These days, you can't get into any self-respecting building in Washington, public or private, without showing identification and signing a visitors' log. When I went to give a talk at the National Defense University last week, it was like entering the Green Zone in Baghdad. They made me open the trunk the hood and all four doors of my car--and that was after my license plate number had been cleared in advance.
On the one hand, Mr. Ignatius’s account of his experience at National Defense University has the ring of truth. A decade ago, my family joined the swim club at Fort Meyer in Arlington. After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the newly beefed-up security procedures at Fort Meyer made going to the pool more trouble than it was worth. In addition to opening the trunk, the hood, and all four doors, we had to get out while security guards used long-handled mirrors to inspect the undercarriage of our vehicle. Before long, we found ourselves a new swim club. So, yeah, I could relate to Mr. Ignatius’s lament.
On the other hand, I visit a lot of offices in this city—executive agencies, NGOs, think tanks, government relations firms, Congressional offices—and I am struck not so much by the strictness of the security as by its unevenness.
As it happens, my colleague, Laura Allen, and I visited NDU the same week as Mr. Ignatius. We didn’t drive; we walked to Fort McNair from the Waterfront Metro stop. Laura was carrying an oversized handbag. I had a backpack with enough room for a dozen hand grenades or more. At the gate, no one looked in our bags. We were not asked to empty our pockets or to pass through whole-body x-ray machines. The guard simply took down some information from our drivers licenses, returned them to us, and waved us through.
When we go out to visit Glenn Fellows at their internship sites, Laura and I find that it is simply impossible to predict the level of security to which we will be subjected. Several weeks ago, we encountered Green Zone-level fastidiousness at the National Park Service, and we were wanded twice at the Department of Agriculture. Does anyone really think that the NPS and USDA are more likely targets of terrorism than Fort McNair?
I am reminded of my daily commute on the Washington Metro. I know that on any given day at least one of the four escalators I need to use will be out of service. And yet, I never know which one, as today’s out-of-service escalator pattern never seems to bear any relation to yesterday’s.
What makes all this unnerving is that one can’t help but consider the possibility that Metro’s incompetent escalator maintenance—which I have been furiously, albeit silently, documenting for the past twenty years—is an indicator of its inability to do other, even more important, things, such as maintaining the electronic circuitry on which the prevention of deadly train wrecks depends. I suspect I am not the only Red Line rider—excuse me, “customer”—who has reflected on that since the unfortunate June 22 “incident” at Fort Totten.
Before we scale back our security system, let’s try to address the element of caprice inhering in it.
