The op-ed cometh: "A Three-Ring Circus of Failure, Waste and Abuse"

CelticWhisper · Jul 15, 2012

So I finally forced myself to sit down and hammer out the op-ed I was meaning to write. In a way, I think my train trip took some of the fight out of me by showing me I wasn't as trapped as it felt like I was. I credit the TSA@CUS video for restoring the feeling of urgency.

So here's the first draft. 1195 words as of now, so per the guidelines given to me by Lisa and others, I have a fair bit of trimming to do. I tried to give a little background, some quick narrative leading up to the present, and mention noteworthy abuse cases and incidents of TSA having egg on their face (You're welcome, Affection. ) Plugged TUG by name and made sure to nail Durbin and Schakowsky to the wall as best I could without using too many words to do it.

Copy follows. As always, suggestions are welcome, requested, pleaded and groveled for. Once this battle is won I vote for a TUG meetup where I'm buying everyone a round of drinks in exchange for the invaluable help you've given me.

TSA: A Three-Ring Circus of Failure, Waste and Abuse

Never in our nation’s history has there been an agency so uniformly incompetent, so completely inept at using the resources at its disposal, and so sickeningly disrespectful of the American public as the universally-reviled Transportation Security Administration. Founded with the ostensible goal of preventing another aviation-based attack like those on September 11, 2001, the agency has been charged with keeping weapons, explosives, and incendiary devices (officially abbreviated by the agency as WEI) off of commercial airplanes. The agency has done such a terrible job of this, in addition to committing so many crimes and acts of abuse against the traveling public, that it’s a wonder it’s been allowed to continue to exist as long as it has.

At the start, TSA wasn’t much more odious than the private security airports had employed in decades past. The uniforms were different and only ticketed passengers were allowed into the “sterile” part of the airport, but aside from that life was more or less the same at the airport. Once new regulations appeared, however, things got ugly fast. With Richard Reid’s failed bombing plot, travelers were required to remove their shoes when traversing the airport checkpoint. When rumors arose of binary-liquid bombs, fluid amounts permitted to traverse the checkpoint were severely limited. Most sickening of all is TSA’s response to the “underwear bomber” plot. Named “scope-and-grope” by its legion of detractors, it is TSA administrator John Pistole’s decision that travelers must be presented with a Morton’s Fork of undergoing an electronic and potentially carcinogenic strip search or submitting to an “enhanced patdown” that, were it conducted by any other person in any setting other than an airport, would unquestionably constitute felony sexual assault. The agency has either ignored, laughed off, or blatantly lied in response to questions and criticisms of this screening regime, and has yet to comply with a court order requiring them to hold a period of public review about its body-scanning equipment – something they were supposed to have done before introducing scope-and-grope but opted instead to ignore, forcing the program upon an unsuspecting and unprepared public.

These policies are far from the only failings of TSA. Their screening procedures are unconscionable to any who still believe in the spirit of American freedom, but TSA screeners have done much worse. In the past three months alone, they have threatened and terrorized a 4-year-old girl; spilled the ashes of a traveler’s grandfather all over the airport floor, violating their own stated policy for screening human remains and laughing aloud at him as he scrambled to collect up as much of the ashes as he; and mocked a disabled traveler, calling him a “f***ing deafie” and stealing the candy he was traveling with, first lying about donating it to charity and then proceeding to eat it in front of him. And speaking of American freedom, the idea of inalienable rights is itself such an alien concept at airports that last year, a retired Lieutenant Colonel of the United States Air Force was arrested at TSA’s request for the “crime” of reciting the 4th Amendment at the checkpoint of the Albuquerque, NM International Airport.

These are far from the agency’s only abuses – activist website Travel Underground (www.travelunderground.org) maintains “Master Lists” of abuses and cases of TSA personnel arrested on criminal charges, sometimes for crimes committed while on the job, at airports across the nation. Additionally, US Representative Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) released a report of the 50 most severe cases of TSA criminal conduct as a part of an initiative to rein in the agency and prevent it from using the term “Officer” to refer to its screening clerks – a criticism some have said constitutes impersonation of a law-enforcement officer. The list, in any form you take it, is disconcertingly long.

Alas, Rep. Blackburn is one of too few members of Congress who are willing to stand up for the rights of the people against TSA’s unjustifiable prioritization of safety above liberty. My own federal-level officials, Senators Mark Kirk and Richard Durbin, and Representative Jan Schakowsky, have been woefully negligent in defending their constituents from TSA abuse. While I’m willing to pardon Kirk to a degree on medical grounds, Durbin has seemed quite content to send out form letters that no longer even pertain to the topics about which I’ve contacted him; and Schakowsky is apparently so cravenly apologetic toward TSA as to defend them at any opportunity, voting against Rep. Blackburn’s STRIP Act and stating that to her, TSA’s ordered arrest of the USAF officer “was not evidence of abuse.” Of course not, Jan. Arresting people for peacefully reciting the law happens all the time in free countries, it’s perfectly normal.

In any free nation, it is understood that liberty has a price and that sometimes that price is high. As we learned on 9/11, “high” can be much, much higher than we tend to usually think it is. However, the pursuit and keeping of liberty demands that the price be paid just the same, and that liberty itself can act as the tribute to the memory of those lost. Knowing this, it is easy to see how people can be shaken by this notion and want to have freedom and safety at the same time. With TSA, however, we apparently cannot have either. In 10 years, after consuming hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars, TSA has yet to catch a single terrorist at their vaunted checkpoints. The best they seem able to do is play catch-up and react to threats that have already reached airports and airplanes, responding to yesterday’s dangers today.

Many have advocated, and I agree, that it is time to return to pre-9/11 passenger screening at airports. Keep the locked and reinforced cockpit doors on planes, keep the passenger do-or-die attitude, but take TSA, their dangerous, expensive, and useless body scanners, and their blue gloves, and leave them to decay upon the garbage heap of history as a failed experiment in treating a nation’s citizenry with suspicion and contempt. Bring back private screeners who have no immunity to lawsuits or criminal prosecution and use dogs to sniff for bombs instead of body scanners that can be defeated simply by carrying the dangerous object at one’s side as engineer and activist Jon Corbett proved in multiple experiments.

First, we need elected officials who are willing to put rights before safety. As this is an election year, it’s a good time to make TSA a debate issue for anyone up for reelection, but there’s no wrong time to communicate to our representatives that their inability to rein in TSA is unacceptable. Durbin and Schakowsky in particular should take note of this – their failure to advocate for air travelers is the stuff of legends and neither they nor any official who defends TSA should expect to have our votes. With every day Congress spends hemming and hawing, toying with minor budget cuts and giving stern talks to TSA which the agency can turn around and ignore, more innocent travelers are going to be abused.

As for TSA itself? It’s time to stop fooling around – abolition is the only solution.
Click to expand...

I also want to mention the Union Station appearance, but I'm torn on whether that would be better discussed in a separate op-ed in the event I'm welcomed back for a follow-up article (or even if I'm not )

phoebepontiac · Jul 15, 2012

I want to give you an edit, but I'm wondering if anybody can help me figure out how to do Track Changes (or whatever it's called, editing mode) in Open Office. If not, I'll do a low-rent edit, making up my own format.

ETA: Never mind, I'm into working on the edit with bold and underscore.

Mike · Jul 15, 2012

singular/plural agreement: "attack like those" should be either "attacks like those" or "attack like that"

Mike · Jul 15, 2012

maintains “Master Lists” of abuses and cases of TSA personnel arrested ...

We should make sure they're up-to-date before this op-ed is distributed. I presume Bill has been updating them for both Bill & Lisa since I set up his FTP account. I'm no longer receiving either in email but I haven't been checking that they're updated.

Mike · Jul 15, 2012

This is a good piece.

Shortening it won't hurt, but you know that.

You can probably get a passable non-Illinois version by eliminating references to Durbin and Schakowsky, and then applying any still-meaningful Illinois edits to what remains.

RB · Jul 15, 2012

I'm certainly no writer but if you could say everything you wrote in about half the words I thing the piece would have more impact. Tighten it up a bit if you can. That being said I like the article.

Doober · Jul 16, 2012

Agree with RB. It's a difficult thing to do, especially when there's so much passion involved.

Caradoc · Jul 16, 2012

CelticWhisper said: ↑

I also want to mention the Union Station appearance, but I'm torn on whether that would be better discussed in a separate op-ed in the event I'm welcomed back for a follow-up article (or even if I'm not )
Click to expand...

How about the Savannah train station VIPR episode, where the TSA lied to passengers about where their baggage could be picked up, searching passengers as they disembarked from the train?

CelticWhisper · Jul 17, 2012

Caradoc - I'm hoping to write a companion or follow-up piece titled "Train Stations: A Very Bad Place for TSA" where I'll go into that.

Mike - When you talk about removing the references to my legislators, are you thinking in terms of releasing two separate versions or just taking it out for now, in order to get the flow perfected or the word-count under control? Sorry, but for whatever reason I'm having trouble wrapping my head around where you're going with that.

I'm at 1349 words right now and so I have some major paring-down to do, but I'm trying to get all my logic and arguments to flow right first.

On that note, here's the 2nd edition. Can you folks read through this and see if there are any glaring factual errors that could either get it rejected, see me made a fool of, or give TSA easy points to latch on to for rebuttals? I'd like maximum impact for this article and I fear that won't happen if minutiae are able to drag it down and distract discussions about it away from the point of the whole.

(P.S. MAJOR thanks to Phoebepontiac, who sent me a PM with a long list of edits and explanations thereof. That was seriously worth its weight in gold.)

TSA: A Three-Ring Circus of Failure, Waste and Abuse

Never in our nation’s history has there been an agency so incompetent, so inept at using the resources at its disposal, and so disrespectful of the American public as the Transportation Security Administration. Founded with the ostensible goal of preventing more aviation-based attacks like those on September 11, 2001, the agency has been charged with keeping weapons, explosives, and incendiary devices off of commercial airplanes. The agency has done such a terrible job of this, in addition to committing so many crimes and acts of abuse against the traveling public, that one is left wondering why it has not been abolished entirely as it should.

At the start, TSA wasn’t much more offensive than the private security airports had employed in decades past. The uniforms were different and only ticketed passengers were allowed into the “sterile” part of the airport, but otherwise life was about the same in checkpoint land. Once new regulations appeared, however, things got ugly fast. With new bombing plots or even mere rumors, travelers were required to remove their shoes, limit liquid quantities, and bundle fluids together into plastic bags.

Most sickening of all is TSA’s response to the “underwear bomber” plot. Named “Scope-and-Grope” by its legion of detractors, it is TSA administrator John Pistole’s decision that travelers must choose between equal but different evils: undergoing an electronic and potentially carcinogenic strip search or submitting to an “enhanced patdown” that, if done anywhere else, would constitute felony sexual assault. Compounding this problem is that submission to a scan does not necessarily guarantee a traveler will not be groped; and that when an explosives-trace test following the groping comes back positive, the traveler is required to submit to a more thorough physical search in a closed-off side room where the public cannot supervise TSA clerks’ actions. To date, explosives-trace tests have returned only false positives – never have they caught an actual bomb.

Incredibly, the agency has yet to comply with a court order requiring it to hold a period of public review about its body-scanning equipment. This was supposed to happen before introducing scope-and-grope but TSA apparently decided, “administratively,” to opt out of it, instead forcing the program upon an unsuspecting and unprepared public. It has been a year since the court order to hold this review, and TSA has not even begun the process.

TSA’s policies are far from its only failings. Their screening procedures are unconscionable to any who truly believe in American freedom, but TSA screeners have done much worse. In the past three months, they have threatened and terrorized a 4-year-old girl for the “crime” of hugging her grandmother before screeners wanted her to, claiming the grandmother could have passed the girl a gun concealed in a stuffed toy; spilled the ashes of a traveler’s grandfather all over the airport floor, violating their own stated policy for screening human remains and laughing aloud at him as he scrambled to collect up as much of the ashes as he; and mocked a deaf traveler, calling him a “f***ing deafie” and stealing the candy he was traveling with, first lying about donating it to charity and then proceeding to eat it in front of him. And speaking of American freedom, the idea of inalienable rights is itself such an alien concept at airports that last year, a retired Lieutenant Colonel of the USAF was arrested at TSA’s request for the “crime” of reciting the 4th Amendment at the checkpoint of the Albuquerque, NM International Airport. TSA claimed that the traveler was disrupting screening at the checkpoint, but one is left to wonder exactly why the agency considers the Constitution disruptive to its proceedings. These are not the agency’s only abuses. Activist website Travel Underground (www.travelunderground.org) maintains “Master Lists” of cases of TSA personnel arrested on criminal charges, sometimes for crimes committed while on the job, at airports across the nation.

Additionally, US Representative Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) released a report of the 50 most severe cases of TSA criminal conduct as a part of an initiative to rein in the agency. She also introduced the STRIP Act, which would force the elimination of the police-style uniforms and fake badges and prevent TSA from using the term “Officer” to refer to its screening clerks – a practice some have said constitutes impersonation of a law-enforcement officer, for which TSA employees have also been arrested in the past.

Rep. Blackburn is one of too few members of Congress who are willing to stand up for traveler rights against TSA’s unjustifiable prioritization of safety above liberty. My own federal-level officials, Senators Mark Kirk and Richard Durbin, and Representative Jan Schakowsky, have been pathetically negligent in defending their constituents from TSA abuse. While I’m willing to pardon Kirk to a degree on medical grounds, Durbin has seemed content to send out form letters that no longer even pertain to the topics about which I’ve contacted him; and Schakowsky is apparently so cravenly apologetic toward TSA as to defend them at any opportunity, voting against Rep. Blackburn’s STRIP Act and stating that to her, TSA’s ordered arrest of the USAF officer “was not evidence of abuse.” Of course not, Jan. Arresting people for peacefully reciting the law is perfectly normal in free countries.

In any free nation, it is understood that liberty has a price and that sometimes that price is high. As we learned on 9/11, “high” can be much, much higher than we tend to usually think it is. However, the pursuit and keeping of liberty demands that the price be paid just the same, and that liberty itself can act as the tribute to the memory of those lost. Knowing this, it is easy to see how people can be shaken by this notion and want to have freedom and safety at the same time. With TSA, however, we apparently cannot have either. After 10 years and hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars, TSA hasn’t caught a single terrorist. The best they seem able to do is play catch-up and react to threats that have already reached airports and airplanes, responding to yesterday’s dangers today. TSA trumpets “good catches” by their clerks all the time, but the fact of the matter is that none of the guns and knives they confiscate would have posed a threat to a group of passengers bound and determined to fight off a hijacker. The problem that allowed 9/11 to happen was fixed on 9/11. Passengers don’t need TSA’s disgraceful screening in order to be safe in the air.

It is time to return to pre-9/11 passenger screening at airports. Keep the locked and reinforced cockpit doors and defiant passenger attitude, but take TSA, their dangerous, expensive, and useless body scanners, and their blue-gloved grabby hands, write them off as an expensive mistake. Bring back private screeners vulnerable to lawsuits and criminal prosecution. Stop grabbing at people’s drinks that were purchased from supposedly secure vendors. Limit explosives-detection screening to trace swabbing on carry-on luggage only - no skin contact - instead of body scanners that can be defeated simply by carrying the dangerous object at one’s side, as engineer and activist Jon Corbett proved in multiple experiments.

First, though, we need elected officials who recognize that risk-elimination is impossible and rights are not worth sacrificing to the illusion of safety. As this is an election year, it’s a good time to make TSA a debate issue for anyone up for reelection, but there’s no wrong time to communicate to our representatives that their inability to rein in TSA is unacceptable. Durbin and Schakowsky in particular should take note of this – their failure to advocate for air travelers is staggering and neither they nor any official who defends TSA should expect to have our votes. With every day Congress spends hemming and hawing, toying with minor budget cuts and giving stern talks to TSA which the agency can turn around and ignore, more innocent travelers are going to be abused.

As for TSA itself? It’s time to stop fooling around – abolition is the only solution.
Click to expand...

Mike · Jul 17, 2012

CelticWhisper said: ↑

Mike - When you talk about removing the references to my legislators, are you thinking in terms of releasing two separate versions or just taking it out for now, in order to get the flow perfected or the word-count under control? Sorry, but for whatever reason I'm having trouble wrapping my head around where you're going with that.
Click to expand...

I'm suggesting removing the Illinois policiticians to make a more general op-ed piece applicable to the other 49 states.

CelticWhisper · Jul 24, 2012

A few quick questions before I turn in for the night:

-Both my local paper and the WSJ (first result when I googled op-ed guidelines) include a clause stating the article must be exclusively written for their publications. Does this translate to "choose one and only one paper to publish in, because we won't consider anything that's been published elsewhere?"

-Also, in terms of copyright, can I be prevented from republishing anywhere else (e.g. TSA News Blog)? I mean...I wrote it, so I can still send it elsewhere, right?

-WSJ cites a desired length of 600-1200 "jargon-free" words. I'm currently at 1142. Not sure if that means "do not exceed 1200 and don't you dare use what we consider to be jargon" or if it means 600-1200 words with "jargon" being excluded from the count.

Also, while I'm on the topic, who curates TSA News Blog? Is it Lisa? If it is, or if it's someone else at TUG, would they be willing to run a longer piece if I wind up having to cut out too much from this article?

Mike · Jul 25, 2012

TSA New Blog is Christopher Elliott's baby. However, I think Lisa pretty much has full editorial capabilities. If you work with her, it'll get published.

A lot of WSJ pieces ultimately are reprinted elsewhere. If you can get them to publish it, it would be worth going along with their terms -- you would have an enormous initial audience.

Fisher1949 · Jul 25, 2012

Mike said: ↑

maintains “Master Lists” of abuses and cases of TSA personnel arrested ...

We should make sure they're up-to-date before this op-ed is distributed. I presume Bill has been updating them for both Bill & Lisa since I set up his FTP account. I'm no longer receiving either in email but I haven't been checking that they're updated.
Click to expand...

I've updated mine but haven't received any from Lisa. I'll gladly upload hers if she sends them to me.

CelticWhisper · Jul 27, 2012

Revision 4. Many thanks to Lisa and (again) to Phoebepontiac for their invaluable guidance, and to everyone for bearing with me. Wish I didn't have to be such a perfectionist but I want to make sure to hit this one out of the park.

I hate that I had to cut out a passage explaining that sometimes freedom is dangerous, but it was just too many words and as much as I hate that nobody takes a stand on principle anymore, I have to face facts: practical arguments have a better shot at getting through.

Down to 976 words now. At this point I do wonder - if WSJ allows up to 1200 words, would it be better to send them a previous revision (I've been saving these as separate files) that's a little wordier to make it sound better? Or would packing more detail into the newly-available ~200 word space be a better way to go? How much informational density are WSJ (and other) readers normally able to process?

TSA: A Three-Ring Circus of Failure, Waste, and Abuse

Never in our nation’s history has there been an agency so incompetent, so inept at utilizing its resources, and so disrespectful of the American public as the Transportation Security Administration. Founded with the ostensible goal of preventing another 9/11, the agency has been charged with keeping weapons, explosives, and incendiary devices off commercial airplanes. The TSA performs so poorly at this, in addition to perpetrating so many crimes and abuses against innocent travelers, that one is left wondering why it hasn’t been abolished.

At the start, TSA wasn’t much more offensive than existing private airport security. The uniforms changed, and only ticketed passengers were allowed into the “sterile” part of the airport, but otherwise checkpoints were mostly unchanged. Once new regulations appeared, however, things got ugly fast. With new bombing plots or just rumors thereof, travelers were required to remove shoes, limit liquid quantities, and bundle fluids together into plastic bags.

Most sickening of all is TSA’s response to the “underwear bomber” plot. Named “Scope-and-Grope” by its legion of detractors, it is TSA administrator John Pistole’s decision that travelers must choose between equal but different evils: undergoing an electronic and potentially carcinogenic strip-search or submitting to an “enhanced patdown” that, if done anywhere else, would constitute felony sexual assault. Furthermore, submission to a scan does not guarantee a traveler won’t be groped. And when an explosives-trace test following the groping comes back positive, the traveler is required to submit to a more thorough physical search in a private room, thus inviting more abuse. To date, explosives-trace tests have returned only false positives – never have they caught a bomb.

Incredibly, the agency has yet to comply with a court order requiring it to seek public input about its body-scanning equipment. The order was issued a year ago but TSA hasn’t even begun the process, while still forcing the program upon the public.

TSA’s screening procedures are unconscionable. In the past three months alone, they have threatened and terrorized a 4-year-old girl for the crime of hugging her grandmother, claiming the grandmother could have passed the girl a gun concealed in a stuffed toy; spilled the ashes of a traveler’s grandfather all over the airport floor and laughed at him as he scrambled to collect them; and stripped a woman and contaminated her feeding tube, thus endangering her life.

Apparently the idea of inalienable rights is itself such an alien concept at airports that last year, a retired Lieutenant Colonel of the USAF was arrested at the Albuqerque airport for reciting the 4th Amendment. TSA claimed that the traveler was “disrupting screening.” One is left to wonder exactly why the agency considers the Constitution disruptive to its proceedings.

These are not the agency’s only abuses. Activist website Travel Underground (www.travelunderground.org) maintains Master Lists of abuses and crimes committed by TSA agents, including crimes committed while on the job.

US Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), in an effort to rein in TSA, released a report of the 50 most severe cases of TSA criminal conduct. She also introduced the STRIP Act, which would force the elimination of police-style uniforms and fake badges and prevent TSA from using the term “officer” to refer to its screening clerks – a practice many have said constitutes impersonation of a law-enforcement officer.

Blackburn is one of too few Congresspeople who are willing to protect traveler rights against TSA’s unjustifiable prioritization of safety above liberty. My own officials, Senators Kirk and Durbin, and Rep. Jan Schakowsky, have been pathetically negligent in defending their constituents from TSA abuse. While I’ll pardon Kirk to a degree on medical grounds, Durbin replies with form letters that no longer even pertain to the topics I’ve written him about; and Schakowsky is apparently so cravenly apologetic toward TSA as to defend them at any opportunity, voting against Blackburn’s STRIP Act and stating that to her, TSA’s ordered arrest of the USAF officer “was not evidence of abuse.” Of course not, Jan. Arresting people for peacefully reciting the law is perfectly normal in free countries.

After 10 years and 60 billion taxpayer dollars, TSA hasn’t caught a single terrorist. The best they manage is playing catch-up and responding to yesterday’s dangers today. TSA routinely praises their clerks making “good catches,” but the fact is that none of the guns and knives they confiscate would have stopped a group of passengers from fighting off a hijacker. The problem that enabled 9/11 was fixed on 9/11. Passengers don’t need TSA’s disgraceful screening in order to fly safely.

It’s time to return to pre-9/11 passenger screening at airports. Keep the hardened cockpit doors and defiant passenger attitude, but take TSA, their dangerous, expensive, useless body scanners, and their blue-gloved grabby hands, and write them off as an expensive mistake. Bring back private screeners vulnerable to lawsuits and criminal prosecution. Stop grabbing at people’s drinks that were purchased from supposedly-secure vendors. Limit bomb screening to trace swabbing on bags only. No groping, no skin contact. And no body scanners, which can be defeated simply by carrying an object at one’s side, as engineer Jon Corbett proved repeatedly.

First, though, we need elected officials who recognize that risk-elimination is impossible and that rights are not worth sacrificing to the illusion of safety. As this is an election year, it’s a good time to make TSA a debate issue for anyone up for reelection. But there’s no wrong time to communicate to our representatives that their inability to rein in TSA is unacceptable. No official who defends TSA should expect to have our votes. With every day Congress spends hemming and hawing, toying with minor budget cuts and giving stern talks to TSA which the agency the turns around and ignores, more innocent travelers are abused.

It’s time to stop fooling around – abolition of TSA is the only solution.
Click to expand...

DeafBlonde · Jul 27, 2012

Awesome, CW! Simply awesome! <*standing, applauding, throwing roses and kisses*> It gave me goose-bumps!

CelticWhisper · Aug 6, 2012

Alright, I've decided it's time stop hemming and hawing. No guts, no glory and all that jazz.

The last revision posted is where this is at and I'm gearing up to send it to WSJ and see if it gets accepted. Before I do, I'm inviting one last round of suggestions - if there are any errors that have the potential to seriously discredit the article, me, or the general Flyers' Rights movement, let's hear 'em. Any other major revisions, same goes. Otherwise, I'm going to submit this either tonight or tomorrow morning. No sense in letting it linger.

And one more great big thank-you goes out to all the folks who helped me polish this up to the point it's at now. If it gets published, you share in the glory. And if it's rejected, I'm coming after you with a very large trout.

Incidentally, if this does publish then here's the point where I lose all pretense of anonymity. I'll still go by CW since I've had this username forever and have grown rather fond of it, but you'll all know who I am. *dramatic chord*

DeafBlonde · Aug 6, 2012

CelticWhisper said: ↑

...<snip for brevity...>

Incidentally, if this does publish then here's the point where I lose all pretense of anonymity. I'll still go by CW since I've had this username forever and have grown rather fond of it, but you'll all know who I am. *dramatic chord*
Click to expand...

I do not think that you have to worry about "us" (i.e., TUG members) knowing who you are; however, if I were you, I would worry about "them" (you know, DHS, TSA, FBI, <*insert other, ominous three-letter acronyms here*>, etc.) knowing who you are...just sayin'.

LeeAnne · Aug 6, 2012

Okay, just one comment: I don't think you have enough numbers in there about their crimes. I saw a comment on an article the other day that really resonated - I think it was posted by Fisher1949, and it was just a brief by-the-numbers rundown of the number of agents who've been arrested for sex crimes, theft, etc. My personal opinion is that one short paragraph with a few statistics like that would be pretty punchy, and would drive home how out-of-control they really are, and could be done without adding too many words. Your list could also include some of the more famous names of those abused, such as Nadine Hayes, Stacy Amato, Ruth Zimmerman, Tom Sawyer. etc. People HAVE heard those stories, and reminding them of just how prevalent they are could possibly get some folks thinking "Hmmm, y'know there really have been an awful lot of those, now that you mention it..."

Full disclosure: I have not read your earlier versions, so you might have already weeded out that type of information. If so I apologize. But I think the article is less forceful without it.

Doober · Aug 6, 2012

DeafBlonde said: ↑

I do not think that you have to worry about "us" (i.e., TUG members) knowing who you are; however, if I were you, I would worry about "them" (you know, DHS, TSA, FBI, <*insert other, ominous three-letter acronyms here*>, etc.) knowing who you are...just sayin'.
Click to expand...

No need to worry - they already know who we all are.

CelticWhisper · Aug 6, 2012

LeeAnne said: ↑

Okay, just one comment: I don't think you have enough numbers in there about their crimes. I saw a comment on an article the other day that really resonated - I think it was posted by Fisher1949, and it was just a brief by-the-numbers rundown of the number of agents who've been arrested for sex crimes, theft, etc. My personal opinion is that one short paragraph with a few statistics like that would be pretty punchy, and would drive home how out-of-control they really are, and could be done without adding too many words. Your list could also include some of the more famous names of those abused, such as Nadine Hayes, Stacy Amato, Ruth Zimmerman, Tom Sawyer. etc. People HAVE heard those stories, and reminding them of just how prevalent they are could possibly get some folks thinking "Hmmm, y'know there really have been an awful lot of those, now that you mention it..."

Full disclosure: I have not read your earlier versions, so you might have already weeded out that type of information. If so I apologize. But I think the article is less forceful without it.
Click to expand...

Can you link me to that if you find it? Alternatively, Fisher1949, can you repost it here (and can I snurch it for my op-ed)?

Also, regarding the lists, I'm trying to find a way to word it so I can include the prodigious size of these documents without calling too much attention to the fact that they haven't been updated in the past couple months.

The last thing I want to do is apply pressure or come off like I'm making demands, but it probably would be a good idea to update them so we can at least have the timestamps reflect a recent update. Maybe just add in a few high-profile cases and flesh the rest out later.

Revision 5: (up to 1071 words but within WSJ's guidelines)

TSA: A Three-Ring Circus of Failure, Waste, and Abuse

Never in our nation’s history has there been an agency so incompetent, so inept at utilizing its resources, and so disrespectful of the American public as the Transportation Security Administration. Founded with the ostensible goal of preventing another 9/11, the agency has been charged with keeping weapons, explosives, and incendiary devices off commercial airplanes. The TSA performs so poorly at this, in addition to perpetrating so many crimes and abuses against innocent travelers, that one is left wondering why it hasn’t been abolished.

At the start, TSA wasn’t much more offensive than existing private airport security. The uniforms changed, and only ticketed passengers were allowed into the “sterile” part of the airport, but otherwise checkpoints were mostly the same. Once new regulations appeared, however, things got ugly fast. With new bombing plots or just rumors thereof, travelers were required to remove shoes, limit liquid quantities, and bundle fluids together into plastic bags.

Most sickening of all is TSA’s response to the “underwear bomber” plot. Dubbed “Scope-and-Grope” by its legion of detractors, it is TSA administrator John Pistole’s decision that travelers must choose between equal but different evils: undergoing an electronic and potentially carcinogenic strip-search or submitting to an “enhanced patdown” that, if done anywhere else, would constitute felony sexual assault. Furthermore, submission to a scan does not guarantee a traveler won’t be groped. And when an explosives-trace test following the groping comes back positive, the traveler is required to submit to a more thorough physical search in a private room, thus inviting more abuse. To date, explosives-trace tests have returned only false positives – never have they caught a bomb.

Incredibly, the agency has yet to comply with a court order requiring it to seek public input about its body-scanning equipment. The order was issued a year ago but TSA hasn’t even begun the process, while still forcing the program upon the public.

TSA’s screening procedures are unconscionable. In the past three months alone, they have threatened and terrorized a 4-year-old girl for the crime of hugging her grandmother, claiming the grandmother could have passed the girl a gun concealed in a stuffed toy; spilled the ashes of a traveler’s grandfather all over the airport floor and laughed at him as he scrambled to collect them; and stripped a woman and contaminated her feeding tube, thus endangering her life. This is atop previous abuses such as those of Thomas Sawyer, whose urostomy bag was ruptured twice by TSA; Stacey Armato, who was unlawfully detained by TSA and made to miss her flight over her concern for how her bottled breast milk was handled; Ruth Zimmerman, who was unlawfully strip-searched to effect an examination of her colostomy bag; and Andrea Abbott, who was arrested for protecting her child from an invasive patdown.

Apparently the idea of inalienable rights is itself such an alien concept at airports that last year, a retired Lieutenant Colonel of the USAF was arrested at the Albuqerque airport for reciting the 4th Amendment. TSA claimed that the traveler was “disrupting screening.” One is left to wonder exactly why the agency considers the Constitution disruptive to its proceedings.

These are not the agency’s only transgressions. Activist website Travel Underground (www.travelunderground.org) maintains Master Lists of abuses and crimes committed by TSA agents, including crimes committed while on the job. The lists were over 200 strong as of May 2012, and continue to grow as TSA continues to mistreat the American traveling public.

US Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), in an effort to rein in TSA, released a report of the 50 most severe cases of TSA criminal conduct. She also introduced the STRIP Act, which would force the elimination of police-style uniforms and fake badges and prevent TSA from using the term “officer” to refer to its screening clerks – a practice many have said constitutes impersonation of a law-enforcement officer.

Blackburn is one of too few Congresspeople who are willing to protect traveler rights against TSA’s unjustifiable prioritization of safety above liberty. My own officials, Senators Kirk and Durbin, and Rep. Jan Schakowsky, have been pathetically negligent in defending their constituents from TSA abuse. While I’ll pardon Kirk to a degree on medical grounds, Durbin replies with form letters that no longer even pertain to the topics I’ve written him about; and Schakowsky is apparently so cravenly apologetic toward TSA as to defend them at any opportunity, voting against Blackburn’s STRIP Act and stating that to her, TSA’s ordered arrest of the USAF officer “was not evidence of abuse.” Apparently, arresting people for peacefully reciting the law should be considered perfectly normal in free countries.

After 10 years and 60 billion taxpayer dollars, TSA hasn’t caught a single terrorist. The best they manage is playing catch-up and responding to yesterday’s dangers today. TSA routinely praises their clerks making “good catches,” but the fact is that none of the guns and knives they confiscate would have stopped a group of passengers from fighting off a hijacker. The problem that enabled 9/11 was fixed on 9/11. Passengers don’t need TSA’s disgraceful screening in order to fly safely.

It’s time to return to pre-9/11 passenger screening at airports. Keep the hardened cockpit doors and defiant passenger attitude, but take TSA, their dangerous, expensive, useless body scanners, and their blue-gloved grabby hands, and write them off as an expensive mistake. Bring back private screeners vulnerable to lawsuits and criminal prosecution. Stop grabbing at people’s drinks that were purchased from supposedly-secure vendors. Limit bomb screening to trace swabbing on bags only. No groping, no skin contact. And no body scanners, which can be defeated simply by carrying an object at one’s side, as engineer Jon Corbett proved repeatedly.

First, though, we need elected officials who recognize that risk-elimination is impossible and that rights are not worth sacrificing to the illusion of safety. As this is an election year, it’s a good time to make TSA a debate issue for anyone up for reelection. But there’s no wrong time to communicate to our representatives that their inability to rein in TSA is unacceptable. No official who defends TSA should expect to have our votes. With every day Congress spends hemming and hawing, toying with minor budget cuts and giving stern talks to TSA which the agency the turns around and ignores, more innocent travelers are abused.

It’s time to stop fooling around – abolition of TSA is the only solution.
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