Has Airport Secruity Improved Since 9/11 or Not?

Oct.31, 2006— -- The story broke Oct. 27, when the Newark Star-Ledger ran a story about its own local airport's reportedly dismal performance in the face of security "testing" by the Transportation Security Administration's internal "Red Team" agents.

According to the report, the TSA screeners at Newark Liberty International Airport failed to detect contraband items 20 out of 22 times, and with Newark being one of the big three airports serving New York City, the story quickly went national.

The failures were not just local failures. They represented the TSA's vulnerability to similar Red Team tests across the nation, tests in which agents try to smuggle fake guns, knives and other prohibited objects past their own screeners to see how well the checkpoints are working.

When a TSA screening team flunks such tests, that failure is supposed to prompt immediate correction through both retraining of the people and improvement of the process. Failed tests mean that TSA's local screening is not perfect. But failed tests do not mean that TSA's screening system is failing, or even in deep trouble.

What everyone missed in the first few days after the story broke was the fact that the TSA system of federalized screeners set up following 9/11 was never expected to be a perfect barrier filtering out 100 percent of all the contraband we don't want near commercial aircraft.

We could try to do that, of course. The country could build a different version of the TSA screening system that would absolutely find 100 percent of the contraband 100 percent of the time, just like Israel's state airline, El Al, has done for decades on a much smaller scale.

But even before 9/11, most of us who watch and analyze this great airline system were warning that to ever impose El Al style security on the U.S. airline system would have a dramatic negative impact on our freedom to move around our own nation, severely cutting the number of flights that TSA could manage in a given day, especially with the number of TSA employees naively capped by Congress at a maximum of 43,000.

Even if TSA had 200,000 employees doing the screening, there is virtually no realistic way they could impose an airtight El Al style security system across the entire United States. An airtight system requires individual passenger profiling and background checking along with intense personal interviews required for virtually every passenger.

Enough, in other words, to bring our system to a universal state of bankruptcy and shutdown, serving our enemy's purposes well in the process.But does that mean we should accept less-than-perfect performance from TSA, and thus tolerate what seems to some to be compromised security on our airliners?

Actually, yes, it does, and it may be a shocking reality, but even though the system is not going to catch every knife and pass every test, it's still OK, very safe, and performing pretty much as designed. How can that be? Because our public perception that TSA screening should be an impenetrable barrier has always been wrong. The TSA screening system was designed to effectively minimize the risk of terrorism on commercial flights, not completely eliminate it.

First it's important to remember what the TSA force replaced: a system of private screeners poorly managed and trained by security companies whose bewildered minimum-wage employees had essentially no hope of deterring any organized attempt to smuggle in dangerous items.

The inescapable proof of this was Muhammed Atta and his murderous henchmen sailing through the checkpoints of three airports without challenge on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, their razor-sharp box cutters openly going through.

That wasn't a failure of the individual companies that were pretending to provide security. It was the failure of a rotten system that had been perfectly constructed to provide the illusion of security while permitting the airlines to get by complying with only the Federal Aviation Administration minimums.

It was a fraud on the American public inadvertently triggered by a disastrous FAA decision in the late 1960s to force the airlines instead of the government to pay for screening out potential hijackers who wanted to go to Cuba.

What's truly sad is that by the year 2000 every airline professional knew airport screening was a sick joke, but neither airline leaders nor lawmakers cared -- until 9/11. In a few hours that day, our national priorities changed, and suddenly our most important priority was denying terrorists access to airline cockpits ever again. But why was the TSA never expected to perform perfectly?

Because TSA is a human organization, and by definition, human organizations are incapable of sustained perfect performance. The fact is, never in all the post 9/11 construction of a new defense system was the new TSA federalized screening force supposed to be the one and only barrier against terrorists. Instead, it was an important but limited component of a multifaceted new defense system.

By hardening the cockpit doors, retraining pilots and flight attendants, involving the passengers, vastly improving the communication of threat intelligence directly to airline command centers and crews, as well as revamping identification systems and improving (though not yet anywhere near adequate) the extent to which airport and ramp employees have been background checked, the government raised a score of new barriers against any terrorist planners believing his people might ever again make it through to the cockpit of an airliner, or even the airline cabin.

Remember that the terrorist organizations with whom we are at war do not launch attacks that are essentially gambles. In other words, if the chances of success in getting the items required for a major attack through airport security is significantly low -- and if too many other new defense systems stand in their way -- few terrorist planners would consider making the attempt in the first place.

The primary security goal was to prevent another 9/11, and we have accomplished that, as shown in September when officials in London foiled a plot to smuggle liquids aboard which might be mixed to make an onboard bomb. What's significant there is that al Qaeda's planners could no longer plan to invade the cockpit. By selecting liquids, they tried to exploit one of the few remaining holes in the system, a hole that has now been slammed shut.

Our new TSA force has given the nation its first standardized, educated, trained and rationally controlled security checkpoint at every airport. It features employees who can actually speak our language and who are equipped with at least the basic equipment to seriously discourage terrorist threats, if not eliminate them altogether. And this, then, is the basic point: However flawed TSA's screening might be in falling short of 100 percent perfection 100 percent of the time, it has fully achieved its goal as an effective part of a long line of new barriers seriously frustrating our enemies.