When was the last time you let a bunch of potential terrorists into your house? Indeed, when was the last time you let any group of strangers walk around your house without asking them what they wanted or where they were from?

You haven’t done either of these, of course. You’d be mad not to want to know who they were before you let them in. And you’d have to be especially mad if you had recent experience of people blowing your house up.

Yet for some reason most of Europe seems to be up in arms that Michael Chertoff, the US Homeland Security Secretary, is demanding that some basic background information about air passengers – passport details, travel plans and details of the credit cards that paid for flights – be handed over by airlines before they land in or fly over the US.

It is, we are told, an outrage; an offence against our civil liberties and another example of the encroachment of the State on individual rights.

Forgive me for stating the obvious, but isn’t Mr Chertoff being perfectly sensible? Given the experience of 9/11, of the shoe-bomber Richard Reid and of other Islamist terrorists’ attempts to use aircraft as flying bombs, the most basic security precautions surely involve cross-checking passengers’ data against suspicious behaviour patterns. Or should the Americans have no rights to keep out people they consider to be a threat?

The latest issue of The Economist adopts the outraged tone of the objectors, arguing that “risking death alongside American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan makes you a valued ally – unless you want to visit the US. Then you are a security risk and have to pay a hefty fee for a visa . . .” Eh? As if the welcome behaviour of some EU governments in sending soldiers to support the War on Terror means that they are less likely to harbour terrorists. Unfortunately, terrorists are not renowned for deciding that they will not operate from America’s allies.

The real issue, surely, is not the US; it is why we don’t demand the same information about passengers flying over our own airspace.

As for the idea that this is an encroachment on civil liberties, akin to ID cards: nonsense. ID cards depend upon compulsion – whatever mendacious claims the Government makes about their being voluntary. No one is compelled to hand over any information to the US, because no one is compelled to fly there. The solution to this non-existent problem is straightforward. If you don’t like America’s terms of entry, don’t go.

Stephen Pollard is president of Centre for the New Europe, a Brussels think-tank

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