TSA deserves break in honey-bomb case
Which type of armchair quarterbacking would most of us prefer? The kind in which we look back on an act of mid-air sabotage carried out by a terrorist we could have, should have, and in fact did identify prior to a tragic and preventable act of mass murder? Or the kind in which we criticize and ridicule the Transportation Security Administration for shutting down the Bakersfield airport over five suspicious bottles of home-packaged honey?
Fortunately, we don't need to mourn loss of life in either case. The Christmas Day underpants bomber managed only to scorch his privates, and the Meadows Field honey was only honey.
Here's the point: The TSA can't be too careful these days. Condemning the TSA and other federal security agencies for allowing Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab to board that Dec. 25 flight to Detroit, despite ample evidence that he was an unacceptable risk, is the same thing as demanding that those government agencies turn over every rock, probe every lump and sniff every Gatorade bottle of liquid in their quest to keep us safe. They've got to do their jobs, even if it means risking the chance they'll occasionally look silly. There's no second-place prize for vigilance.
The honey in question was in bottles stored in luggage carried by a Wisconsin gardener, whose contact with fertilizer may have left trace amounts on his luggage that could have set off alerts. Fertilizer was used in the 1995 bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building; 168 people died there. Who really cares if five bottles of fertilizer is not sufficient to bring down an airplane? People in this world are working daily to visit new terror on this nation, and we're well advised to respect their skills as chemists -- even if their work has not been especially impressive thus far. They'll keep trying.
