On getting over it

Two weeks ago on a cross-country flight I checked three bags, and when I unpacked I found three printed memos from the Transportation Security Administration indicating that they’d each been searched.

Now, my bags contained nothing but used clothing, as a scan probably revealed, and I’m a Baby Boomer with no criminal past. So the traditional legal standard for police searches–probable cause–offers nothing to justify uniformed apparatchiks running their paws through my shirts, shorts, and undies. Apparently I was asleep when the Fourth Amendment was repealed.

I didn’t boil my clothes afterward, but I have to say I’m irritated by this incursion into private space. Worse, I flash to the advice of Antonin Scalia, the Supreme Court associate justice, when he was asked a few years back about lingering anger over the disgraceful 2000 ruling he signed that gave the presidency to George W. Bush. “My usual response is, get over it,” Scalia said.

Now, “getting over it” can be the voice of maturity, sympathetic words to console and encourage a child. But it can also counsel acceptance of the unacceptable. And there’s entirely too much of that sort of “getting over it” going around.

Consider the refusal of the Obama administration to tell the public just what basis it uses in deciding whom to kill. That formulation is a little bald, but basically accurate. Lawsuits brought by the American Civil Liberties Union and The New York Times sought to force the administration to share its legal rationale for targeting and killing individuals targeted as enemies.

Included are U.S. citizens, notably U.S.-born Anwar al-Awlaki and his 16-year-old son, both killed in separate 2011 drone strikes in Yemen.

This is a big deal. Normally, when the government kills a citizen it’s called capital punishment, and happens only after criminal indictment, trial, conviction, sentencing, appellate review, clemency hearing—the full panoply of procedures and protections that constitute due process.

None of that applies here. Now, the lawsuits never challenged the killing. They simply asked a court to declare that the U.S. government can’t refuse to disclose what principles, guidelines, or rules it applies in designating people for drone strikes, hit teams, Acts of God, or whatever other assassination methods it decides the “war on terror” demands.

And the court said it couldn’t do that.

Manhattan federal judge Colleen McMahon seemed embarrassed by her own ruling. “The Alice-in-Wonderland nature of this pronouncement is not lost on me,” she wrote.


Wow. It’s easy to miss how appalling McMahon’s ruling is. It identifies no principled basis to force our government to come clean on precisely why it believes it may use the most staggering power any state can wield—the power to take the lives of its own people. What exactly does somebody have to do to deserve death? How does the government know he or she has done it? What’s the evidence? Who decides? What other measures must be exhausted?

That’s none of our business, the court ruled. Get over it.

The Obama administration’s aggressive belief in its right to evade accountability extends to harsh measures against anybody who exposes sensitive governmental activity without authorization, even when the consequences of exposure seem remote and the public’s right to know about the activity seems indisputable.

Take torture. A veteran CIA agent named John Kiriakou is about to go to prison for 13 months. He was retired at the time he allegedly referred a reporter to another CIA operative, also retired at the time, who Kiriakou thought might have information about waterboarding terrorist suspects some years earlier.

So while the torturers themselves walk free and their ex-bosses draw pensions and write memoirs, we jail people for that?

The government, it seems, is entitled to force us to regard its secrets very seriously indeed, and the Obama administration’s continuing campaign against leaks, from Kiriakou to Wikileaks, is harsh testimony to that determination, even where nobody even pretends to believe the public has been harmed.

Their secrets count, while my private space is another matter. I, it seems, have no choice but to submit to having my personal things rifled by unseen inquisitors.

It’s part of the cost of air travel. And my only option is to get over it.


6 responses to “On getting over it

  1. “All our executioners are humanitarians”
    A Camus

  2. Lauren Pomerantz

    Another brilliant and thought provoking newsletter. Thank you. I also thought about the recent suicide of a brilliant loving innovator in his 20s who was bullied by a Justice Department appointee over downloading documents that were not even harmful and were legal to download. It seemed another tragic case where people who had power abused it for their own means.

  3. Ed,

    What I think you may not entirely appreciate is the very direct connection between your pawed-over undies, the extra-judicial executions imposed by the administration and the executive’s — now judicially sanction — opacity about the justification or authority for imposing them. The TSA exists for many reasons, but among the central purposes for this “security theater” troupe is to maintain sufficient levels of fear among the populace and to accustom American subjects, er, citizens to the notion that their rulers, er, government can do what it pleases as it pleases to whom it pleases.

    Growing directly from this ongoing campaign is a civil society in which “getting over it” becomes the default setting when faced with each fresh outrage. I addressed the issue here: http://suburbansheepdog.blogspot.com/2010/11/bad-touch.html

  4. Mr. Wasserman,
    Thankyou for making public mention of what, in a growing way, we Americans resent and will someday (hopefully soon) effectively react to.
    Bob Ekstrom

  5. It’s apples and oranges, but I totally agree with your views.

  6. (Only 5 replies?) Suggestion for undies, while flying NKVD, : place said items into ziplock bags, flat!
    Ruling by Manhattan federal judge, Colleen McMahon, is quite aware of the contradiction. (and you ask how the Nazi’s came to rule in Germany). She, however, is attentive to U.S. citizens Anwar al-Awlaki and son’s “treason” toward his birth country. Go grab them for trial you say!? The evidence for this administration is the death of many, multiples of Americans serving and defending his/our country. There in lay the puzzle.
    AS for veteran CIA’s big mouths, they only called attention to “water boarding.” No deaths here. Wikileaks, MURDERED or caused collateral deaths!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I cannot even say what I would do if it was my husband or family member betrayed by this pompous piece of Euro trash.

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