TSA Christmas memo defies facts

[Sandra]

Not only does the memo skew facts of the public perception, Pistole also praised the TSA under his own "wise financial stewardship"

TSA Christmas memo defies facts

 By Doug Hagmann  Friday, December 31, 2010

A memorandum dated 24 December 2010 signed by TSA Director
John
Pistole and Deputy Administrator Gale Rossides was sent to all
Transportation Security Administration (TSA) agents, praising the
advances made by the TSA this year. Not all federal agents who received
this memo were in agreement with the reported strides made by the TSA as
Pistole alleges, with some calling the memo “pure propaganda” and “boldly
inaccurate.” One problem, according to the federal officials interviewed
about this memo, is that Pistole and Rossides misrepresented the facts to
his employees about the public support the TSA has received about their
enhanced screening procedures.

The TSA, an agency that never stopped an attack on any airline in its
nine year history, nonetheless boasted to its employees that they kept
air travel safe in 2010. In particular, Pistole expressed pride in the
“outpouring of support” from the public over the

Thanksgiving holiday and in the professional manner in which the TSA
workforce handled the national “opt-out” day, a day when many air
travelers planned protests of the enhanced passenger screening
procedures.

Specifically, a significant number of air travelers selected the day
before Thanksgiving to refuse screening by the new “AIT” (Advanced
Imaging Technology) scanners or subjected to enhanced pat-downs, in order
to send a message to the TSA that they’ve gone too far. As excerpted from
the memo, Pistole and Rossides praised TSA agents with getting passengers
through the screening process without incident and safely to their
destination:





What Pistole and Rossides did not mention was what supervisors at the
various TSA checkpoints knew in advance of the opt-out day, and what the
corporate media failed to report: passengers were not subjected to those
standards during that period to avoid air travel gridlock and the
subsequent embarrassment that would likely ensue. Instead, they reverted
to older screening standards, using older detectors in place of the AIT
units, while conducting less intrusive pat-downs when necessary.

Not only does the memo skew facts of the public perception, Pistole also
praised the TSA under his own “wise

financial stewardship” of one billion dollars to purchase,
deploy and implement “cutting edge technology” to airports, including 500
AIT units to airports nationwide:





These measures are being funded and directed by the
Obama
/Napolitano Department of Homeland Security with funds from the American
Recovery & Reinvestment Act of 2009. The stimulus money is being
poured into the purchase of new technology despite legitimate health and
safety concerns it poses and amid the Constitutional concerns over
privacy and the rights of American citizens to be protected from
unreasonable searches.

Pistole was sworn in as the TSA’s fifth agency head in July. He oversees
about 60,000 federal workers and employees, and the operations of over
450 U.S.
airports, the Federal Air Marshal Service (FAMS), and the security
for highways, railroads, ports, mass transit systems and pipelines. A
former deputy director for the FBI,
Pistole
is a primary architect with DHS Secretary Napolitano to expand the
national “see something, say something” campaign, which is gaining in
controversy by critics calling the program Orwellian in nature. Pistole,
along with Napolitano, is also involved in
thecontroversial
Stasi-style
Nationwide Suspicious Activity Reporting Initiative, or SAR for
short.

Readers might recall that the memo’s co-author, Gale Rossides was at

the center of controversy in 2009, while she was the acting head of
the TSA before Pistole was appointed. At a hearing of a
House
Homeland Security Committee subcommittee, she was questioned about a
TSA Standard Operating Procedures screening manual being found online by
bloggers. Rossides stonewalled Congress, and refused outright to provide
subcommittee members the current version of the SOP manual or answer
questions about the scope of the breach caused by the publication of the
manual. She drew the ire of not only House subcommittee members, but of
TSA agents with direct knowledge of the manual contents who stated that
the gaffe unnecessarily caused a significant compromise to air
travel.

Joe Hagmann, research specialist contributed to this report.





View
TSA Memo


 
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