John Tierney: “First, we will have national insecurity, not national security if we start down the path of deploying and actually…”

“First, we will have national insecurity, not national security if we start down the path of deploying and actually building and producing a system that is not yet workable. I do not think anybody can make a logical argument that this system is ready to work. I understand everybody would love to have it, but it just does not work that way. Our testing is not there. That is simply the argument here. Are we going to give in this budget so much money that it goes beyond testing and starts with building when it is not ready, therefore giving us national insecurity? Are we going to give ourselves just the amount that we need for testing and continue to do that until testing shows that we have something that is workable, or are we going to waste resources by building something and then have to go back to the beginning at far more expense, at possibly the expense of lives, because we relied on something that does not work? For $1.6 billion, we can put money into airline security that we choose to put it in this way, and that is wrong.”