The funny and the ugly of TSA

First the humor of TSA molestations. Here is a recent skit from Saturday Night Live regarding the new Total Sexual Abuse administration. Now that you laughed here is the very, very ugly side of TSA—and no, I'm not talking about Janet Napolitano.

Thomas Sawyer, 61, survived bladder cancer but now he has to wear a urostomy bag that takes the urine from an opening through his stomach. There is a patch that is sealed to his stomach, and through that the hose is attached so his urine can collect in the bag.

Sawyer was flying to a wedding and went through Janet's pornoscanner, which would obviously pick up something as large as the urostomy bag. He was then told that in addition to the scanner he now had to be molested by TSA agents. Because of the bag Sawyer asked for a private pat-down which agents at first refused him, telling him that they really don't have a place to do that. Matters got worse.

Sawyer has to wear pants that are too large for his body in order to accommodate the bag he has to wear. TSA forced him to remove his belt. As he tried to walk to the office for the pat-down his trousers fell down twice and he had to ask for permission to pull them up. He tried to tell the officials about his medical condition but they told him they weren't interested.

They had him remove his sweatshirt and then started running their hands down his chest. He told them that they had to be careful or the would break the seal on the bag. They ignored his warning. He said, "Sure enough, the seal was broken and urine started dribbling down my shirt and my leg and into my pants." The agents offered no help and left him to fend for himself. Sawyer had to board his plane soaked in urine.

Cathy Bossi is also a cancer survivor and a long-time flight attendant with U.S. Airways who has proven herself, repeatedly, to NOT be a terrorist threat. Because of her bout with cancer her doctor recommended she avoid the scanners. This meant she had to endure a TSA agent fondling her breasts, or in this case, breast. She lost one breast to the cancer and wears a prosthesis. The agent grabbed the prosthesis and demanded to know what it was. No one thought these TSA officials to be intelligent enough to figure out something that obvious.

Bossi told the agent it was her prosthesis, which may confuse the poor official as it is a big and complicated word, unlike those in the Dick & Jane books she normally reads. Bossi explained what it was and why she wore it. The agent informed her she would have to remove it for inspection. As might be expected Bossi found the experience upsetting.

Musa Mayer is another breast cancer survivor and has been wearing a prosthesis for 21 years. Because of that she had to be poked, prodded, fondling and touched by TSA agents. Mayer notes that 3 million women have had breast cancer and many wear a prosthesis, she wants to point out that all of them are now subjected to intrusive pat-downs because of it.

Remember, this is entirely the doing of Obama, Napolitano and the Democrats. While the Republicans are not friends of civil liberties, and certainly don't believe you have sovereignty over your own body, they did not do this. Obama, Napolitano and other officials in this administration are defending these practices. Obama needs to be sent into retirement permanently. You need to make it clear to the TSA agents that you resent what they are doing. You need to write Democrats and let them know this is alienating you entirely from their party and they will wish for the good old days of the 2010 election if they don't tell their party leaders to stop. And you need to let the airlines know that their silence on the matter is problematic and that you insist they defend their passengers.

A funny and not-so-funny look at the TSA.

While the video is amusing, remember the reality of the TSA is pretty disgusting. This is what happens when a government agency has to deal with a problem—it overreacts and exaggerates threats while acting like a bull in a china shop.

One of the great dangers of government is that it often solves problems by creating situations that are worse. I have previously shown that the scanners they use to take pornographic photos of passengers emit sufficient radiation to cause more deaths per year than they could save if they reduced terrorist attacks to zero.

But there is a second way in which government policy kills people. To the degree that the TSA makes flying unattractive people look for other alternative methods to travel. And all of them are LESS safe than flying leading to more accidental deaths.

Consider a flight from LA to San Diego. It is a two hour drive. The flight itself takes 45 minutes. So flying, under the best of circumstances means you arrive 75 minutes faster. But government bureaucracy means you are supposed to check in one hour early. And if you are checking luggage you might need to come even earlier. You have to take into account the TSA acting to delay every single passenger. You can show up one hour early and perhaps make the flight, but to be safe you might want to be there at least 90 minutes to 120 minute prior to the flight. At this point flying will take you much longer to get to San Diego than driving.

Only government could make cars air travel slower than driving. And when that happens people start to drive more. But car accidents kill three times as many people per mile traveled than does flying. One out of every 7,700 people will be killed in a car accident. But flying deaths are only 1 out of every 2 million people. The TSA, in order to "save lives" is pushing people into modes of travel that kill more people every year than all the terrorists deaths in America combined.

So the scanners alone will kill more people per year than terrorists. And by pushing frustrated travelers into cars, instead of planes, Janet Napolitano and her travel Gestapo are actually killing more people per year than terrorists. The TSA, because it has no clear picture of what it is doing, is more dangerous that terrorists to intend to kill people. Just because Janet and her thugs have "good intentions" doesn't mean they are making us safer. Their voodoo safety is highly dangerous and deadly.

The TSA is NOT your friend.

Now the TSA gets off its ass

After the travel gestapo working for Homeland Security totally flubbed the warning they received about would-be terrorist Umar Abdullmutallab they have finally gotten off their fat asses and done something. Once again, it is the wrong thing.

As you will remember they imposed these new absurd travel regulations stripping people of the right to pee during the last hour of a flight. Well, that information was made public through some blogs. So what do the Travel Nazis do? They go after the blogs with subpoenas.

The writer Christopher Elliot, found a TSA agent at his front door with a subpoena saying: "You are hereby commanded by the administrator, Transportation Security Administration, United States Department of Homeland Security to produce and permit inspection of the records described below...."

While the TSA didn't have time to investigate someone reported by his own family as a terrorist, who flew without luggage and who appeared on a list of suspected terrorists, they do have time to harass bloggers. Why? The bloggers printed the new TSA "guidelines" on "How to Harass Innocent People Why Ignoring Real Threats." Okay, maybe the TSA called it SD 1544-09-06. They are demanding the bloggers reveal the source of their information. It is a pathetic commentary on the Homeland Security State of Napolitano and Obama, when instead of fixing what went wrong, they concentrate on unimportant issues while harassing bloggers.

The TSA sent two of their thugs to visit travel blogger Steve Frischling as well. They confiscated his lap top computer. Frischling said that they threatened to "interfer" with his contract to write a blog for an airline if he refused to cooperate with them. They wanted him to name names. Is Joe McCarthey running TSA? The New York Times is reporting that the TSA refuses to say how many American bloggers are being harassed under this new fishing expedition. What they want is to silence anyone exposing TSA stupidity—which would be a full time job.

So, all you morons who thought Obama would be different than Bush, you are right. He's worse. I could be wrong, but I don't remember TSA thugs harassing bloggers under Bush. That seems to be an Obama innovation. Certainly this contempt for the First Amendment is not unique it was used before—by men like Stalin, Mao, Mussolini and Hitler.

Huffington Post says:

The agents threatened to get Frischling -- a blogger for KLM airlines -- fired from his job, confiscate all his electronic devices -- phones, computers, and iPods -- and declare him a security risk -- which would get him on the No Fly list -- unless he cooperated.

Frischling -- who has worked for Life, Time, Newsweek, New York Times, and was embedded with troops in Iraq -- didn't know what to do. He couldn't reach a lawyer.

The civil subpoena threatened a fine and up to a year in jail for failure to comply.

The TSA has been under fire lately for failure to stop the Christmas Bomber from boarding the NW flight. Frischling told the Huffington Post that he didn't know who sent him the memo and that it is not in any of his computers. The memo was hardly secret. It was sent to approximately 10,000 airlines, airports, and security firms around the world, including locations in Riyadh, Islamabad, and Lagos.

So the TSA sends out a directive to thousands of places, which is seen by tens of thousands of people, and then starts harassing two people for knowing what is in the directive. This is par for the bungling, authoritarian perfomance of Napolitano. She really does want to be another Janet Reno. Now all she needs is to kill some women and children by buring down their "compound" and send in armed thugs to terrorize a small child. Janet Reno Lives. Be Afriad. Be Very Afraid.

Image: Janet Reno showing the world some of her "tools of persuasion." She promised to later show reporters the "rack," "iron maiden" and other tools she finds usesful as first security reichfürher.

More questions on the failed TSA

It is astounding to watch how the Obama administration has been dealing with the most recent incident on a international flight. We should itemize first, all the ways in which the bureaucratic system of governance failed to deal with the problem.

We know that the family of the would-be terrorist, Umar Abdulmutallab, had warned the U.S. government that he had become fanatical in his Islamic beliefs and that they felt he posed a threat. We know the U.S. Embassy in Nigeria was informed and passed the information on to Washington. The U.S. Embassy, however, didn’t revoke Abdulmutallab’s existing visa to fly into the United States. Instead they decided to flag it for more investigation if were to apply for a second visa later on. So, while they felt the threat was possible, they decided to allow him to fly without any further investigation at this time.

Once the information got to Washington the terrorism bureaucracy put Abdulmutallab on the list of possible terrorists and that is all they did. No other action was taken. And when Abdulmutallab purchased a ticket to fly to the U.S., the government warning system on terrorism gave him a clearance, no red flags of any kind were waved. Security personnel were not told that Abdulmutallab deserved any extra scrutiny whatsoever.

Then we learn that Abdulmutallab purchased his ticket at the airport with cash, which our government says is a “red flag” and that he had no checked luggage for his international flight—allegedly another red flag. So we had red flags flapping wildly in the breeze and the terror bureaucracy simply passes Abdulmutallab for the flight. And security personnel never found the explosives that Abdulmtuallab strapped to his leg nor the syringe of liquid he had hidden in his underwear.

Now let’s investigate what did work. Abdulmutallab attempted to light the explosive. It popped, it fizzled, it sparked and it sent off some smoke and some flames. But it didn’t explode, which is pretty much what happened last time this was tried. Passengers immediately saw what happened and jumped Abdulmutallab. Horrors! They left their seats during the last hour of the flight, something that is now forbidden by bureaucratic edict alone. The passengers worked. They grabbed the man, they extinguished the flames, they took him into custody and with crew members handcuffed him. They even strip searched him to make sure he didn’t have other explosives on him. The crisis was averted for two reasons. First is the difficulty of concocting a bomb on the plane means that no explosion took place, only sparks, some flames and smoke. Second is the fact that passengers will act when they have to and are especially vigilante since 9/11.

Yet Reichführer Janet Reno went on television to tell the nation “the system has worked really very, very smoothly over the course of the past several days.” The New York Times reports: “Robert Gibbs, the White House spokesman, echoed the positive comments Ms. Napolitano made on ABC’s ‘This Week,’ saying in an interview on ‘Face the Nation’ on CBS that ‘in many ways, this system has worked.’”

Worked for whom? It has given immense powers to unelected bureaucrats. It has created a massive bureaucracy that lives off taxpayers and sucks up to politicians for more goodies. It has stripped Americans of numerous freedoms. But it hasn’t worked in stopping incidents like this.

The government’s famed database on terrorism suspects failed since Abdulmuttalab was listed there. An official for the government told the Times, “The information goes in there, and it’s available to all the agencies. The point is to marry up data from different sources over time that may indicate an individual might be a terrorist.” Unfortunately it appears that the way government works the data is not “married up” until after something happens.

And consider how the government bends over backwards to avoid stereotyping potential terrorists. They will have staff pat down, bark at, search and harass some 90-year-old Anglican nun with a walker even though one fact remains constant for the terrorists and it isn’t that they are Anglicans. The reality is and has been that the attackers are Islamists. In order to not discomfort Muslims the government policy is to waste a lot of time discomforting everyone.

If a women were raped we don’t randomly search people on the street. And the police don’t just go out and start questioning women, old men in wheelchairs and children. The reality is that the rapist going to be a man in virtually case, and he is going to be over a certain age and physically capable of using violence. Resources are not expended on individuals unlikely to have been involved. But at the airports 99% of the effort to find terrorists is diffused among people who are unlikely to be terrorists.

The net result is that the effort is spread out thinly with random individuals being subjected to extra measure mainly for show. Meanwhile the individuals who fit the profile of the typical terrorist—male, young and Muslim—can pass cursory inspections, as Abdulmuttalab did. Since the government refuses to “profile” suspects this means that every passenger, unlikely to be a terrorist, acts as a cover for the terrorists. Government randomly picks passengers for extra scrutiny because the “uncertainty” is supposed to impede the terrorists. But the odds are with the terrorists. Only one out of millions of people is likely to be a terrorist. So the chance of being randomly selected for extra scrutiny is almost non-existent. The only other option is to profile who is chosen for extra security measures but that violates some politically correct worldview and is shunned.

Even Christopher Hitchens seems annoyed at the utter stupidity of the moves by Napolitano. Pesonally I like Hitchens as an individual. We had to work together at one point and our interactions were pleasant and I got a signed copy of God is Not Good out of the deal. But Hitchens was one of those wrapped up in the fever over the war on terror. Perhaps he is starting to figure something out: just because you favor government doing something that would be objectively good doesn’t mean that the government will do the job well. In fact, there is a high chance that they will not only do it badly but make the original problem worse in the process. Hitchens writes:

Why do we fail to detect or defeat the guilty, and why do we do so well at collective punishment of the innocent? The answer to the first question is: Because we can't—or won't. The answer to the second question is: Because we can. The fault here is not just with our endlessly incompetent security services, who give the benefit of the doubt to people who should have been arrested long ago or at least had their visas and travel rights revoked. It is also with a public opinion that sheepishly bleats to be made to "feel safe." The demand to satisfy that sad illusion can be met with relative ease if you pay enough people to stand around and stare significantly at the citizens' toothpaste. My impression as a frequent traveler is that intelligent Americans fail to protest at this inanity in case it is they who attract attention and end up on a no-fly list instead. Perfect.

It was reported over the weekend that in the aftermath of the Detroit fiasco, no official decision was made about whether to raise the designated "threat level" from orange. Orange! Could this possibly be because it would be panicky and ridiculous to change it to red and really, really absurd to lower it to yellow? But isn't it just as preposterous (and revealing), immediately after a known Muslim extremist has waltzed through every flimsy barrier, to leave it just where it was the day before?

What nobody in authority thinks us grown-up enough to be told is this: We had better get used to being the civilians who are under a relentless and planned assault from the pledged supporters of a wicked theocratic ideology. These people will kill themselves to attack hotels, weddings, buses, subways, cinemas, and trains. They consider Jews, Christians, Hindus, women, homosexuals, and dissident Muslims (to give only the main instances) to be divinely mandated slaughter victims. Our civil aviation is only the most psychologically frightening symbol of a plethora of potential targets. The future murderers will generally not be from refugee camps or slums (though they are being indoctrinated every day in our prisons); they will frequently be from educated backgrounds, and they will often not be from overseas at all. They are already in our suburbs and even in our military. We can expect to take casualties. The battle will go on for the rest of our lives. Those who plan our destruction know what they want, and they are prepared to kill and die for it. Those who don't get the point prefer to whine about "endless war," accidentally speaking the truth about something of which the attempted Christmas bombing over Michigan was only a foretaste. While we fumble with bureaucracy and euphemism, they are flying high.

Below is a recording of a live announcement from a pilot regarding the new retrictions that Janet "Iron Fist" Napolitano is going to impose in order to give you the illusion that the government is making flying safer. Please act deluded. Failure to act deluded could be cause to harass, threaten, taser, shot, or incarcerate you. Remember, Big Brother is our friend.

Flubbed terrorists known to government.

The Nigerian who tried to light explosive strapped to his leg was known to the U.S. government. Umar Abdulmutallab's name was added to a list of known or suspsected terrorists by the government a month ago. However, when the man's name was run through the database, before he could board his flight, it came up with a green light. There was no warning of any kind. There wasn't even a suggestion that he be put under additional scrutiny. Instead of focusing on people the government KNOWS to be risks the bureaucrats prefer to go after everyone.

There are new restrictions on hand luggage put into place—yet the explosives the man carried were strapped to his leg and never in hand luggage. There is the new regulation confining passengers to their seats yet the man was in his seat when he tried to light the explosive. Abdulmutallab would have been in compliance with all the new restrictions imposed by the government had they been put in place before he boarded the plane. In other words, NONE of the new regulations would have had any impact on the incident. These regulations do not prevent incidents such as the one that happened, that is clear. The incident is merely an excuse for the additional regulations not a justification.

Take the new rule on one piece of carry-on luggage only as an example. Abdulmutallab had only one piece of carry-on luggage. In fact, it was the only luggage he had. Apparently no one found a man flying thousands of miles, with just one piece of hand luggage unusual. His ticket showed him being on his trip for almost two weeks—yet he had no luggage and no one found that unusual. He was on a list of suspected terrorists which exists to allegedly warn airport security about yet the U.S. government gave the man the green light so security staff were not even warned to give the man a bit of additional scrutiny.

Instead of focusing on ways in which the existing failed the bureaucrats like Napolitano look for ways to complicate the lives of innocent people. One month ago our government listed Abdulmutallab as a potential terrorist and yet they approved him to fly without even a hint that he might be a problem. The failure was not the result of too little regulation, as Napolitano is always inclined to think, it was the failure of government. Having the travel gestapo spend more time hassling flyers is no help. All it does is tie up security staff with millions of innocent people.

Since the government knew that Abdulmutallab was a potential risk the most sensible thing to do was to ask security staff to check him out thoroughly. When the man checked-in, was on a list of potential terrorists AND had no checked luggage that should have sent alarm bells ringing. But no one, other than the bureaucrats, knew he was on the list. Security at the airport was never told.

Notice that the failure in security belongs heavily to the bureaucrats in Washington for failing to sound the alarm bell for extra scrutinty. It partially belongs to security staff for not wondering about the absence of luggage. Instead of addressing precisely where security failed, Napolitano pretends the problem was not enough state control and ups the level of regulations stripping Americans of freedom. This is why I don't think there is a war on terrorism, there is a war on freedom however. Everytime some would-be terrorists does something the U.S. government, instead of actually focusing on the individuals with a known tie to terrorism, clamp down on the traveling public.

Photo: Janet Napolitano illustrating how to slowly grab liberty by the throat.