CREDIT WHERE CREDIT'S DUE :

Liberal Reality Check (NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF, May 31, 2002, NY Times)

As we gather around F.B.I. headquarters sharpening our machetes and watching the buzzards circle overhead, let's be frank: There's a whiff of hypocrisy in the air.

One reason aggressive agents were restrained as they tried to go after Zacarias Moussaoui is that liberals like myself--and the news media caldron in which I toil and trouble-- have regularly excoriated law enforcement authorities for taking shortcuts and engaging in racial profiling. As long as we're pointing fingers, we should peer into the mirror.

We must also relax a taboo, racial profiling, for one of the lessons of the Moussaoui case is that it sometimes works.

Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta bars airport security screenings based on religion or ethnicity. That's why aging nuns are plucked out of airport lines for inspections of their denture bags, why women with underwire bras are sometimes subjected to humiliating inspections after the metal detector goes off. But let's be realistic: Young Arab men are more likely to ram planes into nuclear power plants than are little old ladies, and as such they should be more vigorously searched - though with no less courtesy. El Al, the Israeli airline, has the world's most effective air security system, and it's all about racial profiling.

The backdrop is that the risks of terrorism are growing. As Joseph Nye of Harvard University observes, terrorist incidents in the 1970's (such as the attack at the Munich Olympics) had maximum death tolls of about a dozen; attacks in the 1980's and 1990's raised the scale (as in the Air India and Pan Am 103 bombings) to the hundreds; 9/11 lifted the toll into the thousands; and terrorists are now nosing around weapons of mass destruction that could kill hundreds of thousands.

As risks change, we who care about civil liberties need to realign balances between security and freedom. It is a wrenching, odious task, but we liberals need to learn from 9/11 just as much as the F.B.I. does.

I don't often agree with the columnists at the NY Times, but this is an adult column--accepting, even asking for, blame and examining preconceived notions from a fresh perspective. Combined with his recent column about the work being done by Christian humanitarian organizations in the Third World, it offers hope that Mr. Kristof may provide us with one worthwhile reason for checking the Times's Op-Ed page, other than to get our own dander up. Posted by Orrin Judd at May 31, 2002 12:44 PM