Little improvement in airline security
The Transportation Security Administration is not amused. It doesn’t appreciate being shown up by Nathaniel Heatwole, the 20-year-old college kid who is charged with smuggling box cutters and other verboten items aboard two commercial jetliners last month.
“When you have individuals like this gentleman,” said Chris Rhatigan, a TSA spokeswoman, “or other individuals who feel they need to be testing the system, we would say, ‘You don’t know what you’re doing.’ They’re not helping.”
And to dissuade others from following Heatwole’s example, the TSA has thrown the book at him. He was charged this week in federal court with taking a dangerous weapon aboard an aircraft. If convicted, he could face up to 10 years in the slammer.
But Heatwole, a junior at Guilford College in Greensboro, N.C., didn’t mean any harm.
He just wanted to see for himself whether airport security really has gotten appreciably better since the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks; whether Mohammed Atta could make it past screeners today with box cutters, bleach and ersatz plastic explosives.
And Heatwole gave the TSA an edge that Atta never would have: He sent the agency e-mails telling them that he planned to place suspicious items on aircraft, a senior Bush administration official reportedly told The Washington Post.
Yet, it took nearly five weeks for the smuggled items to be discovered aboard two Southwest Airlines jets. And the discovery was made not by TSA agents or airport security personnel, but by the airline’s maintenance crew. The only reason the TSA was able to trace the items to Young Man Heatwole is because he was thoughtful enough to leave them a note with his name and phone number.
In e-mails to federal authorities, the collegian described his stunt as an “act of civil disobedience with the aim of improving public safety for the air-traveling public.”
And while the TSA is understandably embarrassed that Heatwole managed to make such a mockery of airport security, he actually performed a public service.
For he exposed the continuing inadequacy of the nation’s screener force, two years after Atta and his fellow terrorists traipsed past airport security, commandeered four commercial jets and flew them into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a Pennsylvania field.
We were promised a more competent, federalized screener force — better educated, better trained, higher paid. But as Heatwole demonstrated last month, the new screener force is hardly any more proficient in uncovering weapons and potential explosives than the old maligned screener force.
And the failings of the screener force are not confined to one or two or three problem airports – like Baltimore-Washington International and Raleigh-Durham, the two airports Heatwole successfully penetrated. It’s a systemwide problem.
Indeed, lawmakers on Capitol Hill were briefed last month on an undercover investigation by the General Accounting Office in which federal agents tested screeners at a number of airports.
Meanwhile, the TSA’s testing of screeners has been exposed as a fraud by Clark Kent Ervin, the acting inspector general for the Homeland Security Department.
For instance, on a recent final exam given to new screeners at LaGuardia Airport, 22 of the 25 questions were used during a practice quiz in advance of the exam. That, according to Ervin, “maximized the likelihood that students would pass.”
The TSA has failed, so far, to upgrade the quality of airport screening. The nation’s flying public is hardly any safer today than it was on Sept. 11, 2001.
(Joseph Perkins is a columnist for The San Diego Union-Tribune and can be reached at [email protected].)