The Dulles Experiment

I can't take it anymore. After reading John Tierney's NY Times op ed about the incompetency of our government to put effective security measures in place at our airports (not to mention in every other vulnerable place) I came up with a Dulles Experiment of my own.

The Dulles Experiment, as Tierney explains, borrowed techniques from the Israelis who, instead of looking for "things", observed a passenger's behavior as he entered the airport, checked luggage and stood in line at the security checkpoint.

"The screeners were looking for unusual behavior like sweating, rigid posture, clenched fists. A screener would engage a passenger in conversation and ask questions he wouldn’t have been trained to expect, like whether he’d seen a Redskins game the night before even though the Redskins hadn’t played."

It strikes me that this would be a great technique to use on Bushie to find out a thing or two.

Here's how it would work. We borrow a couple of the "best of the best" airport screeners trained to observe suspicious behavior and have them "interview" Georgie about what exactly happened on 9/11. They'd nonchalantly say things like, "Gee, seems strange that the secret service didn't wisk you away to safety immediately after you found out that America was under attack ... you being the President and all. What were they thinking?" Or, "Hey, what ever happened to those video tapes that were confiscated from near the scene of the Pentagon attack anyway? How come ya don't just release the whole slew of 'em to the media to stop all those pesky conspiracy theories?"

The screeners would then just sit back and observe the Preznit's response. You know, like count how many times he stutters trying to figure out how to keep his foot out of his mouth. Stuff like that.

Better yet, maybe we could disguise one of the screeners as a fake news guy like Bill O'Reilly, get him a press pass and sneak him into the next Press Conference. That way, the whole country can catch it on tape. Now that would be entertainment.

As for why our government has done next to nothing about securing the country since 9/11, well I have a theory about that. If 9/11 was government sponsored terrorism, and, especially if they are planning a repeat performance in the near future, there is really nothing to secure us from -- except the government, of course. So Homeland Security makes a half-hearted effort to put a few airline restrictions in place, while they smile as the current TV news "security" specials reveal our must vulnerable areas of attack to the whole world--kinda like a "USA Target 101" primer for terrorists. But heaven forbid some squirrelly NY Times reporter reveals that we are tapping terrorist phones!--throw that traitor in jail!

Tiresome, isn't it?


Come Wait With Me
By John Tierney
The New York Times

Three years ago, officials at Dulles Airport conducted a little experiment to improve security on international flights. They wanted most passengers to spend less time in line at checkpoints.

Today, of course, this idea sounds terribly dangerous. Who can afford to worry about passengers’ convenience? Let them wait for hours. Take away those Evians of mass destruction. Last weekend, even reading material became suspect — why would anyone on a six-hour flight need a book anyway? Stop making trouble and watch the movie!

The Dulles experiment was radical even in 2003, when airport screeners thought nothing of making passengers wait while they searched Grandma’s purse for nail scissors. But a few experts wondered if there was a better use of everyone’s time.

The screeners at Dulles stopped worrying about pen knives, shoes and laptops, allowing passengers to pass through more quickly. The speed of the line increased by nearly a third. The screening process required fewer workers, but they detected more problems because they worked smarter.

Instead of looking for things, they looked at people. Borrowing techniques from Israeli airports and the U.S. Customs Service, screeners observed a passenger as he entered the airport, checked luggage and stood in line at the security checkpoint.

The screeners were looking for unusual behavior like sweating, rigid posture, clenched fists. A screener would engage a passenger in conversation and ask questions he wouldn’t have been trained to expect, like whether he’d seen a Redskins game the night before even though the Redskins hadn’t played.

The screeners were looking for telltale body language of someone trying too hard to act natural. When they spotted it, they singled out that person for interrogation, a pat-down and a luggage search. The screeners caught no terrorists, but they consistently found people with something to hide, often a forged visa, a stolen airline ticket, drugs or other smuggled goods.

Scott McHugh, who oversaw the Dulles program for the Transportation Security Administration, is confident this type of screening would have flagged the Sept. 11 terrorists or the latest plotters in London. “If you look at the videos of 9/11 terrorists and the interviews with people who talked to them,” he says, “they all exhibit symptoms of stress that would have been identified, like failure to make eye contact and failure to answer questions directly. They’re not exactly sophisticated. They’re under so much stress that anything out of the ordinary really throws them off their game.”

McHugh, though, doesn’t hold much hope for the current system. He’s now in the private security industry after leaving the T.S.A. in frustration at its inertia. Although the agency has been introducing the innovations from the Dulles program to other airports, it still spends most of its time and money looking for things.

“Airport security isn’t much better than it was on September 10,” McHugh says. “Terrorists will always come up with something new. As long as we keep looking for things from the last plot, we’re inconveniencing 99.99 percent of the people with no real benefit.”

It’s not that the T.S.A.’s leaders don’t see the problem. Kip Hawley, who took over the agency last year, is a smart manager who has been trying to change the agency’s focus. He removed small scissors from the taboo list, and he has complained about all the time spent by screeners seizing cigarette lighters to comply with an order from Congress.

But he’s making little headway because he has inherited an unworkable mess created by Congress after Sept. 11. It ignored the security model in Israel and much of Europe, where screening programs are run by airports under the guidance of a national agency. Instead, Congress ordered the T.S.A. to both supervise and run the screening programs itself.

The result has been a waste of billions of dollars on an unwieldy federal agency that’s become known as Thousands Standing Around. The T.S.A. should be trying to anticipate new terrorist tactics, like the bomb plot uncovered in England, but it had to raid its research budget to pay for the screening program, as Eric Lipton and Matt Wald reported in The Times.

It should be looking for new ways to identify dangerous passengers, but it’s too busy following Congress’s mandates to search everyone’s bags. Now screeners have even more stuff to look for as we all stand in line — well, almost all of us. Anyone serious about blowing up an airplane is off somewhere else working on something new.

Photo credit: John Tierney. (Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times)

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