This Week's Attack in Yemen Should Make Us Doubly Grateful for TSA Pat-Downs

All the world is now aware of the Al Qaeda suicide bomber in Yemen who blew himself up this past Monday, killing more than eighty members of a military unit who were rehearsing for a parade, in addition to wounding hundreds of spectators. As the New York Times reported on Tuesday morning, the bombing occurred "soon after the discovery of the third attempt to smuggle a bomb aboard a United States-bound jetliner by Qaeda militants based in Yemen."
 
such an event serves to highlight the point -- as any fair-minded observer will, in my view, agree -- that it is no longer necessary for terrorists to break into the cockpit of a plane to bring it down, as they did on 9/11. And passengers aboard such a plane will no longer be able to subdue a terrorist who enters the lavatory of a plane to detonate the explosives he carries on his person, or who slips through intelligence efforts by the C.I.A. and others to discover such terrorists before they reach an airport. The only remaining line of defense is the TSA, examining passengers before they board the plane and often patting them down, in addition to using explosives-detecting swabs.
 
Those self-evident conclusions, in my opinion, make awfully weak the continuing din of fierce attacks on the thoroughness with which the TSA fulfills its responsibility to keep us safe. Rather than regard the TSA's work as an anti-American, un-constitutional invasion of our liberties, I look upon our cooperation with the TSA as a patriotic act, as an assertion by the thousands of people who go through particular airport terminals each day that they are determined to keep flying despite terrorist threats, that they are engaging in a joint, communal, all-American effort to assist the TSA to defeat the terrorists.
 
You may recall that several days ago, I challenged the critics of the TSA to make positive suggestions, to tell us what they would substitute for the present procedures of the TSA In their comments (elsewhere in this blog), you will note that the majority rely on the work and rhetoric of a self-anointed so-called security expert named Bruce Schneier, author of books on cryptography and digital security, publisher of a newsletter called "Cryptogram" and a similar blog. I ploughed through the two major essays by Bruce Schneier on the TSA and, so help me, there isn't a single reasoned explanation of what he would suggest in place of the TSA, other than to vaguely state that its procedures should possess "accountability" and "transparency," whatever that means.
 
Indeed, at the end of his labored criticism of TSA tactics, he urges us to have a stiff upper lip, to assume that the terrorists will actually succeed in blowing up planes, and to face that outcome with American-style bravery. He ends his second major essay (cited by the critics of my opinions), in which he has fulminated against TSA efforts to keep terrorists off planes, saying that if we passengers refuse to be terrorized, "then the terrorists fail even if their attacks succeed."
 
."..[E]ven if their attacks succeed." In other words, if we go to our deaths with courage, then we win.
 
And by the way, earlier in the essay, he grudgingly admits it was TSA security checkpoints that earlier caused the failure of the Christmas attempt to blow up a bomb on a U.S. airliner. Because of the TSA checkpoints, he points out, Al Qaeda was not able to use metallic detonators, but had to adopt a faulty, awkward use of a syringe setting off a largely-failed twenty-minute effort in the lavatory to ignite the explosives carried by the would-be bomber. "The security checkpoints worked...," he writes.
 
So when you read these continuing efforts by writers we thought were serious, attempting to ridicule the TSA's work and make it into an un-American incursion on our liberties, ask yourself the question that I have repeated over and over: what do they suggest? Should we simply walk onto planes without undergoing security checks? Shall we really revert to pre-9/11 procedures that failed so miserably on the morning of 9/11? Or should we cooperate with the TSA and together work towards the defeat of terrorism.