The Bush Betrayal: Chapter 11

We continue coverage of this awesome book with another small sample:

        Chapter Title: Airport Antics, The TSA Attitue Police
Section Heading: TSA's PUBLIC ENEMY NUMBER ONE

OK, there's gonna be some text here, and it's going to look like a joke - and it will be - but it will also be reality - the reality that the Bush Administration is imposing on us. The TSA is a joke - it's all for show. It's expensive, and inconvenient, and essentially meaningless. Now, read:

In reality, after 9/11, TSA shut down perhaps the most effective check-point testing system because it did not want to frighten its own screeners. In the late 1990s, the FAA created the Threat Image Projection System, which placed images of objects that might be threats on X-ray screens "during actual operations to record whether or not a screener detects a threat."⁴(PDF) This was the most frequently used method to test airport screeners prior to 9/11. But the system "was shut down immediately following the September 11th terrorist attacks due to concerns that it would result in screening delays and panic, as screeners might think that they were actually viewing a threat object," the General Accounting Office reported in September 2003.

I know this is so bizarre as to stretch credulity, or the very limits of your imagination, but this stuff is true. We're talking about a GAO report!

The feeling that really creeps up on you, though, the really scary one, is that someone at the TSA is no longer concerned that more attacks might happen. It's like they actually do know that nothing else will happen - for sure. I love conspiracy theories, especially ones backed-up with lots of facts, but this one is just bizarre. Why get rid of your most effective means of detecting weapons?

I don't actually believe, and really don't care, whether there's a conspiracy thing going on at the TSA. Any reasonable person will look at the facts that Bovard presents and conclude that the TSA is a monumental government waste, and if anything, gives Americans a false sense of security.

Links:
20. Philip Brasher, "Critics Decry Farm Bill Price Tag," Associated Press, May 7, 2002.

Link to original article (and Chapter 1 - Introduction) here.

Link to previous chapter.

Chapter 12.