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[Adder]

Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop
Marty Peretz -- who is a pompous gasbag, and a jackass to boot -- describes how Israel screens airline passengers:

• Every passenger who flies El Al, whether from Ben Gurion Airport near Tel Aviv or from locations outside Israel, is put through a personalized psychometric at point of departure. This is not a machine test. It is an interview, short but probing, with questions that some may experience as a bit invasive, before the passenger gets to the ticket counter.
  
  It is hard to imagine the current crop of Transportation Security Administration employees deployed in U.S. airports performing this delicate function. The interviewers are smart and young, mostly female, and on their way to other jobs. It was one of these El Al personnel who discovered, simply by talking with and closely observing a young Irish woman, that she had carried in her checked baggage a "gift" she had not seen, handed to her by a Palestinian boyfriend. She was also carrying his baby in her stomach. The boyfriend was a ... well, you understand what he was.
  
  I have traveled to and from Israel on dozens of occasions. Each time I am a bit surprised and sometimes even thrown off balance by the questions. The volume of passengers at U.S. and big European airports might preclude relying on a system like Israel's--unless, of course, security service at airports and other vulnerable spots in society were to be made mandatory for a year or so. You can't imagine what a trained young person can discover in watching the subtle behavior of anxious people.
  
  Here is a true story. Do you remember the days when student air discount tickets were available for almost anybody not obviously in middle age? Well, some twenty years ago, a friend of mine, an American who was living in Rome and working in advertising, was to meet me in Israel. He had purchased a bootleg El Al student ticket. When he arrived at Da Vinci Airport, he was greeted by a genial security officer. She looked at his passport and then his ticket. "Oh, you are a student," she exclaimed. "What do you study?" Fishing out of nowhere and quickly, Bill said, "Architecture." "So, tell me," asked his questioner, "when was Palladio born?" He did not get on the plane till the next day when his innocence of malevolent intent was vouched for and proven. Now that is security.

There is no good reason for us not to be doing the same thing, except that our government does not take the threat of terrorism as seriously as Israel's does.

I agree. We had a very pale shadow of this sort of thing at one point, but the universal uproar against the three questions (did you pack your own bags? did anyone give you to take on the plane? have your bags been with you since you packed?) after 9/11 only moved us farther away. Those questions were far from sufficient, but the goal there was to catch the stupid (like the Irish girl in the story), not the suspiciously nervous.

Anyway, point being is that I think we could get some incrimental gain just by enlisting airline ticket and gate agents again in the interrim while professionals are trained.