Bending the Third Rail
Because We Should, We Can, We Do
Friday, August 11, 2006
Chickens Without Heads
William Arkin has a nice piece today describing his day of trying to cover yesterday's panic story of the terrorist arrest in Britain. He generally describes an American government in disarray with all the various agencies pointing their fingers at each other, while the Pentagon runs away from Chertoff and the color coded Homeland Security clowns.

Arkin makes one particularly good point:
Here’s how I see it: Okay, maybe it was the case that plotters had still not been apprehended. Maybe it is the case that some copy cat could rush to the local airport to mix peroxide with something else to make an explosive and attempt to detonate it in a Unabomber moment, maybe the entire plot was a diversion for AN EVEN BIGGER PLOT, but the truth was that probably anyone implicated or connected to the Heathrow 24 and not in custody was going underground.

And the TSA was doing what the TSA always does, fighting the last war.

If liquids are a threat to airline safety and not just a prop in Michael Chertoff's press conference, then why hadn’t Homeland Security and TSA dealt with them months ago, when the intelligence agencies became aware of the British investigation (July 2005)? Why not after 9/11 in the first place? After all, there’s the already thwarted "Bojinka" plot, originally hatched and planned by al-Qaeda in 1995, to blow up airliners (using liquids) simultaneously over the Pacific Ocean.
Good question Bill.
Written at 9:02 AM by Greyhair.
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