Where The Sun Doesn't Shine

I just completed two airline trips in the past three months. The first was a trip to Europe two days after the British captured the terrorists this past August and the second was a quick business trip from Salt Lake to Denver. As we negotiated our way through the various security measures set up to "protect" us from further terrorist activities, I was reminded of a recent article by Ann Coulter in Human Watch.

Terrorists Win: Deodorant Banned From Airplanes

by Ann Coulter
Posted Aug 16, 2006

Last week marked the first official admission that everything government airport screeners have been doing until now is completely pointless -- unless you're an airport security guard with a thing for women's undergarments, in which case it's been highly effective.

As we now know, all the ingredients necessary to blow up an airplane can be carried in small liquid containers. Airport security has not even been looking for small liquid containers. Judging from my personal experience, they seem to have been focusing on finding explosive devices inside women's brassieres.

After five years of submissively complying with bag checks, shoe checks and underwire bra checks, Americans have now been informed that the hell we've been going through at the airports (but which the president and members of Congress do not go through because they refuse to fly commercial air) has been a useless Kabuki theater.

The procedures that have wasted millions of hours of time cannot keep the most basic bomb materials off an airplane. This is like locking your windows to prevent burglaries, while leaving the front door wide open.

Airport security has been using metal detectors to confiscate sharp objects that could be turned into make-shift weapons, which could then be used by terrorists to commandeer control of a plane and fly it into a building.

Except the terrorists can't do that because we've seen that trick before.

But her closing comments were the most illuminating to me.

What stopped last week's terrorist attack was ethnic profiling. . .

Without the ethnic profiling going on outside of airports, no security procedure currently permissible inside airports would have prevented a terrorist attack that would have left thousands dead.

Airplanes, ports, bridges, subways and shopping malls cannot ever be sanitized against every type of attack that can be dreamed up by fanatics engaged in asymmetrical warfare. We have to target the fanatics themselves. Baby formula doesn't kill people. Islamic fascists kill people.

I was horrified to realise, that the next most humiliating thing the terrorists can do, is to concoct a plan to attempt to smuggle weapons or explosives on to airliners hidden in a human body cavity. It doesn't even have to work. Once their attack is discovered and thwarted by our effective ethnic profiling monitoring, cavity searches would become manditory on any flight to the United States.

Osama Bin Laden would howl with delight to realise that it was no longer a figure of speech when he says we can take democracy and shove it . . .