Saturday, February 12, 2005

TSA is banning Lighters

I was flying back from Colorado on Wednesday and heard that the federal government (the TSA to be exact) is banning lighters on commerical passenger aircraft starting February 15.
This brings up a couple of questions. First, why are the banning lighters? Presumably, the answer will be to keep terrorists from lighting explosives. But the explosives are already banned. If they can get a bomb that is banned onto the plane, a lighter should not be a problem. I suppose that matchs will still be allowed.
The second quesiton is more obvious: If lighters are so dangerous that they must be banned, why wait until February 15? Why not ban them NOW?
This is a case of the Feds fighting the last war. Hijacking jets and flying them into buildings only worked for about an hour. Once passengers found out what was happening (Flight 93), the plan failed. Innocent people died, which is tragic, but the plan failed then and will fail now.
I'm not going to write where I think the next attack will take place. Why tell the enemy what they may not know already. But it is not too hard to figure out and that is where we need to put our efforts. Airliners are no longer hijackable.

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