A woman has filed a complaint with the Department of Homeland Security over how her elderly mother was detained and searched by Transportation Security Administration officers at the Northwest Florida Regional Airport last weekend.

News Herald reported that Jean Weber filed the complaint after her wheelchair-bound 95-year-old mother, who is in the final stages of her battle with leukemia, was asked to remove an adult diaper during a pat down search.

According to Weber, her elderly mother was first taken to a glass-partitioned area and patted down before being taken to another room. As she was waiting outside of the room, officers conducting the pat down told Weber that her mother's Depends diaper would need to be removed because it was soiled and impeding their search.

“It’s something I couldn’t imagine happening on American soil,” Weber said. “Here is my mother, 95 years old, 105 pounds, barely able to stand, and then this.”

Weber took her elderly mother to the bathroom and removed her diaper, then returned to complete the pat down. She said she did not have another clean diaper with her.

A spokesperson for the TSA said that officers must follow the same procedures for everyone to prevent terrorists from finding vulnerabilities in the security check points.

Labels: brownshirts, fascism, just another outrage, security theatre, thuggery

The paranoid environment created by the 9/11 attacks has allowed for a myriad of civil rights infringements under the guise of national security. Airport security especially ratcheted up racial profiling, marking any Middle Eastern sign or symbol a suspicious target, particularly the turban. Even turbaned individuals with no affiliation with Islam or the Middle East, such as Sikh men, have become “a superficial and accessible proxy for the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks” and a “target of discriminatory conduct,” including employment discrimimation, harrassment, and violence.

But now, this long-permitted prejudice is creating diplomatic tension between the U.S. and India. Today, the Indian press reported on an incident last month in which Houston, Texas airport security officials detained Indian’s UN envoy Hardeep Puri in a holding room for 30 minutes because he was wearing a turban. As a Sikh, Puri is obliged to keep all hair intact and his head covered in public at all times. The turban symbolizes self-respect and piety — “touching of the head dress in public is not allowed” and can only be removed “in the most intimate of circumstances.”

However, as officials present during the incident told Turtle Bay, airport security officials ignored Puri’s religious requirements and long-standing protocol exempting dignitaries from such treatment and demanded to physically check his Turban themselves until Puri informed them that TSA regulations allow him to check himself:

Airport security agents in Austin pulled Singh aside into an enclosed glass holding room for questioning after he refused a request to remove his turban or allow inspectors to touch it, an Indian official who witnessed the incident told Turtle Bay. “He said no, you cannot check my turban,” according to the Indian official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “I won’t allow you to touch my turban.”

The Indian official said Singh offered to touch the turban himself and to allow the security agents to run a check of his hands for traces of explosives, but he said that one security official refused. Singh insisted that the security official had no right to check his turban, citing TSA regulations for searches of foreign diplomats. “Obviously you don’t know your own rules. Please check your rules,” he told the security agent, according to the Indian official. “The person insisted that he had to do it. He said, ‘Don’t tell me the rules.’”

Labels: brownshirts, thuggery, TSA

NPR received a bomb threat Monday, five days after its decision to fire news analyst Juan Williams sparked a hugely negative reaction.

Sources at the news organization said the threat was received via U.S. mail and was immediately turned over to local police and the FBI. The organization did not publicly disclose the threat or release details, on the advice of law enforcement officials.

The letter didn't reference the Williams firing specifically, but people at NPR, who spoke about it on the condition of anonymity, said the timing and tone suggested it was sent after Williams's widely publicized termination.

Labels: brownshirts, thuggery, wingnuttia

With the support and encouragement of the Republican leadership, one of America's most despicable political thugs, Dick Armey, a corporate lobbyist funded by the "health" industry, is organizing mobs to disrupt, harass and intimidate every public event organized to discuss the health care reform effort.

It's not just Dick Armey. The entire Republican leadership has been fanning the flames with persistent lies claiming the Democrats want to force euthanasia on old people, abortions on the unwilling and have Obamacrats tell your doctor how or whether to treat you. We've seen months of pernicious lies, and they're having the predictable effect in scaring the elderly and inciting the gullible to vent their anger at anyone they can associate with Obama or health reform.

But instead of condemning such reprehensible behavior, the media writes absurd stories about the resurgence of the party, it's prospects for 2010-12 and who the next leader will be. But we already know: the leaders of the Republican Party are liars who think it's fine to organize thugs to disrupt town halls and stifle discussion.

Armey's Republican endorsed effort is profoundly anti-democratic. It is nothing less than an assault on the country's ability to talk about public issues. It seeks to prevent public officials from speaking to or hearing from affected citizens.

The organizers and their corporate sponsors are not interested in public dialogue or debate. Their purpose is to intimidate and threaten reform proponents, to silence them and prevent their views being heard.

The First Amendment protects even the most objectionable speech. Even speech whose content you hate. But this will quickly move beyond speech. It is sheer thuggery, driven by anger and induced by lies. And because the Republicans are inciting the most gullible and desperately fearful, it will get worse unless the Party's leaders, organizers and their corporate sponsors are shamed into stepping back from the abyss.

The restraints that separate where we are from organized violence are always fragile, based as much on a commonly shared sense of fairness as on civil enforcement. That shared notion has been severely damaged in recent years. Once it's gone, it's a small step for angry people to cross the line from vigorous, constitutionally protected demonstrations to illegal and violent behavior.

Rep. Brad Miller (D-NC) will not be hosting any town hall events this August -- instead, he's making himself available to constituents for one-on-one meetings about health care reform -- and at least part of the reason is this: His offices have received threatening phone calls, including at least one direct threat against his life.

"We had no town hall events scheduled for the August recess anyway, but in light of everything that's happened -- we have received a threatening phone call in the D.C. office, there have been calls to the Raleigh office," said Miller communications director LuAnn Canipe, in an interview with TPM. The threatening call in question happened earlier this week.

"The call to the D.C. office was, 'Miller could lose his life over this,'" said Canipe. "Our staffer took it so seriously, he confirmed what the guy was saying. He said, 'Sir is that a threat?' and at that time our staffer was getting the phone number off caller ID and turning it over to the Capitol Police."

They haven't heard anything back from the police yet, but they did get the caller's number. So this could develop into something soon enough.

Hectoring protesters at a handful of Democratic town hall forums became a flash point Wednesday in the health-care debate, as party leaders cast the critics as "angry mobs" trying to "destroy President Obama" while Republicans accused Democrats of dismissing public opposition to their proposals.

As House members head home for the August recess, some Democrats have been met by taunts, jeers and, in one case, an effigy. Video footage of the sometimes-belligerent protests has taken hold online and on television in a relatively quiet news week, threatening to drown out any health-care debate.

That has fed a political tug of war over whether the protests, at gatherings from Pennsylvania to Texas to Wisconsin, have been organized by conservative groups or sparked by average citizens voicing their own displeasure.

Labels: brownshirts, right-wing hatemongers, thuggery, wingnuttia