TSA: No Pat-Downs for Children, No Mercy For Elderly

By Austin Johansen Monday, June 27, 2011

TSA announced they would make efforts to “reduce–though not eliminate” pat-down searches on

young children. 95 year-old terminal leukemia patients, however, are still a perceived risk.

Yes, toddlers and young, innocent children are sometimes employed by insurgents in war-ridden

countries to carry out disgusting, heartless acts of terrorism, as seen Saturday in Afghanistan. CBS News

reports that Taliban insurgents gave an unsuspecting 8-year-old girl a bag full of explosives and told her

to carry it towards police forces stationed at an Afghan checkpoint before detonating the explosives

remotely, killing no one else but the young girl.

A week before, police in Pakistan defused a bomb strapped to a 9 year-old girl who had been kidnapped

and similarly instructed towards police forces. In certain parts of the world, indeed these horrid tactics

are being used.

However, we don’t live in those regions.

It seems the TSA is finally gaining some perspective on how our security officials approach these threats

on our own soil, where the instances of child bombing are so far non-existent. In a statement released

Wednesday by TSA Administrator John S. Pistole, efforts will be made to perform fewer pat-downs on

young children, allowing officials to perform repeated screening attempts before resorting to a pat-

down search. The changes are part of an effort to “get smarter about security…to ultimately reduce–

though not eliminate–pat-downs of children.”

Citing the absence of child bombing incidents on American soil, Pistole stated, “We need to use common

sense.” While “common sense” might mean less intrusive waistband searches for 6-year-olds,

apparently the decrepit elderly don’t fall under the same category.

A 95-year-old woman with end-stage leukemia and bound to a wheelchair was subjected to a private

screening at an airport in Destin, Florida after officials “felt something suspicious” on the woman’s leg.

An agent then told the woman’s daughter, Jean Weber, they felt something “wet and firm” on her

mother’s leg and needed to remove her adult diaper to complete the search. The TSA defended its

agents’ actions saying they “acted professionally and according to proper procedure.” Therein lies the

glaring problem.

It may be a fine line, but nonetheless there exists a point in any official book of procedures where

humanity and Pistole’s newfound “common sense” should come into play, and it involves human

profiling. There’s a vast difference between racial and demographic profiling. In a lineup of five 30 year-

old males, all of different races and nationalities, each man should rightfully receive equal security

attention. In a lineup of five individuals in which a toddler and a 95 year-old woman in adult diapers are

involved, “common sense” tells you that two of them are a dramatically reduced security risk.

Why do officials feel they don’t possess the right, or intelligence, to act on these natural intuitions?

Acting “according to procedure” cannot be an infallible defense for security measures that unreasonably

intrude on Americans’ privacy rights; ones that have been steadily chipped away at airports since 9/11.

For the sake of my continued faith in the human race, I hope least one of the TSA agents thought to

themselves, while removing a frail woman’s soiled adult diaper to check for explosives, “This may be

procedure…but this is ridiculous.”

I once heard an amusing opinion that said “we haven’t won [the War on Terror] until I can go through

airport security without taking off my shoes.” While we may never enjoy that freedom in the

foreseeable future, I’d like to think that my country doesn’t live in such a deep fear as to suspect that an

elderly woman, too ill to walk through security gates and traveling with family, is carrying a bomb in her

adult diaper.