Friday, November 19, 2010
by Karl Denninger market-ticker.org
The Truth Comes Out From The Sexual Assaulters (TSA)
Well well look what we have here:
"This year alone, the use of advanced imaging technology has led to the detection of over 130 prohibited, illegal or dangerous items," TSA spokesman Greg Soule told FoxNews.com. The TSA would not disclose exactly what those items were, but it said they included weapons like ceramic knives and various drugs -- including a syringe filled with heroin hidden in a passenger’s underwear.
This year is almost over.
Various drugs may be dangerous (to the user) and are illegal - but they are not a risk to airline safety.
Note how the TSA includes all sorts of things that have nothing to do with safety of the flight (e.g. drugs) into the mix.
The truth suddenly appears - the purpose of these devices is to use the excuse of an air flight to perform a search that would otherwise be blatantly illegal.
Also note that nobody's breaking down how much of what type of device or weapon has been found.
Perhaps that's because most - or perhaps all - of the "weapons" are things like nail files, knitting needles, nail clippers and other similar items.
Indeed, here's the Amazon link to all the hyper-dangerous terror-loving ceramic kitchen knives!
While it's certainly possible that someone intended to do something nefarious with such a thing, it's far more likely that said ceramic knife was not intended to do anything other than cut tomatoes or otherwise perform a common and quite-legal function - and was accidentally brought into the security area. Of course the TSA doesn't provide details that might inconveniently point to the truth of what was found, where, and the intent of the bearer (like, for instance, if one of the alleged "offenders" was a professional chef flying home from a trade show!) nor do they disclose that nearly all ceramic knife manufacturers intentionally add enough metal to the knife somewhere (frequently in the handle) to insure that it is detectable with a common metal detector - especially one set to a highly-sensitive level, as those in airports are!
Speaking of intentional government lies about airport detectability of weapons - does anyone remember the outrageous lies that were told about Glocks when they were first introduced in the 1980s? "Plastic and undetectable guns" were the mantra then - we were told that they could go through an airline scanner undetected and that led an attempt to ban them outright. That was an intentional lie. There always was more than enough metal - including the chamber and barrel assembly, weighing nearly a pound - not to mention the cartridges, magazine and bullets - to set off any common metal detector. Was that lie ever retracted? Oh hell no. Maybe you don't remember this little bit of intentional government fabrication, but I sure do. Today, of course, a significant percentage of police officers carry Glocks as their duty weapons!
Intelligence tells us that our enemy still seeks to target airplanes, and as we saw illustrated last Christmas Day, that threat can manifest itself in an improvised explosive device that has no metal in it."
Uh huh. You mean the man our government allowed to board an international flight to The United States without proper documentation - a Passport - and who was on a terrorist watch-list, never mind that he had originated his travel in a known terrorist hotbed?
That guy?
The government people involved in that little fiasco should be in prison for criminal negligence - assuming it really was negligence and not something worse. (If it was something worse a Treason charge - literally, with the death penalty - is called for.) After all, what sort of legitimate purpose would a government employee have in overriding procedures for a guy coming out of a known terrorist hotbed, bound for the US, who doesn't happen to have the passport he had to have to exit another nation on a different flight a few hours earlier?
Napolitano and Pistole must think The American People are just plain stupid.
Well, maybe most Americans are.
But I'm not, and I recognize horsecrap when I see and smell it - especially when the government's "airline safety" people have a documented record of lying repeatedly to the public about various weapons and their detectability by common airline screening devices - going all the way back to the 1980s.
"Passengers need to readjust their expectations on what they’re going to find at the airport," IATA spokesman Steve Lott told FoxNews.com.
No, Airlines need to adjust their expectations.
They either stop this crap by refusing to cooperate with it, or we won't fly.
Period.
End of discussion, full stop.
Let's be frank folks. The airports - even little airports - have had "swab" machines for years. Even my little local airport has one and my laptop has been swabbed in the past. The TSA guy (and before him the private security folks) simply run the swab over a surface (say, your pant leg or a laptop) and then put it in a machine. The machine is essentially a computerized gas chromatograph, and in a few seconds (really) it checks for common explosive residues and materials.
If you stuff a bomb in your pants and they swab you, it's going to pick it up.
IF they swab you.
Now if the bomber instead shoves the bomb up his ass, and then bathes well enough to get any residue off his hands and other body parts, it might not pick it up (especially if he then puts on clean clothes.)
So long as he doesn't fart, of course.
But then again, the so-called "full-body" scanners and an "aggressive" crotch-grope isn't going to find that bomb up the suicidal maniac's ass either.
Oh, there is one other thing about these "full body" scanners: The former chief of DHS - Chertoff - is a consultant for the company that makes them.
How much money is involved here?
One billion dollars for "advanced" equipment, including these scanners, ordered directly by our fabulous President, who has never seen a word of the Constitution he's unwilling to wipe his ass with.
So let's see what we got here:
The newfangled scanners are an effective virtual strip-search.
The "grope" alternative is an effective sexual assault and would be illegal if performed by any random person. In fact, the only time it's legal for an actual police officer to conduct a search of this sort is when you have been lawfully placed under arrest. This is not "stop and frisk" - it is known in the vernacular as a "custody search" and as the name implies, you have to be in custody before it's permitted under long-standing law.
The TSA won't disclose of the 130 items found "this year" how many were weapons, what sort of weapons (or explosives), whether any were actually dangerous devices intended to be used to terrorize and exactly what they were so we can determine if a metal detector would have picked them up. One is therefore free to believe (and it is in fact probably true) that all, or essentially all, were things like nail files, knitting needles and drugs - none of which have anything to do with airline safety, and all of them - or effectively all, sans the drugs (which aren't dangerous to the plane) would have been caught by a metal detector.
Janet Napolitano is allegedly "considering" a request by CAIR to allow Muslim women to "self-examine." Does the government really think we're this stupid? Can you identify exactly how many airline terrorist incidents related to the United States have been undertaken by other than Muslims? I think that count over the last decade is zero, right? So we're considering allowing one half of the Muslim population to "self-screen" while the rest of us get sexually assaulted? How do you spell "****" and "you" in whatever language Napolitano best understands?
If the airline industry (or the government) thinks that people are going to put up with this crap, they're very wrong. A Reuters poll revealed that ninety-six percent (96% for those who can't read words, like Napolitano) affirmed they would make alternative travel plans rather than submit.
You want us to put up with this eh?
Here's my answer: Go to Hell.
If the airlines would not like to all go bankrupt and the airports would not like to see their tax revenue go straight down the toilet, they better put a stop to this crap - right now.
