More TSA Stupidity: These Recent Goofs Will Have You Shaking Your Head in Disbelief

A Transportation Security Administration (TSA) screener has been “immediately and permanently separated from federal service” for making an “egregious mistake” that was “unacceptable.”

No, unfortunately, it was not the Tyrannical Sexual Assaulter who recently gave an innocent 9-year-old boy an absolutely disgusting pat-down that would make the worst of sex offenders proud.

WSB-TV Atlanta has the details…

Channel 2 Action News has confirmed that the Transportation Security Administration fired a screener who missed a loaded handgun in a passenger’s carry-on bag Sunday morning at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport.

According to an Atlanta police incident report, Katrina Jackson, of Hoover, Alabama, discovered the handgun as she checked her purse for her passport while at the gate.

This is where the story gets even more twisted…Jackson SELF-REPORTED to police when she realized the gun was in her purse.

Because no good deed goes unpunished – Jackson – who told police she has a permit from Alabama but did not have it with her – was promptly arrested and charged with unlawful possession of a handgun.

Police confiscated her gun and bag.

A TSA spokesperson sent WSB-TV the following statement:

“This egregious mistake was unacceptable and the officer, who was still a probationary employee, was immediately and permanently separated from federal service.”

According to the TSA, a screener’s probationary period lasts two years.

Meanwhile, an incident that occurred at LaGuardia airport in New York is so idiotic that it is almost comical…

From Newsday:

The report of a “hazardous” white substance forced the closure of a main terminal concourse at LaGuardia Airport early Wednesday, sending three people, two of them TSA agents, to the hospital for observation, the Port Authority said.

The incident was reported at 5:30 a.m. at a screening point Terminal B’s Concourse D, the Port Authority said.

It was there, Port Authority spokesman Joseph Pentangelo said, that the two Transportation Security Administration agents “came into contact” with the unknown white substance that was in a bag.

Wondering what that “hazardous material” was?

Pix 11 has the answer…sort of…

The unknown “hazardous material” was a white powder that was later deemed non-explosive, and was, in fact, a food item or spice, police said.

During the inspection, and “out of an abundance of caution,” police were contacted, and the airport checkpoint was closed for about 40 minutes, according to the TSA. It reopened at 6:26 a.m.

What is it with TSA agents and food? Last April, the TSA confiscated CNN journalist Campbell Brown’s pimento cheese. In January 2016, a 10-year-old girl was given a shockingly invasive pat-down at the Raleigh-Durham International Airport. The trigger? A juice pouch the girl accidentally left in her carry-on bag.

Most of the TSA’s actions are purely security theater, designed to make people believe the government is actually doing things to prevent terrorist attacks or other problems on flights.

Or, perhaps their tactics are designed to condition us to accept the expanding tyrannical police state.

We reported on the following back in February:

• A man demonstrated how he was able to build a break-action shotgun out of items he purchased in the airport after going through TSA… a weapon capable of exploding and shooting a hole the size of almost two quarters near a sheet of drywall.
• At New York’s John F. Kennedy airport, 11 people walked right on through an unattended security checkpoint without being screened and hopped right onto flights.
• Twelve TSA and airport employees who were involved in a massive cocaine trafficking operation that lasted nearly two decades were indicted by a federal grand jury in Puerto Rico on February 8.

In recent years, the TSA has dealt with a number of high-profile security lapses at airports, including a gun-smuggling operation uncovered at Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport in 2015.

Last July, it was reported that nearly half of the TSA’s entire workforce had allegedly committed misconduct, and almost half of those did so repeatedly.

And, also in February, a report on the findings of a two-year House Homeland Security Committee investigation into “insider threats” posed by airport employees was released. Problems abound, including inadequate employee screenings at secure access points, an attempt to detonate a bomb at an airport, gun and drug smuggling, an expressed willingness to smuggle explosives, as well as employees who became involved in terrorist activities overseas.

In 2015, we reported…

An internal investigation of the Transportation Security Administration revealed security failures at dozens of the nation’s busiest airports, where undercover investigators were able to smuggle mock explosives or banned weapons through checkpoints in 95 percent of trials.

That’s right – TSA agents failed to detect almost every single test bomb and gun during that investigation.

In March, Bloomberg reported that the TSA recently implemented a more “comprehensive” physical screening:

Denver International Airport, for example, notified employees and flight crews on Thursday that the “more rigorous” searches “will be more thorough and may involve an officer making more intimate contact than before.”

“I would say people who in the past would have gotten a pat-down that wasn’t involved will notice that the [new] pat-down is more involved,” TSA spokesman Bruce Anderson said Friday. The shift from the previous, risk-based assessment on which pat-down procedure an officer should apply was phased in over the past two weeks after tests at smaller airports, he said.

The TSA is a massive waste of taxpayer money – the agency’s budget for fiscal year 2017 is $7.6 BILLION.

And we’ve got nothing to show for it except for the increasing invasion of privacy and erosion of civil liberties.