Anti-TSA Activist, Labeled a Terrorist and Corporate Tool, Speaks Out

Inspired by a pilot who refused to submit to one of the TSA’s new full-body scanners or invasive pat downs -- and just in time for the busy holiday travel season -- George Donnelly and fellow activist James Babb launched WeWontFly.com, helping to draw attention to last week’s “National Opt-Out Day,” where travelers with no option but to fly were encouraged to opt-out of the full-body scan as a way of lodging their discontent.

And for that they've been viciously attacked -- and not just by the usual bed-wetting right-wingers for whom no infringement of rights in the name of “security” is too much.

Speaking on The View, renowned political thinker and Sister Act star Whoopi Goldberg said Donnelly and Babb ought to be considered terrorists -- a sentiment with which her fellow babbling heads readily agreed. The Nation, a stalwart defender of civil liberties during the Bush administration, even published a poor attempt at a hit piece mocking anti-TSA activists for standing up to "evil government oppressors," suggesting -- amid a conspicuous lack of evidence -- that they weren’t grassroots activists or concerned citizens at all, but mere corporate tools pushing a nefarious right-wing agenda of privatization and racial profiling.

“I was mildly amused and frankly a little bit disappointed,” Donnelly tells Change.org of his reaction to the piece -- an article the magazine’s editor has since apologized for publishing. “I was expecting Jim Babb and I to be cast as ... a couple of crazy anarchists trying to wreak havoc in our airports.”

Instead, they were portrayed as pawns of the staid, conservative-minded Koch brothers -- the billionaire oil barons and George Soros-like boogeymen of the liberal left -- who are better known for sponsoring lectures on monetary policy in Eastern Europe (and basking in their state-enabled riches) than encouraging mass civil disobedience. Then again, as Donnelly notes, it’s not as if the piece’s authors, faux-journalists Mark Ames and Yasha Levine, even bothered to contact him. If they had, as he explains on his blog, they might have discovered that his brand of mutualist-oriented anarchism is more left-wing than right -- and a far cry from the pro-corporate ideology backed by the brothers Koch.

But Donnelly isn't deterred by the attacks. Instead, he's helping organize another big day of anti-TSA activism on December 23 aimed at encouraging a boycott of flying. And in the meantime, "Everyday is We Won't Fly Day," he says, explaining his group's chief recommendation: don't fly if you can avoid it. That strategy's aimed at hitting the airlines in their pocket, the assumption being that once their revenues take a hit they may just become allies in the fight against the TSA's intrusive -- and ineffective -- policies.

"Our target right now is the travel industry," Donnelly explains. "They need to understand how serious this issue is so that they can get on our side here, work with us, and then go up against the government and get them to listen to reason."

Alternatively, WeWontFly.com recommends travelers opt-out of the full-body scanners and lodge formal complaints with both the government and civil liberties groups if they feel their rights have been violated. At airports across the country, activists are also distributing pamphlets informing passengers of their freedoms as well as copies of the Bill of Rights -- the latter a document that, according to George Washington University law professor Jeffrey Rosen, quite clearly makes the TSA's new tactics not just invasive and annoying, but unconstitutional.

"Unfortunately," says Donnelly, "to a limited extent [opposition to the TSA] seems to be falling into the Red Team/Blue Team trap at this point." The tribalistic left, for instance, which would've burned effigies of Bush had he been directing the government to grope your grandma -- typified by the likes of The Nation's Ames and Levine (and not to be confused with the principled, non-partisan lefties at Firedoglake) -- has begun casting opposition to the TSA's tactics as much ado about nothing, with liberal blogger Kevin Drum penning a typically condescending, our-betters-are-just-trying-to-keep-us-safe! piece for Mother Jones. And as Donnelly acknowledges, the issue has become something of a cause célèbre among the conservative right, which is of course guilty of its own glaring hypocrisy (see: Jan. 20, 2001 -- Jan. 21, 2009).

But it shouldn't be that way.

"This is not a a partisan issue," says Donnelly. "This is an issue that affects everyone because we’re being forced to trade our basic human dignity for no additional security." The debate has been falsely cast as one between privacy and security, he argues, but "right now we don't have either. This is security theater."

Photo Credit: We Won't Fly