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.
I'll be sure and check my vehicle for an IED in the morning.
I can tell by her posts that she is quite ticked at you because it was you that was fingered and not her. But we all have burdens to bear.
Seriously, SMaj, is a TSA check really “rape” and “sexual assault?”
What would happen if some guy in a movie ticket line reached for his hip pocket wallet and she was standing a little close so the inside front of her leg was touched?
A 1 inch 5 shot group of 230 grain JHP?
Abolish TSA.
If he reaches down HER pants looking for HIS wallet, yeah.
I love to fly, but I don’t anymore since TSA. If I can’t drive there, I don’t need to go there. I have missed many adventures because of this -— but not the adventure of going to jail for backhanding some TSA groper who had their hands where they didn’t belong!!!
My "physical intrusion" also involved groping between my legs, both front and back, though it included unhooking the waistband of my slacks and opening the front zipper, after first patting the area down!
She then proceeded to put her hand down the back of my pants, presumably to check the manufacturer's label, then doing the same thing with my underpants!!!!
All this occurred while I stood on my one foot as the other one was broken - the reason for the aircast and crutches!
I was demanding to know what in the world gave her the opinion that I was carrying something in my underpants. She respinded that if I "couldn't go through the scanner, then they had to make certain I wasn't carrying anything there!"
My situation didn't didn't occur because a TSA agent found something that needed further "checking," (those full body scans weren't in use then, other than one or two sites) but rather because I was wearing an aircast and using crutches. The TSA agent informed me, as I sat in an airport wheelchair, that she would "need to do a "personal check," as I was unable to go through the scanner wearing a cast, while on crutches and asked whether I wished to to be done between the two XRay machines in public or I could opt for a "private" thorough examination.
I was privately seething being treated as a guilty terrorist but determinded to cooperate and speed up the process, opted to do a public examination.
This Darwin reject proceeded to "pat down" my ticket sleeve and the airline's own wheelchair, presuming they contained contraband!
While I was white-hot with anger at this physical man handling and assault, I knew if I let her know the level of my anger, I'd most likely be kicked off my flight and possibly even being arrested and chose to be quiet and continue on to the wedding of my friend's son.
If a total stranger patted down my crotch, front and back, unzipped my slacks and stuck her/his hand down my pants, you'd better believe I would contact the police and report a sexual assault, insisting on the arrest of the perp and charges brought.
Complete strangers, however, merely because they are government employees regardless of their sex, are free to molest everyone, regardless of age, sex, or condition merely because I need to purchase a seat on an airplane, is unconscionable.
Yer not bein' very neighborly.
Totally true, but the WOMAN inspector did not. It was on the outside.
Seriously, in a world as FUBAR as this, calling a very low dose x-ray type scan “rape”, makes one question the stability of the person writing the piece.
What would happen if she ran through a Highway Patrol radar speed check and got a ticket? Would she run home and get her small, convenient, purse-sized, handheld thermonuclear device?
She was in an Italian restaurant once when the the pie maker was tossing a pizza around in the air and a piece of pepperoni flew off and hit her in the bare arm.
She cut off his head with the pizza slicer.
The original poster was very lucky.
Lots of times the ‘check’ involves gloved hands against bare genitals.
The same gloves, I might add, that have ‘gloved’ countless other sets of bare genitals previously that shift.
I suppose you’re OK with this particular police behavior?:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xby01WRj-q4
Before they muster the courage to bulldoze bodies into pits, they must first dehumanize you.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mEhHeILa3HE
+
They have a cadre on here demonizing and ridiculing Gina.
Thanks for your candor.
If you decide to start a petition asking Congress and President Trump to shut down this TSA nightmare, I’m sure you will get tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of signers.
I will.
Excellent post.
You’re not the first person to have this type of TSA behavior happen to and you certainly won’t be the last. You bought a ticket to fly and you knew (I hope) that you would be going through a security checkpoint. You made a deal with the devil, the devil this time wanted to play.
They got rid of the rapiscan machine. What they use now just shows a little diagram figure No one sees you anymore.
You really allowed someone at an airport in the Bahamas to touch your “young child’s” genitalia without protesting and you still think that was fine? Wow.
Or were you just exaggerating, and this woman’s experience really was much worse than yours? I’ve been patted down before, but never has any of my genitalia been touched, much less the entire area. Any rational person would see that as improper, especially if there was not a very good justification for it (and I’ve had areas show up in those scans that were simply where the fabric was wrinkled and a bit clumped, so no the scan alone doesn’t prove anything). I can tell you who sounds like the one more “out of her mind” to me (or at least less interested in basic human liberties and the right not to be sexually violated)...
Nice One, friend!
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.