A Canadian Traveler Who Asked U.S. Border Officer to Say “Please” Gets Peppersprayed
March 4th, 2009Welcome to The Land of the Free.
Via: National Post:
A Canadian who demanded courtesy from a U.S. border security guard says he was pepper sprayed and held in custody for three hours for asking the disrespectful officer to “say please” when ordering him to turn his car off during a search.
“I refused to turn off the car until he said please. He didn’t. And he has the gun, I guess, so he sprayed me,” said Desiderio Fortunato, a Coquitlam, B.C., resident who frequently crosses the border to visit his second home in the state of Washington. “Is that illegal in the United States, asking an officer to be polite?”
The incident occurred on Monday at the Aldergrove border crossing, east of Vancouver, shortly after 12 p.m. Mr. Fortunato, a dance studio director, was travelling to his home in Blaine, Wash., to retrieve a wallet his wife had left during their most recent visit.
He said he was questioned by a border officer who demanded he turn off his car and, when asked to make the request more politely, threatened to spray him with his pepper gun if he did not comply.
“I just felt I should stand my ground about it. I should not be treated like that. No matter what kind of position you are in, if you want respect you have to show respect,” he said yesterday. “I asked him three times and when I didn’t turn the car off, because he didn’t say please, he pepper sprayed me…. It was terrible. For half an hour or so I couldn’t see anything.”
I had a much milder, tho gratuitously offensive, experience at the airport in Seattle (coincidentally) a few years back (post-9/11, of course). We were in line to go thru the metal detector, and just as I was walking thru, this troll-like woman shot her arm up right in front of my face, barring my way. “You gotta wait” is all she said, and when I pointed out that she could have just told me as much, she just sneered. Again, nothing like getting pepper-sprayed, but the vibe — of the “police” figure able to behave in what should be unacceptable ways — was very creepy.
I´ve got another story. I was flying back from GDC at SFO in ´07 when I saw told to take off my flip flops. I said, with a kind of incredulous spike of humor in my voice “right… in case there´s a bomb in there.” The TSA guy must have misheard me because he quickly turned hostile and called his supervisor. I had my stuff searched and was patted down. They threatened to put me in a database. This was one of those moments that wakened me, followed by learning about peak oil and fractional reserve banking in following months. A database is the greatest threat short of execution someone can make.
@pdugan: I would guess that the regular visitors to cryptogon, for example, are on some government “security” database somewhere, perhaps “potential terrorist sympathizers” or some such. The technology’s been there for years, as has the budget. And the will.
Full-on jackbooted police-state fascism seems just around the corner for America. It’s nibbling away at the edges and rotting the country now, but you can expect to see a lot more of this — until, that is, reporting on such incidents itself becomes a “crime”.
@pdugan “The TSA guy must have misheard me because he quickly turned hostile”
Oh, he heard you just fine, I’ll wager. Goons don’t like anyone to make fun of their work that is “necessary” for our safety. Overheard in 2003 by a friend of mine waiting in a long line of harassed and frustrated sheeple: TSA goon turns to her fellow colleague and hisses, “Don’t they know we’re at WAR?!!”