The TSA: More Crimes, More Lies

The latest brutality to catch the corporate media’s attention features an 84-year-old woman who divides her time between New York’s Long Island and Florida. Lenore Zimmerman wears a defibrillator, uses a walker and wheelchair, weighs less than 110 pounds and stands under 5 feet tall. She also boasts a nose for nonsense: “I really look like a terrorist,” she sarcastically told New York’s Daily News.

Ms. Zimmerman tried to catch a flight on November 29 from JFK to Fort Lauderdale and “asked if she could forgo the advanced image technology screening equipment [sic for ‘carcinogenic porno-scanner’], fearing it might interfere with her defibrillator. She said she normally gets patted down [sic for ‘sexually assaulted’]. But this time, she says that two female agents escorted her to a private room and began to remove her clothes. ‘I was outraged,’ said Zimmerman, a retired receptionist.”

{modulepos inner_text_ad}

Who wouldn’t be? But that didn’t end her travails: “As she tried to lift a lightweight walker off her lap, she says, the metal bars banged against her leg and blood trickled from a gash. ‘My sock was soaked with blood,’ she said. ‘I was bleeding like a pig.’ She says the TSA agents [sic for ‘sociopaths’] showed no sympathy, instead pulling down her pants and asking [sic for ‘brusquely ordering in stentorian tones,’ or I miss my guess] her to raise her arms.”

It takes a special breed to “work” for Leviathan: While you and I would have been horrified at Ms. Zimmerman’s injury and immediately tried to comfort her while grabbing something to stanch the flow, the TSA’s thuggettes “showed no sympathy.” (Then again, you and I would never have been in that room strip-searching a little old lady in the first place.) Try to imagine the barbarity required for ignoring an infirm elder’s distress as she gushes blood. Now remember that she, you, and I are paying for this ferocity — to the tune of $8.2 billion per year.

Remember as well that Dr. Ron Paul (R-Texas) alone of the Republican presidential candidates has called for abolishing this vile agency. In stunning contrast to his congressional colleagues: Not only did those rats and wusses sic the TSA on us in 2001, they’ve authorized its escalating budget every year since, regardless of how many or bloody its atrocities against their constituents during the preceding 12 months. 

Meanwhile, the TSA reacted to the attack on Ms. Zimmerman as it has to those on countless others. First, it upheld its savages’ sadism and even justified it as “proper procedure.” That’s an astonishing bit of truth from these pathological liars, that abusing the weak and helpless is official policy. Indeed, the agency’s mentors proclaimed the same doctrine.

But thereafter, we descend into an abyss of deception and propaganda. The TSA “denied that its agents strip-searched the Long Beach grandma”; indeed, it categorically dismisses the very notion of a strip-search: “TSA does not include strip searches in its protocols,” its blog blithers, “and a strip search did not occur in this case.” (Emphasis in original.)

What was Ms. Zimmerman’s response to these professional liars slandering her as an amateur one? “I say they’re lying.… They’re doing it to protect their butts.”

Unfortunately for Our Rulers, a second victim corroborates the fact that the agency does indeed “include strip searches in its protocols”: “88-year-old Ruth Sherman spoke to … WCBS after hearing about Zimmerman’s story, claiming to have had a similar ordeal at the same JetBlue terminal one day earlier. Sherman, of Sunrise, Fla., was returning home from a Thanksgiving holiday in New York when TSA screeners wanted to check the bulge from Sherman’s colostomy bag. ‘This is private for me. It’s bad enough that I have it,’ she [says]…. ‘I had to pull from my sweatpants and I had to pull my underwear, my underwear down. You don’t do that anybody [sic],’ she added. ‘I felt like I was invaded.’” That’s because you were, ma’am. Outside an airport, what you suffered is a crime known as “assault.”

And a third woman, this one a diabetic in her 60s with a blood-sugar monitor strapped to her leg, says the TSA forced her to lower her britches, too.

Though it avers it has nothing for which to atone, the TSA “‘contacted [Ms. Zimmerman] to apologize that she feels she had an unpleasant screening experience.” Dismissing a victim’s charges as mere perception is one of the bureaucracy’s favorite ploys: Dissidents only “feel” they endured an “unpleasant experience”; in reality, the TSA’s molestation is necessary and beneficial, as any good Amerikan can testify.

Regardless, the agency may be lying even about this minutia. “Zimmerman said … she doesn’t recall the TSA calling her. ‘I really don’t remember if they called to apologize,’ said Zimmerman, explaining that she’s been so upset she’s been taking sleeping pills.”

From inept but simple falsehoods, we now move to the TSA’s equally inept brainwashing. “Our screening procedures are conducted in a manner designed to treat all passengers with dignity, respect and courtesy,” the agency insists as usual despite nauseating evidence to the contrary. Apparently, it believes that repeating a Big Lie often enough guarantees our believing it.

Ms. Zimmerman’s tale contains details, such as a medic’s dressing her leg, that are easily disproved if she’s hallucinating. Yet the TSA hasn’t cited anything beyond its pablum about respectfully molesting passengers and its surveillance tapes, which it hasn’t released, to bolster its version of events. And it continues vehemently disputing Ms. Zimmerman’s account.

Meanwhile, one of those aforementioned congressional wusses chortles that increasing multitudes of us will endure these humiliating, traumatic, and criminal assaults: "You have pacemakers, you have artificial hips, you have artificial knees," Rep[ulsive] Peter King [R-N.Y.] told the Associated Press. It’s a measure of congressional depravity that this craven bully presides over the House Homeland Security Committee. "As we get older and we keep ourselves together, it’s going to take more and more surgery. There’s going to be more and more medical improvements, but that can create what appears to be a security issue."

Only in a police-state.