This one is a bit tough to deal with. Should Nathaniel Heatwole be jailed or rewarded? Heatwole didn't feel that the Transportation Security Administration was doing an adequate job of screening passengers boarding commercial airlines. To prove his point he hid caches of box cutters, bleach and modeling clay shape to look like explosives onto about six Southwest Airlines planes. He then wrote a letter to the TSA telling them what he had done. The materials remained hidden in the airplane bathrooms for five weeks while the TSA sat on its haunches and ignored Heatwole's letters.
Finally one of the caches was found by a maintenance worker, the Heatwole letter surfaced, and Nathaniel Heatwole was arrested and will be charged.
Maybe the real lesson here is that there is really no politically correct way for officials to make sure that nobody manages to secret weapons onto an airliner. It's time to play this game the way the world's best do ... by looking for terrorists instead of weapons. That means profiling. We won't do that, though, and will eventually end up sacrificing American lives to the gods of political correctness.
Finally one of the caches was found by a maintenance worker, the Heatwole letter surfaced, and Nathaniel Heatwole was arrested and will be charged.
Maybe the real lesson here is that there is really no politically correct way for officials to make sure that nobody manages to secret weapons onto an airliner. It's time to play this game the way the world's best do ... by looking for terrorists instead of weapons. That means profiling. We won't do that, though, and will eventually end up sacrificing American lives to the gods of political correctness.
