March 29, 2024 / by 

 

Apparently Criticizing TSA’s Boss Is Anti-Worker

Yasha Levine insinuates I’m responsible for Paul Ciancia’s attack on TSA workers the other day.

The “progressive” blog FireDogLake was perhaps the biggest and loudest leftie media outlet to promote the anti-TSA crusade. The site even launched a “Petition to Investigate the TSA,” adopting right-wing lingo in calling the agency’s pat down procedures “aggressive groping” and getting “sexually assaulted by a government official.” FireDogLake blogger Marcy Wheeler frequently referred to TSA checkpoints procedures as “rape” and “groping.” In December 2010, she warned her readers that anywhere from a quarter-million to 1 million people “had their genitalia groped by a stranger working for the government” in a single week, and the Obama administration simply didn’t care. “That sort of seems like a lot of junk-touching in just one week.”

Two years later, Wheeler was comparing TSA workers to rapists, Tweeting out: “Rape is not about sexual enjoyment. It’s about power. So is this TSA stuff.”

[snip]

But so far the left has been strangely silent about the violent right-wing rhetoric and conspiracy-mongering that inspired the TSA shooting at LAX. I guess that isn’t very surprising, considering the left helped enable it.

I’m not going to respond to this beyond pulling together all the posts where I talk about how asinine the TSA screenings are. If there’s a villain in them, it’s TSA Director John Pistole, the guy setting that asinine policy, not the line workers who implement his policy. There are a number I haven’t included talking about John Pistole’s potential role in the UndieBomb 2.0 leak, some references in “Links” posts, some on relative choices in counterterrorism approaches, and a few on contractors.

Note, especially, the post with the asterisk, where I unpacked the illogic of Levine’s first conspiracy theory on TSA, which might explain why he’s now accusing me of contributing to someone’s death.

That is all.

June 28, 2007: TSA versus Booz Allen

August 15, 2007: Behavior Detection

November 22, 2010: John Pistole Wants Us to Be Afraid of His Shadow

November 22, 2010: White House: Only 170,000 People Have Had Genitalia Groped by Complete Stranger in Last Week

November 23, 2010: Did Just 170,000 Passengers Get Groped by Strangers Last Week? Or a Million?

*November 25, 2010: Correlation Does Not Equal KochNation

December 1, 2010: FBI Entrapment Leads to TSA Pat-Downs

December 9, 2010: John Pistole: “What I Think Is Appropriate in Terms of Privacy”

December 19, 2010: Protecting DC’s Metro from the FBI and Facebook

December 27, 2010: TSA’s Legal Justification for Gate Grope

May 17, 2011: Apparently the Terrorists Can’t Learn How Much Radiation They’ll Get from Going through TSA Security

May 21, 2011: First Mickey Donned Night Vision Goggles, Now Mickey Embraces GateGrope

June 14, 2011: More Security Theater as Play

May 7, 2012: It Takes an Attempted Terrorist Attack to Actually Test Backscatter Machines

August 12, 2012: Racial Profiling Is Wrong, Sometimes

August 7, 2013: The Ooga Booga* Continues to Wear Off 

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Originally Posted @ http://www.emptywheel.net/tag/john-pistole/