Has security improved in a year?
Tom Ridge was asked a direct question during an interview with the San Diego Union-Tribune’s editorial board: Is America safer today than it was on Sept. 11? “Yes,” the White House homeland security chief replied. That’s a profoundly troubling answer when held up against a recently published investigative report about lax airport security by The New York Daily News. It suggests that Ridge either is unaware of the remaining problems with security or is hiding the truth from the flying public.
The New York tabloid conducted undercover tests at airports around the country to ascertain whether security screening truly has improved, one year after hijacked commercial jets were used in terror attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
Daily News’ reporters boarded flights over the Labor Day weekend, carrying such contraband as box cutters, razor knives and pepper spray.
The problems suggest it wouldn’t be much more difficult today for terrorists to slip pass airport security with weapons, to use those weapons to commandeer commercial jets, and to use those jets as missiles to destroy targets, to kill thousands.
Oh, sure, airports throughout the country have implemented new, supposedly improved, security procedures in the last year.
It might be something of a comfort if the New York tabloid’s investigatory findings were a fluke, if its reporters caught airport security personnel on a holiday weekend when they weren’t as attentive as usual. But the Daily News’ expose simply confirms what at least two undercover government tests previously revealed.
Indeed, officials at the new Transportation Security Administration acknowledged this summer that screeners at 32 of the nation’s largest airports failed to detect guns and bombs in nearly 25 percent of the undercover tests back in June.
What’s especially troubling is that undercover agents did not go to any unusual lengths to hide the weapons, as a terrorist would. Rather, they were instructed to pack their bags like a typical passenger.
In an earlier government audit of airport security, conducted from last November to early February, weapons were stealthily concealed. According to a memo authored by the Transportation Department’s inspector general, screeners failed to uncover knives in more than 70 percent of tests, fake bombs in 60 percent of tests, and guns in 30 percent of tests. No less disturbing, investigators managed to secretly board airplanes or gain access to the airport tarmac in nearly 50 percent of tests.
Such abysmal airport security is unacceptable.
The flying public doesn’t expect the screeners inspecting baggage and carry-ons for weapons and explosives to be perfect. They don’t expect the screening system to be fail-safe. But they probably expect that the security personnel assigned to airport checkpoints would have a better failure rate than 25 percent (or higher). They probably expect that the Daily News’ reporters smuggling box cutters and razor knives and pepper spray would have been found out by screeners at one or more of the airports they visited over the recent Labor Day weekend.
It’s appalling that the nation’s airports are hardly safer today than they were last Sept. 11. Let us hope a new screener force brings marked improvements by the second anniversary of the worst-ever terror attack in U.S. history.
(Joseph Perkins is a columnist for The San Diego Union-Tribune and can be reached at [email protected].)