Posted on 12/05/2011 7:21:28 AM PST by IbJensen
An 84-year-old grandmother in a wheelchair abused by Transportation Security Administration screeners at John F. Kennedy airport plans to sue the TSA, complaining of injuries and extreme humiliation suffered during a strip search. Homeland Security spokesmen, however, said “proper procedures were followed” and later claimed that the victim’s clothes were not fully removed.
In a phone interview with The New American, the traumatized 103-pound woman, Lenore Zimmerman, warned that America was in “deep trouble” if manhandling frail grandmothers was what “security” had come to. But she plans to seek justice and has already contacted an attorney.
“They stopped me to pat me down and I said ‘I can’t go through the machine because I have a defibrillator’,” Zimmerman explained, clearly distraught at the recollection. “So they patted me down and then they escorted me to a private room and strip-searched me.”
Zimmerman, utterly humiliated, demanded to know why she was being molested, asking the screeners for an explanation. “They’re off their rocker,” she said of the people running TSA, noting that there was no justification for conducting a strip search. “They’re nuts!”
But instead of getting an answer to her question, the abuse intensified, culminating with an agitated Zimmerman banging her leg on a metal walker she had with her. Blood began to flow down her shin and she was bleeding “like a pig,” she said.
The whole ordeal forced Zimmerman to miss her flight to her winter home in Florida after she sought medical attention to deal with the injury in New York. And when she finally arrived, a doctor was forced to give her a tetanus vaccine to prevent further complications. Her next medical appointment related to the wound, she explained, is scheduled for December 5.
“In my wildest dreams I couldn’t have imagined such a thing,” Zimmerman told The New American. “I’m going to be 85. I was in a wheelchair with a walker on my lap. If this is what the security is in this country, we’re in big trouble.”
The TSA responded by deploying tax-funded pubic relations experts to counter the barrage of negative publicity generated by the abuse. A spokesperson for the embattled screening agency essentially told CBS that Zimmerman asked for it. "Private screening was requested by the passenger, and was granted," said TSA public-affairs person Kristin Lee, denying that Zimmerman was strip searched.
But according to Zimmerman, a retired receptionist, her pants and even her underwear were pulled down during the ordeal. Outraged at official denials, she suspects the TSA is publicly denying the full extent of the abuse owing to concerns over the looming lawsuit.
Spokespeople for Homeland Security’s transportation apparatus insist there is nothing wrong with the screening process. "TSA screening procedures are conducted in a manner designed to treat all passengers with dignity, respect and courtesy, and that occurred in this instance,” said Lee, presumably reading from the same prepared remarks as other spokesmen who were quoted saying virtually the same thing in separate reports.
News of the scandal quickly went “viral,” grabbing headlines across the globe following a report in the New York Daily News. After the incident, Zimmerman said, her relative’s son-in-law who lives in England had even learned of the abuse she suffered from a television segment.
But her story is only the most recent allegation of TSA brutality and abuse to be picked up by media outlets worldwide. New reports of abuse, molestation, theft, and other improprieties are reported so frequently that they have almost become routine.
In another brewing scandal, airport screeners in Florida are under fire for detaining a pregnant teenage woman over a purse with an embroidered gun image on the outside. Apparently TSA told her possession of the purse was a “federal offense.”
But even as the supposed security screeners are under increasing fire from the press for harassing grandmothers and pregnant women, Congress has jumped on the bandwagon as well. Big changes could be on the way soon.
The new uproar comes just weeks after a stinging Congressional investigation revealed TSA screening was based on “theatrics” and had failed to catch one single terrorist so far. And despite close to $60 billion spent on the apparatus since the attacks of September 11, air travel is no safer, according to the report.
The probe described the TSA as “an enormous, inflexible and distracted bureaucracy, more concerned with human resource management and consolidating power” than actual security. And the final report concluded that most of the agency’s functions would be better handled by private companies.
A typical reason for de-nutting our worthless central socialist government! Then we can work on our worthless state governments!
Well according to a DHS report, she is old and White, thus she is a likely terrorist in the era of Obama.
TSA is a POS thug organiztion but this woman is full **it.
Very inventive but that happens with dementia. Yuh see things that just aren’t there.
They are real to you but they are not reality.
One of the inconsistencies in the story is that they said she had a lower back brace which they removed and put back on. In order to do that they would have had to taken her pants down...thus they are most likely saying it is not a strip search, but golly gee it feels like one when you start taking some ones pants off and they could not have taken this brace off without doing that.
I think a primary goal of TSA is force americans to function in an environment where they pretty much have no rights, and no real recourse nor access to the rules they are being searched by.
This is presumably a prelude to having this level of federal direct control/intervention in many more aspects of our lives.
From a longer-term view, when a country reaches this point, I think it is time to consider finding a new country, because history is very, very unkind on what has to happen BEFORE this stuff gets removed. Late-stage republic, well into the demogogue phase, what comes next? More and more a police state, with government more concerned with control over its own people that worrying about external enemies.
Also, will add that walking into their x-ray machines strikes me as a very poor risk-reward - these things have no public test history or oversight for human safety or long-term impact of repeated exposures.
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2013733774_scanners22.html
Sounds like you had a great trip...
I would change my mind about flying if my husband booked me a trip to Israel..Never been there and would love to go..
Some people won't be happy until there are two cops per civilian. You need one cop to hold the gun to your head while the other searches you. But of course, there is nothing to worry about if you are not doing anything wrong.
Miami Airport is the worst airport in the world, it’s worth it to pay the extra money to fly into Fort Lauderdale.
I would love to be on a jury on a case like this. Unless the TSA is searching someone named mohammed, I’d be extremely skeptical of anything they might say. Security theater is for the big screen, not our airports!
No other choice my husbands ticket was paid for by the person that we went to see and was a business man..Mine of course was paid by us..So we came back through Miami and then got a plane for Caymans..
“It’s just not that hard. But in all my travels, far more than the airline personnel or TSA personnel, the biggest problems and annoyances are caused by some asshat passenger that decides they need to get rude and disruptive and get in somebody’s face.”
I have 2 8” titanium rods in my back, walk with a can & wear a prosthetic. I get to go the the time-out box & get the the “full grope” every time. I’m sure I hold up the line- am I an asshat?
I mourn for my country, because the terrorists won- we just haven’t admitted it yet.
Because Republicans have not stopped this abuse, it is clear we can not trust the govenrment with this kind of power over us. Either they restrict their hunt to Mulsim radicals, or the war on terror measures are purely toltaltarian bs. Open borders McStain is behind this abuse of Americans and the overturning of our constitution.
I wonder if this poor woman voted for Barky in 2008?
You don't know the half of it, Grandma. Get yourself a gun and a box of ammo.
And take a bus.
Mind-Blowing TSA Stupidity and Political Correctness
I’ve had some fun mocking the bureaucrats from the Transportation Security Administration, including stories such as:
o Confiscating a plastic hammer from a mentally retarded man.
o Detaining a woman for carrying breast milk.
o Hassling a woman for the unexplained red flag of having sequentially numbered checks.
o Demanding that a handicapped 4-year old boy walk through a metal detector without his leg braces.
o Putting an 8-year old cub scout on the no-fly list.
Keep in mind that these are the geniuses who still fail to catch guns and box cutters – even when using the body-scan equipment!
May you live to a ripe old age and experience all the blessings that come with it.
May the government be with you every step of the way to help you along. :-)
I used to just dislike bureaucrats and technocrats, but my dislike has turned into something very close to hatred.
Well, I’m sure not going to defend some of the sillier things that TSA has done. I wasn’t a fan of it’s creation. I felt, and still do, that it was unnecessary. I think Flight 93 was all the lesson we needed that the way to make planes safer is to have ~more~ weapons aboard, not fewer.
But that said, if the job is going to be done, the TSA agents are far and away better than what they replaced. Remember that? Remember those ubiquitous little old (and I mean ~old~) asian ladies that were the staple of airport security before 9/11? Few if any spoke english and the ones behind the monitors were half asleep. All the whining aside, the new TSA agents do have a more professional appearance. I think there’s too many of them, but by and large the ones I’ve seen at various airports are cordial and polite and cheerful. And they do seem to take the job somewhat seriously. As they should.
In most material respects, though, not much has changed in the actual “inspection” you get now versus pre-9/11. They still x-ray your bag, you still have to go through a metal detector, and they still do a pat-down and wanding if you beep. OK, so now you have to take off your shoes too. Big deal. Sorry, but it’s just not that invasive. Even the newer scanners are, I think, no big deal. I don’t see it as an infringement on my liberty. What WOULD be an infringement would be if I could no longer freely fly around the country whenever I wanted. THAT would indeed be a problem.
There’s way too much drama and too many people getting their knickers all twisted over practices that, really, haven’t changed all that much since the 70’s. The only thing that’s really changed is the list of stuff you may and may not carry on the plane. The 9/11 hijackers didn’t violate any carry-on rules. Knives and box-cutters were perfectly OK to carry back then. I carried a knife on my belt back then. And again... I think it’s a mistake to disarm everybody, but taking it out on the TSA guy at the airport isn’t going to fix it.
The thing to do is to get Congress to pull their stupid heads out of their butts and develop some common sense about what it ~really~ takes to keep planes from being hijacked. Until then, though, all this whining about the TSA guys is just wasted breath. Smile, be polite, be nice, and have a plan to kill anybody on the plane that needs killin’. Your travel day and mine will go much smoother and be much more enjoyable.
:-)
No. The last time I flew was about two months after 9-11-01 and the security agents were Arab men. That was at DIA.
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