That pesky barn door

Amazing! That pretty much sums up this breaking story about two terrorism suspects arrested this morning at Amsterdam's Schiphol airport at the request of American authorities. Although you may think the story could have been dreamt up in the writers' lounge for "24" it actually sounds more suited to the writers' suite of Jon Stewart's "The Daily Show."

Let me just get this straight. One of these fellows was stopped and searched in Birmingham, Alabama before boarding a flight to Chicago. TSA authorities diligently discovered $7,000 in cash and all these fake bomb 'toys' in his luggage.

Once in Chicago, one of the two parted company with his luggage. Unimpeded he boarded a flight

out of the country to Amsterdam while his luggage was checked, loaded and flown to Washington's Dulles Airport for onward flights to Dubai and Yemen. Without him! Only after the bags were taken off one plane in Washington, loaded onto another continuing flight to Dubai, all the passengers were screened and counted and the plane left the gate did the authorities take action, recalling the jet to the gate and removing the luggage of now long-missing Mystery Passenger #1.

Call me crazy but isn't it extremely odd that while people are regularly arrested in American airports for making clearly joking comments about bombs or terrorists, this fellow was sent on his way from Birmingham to Chicago. I can hear the TSA worker now in Birmingham, "Thank yu sir for yur cooperation. I's wunderin', can I get me's some of them toys for my grandson Billy-Bob at 'Toy Bombs R Us?' Ya'all have a nice flight now, ya'hear."

Maybe I'm being too hard on the TSA employee. It could be that the grandson has a perfectly normal single name sans hyphen. Sorry. And let's be fair to the system. Perhaps this is the first time such a bizarre event has occurred.

We know from experience that we only like to think about new security threats after a terrorist has been kind enough to show us what they are. Like that nice bearded fellow who showed us how Dr. Scholl's Exploding Soles work. Or those jolly folks from the UK, where they do love their binge drinking, who were mixing up some in-flight BYOB liquid cocktails that really packed a punch. Not to mention that sweet albeit confused young man with the underwear fetish and his Panty-Plastique.

After all, we don't want to make it too challenging for all those hard-working men and women in all those government agencies and government-funded tinkertoy think tanks who get hundreds of thousands of dollars to study what happened, explore all the implications and then present a thousand-page finding to the government: "Check the shoes" or "Jeez, why don't we use those nifty body scanners once in a while."

And naive as I am, I really was under the impression that matching checked luggage and boarded passengers was from Intro to Airline Security 101. In fact, matching boarded passengers and their luggage is not only a 101 level course, it was literally the Mother of all Measures - the first major security innovation ever introduced to flying way back in 1968.

But again, I am being harsh. The airlines have only had 42 years to wrap their heads and systems around this complex concept - "Checked luggage?" "Check!" "Corresponding boarded passenger?" "Huh?"

Airline security is no laughing matter but this incident takes a poke at our elaborate, expensive and intrusive airport security umbrella. One that again shows that even in this hyped-up hysterical security conscious world, we still haven't learned what every farmer knows since the invention of the barn door: You close it before the cows run away.