Over the weekend I was thinking about my last trip to Europe (we’re planning another this Summer) and the TSA agent in Atlanta who ripped me off on my return.  I was in London and Dublin at the invitation of the State Department to speak at the U.S. Embassies in those two cities about the role of talk radio in a presidential election.  You can imagine the pictureS I had on my camera.  Actually .. imagine those pictures is pretty much all you can do.  I actually watched a TSA agent take my camera out of my backpack in Atlanta and quickly disappear.  Atlanta’s airport is strange.  When you arrive on an international flight you have to claim your luggage and go through customs.  Then you have to go through security to get out of the international gates and into the main terminal.  Why?  Because you could have taken something nasty out of your checked luggage while going through customs.  So I go through the security, the metal detector detects my titanium knee, and I’m in the Plexiglas bullpen waiting for a groping.  While there I saw this TSA agent grab my backpack out of the x-ray machine, reach in, grab my camera and iPod, and disappear.  I stood in the bullpen screaming at him, but it didn’t help.  By the time I got back there with a supervisor this agent had “gone home for the day.” 

OK … so that was a crooked agent, but how about the dumbest agent I’ve ever encountered.  This guy worked at the Phoenix Sky Harbor airport. 

I suppose most of you have printed an airline boarding pass from the Internet. You get a boarding pass printed on an 8x11 piece of paper.  You get your scissors, right?  And you cut out the boarding pass and throw the rest of the paper away.  So … what happens in Phoenix?  The agent – his name was Joe – wasn’t pleased that I didn’t hand him the entire 8x11 sheet the boarding pass was printed on.  I pointed out to him that all of the required information was there.  Name, flight, bar code … .all of it.  Still, he wondered what could have been on the rest of the piece of copy paper that I threw away.  “How do I know there wasn’t something else on that paper?” he said.  So I had to leave security, go to the AirTran desk and have a new boarding pass printed out.  It was on a piece of paper with perforations where the ticket agent tore it out of the printer.  When I got back to Joe he gave the boarding pass his blessings and told me to move on.  Well, you know me.  I just couldn’t let it go.  I asked him about the perforations and if he really knew what was on the piece of paper that had been torn away from the boarding pass.  He wasn’t amused, nor was my wife.  I figured it was time to shut up or be prepared to wait a long, long time for the next flight.

You do realize, don’t you, that there is not one single documented incident where any TSA agent has actually stopped someone trying to get on an airplane with a weapon or anything that could have been used as a weapon which that person intended to use to cause harm or disrupt the flight.  Not once. 

Oh .. by the way.  I have a friend, a multiple-transplant patient, who flew to Pittsburgh last week for a checkup.  The TSA stole her handicap parking placard from her luggage.  Nice.