Better Safe
Still not serious about security.

By NR Editors
From the March 25, 2002, issue of National Review

id 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.