Federal officials say mechanical failure probably caused the crash of Trans World Airlines (TWA) Flight 800 last year, but tough security measures to deter terrorism continue to be enforced.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is close to wrapping up its criminal investigation into whether the crash resulted from foul play, according to informed sources, and many FBI officials are now convinced that the plane’s crash off the coast of New York City was caused by mechanical failure.

The new faith in “catastrophic mechanical failure” as the cause behind the crash was stated most clearly at the weekend by FBI Director Louis Freeh, who said, “The evidence is certainly not moving in the direction of a terrorist act. It is, in fact, moving in the other direction.”

Stringent security measures, taken at U.S. airports on orders of President Bill Clinton, since the July 17 1996 crash, however, remain in foirce. So do plans to implement “automated profiling” of people deemed most likely to be aviation security threats – a recommendation of a panel chaired by Vice President Al Gore – which is worrying many civil rights campaigners.

“The aviation security measures proposed after the crash of TWA Flight 800 unnecessarily infringe on passengers’ rights to equality and privacy,” warns Greg Nojeim, legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). “We are hopeful that these proposals will be viewed with a critical eye, because they won’t make passengers any safer.”

“Profiling” has been a particular bone of contention for Arab American groups, who contend that Middle Eastern peoples will be targeted by any system designed to pick out “likely” suspects for terrorism, says Houeida Saad, legal counsel to the American-Arab Anti- Discrimination Committee.

“We (Arab Americans) are currently being humiliated at airports,” Saad argues. “(Airport authorities) are singling out flight destinations as a means of security,” with passengers from Middle Eastern routes often facing harsh security checks, she adds.

In one example, on Feb 21, a Northwest Airlines flight from Amsterdam scheduled to fly to the United States was stopped at a security check where, Saad says, the security personnel told “all Arabic-speaking people” to file in a line separate from other passengers. All the luggage of the Arab passengers were then searched by hand, a procedure Saad claims is both humiliating and ineffective as a security precaution.

Those measures may have seemed justifiable in the immediate aftermath of the TWA explosion, which resulted in the deaths of 230 people.

The FBI initially explored theories that the crash resulted either from a bomb or from a missile fired from a boat below, and more than 500 FBI agents joined the investigation, along with officials of the National Transport Security Board.

Although authorities did not point to any one group as the main suspect, several media outlets initially broadcast rumours that Islamist groups dedicated to the overthrow of Saudi Arabia’s monarchy were behind the explosion. By contrast, journalist Pierre Salinger, former press secretary to President John F. Kennedy, spread a theory that an errant U.S. Navy missile hit the plane. Little support surfaced for any of the theories.

In recent weeks, the FBI decided, in the words of spokesman Joseph Valiquette, that “logic would demand that we look more toward the mechanical.” A painstaking reconstruction of the Boeing 747 plane has not revealed any hole large enough to be caused by an explosion, or any path that a missile could have followed upon striking the plane, FBI officials say.

FBI regional director James Kallstrom says that the agency may reach a conclusion on its case within the next two to three months, with mechanical failure as the leading theory behind the crash.

Some civil-rights lawyers are still upset about the divergence between the officials’ conclusions now and the stringent security measures.

“When Kallstrom was asked what new measures could be taken to prevent future Flight 800s, he said at the time, ‘Fund wiretapping proposals’,” one lawyer, speaking on condition of anonymity, says. “Would that help prevent future mechanical failures?”

Clinton, in fact, urged Congress to pass measures allowing for expanded legal use of wiretaps but was rebuffed by a coalition of conservative Republicans and liberal Democrats. The Clinton administration is pushing ahead with its proposals for ‘profiling’, which would allow security officials to target specific types of individuals when they check for possible threats.

The White House has insisted that no race, ethnic group, or nationality would be targetted for the profiles. But Saad says that current proposals would not protect groups from being discriminated against on the basis of race or national origin, and she warns that some particular features or traits — such as Arabic surnames — could become part of the profile of a likely security threat.

“The profiling system proposed by the Gore commission should either be abandoned or be subjected to rigorous outside scrutiny…to ensure that passengers are treated equally, with dignity and respect,” Nojeim says.