It is long past time for the federal Transportation Security Agency to start profiling airline passengers.
Not based on ethnicity. Not based on religion. Based on their words, deeds and associations. We are inviting mass murder by terrorists if we refuse to profile those who pose a possible threat to the security of innocent Americans.
Yet government's response to attempted terrorist attacks so far has simply been to make things more inconvenient for the innocent traveling public.
One terrorist tried to set off a bomb in his shoe back in 2001. Now, everybody has to take off their shoes and send them through the scanner. Another tried to do it with liquid in 2006. Now everybody can carry only three ounces or less of liquids.
And the latest high-profile example is the Christmas Day attack on Northwest Flight 253. Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the 23-year-old son of a wealthy Nigerian banker, tried to blow up the airliner as it approached Detroit from Amsterdam, by igniting an explosive sewn into his underwear.
As has been noted numerous times since the attack, the event exposed the colossal failure of a $40 billion security system that has made air travel an expensive, time-consuming nightmare for average citizens.
Abdulmutallab never should have gotten on that plane. He should have set off numerous red flags for security personnel, if they were profiling in a way that had nothing to do with race or religion. His father had warned U.S. officials weeks earlier that he feared his son had been radicalized to the point where he might commit a terrorist act. He bought his ticket with cash. He carried no luggage. He was on a watch list.
Yet he was not pulled aside for additional screening. He was not stopped by TSA personnel, by screening devices, air marshals or flight attendants. The only things that saved passengers and others on the ground from a catastrophic explosion were blind luck and courage — the explosives malfunctioned and a passenger jumped on Abdulmutallab when flames shot up from his seat.
Government's response? Since Abdulmutallab tried to set off his explosive during the last hour of the flight, the word is that passengers will not be allowed out of their seats for the last hour of flights — at least international flights, and perhaps domestic as well. Since he tried to set off the explosive under the cover of a blanket, passengers will be banned from having anything on their laps for that last hour.
Somewhere, those in al Qaeda terrorist camps must be laughing. Are Americans really so stupid that they think if they respond to what terrorists tried the last time, that will protect them in the future?
Apparently we are. That's all we've done so far.
Federal officials, including Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, have said it would be too difficult to do additional screening of all those on various watch lists, because there are more than 500,000 of them.
But there are more than 600 million who fly during a given year in the U.S. Why is it no problem to add insult, time and aggravation to their security screening, instead of adding it to the paltry half-million who really deserve it? Plenty of people have observed that a driver's license is not a right. Neither is flying to, or within, America.
President Obama is fond of saying that he and his administration "will not rest" until they have defeated those who seek to kill Americans.
But it doesn't matter how hard you work at something, if your methods are ineffective.
If he is serious, he should start by ordering the start of rigorous profiling. People are at war with us. We must fight back.
