"air security lies in deterrence"

This sensible essay appears in today's Wall Street Journal:

January 7, 2004

Business World
Air Security Lies
In Deterrence, Not Nuggets
By HOLMAN W. JENKINS JR.

That information and intelligence are two different things was amply
demonstrated by the executive branch's difficulty in deciphering
Iraq's weapons progress from a distance. Making sense out of noise
seems again to have been a trouble last week as several governments
cooperated to cancel or delay a dozen flights due to terrorist alarms.

A British newspaper pointed to a police "informant" who had fingered
British Airways, Air France and Aeromexico as targets for
hijack-and-crash plots. U.S. papers pointed to e-mail or phone traffic
for a specific flight number, BA 223. The Journal cited six passengers
on an Air France flight with names similar to known terrorists. All
these tips seem to have come a cropper, or so the news organizations
report.

Oh well. Disruptions were fewer than those caused by a thunderstorm
over Cleveland, though thunderstorms tend not to produce the same
lingering effects on airlines that terrorist scares do. And at least
our willingness to cancel routines based on slight or ambiguous
evidence adds a new complication for terrorist groups already
straining to pull off jobs with slender resources and a shortage of
personnel who are both motivated and competent (the hiring criteria
being especially stiff in the suicide era). This is a silver lining to
what is, objectively, our stronger propensity to panic over al Qaeda
since Sept. 11, even though al Qaeda objectively is weaker.

Still, judgment should play a role, and judgment says Sept. 11-style
hijacking plots have been removed from the terrorist arsenal. Speaking
with the New York Sun recently, former Sen. Bob Kerrey, a member of
the federal commission investigating the attacks, made the key
observation: "The hijackers recognized we had the wrong rules on the
airline. We could have taken that means of delivery of a weapon off
the table, had we merely said, lock the pilot up front and resist. We
never made that confession of that mistake."

Mr. Kerrey, no longer in office, can say what other politicians won't.
Aviation will remain a target not only for the obvious reasons, but
because it's a sprawling and highly routinized system:
Vulnerabilities, once found and tested, can be counted on to persist.
But that has implications for us too. Instead of turning ourselves
upside down over ambiguous nuggets of information, we should recognize
that we can deter attacks with a high degree of confidence simply by
focusing on vulnerabilities that are every bit as apparent to us as
they are to terrorists.

In the context of the recent hullabaloo, it's interesting to note what
was known and done without hullabaloo in the pre-9/11 past.

In 1994, French commandos killed four Algerian terrorists who'd taken
over a plane, landed in Marseille and ordered up a full load of fuel
with the suspected aim of crashing it in Paris. In 1995, a rollup of
al Qaeda operatives in Manila uncovered firm evidence of a plan to
hijack a plane and crash it into CIA headquarters. In July 2001, the
Italian military went on full alert during a G-8 summit in Genoa based
on intelligence of a hijack-and-crash plot while President Bush was in
town.

These are mere highlights of what had been deluge of indications more
substantial than "chatter" about the possibility of such plots.
Looking back now, we shouldn't be berating ourselves for not noticing
the stray clue that would have led us to the 9-11 plotters. We should
be berating ourselves for not plugging the hole that the terrorists
were counting on -- that is, for not revoking the FAA protocol that
said terrorists were to be negotiated with, not resisted.

If you suppose al Qaeda sticks to its knitting, it's not hard to
figure out where its investment in loophole-hunting is concentrated
now: How to get bombs aboard multiple flights simultaneously.

This was the gist of the well-documented Bojinka plot, planned out of
the Philippines, which aimed to blow up a dozen U.S. airliners
simultaneously. A test bomb aboard a Philippine Airlines flight killed
a Japanese businessman in 1994, and only lucky (and diligent) police
work in Manila prevented the plot from going further. You don't need
chatter to recognize the significance of Richard Reid: The shoe-bomber
with his matchbook was meant to test a solution to getting an
explosive on a plane without the necessary timing and ignition
mechanism that would likely show up on an x-ray. The Brits just
arrested another potential shoe-bomber in November, finding also a
pair of socks impregnated with three kinds of plastic explosive,
evidently for a suicide bomber to wear around his/her neck.

We'll leave out the case of 9-year-old boy who showed up for a flight
in Orlando in July with a handgun sewn into his teddy bear. His
parents said a strange girl had appeared at their hotel room door with
the bear as a "gift." The FBI says the investigation is pending and no
arrests have been made. Presumably the agency has examined
surveillance videos to see who might have been watching from the
shadows when the boy tried to take it through security checks.

Passenger profiling is a useful layer of security, but we'd be nuts
not to maintain a high level of random screening too. Keep this in
mind next time you're tempted to throw a fit when grandma or some
four-year-old is pulled out of line. What stops "Bojinka"-style plots
from happening is the fact that suicide terrorists are presented with
an unacceptable chance of being stopped at the turnstile.

America's vulnerabilities, on paper, are unlimited. But the lack of
attacks should remind us there's a sizeable gap between the desire to
do us harm and the means to pull it off. Let it also be said the Bush
administration has contributed to the misallocation of energies with
creation of a Homeland Security Department. Out another side of its
head, however, it's pursued a remarkably patient and proactive
strategy to eliminate al Qaeda and address the deeper quandary of a
Middle East that has been hurtling down history's dead end for too
long.