TSA workers fired after huge bribery scandal at the Philadelphia International Airport

Tuesday, June 26, 2012 by: Ethan A. Huff, staff writer
Tags: TSA, bribery, scandal

(NaturalNews) More corruption at the U.S. Transportation Security Administration has led to the federal conviction of a TSA training supervisor, the voluntary resignation of three TSA workers, and the firing of seven other TSA workers at Philadelphia International Airport (PHL) in Pennsylvania. This major house-cleaning at the TSA comes after a seven-month investigation uncovered a huge bribery scandal in which TSA workers were paying off the training supervisor to obtain passing grades on their annual proficiency exams.

Apparently too inept to pass the basic exam on their own, the TSA workers in question allegedly caved to demands by Shannon Gilliam, 30, a former TSA training supervisor at PHL, that they pay her $1,000 each in exchange for passing test scores. After being outed, Gilliam was later taken to court where she pleaded guilty to accepting bribes from TSA workers, and was sentenced to six months of home detention, four years of probation, and 300 hours of community service as a result.

Three of the TSA workers involved in the scheme quit their positions at the agency not too long after the sentencing, and another seven TSA workers were notified by their superiors that they would soon be terminated as well. At the end of the day, PHL lost a whopping ten TSA workers and a TSA training supervisor as part of the debacle.

"There's a TSA disaster every week, and the security meltdown gets more and more outrageous," said Rep. John Mica (R-Fla.) in response to the outrageous case. Rep. Mica, who was actually responsible for authoring the very legislation that created the TSA in the first place (http://www.theblaze.com), is now calling for the agency to be completely disbanded and replaced with a privatized security force.

"Everything they have done has been reactive," Rep. Mica is quoted as saying by The Blaze. "They take shoes off because of [shoe-bomber] Richard Reid, passengers are patted down because of the diaper bomber, and you can't pack liquids because the British uncovered a plot using liquids ... It's an agency that is always one step out of step."

John Corbett, the engineer whose viral video exposed the TSA naked body scanner protocol as completely useless in detecting weapons (http://www.naturalnews.com), is continuing to push the U.S. Supreme Court to hear his case against the agency. His suit alleges that TSA naked body scanners and pat downs are unconstitutional because they violate the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures (http://tsaoutofourpants.wordpress.com).

Sources for this article include:

http://philadelphia.cbslocal.com

http://travel.usatoday.com