From: cdhart@laurie.net (Carolyn Hart)
Subject: SNET: [piml] [Fwd: March 13 column - airport security]
Date: 12 Mar 1999 06:44:43 -0500
To: piml@egroups.com


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Vin Suprynowicz wrote:
> 
>     FROM MOUNTAIN MEDIA
>     FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE DATED MARCH 13, 1999
>     THE LIBERTARIAN, By Vin Suprynowicz
>     Back to the drawing board
> 
>     During recent surprise exercises to find out if all the expensive,
> confoundedly demeaning security procedures at America's commercial airports
> are really doing any good, federal agents made the not terribly surprising
> discovery that they could sneak through supposed "security" doors 46 times
> at four major airports, and even board empty airliners at will.
> 
>   "Without displaying any identification, the agents roamed the air
> operations area, passing 229 employees, but were challenged only 53 times,"
> according to retired Adm. Cathal Flynn, the Federal Aviation
> Administration's associate administrator for aviation security.
> 
>   Unstated is the obvious corollary, that even after being discovered the
> agents were always able to talk themselves out of trouble by flashing
> easily-counterfeited ID cards.
> 
>   Adm. Flynn has subsequently warned airport officials nationwide by letter
> that, if this problem cannot be solved, it may become necessary to order a
> guard posted at every airplane.
> 
>   Hundreds of planes per airport, 24 hours a day?
> 
>   That's ridiculous. Though his real life adventures are by now well melded
> in the public mind with the fictional embellishments of his popular "Rogue
> Warrior" novels, the original claim to fame of 30-year Navy Cmdr. Richard
> Marcinko, a Vietnam special forces veteran who later helped run SEAL
> counter-terrorist operations in the 1970s and '80s, stemmed from his
> similar "red team" assignment to test out security at such facilities as
> American embassies abroad.
> 
>   Cmdr. Marcinko writes that it turned out such facilities could often be
> easily penetrated by someone who spoke English, wore a uniform, and simply
> acted as though he belonged there, by such simple expedients as entering
> through a patio "smokers door" left propped open for the convenience of
> employees not allowed to smoke inside the building.
> 
>   And that's without even mentioning the U.S. Marine embassy guards in
> Moscow who were recently discovered to have Russian girlfriends --
> girlfriends not reluctant to share their pillow talk with their KGB
> handlers.
> 
>   If security measures enforced by armed U.S. Marines with orders to shoot
> to kill can be so easily defeated in such relatively small, highly secure
> facilities, the notion that legions of civilian "Fred and Ethel Mertz"
> security staff in ill-fitting uniforms running us through metal detectors
> and asking us to remove our belt buckles can secure airports with dozens of
> miles of unsupervised perimeter fencing is absurd.
> 
>   "It's like putting a steel door on a grass hut," one airport official
> told the Dallas Morning News last week.
> 
>  Airline flight crews tell me they're routinely picked up at their motels
> by drivers whom they have never met before, and driven (their personal
> luggage uninspected) through gates that open automatically in front of
> these vehicles, directly to their planes. Any four people who showed up in
> that motel parking lot at the right time, with good haircuts and wearing
> the right uniforms, would receive the same courtesy.
> 
>   But rather than panicking and slapping on ever more expensive, intrusive
> layers of this so-called "security," might it not finally be time to ask
> why millions of airline passengers are inconvenienced waiting to pass
> through metal detectors and body searches -- conditioning Americans to
> tolerate as routine these ever more repressive violations of our persons
> and property -- if the whole procedure turns out to do no good?
> 
>   Yes, planes have been hijacked in the past. Planes will probably be
> hijacked in the future. But just because meteorites are certain to keep
> falling doesn't mean we all walk around wearing crash helmets. First, the
> risk is minimal. Second, the helmet wouldn't do any good anyway.
> 
>   No one is saying airports should have no security. But one begins to
> wonder if the threat of "terrorism" isn't more often used to compromise our
> Fourth Amendment rights for the mere convenience of those trying to fight
> the War on Drugs, or even the War Against Moving Money Around.
> 
>   Routinely harassing millions of blameless passengers to stop the
> theoretical one-in-a-million criminal isn't the American way. Israel's
> security services seem to have solved that nation's historically much
> larger problem by merely salting their flights with the occasional armed,
> plainclothes officer.
> 
>   Perhaps it's finally time to seek out methods both less intrusive and
> more effective (or -- gasp -- even to get government out of the loop
> entirely, allowing the different, independent airlines to try their own
> schemes, under the goad of free-market liability insurance premiums) ...
> rather than merely doing more of what we already know doesn't work.
> 
> Vin Suprynowicz is the assistant editorial page editor of the Las Vegas
> Review-Journal. His new book, "Send in the Waco Killers" is available at
> $21.95 plus $3 shipping ($6 UPS; $2 shipping each additional copy) through
> Mountain Media, P.O. Box 4422, Las Vegas, Nev. 89127-4422. The 500-page
> trade paperback may also be ordered via web site
> http://www.thespiritof76.com/ wacokillers.html, or at 1-800-244-2224.
> Credit cards accepted; volume discounts available.
> 
> ***
> 
> Vin Suprynowicz,   vin@lvrj.com
> 
> The evils of tyranny are rarely seen but by him who resists it. -- John
> Hay, 1872
> 
> The most difficult struggle of all is the one within ourselves. Let us not
> get accustomed and adjusted to these conditions. The one who adjusts ceases
> to discriminate between good and evil.  He becomes a slave in body and
> soul. Whatever may happen to you, remember always: Don't adjust! Revolt
> against the reality! -- Mordechai Anielewicz, Warsaw, 1943
> 
> * * *

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