dixieflyer
Well-known member
- Joined
- Feb 18, 2002
- Posts
- 237
I agree with the point the author is making. The TSA is another example of Big Government srewing things up. The TSA is a joke, and out tax $$ are paying or it.
SEARCHING FOR BOOBY TRAPS
"I'm a law-abiding citizen, so I have nothing to fear," is the average Joe's standard reply to the voiced concerns of his more paranoid neighbors who fear that increased Homeland Security measures are turning their homeland into a police state. If you still belong to that group, you probably haven't spent much time at airports lately.
More and more stories about ordinary people being scrutinized, even strip- searched by TSA agents emerge in the mainstream media--most recently the case of San Diego resident Ava Kingsford who was about to board a flight home from Denver with her 3-month-old son. After having been patted down and screened with a metal detector wand, a female screener of the Transportation Security Administration told Kingsford, "I'm going to touch your breasts now." The 36-year-old objected that she was uncomfortable with that. When she pulled her tank top down to prove that she wasn't hiding anything, the officers told her they had enough and she wasn't going anywhere. Kingsford, her fiancé and baby son ended up renting a car for the 15-hour drive home.
Kingsford's case is far from being an exception; as WorldNetDaily put it, "travelers who don't quietly acquiesce to [the TSA's] demands face arrest, prosecution and future restrictions on their travel."
In October 2002, Los Angeles writer Nicholas Monahan and his seven and a half months pregnant wife Mary were both singled out for a detailed search at Portland International Airport. Monahan had to remove his shoes, hat and sweater, and was finally "standing on one foot, my arms stretched out, the other leg sticking out in front of me a la a DUI test," he wrote in an editorial on LewRockwell.com <http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig3/monahan1.html>. "I began to get [expletive] off, as most normal people would."
After the procedure, he went back to his wife and found her sitting in a chair, sobbing. She told him that the TSA screeners not only had touched her swollen breasts but had forced her to lift her shirt; "not behind a screen, not off to the side--no, right there, directly in front of the hundred or so passengers standing in line," Monahan says. Enraged about his wife's humiliation, he walked up to the screener and shouted "What did you do to her?" whereupon he was handcuffed, arrested and held in a jail cell within the airport for two hours before he was cited for disorderly conduct.
Finally, Monahan and his wife were informed by the arresting police officer that he would "do them a favor" and not charge the writer "with a felony." The couple was banned from the airport for 90 days and escorted off the property by police. Monahan was fined $250 plus court costs for his misconduct.
He should be glad that he got off so easily. According to WorldNetDaily, "experts say, because of the way new airport security laws are written, unhappy passengers have little recourse to complain; airport security personnel have been given absolute authority, and any passenger-caused problems, no matter how petty or minor, could result in prison terms of up to 20 years."
On the other hand, an all too compliant attitude with the TSA's requests will get you in trouble, too. In November 2002, a woman at Evansville Regional Airport in Indiana, whom TSA officers had attempted to screen with a metal wand, reportedly stripped down to the waist in protest. According to AP, she "kept reaching inside her sweater, prompting guards to search her again. [She] then became upset and removed her sweater, shirt and bra before trying to pull away as an officer tried to handcuff her." The 56- year-old passenger pleaded guilty to two misdemeanor counts and was fined one dollar for each count.
Overzealous airport security causes us to ask, for what? All planes nowadays have armored cockpit doors, so the chance of a terrorist being able to use another plane as a missile are almost nil. Of course, someone could strap on a belt of explosives and blow up the whole plane... but that would "only" mean killing the people on the plane, not targeting some larger group of victims or a monument of U.S. power such as the White House. If terrorists wanted to stage a mass murder, they could do so much easier in an area with less security--subways, football stadiums, bus stations, you name it.
The question is, what's going to happen if the next terror attack occurs, say, at a church? Will parishioners across the country from then on be patted down and strip-searched before attending Sunday mass?
Terrorists win when they can make a government take extreme measures to counter their attacks, especially when those measures include stepping on civil liberties. It may start with a pregnant woman having to lift her shirt.
Where it ends, one can only imagine.
SEARCHING FOR BOOBY TRAPS
"I'm a law-abiding citizen, so I have nothing to fear," is the average Joe's standard reply to the voiced concerns of his more paranoid neighbors who fear that increased Homeland Security measures are turning their homeland into a police state. If you still belong to that group, you probably haven't spent much time at airports lately.
More and more stories about ordinary people being scrutinized, even strip- searched by TSA agents emerge in the mainstream media--most recently the case of San Diego resident Ava Kingsford who was about to board a flight home from Denver with her 3-month-old son. After having been patted down and screened with a metal detector wand, a female screener of the Transportation Security Administration told Kingsford, "I'm going to touch your breasts now." The 36-year-old objected that she was uncomfortable with that. When she pulled her tank top down to prove that she wasn't hiding anything, the officers told her they had enough and she wasn't going anywhere. Kingsford, her fiancé and baby son ended up renting a car for the 15-hour drive home.
Kingsford's case is far from being an exception; as WorldNetDaily put it, "travelers who don't quietly acquiesce to [the TSA's] demands face arrest, prosecution and future restrictions on their travel."
In October 2002, Los Angeles writer Nicholas Monahan and his seven and a half months pregnant wife Mary were both singled out for a detailed search at Portland International Airport. Monahan had to remove his shoes, hat and sweater, and was finally "standing on one foot, my arms stretched out, the other leg sticking out in front of me a la a DUI test," he wrote in an editorial on LewRockwell.com <http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig3/monahan1.html>. "I began to get [expletive] off, as most normal people would."
After the procedure, he went back to his wife and found her sitting in a chair, sobbing. She told him that the TSA screeners not only had touched her swollen breasts but had forced her to lift her shirt; "not behind a screen, not off to the side--no, right there, directly in front of the hundred or so passengers standing in line," Monahan says. Enraged about his wife's humiliation, he walked up to the screener and shouted "What did you do to her?" whereupon he was handcuffed, arrested and held in a jail cell within the airport for two hours before he was cited for disorderly conduct.
Finally, Monahan and his wife were informed by the arresting police officer that he would "do them a favor" and not charge the writer "with a felony." The couple was banned from the airport for 90 days and escorted off the property by police. Monahan was fined $250 plus court costs for his misconduct.
He should be glad that he got off so easily. According to WorldNetDaily, "experts say, because of the way new airport security laws are written, unhappy passengers have little recourse to complain; airport security personnel have been given absolute authority, and any passenger-caused problems, no matter how petty or minor, could result in prison terms of up to 20 years."
On the other hand, an all too compliant attitude with the TSA's requests will get you in trouble, too. In November 2002, a woman at Evansville Regional Airport in Indiana, whom TSA officers had attempted to screen with a metal wand, reportedly stripped down to the waist in protest. According to AP, she "kept reaching inside her sweater, prompting guards to search her again. [She] then became upset and removed her sweater, shirt and bra before trying to pull away as an officer tried to handcuff her." The 56- year-old passenger pleaded guilty to two misdemeanor counts and was fined one dollar for each count.
Overzealous airport security causes us to ask, for what? All planes nowadays have armored cockpit doors, so the chance of a terrorist being able to use another plane as a missile are almost nil. Of course, someone could strap on a belt of explosives and blow up the whole plane... but that would "only" mean killing the people on the plane, not targeting some larger group of victims or a monument of U.S. power such as the White House. If terrorists wanted to stage a mass murder, they could do so much easier in an area with less security--subways, football stadiums, bus stations, you name it.
The question is, what's going to happen if the next terror attack occurs, say, at a church? Will parishioners across the country from then on be patted down and strip-searched before attending Sunday mass?
Terrorists win when they can make a government take extreme measures to counter their attacks, especially when those measures include stepping on civil liberties. It may start with a pregnant woman having to lift her shirt.
Where it ends, one can only imagine.
