newjerseynewsroom.com

BY BOB HOLT

NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM

Republican Presidential candidate Ron Paul says that the TSA only shows people the illusion of airline security, and the government has no business being involved in such matters.

Paul said, according to Mediaite, “There’s no way you can travel if you don’t do it. When you look at some of these pictures of probing groin areas and breast areas, and old women having to take their clothes off, if we as a people are so complacent that we can look at that and say, ‘That’s okay, they’re making us safe.’ It doesn’t make us safe.”

Paul and his son Rand Paul have long disagreed with the TSA's methods. But a week ago, Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul was forced to miss a flight by the TSA for refusing a full-body pat-down after he set off an alarm going through a scanner at Nashville International Airport. Rand Paul said that he showed TSA officers his knee and under his socks and wanted to pass through the scanner again- but was refused.

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A TSA spokesman told CNN, "When an irregularity is found during the TSA screening process, it must be resolved prior to allowing a passenger to proceed to the secure area of the airport." Paul said he didn’t feel a pat-down was "appropriate."

A day later, Ron Paul announced the start of an End the TSA Money Bomb fundraiser in an attempt to shut the organization down. Paul said in a press release, according to the Huffington Post, “The elderly. The disabled. Little kids. All victims of an out-of-control police state that, while doing nothing to make us safer, is working overtime to strip away our freedoms, our rights, and our basic dignity.”

In December, 85-year-old Lenore Zimmerman from Long Island woman said she was strip-searched at Kennedy Airport. The New York Daily News reported that Zimmerman asked if she could pass on the advance image technology screening equipment, out of fears it might cause her defibrillator to malfunction.