Huh? So you gonna meet in Geneva with the mujahidin to shake hands on the "rules" that we and they will accept? Not likely.

What we're running into here is precisely what every civilian of Afghanistan lives every day. The Taliban move among them. To intercept a Taliban means you have to look at every local as a POTENTIAL Taliban. Damned if the guys were offered the privilege of badges that say "I am Taliban" and turned it down. They are NOT team players, I don't care what you tell me.

So now we're here where airline passengers are the villagers of Afghanistan. Plane bombers move among them, they too (is the "team player" an extinct species?) are refusing to stand out from the stream of public travelers. So dammit, we now all get to participate just as happened in Iraq and Afhganistan. I agree, its a bit annoying. At least our wedding parties don't get mistaken for Taliban convoys and blasted to smithereens. I'll bet the TSOs are also real happy that none of them are dying from socalled "friendly fire" (if fire can be friendly, you know we're thru the looking glass).

Anyway, bottomline, in the Looking Glass War, these rules of "fairness" are pretty hard to maintain. All I want is for the adminstrators to give a whoop for the people who fund their agency. Not get so hardened that aviation itself is now "the enemy". Just as the banking customer is not the enemy of the teller, so the traveler is not the enemy of the TSO. The customer and the traveler are they without which your job couldn't exist. Remember how you like depositing your paycheck when you screen them and try to smile if you can. If you smile at us, there's half a chance we'll smile back. Worked with me and the guy in De Gaulle.