Erroll Southers replies by letter to the New York Times

Erroll Southers, the Los Angeles airports police official whose nomination to be head of the T.S.A. was blocked by Washington politics, objected to a New York Times editorial that said he misled the Senate over his censure two decades ago for accessing a police database without authorization to check on his estranged wife's boyfriend. Southers' letter to the editor has a bit of a chiding tone to it:

Facts: the Senate was not misled; the incident was disclosed before being reported in The Washington Post; and I was not “challenged” on my testimony.

Perhaps the T.S.A. is certainly deserving of an assistant secretary with a better memory, but at no time during this process did anyone challenge my academic, operational or international counterterrorism experience.

There is one truth certain in all of this. Facts matter little, when political points and cheap shots are the only scores that matter in the end.

Southers' faculty bio at the USC School of Policy, Planning and Development includes the tidbit that he used to ride motorcycles with Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.