Orwell, eat your heart out: 'TSA denies having required a 95-year-old woman to remove diaper'

TSA denies having required a 95-year-old woman to remove diaper

(CNN) -- The Transportation Security Administration has denied that its agents required a 95-year-old woman to remove her adult diaper last week before allowing her to pass a screening checkpoint at Northwest Florida Regional Airport.

"While every person and item must be screened before entering the secure boarding area, TSA works with passengers to resolve security alarms in a respectful and sensitive manner," the agency said Sunday night in a statement. "We have reviewed the circumstances involving this screening and determined that our officers acted professionally, according to proper procedure and did not require this passenger to remove an adult diaper."

A response released earlier Sunday by the TSA said that the agency had reviewed the circumstances "and determined that our officers acted professionally and according to proper procedure."

The woman's daughter, Jean Weber, told CNN on Monday that the TSA agents acted professionally and never ordered the removal of her mother's diaper. However, Weber said the agents made it clear that her mother could not board the plane unless they were able to inspect the diaper.[...]

Once, I remember, I ran across the case of a boy who had been sentenced to prison, a poor, scared little brat, who had intended something no worse than mischief, and it turned out to be a crime. The judge said he disliked to sentence the lad; it seemed the wrong thing to do; but the law left him no option. I was struck by this. The judge, then, was doing something as an official that he would not dream of doing as a man; and he could do it without any sense of responsibility, or discomfort, simply because he was acting as an official and not as a man. On this principle of action, it seemed to me that one could commit almost any kind of crime without getting into trouble with one's conscience.

Clearly, a great crime had been committed against this boy; yet nobody who had had a hand in it — the judge, the jury, the prosecutor, the complaining witness, the policemen and jailers — felt any responsibility about it, because they were not acting as men, but as officials. Clearly, too, the public did not regard them as criminals, but rather as upright and conscientious men.

The idea came to me then, vaguely but unmistakably, that if the primary intention of government was not to abolish crime but merely to monopolize crime, no better device could be found for doing it than the inculcation of precisely this frame of mind in the officials and in the public; for the effect of this was to exempt both from any allegiance to those sanctions of humanity or decency which anyone of either class, acting as an individual, would have felt himself bound to respect — nay, would have wished to respect. This idea was vague at the moment, as I say, and I did not work it out for some years, but I think I never quite lost track of it from that time.