In the wake of the attempted terrorist attack on Christmas day aboard a Detroit-bound flight, President Obama has ramped up security at the nation’s airports. Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who was trained and funded by an Al Qaeda cell in Yemen, was able to board a plane, despite the warnings the would-be bomber’s father made to embassy officials in Nigeria. The National Security Agency (NSA) had also intercepted Al Qaeda communications referring to the attempted attack, but was unable to connect this with the father’s warnings.
The President announced new airport security measures on Tuesday in response to the failure by various intelligence agencies, including the NSA, in allowing Abdulmutallab onto a plane with concealed explosives.
Citizens flying to the United States from Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Algeria, Pakistan, Nigeria, Yemen, Somalia, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Sudan, Syria, and Cuba will receive a full-body pat down and an extra search of their carry-on luggage. The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) has chosen these countries because they have a higher risk of producing terrorist suspects or governments that are suspected of sponsoring terrorism. Obama has also allocated over a billion dollars to put more advanced security devices in domestic airports.
These new security measures will do little to make Americans safer. It is nearly statistically impossible, through pat-downs and additional baggage searches, to weed out a fraction of a percent from the over 150 million citizens of the fourteen proscribed nations who are terrorists. The only effect such measures have had and will have are long delays and headaches for all travelers.
The intelligence agencies are merely following the formula of all airport security in post-9/11 America: “security theater.” Though conservatives would have you think otherwise, Bush’s security policies did nothing to decrease the threat of terrorist attacks, nor, it would appear, will Obama’s agenda. A report from the United States Government Accountability Office in October 2009, demonstrated a failure by the TSA to assure that its screening technologies addressed the highest priority security needs at airport security checkpoints.
An additional flaw is that security may be more lax in other countries, something the United States has little control over. For example, there were “close calls” on planes bound for the US from London: the failed shoe bomber, Harry Reid in 2001, and a plot to smuggle explosive liquids aboard in 2006 that was thwarted. These failed attacks show that terrorist cells will always find a loophole around airport security.
Another problem with Obama’s new plan is that it will overflow the intelligence community with data, making it even harder to prevent terrorist plots. Abdulmutallab was able to slip through the cracks because of the already monumental amount of data possessed by American intelligence. The Terrorists Identities Datamart Environment (TIDE), a list of suspected terrorists which Abdulmutallab was on, has over half a million names on it.
This list will surely get larger as a result of new security procedures, making it nearly impossible to identify any real terrorist threats. It will make it harder for agencies to work together, as was the case in the Christmas Day plot. A similar lack of information sharing between the FBI and CIA helped Al Qaeda kill over three thousand people on September 11th.
Republicans have seized this opportunity to criticize the Obama administration on being soft on terrorism, using the erroneous mantra that there were no attempted terrorist attacks after 9/11 under Bush. Bush’s security policies, which were praised by conservatives, violated the Constitution with unwarranted wiretaps and other blatant encroachments on citizens’ rights, and violated international law by torturing and illegally imprisoning suspects without habeas corpus. These actions created an environment of fear, and in reality made the nation no safer.
President Obama’s new policy, though more legally sound, will do no better to protect the nation’s citizens. Rather than putting even more time and money into intelligence gathering and airport security, the government should instead try to figure out the cause of the extreme anti-American sentiment in Muslim countries. In the long run, mending our relationship with the Muslim world is the only way to truly making the United States safer.