Somewhere, at an airport near you, TSA personnel are asking elderly women to remove their adult diapers for inspection, performing patdowns on children with cerebral palsy, and doing full body scans of grandpas whose only ties to terrorism are the books they’ve read on the subject since the 9/11 attacks.
And while the humiliated elderly lady is putting her diaper back on and the parents of the child with cerebral palsy are trying to calm their daughter down and the grandpa is wondering why he’s being treated like a terrorist, real terrorists wearing underwear bombs can board planes undetected. This important tidbit became paramount on Tuesday, when a CIA/Saudi double agent wearing an underwear bomb for Al Qaeda turned the bomb over to U.S. officials before boarding the plane he was assigned to take down.
Speaking on condition of anonymity, law enforcement officials familiar with the TSA screening process said the screening process would not have detected the bomb had someone been wearing it and wanted to board the plane. They contend that the “only surefire way to detect nonmetallic explosives [used in such] devices is [by] using bomb-sniffing dogs.” However, the sad truth is that “there aren’t enough dogs to check every passenger at every security line.”
Nevertheless, Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano contends there is a “high likelihood” they would catch such a bomber, yet she offered no explanation for how TSA would do it. We do know that patting down grandmas, grandpas, and children won’t get it done.