Kudos to BlueDotRedField's diary shining sunlight on more lawlessness by the administration. The Bush administration has undertaken a systematic program of TSA agents violating people using public transportation.
The diary "Federal Agents Searching People at Indianapolis Bus Stops: Air Marshals Patting Civilians Down"poses many critically and direct questions about this program including these three:
Why (this is the key); what SPECIFIC threat - or is there one (hint: "no"); & with concerns over the number of air marshals on commercial planes, why do we have them at bus stops rather than at the airport?
My personal experience with bureaucracies (medical and law enforcement) points me to a partial answer to these three questions and an explanation of why federal agents are patting down bus riders in U.S. cities.
This is a training exercise using a population that is vulnerable, lacks resources to object and has little or no incentive to object -- or all three.
Let me explain . . . .
How do some Hospitals train their greenest, most inexperienced recently minted M.D.s? Answer: Medicaid patients. For example, surgeons will frequently schedule elective surgery on their well insured and "quality" private clients during optimum times of the year if at all possible. Then, they schedule Medicaid patients for surgery immediately after a new rotation of residents starts doing the cutting on their own. Physicians talk about "practicing" - as in really practicing - on Medicaid patients. It’s an old game played in the medical world, especially within the inner-city of the two Americas.
The mentality transfers to federal agents controlled by a lawless administration. Structured regular programmatic pat-downs do not occur at the gold club entrance to that first class flight to Rome. Aside from P.R., it is a bad "test" group for practicing techniques and developing protocols. It's like training bomb dogs on packages that never have a scent.
So, how do TSA agents train to detect behavioral patterns of people carrying contraband, and how do they receive real world experience before dealing with the fast pace airport or high-risk environment?
Answer: Take the agents into the field and work over hundreds of resource challenged inner city bus riders in conservative states who (a) are likely to present contraband on a somewhat regular basis - thus giving TSA agents an opportunity to compare and contrast between passengers; and (b) who do not have the ability to challenge being violated by illegal acts committed against them by government agents.
Like newly minted residents practicing on inner city Medicaid patients to develop their skills for later use in a "high value" environment, these agents are practicing on a population that cannot assert its rights.
This is largely a TSA training exercise performed on a vulnerable, unsympathetic population that is unlikely to throw their lives into turmoil by contesting - i.e. going to federal court to suffer greater harassment - the abuses perpetrated against them.
This is cynical and cruel. It further insulates people in general and law enforcemnt specifically from a respect for legal process, rule of law, civil rights, constitutional rights and human rights. This is further erosion of civil society and it gets worse every day.
I'll be back at lunch break. Thanks to BlueDotRedField for highlighting this abuse. Please give BDRF a well deserved recommend at Federal Agents Searching People at Indianapolis Bus Stops: Air Marshals Patting Civilians Down