I don’t think we need more money in government; I do think we need more morality and decency in our culture. Just as numerous cultural forces have brought our standards down—way down—other influences in society can surely reverse that trend. And if we really want government to “get off my lawn,” then part of the solution is better citizens obeying the laws we already have so we don’t have to pass new laws to further explain and expand the old ones.
The great writer Tom Wolfe said it best, in his satirical novel The Bonfire of the Vanities, through the character of Judge White (played in the movie by Morgan Freeman) as he speaks from the bench: “Let me tell you what justice is. Justice is the law, and the law is man’s feeble attempt to set down the principles of decency. Decency! And decency is not a deal. It isn’t an angle, or a contract, or a hustle! Decency … decency is what your grandmother taught you! It’s in your bones! Now you go home. Go home and be decent people. Be decent.”
10
Bend Over and Take It Like a Prisoner!
“SPREAD YOUR FEET and put your hands up!” shouted the federal agent. As my computer and wallet were taken from me and out of my sight, I asked, “Can I keep an eye on my wallet, please?”
“No! Don’t move! Stay right there,” the agent barked in reply.
You may be wondering, “Gov. Huckabee, when were you arrested?” Let me assure you, this wasn’t an arrest; for me, it was just another day in the airport “security” line, undergoing the process we all endure just to get on a plane. Where else would I be ordered to stand still, put up my hands, and have my personal belongings taken and searched without a warrant or probable cause? After years of this indignity, much of the flying public thinks little of it, and they usually don’t complain. They just dutifully stand there, bend over, and take it like a prisoner.
President George W. Bush created the Office of Homeland Security just days after the September 11, 2001, jihadist terror attacks on American soil. Former Pennsylvania Governor Tom Ridge headed up the office as of October 8, 2001. By the fall of 2002, it had become the Department of Homeland Security and merged a number of federal agencies into a single behemoth bureaucracy.
The USA Patriot Act was created even more hurriedly. It passed the House 357–66, and the Senate 98–1, and was signed by President Bush just six weeks after 9/11. The “USA Patriot Act” is actually an acronym for the “Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism” Act. Whew! One has to wonder if it took more time to come up with the catchy name—or, heck, even to say it—than it did to consider whether Americans were being asked, in the name of freedom, to give up substantial freedoms and constitutional rights. A subtitle explained that this was “An Act to deter and punish terrorist acts in the United States and around the world, to enhance law enforcement investigatory tools, and for other purposes.” We are all for punishing terrorists. Never met someone who thought we shouldn’t. But did anyone anticipate that not many terrorists would really get punished as a result of this act, but that American citizens would? And isn’t the tacked-on phrase “for other purposes” a little vague?
Government doesn’t do things well, even when it takes its sweet time. When it acts in haste, it can really screw things up.
Many of the act’s provisions were set to begin expiring in 2005, but Congress voted to reauthorize it. The Senate version made major changes due to bipartisan concerns about civil liberties violations, but the extension that came out of reconciliation was mostly the House version, which was substantially the same bill as in 2001.
Parts of it were due to sunset again in 2009, but Congress passed a one-year extension. Another attempt at a one-year extension failed, but then Congress passed the PATRIOT Sunsets Extension Act of 2011, a four-year extension of three major, controversial provisions: roving wiretaps (to track people who might be avoiding wiretaps by using multiple phones); allowing the feds to secretly search library and business records (known as the “library records” provision); and surveillance of “lone wolf terrorists” (people not known to be linked to terrorist groups but suspected of terrorism-related activities). The extension also finessed a few parts of the original law that had been ruled unconstitutional by the courts. President Obama signed the one-year extension in 2010 and let his autopen sign the four-year extension in 2011.
“Don’t like the law? Blame my pen! It signed it, not me!”
Some Republicans questioned whether it was constitutional to sign with an autopen, but since nobody ever presses Obama beyond the initial question on any constitutional issue, that never went anywhere.
After the horrific attacks of 9/11, some cracks began to appear in the foundation of freedom upon which the United States of America is built. America hadn’t suffered such a deadly attack from an outside force since Pearl Harbor. And like Pearl Harbor, 9/11 led to a vast expansion of government spending on defense and intelligence. But unlike 9/11, the attack on Pearl Harbor was carried out by a specific national government—Japan’s, for those who dozed through history class. The Axis nations of Japan, Germany, and Italy were the targets of our shooting and spying, and we knew it was over when they formally surrendered and went back to selling us cars, ale, and expensive shoes.
With 9/11, the emotional impact was even greater than it had been with Pearl Harbor. This time, the victims weren’t active-duty military and battleships, but thousands of innocent civilians in New York City and Washington, D.C. The office workers, airline passengers, and first responders who died could have been any of us, just going about our day. The horror was brought right into our homes—a shocking television drama that was real, live, and uncut. Such unprecedented atrocity required a response of unprecedented strength. But this shadowy enemy offered no clear target and no defined “end” to the fight. This was an entirely new type of warfare, so we had to feel our way in learning how to wage it. And as weasel-y politicians like to say, “Mistakes were made.”
One mistake the government made was to assume that because the enemy hid in a crowd, it was okay to treat the entire crowd as suspects. And one mistake Americans made was to let the fear and paranoia generated by 9/11 lead them to forget Benjamin Franklin’s sage warning about the slippery slope of trading freedom for security:
Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.
—BENJAMIN FRANKLIN, PENNSYLVANIA ASSEMBLY: REPLY TO THE GOVERNOR, NOVEMBER 11, 1755
What would Ben say today? Would he cheerfully go through a full-body scanner that electronically strip-searched him and then allow a federal agent to put his blue-gloved hands inside his pants and over his thighs, crotch, and upper body for the sake of domestic travel on a privately owned commercial carrier? I’ll bet you a Benjamin that he most certainly would not. (Come to think of it, though, kite-flying Ben would definitely be in awe of this and every other use of … electricity! Also airplane flight, but I digress.)
One can’t blame Democrats or Obama for this intrusion. And one must concede that things done in the aftermath of 9/11 were carried out in the fog and fear that mark the launch of any war. But almost fourteen years later, have we made major adjustments based on common sense and that pesky little document called the Constitution, or do we just bend over and take it like a prisoner?
Almost certainly, I travel by air more than you do. Over the past few years, I’ve logged 300,000 to 350,000 miles annually. That includes roughly 200 flight legs a year just on airlines, plus numerous flights on private aircraft when I can’t make an event by airline schedule or if someone offers to get me there on a private plane. I reach Delta’s Diamond Medallion status (highest level of frequent flyer) by April or May of most years. All this is to make the point that I’m a seasoned traveler.
I will say that there have been some significant improvements in the TSA process, most notably the PreCheck program whereby one pays a fee to have an extensive background check done, be fingerprint
ed, fill out paperwork, and submit to a personal interview with a federal agent to qualify for expedited screening.
For my friends who say, “I don’t want to give the government my fingerprints,” I remind them that when you go through that full-body scanner, you’re giving them far more than fingerprints—you’re allowing them to take a peek “under the hood,” so to speak. When a TSA agent comes running up to the security line laughing out loud and showing other agents something on his iPhone, you just hope it isn’t the image of you that’s got them chuckling. Despite the personal disclosures and fingerprints, PreCheck is a godsend to frequent flyers and well worth the money to avoid getting stuck behind someone who brings a thirty-two-ounce bottle of water through the line because, he says, “I didn’t know water was a liquid.” People that dumb must be the ones who actually need the flight attendant’s demonstration of how to buckle a seat belt. (I kid you not, on a flight out of Panama City, Florida, I was seated next to a lady who didn’t know how the seat belt worked and asked me if I could help!) Really, if you don’t know water is a liquid or how to buckle a seat belt, you shouldn’t be allowed to fly.
The PreCheck system and the Global Entry program for returning to the United States from another country are fantastic innovations, showing that at least someone in the federal government has a brain and some common sense.
But most of the procedures designed to “protect” us are there largely to protect politicians from accusations of political incorrectness. That’s why we ended up with so many idiotic, inconsistent, and irrational rules being applied to American citizens who just want to take the kids to visit Grandma or get them to Disney World without having to reprise National Lampoon’s Vacation.
Jason Edward Harrington did a six-year stint as a TSA agent in Chicago while trying to work his way through college. He wrote a couple of articles for Politico in January and March 2014 that went viral. Some excerpts:
I hated it from the beginning. It was a job that had me patting down the crotches of children, the elderly and even infants as part of the post-9/11 airport security show. I confiscated jars of homemade apple butter on the pretense that they could pose threats to national security. I was even required to confiscate nail clippers from airline pilots—the implied logic being that pilots could use the nail clippers to hijack the very planes they were flying.
Once, in 2008, I had to confiscate a bottle of alcohol from a group of Marines coming home from Afghanistan. It was celebration champagne intended for one of the men in the group—a young, decorated soldier. He was in a wheelchair, both legs lost to an I.E.D., and it fell to me to tell this kid who would never walk again that his homecoming champagne had to be taken away in the name of national security.
There I was, an aspiring satire writer, earnestly acting on orders straight out of Catch-22.
I quickly discovered I was working for an agency whose morale was among the lowest in the U.S. government. In private, most TSA officers I talked to told me they felt the agency’s day-to-day operations represented an abuse of public trust and funds.
Charges of racial profiling by the TSA made headlines every few months, and working from behind the scenes we knew what was prompting those claims. Until 2010 (not long after the TSA standard operating procedure manual was accidentally leaked to the public), all TSA officers worked with a secret list printed on small slips of paper that many of us taped to the back of our TSA badges for easy reference: the Selectee Passport List. It consisted of 12 nations that automatically triggered enhanced passenger screening. The training department drilled us on the selectee countries so regularly that I had memorized them, like a little poem:
Syria, Algeria, Afghanistan
Iraq, Iran, Yemen
and Cuba,
Lebanon-Libya, Somalia-Sudan
People’s Republic of North Korea.
People holding passports from the selectee countries were automatically pulled aside for full-body pat-downs and had their luggage examined with a fine-toothed comb. The selectee list was purely political, of course, with diplomacy playing its role as always: There was no Saudi Arabia or Pakistan on a list of states historically known to harbor, aid and abet terrorists. Besides, my co-workers at the airport didn’t know Algeria from a medical condition, we rarely came across Cubans and no one’s ever seen a North Korean passport that didn’t include the words “Kim-Jong.” So it was mostly the Middle Easterners who got the special screening.
I recently had a bad flashback. I was lying in bed trying to fall asleep when I was hit with a vivid memory from my time as a Transportation Security Administration officer at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport. It was 2008, and I was conducting a bag check when three of my TSA colleagues got into an argument with a passenger at the checkpoint. Things got pretty heated.
The subject of debate? Whether mashed potatoes were a liquid or a solid.
In the end, of course, the TSA agents had the last word: Since the potatoes took the shape of their container, they were determined to be a liquid—specifically, a gel. That’s the official TSA line. “Liquids, aerosols and gels over 3.4 ounces cannot be brought through security.” The potatoes were forcibly surrendered.
If you’re anything like me, you may have thought, “Well, mashed potatoes are technically gelatinous, so…”—which sends one down the rabbit hole of bureaucratic absurdity that ends with a passenger looking a TSA officer in the eye and saying, “Do you really think my mashed potatoes are a terrorist threat?” And the officer, if he or she is just an all-around tool, saying: “Ma’am, possibly. Rules are rules.”
Another one: It’s 2010, and a passenger is trying to bring her live goldfish through security. One of my co-workers informs her that the fish can go through but the water cannot. The woman is on the verge of tears when a supervisor steps in to save the fish’s life.
And another: Working alongside a screener who always demanded that pacifiers be removed from infants’ mouths and submitted for X-ray screening before the babies and their mothers were permitted to pass through the metal detectors.
Perhaps the biggest surprise to come out of what I now see as the life-changing experience of having my story go viral is the realization of just how much I still have left to tell about my six years at the TSA—the strange checkpoint happenings, the colorful passengers and the outrageous, real-life TSA characters.
Americans took my initial report as confirmation of what they always dreaded about a humiliating experience so many millions of them had shared. But I also realized that there was a part of the story I hadn’t fully told: about a government agency and its leaders, and how they came up with the absurd policies that turned me and my colleagues into just-following-orders Mashed Potato Police [reprinted with permission from Jason Edward Harrington].
Jason is like many other TSA agents, who did what they were told because they needed the job and who knew full well that many of their tasks couldn’t be defended in the name of “national security.” Certainly, the majority of TSA workers are just people doing the job they’re required to do, as well as they can and with a good attitude.
* * *
Because I encounter so many of them in virtually every airport in America, I can attest that it’s not fair to blame security agents for the procedures they’re required to follow. It’s obvious that some are truly pained to have to go through certain machinations of “security check.” On the other hand, some obviously enjoy bullying and bossing people around, reveling in the fact that there’s not much a passenger can do if he really has to get to Cleveland tonight. As for filing a complaint with those little forms or going to the Web site to complain, fuggedaboutit! Waste of time.
Todd and Selena Drexel of Bowling Green, Kentucky, were trying to board a plane in New Orleans when their daughter was singled out for a pat-down. Her mom asked why and got no good answer. She asked for an alternative, like a rescan, but they refused. The parents had to stand by, powerless, as a screener rubbed their daughter’s thighs and felt inside he
r pants waist. She cried when it was over.
Their daughter was six years old.
But there was one thing her parents had the power to do: They recorded it all and posted the video on YouTube, where it ignited a firestorm. The TSA responded that this was actually their proper, approved procedure for dealing with children.
A Destin, Florida, woman filed a formal complaint in June 2011 after her sick mother was subjected to a complete pat-down search. The woman is ninety-five years old, in the final stages of leukemia, and barely able to stand. But she was forced by TSA agents to get up from her wheelchair and undergo an extensive body search—including an examination of her adult diaper. Again, Homeland Security insisted that they followed proper procedures because anyone can be a terrorist [news.travel.aol.com, “TSA Pats Down Cancer-Stricken 95-year-old Woman, Removes Adult Diaper,” June 26, 2011]. It might be worth noting, though, that if this 95-year-old, 105-pound, wheelchair-bound, leukemia-stricken Florida grandmother did turn out to be a terrorist, she would be the very, very first one, ever. It might also be suggested that such a waste of attention and manpower at the security checkpoint could only help a real terrorist slip through.
While many people complain about the Transportation Safety Administration, its defenders say all that groping, poking, and peeking is keeping us safer. But what does the man who actually created the TSA think about it now? Florida Representative John Mica is chairman of the House Transportation Committee, and he wrote the bill creating the TSA. Ten years later, he told Human Events that he gives it a grade of “D-minus.” Representative Mica says the TSA was hijacked by bureaucrats and has mushroomed into a $9 billion “fiasco” that reacts to every threat by making us all remove our shoes or leave behind our shampoo, yet in ten years has failed to detect any real threat. The father of the TSA thinks it’s time to scale it down, slashing it to five thousand people who monitor intelligence. Screening should be privatized and turned over to the airports, where they have a vested interest in both security and customer satisfaction. Thus, the father of the agency has taken Bill Cosby’s approach to parenting: “I brought you into this world; I can take you out!” In Mica’s case, he really means it!
God, Guns, Grits, and Gravy Page 13