The Obama administration is angry about the controversy over the new TSA procedures:
Aggressive pat-downs and new X-ray machines are part of President Obama's effort to redouble attention to transportation security after the attempted suicide bombing aboard an airplane landing in Detroit last Christmas. That incident exposed Obama to scathing criticism from Republicans who said he failed to grasp the terrorist threat the nation faced.
Now, the administration is under attack from the opposite direction, as some travelers complain that the latest measures go too far. That -- and polls showing broad public support for the X-ray machines -- has left some White House advisers feeling "frustrated," as one put it, by an onslaught of media coverage focused heavily on the treatment of passengers rather than the dangers the measures are designed to prevent.
It's true that some of the backlash is pure Republican cynicism. But on the merits, critics of the new procedures are on firm ground. The Government Accountability Office has shown that the TSA itself doesn't really know how much they mitigate risk.
Then there's the Christmas bombing itself. The GAO says it's not clear the new scanners would have found the device, and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence issued a report concluding that, less than an equipment failure, allowing Umar Abdulmutallab to board Northwest Airlines Flight 253 reflected a failure of the intelligence community to utilize already available information. The report stated that among other problems, the State Department should have revoked Abdulmutallab's visa to begin with, let alone allowed him to get on a plane bound for the U.S.
So on the one hand, I'm sympathetic to the administration's irritation at Republicans cynically exploiting the aftermath of the attempted underwear bombing to argue for racial profiling, or torture, or military commissions or military detention for people apprehended on U.S. soil. But on the other, it's not clear why the administration reacted to an intelligence failure by instituting more invasive screening procedures that are of unproven effectiveness.
For what it's worth, though, the public seems mostly behind the new procedures, two-thirds support the body scanners while about half oppose the pat downs. If this conflict gets more partisan, however, I think we're likely to see self-identified Republicans growing far more opposed than they are now. After all, partisan identification produced Republican endorsements of torture and global warming denial, so opposition to the new TSA procedures is a piece of cake, and there are already a half dozen conservative narratives to choose from.
