2. TSA Sexually Assaults Miss USA, Susie Castillo
My full report on Susie's story here.
3. TSA Sexually Assaults Six Year Old Girl
This April, Americans were outraged after The Drudge Report posted the following video of a six year old girl being molested by a federal employee working for the TSA:
4. This May: TSA pats down a baby.
5. TSA admits to conducting 8000 surprise raids yearly
"As part of the TSA's request for FY 2012 funding, TSA Administrator John Pistole told Congress last week that the TSA conducts 8,000 unannounced security screenings every year. These screenings, conducted with local law enforcement agencies as well as immigration, can be as simple as checking out cargo at a busy seaport. But more and more, they seem to involve giving airport-style pat-downs and screenings of unsuspecting passengers at bus terminals, ferries, and even subways."
6. TSA Sexually Assaults a Mother in Phoenix
The country was shocked by the following video of a woman in tears screaming for the police to come after being sexually assaulted by the TSA at a checkpoint in Phoenix. Notice how the TSA harasses and lies to her son as he films them (which is perfectly legal in a public place):
7. Male TSA Officers Laugh as a Passenger Is Forced to Remove Her Nipple Piercings with Pliers
Could their behavior get more brutal or disgusting? Back in 2008, CNN reported one woman's harrowing experience in Texas:
The Transportation Security Administration said Friday its officers at a Texas airport appear to have properly followed procedures when they allegedly forced a woman to remove her nipple rings -- one with pliers -- but acknowledged the procedures should be changed.
The woman involved -- Mandi Hamlin -- told reporters earlier Friday she was humiliated by last month's incident, in which she was forced to painfully remove the piercings behind a curtain as she heard snickers from male TSA officers nearby. The incident occurred at the Lubbock, Texas, airport.
8. TSA vandalizes passenger's prescription drugs
In an email last year, one Humble Libertarian reader told me about how the TSA had vandalized her prescription medicine:'The difference between this trip and the countless similar trips over the past two decades is that in both of these instances the TSA tampered with my prescription medicine. I personally saw them rifle through my bags and open my prescription medicine and "test" it after it was flagged as "suspicious" by the TSA busy body at the X-ray machine - I guess to make sure I wasn't going to blow up the plane with it.'
Read her entire story here.
9. Texas State officials groped by TSA as punishment
State officials from Texas, which has been leading the charge to nullify the TSA's unconstitutional police actions, are reporting the use of searches by the TSA for punitive and intimidation purposes, rather than for the purported reasons of national safety and counter-terrorism:
“Let me put this delicately. I was still feeling the effects of the pat-down as I sat in my seat from New Orleans to Houston, and then Houston to Austin.” Chairman of the Texas Public Utilities Commission Barry Smitherman told Fox 7 News.
Smitherman described the groping as “aggressive” and recounted an admission by a TSA supervisor that he was being “punished” for opting out.
Texas State Rep. Barbara Nash also told Fox 7 that a TSA agent “moved my legs apart and went up my legs, all the way up, and then she made me stand a different way where she could go all the way up the front., and then all the way up the back of my dress.”
State Rep. David Simpson, who sponsored the original anti-groping bill, House bill 1937, noted “This is a sexual assault in any other activity. If that happened right now, it would be sexual assault.”
More details here.
10. TSA Spills Urine All Over Bladder Cancer Survivor
Earlier this year, MSNBC reported:
A retired special education teacher on his way to a wedding in Orlando, Fla., said he was left humiliated, crying and covered with his own urine after an enhanced pat-down by TSA officers recently at Detroit Metropolitan Airport.
“I was absolutely humiliated, I couldn’t even speak,” said Thomas D. “Tom” Sawyer, 61, of Lansing, Mich.
Sawyer is a bladder cancer survivor who now wears a urostomy bag, which collects his urine from a stoma, or opening in his abdomen. “I have to wear special clothes and in order to mount the bag I have to seal a wafer to my stomach and then attach the bag. If the seal is broken, urine can leak all over my body and clothes.”
On Nov. 7, Sawyer said he went through the security scanner at Detroit Metropolitan Airport. “Evidently the scanner picked up on my urostomy bag, because I was chosen for a pat-down procedure.”
Due to his medical condition, Sawyer asked to be screened in private. “One officer looked at another, rolled his eyes and said that they really didn’t have any place to take me,” said Sawyer. “After I said again that I’d like privacy, they took me to an office.”
At Reason Magazine, Mike Riggs exposes the TSA's flawed reasoning in defense of all of the revolting things you just read above:
If such incidents are starting to feel almost common, there’s a reason for that: TSA screeners are doing exactly what they’re supposed to be doing.
When the online response to this weekend’s screening faux pas grew to a howl, the TSA issued the same statement it’s issued dozens of times since its founding: "We have reviewed the circumstances involving this screening and determined that our officers acted professionally and according to proper procedure."
These bodily violations, in other words, are consistent with how the TSA thinks travelers should be treated. Screeners are simply following orders.
So much for dignity.
As Republican Liberty Caucus Chairman Dave Nalle recently said:
"Going after the TSA for groping flyers is not an end goal. It's a wedge issue which has a strong emotional appeal to a broad audience which we might not be able to reach otherwise. It's not the war, it's just a battle where we've found some friendly ground to fight on. It opens the door on the larger campaign which is to end the entire apparatus of the overblown security state once and for all."
Anti-TSA Merchandise
Wes Messamore,
Editor in Chief, THL
Articles | Author's Page
