Force a woman to cut her own nipples to spite Bin Laden? Just following Homeland Security orders, ma’am.
I think the whole War on Terror idea is a monstrous stupidity at best – and at worst a cynical ploy by our governments to keep us afraid and to keep them in office. Following that latter argument: enough people in the Republican administration must have realised Bush would never have been reelected without 9/11. So, it would make sense to use and manipulate the terror threat to keep the sheep so afraid of the idea of wolves that they would choose to follow even the most incompetent and corrupt shepherd.
I also believe bureaucracies are forces for evil. Within bureaucracies people stop to act and think as moral and responsible human beings. They will hide inside and behind these structures and are able to do the most monstrous things while using the ‘just following orders’ excuse/explanation. To make the most obvious comparison: the machinery behind the Nazi death camps was a perfect bureaucratic construct. Bureaucracies are also a great place and a magnet for petty and small-minded people who just love a bit of power and a big machine to hide behind when their decisions are questioned.
So, when you start with the fear-mongering monstrosity that is the War on Terror and its moronically perverse child ‘Homeland Security’ and you combine that with the societal evil of bureaucracies, you can be assured that things will soon get out of hand.
Which leads to stories like the following:
A Texas woman who said she was forced to remove a nipple ring with pliers in order to board an airplane called Thursday for an apology by federal security agents and a civil rights investigation.
Hamlin, 37, said she was trying to board a flight from Lubbock to Dallas on Feb. 24 when she was scanned by a Transportation Security Administration agent after passing through a larger metal detector without problems. The female TSA agent used a handheld detector that beeped when it passed in front of Hamlin’s chest, the Dallas-area resident said.
Hamlin said she told the woman she was wearing nipple piercings. The agent then called over her male colleagues, one of whom said she would have to remove the jewelry, Hamlin said. Hamlin said she could not remove them and asked whether she could instead display her pierced breasts in private to the female agent. But several other male officers told her she could not board her flight until the jewelry was out, she said. She was taken behind a curtain and managed to remove one bar-shaped piercing but had trouble with the second, a ring.
“Still crying, she informed the TSA officer that she could not remove it without the help of pliers, and the officer gave a pair to her,” said Hamlin’s attorney, Gloria Allred, reading from a letter she sent Thursday to the director of the TSA’s Office of Civil Rights and Liberties. Allred is a well-known Los Angeles lawyer who often represents high-profile claims.
Applying pliers to the torso of a mannequin that had a peach-colored bra with the rings on it, Hamlin showed reporters at the news conference how she took off the second ring. She said she heard male TSA agents snickering as she took out the ring. She was scanned again and was allowed to board even though she still was wearing a belly button ring.
“After nipple rings are inserted, the skin can often heal around the piercing, and the rings can be extremely difficult and painful to remove. The conduct of TSA was cruel and unnecessary,” Allred wrote. “The last time that I checked a nipple was not a dangerous weapon.”
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