TSA Makes Rand Paul Miss His Flight

Senator Rand Paul (R) of Kentucky was stopped from boarding his flight by the Transportation Security Administration at Nashville airport on Monday. He was later allowed to go on another flight, but not before being detained for some time. Paul was enroute to Washington D.C., and at the security check in the airport, a TSA agent detected an “anomaly” in Paul’s knee. The Tea Party favorite was told that he would have to undergo a full-body pat-down, but he refused and instead offered to show his knee.

The TSA agents however stuck to their demands. What happened after this it remains unclear. Paul claims that he was “detained” by being cornered in a cubicle, while the TSA has said that he was not. The agency claims that Paul was made to undergo a second scan and this time the scanner did not show any anomaly, so he was allowed to board another flight. This fact has made the libertarian and big-government skeptic believe that there was no anomaly in the first place. Paul appeared on CNN’s “The Situation Room” with Wolf Blitzer and said that he was told by two TSA employees that their systems made random mistakes sometimes.

The White House has jumped to TSA’s defense; with White House spokesman Jay Carney saying that TSA was right in denying access to the gate area to Paul.

TSA’s latest move comes as more proof to the agency’s skeptics who accuse it of being heavy-handed and generally incompetent. They trade horror stories about their experiences. Some of the big TSA horror stories of the last year include:

–    puncturing a cancer survivor’s urine bag which resulted in the man being covered in his own urine.
–    making a breast cancer survivor take off her prosthetic breast.
–    aggressively carrying out a full body pat down of a five year old girl (whose video went viral), and
–    making a developmentally-disabled 4-year-old who could not walk without leg braces, take them off and walk through the metal detector.