Thursday, March 15,
2007
Commentary
While airport passes the buck,
guns take flight
Take comfort in statistical probability.
That is your best security.
By Mike Thomas
The Orlando (FL)
Sentinel
Despite all that you've been reading about
security lapses at Orlando International Airport, rest assured that it still is
safer to fly to Ohio than to drive a Yugo to Ohio.
If you calculate the
odds that terrorists are going to strike on any given day versus about 30,000
airline flights every day, the chances of a bomb winding up in your overhead
compartment are pretty remote.
Unfortunately, so are the odds that
security would prevent it from getting there. Take comfort in statistical
probability. That is your best security.
Last week we learned airport
employees were charged with using airliners to smuggle guns to Puerto
Rico.
Actually, we learned that in 2004. What we learned last week was
that nobody has done anything about it.
And now we have airport
authorities and the Transportation Security Administration arguing over whose
responsibility it was to guard unmanned employee entrance doors behind
baggage-claim carousels.
"There's no requirement for us to staff the
doors," OIA spokeswoman Carolyn Fennell said. "We were not asked to take that
responsibility."
If there is a serious security breach right in front of
your face, is the proper response to shrug your shoulders and say, "Not my job,
man"?
The TSA, on the other hand, claimed it is only a "regulatory
agency" and that the doors are the airport's responsibility.
Not my job,
man.
This is like two lifeguards arguing over whose section of beach that
guy drowning out there is in.
The alleged smugglers walked through one of
those doors with the duffel bag filled with 14 guns.
Even more amazing is
that these employee entrances were flagged as a security problem back in 2004,
when five current and former workers were caught smuggling guns and drugs on
planes. One claimed he did it regularly.
After that incident, the TSA and
the airport announced they would begin screening workers. At some point, that
stopped.
If you want to know why or when, don't ask Fennell. While she
has been with OIA for more than 20 years, she told a reporter this week that she
doesn't remember the arrests or increased security.
I'll refresh her
memory with these two headlines from back then:
OIA runway workers face
security screen.
OIA bribes reveal airport vulnerabilities.
OIA
means Orlando International Airport.
Here is a line from the second story
about how the men bypassed security: "It was so easy that a baggage handler
earning $240 a week delivered two duffel bags in two days to OIA departure gates
without their being checked."
How do you forget that?
Or this
quote from Robert Monetti, past president of Victims of Pan Am 103, talking
about security breaches: "The terrorists are not stupid people. They notice
what's been fixed and what hasn't."
Evidently that is more than we can
expect from the people who are supposed to stop the terrorists.
Of
course, in defense of the airport and TSA, it's not like checking the workers
would have mattered anyway.
Last year, more than half the TSA screeners
at the Orlando airport failed a test that measured how well they could detect
explosives, guns and other weapons on the scanner.
We face an
increasingly sophisticated and agile enemy.
And we are defended by
plodding bureaucracies that seem to be more concerned with passing the buck and
covering their rear ends than protecting us.