Our responsibility at the Department of Homeland Security is equally clear…we must create new ways to share information and intelligence both vertically, between governments, and horizontally, across agencies and jurisdictions.
Department of Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge
October 2003
“Our infrastructure to protect aircraft passengers, crews, and cargo from terrorist acts has never been stronger than it is today. The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) workforce, comprised of tens of thousands of professional screeners, has been deployed at the 429 commercial airports across the Nation.”
The more than 7,000 new screening devices currently in use ensure that the latest technology is helping to keep dangerous weapons off aircraft. Federal Air Marshals are protecting tens of thousands of air passengers in aircraft cabins each day…Enhanced intelligence and tracking efforts throughout DHS are keeping high-risk passengers off aircraft and out of the country.”
Bringing 22 federal agencies under the DHS umbrella will improve air travel security, they said. Hiring thousands of “professional screeners” will “protect our nation from dangerous people,” they said.
How’s that working out for the brainiacs entrusted with our security when we fly?
As ever, DHS and the Transportation Security Administration — which sounds more and more like an oxymoron along the lines of “military intelligence” — are interested only in the appearance of security rather than actual security.
Today it’s apparent that they’ve failed at both missions. As we fly the friendly skies we neither feel secure nor are we actually secure.
And as we continue to pour hundreds of billions of dollars down the toilets otherwise known as Afghanistan and Iraq — you know, those wars that are supposed to secure us from “terror” — the only security God’s Americans are interested in, flying in an airplane without fear of it falling from the sky, is no closer to realization.
Six years after the creation of DHS and the TSA, President Obama yesterday said “there had been a “systemic failure” of the nation’s security apparatus.”
No shit, asshole. TSA’s latest failure can be laid directly at the door of misguided and pointless military decisions like the latest “surge” and the bank bailing out of the richest humans ever to exist, which drain the federal budget and leave but scraps for the things Americans actually care about.
Full-body scanners are nowhere to be seen at most airports. Vaunted “bomb-sniffing” technology languishes in a lab somewhere, starved of necessary government funding to perfect and implement.
Meanwhile, the same jackasses who fucked up security in the first place (Republicans and their Democratic enablers) make political hay over the latest lapse, calling for the specific targeting of young Muslim men. Because they’re all terrorists, don’t you know.
It’s worth quoting wholesale from the New York Times here to highlight just how fucking useless DHS and the TSA actually are:
Two officials said the government had intelligence from Yemen before Friday that leaders of a branch of Al Qaeda were talking about “a Nigerian” being prepared for a terrorist attack. While the attacker was not named, officials said it would have been evident had it been compared to information about Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab , the 23-year-old Nigerian charged with trying to blow up an American passenger jet on Christmas Day.
The government also had more information about where Mr. Abdulmutallab had been and what some of his plans were before boarding the Northwest Airlines flight to Detroit. Some of the information was partial or incomplete at the time, and it was not obvious that it was connected, one senior administration official said, but in retrospect it now appears clear that had it all been examined together it would have pointed to the pending attack.
In other words, the specific mission of DHS, the reason for bringing 22 federal agencies into one department — “to establish a more focused and coordinated Federal homeland protection strategy” — lies in tatters, compromised, a complete and utter failure.
Do you feel safer now?
It could have been a lot worse. We could have had someone in charge at TSA.
Except for Sen. Demented
Simple solution: once the passengers are on board the airplane, fill the cabin with knockout gas.
A sleeping terrrrist is a foiled terrrrist!
@memzilla : No more listening to crying babies, drunk salesmen, or worrying about turbulence. Sign me up!
How about this? We start to consider flying a personal choice, like smoking. It entails risk. Some people (me for example) will be willing to accept a relatively higher level of risk. We will fly and occasionally die of terrorisms. Others will stay home, safely supping on corn syrup and transfats. They will have eternal life in the bosom of the baby Jeebus.
@x111e7thst: That is the best fucking idea I have ever heard. I’ll fly on a free-for-all flight any day. We’d still be far safer than we’d be in an automobile. Plus we’d have weapons on board ourselves to fight the terrorisms. It’d be like a Steven Seagal or Muscles from Brussels movie in the air. Bring it on!
Speaking of UTTERLY ANNOYING BULLSHIT, when did we become a fucking homeland?
And do we get some Lebensraum and a Drang nach Osten with that.
Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer!
@x111e7thst – That’s fatherland.
@HoboSpaceJunkie response – I think that would make some great reality TV – “Flying with guns”…hmmmmmmm