This past week a man walked through an emergency door at San Diego International airport, on to the tarmac and boarded a United Express plane.  He did all this without a ticket or boarding pass and was never frisked or questioned by TSA agents.

 

After 10 years of fear and paranoia we still have failures in a system that you could drive a truck through.  38 year old Marc Duncan was paroled from jail the night before where he had been held for theft.  Duncan waltzed through an emergency door and set off a very annoying alarm but yet TSA officials took four minutes to respond.  Imagine the horror that could be done in four minutes.  Duncan could have been armed and shot up the plane.  He could have had a bomb and blown up the plane, passengers and crew.

San Diego Harbor Police Chief John Bolduc said, "The guy did breach security, but he was caught, we have multiple layers of security built into airports, as you know, and the backup systems were able to catch this guy."

I submit to Chief Bolduc that they lucked-out in catching this guy!  The TSA had nothing to do with it.  A stewardess noticed that she had one too-many passengers when she check her count and notified the tower otherwise this guy could have gone on to Los Angeles.  TSA spends too much time and effort searching 85 year old people in wheel chairs or 2 year olds with soggy diapers.  We need to do as the Israelis do.  They don't use jaded 'rent-a-cops' but instead use heavily armed and trained people to intimidate the wrongdoers into acting nervous.  Then they profile and screen the heck out of the people that act paranoid.  The Israelis don't have incidents like Mr. Duncan and they don't have terrorists taking off from Tel Aviv!

Sure only about 2 million passengers fly through Ben Gurion Airport at Tel Aviv each year so the cost to the USA government would be much greater but how much are we wasting now?  We have x-ray machines and high-tech scanners bought and stored at enormous cost but still miss the occasional whacko.  I find the TSA to be totally unacceptable.

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