People who secure glass houses . . . uh, Newark Airport . . . shouldn’t throw stones.
Surely that’s the lesson the Transportation Security Administration would be wise to take now that its attempt to blame the messenger for its own failings has backfired — leading senators and congressmen to ask more question about TSA practices.
The TSA first got its back up when The Post reported that screeners at Newark’s Liberty International Airport had allowed an undercover fed with an improvised explosive device stuffed down his pants to get through a screening and a secondary pat-down.
Instead of admitting the problem, the TSA took to its blog to defend itself by whining about how hard its job is. “Items are extremely hard to spot,” it complained, because testers aren’t using “a cartoonish bundle of dynamite with an alarm clock.”
Our point exactly. Do they think the terrorists are going to make it easier?
Remember, Newark Airport is where al Qaeda operatives boarded a plane on 9/11 that the brave passengers later had to force to the ground in Pennsylvania. It’s the same airport where 52 screeners had to be fired last year. And as New Jersey’s two senators noted in a letter to TSA Administrator John Pistole yesterday, it’s also the airport where another test found screeners properly “identified and took appropriate action on prohibited items in only about 25 percent of all cases.”
The senators want to know whether the breach is “a Newark-specific problem” or a problem with TSA procedures more broadly. We suspect Pistole’s appearance before a House Homeland Security subcommittee yesterday probably raised rather than alleviated their concerns.
We don’t pretend that TSA’s job is easy. But we’d have more confidence in the agency if we were sure it understood the real enemy here is the terrorists — not those trying to hold the TSA accountable for how well it does its job.