Grandma or children... It doesn't matter to them....
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.
One has to wonder what good is being achieved by taking aside a mercenary target like the frail 85 year old Lenore Zimmerman who was wheelchair bound and packed with bandages to both legs and subjecting her to the oppressive experience of a body x ray? What were authorities looking to find? Even they must have suspected that she was on a scale of 1 to 10 of potential terrorist a minus billion but proceeded to humiliate her anyway cause it's important to pick out the most non targets as possible and then later tell the public it spares no one when it comes to sometimes necessary heavy handed screening seems to be counter productive and only sends out the message that the TSA is in fact discriminatory and fool hardy. Surely the odds must remain that if a terrorist plot were to unfold it would be in the hands of an able bodied individual, not a sitting target like Ms Zimmerman.
Really one has to wonder if we shouldn't be protecting ourselves from potential terrorists but the terrorism of the TSA and one has to wonder what Bozo's IQ is when he appointed a dyke like the grotesquely ugly Incompetano as it's chief.
Pubic relations experts?
Grandma or children... It doesn't matter to them....
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There have been conflicting stories about this. Secondly, why did the family release a picture of her as a 60 something when she’s 80 something. There are things that just don’t pass the smell test.
The 84 year old lady has an ICD (an implanted defibrillator) which is quite vulnerable to magnetic fields. She has an innate fear of setting the danged thing off. And so refused the radiation chamber.
I am her age and have an ICD and the same caution (fear) of magnetic fields. Recently went through the TSA Maginot Line in Atlanta. They assured me the radiation field wouldn’t affect the ICD, so I went right in and out. No problem.
Went through the same process at Tulsa on the same trip. Nothing.
But I fully understand her fear. A random shock from an ICD is no fun. And if she was strip searched, I hope she carries this right to the courts with big recovery of moolah.
“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.”
So it differs in no way whatsoever from all the other government success stories from schooling and health care to resource and parks management.
It’s just government business as usual.
I think that most of this is just to embarrass people..I also would like to see the person or persons that invaded this nice lady..Strange how they let the Muslims through and stop the white grannies..
It may be conflicting but it nevertheless helps point out, the way a political cartoon does, that the TSA is part of a monstrous oligarchy that is ruining this nation as certain as muslim terrorists could!
We can’t sit back and do nothing as they pile-drive this nation into a pit. America and its citizens are being shackled by regulations that are so numerous and bizarre that they cry to Heaven for vengeance!
Sure, there’s some silly things they make TSA do, but I smell a set-up here. I would bet that a complete video would show a cantankerous and crabby old lady that was already throwing a fit well before any search. Then she kicks at somebody and hits her walker instead.
Yes, we should be profiling and giving our extra attention to swarthy males between 17 and 35. You can’t however, announce that certain classes of people are exempt from screening or they’ll be the ones carrying the ‘splosives.
I’ve been through the screening hundreds of times, before and after 9/11 and creation of the TSA. I’m polite, I’m prepared, and I never have had any trouble. I breeze through. In my experience the people who bring an attitude and get all huffy about things are the ones that end up slowing everybody else down, and they’re invariably the ones that end up throwing a fit.
One gal in line ahead of me once was a classic case. I swear she looked like she decided to wear every piece of goth metal-studded clothing she owned. Complete with knee-high boots with about a dozen buckles each, huge bangly earrings, a steel-studded collar, studded gloves... and nasty, obnoxious attitude. I really wanted to ask her “did you not know you were going to the airport when you got dressed this morning? Seriously?” She slowed everybody else down and got all crabby like it was somebody else’s fault.
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.
My 94-tear-old uncle, who passed away last year, was always targeted for an intimate search. He submitted meekly like most of us do, but said that America had come to a terrible state when this is how we look for potential terrorists.
My problem is that since I have so much metal installed in arms, shoulders and knees that I am always singled out even though I show them my medical certification. They are rude and abusive and I hate what is happening to my nation.
I think that there will be some sort of revolt but not as violent as the Revolutionary War or the Civil War. The US is far too large now for that to happen but there will be some sort of defiance against the government over all this.
It’s very difficult for me to give a damn seeing as though our socialist government is inherently evil as are the thugs that do the searching and the asshats that run this freaking bureaucracy.
intended pun?
I’m all for it.
It’s difficult to ascertain just how much more abuse from an out-of-control government and the lackadaisical Congress that we just can’t seem to get right!
Unfortunately, what is happening is that these two political parties have become a cancerous carbuncle on our bodies and the body politic. It must be lanced and lanced quickly. All the salaries, staffs, pensions, perks, etc. must be reduced dramatically, in the salary category, while the rest must be taken away retroactively.
This pathetic scum that rule our lives are just not worth much at all. They are an embarrassment to America and Americans.
This smells wrong to me.
When the government messes up it’s all about America. When something good happens by Americans the gov’t takes the credit for it.
I am so sorry for the elderly that have to go through this invasion of their body's..You don't have to tell me how rude those people are and that isn't from me going through their line just by what people tell me..
The TSA screeners are mostly dolts.
About 4 years ago I wheel my 94 yo granfather to the Orlando airport security checkoint and one idiot asks if he can stand and shuffle through the metal detector. So he does, and no alarms go off, but the moron screener thinks he can make the old guy stand with his feet together, no shoes with his arms extended out. ALSO makes him take his belt off.
So here is the 94 yo retired steel worker, wobbling around, his pants falling off while the braindead moronic screener is wanding him over. I bet the video screeners behind closed doors were just roaring in laughter. I was furious and I know if I breathed one word of protest id have been slammed to the floor and carted off to jail. It was the last time I saw my old grandpap.
Basically, radical islam has dictated how we conduct ourselves in America—with full approval of our handlers/politicians.
We had a great trip on LAN Airlines from Miami to Santiago, Chile two years ago and it was a real treat. We flew from Santiago later on to Bariloche and then on to Buenos Aires on the same airline within a period of three weeks. Nobody checked us for anything. All they wanted to see was a passport.
Apparently the South American first-rate airlines know who you are and what you’re up to before you get to the airport which is rather like El Al.
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