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Why I Avoid Airports by Steven Yates
I’ve been avoiding airports. I haven’t been in one since 9/11. It isn’t that I am afraid to fly. If there are Al Qaeda or other terrorist operatives in the U.S. planning another attack, I don’t see why their plans would necessarily involve another commercial airliner. There are reasons to avoid flying that have nothing to do with any terrorist threat. One of the consequences of 9/11 has been the across-the-board federalization of airport security. Security checkpoints have practically become owned subsidiaries of the federal government. The people working in them have a lot of leeway to do as they please. Vastly more than they should have, under any circumstances. Lately I’ve been checking out allegations of women and girls being "searched" rather zealously, shall we say, at security checkpoints in airports. Incidents of overly intimate touching and fondling have been reported at Phoenix, Atlanta, Raleigh-Durham, Portland, and elsewhere. Perhaps three dozen such cases have been reported. I don’t know that they happen everywhere. There is no way to know what hasn’t been reported, of course. A few of these cases involve children. In the Atlanta case, a 9-year old girl was frisked. In yet another, from Orlando, a 3-year old girl was patted down. There are related cases of absurd levels of paranoia among security personnel. At Kennedy Airport in New York City, a woman was forced by a security guard to drink from three bottles of her own breast milk to "prove" that the white liquid posed no threat to anyone. The dominant news media have been mostly silent about these cases except for a tiny handful of local news stories. I’m surprised feminists haven’t had more to say about them. I guess they are still busy griping about all those dead white males in the textbooks. What makes these incidents so traumatic for both victims and their relatives is their inability to protest in the face of overwhelming federal power. As Lonnie Jaycox put it after watching his wife be frisked "vigorously and inappropriately" at the checkpoint in Houston’s Hobby Airport, "they make it clear that if you oppose them in any way they will call the National Guard and cause you to miss your flight and possibly be arrested." In the Portland case, this actually happened. On October 26, Los Angeles writer Nicholas Monahan’s pregnant wife Mary was reduced to tears after an episode of breast touching by a complete stranger. The two of them had been pulled aside for individual inspections. This has become standard practice: random searches of ordinary citizens without any kind of reasonable suspicion. Mary Monahan’s sobbed words: "I felt like a clown … on display for all these people, with the cotton panel on my pants and my stomach sticking out." Monahan records that he "marched up to the woman who’d been examining her and shouted, ‘What did you do to her?’" The woman immediately summoned police who handcuffed him and locked him in a jail cell in the airport for two hours. They cited him for disorderly conduct. Monahan records that he was threatened with a felony charge. The couple was escorted off airport grounds and banned from returning for 90 days. Screeners’ official statements ignored the issue of the touching of Mary Monahan’s breasts. They report that her husband had been uncooperative from the start, and "blew up" when scissors were found in his suitcase. They allege that he began shouting obscenities. The arrest involved a "struggle" to get him into handcuffs. Monahan has accused the airport security personnel of lying and staging a cover-up. "There was no willful disregard of screening directions. No explosion over the discovery of a pair of scissors in a suitcase. No struggle to put handcuffs on. There was a tired man, early in the morning, unhappily going through a rigorous procedure and then reacting to the tears of his pregnant wife." Monahan’s description of his own search might be of interest: "My shoes were removed. I was told to take off my sweater, then to fold over the waistband of my pants. My baseball hat, hastily jammed on my head at 5 a.m., was removed and assiduously examined… Soon I was standing on one foot, my arms stretched out, the other leg sticking out in front of me a la a DUI test. I began to get pissed off, as most normal people would." Writer and communications policy analyst Rebecca Hagelin reported the frisking of her 9-year-old daughter Kristin: "Little Kristin’s hazel eyes were as big as saucers and began to fill with tears as she stood there, spread-eagle, while some stranger frisked up and down her little body. I hovered close by with a weak, forced smile, in a lousy attempt to reassure my daughter while at the same time trying to hold back my anger over the absurd situation. I could do nothing to stop this groping of my little nine-year-old …" No federal law requires that the federal employee doing the search be the same sex as the person searched. In several cases, women passengers report being fondled by male security personnel. The most they can do is lodge complaints with the Transportation Security Administration created by the Bush Regime to take charge of our newly federalized airports in the wake of 9/11. These are the sort of sexual harassment allegations that have destroyed the careers of men in the private sector and in academia with far skimpier or even nonexistent evidence. But really, how stupid is it to think any of these people might be terrorists? There are plenty of reports of Middle Eastern passengers being allowed through without much more than a passing glance. Apparently, federal employees can abuse power all they want with white Americans, but politically correct fears of "racial profiling" remain in force. Thus whatever danger existed prior to 9/11 is still there. Is anyone really dumb enough to think that foreign-born Arabs are less risky than native-born Americans (some of the latter under 10 years old!)? Situations like this should be of enormous public concern, as more evidence that in our post-9/11 Crisis Era, what was once a Constitutional republic is rapidly becoming a police state. Traveling by air never used to involve routine humiliation of passengers, of course. My father’s job in the private sector involved frequent flights to New York City and elsewhere from the 1950s up through the late 1980s. He logged hundreds of hours on airplanes. He reports almost uniformly courteous treatment. Nobody bothered him. Even after security checkpoints were introduced following the spate of hijackings of flights to Cuba back in the 1960s, no one routinely searched his luggage and confiscated items they judged could be used as weapons. The federal government was busy expanding the whole time my father was working, of course, but there were limits; airport security personnel were not rocket scientists even then but had at least some common horse sense. Anyone caught patting down a 9-year old girl would probably have been fired on the spot. Today’s situation has all the earmarks of institutionalized bullying, sexual or otherwise. We have groups of federal employees vested with nearly unchecked power. The federal government has hired some 70,000 of them and dispatched them to airports all over the country. American citizens are expected to keep their mouths shut and submit to these highly invasive searches. This is why I consider it bullying. Obviously, citizens individually going about their private business have no means of standing up to this new federal police force. Most have real jobs and busy schedules to keep, and can’t afford the disruption a protest might create. They have none of the resources available to the feds. They aren’t motivated by power. There is a strong incentive to go along because they have been led to believe that by doing so, they are helping fight the "war on terrorism." I can’t prove it, of course, but I can’t help but think that at least some who applied for federal airport security positions did so because they get their jollies dominating others – of having complete control over, say, a helpless woman whose husband they know they can have arrested. There are probably many schoolyard bullies who never really grew out of it. In addition, I have to wonder about anyone applying for a job involving actions that would probably be classified as sexual misconduct if anyone did them but a federal employee. This is of concern to me personally – in part because of my intense dislike of anyone who abuses power. Were some bimbo drawing a federal paycheck to touch my girlfriend intimately, I cannot say I wouldn’t react. I know myself well enough to know I probably wouldn’t just stand there and say nothing. If it were a male who did it, I cannot guarantee he wouldn’t be picking himself up off the floor. I am very much afraid I’d be one of the people handcuffed and hauled off. How is a normal person supposed to react to this sort of absurdity? My recommendation? Unless and until a lawsuit of some kind puts a stop to this nonsense, avoid airports like the plague. I do not relish the thought of being in a situation where any protest against the actions of people representing my government would result in escalating penalties, as if I’d been transported back to Nazi Germany in the early ‘30s. I imagine others are avoiding flying for the same reason. The airline industry is in a financial tailspin, and no doubt this is part of it. I would think airlines themselves would evidence more concern about the direction the country has taken since 9/11 – unless, of course, the federal bailouts are already arranged. This has nothing to do with the "war on terrorism" and everything to do with the U.S. government terrorizing its own people, whether through humiliating treatment at airports, from the amoral John Poindexter’s Total Information Awareness, or whatever nightmare the feds dream up next. My prediction: someone is going to end up staring prison in the face after a confrontation at a security checkpoint in an airport goes bad. Probably someone who saw his wife being fondled and lost control, or possibly just a guy who lost patience after a bad day at work or a poor night’s sleep. I’m surprised it hasn’t happened already. I can see the feds trying to make an example of such a person – a citizen whose "crimes" consisted in believing that there should be limits on what the federal government can do, even in an age of terrorism, and that citizens have an inherent right not to be bullied by their government. When federal employees can bully citizens with impunity, including getting cheap sexual thrills out of it, the citizens cease to be citizens and become subjects: subject to arbitrary federal power. I know of no answer except litigation, which has already begun in the Monahan case. If it should turn out that litigation is impossible, we will know that we are living in a police state. Can our government claim to be morally superior to Bush’s "axis of evil" if its best answer to whatever terrorist threats really exist is to terrorize its own people? How different are these federal employees from the schoolyard bullies we grew up with who got their jollies terrorizing smaller kids? At least you could talk back to them without the risk of being handcuffed and thrown in jail. January 1, 2003
Copyright © 2003 LewRockwell.com
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Steven
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