TSA statements to court reviewing interrogations of travelers

In a filing with the Court of Appeals reviewing a TSA mandate for airlines to interogate passengers on international flights before allowing them to board, the TSA has directly contradicted previous explicit written statements by an official TSA spokesperson as to whether passengers are required by the TSA to answer questions from airline staff about their travel purposes as a condition of being allowed to fly.
Equally if not more disturbingly, the TSA also claimed in the same filing with the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals that an airline licensed by the US government to operate as a common carrier has ‘independent discretion to deny boarding to any passenger about whom they have a concern.’
In an email message in January of this year to ‘professional troublemaker’ and frequent traveler Jonathan Corbett, the TSA ‘Office of Global Strategic Communicationsa Desk’ said:

This post was published at Papers Please on June 2nd, 2015.