Just how stupid do you have to be to blame people, criticize people
posted by Bill Arnett @ 9:53 AM Permalink …relentlessly, lay blame on those not responsible for a security breach, start calling a President weak on security, and declaring that Janet Napolitino is incapable of securing our border using security measures devised and implemented by the bush /cheney maladministration?And why are they now going to spend hundreds of millions of dollars for new machines when a well-trained bomb dog, for a tiny, tiny, fraction of the cost, would have smelled he explosive power being carried by the alleged bomber?
Have we abandoned all commonsense?
Do we now believe that in this time of fiscal austerity we have billions of dollars more to spend on machines that don't work, staffed by people ill-trained and unable to make them work properly?
Are president Obama and Jane Napolitino to be endlessly criticized because the security systems devised by bush/cheney didn't work? To still be endlessly criticized by cheney, who just loves the roll of the big talking Dick?
Doesn't the fact that it was a foreign airport that allowed the bomber on the plane despite the many warning signs that an ignorant fool could plainly see carry any weight? And how can Obama and Napolitino be faulted for the obvious failure of people over whom Omana and Napolitino exercised zero control at of the foreign airport that allowed the bomber on a plane count for nothing?
All we'll hear for weeks now on cable TV is how Obama screwed up, how Obama should ignore deficits to make us safe (not healthier, oh no, not healthier) to buy evermore expensive machines when our four-footed friends of the canine variety would do a better job?
True story: A cargo plane was ready to leave Ubon, Thailand. The dogs giving it a last check gave their signal for a drug alert. The plane was emptied and searched to the last bolt. No Drugs were found, so the plane took off and landed at Clark AB, Philippines. The drug dogs went nuts, clearly alerting to the scent of drugs. The plane was again emptied and inspected to the very last bolt; no drugs were found, plane reloaded and sent on its way. When it landed at Travis AFB, California, the dogs again went crazy with drug alerts, so the Air Force decided to find out why. They stripped the plane, opened every crate being transported, inspected it to the last bolt, and the dogs were still going nuts. The plane's commander ordered all fuel and oil tanks drained so they could be inspected. With the fuel, no hit. The oil, on the other, made the dogs go nuts. They finally figured out that some drug smuggler had found a way to dissolve heroin into the oil, where, on the other end, it was extracted using a highly sophisticated filtering system and returned to it's natural state of 99% pure heroin.
It's a known and proven fact that if you train a german shephard to find salt, a not too odiferous substance, put five 55-gallon barrels of water side-by-side, put one teaspoon of salt into ONE drum (a ratio of one million to one), that dog will correctly identify the barrel with the salt in it EVERY TIME.
So don't tell me a properly trained dog, at a cost of a few thousand dollars, can't outperform million dollar machines with a very high failure rate.
See:
Efforts to fit major airports with devices capable of ferreting out the best-concealed bombs have a long way to go. Even state of the art bomb detectors suffer from a welter of drawbacks, ranging from frustratingly slow operation to astronomical cost and, in some cases, an all-too-high failure rate.[…]Take a look here also:
The problem, as Graseby's sales manager, Geoffrey Greenhough, readily concedes, is that Plastec can never be a first line of defense.
"X-ray machines will always be the primary screening devices," he said. "They can process things like carry-on bags far faster as they roll along a conveyor belt." If the X-ray picture raises suspicions, the bag can be re-tested for explosives.
On Monday morning, September 14, 2009, the Joint Terrorism Task Force executed multiple search warrants in the Borough of Queens, New York. A Denver man was arrested and then released in connection with the terrorism raids. He had recently traveled to Pakistan and then, according to ABC News, showed up in New York last Thursday, September 10, with bomb-making documents. The question no one has asked is how was he able to fly around the world and in the United States unchallenged when thousands of innocent Americans are hassled by Transportation Security Administration agents every day.So whether it be from millions of dollars of equipment that doesn't work, to the lack of use of "old-fashioned" equipment like dogs that do work, well-trained personnel replaced with ill-trained, sometimes convicted felons, well, it's plain that the hugh sums of money recklessly borrowed and spent by bush/cheney haven't done a damned thing to make us any safer,
If you think you’re safe getting on a plane in the United States — think again. The hundreds of billions of dollars we have spent on security and the huge Homeland Security workforce we have added to the federal payroll make for a feel-good marketing strategy that only fools us into believing we are safer. The truth is, the weaknesses in aviation security that were there prior to 9/11 are still there today.
The biggest danger we face is government agencies so sloppy and arrogant in their collection and distribution of intelligence that huge selectee and no-fly lists do not include some of the most dangerous terrorists. At the Central Intelligence Agency and Defense Intelligence Agency certain names and aliases are kept from the airlines and off the no-fly list to protect intelligence assets who are suspected or known terrorists. In other instances our intelligence agencies keep names off the list at the request of allies such as Pakistan and Saudi Arabia.
Regardless of what Big Dick Cheney says,
Labels: aviation safety, cheney secrecy, Conservatives, conspiracy, Fiscal irresponsibility, hypocrisy, propaganda
3 Comments:
I agree with most of your points, but I'd like to add:
chances of dying from terrorism in this country are minuscule compared to dying from lightning.
The TSA is currently being run by a Bush appointee because one Repub senator hates unions.
The republican answer to everything is 'cut taxes, abolish unions and start a war' that they'll never have to fight.
Follow the money. Who made the money from nothing changing but billions of dollars were spent.
Of course we shouldn't blame the Obama Administration for the no-bid culture of benefit-unproductive services implemented by the Bush Adminisration(s), I mean ... after all ... it's not like Obama is adopting many (if not most) of Bush's most insane war-crimes conduct and then adding his own flavor by peeing in it ... .
As the Sailor mentioned above, and if you do follow the money you will discover that is also Obama-clan crooks that are benefitting. There's only one constant here, and it's that the tax-payer is still shelling out for it all.
DanD
I disagree, DanD. Bush/Cheney and GOP thugs and looters robbed this country of trillions of dollars long, long before Obama took office. If he's smart, and we all know he was plenty smart enough to fool bush, cheney and the GOP, Obama will be out there everyday saying, "See? The Republican party that allowed the worst terrorist attack ever on American soil, reduced the honorable men and women who serve this country into base, morally-lacking, torturers, proving the torture is not going to stop a dedicated terrorists from blowing his own ball off in order to bring down one of our planes, an attack that would have been stopped by a mediocre -trained K-9 dog, those same Republicans want to do it all over again, destroy our economy, bankrupt the country yet again on billion dollar machines with extremely spotty success rates, and once again bury America under under trillions of dollars of debt. Our current method of fighting terrorists, courtesy of the above-mentioned GOP i an utter failure, and Osama bin Laden needs to revise this speech: "All that we have to do is to send two mujahedin to the furthest point East to raise a piece of cloth on which is written al-Qaeda, in order to make the generals race there to cause America to suffer human, economic, and political losses without their achieving for it anything of note other than some benefits for their private companies.
"This is in addition to our having experience in using guerrilla warfare and the war of attrition to fight tyrannical superpowers, as we, alongside the mujahedin, bled Russia for ten years, until it went bankrupt and was forced to withdraw in defeat... So we are continuing this policy in bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy."
Osama thought it was funny that his interests and Bush's converged so closely:
"That being said, those who say that al-Qaeda has won against the administration in the White House or that the administration has lost in this war have not been precise, because when one scrutinizes the results, one cannot say that al-Qaeda is the sole factor in achieving those spectacular gains.
"Rather, the policy of the White House that demands the opening of war fronts to keep busy their various corporations – whether they be working in the field of arms or oil or reconstruction – has helped al-Qaeda to achieve these enormous results.
"And so it has appeared to some analysts and diplomats that the White House and us are playing as one team toward the economic goals of the United States, even if the intentions differ."
Osama bin Laden, aided and abetted by bush, cheney, and the GOP. lost this war the minute they engaged the enemy on his own terms.
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