It's interesting how this thread suddenly disappeared from the front page, btw.
Sad but predictable in a world with a global movement of suicidal religious fanatics willing to murder thousands of people and cause billions in property damage. It is what is. I miss the old days too, but I wouldn't vote to water-down airport security.
>I'm sad at how he was treated and it's something that needs to be changed.
Does it? He refused the millimeter wave scan, got a pat-down, tested positive for an explosive or poison, and then refused further screening - what should happen at that point? Should he be cleared? Where did the TSA go wrong here?
He wasn't detained because he refused a scanner. You know that.
>when his choice was going to get complicated he could no longer switch back to the scanner.
Well ... yeah. What you refer to as a complication was him testing positive for explosives or poison.
>Why deny him a glass of water?
Is that the problem? He didn't get a glass of water?
Testing positive for some chemical that might be used in explosives. Otherwise they wouldn't have asked him for what cleaning supplies he might have used.
You might want to look at the Birmingham Six.
They were from Northern Ireland (and thus automatically suspected of terrorism) and living in Birmingham; they were travelling to attend the funeral of a childhood friend (and he was a terrorist); they travelled on the day a bomb went off in Birmingham; and they played a game of cards on the train.
Those cards were coated with nitrocellulose.
The fragments of nitrocellulose on their hands tested positive as nitroglycerine, and that bit of "evidence" was used to convict them of a crime they did not commit and imprison them for very many years.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-12664938
You shouldn't make assumptions.
Perhaps it was the bit where they held him for 18 hours without charge, due process, food, or water.
Edit: Misread the article. He was held for 3½ hours. Still, refusing to give him a glass of water was not necessary, unless water-activated throat-bombs are now a thing.
In a more general sense, TSA went wrong the same way they usually go wrong. Kafka-esque "you're not detained but you can't leave" nonsense designed to side-step due process, comically ignorant staff who think Islam is the only religion brown people can have, whilst not even being effective at detecting contraband.
OK. Sure. I suppose if you're held for 3 hours, you should have a right to water. Is the big problem here? If you're detained for more than 1 hour you should get a bottle of water?
It seems obvious to me that refusing to give water is a calculated act designed to cause discomfort - not unlike unnecessarily giving multiple "obscene" pat downs [their words] - the closest TSA thugs can get to using the "enhanced interrogation" techniques that I think they wish they were allowed to use.
So it isn't specifically the lack of water that's the problem. The problem is the pattern of behaviour that the lack of water and the rest of the unnecessarily combative treatment are examples of. Too many TSA employees are on power trips.
Seriously?
No doubt there are many fine upstanding people working for the TSA, who don't abuse their power and are angry at co-workers that do. Those people aren't what's wrong with the TSA.
The people who are a problem within the TSA are those who deny repeated requests for water or refuse to allow a person who is not under any kind of lawful detention to use their mobile phone, for, I claim, no purpose other than to assert their dominance.
The mobile phone is potentially defensible, but I challenge you to present a reasonable national security justification for denying the not-technically-a-detainee water. Until you do, I'm going to call those people thugs.
White Americans cause more acts of terror than Muslims. The last plane hijacking before 9/11 was by a white American. "Muslim" is not an indicator of people from the middle East, much less terrorists- the majority of Muslims are not from the middle East, they're African or Asian. Demonizing Muslims is a completely arbitrary choice based solely on one extreme outlier, and not on the danger they present.
You ask what should have happened. Did we read they same article? He asked to go home. They should have let him go. When he asked to leave they locked him up for 6 hours. He didn't want to be there and they had no right or reason to keep a him there. They treated him like shit, probably searched his apartment without a Warrenton, and cancelled his ticket and didn't reschedule him. And this was at JFK! This is likely among the best, least prejudiced experiences you can hope to have in a US airport. It's one of the largest, most liberal airport; the TSA shouldn't be locking people up if they don't even intend to fly.
I'm white and I once tripped the bomb paper with my shoes. You know what happened? The TSA guy just waved me through. If I was a little browner I would have been locked up in a room for six hours. If I had been treated like this man, I would be in jail for socking an agent in the face.
They detained someone who wasn't a threat. They go wrong every single time that happens. It could be an excusable error if there was good evidence that they prevent what they were created to prevent, but they have yet to produce any.
Do you mean the "security" theater with a 95% failure rate? http://abcnews.go.com/US/exclusive-undercover-dhs-tests-find...
To which the response is "cavity searches!" which will only continue to fail. http://kxan.com/2017/03/06/tsa-changing-pat-down-policy-afte...
The most effective change to security protocols was reinforcing the cockpit doors and changing how authorized people enter the cockpit. Every high-profile attack since 9/11 has not involved hijacking, has not been stopped by the TSA, but has been handled by better educated passengers and flight attendants. http://www.nydailynews.com/news/world/shoe-bomber-subdued-fl... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umar_Farouk_Abdulmutallab#Atta...
Terrorists don't kill people on any scale worth worrying about. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2015/11/2...
The barely trained high school dropouts in blue uniforms at the TSA only serve to increase our sense of servility to a government that is increasingly afraid of its own citizens.
The TSA notionally prevents the use of domestic and outbound international airplanes as weapons. In order to hijack a plane you would need to subdue hundreds of people (because why take over a small plane), find and subdue the air marshall, break into the cockpit, and know how to fly a massive jetliner. It is an insane concept. You could just buy a schoolbus(legal), steal a truck, or even just rent a big uhaul, fill it with explosives(undetectable and not even checked for), and drive it onto a big bridge or next to a stadium(also legal). You wouldn't even have to kill yourself to do it, you could kill many more people, and it would be almost impossible to stop.
If you just wanted to kill people you wouldn't even do that. You'd just set up IEDs like people do in Iraq and Syria. That would be way more terrifying than plane hijacking- the bombs could be everywhere. There would be nearly nothing we could do about it.
The fact that none of that happens says that terrorism is just not a threat in the way we think of it. The TSA is the most useless government organization in the US.