A terrorist from Nigeria has been charged with plotting to blow up an airliner. He carried explosives onto a plane, without being detected by security screeners. Several passengers were injured by the fire that resulted when the terrorist attempted to set off the explosives. Only the quick action of passengers put out the fire and prevented a bigger tragedy from occurring. He was allowed on the plane despite the fact that he was on a terror watch list of people suspected of ties to terrorists.
The Obama Administration has undermined airline and rail security. It is also seeking to unionize airport security screeners, which would result in collective bargaining agreements that make it even harder to get rid of incompetent and inattentive employees who overlook terrorists getting onto airplanes.
In the aftermath of 9/11, a foolish Congress shifted airline security screening to the inept Transportation Security Administration (TSA), which fails to detect explosive ingredients and fake bombs, in performance tests. Now, the Obama Administration is making matters even worse by compromising both airline security and railroad safety.
A study found that the TSA is more than twice as likely to fail to detect a bomb as the private security firms it replaced. And TSA's failure rate is three or four times as high as the few remaining private firms still allowed to handle airline security.
Rather than having the federal government take over airline security screening, the Feds should have stepped up policing and regulation of the private companies that performed it, to weed out bad companies and promote the best.
Bush initially objected to Congressional demands for a federal takeover, but then knuckled under for political reasons. Ironically, even in European countries governed by Socialist parties, airline security and screening is generally in the hands of private companies, because private companies are usually more diligent and innovative and less bureaucratic and inefficient.
The Obama Administration is also undermining the security of railroad passengers by gutting an expert, highly-rated, anti-terror agency at Amtrak, which Amtrak's unions hate, despite its efficiency, because it is not unionized. Political cronyism is also playing a role in the gutting of Amtrak’s Office of Security Strategy and Special Operations (OSSSO). Ultimately, OSSSO's "highly-specialized officers" will likely be replaced by unionized employees with "alarmingly low pass rates" in "basic" classes.
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