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TSA Explains It All for You

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By Timothy Noah
Posted Friday, Aug. 11, 2006, at 11:52 AM ET

Law enforcement officials in the United Kingdom have arrested two dozen people suspected of plotting to blow up commercial passenger jets flying from London to the United States. The plot is said to have involved sneaking liquid explosives onto planes. It isn't clear whether all the conspirators have been captured and the plot entirely foiled. The Transportation Security Administration weighed in immediately with new rules about what passengers departing from airports in the United States may and may not bring in their carry-on luggage. The rules are so new, and were apparently assembled in such haste, that not even TSA seems very clear about what they are. The FAQ reprinted below, copied on Aug. 10 from the TSA Web site, raises nearly as many questions as it answers. The FAQ has since been redesigned (click here to see it), with one feature that allows readers to request updates and another that invites readers to vote on how responsive a particular answer is. (Making the answers responsive in the first place either wasn't possible or never occurred to the people who prepared the FAQ.) The text, though rearranged, remains essentially the same.

To read the footnotes on the document below, roll your mouse over the passages highlighted in yellow.

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This is a strangely literal-minded formulation. All it means is that the plotters didn't plan on TELLING anybody before they blew the planes up. That they planned to blow the planes up is not in dispute, according to news accounts; authorities had them under surveillance.
I puzzled over this for a long while before concluding that this is just an unusually awkward attempt at flowery language. "Pack your patience" is an attempted metaphor for "be very patient." But it's confusing, because "pack" connotes "put away." In fact, TSA wants its passengers to UNpack their patience and carry it with them through security, where they'll most need it. But the whole formulation is ill-conceived. Mysteriously, it still survives in the redesigned Web site.
Slate's William Saletan points out that prescription labels can be faked and existing prescription bottles emptied out and refilled with nefarious substances.
What's interesting about this answer is that it doesn't even pretend to answer the question. Apparently TSA has yet to rule on whether eyeliner will be permitted.
This is misleading. TSA-the-agency does not require, officially, that passengers sample fluids or beverages, as some foreign governments do. But according to a much more helpful FAQ in the Aug. 11 Washington Post, some individual TSA agents have been requiring passengers to sample the fluids. The Post's FAQ can be found at: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/graphic/2006/08/11/GR2006081100055.html
This, to me, is the most alarming news of all. That TSA would impose a SECOND screening process at the gate, which is certain to be a nighmare for both passengers and TSA, suggests to me that intelligence and law enforcement agencies are seriously worried by what they've learned. Nobody would impose a bag check at the gate unless they felt they had absolutely no choice.
Surely TSA knows this dodges the question. We can detect liquids and we can detect explosives. But can we detect liquid explosives? I take TSA's answer as a "no."
Is this really being kept secret because of the ongoing investigation? Or is it being kept secret because governments don't want to cause unnecessary panic? If it's the latter, it may well be justified. Remember how irritating it was back when Homeland Secretary Tom Ridge was issuing vague warnings along the lines of, "If you go to New York or California on such-and-such a date, don't blame me if you get blown up"?
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By Timothy Noah
Posted Friday, Aug. 11, 2006, at 11:52 AM ET
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Timothy Noah is a senior writer at Slate.
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