It’s not your beverage, it’s your behavior: that’s the excuse the TSA gave for refusing to let a woman fly out of a Houston, Texas airport recently after she became argumentative when security officers demanded they inspect her bottled water.
The victim, whose name has not been made public, says the TSA told her she couldn’t board the plane because of her actions immediately beforehand. Officers with the Transportation Security Administration, a division of the US Department of Homeland Security, had allegedly asked her if they could inspect and test a beverage that was rightfully purchased from a vendor inside the airport after she was already cleared through the airport’s standard TSA screening station. The woman refused to let the TSA examine her drink, an unusual testing procedure that RT has reported on twice now in clearly weeks. When she was approached by agents after, she recorded video of the incident which clearly shows that her actions weren’t the reason for the agents to keep her from boarding — it was the attitude. “Let me get this straight,” the woman asks a TSA agent caught on film, “this is retaliatory for my attitude, this is not making the airways safer it’s retaliatory.”“It pretty much definitely is,” the screener responds.On the YouTube page where the woman uploaded the video, she says the event happened inside the terminal of the Houston airport, presumably George Bush Intercontinental Airport, a Class B international transportation hub in Houston.“I was not allowed to board a plane (even though I had already been through airport security) because I drank my water instead of letting the TSA ‘test’ it,” she writes. “The TSA agent finally admitted that it wasn’t because they thought I was a security risk – it was because they were mad at me!”Last week, a man named Dan Holland wrote on his personal YouTube page, “While waiting in the Columbus, OH airport for our flight to Oakland, I couldn’t help but notice the two TSA women that were ‘testing’ any and all liquids that people had in their hands.”“Now remember that this is inside the terminal, well beyond the security check and purchased inside the terminal…just people waiting to get on the plane,” Holland added. In his clip, he caught the agents on camera conducting a test similar to the one that was refused in Houston. When RT reported on these in-terminal tests earlier this year, the TSA issued a statement saying, “Passengers may be randomly selected for additional screening measures at the checkpoint or in the gate area at any time.”