There are fundamental problems with the way the Transportation Safety Administration combats terrorism. Take our governments fanaticism about being politically correct, instead of worry about safety first, and then making people feel totally safe, when the obviously are not, and you have big problems.
Here are some issues to think about seriously:
- A Michigan man who was aboard Northwest Airlines Flight 253 says he witnessed Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab trying to board the plane in Amsterdam without a passport. Kurt Haskell of Newport, Michigan confirmed he was on the flight by sending a picture of his boarding pass. Haskell said he and his wife were sitting on the ground near their boarding gate in Amsterdam, which is when they saw Mutallab approach the gate with an unidentified man. While Mutallab was poorly dressed, his friend was dressed in an expensive suit, Haskell said. He says the suited man asked ticket agents whether Mutallab could board without a passport. “The guy said, ‘He’s from Sudan and we do this all the time.’” If this can be confirmed, the boarding agent should be fired and the airline severely fined.
- We have pledged to a War on Terror when we should be defending ourselves from Jihad. Because of political correctness our government and news agencies apparently feel that naming Jihad as the enemy would give us new enemies. Well guess what, in these fanatics mind, we are the enemy, any way you look at it, and they want to kill us.
- We publicize each new attack and react to it, successful or not, leading both the public and the enemy to believe that such attacks are more common and more successful than they actually are.
- The controls we enact are in reaction to each new attack, rather than against all such attacks. This will lead to the eventual crippling of the enforcement system, as both its legitimate users and its enforcers become overburdened. Each new rule gives a hint to the attacker of what to try next.
- The rationale for a security control must be clear or the public will reject the control. This is called psychological acceptability. An unacceptable control, such as not being able to leave your seat during the last hour of a flight is totally ridiculous. The public must perceive that the control offers enough protection to justify its use.
Meanwhile, details about Abdul Mutallab’s background are emerging, like this piece in the Nigerian newspaper, This Day. The cases have frazzled nerves, and prompted the TSA to tighten security measures. So is it time to forget Political Correctness and base the level and type of screening using ethnic profiling? I vote yes, and the sooner the better. If you look the people that carry out these attacks they all seem to fit a very similar profile.
The outbreak of anger over Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano’s mysterious declaration on CNN that “the system worked” when a terror attack almost succeeded on the Northwest Airlines flight is causing people to wonder about her odd statement to a German magazine in March that “man-caused disaster” is a better term than “terrorism.” If that isn’t Political Correctness totally out of control, I don’t know what is.
In case you are wondering whether our major media outlets covered that gaffe last spring, the answer is: Most didn’t. Those who didn’t think it was newsworthy included: ABC, CBS, NBC, NPR, The News Hour with Jim Lehrer on PBS, Time, Newsweek, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and the AP wire. And the media wonders why people are bailing on network TV and newspapers and using the Internet to get their daily news.
According to Radio Netherlands Worldwide, “A body scanner at Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport would not necessarily have detected the explosives which the would-be syringe bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab had sewn into his underwear. A Dutch military intelligence source told De Telegraaf newspaper that Al Qaeda has its own security scanners and has been practicing ways of concealing explosives.” That settles it in my mind, full pat-downs, or more, for anybody that fits the profile of a Jihadist.
We were planning on taking a vacation that required flying across the ocean; I’m not so sure we will go now. Things are getting worse, not better.
Update – It looks like I am not alone – Click To Read.
Tags: Behavior, Government, Political Correctness, Stupid
