Terrorism

Thinking outside the box on security

by Fred Smith on January 7, 2010

in Mobility, Precaution & Risk, Regulation

The Washington Post editorial, “In the wake of Flight 253, the TSA must get more anti-terrorist tools” makes a short-sighted argument for increasing resources for the TSA.  Terrorists, as we’ve seen in Iraq and elsewhere, have diversified, wreaking havoc wherever individuals congregate.  Malls, mass transit systems, sports stadia, churches all represent targets.  To focus scarce taxpayer funds on the risks of air travel alone neglects the broader terrorist threat.

Why not encourage a more active anti-terrorist role for air travelers and airlines – and enact “Good Samaritan” laws to reduce their liability?  Unfortunately, current privacy laws and anti-discrimination lawsuits have restricted their ability to augment efforts of the TSA.  Consider how airlines might have responded to 9/11. A US Michael O’Leary might well have launched a “John Wayne” or a “Nervous Nelly” option.  The first would arm passengers (and crews) for self-defense (that approach might well have minimized the killing sprees at Virginia Tech and Fort Hood).  The latter might require passengers to strip and don strait jackets for the duration of the flight.  Competition would encourage a more careful balancing of security and privacy concerns with passengers playing a creative role.  Thank God the passenger on Northwest was not forced to remain in his seat!

Why should efforts to advance public safety exclude the public?  America’s history shows numerous ways in which the citizenry has played a critical security role.  Government should play a role in defending the citizenry but your focus on the role of bureaucracy alone risks losing the creativity of travelers and airlines.  Why not encourage their involvement too?

And, given the problems already observed with both the TSA and the HAS in their preemptive efforts to alone provide security, shouldn’t the possibility of enlisting business and the citizenry in this effort be considered?

Terrorism Is Rare

by Ryan Young on January 2, 2010 · 5 comments

in Nanny State, Personal Liberty, Precaution & Risk

Radley Balko points to an article that shows exactly how rare terrorism is.

The figure that caught my eye was the last one. There were 647 deaths due to airborne terrorism over the last last ten years. There were 7,015,630,000 passengers over the same period. Yes, that figure is higher than current world population. That’s because each time someone flies, they count as one passenger. You take ten trips, you’re counted ten times. That represents each opportunity to become a terrorist victim, and is therefore the correct measure to use.

Each time you board a plane, your odds of being a victim of terrorism are about 1 in 10,408,947 (my own calculations yielded 1 in 10,843,323, but the point holds either way). Your odds of being struck by lighting are over twenty times higher!

Terrorists are so rare that they can’t win by killing people. There are too many of us and too few of them. Terrorists can only win by scaring people. Making them overreact. Making them trade away their freedom for for the illusion of security. The TSA, which is based on exactly that, represents the terrorists’ greatest victory yet.

That’s why people need to know just how safe we really are, even with all of the terrorists out there. The more we know, the less scary they become. And fear is their only effective weapon. If we take it away, the terrorists lose.

TSA Praises Itself After Year of Security Lapses; Obama Administration Backs TSA Unionization at Public Expense

by Hans Bader on December 31, 2009 · 1 comment

in Employment, International, Labor, Mobility, Personal Liberty, Politics as Usual, Precaution & Risk

In a year-end message to Transportation Security Administration (TSA) staff, the agency praised itself for a “very good year” in airline security, despite repeated security failures.  But, as ABC News notes,

The message made no mention of TSA snafus during 2009, including several highly critical reports by the inspector general for the Department of Homeland Security and the inadvertent posting on the Internet of confidential documents revealing airport security procedures.

Recently, a Nigerian terrorist nearly managed to blow up an airliner, after being allowed on the plane despite being on a terror watch list.  He set fire to explosives, but was thwarted at the last minute when vigilant passengers put out the fire. Amazingly, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano claimed that the episode showed that “the system worked.”

The Obama administration is now trying to unionize the TSA., which will make it even more cumbersome, slow-moving, and bureaucratic.  The Washington Examiner explains why that is a very bad idea that would undermine travelers’ safety.  Union-mandated “collective bargaining would cripple the TSA,” stripping the TSA of “its flexibility to move people . . . and change protocols when it believes there is a terrorist threat,” requiring “TSA managers to share sensitive intelligence information with union negotiators . . . increasing the possibility of damaging leaks,” and restricting managers from rewarding ”high-performing screeners or fire those unable or unwilling to perform their duties in an efficient manner.”

The TSA is now reportedly planning to impose additional pointless restrictions on airline passengers, such as limiting access to blankets, and requiring passengers to stay in their seats during the last hour of flight, even though it was a passenger who got out of his seat during the last hour of flight who thwarted the recent attempted terrorist attack by putting out the fire the Nigerian terrorist had set to the explosives he carried on the plane.

For more on the TSA see here.

Terrorist Charged After Trying to Blow Up Plane; Government Undermines Airline and Railroad Security

by Hans Bader on December 27, 2009 · 3 comments

in Employment, Labor, Mobility, Politics as Usual, Precaution & Risk

An alleged terrorist from Nigeria has been charged with plotting to blow up an airliner.  He carried explosives onto a plane and set them on fire.   Only the quick action of passengers put out the fire and prevented an explosion.  He was allowed on the plane despite the fact that he was on a terror watch list.

Despite this utter failure, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano claims that “the system worked” because no one died. Her agency is now planning to make overseas air travel much more onerous, by banning passengers from getting out of their seats during the last hour of a flight (even though a passenger who did just that that foiled the terrorist attempt) and by restricting carry-on luggage and items like blankets on flights.

In the aftermath of 9/11, Congress shifted airline security screening to the inept Transportation Security Administration (TSA), which fails to detect explosive ingredients and fake bombs, in performance tests.  A study found that the TSA is more than twice as likely to fail to detect a bomb as the private security firms it replaced. And TSA’s failure rate is three or four times as high as the few remaining private firms still allowed to handle airline security.

In tests, TSA failed to detect fake bombs 60 percent of the time at Chicago’s O’Hare airport, and 75 percent of the time in Los Angeles. Yet the Obama administration plans to make TSA even more bureaucratic by introducing collective bargaining, which will make it even harder to get rid of incompetent employees.

Rather than having the federal government take over airline security screening, the feds should have stepped up policing of the private companies that performed it, to weed out bad companies and promote the best.

Bush initially objected to Congressional demands for a federal takeover, but then knuckled under for political reasons.  Ironically, even in European countries governed by Socialist parties, airline security and screening is generally in the hands of private companies, because private companies are usually more diligent and innovative and less bureaucratic and inefficient.

The Obama administration is also undermining the security of railroad passengers by gutting an expert, highly-rated, anti-terror agency at Amtrak, which Amtrak’s unions hate, despite its efficiency, because it is not unionized.  Political cronyism is also playing a role in the gutting of Amtrak’s Office of Security Strategy and Special Operations (OSSSO).  Ultimately, OSSSO’s “highly-specialized officers” will likely be replaced by unionized employees with ”alarmingly low pass rates” in “basic” classes.

Fort Hood’s Lessons: Treat People Equally, Without Politically Correct Double Standards

by Hans Bader on November 9, 2009

in Legal, Personal Liberty, Politics as Usual, Sanctimony

Intelligence officials knew that Nidal Hasan, the soldier who killed 13 people at Fort Hood, was trying to contract Al Qaeda.  (He once attended the same mosque as 9/11 terrorists.)

Although the killer’s extremist rantings were common knowledge, “a fear of appearing discriminatory . . . kept officers from filing a formal written complaint,” reports the Associated Press.  As a result, he escaped any disciplinary action or review of his fitness.

The Fort Hood shooter had previously said that Muslims should rise up against the military, “repeatedly expressed sympathy for suicide bombers,” was pleased by the terrorist murder of an army recruiter, and publicly called for the beheading or burning of non-Muslims, talking “about how if you’re a nonbeliever the Koran says you should have your head cut off, you should have oil poured down your throat, you should be set on fire.”  But thanks to a politically-correct double standard, nothing was done to remove him from a position where he could harm others.

The lesson of the Fort Hood shootings is that applying politically-correct double standards, rather than treating people equally, can be lethal.

In a desire to curry favor with the liberal Congress that funds it, the military has increasingly adopted politically-correct policies that abandon equal treatment, such as imposing racial preferences in admissions to the military academies in the name of “diversity.”  (In practice, “diversity” seems to mean “racial proportionality:” it is harder for Asians to be admitted to the academies than for whites and Hispanics, and harder for whites and Hispanics to be admitted than for African-Americans.  Such preferences are of dubious legality under Supreme Court precedent.)

In this climate of political correctness and double standards, it is understandable that officers were afraid to file complaints about Hasan, for fear that they would incur the wrath of the “diversity” police.  Even now, the Army Chief of Staff, General George Casey, seems mainly concerned that the shootings will undermine the army’s commitment to “diversity,” rather than being concerned about the double standard that spawned this tragedy.  He seems more concerned that “diversity” will become a “casualty” of such shootings than that his soldiers will.

President Obama’s initial response to the tragedy was embarrassing, even for some liberal journalists.  Obama’s initial remarks about the tragedy came buried in the middle of a speech laced with “wildly disconnected” ramblings about an unrelated topic, starting with a “joking shout-out.”  Even the liberal Boston Globe chided the president for a speech lacking in ”empathy” for the victims.

In an absurd display of political correctness, early media reports chose to harp on the false claim that the killer had PTSD (which he didn’t: he never even served overseas) or the unsupported claim that he had been subjected to harassment (support groups for Muslim soldiers say they have received no recent reports of a Muslim soldier being harassed “simply because he was Muslim”).  They also jumped to conclusions in denying (as Atlantic Magazine’s Max Fisher did) that the shooter’s motives had anything to do with his extreme religious beliefs or “any related political causes.”

In the aftermath of the shootings, some commentators have criticized a gun-control policy that disarms soldiers while on military bases to create “gun-free zones,” leaving them defenseless in the face of an attack.  The policy succeeded in disarming the killer’s victims, but not the killer himself.

Tea Party Protesters Are Right

by Hans Bader on April 17, 2009 · 4 comments

in Bailout Watch, Economy, Legal, Politics as Usual, Stimulus to Nowhere

Tea party protests questioned the constitutionality of some of the massive bailouts over the past year, which amount to trillions of dollars. That drew bizarre attacks from leftists, who argue that these peaceful protests will somehow lead to another terrorist incident like the Oklahoma City bombing, and that the tea party protesters, like the Founding Fathers, are just a reactionary “bunch of white males who didn’t want to pay their taxes.”

Not all of the bailouts are illegal or unconstitutional, but some of them are. Some bailouts were sweeping, standardless grants of authority to spend money that violate the non-delegation doctrine, a Constitutional separation-of-powers safeguard enforced by the Supreme Court in the 1935 Schechter Poultry case. Others were never authorized by Congress.

For example, the auto bailout was either illegal or unconstitutional. Even Andrew Sullivan, a critic of the tea parties, reached that conclusion. So have liberal commentators like Clinton Administration Labor Secretary Robert Reich and conservative commentators like the Heritage Foundation and George Will. I earlier explained why the bailout is illegal or unconstitutional: either the bank bailout bill didn’t confer such vast discretion to spend money that it could be diverted to an auto bailout (in which case the auto bailout was illegal), or it did (in which case the bank bailout bill was itself an unconstitutional violation of separation of powers).

A similar auto bailout in Britain failed miserably, wasting billions in the process.

There was a bomb threat recently, but it wasn’t from conservatives or libertarians, but rather an advocate for illegal aliens. So much for the Obama Administration’s baseless suggestion that the next terrorist attack may come from opponents of illegal immigration or supporters of federalism.

Other criticisms of the tea party protests also were baseless. They have been criticized for supposedly offering no solutions or constructive suggestions about how to cut spending. But they have specifically identified two massive spending programs that need to be cut. The first is Obama’s $800 billion stimulus package, which was falsely sold to the public as needed to prevent “irreversible decline,” but which the Congressional Budget Office repeatedly pointed out would actually shrink the economy “in the long run.” The second is the Obama Administration’s mortgage bailout, which would benefit even high-income people with modest mortgages (scroll down to this protester’s “I can’t afford your mortgage” sign).

For having the temerity to protest Administration lies and out-of-control spending, the protesters have been attacked elsewhere in the most vicious terms as “redneck, racist Republicons” and as “a bunch of white old people and rednecks” who “got together and tried to start a revolution…to drive the Fascist/Communist n****r out of the White House and stop the fags from stealing their children.” As a Harvard-educated urban dweller with a multiracial family, whose office hosted the end of the Washington tea party, I find these claims baffling.

Andrew Sullivan dismisses the tea parties as “opposition to the Obama administration’s spending plans, manned by people who made no serious objections to George W. Bush’s.”

I certainly made “serious objections to George W. Bush’s” spending plans. I condemned his costly prescription-drug entitlement in the Washington Times, and repeatedly condemned the $160 billion Bush “stimulus rebates” in 2008. I called his $700 billion Wall Street “bailout bill dangerous, inflationary, unnecessary, and unconstitutional.” And I condemned his multibillion dollar auto bailout.

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