Airport security before 9/11

A column at Salon reminds us that we lived with terrorism long before 9/11/01, and our response was much more measured and less theatrical.  He cites the period 1985-1989:

First on that list was the spectacular saga of TWA Flight 847, a Boeing 727 commandeered by Shiite militiamen in June of '85. Even before that crisis ended, Sikh extremists would blow up Air India Flight 182 off the coast of Ireland -- the deadliest civil aviation bombing in history. The Abu Nidal group then murdered 20 people at the airports in Rome and Vienna, followed in short order by the bombing of TWA Flight 840 as it descended toward Athens. Abu Nidal struck again in Karachi, attacking a Pan Am 747 with machine guns and grenades. Then, in December 1988, Libyan operatives planted the luggage bomb that brought down Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in what would stand until 2001 as the worst-ever terror attack against a U.S. target. The Libyans later used another luggage bomb to take out UTA Flight 772 over Niger in September 1989.

Also occurring in that same span were the non-terrorist bombing of a Korean Air Lines 707 and the downing of a San Francisco-bound Pacific Southwest Airlines flight by a recently fired employee who burst into the cockpit and shot both pilots...

With respect to airport security, it is remarkable how we have come to place Sept. 11, 2001, as the fulcrum upon which we balance almost all of our decisions. As if deadly terrorism didn't exist prior to that day, when really we've been dealing with the same old threats for decades. What have we learned? What have we done?...

We continue enacting the wrong policies, wasting our security resources and manpower... Cargo and packages go uninspected while passengers are groped and harassed over umbrellas and harmless hobby knives. Uniformed pilots are forced to remove their belts and endure embarrassing pat-downs...

In the 1980s we did not overreact. We did not stage ill-fated invasions of distant countries. People did not cease traveling and the airline industry did not fall into chaos. We were lazy in enacting better security, perhaps, but as a country our psychological reaction, much to our credit, was calm, measured and not yet self-defeating.

The writer is an airline pilot who is worried about the overreaction that will occur after the next incident.