I want to applaud ProPublica for their ongoing series on the risks of X-ray body scanners, including a look at the political process of awarding the contracts. Even though officials deny the pressure had any effect on their decision to remove them from major airports, I think it's obvious it did -- for which we can all be grateful:

The Transportation Security Administration has been quietly removing its X-ray body scanners from major airports over the last few weeks and replacing them with machines that radiation experts believe are safer.

The TSA says it made the decision not because of safety concerns but to speed up checkpoints at busier airports. It means, though, that far fewer passengers will be exposed to radiation because the X-ray scanners are being moved to smaller airports.

The backscatters, as the X-ray scanners are known, were swapped out at Boston Logan International Airport in early October. Similar replacements have occurred at Los Angeles International Airport, Chicago O'Hare, Orlando and John F. Kennedy in New York, the TSA confirmed Thursday.

The X-ray scanners have faced a barrage of criticism since the TSA began rolling them out nationwide after the failed underwear bombing on Christmas Day 2009. One reason is that they emit a small dose of ionizing radiation, which at higher levels has been linked to cancer.

In addition, privacy advocates decried that the machines produce images, albeit heavily blurred, of passengers' naked bodies. Each image must be reviewed by a TSA officer, slowing security lines.The replacement machines, known as millimeter-wave scanners, rely on low-energy radio waves similar to those used in cell phones. The machines detect potential threats automatically and quickly using a computer program. They display a generic cartoon image of a person's body, mitigating privacy concerns.

"They're not all being replaced," TSA spokesman David Castelveter said. "It's being done strategically. We are replacing some of the older equipment and taking them to smaller airports. That will be done over a period of time."

He said the TSA decided to move the X-ray machines to less-busy airports after conducting an analysis of processing time and staffing requirements at the airports where the scanners are installed.The radiation risk and privacy concerns had no bearing on the decision, Castelveter said.

Asked about the changes, John Terrill, a spokesman for Rapiscan — which makes the X-ray scanners — wrote in an email, "No comment on this."

Now, almost everyone who doesn't regularly sniff glue wouldn't equate a medical procedure with taking a flight to Daytona. But the irony of a right-wing authoritarian like Carpenter -- who cheered on all of the domestic spying, indefinite detention and torture of the Bush administration -- complaining about invasive security measure, is indeed thick.

It must be really hard to be an anti-choice wingnut and not reach for absurd non-sequiturs like this.

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I'm not the biggest fan of TSA security procedures myself, but I probably prefer them to the laughably ineffective regime that existed prior to 9/11. And I definitely prefer them to what the bedwetting wingnuts who want us to resort to ethnic profiling measures immediately instead of messing around with random searches, which they consider "political correctness."

Guys like wingnut Georgia GOP Rep. Paul Broun, who was on Fox News yesterday with Shannon Bream sharing his expertise -- the guy sits on the Homeland Security Committee, which is a disconcerting thought indeed -- because of TSA procedures he witnessed recently in an airport:

BREAM: Congressman, thanks for joining us today. What did you see that has you so upset?

BROUN: Well, Shannon, what happened at the airport is, uh, an elderly lady walked -- ah, followed me behind in the screening process, and she was patted down. A little kid was patted down. And this guy in Arabian attire just walks right through.

And the point of all this is that we have to focus upon those people who want to harm us. TSA has been abysmal -- abysmal failure. We're spending eight billion dollars a year on this, and we're -- we're focusing on these total body scans, these enhanced patdowns. We need more, uh, intelligence.

That we do, Congressman, that we do. In Congress, especially.

Broun wants everyone who wears "Arabian dress" to get the thorough patdown at TSA security checkpoints -- even though anyone even half-knowledgeable about antiterrorist security can tell you that no terrorist will wear garb that attracts attention to themselves. They are uniformly intent on blending in and being unnoticed. Anyone wearing "Arabian dress" is actually not likely at all to be a terrorist.

But that ain't no nevermind to someone like Broun. He has bigger fish to fry here:

BROUN: We need to focus on those people who are trying to harm us as a nation. And so it's absolutely critical for us change from this wasteful, um, inefficient -- type of screening that's going on at the airport. It's wasting billions of dollars and we need to start focusing upon what is absolutely going to help prevent people from being killed. And that's to get the human intelligence out there -- some -- infiltration into these various groups so that we know who is gonna harm us and so we stop these attacks, instead of wasting the taxpayers' money, instead of having this big hassle at the airport. It's costing American taxpayers, as well as the airline industry, billions of dollars.

See, Broun is one of those many Republicans who thinks that simple ethnic profiling measures will do the job and make us good and secure, and probably save us a bundle in the process. Skip the random patdowns and replace it with simple profiling of Muslims, and voila! No more need for a TSA.

This is, of course, rank stupidity guaranteed to get people killed, because it is guaranteed to make us more vulnerable. As we've explained previously:

If you want to profile every "known Muslim," you're going to have a hell of a time in countries like Indonesia and the Philippines, considering that their populations are a mix of the world's religions, and any Muslim who wanted to pose as a member of, say, a Christian church in order to fool authorities could do so with ease.

This just underscores how foolish the whole notion of racial profiling actually is, because when you embark on such policies, they actually make you more vulnerable, not less.

That's because terrorists are not that stupid. If you begin profiling for Middle Eastern men, they will find Indonesian or African or European operatives to perform the same task. If you begin profiling for Muslims, they will find ways to conceal their religious preferences.

We know two things about profiling, especially ethnic, religious, or racial profiling: 1) These policies expose the profilers to being gamed by terrorists; and 2) They are always a tremendous waste of resources and inevitably are counter-productive.

Sounds like your classic conservative solution: Hey, let's just make matters worse!

And waste a bundle of money while we're at it.

The best part is listening to Broun provide a down-home rationale for ethnic profiling, straight out of Dukes of Hazzard:

BREAM: But Congressman, how tough is this job now for the TSA, just to see the way that somebody is clothed, or see the pigmentation of their skin to automatically have to suspect them? That puts them in a tough place.

BROUN: Well, it does, Shannon. But the thing is, if a guy who's a young man robs a bank and goes and jumps in a blue Camaro with racing stripes and flames on it and goes running off, you say -- does the police put out an all-points bulletin saying, 'There's a person driving a motorized vehicle. Look for them.'

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As I watched the whole TSA swarm descend on the media and Internet over the past month, I was surprised at the violent reaction from the left AND right on airport screenings. Blowing this issue up right before the holidays seemed to be a Tea Party tactic from beginning to end, as far as I was concerned.

Mark Ames and Yasha Levine at The Nation contended in a post yesterday that the current publicity surge was orchestrated and magnified by organizations with ties to Koch Industries. With one exception, they list a solid trail that leads back to organizations with a vested interest in: a) discrediting government agencies and the TSA specifically; and b) discrediting the current administration's ability to handle national security. Unfortunately, they led off the article by trying to link up John Tyner ("Don't Touch My Junk") with these organizations, and as many critics have pointed out, there is no "there", there.

Glenn Greenwald:

As for his standing accused by The Nation of suspicion on the grounds of his avowed libertarianism, consider what he wrote several weeks before the TSA incident. In a post responding to this question -- "When’s the last time you were seriously inconvenienced or injured by something that big government did?" -- Tyner wrote:

Gay rights [infringements], TSA body scanners, highway checkpoints, the PATRIOT Act, warrantless wiretaps, extra-judicial assassinations, indefinite detentions, inflation, etc. Don't tell me that (some of) these don't affect me. When one person's rights are trampled, everybody's are, and that's just at the federal level.

What a right-wing monster! If only Democratic Party leaders -- who support most of the serious rights infringements he condemns -- were this monstrous. Or consider what he wrote about the statements of Juan Williams and Bill O'Reilly which conflated Muslims with Terrorists: (read the rest)

Jeremy Scahill:

The article my magazine, The Nation, published about John Tyner is a shameful smear

While I tend to agree with his criticism of their opening focus on John Tyner, and particularly the authors' focus on personal details of Tyner's education and background as evidence of his bias, that should not automatically disqualify the balance of their article, where they list at least six other connections which are solid and easily documented.

The authors responded to Greenwald's criticism late Wednesday, writing:

We believe that Tyner is in all likelihood innocent in his motives, but our larger point is that his discourse and the movement that has embraced it is far from innocent. In focusing entirely on our characterization of Tyner, Greenwald ignores the larger thrust of our argument and the vast majority of the evidence assembled in the piece, leaving a distorted impression of it.

On this point, I agree. Their article would have been stronger without any reference or only a mere passing reference to John Tyner. I don't believe anyone is arguing that the TSA is perfect, that their scanners are the best we have to offer, or that body searches are not a violation of civil liberties. I certainly am not. At the same time, these issues are not new. It isn't as though patdowns are a new procedure in effect as of this holiday. They've been doing them for years. So why now? Why when there are so many important issues on the table, is this one taking the center stage. Levine and Ames have the same question:

Here is what the article really said: Like many Americans, we found the TSA's intrusive procedures offensive and we are against the invasive pat-downs and attack on our civil liberties. This was a given in our article, and we stated as much. What our article did was look beyond the obvious surface, into possible reasons why this particular issue suddenly rose to forefront of the national debate, when dozens of other, more pressing issues are getting so little attention--people being kicked out of their homes and living on the street because of fraudulent foreclosures, a massive wealth transfer from struggling Americans to the financial sector, ongoing wars that are bankrupting the country and killing thousands, the attack on public education and so on.

They found enough connections inside and outside of Congress to warrant a report on it. Unfortunately, the gist of their findings has been lost in the larger anger over a) the tenuous linking to John Tyner; and b) the overall outrage over enhanced TSA screening procedures.

Here's what bothers me. This smelled like an overblown PR effort from the get-go. Again, I am NOT saying there aren't problems, but this happening right now when more people are flying home to family and friends for the holidays is not coincidental. It's just not. Now The Nation has linked the "OptOut" campaign to astroturf sources, but is still getting a complete smackdown by those who would ordinarily pay attention because...why?

The anti-TSA campaign began in early November, and gained traction just in the nick of time for Thanksgiving travel. Absent from the debate on the left side of the aisle was any discussion about where employees of the TSA stand with regard to unionizing (they have not had a chance to vote on a union to represent them yet); about the clamor for privatization despite the fact that privatization has failed once; whether those employees were properly trained and whether the actual stories told were factual or not. We know Meg McLain's was a complete fabrication. We know the guy headlined by Drudge actually cooperated with authorities.

So what is so unreasonable about linking up agendas with what certainly appears to be a well-timed and carefully crafted campaign? Isn't there a way to both acknowledge the issues inherent with these TSA screening procedures AND the idea that it's being capitalized upon for political gain?

To many, it seems to be a zero-sum game. If one doesn't choose to accept the premise that this entire brouhaha is an organic swarm commanding attention because of self-inflicted TSA incompetence -- malevolence, even -- from a government intent on invading every single aspect of our lives and killing the constitution, then in Greenwald's estimation we must be "centro-facist" (see below) party hacks falling into lockstep and yessing every move with no regard for facts, liberties, or any combination thereof. And that conclusion would exclude any possibility at all that there was, in fact, a PR push to make this a Very Big Issue at a time where a lot of people would be affected and view the TSA, and by extension, this administration in a negative light.

I do believe the TSA has bungled their handling of airport security. I do believe they believe they're doing what they're called to do, but doing it badly and without regard to people's rights. I also believe those errors were capitalized upon by people with agendas and money who set a PR machine in motion to score political points and ultimately political victories which also will disregard our rights and liberties. For Glenn Greenwald and others, this is less important than what the TSA is doing right now. He acknowledges the possibility that the six different instances cited by The Nation may have been true and factual, but for him, the mention and "smear" (his words, not mine) of John Tyner supercede any validity the other 3/4ths of their piece may have had.

It may be that several vocal opponents of the new TSA process are Koch-funded -- that wouldn't surprise me -- but that has absolutely nothing to do with Tyner, and The Nation, for which I have high regard, owes him an apology and retraction for the innuendo it smeared on him without a shred of evidence.

Nothing is absolute. It's likely that all dynamics are at work. Without the work of The Nation's reporters, we would be missing a piece of the larger picture. How are we harmed by that, and why shouldn't it be weighted with more than a passing nod tossed in a maelstrom of biting criticism?

Update and clarification: The term "centro-fascist" was one used by The Nation authors in their response to Glenn Greenwald. The phrasing I used made it appear to be attributable to him. I had originally quoted the authors' full quote using that term, and removed it to make the length readable. In so doing, it left that quote attributable to the wrong speaker.

The new TSA policy is awful and will have ramifications until the Obama administration does something about it. More and more people will be filmed to cause attention to themselves and also the new rules. We know that the right wing will exploit this as much as they can. If a Republican was in the Oval office they would be doing and saying the exact opposite. They'd give up their dignity in a second to prove that Conservatives are the only real Americans and care more about our safety than the left, but implementing a bad, bad policy only makes things easier for them and causes videos like this to explode on Drudge.

Duncan:

...it really should be obvious to our overlords that taking pictures of and fondling peoples' genitals aren't really acceptable security measures.

Is that so hard to understand?

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What is it about conservatives that they manage to take every real and legitimate issue Americans face and not only propose, but adamantly pursue, policies that reflexively rely on lizard-brain idiocy guaranteed to make things worse?

Take as the latest example the TSA scanner/patdown controversy, which raises real and very legitimate civil-liberties concerns (the ACLU has much more on this). Yet in joining in with the raised voices, right-wingers are using the controversy as an opportunity for pushing forward one of their favorite xenophobic tropes -- namely, that we should instead institute ethnic-profiling measures to deter acts of terrorism.

Leading this particular parade has been the reliably execrable Ann Coulter. This weekend, Charles Krauthammer codified it:

We pretend that we go through this nonsense as a small price paid to ensure the safety of air travel. Rubbish. This has nothing to do with safety - 95 percent of these inspections, searches, shoe removals and pat-downs are ridiculously unnecessary. The only reason we continue to do this is that people are too cowed to even question the absurd taboo against profiling - when the profile of the airline attacker is narrow, concrete, uniquely definable and universally known. So instead of seeking out terrorists, we seek out tubes of gel in stroller pouches.

Today on Fox, Neil Cavuto hosted famed lizard-brain Bo Dietl to give the boot-camp sergeant version of this. Later, Cavuto added: "Should we get back just to profiling? ... El Al, if you think about it, that's what they do."

As we've explained several times, this is a load of bollocks. In fact, it's a recipe for disaster:

If you want to profile every "known Muslim," you're going to have a hell of a time in countries like Indonesia and the Philippines, considering that their populations are a mix of the world's religions, and any Muslim who wanted to pose as a member of, say, a Christian church in order to fool authorities could do so with ease.

This just underscores how foolish the whole notion of racial profiling actually is, because when you embark on such policies, they actually make you more vulnerable, not less.

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There's something quite wrong with our airline security system, and it seems we've reached critical mass on public outrage. Maybe it's time we revamped these numerous rules and procedures:

CHARLOTTE, NC (WBTV) - A Charlotte-area flight attendant and cancer survivor contacted WBTV after she says she was forced to show her prosthetic breast during a pat-down.

Cathy Bossi lives in south Charlotte and has been a flight attendant for the past 32 years, working the past 28 for U.S. Airways.

She reluctantly agreed. As a 3-year breast cancer survivor she says she didn't want the added radiation through her body. But, Bossi says she did agree.

In early August Bossie was walking through security when she says she was asked to go through the new full body-scanners at Concourse "D" at Charlotte Douglas International.

"The T.S.A. Agent told me to put my I.D. on my back," she said. "When I got out of there she said because my I.D. was on my back, I had to go to a personal screening area."

She says two female Charlotte T.S.A. agents took her to a private room and began what she calls an aggressive pat down. She says they stopped when they got around to feeling her right breast… the one where she'd had surgery.

"She put her full hand on my breast and said, 'What is this?'. And I said, 'It's my prosthesis because I've had breast cancer.' And she said, 'Well, you'll need to show me that'."

Cathy was asked to show her prosthetic breast, removing it from her bra.

"I did not take the name of the person at the time because it was just so horrific of an experience, I couldn't believe someone had done that to me. I'm a flight attendant. I was just trying to get to work."

Yesterday, the ACLU filed a lawsuit on behalf of Nick George, a Pomona College student who was detained and aggressively interrogated by Transportation Security Administration (TSA) authorities, by the FBI and by Pennsylvania police when he tried to board a plane carrying Arabic language flash cards.

You heard right: Not liquids, not matches, not a bomb. Flash cards.

George, a physics major who's studying Arabic, was pulled aside for secondary screening at the Philadelphia International Airport as he tried to go through security. When he emptied his pockets, the inspector saw his flash cards and he was arrested, handcuffed, locked in a cell for hours and aggressively questioned. Because of some flash cards.

The following exchange took place between George and a TSA supervisor who questioned him:

TSA Supervisor: You know who did 9/11?

George: Osama bin Laden.

TSA Supervisor: Do you know what language he spoke?

George: Arabic.

At that point, the TSA supervisor held up George’s flash cards—which had words such as "to smile" and "funny" and on them—and said: "Do you see why these cards are suspicious?"

Ah, the smoking gun.

Here's the problem: During George's ordeal, no fewer than seven law enforcement officers took part in detaining and questioning him. The unnecessary arrest, detention and questioning of someone who, like George, poses no threat to flight safety, makes everyone less safe by diverting resources away from real threats.

George said yesterday, “As someone who travels by plane, I want TSA agents to do their job to keep flights safe. But I don’t understand how locking me up and harassing me just because I was carrying the flash cards made anybody safer. No one should be treated like a criminal for simply learning one of the most widely-spoken languages in the world.”

One of the FBI agents who questioned him put it best, we think. At the end of his ordeal, he said to George: “The police call us to evaluate whether there is a real threat. You are not a real threat.”

The Transportation Security Administration is announcing the implementation of "enhanced screening" for personnel coming in from nations that have been designated as terrorist havens. I wonder if "enhanced interrogation" comes with the package? Could they have picked a worse term?

Because effective aviation security must begin beyond our borders, and as a result of extraordinary cooperation from our global aviation partners, TSA is mandating that every individual flying into the U.S. from anywhere in the world traveling from or through nations that are state sponsors of terrorism or other countries of interest will be required to go through enhanced screening. The directive also increases the use of enhanced screening technologies and mandates threat-based and random screening for passengers on U.S. bound international flights.

File this under "things that would not have stopped Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab from flying from Nigeria through Amsterdam to the United States." Nor would it have stopped the feared "liquid bombers" from the United Kingdom. And it won't stop al Qaeda cells operating in Germany. So exactly how is this security theater meant to protect us? Short answer, it won't. It's just movie drama theater. It will, however, piss off a lot of normal travelers who will decide that flying to America just isn't worth it anymore. It will also cost the airports a great deal of money and slow down security checks even further. So overall, yeah, great news, TSA.

The NY Times has a list of countries who will be affected by this directive.

Citizens of Cuba, Iran, Sudan and Syria, countries that are considered “state sponsors of terrorism,” as well as those of “countries of interest” — including Afghanistan, Algeria, Lebanon, Libya, Iraq, Nigeria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Somalia and Yemen — will face the special scrutiny, officials said.

But it still won't stop "non-state actors" from flying to America if and when they want.

TBogg: No paranoids please, this is a restricted conspiracy

Just An Earth-Bound Misfit: Grow Up, America

They gave us a republic: The Haves and Have-Nots: You can't there from here

Runway Girl: TSA agent's notebook discovered in public place

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