One Man's Terrorist Is Another Man's TSA Agent

By BlackJack

I've said it before but I think it bears repeating. We've already lost the so-called 'War on Terror'. Terrorism by definition is an activity designed 'to intimidate, destabilize, or otherwise influence' a society. If that was the goal of the September 11th events, they succeeded vastly as we are a nation who have come to live with fear and who have changed our daily lives and given up our own freedoms.

The terrorist have succeeded. Just ask Mandi Hamlin. Transportation Security Administration officers at the Lubbock, Texas airport, most of whom were male, made the 37-year old woman remove her nipple ring using a pair of pliers while standing behind a curtain on the concourse.

"TSA is well aware of terrorists' interest in hiding dangerous items in sensitive areas of the body, therefore we have a duty to the American public to resolve any alarm we discover," the agency said in a written statement. But Hamlin, a member of the 'American public' the TSA is claiming to protect wasn't amused and has hired an attorney to represent her.

A spokesperson for the agency, a unit of the Department of Homeland Security, admitted the TSA's own policy called for a pat-down under such circumstances but did not require the piercings to be removed.

The fact that several male TSA agents stood on the other side of the curtain snickering to each other while Mandi struggled to remove her jewelry added insult to, well, insult. There's an awful lot of terroristic intimidation, destabilization and influencing in that kind of activity. Perhaps we are our own terrorists at this point.

Sadly, our government has acted as the terrorist's foot soldiers in their willingness to trample upon our civil rights and freedoms and have assisted al Qaeda in creating fear in perpetuity. In the never ending 'War on Terror' the lines between us and them have become permanently blurred.