The editor of AIRPORT BUSINESS would have to give me the entire magazine just to mention, much less try to explain, all the angles, news stories, and just plain bad information surrounding the crotch-bomber story.  So much of it is political posturing, finger-pointing, and ill-considered opinions that it’s impossible to know where to begin.

The single point that everybody, including the President and me, seems to agree on is that it was a failure of intelligence to (a) connect the dots, and (b) communicate the findings. However, according to everybody from several Congressmen and ill-informed news commentators to my ugly cousin’s barber, the causes and solutions are a bit like Imelda Marcos’ 3,000 pairs of shoes – individually, they may look sorta OK-ish, but each one only goes with one outfit.

Let’s start on a positive note, before I lose you in the excess of nonsensical trivia.  My mantra for years has been to triple the intelligence budget, so we try to catch them three weeks before they head for the airport, rather than in a few seconds passing through the magnetometer. The Homeland Security Policy Institute of George Washington University apparently agrees, stating in a recent report that airports and aircraft are, or should be, our last line of defense, not our first.

Note that I did not say, “…and cut back on screening.”  It has to be done.  As much as we rag on TSA screeners’ occasional frontline errors and objectionable behavior, TSA/DHS is essentially telling them “we don’t know if there’s any bad guys in that line of 200 people – see if you can find one. And make it quick; there’s 200 more behind those.”  Throughput uber alles.

Two more items for this brief space.  First is the clamor for whole body imaging (WBI).  While it is a perfectly good technology, it cannot replace good intelligence, and is not, repeat, not the proverbial silver bullet.  It does not detect explosives; it detects anomalies of just about every description that might be on your body. Notwithstanding the privacy issues, and the silly claim by the British that it would violate their child pornography laws (but apparently not the adult ones), it simply identifies areas that may or may not demand secondary screening.  Guns are easy; “lumps of stuff” are not, and can take a long time to resolve manually.  And to be a bit delicate about it, the BVD bomb probably would not have been spotted in that location.

The other important issue is one of international flights – it seems the terrorists are not (yet) boarding flights in Peoria, but on flights from foreign cities headed into the U.S.  TSA demands that certain screening standards be met in order to fly here, but the U.S. has little control over how foreign governments apply those standards, including paying for new screening machines, making space for them at crowded checkpoints, setting operating procedures and enforcing the rules. It only works with the cooperation of those foreign governments, many of whom in the EU were recently quite irked by Secretary Napolitano’s statement that “the system worked” and that the U.S. is “not doing anything differently”, while TSA was imposing additional new requirements at foreign airports that added an average of two hours of delay to U.S.-bound flights.

Finally, there was a big flurry of “incidents” that quickly followed in the news, and are not too surprisingly absent a few weeks later. I wonder if they were always happening, and people were just paying closer attention while the heat was on, so as to not lose their jobs. As an aside, there were several headline revelations expressing the astonishment of “experts” that TSA does not control the airport security cameras.  For this magazine’s airport-wise readers, suffice it to say: “well, duuuh”.  For anyone who doesn’t understand how dumb that is, have them give me a call.