Help me with this. Passengers on a Northwest Airlines flight discover a guy named Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab is setting his undershorts on fire. As Miss California would term it, are we being appropriate?

Experts say the undershorts had PETN in them, the same chemical that was in Richard Reid's shoes, although Abdulnutcase had twice as much of it as Reid had. The thing was, though, that both Rein and Abdulnutcase tried to set the PETN on fire.

If PETN is exploded, the amount that Abdulnutcase had in his shorts would brought down the plane. In fact, it was enough to shred an automobile, which isn't intentionally built light so it can lift off the ground. But you can't get PETN to explode with fire. Nor can you get it to explode if you hit it with a hammer. It takes a blasting cap.

Blasters like PETN

Demolition experts like PETN. It's compact, lightweight, and they don't have to worry about accidently turning themselves into a red cloud. Once you've turned yourself into a red cloud, of course, you have few worries about collateral damage....

Do you suppose there's a disconnect at Al Queda? I mean, Richard Reid pulled his dumb cluck stunt in 2001. Haven't they updated the training manuals yet? Note to instructors. You can't make PETN explode by setting it on fire.

What's worse, the feds, the Transportation Safety Administration reacted to Abdulnutcase toasting his family jewels by ordering full body scanners installed at a number of airports in the US. Boy, when it comes to security, they really know how to spend loads of money.

Would a full-body acanner show someone who has PETN secreted among his genitals? Apparently, the answer is yes. At least, we're told Al Queda thinks so, because they purchased one or more full-body scanners some time ago to figure out ways to circumvent airport security. Let's hope that they sit on whatever information they learn, and neglect to update their training manuals.

But Does It Matter?

But does it really matter? Abdulnutcase would not have been detected had all these expensive new scanners been installed, nor even if they installed those scanners at every airport in the US because he was flying to the US, having boarded in Amsterdam. It doesn't do any good to scan passengers ONCE THEY'VE LANDED.

Meanwhile, a number of websites have published details of the TSA manuals. I haven't bothered looking at the details, because I haven't flown since 1995 or so, and that experience was so bad (it was Northwestern, of course) that I resolved never to board a commercial flight ever again, for the rest of my life. My worry is not that the plane will crash, but that it might land safely, and I'll have to endure the taxiway and terminal a second time at my destination, and again twice more for a return trip. I'd rather hop on the Balloon Boy's balloon and take my chances that way. Is it possible to take a Carnival cruise from Lancaster Pennsylvania back home to Ohio, should I ever be demented enough to want to see my family again?

But are we really sure that Al Queda wanted the PETN to explode? If it had, we wouldn't be sure that it was an act of terrorism; it might simply be blamed on Northwest/Delta maintenance, and quite reasonably so. And if we concluded that it was blown up on purpose, we would never know that it was an Al Queda operative. There would be hundreds of websites springing up immediately insisting that it was an insider job, perhaps by Delta/Northwest personnel trying to coerce the airline into paying better, or perhaps by TSA employees, trying to get bigger budgets passed by Congress, or maybe by the CIA, trying to kill one person on board, and considering the other passengers "good cover". Or maybe it would be blamed on some right-wing nut job trying to keep the TSA from being unionized. Already, the GOP is being demonized because they didn't approve an Obama nominee immediately, when it took Obama something like eight months to come up with a nominee in the first place.

Demonizing The GOP?

Mind you, I don't mind the GOP being demonized. Nor the Democrats. Neither party seems to be operating with the interests of the American people in mind.

But the TSA is now serving warrants on people who own websites, and confiscating their computers, if they were involved in publicizing the TSA manuals. If there was anything in those manuals that was unexpected, we'd have heard about it. Most people, on the other hand, are unaware that it ever happened. That means that they are POed that the manuals were publicized because they show just what a rinky-dink outfit the TSA is. They probably don't update their manuals any more often than Al Queda.

And then there's Dick Cheney putting his two cents in. You know what the definition of terrorism is, don't you? It's striking fear into the hearts of people, in order to achieve a political objective. It appears to me that Dick Cheney is the most effective operative that Al Queda has. Every time Al Queda burps, Dick Cheney is all over the news, proclaiming that we're all going to die, oh, lawdy, lawdy, me. It benefits the GOP a little to have Dick Cheney trying to make Barack Obama look as inept as Bush 43, not that he's particularly successful at that; Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi seems quite capable of doing that much more effectively than Dick Cheney. But Dick Cheney stirs fear in the hearts of the pathetically stupid.

Al Queda is really getting a lot of bang for the buck. They have fewer than 100 fighters in Afghanistan, and they've got us running around like madmen, throwing 1000 soldiers against each one of them, spending $300 million per Al Queda fighter per year, and this from a country with an economy that can't afford cardboard boxes to sleep in.

Cheap Tricks

The 9/11 activities were genius. Evil, admittedly, but genius. Twenty guys, well, nineteen, and some box cutters, some airplane tickets, and four seats in a flight school. And I bet they bought their tickets online, saving a bundle at Priceline. We have Bin Forgotten's voice expressing surprise that the towers fell. All they wanted to do was to get a few headlines. Instead, they got us to panic, to spend a trillion dollars, and kill thousands of our precious children, fighting in the mid-east, and the choicest part of the deal, as far as they are concerned, is that most of it was fighting Saddam Hussein, their enemy.

And at the same time, they've gotten us to do to ourselves what they never could have done directly. Fifty years ago, I would see movies on television of Gestapo stopping people on trains or in black sedans. Your papers, please. We laughed. Now, we have our own Homeland Security (wasn't KGB Russian for "Committee for Homeland Security"?) forces, not only stopping travelers and demanding identification, but sometimes searching, even strip-searching them. Beeeep! Underwire bra, ma'am? You'll have to remove that. What do you mean, you want to go someplace else to remove it? Are you a terrorist, or merely unpatriotic? Oh, never mind, if you insist, just undo your blouse and I'll paw you by hand. Hey Fred, come check this out. Is she hiding something in her bra? I can't tell? Try pinching her nipple, really hard, and see if she gasps in pain like she did for me.

Shoe Are For Phones, Not Bombs

And since Richard Reid tried to set his shoe on fire, that PETN that doesn't explode if exposed to flame, we have travelers walking barefoot through airports. Schools do random searches, and so do the people taking tickets at the stadium, and the police get increasingly thuggish, not that they weren't before, as they become more and more militarized and jackbooted. Is it really necessary for cops to carry the most impressive guns in existance in order to not be "out-gunned"? Doesn't it make more sense to provide them with more armor, instead of providing them with weapons that will shoot through three armored vehicles, two brick walls, and the skull of a 7-year-old sitting at his desk in school, two miles away?

Is it really necessary that the cops can pull your library records and not tell you? If there is any book in the library that you ought not be borrowing, any book that people ought not read, why does the library have that book in the first place? Better yet, wouldn't it be reasonable to assume that people who are about to commit terroristic acts are more likely to steal books than to check them out? And wouldn't it be more likely that they'll get their books at B&N or Borders, instead of the Duke Street Library, given that the security is less at the retail stores, and the variety of books is greater?

Who would have thought that nineteen guys with box cutters and discounted fares could make us afraid of underarm deodorant and full-size bottles of shampoos? The terrorists don't seem to be able to do much, operationally, but in terms of getting us to do it to ourselves, they have accomplished a lot.

Man Up, Mr. President

It's time for our president to stand up, wave the flag, and say "These colors don't run." He needs to point out that this country was founded on a number of principles, and that among them is freedom, and sometimes you need to pay a price for your freedoms. After the JFK assassination, the Secret Service pointed out that if an assassin wants to kill the president, and he's willing to pay the price of his own life to do it, he can probably do it, no matter what the Secret Service does.

Well, the same goes for each and every one of us. Someone needs to stand up to Dick Cheney and call him out for being the coward that he is. Someone needs to stand up and say "if you're afraid of flying, you're afraid of flying, but we're no longer paying to turn our airports into concentration camps and our airplanes into prisons." We need to look a large tube of Prell straight in the label and say "I will no longer tremble in trepidation of economy-size shampoo."

Fuck you, Al Queda. It's time to get along with our lives, and you can't stop us.

Other Bloggers On Related Topics:
- Al Queda - Amsterdam - Balloon Boy - body scanners - Dick Cheney - JFK - library books - Northwest Airlines - PETN - Richard Reid - Secret Service - terrorism - training manuals - TSA - Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab