"Real security is worth some real aggravation"

Sunday, August 13, 2006

Column
Real security is worth some real aggravation 
By Leonard Pitts Jr
The Miami (FL) Herald


Well, that was close.

Wednesday morning, I flew home out of London's Heathrow airport. Thursday
morning, British authorities announced they had broken up a terrorist plot
to blow up U.S.-bound flights out of Heathrow using bombs in carry-on bags.

Needless to say, I am happier than usual to be home.

The word from London as this is written is that passengers leaving Heathrow
should expect long delays and restrictions on carry-on luggage so stringent
that not even iPods and paperbacks will get by. Those few items that are
allowed through - glasses, medicines, passports - will have to be carried in
see-through packaging.

This will, of course, require major adjustments for travelers, especially as
compared with how easily I got through security before Thursday. Let them
X-ray your bag and feel you up, and you were ready to fly. No need to even
take off your shoes as in the United States.

Not that I would hold up U.S. airport security as a model. No one could do
that who remembered the spate of incidents a few years ago showing that our
security leaks like a sieve. Between them, travelers who were simply
careless and a college student, a team of journalists and some
Transportation Department officials who set out separately to test security,
managed to get knives, box cutters, pepper spray and loaded semiautomatic
pistols past the crackerjack women and men of the Transportation Security
Administration. Indeed, the Transportation Department test found that
screeners missed 30 percent of guns, 60 percent of simulated explosives, 70
percent of knives.

That's why I'm gratified to see the U.K. taking security more seriously. And
why I wish the United States would do the same. Yes, the (temporary?) new
procedures are an inconvenience. Yes, inconvenience is a four-letter word in
this country.

But maybe it's a word we should get used to. I don't know how it is in the
U.K., but here in the States, the architects of the "War on Terror" have
been curiously unwilling to ask sacrifices of us. Oh, they happily impose -
and we meekly accept - all sorts of infringements upon our civil liberties
based upon all sorts of spurious reasoning. But they seem loath to truly
inconvenience us. We - and I include myself - remove our shoes and take our
laptops out of briefcases and whine about it as if we are rationing nylon or
collecting scrap.

If, however, this war is, as advertised, a struggle of civilized people
against a culture of barbarism and murder, perhaps we ought to, as a
pragmatic necessity and a moral duty, be willing to accept some real
aggravation in exchange for real security.

It is worth noting that El Al, the state airline of Israel, a nation that
knows a little something about terrorism, backstops the TSA - i.e., does a
secondary security screening - at four of the five U.S. airports from which
it flies and has sought permission to do so at the fifth. Shows you what
they think of what passes for airport security here.

Yet, when asked about adopting El Al's methods in the United States -
intensive interrogation of each passenger, hand searches of every bag, air
marshals on every flight - an airline security expert told the New York
Times in May that you couldn't do that here because it would disrupt
American air travel.

Hey, I don't want to face an inquisition each time I fly. I don't want to be
stuck on a plane without my iPod and headphones, sitting next to some cranky
toddler who has been denied his boo bear and pacifier. And if there are
effective security measures short of that, I will gladly accept them. If,
however, there aren't, I will adapt. See, the one thing I "really" don't
want is to be blown to pieces in midair because somebody didn't want to
inconvenience me.

Getting killed is the biggest inconvenience of them all.

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