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.