7 ms·

In horrific detail, women accuse U.S. customs officers of invasive body searches

160 points by HoppedUpMenace 8y ago

mLuby 8y ago
Wonder if TSA/CBP has to submit to one of these searches themselves before they're allowed to perform one? Kind of like with Tasers or tear gas.
- dsfyu404ed 8y ago
  >Kind of like with Tasers Well that doesn't exactly stop the cops from abusing them. It's lot different when it's someone on your side, maybe someone you know, doing it because they have to and you can be basically assured they won't go out of their way to harm you or be sadistic. It's like the mythbusters water torture episode where Adam just sits there because without all the situational stuff it's not really that bad. People who are actually on the receiving end of people abusing their power have no such luxury.
glangdale 8y ago
Grotesque. Something I noticed several years ago (with the second Iraq War) was the mainstreaming of behavior that previous seemed to stay hidden in the prison system among prison guards and the worst level of corrupt cops. If you were surprised by Abu Gharaib then you clearly weren't paying attention to exactly the same sort of thing happening in prisons in the South. We seem to be progressively empowering more and more fearless bullies in all walks of life; even mall cops and campus cops now act like they are cleaning up a riot in a Supermax.
- dsfyu404ed 8y ago
  >you were surprised by Abu Gharaib then you clearly weren't paying attention to exactly the same sort of thing happening in prisons in the South. If your were surprised my Michael Brown et. al. then you just weren't up to date on how the cops treat poor and/or black people. If you were surprised by the stuff Snowden published it was because you didn't know the history of the federal intelligence and law enforcement agencies. If anything the ATF does surprises you then you must have just slept through the 90s. If this surprises you then you probably weren't keeping tabs on civil liberties at the border, there's been a slow trickle of allegations like this over the years. They can't all be false. It's all just shit. All these organizations just do terrible things with alarming frequencies but it's ok because they only abuse "bad" people and when they abuse innocent people they can either revise the narrative to make those innocent people bad and/or those innocent people are poor and not well connected. It's like the population is so overwhelmed that it can't focus on fixing any one agency.
  - almostdeadguy 8y ago
    Going to get a lot of hate for this, but my cranky anarchist take is that these institutions are broken because they're broken by nature and shouldn't exist. Punitive, carceral systems have never not been full of rampant abuse above their mandate, but the baseline nature of what they do is horrific on its own. Carceral institutions do not address undesirable social phenomena, they exacerbate them and then punish the families of the alleged perpetrators. Not to mention the absolute brutality they enact in trying to enforce the laws.
    - GW150914 8y ago
      On one hand I agree with the “broken by nature” argument, I really do. To me, it’s a strong argument for cutting down our criminal code and not jailing people over drugs, sex, and fines. I still want rapists and killers and inveterate thieves removed from society though, but I don’t want to kill them. Without incarceration how do we achieve these seemingly contradictory aims? I don’t have a good answer, but neither “keep it as it is” or “burn it all down” sound good.
      - almostdeadguy 8y ago
        There are lots of ideas about this, but generally the restorative/transformative justice frameworks are the things prison abolitionists tend to focus on. I'm not well versed on the research surrounding these things, I'm sure there are limitations and criticisms, but I've always thought they advocated a reasonable start for thinking about dismantling carceral systems. Mariame Kaba, an author and activist who writes a lot about this, has a good reading list here: http://www.usprisonculture.com/blog/essential-pic-reading-list/ http://www.usprisonculture.com/blog/essential-pic-reading-li...
        phry 8y ago
        yep, transformative justice seems natural to me. taking 'anti-social' people and isolating them in a situation where there's little semblance of the life they're supposed to start living does not.
- jancsika 8y ago
  > If you were surprised by Abu Gharaib then you clearly weren't paying attention to exactly the same sort of thing happening in prisons in the South. Prison guards in the South in the early 2000s were making the equivalent of photographic "trading cards" glorifying their torture, rape, and humiliation of inmates[1]? I'll admit I've never read anything about that. Can you give some links to stories that covered this at the time? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Ghraib_torture_and_prisoner_abuse#Prisoner_abuse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Ghraib_torture_and_prisone...
  - PhasmaFelis 8y ago
    You seem to think that glangdale is trying to play down Abu Ghraib. I think they're acknowledging the horror there while also trying to draw attention to other atrocities.
    - jancsika 8y ago
      Again-- what are some links to investigative reports of these atrocities that were happening in prisons of the South around the early 2000s (or 1990s) in the U.S. which are "exactly the same sort of thing" as Abu Graib?
      - PhasmaFelis 8y ago
        I don't have any links on hand, personally, but I'm sure you're as good at googling as I am, maybe better. Why are you so skeptical about the idea that serious abuse may have occurred in Southern prisons? Are you concerned about slandering innocent Southern prison workers? Do you think that it would diminish the importance of the Abu Ghraib atrocities? Or are you just nitpicking over whether they were really, literally exactly as bad, as opposed to merely very-bad-but-not-quite-as-bad?
      - Kim_Bruning 8y ago
        Here's a memorandum opinion somewhere in the middle. https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/FSupp2/37/855/2415783/ https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/FSupp2/... If (like me) you're mostly interested in substantiation of the claim, the summary of the situation seems useful already. There are also plenty of references and keywords to be found in this document. For instance, many news reports and court documents seem to refer back to a quote from section XI-A; searching for "culture of sadistic and malicious violence" yielded a large number of relevant hits. Apparently this has been a well known issue, and all 3 branches have been working on improvement.
- int_19h 8y ago
  "The perpetual menacings of danger oblige the government to be always prepared to repel it; its armies must be numerous enough for instant defense. The continual necessity for their services enhances the importance of the soldier, and proportionably degrades the condition of the citizen. The military state becomes elevated above the civil. The inhabitants of territories, often the theatre of war, are unavoidably subjected to frequent infringements on their rights, which serve to weaken their sense of those rights; and by degrees the people are brought to consider the soldiery not only as their protectors, but as their superiors. The transition from this disposition to that of considering them masters, is neither remote nor difficult; but it is very difficult to prevail upon a people under such impressions, to make a bold or effectual resistance to usurpations supported by the military power." When Hamilton wrote this 230 years ago, he was talking of the standing army (of which he was not an opponent, recognizing its necessity - but also recognizing the dangers). An argument could be made - indeed, has been made by many - that modern law enforcement agencies are, in many ways, like a standing army, or at least would be recognized as such by the founders. And if so, it would seem that the above is equally applicable to them.
  - TheCoelacanth 8y ago
    That's actually a really good point. At the time of founding, standing police forces were pretty much non-existent in the US (and not very widespread in the rest of the world). Law enforcement was mostly handled by an elected sheriff who would raise a militia when necessary.
dudul 8y ago
Don't we read the same stories about CBP and TSA every 2 or 3 weeks? Does anybody know if this happens so frequently in other democratic countries? I can't imagine that a story like that would surface in Finland, Spain or Canada without shocking the entire population, who would immediately demand that the problem be addressed. Assuming I'm correct, what is so different about the US that we can't seem to be able to fix this?
- adventured 8y ago
  Reduce the power and reach of the state. Stop giving it more social territory and more power. Start taking things away from it aggressively, remove its regulation of our personal and business lives. You either let the bear stick its nose into the basket or you don't. The US Government involves itself in every single aspect of our lives, and that has to stop if you want to reduce their bad behavior. They have to be taught that there are things that are off limits and there are behaviors that are unacceptable. In short, the American public has allowed the monster in DC to sprawl entirely out of control, for roughly 70 years. The US military is half the size of the entire Russian economy now. The US Government is the size of Germany's entire economy. Who could possibly hold that thing to account? It's too big. The US isn't a small soft cuddly bunny like Finland. WW2 and forward it's a rolling war machine that was built to defeat the monsters of Europe and Asia. That's what the military industrial complex was created to do. More recently, for 40 years it held the Soviet Empire - another European monster - in check in Europe and Asia. The genie has never been put back into the box, it roams the streets daily as the military industrial complex, and it spills into every aspect of daily American life. From the spy agencies, to homeland security & border control, to defense contractors, to foreign military adventurism or nation building, to our police militization, to how we interact with our allies. Both political sides are overwhelmingly guilty of kowtowing to it and expanding it, and using it as a stick when it's convenient. Who wants to give up that much power? And the $200 billion plus we'd save by putting that WW2 genie back into the box, can go toward more important priorities. The problem? It requires a dramatic increase in US isolationism. The US must pull entirely back from trying to police every corner of the planet both militarily and politically, which every globalist in DC is yelling at the top of their lungs trying to prevent from happening. We can't have it both ways. We can be the WW2 global juggernaut that polices all, acting as a shield for Europe and Asia. Or we can shut that all down, demilitarize across the board and redirect our priorities to domestic social welfare. In short, we can start behaving like a normal nation again. We either do it voluntarily (sparing ourselves immense pain and treasure), or eventually the cost gets high enough ($21 trillion and counting) that we'll be forced to do it regardless.
dsfyu404ed 8y ago
My tinfoil hat theory is that the people up top know if they allow stuff like this to happen just frequently enough that the people who care about civil liberties are well aware of it and the general public isn't that that will keep the civil liberties crowd from standing up for their rights and getting the general public to do the same but not so frequently that politicians get interested in cleaning them up. It's like the ATF, they just keep the terribleness at a low simmer and nobody cares.
patrickg_zill 8y ago
Perhaps this sounds snarky but as a not-buff roughly middle-aged male, I have never had to deal with this.... I do think that there are far better ways to do screening. I haven't been subject to such searches while overseas, that I can recall. Which clearly puts it in the category of security theater vs. actual security.
captain_perl 8y ago
The news article only got half of the story. The other half is that when they don't get an arrest, they break into your phone or car looking for evidence since they have the contents of your pockets or purse. And sometimes planting it.
chuckgreenman 8y ago
It seems like once a month we get a report about the TSA or Homeland Security falling down on the job. Is there a school for TSA or DHS? Can it be overhauled? It seems like an external government agency needs to be brought in to evaluate pretty much every agent they have on payroll and classify them into "OK", "Retrain", and "Dismiss" groups. The problem is their might be too many in the "Dismiss" group for it to work without sacrificing screening capacity and efficacy.
g5095 8y ago
Why can't we call this what it is, govt sanctioned rape of minors.
g5095 8y ago
https://imgur.com/7eFDT5X https://imgur.com/7eFDT5X
- Memosyne 8y ago
  It surprises you that a digital medium catering to software developers and tech experts largely focuses on news about technology? There are various other forums which are much more passionate about these types of civil liberty issues.
dotancohen 8y ago
This is the whole article for me: Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in most European countries. Thank you GRPR for preventing this website from invading my privacy! I prefer the polite notice to intrusion. To those users in the target locale, beware this website's practices.
- blub 8y ago
  The article can be summarised as "don't visit the US". According to a plaintiff, they did a cavity search on three women with the same glove. They performed searches on minors, menstruating women and old women. In one case they forcibly took someone to a hospital where they gave her IV drugs, undressed her and examined her.
  - dotancohen 8y ago
    Cavity search? Was this a medical professional who performed the search? It seems like either: 1. There does not exist a medical professional on site, so they cannot perform cavity searches, OR 2. There is a medical professional on site, so it would be expensive to have him there and _not_ perform constant cavity searches, OR 3. An untrained agent is performing cavity searches. Does this person know how to deal with diseases, aberrations, birth defects, etc? Cavity search is very invasive.
    - freeone3000 8y ago
      It was (3), as is the norm in the US.
coss 8y ago
Jesus, four fingers!?
joneston 8y ago
“This officer squeezed my breasts hard and went into my underwear and in my vagina with her finger. She did this with the same glove that she did three other women before me!” Ugh. Geeze. There are so many really horrible, permanent, life-shortening-if-not-absolutely-lethal diseases that will basically make people never buy another plane ticket again, just to think of that possibly happening to the rest of your previously reasonable, but now ruined life. Say what you will about officers of the same gender, and whether or not that precludes sexual pleasure being experienced on the part of the officer. That anyone has ever been lined up next to three complete strangers at an airport, and had that happen, should strike mortal fear into the hearts of anyone setting foot inside an airport. More than planes disappearing over the ocean without any known cause. More than planes being willfully smashed into moutains or buildings. That one should cut right through the rest of the noise. Standing in a room, effectively at gunpoint, with two angry women (who either have no medical training, or having medical training and maliciously deviate from it for their own reasons), and find yourself forced to share fluids from the orifices of three strangers. Imagine this same story taking place in a private hangar, a strip search at gunpoint the hands of a Cessna pilot acting as a private citizen, that results in accidental transmission of a life threatening disease. This is the kind of physical transgression that puts ordinary criminals in jail with multiple life sentences, as violent offenders.
likeclockwork 8y ago
I'd rather have more drugs in the country than people being invaded and subjected to these sorts of indignities out of hand.
LeoNatan25 8y ago
Apparently, Israel is part of the EU and so, I cannot access this moronic website.
- GiuseppaAcciaio 8y ago
  Well, they do compete in Eurovision, I guess that's kinda the same thing?
walrus01 8y ago
I see a number of people conflating the TSA and CBP/ICE. Just so we're clear: TSA is a makework security theater program of a bunch of $15/hour people standing around doing not very much. TSA is not a "real" federal law enforcement agency. CBP/ICE, on the other hand, will definitely fuck you up if you anger them while crossing the border. CBP has access to a whole bunch of federal databases and ways to profile and track people that TSA doesn't. 4th amendment rights pretty much don't exist at the border.
YeGoblynQueenne 8y ago
>> In 2000, the Government Accountability Office found that two years earlier, black American women were nine times more likely than white counterparts to be X-rayed by customs officers after airport frisking, although they were less than half as likely to be found with contraband compared with white women also X-rayed. Which I guess, tells us two things: a) Law enforcement agents never learn b) Smugglers do learn
- grasshopperpurp 8y ago
  Yes, but you're missing the bigger point. Law enforcement will abuse the most vulnerable.
AnnoyingSwede 8y ago
Yet another article not available in countries subject to GDPR, would be great to headline [US ONLY] for media not prepared to serve content to EU, much like the paywalled mentions.

Wonder if TSA/CBP has to submit to one of these searches themselves before they're allowed to perform one? Kind of like with Tasers or tear gas.

dsfyu404ed 8y ago
>Kind of like with Tasers Well that doesn't exactly stop the cops from abusing them. It's lot different when it's someone on your side, maybe someone you know, doing it because they have to and you can be basically assured they won't go out of their way to harm you or be sadistic. It's like the mythbusters water torture episode where Adam just sits there because without all the situational stuff it's not really that bad. People who are actually on the receiving end of people abusing their power have no such luxury.

glangdale 8y ago

Grotesque. Something I noticed several years ago (with the second Iraq War) was the mainstreaming of behavior that previous seemed to stay hidden in the prison system among prison guards and the worst level of corrupt cops. If you were surprised by Abu Gharaib then you clearly weren't paying attention to exactly the same sort of thing happening in prisons in the South. We seem to be progressively empowering more and more fearless bullies in all walks of life; even mall cops and campus cops now act like they are cleaning up a riot in a Supermax.

dsfyu404ed 8y ago
>you were surprised by Abu Gharaib then you clearly weren't paying attention to exactly the same sort of thing happening in prisons in the South. If your were surprised my Michael Brown et. al. then you just weren't up to date on how the cops treat poor and/or black people. If you were surprised by the stuff Snowden published it was because you didn't know the history of the federal intelligence and law enforcement agencies. If anything the ATF does surprises you then you must have just slept through the 90s. If this surprises you then you probably weren't keeping tabs on civil liberties at the border, there's been a slow trickle of allegations like this over the years. They can't all be false. It's all just shit. All these organizations just do terrible things with alarming frequencies but it's ok because they only abuse "bad" people and when they abuse innocent people they can either revise the narrative to make those innocent people bad and/or those innocent people are poor and not well connected. It's like the population is so overwhelmed that it can't focus on fixing any one agency.
- almostdeadguy 8y ago
  Going to get a lot of hate for this, but my cranky anarchist take is that these institutions are broken because they're broken by nature and shouldn't exist. Punitive, carceral systems have never not been full of rampant abuse above their mandate, but the baseline nature of what they do is horrific on its own. Carceral institutions do not address undesirable social phenomena, they exacerbate them and then punish the families of the alleged perpetrators. Not to mention the absolute brutality they enact in trying to enforce the laws.
  - GW150914 8y ago
    On one hand I agree with the “broken by nature” argument, I really do. To me, it’s a strong argument for cutting down our criminal code and not jailing people over drugs, sex, and fines. I still want rapists and killers and inveterate thieves removed from society though, but I don’t want to kill them. Without incarceration how do we achieve these seemingly contradictory aims? I don’t have a good answer, but neither “keep it as it is” or “burn it all down” sound good.
    - almostdeadguy 8y ago
      There are lots of ideas about this, but generally the restorative/transformative justice frameworks are the things prison abolitionists tend to focus on. I'm not well versed on the research surrounding these things, I'm sure there are limitations and criticisms, but I've always thought they advocated a reasonable start for thinking about dismantling carceral systems. Mariame Kaba, an author and activist who writes a lot about this, has a good reading list here: http://www.usprisonculture.com/blog/essential-pic-reading-list/ http://www.usprisonculture.com/blog/essential-pic-reading-li...
      - phry 8y ago
        yep, transformative justice seems natural to me. taking 'anti-social' people and isolating them in a situation where there's little semblance of the life they're supposed to start living does not.
jancsika 8y ago
> If you were surprised by Abu Gharaib then you clearly weren't paying attention to exactly the same sort of thing happening in prisons in the South. Prison guards in the South in the early 2000s were making the equivalent of photographic "trading cards" glorifying their torture, rape, and humiliation of inmates[1]? I'll admit I've never read anything about that. Can you give some links to stories that covered this at the time? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Ghraib_torture_and_prisoner_abuse#Prisoner_abuse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Ghraib_torture_and_prisone...
- PhasmaFelis 8y ago
  You seem to think that glangdale is trying to play down Abu Ghraib. I think they're acknowledging the horror there while also trying to draw attention to other atrocities.
  - jancsika 8y ago
    Again-- what are some links to investigative reports of these atrocities that were happening in prisons of the South around the early 2000s (or 1990s) in the U.S. which are "exactly the same sort of thing" as Abu Graib?
    - PhasmaFelis 8y ago
      I don't have any links on hand, personally, but I'm sure you're as good at googling as I am, maybe better. Why are you so skeptical about the idea that serious abuse may have occurred in Southern prisons? Are you concerned about slandering innocent Southern prison workers? Do you think that it would diminish the importance of the Abu Ghraib atrocities? Or are you just nitpicking over whether they were really, literally exactly as bad, as opposed to merely very-bad-but-not-quite-as-bad?
    - Kim_Bruning 8y ago
      Here's a memorandum opinion somewhere in the middle. https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/FSupp2/37/855/2415783/ https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/FSupp2/... If (like me) you're mostly interested in substantiation of the claim, the summary of the situation seems useful already. There are also plenty of references and keywords to be found in this document. For instance, many news reports and court documents seem to refer back to a quote from section XI-A; searching for "culture of sadistic and malicious violence" yielded a large number of relevant hits. Apparently this has been a well known issue, and all 3 branches have been working on improvement.
int_19h 8y ago
"The perpetual menacings of danger oblige the government to be always prepared to repel it; its armies must be numerous enough for instant defense. The continual necessity for their services enhances the importance of the soldier, and proportionably degrades the condition of the citizen. The military state becomes elevated above the civil. The inhabitants of territories, often the theatre of war, are unavoidably subjected to frequent infringements on their rights, which serve to weaken their sense of those rights; and by degrees the people are brought to consider the soldiery not only as their protectors, but as their superiors. The transition from this disposition to that of considering them masters, is neither remote nor difficult; but it is very difficult to prevail upon a people under such impressions, to make a bold or effectual resistance to usurpations supported by the military power." When Hamilton wrote this 230 years ago, he was talking of the standing army (of which he was not an opponent, recognizing its necessity - but also recognizing the dangers). An argument could be made - indeed, has been made by many - that modern law enforcement agencies are, in many ways, like a standing army, or at least would be recognized as such by the founders. And if so, it would seem that the above is equally applicable to them.
- TheCoelacanth 8y ago
  That's actually a really good point. At the time of founding, standing police forces were pretty much non-existent in the US (and not very widespread in the rest of the world). Law enforcement was mostly handled by an elected sheriff who would raise a militia when necessary.

dudul 8y ago

Don't we read the same stories about CBP and TSA every 2 or 3 weeks? Does anybody know if this happens so frequently in other democratic countries? I can't imagine that a story like that would surface in Finland, Spain or Canada without shocking the entire population, who would immediately demand that the problem be addressed. Assuming I'm correct, what is so different about the US that we can't seem to be able to fix this?

adventured 8y ago
Reduce the power and reach of the state. Stop giving it more social territory and more power. Start taking things away from it aggressively, remove its regulation of our personal and business lives. You either let the bear stick its nose into the basket or you don't. The US Government involves itself in every single aspect of our lives, and that has to stop if you want to reduce their bad behavior. They have to be taught that there are things that are off limits and there are behaviors that are unacceptable. In short, the American public has allowed the monster in DC to sprawl entirely out of control, for roughly 70 years. The US military is half the size of the entire Russian economy now. The US Government is the size of Germany's entire economy. Who could possibly hold that thing to account? It's too big. The US isn't a small soft cuddly bunny like Finland. WW2 and forward it's a rolling war machine that was built to defeat the monsters of Europe and Asia. That's what the military industrial complex was created to do. More recently, for 40 years it held the Soviet Empire - another European monster - in check in Europe and Asia. The genie has never been put back into the box, it roams the streets daily as the military industrial complex, and it spills into every aspect of daily American life. From the spy agencies, to homeland security & border control, to defense contractors, to foreign military adventurism or nation building, to our police militization, to how we interact with our allies. Both political sides are overwhelmingly guilty of kowtowing to it and expanding it, and using it as a stick when it's convenient. Who wants to give up that much power? And the $200 billion plus we'd save by putting that WW2 genie back into the box, can go toward more important priorities. The problem? It requires a dramatic increase in US isolationism. The US must pull entirely back from trying to police every corner of the planet both militarily and politically, which every globalist in DC is yelling at the top of their lungs trying to prevent from happening. We can't have it both ways. We can be the WW2 global juggernaut that polices all, acting as a shield for Europe and Asia. Or we can shut that all down, demilitarize across the board and redirect our priorities to domestic social welfare. In short, we can start behaving like a normal nation again. We either do it voluntarily (sparing ourselves immense pain and treasure), or eventually the cost gets high enough ($21 trillion and counting) that we'll be forced to do it regardless.

dsfyu404ed 8y ago

My tinfoil hat theory is that the people up top know if they allow stuff like this to happen just frequently enough that the people who care about civil liberties are well aware of it and the general public isn't that that will keep the civil liberties crowd from standing up for their rights and getting the general public to do the same but not so frequently that politicians get interested in cleaning them up. It's like the ATF, they just keep the terribleness at a low simmer and nobody cares.

patrickg_zill 8y ago

Perhaps this sounds snarky but as a not-buff roughly middle-aged male, I have never had to deal with this.... I do think that there are far better ways to do screening. I haven't been subject to such searches while overseas, that I can recall. Which clearly puts it in the category of security theater vs. actual security.

captain_perl 8y ago

The news article only got half of the story. The other half is that when they don't get an arrest, they break into your phone or car looking for evidence since they have the contents of your pockets or purse. And sometimes planting it.

chuckgreenman 8y ago

It seems like once a month we get a report about the TSA or Homeland Security falling down on the job. Is there a school for TSA or DHS? Can it be overhauled? It seems like an external government agency needs to be brought in to evaluate pretty much every agent they have on payroll and classify them into "OK", "Retrain", and "Dismiss" groups. The problem is their might be too many in the "Dismiss" group for it to work without sacrificing screening capacity and efficacy.

g5095 8y ago

Why can't we call this what it is, govt sanctioned rape of minors.

g5095 8y ago

https://imgur.com/7eFDT5X https://imgur.com/7eFDT5X

Memosyne 8y ago
It surprises you that a digital medium catering to software developers and tech experts largely focuses on news about technology? There are various other forums which are much more passionate about these types of civil liberty issues.

dotancohen 8y ago

This is the whole article for me: Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in most European countries. Thank you GRPR for preventing this website from invading my privacy! I prefer the polite notice to intrusion. To those users in the target locale, beware this website's practices.

blub 8y ago
The article can be summarised as "don't visit the US". According to a plaintiff, they did a cavity search on three women with the same glove. They performed searches on minors, menstruating women and old women. In one case they forcibly took someone to a hospital where they gave her IV drugs, undressed her and examined her.
- dotancohen 8y ago
  Cavity search? Was this a medical professional who performed the search? It seems like either: 1. There does not exist a medical professional on site, so they cannot perform cavity searches, OR 2. There is a medical professional on site, so it would be expensive to have him there and _not_ perform constant cavity searches, OR 3. An untrained agent is performing cavity searches. Does this person know how to deal with diseases, aberrations, birth defects, etc? Cavity search is very invasive.
  - freeone3000 8y ago
    It was (3), as is the norm in the US.

coss 8y ago

Jesus, four fingers!?

joneston 8y ago

“This officer squeezed my breasts hard and went into my underwear and in my vagina with her finger. She did this with the same glove that she did three other women before me!” Ugh. Geeze. There are so many really horrible, permanent, life-shortening-if-not-absolutely-lethal diseases that will basically make people never buy another plane ticket again, just to think of that possibly happening to the rest of your previously reasonable, but now ruined life. Say what you will about officers of the same gender, and whether or not that precludes sexual pleasure being experienced on the part of the officer. That anyone has ever been lined up next to three complete strangers at an airport, and had that happen, should strike mortal fear into the hearts of anyone setting foot inside an airport. More than planes disappearing over the ocean without any known cause. More than planes being willfully smashed into moutains or buildings. That one should cut right through the rest of the noise. Standing in a room, effectively at gunpoint, with two angry women (who either have no medical training, or having medical training and maliciously deviate from it for their own reasons), and find yourself forced to share fluids from the orifices of three strangers. Imagine this same story taking place in a private hangar, a strip search at gunpoint the hands of a Cessna pilot acting as a private citizen, that results in accidental transmission of a life threatening disease. This is the kind of physical transgression that puts ordinary criminals in jail with multiple life sentences, as violent offenders.

likeclockwork 8y ago

I'd rather have more drugs in the country than people being invaded and subjected to these sorts of indignities out of hand.

LeoNatan25 8y ago

Apparently, Israel is part of the EU and so, I cannot access this moronic website.

GiuseppaAcciaio 8y ago
Well, they do compete in Eurovision, I guess that's kinda the same thing?

walrus01 8y ago

I see a number of people conflating the TSA and CBP/ICE. Just so we're clear: TSA is a makework security theater program of a bunch of $15/hour people standing around doing not very much. TSA is not a "real" federal law enforcement agency. CBP/ICE, on the other hand, will definitely fuck you up if you anger them while crossing the border. CBP has access to a whole bunch of federal databases and ways to profile and track people that TSA doesn't. 4th amendment rights pretty much don't exist at the border.

YeGoblynQueenne 8y ago

>> In 2000, the Government Accountability Office found that two years earlier, black American women were nine times more likely than white counterparts to be X-rayed by customs officers after airport frisking, although they were less than half as likely to be found with contraband compared with white women also X-rayed. Which I guess, tells us two things: a) Law enforcement agents never learn b) Smugglers do learn

grasshopperpurp 8y ago
Yes, but you're missing the bigger point. Law enforcement will abuse the most vulnerable.

AnnoyingSwede 8y ago

Yet another article not available in countries subject to GDPR, would be great to headline [US ONLY] for media not prepared to serve content to EU, much like the paywalled mentions.