And this is better than air travel. I’m the fatalistic type–when my number’s up, it’s up. And I’ll be damned if I’ll let the terrorists dictate my life, even on something as mundane as travel plans. But the plain fact is that the country is under attack again (whether the anthrax letters turn out to be home-grown or part of an Al Qaeda plot), and not enough has been done yet to secure public safety. Philadelphia’s cops were smart–or lucky–enough to head off a bus-station bombing today. Yet five weeks after Sept. 11, the government is still a little slow on the uptake.
On this trip, for instance, I got on the train in Boston, the takeoff point for the planes that destroyed the World Trade Center towers. You might think there would at least be a metal detector at the station. Nope. I can see how some of the smaller stations along the East Coast would not have metal detectors yet; a few holes in the system while security gets up to speed. Commuter trains and subways can’t possibly have them or we’d all go completely nuts. But Boston’s South Street Station? New York’s Penn Station? Apparently no one at Amtrak has ever seen “Under Siege II” with Steven Seagal.
This is not to say that Amtrak has been asleep at the switch. You need a photo ID to purchase a ticket now, and the days of buying one on the train are over. Tickets are taken on the platform by experienced conductors who look you over, while plainclothes police patrol most trains in the Northeast corridor. Railroad officials say metal detectors are probably coming. And they remind me that despite a huge rail system, Europe has experienced only one terrorist incident on a train–in the 1970s in Holland–and none have occurred here.
Of course in Europe, train stations look more like airports, and we’re probably headed toward that here. Not that airport security is so hot. A large security company called Argenbright, which was fined last year for hiring convicted felons to screen passengers at the Philadelphia airport, is back in trouble again. A Federal Aviation Administration task force found last week that the company employed illegal aliens at Dallas-Forth Worth and incompetents (guards who flunked minimum-skills tests) at Dulles. Prosecutors have found that even after being fined, the company continued to hire employees without checking to see if they had criminal records.
And if you think this shows that at least the FAA is on the case, consider this: The air-traffic controllers union says that radar centers and towers are basically unprotected. While National Guard troops are patrolling air terminals (to what effect beyond making the government look responsive?), “most of our facilities have no more protection than an orange parking cone,” says John S. Carr of the National Air Traffic Controllers Association.
The FAA says it is “in the process” of fixing this problem, in the same way it is trying to encourage airlines to secure cockpit doors on the nation’s 7,000 passenger planes. The latter is a perfect example of the system’s weakness. Why couldn’t the government simply order every airline to install steel bars (a makeshift solution, but better than nothing) in a matter of days, as some airlines are doing themselves? And why did it take until this week for the FAA to announce that it would join with the FBI to undertake rudimentary criminal background checks on the 750,000 airline and airport workers who have access to secured areas?
Part of the answer is that everything costs money, and the money is still in the pipeline. But there’s a larger issue that will have to be resolved by Tom Ridge and the new Office of Homeland Security. Washington has yet to make the basic decision of who should run transportation security. Republicans mostly want to maintain the current structure, with some tougher security measures and better coordination. Their opposition to federalizing the air-traffic security system is ideological; they prefer more state and local control and some argue that federal law-enforcement authorities like the FBI and the CIA have not exactly covered themselves in glory in recent years.
But the reformers have the better argument. They say the air-traffic system is national and should be addressed nationally. The FAA is trying to beef up standards but can’t make much progress without more authority over the security systems now run by individual airlines and airports. The biggest challenge right now is securing the baggage that goes aboard airliners, so that some suicidal terrorist can’t check a bomb. Currently, there are 142 sophisticated bomb detectors at 47 airports. But for full security, the nation’s airports would need at least 2,000 of them, at $1 million a pop.
Some of the new money just approved by Congress will go toward buying more, and the FAA administrator has deemed it a priority. As a stopgap measure, the airlines are using something called the Computer-Assisted Passenger Pre-Screening System (CAPS), which selects bags for inspection based on a profiling system. The criteria are secret, though the FAA says that they are partly based on frequency of travel (excluding many business travelers) and aren’t racial. Airline check-in clerks are allowed to use their judgment in determining which bags should go through the bomb-detection devices, though not all airports have the machines.
In the meantime, international travel is arguably safer than domestic. But even on those flights the system is spotty. “We don’t have 100 percent scanning for explosives on either domestic or international flights,” concedes an FAA spokesman. And when we do, it won’t be enough. The only long-term solution is to move toward more of an Israeli system, where well-trained security personnel look over the passengers, ask good questions and manage to keep El Al Airlines remarkably safe.
I don’t mean to be too hard on those charged with assuring our safety. The U.S. government is trying to respond to terrorism. So are the American people. But in the wake of Sept. 11, there was some wishful thinking that all of the madness would stop and we could take our time implementing new security measures.
The anthrax attacks are a reminder that there’s no time to lose. We have to move faster than ever before, even if it means that my train or plane gets me home even more slowly.
