Richard Reid

It's hard to get ahead of a problem until we see the problem exposed.

But sometimes it ends up with some pretty heavy-handed results, like taking off your flip-flops, even though Richard Reid's shoes kind of look like he had a bomb in his shoes.

Yeah, absolutely.

You set it off at the start.

Of course, Flight 93, 9/11.

The underwear bomber, remember that? The shoe bomber, Richard Reid, remember that? Remember the passengers? Amazingly, none of the passengers were injured, and according to reporting today, the first officer on this flight tried to hijack the plane with the, quote, "intention of crashing it into the ground," but an additional flight crew and passengers on board were able to subdue that first officer and bring the plane under control, which is unbelievable.

Eerily similar to Flight 93.

But what I think is maybe the most interesting piece of information tonight is the lack of information.

Uh, I'm gonna set the question up.

Uh, for over 20 years, uh, Americans had to take their shoes off when they went to the airport to fly because of one incident on one plane by Richard Reid.

Uh-huh.

Okay? So today, we find out that, uh, the pilot of this plane that was flying to Israel-

So should we start banning? I gotta, I gotta tell you, you know, you're right.

We subject- Um, everybody in the world to this extreme level of scrutiny.

Uh, you mentioned the Richard Reid shoe bomber stuff, and we had the diaper bomber guy, and we had...

And, you know, maybe the, the common thread is not shoes so much as it is radical Islam.

He's saying that there's a kind of philosophical argument aspect to it, but there's also the real threat.

I mean, Richard Reid would be the famous example of a British Islamist who's a threat to Americans.

And that's kind of what I'm trying to get at here.

Is this actually, there's something worse going on here? How much the American intelligence worried about, how much is the CIA worried about what's coming from Europe?

Yeah.

Was that Richard? Richard Reid i- was the guy who tried to blow up his shoes.

The shoe bomber, yeah.

So we all-

something that is changing after 9-11.

Wasn't the shoe bomber shortly after 9-11? It was within a year or two? Within a few months, wasn't it? Yeah.

Or was it months? I

want to say it was within a couple of months, but I may be wrong on that.

...

Richard Reid, the shoe bomber, tried to put a fuse in it, like, fuse in his shoe like the Bugs Bunny cartoons.

[laughs] Just go blow his shoe up.

[laughs]