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Good lord, these people are nuts.

Consistently wrong since 2002

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T R E 4 5 O N

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DeSantis transforms Florida into 1930s Germany with gators and theme parks.

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You are here: Home / Politics / War on Terror / War on Terror aka GSAVE® / So Why Tell Them?

So Why Tell Them?

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Why are we hearing about this now?

Police across the country should be on the lookout for what could be “dry runs” for a terrorist attack, the Transportation Security Administration advised after series of suspicious incidents occurred at U.S. airports.

An unclassified advisory, sent July 20 from TSA to law enforcement agencies, raised the possibility that recent activity could be “pre-attack security probes.”

CNN obtained the advisory from a government source.

The TSA downplayed the significance of the advisory in a statement released to the media following its leak.

The TSA said it was one of more than 90 bulletins sent to police in the past six months “with the intent to provide as much information as possible to our front line officers.”

“There is no intelligence that indicates a specific or credible threat to the homeland,” the TSA said.

The advisory details four incidents from the past 11 months in which screeners found unusual objects with items that could mimic bomb components in passengers’ checked or carry-on bags.

In one case last September, a couple in Baltimore, Maryland, checked a plastic bag with a block of processed cheese taped to another plastic bag containing a cell phone charger. Earlier this month in San Diego, California, a passenger checked a bag containing two ice packs covered in duct tape. The ice packs had clay in them instead of the normal blue gel.

A.) Why am I hearing about a block of cheese from nine months ago?

B.) Wouldn’t it be smarter to let the dangerous block of cheese go through, let them think their efforts at planting an explosive cheddar succeeded, and then monitor the milk product and its owners? Aren’t they now going to work on a better cheddar?

Or does this new scare have anything to do with this or this?

Reader Interactions

33Comments

  2. 2.

    Punchy

    About the “clay” in ice packs…

    San Diego Harbor Police Chief Kirk Sanfilippo said the incident involved a bag checked by a woman in her 60s flying out of Lindbergh Field.
    Sanfilippo said a routine swab test of the bag indicated the presence of a chemical that is sometimes used in explosives or medications. Inside the luggage, inspectors found cold packs, wrapped in clear packing tape, that were old and leaking.

    The TSA bulletin said the ice packs were covered in duct tape and had clay inside of them.

    Sanfilippo said they weren’t covered in duct tape and didn’t have clay inside of them. “It is a little bit off,” he said of the bulletin.

    The chief said a Harbor Police officer found what appeared to be hardened old gel that had seeped out of the ice packs and dried, leaving a clay-like substance around the outside edge of the pack.

    . . .

    In all, it took about three hours for the woman’s luggage to be cleared by security officials.

    After the packs were cleared, the woman told authorities she didn’t want to keep them and they were thrown away, Sanfilippo said.

    That’s your (supposedly non-political) TSA working to keep things accurate.

  3. 3.

    Shabbazz

    A.) Why am I hearing about a block of cheese from nine months ago?

    Probably because two White House officials are (rightfully) being charged with contempt of Congress. Nothing buries those unpleasant headlines like the ole shuck-and-jive FEAR-FOR-YOUR-LIFE routine. It works every time!

  4. 4.

    Wilfred

    OH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

    Twenty-twenty-twenty four hours to go
    I wanna be al-Qaeda’d
    Nothing to do
    Nowhere to go
    I wanna be al-Qaeda’d
    Just get me to the airport
    And put me on a plane
    Hurry hurry hurry before I go insane
    I can’t control my fingers
    I can’t control my brain
    Oh no oh no
    Just put me in a diaper
    And get me to the show
    Hurry hurry hurry before I start to blow
    I cant control my bladder
    I cant control myself
    Oh no oh no

  6. 6.

    ConservativelyLiberal

    Why did they not use some kid that was bringing their Play-doh on a trip to visit their grandparents? I am sure that has happened before. Next we will hear about plans to smuggle on explosive ham sandwiches…

    This is nothing more than:

    ‘Look! A whole herd of jackalopes! And they are doing hand stands, wow!‘

  7. 7.

    jake

    No wait, this makes perfect sense, I see it all now!

    A week or so ago, DHS Headcase Mike Squirtoff said he had a “gut feeling,” that the turrists would try something in this summer. Could it be … these intestinal disturbances were caused by … CHEESE?

    Wait, I had another thought!

    Many people are lactose intolerant. What if a bunch of turrists posing as tourists ate a crap load of cheese before boarding a flight from NYC to LA? Six hours of Chernobyl farts and overflowing toilets leaking toxic fumes would have passengers fighting to leap out of the emergency exits!

    Clearly the only way we can save ourselves is to kill all of the cows before they kill us!

    Maybe we should all follow this writer’s lead and indulge in a little navel gazing:

    “Oh glorious loyal and hardworking gut,” I said. “Thank you for efforts in digesting those two honey-laden croissants and tub of low-fat raspberry yogurt but now you are charged with an even higher calling.

    “One of your gurgling colleagues warns of another 9/11-type event. The original sparked two invasions, a network of secret prisons, a proliferation of US bases and the introduction of authoritarian laws. What say you might happen this time around?”

  10. 10.

    Jon H

    “Sanfilippo said a routine swab test of the bag indicated the presence of a chemical that is sometimes used in explosives or medications.”

    Uh, like nitroglycerin?

    DOWN ON THE GROUND, GRAMPS, OR SHOULD I SAY “OSAMA”? THAT PALE COMPLEXION ISN’T FOOLING ANYONE!

  11. 11.

    Jon H

    Maybe the cheese was taped to the charger so it would be less likely to be stolen by a TSA agent?

  12. 12.

    ConservativelyLiberal

    Stay tuned, senior citizens are making dry suicide runs on planes! They’re lactose intolerant and are smuggling cheese along with their nitroglycerin pills. If they had not been noticed, a group of them were going to board one plane, eat the cheese, cut the cheese, sprinkle pills all over and flick a lighter to set it all off in mid-air!

    jake almost had it right! ;)

  13. 13.

    jake

    ::snap::

    Is that a finger snap or a mouse trap snap?

    Stay tuned, senior citizens are making dry suicide runs on planes!

    [Insert Depends joke here]

    Or not.

  14. 14.

    Rome Again

    Is that a finger snap or a mouse trap snap?

    Finger hon. I would never hurt you, despite what our new resident troll thinks, I do have compassion. ;)

  15. 15.

    Wil

    Just another example of the Bush administration doing its very best to terrorize Americans and keep us all subservient and under control.

  16. 16.

    Dreggas

    Oh c’mon, it’s got nothing to do with shrub making an ass of himself. It’s got everything to do with the fact that Gonzo perjured himself in front of congress 6 ways to sunday yesterday AND the DOJ basically told congress to go fuck itself when it comes to prosecuting contempt charges. Given that it’s coming out on a wednesday look for the real jackalope to come tomorrow or friday.

  17. 17.

    RandyH

    I just posted the following comment and it disappeared after a long wait. Thankfully I copied the text before it went bye-bye. Let’s see if it works this time around…

    Obviously fear mongering propaganda campaigns aren’t working on us anymore. And I watch the news and they breathlessly report all of this scary stuff like it’s fact. But they’re all actors in front of a camera nowadays. So I am curious.

    Do any of you actually know many people who fall for this shit anymore? I don’t, but I don’t have alot of social interaction with many people from day to day. So really… Is this garbage PR working anymore? Are we all just feared-out? I hope so.

  18. 18.

    scarshapedstar

    Personally, if I were tracking down a terrorist cell, I’d make frequent public announcements saying so.

  19. 19.

    jg

    Do any of you actually know many people who fall for this shit anymore?

    Yes. They might realize the gov’t is exagerating shit but they hate liberals so they put up with it.

  20. 20.

    Dave

    The thing that really pisses me off about all these fake terrorism warnings is one day it will be true, one day there will be reason to be alert and the country will have long since tuned it out as another boy who cried wolf story.

    I guess this is all apart of Bush making us more safe.

  21. 21.

    demimondian

    Yah. Dave nails it: the problem here is the “cry wolf” syndrome. Sooner or later, one of these is going to be real, and lots of people are going to ignore it.

  22. 22.

    ThymeZone

    Or does this new scare have anything to do with this or this?

    Yes, this “scare” has to do with those things.

    But for me, mainly it has to do with the fact that the same people who ignored the real proximate threat that turned out to be 911 are now telling us stories about cheese.

    What is the message? Clearly, that they have no respect for us whatever. And, the feeling is more than mutual.

  24. 24.

    Wilfred

    From the L.A. Times story:

    “Yet despite all the evidence, some will tell you that Al Qaeda in Iraq is not really Al Qaeda and not really a threat to America,” the president continued. “Well, that’s like watching a man walk into a bank with a mask and a gun and saying’s he’s probably just there to cash a check.”

    Cheesus H. Spoof. I’ll bet he came up with that one himself.

  25. 25.

    jake

    “Well, that’s like watching a man walk into a bank with a mask and a gun and saying’s he’s probably just there to cash a check.”

    One could also say that it’s like watching a smirking, spoiled shaved chimp in a suit who has failed at everything he’s done before stand up and drawl “I’m going to fix America!” and thinking “I’m going to vote for him.”

    Do any of you actually know many people who fall for this shit anymore?

    Nope, but I live in the DC/Metro area. Anyone over the age of 30 (?) grew up knowing the place was a Target # 1 for a rocket from Russia. Vague threats about some guys who might get hold of a dirty bomb?

    Snore.

    We also grew up hearing that if we didn’t allow the guvmint to build a bazillion dollar anti-nuke catcher’s mitt in space we would get vaporized.

    Snore.

    Plus, this place is BDS Central.

  26. 26.

    ET

    I find the whole incident about the icepacks so terribly typical. Apparantely TSA either didn’t wait for a full report on the whole thing before releasing that alert or they knew it wasn’t a training run and said it was anyway. I often wonder if they are deliberately trying to make themselves look bad.

  27. 27.

    Faux News

    Can we get back to more important topics now? For example Senators, diapers, and whores?

  28. 28.

    myiq2xu

    Winston Churchill:
    “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.”

    Franklin D. Roosevelt
    “We have nothing to fear, but fear itself.”

    George W. Bush:
    “I have nothing to offer, but fear itself.”

  30. 30.

    croatoan

    Maybe they’re warning about a West Wing rerun. We’ll need a Wheat Thin the size of Lake Tahoe.

    And we shouldn’t dismiss the lethality of cheese-based weapons. In Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid, Nazis destroyed Terre Haute, Indiana, with a deadly cheese mould “so powerful it could decompose rocks, trees and mountains.”

  31. 31.

    Jake

    If you haven’t done so already, I would suggest buying duct tape and plastic sheets and covering up your windows and doors.

    But don’t eat any cheese once you’ve sealed yourself in.

  32. 32.

    WilyWondr

    Mistake #1 of the TSA was saying anything bad having to do with cheese at the Milwaukee airport. We take our cheese very seriously here. Just ask the California Dairy Council. Do you know how many people fly out of the Milwaukee airport with cheese in their luggage? I would say hundreds in the last week. There is a store inside of the airport that sells Wisconsin cheese for tourists to take with them…..I said tourists. The TSA has been releasing statements since this story broke in attempts to try to make it sound like it was not a lie, but they seem to be following the example of Alberto Gonzales.

    This was BS from day 1 and anyone that did not see that should read this list of words: believing, bite, born yesterday, credulous, easy, easy mark, eat up, fall for, fleeceable, foolish, go for, green, innocent, kid oneself, lap up, mark, naive, patsy, silly, simple, sucker, susceptible, swallow, swallow whole, taken in, trustful, tumble for, unskeptical, unsophisticated, unsuspecting, wide-eyed, yoyo, dupes, easy marks, greenhorns, gulls, gullible persons, simple souls, stooges, suckers, trusting souls, victims. Then decide which one of them they would like people to use when referring to them.

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