April 15, 2004
OVER YOUR QUOTA (via Tom Corcoran):
Listen to Lehman: The press attention is on the wrong commissioners. (Michael Smerconish, 4/15/04, National Review)
Among Lehman's questions was this: "Were you aware that it was the policy...to fine airlines if they have more than two young Arab males in secondary questioning because that's discriminatory?"Rice replied: "No, I have to say that the kind of inside arrangements for the FAA are not really in my...." (Lehman quickly followed up: "Well, these are not so inside.")
Watching the hearings on television with the rest of the nation, I wondered what in the world Secretary Lehman was talking about. This, I'd never heard before. Was he saying that the security of our airlines had been sacrificed by political correctness? A few days after the klieg lights had faded, I had the chance to ask him.
"We had testimony a couple of months ago from the past president of United, and current president of American Airlines that kind of shocked us all, Lehman told me. "They said under oath that indeed the Department of Transportation continued to fine any airline that was caught having more than two people of the same ethnic persuasion in a secondary line for line for questioning, including and especially, two Arabs."
Wait a minute. So if airline security had three suspicious Arab guys they had had to let one go because they'd reached a quota?
That was it, Lehman said, "because of this political correctness that became so entrenched in the 1990s, and continues in current administration. No one approves of racial profiling, that is not the issue. The fact is that Norwegian women are not, and 85-year-old women with aluminum walkers are not, the source of the terrorist threat. The fact is that our enemy is the violent Islamic extremism and the overwhelming number of people that one need to worry about are young Arab males, and to ask them a couple of extra questions seems to me to be common sense, yet if an airline does that in numbers that are more than proportionate to their number in particular line, then they get fined and that is why you see so many blue haired old ladies and people that are clearly not of Middle Eastern extraction being hauled out in such numbers because otherwise they get fined."
The reality is that we're not going to sacrifice our freedoms just on the chance of stopping terrorists, which is why the Kerry notion of treating it as a police matter is doomed to failure. We have to radically alter the culture that breeds terrorists. Posted by Orrin Judd at April 15, 2004 10:33 AM
Except that this is the worst of all worlds. We are sacrificing our freedoms (although the freedom to walk right onto an airplane is a pretty minor freedom), but doing so in a way that doesn't make us much safer.
Posted by: David Cohen at April 15, 2004 10:58 AMThat's the root of most of my objection to the Patriot Act - the infringements, while relatively small, don't actually achieve anything. Yet, contra Mr. Judd's claims, there it is.
Posted by: Annoying Old Guy at April 15, 2004 11:04 AMSacrificing freedoms? They wave a wand at you and maybe make you take your shoes off. It's hardly the gulag.
Posted by: oj at April 15, 2004 11:10 AMThis is an example of national suicide by law. Why is Minnetta still there? What in hell is homeland security doing about it? Now; not later when the Commission recommends it ... assuming Gorelick doesn't object to it.
Kean not removing Gorelick from the Commission for conflicts of interest, it's "none of your business" he stated, is dereliction as chair.
Posted by: genecis at April 15, 2004 11:39 AMOne critique of the eighty-year-old-grandmothers-aren't-terrorists mentality: if our prevention strategy were specifically targeted at young Arab males, then the terrorists would note this and then deliberately find people who didn't fit that target group. There are eighty-year-old grandmothers out there that could be trained or duped to become terrorists - say, if they put a bomb in their shoe. I'm not saying that we should ignore young Arab males, just that we shouldn't ignore someone just because she's not a young Arab male.
Posted by: Just John at April 15, 2004 3:02 PMThis morning, NPR stated, as if it were self-evident, that we failed to stop that attack because of a failure of intelligence.
Not really. The failure was not tactical but strategic. We failed to appreciate who and what our enemy is.
Even if we had made the correct strategic conclusion (which we still have not made), the attacks of Sept. 11 might have been completed.
We would then have lost a battle. That happens sometimes during a war.
We still are not fighting the same war our enemies are and have not even correctly identified who our enemies are.
The commission is a waste of time.
Posted by: Harry Eagar at April 15, 2004 4:19 PMSee how Allah sends confusion on the Enemies of the Faithful to ready them for slaughter?
Posted by: Ken at April 15, 2004 5:49 PM