dumped its anti-terrorist program of closely searching everyone flying into the United States from Iran and 13 other countries and replacing it with a new system of singling out people for suspicious conduct, not based on where they are from.
The new system ought to vastly reduce the number of Iranians pulled aside for extra searches since so few Iranians have ever been implicated in any terrorist acts. However, it remains to be seen how the new rules will be applied and Iranian-Americans could continue to face problems at airports simply because most airport inspectors do not understand that most of the Iranians they see have fled the Islamic Republic.
The heightened concern about terrorists was sparked Christmas Day when a Nigerian flying into Detroit from Europe tried to ignite explosives in his underwear. He failed and was subdued by passengers, but his attempt prompted calls for more action to intercept terrorists.
The Obama Administration responded in eight days by announcing that it would focus extra attention and searches on passengers arriving in the United States on passports from 14 countries and on persons coming from those 14 countries, even if they held American passports.
Except for Cuba, the 14 countries all had large Muslim populations. The others were Afghanistan, Algeria, Lebanon, Iraq, Iran, Libya, Nigeria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen.
The Obama Administration said that was a temporary policy while it took a closer look at options for countering terrorists. Last Friday, 90 days after instituting the 14-country policy, Janet Napolitano, secretary of homeland security, announced the 14-country was being dumped.
The new policy makes all passengers arriving in the United States from a foreign airport subject to increased inspection, regardless of nationality. U.S. officials have been concerned that their focus on people from Muslim countries has prompted terrorist groups like Al-Qaeda to work hard at recruiting people with passports from non-Muslim countries—especially people with American passports.
Passengers will be selected for closer inspection based on particular intelligence information. For example, if U.S. intelligence gets information that a Japanese male in his 20s has bought explosives and an airline ticket to the United States, then every arriving Japanese citizen in his 20s can be pulled aside for extra inspection. If intelligence learns that someone with a passport ending in the numbers 4321 has just left an Al-Qaeda training camp, then every passenger arriving in the United States with a passport ending in 4321 can be pulled aside, regardless of nationality.
As outlined by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), this would appear to end the practice of pulling someone aside because his U.S. passport shows that he was born in Iran.
But the new system will also require more training and more judgment by DHS staffers at airports. If the intelligence provided identifies a suspect as a short, dark skinned male born in the Middle East with a large scar on his left buttock, the opportunities for embarrassment could be huge.
The point is to check passengers at airports abroad before they board planes bound for the United States.
But The New York Times reports that currently the only information typically checked before boarding is name, date of birth and nationality. It says much more information is collected on passengers—for example, where the passenger started his flight, what hotel he was staying in, how he paid for his ticket—but those details are normally checked by officials in the United States only after the plane is in the air and they are weighing whom to check on landing.
The new policy also requires that U.S. intelligence collect such threat information and pass it along quickly to DHS who must pass it along quickly to its staff at airports. Had the new policy been in effect last Christmas Day, it would not have caught the Nigerian man with the explosive underwear. Although the man’s father had gone to the American embassy and told the staff there of his suspicions that his son had become a terrorist, the embassy did not pass that information on to DHS.
The new policy does not have anything to do with the no-fly list that DHS maintains of names of suspicious people. Iranians with names similar or identical to those on that list will still be stopped. The names are largely but not exclusively Islamic. The late Senator Edward Kennedy had problems because an Irish terrorist named Edward Kennedy is on the list. David Nelson, son of Ozzie and Harriet Nelson and part of one of the most popular television comedy shows of the 1950s, has also been stopped.
About 24,000 people are found on this list—actually two lists, a small one of people banned from flying and a longer one of people requiring a further check before being allowed to board an airplane.
As for the new security measures, DHS said, “Passengers traveling to the U.S. from international destinations may notice enhanced security and screening measures throughout the passenger check-in and boarding process, which could include explosives trace detection, use of advanced imaging technology [meaning body scans], canine teams or pat downs, among other security measures to keep air travel safe.”
The Washington-based Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) lauded the new policy. “We applaud the Obama Administration’s new passenger screening policy because it does what security experts and civil libertarians have always asked for—it screens passengers based on actual suspicious behaviors or actions, not on national origin or religion,” it said.