Writing for the editors, The Weekly Standard’s Fred Barnes argues for a way to deter air terrorism: “Arm the Pilots and Profile the Passengers”:

The first [step] is arming pilots. This is such a simple solution to airline hijacking — such a powerful deterrent — that pilots and passengers overwhelmingly agree it should be done as soon as possible. In fact, practically everyone is on board, except the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) and the airlines themselves. And their opposition is downright inexplicable.

When TSA director John W. Magaw appeared before a Senate committee last week, he was asked by Republican Sen. George Allen of Virginia whether the arming of pilots would have made a difference in warding off the hijackers who flew planes into the World Trade Center and Pentagon on September 11. ‘Well, it may have,’ Magaw said. He went on to say things are different now. Cockpit doors are locked and air marshals are on some flights.

But even a clumsy terrorist might succeed at jimmying the lock […]

[…]The second step is ethnic profiling. Transportation Secretary Norm Mineta has adamantly refused to allow it at airports or other transit centers. And while his decision may be politically correct and pleasing to Arab-American grievance groups, it defies common sense. Virtually every bit of intelligence about potential hijackings, before and after September 11, has pointed to Arabs as perpetrators. All 19 of the September 11 hijackers were young Arab males.

So why not concentrate on them instead of frisking grandmothers of Norwegian descent? “Scrutinizing Arab air travelers is no different from police departments who regularly narrow their search for criminal suspects on people of a certain race when the witness who reported the crime noted the perpetrator’s color of skin,” says Marc Levin of the American Freedom Center. And it could even be national rather than ethnic profiling, checking out people from countries with a history of funding or harboring terrorists.

In the absence of official profiling, the task is, in effect, left to passengers. They have the option of demanding a suspicious passenger be escorted from the plane or leaving themselves.

[…] Magaw and Mineta don’t have to be the final word on arming pilots or profiling passengers. They have a boss–President Bush. On his trip to Europe, Bush has blared one message over and over again: The threat of terrorism is real. Deal with it, he told Europeans. It’s good advice that applies here at home as well.

This probably won’t come as a shock to regular visitors to this site, but I couldn’t agree more with Barnes, et al. on this issue. I’ve yet to hear a convincing argument for why pilots shouldn’t be allowed to arm themselves (should they wish to, that is — hell, the mere possibility that a pilot might be armed is enough to deter most potential hijackers), nor can I wrap my mind around the tenacity of this government’s bureaucratic and political resistance to “profiling” — a perfectly legitimate law enforcement tool. I mean, wouldn’t such profiling benefit everyone, including the profilees? An example: Presumably, Yemeni nationals not involved in terrorist plots (the vast majority of all Yemenis) are just as averse to being blown to smithereens by Islamokazis as anyone else. Wouldn’t it follow, then, that they’d like to see more efficient security screening, too? And that’s just what it’d be, too — more efficient.

[update: Just Cuz and Oxblog are going back and forth about profiling, as well. Oxblog’s Josh Chafetz questions the “morality” of racial profiling. Dean sees nothing immoral about identifying empirical features for the purposes of saving lives. Dean is right, of course — my respect for the whole Oxbridge culture notwithstanding….]

—–