Wrong and Getter Even More Wrong on Airline Passenger Screening

Why is Israel is so much more successful than the U.S. in averting attacks using or on its airliners?  An Israeli security officials is reported to have given this devastatingly accurate and succinct explanation:

"We screen for terrorists. You screen for tweezers."

In addition, unlike their counterparts in the U.S., the Israelis are not handicapped by political correctness. Thus they don't waste a great deal of attention, energy, time, or any other resource on unwrapping and examining presents being carried by members of a blue-eyed blond family trying to fly to grandma's house for Christmas. The Israelis instead are able to focus on those with the characteristics displayed by those who have engaged in prior terrorist activities.

In the wake of the narrowly averted Christmas Day tragedy involving a Detroit bound flight, the U.S. now is moving to acquire and install more high tech screening machinery at the nation's airports. More stuff even though it is clear that imaginative motivated people always can circumvent and defeat stuff. That, however, misses the point. 

If the point truly was to prevent or disrupt and defeat terrorist attacks, we would hire, train, and pay for highly intelligent and perceptive screeners. Instead, we utilize machinery and Transportation Security Agency personnel who appear to have been recruited from the nation's Society of Mental Midgets and are eager to exercise authority over, and humiliate those subject to their whims. 

What is going on under the guise of security screening at American airports is a campaign to convince the public in general and travelers in particular that the government is "doing something" about their legitimate safety concerns. And the rationale is that the more expensive, inconvenient, intrusive, and time consuming the screening, and the more costly, extensive, and sophisticated the utilized gadgetry, the more the government will be perceived as doing, irrespective of how often the effort is shown to be little more than an ineffective comical charade.