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Former GOP Rep. Bob Barr: TSA 'harassing tots and seniors' with pat-downs
A former Republican congressman and Libertarian presidential candidate said Wednesday that the Transportation Security Administration has been too quick to defend its employees for controversial airport security pat-downs.
Former Georgia Rep. Bob Barr, who was the Libertarian Party's nominee for president in 2008, said the TSA appears to be more interested in being right than having policies that make sense.
"What I want is men who will support me when I am in the wrong," Barr wrote in his column in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. "These words were uttered by a British Whig politician, William Lamb, Lord Melbourne, in the early 19th Century, reportedly in reply to a fellow politician offering to support him when he was in the right. The principle the words embody, however, might as well be emblazoned on the employment contract for each TSA manager, especially those at the highest levels of this federal bureaucracy."
Barr was sharply critical of recent reports the TSA made an elderly woman remove her adult diaper at an airport in northwest Florida, which the agency denied earlier this week.
"Telling a cancer-stricken, 95-year old woman traveling in a wheelchair, that she cannot board a commercial airliner for which she has paid her fare and been 'cleared' to travel, unless she takes off an adult diaper that a TSA agent deemed to be suspicious, is 'professional' and 'proper,'" he wrote.
A TSA spokesman told The Hill this week that the agency "reviewed the circumstances involving this screening and determined that our officers acted professionally, according to proper procedure and did not require this passenger to remove an adult diaper."
The woman's daughter, Jean Weber, disagreed, telling CNN that the TSA's procedure that impacted her mother needed to be changed.
In his column Wednesday, former Rep. Barr agreed.
"Clearly, President Obama is not inclined to step up and rein in the TSA or its parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security," he wrote. "And thus far, TSA has resisted efforts by the Congress – especially the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, headed by California Republican Darrell Issa – to consider any reasonable limitations on the agency’s vast power over law-abiding citizens.
"Whether citizens of this country will arise from their fear-based stupor to declare that 'enough is enough,' and demand they stop being treated like common criminals simply because they need to travel by air, remains to be seen," he continued. "Thus far, despite occasional public revulsion at individual incidents, the fear mongerers are winning."
