How secure are our airlines?

  • William Raspberry / Washington Post columnist
  • Sunday, December 30, 2001 9:00pm
  • Opinion

WASHINGTON — Security quiz. You are in charge of airline security when:

(A) A Japanese tourist, frustrated over the slow pace of the passenger-screening line, tells members of a flight crew, "If I was a terrorist, I’d blow up this airplane."

(B) An Arab-looking man, carrying a handgun, claims to be a member of the Secret Service detail en route to join the president in Crawford, Texas. He offers to have the Secret Service confirm his identity.

Which one do you escort off the plane? Which do you arrest, and on what charge?

By now, you probably know the real-life answers to the incidents, both reported last week. Capt. Les Abend, pilot of American Airlines Flight 27 to Seattle, refused to leave the Miami airport with Yasuaki Ichimura aboard. The 28-year-old Tokyo resident who, according to the police report, also made "numerous derogatory remarks" about Americans was hustled off the plane and charged with making a false report of planting a bomb. He could, on conviction, be jailed for up to 15 years and fined as much as $10,000.

The other passenger was in fact an Arab American member of the team assigned to protect President Bush. He was already on the plane when an airline security agent asked him to exit. During a delay of more than an hour, he was questioned by airline officials and airport police and, despite an offer to have the Secret Service confirm the validity of his credentials, was not allowed to continue his trip.

Overreaction? Racial profiling? Awkward-but-justifiable prudence?

The case of the Secret Service agent may be the more troubling — and on several counts. It is hard to imagine that there would have been any question had the agent been a white guy. As Ibrahim Hooper, a spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, put it, "They didn’t see an American, they didn’t see a law-enforcement professional. All they saw was a racial and ethnic profile that they didn’t want on their flight."

Sure, but given some of the stuff we’ve been hearing about (and Lord knows how much we haven’t heard about), didn’t it make sense to be extra wary of an Arab-looking gentleman? OK, you’d have made the call to the Secret Service — but if you got the phone number from the suspect, how could you be sure you were really talking to a government official?

And face it, the guy was armed. If things had turned out a little differently, you might have been a hero credited with saving scores of lives — or excoriated as the idiot who allowed the plane to be highjacked.

You might find it harder to be sympathetic to the Japanese tourist. He does sound a bit obnoxious. But can you really read his if-I-was-a-terrorist remark as a threat?

I’m reminded of what happened to Carol Cutler a little while back. She and her husband were returning home to Washington from Paris by way of Pittsburgh. There, they cleared customs so quickly, she told me, they found themselves in time to make a 4:20 p.m. flight to National Airport instead of their scheduled 6 o’clock flight.

Could they rebook? The gate agent said sure. But when Cutler mentioned that their luggage was checked through on the 6 o’clock flight, the agent changed her tune. "I’m sorry, but you’ll have to fly with your luggage," Cutler said she was told.

"I saw the sense of that right away," she recounted. "I said: ‘Of course, there could be a bomb.’ "

And then all hell broke loose. The agent summoned an officer from the Allegheny County police who, as Cutler put it, "went ballistic." "He told me he’d have to give me a citation for making a threat, and I told him I hadn’t made a threat, but he said I’d said the word ‘bomb.’ She was hustled away, questioned at some length and then cited for disorderly conduct. She later forfeited $280 in fines and courts costs rather than drive back to Pittsburgh to plead her innocence.

And during the entire episode, she said, they never once looked into her carry-on bag.

Final questions: How much of a threat did they really think she’d made? And how much safer do you feel?

William Raspberry can be reached at The Washington Post Writers Group, 1150 15th St. NW, Washington, DC 20071-9200 or willrasp@washpost.com.

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