In the Philadelphia Inquirer lately, an article praised the air marshal service:

Almost every day now, somewhere around the country, somebody is being arrested by a federal air marshal.

Well, wonderful. Good to know that people are being arrested. But does the fact that the marshals are arresting people mean that they’re making things better?

Minutes after takeoff in the close confines of an airline cabin, a loud-mouthed passenger demands a beer and shoves an attendant. Other passengers gasp.

A federal air marshal - one of thousands now at work since Sept. 11 - approaches, identifies himself, and tells the man to calm down. Instead, the man mouths off.

Explosively, without warning, the air marshal grabs the man by the head, yanks him face-first to the floor, handcuffs him, and shouts to passengers to remain seated and calm.

Gosh. When you’ve got law enforcement like this, who needs hijackers? “Mouthing off” is cause for violent arrest — even when, as in an airplane cabin, the “mouther” is unarmed — he hasn’t even got a nail file, thank God — and there’s no chance that he’ll escape. Let’s hope this particular marshal is relieved of duty: if the point is to preserve order on planes, this guy certainly isn’t helping.

But wait:

Jarring and fearsome, the staged incident was part of a training session by the Federal Air Marshals service. It was performed for reporters late last week at the secretive agency’s training center near Atlantic City, to reassure and educate travelers about the things they one day might witness in the skies.

“We want to get the message out that we’re enforcing laws up there, which has not always been the case,” said Greg McLaughlin, deputy director of the Federal Air Marshal service, a branch of the recently created Transportation Security Administration. [emphasis added]

So this was an exercise. This is how it’s supposed to be done, with a maximum of shouting, violence, and intimidation of passengers.

The Air Marshal service is getting a message out, much as Tony Soprano might do by having someone’s legs broken. That message? Sit down and shut up, presumably.

And, somehow, all of this is supposed to reassure the flying public.

Another Inquirer story from September — by the same writer, who seems to be on the air-marshals beat — is even more reassuring.

The incident on Delta Flight 442 was scary enough last month: U.S. marshals seized an unruly passenger, then one aimed a pistol at other passengers for a half hour and shouted at them to stay seated.

The event, however, didn’t end there. Unknown to most passengers on the Atlanta-to-Philadelphia flight, the marshals upon landing also seized an Indian passenger from first class and silently whisked him away in handcuffs.

Far from being a terror suspect, the second detainee turned out to be a former U.S. Army major and military doctor from Lake Worth, Fla., where he has had a family practice for two decades. Both detainees later were released without charge […]

They maintain that they’re “enforcing the law”, but if they’re not charging people, it means that they don’t think they can show that any law was violated.

Very reassuring. This should ease the airlines’ customer-service burden somewhat, though, as any passenger who annoys the cabin crew can be declared ‘unruly’, and thrown face-first to the floor.