95 year old Lena Reppert
Lena Reppert is wheel chaired bound, weakened by and in the final stages of Leukemia. She is frail and 95 years old and along with her daughter Jean Weber, was on her way to visit relatives in Michigan. What should have been a non eventful and joyous trip turned into a humiliating nightmare thanks to TSA agents at the Destin-Fort Walton Beach Airport (DSI) in Okaloose County, Florida.
When Lena Reppert was unable to stand, due to her illness, and go through the metal detector TSA Agents took her aside for a visual search. This included a pat down. But the agents didn’t stop there; according to her daughter Jean, they insisted the elderly woman remove her adult diaper so they could complete their search. Mrs. Reppert’s daughter wheeled her into the bathroom and removed it. It took them 45 minutes for TSA to complete their search of the two women.
Ms. Weber told the Northwest Florida Daily News, “It’s something I couldn’t imagine happening on American soil. My mother is very ill. She had a blood transfusion the week before, just to bolster up her strength for this travel. Nobody should feel the way I felt that day. I’m not angry. The rules need to be changed.” Needless to say Jean Weber filed a complaint with TSA.
TSA check point
TSA’s response, “‘While every person and item must be screened before entering the secure boarding area, TSA works with passengers to resolve security alarms in a respectful and sensitive manner. We
have reviewed the circumstances involving this screening and determined that our officers acted professionally and according to proper procedure.’
A TSA spokesman told the Northwest Florida Daily News it would be dangerous for them to exempt any group from screening. “We know from intelligence that there are terrorists out there that would then exploit that vulnerability.”
So TSA is basically saying that they were “Just following orders.” But this story gets better. In a statement later to MSNBC TSA said, “While every person and item must be screened before entering the secure boarding area, TSA works with passengers to resolve security alarms in a respectful and sensitive manner. We have reviewed the circumstances involving this screening and determined that our officers acted professionally, according to proper procedure and did not require this passenger to remove an adult diaper.”
Jean Weber is sticking to her statement, “My story has not changed from my first contact with TSA at the airport.”
TSA stopping an obvious terrorist
No one will argue the point that due to today’s terrorist threat we need to have strong security at our points of departure. This is just common sense. But is the TSA the proper agency to dispense that protection? The answer is obviously “No.”
The TSA has been an embarrassment to our country since it was established by President Bush as part of the Aviation and Transportation Security Act in 2001. It is presently under the jurisdiction of The Homeland Security Agency. For any security agency to work effectively you need to staff it with experienced and intelligent people. That is obviously “not” the case with the TSA. Time after time we hear how their agents fail to see dangerous items either on their scanners or during their pat downs; time after time we hear how their agents rudely treat passengers during their scans or subsequent body searches. As I said we all understand security is a necessary evil in today’s world but it does not have to be such an arduous experience for those who simply wish to travel from point “A” to point “B”.
When I travelled to India to film a movie I went through more security in one airport than I’ve been through here in the US in the last 5 years. I went through no less than 8 security checks, from metal detectors, to wands, to pat downs, to having armed soldiers going through my luggage on the tarmac. At each point they were polite; apologizing for the delay I had to experience, professional and courteous. But when you boarded that plane you knew it was secure. Can we say the same about the TSA? I think not.
This country, if it truly wants to make the skies safer, needs to retool the TSA and replace their present agents with a professional and intelligent staff who are specially trained like the Israelis, to visually spot suspicious people and not depend so much on machines to do their work for them. Knowledge is power and lack of knowledge is a dangerous thing. Right now the TSA is a dangerous thing.
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That could be me. All they had to do was have a bomb sniffing dog there to prevent this. In the meantime, they let thousands of illegals stream in across our unsecured borders. Hypocrites…
This is beyond invasive – so gross!!
bomb sniffing dogs or just utilize the swabs more like they do in Israel.
These are the effects of very badly executed policy and a small crack in the façade of “Insidious Control.” Focus on the policies.
“They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” A Benjamin Franklin quote, or so some believe. And we moan about the intrusiveness of the TSA, yet demand to be protected.
Since when did the benefits of our unalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness come without risks? And when we forgo the “risks” we are surrendering the “freedom” associated with those “rights.” What is the “right to life” if I no longer embrace the liability and answerability for that treasure? This would include personal, individual subjective moral responsibility and accountability. Liberty is an unalienable right which carries the burden of stewardship. Security is a luxury, once tasted it becomes a nihilistic necessity, much like entitlements. For all our whaling and cashing of teeth, why not embrace the Israeli method of airport security…why…is might work. And we couldn’t learn from others.
Do not get lost in the trivial pursuit of sophomoric missteps of a national leviathan, now unionized, the TSA.
When pondering, while analyzing the mission and goal of the TSA, one might consider that on July 15, 2008 Obama is reported to have indicated a desire for a “unionized civilian national security force.” “Are we talking about creating a police state here? The U.S. Army alone has nearly 500,000 troops. That doesn’t count reserves or National Guard. In 2007, the U.S. Defense budget was $439 billion. Is Obama serious about creating some kind of domestic, “transparent” (about its real mission and goal) but out in the open, security force bigger and more expensive than that?” A recent report indicates the TSA has hired some 110,000; many have quit or were fired. And presto, he now has it all.
“Who will Obama appoint to administer this new “civilian national security force”? Janet Napolitano one says? Where will the money come from? Where in the Constitution does he see justification for the federal government creating such a domestic army?”
And there we have the TSA, an appeasement to terrorism. As we give up infinitesimal pieces of that treasure called liberty, at what point do we lose the ability to reverse this march to…possibly slavery? Those in North Korea, dying from hunger, lost that option, surrendering liberty for tyranny, many years ago. Is it possible in America? Absolutely! But then there are deniers. Read “Denial of the Truth” by Michael Cochrane.
War is Darwinism at its most efficient and the rules are innately commonsensical. Do not get “hooked” on the “macho” of the message for the “wisdom” is in the “weeds.” We cannot allow the anger or passion of any incident, semantic delivery, or intel-hijacking, to spoil the soul wrenching argument on “national security”, no matter what your sensitivities, beliefs or definition.
nd we cannot allow this administration to create a Gestapo under the umbrella of the TSA. Does anyone remember “For several days now, WND (World Net Daily) has been hounding Barack Obama’s campaign about a statement he made July 2, 2008 in Colorado Springs – a statement that blew my mind, one that has had me scratching my head ever since.
Obama’s ‘civilian national security force’ http://www.wnd.com/index.php?pageId=69601#ixzz1QligpCTy
Obama “In talking about his plans to double the size of the Peace Corps and nearly quadruple the size of AmeriCorps and the size of the nation’s military services, he made this rather shocking (and chilling) pledge: “We cannot continue to rely on our military in order to achieve the national security objectives we’ve set. We’ve got to have a civilian national security force that’s just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded.”
As a reminder, “They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” A Benjamin Franklin quote, or so some believe. And we moan about the intrusiveness of the TSA, yet demand to be protected.