Is airline correctness getting it all wrong?

FEW documents will have a more searing effect on US security and intelligence operations than the report of the commission on the 11 September attacks. We hope. Almost three years after the hijacks, surely such appalling attacks could not be repeated?

Think again. Two reports from the US of disturbing incidents on recent flights suggest that the danger of terror hijack may be as "clear and present" as ever - certainly in the mind of passengers.

One account, by an American woman journalist, describes highly unusual behaviour by a group of 14 Middle East passengers on board a Northwest Airlines Flight 327 on 29 June from Detroit to Los Angeles. The movements of the 14, which terrified a number of passengers, suggested an intelligence-gathering operation by terrorists. Other reported incidents on recent flights have included a Middle East passenger being caught in the toilet trying to break through the wall towards the cockpit.

These reports come in the wake of a January FBI report that suicide terrorists were plotting to hijack transatlantic planes by smuggling "ready-to-build" bomb kits past airport security and later assembling the explosives in aircraft bathrooms.

While such reports need to be carefully studied and researched, what is also disturbing and not easily dismissed is the flow of corroborative accounts these reports have triggered both from airline passengers and crew. These would seem to suggest that the incident on the video clip showing the 9/11 hijackers passing through security checks to board the plane may not be as historic as we would wish it to be.

And the reason for that may have less to do with slack airport security or faulty technology than with legislation forbidding discrimination. This works to prevent effective screening of passengers with certain ethnic backgrounds. Airlines are only allowed to scrutinise intensely two Middle Eastern passengers (or any other ethnic group) per flight, or they can be - and have been - sued. Consequently, a group of half-a-dozen Syrians cannot be taken aside by the airline and investigated.

We have to ask whether we have a "security" problem in the real sense or a political problem in the reluctance to face the consequences of rigorous enforcement of the Human Rights Act.

The first report, by Annie Jacobsen, a business and finance writer for the online magazine Women’s Wall Street, centred on the unusual behaviour of a group of an initially unconnected Syrians who began congregating in groups of two or three throughout the flight and consecutively filed in and out of bathrooms. Her account was confirmed by David Adams, spokesman for the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Federal Air Marshal Service, who said officers were on board throughout the flight. Nothing suspicious was found in the toilets, "but there was enough of a suspicious nature for the FAMS, passengers and crew to take notice".

The men were taken into custody at Los Angeles and later released after questioning. They claimed to be a group of musicians travelling to a performance, and were on no terror suspect list.

Geoff Boettcher, an airline pilot and a director of the Allied Pilots Association, has said that Mrs Jacobsen’s incident "is not a singular or isolated experience. The terrorists are probing us all the time". Mr Boettcher said captains have been trying to speak out on this, but so far their words have been falling on deaf ears.

It is telling in this context that the 11 September Commission’s report documents the patience and determination of the hijackers and how they explored weaknesses in airline and border procedures, even taking test flights to see when cockpit doors were open.

According to Mark Bogosian, a pilot for American Airlines, such incidents "occur more than you like to think. It’s a ‘dirty little secret’ that all of us, as crew members, have known about for quite some time."

Rand Peck, captain for a major US airline, said he was "deeply bothered" by the inconsistencies he sees at the Transport and Security Administration. "I’ve observed matronly grandmothers practically disrobed at security checkpoints and five-year-old blond boys turned inside out, while Middle Eastern males sail through undetained.

"We have little to fear from grandmothers and little boys. But Middle Eastern males are protected, not by our Constitution, but from our current popular policy of political correctness and a desire to offend no-one at any cost, regardless of how many airplanes and bodies litter the landscape."

None of this should obscure the broader security lapses in the run-up to 11 September or detract from the report’s recommendations, already being described as the most sweeping shake-up of the Central Intelligence Agency since the Second World War. Proposals include the creation of a national counter-terrorism centre and the establishment of a new national intelligence director.

An attack of even greater magnitude is now possible and even probable, the report finds. "We do not have the luxury of time. We must prepare and we must act," said the Commission chairman, Thomas Kean.

What the report did not present was a wider assessment of the "war against terror", and here a long, hard assessment is surely now needed on whether America is winning this war - or losing it.

According to Anthony Cordesman, of the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies, nothing suggests that Islamic extremism and terrorism have been eliminated in a single country. On the contrary, new leaders and fighters have emerged.

The International Institute of Strategic Studies recently estimated that al-Qaeda and its affiliates are now some 18,000 strong, many joining as a direct result of the Afghanistan and Iraq conflicts. The 9/11 Commission is all very well, but it means little without a more coherent US policy to contain and discourage terrorism across the Middle East.

In the meantime, millions of airline travellers will judge the extent of effective security by what they see on the ground at airports. The overwhelming majority want to see real, evident specific examples of tighter screening as passengers board planes.

But while this seems an obvious point to most, not everyone agrees, and not all the reaction to Mrs Jacobsen’s piece has been favourable. Many e-mails were sent in calling her a racist for referring to 14 men with Syrian passports as Syrian men.

And a 9/11 Commission member, John Lehman, stated back in April that "it was the policy before 9/11 and remains the policy today to fine airlines if they have more than two young Arab males in secondary questioning because that’s discriminatory".

Indeed, post-9/11 complaints have been filed against United Airlines (settled by a payment of $1.5 million in November 2003), against American Airlines (settled in March 2004 for $1.5 million) and against Continental Airlines (settled in April for $0.5 million).

And this, in Mrs Jacobsen’s view, takes us to the heart of the matter: political correctness. This, she writes, "has become a major roadblock for airline safety. From what I’ve now learned from the many e-mails and phone calls that I have had with airline industry personnel, it is political correctness that will eventually cause us to stand there wondering: How did we let 9/11 happen again?"