By Becky Akers
http://www.forbes.com/2011/05/26/abolish-the-tsa.html

Shades of 1861: The Feds have threatened to close airports and cancel flights in Texas if the state passes legislation outlawing the Transportation Security Administration's (TSA) "invasive searches." The bill would have prohibited screeners from "intentionally, knowingly, or recklessly" groping passengers, even "through clothing." It sailed through the House earlier this month and seemed likely to clear Texas' Senate within the next few days.

Then two of the TSA's honchos visited its sponsor, Sen. Dan Patrick, R-Houston, with their "heavy-handed threats," as he put it. That spooked his colleagues and stalled the legislation.

"Our law-abiding citizens should not be subjected to invasive searches that are embarrassing and humiliating," Sen. Patrick fumed.

The TSA vehemently disagrees. Despite Texas and the nation's outrage over its invasive assaults at airports, the agency longs to expand its checkpoints into terminals for busses and trains, too. Many experts believe it will exploit Osama bin Laden's demise, and predictions of his followers' revenge, to molest us at shopping malls, hotels, even houses of worship.

Surprisingly, some Americans still defend the TSA. They believe its nonsense protects aviation. But then, surprising numbers bank on Social Security's solvency too.

The evidence against the TSA's competence is overwhelming, to put it mildly. For starters, no employee of the TSA has ever caught a single terrorist anywhere, at any time. In fact, just the opposite: screeners overlooked 16 passengers suspected of ties to terrorism at least 23 times from 2004 to 2008.

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By Thomas R. Eddlem
www.thenewamerican.com -
(http://thenewamerican.com/usnews/congress/6988-anti-fourth-amendment-patriot-act)
[Edited for Length]

NSA Former U.S. Army Lieutenant and lawyer Brandon Mayfield may be the Patriot Act's most prominent innocent victim. The federal government imposed warrantless surveillance and a "sneak-and-peek" search of his home upon the innocent U.S. citizen and Muslim convert and arrested him on a "material witness" warrant, even though officials never intended to have him testify in court. In fact, Mayfield was under investigation for supposedly having had a role in the 2004 Madrid train bombings, as the FBI initially identified him (using his military service fingerprints) as one of the persons whose fingerprints were on a bag of bomb parts similar to those used in the bombing.

Just days before Mayfield's arrest, Spanish investigators told FBI officials that Mayfield's fingerprint was not a match to the "Latent Fingerprint No. 17" and that FBI officials had erroneously linked Mayfield to the bombing. Despite being cleared by Spanish authorities (and not having traveled to Europe since 1994), the FBI arrested Mayfield anyway and held him for two weeks without charges on the bogus "material witness" warrant. In the meantime FBI officials leaked to the media that Mayfield was a Madrid bomber, proven through fingerprint "evidence," and told his wife and family that he would be charged with crimes that qualified for the death penalty.

After unjustly imprisoning Mayfield for more than two weeks, ruining his private law practice (including taking all the confidential files of the clients he represents), and terrifying his family, the federal government was eventually forced to admit it had made a "mistake." Then-Attorney General John Ashcroft testified about what happened to Mayfield before the Senate Judiciary Committee on June 8, 2004: "That is an unfortunate situation which I regret. Anytime any American is detained and we later find out that the detention was not necessary for the maintenance of public safety, and that someone's liberties were offended, I think that's something to regret." The federal government subsequently issued a formal apology for Mayfield's treatment and agreed to pay him $2 million in compensatory damages.

"When legislation is written that waters down the standard of the Fourth Amendment, it is not the guilty who suffer, but the innocent," Mayfield wrote in a statement on renewal of the Patriot Act, which Congress is considering. "The Patriot Act weakened the requirements the government needed under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act in order to bug my home and office, and this weakening of the law -- now found unconstitutional -- caused the framework designed to protect the innocent to fail."

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Do you believe by ignoring the 4th Amendment's right against unjustified search and seizure the Patriot Act will make Americans safer and protect freedom?
(See story on this page)