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."

Comments

Explosives Residue

[the eric conspiracy]

If somebody tested positive for explosives residue going through airport security I'd be suspicious too.

The problem here is the level of expertise of the people responding to this situation. It's like these people are DMV rejects. They do not have the training or even basic knowledge needed to deal with this situation AT ALL.

Re:Explosives Residue

[kaiser423]

This guy got a raw deal. Hell, at LAX I was running late for my plane with my family and had some luggage that had tested positively for bomb residue just a week earlier (I was working at an explosives facility...). I, of course, got stopped for more luggage swiping because I had recently tested positive. While in the plexiglass cube surrounded by TSA agents I yell at my wife to take all of my luggage, everything except my shoes and wallet because they're going to test positive for bomb residue. A TSA agent was literally standing next to me as I'm telling my wife to take my stuff because it has bomb residue on it, and no one cared.

Then they didn't even test me because it appeared that all I was travelling with was a wallet and flip flops. Shouldn't that also be some kind of warning sign?

The advantages of being a white male I guess.

SPOILERS

[GameboyRMH]

Why did this happen?

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 on his pants which came back positive for some unknown reason, 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.

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?

This is why I don't fly in clothes that I've handled gasoline or worked on cars in, you never know what might have been absorbed into the fibers.