As IF Times

link Taliban imposter: Senior Taliban leader was a fake, officials say – latimes.com.

Well duh! What was the first clue?  The guy was holding peace talks! Some may recall that the mission statement of the Taliban was to wipe out the Great Satan, kill all non believers etc etc.  The only logical reason to negotiate with the sworn enemy is either you’re out of bullets, out of suicide volunteers or in this case, if you were an impostor. It’s actually amazing no one else has gamed the system up to now, excluding Hamid Karzai of course.

If you are living in Afghanistan,  you likely spend your days watching the landscape transistion from one shade of khaki to another and nothing ever changes.  Why not pretend to represent the locals and get feted and fawned over by all the elite mucky mucks of the West?  It’s a fair bet the food is better and the beds they provide softer than the straw mat in a dusty corner of a cave that you’re accustomed to.  You get to shower and glad hand all the top officials sent to meet you.  It’s not as if it’s easy, even if you had a program, discerning the good guys from the bad over there; I mean come on, all bearded men look the same.  It could have been Cat Stevens for all anyone knew.   But you would think some cursory checks were made to verify that this guy was who he said he was. 

This has been a fairly dependable tactic on dealing with the West, supported by decades of precedence.  The root of this begins from early childhood.  As most public school teachers surely know, average decent and unassuming students don’t cause them any grief.  The really rotten kids, the misbehaving, class disrupting social misfits take up way more of the teacher’s time and attention than the well behaved kids.  It’s not lost on the little darlings that the more they misbehave, the more attention they get.

As they grow older and see that this tactic always brings about the desired response, they become even better at employing it.  In the West, they go on to Hollywood and become actors and entertainers, or they become lawyers, or they go into politics and become Democrats.  Recently there has been a new vocational direction for these folk, the area of environmental activism.  Whatever their chosen vocation, the common denominator is that the public is usually held ransom by their utterances and they themselves believe in the importance of their lives.  But I digress.

On a global scale, this tack is employed again and again by rogue nations looking for some kind of concession by the community at large, principally of course the West.  Think North Korea, think Iran, think Venezuela.  So in this particular case, the Akhtar Mohammad Mansourh impostor figures, why not dance with NATO a bit?  It’s likely that NATO was so keen on getting some discussions going, they didn’t even bother with the usual TSA style security groping.  The tip-off should have been that the impostor was sipping on a 12 year old Glenfiddich and watching Dancing With The Stars in his hotel room. This fiasco is a big red flag that the tactics being employed by our top people there mirrors the competence of  the idiotic TSA regime back here. But you cannot really blame the impostor for taking advantage of the red carpet being deployed for every nut who rattles sabres and wants attention.  The West calls it diplomacy.  The other side calls them Suckers.

link Enhanced pat-downs necessary for now, TSA chief says – CNN.com.

Neccessary? As if.  It’s as clear an admission of institutionalized idiocy as anything uttered since someone insisted icebergs were disappearing.   On the latter issue, at least those words were famously offered by a particular politician, so we all knew it was unvarnished poop despite the massive worldwide propaganda campaign.  (Incidentally we probably won’t hear much about global warming for a few months because all of the concerned protestors are off skiing at Val D’Isere enjoying the record snowfall)   In this particular case, the decree has come from the TSA,  a Frankenstein government agency that has morphed from defending the public to one that itself is terrorizing the public.  Another descent into a real life George Orwell novel.

Since this is an agency policy, political parties on both sides are reluctant to reign them in since woe be to the party that publicly opposes the TSA should any grief happen.  That party will be painted as being responsible for any ill fate that may befall anyone and all of a sudden, it’s a partisan issue. By now, numerous stories have exploded into the public space about the Mexican prison style searches now being administered by the TSA in under the cover of security.  People can search and read for themselves about the outrageous and invasive manner in which the public’s collective safety is being protected and make up their own minds.  Suffice to say, as someone commented, on a date it would be called second base. 

The alarming fact that no one seems to be willing to reign in the tactics and deeds of this domestic terror organization should disturb everyone.  There should be a bi-partisan push to bring back into line an agency which seems to be responsible to no one.  At the moment, the decrees of an unelected bureaucrat, John Pistole are carried out without pushback except for the vocal protests of Ron Paul, a Texas congressman.  We know for an absolute certainty that there are numerous other effective and more importantly, intelligent ways to truly shield air passengers from harm.  As most know, the Israelis are very adept at assessing risk by individual interviews and evaluating traveller profiles.  Of course the politically misguided fear of being labelled profilers trumps any concession to common sense in employing these same techniques over here.  Consequently, we are more willing to infringe upon the privacy of the innocent public as well as physically assault them rather than risk the scarlet letter of profiling. 

Certainly, the job of security could me made so much easier if all the terrorists had a consistent, identifiable profile.  If only they were all the same race, age and sex and whose flights originated from the middle east or North Africa.  If only they had the same religious affiliation and haircut.  If only this small group stood out conspicuously from the rest of the population.  If only there wasn’t a history of Grandmothers, children, goofy teenagers and frequent business travellers who consistently pose dangerous risks.  Yes, it’s too bad that the methods employed now are the ‘best techniques’ we have today to blunt attempted attacks. Playing real life whack-a-mole with obviously benign travellers is the best way to stop would-be terrorists.  And finally, it’s a good thing these tactics have captured every attempt in the past.  These are the brilliant techniques used today by an agency using tens of billions of dollars.  This apparently represents the acme of American ingenuity and intelligence. 

If this were all about safety and not about politically correct security Kabuki, it would make far more sense for ALL air travellers to be medicated with rophynol before all flights and then loaded like baggage  onto storage racks aboard the aircraft.  That way, all checks can be avoided, aircraft can carry many more passengers and they wouldn’t even need airline stewards.  You wouldn’t even need airlines, just FedEx or UPS.  How is this much more grotesque than the stupidity being imposed on people today?  You just can’t help but think that we have the genius of Wile E. Coyote running the TSA.  Like him, billions of dollars are spent to create elaborate contraptions to do something very simple.  He never catches the frickin bird.