Up in the air -- the sequel

WASHINGTON

It is often difficult to tell if our president is speaking to reassure us or is just chatting to us about a problem. Is he suggesting that while mistakes always happen, his skills as an empowered community organizer can correct them?

On Christmas Day, a Nigerian man, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, smuggled an explosive device onto an airplane from Holland to Detroit. He was apprehended by alert passengers and crew and is awaiting trial. The White House and the whole national security apparatus became intensely involved, with the president taking personal responsibility on behalf of his advisers.

That was a mistake.

For three weeks we have watched Barack Obama's security officials -- either retired service officers or high-powered politicians. Each and every one is well dressed and distinguished. It is quite impossible to see any of them standing in lines being ordered to take their shoes and belt off, after walking airport corridors hauling a bag.

So, Mr. President, your first mistake is not having advice from the paying customers and citizens who vote about what many of them see as monsters from the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), who either patently do not care or view every passenger as a potential threat.

And, as such, TSA people treat us all alike. We are dominated, intimidated and controlled. Now, al-Qaida has won a new victory over the United States and has shown our systems and planning to be inadequate. Alternative full-body screening is already running into problems.

Sure, we can all stand in front of a camera that can see through our clothes, but the camera has not yet been invented that can search body cavities. And let's not forget that we seek out suicide bombers.

Then there is the entire question of political correctness. Since the assassination of Bobby Kennedy in 1968 by a young Muslim in California, there has been a hideous upsurge in fatal attacks by Muslim males between the ages of 17 and 42 who are also religious extremists -- from the attack on the Israeli Olympics team in Munich through attacks on the World Trade Center in New York, to the killings of 9/11, to bombings in Africa, Europe and throughout Asia.

Where religion is used to enhance a problem, the only sane step to take is to solve the problem. That is an answer that appeals to a lot of our friends. But it is no solution.

President Obama has announced that citizens of 14 countries -- including Pakistan and Saudi Arabia -- will face intensive screening when flying to the United States. So has the era of racial profiling begun officially?

Sadly, terrorists don't all have the same profile and the same mustache. They don't all come from the same country and don't all have the same skin color.

Some of our friends are calling -- without joking -- for a separate security line for all passengers named Abdul or Mohammed. But that wouldn't have stopped Richard Reid, the terrorist with the booby-trapped shoe, a Brit with Jamaican origins.

Nor would it have stopped Jose Padilla, the American from Puerto Rico who became an Islamic radical, accused of plotting a "dirty bomb" attack.

And that wouldn't have stopped Timothy McVeigh, either, completely white and American.

It did make a young white woman named Alison be selected for special questioning on arrival; someone heard her being called Ali and alerted authorities.

The miracle solution, as understood by some, is considered by security experts to be equally ineffective as uselessly discriminatory. Why rely on a name or appearance or origins• The vast majority of American-Arabs we know are devoid of sympathy for the terrorists. Many are Christians.

Airport security, like all branches of intelligence gathering, is an art rather than a science. So the already routine filling out of personal data prior to check-in combined with improved (rather than minimum-wage) intelligent interpersonal screening at check-in could be more effectively used.

Neither the systematic singling out of passengers for their religion or faith nor the systematic singling out of unlikely targets to prove profiling avoidance will make flights safer. It's quite the reverse. The increased sense of injustice and persecution is making us all act out. Militant jihadism depends on that to place us further at risk.

Pragmatism, for once, favors principle. Good intelligence, supported by random testing, however annoying and unscientific, is not only fairest but may also be best. But it does not rely on equipment purchases and benefits shareholders. But it does rely on trained employees.

Dateline D.C. is written by a Washington-based British journalist and political observer.