Fly The Reactionary Skies

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As the new year (and decade) begins, what nearly happened in Detroit on Christmas Day has politicians and other government officials pointing fingers while airline passengers are treated even more like criminals.

Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab is currently being held at a federal prison somewhere in Michigan awaiting trial.  He allegedly tried to bring down a Delta/Northwest flight from Amsterdam wearing bomb-making material in his underwear.  It took several passengers to keep him from carrying out his plot.

There were many mistakes on the intelligence front, despite Homeland Security secretary Janet Napolitano's initial insistence that "the system worked".  The father of Abdulmutallab warned authorities in Nigeria that his son might be a flight risk, but boarded a flight from there to Amsterdam anyway.  Once he was there, security either didn't notice or just waved him through.  Then he was on his way to the U.S.

While all this was going on, President Barack Obama and his family were in Hawaii on vacation.  He monitored the situation and made some statements, but he seemed to give the impression that it was no big deal as long as nobody was killed.  He really should have gone back to Washington immediately.

Today, the President announced stringent new security measures for international flights that come into the U.S.  Among them:  more emphasis on passengers that come from parts of the world where terrorist activities might be taking place.

What a novel approach.  Since 9/11/01, the symbol of America's war on terror has been the knee jerk reaction to an incident, and airline passengers have been the victims of it.  It goes like this:

• You fly airplanes into our buildings, and we'll invade your countries, whether they had anything to do with it or not.
• You try to detonate yourself with shoes, liquids or underwear in an airplane.  Then we'll force everyone to take off their shoes, throw liquids in the trash, and submit them to body scans.  And that includes babies and grandmothers.
• You try to come in through Canada or Mexico without so much as a visa, then we'll make everyone buy passports even though those two countries are within driving distance.  We might throw in Alaska, Hawaii and Puerto Rico for good measure.
• You try to sneak past security, then we'll make everyone go through it again.

No wonder Al Qaeda is laughing its heads off, because all this is costing the United States billions of dollars a year.  And this nonsense will keep happening unless there is a rational, clear-headed plan to protect people's right to have a safe and relatively painless flight.

If you must fly, this is the way it's going to be from now on.  For the rest of us, there are other modes of transportation that don't require restrictions on what you can and cannot bring.  And the price of gas doesn't seem so bad by comparison.