Airport Security and Mr. McGurn
Bill, your question below, about letters of marque and reprisal, set me to thinking. I'm in complete agreement with the impulse behind your question, which I take to be as follows: Since the private sector almost always operates more effectively than the government, the government ought to contract out work whenever it can. What, then, do you make of George W. Bush's decision when, after 9-11, he was faced with the need to increase security at airports around the nation?
The President could have contracted the work out to private security firms, and I thought it a mistake--to be honest, a terrible mistake--that he didn't, instead creating a whopping new bureaucracy, the Transportation Security Administration. When you joined the White House staff a few years later, did you ever hear a convincing rationale for that decision? Did the President and his advisors honestly believe the TSA could do a better job of securing air travel than could private security firms? Or was the creation of the TSA another of those concessions--like a lot of the increase in domestic spending--that the President felt he had to make to Congress to ensure support for the war in Iraq?
While we're at it, what do you make of the present-day politics of the TSA? Americans lose hundreds of thousands of hours a day standing in lines, submitting to frisking, and taking off their shoes, and fishing in their luggage for their laptops, and putting all their gels and deodorants into teensy little bottles. Must we live this way? Manifestly not. Just look at airport security in Israel. Quick, relatively painless, and, the record suggests, successful. So why isn't anybody complaining?
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Re: Airport Security and Mr. McGurn
As Adam mentioned, Ron Paul was the one who tried to revive the letters of marque and reprisal as a response to 9/11. Of course, Ron Paul wanted this *instead* of a war. I am still just wondering if this constitutional provision could be more than a joke.
We do have bounties on al Qaeda leaders. I know Reagan was accused of looking at things through Hollywood lenses (remember the Paul Newman movie about a man who defects to East Germany and then back, all about missile defense), but I did find Mel Gibson compelling in Ransom, where he first cooperates with criminals who have kidnapped his son and then doubles the ransom and makes it a bounty.
Again, would like some lawyers here. The private companies who helped us with wiretaps were, I believe, protected from prosecution. Again, the original question: is this dusty constitutional provision just an anachronism or are there creative uses today where we do not want or have the options of full military force.
Edited on Jun 17, 2010 at 11:09amMay '10
Re: Airport Security and Mr. McGurn
Wasn't there a huge battle with Lieberman over this, and the administration had to give in on civil service status for TSA? I remember myriad blog posts by people all over, describing every problem ever encountered with Wackenhut security guards.
May '10
Re: Airport Security and Mr. McGurn
I cannot see how private security firms could do any worse than the TSA. I go through a lot of security lines in the US and throughout the world. I am not speaking of all TSA agents in general here, but generally speaking I see more apathy among TSA agents than with any other group of airport security agents in the world. I get more of a sense from TSA employees that they are simply putting in their time than anywhere else in the world. The regulation, the bureaucracy, the mind numbing impact of government run organizations, along with the public service entitlement mentality that seems prevalent in the US does not seem t make our airports more secure.
How many terrorists tried to make it through security with false ID? How many bombings have they thwarted by swabbing the zippers on computer bags?
May '10
Re: Airport Security and Mr. McGurn
Creation of the TSA had little to do with sense and everything to do politicians covering their butts.
Israel has a much better strategy; not surprising, considering their history. They train security officials to profile and to engage people of interest in conversation (even true believers sweat and stutter when they blow themselves up). More importantly, they rely heavily on an informed public to identify suspicious activity.
It's literally impossible to anticipate every method and location of attack. The best defense will always be a watchful citizenship. That's even more true in a nation as huge as ours, with countless potential targets and such a diverse citizenry.
Re: Airport Security and Mr. McGurn
Devin, an Israeli security expert I saw interviewed about the TSA's approach had it right, saying approximately, "The US doesn't have a passenger security system, it has a passenger annoyance system." As with Obama's theatrics over the oil spill, the appearance of doing something trumps actual effectiveness.
May '10
Re: Airport Security and Mr. McGurn
What I wish the right could figure out -- and I am failing as much as anyone -- is how to reverse these kinds of enlargements of state. It isn't as though TSA is popular with the American public. Anyone who travels sees the absurdity of their security theater, and is unimpressed by the personel.
Yet now that airport security is federalized, it seems politically unthinkable to go back for some reason -- or at least I've never seen any prominent politician suggest a reversal. Why is this? It isn't like Social Security, where the policy creates a built in interest group to defend it.
Welfare reform is the one instance I can think of where government was rolled back. How do we achieve more successes like that? I wish I knew!
May '10
Re: Airport Security and Mr. McGurn
Yup! First we need a conservative congress with the intestinal fortitude to fix these travesties.
May '10
Re: Airport Security and Mr. McGurn
I have no problem with a federal agency in charge of airport security, per se. Guaranteeing the security of interstate and international travel is well within the federal government's brief under the Constitution. The problem I have, and I think this is where we all agree, is that the execution has been lousy; we can hardly be blamed for thinking a private contractor could deliver the same or better product at a better price. The TSA personnel too often look like the overachievers from 7-Eleven and the Circle K. Political correctness neuters security inspection procedures. The initial focus when Congress established TSA was not security, but collective bargaining rights. I just think back to my time flying out of Narita airport in Japan - Japan is not a highly militarized society by any means, but there was a palpable sense of focused, serious security.
May '10
Re: Airport Security and Mr. McGurn
President Obama's BP shakedown notwithstanding, the problem with government agencies typically is not authority but competent execution of the mission. The norm, not the exception, is that ancillary concerns like collective bargaining, political correctness and the like (the list swells without fail) subsume an agency's duty or primary mission. Public schools are not educational institutions - they are jobs programs for teachers and fertile ground for local building contractors. The TSA is not a security agency - it is low hanging fruit for public sector unions.
May '10
Re: Airport Security and Mr. McGurn
Speaking of government security incompetence...
After more than 3 months, the visas of some of these Afghan soldiers AWOL on U.S. soil are still "in the process of being revoked".
We can only wonder how many days it took them to tag each of these 17 Afghans as AWOL and then deactivate their DOD access cards. Just 2 or 3 days is all the time one would need to enter a DOD facility and attempt to steal sensitive information. Odds are, these Afghan soldiers simply got a taste of American life and decided they wanted to live here illegaly, but that's obviously not a chance we should take with foreign soldiers.
Re: Airport Security and Mr. McGurn
FeliciaB: Yup! First we need a conservative congress with the intestinal fortitude to fix these travesties. · Jun 17 at 5:54pm
Other alternatives: top-down system failure (catastrophe despite huge outlays); bottom-up system failure (rogue private airlines). A better congress is the most palatable.
Re: Airport Security and Mr. McGurn
I wrote a piece in the WSJ about airport security: