“In the wake of the latest failed terrorist incident, the TSA announced a new round of security procedures designed to greatly inconvenience millions of air passengers without doing anything to increase their security…”
Here’s an idea. Let’s start using basic counterintelligence principles to screen prospective travelers to the United States and bar those young, unmarried, Muslim men having affiliations with radical mosques, madrassas, imams, extremist Islamist political groups or a history of mental illness and erratic behavior from receiving visas to enter the United States. This clown should never have been able to get a visa. His own father, a senior government official of a foreign nation, was trying to red-flag him as a potential al Qaida terrorist for us(!).
Would such a policy catch every prospective terrorist? No. Nothing will.
But it should at least keep out the no-brainer cases who currently are admitted to the U.S. under our politically correct TSA-DHS-State immigration regime. There’s really no upside to allow radical activists, recruiters for Hizb ut-Tahrir, Hezbollah fundraisers, and other enemies of civilized existence into our country. Or better yet, any Western country. Sure, CAIR will complain but as that organization is an unindicted co-conspirator in a terrorism case, in terms of civil rights, they are not exactly the NAACP.
In the meantime, maybe the airlines will start distributing catheters to pasengers whose landings are delayed.
“His own father, a senior government official of a foreign nation, was trying to red-flag him as a potential al Qaida terrorist for us(!).” Well, there’s a big clue, eh?
So, I may have told this story around here before, but when I was a kid and went to the regional immigration center to do my whole immigration interview thing (naturalized US citizen as a child), the IO opened up my file, looked at it, and said, “why are you here? You’re already naturalized. You’re already a citizen.” I was there because my parents did all this paperwork and we got an interview and thought we were supposed to go. No one told us not to show up. Well, that’s what my faulty memory tells me. Paperwork, bureaucracy, etc.
Another story: someone I know (an immigrant) called up immigration to report some nefarious – what they thought was nefarious – stuff and got, “oh, that stuff happens all the time.” Click. Down went the phone from the official who wasn’t the least bit interested in pursuing the tip….
This stuff has been going on for ages and doesn’t seem to get better, despite huge sums of money being spent and new agencies created….Que?
Al Qaeda and Iran won a major victory on Xmas. They may not have crashed an airplane and maybe nobody died, but they did terrorize the Obama government which promptly responded by punishing American travelers.
Now we will have to endure more strip searches, longer lines and random interogations. We will endure humiliation and inconvenience because the Obama Government is afraid to admit that state sponsored terrorism, or any form of organized terrorism, exists. They are afraid to go after terrorists where they live. They would rather arrest them after they kill us.
Our free American way of life, that thing we fought for when we were soldiers, is being lost one big step after another.
What with the billions they are handing out to buy votes to cram Health Change down our throats Obama has no money left to pay for air marshalls to protect our aircraft in flight. Instead he relies on unarmed stews.
This guy apparently boarded in Nigeria, having paid cash for a one way ticket with no luggage, carry-on or otherwise to travel through Europe to Detroit. Would it be too much to expect a responsible airline to profile that customer? I don’t think so.
Obama,meet Tarpeian rock.
It’s very depressing. Were it not for amateurish, low IQ, incompetence on the part the aimless, alienated, dopes the AQ is convincing to be suicide bombers and the presence of mind of a few air passengers, hundreds and hundreds of innocent ppl would be dead.
It’s not that we cannot do better than this. Our elite chooses not to do better than this because they prefer their make-believe ideology and business as usual bureaucratic culture to American lives.
And yes, the Obama administration is to blame but frankly, this idiotic policy began under the Bush administration in 2001, with Democratic holdover Norm Mineta. And Bush reappointed him in 2004.
The whole beltway elite subscribes to this PC worldview, at least in public.
At the risk of stating the obvious, the reason the beltway elite publicly subscribe to the PC view is because PC DOESN’T HAS NO EFFECT ON HOW THEY LIVE.
Profile them.
We have this politically correct nonsense because a lot of people in the Western world require it to shore up their own flagging self-esteem.
These people really do believe that the vast majority of Westerners, especially Americans, are frothing xenophobes and racist whose murderous impulses are kept in check only by the continuous efforts of a small elite of intellectual and moral superiors. They have to view the rest of us as idiot racists because otherwise, the leftist intellectual has no significant role to play in our society.
This is why you see leftists continuously talking so much about utterly marginalized groups like neo-nazis and their ilk as if they were actual significant political actors. The leftists’ own need to see themselves as participants in a titanic struggle between good and evil requires that they invent a super-villian for them to fight against.
If they admit that as a society we could justly profile airline passengers for their dangerousness, they would be saying that the rest of us don’t need the wise moral guidance of the leftists. Their narcissism and leftism won’t allow them to reduce themselves so. They won’t ever allow any system of protection that implies that they are not better than the rest of us.
There are a couple of other features to this story. There are reports that the entire incident was video recorded by “An Indian man” a couple of rows behind the perpetrator. That man has not been found. Was this a backup to see if he failed, why he failed ?
Second, the amount of PETN was sufficient to blow a hole in the fuselage next to the man with the bomb but, at the low altitude the plane had reached when the bomb went off, it would probably not have brought it down. The bomb seems to have been detonated too late for the purpose it was intended, an explosive decompression at high altitude. The TSA has helpfully corrected this error by the would-be bomber with its new rules. They will insure that the next bomber sets off his device at high altitude and succeeds.
This device sounds quite similar to the device used by Ramzi Yousef in a Pacific flight in the 90s when the bomb was left behind in a seat pocket. That one also failed to bring the aircraft down.
The following anecdote is from Fred Leland, a law enforcement and first responder tactical expert, that he left at ZP:
“I have taking a training class a few years back with a security represen tive from El Al and one slide stood out “Political correctness will get you killed!”
A lot of airport screeners have been trained in Israeli methods of screening yet the practicing of them can be a problem to those doing the sreening. Complaints filed etc some have the strength of character to carry on and do what needs to be done, others turn a blind eye for fear of losing jobs or being disciplined or accused of racism etc.
Our adversaries no our system and exploit it in the most and defeat security measures in the most human ways!”
Fred’s site is here, for those interested:
http://www.lesc.net/