Re: The ongoing national freak-out over the backup band of 'Syria's Wayne Newton'

(No, I'm not giving "Women's Wall Street" any more ill-gotten traffic, and the original breathless article by Annie Jacobsen is too damn long.)

Annie my girl, what took you so long? American aviation, particularly domestic flights, has been insecure for a long, long time. The spate of hijackings, airport attacks and bombings in the 60s & 70s resulted in fairly effective overhauls of airport and airline security in Europe, Asia and the Middle East, but even after Lockerbie, U.S. airlines continued to operate an inefficient, insecure and badly-integrated system with procedures that were applied so inconsistently as to be pointless.

The inconsistency is alive and well post-9/11; despite advanced age, government credentials, an Indian passport and accompaniment by a horrified wife, the Defense Minister of India was subjected to a body search on 2 separate visits to the United States. Ethics aside, racial profiling *could* be an effective security measure, but not when it is inconsistently applied by untrained people. American aviation is plagued by both.

I've been flying since I was a year old, and I've found domestic airline security procedures in small cities in India (such as checking luggage against passengers right on the runway after passenger check-in) to be better those in the United States. El Al locks its pilots into the cockpit, puts *all* its passengers through a rigorous security check, and has an armed marshall (commando is more like it) on every flight. All this is well-known, and by making itself such a notoriously long-shot target, El Al has managed to discourage would-be hijackers.

If implemented in the U.S., all this security will cost airlines a good deal of money, and passengers must also be willing to accept longer check-in time and incursions on their privacy as their luggage and persons are relentlessly examined. In addition, more secure alternatives to paper documents (such as iris scans) need to be fast-tracked under public oversight. Americans may even have to give up quick, no-check commuter flights and think about that high-speed train system we never managed to get built.

And all of the above combined happens to be the real solution to making the skies safe. It's not sexy, and there will be a lot of growing pain for all concerned. Many people prefer a policy of zeroing in on a small group of passengers and making them pay all the price, but that's neither effective nor just. And yes, justice and civil rights matter. Without those, we'd be afraid for our lives all the time, and not just when we're sitting on a plane with people that remind us of Mohammed Atta.

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