Lawyer for Newark TSA screeners: firings, suspensions only “face-saving”

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The lawyer for the TSA screeners who were fired and suspended, about whom we wrote last week, says that the TSA is merely engaged in a “face-saving” measure.​

He says the screeners were doing exactly what they were trained to do, by the book, yet were suspended to make the higher-ups look better:​

“They’re spinning it to make it look like they accomplished something,” the lawyer, Philip Taubman, said of a year-long investigation into lax screening followed by six months of hearings. “It was face-saving.”​

This scenario, as I wrote last week, is entirely believable. Do we know for a fact that it’s true? No. And we won’t. But it’s a possibility. In addition:​

Taubman called it a “collossal waste of taxpayer money” that his clients had been placed on paid administrative leave for six months while the hearing process played out.​

Regardless of what the truth is, the whole episode demonstrates — once again — the charade that is TSA screening. Hundreds of thousands of bags — no, make that millions — are “screened” every day (by the TSA’s own estimate, 1.8 to 2 millions passengers fly in this country every day — give each of them one bag, and you know most of them have more than that). Yet despite all this supposed “screening,” we see that lots of bags aren’t being checked at all.​

And guess what? Planes still aren’t being blown out of the sky left and right.​

How is this possible? Doesn’t “the TSA have to be right every time but The Terrorists only once”? That’s what the TSA and its defenders are always telling us.​

Oh, but there I go again talking logic. Somebody stop me next time.​

(Photo: Leif Skandsen/Flickr Creative Commons)​