Fight or Flight 2: The Reckoning

Remember that story I told a couple of days ago about the surly, smart-ass comment from a TSA agent as I tried to take Inara through airport security last weekend?

Well if this had happened, I wouldn't even have made it onto the flight. In fact, I'd probably be facing federal charges right now.

CBS News: Six-Year-Old Girl's TSA Pat-Down at Airport Sparks Outrage/4.13.11

My favorite part about this is that, of course, that arrogant tool John Pistole -- the head of the TSA -- says the pat-down was justified and according to procedure. Sorry, asshole, but if groping a six-year-old-girl is something done in adherence with policy, there's something really fucking wrong with the policy -- to say nothing of you and the overreactive, pants-wetting babies who came up with the policy. When little kids are being legally felt up at our nation's airports, that's when that police state we've all been warned about is finally here.

By the way, a couple of people wrote because I didn't bother to put in a link the other day explaining why a sudden ban on printing toner cartridges on planes proves that potential terrorists are still dictating the rules of the game and the idiots charged with protecting us are merely playing catch-up.

Well, for those with short memories, here.

And now, for the hell of it and as a means of elaborating on my argument, let's bring back my last diatribe against the inefficacy of the current TSA model.

"The Unfriendly Skies" (Originally Published, 12.26.09)

Thank you for flying Knee-Jerk Airlines, where the illusion of safety is always our top priority.

Remember back when authorities in Great Britain foiled a plot to detonate liquid explosives on-board ten airliners bound for the U.S. and Canada? Whether you know the specific details of the 2006 arrests or the terrorist plans, you're damn sure familiar with the fallout from that threat: Since then you've been forced by the TSA to adhere to a set of byzantine, seemingly arbitrary restrictions on what liquids you can and can't stow in carry-on luggage -- how many ounces are acceptable and in what kind of clear plastic bag they have to be contained -- each time you fly. While those restrictions have relaxed somewhat over the past couple of years -- often dependent on how generous the particular security juggernaut you face at the airport is feeling on the day you happen to be flying -- they're still very much in place. The last time I flew north to pick up Inara, the humorless TSA employee manning the scanner took a tube of Crest toothpaste from my bag and held it up in front of me as if to signal to me that I should've known better than to try to get it past him. I wanted to grab it out of his hand and squeeze the whole fucking thing into my mouth, but thought the better of it.

Well, if you thought that that reaction was ridiculously overcompensatory and likely did almost nothing to make you safer in the skies other than maybe forcing you to rethink flying altogether, get ready -- shit's about to get a whole lot worse. In response to yesterday's arrest of a Nigerian man who allegedly tried to blow up a Delta/Northwest flight as it landed in Detroit, transportation officials and Homeland Security are announcing new restrictions on passenger behavior while flying within the continental United States. New rules will forbid airline passengers from getting up from their seats, accessing their carry-on luggage or having personal belongings on their laps during the final hour of flight before landing. This kind of thing has been in place at Reagan Airport in D.C. since the 9/11 attacks; now it'll be implemented nationwide.

Will this make anyone safer? Probably not -- but that's not really the point.

What makes these new restrictions so laughably outrageous is this: They're a reaction to a suddenly perceived threat that's technically been there all along. Like the liquid ban, which was a response to an attempted attack that had already taken place, this is a case of America's ostensibly sharpest minds in the realm of national security responding to a situation rather than planning for it in advance and thereby heading it off at the pass. Did we never realize that it was possible for terrorists to bring liquid explosives onto planes? If so, then why the hell were liquids of a certain volume ever allowed onto flights; if not, then for fuck's sake why not? Likewise, did no one ever consider the possibility that someone could blow up a plane as it prepared to land? And isn't a threat while landing completely arbitrary anyway -- and our reaction to it, to restrict the movement of passengers during landing, just as arbitrary and worthless?

The only way to truly keep us truly safe while flying a commercial airliner would be to put us all through body scanners then have us fly in our underwear, forcing every passenger to check his or her bags and carry nothing on. And even then, I'd bet my life -- literally, because there's no other option -- that those who want to kill us would just find some other way to accomplish their goals.

And then the geniuses at the TSA would simply wind up having to impose a knee-jerk crackdown on something else as a response to that "new threat." If and when that happens, the newer, harsher security measures will be exactly what they are now: a floor show, and nothing more.

Fight or Flight

Story time...

So I'm taking Inara through airport security in Fort Lauderdale on Saturday morning and the crack staff of the TSA is being especially difficult.

As I haplessly juggle a toddler, a folded-up umbrella stroller and two carry-on bags -- all while trying to re-dress myself after my virtual cavity search -- an irate agent is demanding that I give her my undivided attention while she runs some kind of Ghostbusters PKE-meter device across a pouch of Caprisun fruit punch she's removed from our luggage. Another agent has already informed me that it was apparently impertinent of me to assume that I could get an 8-ounce bottle of shampoo past him, so needless to say I'm not in the best of moods -- especially not since a sign at the beginning of the line declaring that printing toner cartridges are now forbidden on planes lets me know in no uncertain terms that potential terrorists are still dictating the terms of the game and no part of this little dog-and-pony show is keeping me any safer in the air.

After collecting the now scanned and TSA-Approved Caprisun, I bend down to make sure Inara's boots are zipped up -- still trying to balance the unopened stroller with one hand while making sure our bags don't fall off my shoulder -- when a large female agent who happens to be casually strolling by looks at me and huffs with snotty condescension, "See? Now you know what it's like to be Mommy."

At that, I stop cold, affect an expression of shock and contempt and scold, "Her mother," gesturing to Inara, "died in a car accident last year."

The look of absolute shame on that woman's face -- I'm telling you, it's the little moments.

FTW

These guys just keep stepping up and slamming Bobby Thompson-off-Branca-style homers into the parking lot.

(via Cesca)

Boot the Messenger

CNN Investigative Reporter Drew Griffin is one of my favorite people in TV news. He and I first worked together back in the mid-90s at KCBS in Los Angeles, where the two of us made a kind of juvenile game out of seeing who could better embarrass the other on television. I drafted him to do a light news story that most would've considered far beneath his abilities (but which eventually wound up surprising the hell out of both of us by winning him and myself a Golden Mic award); he returned the favor by making me a guinea pig in an investigation he was doing on drunk boating, basically taking me out to a lake and encouraging me to get hammered before hopping onto a jet ski -- all while taping the entire thing. (I still remember his exact quote from the finished piece: "After a half a bottle of tequila, Chez became foul-mouthed, belligerent, and unwilling to accept that he could no longer drive.") Despite these kinds of shenanigans however -- the things local TV people have to do to keep their minds from completely stagnating -- make no mistake: Drew Griffin has always been one of the hardest working and most talented journalists around.

So you can imagine my shock when I found out that he's also, apparently, a threat to national security.

Last week, CNN ran a piece in which Drew Griffin confirmed that he's been placed on the TSA's infamous and extensive Terrorist Watch List. The question many are now asking: Was he put there as some form of payback for an investigation he did a couple of months ago on both the TSA and the Federal Air Marshal Service? In the original report that ran on Anderson Cooper's show, AC 360, Griffin revealed that fewer than 1% of all daily commercial flights are protected by air marshals. What's more, he talked to some within the service's rank and file who complain that morale is so low that many experienced marshals are leaving in disgust -- only to be replaced by TSA screeners who are quickly being given weapons and put on planes, even though they have no law enforcement or military experience. (Hell, anybody who's traveled by air within the past couple of years knows that some TSA screeners behave as if they barely qualify to work at a Burger King.)

According to a separate story by investigative reporter and aviation terrorism expert Annie Jacobsen -- and last week's report by Drew Griffin himself -- the TSA and Homeland Security are now putting all their resources not into fixing the problems the initial report exposed, but into finding the people who aided Griffin in exposing them. Essentially, they're going on a witch hunt within their own organizations looking for the anonymous tipsters and whistleblowers who helped Drew Griffin hold them up for shame them on national television.


Which leads us to Drew's sudden appearance on the Terrorist Watch List.

Texas congresswoman and notorious troublemaker Sheila Jackson Lee is calling for a probe into what would seem to be the TSA's spiteful act of vengeance against Griffin for his investigation. Jackson Lee confronted DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff, a man who's used to being called to the carpet for his agency's dangerous ineptitude, and asked him flat-out, "Why would Drew Griffin’s name come on the watch list, post-his investigation of TSA? What is the basis of this sudden recognition that Drew Griffin is a terrorist? Are we targeting people because of their critique or criticism?” Chertoff responded by rattling off his department's usual horseshit answer: It's probably just a coincidence that Griffin shares a name with someone recently put on the list.

Needless to say, as Annie Jacobsen notes in her own story on this mess, it requires a pretty painful game of Twister within the logic center of your brain to actually accept that somebody else named Drew Griffin was discovered to be a potential terrorist threat seven years after 9/11 but just a week or two after investigative reporter Griffin's exposé aired on CNN.

The more likely, though more unsettling, possibility is that Griffin did exactly what he was supposed to do as an investigative reporter and ruffled a few feathers in a some very high places.

He set out to reveal the incompetence of one of this country's most powerful and essential government agencies -- and may have wound up revealing its petty maliciousness as well.