Happy New Year, Homeland Security!

It's hard to say exactly who's to blame for the olympiad of idiocy that is airport security. I suppose if we wanted we could follow the daffy crumb trail right into the Oval Office. The Decider's decision to respond to 9/11 by forming the largest bureaucracy in the history of civilization pretty much sewed up our fate: Thrust upon us - and anyone wishing to visit us - is an impenetrable morass of bad security policy and ineffectual implementation.

Nowhere is this more evident than in Homeland's laughable security cordon at American airports. We remove our shoes because a half-wit named Richard Reid once tried to set his sneakers on fire flying from London to New York. What if Reid had been wearing an explosive bra? The most frustrating aspect of TSA's ineptitude is exactly what is so malignant about bureaucracy: it's rules are unthinking and arbitrary. There's an actual need for security that TSA simply doesn't fulfill. For example, nearly every terminal in the States has a $20 million "Explosives Trace Detection Machine", but the personnel actively screening passengers are paid $10 an hour. You get what you pay for.

I could rant about this at length, but instead I'll refer to something that Patrick Smith, a commercial airline pilot who writes a New York Times blog called "Jet Lagged", wrote last week.

"...The liquids and gels restrictions [were] introduced two summers ago following the breakup of a London-based cabal that was planning to blow up jetliners using liquid explosives. Allegations surrounding the conspiracy were revealed to be substantially embellished. In an August, 2006 article in the New York Times, British officials admitted that public statements made following the arrests were overcooked, inaccurate and “unfortunate.” The plot’s leaders were still in the process of recruiting and radicalizing would-be bombers. They lacked passports, airline tickets and, most critical of all, they had been unsuccessful in actually producing liquid explosives. Investigators later described the widely parroted report that up to ten U.S airliners had been targeted as “speculative” and “exaggerated.”

It's a sad blowback of the 2001 terror attacks. How many billions have been wasted chasing our tail in airports? Sadder still, if you look closely at the other high-profile terror arrests that Homeland trumpets so proudly, and which shape its response to threats, they fall apart under the most cursory inspections. Remember the half-baked plot to blow up the Sear's Tower? How about the Albanian pizza deliverymen conspiring to over Fort Dix? Homeland Security is a heady combination of dangerous and laughable. And that means that the joke is most certainly on us.