Quelle Stupide!

Or however you say "What a bunch of morons!" in French. (That's a Salon.com link, watch the free ad if you want. In brief, the French test their bomb-sniffing dogs by hiding explosives in passenger luggage. Yes, it seems that they do this without notifying the passenger. One such bag has now been lost.)

I don't actually have a problem with their technique, although it does seem that there are better ways to go about it. I mean, this means (or meant, anyway) that if you fly through DeGaulle, the French police might have opened your bags and put stuff in it without your knowledge, and that's not a good thing. But I understand why they don't just pack a dummy bag and send it through the system--how do you guarantee that the dog won't single out the bag because he's smelling the scent of one of his trainers?

No, what's stupid about this whole thing is that they apparently didn't SCAN THE AIRLINE TAG ON THE LUGGAGE. If I were designing a system to test dogs with random explosive placement--not that I would, mind you!--I'd want the officers to make a note of which bags they put the freaking explosives in! Especially nowadays, when everything is barcoded; how hard can it be to use a portable scanner? That way, if you lose the bag, you can at least find the passenger! What happens when the poor sap runs into security problems in Hamburg or Moscow or Washington? "Uh, sir, what is this package of explosives doing in your luggage?"

Now, of course, they'll HAVE to figure out an alternate system. Idiots.