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'm the author, and it's not that I "didn't think it would ever happen" to me, but I had hoped that it wouldn't happen without any hint of a reason.
“And ask yourself, if you are so easily upset by something as minor as this, should you really let yourself be around firearms?”
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What the hell is the matter with you?
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You're right, Zathras, but I was too blinded by rage to navigate that process, and like 99.999% of travelers who've been abused by the TSA, I was under a time constraint to get to my flight and couldn't spend the time it would've taken to do that.
Thanks, Sport! :-) You’re spot-on right about those preevs, too.
As if that young man and his mother would actually be planning a terrorist act.
I have also seen hijab-wearers get a smooth pass through without being "handled" in any way.
You are welcome.
Friday, at a foreign airport, I was directed to walk through a walk through scanner, with my belt and big silver buckle, harness boots and everything in my pockets, my laptop and tablet in a backpack and thought it was a preliminary scan, but then got on a plane and came home.
Poo... welcome to the world of the little people ...
what makes you so special ???
Ive had that happen to me and I didn’t have any “alerts”
In the first in Dallas in 2002 I heard my name called and was told I had been randomly selected for an enhanced security check. I was taken aside to be examined.
A beautiful, young blond woman told me to take off my belt and untuck my shirt.
She then put her hands under my shirt and slowly felt my chest, stomach and back. She then ran her hands under my collar slowly examining my neck and shoulders..
She then put her hands inside the waist band of my pants and slowly felt around inside my pants.
Then she got down on one knee and slowly went up each of my legs and then her hands slowly and thoroughly examined my thighs, crotch and butt.
She took her time and had a very sensitive touch.
Another time at Las Vegas airport an employee told me she saw something in the scan.
I stood in front of her while she sat on a chair with her face about six inches from my crotch and she slowly examined my inner thighs, crotch and butt. She first felt outside my pants and then put her hands inside my pants and felt my crotch and butt for a while.
Mostly I hate airport security but these times were ok.
Hello, Noob. So, you like tyranny? You like unreasonable searches of your body? You're a TROLL. TAKE A HIKE.
No, thank our government who believes Isis types have a right to come to this country. Also blame politically correct thinking that says you can’t single people out as constituting a greater threat. These lines are nothing more than a reminder of how stupid our elected officials are.
How should this job be done?
Is there anyone with a smarter plan?
I have no desire to fly again until the rapture!
“Those who surrender freedom for security will not have, nor do they deserve, either one.” - Benjamin Franklin
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The illegal searches and seizures performed by the TSA are clearly unconstitutional. The TSA needs to be disbanded and the responsibility for airport/airline safety returned to the airlines. The airlines should then implement security measures modeled after Israel’s (El-Al) methodologies. As a side note, I really believe that most of the TSA personnel are “on the lower half of the bell curve” and actually get a perverse sense of power and pleasure from abusing travelers.
I’m not kidding. Send this to the Trump Administration. It happened on their watch. Send this to the Oval Office Staff itself. We need to see if they will really respond to us.
I loathe George W. Bush with a blood passion for turning this fascist monster on us. My worst interaction with them came in 2006 at Chicago Midway. They pulled me out of line but stopped short of groping my crotch, all the while our headdressed friends skated right through. People were saying, “What did he do?” My daughter said, “I honestly have no idea. Must be their time to hassle somebody.”
Ironically, my best interaction was in Phoenix. I got waved through to the easy search line because I was wearing a Green Bay Packer shirt and the TSA guy was from Wisconsin.
Sorry you went through that, Gina.
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
In truth, no one is required to go through the backscatter machine. The traveler can always opt out. I had a colleague who was afraid of radiation, and he always opted out. And I had to opt out a few time because of an injury that make the 'pose' impossible to accomplish. I explained nicely, and they were always quick to civilly and professionally accommodate me.
But the story does make one good point. You show up at the checkpoint with an attitude, and you are likely to get special treatment.
The last I checked, they're not mind-readers. My attitude was inside my mind as I quietly stood in line, so I'm not sure what you're talking about there, Par.
“Is there anyone with a smarter plan?”
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Israel.
This doesn’t have to be if we used profiling. This just enrages citizens and wastes resources. But the public and airlines put up with it in the name political correctness. I refuse to participate and will not fly or darken the door of the looney bin aka airport.
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