Better Dumb Than Sorry?
Unbelievable. I just read this CNN article, “No-Fly List” Keeps Infants Off Planes, and I’m stunned. Basically, it reports that infants and small children are being prevented from boarding planes because their names either match or are similar to names of suspected terrorists on the Federal “No-Fly List.”
The list is absurd, in the first place. You have to provide a Social Security number, date of birth, and the maiden name of your mother’s first pet before the phone company believe that you’re you, and not one of thousands who share your name. But if your name matches or is even similar to one on the government’s list of suspected naughty people, you get to sit in the lobby of the airport, subsisting on a diet of overpriced candy bars, until some disgruntled TSA employee who used to be a Telecom executive remembers where he put his rubber gloves and petroleum jelly. Never mind the fact that the terrorist was probably using an alias, anyway.
But what’s truly ludicrous is that small children are being kept off planes because “their” names are on the list.
“Yes sir, I am aware that your son Ben is only nine months old, but can you prove that he is not also Ali Bin Faisal, the notorious terror mastermind?”
Clearly there’s a problem in the system. Call me crazy, but if a three-year-old kid named Osama Bin Laden shows up at Denver International Airport with his parents for a flight to Washington, D.C., I’m pretty sure the President’s gonna be okay.
Here’s the point. If a person is so stupid that he or she would need to check a child’s background because that child’s name matched one on the “No-Fly List”, that person needs to be on a short yellow bus, not at the airport checking tickets and bags. It’s like making a doctor check a woman for prostate cancer. And if the system is so poorly designed that it forces its employees to waste their time on the absurd, then it probably isn’t doing a very good job keeping us safe.
August 16th, 2005 at 2:17 pm
I agree. This whole notion that we absolutely can’t do any racial profiling leads to ridiculous practices of searching old ladies and babies while anyone who looks more likely to be a terrorist gets a free pass because we don’t want to discriminate against anyone. I understand that we don’t want to cause undue annoyance and humiliation to people who are unfortunate enough to come from countries near where the terrorists are from, but is targeting old ladies and babies the answer?
Norm Mineta is the one who set up this policy after 9/11 and I think the guy is wasting a lot of people’s time and money.
August 17th, 2005 at 7:28 am
I rather liked it when they kept Senators off the planes.