The TSA wants to order whole body scanning equipment for the nation’s airports as they believe that such devices could have prevented the attempted terrorist detonation in Detroit, as well as prevent further terrorists plots.

The Transportation Security Administration wants to install more of the devices, known as whole-body imaging scanners, but the agency has met resistance from civil liberties groups, passengers and some members of Congress.

Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport, the nation’s third busiest, has just two of the machines.

The scanners are able to detect weapons and explosives in places security screeners are not allowed to touch in physical pat-down searches, such as the groin area and even body cavities where items could be concealed.

Government investigators say they believe Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the man accused of attempting to blow up a Northwest Airlines flight on Christmas Day, hid the explosives he used inside his underwear.

I find it deeply ironic that American citizens must discard their privacy and dignity at the door of an airport and have their naked bodies projected onto a screen for TSA agents, who are often inadequate (as former TSA employee caller Steve reported last night on my show), to scrutinize for weaponry. Law-abiding citizens punished because the State Department and TSA are incompetent, impotent regulatory bodies, the former who brushed off a credible report from a man in Nigeria who warned the US embassy there that his son may be a terrorist. This same regulatory body issued a visa to that said terrorist and thus, Detroit.

You don’t need whole body scanners (where are we obtaining this money?) to thwart terrorist attacks – you need a State Department that is willing to actually do its job and to not issue visas to individuals on suspected terrorist lists such as Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was on the FBI’s list. Such individuals should be barred from entering the United States, period.

Oh, but he had money.

State Department spokesman Ian Kelly says it was up to the National Counterterrorism Center to block 23-year-old Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab from entering the United States. He says U.S. counterterror agencies received the information on Nov. 20, a day after it was provided by the father, but it was not enough to revoke the visa.

Kelly says officials get thousands of negative messages about people that are not always accurate.

He says Abdulmutallab got the two-year tourist visa in 2008 because he had money, was attending a reputable school and had visited the United States before.

Because we all know that terrorists, all of them, only live in the desert and don’t attend prestigious schools or live in nice houses.

Wait – isn’t that profiling? And quite pejoratively, too, one would say racist. So TSA agents aren’t allowed to profile anyone of Arab descent (let’s be honest, how many Protestant ginger kids have flown planes into buildings? As I was saying.) yet the State Department itself profiles by assuming that unless an individual comes wrapped in sheets, covered in sand, and barely literate, they can’t be a terrorist. Hey – isn’t bin Laden a petrillionaire?