Originally Posted by
tom911
Might be as easy as activating the National Guard. Aren't those the folks we already see on patrol at Penn Station in New York City and at the Port Authority airports? Might entail a lot of hand searches and pat downs, but they'd surely get passengers moving if there were no TSA screeners. I wonder if some of them are already tasked to Super Bowl venues.
The idea of uniformed soldiers detaining and frisking thousands of people who just want to get on a plane to go home after a football game makes me shudder. Even after 9/11, when the NG was deployed to many airports to provide 'security', they didn't handle screening - they merely patrolled the terminals and tried to look tough (despite the pimples and the empty mags on their weapons).
This isn't a military dictatorship, it's a free society, and if our fear of the terr'ist boogie-man is so great that we're willing to let the armed forces (even the National Guard) handle something as inherently civilian as airport passenger screening, we're in far deeper trouble than having a dysfunctional government.
Originally Posted by
GUWonder
Have we yet exceeded 12% nation-wide absentee rates for the TSA?
I doubt that the average National Guard member using the baggage scanners would be anywhere close to being more effective at finding WEIs than the current TSA screeners using the machines. Using a WTMD and doing dog and pony show patdowns are easily replicated, but the effectiveness of scanner use is much more up in the air and varies based on training and experience. And then there is the whole issue of having to deal with the ridiculous ID w/boarding pass checks if the National Guard were to do this.
We really should get rid of the TSA as we know it and put this stuff in the hands of airports and airlines again and end the passenger ID checks.
Despite my revulsion at the idea of letting soldiers do the screening, I cannot believe that they'd be any LESS effective than an agency which misses up to 95% of the WEI they're supposed to be looking for.