Paul Joseph Watson
February 5, 2014
The TSA’s glib response to a former employee’s damning
exposé of the federal agency has been blasted as an exercise in
propaganda by a deluge of respondents who flooded the official TSA blog
to pour scorn on the agency’s claim that ex-screener Jason Harrington’s
article was a mischaracterization.
Image: TSA (YouTube).
Last week, Harrington wrote a piece for Politico Magazine in
which he lifted the lid on the endemic corruption that pervades the
TSA, revealing how TSA screeners laughed at naked images of passengers,
deliberately targeted attractive women, operated dangerous full body
scanners while being fully aware of the fact that they didn’t work,
punished travelers who didn’t display the right attitude, and a whole
host more.
The TSA’s Assistant Administrator LuAnn Canipe responded on the agency’s official blog website by
claiming Harrington’s article was a mischaracterization of TSA
procedures, adding that many of them were no longer in place. The
response attempts to make the case that “the TSA of today” is an
entirely different entity which is unrecognizable from that depicted in
Harrington’s exposé.
At no point does Canipe’s response admit fault on behalf
of the TSA, nor does it actually mention a single example of how
Harrington supposedly mischaracterized the agency’s policies.
The response to the TSA’s ‘rebuttal’ of Harrington’s
article was explosive, with numerous people expressing fury at the
agency’s failure to admit responsibility for its onerous past policies,
while others expressed derision at the claim that the TSA was a
completely changed outfit, pointing out that the vast majority of its
inane policies are still very much in place.
Out of the dozens of comments left in
response to the post, just two side with the TSA. Judging by the number
of people complaining that their previous posts had been censored, the
TSA has also been busy deleting a number of additional negative
comments.
Here are some of the best comments posted on the TSA blog;
—————————————————–TSA is still electronically strip searching people.TSA is still feeling peoples breasts, crotches, and buttocks.TSA is depriving people of common LGA’s without cause.TSA is still forcing most people to remove shoes, belts, and jackets.TSA is still treating people like cattle complete with barked orders.Sure looks like the same old TSA to me.—————————————————–“Many of the TSA procedures and policies referenced in a recent opinion piece are no longer in place or are characterized inaccurately..”You are overlooking the most important point. TSA decided to subject travelers to x-rays, take naked pictures of travelers, and feel up children. An agency that could ever think that subjecting people en masse to medically unnecessary x-rays is acceptable is an agency that is deeply flawed at the most fundamental level. You cannot say you are protecting people from one threat while you are exposing them to another–especially when the odds of dying from radiation-related conditions are higher than the odds of dying in a terror attack. If TSA cannot figure out that fundamental principle, TSA has no business existing. Your credibility as a security agency was destroyed the moment you installed the first backscatter scanner in an airport and started harming the people you were supposed to protect.—————————————————–You are offering rebuttal to an article without providing any context to it. You declined to either link to it or refer to it by name. That doesn’t conform to any journalistic standards that we see elsewhere online from reputable media. Are you afraid of the public reading this article if they haven’t already seen it?—————————————————–The only real problem with the response to the article is that TSA has NEVER accepted responsibility for its gross mistakes and pointless behaviors. That you don’t do so now is to be anticipated, but certainly can’t be taken as a sign that anything has changed.—————————————————–This is not a “new” TSA, it’s a pig with lipstick! They go on about how the policy and procedures and machinery has changed since his resignation. However, now it’s more of a problem with the employees who continue to run roughshod over innocent people. (Retaliatory waiting time) (Harassing attractive women and medically disabled people) And this ‘threats are detected using software’ claim? As in ATD? (Automated threat detection). Jonathan Corbett was also able to get around that as well! New machines, yet still obsolete! Add to the fact that the lines are still dangerously (yes dangerously) long and people wanting to cause mayhem could easily do just that while in the line!—————————————————–Not only did TSA install Whole Body Xray devices they went on to lie about the clarity of the images these devices created.TSA lied about the testing of the Backscatter Whole Body Strip Search machines claiming that independent agencies had tested the machines. We know now that that didn’t happen at all.TSA lied about the ability of the Whole Body Xray (and MMW) scanners ability to not only store but transmit images. Contract specs required this ability.TSA lied about the invasiveness of Pat Downs using words like “meet resistance” when what they should have been saying was genitals.TSA has lied about TSA screenings where travelers have reported extremely abusive practices such as strip searches and other such events.What the public has clearly learned is that TSA lies. TSA lies about anything and everything and nothing coming out of TSA can be considered truthful.TSA has worked extremely hard to be known worldwide as the federal agency that is dishonest.—————————————————–I don’t see any specific denials to what was in the article by the former TSA screener.—————————————————–Clearly the article in Politico today hit a nerve, huh?Is your response meant to suggest that a passenger could now carry a jar of apple butter through security? That that was just an old misunderstanding?Are you saying that employees are no longer afraid of the amount of radiation coming from the AIT scanners?Are you suggesting that you now do background checks on all TSA employees before they start work and that the agency is now a model of efficiency?If not, what parts of Jason Harrington’s scathing indictment is incorrect?—————————————————–How lawyerly of you, Ms. Canipe, to not once have actually denied anything that Mr. Harrington wrote.Can I opt out of having my tax dollars go towards wonderful pieces of propaganda such as this, Ms. Canipe?—————————————————–
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