Travel: USA's TSA's list of outrages goes on

Lena Reppert is 95 years old and she is wheelchair-bound. She is in the advanced stages of cancer and she is dying. When she was in the queue for boarding a domestic flight out of Northwest Regional Airport in Florida TSA agents demanded that her adult nappy be removed.

Aside from the inconvenience, this was an incredibly embarrassment for the woman who was travelling with her daughter.

First, the TSA said that she could not go through the screening devices in her wheelchair. That is, unfortunately but probably properly, standard operating procedure at most airports where only airline-supplied wheelchairs are allowed to be used airside. It is not known why Reppert was not being escorted by the airline's special services staff which would, for many airlines, be standard operating procedure from check-in where a passenger is in a wheelchair.

Then the TSA separated Reppert and her daughter, taking Reppert into an examination room where she was subject to the infamous "pat down." But TSA officials can't pat through a thick pee-pad and so they demanded she remove it. It was already soiled and so TSA demanded that Reppert's daughter remove it for them, even though she told them that she was not carrying a replacement.

The whole process took 45 minutes and caused such delay that, according to Reppert's daughter, there was only "two minutes" until the gate closed. Reppert's daughter says that her mother caught the flight but that there was no time for a proper goodbye.

Recently, minor celebrity Susie Castillo issued a rant that collected a huge amount of coverage (but frankly little interest) when she refused a full body scan. Her argument is that "I did not want to be radiated on." She says that TSA officials touched her in an inappropriate manner four times during a pat down. But her anger is, if she is correct in her allegations relating to the conduct of a female officer doing the pat down at Dallas Fort Worth justified: " What bothered me most was when she ran the back of her hands down my behind, felt around my breasts, and even came in contact with my vagina!" Castillo wrote on her blog. She flies a lot and always chooses the pat down: this is, she says, the only time that the contact has been of such an intimate nature. "The TSA employee at DFW touched my private area 4 times, going up both legs from behind and from the front, each time touching me there."

YouTube has dozens of films (taken despite a ban on the use of cameras in secure areas) of pat downs, several of which involve children as young as three years old. To be fair, those involving children seen by BankingInsuranceSecurities.Com are dealt with with considerable sensitivity and it is, generally, the parents who are offended more than the child. However, a video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ciZjAAaK_4&feature=related displays an astonishingly display of poor handling of a pat down of a near-hysterical child.

61 year old Thomas Sawyer had his bladder removed to combat cancer and he wears a urostomy bag. It is worn under his clothes near his midriff. He went through the backscatter machine and it disclosed the sac so he was referred to a pat-down. The officer, Sawyer says, began a firm patting of his chest and, as he worked down, Sawyer tried to tell him that the bag was there and that pressure would break its seal, causing its contents to escape. But, Sawyer says, the officer would not listen and, sure enough, hit the bag with sufficient force to burst it open, causing urine to soak Sawyer's shirt and trickle down to his other clothes.He had at least managed to persuade the TSA to conduct the pat down in private due to his medical condition but he still had to walk out with pee-soaked clothes and get onto a plane.

Another cancer survivor, Cathy Bossi, has been an air stewardess for 28 years and (some may say possibly because of her exposure to radiation in that job) suffered breast cancer. After a mastectomy she wears a prosthetic breast. In May this year she became the latest wearer of such an item to be ordered to remove it following a scan.

But at the opposite end of the scale is the incredible story of Olajide Oluwaseun Noibi who has been convicted of being a stowaway. Did he hid in the wheel arch of a plane? No, he walked through all the security checks without proper travel documentation and with stolen boarding passes that did not relate to him or to the flights he was travelling on. Amazingly, a stewardess on his Virgin Airways flight from New York to LA did notice the discrepancy in his boarding pass and reported it. Initial reporst said that he was not even stopped and questioned as he left the appropriately named LAX, although the FBI said they did question him and found that he had a return ticket for 29th June. On that day, the FBI was monitoring the Delta Check In and Noibi was persistent in trying to board with false documents even though the Delta staff refused him a check-in. He was arrested - and FBI found ten stolen boarding passes in his luggage. However, they found his conduct "at the lower end of the spectrum of seriousness."

Quite why this is an FBI matter and not TSA is confusing. Whatever the situation, one thing is clear: travel security in the USA is in a mess and it causes anger and resentment, delay and inconvenience while providing remarkably little overall security to a determined criminal.