“Targeting Needles or Adding More Hay?” Briefing and Hearings on Profiling and Airport Security

A flurry of congressional hearings has been scheduled in the House and Senate this week in response to the Christmas Day bombing attempt aboard a flight beyond for Detroit. With titles like “Securing America's Safety: Improving the Effectiveness of Anti-Terrorism Tools and Inter-Agency Communication” and “Flight 253: Learning Lessons from an Averted Tragedy,” hearings should and will likely examine the security implications of the failed terrorist attempt. We hope that they will also examine the potential these enhanced security measures have for violating fundamental human rights, including the right to equality under the law, and also for further threatening safety as they misdirect already stretched intelligence and airport security resources.

Following the Christmas Day bomb attempt, the Obama Administration announced new airport screening measures effective January 4^th. A news release from the Transportation and Security Administration states that the measures will selectively target individuals for enhanced screening who are “flying into the U.S. from anywhere in the world [holding] a passport issued by or [are]traveling from or through nations that are state sponsors of terrorism or other countries of interest.” These new guidelines, addressed in a Hill briefing last week organized by the American-Arab Institute (AAI) that featured Dr. James Zogby of AAI, Michael German of the ACLU, Jumana Musa of the Rights Working Group, and Amardeep Singh of the Sikh Coalition, are unconstitutional, won’t work and will actually be counterproductive from a national security standpoint:

Selective enforcement of security measures based on such arbitrary factors as which country someone was born in or travelling through doesn’t work. Previous selective enforcement measures like the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System (NSEERS) that targeted men from 24 Muslim majority countries (and North Korea), forcing them to report to immigration authorities for fingerprinting and interrogations were wholly ineffective. We are not aware of any individual charged or convicted of terrorism who came to the government’s attention based solely on NSEERS registration. Moreover, no successful terrorism prosecution resulted from the post-9/11 mass round-ups and detentions of Muslims and Arabs, another government initiative that indiscriminately targeted members of whole communities. Josh Gerstein, White House reporter for Politico, aptly titled his report on the new TSA guidelines, “TSA’s echoes of Ashcroft” and many advocates see clear links between the new guidelines and the NSEERS program.

Law enforcement would best utilize its resources by focusing on the behavior of individual travelers. Plenty of evidence unrelated to his national origin was available about Umar Abdul Mutallab, the alleged Christmas Day bomber. He was travelling one-way, with no luggage for an international flight, on a ticket purchased with cash. He was reported by his own father to U.S. government authorities raising concerns about his terrorist associations. As President Obama has said, this incident presented a failure in integrating and sharing intelligence information—and a failure of detecting an individual’s suspect behavior. This incident did not demonstrate that whole classes of people are suspect, based solely on their country of origin.

If resources are misdirected toward the blanket scrutiny of whole classes of people who happen to be from predominately Muslim countries, actual terrorist plots go unnoticed—attempts like that of the so-called Shoe Bomber, British born Richard Reid, who attempted to blow up a flight between Paris and Miami in 2001.

If security officials will now go after Nigerians, from a country never previously considered to harbor or train terrorists and one that calls its inclusion in the U.S. screening list “unfair” and discriminatory, who’s to say that the next plot won’t originate from a country not yet subject to heightened scrutiny.

The new TSA guidelines allow for de-facto racial profiling and grant law enforcement agents cover to act on their own prejudices. They threaten civil rights, denying equality before the law. New York Times reporter Eric Lipton rightfully described this action as one that “further establishes a global security system that treats people differently based on what country they are from, evoking protests from civil rights groups.” These guidelines assume that people originating from or travelling through certain countries are more likely to commit crimes than others. Additionally, individuals targeted for full body pat-downs and increased scrutiny of carry-on luggage may be U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents returning home after business or personal travel. TSA officials deny that these new guidelines are equivalent to racial profiling. However, if the guidelines result in the blanket targeting of members of whole communities, they are discriminatory in effect.

The new TSA guidelines undermine the Obama Administration’s stated commitment to rebuilding U.S.-Muslim relations, creating the impression that the West is in conflict with the Muslim world. Dr. James Zogby has written that “[i]f the purpose of Al-Qaeda, in organizing these attacks, is to create panic and deepen the divide between Muslims worldwide and the US, the resentment created by a massive profiling regime plays right into their hands.”