It's tough, when your boss is insisting loudly and publicly, that you have to hire the right kind of people (as opposed to merely the best people, opening up the process to everyone).

The recruiting team for the TSA was aware of the agency's officially-voiced desire to recruit as many minorities and women as possible. The problem was, at least from the numerous witness reports we received, the applicant pool wasn't cooperating. The TSA's required mix of applicants didn't show up at the door, so we're figuring that the deck had to be somehow stacked, to achieve the TSA's published, desired result.

Well, now the AP reports that, "Four baggage screeners at LaGuardia Airport said they were given answers to questions on a certification test moments before they took the exam, Newsday reported Sunday."

The screeners in the story were not identified, likely because they feel as secure about being whistleblowers as do some Iraqi nuclear scientists; so we cannot verify if they were indeed members of the favored classes of applicants -- but what other motivation would there be?

TSA Denies Everything

To no one's surprise, Mark Hatfield, a TSA spokesman, said the alleged screeners were lying. "That absolutely would not be done," Hatfield told Newsday.

So far, it's four against one. If the TSA would release information about its applicant pool's demographics, its screen-the-screener process, and the criteria it used to flunk so many non-special-group applicants, perhaps their position would be more credible -- assuming we could trust the numbers they'd give us, in the first place.

Make up your own mind.

It comes down to, "Whom do you believe?" Does one believe the screeners, who presumably have nothing to gain, and a lot to lose, by independently exposing what they see as crooked dealings; or should we believe the TSA, which, while touting its 'balanced' results, apparently pulled every trick in the book to achieve them, and refuses to discuss methodology, or even the broadest parameters of the applicant pool and the screening/testing methods?

Interestingly, a Boeing spokesman (Boeing administered the test, once the TSA determined who might be eligible to take it), told Newsday, "I consider it unlikely that an instructor would have reviewed every question in advance of the test." [Besides, scores were never made available to the applicants -- so no one ever knew if he actually did more-poorly than the 'desired' applicant, anyway --ed.]

FMI: www.tsa.gov