FOIA Letters Reveal Shocking Cases Of TSA Groping Genitals
“Sexually abused by a government official”
By: Paul Joseph Watson
Hundreds of letters of complaint about the TSA’s invasive security procedures released this week under the Freedom of Information Act include numerous horror stories about TSA screeners directly touching people’s genitals during pat downs.
Following a FOIA request in 2010, the non-profit website Governmentattic.org has released the files after a two year battle with the TSA to make them public. The letters can be viewed here.
The letters confirm what we first reported back in 2010, that the TSA’s new security procedures for “advanced pat downs” include literally touching and in some cases groping the genitals of travelers.
In one incident which occurred on October 29, 2010 at Hobby Airport, Houston, a woman reveals how a TSA screener “putting her hand on my vagina,” caused the woman to “have traumatic reaction that lasted for days.”
In another letter, a woman complains to Congressman Mike Turner about an incident that happened on November 12, 2010 at Dayton International AIrport. The woman explains how a TSA screener, “felt my inner thighs and my vagina area, touching both of my labia.”
The woman relates how she stood for a minute holding her baby without being able to move having been “sexually assaulted by a government official.
“I began shaking and felt completely violated, abused and assaulted by the TSA agent. I shook for several hours and woke up the next day shaking,” she writes.
Another woman traveling through LAX on November 10, 2010 complains of how she was “sexually assaulted” after a TSA screener touched her vagina.
The files are also replete which cases of TSA screeners fondling men’s genitals.
A veteran of the 10th Special Forces from Bradenton, Florida, who had metal parts in his body as a result of combat injuries reveals how he was subjected to an aggressive pat down “so rough he injured my testicles and (I) was nauseated for hours.”
In another incident which occurred at Phoenix airport, a man with an enlarged prostate reveals how a TSA screener used a metal detecting wand to poke “my penis and my testicles very hard,” despite the fact that the man warned the TSA screener in advance that he suffered pain in his genitals.
In another letter, a former U.S. Air Force officer complains to his Congressman about an experience at Orlando AIrport during which a TSA agent shoved his genitals to one side in order to ensure “it really is your crotch.”
More incidents of TSA agents causing urostomy bags to break are also documented in the files.
As Texas Watchdog reports, “A woman flying out of Detroit Metro Airport tried to explain that after a rather serious cancer surgery she had been fitted with a urostomy bag for the collection of urine. Her searchers ignored her pleas that their rough grabbing and patting would break the seal of the bag and when it did, she wrote, “urine started dribbling down my shirt and into my pants.”
Rape counselors have warned that women who have been sexually assaulted face treatment metered out by TSA screeners that can be “extremely re-traumatizing to someone who has already experienced an invasion of their privacy and their body.” An estimated one in six women in the United States have been the victim of an attempted or completed rape.
In an article published last month, we highlighted a number of other cases where TSA screeners have touched people’s genitals in addition to the ones highlighted in the complaint letters.
The TSA routinely claims that millions of travelers pass through the federal agency’s security procedures every year without complaint. However, when complaints are made, the agency is loathe to make them public.
It took a staggering four years for the TSA to acquiesce to a Freedom of Information Act request filed by ProPublica’s Michael Grabell back in 2008 which asked the agency to reveal details of passenger complaints.
The TSA has also failed to act on a year-old federal appeals court decision demanding the agency hold public hearings about the privacy and health concerns of the naked body scanner program.
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