It’s beginning to seem — no, actually it began to seem a long time ago — like the T in TSA stands for “Tragedy”.

If Seth, being the security professional hereabouts and the most loudly vocal critic of the Transportation “Security” Administration I have the pleasure of knowing, were posting this one, I’m sure he’d have some choice epithets.

From CSN News:

Transportation Security Administration (TSA) approved flight training for 25 illegal aliens at a Boston-area flight school that was owned by yet another illegal alien, according to the Government Accountability Office.

The illegal-alien flight-school attendees included eight who had entered the country illegally and 17 who had overstayed their allowed period of admission into the United States, according to an audit by the GAO.

Six of the illegal aliens were actually able to get pilot’s licenses.

I wonder if “Gadzooks!” would be considered sufficiently strong to cover this piece of news…

Rep. Mike Rogers (R.-Ala.), chairman of the House Homeland Security Subcommittee on Transportation Security, said he found the GAO’s findings “amazing.”

Indeed!

“We have cancer patients, Iraq War veterans and Nobel Prize winners all forced to undergo rigorous security checks before getting on an airplane,” said Rogers, “and at the same time, ten years after 9/11, there are foreign nationals in the United States trained to fly just like Mohammed Atta and the other 9/11 hijackers did, and not all of them are necessarily getting a security background check.”

Stephen Lord, who is the GAO’s director of Homeland Security and Justice Issues, testified about the matter Wednesday in Rogers’ subcommittee. Rogers asked him: “Isn’t it true that, based on your report, the Transportation Security Administration cannot assure the American people that foreign terrorists are not in this country learning how to fly airplanes, yes or no?”

Lord responded: “At this time, no.”

Although the illegal alien who owned the Massachusetts flight school had not undergone a required TSA security threat assessment and had not been approved for flight training by the agency, he nonetheless held two Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) pilot licenses, also known as FAA certificates.

Read the entire article here.

What kind of government are we running here, exactly? More to the point, what kind of people are these politicians we elect to protect us hiring to supervise these efforts? Can you imagine such incompetent people holding a job, for any length of time, in the private sector?

Seth has long advocated extracting the politics from the business of protecting the people and placing qualified, dedicated professionals in charge of these efforts, people who have literally been there and done that, rather than PhDs owed political favors by career politicians for getting their worthless hides elected.

As taxpaying citizens, a form of paying customer, we are surely entitled to some bang for our buck, and I’m not referring to the kind of “bang” we’ll get if these idiots don’t start doing what we pay them to do.