Homeland Security: A Day Late? Try Ten Years

Like all Americans, we welcome the clampdown at airport security checkpoints in the wake of the arrests in London. A question raises itself, though: as with so much of the Bush administration's approach to homeland security, couldn't we have gotten ready for this risk before now? We've already had a warning:

During the mid-1990s, the U.S. took into custody two Kuwaiti men who had devised the technical plan for Operation Bojinka – the name for a plan to blow up a large number of jumbo jets over the Pacific. In a test, the perpetrators in 1994 blew up an unsuspecting Japanese businessman in his seat on a Philippine domestic flight by wiring a device using a watch and liquid explosive disguised in a contact-lens case. This proved to the terrorists that they could get explosives aboard undetected.

Thanks to Philippine intelligence, the U.S. eventually arrested the two terrorists, Abdul Hakim Murad and Ramzi Ahmed Yousef. The two told the CIA about Bin Laden's plans to knock down big buildings using planes and blow up airliners using small chemical bombs. That was in 1995. (Yousef was later convicted in the U.S. for the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center.)

Thursday, the British arrested 24 people, including one airport employee. ... A few hours later, the Bush administration put on a dog-and-pony show, with elevated alert levels and the Department of Homeland Security barring liquids on U.S. flights. The Transportation Security Administration mentioned nothing about screening the 600,000 employees who work in U.S. airports or the airport contractors who service the planes. How hard would it be for one of them to substitute an explosive in a cola can or water bottle, or even in the liquids used to clean the planes?

It was business as usual for the TSA: Give passengers and the public the illusion of security but not the reality. One TSA official – disgusted with the agency's standard practice of putting on a strong show of security at the passenger screening checkpoints while ignoring yawning holes in security elsewhere in the civil aviation system – has referred to it as "just more eye candy ... feel-good stuff."

The hard work of closing those loopholes might not win as much attention as, say, knocking off Saddam Hussein – but if Bush wants to get serious about terrorism, he has to start dealing with these problems. And soon.

Posted by Americans United For Change Web Team