Bend Over and Spread Your Cheeks, Madam

The U.S. Transportation Security Administration (TSA) is now treating every airline passenger as a potential criminal terrorist suspect. All travelers must line up like prison inmates and submit to humiliating full body searches or be denied access to their flight. Huge x-ray scanner machines allow the government agents to see through clothing and view the naked bodies, genitalia and all, of each suspect in a virtual digital strip search.

Suspects may opt out of these body scans only if they agree to suffer the indignity of a far more comprehensive and intrusive full body prison style frisking during which buttocks, breasts, and private parts are patted down, squeezed and groped by government agents. Any complaints or even mild displays of annoyance on the part of a suspect will result not only in exclusion from a flight but potential criminal prosecution as well.

The agents wear rubber gloves while groping the suspects because they want to protect themselves from germs, however, they won’t change their gloves between suspects, so each suspect is exposed to the germs from the bodies of all the other suspects.

If all this is constitutional under the 4^th Amendment then the 4^th Amendment has been completely gutted by the government. If this is constitutional then there is nothing in the way of actual strip and full body cavity searches of all passengers by government agents at airports regardless of whether there is any probable cause based upon a reasonable suspicion that a passenger has or is about to commit a crime.

“Bend over and spread your cheeks, madam,” could be the next official TSA protocol.

President Obama admits that all this is “a huge inconvenience for all of us but necessary to keep us safe from terrorists.” But surely the chances of you or me or president Obama trying to smuggle a plastic bomb on an airplane in his ass crack are equally remote. So why must you and I suffer the indignity and abuse while Obama and his family escape?

I wonder how the president would like to be either strip searched or aggressively frisked every time he tried to board Air Force One. After all, he might be trying to smuggle on a bomb. It’s remotely possible, you know – at least as possible as with any other criminal suspect at the airport, including three year old toddlers and their grandma’s. How would the president like having his own little kids strip searched or groped by government thugs looking for contraband? Surely the first lady’s ass cheeks cavity is more than ample enough to conceal a bomb. Why then isn’t she run through the necessary security gauntlet like the rest of us potential criminals? Why they are not considered suspects but you and I and everyone else is? I have no criminal record, nor do president Obama and his family. Shouldn’t that count for something? I’m not a terrorist and neither are the Obama’s.

Should we all be searched in like manner at office buildings, court houses, and the post office? Anyone anywhere could be trying to conceal a bomb. One of the usual talking head TV pundits – a lawyer of all things – attempted to justify the searches, saying: “we all have a constitutional right to privacy but no one has a constitutional right to fly.” Nonsense! By this reasoning, no one has a constitutional right to ride the bus either, or the subway, unless they sacrifice their privacy like a convict. Can you imagine mandatory strip searches at the Greyhound bus station? At the grocery store?

The fact is, people have a far better chance dying from a slip and fall in their own bath tubs at home than they do at the hands of a terrorist in an airplane. We are at greater risk of death while driving our cars to the airport than we are while flying inside the airplane. So the risk simply does not justify the abusive scrutiny we must endure today at the hands of the police state Authority!

The fact is, a real terrorist could load up the trunk of his car with high explosives; drive it through the Lincoln Tunnel toward Manhattan; blow it up; and cause catastrophic damage to people and property in the same manner as the terrorists of 9/11/01. So, should we stop every vehicle in the queue; strip search each driver and passenger; and inspect the trunk of every car?

The authorities should stop looking for dangerous implements on every passenger, and start searching instead for potentially dangerous criminals among the passengers. They should know who each passenger is before they ever arrive at the airport.

The average citizen traveler should not have to put up with this unconstitutional degradation of their rights in a free society. When an ordinary crime is committed, the authorities investigate and employ criminal profiling to zero in on an identification of the perpetrator. They certainly don’t conduct random searches of the entire populace in order to find leads. That would be unconstitutional, not to mention a waste of time and resources.

Terrorists can and should be identified and dealt with in the same fashion as ordinary criminals without violating the rights of innocent citizens.