The American Spectator

p> TSA’s efforts to search passengers ignores many other threats. Air freight typically goes unexamined. Service workers such as caterers and baggage handlers receive little scrutiny. Perimeter security is spotty at best. The document used to enter the gate area is a boarding pass, which can be easily duplicated using a scanner. Given all this, it’s fortunate there have been no further domestic terror attacks. Perhaps Bush’s preemption doctrine deserves credit. br> — Ian Callum /p>

The metric I use to assess airport security is very simple: if I myself am not subjected to extra intense scrutiny, then the airport and the flight I’m on are definitely not secured. Reason is, I am a very suspect-looking son of a bitch. I would pull me off the line every time and do strip and body-cavity searches. I’m usually traveling alone, I’m swarthy and Middle Eastern looking, I’m generally nervous and twitchy, travel without checked luggage, speak a Middle Eastern language into my cell phone and carry books, newspapers and other printed matter in a Middle Eastern language, much of which has photos such luminaries as Osama, Yasser, and Assad the Younger. The usual suspects. And don’t try to tell me the TSA employees can distinguish Hebrew from Arabic!

Like Groucho, who famously said he wouldn’t join any country club that would have him as a member, I don’t board any flight calmly when I’m permitted to board without getting the third degree.

Sadly, I slip through TSA security like a hot knife through butter. In the course of flying about 100,000 miles over the past 18 months, I’ve been given extra scrutiny (the “random” gate search) exactly once. In Raleigh-Durham, where they took Jed Babbin’s armor-piercing cigar lighter.

My kid recently made it through FLL security on a flight to LGA with a couple of live 9mm rounds in his jacket pocket, souvenirs of our lovely bonding day at the pistol range here in Florida. He looks even more menacing than I do, and has a Levantine given name to boot.

And I made it through FLL and again through JFK on a trip to Tel Aviv (!!!) with the tote bag we’d had at the range that day. Repacking it in Tel Aviv for my flight back to Florida, my wife found a few more 9mm rounds in one of the interior pockets. Somehow, I think these would have been found at Ben Gurion airport.

My personal, subjective impression is that U.S. airport security is <= (less than or equal to) what it was pre 9/11.

p>Having said that, it seems to me it is even worse in the UK. I’ve been through Gatwick several times this year, and each time, when I removed my laptop to pass it, exposed, through the machine, the inspector scornfully informed me that this was unnecessary. The last one, in August, added: “Here in Britain, we’re professionals!” Britain seems to have taken the position that the “phoniness” of the threat posed by Saddam extends to all of the Islamofascist hosts. br> — Paul Kotik /p> p> I read somewhere, strategypage.com I believe, that ground fired missiles could not take down a 737 or any plane bigger than a 737. Is this a true statement and does the