TSA is hijacking our freedom

"Beam me up, Scotty. There’s no intelligent life on this planet."

I couldn’t help but think of that apocryphal quote from "Star Trek" as I gazed at the full-body scanners in the security lines at Newark Airport on Thursday.

The scanner booths, which bear a resemblance to that mythical "transporter" in the TV series, weren’t in use that day. But when I called Transportation Security Administration spokesperson Ann Davis on Friday, she informed me that the plan is for all passengers to be required to go through what amounts to a nude photo shoot before boarding an airplane.

That’s unless, of course, that passenger wants to have his or her genitals groped by an angry federal employee.

Davis didn’t say that. But a lot of the TSA’s critics are.

One such critic is John Whitehead. He’s a lawyer with the Rutherford Institute, a civil liberties advocacy group in Virginia that is suing the feds to stop the scanning. The alternative to the scanning is a manual pat-down that many consider to be little more than molestation, he said.

"We’re getting flooded with e-mails, mainly from females who don’t like their breasts touched and their vaginas touched," said Whitehead. "We got one e-mail from a mother whose 12-year-old daughter was put through the scanner and then groped."

When I asked Davis about these complaints, she neither confirmed nor denied this is federal policy.

"There is not much I can say about what the pat-downs consist of, for security reasons," she said.

There’s plenty that people on the internet can say, though. And what they’re saying is that "pat-downs" are punishment for not following TSA orders.

"If people say they don’t want to go through the scanner, the TSA agents yell ‘opt-out!’ and rush up and go all over them," said Whitehead. "If you don’t agree with them, they call the police."

That’s what happened to Mike Roberts, the man who’s become the hero of the anti-scanner movement. The TSA called the cops on Roberts, a 35-year-old pilot for ExpressJet airlines, when he refused to be scanned or groped prior to a flight out of Memphis. Roberts was then banned from flying. Rutherford is representing him in an effort to get the TSA to lift the ban.

The TSA’s practice of forcing pilots to go through scanners is evidence of just how far the TSA bureaucrats have strayed from reality. The purpose of scanning is to prevent hijacking. And the pilot can’t hijack the airplane for a rather obvious reason: He’s already flying it.

One of my pals who is a pilot told me how the TSA once took away his nail clippers. That meant he couldn’t trim his nails in midair. If he’d wanted to kill someone, however, he could have picked up that axe that hangs on the cockpit wall.

The TSA may be lost in space, but here in Jersey, we have politicians of both parties trying to bring it back to Earth. U.S. Rep. Rush Holt, a Democrat from Princeton, was among the first to raise objections to the scanners. Back in August, Holt, who is a physicist by trade, called for a study by the Government Accountability Office to determine if the scanners are safe and/or effective. There’s doubt they could detect bombs hidden in body cavities, Holt says.

He cited the work of physicist David Brenner, of Columbia University, showing that the X-rays employed in the "backscatter" type of scanner create a small but measurable cancer risk. The other type of scanner, called "millimeter wave," does not present that risk. But the TSA mainly bought the risky type because ... well, because the manufacturers lobbied Congress and President Obama ponied up a billion bucks in stimulus spending.

No one asked the public, however. But state Sen. Mike Doherty has heard enough complaints that he’s called a news conference for tomorrow to seek a suspension of the scanning program.

"We have open borders and we have no idea who’s coming in and out of our country," said Doherty, who is a Republican from Warren County. "Yet when American citizens try to travel, the TSA is actually groping people’s genitals, buttocks and breasts, including children."

Doherty said legislators from both parties, as well as a representative from the American Civil Liberties Union, will register their objections to the program tomorrow. So maybe there’s intelligent life on the planet after all.

And maybe, some day, some genius will invent a means by which we citizens can send messages to Washington.

ADD: Over at View From the Right, Larry Auster asks a question a lot of Americans are asking, but few of our leaders are. Instead of turning America into a police state, why don't we just be more selective about who gets in?

I made a similar point in a June column about the hysterical over-reaction by the TSA in Newark when that guy slipped through security to kiss his girfriend goodbye, The column was headlined, "Let's face it; Obama is winning this war" and it contained this observation:

One of the former CIA spooks with whom I discuss this sort of thing from time to time is Robert Baer, who spent a lot of time in the Mideast back in the Cold War years. The first time we spoke was not long after 9/11.

At the time, Baer said he had expected the Bush administration to make our immigration policies more like those of Switzerland — where he recalled checking into a hotel only to get a visit a short time later from Swiss authorities who wondered why he hadn’t paid a parking ticket last time he was in town.

Instead, Bush had named an open-borders advocate to run the Immigration and Naturalization Service, which mailed visa renewal forms to two of the deceased hijackers not long after 9/11. Bin Laden must have gotten a chuckle out of that one.

The underreaction on the domestic front was countered on the foreign front, said Baer. "We totally overreacted," said Baer. "We invaded two countries we shouldn’t have invaded. We completely wore out the military and the CIA."

Thousands of lives and a trillion dollars later, al Qaeda is using our presence in Iraq and Afghanistan to recruit more potential terrorists.

"We fell right into the trap," said Baer. "We just made it more dangerous."

Link to source: http://blog.nj.com/njv_paul_mulshine/2010/11/scanner.html