There’s a lot of uproar at the moment about body scans and “patdowns” at airports recently. Some of the stories do seem outrageous, such as the woman who had to remove her prosthetic breast to show she wasn’t hiding explosives in it.
Other people seem to be over-reacting. Best comment so far: “If you think a TSA pat down is sexual assault then you don’t ever want to go on the New York subway at rush-hour.” Yes. I call them “sardine cars,” because people are packed in them like sardines. Do you shove yourself into the car and experience full-body contact with a bunch of strangers, or do you wait for the next train, in the chance that it will be less crowded? If you’ve lived in New York for a while, you learn to not be too squeamish if you want to get to work on time.
But it strikes me that (if Memeorandum is any indicator) there is more uproar about the TSA coming from the Right, not the Left. Some of it is the usual posturing (it’s “Obama’s” TSA, after all). And, let’s face it, righties are whiners. But it strikes me that these are the same people who justified waterboarding because it might “save lives.”
If you could get information that would save lives, or save a school full of children, or prevent another 9/11, wouldn’t it be wrong to not waterboard somebody? We were asked. The fact that such information is rarely reliable was never part of the scenario.
To me, it was like asking If you could stop a terrorist by leaping off an office tower and landing on him, killing both of you, wouldn’t it be wrong to not leap off the office tower? Never mind the sacrifice involved; it’s unlikely I would be able to direct my falling body with enough precision to do much good. So the answer is, um, no. Let’s go with what works, which is not waterboarding.
And let’s not even start on the wisdom of invading random foreign countries on the chance they might have weapons of mass destruction-related program activities.
The thing is, if bodily violations actually provide greater security and reduced the possibility that the plane would be hijacked or blown up by terrorists, I might go along with them. I can imagine being on a plane that is being hijacked and thinking, damn, why weren’t we all body scanned?
It’s not clear that body scans and patdowns actually make us safer, since apparently the TSA hasn’t caught any prohibited items that they probably would not have found through more conventional screening means. On the other hand, it’s possible the security theater discourages would-be terrorists from attempting anything.
What say you?