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Those were the words Wednesday from Admiral Dennis Blair, the United States Director of National Intelligence.

He was testifying before the Senate’s Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs. Click on the link, which will take you to the hearing page. Toward the upper left corner is a link, “view archive webcast.” Click on that, go about 69 minutes into the hearing and you will see Blair — I’m sorry, Admiral Blair — pretend to slap himself on the forehead when he says it.

He was responding to a question from Senator Collins from Maine who wanted to know whether he, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano or Michael Leiter, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, had been consulted before the decision was made to read Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab his rights and treat him like a criminal.

As it turns out, while none of the three — who were testifying as part of the first of two hearings by the committee on “the lessons and implications of the Christmas Day attack” — were consulted by the Justice Department, they probably all should have been.

That’s why, last August, President Obama created the High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group or HIG.

“That unit was created exactly for this purpose, to make a decision on whether a certain person who’s detained should be treated as a case for federal prosecution or for some of the other means,” Blair told the committee. “We did not invoke the HIG in this case; we should have.”

Blair’s comment in the headline — “Duh! You know…” — was made as he explained the HIG program was created with the thought of people being detained overseas, not within the United States and, as a result, no one really thought to invoke it.

Over at the Senate Judiciary Committee during a similarly themed hearing — this one was “Securing America’s Safety: Improving the Effectiveness of Anti-Terrorism Tools and Inter-Agency Communication — FBI Director Robert Mueller, pretty much backed up what Blair had to say, testifying that “It happened so fast there was no time really at that point” to figure out if they should bring in other interrogators.

While they appeared to be on the same page while visiting the Senate, Mueller and Blair — or at least their aides — must have had words later in the day because Blair later released a statement, saying:

“My remarks today before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs have been misconstrued. The FBI interrogated Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab when they took him into custody. They received important intelligence at that time, drawing on the FBI’s expertise in interrogation that will be available in the HIG once it is fully operational.”

So, here we are two weeks after the President released the review of the intelligence failures leading up to the attempted attack on Christmas Day and calling for more cooperation, it seems the children are still having a hard time playing together.

The news came out in the daily press briefing at the State Department where spokesman PJ Crowley was discussing how since Christmas “additional visas have been revoked for people that we believe have suspected ties to terrorism.”

Crowley was talking about actions the administration has taken since the attempted bombing, saying that as a result “additional visas have been revoked for people that we believe have suspected ties to terrorism.”

Despite being pushed by reporters, Crowley said: “It’s just I don’t think it’s fruitful to get into a scoreboard about how many people have we found today that we think have links to terrorism. That’s not something that we feel comfortable discussing publicly.”

One reporter, though, said they had heard that five visas had been revoked since Christmas, about one every other day — or roughly the same pace as the past eight years.

Conor Friedersdorf chalked the opposition to scanners up to prudery, claiming they’d be worth it if they somehow made it quicker to get through airport security.

“My hatred for lines is such that I’d gladly walk a gauntlet of TSA employees completely naked were it offered as a speedy alternative to arriving at the airport two hours early and standing in line for 45 awful minutes,” Friedersdorf wrote. “But don’t the people who are apparently uncomfortable with this get checkups at the doctor? Didn’t they take showers after gym class? Shouldn’t it be far easier for the modest person to stay dressed while passing through a scanner being viewed by a TSA employee they’ll likely never see again? So long as faux-nudity isn’t irrationally fetishized, I don’t understand what the big deal is here.”

Here’s the problem: Airport security isn’t the after-gym shower. In that case, you might’ve been naked, but so was everybody else in the class. The vulnerability was roughly equal. Not so in an airport security line. Chances are, faux-nudity will be fetishized; this kind of stuff always is. Sure, security professionals claim that the virtually naked images won’t be stored—but does anybody really want to bet on how long it takes for some of those images to hit some creepy website? Why on earth should we have any confidence?

I suppose it is possible that an image like this one might be saved somehow by a TSA worker in violation of protocol, uploaded to some obscure Web site for the 7 people who get off on body x-ray scans, and… then what, precisely? I am sorry if the answer is obvious, but I am unsure how it would affect my life if a weird scan that doesn’t even identify me by name or race winds up somewhere on the Internet.

The writer goes on:

Ann Davis, a TSA spokesperson, says that screeners shouldn’t have been waving my birth control in the air.

“We do instruct our officers to screen passengers with the utmost respect and dignity,” Davis says. “We expect a high level of professionalism. We’ll investigate when we get reports otherwise.”

And yet problems happen. Dirtbags get jobs that require a discretion they lack. The problem is that—unlike Friedersdorf’s fantasy—TSA screeners aren’t doctors, who have years of training on how to act professionally and a massive financial incentive to keep their jobs. Instead, the airport security line usually appears to be staffed by people who couldn’t quite make muster to staff the overnight shift at 7-Eleven.

Oh, come now, apologies for being graphic, but once we get old enough doctors strip us naked in private rooms where they penetrate our orifices with their fingers. We hardly require the same training and professionalism for someone who is going to sit staring at a monitor as thousands of people pass briefly by, never interacting with him at all.

Mr. Mathis concludes:

It’s possible that the government will decide full-body scans are a necessary tool to deter terrorists, and we will probably adjust. But when I think about standing in an airport security line, watching a blue-shirted man wave my condoms around to his friend, I know abuse of a full-body scan by TSA screeners isn’t just a possibility—it’s a dead-on certainty.

For me this example demonstrates how TSA is capably of abusing passengers in the course of searching their luggage far more than they’d be by having them walk through a full body scanner.

“The US government had sufficient information” to stop the plot, President Obama said. “But our intelligence community failed to connect those dots. This was not a failure to collect intelligence. It was a failure to integrate and understand the intelligence we already had.”

The president’s remarks came after a Situation Room meeting with 20 of his top national security advisers.

“I will accept that intelligence by its nature is imperfect, but it is increasingly clear that intelligence was not fully analyzed or fully leveraged,” he said. “That’s not acceptable, and I will not tolerate it.

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

After the Northwest Airlines incident on Christmas Day, it seemed like everything that had become routine about air travel and security was thrown out the window.

Now, no one knows what to expect. Perhaps it’s a good thing, making it difficult for terrorist to study what’s allowed and what’s not. But how much of it is appropriate? There were many wild stories being thrown around the web the week after December 25 about ridiculous security mishaps, from airlines turning off all of their TVs for the duration of an entire flight to prohibiting travelers from knowing where they were (no maps, no landmark announcements) to kids being patted down at airport security checkpoints.

Now this: TSA announced this week that travelers entering the United States from a list of “terror-prone” countries will be subject to extra security procedures and screening.

TSA has specified 14 countries that will be seeing enhanced screening. It’s broken down into two lists:

State sponsors of terrorism: Cuba, Iran, Sudan, Syria

Countries of interest: Afghanistan, Algeria, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Nigeria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Yemen

Eva Rodriguez of the Washington Post points out that this leaves the gap open for terrorists from other countries, citing that the would-be shoe bomber, Richard Reid of Britain, entered the U.S. from France. While he is a Nigerian citizen, the Northwest attacker, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, flew to Detroit from Amsterdam. So far, The Netherlands isn’t on the list.

Not to mention that some of the terrorists being groomed in these countries are U.S. citizens. Just yesterday, five Americans were detained in Pakistan on their way to Afghanistan to allegedly plot future terror attacks. We can’t just forget that terrorists can be home-grown as well.

How helpful is it to only screen certain extra passengers? There are many ways of getting around TSA rules. (You might only be able to bring 3-oz bottles, but you could just pack several 3-oz bottles of the same liquid. Does that make any sense?) While getting to the airport and standing in security lines forever are already, none of us want anything bad to happen while we’re in the air. It might be time to take more drastic measures, like more in-depth carry-on luggage checks and full-body scanners.

I have not personally experienced any new security measures as I flew into the United States (from Paris) on Air France the week before. When I returned from San Francisco to Paris (via Washington Dulles airport) the day after New Year’s on United Airlines, there was not a single noticeable difference from any time I had flown before. There were books on the lap of my neighbor while my scarf and sweater were on mine, and the flight attendant was seated directly across from us in the jump seat. And the pilot happily pointed out the sparkling Manhattan skyline while flying over it. Yes, this was leaving the U.S., and while I’d prefer not to go through any extra security hoops, how much can people get away with domestically if all of the attention is pointed somewhere else?

So readers, do you think these lists and extra screenings for passengers from the said-countries is appropriate and necessary? Is there any way around it at this point? How much of it will actually be effective?

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By now you may have heard about this:

All travelers flying into the U.S. from foreign countries will receive tightened random screening, and 100 percent of passengers from 14 terrorism-prone countries will patted down and have their carry-ons searched, the Obama administration was notifying airlines on Sunday. – Politico, Jan 3/10

Okay. Predictably, the reactionary response to the Christmas Day bombing attempt on Northwest flight 253 that caused massive delays in its first few days will only expand, and now includes a form of what might best be described as national profiling. But will it work? According to an Israeli airport security expert, the long line-ups and crowded airport hallways are fresh invitations for terrorism.

“If you have a suicide bomber or somebody who wants to make an impact, he doesn’t have to bring down a plane. He can just explode in the middle of this huge crowd that is waiting for security.”

The inherent problem with the North American approach to aviation security is that it spreads its resources by treating every passenger equally, [Rafi] Sela says. That means the rare passenger who is a potential threat gets screened for the same short time as the vast majority of travelers who are not dangerous.

So it appears as though the new regulations are meant to combat this tendency. By focusing on individuals from certain countries, airport security will now devote more time to those people who could be the biggest threats. Just another extraordinary measure to fight terrorism, right?

In today’s Guardian, Gary Younge writes,

The trouble is that even by their own shabby standards, none of these “extraordinary measures” have ever worked. No new laws were necessary to stop 9/11. If the immigration services, the FBI and the CIA had been doing their jobs properly, the attacks could have been prevented.

One might argue the same in the case of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who had been red-flagged by everyone from the British and U.S. governments to his own father. But if and when those first lines of defence fail, (as they did) is airport security the last stand? It would seem the answer is yes, but then…

There will always be a way to get around security because it’s only as good as its weakest point. In the case of Abdulmutallab, that weakest point was in any number of spots, but none larger than the on-going failure of decades of foreign policy. The fundamental problem in the on-going global grapple with would-be terrorists hardly starts at an airport.

Younge continues,

“If there’s a 1% chance that Pakistani scientists are helping al-Qaida build or develop a nuclear weapon,” [Dick] Cheney once said, “we have to treat it as a certainty in terms of our response. It’s not about our analysis … It’s about our response”. But it’s precisely because their analysis has been so deeply flawed that their response has been so faulty.

What the reactionary security enhancements at airports do is deter a direct attack, and force anyone wanting to cause havoc to look elsewhere, exposing areas that aren’t part of the security wall. It also gives those of us not from one of the 14 listed nations of interest the false sense of a problem being solved, when in reality it’s sort of evidence of the exact opposite.

When the French built the Maginot Line – a massive, fortified security barricade – after the end of the First World War, it was because they expected a future attack from Germany to be the same as the last one. That wasn’t the case – it rarely is. And as Frederick Taylor writes in his book, The Berlin Wall,

The French built fairly desultory defences along the Belgian border and continued to proclaim the Maginot fortifications’ impregnability to one and all. Many were impressed, above all the French public.

We, too, seem to be suffering from a “Maginot mentality.”

“Your dedication is second to none, and your professionalism will be on display once again as you ensure that passengers get to their destinations safely,” she wrote. “Thank you for all you will do in the coming days to keep operations running smoothly.”

Now, of course, there was no way Rossides could have known what was headed her way — and the fact is most TSA employees are probably hard working people.

But, wow.

“We’ve come a long way in just the eight years since TSA was created,” she added. “Our stakeholder and Congressional relationships are strong, we are respected internationally for our security work, and we are on the cutting edge with out technological advancements. For this, we can all be proud.”

Of course, there is quite the list of things maybe they’re not so proud of.

For instance, the leak earlier this month of their standard operating procedures manual.

And then there’s the fact that yesterday, while maybe they should have been busy working on improving airport security, they were sending agents to the doors of two bloggers who had posted copies of the new security directives after the Christmas attack.

Chris Elliott and Steven Frischling both posted details about the visits they received. The Associated Press now has a story up on the visits.

Rossides closed her message by saying:

“Whether you’re on the front line, at headquarters or stationed throughout the world, I ask that you all remain vigilant this holiday season and in the year to come. The security of our transportation system depends on you.”

I would add that maybe employees spend a little less time harassing bloggers and more time focusing on actual security

In the meantime, maybe Jim DeMint could remove his hold on the nomination of Erroll Southers to be the permanent head of TSA so the agency could finally start moving ahead.

I just finished a hot croissant delivered by an enterprising young man plying the water on an inflatable dinghy (deftly prying Euros from my wallet with inflated prices – C’est la Vie!). The sun is shining, the breeze is steady and the temperature is 80°F.

What could be wrong with this picture?  Nothing except what dutifully drops into my Kindle every morning via Whispernet (as opposed to the old Eastern Whisperjets…)

The absurd, inane, horse-out-of-the-barn response to the Christmas Day “Fruit of the Boom” Bomber-wannabe gives me even more reason to dread the trip back home.

My Kindle tells me my family and I will face long lines, lots of questions, pat down searches and an hour of lockdown time in our seats before landing. It is as if my ruler-brandishing first-grade teacher Sister Grace took over Delta Air Lines. “Books away – feet on the floor – hands on your desk – eyes straight ahead…”

It is brilliant thinking like the new seat arrest rule that should tell you a lot about our ill-conceived approach to thwarting terrorists who continue to find plane loads full of innocent Americans to be tempting targets. I don’t suppose future terrorists might try to light some portion of their clothing 61 minutes before landing do you?

What about the baby who needs a bottle or a passy on descent and is crying his lungs out?  God help him, his mother and the rest of us…

We put the jerk in knee-jerk with the way we respond to threats.

Our Homeland Security Czarina Janet Napolitano tried to spin the whole thing into a triumph of our security apparatus. At least she didn’t get a “Nappy, you’re doin’ a heckuva a job!” from our Commander-in-Chief, but the Sunday talk show gaffe was one of those moments when the political Cuisinart jams on a big chunk of reality (it does, indeed, bite).

And of course we all know the Brief Bomber laid bare what I have suspected for a long time: that our no nail-clipper, no-hair gel, shoes-off, laptop-out security apparatus is little more than a Potemkin Village. It gives the appearance that we are doing something real  – when all we are really doing is providing travelers a false sense of security – and often a real sense of frustration.

Let’s see: a young man embraces radical Islam and starts spewing some twisted, violent vitriol. His respected, influential father tells the CIA that he fears trouble and the US should revoke his son’s visa. The young man arrives at an an airport without any luggage and buys a one-way ticket to Detroit – with cash. And no one even arches an eyebrow? Come on people…you don’t have to be a security expert to know something was not right with that deal.

There was a time after 9/11 when I would routinely get selected for additional screening whenever I purchased a one-way ticket (which was fairly often given the vicissitudes of the TV News business).  And I was using a corporate Amex card – flying an airline where I had logged a million miles. I used to grumble about it (silently, of course) because I assumed no future terrorist would be so stupid (or cheap) to buy only a one way ticket.

But, as I mentioned, I am no expert.

Here is what any moron can see as plain as day: our $40 billion dollar post-9/11 airline security net is a total joke – a White Elephant of epic (and potentially tragic) proportions.

The truth is the only aspect of our post 9/11 defense that has turned out to be 100% effective are the passengers themselves. Without really thinking about it we have become an airborne militia – all watching and ready to kick al Qaeda butt at the drop of… a pair of trousers. It began in Shanksville – it effectively thwarted the shoe-bomber – and now Captain Underpants.

Which brings me to my big worry: ever since Richard Reid tried to light up his sneakers, we have all had to remove our shoes before boarding. The logical conclusion in this illogical system: government sanctioned panty raids.

Your mother always told you to wear clean underwear.

Or maybe we should just get it over with and fly like the fat, old French guys I see strolling around this little cute Caribbean town: in Speedos and plastic sandals.

Image by dan paluska via Flickr

Come with me once again into the cycle of symbolic security-tightening at the airport. Refrain from petting the German Shepherd busily sniffing your duffle. Try not to look into your bag too many times. Actually, try not to look at much of anything. Let your carry-ons get whisked away. See babies submit to frisking. Listen to Michael Chertoff plead for widespread use of the body scanner, otherwise known as the “virtual strip search.” No more personal items on the lap. No more pillows on the floor. No more blankets on the head. And when you go to the bathroom, everyone will be watching anxiously.

Frankly, I’m fine with all of it. Air travel is the one thing that legitimately, categorically scares me shitless, fear I feel in the brainless way a dog fears thunder, so I’ve never had a problem with increased security measures. I basically believe they’re intended to make me and my fellow travelers not die. I do get a twinge of worry about their efficacy, that while we hunt down the threats of yore, aspiring terrorists are moving on to tactical frontiers beyond our purview (underpants! Of course!). Sometimes, my own pants sliding down as I wait beltlessly in line at the metal detector, that phrase failure of imagination comes to mind. And this thing that Jeffrey Addicott, the director of the Center for Terrorism Law, told the NYT yesterday struck me as stunningly true, whitewashing all the squabbles over security airport security measures: “If you are trying to stop these people at the airport, you are too late.”

But mostly I’m happy to do what they want. Take off my shoes? Sounds freeing! Throw out my Pantene Pro-V? My hair looks better dirty! Wand me, scan me, put me in one of those giant tubes and blow puffer jets on me. I don’t mind. Except…one time a security person felt along the underwire of my bra, which raised some questions. And the photograph of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s singed undies on A8 in Tuesday’s paper of record did strike me as an eerie totem of privacy invasion beyond the scope of my own purview.

Broadly I feel like, whatever they need to do to pull off this black magic trick of safe aviation is all right by me. And in a narrower sense flying already feels like a surrender of autonomy. You give away your suitcase, let a stranger paw through your purse; you enter a vessel from which there’s no leaving until someone else releases you; they tell you when you can listen to your Taylor Swift and when you have to shut it off, when to sit down and strap in, when to open and close your shades; and you’re basically dumping your whole life-or-death fate into the uniformed lap of some invisible stranger behind a curtain at the front of the plane.

It has to be this way. We have to surrender to direction, and to incursions into our privacy, because the dangers of flying are unlike the dangers of doing anything else. There’s a fragility to the whole enterprise (hundreds of people, up in the clouds), a unique vulnerability to pocket-sized threats, and if something goes wrong there is no escape.

The problem, as I see it, is less an issue of privacy invasion and more the threat towed in by treating all passengers like suspects: profiling. I mean, who can blame the crew of December 27’s Northwest Flight 253 for being a little on edge, but what misery for that poor guy who got hauled out of the plane bathroom, cuffed, and interrogated because he was Nigerian, and because he’d had to hole up in the toilet after eating some bad clams or whatever (“I’d get belligerent if they pulled me out of the bathroom, too!” said my stepfather).

Shamefully, I once profiled somebody on a plane. I used to take Unisom to fly*, and on one trip I drowsed in and out next to a man in a knit cap, a rosary, and a Franciscan monk’s robe, which, I couldn’t make myself unnotice, was so synthetic as to seem like a Halloween costume. I then disappointed myself by noticing that he was reading a little book written in Arabic, and at one point I woke to him removing a large, metal cylinder from the overhead compartment. He sat with it on his lap, pried off the lid, and started rustling through plastic bags inside. I began, disappointingly, to try to haul myself away from the pull of the sleeping pill, to prepare to heroically rise to the occasion by yelping or pressing my flight attendant call button, when the monk produced a candy from his tin, unwrapped it, and ate it.

Was this poor monk aware of my monitoring him? If so, did it bother him? If I wasn’t restrained by Unisom and my better judgment, could I have made his life hell? I’ll never know, but I’m certainly retroactively bothered and disappointed by having reacted as I did.

Behavioral and racial profiling have pretty ugly worst-case scenarios, and I think they’d be easier to resist, they’d seem more clearly unethical, if we benefitted from the reassurance that people on terrorist watch lists were actually being watched.** The follow-up investigations into the Christmas Day attempt echo grim suggestions of the 9/11 Commission report–that the agencies in charge have the information they need to prevent terrorism, and they aren’t in full command of it.

*The two problems with Unisom are: 1) it’s possible to stay awake on it in a terrifyingly helpless, trapped-in-a-lifeless-body type of way, and 2) it doesn’t work for short hauls. Flying back to California from my stepbrother’s college graduation in Oregon, I walked to the back of the plane as it bounced through the sky, since sometimes I handle turbulence better if I’m in motion. My mother joined me and said to a flight attendant, “Tell her turbulence is no big deal.” The flight attendant simpered. “Oh, this isn’t turbulence. It’s just a bump in the road.” I smiled, and she added, “But if it’s your time to go, it’s your time to go.”

Swerving off the Southwest script, maybe, but her bitter pill did help me kick my Unisom dependence. Now when I fly through turbulence, instead of trying to knock myself out or persuade myself that there’s nothing wrong with the plane (impossible to know with any kind of reassuring certainty), I try to persuade myself that it’s all right if I die. Also, I drink a little wine.

**Which isn’t to suggest that such monitoring doesn’t happen at all. My stepbrother’s girlfriend, a flight attendant, told our family over dinner that once on a flight headed for DC an air marshall asked the crew to be mindful of the passenger in 4B, because he was on a terrorist watch list. The flight attendants watched him carefully, chilled by his “I Love New York” T-shirt, freaked by his carrying a briefcase on frequent trips to the bathroom, until one flight attendant discovered, in a reconnaissance mission down the aisle, that 4B was keeping a PlayStation in his case, and he seemed to have been afraid someone would try to steal it.

Still in troglodyte mode (Image via Wikipedia)

A chagrined senior official of al Qaeda admitted today that “systemic failures, human error and dumb screw-ups” had prevented the terrorist organization from blowing up a U.S.-bound airliner on Christmas day.

“This is totally unacceptable,” said Omar N. Rahmanabdulmufarrad, chief of al Qaeda’s Exploding Underwear Division, at a news conference in Yemen.

“We got the guy on the plane, for heaven’s sake and we still blew it,” he said, striking his forehead with his palm.

Rahmanabdulmufarrad said he had ordered a departmental review to determine who was accountable for the failures and that “several scapegoats will probably be executed” as a result.

Asked about rumors that al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden was vacationing in Dubai during the operation, Rahmanabdulmufarrad replied, “No, he is still in his cave in northwest Pakistan as usual.”

“In fact,” he added, “just a few hours ago, I received a text message from OBL, advising that I commit suicide. But since it was more of a suggestion than a command, I am not obligated to do so.”

Rahmanabdulmufarrad cut off an al-Jazeera reporter in mid-question, saying, “Uh-oh, I think I hear a Predator Drone.” He then rushed from the room.

Another al Qaeda official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the group feared it was running out of hiding places in the human body. “We’ve done a shoe bomb and we’ve done the crotch,” he said. “We’re looking into the ears but there’s not much room there.”

Image by AFP/Getty Images via Daylife

After accused bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab managed to get explosives past security at Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport last week on Northwest Airlines Flight 253, it looks like the Dutch aren’t taking their chances anymore.

Dutch authorities have just announced they’ll be introducing full-body imaging machines on passengers bound for the United States. (Not that terrorism doesn’t happen or could happen anywhere else. London? Madrid?)

Reuters reports that there are 19 in use in the U.S. already, but they’re only optional. But we could be seeing a lot more of them in the near future, since full-body scanners can pick up prohibited objects that the currently-used x-ray machines cannot.

Amsterdam is taking a lot of flack right now (as they should) for letting this guy slip through with these kinds of materials, but perhaps they’re taking an extreme step. For a lot of people, it’s understandably controversial, whether its political or religious beliefs, or how they are going to treat children. (There’s already reports of young kids getting patted-down by security officials, and there’s something a bit ridiculous and wrong about that.

Even American authorities are divided on the issue, nor has the European Union approved their mandatory use. TSA is going to need to take a lot of care if they introduce this stateside. Without proper regulation and guidelines, there’s a real potential for abuse of this device. How do you determine who goes through it? Does everyone? Which flights and which destinations?

Personally, I’m not a big fan of the full-body scanner. But if it means that security guards will catch everything they need to (and we’re allowed to use the bathroom, TV screens and iPods during the last hour of the flight), then I’m all for it. Obviously, steps need to be taken to make sure this doesn’t happen again, and these rules are being put in place for all of our safety. But I don’t like being made to feel like a prisoner when I fly.

How do you feel about the introduction of the full-body scanner, not just on international flights into the U.S., but perhaps domestically in the future as well?

Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport. Sue Frause photo.

I’ve always enjoyed flying through Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport. It’s a main European hub if you fly from the US on Northwest Airlines/Delta Airlines. Not only does it have a bubbly bar called Bubbles (great shrimp sammies), but there’s plenty of good shopping. I always bring home tulip bulbs and chocolates.

But things won’t be so breezy with this recent announcement via CNN:

(CNN) — Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport will begin using bodyscanners on all passengers taking flights to the United States following the attempted terrorist attack on a U.S.-bound flight on Christmas Day, the Dutch interior minister said Wednesday.

The bodyscanners will be in place in about three weeks.

I’ve never had a bodyscan, but if it prevents such Oops! situations as the terrorist who managed to board a flight with bomb fixin’s in his shorts, I’m game.

When Richard Reid tried to blow up a plane going from Paris to Miami, the first time President Bush mentioned it was FIVE DAYS after the incident when he was finally asked about it while he was on vacation at his ranch in Texas.

The first time John Ashcroft appears to have mentioned it was almost ONE MONTH after the incident when he had a press conference announcing that Reid had been indicted.

Tom Ridge, who was in charge of Homeland Security at the time and Vice President Cheney also appear to have waited until after Reid had been indicted.

And no one criticized them for not responding sooner or having missed an apparently huge gap in aviation security.

So, keep that in mind when you hear people like Congressman Peter King, a Republican from New York, open his mouth and say things like:

“I’m disappointed it’s taken the president 72 hours to even address this issue. Basically nobody, the president, the vice president, the attorney general, nobody except Secretary Napolitano has come out.”

And when King says things like it was a “terrible mistake” for the Obama Administration to charge Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab criminally instead of turning him over to the military, asking him how come he never criticized the Bush Administration for how they handled the Reid case, which was virtually identical.

And when Ridge — who, again, was IN CHARGE of Homeland Security when Reid was arrested, tried and convicted — goes on Larry King and is critical of the decision to charge Abdulmutallab criminally saying, “I take a look at this individual who has been charged criminally, does that mean he gets his Miranda warnings? The only information we get is if he volunteers it? He’s not a citizen of this country. He’s a terrorist, and I don’t think he deserves the full range of protections of our criminal justice system embodied in the Constitution of the United States”

Maybe ask him and Peter King what they think about how when Ashcroft announced Reid’s indictment, he talked about how — thanks to Congress — the criminal justice system had “the necessary tools that we need to protect the safety and security of American citizens.”

It couldn’t possibly be that they’re criticizing President Obama and his Administration because they are Republicans and he is a Democrat whereas President Bush was a Republican just like them?

They wouldn’t play politics with something like national security?

Certainly not Peter Hoekstra, the Republican Representative from Michigan who is running for governor? Oh, wait. He just used the Christmas Day incident in a fundraising letter?

This is not in anyway to defend anyone’s handling — except for the passengers who disarmed Abdulmutallab — of the incident. As President Obama said, there were clearly “systemic failures” all over the place.

After all, the Obama Administration has been in office for just over 11 months and while they’ve gotten some things right — and some things wrong — they can’t be expected to fix everything right away. I mean, the Bush Administration had seven years after September 11th to improve the way the country’s intelligence community talks with each other.

Another thing worth pointing out, it’s been nearly six years since the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States — aka The September 11th Commission — pointed out that:

“Since 9/11, significant improvements have been made to create an integrated watchlist that makes terrorist name information available to border and law enforcement authorities…new insights into terrorist travel have not yet been integrated into the front lines of border security”

and

“Targeting travel is at least as powerful a weapon against terrorists as targeting their money. The United States should combine terrorist travel intelligence, operations, and law enforcement in a strategy to intercept terrorists, find terrorist travel facilitators, and constrain terrorist mobility.”

So, maybe we can all agree that the system isn’t working now — things did not work the way they were supposed to. At the same time, it wasn’t working under the previous Administration and maybe instead of name-calling and blame-placing, maybe we can all work together the get the thing fixed?

Looks like the ‘Butt Bombers’ are at it again…

From the most-recent thwarted attempt to blow up Northwest Airlines Flight 253 en route from Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport to Detroit Metro Airport in Michigan, it seems that Al-Qaeda is again resorting to the ‘butt bomber’ modus operadi in trying to carry out alleged acts of terrorism.

According to ABC News, one “singed pair of underwear with a packet of powder sewn into the crotch, seen in government photos obtained exclusively by ABC News, is all that remains of al Qaeda’s attempt to down an American passenger plane over Detroit.”

The underwear with the explosive worn by alleged Northwest 253 bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab is shown in this undated photo. (Courtesy of ABC News)

As seen in these photos, the alleged bomb consisted of a packet of powder sewn into the briefs of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a 23-year-old Nigerian. Al Qaeda took credit Monday for the attempted bombing, boasted of its ability to overcome U.S. intelligence and airport security, and promised new attacks.

But this is not the first time a ‘butt bomber’ has used the nether regions of their body to try and explode a suicide bomb.

In a previous column of mine, I wrote about the would-be assassin of Saudi Arabia’s Prince Mohammed bin Nayef (head of Saudi Arabia’s counterterrorism efforts) who apparently decided in October 2009 to hide his bomb in his underwear, apparently believing that cultural taboos would prevent a search in that part of his body, according to a Saudi government official close to the investigation.

In the October 2009 Saudi assassination attempt, the terrorist concealed the bomb, made of [the explosive] PETN, in his underwear, according to the official Saudi investigation.

According to CNN, “PETN is a plastic explosive that is not picked up by metal detectors — through which the would-be assassin had to pass before he was allowed to meet with the Saudi prince.”

Like the October 2009 Saudi assassination attempt, similarly, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab allegedly attempted to bring down Northwest Airlines flight 253 using the same kind of ‘PETN underwear bomb’ that was not discovered by metal detectors.

Sadly, as I had written before, after this most recent Christmas Day incident with Northwest Airlines Flight 253, there are only two things that are going come out of yet another silly and tragic episode of ‘toilet terrorism’:

1) Airport screeners will probably now invest even more money to buy latex gloves and;

2) In addition to already removing half of our clothing at the airport, young brown six-foot-four Muslim males (like myself) who fit the ‘racial profile’ will probably have to spend a little more time at the airports ‘assuming the position’ and ’spreading our cheeks’ the next time that we want to board an airplane.

Thanks a alot, Butt Bombers…

…the technology has raised significant concerns among privacy watchdogs because it can show the body’s contours with embarrassing clarity. Those fears have slowed the introduction of the machines.

Jay Stanley, public education director for the American Civil Liberties Union’s Technology and Liberty Program, said the machines essentially perform “virtual strip searches that see through your clothing and reveal the size and shape of your body.”

In a world of ceramic knives and plastic explosives, these machines make a lot more sense than the current system of metal detectors, and I must say that I’m unsympathetic to the argument that they’ll prove to embarrassing for people who bashful about the size or shape of their body parts. Get over it! That some anonymous TSA employee sees an x-ray image of your body for 15 seconds, in a stream of hundreds of other people everyday, will have not the slightest impact on your life, whereas every alternative is either significantly less safe or significantly more burdensome and time consuming.

Admittedly, I’m an outlier here: my hatred for lines is such that I’d gladly walk a gauntlet of TSA employees completely naked were it offered as a speedy alternative to arriving at the airport two hours early and standing in line for 45 awful minutes. But don’t the people who are apparently uncomfortable with this get checkups at the doctor? Didn’t they take showers after gym class? Shouldn’t ‘t be far easier for the modest person to stay dressed while passing through a scanner being viewed by a TSA employee they’ll likely never see again? So long as faux-nudity isn’t irrationally fetishized, I don’t understand what the big deal is here.

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

So the president took a few days to speak to the nation about the failed terrorist effort on Christmas Day.

b.f.d.

While we would expect that the GOP voices would not miss an opportunity to criticize Obama – no matter what he did – this time the media, from the left all the way to the right, was quick to jump down the president’s throat for waiting until he actually had something to say before addressing the nation.

According to the media and the Republican critics, the president erred in not taking immediately to the airwaves to provide his fellow Americans  ‘assurance and comfort’ that everything was, indeed, okay.

What are we…five year olds? Obviously, everything was and is not okay and hearing the President of the United States pretend otherwise would only have provided me with assurance that the government was treating me like an imbecile.

But Obama didn’t do that. He waited until he knew what he was talking about before passing the information along to us- a lesson Homeland Security Chief Janet Napolitano might want to take to heart. When government officials speak before they think, they say stupid things like “The system worked.”

Apparently, President Obama believes that we should be treated like adults. Go figure.

In point of fact, it wasn’t until the last twenty-four hours that Obama had enough facts to tell us something useful. Speaking today from Hawaii, Obama said-

A systemic failure has occurred, and I consider that totally unacceptable. There was a mix of human and systemic failures that contributed to this potentially catastrophic breach of security. We need to learn from this episode and quickly fix the flaws in our system because our security is at stake and lives are at stake.
Via LA Times

The president went on to report that there had been information provided to the intelligence community that should have been put together and that, had things worked as they are supposed to, the terrorist would never have been permitted to board the plane he attempted to blow up.

While some Americans may find that news in no way reassuring, I find it to be quite to the contrary. I’d much rather the president get to the bottom of the problem and do something about it rather than read me bedtime stories so I can fool myself into sleeping better at night.

It’s time to grow up folks. It’s a rough world we live in and having leaders who would tell us otherwise is not going to do anyone any good.

To my Republican friends I would say this – enough already with the whole political points game. Serious times require serious people and there doesn’t seem to be a serious bone in your collective bodies except for when it comes to feathering your own re-election opportunities. Your behavior – in the midst of an important national situation – is immature, immoral and wholly unacceptable. Whether you like it or not, Obama is the president we have. Until that changes, maybe you should get your heads out of your collective behinds and see if you can’t figure out that terrorist attacks don’t make for good political gamesmanship. You might also take note that people who can read and think know all too well that it was the GOP in Congress that shot down approval of a technology system capable of catching a terrorist stuffed with the very chemical compound involved in this incident.

And to the media – whether liberal, conservative or whatever, I would remind you that the president does not serve to make your job easier. While a Christmas Day speech might have given you something to talk to death, at least for those of you who showed up to cover the event which excludes MSNBC, such a speech would have served no public benefit whatsoever as the president didn’t yet know enough to say anything important. If you want information to talk about, get your pundit’s posteriors off your cushy studio seats, go out there and dig it up for yourselves. That is, I believe, the actual job of a news organization.

It is often suggested that when someone is treated as an adult, they will, in turn, act like an adult. President Obama is doing his part – maybe the rest of us should get on board and do ours.

He was the deputy director of the California Office of Homeland Security.

He’s the associate director of the Homeland Security Center for Risk and Economic Analysis of Terrorism Events at the University of Southern California.

He’s currently the assistant chief in charge of the Office of Intelligence and Emergency Operations at Los Angeles World Airports.

Despite that, Erroll Southers, whom President Obama nominated in September to head up the Transportation Security Administration, doesn’t deserve a vote.

At least that seems to be the message that Jim DeMint, senator from South Carolina, seems to be sending.

DeMint, who is apparently concerned that TSA workers might be allowed to join a union, has had a hold on Southers’s nomination.

The union issue didn’t seem to be as much of a concern when President Bush’s nominees for various parts of the Department of Homeland Security were up for confirmation votes since many of those agencies have worked who are union members.

The American Federation of Government Employees, for instance, represents nearly 40,000 DHS employees in collective bargaining.

Meanwhile, Republican John Mica of Florida, who helped create the TSA as a member of the House of Representatives and helped get it placed in the Department of Homeland Security, now calls the agency lost and bloated and that Congress “must change the process by which TSA administrators serve. There has been no TSA administrator for nearly a year and the next one will be the fifth in eight years. Running a security agency with a revolving door is a recipe for failure.”

A couple of interesting things there. First, Mica neglects to mention that those first four TSA administrators all served under President Bush and each one left there wasn’t a word from him about the “revolving door” at the agency.

Second, if there are problems with TSA being lost in the bureaucracy of DHS why has he waited until now to say anything about it? It couldn’t be because there’s a Democrat in the White House and he’s a Republican (the same could be said of DeMint’s criticisms, by the way).

Lastly, in December 2001, right after the Richard Reid attempted shoe-bombing incident, Mica “said it was a “sign that we need to bring immediate focus to our new transportation security agency” and asked that Presdeint Bush immediately appoint an aviation security czar.”

He didn’t want President Bush to even wait for Congress to come back into session.

I wonder how he would react if President Obama were to do the same.

It’s not about security, apparently. It’s about politics.

During the exchange Paul explains that the reason Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab wanted to attack the United States is because we had bombed Yemen several weeks ago.  He describes the United States as occupiers of Muslim lands, and elaborates on the idea that Osama bin Laden’s entire point in enacting the 9/11 attacks was to embroil us in a long, expensive, and ultimately counterproductive war in Muslim lands.  This would eventually bankrupt the United States and strip us of our most dear civil liberties and freedoms.  He points out that young men like Abdulmutallab become terrorists because we are in this destructive and ongoing war in the first place – a war which can very easily be perceived as a war against Islam – and which creates a never ending supply of fresh recruits.

Stein says this is nonsense, and when asked why he thinks these young men become terrorists he responds: “Because they’re psychopaths.”

I always thought Stein was a smart guy, but I’m really beginning to wonder.  The whole Intelligent Design business was bad enough, but boiling down the motivation of all of our enemies to “because they’re psychopaths” is downright stupid, not to mention lazy.

In any case, when Paul attributes the motivation of these recruits to occupation – and I assume he’s referring to U.S. occupation, not Israeli – Stein immediately calls the assertion anti-Semitic.  Which leads to several minutes of unintelligible arguing between the two with both King and Jackson attempting to referee, and several demands from Paul that Stein apologize.

Another interesting thing about this video is the three philosophies presented by Stein, Jackson, and Paul.  Stein wants the government to contract out our security to firms like IBM (private industry can do it better).  Jackson has complete faith that with enough internal reviews and procedural changes, the government itself can figure out what went wrong and how it can be fixed in the future (the state can do it better).  And Paul wants us to get the hell out of Dodge (nobody can do it better so we’d better stop while we’re behind).

I have to say, I find Dr. Paul’s vision the most sensible.  It’s time we left the Middle East to its own ends.  We can protect our homeland better by not interfering with the rest of the world than either IBM or the federal government can through innovation or review.

Image via Wikipedia

“We were very lucky this time but we may not be so lucky next time, which is why our defenses must be strengthened.”  Joe Lieberman was half right when he issued a statement about the now infamous Christmas Crotch Bomber.  America got lucky.  Two wars, eight years, billions of dollars, a whole new government agency, vastly increased powers of surveillance, and interrogation… and it is a flying dutchman named Jasper Schuringa who  lept across four passengers that saved Northwest Airlines Flight 253.

Consider what went wrong.  Despite having known ties to Al Qaeda, the bomber slipped through the no fly list; his family’s warnings of his intentions went unheeded; finally, he walked through  security with a bomb in his pants and boarded a flight devoid of TSA’s much-vaunted air marshals.

In a few day’s time a crush of Americans will fly home at the close of the holiday season.  They will subject themselves to an absurd, time consuming, and apparently wholly ineffectual ritual  debasing at the hands of the TSA in the name of “security” though in the light of last week’s failures it remains unclear as to who, exactly, is being made more secure.

Bombings and hijackings are not something unique to the 21st Century American experience.  Air travel has been rife with such attacks for decades. The only thing that changed on 9/11 was that Americans realized that a hijacked plane put more people at risk than those already on the plane.

Americans saw that and the panicked.  The result is the gauntlet of security procedures that now crouches at the entrance to every airport boarding area.

Consider what this year’s holiday travelers will be subjected to before being allowed to board their flights: no sharp metal implements of any kind, no liquids or gels in any meaningful quantity, no shoes allowed in the metal detector or during your complementary frisking, no additional batteries for laptops, and nothing – no blankets, pillows, books, or iPods – on your lap during the final hour of the flight.  Pilots aren’t even allowed to distract passengers by attempting to point out obscure and difficult to see landmarks for fear that a would-be terrorist could use the information to work out when to trigger a bomb.

Unfortunately the problem with air travel wasn’t and isn’t that planes are full of nail clippers and bottled water or even knives and bombs; the problem is that airplanes consist of pressurized aluminum tubes strapped to a couple tons of highly flammable liquid all hurtling through the air at just under the speed of sound.  As safe as air travel has become (safer than any other form of travel per passenger mile), we have collectively forgotten that the default ending for any such journey – absent the absurdly delicate machinations of modern avionics – is a field of burning debris.

Try as we might to ban the specific techniques that a would-be terrorist might use to bring down a plane, the simple truth of the matter is that short of a full-body-cavity search prior to hooding and cuffing the passengers for the duration of the flight, it is neigh impossible to protect something as delicate as an airplane from the concerted efforts of those on board to destroy it.

The security measures implemented since 9-11 do not make us more secure.  They make certain politicians – political leaders who wish to look like they’re “doing something” about the threat of terrorism – more secure in their jobs but the conspicuous absence of press releases from TSA announcing that they stopped one plot or another thanks to the “we get to X-ray your shoes” or “no liquids allowed” policy suggests that these are an institutional case of locking the barn door after the horse is gone rather than the preventative and life-saving measures the American people were sold.

Certainly would-be-terrorists, deterred by whatever security measures are in place, may seek other means of downing of commandeering a flight, but it is not as if there is any shortage of those.

Bruce Schneier calls all of this absurdity “security theater,” a term meant to illustrate how ineffectual it all  is and who it really benefits.  We parade ourselves past the apparatus of airport security not because it makes us safer but because it makes us feel safer.  We do it because we have thus far failed to find a way to do away with the small but unacceptable (to the public) risk  of being killed in a terrorist attack.  Indeed, one might argue that the very same irrational and ineffective need to “do something” about the Shoe Bomber or the more recent Crotch Bomber is the same need that drove the United States to war in Iraq and Afghanistan.

After all, more people drown every year than died in the 9/11 attacks, but the Air Force isn’t dropping precision guided munitions on swimming pools.

As Schneier himself commented in the wake of the TSA’s announcement of its new security script,  “I wish that, just once, some terrorist would try something that you can only foil by upgrading the passengers to first class and giving them free drinks.”

We can all drink that… if we can get the bottle past security.

Image via Wikipedia

Joe Lieberman was one of the most vocal supporters of invading Iraq after the attacks of September 11, 2001. He also harbored fantasies of being John McCain’s Secretary of Defense and can barely restrain his enthusiasm when the bad guys get what’s comin’ to ‘em (even if it’s only in a Hollywood film).

Lieberman likes expressions of American power. A few years ago, I was in a movie theatre in Washington when I noticed Lieberman and his wife, Hadassah, a few seats down. The film was “Behind Enemy Lines,” in which Owen Wilson plays a U.S. pilot shot down in Bosnia. Whenever the American military scored an onscreen hit, Lieberman pumped his fist and said, “Yeah!” and “All right!”

Armchair General Joe, who has never served in the military (but he’s seen lots of films!) is always the first to advocate the use of military intervention, and yet he has been wrong about pretty much everything.

Lieberman qualified for a family deferment from Vietnam because he was already married and had a child. However, that moving tribute to family devotion has not stopped Lieberman from fiercely advocating the deployment of other husbands, wives, fathers, and mothers into wars zones.

Evan Bayh, Jon Kyl, Lieberman, and the rest of the Always Ready For War (As Long As They Have To Sacrifice Absolutely Nothing) Crew, all supported the Iraq invasion. They also contradicted the 2007 NIE and declared as an “inescapable conclusion” that “Iran is determined to acquire nuclear weapons.”

[T]hey favorably cite a “bipartisan” report from former Senators Chuck Robb (D) and Dan Coats (R) which urges the President to begin preparing for military action against Iran, and lays out a detailed plan for what it would entail, beginning with a naval blockade and extending to “devastating strikes” against “assets” inside Iran that “would probably last up to several weeks and would require vigilance for years to come.” That’s what three key U.S. Senators are explicitly threatening.

But this isn’t enough blood for Warmonger Joe.

During a recent interview with — you guessed it — Fox News, Lieberman discussed Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the 23-year-old Nigerian accused of attempting to explode a plastic device aboard a flight from Amsterdam to Detroit. Abdulmutallab told authorities that he traveled to Yemen to link up with al-Qaida operatives. During the Fox interview, it became clear that Lieberman is itching to invade yet another country.

Lieberman admitted that in a Fox New interview that he was “not sure” whether the Nigerian succeeded in making contact with the individuals he “reached out to” in Yemen.

But “not sure” is good enough for Lieberman.

So, he says, it is time to start lobbing bombs — lots of them. (Presumably, Lieberman is talking about more attacks than have already been taking place as part of a U.S./Yemen partnership that has seen Washington spend $66 million this year on security and military assistance to Yemeni counter-terrorist forces — a project that most observers believe has included the use of U.S. warplanes, drones and/or cruise missiles in recent strikes against al Qaeda targets.)

Referencing his own travels to Yemen, and meetings with unnamed U.S. officials, the senator chirped: “Iraq was yesterday’s war, Afghanistan is today’s war. If we don’t act preemptively, Yemen will be tomorrow’s war.”

Hm, the use of preemptive action. Where have I heard that before?

And so we’ve reached the limits of Joe Lieberman’s usefulness. A typical Lieberman-esque response to conflict entails some kind of combination of cowardly inaction (while beating his chest in a manly way and sending others to die,) political party betrayal, and/or full-scale military invasion. He sees the world in terms of “good guys,” and “bad guys,” and is incapable of recognizing that what is happening in Yemen involves water shortages and blowback for US and Yemeni army attacks on Maarib.

Lieberman has a history of being wrong on the topic of military intervention, and yet he is consistently paraded onto national television as a so-called expert. I wish I could blame this on Fox News, but beyond the neoconservative propaganda channel, Lieberman has appeared on the Sunday Morning bobblehead shows (on so-called “mainstream channels”) enough times to officially rename David Gregory’s hour of beltway platitudes Meet Joe.

Lieberman has blood on his hands, and yet people still listen to him when it comes to war. I’m not sure why. Maybe he’s telling the right people what they want to hear: the world is a place full of bad people, who inexplicably do evil things, and we need to build and buy more of those expensive weapons, which are some of the only products the US still produces on a consistent basis.