Nobrainer’s Think Tank

As you may have heard, around Christmas time, one more Muslim with a death wish tried, unsuccessfully, to blow an American airliner. To me, it was not news that someone had managed to outsmart the TSA and get explosives onto an airplane. I was, however, a bit bothered by the fact that they failed the “When somebody’s daddy turns him in and THEN he pays cash, has no luggage or passport for an international flight: you PAY F*CKING ATTENTION!!!!” test.

Fortunately Christopher Hitchens provides some commentary that I’m sure, sadly, will never make it to the people who could afford to read it.

Why do we fail to detect or defeat the guilty, and why do we do so well at collective punishment of the innocent? The answer to the first question is: Because we can’t—or won’t. The answer to the second question is: Because we can.

This is our government in action. It promises to do that which it cannot, and then goes to great lengths to do what it can because it has to do something even though that something accomplishes nothing. This is a George W. Bush line of thinking that has failed… yet it is the exact same kind of logic that today’s Democrats are using as justification for Obamacare2009!

Hitchens continues

The fault here is not just with our endlessly incompetent security services, who give the benefit of the doubt to people who should have been arrested long ago or at least had their visas and travel rights revoked. It is also with a public opinion that sheepishly bleats to be made to “feel safe.” The demand to satisfy that sad illusion can be met with relative ease if you pay enough people to stand around and stare significantly at the citizens’ toothpaste. My impression as a frequent traveler is that intelligent Americans fail to protest at this inanity in case it is they who attract attention and end up on a no-fly list instead. Perfect.

Hitchens goes further still and hits a question I discussed last night when I was waiting for my bags in Baltimore and was startled to hear that the threat level was orange. Still.

It was reported over the weekend that in the aftermath of the Detroit fiasco, no official decision was made about whether to raise the designated “threat level” from orange. Orange! Could this possibly be because it would be panicky and ridiculous to change it to red and really, really absurd to lower it to yellow? But isn’t it just as preposterous (and revealing), immediately after a known Muslim extremist has waltzed through every flimsy barrier, to leave it just where it was the day before?

Like I said in the intro, I never expected the TSA to have a perfect record going into perpetuity. But I figured that they’d get beat in the direction they were looking. In this crotch bomber episode, Al Qaeda took a look at the TSA playbook, apparently decided that the TSA wasn’t even capable of following their own basic guidelines, and didn’t even bother with real trickery or misdirection. Which begs the question, who the fuck does that?

Seriously.

Are they that stupid? Not that I pay super close attention, but the serious airline bombings are a little bit few and far between. Presumably they want to make the most of their opportunities. So why would they take the risk of putting a bomb on such an obvious candidate?

Are they that bold? Are they that confident in their ability to get explosives onto airplanes that they didn’t think twice about putting their bomb on that guy? If so, it suggests to me that their point was more about showing off the obvious security flaws and causing a security crisis rather than bring down an airliner. Because if they can confidently get bombs on planes, it seems like they would want to bomb many planes at once. So they succeeded in flaunting security. But I would think that a terrorist organization would be more interested in blowing up a whole bunch of stuff rather than pointing out the breachable flaws in security. Which brings me back to asking, are they that stupid?

[Via Overlawyered]