Last Stop Willoughby

--Keeping Akron safe

Mr. Williams's protection fell away from him
and left him a naked target.
He's been cannonaded this afternoon
by all the enemies of his life.
His insecurity has shelled him,
his sensitivity has straddled him with humiliation
--A Stop at Willoughby, The Twilight Zone

--I only know you got the wrong man.
--Information Transit got the wrong man.
I got the right man.
The wrong one was delivered to me as the right man,
I accepted him on good faith as the right man.
Was I wrong?
--Brazil (1985)

________________

While recently visiting my aged parents it was necessary to pass through four large airports.

There was a Transportation Security Administration warning playing on a continuous loop in each: "If you see anything strange [etc.], report this to the nearest law enforcement officer." Problem was, in two of the four airports, there were no armed law enforcement types visible. In Akron-Canton, I saw a Deputy Sheriff, but Akron is not exactly a threat environment.

The next point: What will an armed cop do to protect us from an IED, or even a camel-mounted machine gun? If a terrorist is going to conduct an attack in an airport it will be done in the blink of an eye, as it was in Lod, Rome and others. However, the reality is, we will never see such an attack in the good old Homeland.

The threat in the airports of America does not originate with the travelers, but rather with the vendors.

All of our airports have inside the security zone commercial activities that have thousands of workers who bypass the outer and inner security belts with ease. This is the weakness of our system. If there is a bomb or weapon smuggled, it will be performed by an insider who is able to bypass the TSA security theatre.

Even so, it is doubtful that any terror organization, to include al-Qaeda, has the ability or operational status to carry out such an attack at this time. For a terrorist attack to have any significance, it must be sensational and symbolic; such a bombing would lack that distinction.

Al-Qaeda will use disposable people like shoe-bomber Reid or crotch bomber Abdulmutallab as a means of keeping pressure upon our infrastructure, but that threat is consistently low order. The supposed bombers that the U.S. has arrested are naught but actors in the terror theatrics.

Actors just as surely as is the TSA organization an eye candy effort which, on a daily basis, closes the barn door after the horse is out