I was in Istanbul a few years back and due to a pretty bad mistranslation error we managed to set off the security alarm at the gates of the runway. (green means go, right?). Long story short we were on the plane 5 minutes later. If I were from Istanbul and set off the alarm in a an airport in the US I would be in jail for 5 years before they even figured out how to charge me.
How fucking bad is it that you fear a Turkish prison less than the god damned TSA?
That stuff Arctanget quoted… just wow.
Seriously guys what the fuck.
And here’s another seriously grim story about how the immigration guys run amuck. (From the New York Times).
(You may need a login, but the direct link worked for me.)
He was a carefree Italian with a recent law degree from a Roman university. She was “a totally Virginia girl,” as she puts it, raised across the road from George Washington’s home. Their romance, sparked by a 2006 meeting in a supermarket in Rome, soon brought the Italian, Domenico Salerno, on frequent visits to Alexandria, Va., where he was welcomed like a favorite son by the parents and neighbors of his girlfriend, Caitlin Cooper.
But on April 29, when Mr. Salerno, 35, presented his passport at Washington Dulles International Airport, a Customs and Border Protection agent refused to let him into the United States. And after hours of questioning, agents would not let him travel back to Rome, either; over his protests in fractured English, he said, they insisted that he had expressed a fear of returning to Italy and had asked for asylum.
Ms. Cooper, 23, who had promised to show her boyfriend another side of her country on this visit — meaning Las Vegas and the Grand Canyon — eventually learned that he had been sent in shackles to a rural Virginia jail. And there he remained for more than 10 days, locked up without charges or legal recourse while Ms. Cooper, her parents and their well-connected neighbors tried everything to get him out.
Heh, last time I crossed the border into the US I had no license plate on my utility trailer as I had fallen off twice so I keep it in my trunk. Yeah I should have properly attached it but as I had crossed like ten times before without a problem I had let it slide.
This time when I crossed I got stopped and the way the guards acted made me feel like they wanted to shoot me down on the spot. Totally within their rights no doubt, but I’m now only going to go into the US when I have to to get somewhere else.