NEW YORK - A woman says a security guard at Kennedy Airport forced her to drink from three bottles of her own breast milk to demonstrate the liquid posed no threat to other passengers.
Elizabeth McGarry, 40, said the incident occurred April 2 as she was boarding a Delta flight for Miami with her infant daughter. She called it "embarrassing and disgusting."
The federal agency in charge of post-Sept. 11 airline security said it is investigating. But the security guard's demand would have been within federal guidelines at the time. The policy has since been changed.
Civil rights attorney Ronald Kuby, who fielded a call Wednesday from McGarry on his radio talk show, ridiculed the notion that anyone could have suspected the Long Island woman of being a terrorist.
"The number of middle-aged, lactating white women who passed through al-Qaida training is probably negligible," he said.
Kuby said the suburban woman is not looking to sue over the incident.
"She's primarily concerned this doesn't happen to somebody else," Kuby said. "She does feel the people who did this were plain stupid, and should be punished in some way."
McGarry and her daughter were pulled out of the boarding line for a random search. Guards examined her shoes, searched her baby and went through her diaper bag, Kuby said.
"None of that bothered her," Kuby said. "Only when she was ordered to drink the breast milk did she fail to see the connection to stopping terrorism."
The male guard was employed by a private company.
At the time, screeners were permitted to have passengers drink from containers, said Transportation Security Administration spokesman Sebastian Warren. That policy was changed on June 24, he said.
"In light of this unfortunate incident, the TSA is redoubling its efforts to ensure that both private-sector and federal screeners uniformly and consistently apply this policy," Warren said.
