TSA Capitol Hill Pat-Down Demonstration Backfires

by Jordan Yerman | November 23, 2010 at 04:33 pm

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TSA Pat-Down Reassurance Fails on Capitol Hill

We're not sure exactly what the TSA expected when it sent agents to Capitol Hill to demonstrate the oft-maligned "enhanced pat-downs", aka "gate grope" or "gate rape". What happened was predictable to most of us: a roomful of weirded-out House staffers.

This snippet summarizes the TA gate-grope demonstration nicely:

The TSA just accelerated that process by going up to Capitol Hill and demagoguing terror before collectively embarrassing a bunch of staffers by feeling them up.

“The dumbest part: they did two pat-down demonstrations – male on male, and female on female,” the House staffer said. And they used a young female TSA volunteer “and in front of a room of 200 people, they touched her breasts and her buttocks. People were averting their eyes. The TSA was trying to demonstrate ‘this is not so bad,’ but it made people so uncomfortable to watch, that people were averting their eyes.”

One staffer who witnessed the awkward fiasco asked, "Why fund this huge intelligence operation if we are going to treat everyone like terrorists?"

"The woman who checked me reached her hands inside my underwear and felt her way around," ABC producer Carolyn Durand told ABC. "It was basically worse than going to the gynecologist. It was embarrassing. It was demeaning. It was inappropriate."

TSA Administrator John Pistole told ABC that that incident should not have happened.

... but it did happen. That's what John Pistole either does not comprehend, or is willfully ignoring. How many public apologies is Pistole prepared to issue? What happens when the demands for apologies turn into lawsuits?

We're left scratching our heads here: how can Pistole handle this situation any worse?