Joking about bombs at airports is not clever. Nonetheless, throwing people in jail for it is monumentally ridiculous: there are few better indications that someone isn’t a terrorist…

In more civilised times, we (that’s we the British, when the IRA and their like were still a real threat) used to take such people aside, probe them in unpleasant ways, rip their luggage apart, and let them get the next flight.

Then again, who’d volunteer to teach an American moderation?