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Don't Fly During Ramadan
An anonymous reader sends in a harrowing story from Aditya Mukerjee about his recent attempt to fly from New York to Los Angeles. After being pulled aside in the security line, he faced hours of interrogation by uncommunicative officials from several different agencies. When he was finally cleared, his airline, Jet Blue, wouldn't let him on the plane anyway. When he got home, he found evidence that it had been searched. He writes,
"It was 2:20PM by the time I was finally released from custody. My entire body was shaking uncontrollably, as if I were extremely cold, even though I wasn’t. I couldn’t identify the emotion I was feeling. Surprisingly, as far as I could tell, I was shaking out of neither fear nor anger - I felt neither of those emotions at the time. The shaking motion was entirely involuntary, and I couldn’t force my limbs to be still, no matter how hard I concentrated. In the end, JetBlue did refund my flight, but they cancelled my entire round-trip ticket. Because I had to rebook on another airline that same day, it ended up costing me about $700 more for the entire trip. .. But no matter how I’ve tried to rationalize this in the last week and a half, nothing can block out the memory of the chilling sensation I felt that first morning, lying on my air mattress, trying to forget the image of large, uniformed men invading the sanctuary of my home in my absence, wondering when they had done it, wondering why they had done it."
Hey, America,
Are you proud of yourself yet? Proud of what you've become to yourself, your citizens and to the rest of the world? I can't imagine that this is what any of our founding fathers envisioned when they risked everything in order to found this country. And now look what you've made of it.
Ashamed,
A Disappointed Citizen
It's called jihad.
When an entire religion declares that non-members are subhuman kafirs who deserve death, and the "moderate" members of that religion tacitly allow that, it's bad enough.
But it's even worse when that religion places the "holy" duty of jihad on all its members to go out and literally wage war against kafirs.
You reap what you sow.
What the fuck does TFA have to do with flying during Ramadan?
In any case, while the argument can be made he could have driven or taken the bus instead of flown, and so travel is not infringed, there are cases when air travel is the only viable option. Therefore the security theater that has popped up over the past decade can only be construed as an attack on our right to travel, and, along with the job creation program called military action and surveillance, transform us into a citizenry whose ability to grow and become education is much less that the previous generation.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Actually, the after-effects from a surge adrenalin was why he was shaking.
Admittedly, caused by the "fight or flight" reflex triggered by the fear engendered by the abusive of authority administered upon his person.
Its literally his body and muscles, all hyped up to run but having no escape, trembling as it releases all that energy and tension to return to normal functioning.
Remember when "fear of flying" used to be about the planes crashing?
I think opening a newspaper recently, and following anything happening regarding the NSA, Snowden, Manning, Greenwald, etc. might provide you with some circumstantial evidence that would indicate that the scenario described is plausible. Hell, even if it isn't true, I'm angry that things have gotten to the point that I can believe it. Further, now that Clapper has gone in front Congress and been caught lying without repercussions, even a flat denial from officials doesn't cut it for me anymore. This is a problem for our now seemingly nominal democracy. I heard a great line from Ron Paul - I may misquote: "The truth becomes treason in an empire of lies". We're there.
Or more terminologically correct, "Terror".
Terrorism:
Terrorism is the systematic use of terror, often violent, especially as a means of coercion.
Terrorist:
A person who uses terrorism in the pursuit of political aims.
So really, you, like Miranda last week, had a run in with terrorists and lived.
the only crime here is the gentleman indulged these assholes for more than three hours in a groundless invasion of his privacy and freedom of religion in the pursuit of domestic travel. shit like 'how many times do you pray' and 'did you eat breakfast' are pointless.
and that cold feeling? thats called physical exhaustion. low blood sugar , blood pressure and high stress.
unless chimeracoder feels like pressing charges or hiring an attorney though, which im sure the TSA would clearly apreciate if he didnt, its just another story of a government agency that glad-hands people into submitting to pointless unlawful detention based on skin color. Use your instincts. refuse full body scans and opt for public pat-down. if thats not an offer, refuse private pat-down and leave. Sure, you may be detained or arrested by police as a matter of policy, but its seriously unlikely you'll face or be convicted of any misdemeanor or criminal charge.
Good people go to bed earlier.
I've felt that feeling to a much smaller degree when I found out that my identity was stolen and a credit card was opened in my name. We go about our lives confident that some things are safe. When we leave the house/apartment in the morning, we're confident that everything will be there when we get back. When we walk down the street, we're confident that our body won't be violated by some random stranger. When we go about our daily lives, we're confident that someone isn't - at that moment - opening lines of credit that will financially ruin us.
We're confident about all this because the alternative is living in terror of assaults from all angles at every second and there's no way a sane mind could deal with this.
So we convince ourselves that we (and our belongings, credit, loved ones, etc) are safe.
And then something like this happens which shatters our illusion of safety. Mine was a bit abstract (your credit score isn't exactly a physical entity) and was caught early so the impact wasn't as big. The author's impact was worse because his body safety illusion was shattered, his concept of having the freedom to move as he pleased was destroyed, and the safety of his personal effects was violated. Rape victims probably feel something similar. We don't really have a word that accurately describes it because it isn't a feeling we feel often enough.
Oh and if you think you don't have an illusion of safety because you've read stories like this and know it can happen - you're wrong. Even though you read the stories, part of your brain rationalizes away the terror of the situation as "things that happen to other people" and you maintain your internal safety illusion until something like this happens.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
You're proud to be a bully? Go you!
Maybe, just maybe some TSA bullie saw hindu clothes and some headgear and said let me fuck with this rag head, and pushed the little button that makes the machine light up regardless of whether residue is present.
Silence is a state of mime.
Actually it would be like detaining an Irish pagan on suspicion of being an IRA terrorist. Hinduism and Islam are entirely unrelated to each other. Episcopalians and Catholics on the other hand might as well belong to the same religion.. Oh wait, they do. Ironic how the kernel of your post was about ignorance.
Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power. -- Mussolini
That's a shame then, a case of mistaken identity. Unfortunately this sort of thing happens occasionally, but it is the Muzzes to blame not the authorities defending against them.
I generally don't presume to speak for others, but in this case I'll make an exception.
On behalf of everyone who isn't a bigoted moronic arsewipe, I'd just like to say to you: You are an oxygen thief.
Fuck you. Flying is a necessary part of a normal life. Just because you have decided you don't need it doesn't make it a luxury. People with family abroad, jobs that are in different cities, or maybe someone who wants to see parts of the world and expand their mind beyond their backyard.
The market-based solution of boycott isn't always the solution! Sometimes you need laws to protect minorities.
An uncorroborated story, retold in amazing detail (he remembers almost everything said to him so clearly that he's comfortable using quotation marks for dialog), complete with a clever protagonist who's at the mercy of idiots (the Jet Blue agent who, despite working at one of the busiest airports in the US seems never to have encountered anyone who isn't a WASP, the TSA drones who think they're working in the Hotel California, the cops who can't read dates on an ID card and mistake venture capital with capitol one credit cards because, y'know, they're a bunch of blue-collar dummies. Luckily though, our protagonist is clever enough to be able to guess their source of confusion immediately). Then, the chilling conclusion, where he returns home to find almost everything exactly in place, except for the missing photograph. Why would whatever shadowy TLA actually take a photograph off the wall? If they were interested in what it showed, might it not just occur to them to, I dunno, take a picture of it themselves? Then there's the procedural inconsistencies...the NYPD officer can't even be present when he's patted down "because when we pat people down, it’s to lock them up." Really? NYC, the focus of the "Stop and Frisk" controversy actually has officers who believe they can't do a pat-down unless it's during an arrest? And going back to the uncorroborated nature of the story, he would have at least had some voicemails from himself during this ordeal, except once again the universe conspired against him and when he called his parents, "Unfortunately, my mom’s voicemail was full, and my dad had never even set his up".
I'm not going to go so far as to say that the blogger here is lying, but there's more than enough here to make me very skeptical.
Some bring out the best in others, some the worst. Some bring out far more.
You got the wrong Arthur Dent quote - should have been this: “It comes from a very ancient democracy, you see..." "You mean, it comes from a world of lizards?" "No," said Ford, who by this time was a little more rational and coherent than he had been, having finally had the coffee forced down him, "nothing so simple. Nothing anything like so straightforward. On its world, the people are people. The leaders are lizards. The people hate the lizards and the lizards rule the people." "Odd," said Arthur, "I thought you said it was a democracy." "I did," said Ford. "It is." "So," said Arthur, hoping he wasn't sounding ridiculously obtuse, "why don't people get rid of the lizards?" "It honestly doesn't occur to them," said Ford. "They've all got the vote, so they all pretty much assume that the government they've voted in more or less approximates to the government they want."
A friend of mine set off the explosives detectors while trying to fly home for spring break. He hadn't been in contact with any cleaning products or fertilizers or anything like that, and he couldn't for the life of him figure out what the culprit could be.
In the end, it turned out it was his sweat-absorbing socks. I'm not a chemist, so I don't know precisely what it was in sweat that can set off their detectors (ammonia, maybe?), but for everyone's sake I hope TSA had some good hazmat disposal protocols for those things.
Of course, my friend is white, so no back-alley interrogation for him.
Your contention is "He was just asking for it"?
Make sure to mention that line of thinking if you get called to jury duty. I'm sure the victim doesn't want you on the jury any more than you want to be on the jury. Perhaps even more.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
Most of us have "garage" clothes and don't wear them out. You know, because we have some self-respect and class.
And so would any real terrorist, but they don't seem to consider that.
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
... and you cut off before the most important bit:
"You mean they actually vote for the lizards?"
"Oh yes," said Ford with a shrug, "of course."
"But," said Arthur, going for the big one again, "why?"
“Because if they didn’t vote for a lizard, the wrong lizard might get in.”
I agree about their randomness. I suspect that they mean random in the same sense as "random access memory". What the computer does with RAM is not random.
I got "randomly selected" for five legs of a six-leg trip once. Then I stopped flying if I could avoid it.
www.wavefront-av.com
Aside from the deprivation of water for an extended period of time (which was probably due to fear of him washing off residue, but still, it perhaps shouldn't have been for that long), I, anti-TSA and 9-11 truther, support these TSA and FBI actions for the most part (though I would have preferred they had been done by private businesses, such as the airlines and airport). Non-invasive chemical testing is precisely the sort of testing that should be done, rather than sexual molestation and virtual strip searching.
The only problem here is JetBlue a) denying him passage and b) compounding the problem by not rebooking him for the same fare. I support such actions in theory, under the First Amendment freedom of association, but if the guy's account is accurate, the public should know about JetBlue's policies.
Note: My personal support of First Amendment freedom of association is at odds with the Civil Rights Act, which I think should be abolished, except in the South. The guy may have a case of racial discrimination under the Civil Rights Act, but of course JetBlue would use the defense that they had the results of the objective chemical test.
I haven't flown in 11 years, and I routinely encourage others not to. Not for personal, not for business. Not at all.
I routinely drive 200-500 mile round trips because I won't advocate a pat down or a naked picture. Not of my wife, my children, or even myself. It is an unacceptable term of flying.
Don't tell me that I'm not willing to inconvenience myself sir, I find it repugnant, and offensive - and I have put my money where my mouth is.
Video meliora proboque deteriora sequor - Ovidius
The guy's Indian, and to your average dimwitted, racist TSA goon that's just another variety of "terr'ist sand-nigger." They're not even smart enough to be racist properly.
This led to him getting an enhanced pat-down with an explosive swab test
Last time I flew to the US I had the privilege of being tested for explosives too. The test came back negative, which is why I didn't go through several hours of interrogation.
Sadly your paranoid prejudiced stupid theory falls apart: I'm not Indian.
Now this raises the question, is this how they treat anyone who they think is a Muslim? Explosive swab test and then run them through the wringer if it tests positive, complete with searching their home?
Explosive test comes up positive in an airport and you wonder why they react strongly? You truly are a fuckwit.
Bullshit, he tested positive for chemicals which are also used in explosives. That doesn't warrant holding someone for longer than it takes to determine they don't have explosives on them or in their luggage. On top of that they then apparently went and searched his appartment, because he had chemical residues on his person.
I've worked in close proximity to military working dogs that did bomb sniffing. Their training is such that when in doubt they sit and indicate a chemical. I can't tell you how many times I saw the base I was at go into a temporary lockdown which they searched a truck more thoroughly because a dog sat down. It doesn't mean that it isn't a valid form of detection but that false positives are far more likely than you might think and should be handled in a professional manner.
They surely get many false positives or positives for innocent reasons, yet they treated this guy like Bin Laden reincarnated for hours on end. If you RTFA'd you'd see that one of the agents even admitted the treatment was because of his "background." Is that clear-cut enough?
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
> and everything snowballed from there like some kind of comedy skit, where everything he did and said was
> interpreted as matching the profile of a terrorist.
They call it security THEATER for a reason. These people's jobs are best understood as acting jobs as part of a demented straight faced comedy troupe whose schtik is acting like they have no sense of humor at all.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
Black box gave false positive result.
Under-trained and under-educated interrogators were not capable of either asking relevant questions or understanding his answers.
Interrogators resorted to low-level torture (not providing water after multiple hours).
Unconstitutional search of his apartment was conducted.
FTFY
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Saying that someone "tested positive" is far too strong for such a test.
This is true especially for cases where the 'true positives' are a very small percentage of the total population. For example, if the test has a 5% false positive rate, and 1% of the population is actually positive, then for every true positive there will .05*.99 = 4.95 false positives. IOW, if you test positive you are still just slightly more than 20% likely to be true positive.
This is a well know problem in medical testing and drug testing (though it's often forgotten in the drug testing business). There is a name for this rule but I forget what it is. Here's a better explanation (Bayes' FTW).
Suppose that you are worried that you might have a rare disease. You decide to get tested, and suppose that the testing methods for this disease are accurate 99 percent of the time (regardless of whether the results come back positive or negative). Suppose this disease is actually quite rare, occurring randomly in the general population in only one of every 10,000 people.
If your test results come back positive, what are your chances that you actually have the disease?
Do you think it is approximately: (a) .99, (b) .90, (c) .10, or (d) .01?
Surprisingly, the answer is (d), less than 1 percent chance that you have the disease!
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