He quotes the list of items forbidden to airline passengers, including:

• No guns. (Obviously)
• No knives. (Ditto)
• No boxcutters. (Certainly now justified)
• No toenail clippers. (What?)
• No knitting needles. (Huh?)
• No crotchet hooks. (Now, wait a minute!)
• No sewing needles.
• No mace.
• No leaf blowers. (OK, now it's personal)
• No corkscrews.
• No letter openers.
• No dry ice.

After a silly digression, Moore continues:

More importantly, though, I kept noticing something strange. The guy in front of me, while emptying his pockets into the little plastic tray to run through the x-ray machine, would take out his butane lighter or matchbook, toss them into the tray, then pick them up on the other side — in full view of security. At first I thought this was a mistake until I looked at the list of banned items again — and saw that butane lighters and matchbooks were NOT on the forbidden list.

Then came December 22, 2002. Richard Reid, on an American Airlines flight from Paris to Boston, attempted to light his shoes on fire. His shoes, the police said, contained a plastic explosive and, had some passengers and flight attendants not taken quick action to restrain him, he would have been able to blow the entire plane out of the sky. But his lighter would not light the shoes fast enough, and everyone survived.

I was sure after this freakish incident that the lighters and matches would surely be banned. But, as my book tour began in February, there they were, the passengers with their Bic lighters and their books of matches. I asked one security person after another why these people were allowed to bring devices which could start a fire on board the plane, especially after the Reid incident. No one, not a single person in authority or holding an unloaded automatic weapon, could or would give me answer.

My simple question was this: If all smoking is prohibited on all flights, then why does ANYONE need their lighters and matches at 30,000 feet — while I am up there with them?!

And why is the one device that has been used to try and blow up a plane since 9-11 NOT on the banned list? No one has used toenail clippers to kill anyone on Jet Blue, and no one has been blowing away the leaves in the aisle of the Delta Connection flight to Tupelo.

BUT SOME FRUITCAKE DID USE A BUTANE LIGHTER TO TRY AND KILL 200 PEOPLE ON AMERICAN AIRLINES FLIGHT #63. And this did nothing to force the Bush Administration to do something about it.

I began asking this question in front of audiences on my book tour. And it was on a dark and rainy night in Arlington, Virginia, at the Ollsson's Bookstore a couple miles from the Pentagon that I got my answer. After asking my Bic lighter question in my talk to the audience, I sat down to sign the books for the people in line. A young man walks up to the table, introduces himself, and lowering his voice so no one can hear, tells me the following:

“I work on the Hill. The butane lighters were on the original list prepared by the FAA and sent to the White House for approval. The tobacco industry lobbied the Bush administration to have the lighters and matches removed from the banned list. Their customers (addicts) naturally are desperate to light up as soon as they land, and why should they be punished just so the skies can be safe?

The lighters and matches were removed from the forbidden list.

I was stunned. I knew there had to be some strange reason why this most obvious of items had not been banned. Could the Bush mob be so blatant in their contempt for the public's safety? How could they do this, and at the same time, issue weekly warnings about the “next terrorist threat”? Would they really put Big Tobacco's demands ahead of people's lives?

Yes, of course, the answer has always been YESÉ but not now, not in a time of national crisis, not NOW, so soon after the worst domestic mass murder in U.S. history!

Unless there was no real threat at all.

The hard and difficult questions must be asked: Is the “War on Terrorism” a ruse, a concoction to divert the citizens' attention?

Accept, if you will for just a moment, that as truly despicable as George W. Bush is, he would not be so evil as to help out his buddies in tobacco land that that would be worth suffering through another 9-11. Once you give the man that — and for once I am asking you to do just that — once you admit that not even he would allow the murder of hundreds or thousands more just so Marlboro addicts can light up outside the terminal, then a whole Ônother door opens — and that door, my friends, leads to the Pandora's Box of 9-11, a rotten can of worms that many in the media are afraid to open for fear of where it might lead, of just how deep the stench goes.

What if there is no “terrorist threat?” What if Bush and Co. need, desperately need, that “terrorist threat” more than anything in order to conduct the systematic destruction they have launched against the U.S. constitution and the good people of this country who believe in the freedoms and liberties it guarantees?

Do you want to go there?

I do. I have filed a Freedom of Information Act demand to the FAA, asking that they give to me all documents pertaining to the decisions that were made to allow deadly butane lighters and books of matches on board passenger planes. I am not optimistic about what the results of this will be.

(All errors are directly copied from the original.

The politics: Michael Moore’s airport security expose by Lee Salazar, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. Terms and conditions beyond the scope of this license may be available at leesalazar.com.