Obama's airport security strategy dictated by CAIR

By Jim Kouri

Obama said counterterrorism experts have told him that the current procedures are the only ones that they think can effectively guard against threats such as last year's attempted Christmas-day bombing.

On Saturday while in Libon, Portugal, President Barack Obama told reporters that he asked security officials whether there's a less intrusive way to screen U.S. airline passengers than the pat-downs and body scans causing a holiday-season uproar.

Obama claims his security team told him there wasn't.

Passengers at some U.S. airports must pass through full-body scanners that produce a virtually naked image. If travelers refuse, they can be forced to submit to an thorough patdown of their bodies, including of clothed genital areas and breasts, by security officers of the same sex as the passenger.

Obama claims that he's told the U.S. Transportation Security Administration: "You... have to think through, are there ways of doing it that are less intrusive." At this point, Obama said counterterrorism experts have told him that the current procedures are the only ones that they think can effectively guard against threats such as last year's attempted Christmas-day bombing.

"Either [President] Obama is being deceived or he's doing the deceiving. Any cop worth his salt will tell you there are definitely alternatives to this intrusive and time consuming nonsense," said former police detective and expert in interview and interrogation Mike Snopes.

"The fact of the matter is that the Obama administration is bowing to the demands of groups such as CAIR and others who don't want Muslims to be inconvenienced," said Snopes.

Truth be told, there are alternatives to the current heavy-handed security measures being used at U.S. airports: Psychological profiling and transactional analysis.

A PROGRAM KICKED TO THE WAYSIDE

The Council on American Islamic Relations, the nation's largest Muslim civil rights and advocacy group, began 2010 by complaining about a new security training program Transportation Security Administration security officers assigned to the nation's airports.

The CAIR leadership had released a statement that claimed the TSA's airport security directives amount to the profiling of Muslims.

According to TSA officials, security officers at major airports across the country would be trained to use "casual conversation" to flush out possible terrorists. Instructors would first teach officers what suspicious behaviors to look for in travelers. These can include nervousness, wearing a big coat in the summer or reluctance to make eye contact with law enforcement. Then, the officers carry on a supposedly casual conversation with passengers in hopes of spotting possible terrorists or to determine whether further scrutiny of a passenger is required.

This would have been a welcomed program by those in law enforcement who've said for years that psychological profiling should be used by airport security staff. While representing the staff and membership of the National Association of Chiefs of Police at lectures or during media interviews, this writer often discusses the need for upgrading the training of airport security staff with part of that upgrade to include psychological profiling.

Most police officers and investigators are familiar with the concept since it's used during the interrogation and interview process to detect deception on the part of the subject. Without going into too much detail, interrogators or interviewers, while questioning a subject about the matter at hand, are observing body language, eye contact, breathing, physical characteristics such as dry mouth or profuse perspiration, and other criteria.

However, the Washington-based CAIR officials claimed that the new guidelines, under which anyone traveling from or through 13 Muslim-majority nations will be required to go through enhanced screening techniques before boarding flights, will disproportionately target American Muslims who have family or spiritual ties to the Islamic world and therefore amount to religious and ethnic profiling.

"Under these new guidelines, almost every American Muslim who travels to see family or friends or goes on pilgrimage to Mecca will automatically be singled out for special security checks — that's profiling," said CAIR National Executive Director Nihad Awad.

"While singling out travelers based on religion and national origin may make some people feel safer, it only serves to alienate and stigmatize Muslims and does nothing to improve airline security," he said.

"We all support effective security measures that will protect the traveling public from an attack such as that attempted on Christmas Day," added Awad. "But knee-jerk policies will not address this serious challenge to public safety."

However, security experts believe that the measures are reasonable and necessary in order to enhance airport and airline protection and safety.

"Look, I don't buy it. The fact is, what I say is do smart screening. Ethnicity is one of the factors that should be included in the profile. After all, what is profiling? You're extrapolating the common characteristics of the terrorist attacks. 100% of all the terrorist attacks against the United States last year were carried out by Muslim jihadists. So, if that's the one common denominator, let's include that in the mix. That at airports would trigger a secondary inspection in which case the bomber on Christmas Day this year, maybe have they found the bomb," said the respected terrorism expert Steven Emerson, founder and director of the Investigative Project on Terrorism.

"Are you going to inspect 98 year old ladies from Sweden in wheelchairs because we're trying to distribute the risk among 300 million Americans when the risk category is really spread 99 to 1 million people? No I don't buy it. Let's be smart about this," added Emerson, who is a consultant for several media and law enforcement organizations.

Israeli security agents and police have used this method for screening people at airports and security checkpoints for years with much success.

In a commentary distributed by CAIR challenging calls for profiling, Awad suggested alternatives to faith-based security checks: "First look at behavior, not at faith or skin color. Then spend what it takes to obtain more bomb-sniffing dogs, to install more sophisticated bomb-detection equipment and to train security personnel in identifying the behavior of real terror suspects."

But law enforcement officials and security professionals believe that to treat everyone equally is like grade school discipline.

"It's ridiculous. Because a few extremists who are Muslims perpetrate terrorist attacks on planes, everyone must be inconvenienced and harassed? That's like elementary school when a student misbehaves and the teacher punishes the entire class by keeping them all after school," said former intelligence officer and NYPD detective Sid Franes.

"The Israeli security people are trained to use profiling — they also look at body language, listen to voice patterns, check eye contact and other facial indicators of deception," said Franes.

Counterterrorism experts believe that part of the professionalization process is the training of airport security staff in what's been called psychological profiling or behavioral analysis or a number of other terms that all amount to the same thing — effectively screening out potential terrorists.

© Jim Kouri