It’s not intuitive that the world would materially change in the 48 hours between September 10th and September 12th, 2001 - that one minute we were safe, and the next minute had a terrorist behind every bush. What did change was our perception. And that was the basic picture it saw. And then a variety of people responded to the September 11th attacks in a variety of ways.
Obviously aviation was going to be affected most immediately since it had been the instrument of Al Qaeda’s plan. But as we shall see, not everybody did the right thing - for aviation, for security, or for the United States of America.
Please Remove Your Shoes is a documentary effort that will probably raise more questions than it answers: Why did Congress really have to come up with a Band-aid security plan for America’s airports in the short time that it did? What has been the real cost of airport security in dollars, commerce, and Constitutional freedoms? Why did the “land of the free and the brave” lose its nerve? Has airport security even accomplished anything or does it remain the same “security theater” that might have been justified to quiet the populace seven years ago yet threatens its existence today?
This is film documentary as sociologic forensics: Where was the “tipping point?” What cultural features of the eighties and the nineties conspired to make us psychologically so ill equipped to handle the effects of eighteen terrorists in four commercial airplanes that we were willing to forfeit billions of dollars and our civil liberties with certainty on the off chance that we might improve our safety?
Please Remove Your Shoes will sniff the trail from the blogs and videos and interviews of enraged victims of TSA’s mind numbing preoccupation with rigid and frequently abusive “search and seizure” to the politicians that conceived it. It will explore the relationship between the disingenuous “Patriot Act” and the birth of Homeland Security and he Transportation Security Administration. Wading back through the drama of Senate and House demagoguery and debate in October and November of 2001 between both the House and the Senate, it will seek out the butterflies and moths of reason and fear and pin them both to the mat for the scrutiny that they so richly deserve in 2009.
It will import the opinions and observations of sociologists, professors of government and law, passengers, pilots, and employees of the TSA and pursue the denizens of Capitol Hill to find out who deserves the blame and who deserves the credit as “proxy” representatives for the citizenry of the greatest country on earth.
Do we want to spend $6 billion a year submitting to the same abusive airport search procedures that no intelligent terrorist would challenge in the first place? This is a national crime scene with two million victims a day. What the movie will try to expose are the true “perps.”
But the process starts with you: what have you witnessed that we don’t know? What are your experiences with airport security that we haven’t heard about? Help us join the search for truth so we can find the real villains. They may not be the ones you suspected! Post your opinions, your questions, and your leads on this site. We need you as witnesses. we need you as jurors. It’s time for the trial of the century!
