Tilting at Windmills: False Whoops * Senior Screeners * Amorous Profs Palm Trees in Jalalabad * Canned Peas in Cameroon.

• Author: Peters, Charles

REMEMBER ALL THOSE STORIES about how military action would be impossible after October because of the snow that would blanket Afghanistan? Well, the fall of Kandahar didn't occur until December, and did you see any snow, even then? Of course, there is snow in the high mountains, but there are palm trees in Jalalabad. Another example comes from CNN's David Ensor, who referred to the airport at Kandahar as "just an airstrip." In fact, it was built to serve as an international airport in a multimillion-dollar project that was considered one of the Agency for International Development's major boondoggles of the 1960s. The problem here is the tendency of reporters and commentators to feel that they have to appear knowledgeable about subjects of which they're totally ignorant. This, alas, is not a tendency confined to Afghanistan.

SO FAR THERE HASN'T BEEN much support for my campaign to fight the recession with more public spending instead of with more tax cuts. But I remain convinced that it is the way to go. A recent story by Jacques Steinberg in The New York Times explains why. The article's headline is "Economy Puts Schools in Tough Position, Budget Cuts Conflict With Pressure to Improve Student Performance." Steinberg reports that school budgets are being trimmed "from New York to California." Does that make any sense at all?

THE AIRPORT IN FRESNO, CALIfornia, has installed advanced face-recognition technology to spot terrorists before they can board planes. It matches features of passengers to pictures of known terrorists at 26 points on the face, according to John Johnson of the Los Angeles Times, and when a match is found, an alarm goes, "Whoop, whoop, whoop!" The only problem is that so far all the matches have been false. Even an executive of the company that manufactures the system was identified as a terrorist.

NORMAN MINETA HAS LESS THAN 11 months left to hire and train 28,000 screeners for the nation's airports. This is obviously a daunting task, and Mineta needs all the help he can get. So here are a few suggestion based on my experience as one of those who started a new agency, the Peace Corps, from scratch in 1961.

First, put major emphasis on active recruitment; we did not sit and wait for applications, we flooded the nation's campuses with recruiting teams. Our leader, Sargent Shriver, put great store in recruiting--everyone on the staff knew he had to do his part or face the boss's displeasure. After we had cast a wide net to persuade recruits to apply, we instituted a rigorous selection program that eliminated those who didn't have the right stuff. Then we provided adequate training before they went on the job. In the beginning, some of that training wasn't very good, but we had a system of feedback that made sure we fixed what was wrong.

Both the recruiting and selection procedures for the screeners should draw on studies of the people who have actually turned out to be the best of the current screeners. A former FAA security chief says, "The best screeners were elderly widows. They had great powers of concentration and weren't worried about having a date or going out for a beer."

One problem with the screening job is that it is cruelly monotonous, looking at a screen or searching bags all day, every day. To meet this problem, The Washington Post's Stephen Barr reports that transportation department officials are planning to have screeners "rotate jobs, such as pulling passengers out of line for `wanding,' searching airplanes each morning, and walking through airports as `rovers' checking for potential security problems." One model Barr suggests is the Coast Guard, which "trains its staff to work in a variety of jobs, such as search and rescue, law enforcement, engineering, and navigation" and "is known for instilling pride and camaraderie in its personnel."

SPEAKING OF THE PEACE CORPS, how could Bush have dared nominate as its new director a man so totally unqualified as Gaddi Vasquez? He has no background in either international or humanitarian efforts, and his experience as a public official consisted of supervising the loss of $1.64 billion in bad investment of the funds of...