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    -AUTHOR SITE: Michael Smerconish
    -RADIO SITE: Michael Smerconish (1210AM, The Big Talker)
    -ARCHIVES: Michael Smerconish (Philly.com)
    -ESSAY: Listen to Lehman: The press attention is on the wrong commissioners. (Michael Smerconish, April 15, 2004, National Review)

Richard Ben-Veniste and Bob Kerrey received the lion's share of media attention paid to last week's 9/11 Commission hearing with Condoleezza Rice, thanks to their generally intemperate questioning style. But while Ben-Veniste and Kerrey played to the cameras, it was their colleague, John Lehman, who was breaking new ground with the national-security adviser, but few noticed.

Lehman's focus was the transition between the Clinton and Bush administrations. He told Rice that he was "struck by the continuity of the policies rather than the differences," and then he proceeded to ask Rice a series of blunt questions as to what she was told during the transition.

Among Lehman's questions was this: "Were you aware that it was the policy...to fine airlines if they have more than two young Arab males in secondary questioning because that's discriminatory?"

Rice replied: "No, I have to say that the kind of inside arrangements for the FAA are not really in my...." (Lehman quickly followed up: "Well, these are not so inside.")

Watching the hearings on television with the rest of the nation, I wondered what in the world Secretary Lehman was talking about. This, I'd never heard before. Was he saying that the security of our airlines had been sacrificed by political correctness? A few days after the klieg lights had faded, I had the chance to ask him.

"We had testimony a couple of months ago from the past president of United, and current president of American Airlines that kind of shocked us all," Lehman told me. "They said under oath that indeed the Department of Transportation continued to fine any airline that was caught having more than two people of the same ethnic persuasion in a secondary line for line for questioning, including and especially, two Arabs."

Wait a minute. So if airline security had three suspicious Arab guys they had had to let one go because they'd reached a quota?

That was it, Lehman said, "because of this political correctness that became so entrenched in the 1990s, and continues in current administration. No one approves of racial profiling, that is not the issue. The fact is that Norwegian women are not, and 85-year-old women with aluminum walkers are not, the source of the terrorist threat. The fact is that our enemy is the violent Islamic extremism and the overwhelming number of people that one need to worry about are young Arab males, and to ask them a couple of extra questions seems to me to be common sense, yet if an airline does that in numbers that are more than proportionate to their number in particular line, then they get fined and that is why you see so many blue haired old ladies and people that are clearly not of Middle Eastern extraction being hauled out in such numbers because otherwise they get fined."

    -ESSAY: HE LOOKED TERROR IN THE EYE - AND BLINKED (Michael Smerconish, Feb. 24, 2005, Philadelphia Daily News)
    -ESSAY: Cat Stevens Islam: Not long ago airlines would have been fined for doing to Yusuf Islam what the U.S. government just did to him. Has Morning Broken? (Michael Smerconish, 9/27/2004, American Spectator)
    -INTERVIEW: Michael Smerconish (Philly Talk Radio May 15, 2002)
    -PROFILE: The Big Talker (Philly Mag, October 2001)
    -REVIEW: of Flying Blind: How Political Correctness Continues to Compromise Airline Safety Post 9/11 By Michael A. Smerconish, Esq. (Daniel J. Flynn , Townhall)
    -REVIEW: of Flying Blind (Daniel Pipes, Human Events)