Those ‘stupid’ security measures

So Oregon congressman Peter DeFazio thinks random checks of airline passengers’ carry-on bags are “really stupid.”

Well, we’ll take really stupid over a hijacking every time.

Fortunately, we haven’t had one of those in this country for 7fi years.

The interesting thing here is that DeFazio, a 12-term Democrat from Springfield whose district covers most of Oregon’s southwest quarter, told the (Eugene) Register-Guard newspaper that he considers himself an expert on airport security.

DeFazio contends the search was “pointless” because he had already gone through electronic screening machines before boarding a flight in Eugene.

That flight landed in Portland, and DeFazio was taken out of line there, where he caught a flight to Washington, D.C.

“The context is I was inside the airport and had already completed security screening (in Eugene) and had already flown on an airplane,” DeFazio said.

We get the congressman’s point.

Airports being what they are, we’d probably have been annoyed too had we been in DeFazio’s shoes.

But we draw a distinction between annoyances that serve no purpose, and ones designed to keep us from getting killed.

And we would have thought that a congressman who flies a lot more often than almost all of his constituents — DeFazio said he travels between Oregon and Washington, D.C., almost weekly — would have a particular appreciation for that distinction.

DeFazio’s criticism about Monday’s incident is especially surprising considering he has in the past chastised the TSA for being too soft on security rather than too aggressive.

In 2005 DeFazio, citing a couple of federal studies that looked at the effectiveness of airport screening, said: “The common finding is that no set of  screeners, private nor public, is performing anywhere near the level I think we need.”

To be fair to DeFazio, his main complaint then was that screeners lacked state-of-the-art X-ray machines. That’s a valid concern.

Still, it seems curious to us that the congressman, less than four years after he chided the TSA for its poor performance, thinks the agency is, in effect, trying too hard.

DeFazio told a reporter from The Oregonian that TSA had stopped random checks because they weren’t effective, but that the agency recently reinstated the policy.

The congressmen said he had intended to talk with TSA officials about reviving the random check policy. DeFazio had that conversation on Tuesday.

That’s fine. We don’t object to a congressman making sure federal agencies are doing a good job.

But DeFazio should have waited for that private meeting to call the TSA on the carpet.

We’re disappointed that a member of Congress would tell reporters that a practice intended to save lives is “really stupid” and “pointless.”

And one other thing, congressman.

You said this on Tuesday: “I wish the press would pay one one-hundredth as much attention to issues of national import.”

We’re pretty sure airport security qualifies as “an issue of national import.”