FINALLY: Reader Tim Maguire writes:Don't blame us! We're only doing our job! - Eric ScheieI have one comment I have to make about these TSA “front-line grunts” who are “just doing their jobs.” The upper level administrators who make who make these terrible decisions wouldn’t be able to if it weren’t for the legions of low-level staffers who are willing to just do their jobs. They are decision makers too–they decide their own limits and they have decided that sexual assault is within those limits; they are the cogs that keep the wheels of oppression churning.
Because they have created an insular and near-anonymous system, no one is really accountable and there is no one to blame -- as even members of Congress discovered when they tried ever so gently to ask TSA administrator John Pistole if he might consider backing off just a little.Airport 'Security'? - Thomas Sowell
Look for Terrorists, Not Weapons - Mona CharenWhat do the Israeli airport-security people do that American airport-security people do not do? They profile. They question some individuals for more than half an hour, open up all their luggage, and spread the contents on the counter — and they let others go through with scarcely a word. And it works.
Meanwhile, this administration is so hung up on political correctness that they have turned “profiling” into a bugaboo. They would rather have electronic scanners look under the clothes of nuns than detain a jihadist imam for some questioning.
After 9/11, we were all under the impression that the newly created TSA, and its counterparts in other Western countries, would be particularly alert for certain kinds of behavior. Purchasing a one-way ticket, paying cash, having little or no luggage, looking nervous, and traveling from certain unstable parts of the world were all presumed to be red flags that would trigger action. Instead, we seem to have settled into a kind of bovine, tedious hunt for weapons. We screen everyone for guns, knives, scissors, nail clippers, tweezers (yes, I lost a good pair in November 2001), and now also shoe bombs and liquids and gels. In short, we look for weapons, not terrorists.
