Those immortal words still manage to provide an insight into what Washington saw as the lasting legacy of the revolution he had just helped to bring about. That men were subservient to law. All men. None were above it, not even himself.
Those laws seem a little less clear these days with the recent glut of horror stories coming out of almost every airport in America. The line between freedom and safety has been blurred so much as to leave the country in stunned shock at what many see as state sponsored sexual assault. In fact, there are several lawsuits being filed currently alleging just that.
With the newly implemented backscatter x-ray machines that literally see through clothing to the less than gentle and certainly invasive pat downs being done by TSA screeners all across the country, freedom has been degraded to the point of making the simple act of flying anywhere a Bataan grope march of humiliation.
Let's hearken back to that outdated and obscure document we call the bill of rights and read what it says about one of our most basic rights:
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
That's pretty clear don't you think? The phrase "...shall not be violated..." has no gray area. It doesn't say or imply that the government can usurp that right when it deems it necessary or in times of crisis. It says simply, No warrant...no search. End of story. I would guess that most of the people who have already been through the naked scanner or the "pat down" would deem that an "unreasonable search" considering the areas that are checked. Men's groins are groped as well as women's breasts.
One irate air traveler declared flatly, "You touch my junk and I'll have you arrested." He finally declined the naked scanner and the pat down and chose to leave the airport to avoid what he felt was a humiliating and completely pointless search of his person. The government is currently charging him with failure to obey a lawful TSA request and his punishment could include a fine of over ten thousand dollars and/or imprisonment. Bear in mind that he left the airport to avoid the search and decided to travel in another way. The TSA asserts that this is still a violation and he will be prosecuted. Now, if you choose not to fly you still have to have the search performed. In Khrushchev's wildest dreams he could never have imagined the police state that we have denigrated to.
There is also a video on YouTube that has gone viral of a 3 year old girl screaming, "Stop touching me!" as a TSA agent pats her down. The video was taken by her father who just happens to be a reporter. These are not isolated incidents either. Each new day of air travel brings more accounts very similar to the previous examples. Let's examine a statement by the Deputy Director of the TSA,
" No one wants to have their 4th amendment rights violated when they board an airplane but that's what we're gonna have to do."
In that one line he acknowledges that the new security measures violate a basic civil right but we as air travelers have no other option. . It's for safety, right? The words of Benjamin Franklin come to mind in this instance, "They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety. "
Surely if there was another way that didn't violate the constitution they would have implemented it by now. Well, in actual point of fact there is another way. Ask Israel's El Al Air how many times they've had to deal with a hijacking on one of their planes and they'll tell you just once in their entire history. They've not had an incident on a plane for more than 30 years and they don't subject passengers to unreasonable search unless they have a credible reason to do so. They rely solely on human intelligence to keep their planes safe. What most on the left would term "profiling" or what most law enforcement officers would call simple police work. It's more commonly referred to as "gut instinct" and it's helped law enforcement officers do their job for hundreds of years.
A fine example of gut instinct being the key factor in keeping the public safe is the case of the millennium bomber. In December of 1999, upon arriving on a ferry from Canada, al-Qaida operative Ahmed Ressam was arrested with a trunk full of explosives. His plan: to blow up Los Angeles International Airport. He was in possession of a legal Canadian passport, acquired with false information. NBC's Lisa Myers interviewed the alert agent responsible for foiling the plot and reports,
' “His story didn’t make sense to me,” said customs inspector Diana Dean. Now retired, Dean was working the border that night. On a hunch something wasn’t quite right, she questioned Ressam and asked him to pop his trunk. Inside were big bags of white powder that were first thought to be drugs.
But that night, drug tests came back negative. When investigators looked further, they found timers and realized the powder was explosives.
Dean said, “My heart dropped right into my toes when I realized what it was.”
She says no one had told her anything about being on alert for terrorists.
“I don’t recall any specific threats," she added. "I don’t recall anybody saying watch for terrorists.”
Customs officials confirm that no alert had gone out to the field."
Despite White House and 9/11 commission officials claiming that enhanced information and more focus on terrorism saved LAX from a horrific catastrophe it is the work of one very smart Border agent and one very nervous terrorist that averted this crisis.
Perhaps the most telling example of the need for human intelligence being the basic tenet of security is the story of Jose Melendez-Perez, a Puerto-Rican born United States Customs and Border Protection Inspector at Orlando International Airport who became a key figure for the 9/11 Commission when he refused entry to an alleged terrorist prior to the 20th hijacker. Thus there were only four hijackers onboard Flight 93 that crashed in Pennsylvania, and possibly because of the shorthanded muscle on that team, the passengers were able to overcome the terrorists.
A Saudi national, Mohammed al Qahtani, landed in Orlando on a Virgin Atlantic flight. Since the Qahtani's forms were not properly filled out, he was moved to a secondary interview, conducted by Perez. The Saudi did not have a return ticket or a hotel. He had $2,800 in cash and no credit cards. Questions to where he would stay and where he would go were evasive. Besides being quite hostile, Qahtani also made contradictory statements regarding his plans.
Perez advised his superiors to have him sent back. As, according to his testimony, he sent Qahtani back out of the United States, the man allegedly turned around to him and said "something to the effect of 'I'll be back.'"
Both of the examples cited here were successful due solely to the training and innate intelligence of the agents involved. Both used their training and instincts to determine that something wasn't quite right and denied entrance to men who wanted to visit tragedy on American citizens. Neither relied on x-rays or pat downs to come to their conclusions. It is often argued that Melendez-Perez may have in fact saved the White House or the Capital building from devastation as it was determined that one of those two would be the final target for that horrible day. The people who owe their very lives to Melendez-Perez now ignore and dismiss his training as "profiling" and decide instead to subject every American to treatment that might seem common in a communist country but goes against the grain of every lesson learned from the American Revolution.
With the upcoming Thanksgiving holiday fast approaching, the airlines will soon be faced with the usual staggering numbers of travelers they accommodate every year and airports across the country will become the scene of what's being called "Opt Out Day". In an exercise of civil disobedience, thousands of passengers will simply decline the x-ray scanner and force the TSA agents to do endless pat-downs. I say, more power to them.
I'm reminded of another quote from Ben Franklin,
"Disobedience to a tyrant is obedience to God."
