It's not just Saddam Hussein who should be feeling less secure this week.

Air travelers may wonder what's next, after Comair flight attendant Turhan Jamar Lamons, 23, was indicted on charges he tried to "wreck" a May 8 Comair flight between Atlanta and Huntsville, Ala. Wednesday, a wave of apprehension rippled through city halls nationwide, including Cincinnati's, after a political rival gunned down New York City Councilman James Davis at a council meeting. And a 900-page congressional report released Thursday concludes the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks were preventable, and faults the CIA , FBI and National Security Agency for not sharing intelligence, from years before 9/11, about the al-Qaida threat.

There are still too many security breakdowns, and prevention still depends too much on luck.

Too much security consists of reactions afterward. It's comforting to hear Comair has reverified background checks on all 5,500 employees. A month before Lamons tried to set that Comair plane on fire, he was indicted in Georgia on charges that as an AirTran worker, on Sept. 18, 2001, he phoned in an anonymous threat to an Atlanta gate agent that "all passengers on flight 278 are going to die." His alleged motive: He didn't want to work on his day off.

We need more exhaustive background checks, and it starts with challenging assumptions: Not all disgruntled workers are harmless. Not all "kooks" at council meetings are harmless. Not all people who look credible are harmless. If a facility is worth protecting with detectors, there should be no exceptions. Davis' killer, Othniel Askew, 31, was waved past metal detectors. Because he was with Davis, Askew was assumed harmless. U.S. security experts assumed al-Qaida attacks would occur overseas, despite intercepts disclosing that al-Qaida planned to use airliners as weapons and that operations chief Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was meeting recruits here. If we want a safer nation, we need more "gatekeepers" and security analysts who challenge resumes, challenge background checks and challenge assumptions about who's harmless.

--Tony Lang