Pre-Selected For Security Check

I want to know - just what are these criteria for pre-selection for search.
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Lots of folks want to know that, including terrorists. So you won't see any official statements about it. Some of the things that appear to trigger the extra intention include: last minute purchase of tickets, purchasing tickets in cash, one way tickets. Note that some internet discount round-trip tickets from places like Expedia, etc., are two one-way tickets -- guaranteed to get you extra attention.
 
Not hard to guess what some of the flags might be. NOT ethnic background, Heaven forfend! I also believe screeners have some "discretionary" powers (our favorite trait, right Jim March?) I met up with a screener in Dothan, Alabama, for God's sake, who reeked of "attitude". When I gave some back over whether my Pentagon building pass constituted sufficient ID, guess what; I was thoroughly screened. Really pissed me off. Little of this passes the common-sense test.:rolleyes:
TC
 
I guess I should feel slighted. I've flown several times since 9/11, with and without the wife, and have never been pre-selected, post-selected, or selected at all for anything. The only thing I do differently than from before 9/11 is not to take any carry-ons except maybe a book or newspaper.

Along the same line, the wife and I made a short trip into Canada a couple of months back. Having heard some horror stories, especially about getting back into the U.S., we were prepared with all kinds of documents (although if you have a passport that's supposed to be all you need). Well, we got into Canada and back into the U.S. without showing any documents to anybody. So much for increased security. Or maybe it was the DoD sticker on my car.
 
I flew out of Louisville in late September 2001. One way ticket. I had moved my kids and all my stuff here and was returning to sell my house in the PRK and come to live in KY. I was going to drive back.

There was this poor guy in front of us with a huge bag getting searched. My wife and I felt good that we were not in his shoes.

Anyway, our turn comes up and they pulled us aside and we got to have our check in bags searched also. Every item, one by one. I think the one way ticket triggered it.

Profile? I am almost a translucent white guy. I couldn't buy a suntan! My wife is almost the same. We sure don't look like we come from the Middle East.

Anyway, the lady at the counter went trough all of our bags, dirty underwear and all. She wore rubber gloves!

A one way ticket will get you searched everytime.
 
I seem to get a special extra search about 75% of the time I fly - I'm a yound adult male, fly alone, and have Hippie Hair(tm). Heh...last Christmas I was checking a rifle in my baggage, AND had an expired ID (I'd forgotten to renew my driver's license). That was a fun time.:rolleyes:

When I go home from school this Christmas, I'm planning on wearing the stinkiest, grossest, most disgusting pair of college-male socks I can create. Want to take my shoes off again, you goons? Go ahead! :D :eek:

Does anyone know the legality of taking photos of the lines and searches? A little disposable camera could be just the thing to unnerve the security brutes.
 
I flew back in August and everyone in line as well as myself noted that everyone who was getting searched was an attractive MLC (model-looking chick) with Dolly Parton attributes. They were all white and in their 20's.

-SquirrelNuts
 
All sounding familiar. On a recent trip to visit my mother, I was pre-selected for "special" attention. My luggage was swabbed for explosives. At the boarding gate (Southwest airlines, no assigned seat) I was pulled aside for further attention. wanded, took shoes off, patted down, carryon and handbag searched. Last one on the plane. I drove back to my residence (in a rental truck with a load of furniture and dishes she had given me) with my mother, who flew back to her home several days later. Same treatment. My mother is an elderly, middle class white woman. Last one on the plane. She should have been allowed to pre-board because of her age, but no, had to be patted down, wanded and searched. She got the last seat on the plane, at the back. I'm a middle-class, middle-aged, white woman. My husband and I probably pay more federal income tax than the average wage earner in the US. I guess my mother and I are danger to society.
 
I was preselected when I used my military ID for the ID. I plan on using my driver's license this tiem around to see if things go different. I was diverted to a special line for the thorough searches, where I was asked if I was active duty. I said yes, and they said if I passed the regular one I'd be good to go.

THe only delay was that I forgot that there was a dummy 9mm on my keychain. I was willing to give it up, so they didn't hassle me about it. They had to look somethign up about it apparently, which was most of the delay. They were really nice about it.
 
But rest assured that Ahmed, Jabal, and Kahlid, those Saudi "tourists" on the flight, were spared the indignity of being "profiled" by the TSA.

And you had better danged well not try and sneak one of those deadly fingernail clippers onto the flight either.
 
Do I detect Sec. of Transportation Norm Mineta's revenge. Below is from the DOT biorgraphies of DOT officials. :rolleyes:

" Mineta and his family were among the 120,000 Americans of Japanese ancestry forced from their homes and into internment camps during World War II."

All of this pre-flight security might deter a hijacking, but no own really knows what is being loaded on the planes such as cargo. Also, who is on the plane between flights? Somebody could be stashing weapons or explosives.
 
Many moons ago I had a job at an airport. Baggage handlers were pretty much people who couldn't get any better job - not exactly the cream of society. The cleaning crew was the same - the only difference was seniority. So unless they are doing the same kind of screening of the ground crew, all the passenger screening is just eyewash.




So, Cool Hand, you bored lately? You're draggin' up old threads! :D
 
Bottomline.. the only people, err majority of people who want to crash planes into building look like arabs - facts are facts.
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Wow, facts.

What sort of Arabs blew up the fed in Oklahoma city?

Just how dark were the Chechnians in the Russian school attack?

Just how many Muslims have been recruited by Al Quida so far from places like Mallasia, Philipines, Chechnia, Bosnia?


I would EXPECT the next terrorist strike to come from someone pretty white bread looking. Not screening WASPs would be a suicide pact.

I get "pre-selected" sometimes. Other times I don't. It's not a big deal. The security is in the fact that it is not predicatable. What you guys are describing is to YOUR benefit. Wake up.
 
Handy has a got a good point. There are blue eyed and blond Muslims. I remember Malcom X had a bit of an epiphany when he encountered overseas WASP looking Muslims. And, of course, there are the converted Westeners who could look like anybody.
 
Conditioning.

Welcome to the perpetual war for perpetual peace. Be assured by the Ministry of Love that this is all for your own good. The Ministry of Truth said so.
 
Lots of folks want to know that, including terrorists.
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The terrorists couldn't care less. In fact, I'll bet they laugh themselves to sleep at night after watching the antics of the luggage monkeys at our airports.

Just put yourself in their shoes for a moment. Think about how uproariously funny it would be to watch a TSA dope take aside a person that is least likely to commit an act of terror, while at roughly the same time the Brit equivalent of TSA lets the well known death-cultist Yusuf Islam AKA "Cat" Stevens onto a cross-Atlantic flight. Were I they, I would laugh until I wet my pants.
 
Welcome to the perpetual war for perpetual peace. Be assured by the Ministry of Love that this is all for your own good. The Ministry of Truth said so.
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What's that supposed to mean??? Is there some deaper conspiracy to slightly inconvenience caucasions at work here? Oh no, the Man is comin' down on Whitey!!


Sure, this is all stupid, but the masses would be even more pissed if something else got jacked because we didn't visibly raise airport security. Unpredictable security measures are always a better deterant to those looking for targets of opportunity.


If you want to bitch about something, may I suggest our complete lack of cargo container tracking and security?
 
Just how dark were the Chechnians in the Russian school attack?
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No mention of skin tone comparisons here, but...
10 of 32 terrorists at Beslan were Arab nationals with Al Qaida ties
WORLD TRIBUNE ^ | Monday, September 6, 2004


Posted on 09/06/2004 1:04:58 PM PDT by FormerACLUmember


Russian investigators said Arab operatives linked to Al Qaida played a major role in the takeover of a Russian school in which 400 people were killed.

Russian officials said authorities have determined that 10 of the 32 suicide attackers who took over a high school in Beslan in North Ossetia last week were nationals from several Arab countries. Most of the attackers were Chechens and Ingush who had been trained at Al Qaida camps in Afghanistan.

The 10 Arab nationals came from Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Syria, officials said. They said security forces seized notebooks in Arabic in the school taken over by insurgents. Officials said survivors told authorities that some of the captors spoke Arabic during the three-day hostage ordeal.

All of the captors were said to have been killed, but three accomplices were arrested, Middle East Newsline reported.

The Arab nationals were said to have been recruited in the Middle East and hosted by Shamil Basayev, head of the Chechen insurgency and aligned with Al Qaida.

"We're hoping to release additional information over the next few days," an official said. "But precise details will require cooperation from our allies."

The officials said the attackers were trained in Al Qaida camps in Afghanistan and financed by Abu Omar Al Seif, regarded as a leading Al Qaida operative and the organization's representative in Chechnya.

Al Seif, identified as the chief Islamic ideologue in the Chechen insurgency, was brought to Chechnya in 1995 by Saudi national Samir Saleh Abdullah Al Suwailem, known as Abu Khattab. Abu Khattab was said to have been killed in 2002.

Officials said Basayev received Saudi financial aid for at least a decade, most of it through Al Seif. They said Basayev and Al Seif employed hundreds of Saudi volunteers for suicide and other mass casualty attacks in Chechnya and other parts of Russia as well as raised funds required for the attack on the school in Beslan.

In December 2003, Federal Security Service spokesman Sergei Ignatchenko said virtually all of the suicide attacks in Russia over the last few years were organized by Al Seif and Abu Al Walid. Ignatchenko identified Al Walid as responsible for the Arab fighters in Chechnya.

"Major financial resources reach Al Walid and Abu Omar from extremist centers in a series of Arab countries," Ignatchenko was quoted as saying by the Itar-Tass news agency.

Several Middle East countries planned to increase security cooperation with Russia, officials said. On Monday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov was scheduled to meet Israeli leaders in an effort to pave the way for expanded security cooperation. Saudi Arabia and Turkey have also agreed to increased security cooperation with Moscow. Victims of the insurgency attack included at least one Turkish national.

"The recent terrorist act in Russia has showed the importance of international cooperation in fight against terrorism," Turkish Interior Minister Abdulkadir Aksu said.
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Feel free to trot out whomever you wish to point out as an exception to the current reality. No matter, I've long believed that it is a mistake to refer to the death-cultists as terrorists anyway as it obscures their true motivations by highlighting their tactics over and above the substance of the issue at hand.

While it is true that someone "pretty white bread looking" may be involved in an attack, it is even more likely that the "someone" in question will exhibit behaviors and/or appearances that will give him away. The former Cat Stevens is a great example. He not only looks like a death-cult psychotic - who calls for the head of an author of an incredibly banal book - BUT HE IS ONE!!! Go figure. Or how about shoe-boy? Tell me he doesn't look squirrelly. Not to mention the oh, so charming, Johnny "Jihad" bin Walker AKA Rat Boy. Gotta love that gaunt fanatic look in those beady little eyes of his.


Even prominent members of the Muslim world are beginning to speak out. They are as tired as I am of people without the guts to acknowledge the elephant in the room. And just as tired of hijackers of a religion being given a politically correct pass to facilitate MORE HIJACKINGS!!!
Self-criticism in Arab media follows school siege
Al-Arabiya GM: Muslims are main perpetrators of terrorismThe Associated Press
Updated: 6:32 a.m. ET Sept. 4, 2004CAIRO, Egypt - Muslims worldwide are the main perpetrators of terrorism, a humiliating and painful truth that must be acknowledged, a prominent Arab writer and television executive wrote Saturday, as Middle East media and officials expressed horror at the bloody rebel siege of a Russian school.


Unusually forthright self-criticism followed the end of the hostage crisis, along with warnings that such actions inflict more damage to the image of Islam than all its enemies could hope. Arab leaders and Muslim clerics denounced the school seizure as unjustifiable and expressed their sympathy.

Russian commandos stormed the school Friday in Beslan, Russia; it had been taken over by rebels demanding independence for Chechnya. Russian officials said Saturday that the death toll was at least 250, with twice as many wounded. Many of the casualties were children.

Images of terrified young survivors being carried from the scene aired repeatedly on Arab TV stations. Pictures of dead and wounded children ran on front pages of Arab newspapers Saturday.

“Holy warriors” from the Middle East long have supported fellow Muslims fighting in Chechnya, and Russian officials said nine or 10 Arabs were among militants killed.

“Our terrorist sons are an end-product of our corrupted culture,” Abdulrahman al-Rashed, general manager of Al-Arabiya television wrote in his daily column published in the pan-Arab Asharq Al-Awsat newspaper. It ran under the headline, “The Painful Truth: All the World Terrorists are Muslims!”

'Humiliating, painful' picture
Al-Rashed ran through a list of recent attacks by Islamic extremist groups — in Russia, Iraq, Sudan, Saudi Arabia and Yemen — many of which are influenced by the ideology of Osama Bin Laden, the Saudi-born leader of the al-Qaida terror network.

“Most perpetrators of suicide operations in buses, schools and residential buildings around the world for the past 10 years have been Muslims,” he wrote. Muslims will be unable to cleanse their image unless “we admit the scandalous facts,” rather than offer condemnations or justifications.

“The picture is humiliating, painful and harsh for all of us,” al-Rashed wrote.

Contributors to Islamic Web sites known for their extremist content had mixed reactions on the hostage crisis, with some praising the separatists. Others wrote that people should wait until the militants had been identified before implicating Arabs in the drama.

Ahmed Bahgat, an Egyptian Islamist, wrote in his column in Egypt’s leading pro-government newspaper, Al-Ahram, that hostage-takers in Russia as well as in Iraq are only harming Islam.

“If all the enemies of Islam united together and decided to harm it ... they wouldn’t have ruined and harmed its image as much as the sons of Islam have done by their stupidity, miscalculations, and misunderstanding of the nature of this age,” Bahgat wrote.

'A new low'
The horrifying images of the dead and wounded Russian students “showed Muslims as monsters who are fed by the blood of children and the pain of their families.”

An editorial in the Saudi English-language Arab News put some blame for the bloody end to the school siege on Russian President Vladimir Putin, saying he couldn’t afford to lose his “tough-man image.” But it added that “the Chechens, with the choice of their targets, had put themselves in a position where no one would shed tears when the punishment came. They reached a new low when they chose toddlers as bargaining chips.”

Heads of state from Egypt, Lebanon and Kuwait offered their sympathy Friday to Russian officials and to the families of people caught up in the hostage drama. A prominent Muslim cleric also denounced it.

“What is the guilt of those children? Why should they be responsible for your conflict with the government?” Egypt’s top Muslim cleric, Grand Sheik Mohammed Sayed Tantawi, was quoted as saying during a Friday sermon in Banha, 30 miles north of Cairo.

“You are taking Islam as a cover and it is a deceptive cover; those who carry out the kidnappings are criminals, not Muslims,” Tantawi, who heads Al-Azhar University, the highest authority in the Sunni Islamic world, was quoted by Egypt’s Middle East News agency as saying.
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Good point on the shipping end of the terrorist bit, but I think the question still begs-has ANYONE seen someone you might profile as a terrorist actually get searched? I've seen two-maybe three.

They were all over the national news and they were huffing and puffing because they weren't treated like Americans.

Well, from what I see here and hear from my friends and family-they were treated exactly the same as us.
 
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