U.S. Representative Bob Goodlatte (R-VA6) has vivid memories of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Ten years later, he thinks some of the responses to terrorism have been misdirected and it may be time to think about returning airport security to the private sector.
Goodlatte spoke with the Charlottesville Libertarian Examiner at the annual Labor Day festivities in Buena Vista, widely considered to be the launch of political campaign season in Virginia.
‘Totally bizarre’
On the morning of September 11, 2001, Goodlatte was meeting with friends from Roanoke in the vestibule of his Rayburn Building office, when they saw the first televised news reports about an airplane hitting one of the World Trade Center towers.
To him, he said, the reports “sounded totally bizarre.” Still, because the news came from New York, he and his friends parted while he went to a House Judiciary Committee hearing about a bill he had introduced.
In the committee conference room, he and colleagues watched more of the news reports from Lower Manhattan.
“We were standing there and watched as the second plane flew into the other building,” Goodlatte recalled, “and we were pretty stunned. We knew then that it was a terrorist attack.”
Because it was happening in New York City and not Washington, however, the committee chairman decided to go ahead with the hearing, beginning it with a “moment of silence for the obvious victims in those planes.”
Then, he said, “in the middle of the hearing somebody came in and announced that the Pentagon had been attacked. At that point they realized that this was a huge deal and asked people to evacuate the buildings.”
Smoke and fire
It later turned out that the fourth plane – the one that was brought down in Pennsylvania – was “headed toward the U.S. Capitol, so that was a wise decision," to evacuate, but because his Washington apartment "is right next to the Pentagon," he decided to stay in his office, "rather than go over there, where that whole confusion was going on.”
Later in the day, Members of Congress gathered on the steps of the Capitol to sing “God Bless America,” but Goodlatte was unable to get home to Arlington until about 11:00 o’clock that evening. “There was a lot of smoke in the streets,” he remembered, “and they were still battling that fire.”
Unlike Vice President Dick Cheney, who noted in his recent memoir that he was led to a secure bunker, for Members of Congress, Goodlatte said, “we were all each man for himself.”
It is, Goodlatte said, “quite remarkable that we’re coming up on ten years and there hasn’t been another major terrorist attack on the United States.”
At the same time, he cautioned, “some of the things we’ve done to prevent future terrorist attacks may have been too much focused on what actually happened rather than on what other things could happen.”
As an example, he pointed to “security at airports,” where “we have probably gone overboard with some of the machinery and equipment. Once you’ve sealed those cockpit doors and do some other things, you’re not likely to see planes flown into buildings.”
There are, he added, “thousands of other ways that terrorists could launch major attacks.”
Privatize the TSA?
Goodlatte said he “would be comfortable with” returning airport security functions to the private sector, as they were before the creation of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) in the aftermath of 9/11.
Private security operations, he said, would “have to have close government supervision but I really do think we’re spending an extraordinary amount of money on that and it’s hard to justify those kinds of expenditures knowing that there are lots of other ways that our country could be made more secure [but] that aren’t being made more secure because we’re dedicating all those resources to that particular one.”
The reason for the focus of those resources on one type of airport security is that “bureaucrats in charge of that program know [what] happened before. It’s on their watch if it happens again but that doesn’t mean that’s the best allocation of all the resources.”
It’s clear, Goodlatte concluded, that we need “good airport security but I think it would bear review whether we’re spending more resources than we should there.”
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