Where I Stand — Brian Greenspun: DeLaying air security

Thursday, Nov. 1, 2001 | 8:47 a.m.

Isn't it great when the question itself provides the answer? In this case, one of the main reasons why the Congress has dilly-dallyed about with the legislation that will help shore up the public's confidence in airplane travel in the United States is delay. As in Republican Whip Tom DeLay of Texas who has done his level best to keep a law off of the president's desk that will have anything to do with federalizing the role of airport security.

The other reason is DeLay's ideological soulmate, Majority Leader Dick Armey, who sees the idea of making the people who check our bags at the airport federal employees as one of those things you do over someone's dead body.

Well, not to put too fine a point on things, but we have more dead bodies than we know what to do with and many of them are a result of not having the most competent and comprehensive airport security teams in place when we really needed them. And now is not the time to beg for more.

So why did DeLay and Armey hold this legislation up while they hold out for the continued privitization of airport security officers? Certainly they didn't do this without the express permission and at the behest of the president, who just happens to be the head of everything GOP.

Now, just wait a minute. Before some of you jump down my throat for bringing politics into anything that may have President Bush's fingerprints on it, let me assure you that my interests lie elsewhere. I don't think our president is playing the same partisan games that his colleagues insisted upon during the last administration. But only the most naive among us would think that this issue does not have a political edge to it.

The fact of the matter is that airplane travel is down, way down. The federal government is trying to bail the airlines out with $15 billion of taxpayer dollars. Whether that is enough to save them or not remains to be seen. But what we do know is that if people don't get back on those planes pretty soon, there won't be enough money in our already too-depleted treasury to save them from the bankruptcy proceedings that loomed large in their futures -- some well before Sept. 11.

And the only way that America's business travelers -- those are the people who paid the high ticket prices and flew under almost all conditions thereby footing the bill for the rest of the flying public -- will get back on those planes is if they believe them to be safe and if they believe that government is doing all it can to keep them safe.

Technology has provided us alternatives to airplane travel. None of it, though, will ever take the place of face-to-face meetings with clients or on-the-ground inspections that yield information impossible to get through video conferencing. And, yet, I believe it will have to suffice if the alternative is an uncertainty that continues to loom large in the minds of Americans who want so badly to get on a plane and go somewhere.

The federal government can go a long way toward easing that anxiety by passing the airline security law that is being tossed about like some political football. It is being held hostage by the ideologues in the House of Representatives, not because it doesn't provide a measure of security heretofore unattainable but, precisely, because it does.

The people who have studied terrorism have long ago recommended federalizing the employees who check our baggage at airports. It wasn't until Sept. 11, though, that people paid attention. And, now, most are willing to act.

The only problem seems to be DeLay and Armey, who for some reason are fighting the concept that government's main purpose in life is to "provide for the common defense."

If not now, when? And, if not the people who are supposed to stop terrorists before they get on our planes, then who?

Come on, Mr. President, it is time to federalize airline security and get America flying again.

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