Yet again, the United States is doing something for the sake of doing something, rather than something that may actually affect the war on terrorism. In this case, I’m talking about the decision to conduct random searches of people in New York’s MTA system.
According to the news article on NewsWatch 50’s website, “Police Commissioner Ray Kelly said officers posted at subway entrances would not engage in racial profiling, and that passengers are free to ‘turn around and leave.’”
If the people selected are free to turn around and leave, how effective is the searching going to be? The subway sytem in New York City is large enough that within a few blocks there are multiple entrances to the system. What would prevent a suicide bomber from turning around and walking to the next nearest entrance? Eventually—since they are supposedly only searching every fifth person—he would be able to enter the system unchallenged.
The random searches are far more likely to infringe on the civil and constitutional rights of the majority of the public than it ever is likely to capture a terrorist on a suicide mission. Worse than that, the government seems to be saying that this is a security measure that will help prevent the kind of attacks that happened in London…giving a false sense of security.
One blogger is so sure that the random searches will fail to capture a terrorist, he has vowed to fly to New York and eat a pound of spaghetti off the floor of the subway station where it happened, if the new policy catches a terrorist with a bomb. Somehow, I don’t think that Mayor Bloomberg will be setting out a plate for him any time soon.
Unfortunately, this seems to be a strong and ongoing pattern with the United States’s response to all of the terrorist attacks since 9/11/2001. George W. Bush, and his Department of Homeland Security has actually done very little to truly improve the security of the average US resident from terrorists.
For example, the Transportation Security Administration recently fired an employee, who had been hired as a baggage screener. Bassam Khalaf was hired by the TSA as a baggage screener. However, his alter ego, the “Arabic Assassin,” rapped about flying a plane into a building, with lyrics like “My name is Bassam, a one-man band, I came from sand, affiliated with the Taliban.” You can read the complete story about this at MSNBC. If their background screening process allows a person like Bassam to work as a baggage screener—a position where it would be simple to allow someone to slip by with a a bomb intended for an airplane… how much can they have actually improved security.