Did TSA confiscate my Citre' Shine in vain?

In September 2006 I showed up at the Nashville airport packed exactly as I had when flying earlier that summer. Yes, I'd heard that 25 young Muslim men had just been arrested in the UK for plotting to use liquid explosives to blow up planes bound for America, but our life was very busy and I didn't think to check the TSA website prior to packing...I mean, who does?

Well. Losing a bottle of cheap Walgreens shampoo was no big deal, but the Citre' Shine hair gel by Schwartzkopf & Henkel really hurt. It's not cheap and it's not available locally. I had just purchased this bottle online--and it was full. It would've lasted me a year-and-a-half. Arrgh.

When I walked over to the big trash barrel, it too was full--and a TSA employee was hauling over a replacement barrel. She looked to be no happier than I was.

Did you know the TSA had banned cigarette-lighters? I was vaguely aware of it, but since I always keep my lighter in my golf bag--clearly not carry-on baggage--that ban wasn't on my radar. But wait--did you hear that the TSA has now lifted its ban on lighters? It's true. You can look it up.

And when you do, you'll see that in 2006 the TSA confiscated over 20 million lighters, with a peak of 39,000 in one day! And in second place? Knives. One-point-six million knives were confiscated in 2006. This was a full five years after 9/11 and yet the very object used to hijack the planes on that fateful day was still in the possession of 1.6 million Americans lining up to board commercial airliners. 

So here's what struck me: Americans had always carried knives onto airplanes. Before the 19 young Muslim men used knives on 9/11, no traveler on an American airliner had ever used a knife to hijack a plane. And, of course, they never blew up their shoes, or shampoo, or underwear either. 

TSA's 2006 scoreboard: 20 million lighters, 1.6 million knives, countless millions of bottles of water, of shampoo and hair-gel. So...how many terrorists did TSA catch that year? Zero. How many terrorists had they caught in 2002? Zero. 2003? 2004? 2005? Zero. Zero. Zero. Untold billions of our tax dollars have funded the TSA since its inception, but as of December 1st, 2010 the agency has never, ever caught a terrorist. Not one. Of course they're not looking for terrorists--they're looking for hair-gel. And they've gotten really good at it. 

But evidently not good enough. TSA just installed expensive full-body scanners nationwide to boost their annual take of knives and shampoo. And if you'd rather not be irradiated, they'll gladly fondle you from head-to-toe. Janet Napolitano must have a wager with Michael Chertoff that she can beat his record-setting 1.6 million annual knife harvest. Woo-hoo.

My modest suggestion: that the TSA scrutinize young foreign-born Muslim males--call it perpetrator profiling if you like. They could then dramatically cut down on time-consuming and humiliating screenings for 80 year-old Ilsa Nordquist from Bemidji, Minnesota or 3 year-old Olivia Collins from Tucumcari, New Mexico. And think of the hair-gel savings!