The Real Story: Airport Security 9/14/06

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The Real Story: Airport Security

Updated September 14, 2006

Two stories came out yesterday that caught my eye because they seemed so diametrically opposed to each other. First, I saw the headline "Airport Security Lines Normalized Quickly." And on the very next page, the headline, "Banned Items Fly Past Security." If you take these two stories together, they're basically saying that a lot of illegal stuff is getting through checkpoints but - hey - good news, lines are moving fast!

Those headlines are all the proof I need that the Real Story is that our airport security system is still a joke. I say that because we, as Americans, have three very large obstacles in our path to ever getting serious about security: time, money, and political correctness.

Let me start with time. The headline itself proves the point…."Security lines normalized quickly." What is "normal?" How much time should it really take for two or three hundred people to be screened properly? Well, El Al, the Israeli airline known as the gold standard for security, says to get there three hours early. In the U.S. the average wait is less than 20 minutes and all you ever hear is complaining.

What about the money? Well, it's estimated that El Al spends about $77 dollars per passenger trip on security. The TSA? Just over $6 dollars a trip. You simply can not do the job right when you're spending one-thirteenth of the industry benchmark.

Then there's political correctness, a problem more insurmountable than time and money combined. El Al realizes that screening PEOPLE is far more effective than screening luggage. So they divide passengers into three groups: Jews, who are the lowest risk, non-Jewish foreigners, who are medium risk, and then - ready for this - a high risk group that includes anyone with an Arabic name.

After that you undergo intensive interrogations, sometimes by up to three different highly trained specialists who speak different languages and get paid a ton of money, all because El Al gets it! They know that if you can figure out WHO is a threat then you don't have to worry about changing the rules every time a terrorist tries something new. Yesterday it was shoes and lighters, today it's liquids and gels…we're relying on FAILED plots to teach us how to adapt and unless we change this culture of correctness; unless we realize that we're at war against people who could care less about our rules, then sooner or later the plots are gonna stop failing.

http://www.glennbeck.com/realstory/index.shtml