You WILL respect my authoritay!
This isn’t about how investigators were able to smuggle liquid explosives and detonators past TSA screeners earlier this year. It’s about the atrocious treatment endured by some Fort Lewis soldiers who were escorting the remains of a colleague home to Virginia earlier this month. Brief background: On the tarmac, an honor guard had been formed by Port of Seattle Police, airport fire and rescue and military personnel as the soldier’s body was placed on the plane. A police officer then took the escort soldiers up to security. The TSA screener checked everyone’s ID, including the police officer, and then had the soldiers go through the metal detectors. Their combat ribbons and medals set off the alarms.
So what does the TSA screener do? He has the soldiers strip off their uniforms – in front of everyone – down to their tee shirts, pants and socks. Will someone please tell me what the hell is wrong with these people? How does some inept, insensitive idiot with the IQ of room temperature even get a TSA job? That TSA screener should have his ass fired.
I am not typically a violent person. But if I were those soldiers, I think I would have opened up a case of whoop-ass.
Why should military personnel be treated differently than anyone else? Boy, it’s so humiliating having to strip down to a tee shits (oh the humanity). Is it entirely possible that a terrorist could buy a uniform at a military surplus store?
My argument isn’t that all this TSA screening is even worthwhile, I’m just tired of everyone thinking just because someone is a cop, fireman, or in the military they deserve special treatment.
Worship of military chest-spaghetti on Dvorak? True colors, I suppose. (Betcha some of those medals were for “attendance”.)
All in all, I love it when one part of the military police state is pitted against another. More articles like this please!
If all the terrorist have to do to bypass security is dress up as military honor guard, then the terrorist have already won…
An alternative might have been for the guy who was in charge of the honor guard to say “hey guys, we’re going through the metal detector now, make sure you place any metal items in the plastic tubs on the belt going through the x-ray machine”.
Or for the honor guard to have figured to do that out on their own.
TSA employees are only slightly smarter then mall security.
I’m just tired of everyone thinking just because someone is a cop, fireman, or in the military they deserve special treatment.
Why, jealous? Maybe do a job where you have the possibility of loosing your life and you’d think differently.
I love it when one part of the military police state is pitted against another.
Oh Please. Go live in China or North Korea if you want to talk about a real police state.
I have never understood why “regulations” always trump common sense. In the days right after 9/11 anyone traveling under DoD orders could show a copy of them to the screeners and bypass the extra searches being conducted. The theory was that since most people in the military have at least some type of security clearance, it was a good bet they were not terrorists. These guys had to be traveling with orders in hand. Why give them all the grief.
Oh, that’s right, the people standing to the right and left of you are all terrorists!
There isn’t always a direct correlation between judgment and intelligence. I’ve seen Mensa level folks make some really bad calls. Also where are all of these MIT graduates that’s waiting to take the jobs from these, “idiots”. It sounds like a person was hired and given exact instructions they followed it. I doubt it would have been a story if he had let them pass and he got fired for it.
Sounds like more of the anti-troop leftwingers are working for the TSA. Let’s see, this is Seattle, and Oakland has this problem too. Some of the airports are better.
At least they aren’t spitting on the returning troops like Vietnam.
#5
Suck it gquaglia, they signed up for the job. Your a cop lover anyway. F – um.
#1 rasco- perhaps they should have searched the body in the casket too…. you know, just in case. They were already on the tarmac, why go through screening after they have loaded the soldiers body on the plane?
I guess TSA was too lazy to wand them…
If only a congressman or senator got tasered, this story would be complete.
Love it when those that think the rules don’t apply to them get burned.
The “honor guard” wasn’t made up of heroic troops making the world safe for truth, justice, and the American way. It was an unidentified band of “Port of Seattle Police, airport fire and rescue and military personnel”. Oddly, it’s never explained why this “honor guard” couldn’t do their honoring someplace on the outside of the airport metal detectors (like maybe the cemetary?).
And, for some reason, everyone from Ken “Rabid Dog” Schram to MikeN imply (and expect us to infer) that the “fallen soldier” was a valiant young man or woman laid low in the line of duty by IEDs while fighting for our right to be free. If so, what the fuck was he doing in Seattle? I don’t recall SeaTac being on any air route from Baghdad to Virginia. And what was he doing flying out of a civilian airport? I understand they have planes and an airport at Ft. Lewis for use in transporting the troops. Soldiers can get on planes at a military base without having to be subjected to the mortification of having to strip down to their tee shirts.
For all we know from the article, the guy may have gotten his ass kicked in a bar fight, or got shanked in the Ft. Lewis drunk tank.
Anyone going through a civilian airport should expect to be subject to the same security precautions as everyone else.
A friend of mine in the military told me he was flying for the military on a commercial flight, the TSA would not let him board with a tool set (government issue) that he used in his work (it got trashed so we taxpayers could buy another one) but the pistol (unloaded) on his belt (government issue) was ok because he had his traveling papers.
>guy may have gotten his ass kicked in a bar fight, or got shanked in the Ft. Lewis drunk tank.
Next you’ll be telling us Max Cleland doesn’t deserve his purple hearts. Service is service.
>>Next you’ll be telling us Max
>>Cleland doesn’t deserve his purple
>>hearts. Service is service.
Oh no, Mikie. He deserved them, just as John Kerry deserved his. Anyone who is wounded fighting for his or her country is entitled to all the medals they get.
But to let any Tom, Dick, or Harry who can dress up in a military uniform waltz through security at a civilian airport just on their say-so seems a little imprudent, don’t you think?
Besides, “military personnel” made up only a small part of this so-called honor guard, which was formed by the Port of Seattle police (not even the regular police). The rest of them were cops, airport firemen, and rescue personnel. And it wasn’t the mysteriously-dead soldier who had to go through the metal detectors, it was ambulance drivers and airport firemen.
I really don’t see the problem here. Not everyone who is a “good person” gets to bypass airport security just on the basis of their (sometimes self-proclaimed) goodness.
You want to get on a plane at a civilian airport, put your metal shit in the fucking plastic tray.
Mustard- you do realize the “tarmac” is part of the airport runway, well within the secure area of the facility?
>>Mustard- you do realize the “tarmac”
>>is part of the airport runway, well
>>within the secure area of the
>>facility?
Yes Mac, I’m aware of where the “tarmac” is. That part of the story made no sense. Why would anyone have to go through metal detectors to get from the secure area of the facility to the secure area of the facility?
I just wrote that off as the effects of end-stage rabies on the part of the author; perhaps his spittle-flecked monitor did not allow him to review his article before he sent it in.
And so what? How does that affect what I said? Or are you suggesting that the honor guard had already gone through security (presumably they must have, unless they had lived inside the airport since before security checkpoints were common), and then were marched BACK to the metal detectors and forced to go through them a second time??
Yes, that was my point. If they were allowed access to the aircraft before they were searched, then that in itself would be a breach of security.
>>If they were allowed access to the
>>aircraft before they were searched,
>>then that in itself would be a breach
>>of security.
Right. That part of the story makes no sense at all, any way you look at it. That’s why I wrote it off as end-stage rabies.
#3: “If all the terrorist have to do to bypass security is dress up as military honor guard, then the terrorist have already won…”
Fortunately, that’s not a worry any more – they won roughly 5 years ago…
Youse guyse is barkin’ up da wrong tree.
These ridiculous incidents of suspension of common sense are brought to you and yours courtesy of your good friend and mine, Political Correctness.
Once upon a time, before the enforced-egalitarian Marxist contingent set law enforcement and public safety back decades, there was a thing called common sense.
When law enforcement authorities were looking for suspects, they would first devote their attention to members of readily identifiable groups which were statistically shown to commit the offense(s) of interest more frequently.
At some point, far-left PC idiots, aided and abetted by the ACLU and similar groups, notice statistical realities that could be used to (falsely and dishonestly) absolve members of groups overrepresented in criminal offenses, and promote the socially destructive falsehood that no group of people is any more likely to be involved with certain crimes than any other group. They labeled the application of statistical reality to crime investigation “profiling” and denounced it, again falsely, as “racist”.
Their efforts have been largely successful, and now local, state and Federal authorities, in the course of investigation, have to pretend that everyone is exactly as likely as everyone else to have committed a given criminal offense. This has generally been promulgated in the form of Federal court mandates for agencies to demonstrate in their reporting that they only stop / interrogate / investigate criminal suspects in precise proportion to their percentage of the population, instead of in proportion to the percentage of their group which actually commits the crime(s) in question.
And this Logic-Free Reasoning®™ has been successfully applied elsewhere, which is how we come to the point where TSA screeners, as much or moreso than others, are explicitly directed to regard a white 85-year-old American female with no less suspicion than a 25-year-old Arab wearing the garb of a devout Muslim and behaving furtively and suspiciously.
After all, the fact that terrorists, suicide bombers, highjackers, are so often young, Middle Eastern Muslims is no reason to think that other young, Middle Eastern Muslims are more likely to be terrorists than your Grandma, with her hearing aid and walker. To suspect people who match the description and characteristic behavior of actual terrorists has been officially denounced as prejudicial discrimination and racism.
So, as the TSA screeners have had that insane crock of bullshit drummed into them, and made aware of the risks to their continued employment that exercising common sense can cause, are now careful to subject the most obviously unlikely individuals to no less scrutiny than Osama bin Laden himself.
Don’t blame the TSA, blame the lawyers and the scum who have foisted this shit upon our legal system. Next time your dear Nana is strip-searched and her knitting needles siezed as terrorist weapons, just be thankful we live in a society that rejects stereotypes, on dain-bramaged PC principle, even when they’re completely valid – and valuable.
After all, stereotypes don’t pop into existence from nowhere. By way of example, the “unfair stereotype” of mobsters being usually Italians couldn’t possibly have anything to do with the Cosa Nostra being born and headquartered in Sicily, could it? Oh, no. Men and women are equally represented among Mob wiseguys, just as Swedes, Eskimoes and Tahitians are as common in the Mafia as Italians are… What kind of moron would believe such shit for one second?
Hence the Fuckwit’s Mantra: “Ooh, we don’t wanna profile people, that’s not nice…”
So, THAT’S where common sense went. Capisce?
Gosh, el Pescado con Tres Cabezas, that sure was a verbally violent and frightening tirade!
I’m not sure I see what that has to do with TSA staffers making airport personnel, and people who claim to be military pass, through a security checkpoint before they’re allowed into the belly of the beast.
As to your stereotype opinions – interesting. Should we assume you believe that darkies are mentally inferior dropouts who love watermelon, valuable only because of the extra bone in their foot that allows them to jump higher than whitey? That Hebes are penny-pinching shylocks whose only contribution to society has been to start all the wars? That people in Mexico are wetbacks-in-waiting, looking forward to illegally immigrating to the US so they can take good-paying jobs away from red-blooded Americans? That female rugby players at Rutgers are all nappy-headed ho’s?
>>Next time your dear Nana is strip-searched
>>and her knitting needles siezed as
>>terrorist weapons
Nana may be strip-searched, but they will not take her knitting needles away. I look much more like a terrorist than Nana, and I pass through security checkpoints all over the country with impunity, toting my knitting needles. Even if they’re 14″ steel weapons of destruction. Oddly, nail clippers are considered dangerous, but knitting needles and crochet hooks have been allowed on airplanes for years.
This set of comments makes me ill and shows why we need a draft instead of professional armed forces. Some of you whinny bastards would then understand what it takes to preserve this country, the freedoms and values you love to disparage. A draft would also insure we would only engage in wars that were absolutely necessary to protect those same values and freedom. This honor guard should be saluted, the dead should be honored and the head of the TSA should be made to personally apologize to each of them.
#23 You may have said the most sensible thing so far. Unfortunately, the left wing zealots that inhabit this blog will cut you to pieces for uttering such sensible blasphemy.
>>This honor guard should be saluted
What about the next one? The one made up of white-boy converts to Islam, the ones who come to the airport and say they’re there to bid their brother in arms farewell, and then they pull out the MAC-10s, the AK-47s, the C-4 explosive, and the suitcase nuke, and turn the airport into a smoking heap of radioactive waste, unusable for the next 10,000 years?
I really don’t see the problem with expecting ALL people (if you’re going to expect anyone) to go through the metal detectors. What’s the bfd?
Mustard, Put away the Die Hard video and back slowly away from the discussion.
>>Mustard, Put away the Die Hard video and
>>back slowly away from the discussion.
What, you think anyone who shows up at the airport claiming to be George S. Patton or General Petraeus’s mother-in-law should be escorted around the metal detectors?
I’ll back away from the discussion as soon as you put the kibosh on that lunatic who’s posting about 200 messages per hour in outdated threads, exhorting us to buy Xanax and Ambien and Percocet “onlune”.
Deal?
Mustard….as usual, maybe you SHOULD purchase some of those Percocet, and Ambian and take a snooze.
We all know you’re a leftist, anti-government, anarchist. You don’t need to disparage the military or anyone else to prove it.