Ostensibly the Transportation Security Administration exists to keep Americans safe when they fly. In reality it’s a bureaucratic nightmare which never should have been created in the first place. Consider what the TSA has done to pilots and air marshals to put you at risk.

Last month I told you about how the TSA’s bizarre firearm policy forces armed pilots to handle their guns in an unsafe manner. Now it comes out that the TSA is denying the applications of pilots who are also firearms instructors, former law enforcement officers, and otherwise qualified to carry firearms, based on a suspicious psychological test.

Consider the conundrum of one pilot who did not want to have his name made public:

Captain X faces a conundrum. As a volunteer for the Federal Flight Deck Officer’s (FFDO) program — pilots fly armed for free — the TSA gave him a psyche test and failed him. In other words, according to the TSA, Captain X is psychologically unfit to carry a gun. “At first I thought there was something wrong with me,” Captain X told me over coffee. “Now I think there is something wrong with the way the TSA runs the program.”

What struck me as equally bizarre about Captain X’s predicament is that in addition to being an airline captain, he’s a firearms instructor in his home state. He’s been handling and using guns since he was old enough to hunt. And in order to keep his skills current, he maintains rigorous training with a personal firearms coach who is the number one competitive pistol shooter in the state. Captain X owns guns, he trains people to shoot guns, and his state licenses him to carry a gun. But the TSA says he can’t carry a weapon in a lock box in the cockpit of the aircraft he’s flying on any given day because he’s psychologically unfit to carry that gun. — Pajamas Media

The money quote in that article comes from Tracy Price, vice president of the Passenger/Cargo Security Group: “Our view is that it is entirely illogical to tell a pilot he is not stable enough to carry a weapon in the form of a gun when at the same time, he has access to the weapon we are all most in fear of after 9/11 — a plane loaded with thousands of pounds of jet fuel.”

Meanwhile the TSA has been fast-tracking screeners into federal air marshal positions. That’s right, today they’re feeling up your grandmother and threatening you, tomorrow they’re flying the unfriendly skies with a government-issued H&K USP .40 S&W tucked behind their shirt. So far there are at least 36 of them out there.

Now why would they be doing that? Because air marshals are leaving in droves and according to CNN have only one percent of flights covered.

TSA head Kip Hawley told Congress last month that that number was wrong by “an order of magnitude,” but declined to give a more exact figure.

Worse, air marshals say they’re being assigned to no-risk, short-hop flights to make it appear as though they’re covering more flights and that the TSA has lowered the qualifications required to become an air marshal. It seems they would have to do so in order to recruit even your above average screener.

Hawley also defended the practice of fast-tracking screeners into air marshal positions.

“Trust me, you do not want to mess with those guys,” Hawley said. “Anybody who messes with a flight having a TSO on it who is now an air marshal will be dead.” Hawley added that the air marshal service has a 6 percent attrition rate, which he said is average for a law enforcement agency. — CongressDaily

And to add insult to injury, some air marshals report that they’re being denied boarding due to matching a name on the no-fly list — and this has been going on for years.

“In some cases, planes have departed without any coverage because the airline employees were adamant they would not fly,” said the air marshal, who asked not to be named because the job requires anonymity. “I’ve seen guys actually being denied boarding.”

A second air marshal said one agent “has been getting harassed for six years because his exact name is on the no-fly list.” — Washington Times

Now, you can write off all of the above as general bureaucratic incompetence, and certainly much of it stems from the normal symptoms of bureaucracy. Incompetence and covering one’s ass, rather than accomplishing a mission per se, rule the day.

Of course, so does unchecked authority, and you can watch the creeping fascism in every airport security checkpoint in the country, even the newly redesigned one at Baltimore-Washington International Airport where the lights are blue, soothing music plays in the background, and screeners are somehow unfailingly polite.

Polite enforcement just makes creeping fascism worse. A cheerful smile on a fascist face doesn’t change its nature. It makes it more dangerous by making it more tolerable. Fascist power depends on complacency and the general acceptance of a host of colossal lies. Fascist power is implemented by ordinary people who accept and repeat the lies in exchange for good jobs with excellent benefits. Never doubt that they will follow orders, with or without a smile.

Sending TSA agents to customer service seminars doesn’t make the rest of us customers. Neither would putting yellow smiley face stickers on their TASERs. We’re not customers. We’re subjects; we’re subject to search, subject to interrogation, subject to arrest. Our property is subject to confiscation. If you resist, you are subject to injury or death. It’s for our own protection. — The Extremist

Of course we aren’t being protected. Anyone who has watched the Department of Homeland Security can come to no other conclusion. Airport security was nationalized in 2002, and as we have seen in places like Cuba, Venezuela, the Soviet Union and elsewhere, nationalizing an industry only makes matters worse, and undoing the damage proves to be painful at best. Yet it must be done if we are to recover any of the liberty we have already lost to the, uh, bureaucrats.

Special thanks to Annie Jacobsen at The Aviation Nation for the links to the stories above.