Wow: Elderly woman asked to remove adult diaper during TSA search
Jean Weber of Destin filed a complaint with the Department of Homeland Security after her 95-year-old mother was detained and extensively searched last Saturday while trying to board a plane to fly to Michigan to be with family members during the final stages of her battle with leukemia.But the bureaucrats are implacable:
Her mother, who was in a wheelchair, was asked to remove an adult diaper in order to complete a pat-down search.
“It’s something I couldn’t imagine happening on American soil,” Weber said Friday. “Here is my mother, 95 years old, 105 pounds, barely able to stand, and then this.”
Weber said she wished there were less invasive search methods for an elderly person who is unable to walk through security gates."Terrorists"? Are they allowed to use that word? Only when they're dealing with grannies and toddlers. Guys whose names appear on terrorist watch lists breeze through security with explosives in their underwear; no 45 minute invasive searches for them. That kind of treatment would be discriminatory, and is reserved for nonagenarians with advanced leukemia.
“I don’t understand why they have to put them through that kind of procedure,” she said.
Koshetz said the procedures are the same for everyone to ensure national security.
“TSA cannot exempt any group from screening because we know from intelligence that there are terrorists out there that would then exploit that vulnerability,” she said.
Sen. Rand Paul calls the TSA "clueless." He must have been in a generous mood.
Linked at MichelleMalkin.com -- thank you. Many thanks also to Mark Steyn for the sidebar link.
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Steyn has written a Corner post on this (and linked here -- Welcome, Corner readers, make yourselves at home!):
There is a term for regimes that submit law-abiding wheelchair-bound dying nonagenarians to public humiliations without probable cause and it isn’t “republic of limited government”. Given everybody’s touchiness over Kathryn’s North Korean comparisons, I’ll say only this: George III wouldn’t have done this to you.Read the rest. (Links in text above added by me. More on that later, perhaps.)
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Truly remarkable and wholly inexcusable. Past experience has clearly demonstrated that NOT doing their job will NOT get them fired so why would they be fearful of retribution from a supervisor (if in fact there even is one anywhere in the TSA) for simply letting this person pass without resorting to such insistence on checking someones undergarments?
ReplyDeleteIf a Congressman/woman wants to make a name for themselves they could do so by initiating an investigation into the TSA's management and business practices.
Isn't it obvious now that the TSA is not about catching terrorists, but rather conditioning American citizens, frog in the pot style?
ReplyDeleteMost aren't aware that the underwear bomber who started all this was put on his flight with the full knowledge of our government. See the testimony of Undersecretary of State Kennedy: http://tinyurl.com/3fjkxtb
One can also read about the testimonies of those who were on that flight reporting that the underwear bomber looked drugged out of his mind and was helped/escorted on the plane by an official-looking man in a suit.
The very next week, Homeland puts in an order for the naked body scanners manufactured by Rapiscan, who employs The Chertoff Group founded and led by Michael Chertoff, our previous Homeland Secretary. Nice work if you can get it.
I wrote about all this here so I won't go on, but if we value our freedoms and dignity, we won't let this thing go!
http://the-classic-liberal.com/skivvy-naked-body-scanners/
Is there anyone who believes that this elderly lady would have been subject to this painful harassment had she been wearing a burka and was accompanied by a bearded guy in Middle Eastern dress?
ReplyDelete