terrorist

Washington Subway Terrorist Bomb Plot Leads to Arrest

by Hans Bader on October 28, 2010

in Labor, Mobility, Regulation

Federal authorities arrested Farooque Ahmed for plotting to bomb the Washington Metro subway system.  Ahmed, who immigrated from Pakistan, “conspired with people he thought to be al-Qaeda operatives to bomb the Arlington Cemetery, Pentagon City, Crystal City and Court House stations, according to a federal indictment.”

Don’t count on the subway system itself to guard against terrorism, though.  Many of the Washington, D.C. Metro’s unionized employees are incompetent or grossly overpaid, and some simply disregard threats to public safety, as a letter writer recently chronicled in The Washington Post.  Members of its governing board, like Arlington County politician Chris Zimmerman, have turned a blind eye to incompetence, waste, and safety hazards at Metro, even while jacking up subway fares by massive amounts. Federal investigators rebuked the subway system for a “systemic breakdown of safety management at all levels” that led to the deadly Red Line crash last summer and other fatal accidents.

The Obama administration is undermining airline and railroad security against terrorist attacks by pushing policies that benefit public employee unions at the expense of competence and public safety.

TSA Praises Itself After Year of Security Lapses; Obama Administration Backs TSA Unionization at Public Expense

by Hans Bader on December 31, 2009 · 1 comment

in Employment, International, Labor, Mobility, Personal Liberty, Politics as Usual, Precaution & Risk

In a year-end message to Transportation Security Administration (TSA) staff, the agency praised itself for a “very good year” in airline security, despite repeated security failures.  But, as ABC News notes,

The message made no mention of TSA snafus during 2009, including several highly critical reports by the inspector general for the Department of Homeland Security and the inadvertent posting on the Internet of confidential documents revealing airport security procedures.

Recently, a Nigerian terrorist nearly managed to blow up an airliner, after being allowed on the plane despite being on a terror watch list.  He set fire to explosives, but was thwarted at the last minute when vigilant passengers put out the fire. Amazingly, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano claimed that the episode showed that “the system worked.”

The Obama administration is now trying to unionize the TSA., which will make it even more cumbersome, slow-moving, and bureaucratic.  The Washington Examiner explains why that is a very bad idea that would undermine travelers’ safety.  Union-mandated “collective bargaining would cripple the TSA,” stripping the TSA of “its flexibility to move people . . . and change protocols when it believes there is a terrorist threat,” requiring “TSA managers to share sensitive intelligence information with union negotiators . . . increasing the possibility of damaging leaks,” and restricting managers from rewarding ”high-performing screeners or fire those unable or unwilling to perform their duties in an efficient manner.”

The TSA is now reportedly planning to impose additional pointless restrictions on airline passengers, such as limiting access to blankets, and requiring passengers to stay in their seats during the last hour of flight, even though it was a passenger who got out of his seat during the last hour of flight who thwarted the recent attempted terrorist attack by putting out the fire the Nigerian terrorist had set to the explosives he carried on the plane.

For more on the TSA see here.

Terrorist Charged After Trying to Blow Up Plane; Government Undermines Airline and Railroad Security

by Hans Bader on December 27, 2009 · 3 comments

in Employment, Labor, Mobility, Politics as Usual, Precaution & Risk

An alleged terrorist from Nigeria has been charged with plotting to blow up an airliner.  He carried explosives onto a plane and set them on fire.   Only the quick action of passengers put out the fire and prevented an explosion.  He was allowed on the plane despite the fact that he was on a terror watch list.

Despite this utter failure, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano claims that “the system worked” because no one died. Her agency is now planning to make overseas air travel much more onerous, by banning passengers from getting out of their seats during the last hour of a flight (even though a passenger who did just that that foiled the terrorist attempt) and by restricting carry-on luggage and items like blankets on flights.

In the aftermath of 9/11, Congress shifted airline security screening to the inept Transportation Security Administration (TSA), which fails to detect explosive ingredients and fake bombs, in performance tests.  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.

In tests, TSA failed to detect fake bombs 60 percent of the time at Chicago’s O’Hare airport, and 75 percent of the time in Los Angeles. Yet the Obama administration plans to make TSA even more bureaucratic by introducing collective bargaining, which will make it even harder to get rid of incompetent employees.

Rather than having the federal government take over airline security screening, the feds should have stepped up policing 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.

Fort Hood’s Lessons: Treat People Equally, Without Politically Correct Double Standards

by Hans Bader on November 9, 2009

in Legal, Personal Liberty, Politics as Usual, Sanctimony

Intelligence officials knew that Nidal Hasan, the soldier who killed 13 people at Fort Hood, was trying to contract Al Qaeda.  (He once attended the same mosque as 9/11 terrorists.)

Although the killer’s extremist rantings were common knowledge, “a fear of appearing discriminatory . . . kept officers from filing a formal written complaint,” reports the Associated Press.  As a result, he escaped any disciplinary action or review of his fitness.

The Fort Hood shooter had previously said that Muslims should rise up against the military, “repeatedly expressed sympathy for suicide bombers,” was pleased by the terrorist murder of an army recruiter, and publicly called for the beheading or burning of non-Muslims, talking “about how if you’re a nonbeliever the Koran says you should have your head cut off, you should have oil poured down your throat, you should be set on fire.”  But thanks to a politically-correct double standard, nothing was done to remove him from a position where he could harm others.

The lesson of the Fort Hood shootings is that applying politically-correct double standards, rather than treating people equally, can be lethal.

In a desire to curry favor with the liberal Congress that funds it, the military has increasingly adopted politically-correct policies that abandon equal treatment, such as imposing racial preferences in admissions to the military academies in the name of “diversity.”  (In practice, “diversity” seems to mean “racial proportionality:” it is harder for Asians to be admitted to the academies than for whites and Hispanics, and harder for whites and Hispanics to be admitted than for African-Americans.  Such preferences are of dubious legality under Supreme Court precedent.)

In this climate of political correctness and double standards, it is understandable that officers were afraid to file complaints about Hasan, for fear that they would incur the wrath of the “diversity” police.  Even now, the Army Chief of Staff, General George Casey, seems mainly concerned that the shootings will undermine the army’s commitment to “diversity,” rather than being concerned about the double standard that spawned this tragedy.  He seems more concerned that “diversity” will become a “casualty” of such shootings than that his soldiers will.

President Obama’s initial response to the tragedy was embarrassing, even for some liberal journalists.  Obama’s initial remarks about the tragedy came buried in the middle of a speech laced with “wildly disconnected” ramblings about an unrelated topic, starting with a “joking shout-out.”  Even the liberal Boston Globe chided the president for a speech lacking in ”empathy” for the victims.

In an absurd display of political correctness, early media reports chose to harp on the false claim that the killer had PTSD (which he didn’t: he never even served overseas) or the unsupported claim that he had been subjected to harassment (support groups for Muslim soldiers say they have received no recent reports of a Muslim soldier being harassed “simply because he was Muslim”).  They also jumped to conclusions in denying (as Atlantic Magazine’s Max Fisher did) that the shooter’s motives had anything to do with his extreme religious beliefs or “any related political causes.”

In the aftermath of the shootings, some commentators have criticized a gun-control policy that disarms soldiers while on military bases to create “gun-free zones,” leaving them defenseless in the face of an attack.  The policy succeeded in disarming the killer’s victims, but not the killer himself.