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The conjoined ends of the lines for restrooms and the food kiosk at Dublin (Ireland) International Airport last Friday had an oddly familiar air for we old Cold Warriors. Those mingling in the middle of two long lines didn’t care which direction they were moving, because by the time they got to the front of either they would probably be very hungry or really, really have to use the toilet.

Because explosives have made it onto two international flights in the last two weeks, security levels across the globe have been raised from magenta (ridiculous and incompetent) to burnt umber (paranoid and reactionary). Anyone traveling by air is now guaranteed to be harassed, bullied and scrutinized like an enemy of the people in the good old days of the Soviet Union.

The attempted bombing by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab on Christmas Day is widely known here, but the second one, probably not well covered here in the states, involved as much bureaucratic buffoonery as the first.

On Jan. 3, airport security personnel in former-Soviet bloc Slovakia secreted a quarter pound of plastic explosives into an unsuspecting passenger’s carry-on, in order to test their drug sniffing dogs, and then went out for coffee.

When they realized they had put a bomb on a Dublin-bound plane, the Slovaks notified the pilot, but he was cool with the idea of flying with a bomb on board and took off anyway. The Slovaks, using cutting-edge 1960’s technology, telexed baggage handlers in Dublin to be on the lookout for some poor sap with a bomb, and then went out for coffee again for two days. (They have really good coffee in Slovakia.)

When the Slovaks didn’t get their bomb back, they sent a vague tip to Irish authorities warning that the passenger “might have explosives.” The home of the hapless electrician was raided in the night, and he was taken in for some old-school KGB style interrogation by Irish authorities. Airline security authorities kicked up their procedures to a new level of futile abusiveness.

Travelers coming here from overseas now must clear U.S. customs in a foreign airport two hours before departure, and that’s how last Friday more than 700 in Dublin ended up crammed into a tiny space with a handful of toilets for four and a half hours of “additional security measures” that caused even the most pacific passengers to entertain ideas of violence. Conditions on the long delayed flight only exacerbated things.

Passengers were forced to sit while a half dozen well meaning but unenthusiastic flight attendants counted and recounted heads like Stalin’s commissars reformulating a Five Year Plan for steel production. After another hour, all of them came up with the same number, and the flight was allowed to depart.

After takeoff, the political prisoners, errr, passengers were subjected to Lubyanka inspired sleep deprivation and temperature extremes; cabin lights remained on for the entire nighttime flight, and no blankets were allowed, in case one of them tried to hide something.

Bizarrely, when the passengers arrived in the U.S. there was no customs or immigration control. Nowadays, you just walk off the plane, pick up your bag and stumble ashore like boat people fleeing Vietnamese re-education camps.

It’s a sad state of affairs. Systemic failures in national intelligence, consular affairs and transportation security have reduced the stature of U.S. travelers to Soviet-era kulaks, and as usual, the kulaks aren’t doing so well.

The one difference of course, is that the kulaks had neither a choice nor a voice, and we still do.

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