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3,000-plus Americans have to die on Sept. 11? In early March, the
Washington Post reported that nine of the 19 hijackers were
given special scrutiny when they arrived at the airports for their
murderous assignments. Three showed irregularities in their tickets
or their IDs; six matched FAA criteria for special attention. In other
words, they were profiled.
But, as the
New York Times reported the following day, none of the nine
were questioned or personally searched. Only their checked luggage
was given an extra look. Since their box-cutters were not in their
suitcases, they passed with flying colors. This was partly fighting
the last battle — terror attacks on airplanes in the Eighties
and Nineties had featured bombs in the baggage hold. But it was
also the result of our insistence on avoiding any personal unpleasantness
— especially unpleasantness that might have an ethnic or racial
basis.
As Richard
Lowry explained in NR ("Profiles
in Cowardice," January 28), the federal government in the
Nineties chose to forego manual screening since it could be "perceived
. . . as discrimination against citizens on the basis of race, color,
national or ethnic origin or gender," as the FAA put it. Now,
as anyone who has taken a flight since Sept. 11 knows, we have pat-downs
and shoe checks galore. But still no security screener dares to
exercise special care because a passenger is, say, a Saudi.
This suits
the personal agenda of transportation secretary Norman Mineta. The
TransSec, who is a Japanese-American, was interned with his family
when he was ten years old. During the Gulf War, Mineta, then a big
wheel on the House Public Works and Transportation Committee, warned
against "mistaken assumptions about national security"
that "may be implemented without properly protecting the rights
of individuals." Government agencies must never "put expedience
ahead of constitutional safeguards." Now, "the rights
of individuals" was code for the self-esteem of groups; is
it merely expedient to try to save lives? Mineta is still up to
his old tricks. "A very basic foundation to all of our work,"
he says today, "is to make sure that racial profiling is not
part of it."
Mineta-ism
infects even people who are not former victims of 50-year-old injustices.
When an Arab-American Secret Service agent was bumped to a later
flight, because there were problems with the paperwork for his pistol,
President Bush himself said he'd be "mad as heck" if the
agent's ethnicity had anything to do with it. Modern American racial
sensitivities have led us to a corrupt version of the old Roman
maxim, Fiat justitia, ruat coelum (Let justice be done, though
the heavens fall): Let the PC protocols be obeyed, though thousands
die.
Rep. John L.
Mica, reacting to the news about the nine who got away, said that
our security personnel need to "go after the bad guys and not
just the bad objects." Even so, bad guys will elude our detection.
But the paradigm shift must be made, especially since airport security
is not our only vulnerability. Weapons of terror and mass destruction
can be brought to their targets in a hundred ways. We have to hunt
for the likely couriers — and not be shy about flagging possibly
innocent people when our suspicions are legitimately aroused.
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