Good luck over there.
Danny, who are reportedly among the best security people at 'cultural profiling', and especially for terrorists who are trained or originate in the Middle East or southwestern Asia?
There is no doubt that Israel's El Al airlines has never suffered a hijacking.
To be quite frank and to the point, why not have a contract with some El Al or Israeli Army officials who can train selected and experienced airport security staff or even certain policemen to work in short shifts at the security checkpoints? Are these skills so difficult or too subtle to teach that police in other areas of the world could not find it worth their time? Maybe home-grown pride is an obstacle.
This might have benefited the US several years ago. Although I'm referring to observations inside an airport, an FBI lady knew that something was rather odd about a foreign "pilot" who only wanted to learn to fly a simulator enroute-but not take off or fly any approaches. Her supervisors told her to forget about it. Maybe if a man had expressed the same concerns, a much larger investigation might have taken place? This was not long before 9/11. We had vast problems between and inside of so many bumbling bureaucracies. Many are still with us (Katrina...either the Army Corps of Engineers or the state of Lousiana etc consulted with the Dutch flood control and engineering experts after the nightmare...good timing guys).
Why must so many nations learn the hard way (despite the recent outstanding work by police in Britain) to identify subtleties in body language which are learned among a foreign (and domestic) culture and family? How many non-Muslim Britains are quite fluent in Arabic, Farsi or the language(s) of Pakistan? If the Israelis have the best people, despite the fact that we can't convert to their methods of subjecting each passenger to a 2-hour check-in and a detailed interview/interrogation, could we all reap large benefits from highly-skilled security staff after they train with the top experts?
I could easily be wrong, but Israeli security forces appear to be experts with both the mentality and the culture(s) from which many of these terrorists originate. Apart from that, the US and the UK have so many people who are bi- or tri-lingual and after a suitable background check (there "lies the rub"), could some of these help identify subtle but key characteristics based upon underground slang expressions or body language?
This was featured in either the "New York Times" or the "Wall Street Journal": one problem with the many thousands of CIA documents (mostly in Arabic and Farsi) which are UNtranslated and must be shredded after a short while is that not enough translators exist to tackle the immense, highly labor-intensive workloads. The amount of lost information is staggering (is the case in the UK?). Background checks or total fluency seem to be the problems. So many people have relatives in other countries and very many applicants cannot be trusted.
Ironically, the largest US terrorist attack before 9/11 took place in Oklahoma City and the mass murderer was a young caucasian guy from upstate NY. He had served in the Army in Desert Storm in '91. Many people in Chechnya appear to also be caucasian. Many are Muslim, which by itself means little, but maybe the grievances among those terrorists are only against the Russians?
Some of the trouble makers in Chechnya appear to come from other distant countries.