Originally Posted by
Andy1369
Quoted by Gale Rossides, in her
statement to Congress. TSA's job is to stop a terrorist attack.
Originally Posted by
cestmoi123
This doesn't seem like a controversial statement - of course their job is to prevent a terrorist attack.
Cestmoi123, I think you are mistaken.
TSA's mission statement indicates that their job is to "protect the nation’s transportation systems to ensure freedom of movement for people and commerce". In the course of doing their job, they might need to prevent such an attack, but to say that TSA's job is "to prevent a terrorist attack" is no more accurate than to say that the U.S. Department of State's job is to prevent a terrorist attack.
This extreme hysteria over the perceived high risk of someone who opposes U.S. policies using terrorism as a means to strike back against the empire is ridiculous, and after years of having that idea pounded into our heads by our government, much of the American public is going along with it without questioning its validity. In less than a decade, the threat of terrorism has been woven into the fabric of our society. It's sickening.
In that same speech,
Gale Rossides also stated, "Our Officers work in an environment in which 99.9 percent of the people they see every day are not a threat"
Each of these statements is quite revealing about how TSA perceives their role and how they perceive their relationship with those whom they are employed to serve.
In a comment posted to a
recent TSA blog entry, I quoted the TSA mission statement, then
asked:
Christopher,
does TSA believe that 0.1% of the people that airport checkpoint agents see -- that is one out of every 1,000 -- are threats?
How does TSA define "terrorist"? Does it include (quoting
John Gilmore) any IRA member from the last twenty years? A member of the Irgun (led by former Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin)? Nelson Mandela, imprisoned for sabotage for 27 years by the South African government? A WTO protester? The US Government killed more Afghani civilians in the [2002] than the number of US people killed on 9/11; does that make US soldiers terrorists? Israel and Palestine both claim that the other is terrorist. So do India and Pakistan. So do leftists and rightists in Colombia.
If TSA is so wrapped up in dealing with the over-hyped threat of terrorist attack that its Deputy Administrator has forgotten the organization's true mission, so much that you expect us to accept your policy of restricting freedom of movement based on a blacklist labeled "terrorist watch list",
surely you can define "terrorist" for us.
Christopher and the other TSA bloggers have not responded.