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Twenty-one years on from the destruction of the Twin Towers, it's becoming possible to tell which parts of the post-9/11 security state were passing expediencies or flashes of paranoia, and which have become institutionalized parts of American life.Last year's withdrawal from Afghanistan suggests large-scale regime change wars with lots of American boots on the ground are over for now. The Biden administration, for all its foreign policy faults, has drastically wound down overseas drone strikes. Perhaps those too will become a relic of a darker time.Many more elements of the War on Terror bureaucracy have become permanent, accepted features of American life. That would include the most visible, intrusive, and useless of them all: the Transportation Security Administration (TSA).Created just two short months after the 9/11 attacks, the TSA nationalized a largely privatized, decentralized system of airport security that existed previously and replaced it with the federalized behemoth we know today. ...I got a good reminder of the TSA's many excesses just yesterday when going through one of the agency's once-controversial full-body scanners.As I stepped out of the Orwellian picture booth in the Nashville airport, I was told that the machine had issued a "groin alert" and that I'd have to receive the requisite pat down.A TSA agent took me aside and explained in minute detail all the places his hands and fingers would have to go—all, I guess, in an effort to reassure me that the coming molestation was all above board (legally, if not literally). ...Still, nothing has changed about the uselessness of the TSA.The agency misses as much as 70 percent of the fake bombs, guns, and explosives that undercover government auditors try to sneak through their security checkpoints. Surveyed passengers report a near-90 percent success rate at getting illicit substances and items through security.Improved safety obviously isn't the reason the agency is still around. ...
We're going to fly next month for the first time since 9/2019. Not looking forward to it. Praying the flights aren't delayed or cancelled (not to mention the TSA aggravation).
