Question for Napolitano: Why do we take off our shoes?

What’s the point of taking off our shoes at airport security if the screenings can’t pick up a myriad of explosives and detonators?

According to reports the “underwear bomb” worn by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was a military-grade plastic explosive called Pentaerythritol tetranitrate, or PETN, and neither that nor the detonator would have been caught by standard metal detectors. Airports in the United States have a smattering of “sniffer” booths or occasional bomb-sniffing dogs that would have caught such explosives, but for the most part it would be pure luck if an explosive-laden terrorist was sent to the proper “sniffer” line.

So now we know that the vast majority of security we’ve undergone for the past 8 years has been a facade, designed to make us feel better about flying. At the end of the day it’s really vigilant passengers and malfunctioning bombs that have saved lives. While Abdulmutallab and “shoebomber” Richard Reid have both been categorized as bungling nincompoops it’s just a matter of time before one of these bombs works as designed and kills a slew of people.

Meanwhile, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab clearly received aid. If the presence of military explosives wasn’t enough to show that, at least one eye-witness claims that another man coaxed Amsterdam security officials into allowing Abdulmutallab get on the plane even though he had no passport. Abdulmutallab has since told federal authorities that there are others like him in Yemen preparing to bomb airliners. Well, that’s a no-brainer, or at least it should be. But don’t tell that to the Obama administration, which just this month sent another 6 Guantanamo detainees back to Yemen! (Of the 200 remaining detainees, 91 of them are from Yemen). Many released detainees have since returned to their terrorist roots. Indeed, Said Ali al-Shihri was released in 2007, and although Saudi, has since become the “deputy leader of Al Qaeda’s Yemeni branch.”

Not very reassuring, is it?

And yet here’s our Homeland Security Secretary, Janet Napolitano, telling us everything is fine. She’s already retracted what was a carefully worded statement that “once the incident occurred, everything went according to clockwork,” which is like saying everything went according to plan after the fox ate all the chickens, or, after all the animals left the proverbial barn. What a joke she’s become. She now agrees, after much legitimate criticism, that the system failed. No kidding? We need an overpaid bureaucrat to tell us that?

And while we’re on topic, what’s the point of all these different agency no-fly lists if they’re all so big and uncoordinated that a guy like Abdulmutallab — no passport, on at least one watch list, buys a one-way ticket, has no luggage, his own father attempts to warn authorities about him — can get on an airplane?

But we’ll just keep taking our shoes off…

Oh, and can we go back to calling it The War on Terror again? Because apparently al Qaeda didn’t get the memo or know that Obama pressed a “reset” button.