The
first World Trade Center bombing, 1993
Timothy
McVeigh's murderous truck bomb in Oklahoma City, 1995
TWA
Flight 800 explodes over Long Island, 1996
A
bomb explodes in Atlanta's Olympic Park, 1996
The
plot to attack Times Square on New Year's Eve, 2000
Nine-eleven
was hardly unprecedented. The real question is why we weren't
prepared for the unthinkable. What are security gates for? What
has the FAA been mandating all these years?
The
answer should be immediately obvious to anyone who's been to one
of America's major airports. The incident that typifies the incompetence
and sheer uselessness of the so-called "security" is
the night I was attempting to negotiate the always-under-construction
labyrinth of New York's John F. Kennedy International to meet
my brother's incoming flight from Hong Kong. To actually have
a clearly marked route showing where to meet arriving international
passengers would have been too easy. Instead, I had to wander
through three buildings and pass two security checkpoints, complete
with metal detectors and X-ray machines, in order to find the
terminal. Never mind that neither checkpoint was anywhere near
a critical area, and after passing them I could have opened any
door in the empty terminal and let in a small army of terrorists:
I guess it's supposedly enough to know that Big Brother might
be watching you. Nor could the few blue-jacketed guards I found
give me directions to where I was supposed to go—I doubted
they even knew the layout of the airport themselves.
The
final straw came when I had to pass through another useless metal
detector that blocked my path out of No Man's Land and into someplace
actually useful. I took off my zipper-covered leather jacket off,
slid it through the X-ray machine, and stepped through the metal
detector—which, of course went off. The large, sour, African-American
woman who seem to be in charge of this half-assed Checkpoint Charlie
curtly ordered me to step back and empty my pockets. Sheepishly,
I put my keys, loose change, and wallet into the little bin and
tried stepping through that magic portal-which promptly went off
again. Even at that late hour, a crowd was beginning to pile up
behind me, and they were beginning to grumble.
"Take
off the belt," invited the woman, who I felt was getting
a little too personal with her hand-held metal detector pointed
at my crotch. It wasn't my belt, mind you: it was some
objectified thing that was setting off the metal detector. I was
just an object, a large hairy guy in a leather jacket and T-shirt
and jeans. I took off my belt and added my boots for. Still, the
metal detector moronically chimed its message: "Thou shalt
not pass."
"It
must be the rivets in my jeans," I said.
The
guards swept their metal-detecting magic wands over every inch
of my body. Exasperated with the whole situation, I began taking
off my pants. Perhaps fearing my underwear more than the supposed
grenade launcher I had hidden in the back pocket of my Levi's,
the guards waved me through.
This
wasn't security: It was one person's power trip, and I was able
to beat it by being more audacious than they were willing to take.
I doubt they could have found a weapon if I really had one and
had been determined to hide it, say, by sewing it into my jeans.
Instead, they settled for petty harassment. Airport security personnel
are underpaid, barely trained, and often outright incompetent.
Studies have shown they suffer from huge
turnover rates, which means that no sooner does someone
learn the job than they quit. With poor salaries and benefits,
there's no incentive to remain, as opposed to taking a career
with some future, say, becoming a junior high school janitor.
In
fact, airport security always reminded me of another tableau I
once took part in, this time at a Taco Bell Express at a suburban
shopping mall. Impatient for their preprocessed beans wrapped
in a lukewarm tortilla, a long line of irate suburbanites took
their revenge on the faceless Taco Bell corporation by continually
berating the single employee, who was crammed into a space roughly
the same size as those boxes in which they raise veal calves.
Like some sort of crazed robot from a bad '80s sci-fi film, he
hurried through the precise tasks at each workstation to assemble
the faux Mexican food. He clearly had an inhuman job to do, for
which he was no doubt paid a fraction of what the "efficiency
consultant" who designed each of his preprogrammed tasks.
It was a wonder he didn't kill someone with the caulk gun they
use to squirt the guacamole onto the food. I felt so bad for him
that when he apologized for spilling my drink while handing me
my bean burrito, I told him I didn't blame him: I blamed the system.
Then I gave him my Che Guverra pin.
It's
much the same with the security. I doubt that the airlines ever
wanted to thoroughly check anyone's luggage beyond sliding it
through a metal detector. Checking takes time, and time is money.
What would be the payoff for delaying people's departure? More
incidences of air rage? The FAA may give airports and carriers
mandates for implementing security; it is up to private industry
to enforce them. And, for private industry, it comes down not
to a question of safety, but a simple equation: Salaries,
training, and equipment cost money, which are subtracted from
profits.
What
this means is that our only chance to stop a guy who has spent
the last few years planning a hijacking is some overworked shlub
who spends a few minutes looking through his luggage. What they
are seeking to do is provide a product, cheaper-damn the social
costs.
In
a 1996 Salon.com interview, Morris D. Busby, a senior
member of George Bush, Sr.'s administration said, "I don't
agree, and I have never agreed, that security should fundamentally
be in the hands of the airlines, and that it should be paid for
by the airlines. The cost of security is a cost off the bottom
line of a CEO's balance sheet. . . And he's going to do it as
cheaply as he can. And in a world that is as competitive commercially
as the airline industry is, you get what you pay for. What you
end up with, in my opinion, is probably less security than we
need, and deserve."
Private
airport security is not unlike private prisons. It is a public
service that the government ought to provide, yet subcontracts
out to private, for-profit companies-in this case, the airlines.
It's the American way. The airlines, with their fiscal health
ahead of their passengers' further farm out the task. (Have you
ever eaten a meal on an American airline? Whereas the food on
a European carrier approaches the edible, our domestic carriers
obviously see their passengers as so much cattle to be fed at
the proper time.) The end result is the same: a score or so of
hijackers waltzing onto four separate planes with deadly weapons-and
several days later, Northwestern employees do the same thing all
over again.
Nine-eleven
is an indictment against this entire way of doing business. There
are some services that the government ought to provide, because
private companies lack the incentive to do the job right. Yet,
many of the current administration's policies are symptoms of
the same disease. George W. Bush's proposed plan to farm out social
security is a perfect example. It's a hijacking of another sort:
Our financial future (what little is left) is being put in the
hands of the vagaries of the stock market. Obviously, the chances
of the common worker profiting off this move are very, very slim,
yet the venture capitalists receiving the cash have no reason
not to rejoice.
We
can not reverse the tragedy of the eleventh of September. But
we can prevent ourselves from making mistakes of this sort ever
again.