Yes, Virginia, the TSA is now making screeners air marshals. Chris Strohm, reporting for Government Executive, reveals the official number. "According to TSA, 36 screeners, have become air marshals."

Strohm also cites a quote from Kip Hawley to members of Congress that is appalling. Even Hawley can't wrap his brain around a Screener becoming an air marshal. Note how he calls the new air marshal a TSO.

"Trust me, you do not want to mess with those guys," Hawley said. "Anybody who messes with a flight having a TSO on it who is now an air marshal will be dead." 

And as far as the appropriateness of Hawley's your "dead" if you mess with a TSO — oops air marshal — bravado, please read "Terror on the Tarmac." I report the story of what happened to an entirely-innocent airline passenger named Jerry Wynn after he was mis-identified as being a terror suspect and subsequently man handled by FBI agents at Raleigh-Durham Airport last September.  

Hawley's look-out-or-your-dead comments remind us that the TSA is an agency in a free-fall. 

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CNN's Drew Griffin has been taking the TSA to task. In a report last month, CNN revealed that air marshals are leaving the agency in droves and not being replaced. The result is that 1% of America's flights are protected. This morning, Griffin's follow up piece for CNN is more bad news for the secretive Federal Air Marshal Service. In "Ex-marshal: Air marshal training 'a national disgrace,'" CNN reports that TSA is fast-tracking screeners to become air marshals so as to fill the empty spots. 

Drew Griffen interviewed air marshals who said screeners with "no college, no law-enforcement no military background" are becoming air marshals. "It's an embarrassment. I know I wouldn't want them on my flight, I wouldn't want them as my partner," one air marshal said. Watch the CNN video here.

TSA now admits TSOs are indeed becoming screeners air marshals.

Ex-marshal: Air marshal training 'a national disgrace' Their mission is to protect airline passengers from acts of terror on U.S. flights. But in a special investigation, former and current air marshals told CNN that the number of marshals assigned to police flights is so low that the federal agency overseeing them has drastically lowered its firearms and psychological testing standards just so it can qualify new hires.

More than a dozen current and former marshals told CNN that so many federal air marshals have resigned and are not being replaced that airport screeners are being employed to fill the dwindling ranks.

But the Transportation Security Administration, or TSA, says that's not true and the rate of those leaving has remained at 6.5 percent a year since 2001.

Sources tell me that air marshals and FFDO pilots are meeting behind closed-door with lawmakers today on Capitol Hill. It's time for full-fledged hearings on TSA and the Federal Air Marshal Service, they say. 

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This just in from an Air Marshal who wrote:

The following was sent on the TSA Blog at 4:05 PM Eastern Time. It was blocked and at 4:15 PM, [TSA Blogger] Chris White put his own blog post instead, with more of the typical propoganda. Please bring to the attention of the public that TSA is blocking comments they don't like, which is censorship. 

From a TSA Employee:

As a TSA employee, I am embarrassed at what I am reading on this blog [i.e. the TSA Blog]. This isn't a forum to exchange ideas as it was promoted to be, but has instead become nothing more than an outlet for TSA's propaganda machine. When a firearm goes on in a cockpit of a plane while it is on approach for landing, and TSA comes out publicly and claims, "The aircraft and the passengers were never in any danger," does TSA really believe the public is that stupid to believe such propaganda?

Does TSA really believe that they will have any credibility left after such comments?

And now we have this CNN story and one of TSA's biggest responses is that they know more than the air marshals and pilots who fly every day, so they shouldn't be believed. Are you serious? Hey, TSA, who do you think the public is going to believe? Who do you think the public believes has more credibility? Air Marshals and pilots who are risking their careers to tell this story, or the TSA Public Disinformation Officer whose job is nothing more than to protect the public image of the TSA, at any cost, even if it means lying to the public?

Let me give you an example of how the TSA is lying to the public.  This little trickery technique is well known throughout TSA. My agency claims that the attrition rate for the Federal Air Marshal Service is 6.5 % for years. Anyone who has studied Claims Theory and Fallacies knows this technique well.

The critical questions haven't been asked. Attrition rates of what?  TSA won't tell you that part. Attrition rate of blond blue-eyed males who have resigned? Let me tell you how TSA does this scam. When a Federal Air Marshal resigns from his or her job, and goes to work for another federal government agency, TSA doesn't count that as a loss because the employee is still working for the federal government.  So let's say for example 100% of all air marshals quit their jobs today and went to work as Border Patrol Agents tomorrow. 

The TSA would correctly report the attrition rate to be 0%, even though there were no more Federal Air Marshals employed by TSA.  What a great scam, isn't it? Most of the Federal Air Marshals that have resigned will of course find another federal job because they don't want to lose their retirement pensions. So in reality, this number reported by TSA of 6.5% actually represents those air marshals who resigned and went to non-federal government jobs. It doesn't represent those Federal Air Marshals who quit and obtained another job in another federal agency.

In addition, the TSA stated that this 6.5% attrition rate was for the "Federal Air Marshal Service", but they did not say it was the attrition rate for "Federal Air Marshals." Yes, this is second part of the scam.  This means that this 6.5% attrition rate will also take into account every employee who works for the Federal Air Marshal Service, including the janitors. See how the scam works?

Could there be more? Oh, yes indeed. There is even a third part to this scam. Notice TSA states that the attrition rate is "for years?"  Well, for how many years? Two Years? Four years? Six Years? The number of years that is calculated into the formula to come up with the percentage makes a huge difference in what the final number will be –– but TSA conveniently won't tell you that. See how important it is to read through the propaganda carefully? 

Remember folks, it's not what TSA is telling you that is important, it's what they are not telling you that you should be concerned about.

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Air Marshals are leaving the agency in droves. Less that 1% of flights are now covered by armed marshals, a CNN investigation reveals: "Air Marshals Missing From Almost All Flights."

Don't miss the broadcast story tonight at 10:00 p.m. EST. 

"Of the 28,000 commercial airline flights that take to the skies on an average day in the United States, fewer than 1 percent are protected by on-board, armed federal air marshals, a nationwide CNN investigation has found. 

…CNN was told that staffing in Dallas, Texas, for instance, is down 44 percent from its high, while Seattle, Washington, has 40 percent fewer agents. Las Vegas, Nevada, which had as many as 245 air marshals, this past February had only 47."

Ready for the big surprise? TSA, which is in charge of the Air Marshal Service, denies the allegations. And they use their favorite new word with CNN (same as they did with recent stories broken by ABC and Pajamas Media). They call CNN's story a "myth."

The TSA refuses to release either the total number of marshals regularly assigned to flights or a percentage of daily flights that are covered, but called the numbers given to CNN "a myth." 

So, why the exodus? Read Why Have 67,000 employees left the TSA?  

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Don't miss my column on today's front page of Pajamas Media, "American Gangster, American Downfall" –about Las Vegas Air Marshal boss, Gregory Korniloff.

A retired federal agent claims the film American Gangster defames “honest and courageous public servants” and is threatening a lawsuit. The problem, writes Annie Jacobsen, is that the plaintiff isn’t exactly a saint.  

Based on my interviews with air marshals and lawyers, as well as old articles dug up from the public domain, Korniloff's reputation proves to be far from honest and courageous. What kind of public servants is the USG employing these days?

The problem is—according to sworn affidavits as well as interviews with current and former federal agents—the real-life Gregory Korniloff does not have nearly the reputation his lawyer purports. Never mind circa 1970, as recently as this millennium Gregory Korniloff has been accused of threatening people with violence, tampering with evidence, and destroying government property to a degree that makes real life seem far stranger than fiction.

Had Korniloff neglected to step into the limelight last week, perhaps none of this would have come to bear. But Korniloff put the cameras on himself. On the first Tuesday after Thanksgiving, Korniloff gave an exclusive, live telephone interview to FOX News (from inside his Department of Homeland Security office which, incidentally, is against federal policy). This self-promoting act triggered a landslide of news reports.

Suddenly, the relatively unknown Gregory Korniloff was a household name as far away India, Vietnam and Russia.  

Read the whole thing at PajamasMedia.com.

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A male suicide bomber, dressed as a woman and wearing a burqa, blew himself up at a police checkpoint in northern Pakistan today, killing sixteen people and wounding twenty-nine. From Agence France-Presse:

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A 19-year old MIT student was arrested earlier today by Massachusetts State Police after walking through Logan International Airport with a simulated bomb attached to her chest. The device included a circuit board, greed LED lights and wires running to a 9-volt battery. In one hand, the woman, identified as Star Simpson, held a lump of putty. When an airport employee asked Simpson about the circuit board on her chest, she walked away without responding. Shortly thereafter, she was surrounded by police holding machine guns. Major Scott Pare of the State Police told reporters:

The woman was arrested and police determined that the mock bomb did not contain explosives. 

And indeed she is. Ask the family of Rigoberto Alpizar. Alpizar was the 44-year old American Airline passenger who, in 2005, claimed to have a bomb in his carry-on backpack as he ran off a flight that had just landed in Miami. Responding to the bomb threat, two air marshals drew their weapons and told Alpizar to drop the bag. Most importantly they told him to show his hands so they could see that he wasn't concealing a triggering device. When Alpizar did not follow orders, he was shot and killed by the air marshals — as is protocol. There was no bomb in Aplizar's bag. It was reported that Alpizar suffered from a mental disorder and had not taken his medicine.

Star Simpson was charged with possessing a hoax device and ordered to return to see the judge on October 29. What kind of penalty will the judge impose? Let's hope the harshest of punishments. Her behavior wasn't just outrageous, it was intolerable. Major Pare told reporters that Simpson blithely claimed that her fake bomb was a "piece of art." 

Tell that to the families of law enforcement officers, and the law enforcement officers themselves, who are involved in critical shootings.

(Photo credit: Bill Brett for The Boston Globe/AP Photo/Michael Dwyer, pool)

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Last March, two Comair airline employees at Orlando International Airport in Florida were arrested after using their airport security badges to smuggle weapons and drugs onto a passenger flight headed for San Juan, Puerto Rico. The weapons and drugs amounted to 13 guns, an assault rifle and 8 pounds of marijuana transported in a carry-on duffel bag. As a result of this security gap being exposed, the TSA is now running a pilot program, out of Logan Airport in Boston, to screen all airport employees. From Donna Goodison for the Boston Herald:

All 14,000 Logan International Airport workers could be subjected to daily and repeated security screenings for weapons, drugs and other contraband if a new test program proves it's feasible.

The U.S. Transportation Security Administration this month started setting up special checkpoints to screen employees - from baggage handlers to mechanics to truck drivers - headed into secure, non-passenger areas throughout the airport. Employees accessing secure passenger areas will continue to be screened through regular passenger security checkpoints.

In this pilot program, the TSA's after-the-fact approach to airline security is made obvious. It took the embarrassment — and public outcry — of weapons getting onto airplanes to get the TSA to take action on something that TSA's own employees have repeatedly sounded the alarm about. Just three weeks before the incident in Orlando, two Las Vegas Air Marshals (one current, one former) appeared on an ABC News segment exposing the same security hole. TSA took no action and instead issued a terse statement to ABC about the adequacy of their policies, citing "background checks" as a safeguard against rouge employees.

Earlier: When Airport Employees Join Drug and Gun Cartels.

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