Would-be bomber pinched at Orlando airport

posted at 9:36 am on April 2, 2008 by Allahpundit
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Yeah, he has a green card.

A Jamaican planning to board a flight at Orlando International Airport was detained and questioned by FBI agents Tuesday after they found components for pipe bombs and explosive and flammable liquids in his checked luggage…

TSA searched his luggage and found “suspicious items,” according to TSA officials. Among the items seized were two galvanized pipes, end caps, two small containers of BB pellets, batteries, two containers of liquids, a laptop computer and bomb-making literature, according to an FBI statement released Tuesday night.

The interesting part isn’t the who or the what, it’s the how: It wasn’t the bag checkers who found him out but a TSA “behavioral specialist” on the lookout for suspicious behavior in the terminal. That’s a tiny, halting step towards the screening procedures used by the world’s safest airline, known for interrogating passengers at length if their appearance raises even the tiniest red flag. Some have been calling for an El Al model for U.S. security since weeks after 9/11, but anti-discrimination laws bar racial profiling of the sort the Israelis engage in and it’s unclear to me at least if we could manage their level of scrutiny given the enormous volume of American air traffic. TSA’s progressing nicely on the behavioral side, though. And to think, it only took seven years.

Admittedly, though, this one didn’t require Mossad’s finest:

Witnesses said they could tell that there was something wrong with Brown, even before he was arrested.

“He was rocking left to right, looking all crazy. I don’t know what was going on, but police came, the searched him, took off his shoes,” said one passenger.

Exit question instruction: Go on, speculate irresponsibly. You know you want to.

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