Take a look at 4 year old Isabella Brademeyer. That could very well be my own daughter, who is 3. Cute as a button, and according to the TSA, a terrorist.

That’s right, a terrorist. This young lady nearly made the TSA shut down the Wichita airport.

From RT:

Brademeyer was passing through security checks with her mother and her small daughter, Isabella. When the older lady triggered the metal detector, and was told to go for a pat-down, Isabella ran over to and briefly hugged her grandmother.

The TSA immediately said Isabella would now also have to undergo a pat-down, in case the grandmother passed contraband to her during the hug.

When the child shouted “I don’t want to,” the TSA declared Isabella a “high security threat,” and said that they would close down the airport if she moved.

Afterwards, the by-now-hysterical four-year-old was taken to a separate room, and told to stop crying. When she could not, the officers called for backup – saying “the suspect is not cooperating.”

Once the girl calmed down enough to be patted down, Brademeyer claims the transport police repeatedly stated that the girl might be carrying a weapon, as they had previously “seen a gun in a teddy bear.”

Neither the grandmother, nor the child had anything illegal on their person.

Eventually, Isabella and the rest of her family were allowed to board the flight.

The TSA has not questioned Brademeyer’s version of events, but refuses to apologize.

The TSA maintains that proper screening procedures were followed. But this event only highlights the failure of the TSA to differentiate between plausible security threats and passengers unlikely to be doing anything wrong.

I played front row witness to the incompetence of the TSA a few years back, when travelling with a few family members. The eldest, who was wheelchair bound, was shuffled aside, forced to stand on her own while TSA goons patted her down, and ran their hands through her waistline and other areas. You know, just in case granny wanted to “go out with a bang.”

A few years before that, while travelling home on leave from Afghanistan, I was passing through the Dallas airport. I was “flagged” by the counter agent for extra screening. When informed of this by the TSA, I could do nothing else but roll my eyes. I was travelling in uniform, and passed through a thorough customs inspection before leaving Kuwait. I had just spent around 20 hours locked inside a plane that was 100% full. Yet, I was to be viewed with suspicion. Luckily for me, the TSA agent I was speaking with agreed that extra screening was unnecessary, and allowed me through with the normal gamut of checks.

This must stop folks. The TSA is “security theater,” giving the illusion of security with no actual results. In fact, it wasn’t that long ago that their fancy new scanners were shown to be worthless.

Says Ron Paul on the TSA:

“It totally voids the concept of the Fourth Amendment, searches and prodding and poking, you know, with no permission,” Paul told Candy Crowley on CNN’s “State of the Union” today. Paul said the searches are not voluntary, as the government argues, because Americans are not permitted to take commercial air flights without doing exactly what the government demands. “They trap us into it,” Paul told Crowley. “There’s no way you can travel if you don’t do it. So I’ve said, you know, when you look at some of these pictures of probing groin areas and breast areas and all this, 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, oh, that’s OK, they’re making us safe. “It doesn’t make us safe. It undermines our liberties and there’s a much better way of giving us security at the airports than accepting the bureaucrats and the politicians in Washington. That is totally unacceptable from my viewpoint.”

He’s right folks. The TSA is a bureaucratic nightmare that has grown wildly beyond its initial conception. It needs to die a quick and painless death.

Meanwhile, we have a family that is devastated, and a poor 4 year old who had no understanding of what was going on, and was being treated as a common criminal.

When will we finally say “Enough is enough?”

Further reading: Hot Air, Newsmax, Dailymail.