Air marshals pulled from key flights

WASHINGTON, July 29 — Despite renewed warnings about possible airline hijackings, the Transportation Security Administration has alerted federal air marshals that as of Friday they will no longer be covering cross-country or international flights, MSNBC.com has learned. The decision to drop coverage on flights that many experts consider to be at the highest risk of attack apparently stems from a policy decision to rework schedules so that air marshals don’t have to incur the expense of staying overnight in hotels. [...]

[...] The move to pull air marshals from any flight requiring them to stay overnight is particularly disturbing to some because it coincides with a new high-level hijacking threat issued by the Department of Homeland Security. That warning memo says that “at least one of these attacks could be executed by the end of the summer,” according to a source familiar with the document. [...]

You know, nothing surprises me anymore.

Although it would have been nice to have an air marshal on every flight when this all got started, at least there was some peace of mind knowing that even though they might not be on every flight, there were enough to be a credible deterrent--sorta like to the sign you occasionally see--"These premises guarded by Smith & Wesson four days a week. You just have to guess which ones."

Well, I don't suppose anyone intent on doing harm will have to guess now.

What's really going to chap me is if this is some bureaucratic nonsense to create a false budget crisis, similar to the one when the FBI created an artificial backlog of document interpretation to plump for more money.
posted by Terry at 9:24:00 AM