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Vin Suprynowicz
It's all a vicious game of 'Let's pretend'
By now most folks have likely heard about the case of Nigerian-American Olajide Oluwaseun Noibi, 24, also known as Seun Noibi.
On June 25, Virgin America Flight 415 from New York's JFK International Airport to Los Angeles was two hours into its journey when passengers in the upscale "Main Cabin Select" section complained that the man seated in 3E reeked of body odor, the Los Angeles Times reports.
A flight attendant asked the man for his boarding pass and was surprised to see it was from a different flight and in someone else's name. She alerted authorities; Noibi went back to sleep in his black leather airline seat. When the plane landed, authorities interviewed Noibi but chose not to arrest him, not seeing any need to make a fuss about the fact he'd obviously stolen hundreds of dollars worth of air travel. Instead, they allowed him to leave the airport ... and try the same trick again, five days later.
On June 29, Noibi was arrested trying to board a Delta flight out of Los Angeles. Once again, our smiling clown had managed to pass undetected through security with an expired boarding pass issued in someone else's name. Authorities found on his person at least 10 other boarding passes, none of which belonged to him.
Noibi was again able to move past multiple checkpoints -- at the security screening areas and at the gates -- with his expired boarding pass and an expired Michigan university identification, despite the fact college IDs are not sufficient for boarding, according to Transportation Security Administration guidelines.
At one point, it was reported, he got through simply by asserting "They told me to go through here." Law enforcement sources told the Times they suspect Noibi has used expired plane tickets to sneak on to flights in the past. On his website, Noibi describes himself as a "frequent traveler."
Noibi appears to be a smiling, cherub-faced young man. Presumably there was also some fear, in today's politically correct environment, of being accused of racism for getting tough with a black man with a discernible foreign accent -- though, in fact, young black and Arab men with foreign accents fit precisely the profile of would-be terrorists. Unlike, say, 95-year-old white leukemia patient Lena Reppert, who had to get up from her wheelchair to have her adult diaper searched in a humiliating hour-long ordeal at Northwest Florida Regional Airport on June 18.
I actually heard a lady call a national radio talk show, arguing the Noibi incident proves nothing because it was "just one slip-up," while the system has "worked successfully tens of thousands of times."
No it didn't, unless by "worked successfully" you mean that tens of thousands -- nay, millions -- of times the TSA offended the dignity of Americans and legitimate foreign visitors who didn't have the slightest intention of doing any harm, shredding the Fourth Amendment "right of the people to be secure in their persons ... papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures," unless served with a proper and specific warrant, etc.
We're told visitor volume is up at McCarran International Airport, here in Las Vegas. That's great. Yet the Southern Nevada tourist economy still appears to be on life support. Why?
I suspect a big part of the answer is that, while businessmen and conventioneers still fly on business, and young honeymooners with a couple hundred bucks in their pocket may still visit Vegas for a long weekend (God bless 'em), the wealthier tourists, especially those from Europe and Asia, have simply stopped coming in a silent boycott of the ruthless and insane antics of our beloved Homeland Security Abteilung and their blue-gloved goons.
The main reason the TSA's misdirected nonsense appears to have "worked," we are left to conclude, is that hardly any serious adults are trying to damage our planes, any more.
Glamorized or not, I believe there's considerable truth underlying the published adventures of Richard Marcinko, who reports on special forces teams sent to test such supposedly "secure" facilities as U.S. embassies overseas, only to determine anyone could sneak in the unlocked door to the smoker's patio and then -- armed with nothing but a convincing-looking uniform, accent and clipboard -- successfully gain access even to the supposedly sacrosanct "code room."
Are we really to believe any such team of professionals, given a couple weeks, couldn't land low-level jobs at any of our busy commercial airports, scope out the sieve-like "security" on the lower levels and load up the cargo bay of a randomly selected 737 to look like a Hawthorne munitions bunker?
Didn't the Transportation Security Administration announce in June it plans to fire 36 workers, including two high-ranking officials, for failure to properly screen tons of baggage at Honolulu International Airport?
For that matter, anyone wishing to cripple U.S. commercial aviation needn't get through a single security checkpoint or anywhere near a plane. Simply wheel an explosive carry-on into one of those serpentine lines forming outside our security checkpoints, wait till you're in the middle of the room, then leave your bag behind after telling the person behind you that you really, really have to go use the bathroom.
After Osama bin Laden was killed, most American news broadcasts were careful to stipulate, "Of course this doesn't mean we should expect the airport searches to end."
Why? And who told them to say that? Wouldn't it be more appropriate for an independent "news" organization (as opposed to a government propaganda outlet) to aggressively ask why this shouldn't mean an end to the blue-gloved goons?
When our bloated federal government hits the wall and is forced to lay off half its drones, watch and see how quickly the TSA starts to be identified as what it actually is -- a jobs program, without which tens of thousands of highly paid, federal union employees with lavish benefits and few other identifiable job skills will be thrown on the dole. Oh, the humanity!
By the way, Jean Weber of Destin, Fla., who herself was intensively frisked at Northwest Florida Regional Airport on June 18 for the offense of bursting into tears at the way her 95-year-old mother, leukemia patient Lena Reppert, was being treated, calls the TSA's claim about not removing her mother's adult diaper "a lie."
Vin Suprynowicz is assistant editorial page editor of the Review-Journal, and author of the novel "The Black Arrow" and "The Ballad of Carl Drega." See www.vinsuprynowicz.com.
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A repeat of 9-11 is now very unlikely. In the event someone does bring a knife onto a plane, pilots will undoubtedly use effective counter-measures, whether those measures are sanctioned by the government and the airlines, or not. One method is to simply adjust the cabin pressure to the equivalent of fifteen to twenty-thousand foot air pressure. Most people cannot function effectively at that level of oxygen--the equivalent of being high up in the Andes mountains. Another measure will likely be to roll the plane, in which case anyone not strapped in will be tossed around like a ripe melon. The pilot is sure as hell not going to just let terrorists take control of the plane without a fight.
I absolutely agree and am pleased that so many have now recognized that TSA is simply an expensive farce that substitutes harassment of passengers for airline security. Many experts have stated that there has been no increase in aircraft exposure since 2002.
Congress has permitted TSA to promote an agenda of passenger-focused paranoia without consideration for the realities or costs of airline safety.
In the past eight months, TSA has been plagued by reports of agent thefts, sex crimes, assaults, drug trafficking, security breaches, drug use and dereliction of duty. Over sixty screeners have been implicated in that brief time without one notable success to offset this abysmal record. There is something fundamentally wrong when an organization posts this level of criminal conduct.
This ineffective focus on passengers has become both excessive and dangerous. Once cockpit doors were reinforced and pilots armed a terrorist could not gain control of a plane a repeat of 9/11 became impossible. A human is physically incapable of concealing enough explosive to bring down an airliner yet the focus of TSA remains on passengers while allowing 60% of cargo on airliners to go unscreened and remaining oblivious to threat of a ground based attack.
Over a million Americans have died in defense of our Constitutional liberties and it is shameful that the fearful and cowardly among us would squander those rights for the miniscule degree of security that TSA provides.
TSA is far too broken to be reformed and must be closed. There needs to be a grand jury investigation of the agency and its leadership for corruption and mismanagement.
http://www.travelunderground.org/index.php?threads/master-lists-of-tsa-abuses-crimes.317/
I used to fly quite a bit, even following September 11th my flying habits changed very little until 2007 when a note was placed in my CHECKED luggage by a TSA agent. The note stated that the airline I was flying did not allow bottles of alcohol on checked bags and thus the TSA agent removed the two somewhat expensive bottles of wine I had in that bag. My first reaction was a call to the airline to confirm this policy- it doesn't exist. When I informed the airline rep of my discovery, they weren't terribly surprised and asked me to fax them the note and suggested I file a complaint with the TSA. I asked them what they would be doing and she replied, "Nothing, beyond keeping the note on file." She explained the TSA routinely uses staffing practices to cause delays at the checkpoints servicing that airline's gates as retaliation for complaints from the airline about TSA. I did file a complaint with TSA and received in reply nothing more than boilerplate of the kind usually reserved by shady insurance companies to deny a claim. Since then, though I still travel extensively, I avoid air travel as much as possible. Anyone who wishes to see a rather disconcerting similarity with another "state security agency" should do a little research into the SA. This too, was a group made up of under-educated people qualified for little else but to please a bureaucracy that let them make it up as they went about their "business". Anyone who does not see a clear need to re-evaluate the TSA's role and/ or necessity is simply ignorant of facts. This is a window-dressing jobs program that has given us little, if any, safety for the liberty it has snatched from American citizens.
Another thing. I fly for business enough to have obtained a few free round trips. Facts again are stubborn things. Fewer people fly for pleasure today than in recent decades. It is getting so we recognize each other on flights all over the country. B2B is what is keeping business alive today. Tell me all is ok, I can sell you some desert land at 2006 prices.
It is not a good thing to have opinions funded by Hollywood myths and trendy ill-informed newspapers. All those in the know on most any subject see the GROSS silliness portrayed by Hollywood for the fantasy of inept directors and actors. Along with explosive decompression in space the myth about bullets and aircraft continues as noted below...drama is not real life and those who know nothing about what a bullet can and cannot do are ill prepared to comment or teach; yet the silly lap up the lies like nectar...Hollywood on average today is made up of inept high school diploma holders and drop outs who did well in drama and drug culture but poorly in science or any serious subject.
Southwest Airlines recently landing in Yuma showed the survivability of a small opening in the fuselage. El-AL shows guns are a great thing to have on commercial planes every time they fly. Facts are stubborn things.
John F .. are you for real? It has been proven over and over and over again that a bullet hole will not cause a catastrophic de-pressurization. Just in case you didn't know it, aircraft cabins are actually open to the atmosphere via an outflow valve, but kept pressurized by bleed air from the engines. The air inside a 757 is exchanged about every 2 to 3 minutes with a continual flow from outside.
@John F-
Complete myth. Try again. Far more people have been killed because of a lack of guns on planes (in the right hands). Nobody has ever died due to depressurization (or would ever die, for that matter) caused by bullet holes.
Paulweber and Ron Paul are OK up to a point. The last thing you want is someone with a gun on board a plane. The quickest way to kill everyone on board is to punch a hole in a pressurized cabin at 32,000 feet.
Not much useful to offer regarding the TSA, except that eventually these same schmucks (and it will be the same schmucks) are going to be running the health-care system.