Details on the TSA's detainment of Senator Rand Paul, a stinging rebuke by Ron Paul and the revelation of random screening alarms. by Jake Morphonios
(libertarian)
Monday, January 23, 2012
TSA officials at the Nashville International Airport may have just made the biggest mistake of their careers in choosing to engage in a showdown with Kentucky U.S. Senator, Rand Paul. Senator Paul, a Tea Party favorite and son of U.S. presidential candidate, Ron Paul, was detained on Monday by the TSA after refusing a full body pat down.
The incident began when Senator Paul passed through a full body scanner, setting off an alarm. The machine suggested that he was carrying metal on his lower right leg, so officials demanded that Paul submit to a “pat down” – the controversial full search of the body. Paul raised his right pant leg to show officials that he was not carrying anything, claiming that there was clearly a “glitch” in the machine. The TSA was unsatisfied with seeing his leg and told the senator that until he submitted to their demands for an extensive body search that he would not be allowed to pass the screening area. When the senator again refused to comply with their demands, the TSA had him escorted out of the screening area by local law enforcement officials.
The senator’s Communications Director, Moira Bagley, tweeted, “I spoke with him five minutes ago and he was being detained indefinitely. The image scan went off; he refused pat down.” The TSA responded with a statement of their own, claiming that Paul was “not detained at any point.” The ludicrous denial by the TSA was addressed by Senator Paul’s Chief of Staff, Doug Stafford, who wrote in an email, “Well, I don’t know what bureaucrat manuals call it, but: an innocent American citizen who was offering to cooperate while also attempting to stop an invasive search was not allowed to proceed without complying.”
If one wonders why the TSA was so adamant in claiming that the senator had not been detained, the answer might be found in the U.S. Constitution, Article I, Section 6, which prohibits the detaining of congressmen.
“The Senators and Representatives shall in all Cases, except Treason, Felony and Breach of the Peace, be privileged from Arrest during their Attendance at the Session of their respective Houses, and in going to and returning from the same.”
Congress was in session on Monday.
As a result of the detainment, Senator Paul missed his flight to Washington DC. He was scheduled to speak at the March for Life rally for the anniversary of the Supreme Court’s Roe vs Wade decision and to attend a senate session. Later, Paul was rebooked on another flight and again went through the full body scanner. Mysteriously, no alarm went off.
Picking a fight with Senator Paul was just about the stupidest thing the TSA could have done. The agency found itself in Paul’s crosshairs in June of 2011 during a session of the senate’s Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs committee. The senator roundly excoriated the TSA for its recent mistreatment of a constituent from Paul’s own hometown of Bowling Green, Kentucky. Displaying a poster-sized photo of a 6 year old girl standing in a TSA screening area, Paul grilled TSA director John S. Pistole:
“So this little girl would be one of your random pat downs? They [the family] are still quite unhappy with you guys – as well as myself and a lot of other Americans that think you’ve gone overboard and you’re missing the boat on terrorism because you’re doing these invasive searches on 6 year old girls.”
“The same week that this happened, I got a call from another neighbor of mine in Bowling Green. The little boy had a broken foot and was on crutches. They didn’t want to go through all the screenings. They took the crutches away and took the cast off so he could hobble through with his dad helping him. TSA said to the dad, ‘back away, back away!’ Then he had to go through a special search because he had previously had the cast on, even though the cast itself went through the belt. When the dad came close they told him again to ‘back away! If you don’t back away you won’t fly.’
“This gets back to this whole idea of what are we willing to give up as a country. In your interview with ABC you said, ‘I see flying as a privilege’. Well, there are those of us who see it otherwise, the US Supreme Court included. In Saenz vs. Roe in 1999, it says ‘Although the world travel is not found in the text of Constitution, yet the constitutional right to travel from one state to another is firmly embedded in our jurisprudence.' Justice Stuart went on to say in Shapiro vs. Thompson that, ‘The right to travel is so important that it is assertable against private interference as well as governmental action – a virtually unconditional personal right, guaranteed by the Constitution to us all.’”
“Now this isn’t to say that we don’t believe in safety procedures. But I think I feel less safe because you’re doing these procedures and invasive exams on a 6 year old. It makes me think you’re clueless, you know, that you think she is going to attack our country and that you’re not doing your research on the people who would attack our country.”
The exchange can be viewed here:
After the session, Pistole sent a letter to Paul to justify the practice of TSA agents putting their hands into little girls’ pants. In a subsequent session, Paul referenced the letter and rebuked the director’s explanation, saying:
“We had a little girl from Bowling Green who was on Good Morning America that many people saw. And she was on there [on video] with a TSA agent doing an invasive search of her inside of her clothing – inside of her pants. We had an 8 month old having her diaper inspected. And we had a 95 year old who had their diaper taken off and inspected and stayed for hours waiting to get through the TSA. We have to bring some sense to what we are doing in this country.”
Following the detainment, Senator Paul’s father, Congressman Ron Paul of Texas, issued his own scathing rebuke of the TSA, stating:
“The police state in this country is growing out of control. One of the ultimate embodiments of this is the TSA that gropes and grabs our kids and our seniors and does nothing to keep us safe.”
In a Novemer 2010 interview with radio personality Alex Jones, Congressman Paul was asked his opinion on the TSA’s practices. Paul said, “I have to go through that all the time because I have metal in my knees. I get prodded all the time and it is disgusting and I tell them so.”
Like his son, the elder Paul has been a frequent critic of the unconstitutional actions of the TSA. Congressman Paul is the sponsor of the “American Traveler Dignity Act”, which strips TSA agents of protective immunities from prosecution over the invasive pat downs. Ron Paul also mentioned in his statement on Monday that part of his plan to cut one trillion dollars from the federal budget in his first year in office as president would include the complete elimination of the TSA. In Monday's statement, Congressman Ron Paul continued:
"One of the ultimate embodiments of this is the TSA that gropes and grabs our children, our seniors, and our loved ones and neighbors with disabilities. The TSA does all of this while doing nothing to keep us safe. That is why my ‘Plan to Restore America,’ in additional to cutting $1 trillion dollars in federal spending in one year, eliminates the TSA."
The White House has already weighed in on the incident as Press Secretary Jay Carney indicated the administration’s support of TSA actions. “I think it is absolutely essential that we take necessary actions to ensure that air travel is safe.”
Following the White House’s assertion that Senator Paul was not detained, Paul responded, “If you’re told you can’t leave, does that count as detention?” He said further, “I tried to leave the cubicle to speak to one of the TSA people and I was barked at: ‘Do not leave the cubicle!’ So, that, to me sounds like I’m being asked not to leave the cubicle. It sounds a little bit like I’m being detained.”
“For an hour and a half, they said ‘absolutely, I would have to accept a pat down. And, because I used my cell phone, they told me I would have to do a full body pat down because you’re not allowed to use your cell phone when you’re being detained. It’s like, well, I can’t call my attorney? I can’t call my office to tell them I’m going to miss a speech to 200,000 people?”
Senator Paul asserted that not only do TSA agents choose citizens at random for unnecessary screenings, but that the screening machines are designed to sound alarms at random as well – subjecting innocent people to intrusive invasions of privacy.
“In the end, after two hours of this quarreling,” he said, “they did let me walk through the screener and it didn’t go off. So what the TSA is not telling you is the screeners are being used as random devices as well. The screeners will go off randomly, and the [agents] don’t know that it’s a random call but it has nothing to do with what you’ve done.”
As if the Paul family wasn't already a thorn in the side of the TSA, the agency is sure to come under greater scrutiny by the two legislators and their legions of liberty-conscious adherents.
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Jake Morphonios has worked as a political consultant and campaign strategist for over two decades and is the author of "Organizing a Grassroots Political Machine", used in the Steve Forbes 2000 Presidential campaign.
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