criminal background checks<\/a> on half of the 55,000 airport screeners that have been working in our airports.<\/p>\nThese screeners have a pretty important job — they protect the flying public. Federal guidelines require criminal background checks to determine if the screeners represent potential security risks. The Transportation Security Administration, however, hasn’t done background checks on over 20,000 screeners and hasn’t collected fingerprints on over a thousand more.<\/p>\n
This information, learned yesterday during a hearing in the House, led to bipartisan criticism of the TSA with charges that the screeners’ program has been “mismanaged.” Gee, you think?<\/p>\n
Apparently, the TSA was in a hurry to hire new screeners in the wake of 9\/11. In their haste, they failed to do the rigorous checks that would have been done under normal circumstances.<\/p>\n
That may be true, but it doesn’t make me feel any better. I’m looking for safety, not excuses.<\/p>\n
The current system, with ex-cons and all, not only poses security risks, it leads to actual criminal activity. A screener in New York with a criminal record, for example, was fired recently after getting caught stealing $6,000 from a passenger.<\/p>\n
The TSA has announced that it considers this a “serious issue,” and that every screener will have a full background check by Oct. 1.<\/p>\n
Until then, I guess we’ll just have to hope for the best?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In case your confidence in our nation’s airport security couldn’t get much worse, I wanted to seal the deal with news from Carpetbagger regular Chief Osceola — who travels quite a bit by plane. It turns out that the federal government, which promised a revamped security system for our nations airports in the wake of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-56","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=56"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=56"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=56"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=56"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}