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TSA watch: Power without Accountability
I'm flying to Houston from Atlanta this evening, so I'll once again have to deal with all the TSA bullshit. And no, I won't be wearing my "Kip Hawley is an Idiot" T-shirt. Because I'll be going face to face with bureaucracy later today, I want to pass on a story I read yesterday about Nick Monaghan's disturbing experience with TSA back in 2002. An excerpt:
After some more grumbling on my part they eventually finished with me and I went to retrieve our luggage from the x-ray machine. Upon returning I found my wife sitting in a chair, crying. Mary rarely cries, and certainly not in public. When I asked her what was the matter, she tried to quell her tears and sobbed, "I’m sorry...it’s...they touched my breasts...and..." That’s all I heard. I marched up to the woman who’d been examining her and shouted, "What did you do to her?" Later I found out that in addition to touching her swollen breasts – to protect the American citizenry – the employee had asked that she lift up her shirt. Not behind a screen, not off to the side – no, right there, directly in front of the hundred or so passengers standing in line. . . .
. . . as soon as I demanded to know what the federal employee had done to make her cry, I was swarmed by Portland police officers. Instantly. Three of them, cinching my arms, locking me in handcuffs, and telling me I was under arrest. Now my wife really began to cry. . . .
I was shoved into an elevator, a cop holding each arm. After making me face the corner, the head honcho told that I was under arrest and that I wouldn’t be flying that day – that I was in fact a "menace."
Read the rest. It gets worse.
The inevitable conclusion is that government agencies like the TSA have no internal and very little external accountability. Due to this fundamental, systematic flaw, our best chance of positively changing such organizations is through greater awareness. And such vigilance means getting stories like Monaghan's out there.
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