Arthur's Blog: Heathrow Airport Security Agents Perform the Same Routine Procedures as Our Own TSA

Knowing that I would probably set off the alarm while passing through security at Heathrow Airport London last Friday (I was returning home from two weeks in Britain), I was mildly curious to know how English security agents would handle the resulting need to search me (I have a hip replacement that always sets off the security alarm). And guess what? They did exactly what our TSA agents do. Donning rubber gloves to make the entire procedure less threatening, they "patted me down" with the backs of their hands to insure that I was carrying no explosives on my person. They even made me -- oh, horror! -- take off my shoes.
I looked around to see whether any of my fellow passengers, English or American, were gritting their teeth, or expressing alarm, in response to this violent invasion of personal privacy. But no one seemed concerned. Several persons quietly waited their turn to undergo the same examination. I immediately thought of those many sensation-seeking U.S. journalists and bloggers who have repeatedly expressed their anger at this supposedly unnecessary and intrusive invasion of our American rights, going so far as to call them "unconstitutional." Don't you get the impression, from their writings, that TSA pat-downs are a peculiarly American outrage? That it is those people in Washington, D.C., who have degraded and demeaned us by creating the TSA? Would the men at Yorktown, and at Valley Forge, they say, have countenanced such cowardly, un-American behavior?
Next time you read one of those lurid protests -- in the form of columns or blogs appearing on the Internet or in the press -- you might want to consider that the people administering airports all over the world have adopted many of the same methods as our TSA has to insure that bomb-carrying terrorists are unable to blow us up. You might want to reflect on the fact that it isn't just the U.S. federal government that has come up with these procedures, but the governments of Great Britain, France, Germany, Scandinavia, Central and Eastern European countries, India, China, Thailand and elsewhere who have adopted the same procedures.
And you might then join me in responding to these sensation-seeking bloggers and other journalists with the strong declaration that we support the work of the TSA and welcome the care and concentration they devote to their security tasks.