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The Latest Complaints Against the TSA Are Coming from Babies
Did your family have trouble getting through airport security this holiday?
Evidence against the effectiveness of the TSA and their new screening/pat-down horror show continues to mount, and this time, the latest complaints of TSA abuse are coming from babies. Or, well, their mothers.
Salon published a post on Christmas Eve by Wilson Diehl about the inexplicable pat-down her 1-year-old received while going through security on their way to Seattle. That’s right – the TSA checked for bombs on an infant.
Diehl walked through the metal detector with her baby, and when her bra set the metal detector off, she was selected for additional screening. Meaning she – and her baby – were suddenly terror suspects.
From her post:
“It’s just my bra!” I shouted, for all of eastern Iowa to hear. “Can’t I just go to the bathroom and take it off and then come through again? Or one of you could carry the baby through and I could come through again on my own. It’s not her,” I reiterated. “It’s my bra.”
“I’m sorry,” the TSA guy said, seeming more annoyed than sorry.
Ultimately, the female assist called to examine the baby avoided her diapered bits and simply “waved a hand nearish the baby’s torso and called out, ‘OK, she’s good.’” as a gesture of kindness and sympathy toward an obviously distraught Diehl. But that only furthers the point that the TSA is inept. I’m not trying to condemn the officer who mercifully averted the groin of an infant, but rather to say that if the TSA is going to have such ridiculous rules about searching people for weapons and explosives, they would do well to heed them. Is any of this safety charade helping? I’ve heard harrowing tales of ineptitude and abuse like this from people all over the country. I haven’t once heard where the new screening procedures have thwarted a terror threat.
Which brings me to a piece on TIME’s Healthland blog, in which Bonnie Rochman recounts her family’s holiday travels and the snafus they faced at airport security. After Rochman and her three children were scanned and patted, her eldest son Aviv shouted, “Mama, I know how you can sneak an explosive onto an airplane. You put it in the front of your underwear, because they don’t touch you there.”
Aviv may be right. We all remember the havoc explosive underwear caused this time last year when the Christmas Day Underwear Bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, lit his legs on fire. The head of the TSA told Senators back in November that “pat-down techniques are so thorough that they would have thwarted the suspected Christmas Day bomber,” but I’m not so sure. Here we have two instances of the TSA patting down – and failing to pat-down – children. It seems highly unlikely that an obviously Westernized parent (or any parent, for that matter) would be willing to offer his/her child up as a martyr for jihad, no matter how annoying or badly behaved the child may be. I’m not saying we should make U.S. airports screening-free, but we have to stop terrorizing our own citizens before they even board a plane – especially those that aren’t old enough to walk.
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0 Comments
Amanda commented on Dec 30 10 at 1:50 pmWe need to stop looking for weapons and start looking for terrorists, like the Israelis do. Until we make that change, things like this will continue to happen.
Manjari commented on Dec 30 10 at 3:07 pmPlease change the format back.
editors commented on Dec 31 10 at 4:04 pmHi Majari,
Which aspect of the blog’s new design are you referring to?
Thanks,
Margaret Wheeler Johnson
Editor
Linda, the original one commented on Dec 31 10 at 9:41 pmNot Manjari, But the new format is really difficult to navigate. You can’t see how many comments there are on the front page and you also can’t scroll easily from full post to full post.
Manjari commented on Jan 02 11 at 8:41 amI agree. You can’t see how many comments there are, so you don’t know if new comments have been added since the last time you read the post. I read fewer posts now.
WildernessBarbie commented on Jan 02 11 at 5:14 pmTwo points keep getting overlooked in articles regarding this topic…
1) TSA is not only looking for terrorists. They are also looking for drug smugglers and people trying to bring any of a long list of prohibited items from one place to another. Cash, plants, animals, artifacts, art, etc.
2) Just because you haven’t heard about it, doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen. I worked with some senior guys from DHS and just overhearing some of the phone conversations those guys would have about security incidents going on all over the country would make you think twice about flying.
I worked in retail Loss Prevention, and many, many times people would use a child (their own or a borrowed one) to help them hide things they stole (strollers are great for this). Why not also stolen jewelry, drugs, cash and the like through an airport?
Finally, where do you draw the line? Don’t screen a 1yo, but do screen a 2yo? 3yo? Why one and not the other? How is a TSA person supposed to determine this on the fly? Either everyone and everything gets screened, or the whole system is totally useless.
Alyson commented on Jan 03 11 at 12:37 pmWhy is it so hard to imagine that terrorists, who have little regard for any human life, would use a baby to smuggle bombs onto a plane? I mean, if they strapped a bomb to their own body and carried the baby onto an aircraft with the rest of us, what is that baby’s ultimate fate? I get that it’s uncomfortable to watch a stranger paw all over your child, but air travel is NOT a right. It’s a privilege. If you don’t want to subject you or your baby to inspection, then get in the car and drive.
M J commented on Jan 22 11 at 8:26 pmWe do have a right to travel, its more than a privilege. We also have a constitutional right to be free from unreasonable searches without probable cause.
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