Airline Travel

Yesterday was spent flying up to SF and then hanging with buddies in the city - hence no blogging. The flight up, however, gave me some interesting thoughts on airline security. First, there is simply no need to check certain passengers – old ladies, young children. We are in a war with Al Queda and like minded groups, groups that trained insurgents and terrorists in camps in Afghanistan during the 1990s and now continue to train terrorists and fighters in Pakistan after the Afghan war. We have a good idea of this demographic – a MIXTURE of men between 17-40 from all over the world (including Marin, where I’m from – John Walker Lindh and the Netherlands, where the murders of Theo Van Gogh were born and raised).

I looked through the line and for most people, you could easily tell that these folks had zero chance of training in Afghan or Pakistani camps – Asian families, old ladies from the Midwest, a young Hispanic couple holding each other in line. There were a few folks who fit a profile, young, single men, aged 18-40…clearly I was one of them. With this war, I don’t think RACIAL profiling would do the trick…clearly it is a global war against Islamic fanatics that range from the Saudi’s of 9/11, to the Philippino radicals, to the Netherlands, Spain, Britain, Iraq, and in America. However, I see no need to have grandmothers taking off their weird square rubber shoes to be double checked getting into the plane. By overchecking, I actually think you lessen security. It’s like in filmmaking – if you just decide to shoot random coverage of the scene, you won’t get a precise result and the overall quality of the scene will go down. If, however, you plan smartly, get the appropriate coverage and get the good shots that you planned for, you make a dynamite scene.

The same type of precision ought to apply to security, airline or border security or whatever. In the end, however, maybe whatever we are doing is working fine…we haven’t seen any more 9/11s in 3 years. Perhaps 9/11 was a lucky, damn lucky fluke that the terrorists pulled off – something where the stars were aligned perfectly for them, and we need not overreact. Maybe.