Don't touch my junk!

The state fucks you. The TSA is merely the foreplay department.

Comment is Free writer Richard Adams is not at all perturbed by the TSA, inviting them to "touch his junk anytime."

The pathetic mewing set off by the "Don't touch my junk" airport screening incident tells you pretty much everything you you want to know about the teenage grudge-bearing and solipsistic whining of modern society.

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It's bizarre that a nation that has largely rolled over and acquiesced in allowing its government to tap its phones and internet traffic – the Patriot act, a far graver assault on civil liberties – should get so exercised about this instead.

Of course. The Patriot Act was an unacceptable expansion of state power to spy on citizens, and eliminate many of their liberties. The US government has decided that, to make its citizens safe, they must give up a sizable chunk of their freedom.

And the recent screenings and searchings are an extension of this bonfire of liberty. Just take a look at this video. It shows a child being strip searched by a TSA agent. Or how about the humiliating ordeal that a disabled woman was put through while being pat-down in an airport? [emphasis mine]

Sawyer is a bladder cancer survivor who now wears a urostomy bag, which collects his urine from a stoma, or opening in his stomach. “I have to wear special clothes and in order to mount the bag I have to seal a wafer to my stomach and then attach the bag. If the seal is broken, urine can leak all over my body and clothes.”

On Nov. 7, Sawyer said he went through the security scanner at Detroit Metropolitan Airport. “Evidently the scanner picked up on my urostomy bag, because I was chosen for a pat-down procedure.”

Due to his medical condition, Sawyer asked to be screened in private. “One officer looked at another, rolled his eyes and said that they really didn’t have any place to take me,” said Sawyer. “After I said again that I’d like privacy, they took me to an office.”

Sawyer wears pants two sizes too large in order to accommodate the medical equipment he wears. He’d taken off his belt to go through the scanner and once in the office with security personnel, his pants fell down around his ankles. “I had to ask twice if it was OK to pull up my shorts,” said Sawyer, “And every time I tried to tell them about my medical condition, they said they didn’t need to know about that.”

Before starting the enhanced pat-down procedure, a security officer did tell him what they were going to do and how they were going to it, but Sawyer said it wasn’t until they asked him to remove his sweatshirt and saw his urostomy bag that they asked any questions about his medical condition.

“One agent watched as the other used his flat hand to go slowly down my chest. I tried to warn him that he would hit the bag and break the seal on my bag, but he ignored me. Sure enough, the seal was broken and urine started dribbling down my shirt and my leg and into my pants.”

The security officer finished the pat-down, tested the gloves for any trace of explosives and then, Sawyer said, “He told me I could go. They never apologized. They never offered to help. They acted like they hadn’t seen what happened. But I know they saw it because I had a wet mark.”

Humiliated, upset and wet, Sawyer said he had to walk through the airport soaked in urine, board his plane and wait until after takeoff before he could clean up.

“I am totally appalled by the fact that agents that are performing these pat-downs have so little concern for people with medical conditions,” said Sawyer.

Don't you just love civil servants?

It seems the government took seriously the idea that terrorist attacks (like 9/11) happened because the terrorists hate the freedoms and liberties that America has. So the problem is being solved by confiscating from the people as much of their liberty as possible.

Of course, this idea is pure horseshit. Terrorists have a wide selection of other countries to attack that are just as "free" as the USA is. The reason you don't often hear of Switzerland or Sweden being attacked by terrorists is because those countries are much less involved in war, not trying to police the world by killing thousands—easily millions—of foreigners. A couple of years a go, Jack Hunter wrote a piece about "blowback" for the Charleston City Paper, concisely explaining the reasons terrorists hate America. And they have jack shit to do with liberty. They have more to do with the use of violence, coercion and force – the state's bread and butter.

We haven't been minding our own business for a very long time.

As described in a 1987 PBS documentary, when the democratically-elected prime minister of Iran, Mohammed Mossadegh, decided to nationalize his country's oil supply in 1953, the CIA secretly orchestrated his overthrow and installed the shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. Under the shah, U.S. oil companies took over half of Iran's production. The shah was also a ruthless dictator, who through his secret police, tortured and murdered thousands of his own people. These atrocities took place with the full support of the United States.

Chanting "death to the American Satan" in 1979, the Iranian people overthrew the shah, empowering a new dictator, the Ayatollah Khomeini. Most Americans of a certain age can remember well the Iranian hostage crisis of 1979, in which Iranians held dozens of U.S. citizens hostage for 444 days. What most probably didn't realize was that the hostage crisis was provoked by decades of U.S. intervention. It was caused by "blowback."

During the ensuing Iran-Iraq war, the United States backed the president of Iraq, Saddam Hussein, as a bulwark against Iran. From 1983 to 1990, the U.S. government approved around $200 million in arms sales to Iraq. It was during this time that Hussein committed horrible atrocities against his own people, with weapons we sold him. So between 1953 and 1983, America had sponsored two murderous dictators, living side by side.

Our relationship with Hussein changed in 1991 when Iraq invaded Kuwait. In a matter of months, the U.S. declared our former ally a world menace on par with Adolf Hitler or worse. After kicking Saddam out of Kuwait, the U.S. continued to bomb and impose economic sanctions on Iraq throughout the decade.

When Congressman Ron Paul suggested that American intervention overseas, or "blowback," contributed to 9/11, Rudy Giuliani immediately insinuated that Paul was crazy. But is the CIA crazy? The 9/11 Commission? Both cite blowback as a primary cause of 9/11.

One need not be a foreign policy expert to understand this basic concept. Imagine if Gov. Mark Sanford had to ask Russian President Vladimir Putin every time South Carolina passed a new law. Imagine if Russia had thousands of troops stationed in Charleston. Imagine your own family starving, dying, and suffering because Putin had a beef with Sanford. This has been the perceived relationship between millions of Muslims and the United States for a very long time.

The solution, then, is blatantly obvious. Get the fuck out of Iraq. Get the fuck out of Afghanistan. Pull those soldier's arses out of every foreign country they currently are – terrorists' hatred of America is a hatred of violence, not of liberty. The sooner the majority of people understand this, the better our chances of avoiding terrorist attack.

In the meantime, you can shut the fuck up about liberty being a price worth paying for a false sense of security.