Editorial: Get serious about lack of screeners

Thursday, May 27, 2004 | 9:16 a.m.

Last week the Transportation Security Administration announced that McCarran International Airport would receive 35 additional security screeners, bringing the Las Vegas airport's total up to 777 screeners. But airport officials and Nevada's congressional delegation bitterly complained that this move, part of a TSA plan ostensibly to provide better security at the nation's busiest airports, fell far short of what was needed.

On some of the worst days at McCarran, passengers can wait up to four hours to get through a checkpoint, so such a nominal increase would hardly make a dent. The Nevadans also noted that, in terms of screener staffing, Las Vegas was well behind some other airports not nearly as busy, such as Phoenix Sky Harbor, which had almost 200 more screeners than McCarran. Sen. John Ensign, R-Nev., took the extraordinary step of saying that, until security staffing was at an acceptable level, he would use a parliamentary maneuver to prevent the Senate from acting on President Bush's nomination of David Stone to be the next director of the TSA.

Shortly afterward the TSA sought to mollify Nevada's congressional delegation by saying that McCarran would get 81 additional screeners, not 35 as first proposed. Instead of getting locked into a numbers game with the TSA over what is sufficient staffing, Ensign says he will continue the hold on Stone's nomination until he sees whether the waiting times decrease. That watch will continue until after seven new security checkpoints, which airport officials say will require 300 more screeners, open in a couple of months.

Ensign is right to be playing hardball with the Bush administration. It's bad enough that travelers are inconvenienced by such long waits at choked security checkpoints. What's even worse is that a lack of screeners can jeopardize security. Screeners might be so overwhelmed by too many people going through the checkpoints that they won't be able to do an adequate job of making sure that these travelers aren't trying to sneak weapons or explosives aboard planes. That concern should be even more of an issue given the federal government's announcement Wednesday that "credible intelligence" indicates al-Qaida terrorists are determined to attack the United States in some way this summer. Two of the seven suspected terrorists that the government asked the public for help in finding are pilots.

President Bush has been criticized for not offering enough resources and manpower for homeland security in general -- even after 9-11. The administration's failure to provide Las Vegas with its fair share of security screeners, in particular, is something that can't continue to be ignored and must be remedied immediately.