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August 17, 2006
Hear, Hear!
UPDATE: The busted link to CQ is now fixed.
Ed Morrissey notes that US officials are finally regaining their senses: test programs are underway at several airports in which the focus is placed on people instead of objects. This is the basis of El Al's very successful anti-terror policy; it allows for the concentration of scarce resources on the small percentage of passengers who actually harbor a malicious intent. Ed:
Israel doesn't worry about what a passenger might carry onto a flight as much as they focus on the traveler himself. [...] This approach allows people who present no danger to travel without being treated like a criminal from the moment they step into the airport to the time the plane lands at their destination.
Exactly right. The current US policy that manifests itself in the confiscation of sewing needles from dear old ladies has the result of placing us in a constantly reactionary mode: the 9/11 terrorists used box cutters so we concentrate on eliminating every sharp object in everyone's possession; the recent British plot switched to liquid explosives so now we have a beady eye out for hairspray and shaving cream. Concentrating on people and intent will allow us to be much more proactive--if we stop a terrorist as a result of personality screening, then it makes no difference what his potential weapon is.
Ed anticipates the predictable screeching about "racial profiling":
The Times notes that some complain that such a program could turn into racial profiling without any objective safeguards. Some passengers who refused to cooperate in interviews got threatened with arrest, prompting lawsuits. [...] These criticisms should have died on 9/11. The important point about airport security is to secure the airport and the airplanes, not worry that social attitudes may get bruised.
Again, this is spot-on. I saw a civil rights attorney on Hannity & Colmes the other night who almost self-destructed in rage at the mere suggestion that the Israeli style of screening be used. As a commenter to Ed's post asked: what exactly would be the damage done to some who is "racially profiled", anyway? Hurt feelings? Inconvenience?
If all the money currently being used to pay the employees of a blundering bureaucracy was used to hire and properly train a top-notch team of screeners, the possibility of an improper detention, of even Arab or Muslim travelers, would drop.
We are wasting billions on an inefficient system that is not nearly as safe as it should be--all to safeguard the feelings of a small minority.
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Comments
"We are wasting billions on an inefficient system that is not nearly as safe as it should be--all to safeguard the feelings of a small minority."
What's new? It's your gov'ts gross inefficiency at work again! Since Katrina, I've had to ask myself, why do you people blindly support a gov't and a system that produces nothing but lethal, blundering, incompetence? Yea, I was born here, raised overseas, an Expat, and have had to pay huge sums of taxes to support this bungling bunch of boobs for the last thirty years. Know what the best thing you could as for out of this system? A "refund" and yourselves! That's all I want.....a refund of the money I've had to pay into this system. Give me my refund and I'll go away!
Posted by: ed at August 17, 2006 11:55 AM
Winston Churchill was full of great quotes, but one of his most enduring was: "It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried."
Our representative government of 300-odd millions of basically spoiled, generally problem-free (when you consider what my depression-era parents had to deal with) and mostly self-indulgent people is a government that's doomed to act with only the broadest hints of real progress.
I'm not real optimistic these days that we will ever regain our drive and edge--I fear we are a victim of our own success.
Someone recently said, "If you want to know what 1938 looked like, just look around." Maybe the coming crisis will galvanize and focus us, once again. Or maybe not; maybe we've been too selfish for too long now.
Posted by: Jeff at August 17, 2006 10:33 PM
