Joe Carter on Airport Security

At First Things, Joe Carter takes on Charles Krauthammer, who essentially thinks the current system isn’t what it says it is and opts instead for more profiling:

You might assume that preventing a similar type of attack would be a national security priority. You might assume that measures that prevent terrorist from boarding aircraft with weapons would garner almost universal support. You might even assume that the people who were most vocal in criticizing the government for failing to do enough to protect us would praise the increase in security—even though it took nine years to implement.

I confess that I was foolish enough to make just those assumptions. I never suspected that when the Transportation Security Administration announced it was implementing full-body scanners that a significant number of pundits and politicians would hyperventilate and resort to overheated hyperbole to denounce the changes.

Charles Krauthammer provides a prime example in his uncharacteristically crude article on the new measures. Instead of thoroughly checking for weapons, he would prefer that we use ethnic and racial profiling:

We pretend that we go through this nonsense as a small price paid to assure the safety of air travel. Rubbish. This has nothing to do with safety – 95 percent of these inspections, searches, shoe removals and pat-downs are ridiculously unnecessary. The only reason we continue to do this is that people are too cowed to even question the absurd taboo against profiling – when the profile of the airline attacker is narrow, concrete, uniquely definable and universally known. So instead of seeking out terrorists, we seek out tubes of gel in stroller pouches.

The fact that such an intelligent man can believe that these people can be identified by “profiling” is a sign that we’ve long stopped thinking rationally about this issue.

Krauthammer claims that “the profile of the airline attacker is narrow, concrete, uniquely definable and universally known.” Rubbish. Hijackers have been Algerian, American, Arabic, Bolivian, Brazilian, Chechen, Croatian, Czechoslovakian, Ethiopian, German, Indian, Indonesian, Iranian, Jamaican, Japanese, Korean, Lebanese, Lithuanian, Moroccan, Palestinian, Pakistani, Pilipino, Saudi, Sri Lankan, Sudanese, and Turkish. The only narrow, concrete, uniquely definable and universally known characteristic that they all have is that they were men.