Posted on 02/20/2017 3:05:56 PM PST by WXRGina
It was an excellent week-long trip my husband Keith and I took to Arizona to take the 250 Pistol Class from Gunsite Academy. The week ended, and it was time for us to fly back home this past Saturday, February 18th. While I have gone through Transportation Security Administration (TSA) regional airport checkpoints since its spawning after 9-11, I had not yet gone through a TSA checkpoint at a major airport. Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport is a major airport, and on Saturday, I was immersed there in one of those TSA "horror stories" about which I had previously only read.
My very dim view of the TSA has been shaped by all the reports of corruption, misconduct, molestation and sexual assault, theft, abuse of power and ineptitude by the TSA. To find these stories, you need only do an Internet search with any of those terms along with "TSA." In addition to all that, air travelers in the United States are now stupidly forced to remove their shoes because of one Muslim maniac.
Needless to say, as we stood in the moderately long line of the Sky Harbor TSA security checkpoint, I was not happy and only wanted it to be over. We finally arrived at the x-ray conveyor belt with all the gray plastic bins into which we had to put our shoes, belts, purses, bags, watches, cell phones, laptops and anything in our pockets. When flying, I always try to wear nothing that would cause the x-ray imaging machines to raise an alert. So, I wore no belt or any jewelry. I had nothing in my pockets. I only carried my small purse, and I wore blue jeans, a long-sleeved cotton t-shirt and simple leather boots. I removed my boots and placed them and my purse into two of the bins and pushed them on toward the x-ray screener.
I was directed into the – what I call a "rape scan" – body imaging machine. As you may know, we are forced to stand inside it for several seconds with our arms held up as if we're common criminals, and the machine does a circular spin around our bodies. When the scan was done, a black woman told me to step out of the machine. I'm guessing this woman was probably in her early thirties. She directed my attention to the human body outline image on a screen outside the machine, which displayed the supposed results of my scan. There were "warning" boxes superimposed directly on the crotch, one knee and one ankle area, which I instantly knew were bogus.
Because of those flags, she informed me I would be subjected to an enhanced pat-down. I numbly looked at the entirely phony warning box images on the screen, knowing that with the advanced imaging capabilities of that machine, it would not possibly have "seen" any kind of threat anywhere on my body, much less between my legs. Nevertheless, I stood there silently with a smoldering outrage welling inside me as this girl described the sexual assault she was about to undertake on my body.
I hardly heard what she was saying she was about to do, because I was so angry knowing that this was a fake result, either from the machine or from someone's arbitrary decision to subject me to this despicable, Fourth Amendment-crushing, far-beyond-unreasonable search. She finished her little speech by asking me if I preferred [my sexual assault] to be done in a "private room" or right where we stood in front of hundreds of onlookers. I was barely able to mumble a "here" with an indication of my hand gesturing down to the yellow footprint stickers on the floor where I was to place my feet.
She required me to assist her in my sexual assault. I had to lift my shirt to give her clear access to my waistband, into which she thrust her blue-latex-gloved fingers and ran them all around the front and back of it. She made me hold my pants in place from the top as she crouched down and firmly ran her hands from the top of my legs to the bottom, both front, back and sides. She firmly pushed and rubbed her hands between my legs, the entire area – THE ENTIRE AREA – from the front and back.
She finally directed me to hold out my hands, palms up, as she swabbed them with damp squares of white tissue, which she inserted into a machine that I assume "sniffed" for explosive residue. When it gave my hands the all-clear, she indicated that I was free to go.
At that point, I was fairly blind with rage. Shakily, gritting my teeth hard enough to beat the band, I went and retrieved my boots and purse from the end of the screener belt several yards away, where they had remained while I got the enhanced grope-down. I was glad no one had taken my purse. Keith had been moved along after going through security, and from his viewpoint was unable to see my belongings or what was happening to me.
Still seeing red, I slowly walked to a chair near the TSA checkpoint to put on my boots. I was shaking with rage, and my husband had to quickly talk me down from reacting to the powerful anger that was exploding in my mind. The sickening feelings of rage, helplessness and violation continued to roil in me for the rest of the day.
What can I do? File a complaint with the TSA? Yeah, right. Call my congressman? And get a nice form letter reply in the mail in a month or so? Yeah, no. I'm powerless here, as are the many other people who have been sexually assaulted by the TSA. Maybe you'd like me to tone it down a notch and call it "molestation" or merely "groping," but I know what happened to me, and in any other situation, it would be legally regarded as sexual assault. If an ordinary person did to me what that woman – by authority of bad law – did to me, he would go to jail.
The TSA should be dismantled. Airport security needs to be returned to the airlines and local airports. The federal government's takeover of airport security screening after 9-11 has only created yet another unaccountable, monstrous bureaucracy that continues to grow in corruption, especially under Obama's recent lawless reign. Free-born American citizens should not have to abide such degenerate despotism in the name of "security." The TSA has seized illegitimate power in its random imposition of unreasonable searches on innocent airline passengers. If the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution means anything, then the TSA must go.
You’re awfully obsessed with this column and thread, aren’t you? It’s quite a lot like a liberal to attempt to conflate non-related issues. What happened to me is different than the horrible experiences of rape victims (although you are clueless about my past, not knowing what I’ve had happen to me). There are varying types of sexual assault, one kind of which I received on Saturday, and I OWE NO ONE AN APOLOGY.
This report is about our lost liberty, and the fact that you are unable or unwilling to see it makes me wonder what your purpose here is.
Ma’am, if you can’t tell the difference between bring really raped and having an x-ray, if you can’t tell the difference between holding your hands up to shoulder height as millions do every day versus being treated like a criminal, if you think someone purposely made the machine false alarm on you, and if these things push you, as you described it, into such a rage and dis-associative state that you are seriously enraged to the point you were, even before you were “touched”, then I politely suggest, for your own sake, you either obtain help for this or do not fly commercially in the future.
Regardless of the cause, you are paying too high a price for the convenience of air travel.
TSA is not going to go away. Right now, you are obviously paying a very high emotional price for something the rest of us see as an inefficient pain in the arse that affords us at least a modicum of safety, and getting there in 1/10 the time.
Quite frankly, I am much more angry at the airlines increasingly smaller and smaller seats, less leg room and horrible service than I am at TSA foolishness.
I sincerely hope you can find away to avoid that pain in the future.
Good luck.
No, I am not obsessed with anything or anyone. I simply pointed out that you are equating an obtrusive TSA screening to rape, that in my opinion is you being overly dramatic. I have seen first hand what a victim of rape goes through.
I do not like the police state we are living in any more than you do, but you were not raped young lady.
I’m not a “young lady,” and I never claimed I was raped. Perhaps you missed that part. A “rape scan” machine is what I, and many others, call the Rapiscan Systems backscatter equipment, although I don’t believe this scanner was that brand.
I’s suggest letting her be.
She is obviously in a lot of pain over something the rest of us deal with every day.
It’s a shame, but we can’t fix it.
Have a good evening.
If she can get past her personal issues, she has a future in fictional writing.
No, I’m not “in a lot of pain,” unless you consider the pain in the neck of trolls like you two who deliberately miss the meaning of my report. The “shame” is you apparently don’t see what a fine line it is between obscene groping and strip searches. Where would YOU draw the line for the illusion of “security”?
I never claimed I was raped. Perhaps you missed that part.
Maybe, but let’s let her slide.
I don’t think this was just clickbait, but if it wasn’t, she is a hurting puppy.
I know exactly where you are coming from, but at this point, I don’t think she is ready to take what we would call a rational view of this, and pushing her would only hurt her more. At this point, all we would do would be to push her further into her corner.
I’m sure we both wish her well.
Apply yourself and I'm sure we will see your work in the future.
Well THANK GOD you know for a fact that Gina has never been a victim of sexual assault.
Screw you, asshat.
By the way, LZ, you made my radar some time back.
The best part about being a federal contractor, back when I was, was that dam federal badge. :) It was accepted as proof positive ID, and I *NEVER* had to even go through the x-ray machine. Just walk through the metal detector and on my way I went.
:) It was SWEEEEEET :)
Go pound sand, kiddo. I’m not a young woman, unless you consider almost 50 to be young.
You don’t know me, and you clearly don’t see the purpose of my report. It’s a culmination of years of reading of abuses against air travelers by the TSA (air travelers who have no platform for a voice as I do with the several websites that carry my columns), including theft, sexual assault, and other crimes (including murder) for which many of them have been arrested. The problem is with the TSA bureaucracy, and it needs to be reined in.
The story as she described it was not sexual assault.
It is not right, it is government overreach. It should never happen, the people doing it should be put in stockades! But it is not sexual assault!
You sir are defending a drama queen, I sincerely hope that no woman you care about is ever raped.
Would you consider a man "almost" 80 old?
I thought so "young" lady.
Enjoy your youth, it was wasted on the young.
Thank you! I haven't been called kiddo since my mother died in 1968.
Yes, that happens when we call each other names.
Well bless your heart!
Yes, I hope the Lord does. And yours, too, kiddo. :-D
He has young lady, he has!
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