The aftermath of the recent attempted bombing by a Nigerian national of a Christmas-day Northwest airlines jet bound for Detroit is as predictable as it is nonsensical.  Here is what is known so far.

Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a Nigerian national who had publicly expressed his support for the Taliban and Al-Queda in the wake of Sept. 11, had recently been exhibiting behaviour of such an anti-social nature that his own father had contacted U.S. authorities to ensure that he was placed on a terrorist watch list.  Having recently spent time in Yemen – a country well-known for housing terrorist training camps and radical madrassahs (have we already forgotten the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole in the Yemeni port of Aden in 2000?) – Abdulmutallab boarded a plane from Lagos to Amsterdam where he connected to his U.S. bound flight.  Somehow, all of this information was either unavailable or uninteresting to transportation security officials in Amsterdam.  As the plane approached its final destination in Detroit, Abdulmutallab utilized an 80mg chemical concotion sewn into his underwear to ignite an explosive — pentaerythritol tetranitrate (PETN).

In the wake of this spectacular security failure one might expect a significant revisitng of the security regime at airports around the world.  Here’s what U.S. Homeland Security the U.S. Transportation Security Administration (TSA) have come up with:

• No carry-on baggage with the exception of a small purse or diaper bag, laptop bag or back-pack.  Call me crazy here but I don’t feel any safer knowing that the three-year old beside me is going to be without her Dora DVD for the next eight hours.  Nor do I understand how anything short of all-nude flights (an intriguing security option to say the least) will protect us from a person who has sewn a powdery explosive into his underwear in a quantity 20mg LESS than the old draconian rule that prohibited carrying on liquids or gels that exceeded 100mg.  Turns out the hotel conditioner you stole in Cancun IS a threat to national security after all!
• All carry-on baggage will be searched. If it’s being searched by the same people who were unable to match a passenger name to a name on an existing terrorist watch list, I can’t say I’m brimming with confidence at the efficacy of such a search.
• All passengers will undergo a pat-down search.  Unless this is the kind of pat-down that follows dinner with a few glasses of wine, I fail to see how a pat-down is going to reveal the aforementioned explosives in my Joe Boxers.  The alternative is a commitment I’m not sure I’m prepared to make on a first date with my friendly neighbourhood TSA agent.
• It is at the pilot’s discretion whether to disable the on-board GPS channel (which displays the location of the plane in flight), whether to require all carry-on luggage to be stowed overhead rather than under the seat in front of you, whether to allow passengers to have personal items in their laps for the last hour of the flight, and whether to allow passengers to leave their seats for the last hour of the flight.  There are so many bizarre elements to this series of rules that I don’t even know where to begin.  First, is there some sort of new customer-service outreach program that airlines have initiated in conjunction with these security procedures?  I can’t remember the last time my pilot so much as looked at me much less got to know me well enough to make an informed decision at his / her discretion as to whether I’m a security threat to the aircraft.  On what basis is a pilot to exercise this discretion?  What on earth is to guide their decisions?  Can someone explain to me why it’s more desirable to blow up a plane over Windsor, Ontario than say, Topeka, Kansas or some unnamed atol in the Pacific Ocean?  While we’re on the subject, do terrorists only ‘get in the mood’ to self-detonate in the last hour before a plane lands?  Are we presuming that Mr. Abdulmutallab had to finish his scathing literary critique of the latest Salman Rushdie novel before getting around to lighting his drawers on fire?  How does keeping me from reading my Maxim magazine for the final 60 minutes of a flight protect anyone from the suicidal panties of the terrorist in the seat beside me?  Abdulmutallab didn’t slink, shifty-eyed, to the bathroom to knock together a rock and flint so as to spark his homicidal bomb…he activated it while calmly seated in his chair with nothing in his lap.

As politically incorrect as it is to say so, we are going to have to admit, sooner rather than later, that profiling passengers is not only the best way to secure our skies, it is the only way.  Rather than insisting that the mother with three young kids in tow survive a five hour flight with nothing more than a diaper change, we might want to actually READ THE TERRORIST WATCH LISTS and see whose names are on the dang things!  My Grandmother from Montreal travelling with her daughter-in-law should not attract the same TSA scrutiny as a single male from Nigeria whose last passport stamp is marked “Yemen”.  What I am proposing should not be confused as knee-jerk racial profiling but rather well thought-out and carefully considered threat-based profiling.  Race is but one of many factors (including place of origin, previous travel history, accompanying travellers) that TSA operatives must be trained to subject to additional scrutiny.  In this way, thorough screening can be done of high-risk passengers (by they named Richard Reid or Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab) without grinding the entire system to a halt.

***UPDATE***

A host of other pundits are now weighing in on the uselesness of the new TSA rules lampooned above.  For a selection of excellent columns discussing what’s right and wrong with our approach to airline security, I encourage you to peruse the links below:

David Frum: U.S. Looks for Bombs Instead of Terrorists.

David Asper: Learn a Lesson from Israel on Airport Security

Christopher Hitchens: Flying High

Cathal Kelly: The Israelification of Airport Security

Focus on Passenger Behaviour: Israeli Expert

Margaret Wente: Security Theatre of the Absurd