Transportation Security Administration (TSA) is ever the bully and sore loser. Witness its ham-fisted clobbering of John Tyner, the passenger who warned its thugs last weekend not to “touch” his “junk” at San Diego’s airport: The agency has “opened an investigation targeting” him. And is trumpeting this fact in a blatant attempt to discourage other rebels: “Michael J. Aguilar, chief of the TSA office in San Diego, called a news conference … to announce the probe.”
Mr. Tyner was trying to make a flight Saturday when the TSA ordered him out of the line for the magnetometer and into that for its notorious porno-scanner. Mr. Tyner refused permission for Our Rulers to ogle him — which “choice” they still allow, according to the TSA’s website, so long as the dissenter submits to a groping. And what a groping it is — so utterly degenerate that it nauseates pilots. When his assailant informed Mr. Tyner that it includes a “groin check,” our hero responded with a line that became an immediate classic, right up there with “Give me liberty…” and “The British are coming!”: “You touch my junk and I’m going to have you arrested.”
So what will Mr. Tyner’s defense of common decency cost him? Aguilar “said the investigation could lead to prosecution and civil penalties of up to $11,000.” Someone in his audience apparently objected that “TSA agents had told Tyner on Saturday that he could be fined up to $10,000”; Aguilar responded with the bluster that so endears the agency to its victims, “’That’s the old fine … It has been increased.’” Hmmm: just for Mr. Tyner’s benefit? Doesn’t the Constitution prohibit exactly this sort of abuse (spare me the quibbling that this is an ex post facto fine, not an ex post facto law)? Then again, doesn’t the Fourth Amendment prohibit all the TSA’s abuse?
In the nine years that the TSA has warred against Americans and freedom, passengers have frequently made fools of its goons. This isn’t difficult, given that the latter are witless petty tyrants enforcing absurdity. And since the TSA cannot appeal to either logic or morality when criticized, it relies instead on brute force: “We are a huge bureaucracy that can and will crush all opposition.”
Just ask Phyllis Dintenfass. When a screener molested her in 2004 at Outagamie County (Wis.) Regional Airport, Mrs. Dintenfass turned the tables by groping her right back.
This was In September, during the TSA’s last national grope-fest. Oh, yes, folks, we’ve been down this road to serfdom before, with Our Rulers sexually assaulting the taxpayers who foot their bills. That time, their excuse was two Russian jetliners that had crashed within a few minutes and several hundred miles of each other. A Chechen woman was aboard each plane, and investigators found residues of what might have been explosives in the wreckage. But the debris was scattered so widely they refused to speculate as to what caused the disasters.
Not the TSA. From the other side of the globe, its bureaucrats pronounced the women terrorists who had smuggled bombs in their bosoms. I kid you not. You have to hand it to the TSA for creativity: never in the history of aviation has any woman tried to bring down a flight with her chest — or at least, not by trying to blow it up.
We might suppose that after this stunning leap in logic, our adolescent Warriors on Terror would retire satisfied from their hormonal fantasies and rejoin reality. Au contraire. They next decreed that the TSA’s deviants must henceforth grope all female passengers — solely to protect the Homeland, you understand. They got away with this for three long months, until the public’s outrage forced them to desist. Which is yet another in the googolplex of reasons that we must abolish the TSA: its evil does not die. It only sleeps for a season, waiting its next chance to assail us.
The agency’s juvenile exploitation of tragedy ambushed Mrs. Dintenfass the next month in Wisconsin. When the screener copped a feel, Mrs. Dintenfass did as well, then demanded, “How would you like it if I did that to you?” For defending herself, Mrs. Dintenfass was arrested, tried, convicted, and sentenced to a year’s probation, 100 hours of “community service” [sic for “involuntary servitude”] and a fine of $2000. The judge considered this lenient. He could have robbed her of $100,000 and sent her to jail for a year.
Mrs. Dintenfass didn’t tape her attack, and she endured it 6 years ago, when too many Americans still figured the TSA’s only problems were insufficient power and money. But oh, how times change! The TSA is now firmly, hearteningly, completely on the defensive. Polls put it among the country’s most-loathed bureaucracies, right down there with the IRS.
So the TSA’s obvious retaliation against Mr. Tyner may backfire as spectacularly as its sexual molestation has. Meanwhile, the “TSA is changing its tone with passengers,” according to John Pistole, Head Pervert — sorry, TSA Administrator. By which he means that, like the rest of the Federal government, the TSA is abandoning the pretense that we slaves actually have our masters’ ear. A government that ignored our pleas when it rammed the wildly unpopular bail-out through Congress and repeated the performance with Obamacare is growing less concerned with its democratic façade and more insouciant with its naked power.
And so, despite pilots unions’ protesting the TSA’s predation and lawsuits from flight attendants, despite thousands of readers’ comments on hundreds of websites damning the TSA, despite National Opt-Out Day and wewon’tfly.com, despite editorials in the mainstream media boldly headlined, “Abolish the TSA,” Pervert Pistole gives it to us good and hard: “The bottom line is, if somebody doesn’t go through proper security screening, they’re not going to go on the flight.”
As if that weren’t despotic enough, he continued, “On the eve of a major national holiday and less than one year after al Qaida’s failed attack last Christmas Day, it is irresponsible … to suggest travelers opt out of the very screening that could prevent an attack using non-metallic explosives.”
This is, of course, a lie. The porno-scanners would not have caught the Underwear Bomber, nor can they detect “non-metallic explosives” concealed in the body’s orifices. Guess where the TSA’s headed next: can everyone say, “Cavity check”?
“After coming to TSA with 26 years of law enforcement experience at the FBI,” Pervert added, “I understand the serious threats our nation faces and the security measures we must implement to thwart potential attacks.” Translation: shut up, vassals, you don’t know anything while we rulers are omniscient and omnipotent. “This technology is not only safe,” – another outright lie – “it’s vital to aviation security and a critical measure to thwart potential terrorist attacks.”
Really? Then let’s put the porno-scanners where they can do some good: right at TSA headquarters.
Becky Akers, an expert on the American Revolution, writes frequently about issues related to security and privacy. Her articles and columns have been published by Lewrockwell.com, The Freeman, Military History Magazine, American History Magazine, the Christian Science Monitor, the New York Post, and other publications.
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Our Homeland Security and TSA Rulers Demand Gratitude for Groping Us
Getting Rich From the TSA Naked Body Scanners
