THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

And a tip of the hat to Skippy for the heads up. In the LA Times there was this op-ed about Bushovik airline security.

During the mid-1990s, the U.S. took into custody two Kuwaiti men who had devised the technical plan for Operation Bojinka — the name for a plan to blow up a large number of jumbo jets over the Pacific. In a test, the perpetrators in 1994 blew up an unsuspecting Japanese businessman in his seat on a Philippine domestic flight by wiring a device using a watch and liquid explosive disguised in a contact-lens case. This proved to the terrorists that they could get explosives aboard undetected.

Thanks to Philippine intelligence, the U.S. eventually arrested the two terrorists, Abdul Hakim Murad and Ramzi Ahmed Yousef. The two told the CIA about Bin Laden's plans to knock down big buildings using planes and blow up airliners using small chemical bombs. That was in 1995. (Yousef was later convicted in the U.S. for the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center.)

Thursday, the British arrested 24 people, including one airport employee. Nine of those were allegedly set to board flights carrying mini-bombs disguised as everyday liquids. The liquids were to have been mixed together on board and turned into bombs. Authorities said the terrorist cell was believed to have as many as 50 members.

A few hours later, the Bush administration put on a dog-and-pony show, with elevated alert levels and the Department of Homeland Security barring liquids on U.S. flights. The Transportation Security Administration mentioned nothing about screening the 600,000 employees who work in U.S. airports or the airport contractors who service the planes. How hard would it be for one of them to substitute an explosive in a cola can or water bottle, or even in the liquids used to clean the planes?

It was business as usual for the TSA: Give passengers and the public the illusion of security but not the reality. One TSA official — disgusted with the agency's standard practice of putting on a strong show of security at the passenger screening checkpoints while ignoring yawning holes in security elsewhere in the civil aviation system — has referred to it as "just more eye candy … feel-good stuff."

Our Dear Embattled Leader, keeping you safe since 9/11 or whenever that Anthrax guy stopped sending his letters or something.