The SF Chronicle reports what a lovely job our newly federalized airline security "experts" are doing.

I thought it was bad enough when private contractors hired by the airport were ignoring regulations that required background checks and some modicum of training, but it seems the feds, in their own inimitable way, can one-up even that.

The TSA's Mobile Screening Force is alleged to be the "elite" team of screeners that is to go around to the various airports helping train the new screeners to be hired nationwide in the operation of the new bomb detection equipment. The law creating this force (part of a three billion buck bill passed by Congeress in the wake of 9/11) requires that they get forty hours of classroom training, followed by sixty hours of further on-the-job training.

Some of them have gotten as little as fifteen minutes.

That wonderfully efficient and charismatic Norm Mineta, (coming to a lynch mob near you soon) the head of the TSA, has promised that the new screeners he is hiring will do much better than the current private screeners, as they will be trained to higher standards. It kinda makes you wonder what the private compainies are doing. I think they'd have to be lobotomizing all new hires to make them any less qualified.

But it gets worse. TSA spokesflak Greg Warren defends the practice, by claiming that the training requirements only applies to passenger screeners, not luggage screeners, despite the text of the law which reads: "a security screener may not use any security screening device or equipment . . . unless the individual has been trained . . . and has successfully completed a test on the use of the device or equipment."

I guess, then, a baggage screener is not a "security screener," and the high dollar explosive detection machines are not a "device" or "equipment."

It gets worse. The TSA also defended the practice by claiming these untrained screeners were working under the eye of "expert supervisors," so everything would be A-OK. As it turns out, some of these supervisors were also new hires that were expert only in that they were less inadequately trained - they had received the mandated forty hours classroom training, though not the followon sixty hours of OJT.

The TSA has, however, managed to hire, as we approach the fourth quarter, 16,500 of the 54,000 (about one-third) screeners the law requires them to have in place by the end of the year. It makes one wonder what sort of training those folks are going to get.

As a final flourish, the TSA has forbidden any of its employess from talking to the press about lapses such as these, for reasons of national security. This is ludicrous, as all the Bad Guys have to do to find out anything they want to know is go and apply for a job as a screener. It's been demonstrated that they'll get hired and trained, to include learning all the secrets the public is not supposed to know, before their background check is completed.

The reason they're trying to clamp down on this information is because they don't want the Sheepul to know what a botch they're making of this job, as they'll quit flying even more than they already have.

Can someone, anyone, tell me how Norman Mineta still has a job?

Meanwhile, in Congerss, the Democrats, ensnared for life in the clutches of the labor unions, particularly those for federal employees, are fighting with the President over giving him the emergency authority to hire and fire federal security employees without going through the exhaustive process that is the modus operandi for the rest of the civil service beauracracy. The airlines are losing billions of dollars every year, and are trying to make it up by increasing the various miscellaneous fees that don't appear in the standard ticket prices, such as fees for rescheduling a flight. Flying has become a huge PITA, more expensive, and no more safe than it was on Sept. 10, 2001.

We are witnessing the destruction of an industry, courtesy of our federal government.

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