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

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/ct-customs-officers-invasive-body-searches-20180819-story.html

160 47 8 years ago

mLuby• 8 years 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.

dsfyu404ed4• 8 years 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.

glangdale2• 8 years 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.

dsfyu404ed4• 8 years 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.

almostdeadguy2• 8 years 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.

jancsika3• 8 years 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_prisone...

PhasmaFelis2• 8 years 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.

sjs382• 8 years ago

Not just the 1990s and early 2000s. Read about what happens in present-day Angola (Louisiana State Penn.).

int_19h• 8 years 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• 8 years 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• 8 years 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?

adventured2• 8 years 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.

dsfyu404ed4• 8 years ago

I agree with what you're saying but the problem is nobody wants the government out of things they personally want it involved in. Go in other threads and people will be arguing for more government involvement in X or Y with obvious potential for scope creep into the business of individuals.

GW1509142• 8 years ago

On a dispassionate level there is a sense that the country is still in its eternal war on terrorism, and sacrifices must be made. By powerless, generally poor and marginal people of course. Poor kids need to enlist and die in a dessert, poor people need submit to indignities and abuse from police, airport security, and prisons. It’s the same playbook from the war on drugs, and every other American “war” for a very long time. A lot of the country is also poorly educated, very religious, and has strong ideas about what proper patriotism entails, and overbearing security theater is a good thing in that regime.

Half of the US falls into the crowd that wants more prisons, tougher laws, kill dem turrurists, and fuck the socialists. It is an ironic truth that a majority of those people are adversely affected by their own positions.

If you go back in back and study their history, the US has been divided this way as a means to control poor whites by pitting them against (primarily) blacks, and more recently non-whites in general. Not much has changed except the window dressing. Wealthy people need to keep people distracted and at each other’s throats, because otherwise those people tend to work together for better conditions and that hurts the bottom line.

Racism exists elsewhere of course, but in the US it’s woven into the culture in a very specific way, and even after the racism itself departs, the poisonous politics remain ossified. Where racism fails, wars are used. Wars on drugs, wars on terror, gang wars, etc. anyone who’s against getting groped for freedom obviously hates the troops, blah blah. You get the idea. As a result you get liberals calling for reforms and regulations to an extreme, and libertarians calling for dismantling the government to a massive degree. Since both ideas are fundamentally half-baked and unlikely to succeed in the unnuanced and ideologically loaded forms they take, they’re ignored by centrists just trying to hold on to some vision of the middle class.

The result is social and political gridlock, which is acceptable when there’s so much money to be made by the relatively small group in power. Any time people look like cooperating it’s just a matter of a new war on something or actual war, and then it’s business as usual. People are struggling, but business is good.

mythrwy• 8 years ago

If you have to die, a dessert isn't a bad place to do it though :)

Gustomaximus• 8 years ago

what is so different about the US that we can't seem to be able to fix this?

While this is massively oversimplified in something that has many variables, as an outsider, I see a significant variable as a preoccupation with money in the US. We all love money no doubt, but US seems to have turned it into a quasi religion.

This behaviour would much less likely happen to rich people because the person doing it doesnt want to loose their job and get sued (so money). And poor people struggle to get justice because they cant afford it, money again.

Further I think the bad actors in this space behave this way because money is so important e.g I was only following orders is classic thinking of people that want to keep jobs over their morals.

My other view is that the world is being increasingly run by what I call 'one step thinkers'. They are people that can be smart but tend to see the world around them in singular cause/effect only. In this articles case all they can see is their job to stop drug transport.. Meanwhile if you step back and consider you have to shove your fingers up a bunch of innocent womens vaginas against their will, so essentially rape women, to find the occasional drug mule, you'd probably reconsider how important it is to catch that drug mule in this method.

wmeredith• 8 years ago

Critical thinking is what your "one step thinkers" are missing. It's an academic tangent to the grotesque topic at hand, but I think there's a dearth of critical thinking in modern society because all our brains are being DDOS'd with smartphones, social media, 24 hour news, etc...

ufo• 8 years ago

It's anecdotal evidence, but I recently traveled to the US and was sadly reminded by how the "war on terror" is still very much alive in the American public conscious. I don't see the TSA situation improving until that happens.

* The first thing I needed to do was get a visa. All my papers are stamped by the Department of Homeland Security, whose name reflects the post 9/11 mentality of the war on terror.

* When dispatching my baggage, I noticed that Delta airlines offers a special discount for active U.S. military personnel. "You serve us, and we’re delighted to serve you", as they said. This reflects a country that has been constantly at war for a century.

* After I board my flight I read Delta's in-flight magazine. They have an article about how Google is using targeted advertisements to fight "terrorists" and "extremists". Back home, the in flight magazine is full of vapid travel articles but here in the American airline we find an article bringing fear to light and suggesting a multinational corporation's information harvesting product as the solution.

* After I land in the US I almost miss my connecting flight because of the enormous customs and TSA lines. What a way to feel welcome...

* In my connecting flight, I get a quick refresher of what right-wing media can be in the US, as the passenger next to me has brought a newspaper and tuned the in-flight entertainment system to Fox News.

* The newspaper has articles about a new 900 billion dollar defense bill and an article about new scanner technology being investigated by the TSA, which would allow laptops to stay inside the bag. The article suggested that this was the only way to speed up the lines.

* I thought I already knew what Fox News was about, but it still managed to surprise me:

* The Westminster car crash that injured 3 people was covered as a full blown attack. News insertions every 5 minutes. "Alert!" "Alert!"

* One of the talk show hosts went on a product-placement segment about ancesty.com and how she could trace the ethnicity of her ancestors. The 5 white show hosts then spent a couple of minutes discussing her European ethnicity. In these times of racial tension and rising nationalism, things like this make me a little nervous.

* After the ancestry.com segment, they jumped to a musical segment about the Camp4Heroes charity. Another reminder of the constant state of war that the US goes through, the large number of wounded veterans that are victims of it, and the special euphemisms that american english uses for these things: "heroes", "veterans", "serving the country", etc.

* Fox news also aired news about Facebook excusing themselves that their surveilance network failed to stop fake news spread by terrorists. (As if the Google article from earlier wasn't enough).

dsfyu404ed4• 8 years 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• 8 years 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• 8 years 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• 8 years 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• 8 years ago

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

dotancohen2• 8 years 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• 8 years 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.

dotancohen2• 8 years 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.

coss• 8 years ago

Jesus, four fingers!?

likeclockwork• 8 years 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• 8 years ago

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

GiuseppaAcciaio• 8 years ago

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

walrus01• 8 years 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.

YeGoblynQueenne2• 8 years 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• 8 years ago

Yes, but you're missing the bigger point.

Law enforcement will abuse the most vulnerable.

AnnoyingSwede• 8 years 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.

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

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