I'll believe it when I see it

Forgive me for not trusting the lying TSA when it says it will start being smarter and more respectful when screening children at airports. What's interesting is that the reporting - some of it from the MSM - comes across as skeptical as well. A local news affiliate quotes Pistole in full, leaving in clear words that pat-downs of children will continue:

"As part of our ongoing effort to get smarter about security, Administrator (John) Pistole has made a policy decision to give security officers more options for resolving screening anomalies with young children and we are working to operationalize his decision in airports. This decision will ultimately reduce -- though not eliminate -- pat-downs of children.”

The liberal Baltimore Sun quoted Rand Paul's questioning of the TSA over this issue.

Examiner.com points out:

One thing it doesn’t mean is that children will be exempted from having to pass through body imaging machines, which are a whole separate can of worms. In fact, the 6-year-old girl whose pat-down went viral was frisked in the first place only because she had moved while passing through a scanner.

However, while this site quotes Paul, it also ends with this garbage from Pistole:

"Unfortunately, we know that terrorists around the world have used children as suicide bombers," Pistole said.

That sets off major alarms for me - like an email claiming I won the UK lottery. Yes - some (very few) minors have been involved in suicide bombing. And, of course, there are child soldiers in war-torn countries to this day. First off, all child suicide bombers have been over the age of 15. Second, these children are in really desperate situations - their country has been ravaged and they may be orphans. Third, everything I've read about them indicates that they are local to the attack. A Palestinian boy attacking in Palestine, an Afghani boy attacking in Afghanistan, etc... There are zero reports of suicide-bombing children under the age of 15, zero reports of children from Western countries, and, I would guess, they're not usually with their parents at the time of the bombing (but, more likely, their parents have been killed by their perceived enemy). Yet, Pistole continues to try to scare us into supporting the absurdity that is the TSA... and the media plays right along!