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

>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.

> 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...

"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.

Yes, but you're missing the bigger point.

Law enforcement will abuse the most vulnerable.

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.

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.

> 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.

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).

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

>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.

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.