TSA bungling

Airport Security: One If By Land, None If By Sea. We're safe from pocket knives, nail files, and scissors, but the TSA has a long way to go protecting our airports from terrorists wearing Speedos or armed with fish hooks.

Last week, JFK International was invaded by three people (one adult and two kids) who had been fishing in Jamaica Bay. They beached their raft, and then wandered around the supposedly-secure airport operations area for over an hour before anybody noticed. Plenty of time to have a fish-fry. Or, if they were terrorists, to set up a fire base and/or lay some explosives on the runway.

One might think that since the TSA is run by an "Admiral," the threat from the waterside of our coastal airports would be part of the TSA's comprehensive airport security program. Oops, forgot. The TSA has no comprehensive plan. Generously, the TSA did say it will look into the incident. Nice of them. As it stands, and as just about everybody outside the TSA knows, there is no perimeter security plan in place for our nation's airports. Loy is too busy wasting money over-staffing passenger screening points and over-paying politically-connected TSA vendors, not to mention making a laughingstock of the United States of America.

Across town, at LaGuardia, in an "exclusive" story, a New York TV station has found - gasp! - that the fuel farm at LaGuardia Airport is not guarded from terrorist attack. It's a facility with million gallons of fuel, they noted, further pointing out that if it went boom, it would make a really big fire. Needless to say, the fearless reporters built the story around the contention that the problem was cutbacks in police and security, rather than a total lack of vision and planning on the part of the TSA.

However, the Channel-7 reporters did a great job of ferreting-out some other interesting security holes at New York area airports. Like the one in June, when some bozo arrived undetected at the AOA near the Delta terminal at LGA. He swam in from the World's Fair Marina. He was finally discovered out on the runway sometime after he had emerged from the murky depths. When confronted, according to Channel-7, he chanted repeatedly, "Lucifer, Lucifer. I want to talk to Lucifer."

The gentleman's pleas, however, went unanswered. Neither Hillary Clinton nor Admiral Loy were in town.

Please note too that the TSA is continuing to drag its feet on arming the pilots. This incident indicates to me that terrorists wouldn't have to bring weapons through the airlines' check-in procedures. They could just find a way to sneak, say, a couple pistols onto a plane, then have a couple of their boys board that flight knowing where the guns are.

Not to take anything away from those brave souls who attacked the terrorists on Flight 93, but I wonder how many people would rush a couple terrorists holding .45's aimed at them. That's a pretty intimitating barrel. To be sure, some may go ahead and do it anyway, knowing their fate is sealed, but I wouldn't want security to be based on that reaction.

It would seem to me that the Administration should be sweating the possibility of such a thing happening. If it ever does and some F-16 has to shoot a passenger aircraft out of the sky, you can be sure that the blame will be laid right at the feet of whose fault it would be for not taking full precautions, George W. Bush.

Congress has passed two pieces of legislation mandating that the pilots be armed and yet the TSA continues to put roadblocks to its implementation.

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