The TSA released a statement Sunday defending its agents’ actions at the Northwest Florida Regional Airport.

“While every person and item must be screened before entering the secure boarding area, TSA works with passengers to resolve security alarms in a respectful and sensitive manner,” the federal agency said. “We have reviewed the circumstances involving this screening and determined that our officers acted professionally and according to proper procedure.”

I’ll say it again. It’s not the TSA agents. It’s the fact that the leadership of the TSA considers this stuff “proper procedure” that scares the heck out of me.

If we had rogue agents abusing the system, that would be a problem, to be sure. But it would be an easy problem to fix. This issue is embedded in the very core of TSA’s founding principles. The only way to solve this is to disband the agency altogether. Or at least rethink it from the ground up.

We need law enforcement that knows the good guys from the bad. The TSA clearly doesn’t.

But Philip Baum, editor of Aviation Security International, cautioned against any knee-jerk reaction.

“We need to have a commonsense approach to this,” he said. “There’s no point deploying huge extra layers of security and checkpoints for people to go through.

“We have to recognize the fact that most airports are not only points of arrival and departure for passengers flying by air. They are also retail complexes, food courts, businesses that are trying to attract people in from the outside.”

Baum argues that rather than installing more x-ray machines and metal detectors, airports need to introduce behavioral profiling.

“Passenger profiling is the only proven method of countering the threat to aviation,” he said, calling on airports to be on the lookout “for people that don’t fit in, that seem to be out of place.”

Horrible tragedy in Moscow. But here we have a security expert suggesting that adding layers of x-ray scanners might not be the best reaction to this event. Hard to believe. If this bombing had happened in the U.S., that guy would have been strung up by the media already for making such a suggestion.

Never mind that he’s right.

What this incident proves, once again, is that whatever you do to counter terrorism, the terrorists just work around it. They find another loophole and exploit it. You need to go after the root causes of this behavior, and the PEOPLE performing these acts, hopefully before they even get to the airport.