Thoughts this Week

Iran: If you'd asked me, last week, to put together a list of things I didn't think the Iranian government could get away with, I'm pretty sure I'd've put shooting the main opposition candidate's nephew to death on the street would have been on it. I'd've been wrong, of course. That said, my list still has the following: stealing the body of the main opposition candidate's nephew from the hospital after shooting him dead on the street.

Man, if this does turn out to be the big green push to a secular Iran, the government has no one but itself to blame for its own demise.

Terrorism on planes: Kudos all around to the passengers who leapt on Abdul Mutallab when his pants burst into flames. Sure, it could have been an accident, but EVEN SO, what's the harm in helping the man put out his pants, especially on a plane? Good idea on GP, if you ask me.

Abdul Mutallab: Yo, dude, like we didn't have enough problems with TSA wanting to confiscate our shoes, you had to go and pull this? I'm telling you, if Americans on average weren't unpleasant to look at in the nude, TSA would already have us streaking through the lobby.

Northwest Airlines: You let him fly without a passport? Seriously? Are you nuts? After he bought a ticket with $3000 cash? And showed up with no luggage?

I know, I know, he was a young man with a sob story. Believe me, I've been there, and I've done that. When I was 19, penniless and hopeless, I had to rely on the kindness of strangers to get on the Ferry from Dublin to Liverpool, and I looked like an IRA terrorist myself. But if someone comes along with that many problems, you kindly but firmly refer them to the police for sorting out. No harm, no foul.

And finally, for global security in general, a modest proposal: it's time to modernize. Airlines track huge numbers of people moving from place to place and country to country. There should be methods for swiftly sifting through that data and finding potential troublemakers. If an attendant at a ticket counter has a lapse in judgement and lets someone on an international flight without a passport or if a passenger pays thousands of dollars in cash for a one-way ticket on an international flight or if a passenger on an international flight neglects to check any luggage, there should be some sort of data analysis software that could then alert a second level so that proper investigation can be done. Cost be damned, folks. It simply can't be that hard.

And let's not fool ourselves with this: it wouldn't have been too hard for someone to slip by the system by 1) producing a fake passport (how many people can recognize documents from Sudan?), 2) buying a round-trip ticket with a pre-paid credit card, and 3) checking a bag full of rags. Scanning for these easy things isn't going to prevent anyone with an ounce of sense, but it will catch the folks too dumb to get even those things right.