We’ve gone way too long without a bogus terror alert from BushCo. This time it’s a Transportation Security Administration bulletin describing what it calls “pre-attack security probes and ‘dry runs’ similar to dress rehearsals.” It’s all about the cheese in two cases…
Back in September 2006, the report says a search of a couple’s luggage at Baltimore’s airport turned up a block of processed cheese in a plastic bag taped to another plastic bag holding a cellular phone charger.
On June 4 in Milwaukee, another search of a bag produced more cheese, this time connected to a phony trigger/initiator, an electrical switch, batteries, and three tubes.
Why are they telling this now? Oh yes, it was somehow leaked to the media, as Dear Leader’s faltering military adventure has him bleating that the violence in Iraq is tied directly Osama — and that’s why the U.S. has to stay the course. Desperate times call for desperate suggestive “terror alerts.” Even the TSA had to ratchet down the suggestion that something specific was afoot.
“There is no credible, specific threat here,” TSA spokeswoman Ellen Howe said Tuesday. “Don’t panic. We do these things all the time.”OK, now anyone carrying phony bombs at the very least needs to be under investigation; I can’t imagine how a passenger could explain a legitimate reason for a carry-on “cheese bomb,” but if there was a real threat (out of those 90), one would assume the TSA would have made this information public long ago.A statement posted late Tuesday by the TSA on its Web site confirmed that “a routine TSA intelligence bulletin relating to suspicious incidents at U.S. airports” had leaked to news organizations. The statement added, “During the past six months TSA has produced more than 90 unclassified bulletins of this nature on a wide variety of security-related subjects.”
…The bulletin said the passengers carrying the suspicious items seized since September included men and women and that initial investigation had not linked them with criminal or terrorist organizations. But it added that most of their explanations for carrying the items were suspicious and some were still under investigation.
Meanwhile, a seven-year-old boy is repeatedly delayed at the airport – he ended up on the no-fly list as a “known threat to aviation” because he shares the name of someone else who is legitimately on the list. Even though his mom tells her son’s age at the time she books a flight, they are still denied ease of booking and boarding as everyone else because our security system is broken.
Keith Olbermann discussed the nexus of politics and terror. Watch it after the flip.
25 Responses to “‘Deadly’ airbound cheese”
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Can we expect more vague warnings of Al-Gouda to come from the Bushies in the days to come?
Will the sun rise in the east tomorrow morning?
Just don’t accept the genever.
Why, exactly, would they bother with a dry run? If you can get arrested for just saying “I have a bomb,” no matter what a search of your luggage reveals, surely they’d recognize that it’s pointless to make a bomb out of something that wouldn’t explode if they got it through? Unless the post-alarm investigation consists of asking the suspects if they’re sure that they’re not not a terrorist, any suspicious activity, connections, and/or purchases are going to come to light, and you’re not going to get a chance to go through with a real attack. It’s one of those one-shot deals.
I understand they’re hearing some extra cheddar from Al-Gouda…
But wouldn’t the world be a much better–if, perhaps, more odd-smelling–place if terrorists did switch to cheesebombs?
“But wouldn’t the world be a much better–if, perhaps, more odd-smelling–place if terrorists did switch to cheesebombs?”
But what of the vegans who might be pepperjacked with de brie from them?
Oh great, now because of my title I’ll be on the No Fly List… Next we’re gonna hear quotes from John Cleese et al.
I’m just imagining a brie bomb in downtown boston, everyone scattering as bits of soft cheese get stuck in their hair, the rind never coming off fully, and hanging off people’s faces. Quelle terreur !
I would be careful in assuming these were “dry-runs.”
Government watch-dog groups, news organizations, and even government or government contracted agents routinely test the security policies of government agencies. The agencies in question do not always know they are being tested.
The good news, I guess, is that TSA passed.
The bad news is that this information was leaked in the most alarming way possible, in order to create the illusion of terrorist activity.
The tip off for me is that the past activities cited as examples of dry runs are all publicly disclosed and some are not very good examples of dry runs. They were sensationalized and used as PR stunts for the Bush administration and much of the information initially disclosed about them were self-serving and debunked. Still since they exist in the public knowledge already, they are the perfect examples to cite to, if the goal of your memo is to leak to the press for sensationalist purposes.
This is consistent with the Bush Administration’s tactic, outlined beautifully by Keith Olberman in the posted video, of scaring the bejesus out of Americans for political gain.
I wrote about the pitfalls of this not too long ago at the link below.
http://theburningcouch.wordpress.com/2007/07/12/gut-feelings-al-qaeda-and-the-meaning-of-strength/
Improvised Edam Devices
Actually, it’s VERY effective, as that placement of objects breaks no law, since they don’t even come close to simulating a bomb. Assuming your operative is “clean”, all that happens is he/she gets placed on a watch list. “You hooked up your cheese” is about all the feds can come up with, and in the meantime, al-Q finds another TSA checkpoint too hard to get through and crosses another potential airport off its list, and potentially gets to scream “profiling” and sue if the detention/questioning of the operative is too onerous.
The no-fly list is rife with problems, not the least of which is its false positive rate, but the nature of the person caught by the false positive is entirely immaterial to the security of the system.
“The bad news is that this information was leaked in the most alarming way possible, in order to create the illusion of terrorist activity.”
That’s not a bug, it’s a feature.
Gotta keep ‘em drinking the Kool Aid as long as possible…
“The no-fly list is rife with problems, not the least of which is its false positive rate…”
This too is a feature and not a bug. All these messages work in synergy to maintain the pervasive state of fear needed to keep the Reichwing in power a little bit longer…
Pamela, about the Conservative Threat system, it should be at Red/Severe, because they are at it again, threating to terrorize the Senate and shut it down if they refuse to issue a blank check on Bush’s Taliban judges.
These cheese bombs were detected, this time. How many more were not?
And I’m not sure they can’t say that a cheese bomb isn’t terrorism. If making a joke about having a bomb is illegal, likely a prop bomb would be, too.
Quelle terreur!
Uh, I think you mean quel terroir!
OK, maybe I’m dumb, but I just don’t get this. Did someone stick wires into a hunk of cheese as a joke? A test? WTF?
All of the objects described appear, on further reporting, to have pretty darn obvious non-terrorist-related explanations. And yet when the TSA does tests with, say, actual weapons and explosives they seem to go right through…
Hey paul, what is the whole story of the cheese bombs? Just curious…
I think it is good joke. A natural reaction to the unnecessary security by pranksters hassling the hasslers.
I feel bad for that boy!Another reason why I’m glad I don’t have to fly often.
I was carrying some cheese and a phone charger in luggage on my last trip. I guess it wasn’t enough cheese make someone think it was a bomb. (If you had enough explosive to look like a 2-pound brick of cheese you could probably knock down a significant part of the airport…)
Because, of course, there’s no legitimate reason to have a couple of blocks of cheese in your luggage when you’re flying out of the main airport in America’s Dairyland.
:::eyeroll:::