It was not very long ago that American travelers were complaining about the hassle of heightened Airport Security measures that were in place after the Islamic Terrorist attack on September 11, 2001.  Americans were being made to pass through metal detectors, passed over with detecting wands, and had their luggage sent through an x-ray machine. 

Well, after the embarrassment that President Barack Hussein Obama’s Administration experienced over the failed “Underwear Bomber”, Scooter and Janet Big Sis Napalitano have taken it upon themselves, without running it by Congress or anyone else, to install an extremely invasive system of physical pat downs of passengers, ranging from 3 year olds to seasoned citizens.

The head of the Transportation Security Administration, John Pistole, is defending the new procedure,which some have labelled sexual assault. The new procedure involves TSA employees running their hands up the inside of passengers’ thighs and touching around women’s topsides.

Pistole admitted that the government is not always ahead of the terrorists. He said that the TSA is seeking “the proper mix” between passengers’ rights and protecting airplanes. He told a Senate committee which was holding a meeting about the safety of cargo:

There is an ever-evolving nature of the terrorist threat.

We want to be sensitive to people’s sensitivity to privacy and their being while ensuring that everybody is secure on every flight.

Pistole insists that he is concerned about fliers’ safety and privacy and asked the flying public to “work together” with his agency.

According to him, the only people who undergo the patdowns are those who refuse to go through very revealing full-body scanners or those who somehow trip other detectors.

He said:

It’s a very small percentage of all passengers. Our patdown approach is very similar to what is being used in Europe.

Explain that to 3-year-old Mandy Simon. She had to go through security with her daddy at the airport in Chattanooga, Tenn.

Mandy became scared and started crying when she was asked to put her teddy bear through the X-ray machine. Because she was upset, she set the machine off twice, which meant she “must be hand-searched.”

A TSA employee patted down Mandy and she started screaming and kicking her legs. Her daddy, Steve, happens to be a TV reporter and caught 17 seconds of the ordeal on his cell phone:

And if  you think that Mandy’s is an isolated case, watch this pat down of a 3-year-old boy:

The Obama Administration has reassured the flying public time and time again that any naked images of them at airport checkpoints would be destroyed immediately.

However, information has come out that the U.S. Marshals Service, in at least one case, has been keeping thousands of similar naked images recorded by its body scanners.

Gizmodo reports that U.S. Marshalls in a Florida courthouse have saved 35,000 body scanner images.

Just don’t point and laugh, people.

The new TSA procedure has unleashed a firestorm over the internet, driven in part by an airport traveler who famously resisted a full-body scan and groin check with the words:

If you touch my junk, I’ll have you arrested.

John Tyner’s online story,complete with cell-phone video of the encounter,has helped fuel a campaign urging travelers to decline the body scans next week during the busiest travel day of the year.  Here’s Tyner’s story from an interview with Shannon Bream of Fox News:

Tyner is a 31-year-old software engineer from Oceanside, Calif.  He insists that he was not looking to be famous when he stood up to TSA agents last weekend at the San Diego airport.

Tyner said:

I don’t think I did anything heroic.  I stood up for what I thought was right.

After he refused to go through the full-body scanner, he then refused to submit to a groin check as part of a pat-down. He was tossed from the airport Saturday after being threatened with a fine and lawsuit.

HIs defiance has inspired online sales of T-shirts, bumper stickers, hats and even underwear emblazoned with the words, “Don’t Touch My Junk!”

Tyner is hesitant to advocate that Americans do what he did, saying he appreciates that most people cannot afford to put expensive trips at risk:

But people ought to do what their consciences say they should do. If civil disobedience is a way they think would work, I think they should do it.

Tyner’s actions have resulted in an online campaign urging air travelers to refuse body scans in a “National Opt-Out Day” the day before Thanksgiving, one of the year’s busiest travel days.

There are 300 of the scanners in use at 60 U.S. airports. The Transportation Security Administration will be using approximately 500 of them by the end of the year.

In Israel, where Palestinians attacked planes in the 1970s, passengers face tough questioning and multiple inspections. Single women who are not Israeli citizens are sometimes inspected more intensely because militants have tried to use them as couriers.  El Al and British Airways employ profiling as well, and they have never had a hijacking.

Wow.  Actually providing intelligent security measures through the use of profiling. What a concept!

Big Sis Janet Napolitano has defended America’s new Airport Security Procedure, proclaiming:

It’s all about security. It’s all about everybody recognizing their role.

Shut up, she explained.

As regular readers of my Blog can attest, I’m a proud patriotic American, the son of a D-Day veteran.  I bleed red, white, and blue. 

Having said that, I, like a lot of other proud Americans are asking why, with the best intelligence network at their fingertips, are Scooter and Big Sis attacking the delicate problem of Airport Security with all the finesse of a bull in a China Shop?  Has their political ideology trumped their concerns for Americans’ safety?  Is this administration so afraid of offending the Muslim community that it has clouded their memory of exactly what happened and who it was that murdered innocent Americans on 9/11/2001?  Rumors are floating that the TSA may discontinue searching Muslim women wearing traditional garb.  If this namby pamby administration does not put the safety of Americans first, before their political ideology and misguided world view,  and shelves this literally touchy feely security procedure for a smarter one, such as the Israelis use,  they will continue to propagate unrest among their own citizenry, which, as Glenn Beck said yesterday, may be the whole purpose of this new security procedure in the first place.