I write this post from a hotel room in Ireland. I am on vacation here this week with my beautiful wife, and we are enjoying every moment of our stay. It was the travel here that was less than desirable.
We flew first from Raleigh Durham Airport to Philadelphia, then from Philadelphia to Shannon (snow prevent us from going straight to Dublin), then from Shannon to Dublin.
In Raleigh, we entered airport security and were directed toward the security scanners–you know, those pornographic scanners that radiate you and reveal your privies to whichever Tom, Dick, or Harry is manning the monitors. My wife and I both “opted-out,” which means we bypassed the porno-scanners, but instead had to be groped–I mean patted down–by agents. Since my wife and I are of the opposite sex, two agents (one male, 0ne female) had to be called over to perform the pat downs. As I was being patted down, a young girl–maybe 3 or 4 years old–stood nearby waiting for her mother to put her shoes and belt back on. She stood there staring at me, wondering what was going on, what had I done, to deserve this treatment. I was wondering the same thing. After the pat down, the agents had to swab the gloves to check for explosives residue. This part amazed me because nobody checks the porno-scanner patrons for residue. Why do they get off without a residue check, but opters-out do not?
In Philadelphia, I noticed something else. Being a partaker in the goodness of cigar and pipe tobacco, I am sympathetic to smokers of all sorts. I noticed the absence of any kind of smoking area. The last time I flew, those places were prevalent. This time, they were nowhere to be found. I asked an employee, and he informed me that smokers had to go back outside of airport security to smoke outdoors, then return back through airport security to get to their departure gate. Not only has TSA made flying as difficult as possible, but the airports have accommodated their desire to annoy flyers by declaring an entire subculture of flyers will have to go through that security multiple times. Imagine flying and having a several hour long layover!
What was worse, though, was that as we walked through Philadelphia’s International Airport, we noticed at least one security checkpoint (in Terminal A near Gate 17) they didn’t have porno-scanners installed! Passengers entering through that gate simply had to go through a metal detector!
This just baffles me. If I go through a checkpoint with a porno-scanner and opt-out, I am subjected to an embarrassing procedure where I am touched in all the wrong places, while everyone else–including the little children who somehow know this is just wrong!–stares at me as if I’m a criminal. If I go through a checkpoint without a porno-scanner, I simply have to walk through a metal detector–like the old days.
How can such glaring hypocrisies possibly be considered sane? What have we allowed to be done to ourselves in this country? I can’t even say “the land of the free and the home of the brave” without cringing throughout my entire body because of the hypocrisy of the statement.
Oh, how I long for freedom.
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I have written to the Tourism Minister(s) of Ireland a few times explaining why I will no longer travel there, as much as I love Ireland. I have many friends and relatives there and it breaks my heart that I may never meet some of them in person or see the ones I’ve met again. No matter how much I love Ireland I will never subject myself to being pawed and groped by government agents. No vacation or visit “home” is worth it.
Contribute specifics about the gate lacking AIT. Maybe fewer will have to suffer at the hands of the TSA. http://tsastatus.net/search.php?q=RDU
the problem is that it is not Ireland’s fault it is the TSA’s fault or rather the department of homeland security’s fault. Unless you were subject to the same kind of pat down/security coming back from there. I’m sorry to say the US government went crazy when the 9/11 attacks occurred and they have yet to regain any sanity at all.
Some believe that the government was in on the plot and were trying to achieve a reason to curtail human rights to better control those below them in status and power. I don’t quite believe that but I do have some unanswered questions about many things relating to that.
The thing is until we can get this nightmare agency abolished we either have to make the choice to go no where by plane or any other mode of transportation they decide to “secure” or we need to passively resist the exercise.
For me I have decided that should the occasion occur that I am in the US undergoing this type of inspection I will state that I will not resist a pat down and will event cooperate with it but I do not give my consent to them doing it.
I really don’t care whose “fault” it is – as far as I’m concerned anyone who chooses to go along with TSA’s agenda without fighting back is at fault and is complicit in TSA’s crimes. I no longer support the travel industry with my $$$ because by doing so I enable the industry’s complicit behavior.
Are the people at airports complaining about long waits the same ones who tell their children that it’s not okay to sell their bodies for money but on the other hand they must be pawed over and groped by blue-shirted strangers so they can see Mickey Mouse at Disney World?
Susan/Oline: That is correct. The problems I faced were with the TSA in the U.S. When I left Ireland, they didn’t have the porno-scanners, only metal detectors, and they did no unnecessary patdowns. On the return trip, we flew through Manchester, England. There, they had a porno-scanner, but you only had to go through it if you set off the metal detector.
L: The best I can tell you is that it was in Terminal A of the Philadelphia Airport, near but not the closest security entry point to Gate A17.
Matt