Posted by
flagwaver on Thursday, November 18, 2010 10:21:10 AM
I thought we had learned a lesson after the embassy bombings, but maybe I was wrong. I thought we learned a lesson after the WTC bombings in 1993, but I must have been mistaken. I was sure we had learned a lesson after the attack on the USS Cole in 2000, but that seemed to have not made the impression that I thought it did. Surely the attacks on 9/11 opened all of our eyes, and for a little while it did. But as always, we sort of started living our lives again, and while we did not forget the events of that tragic day, we allowed the message that it should have sent to us to be diluted. So I figured that the attempted bombing of a flight in Detroit on Christmas Day 2009 would have been just the wake up call America needed, to snap us out of the lethargy we had fallen into about keeping ourselves safe from terrorist attacks.
Alas, it seems that I was wrong again. It seems that Americans would rather have something to whine and complain about, some reason to accuse the government of wrongdoing over than to get serious about protecting our homeland from attack by people whose sole motivation in life is to kill us.
For the life of me, I cannot understand the uproar being caused by the use of the full body scanners at some of our airports, and by the frisking that TSA workers do in lieu of the scanning when people opt out. The way that people are going on an on about this issue, you would think that the federal government was taking people out of the airports and sending them to GITMO for water boarding ,rather than asking them to consent to a frisking that some people may find a bit uncomfortable. To hear people on both the left and right tell it, the body scanners are some type of porn device that the people operating the equipment are getting their jollies from, and the frisking is either a) one step removed from a sexual assault, or b) an egregious violation of the Fourth Amendment protections against illegal searches and seizures.
My question to the complainers is simply this: What are we supposed to do to keep ourselves safe if both the full body scanners and the frisk are unacceptable?
Now, I think that the idea that the government is violating the Fourth Amendment in conducting these searches is ridiculous on its face. The Fourth Amendment reads as such: "The right of the people to be secure in their persons,
houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures,
shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable
cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the
place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized." The Supreme Court in its rulings have basically established that the Fourth Amendment protects the citizens from illegal, unwarranted searches by the state using its police powers, especially where there is criminal activity, real or suspected, involved. In other words, this amendment protects us from abuses of power by law enforcement, not from being frisked in an airport. I mean, whenever we fly we automatically cede some of our constitutional protections as the cost of doing business with the airline; passengers cannot say whatever they want on a plane without consequence, they cannot bring certain items on planes, and they have long been subjected to having their luggage checked...so what's the big deal now?
As for the idea that the frisk is tantamount to a sexual assault, that is to trivialize the suffering of people who have gone through the trauma of a real sexual assault. Being patted down and having someone maybe touch your breasts or genitalia is not in any way, shape, or form comparable to having someone force you into any type of non-consensual sexual activity. And those who have used that analogy should be deeply ashamed of themselves for trivializing a very real trauma just so they can complain about a government practice that they don't agree with.
You see, the government is in a tough spot here, and is attempting to handle it the best way they know how. Something drastic was going to have to be done in order to avoid another attack like the attempted Christmas Day bombing. Walking through a metal detector is simply not going to cut it when a guy has explosives packed in his underwear! I think that at this moment the TSA is doing the very best it can with the technology at its disposal, and instead of throwing rocks at them, maybe we need to grit our teeth and put up with a little bit of "indignity" by going through the full body scan or the pat down, and stop worrying that images of our naked bodies could possibly, maybe, end up on the net.
Because like Peter Johnson said on Sean Hannity's radio show yesterday, maybe we should stop worrying about being naked on the web, and more about being naked on an autopsy table.