As a high-ranking Democratic member of both the House Aviation Subcommittee and the Homeland Security Committee, Peter DeFazio, D-Ore., has seen a lot of Homeland Security Department officials and nominees. One reason he’s had so many opportunities, he notes, is that the department has become a D.C. revolving door, with short-term officials leaving for lucrative security jobs in the private sector.

So, a little while ago, at a hearing on another nominee for assistant secretary, he offered an unscripted question:

Had the nominee every heard of Ramzi Yousef?

It turned out he hadn’t.

DeFazio suggested that maybe the nominee should look him up.

More than a decade ago, Yousef was convicted of planning to take down U.S. jumbo jets over the Pacific with liquid explosives.

Yousef, and his fluid flare-up formula, has been on DeFazio’s mind for a while. Right after Sept. 11, he remembers, he urged the government to get passenger-carried liquids off airplanes. He raised the issue several times, and sometimes so did Rep. John Mica, R-Fla., chairman of the aviation subcommittee.

But now that the liquids are gone, in the wake of the British breaking a terror plot against trans-Atlantic flights, DeFazio’s still not drinking to U.S. airplane security.

“You don’t have enough people to operate the inadequate machinery we have,” he said. “These people have not taken the continuing threat seriously. I couldn’t be more angry about it.”

From his longtime perch on the aviation subcommittee, DeFazio has seen airline security threats both solid and liquid. The list includes what he calls the “Chechen wake-up,” two women from Chechnya who took down two Russian airliners the same day with explosive material woven into their clothing.

There isn’t, at least not yet, technology to let airports detect everything. But there is, DeFazio said firmly, much better technology available than what we’re using. There are CTX machines, a combination of X-ray and CT scans, for examining baggage; far more airports want them than actually have them. The same goes for air-puffer machines, which can raise residues of explosive material on a traveler.

For years, technology has been available for walk-through portals, which can scan a traveler down to the skin. The resulting image raises privacy issues, but as DeFazio points out, 85 percent of travelers prefer it to an intrusive body frisk.

That’s in London, where the airport has all those resources, which we don’t. London airports, DeFazio notes, also keep a much closer eye on airline contractors than U.S. airports do.

“The back door of our airports is open. We don’t know who’s running around out there,” airline consultant Mike Boyd said Monday on MSNBC. On the other aspects, he added, “The technology is there to find that stuff. We haven’t gone after it.”

Going after it, of course, would not be cheap.

“You’re talking billions of dollars,” DeFazio said. “What’s that compared to the impact on the United States, let alone human life, if we have another major airline incident?”

That’s apparently not the calculation of the Bush administration, which seems to keep cutting research funding for airplane-security technology.

Last year, Cathleen Berrick, director of the Government Accountability Office’s homeland security and justice division, told the Senate that the Transportation Security Administration in 2003 took more than half of its $110 million for research to spend on personnel.

“I would like to see them have a much larger R and D budget,” James May of the Air Transport Association recently told the New York Times. “As the technology of terrorism gets more sophisticated, we have to be more sophisticated.”

Meanwhile, it seems that our shortcomings on airline security technology and implementation aren’t even the most unsettling aspects of our anti-terrorism posture.

“This is where we’re doing best,” DeFazio said about airline security. “You want to talk ports and borders, we’re a long way behind.”