Joe and Susan Trento, author of the book “Unsafe at Any Altitude,” said TSA screeners simply are not finding contraband with any consistency.
“If it gets to the point where they’re on the plane with explosives, the system’s already failed,” Joe Trento said. “TSA, the pilots call it ‘Thousands Standing Around’ — that’s what it amounts to. It’s eye candy. It’s designed to make us feel better.”
This groundbreaking work of investigative journalism goes behind the scenes at our nation’s airports and penetrates the government to paint a picture of a Transportation Security Administration that is remarkably inept, and reveals the great lengths that U.S. air carriers and their lobbyists have gone in order to make certain that serious airline security has not been instituted in this country.
Sounds like more corporatism to me, and quite similar to the failure of SEC and other regulatory agencies to prevent financial fraud. Here we have yet another powerful industry doing end runs around a lethargic and inept federal agency.
DJ commented in my Facebook repost of “Is TSA incompetent”
I’ve argued for years that the goal of TSA is the APPEARANCE of security. Compare their procedures with Taiwan or Japan, or even Sri Lanka or India, and it’s clear that TSA’s are much slower and less effective. They’ve also set air travel back decades, discouraging travel, and I’m not clear if that was part of their intention or not.
Another part of the problem is that Bush combined security agencies into one enormous monolith. By definition, such a behemoth will be slow, ponderous, unable to move or react quickly, and overly concerned with CYA rather than being pro-active.