A Little Dust-Up....

Well, we've had quite a bit of excitement in the Andrea Zinga campaign the last few days. Some of you might have noticed. Thought you might like to get a perspective on what was happening internally.

Before a significant press conference, typically I interview Andrea on the subject we are going to be covering. It's a give-and-take because I offer my suggestions, as well. Then I write a first draft of comments. She takes and revises it, then sends it back to me. We rehash and put together the final version. Then the day before, we go over tricky areas. I did a very sloppy job of final briefing on the facts on this one because I did not do a final briefing at all. We had scheduled to meet at 7 p.m. Sunday in Decatur. But over the weekend my car broke down not once, but twice. (New parts installed, all is well). Perhaps more comically, the mechanic who came to fix the first problem when I was stranded in central Illinois had HIS car break down when we got the parts we needed for the first breakdown. Bottom line, I did not get to Decatur Sunday night. Instead I left Lake County at 4 a.m. Monday morning.

The business about profiling was complex. Her speech was already five minutes long and we had to try to condense that complexity into a paragraph. Here are some facts about our current system:

1) There was a Computer-Assisted Passenger Pre-Secreening System (CAPPS) in place until 2004. It would rate various red flags, such as buying a one-way ticket, paying with cash, country of origin, and a history of travel to and from volatile mid-eastern countries in selecting passengers for pre-screening. It profiled - but one criteria it did not use was ethnicity.
2) Despite the avoidance of the use of race or ethnicity, lawyers at the Federal Dept. of Transportation (DoT) used a 'disparate impact' approach that said that, even if no ethnic factors were used in the profiling, if the factors that WERE used disproportionately singled out members of a particular ethnic group, the airlines would face discrimination lawsuits. Specifically, airlines were warned that if more than three members of a particular ethnic group were singled out on a flight, it would make that airline vulnerable to a discrimination lawsuit from our own government, even though race and ethnicity were not included in the profiling program at all.
3) After dropping CAPPS I because it singled out too many young mideastern males, a new kinder, gentler CAPPS II program was supposed to be adopted. The ACLU and various civil rights groups have screamed about that, too, and I can't seem to find whether we are currently using any pre-screening programs at all.
4)In the last four months of 2001, 23 million passengers flew on American Airlines. American refused boarding to 11 of those passengers because of security concerns that could not be resolved by flight time. The DoT cited 10 of those 11 passengers in a complaint of discrimination against American. American fought back but eventually settled by paying out $1.5 million for sensitivity training for its employees. As to the passenger denied boarding who was not cited in the DoT complaint? That would be one Richard Reid, who was denied boarding on a flight from Paris to Miami on Dec. 22, 2001. French authorites demanded he be cleared to board the next day - and he tried to set off his shoe bomb. Did American get any credit for accurately assessing the risk? No...their reward was simply that he was not used in the discrimination complaint against them. Transportation Dept. lawyers filed identical suits against Continental, Delta and United Airlines, forcing each of them to pony up millions for sensitivity training as well.

The point Andrea was making was not that we should adopt racial profiling (though she does not rule that out as one of the risk flags in these cases), but that when common-sense risk profiling ends up singling out a larger number of a particular ethnicity, let the chips fall where they may - and don't subject the airlines to discrimination lawsuits for protecting all of our security. A critical question came when a radio reporter noted he had a middle eastern last name and did that mean he should be profiled. Andrea said yes, that would be fine. He was asking if he should be screened because of his last name and she was saying the airlines should be free to screen him without fear of retribution.

The point is that we are compromising security over political correctness. We are accepting life-and-death risks to avoid giving offense. That is dumb and it is wrong. Some have tried to liken this to internment camps for the Japanese in WWII. Get a grip. Inconveniencing someone who fits a risk profile while seeking to board a plane bears no resemblance whatsoever to imprisoning people for their ethnicity. And that sort of overheated thinking compromises our ability to defend the security of all Americans.

I made a mistake in the facts I provided Andrea in support of the argument. I had written it was more than two of a single ethnicity rather than the accurate phrase, more than three. I blew it there. I further made an act of omission by not citing in the text which department of our government was pushing that mandate.

The ever-astute Bernie Schoenberg jumped right on it. He whacked us for the error, but when I gave him the data, he also printed the back-up material to Andrea's larger and compelling point - that we are risking public safety in order not to give offense. Many of the wire services that picked the story up did not bother to highlight anything but the error. (I have to give credit to FOX 18 TV in the Quad Cities which, when reading the AP Story that did not have the detail Schoenberg's did, decided that could not be the whole story and called Andrea).

The situation was compounded when the new Springfield Fire Chief said he had not known we were coming to his station. I don't doubt that was the case, as he is the new chief - and that was the only fire station where we talked inside because it was raining out. I also don't doubt the word of our man who set up the locations, because at the fire stations in Quincy, Macomb and Galesburg later that day, all were expecting us and welcoming - but it was not raining at any of those stops and Andrea's comments were made outside those stations. (After Springfield, I think we would have stayed outside if there had been gale force winds and driving rain).

In the end, though, I suspect the proverbial good time was had by all. Some of you have had some fun at Andrea's expense (and to a lesser extent to mine, as well). Meantime the message got out loud and clear that, in Congress, Andrea will put a much higher premium on public safety than on political correctness. Not quite the day we planned, but we'll take it.

Two final notes: first, Andrea's prepared comments are now up in their entirety on her website (the line about more than two per flight has been redacted, but it is otherwise intact and complete). Second, the Manhattan Institute's Heather Mac Donald has written extensively on the subject of the holes in our airline security, most frequently in New York's City Journal. If you look her up at the Manhattan Institute and click on her City Journal archives, you will find a wealth of material.