Mag editor threw tantrum, claim US customs

Mag editor threw tantrum, claim US customs
November 18, 2003 - 5:03PM


Australian magazine editor Sue Smethurst was verbally abusive and threw a sandwich against a wall after she was detained at Los Angeles international airport, a United States customs spokesman said today.

Smethurst has said she was body-searched and "groped beyond belief" by US authorities during her 12 hour-plus detainment at the airport last week.

US Customs and Border Protection responded today, defending its treatment of the 30-year-old editor of New Idea.

"Every effort was made to be professional with her, but she was irate and threw a tantrum and was pretty verbally abusive and threateningly abusive as far as her verbal conduct," US Customs and Border Protection spokesman Michael Fleming told AAP. (snip/...)

http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/11/18/1069027109342.html

This could have never happened in 2000. I don't think it's Smethurst.

I've read about a case of a pregnant woman being basically molested while her husband had to watch her sob. I think it was sometime in the fall of last year.

I do not doubt it wasn't Smethurst's fault AT ALL.

Forgot to mention that they were held over for quite a few hours as well and were Green Party members, I think.

The husband wrote about it. The HSA/TSA assholes made them out to be terrorists.

Fuck Homeland Security. If no Coup 2000, no 9-11-01.

Simple isn't it?

While I may have managed more restraint (fortunately), my last business trip added on a one way ticket to a round trip so that I could save the State money on the tickets and combine two trips. That one way ticket marked me as high risk and started one of the most horrendously embarrassing and disgusting episodes I could have imagined (and this includes prior experience flying through Saudi and Egyptian airports and directly from there to Europe-- where Paris airports were experiencing bomb threats) I was all but publically strip searched by American Airlines security, after having already cleared the main security at Hartsfield in Atlanta.

I have managed to get out of six other trips since then and I'm sure I'm not alone. The airlines are complicit in this crap, so I don't just blame ASSSKROFT.

I volunteer for a drum corps and join and leave their tour a couple of times during the summer which means one way flights every time. I am SO SICK of being searched!! I'm a 46 year old grandmother!!! How threatening do I look??? The last time I told them "I'm not dangerous, but I'm pissed!". They had just broken the zipper on my messenger bag I carry on tour.

I was at an airport waiting for a flight for about 4 hours. I was near Security. Every single person searched in that 4 hour period was a woman with a nice body. No female inspectors in sight. And the guys at the Dept. of homeland security really know how to feel a woman up and down.

If a male police office can't search me (a woman) how can a male security office search me? :shrug:

I never understood this. The last time I flew to Chicago I was "patted down" because I wore an underwire bra. Won't make that mistake again! Fortunately, it was a female security guard. Unfortunately, it was in front of everyone.

Any woman that says a male "patted her down" in a USA Airport is full of shit. You can wail all you want about it but you are full of shit. It does not happen for the obvious reasons.

Law Suits.

I travel often and all over the world. Women are checked by women if contact must be made. Sure a man may "wand" a woman but law prohibits a pat down unless there is serious suspicion and random gate searches prohibit the technique. If you, a woman, are suspected of 'carrying' in an American airport you will be held until a legal search can be made.

I believe in advancing the Liberal cause but the notion that the Patriot Act sponsored sexual abuse is silly. The folks doing the job now are largely the same as in 2000 and Osamma did not make a bunch of pervs out of them. In so far as " nice racks" are concerned and "nothing but women ' being searched, can you imagine that not being picked up on by a rising star reporter or trial attorney?

Bull shit. This kind of crap does little but feed material to those that would discredit us.

The "woman" DHS agent that I saw in the Portland International Jetport patting down a nice looking woman last March was just really, really butch, to the point of having an "coulter-esque" adam's apple and a mustache.

it is nothing more than a way to condition people to being abused by the government.

that'll stop terrorism

Exactly - just like the raid on a high school a week or 2 ago.

Folks - real conservatives know this is wrong. If there is a way to get us all to work together, we all can win.

Let's get the Constitution back first. Then we can get back to squabbles about gun ownership and gay marriage.

ann coulter of harboring a lethal weapon, lets see how she likes it when guards act with impunity. Im a little nautious at the thought.

security guard

years of traveling, I'm a US citizen, I have always dreaded USC. They have always been the nastiest in the world and have probably gotten nastier or as nasty as they were during the McCarthy Era.

http://www.bearingwitnessjournal.com/menschwatch/yoohoo.html

I pop on my clown nose as the security guard starts to pass his electronic metal detector over my body in slow methodical progressions. He does not see the nose right away but there are chuckles coming from his coworkers at the other posts of the international departure checkpoint. The fuzzy electronic beeper goes into a bit of a frenzy around my right pants pocket and the security man, a young Filipino face gazes up at me, stands back in surprise, and then smiles before diving back into his task, discovering the perpetrator, the metallic handle to the zipper on the pocket. The fuzz tones increase as the instrument's nose joins up to the metal tab in an orgasmic explosion. Satisfied, the worker abandons his instrument for a brief pat-down that includes my shoes where he checks the areas above my foot's arch.
My interior debate about whether to clown the checkpoint or not started about an hour earlier as I did my chi gung stretch ritual on the sun-drenched rooftop of the parking structure, a deserted moonscape of clean-curved cement. Not one to flaunt a clown nose in public unless the situation calls for it, I nonetheless do not doubt that 911 terrorism tensions demand release. My hesitation concerns the reactions of the military might rumored to be standing by at all checkpoints. It is mostly on impulse that I pull out the clown nose as I assume the position for the man with the magic wand.



Imagine if EVERYONE went through airport security like this!

and did, quite often.

Asian visitors and business travelers have long been advised which West Coast airports to avoid because of stupid detentions and excessive INS nonsense. Legitimate business travellers have been detained, and returned, for no good reason.

It really got worse after the revised immigration law in 1996 and the absolute discretion the INS had in questioning and detaining. Customs had little to do with it, although now they seem to be virtually the same agency.

It was well over 10 years ago that I had my own hassle with INS. Never saw customs people, it was always INS people at the gateways.

Curiously, I never had a problem showing my US passport anywhere in Europe, but got the third degree from an INS agent when returning from one trip. As a US citizen, the INS shouldn't have squat to say to me, but they did have that annoying little power to send you over to the customs people, who have all day to play.

Where was Arnold?

"Australian passport holders travelling to America for a holiday do not need a visa to enter the country, however, non-US journalists working during their stay need the special I-visa."

What exactly is the purpose of such a requirement?

I thought so