Chris Matthews is a piece of work. Rather than do his homework on the subject of these full body scanners and Michael Chertoff's conflicts of interest with his lobbying group representing their manufacturer, Rapiscan, he accuses EPIC's Ginger McCall of slandering Chertoff for pointing the conflicts out to him.
Matthews claimed he's going to have Chertoff on to "defend himself" and answer the charges. Maybe Matthews can bother to go look up his lobbying ties before he has him on, if he has him on. There have been countless articles written about Chertoff and these machines over the last year or so, this just being one example.
Full Body Scanner Lobby: Michael Chertoff & Rapiscan:
Michael Chertoff, Former Department of Homeland Security, is the head of the Chertoff Group, the lead cheerleader for what is being called the Full Body Scanner Lobby, reports the Washington Post and the Washington Examiner.
Ever since the Christmas Day Bomb Scare, Chertoff has been making the rounds championing the Full Body Scanners as a way to detect hidden explosive devices.
Here is a Chertoff quote from the New York Times on December 29th.“If they’d been deployed, this would pick up this kind of device,” Michael Chertoff, the former homeland security secretary, said in an interview, referring to the packet of chemicals hidden in the underwear of the Nigerian man who federal officials say tried to blow up the Northwest Airlines flight.
A few days later the Washington Post revealed that Chertoff represents Rapiscan - a maker of full body scanners drawing criticism of groups who oppose full body scanners.
"Mr. Chertoff should not be allowed to abuse the trust the public has placed in him as a former public servant to privately gain from the sale of full-body scanners under the pretense that the scanners would have detected this particular type of explosive," said Kate Hanni, founder of FlyersRights.org, which opposes the use of the scanners.
Rapiscan has already sold 150 full body scanners to the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), with a price tag of $25 million. Rapiscan full body scanners, like the Rapiscan WaveScan 200, seem to be the preferred scanner of choice because they obscure the "private parts."
