I have just returned from a very nice two week holiday in the Bahamas with my parents and sister but if you think I am going to write about how the holiday was as my first post then you are sorely mistaken. That will come later.

The first post is about how thoroughly targeted I felt on the journey, how my privacy was invaded at every opportunity and how nobody seemed to want to listen to reason – nobody with any authority anyway.

To get to the Bahamas you have a few choices to make as there is not yet a direct flight to the island of Exuma where we stayed. Do you go to Nassau then on to Exuma or do you go through Miami then on to Exuma? The only difference is that going though Miami is much cheaper but I advise caution if you are a white, British family of four.

The first leg of the journey started at Heathrow which was fairly quick I suppose but for some reason there were four or five people telling us on the way to the security checkpoint that we were not allowed liquids over 100ml, fair enough but after the third person reels of a list of things that could be over 100ml (how stupid am I?) it got quite tedious. By number five I was already making jokes about their job descriptions and CVs. Passport control and signing up for IRIS recognition (more about that in another post) was fast and relatively stress free.

Once in Miami International however, things took a dramatic turn for the worse. The Queue to get into the country was long… the queue to even get into that queue streched right back to an escelator making for some difficult negotiation of luggage and bodies to avoid being dragged back down on the underside. After an hour or so we finally got to immigration where we were interigated (Are you a terrorist? Are you involved in espionage? Real head scratchers…) and were forced to give our fingerprints. You either do it or you don’t come in… I asked.

Now we get to the crux of my complaint. Getting out of America is fatastically difficult and I must say absolutely retarded. To start you have to swipe your passport to get your tickets printed, fine, but if it doesn’t scan and you enter it manually then you have to seek out an attendant type person to ‘approve’ you. Even the one standing right next to us needed plenty of encouragement to even come near us. Then when you have your ticket you have to go to ‘baggage drop’. I must point out this is the same in the UK with Virgin and some other airlines. So we now have to join another queue to drop our bags off, which we do and show our tickets and passports and are asked again if we are terrorist etc. Then for some reason we have to take our bags away, yes that is right, we queued to drop our bags off only told we have to take them back after they’re weighed. This caused no end of confusion and delays for everyone as you have to negotiate the queue back the way you came… to drop your bags at a ‘special’ TSA screening booth.

TSA is the unit that is responsible for the searching of people and bags for things that might be a hazzard, like hand creame, and do so with an obvious lust for power. After being motioned to another queue after dropping our bags of at the bag drop, bag drop… we were then told we had ‘randomly’ been selected for secondary screening or SSSS as it was printed on our tickets. The guy who told us about this was very shocked to see us in this queue as we were a family of four white, British, middle-class holiday go-ers. After being stuck in this queue for half an hour we saw where it went… a ‘special’ area for ‘specially selected’ people of interest. Oh and so show how random it was, there were no Americans in this queue, no Muslims, no Arabs, no Turbans or Burkhas of any kind. Now I’m not suggesting that these people are going to be dangerous but given the way america views the world, I was very surprised. The people in this section were not organised and didn’t care. My family was split up, sent around in circles, asked to point out our luggage that we couldn’t see, and treated pretty poorly. Just like everyone else in this large supposedly random queue. We went through an explosive residue detector, a metal detector and had our shoes and bags scanned… My dad and my sister were put in a special glass ‘pen’ with a locked door and then asked to point to their bags, then searched one by one, frisked, wanded and made to walk through another series of metal detectors. After which they then had to find their shoes and bags (which contained the valuables they had to remove) in a sea of everyone elses. My dad made a very good point that this area would be an ideal target for a suicide bomber as there was so much confusion and so many people it would be easy and result in serious casualties. My mum was wearing a bracelet that went off in every metal detector and every time she was asked to take it off and every time she replied with “I can’t because the clasp screws on” and every time she was met with a puzzled look and asked to take all her other jewellery off (which doesn’t make the machine bleep) and put it in her bag. Then her bag was thrown into the sea of other bags and all she could do was hope that no one saw her put all her gold in it. Then she was searched but of course it had to be by a woman so for the next ten minutes all you could here was “female assist” which went without reply.

It was at this point I read the signs saying “verbal or physical threats or abuse of TSA staff is a breach of federeal law” or words to that effect. It was all I could do to restrain myself from screaming at them “do you actually have any common sense you complete retard!”. So the signs in fact fuelled this sensation.

After all of that was over one guy said “thanks for your patience” and I actually laughed at him saying “it’s not like I had a choice”… he wasn’t happy, I’m surprised he didn’t take me into a back room and perform another kind of search… cough cough.

Then our plane was delayed, delayed again, delayed again then cancelled. Then it took an hour to speak to someone who actually cared and sent us to Fort Lauderdale to get another flight leaving fairly soon.

When we go there and got our tickets you can guess what they said… ‘SSSS’ so we went through the whole process again, albeit much faster as it was a smaller airport, it was the same story with my mum and her bracelet. My comments about organisation and such were not appreciated by the guy searching my bag and pulling out the bottle of water I’d bought after the screening in Miami, not having enough time to think about it before rucshing accross the city to another airport. When he finished he said something about the key to organisation being communication… it made little sense and had little relevance to the situation at hand but he had thought about it for several minutes so he must have felt I needed to hear it. He also wouldn’t let my dad try and find his passport until he had finished looking through his bag.

When we actually went to board the plane, there was another TSA desk that was picking people out of the line and guess what, my sister (the evil and sisnister looking girl that she is) was ‘selected’ and given another rigourous search.

Is the UK not worried about terrorism as much as the US? Are we less of a target? Or is it simply that we seem to be much more pragmatic about the whole process? All I know is that I hope I never go to Miami Interational in a hurry, or maybe I should wear a turban if I do?

In no way do I want this to me misconstrood as belittlement of terrorism of the efforts of people trying to prevent it… but this expericence felt like targeted victimisation. Maybe it was articles like that that got us in the special selection in the first place. I think my name has just moved up a few places in the rankings.

Next time, my fun with IRIS recognition.