Radio host feared arrest for taking photo of incident
Paul Joseph Watson
Infowars.com
Tuesday, May 15, 2012
Radio host Laura Ingraham spoke this morning about the “heartbreaking” scene she witnessed at BWI Airport in Baltimore this past weekend during which a double-amputee war veteran was subjected to an invasive pat down by TSA screeners.
Appearing on Fox and Friends, the same show that featured Geraldo Rivera’s story on Friday about how he was “manually raped” by a TSA agent, Ingraham revealed how she witnessed a severely disabled Afghanistan war veteran treated like a potential terrorist by the widely loathed federal agency.
“It just seemed to me very sad that they’re lifting him up on each side to move him – I guess – to look under his torso to see if there is anything there. They actually took something out of his luggage. And I believe they took it from him – I don’t know what it was, it looked like a long, wooden artifact of some sort. And it looked like they were taking it from him. He had a smile on his face – I don’t know if he had a traumatic brain injury,” said Ingraham.
The radio host added that she thought about taking a photo of the incident, “but I was afraid I was going to be arrested at that point.”
Ingraham said the treatment of the veteran underscored the fact that airport security should be tailored to deal with different people in different ways.
“Something seems to be wrong here,” Ingraham continued. “These men should get red carpet treatment at TSA. To me, it seems like that shouldn’t be something we see.”
As we have documented, far from being forgiven from undergoing the most invasive screening procedures, it seems as though TSA screeners actually seek to target the most weak and vulnerable members of the traveling public for the most intense harassment.
Last month, a family missed their flight because the TSA demanded to subject a 7-year-old girl with cerebral palsy who walks with crutches and leg braces to extra screening after she had already passed through security.
“They make our lives completely difficult,” said her father, Dr. Joshua Frank, a Long Island pediatrician. “She’s not a threat to national security.”
Back in March a video clip also emerged of a 3-year-old boy with a broken leg in a wheelchair being harassed by a TSA worker.
The story also emerged last month of how wheelchair-bound 95-year-old veteran Omer Petti and his 85-year-old partner Madge Woodward were treated like terrorists by TSA agents at San Diego International airport, ostensibly so TSA workers could separate them from $300 dollars in cash which subsequently went missing.
The elderly are also routinely targeted for TSA abuse. Back in December, numerous elderly women came forward to reveal they had been strip-searched by the TSA. In one incident, 85-year-old Lenore Zimmerman was forced to remove her clothes and let TSA agents inspect her colostomy bag.
The TSA initially lied about the incident, claiming it had followed proper procedure but later had to apologize when it turned out the agency had violated their own protocol.
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