Friday, November 19, 2010

Thorough Sexual Assault Update

One last post for the week about this (unless I get a burr under my saddle over the weekend). I just wanted to post a few of the latest TSA horror stories that have bubbled up in the past day or two. Brace yourself...

Rough skirt check leaves passengers in tears

A young woman in Michigan was brought to tears after a rough skirt check by a TSA employee.
WZZM reported:

Before boarding a flight in Grand Rapids, a woman says the search at the security checkpoint was violent, unnecessary and extremely upsetting.

“When I got on the plane all I wanted to do was sob,” says traveler Ella Swift.

Swift was one of an increasing number of passengers Transportation Security Administration officers are thoroughly searching by hand. They call it an “enhanced pat-down.”

Swift says they told her she was singled out because she was wearing a skirt. She says the search earlier this month was very rough and left her in tears.

“The female officer ran her hand up the inside of my leg to my groin and she did it so hard and so rough she lifted me off my heels,” she says. “I think I yelped. I was in pain for about an hour afterwards. It just felt excessive and unnecessary.”

After reviewing the incident, a TSA spokesman says officers involved in the Grand Rapids search acted “appropriately and respectfully.”


Elderly woman with 2 artificial knees describes it as sexual assault
A Chicago woman with two artificial knees set off the metal detectors at Lambert St. Louis Airport this week. The TSA agents then took her aside and groped her. The woman said they touched her “private parts.” She told KMOV reporters, “I felt like I had been raped.”

The woman Penny Moroney described the assault:

I was shaking and crying when I left that room…. (She told agents) I would prefer to use the body scanner and I was told they were not available. (A patdown was the only alternative.) Her gloved hands touched my breasts went between them. Then she went into the top of my slacks; inserted her hand between my underwear and my skin and put her hand up on the outside of my slacks and patted my genital area… I likened it to being raped.


Flight attendant and cancer survivor forced to remove her prosthetic breast
A Charlotte-area flight attendant and cancer survivor contacted WBTV after she says she was forced to show her prosthetic breast during a pat-down.

Cathy Bossi lives in south Charlotte and has been a flight attendant for the past 32 years, working the past 28 for U.S. Airways.

In early August Bossie was walking through security when she says she was asked to go through the new full body-scanners at Concourse "D" at Charlotte Douglas International.

She reluctantly agreed. As a 3-year breast cancer survivor she says she didn't want the added radiation through her body. But, Bossi says she did agree.

"The T.S.A. Agent told me to put my I.D. on my back," she said. "When I got out of there she said because my I.D. was on my back, I had to go to a personal screening area."

She says two female Charlotte T.S.A. agents took her to a private room and began what she calls an aggressive pat down. She says they stopped when they got around to feeling her right breast… the one where she'd had surgery.

"She put her full hand on my breast and said, 'What is this?'. And I said, 'It's my prosthesis because I've had breast cancer.' And she said, 'Well, you'll need to show me that'."

Cathy was asked to show her prosthetic breast, removing it from her bra.

"I did not take the name of the person at the time because it was just so horrific of an experience, I couldn't believe someone had done that to me. I'm a flight attendant. I was just trying to get to work."


12-year old girl traveling without her parents forced through strip search scanner
Recently a 12 year-old girl traveling with friends of the family was separated from her group and forced to go through the naked scanner at the Tampa airport. The girl’s parents say that TSA, “In essence conducted a strip search on a 12-year-old girl without her parents present to advocate for her.”
TampaBay.com reported on the July incident:

A Baltimore family is raising the issue after their 12-year-old daughter was pulled out of line in Tampa and subjected to what they say was an embarrassing and unhealthy scan. The girl was traveling with an adult friend of the family, not her parents.

“Our daughter was scared and didn’t understand what was happening,” said Michelle Nemphos, the mother of the girl. She declined to give her daughter’s name. “In essence they conducted a strip search on a 12-year-old girl without her parents present to advocate for her.”


She was separated from her friend's parents and, once alone, forced to go through the scanner.

You know what this is? This is a bunch of petty thugs on a power trip with no limitations. With the full force and authority of the federal government behind them, these people can do any vile thing they want to innocent passengers.

I called KCI to ask a few questions myself as a concerned citizen. I ended up speaking to a woman who is supposedly the TSA representative at the airport named Sarah Montera. She wasn't quite snotty, but she was certainly unfriendly and unhelpful. She insisted forcefully that she was a peon and had no power whatsoever. She offered the standard lines that we're hearing in the news, that these procedures are necessary and conducted by professionals. No surprise there. After that I called the KCI Aviation Department, which is actually a division within the city government of KC, MO. Interestingly, when I mentioned Ms. Montera's name, the guy there said, "Whoa, you really got someone high up!" A peon, huh, Ms. Montera? Anyway, the KC, MO guy was very friendly and very helpful, and seemed very interested when I mentioned the ability of airports to opt-out of TSA security, asking me several questions about where I read that information. I'd like to think he may have actually gone to check it out after we talked.

Regardless, he said that even if a private security firm took over for the TSA, they'd still have to follow the same procedures dictated by the federal government. That may be so, but I'll bet you any amount of money that someone who can be fired and/or thrown in prison for inappropriate behavior at the airport checkpoint will be vastly more preferable to the TSA thugs with seemingly no fear of disciplinary action that seem to actually relish groping, strip searching, and
abusing passengers, young and old.

What say you?

Oh, and the Obama administration still thinks you, as an American citizen, should continue to be abused like this. I've had many disagreements with nutjob Rep. Ron Paul, but I've got to give him props for offering a bill to crack down on this insanity:
It’s very simple, it’s one paragraph long. It removes the immunity from anybody in the federal government that does anything that you or I can’t do. If you can’t grope another person and if you can’t x-ray people and endanger them with possible x-rays, you can’t take nude photographs of individuals, why do we allow the government to do it? We would go to jail. He’d be immediately arrested if an individual citizen went out and did these things, and yet we just sit there calmly and say, “Oh, they’re making us safe”.
Sounds good to me!

Since it annoys me when people complain without offering suggestions for solving the problem, I'll go ahead and reiterate what I think would be the best possible security we could have:

Forget the porn machines, Michael Totten suggests. Use some common sense instead. It works for the Israelis.

They are, out of dreadful necessity, the world’s foremost experts in counterterrorism. And they couldn’t care less about what your grandmother brings on a plane. Instead, officials at Ben Gurion International Airport interview everyone in line before they’re even allowed to check in.

And Israeli officials profile. They don’t profile racially, but they profile. Israeli Arabs breeze through rather quickly, but thanks to the dozens of dubious-looking stamps in my passport — almost half are from Lebanon and Iraq — I get pulled off to the side for more questioning every time. And I’m a white, nominally Christian American.

If they pull you aside, you had better tell them the truth. They’ll ask you so many wildly unpredictable questions so quickly, you couldn’t possibly invent a fake story and keep it all straight. Don’t even try. They’re highly trained and experienced, and they catch everyone who tries to pull something over on them.

Quite so: When I last flew El Al, they began with simple questions: Why are you flying to Israel? To give a lecture? Where? Who invited you? Really? Do you have a copy of the invitation? How do you know them? Really? And you don’t speak Hebrew? None? Why not? You didn’t learn any in school? Why not? It went on for quite some time. Somehow I ended up telling them where exactly I’d gone to kindergarten. That’s not one of those details that would be easy to manufacture on the spot.

The impression I had above all was that they were really paying attention to what I said. They weren’t rude. But I had no doubt they were thinking very closely about whether the details added up.


The root problem here is the political correctness that has infected this nation at the insistence of the liberal Left. That's the first battle we need to win - get back to common sense and decency rather than fear of calling an evil and dangerous spade an evil and dangerous spade. Stop assaulting nuns and children, and start paying VERY close attention to the one demographic that by far presents the most danger to the flying public: Muslims.

Ask Israel. It works.

It will be very interesting to see what happens when millions of Americans attempt to navigate this awful gauntlet over the next week or so. Somehow I'm guessing the anger will only grow...as it should. The key is to use that anger in a productive way - call your Senators, call your Rep, call your local airport. Demand action to stop the insanity. We the People can win this one, if we choose to.

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