A Tale Of Two Suspects, One Of Whom Is Me: Our Whacked "Security" Priorities
Where would you put our security dollars and attention? Two options -- first, the needle in the haystack approach: putting billions upon billions of dollars into treating every single American who takes a plane as a meaningful suspect. And second, there's targeted intelligence work based on evidence that somebody seems likely to be plotting terrorist act.

Let's look at two potential suspects and how we treat such people currently and have treated them:

Suspect Number One: Detroit-born-and raised Amy Alkon, 49, an outspoken atheist who blogs critically about Islam (for commanding the slaughter of gays, apostates, and rape victims, and for calling for the death or conversion of the infidel -- a demand which many of its adherents take seriously enough to slaughter countless people who are not Muslim or not Muslim enough for their liking).

Suspect Number One's Political Belief System: Alkon is an outspoken libertarian. She believes that people should not be allowed to harm others by hurting them physically or taking their rightful property away from them and that protecting them from those harms should be the role of government.

Recent Domestic Travel By Suspect Number One (Alkon): Trip to New York to appear on Anderson Cooper Live TV show and second trip to New York to attend National Book Foundation awards gala. At neither of these events did she get weapons training, although on the second trip, she did report that her new book editor treated her and her literary agent to a very nice lunch.

Recent Foreign Travel: Alkon was taken by her boyfriend (NAME REDACTED) to Paris. Credit card receipts show that she bought large quantities of French sunblock, which has been known to keep women from looking like old bags by preventing the sun's aging effects.

Security Approach To Suspect Number One: Unskilled workers will treat Suspect Number One (Alkon) the same every single American who ever has to fly somewhere -- as if there is reasonable evidence she will blow up the plane, even though not a shred of it exists.

Security In Action: In Suspect Number One's case, this entails stopping her at the airport every time she flies so workers who would otherwise be employed at Denny's or Dress Barn can touch her breasts and vagina to make sure they aren't armed, and feel up her hair (in case she's hiding a block of C-4 under her bangs).

Suspect Number Two: Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26. Tsarnaev, a radical Muslim, was born and raised in Chechnya, one of the world's fiercest provinces. An LA Times story linked below describes Tsarnaev "as intense and given to occasional outbursts." (To be fair: Alkon, too, could be described that way, and sometimes can be heard saying, "Well, that's very rude!" to people shouting on cell phones in public places.)

To fill in a bit more of the profile, we'll turn to that LA Times piece. Andrew Tangel and Ashley Powers write about Suspect Number Two (Tamerlan Tsarnaev) in the LA Times:

Deceased Boston Marathon bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev was identified by a foreign government as a "follower of radical Islam and a strong believer" whose personality had changed drastically in just a year, according to the FBI.

As investigators considered possible motives for Monday's fatal bombings, U.S. authorities acknowledged that an unnamed government had contacted the FBI to say the 26-year-old ethnic Chechen "had changed drastically" since 2010 and was preparing to leave the United States "to join unspecified underground groups," according to an official statement from the FBI.

U.S. officials have not named the foreign nation, but it is presumed to be Russia. Tsarnaev traveled there in 2012 and stayed for six months.

...According to the FBI, the foreign government had requested information on the older brother, and the agency responded by checking U.S. government databases for information on "derogatory" telephone communications, online promotion of radical activity, associations with other persons of interest, travel history and plans, and education history. The FBI also interviewed the suspect and family members and found no terrorism activity, the agency said.

"The FBI requested but did not receive more specific or additional information from the foreign government," the statement read.

Apparently, when they heard nothing, they just said, "Mkay -- no problemo. We'll just ignore the guy."

I've argued over and over that what we need is security based on probable cause -- reasonable suspicion that somebody is up to something criminal -- to defend ourselves against terrorism. We need highly trained investigators -- those with enough of a brain to not let a guy like this be on his way, unwatched, because some Russian forgot to write back because he had too much vodka at lunch.

In short, those tens of billions we are spending on treating granny like she has a warhead in her diaper, well, that's a lovely security puppet show and one that is meaningless in terms of actual security.

We will never catch every plotter, but we'd catch a lot more of them if the vagina gropers at our airports were unemployed and we spent even a fraction of the TSA money on hiring actually intelligent intelligent officers and having them do what the Constitution allows: Use probable cause to root out probable suspects.

In other words, focus on a few people who we have reason to believe could be Muslim radicals, as opposed to children with MS and Beyonce.