The Travails of The TSA
The Travails of The TSA
At this present moment, one can honestly say that members of Al qaeda would get more love from the American people – at least those who are frequent fliers - than those who are employed by the Transportation Security Administration (hereinafter the TSA). We have seen all the stories and disturbing images of little boys and girls being groped for the benefit of securing air transport and maintaining the peace of the friendly skies. But these are the times we are living in and these drastic and intrusive methods are what are needed to combat an enemy that will keep attacking. When I first came to this country as a boy, I would ponder how drugs made their way inside our prisons; yet, I know that this was a reality. My father, the police officer, explained to me the disgusting ways, one of which includes hiding drugs in orifices to feed the addict’s addiction - I mentioned this to underscore the parallels of the terrorists’ resolve to carry out their perverted cause.
No one I know believes that there is some perverted thrill that those who engage in these searches receive – they are simply doing their jobs until we can come up with a better solution to thwart the terrorists. It is easy to lose our resolve and become complacent; but do not forget how far these murderers would go to harm innocents. It was just over a couple years ago when a terrorist mother was willing to take her newly born child on a flight… filling the baby bottle, not with formula, but a liquid to ignite and bring the plane down over the Atlantic Ocean – this is what we are up again. Something also tells me that the authorities must know plots… that we are not privy to and that is why so far, notwithstanding the outcries, that the TSA is maintaining its resolve in carrying out these intrusive searches.
Politics have also intervened in the fight against terror. Case in point, when the former President Bush was fighting terror… by having the phone calls going to and from terrorist enclaves monitored, the biased media were up in arms… invoking Constitutional privacy rights, but now they are loudly quiet – I wonder if it is because there is a Democratic President at the helm? That is the danger of politicizing the fight against terrorism… I supported President Bush then and I wholeheartedly support President Obama now in our tireless efforts to combat and destroy the terrorist network.
I have seen the elderly gentleman who peed his pants due to an invasive search; I have seen the breast cancer survivor who had to surrender her prosthesis momentarily; and I have seen the little girls/boys being subjected to searches – and if these searches were not under the color of law, that the ones doing the searches would be brought up on pedophilia charges – but again, these are the times we are living in. Of course, we could also adopt the Israeli method of screening would-be passengers (profiling), but this would mean we would have to overcome the malignant cancer of political correctness that directly resulted in the killing of thirteen soldiers down at Fort Hood.
