14 Years Later, Are We Any More Secure Than We Were on September 11, 2001?
I spent a portion of my military prosecution career working with the intelligence agencies, civilian state and federal law enforcement investigators, and fellow prosecutors in the federal national security arena, all working together in the effort to prosecute suspected terrorists. To put it as an understatement, it was an eye-opening experience. By the time I entered that job I had already spent a career learning how to investigate crime, question witnesses, suspects, and defendants, proffer suspects to see what they knew and whether they were willing and could assist us with bigger criminals, building cases, and litigating them before juries. But this was my first experience with national security cases and reviewing our security measures, and it provided some insights I don’t think the average citizen has. Through the prism of that experience, I am disturbed at where we stand today, nearly a decade-and-a-half after September 11th.
Tomorrow is the 14th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. Lots of people will head to airports to travel. I would wager that most of them — although knowing the date is September 11 — will nevertheless not grasp its significance, at least initially. In the early hours, they will be too busy to notice. But once they arrive at the airport, someone or something will make sure they notice. The media will be mentioning it on the news screens, and more practically, the massive airport security apparatus we have set up since 9/11 will effectuate their grasp of that significance.
If you are travelling, and you’re one of the unlucky ones who doesn’t obtain TSA-precheck, you will stand in the obligatory, standard security line on your way into the boarding area. Your loved ones or friends will not be allowed to accompany you to your gate. When you finally get to the TSA officer who will scan your boarding pass into the system, you may or may not have a courteous experience with them. The officer will probably mark up your boarding pass with highlights or scribblings that are never consistent with what previous officers have done; ostensibly, this is done to prove that somebody looked at your boarding pass (again) in the event another TSA officer inside the gate area wants to see your boarding pass to ensure that another TSA officer looked at your boarding pass. Once past this officer, you will remove your shoes, belt, watch, keys, wallet, coins, jacket, backpack, hat, and grab a few bins. If you had a drink in your hand or packed some toiletries in a carry-on and the first officer somehow missed it, you will have to get rid of it. Got all that? Of course you do. But chances are you don’t even give any of it a second thought anymore.
It’s not all that interesting that we have to do all of this, but it is interesting when you look at the historical reasoning behind making us remove or give up all of these items and then ask whether it really gives us added security and is therefore really necessary. Let’s take removing our shoes, for example. Along with TSA, we can all thank Richard Reid for making us remove our shoes for the past thirteen years. Reid smuggled some explosives in his shoes onto American Airlines flight 63 between Paris and Miami on December 22, 2001. Somewhere over the Atlantic, he tried but failed to ignite his shoe bomb and was subdued by fellow passengers. So think back to December, 2001. That’s about when we started taking off our shoes in the security line.
It’s almost fourteen years later, and proponents say we still have to keep doing this because we don’t want another Richard Reid; we don’t have any better way to screen for shoe explosives. But along that line of reasoning, we should be removing our underwear too. Why? Because on Christmas Day, 2009, a Nigerian national named Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab attempted to detonate explosives he had concealed in his underwear on board Northwest Flight 253, which was en route from Amsterdam to Detroit. Again, fellow passengers intervened and subdued the attacker. Still, even after the underwear bomber got explosives past post-9/11 airport security, TSA doesn’t make us remove our underwear. Isn’t that making us all less secure? If we are worried about people smuggling explosives onto aircraft, then why is there a different standard for shoes and underwear? Perhaps TSA thinks they can adequately screen for potential underwear bombers. If TSA thinks they can adequately screen underwear right now without making us remove them, then why can’t they screen our shoes too? Or better yet and more likely, if TSA can exercise some bit of common sense and discretion and conclude that making us all take off our underwear doesn’t make any sense, then why can’t they start applying common sense to our shoes and in other areas?
Take drinks and toiletries, for example. It used to be, even after 9–11, you could go through security with that soda, coffee, or water you brought with you or bought inside the airport, or pack your toiletries in a carry-on bag. I recall at some point before the outright ban on taking beverages through security having an officer ask me to take a sip of my coffee before she let me go through; I guess she figured if I had explosives in it I would either drop it and sprint away or drink it and fall over dead, having poisoned myself. Recently, TSA actually started inspecting coffee purchased after going through security. But I digress; back to the outright ban and when and why it originated. In 2006, the “transatlantic aircraft plot” was uncovered. The suspects allegedly plotted to individually smuggle explosive “precursors” onto planes, mix them together on the plane to create a bomb, and then detonate the bomb during flight. The plausibility of this plot has been seriously questioned by security experts. Regardless, it was after this incident that taking drinks through security was outlawed and most liquids and gels were banned, save for amounts under 3 ounces. This is why you can no longer take a drink or most of your toiletries through security or in your carry-on bag, meaning you can check a bag and have the “baggage” that goes with checked baggage — paying extra to check it, wasting time at the check-in counter and baggage claim, and having to lug it all over the place — or you can buy a bunch of toiletries at your destination.
If one goes deeper, surreal stories abound: Two year-olds getting patted down, 85-year-old women being strip-searched, and little children popping up on a terrorist watch list. An apologist might claim these are just policies being misapplied. But it’s not just officers applying ineffective policies. Most people have either personally experienced or been witness to purely rude behavior. When I was serving as a federal prosecutor, I once handed my Department of Justice credentials to a TSA officer at the Washington-Reagan airport initial screening point, and without even looking at me she curtly demanded, “Take off your hat.” (I was wearing jeans, a polo-type shirt, and an Adidas running cap). Mind you, I wasn’t even going through security yet. “Why do I need to take off my cap?” I asked. “Because I told you to,” she responded. Attempting to take the highest of high roads, I guessed she thought even a DOJ employee could possibly have something dangerous concealed under his hat. But a cynic might say it was a power trip.
Now, I am under no illusion this or anyone else’s questions will lead to any changes; that isn’t my point. My point is, rather, that we have dealt with all of this for so long now that we have all become numb to it; the government has inculcated us to just put up with it. Most people are beaten into submission and will just tell us to shut up; after all the TSA officers are “just doing their jobs.” But their jobs are to implement policies made by the policy-makers. And somewhere up the chain of command at places we can’t get to in an airport, the policy-makers sit in an ivory tower, closed off and protected from the daily, feckless harassment package that is modern air travel “security,” but more importantly, cut off from any meaningful discourse regarding the failure of their policies and the need for improvement. This being a democracy where our policy-makers are appointed by our elected leaders, serious questions must be asked and answered about whether any of the goat-rope we are made to suffer at an airport secures us one bit from another 9/11, or whether it just provides an illusion of greater security.
We must sadly consider the prospect that TSA exists solely to create the appearance of security. As recently as June of this year, TSA failed 95 percent of tests performed by its own undercover officers. Every time this happens, someone at TSA gets fired or reassigned, but the procedures in place at our airports do not change; it’s just more form over substance.
We live in fear these days. We attempt to assuage that fear by making our citizenry more secure. But our present airport security posture is a facade that only provides the illusion of security. It didn’t used to be this way; those 19 hijackers and their cohorts who have been sitting in Cuba waiting for over a decade to be held accountable changed our way of life: They made us afraid. It’s what they wanted to do. And a situation that doesn’t make us any more secure and only harasses and inconveniences us forces us to confront the possibility that those 19 hijackers and their cohorts might actually have won.
