There's a major loophole in the "enhanced" pat-downs and X-ray screenings of passengers: they can't detect bombs located inside body cavities.
Back in 2009, an Al Quaeda member actually used a bomb placed in his rectum to try to kill a Saudi Prince:
The third tactical shift is perhaps the most interesting, and that is the use of an IED hidden in the anal cavity of the bomber. Suicide bombers have long been creative when it comes to hiding their devices. In addition to the above-mentioned IED in the camera gear used in the Masood assassination, female suicide bombers with the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam have hidden IEDs inside brassieres, and female suicide bombers with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party have worn IEDs designed to make them look pregnant. However, this is the first instance we are aware of where a suicide bomber has hidden an IED inside a body cavity.
This has fatal consequences for the notion that the recently instituted highly invasive screenings can actually protect airline passengers. Without a full cavity search of each and every passenger, you simply have no means of preventing people who are truly determined from bringing explosives onto commercial passenger aircraft.
And then things get worse: the whole US is full of soft targets. We have shopping malls. Movie theaters. Sporting events. Nightclubs. Crowded places of all imaginable kinds. Should we somehow actually manage to improve airline security to the point where it really is impossible to prevent somebody from bringing something hazardous onto an airplane, actual terrorists will simply shift targets. Over the years, we've seen bombings of buildings, nightclubs, government offices, embassies, and just about every kind of place you can imagine.
This doesn't mean we shouldn't do any screening at all. There's a history of terrorist preference for attacking aircraft which means that we need to do some screening. But what we did six weeks ago sufficed. Letting the TSA continue with their radically more intrusive screenings won't stop a single attack. At most, it can convince terrorists to make minor changes in their plans.
That's not worth having my balls groped.