Airline security and my 'attack on free enterprise'
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE DATED FEB. 10, 2002
THE LIBERTARIAN, By Vin Suprynowicz
Airline security and my 'attack on free enterprise'
An e-mail correspondent writes in, responding to my January column about a retired Marine Corps general being held up by clueless Phoenix airport security guards, who didn't want him to carry his Medal of Honor on board:
"There's a problem with your story.
"First, you allege in your opening sentence that airport screeners 'let 19 out of 19 terrorists slip through their net...'. This is not true, the hijacker/terrorists did not breach any security pertaining to airport operations. The airport screening contractors did exactly what they were supposed to have done on that day. ... If the U.S. government refuse to allow an aggressive physical profiling system, and fail to prohibit box-cutters from being taken on a plane, what would you have expected these screeners to do? The government ... well, that's another issue.
"You also state that 'The press widely reports that metal nail files and other instruments with blades are now prohibited in aircraft cabins under Federal Aviation Administration regulations that went into effect after Sept. 11 -- though in fact the FAA has no power to enact any new laws through its advisory 'security directives.' This is incorrect.
"The FAA (and the newly named TSA) regularly fine air carriers $11,000 per violation of all the matters set forth in their Security Directives. The fingernail file, a Department of Aviation (the local airport operators) prohibition, although not enforceable through fine, will cause the DOA to shut down the airport if the carriers, though their security checkpoint contractor, do not enforce this prohibition. ...
"I was dismayed to read of your criticism of private enterprise when it is the government that was at fault on Sept. 11th. -- M.V."
# # #
I replied:
Hi, M.V. -- Airport security is supposed to keep would-be hijackers from boarding airplanes. To argue otherwise is to argue: "The purpose of armies is to march around in squares and make their bunks so taut you can bounce a quarter off the blankets. After all, isn't that what we practice, over and over? Yes, yes, my boys surrendered as soon as one enemy soldier came over the ridge on a donkey and told them to drop their weapons. But dammit, I think they put on the smartest surrender parade anyone has ever seen."
Nineteen would-be hijackers tried to board American airplanes on Sept. 11 (Actually, we're pretty sure it was 24 -- another Arab gang on a flight grounded in St. Louis turned out to have box-cutters, and all promptly boarded a train together, escaping to Texas.) Every one got on the plane he wanted to. The security failure rate was 100 percent. To say "The hijacker/terrorists did not breach any security pertaining to airport operations, the airport screening contractors did exactly what they were supposed to ..." is absurd casuistry and dangerous nonsense. Are you a lawyer or a Jesuit?
Americans have been submitting to wasteful, time-consuming, intrusive, humiliating and disgusting searches and snooping for years, all on the premise that this nonsense would PREVENT HIJACKINGS. Yet on the one day it confronted the problem it was supposed to prevent, the system FAILED COMPLETELY. Your argument is like saying, "The operation was a complete success; my stated goal was to remove the appendix and, as you can see, the appendix is out. The fact that the patient died is of no concern to me."
The system didn't even fail because the crack Fred & Ethel Mertz operatives were distracted with flash-bang devices, or because a really clever Tom Clancy/Fred Forsythe-style operative disguised his sniper rifle as a pair of crutches. No, the terrorists breezed through, smiling and flashing their government-issued photo IDs, successfully answering the tricky, "Has anyone else had control of your luggage" questions -- with their box-cutters either taped to their thighs or pre-planted on the planes by Fatimah the night janitor. The airport security system failed ... as it will always fail. Why? One airport executive in Texas has correctly compared the whole enterprise to "putting a steel door on a grass hut."
The events of Sept. 11 would have been impossible if there were NO AIRPORT SECURITY SYSTEM AT ALL. If average Americans were allowed to carry their personal firearms on board our aircraft (as they were up through the 1960s -- any restrictions being prohibited by the Second and 14th Amendments), the chances that several passengers on each flight would have been armed -- and thus able to shoot the hijackers, preventing the Trade Center and Pentagon hits --- would have been quite substantial. Just as school shootings are facilitated by turning the schools into "self-defense-free zones," so the same thing has been done to our airports and aircraft.
Yet your solution is to defend and continue to tinker with the existing, worthless airport security system, tacitly endorsing its continued role in accustoming a once-free people to submitting themselves to random body searches, defending it and the dangerously conscienceless "just-following-orders" morons who staff it, urging the government to "ban box-cutters," and so forth?
If you were aboard the Titanic, would you be pestering the captain with a detailed new plan for rearranging the deck chairs?
I don't give a damn whether the FAA "regularly fines air carriers." I said they have no power to enact new laws by issuing mere bureaucratic directives. The Constitution states "All legislative powers ... shall be vested in a Congress of the United States." Does it say, "... or can be delegated to such non-elected agencies as the Congress sees fit, whereupon such agencies can issue any old piece of paper on their letterhead and the people will have to obey it the same as if it were a law"? I don't think so. I can't find that language in MY copy. If I were to say, "Concentration camp guards have no right to murder inmates in cold blood," would you reply, "This is incorrect; the guards at Auschwitz and Sobibor regularly murdered inmates in cold blood"?
What these fastidious and finally counterproductive little bureaucrats DO has very little to do with their quite limited delegated powers. Do you believe what armed agents of the state have a "right" to do is limited only by what their guns -- and the bovine obedience of the captive masses -- allow them to get away with? Did Hitler have a "right" to conquer Poland?
As for my "criticism of private enterprise": If airlines and airports in America today are a "private enterprise," I'm starting to sell stock today in "Air Ganja," my all-armed, all-smoking private carrier which will indulge in NONE of these security measures, instead advertising, "Our airline is safe because we ENCOURAGE our passengers to come armed. In fact, if you don't have a gun, ask our friendly stewardess; she'll be happy to loan you a Colt .45 (loaded with pre-fragmented rounds) till you reach your destination."
My stewardesses (no, not "flight attendants" -- if I hire someone whose main job is passenger safety rather than delivering the drinks you'll be able to recognize her from her fire axe and her Thompson Gun) will also assure folks that our superior air conditioning system allows them to consume any drug of choice once we're airborn and therefore out of the jurisdiction of any ground-level authority (as all Americans were free to do up through 1933, when this was a much more polite and peaceful nation) -- with free hashish and marijuana spliffs being handed out in First Class.
Since airlines are "private enterprises," rather than captive, subsidized slaves of fascist government overseers with their unconstitutional "one-size-fits-all" regulatory protection rackets -- variously disguised as "advisory directives," "voluntary corporate policy," and so on -- I'm sure no federal agency will have the desire or power to stop me from launching my new airline ... right?
Vin Suprynowicz is assistant editorial page editor of the Review-Journal. For information on his monthly newsletter and on his next book, "The Ballad of Carl Drega," dial 775-348-8591.
Vin Suprynowicz, vin@lvrj.com
"When great changes occur in history, when great principles are involved, as a rule the majority are wrong. The minority are right." -- Eugene V. Debs (1855-1926)
"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed -- and thus clamorous to be led to safety -- by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." -- H.L. Mencken
