Body Scanner Attitude

Dear TSA Employees,

Even if you don’t pay attention to TV  news, online news, blogs, radio, and YouTube, by now  you have to have at least heard from your supervisors that Americans are absolutely not happy with how you are conducting your security searches of law-abiding airline passengers about to board their airplanes.  Why?  Three reasons.  1) Body scanner imagery is pornographic photography of unwilling models, and is peeping-tommery, which is illegal.  2) Enhanced pat-downs, which by definition includes your hands firmly applied to the genitals and breasts of unwilling travelers, is sexual molestation, which is illegal.  Especially when conducted on children under 18.  3) The X-Rays emitted by body scanners, especially for frequent flyers who receive repeated exposure, cause cancer, which is a deadly disease.  And you, who are exposed hundreds of times every day by running these machines, don’t even wear a simple lead apron, like any dental hygienist does.

I have one question for you:

What ARE you thinking???

Can’t you see that your supervisors are hanging you out to dry???  Despite what they are telling you, the Constitution and state criminal statutes are not suspended at the airport gates.   Airports are not Guantanamo Bay,  and they are not prisons where convicted criminals expect to be regularly strip searched.  You are not dealing with people who are in any way even suspected criminals, much less convicted criminals, or people under arrest in any form.  You are dealing with the free and law abiding public, the very society you are sworn to protect, rather than assault.   Despite what you’ve been told, the actions you are committing against the law abiding flying public are crimes, and you will be held accountable.    Do not believe anyone in rank above you who tells you otherwise.    Like the guards in Abu Ghraib in Iraq who followed the instructions of their superiors, yet are serving time now in prison, you will be held accountable.  Like the prison camp guards and military monsters who were tried after World War II at the Nuremberg Trials for their atrocities, the fact that you were “just following orders” is not a legal defense.

I repeat – Your supervisors are hanging you out to dry.  They are issuing orders, but it is you who are physically forcing people into having their naked bodies photographed and poisoned.  It is you who are rubbing your hands on the genitals and breasts of innocent men, women, and children, retraumatizing rape victims, and administering initial trauma on babies, toddlers, and underage children.

It might not be next week.  It might not be next month.  But it will come.  In the coming months, it will come.

You Will Be Held Accountable

Save yourselves and get out now.  Quit and get a different job.  Leave your supervisors, leave the Secretary of Homeland Security (who has now become the monster she was trying to fight), and leave the president, to get what they have coming to them.  Get yourselves out of the way, because the wrath of the American people is coming after them, and you do not want to get caught in the hurricane that is coming. They will be tried in American courts of law.

A Deeply Concerned American,

@BodyScannerAttitude.com