Just when you think that the guardians of airport security, the TSA (Terminally Stupid Agency), can’t get any more obnoxious in the way that it treats hapless airline passengers, along comes this little gem. The arrogant TSA bureaucrats have now moved beyond frisking grandmothers and small children as possible terrorists and are now humiliating amputees as part of the airport screening process. Ah, our tax dollars at work. Our civil liberties RIP.
In his farewell speech to Congress in 1951, General Douglas MacArthur intoned that “old soldiers never die, they just fade away.” Likewise, bad policy ideas never die. Unfortunately, they never fade away either. They just get recycled. The latest example is the decision by the Transportation Security Administration to resume random screenings of airport passengers at the gate. After massive complaints from the public, the TSA abandoned that absurd practice several years ago.
Of all the post-9-11 airport “safety” measures, the random screenings were the most intrusive and useless. All too many instances arose in which the randomly selected passenger turned out to be a toddler or a 90-year-old woman in a wheelchair. As if there was even a snowball’s chance in Hell that such individuals were possible terrorists. My colleague Doug Bandow has a good piece on that practice.
Most of the TSA’s measures at airports are designed to show activity rather than have any real relevance to stopping terrorism, and the random searches were the most blatant examples of activity for the sake of activity. Why America’s security bureaucrats have decided to bring back that useless policy is anyone’s guess. Perhaps TSA really stands for Terminally Stupid Actions.