My Parting Response to Readers Who Believe That the TSA Should be Disbanded or Restricted

Because I have a hip replacement, and thus have metal in my body, I set off the alarm every time I pass through Security at an airport. I am thus patted down on every single visit to an airport, and in both directions. And because I travel by air much more frequently than most normal Americans, I have been patted down on nearly four hundred occasions over the past ten years. Never once has that patting down been inappropriate or out of bounds. The TSA agents who have responded to the request, "Male Assist," have never once been anything other than totally courteous, efficient and detached. They have explained what they were about to do, have politely inquired whether I would like to have this done privately (I always respond that I have no objection to doing it there, on the spot), and on each such occasion the TSA person has donned rubber gloves and conducted any intimate touching with the back of their hands. Not one of them has been a thrill-seeker or a pervert, and they have done only what was needed to determine that I was not concealing explosives or weapons on my person.  It was therefore with astonishment that I read the dozen-or-so negative comments that have been made in response to my recent blog post (scroll down for the comments) in which I discussed the campaign to discredit the TSA, or to replace them with the employees of private, profit-seeking companies, or to force them to discontinue certain security practices (like requiring passenger to take off their shoes and place them on the belt, or to permit passengers to carry large containers of liquid onto flights). See the comment to my blog that states we should "get rid of the body scanners, get rid of the shoe removal, get rid of the liquid restrictions." One wonders what world these strident sorts are living in. Have they never heard of Richard Reid, the "shoe bomber," who concealed explosives in his footwear that were capable of bringing down a plane? Have they never heard of the would-be terrorist who attempted to ignite explosive liquids that he brought onto a plane? What is especially striking about these comments is the extreme quality of the assertions made in them (please note that I do not call them "hysterical"), assertions so spectacular as to make one wonder. One of the comment-providers actually states that "my testicles were removed from my underwear" by a TSA agent conducting a pat-down. Could this really be? Or is it a fantasy? Slightly less dramatic are the claims that some of the 50,000 members of the TSA have, on occasion, been found to have committed crimes, as any group of 50,000 airport workers would be found to have done. If private companies were now brought in to provide security at our airports, they too would undoubtedly number 50,000 persons in size nationwide, including some unsavory types that had slipped through a screening process. Do the opponents of the TSA really claim that the calibre of TSA's work force is less impressive than the bored and bumbling types that used to maintain the security gates prior to 9/11 and who permitted the 19 hijackers to pass almost effortlessly onto the planes they later seized? We are a democracy that have resolved to thwart the terrorists. We have decided to put up with inconvenience as a means of preventing them from seizing our planes in the midst of flight and crashing them into buildings. And our resolve has paid off: in the ten years since 9/11, no American airplane has been seized by terrorists, as may havehappened if we had simply decided to let people wander onto planes without a thorough check. We constantly hear of terrorists around the world (the latest one killed three French paratroopers, three children and one teacher) who would have been more than willing to sacrifice their own lives in the course of an air hijacking. We have stopped them from doing so by the measures we have taken. And yet, these super-libertarians who have responded to my blog have accused me of making "the sort of argument that allowed Hitler to rise to power." Another such person has argued that 9/11 was a "staged event" that does not warrant our security procedures. I trust that the overwhelming percentage of our readers are grateful for the conscientious performance of their work by the TSA.