In the interests of full disclosure let me begin by saying that I did not fly anywhere during the United States' just-concluded Thanksgiving holiday weekend. I did not, therefore, have the dubious pleasure of being part of the country's latest collective security freak-out.

For those of you who may have missed the story, Thanksgiving — traditionally the heaviest travel weekend of the year in the United States — was the first crush period for new security procedures that went into effect at American airports in late October.

For many travellers these involve a choice between standing in a huge machine that generates a full-body image of what is underneath travellers' clothes, or a pat-down that pretty much everyone who does not work in airport security agrees is intrusive to the point of being humiliating.

The government claims that the highly revealing, if somewhat ghostly, images produced by the full-body scanners are neither saved nor archived, but it is clear that a lot of people simply do not believe that.

The government also has been at pains to point out that only a tiny portion of air travellers (either 1 per cent or 3 per cent, depending on whom one asks) actually receive the new, enhanced, pat-downs. Not that you would have known this from the last month of American news coverage.

As it turned out, the Thanksgiving rush was no worse than usual. There were no airport riots. Security lines were about what one normally expects on the heaviest travel weekend of the year.

While I avoided the airport my mother did fly and later reported that the experience was absolutely normal — an analysis that, according to the media, at least, was echoed by most of the flying public (this would, of course, be the same media that had spent the previous three weeks whipping up the frenzy in the first place).

No fear

I am just old enough to remember a time (the early 1970s) when passengers at American airports did not pass through any sort of security at all. On one occasion when I was nine or ten I even recall my grandmother being allowed on to a plane after my younger brother and I (who were travelling alone) were already seated and buckled in.

She was not travelling, but wanted to make sure we were all right before the plane left, so the ground staff let her on board to check on us.

This was the mark of a country that took safe air travel for granted, and therein may lie the real reason why Americans can often seem a bit paranoid when it comes to airport security. After the metal detectors went up at airports around the world hijackings certainly became rarer, but by the 1980s they were almost unheard-of inside the United States itself.

That is one reason why the 9/11 attacks burrowed so deeply onto the American psyche. It was not just the scale of the disaster — it was the fact that it happened in the US, where ‘skyjacking', as it was once quaintly known, had long been seen as a problem Americans had solved despite its clinging on persistently in some other parts of the world.

Add to that the fact that Americans use airplanes the way most other people use trains or buses and one has a recipe for the paradox that is the post-9/11 United States: the expectation that security will be airtight and never fail, coupled with a demand that it be unobtrusive and not slow anyone down.

Profiling

The most disturbing aspect of this debate has been the frequency with which opponents of the new security measures have demanded racial or religious profiling at America's airports.

That argument is usually phrased along these lines: ‘Why are they patting down harmless grandmothers/children/law-abiding citizens when we all know where the real threats come from?'

The answer, of course, is that one never knows where the next threat is going to emerge. Racial profiling does not work because it assumes terrorists will always be foreign and will never recruit an operative from within the target country. The roll call of terrorist attacks and attempted attacks that disprove this thesis is far too long to list here.

Government spin notwithstanding, the real purpose of the new American security measures is to make the flying public feel safer. Opinion polls already show this happening among occasional travellers.

The people angriest about the body scans and pat-downs are those who fly frequently — a minority overall. The government seems to be betting that the frequent fliers will eventually swallow their grumbling, get used to it and move on. In the long run, this is probably a safe bet.

What we have to hope is that an equal amount of attention is being paid to security behind the scenes, where it really counts.

 

Gordon Robison is a writer and commentator who has covered the Middle East for ABC News, CNN and Fox since the 1980s. He teaches Middle East Politics at the University of Vermont and has taught Islamic History at Emerson College.