…I could, in any kind of conscience, leave one of my few pet peeves, that being the incompetence of the Transportation Safety Administration, by the wayside, along comes this item.

The Transportation Security Administration inadvertently revealed closely guarded secrets related to airport passenger screening practices when it posted online this spring a document as part of a contract solicitation, the agency confirmed Tuesday.

The 93-page TSA operating manual details procedures for screening passengers and checked baggage, such as technical settings used by X-ray machines and explosives detectors. It also includes pictures of credentials used by members of Congress, CIA employees and federal air marshals, and it identifies 12 countries whose passport holders are automatically subjected to added scrutiny.

TSA officials said that the manual was posted online in a redacted form on a federal procurement Web site, but that the digital redactions were inadequate. They allowed computer users to recover blacked-out passages by copying and pasting them into a new document or an e-mail.

Okayyyyy….

Yeah, I know, in the past I posted quite a bit about TSA, about their incompetence and the dangers it poses, as a result, to the millions of people who fly out of U.S. airports annually.

The problem, as I’ve said before, is not that the rank and file employees of the TSA are lazy, don’t want to do their jobs or what have you, and not even that they, themselves, are as incompetent as their agency is, as a whole.

Like any government entity, the TSA is run not by people who should be running it, ie veteran industry professionals who have been around the block a few times, but by political appointees who, despite flowery resumes of administrative excellence and vast bureaucratic experience, don’t know diddly about the hands-on aspects of that which they purport to command.

This was true at TSA’s inception, and it’s true today.

It was true under the Bush Administration and it’s true under the Obama Administration, and it’ll probably still be the same under the next administration.

Why?

Because those who run your — our — government, Democrat and Republican alike, care more about the repayment of political favors than they do about your — our — lives. Period.

Stewart A. Baker, a former assistant secretary at the Department of Homeland Security, said that the manual will become a textbook for those seeking to penetrate aviation security and that its leaking was serious.

“It increases the risk that terrorists will find a way through the defenses,” Baker said. “The problem is there are so many different holes that while [the TSA] can fix any one of them by changing procedures and making adjustments in the process . . . they can’t change everything about the way they operate.”

Of course there are “so many different holes” — what do you expect when you entrust policies to people who shouldn’t even be managing a security agency?

Another former DHS official, however, called the loss a public relations blunder but not a major risk, because TSA manuals are shared widely with airlines and airports and are available in the aviation community.

“While it’s certainly a type of document you would not want to be released . . . it’s not something a determined expert couldn’t find another way,” the official said.

A “public relations blunder” is certainly of more worry to a government agency than a risk to the lives of those that depend upon them for security.

As for it’s not something a determined expert couldn’t find another way, well, to say that such a statement should earn the official who uttered it an immediate date with a firing squad would be completely accurate in my book. A dedicated security professional would be looking for methods of preventing “a determined expert” from “finding it another way”.

The “former DHS official”, in my professional estimate, is a piece of shit who has no business in the Protection Industry, not even emptying the waste baskets of the folks actively engaged in doing the job at hand. But then again, look who’s running the Department of Homeland Security — Janet Napolitano, no real, hands-on security experience, instead, an infinitely more relevant qualification, political relevance.

This is a measure of how cavalier, in the name of self and party serving politics, the government can be with the safety of we, the people, whom they are sworn to protect and defend.

Of course, there’s the usual bland, butt covering form letter style malarkey from the TSA.

“TSA takes this matter very seriously and took swift action when this was discovered. A full review is now underway,” the agency said in a statement. “TSA has many layers of security to keep the traveling public safe and to constantly adapt to evolving threats. TSA is confident that screening procedures currently in place remain strong.”

To be perfectly blunt, what’s needed is management, from top to bottom, of the Transportation Safety Administration by purely meritoriously appointed or hired, experienced security professionals who have no political or other debts to anyone in the administration or anyplace else in government.

Such people would ensure the proper training and, in effect, that those trained in each specialty area have completely absorbed all of said training before they are deployed. That these employees are properly motivated. That their supervisory personnel are both responsible people and are experts themselves at their subordinates’ duties, “been there, done that”.

The incompetence at hand, as such, makes for a rather grim joke.

Employees at the Transportation Security Administration inadvertently exposed classified information about the agency’s security procedures because, apparently, they don’t know how PDF documents work.

Read on…

…nobody managed to “slip” through on purpose with a lethal souvenir letter opener or a deadly disposable cigarette lighter…

The TSA spokesman said testing shows that the agency has a “very high success rate” in detecting firearms.

…”catching up” posts.

First, there’s an excellent column by Caroline Glick on the ongoing western policy of appeasement in the face of what I personally prefer to term aggressive Islam.

MUSLIM MINORITIES throughout the world are being financed and ideologically trained in Saudi and UAE funded mosques and Islamic centers. These minorities act in strikingly similar manners in the countries where they are situated throughout the world. On the one hand, their local political leaders demand extraordinary communal rights, rights accorded neither to the national majority nor to other minority populations. On the other hand, Muslim neighborhoods, particularly in Europe, but also in Israel, the Philippines and Australia, are rendered increasingly ungovernable as arms of the state like the police and tax authorities come under attack when they attempt to assert state power in these Muslim communities.

Logic would have it that targeted states would respond to the threat to their authority through a dual strategy. On the one hand, they would firmly assert their authority by enforcing their laws against both individual lawbreakers and against subversive, foreign financed institutions that incite the overthrow of their governments and their replacement with Islamic governments. On the other hand, they would seek out and empower local Muslims who accept the authority and legitimacy of their states and their rule of law.

Unfortunately, with the notable exception of the Howard government in Australia, in country after country, governments respond to this challenge by attempting to appease Muslim irredentists and their state sponsors. The British responded to the July 7, 2005 bombings by giving representatives of the Muslim Brotherhood an official role in crafting and carrying out counter-terror policies.

In 2003, then French president Jacques Chirac sent then interior minister Nicholas Sarkozy to Egypt to seek the permission of Sheikh Mohammed Tantawi of the Islamist al-Azhar mosque for the French parliament’s plan to outlaw hijabs in French schools.

In the US, in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, the FBI asked the terror-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations to conduct sensitivity training for FBI agents.

In Holland last year, the Dutch government effectively expelled anti-Islamist politician Ayaan Hirsi Ali in the interest of currying favor with Holland’s restive Muslim minority.

At the minimum, I would say that sanity does not seem to prevail here; They are in the minority in all these countries, yet their demands are complied with post-haste, even to the point of exceeding accommodations accorded the majority in a respective host population.

This acquiescence is not restricted to laws of a social nature, on the contrary it has found its way into global politics.

THE FOREIGN policy aspect of the rush to appease is twofold. First, targeted states refuse to support one another when individual governments attempt to use the tools of law enforcement to handle their domestic jihad threat. For instance, European states have harshly criticized the US Patriot Act while the US criticized the French decision to prohibit the hijab in public schools.

More acutely, targeted states lead the charge in calling for the establishment of Muslim-only states. Today the US and the EU are leading the charge towards the establishment of a Palestinian state and the creation of an independent state of Kosovo.

In two weeks, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice will host the Annapolis conference where together with her European and Arab counterparts, she will exert enormous pressure on the Olmert government to agree to the establishment of a jihadist Palestinian state in Israel’s heartland with its capital in Jerusalem and its sovereignty extending over Judaism’s most sacred site, the Temple Mount.

The establishment of the sought-for Palestinian state presupposes the ethnic cleansing of at a minimum 80,000 Israelis from their homes and communities simply because they are Jews. Jews of course will be prohibited from living in Palestine.

To continue,

FOR ITS part, the Palestinian leadership to which Israel will be expected to communicate its acceptance of the establishment of Palestine, is one part criminal, and two parts jihadist. As Fatah leader and Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas and his colleagues have made clear, while they are willing to accept Israel’s concessions, they are not willing to accept Israel. This is why they refuse to acknowledge Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state.

A rare consensus exists today in Israel. From the far-left to the far-right, from IDF Military Intelligence to the Mossad, all agree that the Annapolis conference will fail to bring a peace accord. Since Rice’s approach to reaching just such an accord has been to apply unrelenting pressure on Israel, it is fairly clear that she will blame Israel for the conference’s preordained failure and cause a further deterioration in US-Israeli relations.

While Israel is supposed to accept a Jew-free Palestine, it goes without saying that its own 20 percent Arab minority will continue to enjoy the full rights of Israeli citizenship. Yet one of the direct consequences of the establishment of a Jew-free, pro-jihadist State of Palestine will be the further radicalization of Israeli Arabs. They will intensify their current rejection of Israel’s national identity.

With Palestinian and outside support, they will intensify their irredentist activities and so exert an even more devastating attack on Israel’s sovereignty and right to national self-determination.

“Ma zeh?” {Hebrew for “what’s this?”} you may ask. Well, one answer is that it’s lackluster diplomacy — you know, just like what an employer might expect from a lazy employee of the “sweep under a rug” persuasion. The politicians and diplomats on the western side of the equation want only to put the Israeli-”Palestinian” affair to bed once and for all, the consequences of any expediency be damned, and as a bonus, giving Israel the fid will also fulfill the requisites of The New Dhimmitude©.

SHORTLY AFTER the Annapolis conference fails, and no doubt in a bid to buck up its standing with the Arab world, the US may well stand by its stated intention to recognize the independence of Kosovo.

Yeah, well,

As Julia Gorin

(Julia is profoundly well informed on affairs in the Balkans, and the bulk of her columns specialize therein)

documented in a recent article here, in Jewish World Review, Kosovo’s connections with Albanian criminal syndicates and global jihadists are legion. Moreover, Kosovar independence would likely spur irredentist movements among the Muslim minorities in all Balkan states. In Macedonia for instance, a quarter of the population is Muslim. These irredentist movements in turn would increase Muslim irredentism throughout Europe just as Palestinian statehood will foment an intensification of the Islamization of Israel’s Arab minority.

The Kosovo government announced last month that given the diplomatic impasse, it plans to declare its independence next month. Currently, the Bush administration is signaling its willingness to recognize an independent Kosovo even though doing so will threaten US-Russian relations.

In a bid both to prevent the Bush administration from turning on Israel in the aftermath of the failure of the Annapolis conference and to make clear Israel’s own rejection of the notion that a “solution” to the Palestinian conflict with Israel can be imposed by foreign powers, the Olmert government should immediately and loudly restate its opposition to the imposition of Kosovar independence on Serbia.

In the interest of defending the nation-state system, on which American sovereignty and foreign policy is based, the US should reassess the logic of its support for the establishment of Muslim-only states. It should similarly revisit its refusal to openly support the right of non-Islamic states like Israel, Serbia and even France, to assert their rights to defend their sovereignty, national security and national character from outside-sponsored domestic Islamic subversion.

There’s a lot more happening in Ms. Glick’s column, which can be read in its entirety here.

In my mind’s ear (if there can be a mind’s eye, there must surely also exist a mind’s ear) I keep hearing the phrase, “The creep of Islam”.

“Moving right along”…

This is really funny. Put down your coffee cup before you listen.

A car accident happened in the Dallas-Ft.Worth area.

This is a recorded phone call from a man who witnessed the accident involving four elderly women. It was so popular when they played it on the local radio station the station decided to put it on their website.

Next up, and while the following articles are several days old they are by no means historical,

Nearly two dozen illegal immigrants were arrested Wednesday, accused of using fake security badges to work in critical areas of Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport, including the tarmac, authorities said.

The 23 illegal workers were employed by Ideal Staffing Solutions Inc., whose corporate secretary and office manager also were arrested after an eight-month investigation that involved federal, state and Chicago authorities.

The company contracted work for carriers including UAL Corp.’s (UAUA) United Airlines, KLM and Qantas Airways Ltd. (QAN.AU), said Elissa A. Brown, a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent.

“The investigation identifies a vulnerability that could compromise national security, while bringing criminal charges against individuals who built an illegal work force into their business practice,” Brown said.

Read the entire article here.

As if that weren’t enough,

The Transportation Security Administration touts its programs to ensure security by using undercover operatives to test its airport screeners. In one instance, however, the agency thwarted such a test by alerting screeners across the country that it was under way, even providing descriptions of the undercover agents.

The government routinely runs covert tests at airports to ensure that security measures in place are sufficient to stop a terrorist from bringing something dangerous onto an airplane.
Alerting screeners when the undercover officer is coming through and what the person looks like would defeat the purpose.

But that’s exactly what happened April 28, 2006, according to an e-mail from a top TSA official who oversees security operations.

This one’s a real winner, read on…

On the one hand, we have airports hiring HR contractors who make a practice of endangering the lives of scores, hundreds or thousands of people and on the other, the government agency responsible for U.S. airport security is rigging security inspections to make it appear that they are doing their job.

No matter how much effort I put into it, I can’t find even the slightest hint of justification for the above two situations. Does this make me a bad person?

Some people definitely need to be punished to the fullest extent that the law allows, some people need to be replaced and some people need to be majorly retrained….