Someone has to come to the defense of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA).

It was formed in haste, so the numerous problems that attended the agency’s birth continue to plague it and are the subject of a constant stream of official investigations and public revelations. Its screeners haven’t found every mock device that inspectors or the media have sneaked through its screening. It has proposed new fees to fund TSA activities, raising the hackles of anti-tax activists, the commercial aviation industry and members of Congress. It has built next to no political or economic constituency that will come to its defense. Tracking its directors is like trying to follow that old Abbott and Costello routine of “Who’s on first?”

But most of all, TSA is the face of homeland security to the flying public. It is TSA personnel who make passengers take off their shoes, confiscate their personal items, delay progress to their flights and search through carefully packed luggage. Like cops on the beat or referees who make calls against a favorite team, TSA screeners are the authority figures everyone loves to hate. That displeasure is expressed in calls to members of Congress.

Nor has TSA and its staff helped itself; they have made some incredibly bad decisions. An $85,000 party planner for an extraordinarily indulgent office party? Too many potted plants at its operations center? Every lapse, every instance of poor judgment, every failure to understand the impression the agency makes on the public is just more ammunition for its enemies and critics—and they are legion.

I carry no particular water for TSA. I’m a member of the flying public like everyone else. I get no special consideration when I stand in line to go through the metal detectors. TSA personnel have confiscated everything from a scissor I forgot I had in a toiletry bag and a great set of small tools I picked up at a trade show, to letter openers and a tiny screwdriver. I used to keep a handy little Swiss Army knife on a keychain – not anymore. I fly a lot on one-way flights and have to purchase tickets with little advance notice, so I groan whenever I see the ticket agent write that damned “S” on my ticket (I think it stands for “screwed”) and I know that my luggage is going to be unpacked, swiped and searched.

A critical role

For all that, TSA plays an absolutely essential role in protecting the United States and the flying public and in prosecuting the war on terror. It has made us all vastly safer than we were prior to 9/11.

Think back to the day after the terrorist attacks. The private baggage screening force comprised low-paid, high-turnover, under-trained, unmotivated, numb people who ineffectively checked passengers and baggage.

And it’s time to make one other observation and make it out loud: If you went to, say, Dulles Airport on the morning of Sept. 12, you would have seen a workforce about as porous and unsecure as it was possible to put together. Some of these people were from the countries that produced Al Qaeda and Islamist extremism, and security checks were virtually nil.

At the very least, TSA has introduced standards and screening for screeners. It also attracted many motivated, patriotic people who wanted to protect their country and were willing to take up a mind-numbing task to do it.

I wish we could go back to what now seems like a la-la land of pre-9/11 trivialities. But the enemy won’t go back, and neither can we. There are problems with TSA—so let’s fix the problems. But instead of dismantling the flying public’s first line of defense because we’re annoyed or inconvenienced by it, let’s direct our ire where it belongs—at the terrorists whose barbarism and savagery created this situation in the first place. HST