Governor Romney has ordered the MBTA to resume random bag searches. According to the Globe,
Romney said he did not order the move in response to a specific terrorist threat […] Romney said the more immediate trigger was a federal appeals court ruling in August that random bag searches on New York subways are constitutional, saying that the police tactic is an effective and minimally invasive way to help protect a prime terror target. Those searches began after the London bombings in July 2005. Civil liberties groups sued to block the searches, arguing the searches were an intrusion on privacy that terrorists could easily evade.
Or could the immediate trigger be that the election is just 4 and a half weeks away, and it’s time to turn on the fear factor?
The MBTA stopped random bag searches well before New York started them after the London bombings last year. Romney was fine with no bag searches after the DNC left town, and I don’t recall him trying to reinstate them after the London bombings, but now a court ruling in the New York case is the “trigger”?
Random bag searches are not a reasonable antiterrorism tactic. What’s to stop a suicide bomber from choosing Downtown Crossing instead of underground at Park Street? Is Romney going to institute random bag searches in all popular public spaces throughout the state? No, this is a fear tactic, to put us in a siege mentality.
What random bag searches do accomplish, is scaring people away from using the T. People who don’t want their privacy invaded; people who fear the government because of their race or appearance. T fares are already so high that it costs ten times as much for me to ride the T between Cambridge and Somerville, as to pay for gas to drive there. Now I have to worry whether the police will be suspicious of that book on militant Islam I’ve been carrying around recently? No thank you, I’m staying off the T.
If you ride the T, make sure to pack a big, colorful dildo in your bag.
there’s a word I didn’t expect to see on BMG. Heh.
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I heard this story this afternoon on the radio, and the first thing I thought of was if this had anything to do with Healey’s tanking poll numbers? Boy, they really do have the Rovian handbook.