You think that the victims of floods, famines, war, etc., have it bad? Well, it turns out that the people who really have suffered are those, like Ann Coulter, who have lived through the nightmare of airport security checks.
After five years of submissively complying with bag checks, shoe checks and underwire bra checks, Americans have now been informed that the hell we’ve been going through at the airports (but which the president and members of Congress do not go through because they refuse to fly commercial air) has been a useless Kabuki theater.
Please give generously to the “Stop Airport Goons From Pawing Ann’s Dainty Unmentionables” fund, and together we can stop this tragedy.
Also, please give generously to the “Buy Ann Coulter a Brain” campaign. After all, like President Bush Dan Quayle sorta said, a mind is a terrible thing not to have.
Ann’s column starts with two things “we” have learned from the arrests of the alleged terrorist plotters in Britain:
1) Nothing being done by airport security since 9/11 would prevent a bomb from being brought onto an airplane; and
2) This terrorist plot — like all other terrorist plots — was stopped by ethnic profiling.
Her evidence supporting the first claim:
As we now know, all the ingredients necessary to blow up an airplane can be carried in small liquid containers. Airport security has not even been looking for small liquid containers
Well, I thought “we” knew that some of the ingredients would have to be kept in a cooler (or otherwise refrigerated), and that equipment to mix up the concoction would be needed, as would some kind of electronic device to detonate the bomb.
And even so, it’s unlikely that a bomb could be produced on a plane, and even if it was, it’s even more unlikely that it could bring down a plane. Check out “Mass murder in the skies: was the plot feasible?” for details.
Now, on to the evidence of Ann’s second claim:
What stopped last week’s terrorist attack was ethnic profiling. We don’t know the details of the British intelligence work that nabbed the 24 Muslims because The New York Times has not been able to obtain that classified information and publish it on its front page yet. But it is a fact that you could not catch 24 Muslim terrorists by surveilling everyone in Britain equally.
While it is true that we don’t know all of the details of investigation (or really, any details — the British have been pretty close-mouthed about the whole thing), the word on the street is that the intelligence community got the information about the plot from informants and from intercepted communications.
In any case, it is a fact that they did not catch these suspects (it’s now down to 23) by surveilling all Muslims in Britain equally. And THAT, Ann, is what “ethnic profiling” means.
But, hey, I guess I should give Ann a break: after all, she has gone through the hell of having declasse federal employees looking at her underwear, and that has to leave some crippling emotional scars.
