National Security and Swiss Cheese

Somewhere this morning I read an opinion column in which the author described our security against terrorist attack as Swiss Cheese. I think he had in mind a wheel of cheese, but I envisioned this:

In reality our security systems are more like chunks of cheese piled on each other with nothing connecting them and all with gaping holes in their systems. There is nothing secure about any of them and their ability to protect even their own is pitiful. How many policemen were killed recently in Washington State? How many CIA agents were killed inside one of their secure compounds in Afghanistan? How many people walked in on the President's State dinner, uninvited, shook hands with him and his wife, and got their pictures taken with him? Police can't protect themselves, the CIA invites suicide-bombers to lunch, and Our President is not protected from intruders in our White House. I'm expected to trust my life, and the lives of my family to these incompetents. I don't think so!

Recent events, the Christmas Undiebomber, or the bombing of a CIA fortress in Afghanistan, for examples, have shown that Homeland Security, Secret Service, U.S.Marshals, TSA, FBI, ATF, NSA, CIA, etc., are all constructed on the "swiss cheese" model. When we see them in action we find that all that has been accomplished is billions of dollars have been spent creating more holes in bureaucratic pieces of cheese.

When are we going to demand our elected officials actually secure our air travel and "homeland" and not just talk about it? We appear to be as stupid as Janet Napalitano, the Secretary of Homeland Security, who said about the Christmas Plane, "the system worked."

I have no idea where her mind is, but it obviously is disconnected from reality. Unless she thinks there is nothing really all that bad in carrying explosives onto a passenger plane. That may in fact be the attitude in Washington since they have chosen to treat a terrorist as a common criminal and not as a foreign combatant in a war on terror. That decision is not just stupid, it's insane.

Personally I will feel much more secure when my "permission" to protect myself arrives in the form of a concealed pistol license. I'm kind of like the man on the Christmas Plane who said, "I rather be happy to be alive, than lucky to be alive."