Air safety still missing connections
CHECKING in at JFK airport before a recent JetBlue flight to San Diego, I discovered that my 9-year-old son, who was traveling with me, did not require any identification whatsoever to board the flight. In fact, I found that anyone under the age of 18 can fly several airlines domestically without ID and that the new Transportation Security Administration does not challenge this -- a shocking hole in any reasonable system of airline safety.
Susan and Joseph Trento, who have used the lens of investigative journalism to write several books on the ins and outs of the federal government, may not be aware of this large opening for underage terrorists, but they spend most of their latest book, “Unsafe at Any Altitude,” outlining in great and captivating detail every other possible omission and profit-tinged venture that keep our airports and our planes open to terrorism.
They write that the major problem with airport security both before and since Sept. 11 lies not with the screener on the ground but with the country’s “sloppy and arrogant” intelligence agencies and the way they fail to properly collect information and communicate with one another. “Government agencies with too many embarrassments, too many secret deals, have put our citizens at risk,” they write. The Trentos even quote a top air security official as saying we “aren’t any safer now than before 9/11.” The book portrays a climate of collusion between big money and government that gets in the way of security, a collusion that made Sept. 11 a series of events almost waiting to happen. “All the CIA’s bizarre intelligence alliances, the airline industry’s lobbying and self-interest, and the bureaucratic incompetence of the corporate and government partnership were about to exact a price on the flying public,” they write of the time leading up to September 2001.
“Unsafe at Any Altitude” tracks the contradiction between the governmental line on terrorism and real-world politics and commerce. “Our government does not connect the dots because to do so would reveal policies dating back to the Reagan administration that put American intelligence agencies in bed with the terrorists.... The net result: Hezbollah and other Islamic terrorist organizations, including Al Qaeda, have concluded that the United States is willing to capitulate to terrorists if we maintain an image at home of being tough on terrorism.”
All too often, however, the authors’ statements seem more like polemic pronouncements than demonstrable, inarguable facts. They rely heavily on their interpretation of the 9/11 Commission report as well as circumstantial evidence. As an example, they state: “The Bushes would not be eager for the press to learn that on Monday, September 10, the Dulles hijackers had been guests in the same hotel as Saleh Ibn Abdul Rahman al-Hussayen, the top liaison to the worldwide Islamic charities that funded Osama bin Laden.” The authors never provide us with the specifics about the funding of the terrorists, and they go on to speculate further: “Because of pressure from Prince Bandar [of Saudi Arabia] on the Bush administration ... on September 19, al-Hussayen was allowed to fly to Saudi Arabia.”
“Unsafe at Any Altitude” is on firmer ground when it describes how Frank Argenbright of Argenbright Security -- a firm that pre-9/11 was the largest provider of airport security and was the employer of the screeners who didn’t prevent the hijackers from boarding at Washington Dulles and Newark, N.J., airports -- was scapegoated by some for allowing the attacks to happen. The authors say, however, that Argenbright himself was “a lame duck” for at least six months prior to Sept. 11. Even so, “9/11 was the perfect storm. The media began an unrelenting campaign to paint the company as incompetent and hold it responsible for the 9/11 attacks. The organized media campaign ... grew until Congress, with little debate or discussion, stuck the American taxpayers with a bill of $10 billion and counting for a huge new federal bureaucracy.”
Walking through John F. Kennedy International Airport and observing these proud new TSA agents, better paid and with better benefits, it is difficult for me to believe they could be less effective than a group put together by private companies. Yet the Trentos state that “the TSA screeners have a substantially higher failure rate than the private screeners did.” I speak with one of the new TSA supervisors, who has a background in law enforcement, and he acknowledges that many of his screeners are former teachers, clerks and students. He calls TSA “a work in progress” but says he would never stay with the job if he didn’t think there was real progress and adds that the current system is better than the former one.
The real problem with airport workers, though, is not the screeners. The Trentos are also concerned that security doesn’t apply to caterers or other workers who course unchecked from gate to plane. “Around the country several hundred thousand people go to work at airports every day carrying backpacks and lunch boxes without being screened,” they write.
The contention that we are no safer in the skies today than before 9/11 may seem difficult to believe until the authors detail the poor shape of the current “no-fly” lists, where dead terrorists and non-terrorists still abound. (For its part, the government claims that it cannot definitively confirm the identities of many of the 9/11 hijackers, which is why some names remain on the list.) The Trentos were also able to interview a sought-after hijacker from the 1980s not in some secret bunker but at an outdoor Beirut cafe. They write that the skies can be safe only “if the U.S. government, airlines, and local airport authorities demand that our intelligence agencies finally provide a usable national database of people who should not be allowed near passenger planes.”
The authors advocate the use of profiling techniques that focus on the passengers rather than just on their possessions, techniques used successfully by the Israelis for many years, in which airport personnel scrutinize traveler reactions to determine who should be subject to further investigation. It certainly makes sense to raise the art of screening passengers to a higher level.
“Unsafe at Any Altitude” makes a very convincing argument that, despite all the money and attention spent in the last five years, our airport security system remains porous. “Unless the intelligence agencies become collaborative with the men and women protecting air travel, all the moneys spent on uniformed screeners and bomb-detection machines are wasted,” the authors write.
Of course, it is good to remember that terrorist attacks are still statistically quite rare and that I and most everyone else can still make our way safely from one coast to another and places in between.
Even with the failures and opportunities for terrorism, the chances of an attack occurring on my or your plane ride are still extremely low. But it definitely doesn’t feel any longer as if terrorism is remote, especially after reading this persuasive argument of a book.
Marc Siegel is an internist and associate professor of medicine at New York University School of Medicine. He is the author of “False Alarm: The Truth About the Epidemic of Fear.” He writes the Unreal World column for The Times Health section.
