Much has been said about the new TSA procedures of body scans and hands-on searches being an invasion of privacy and a violation of the right to protection from unlawful searches. I have a different point of view. Disclosure: I have been working in the Pentagon for most of the last 10 years (do the math), except for excursions to some of the world's finest resorts and garden spots. I didn't get out of bed this morning to talk about airport security, but I feel that I have something worthwhile to add to this conversation—mostly because my perspective is so different from most others.
Anyone who thinks that we are not already using behavioral profiling is simply not aware of reality. There are some people who are being watched very closely because of their behavior (not race, age, or religion) and these people will never come close to an airport. Meanwhile, there are probably others whose behavior has escaped attention. What about them? I would support making public the fact that we are giving additional behavioral profiling training to TSA agents. Still, behavioral profiling is only a deterrent. It can be defeated by clever and determined terrorists.
Anyone who thinks racial, age, or religious profiling is the answer has probably not thought the issue though very carefully. Terrorists who see that we never check old ladies, ever, will simply exploit that weakness. We are talking about people who put IEDs in dog carcasses because they new American soldiers or Marines would stop to move a dead dog off the road.
Any citizen who submits to mistreatment by the government is asking to be exploited. We need to keep our eyes open and our brains engaged to understand what is going on, and why. We need to hold our elected representatives accountable. That said, whether one thinks he’s being mistreated is a function of his understanding of the situation and the options available. We may hate the new TSA procedures, but let us hate more the circumstances that make them necessary. Are they, in fact, necessary? What would be the public reaction to a second underwear bomber? I believe people would be furious that we had not found a way to screen for and prevent this type of attack. Granted, terrorists will simply look for another weakness, and we will react. Again, what are the real options? Do nothing? Out-spending the enemy is what won us the Cold War.
The relevant poll question is not whether one feels safer now compared to 10 years ago, before 9/11. How could anyone know? How could one measure the level of safety and security one feels (or inversely, the level of threat and fear) consistently over time? How could anyone measure—right now—the safety they felt back then, given all that has happened since? The world is changing. Our frame of reference is changing. As it is unanswerable, this question is moot.
No, the relevant poll question is: Has a terrorist ever tried to kill you, personally? A person’s judgment about new TSA procedures is a function of how they perceive the terrorist threat.
The second most important question is, what would you have our government do about terrorists who want to kill us? If the answer to the first question is "No," then you are likely to think the government is, and since 9/11 has been, over-reacting.
Here's the typical logic: Death on a plane = Death on a plane, i.e., the cause (mid-air collision, lack of maintenance, shoe-bomber) is irrelevant. Since the incidence of any Death on a plane is low, then Death on a plane is not an important problem compared to the economy or health care. Therefore, any attempt to reduce the incidence of Death on a plane should be treated proportionally to all other problems. Out of each dollar, maybe we spend 40 cents each on the economy and health care, 10 cents on the debt, 7 cents on other services, and a penny each on air traffic control, better maintenance, and counter-terrorism. Anything more than a penny on counter-terrorism is going to seem disproportionate to most people.
My point: "most people," thanks to the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security, still have not been personally attacked by a terrorist.
If "most people" want to complain about heavy-handed, over-reacting, freedom-stomping government, that's fine. In fact, that’s a good thing, since it shows that “most people” have never been on the same plane with the shoe bomber, or walked past an SUV-bomb parked on Times Square, or attended a Christmas tree lighting ceremony in Portland, next to a would-be van-bomb.
Meanwhile, having a security conversation with people who have never been bracketed by mortars is likely to be an exercise in frustration for those on both sides.
Getting frustrated with people who don’t get it--that’s not why I got out of bed today.
I have had more than a few near death experiences. There are many ways to die, and they are not all the same!
There may be times when I complain about the invasion of privacy and the lack of convenience, or release a snarky comment about the invasions creating craftier terrorists, but I know that neither of these are really true.
ReplyDeleteWhen it comes right down to it, I know what I am really upset about. Like Rousseau, Jefferson, or Emerson before me, I have a dangerously faulty perception of who and what human beings are. I keep thinking that human beings are capable of respecting one another without feeling the need to blow things up to make a point. It is not the governemnt that I am really mad at; the governemnet just takes the fall for humanity's perpetual letting-me-down-ness.
I find all of these searches unnecessary in the same way that the 13th Amendment should not have been necessary. Nevertheless, America had to make slavery illegal in order to ends its practice and now we have pat downs and x-ray scans because some people can't stop trying to blow things up. What the hell have we become? No, that is once again the wrong question. Who the hell are we? Yes, that's a little better.
Who are we? Are we innately moral beings as Rousseau suggested? Plato before him noted that we humans can conceive of ideal forms of Justice, Love, or Beauty, but the life we live is a mere shadow of those ideals. We can imagine a world in which we all get along, and we can encourage and reinforce the good we see in others. The real-world, small-letter beauty or justice that we experience is merely a shadow on the cave wall.
ReplyDeleteConfronted with the disappointing gap between ideal and real, we sometimes stop trying to live up to the ideal, or turn to mockery and cynicism to bring others down—keeping it real. We become doers of little and complainers of anything and everything. It's always easier to edit someone else's thoughts than to create our own. It’s easier to be an armchair quarterback than step into the huddle and call the plays. Paradoxically, the less we do, the more we demand to be catered to. Kurt Cobain captured it: With the lights out, it’s less dangerous. Here we are now. Entertain us.
Someone figured out that he could get past airport security if he hid the explosives in his underwear. Now, to my way of thinking, that is one bizarre strategy—the work of a creative, determined, and deeply disturbed mind—but it almost worked. We complain about the searches that prevent a second, possibly successful attempt of that bizarre strategy. What if we didn't X-ray people's underwear and some sociopathic nut-job tried again, and managed to blow up a plane and its passengers? You know what would happen as well as I do. We would complain at the top of our lungs that nobody in our government learned from the first guy and did anything to protect us. The hue and cry would result in predictable over-reactions: people would get fired; new agencies would be created; new machines would be fielded. People will complain either way, so I ask, isn’t it better that we are being proactive, that we are trying to forestall an attack?
Indeed we do have "sociopathic nut-jobs" who are hell-bent on the destruction of anyone who fits their political motives. It is this mindset, i.e. the brain that activates its creative facilities in order to murder and to disrupt, that I can not understand or sympathize with. But I have to remember that the underwear bomber is acting on moral priciples. He may not share my morals, but they are morals nevertheless. Leading me to...yes, we are inherently moral beings.
ReplyDeleteIt rather ironic that the very thing that makes us the potentially beautiful beings that we are is also the source of all of our ugliness. The "terrorists" clearly have morals; their morals are just radically different from mine. The "terrorists" are clearly very clever and determined; they just use their determination to achieve different goals. I am not excusing or justifying anyone's behavior. I am just highlighting the sililarities, which directly leads to the differences, between myself and a terrorist.
I am living up to my ideal, or at least making every attempt to do so, but alas, so are the terrorists. The only difference that I can really see is the reliance on violence to achive a said goal. Like I said earlier, it really isn't the government that makes me uneasy; the lengths the government has to go to in order to eliminate violence in my daily life makes me uneasy. When it comes down to it, the government is protecting me in a manner that is mostly non-invasive and non-violent. It does not beat me senseless until I either turn over all hidden weapons or until it believes me when I say I do not have any weapons. It is behaving as I would expect it to under the circumstances.
This is growing longer than I wanted it to be. I just wanted to say that I don't think we are approaching this from very different angles.
Before I deployed to Baghdad from the Pentagon to serve in the Corps HQ, my then-13-year old daughter challenged me with similar logic: what makes me so sure that the war is just? American freedom was won by a bunch of ill-equipped but crafty fighters who toppled an imperial powerhouse. One man's terrorist is another's revolutionary hero, right?
ReplyDeleteWell... I concede that you and she have a point, which is that justice and morality is in the eye of the beholder. Perspective matters! But is every different and often competing version of morality equally valid in an interconnected world? Does "live and let live" mean that we should tolerate or even admire the "morals" of the underwear bomber?
Let's not confuse morals with convictions.
Other than their willingness to fight, die, and even kill for their cause, I would not equate the freedom fighters of the American Revolution with the Wahabi or the Taliban. Terrorists are trans-nationals who target non-combatants and use brutal tactics and other asymmetric means to undermine their much larger enemy's will to fight. American revolutionaries used brutal, asymmetric tactics like ambushes. However, were not trans-national. They did not target non-combatants. If all they had was a pitchfork, then that's what they used.
And what of the Tories? Why do we not celebrate those colonists who spied on the revolutionaries out of conviction for peace under King George III? Should we not celebrate even more those colonists who refused to fight at all under conviction of peace at any cost?
If all morals are equally valid, then we should release murderers from prison immediately. On what grounds could we hold them? Let them go and let them kill again, as long as they do it with gusto.
Not so fast. Clearly, all morals are not equally valid, and an immoral act, such as flying a plane full of civilians into the Pentagon on 9/11, though done with the utmost of conviction, is not to be admired nor even tolerated.