How the US Uses Sexual Humiliation as a Political Tool to Control the Masses

Friday, April 6, 2012 by The Guardian
by Naomi Wolf

In a five-four ruling this week, the supreme court decided that anyone can be strip-searched upon arrest for any offense, however minor, at any time. This horror show ruling joins two recent horror show laws: the NDAA, which lets anyone be arrested forever at any time, and HR 347, the "trespass bill", which gives you a 10-year sentence for protesting anywhere near someone with secret service protection. These criminalizations of being human follow, of course, the mini-uprising of the Occupy movement.

Is American strip-searching benign? The man who had brought the initial suit, Albert Florence, described having been told to "turn around. Squat and cough. Spread your cheeks." He said he felt humiliated: "It made me feel like less of a man."

In surreal reasoning, justice Anthony Kennedy explained that this ruling is necessary because the 9/11 bomber could have been stopped for speeding. How would strip searching him have prevented the attack? Did justice Kennedy imagine that plans to blow up the twin towers had been concealed in a body cavity? In still more bizarre non-logic, his and the other justices' decision rests on concerns about weapons and contraband in prison systems. But people under arrest – that is, who are not yet convicted – haven't been introduced into a prison population.

Our surveillance state shown considerable determination to intrude on citizens sexually. There's the sexual abuse of prisoners at Bagram – der Spiegel reports that "former inmates report incidents of … various forms of sexual humiliation. In some cases, an interrogator would place his penis along the face of the detainee while he was being questioned. Other inmates were raped with sticks or threatened with anal sex". There was the stripping of Bradley Manning is solitary confinement. And there's the policy set up after the story of the "underwear bomber" to grope US travelers genitally or else force them to go through a machine – made by a company, Rapiscan, owned by terror profiteer and former DHA czar Michael Chertoff – with images so vivid that it has been called the "pornoscanner".

Believe me: you don't want the state having the power to strip your clothes off. History shows that the use of forced nudity by a state that is descending into fascism is powerfully effective in controlling and subduing populations.

The political use of forced nudity by anti-democratic regimes is long established. Forcing people to undress is the first step in breaking down their sense of individuality and dignity and reinforcing their powerlessness. Enslaved women were sold naked on the blocks in the American south, and adolescent male slaves served young white ladies at table in the south, while they themselves were naked: their invisible humiliation was a trope for their emasculation. Jewish prisoners herded into concentration camps were stripped of clothing and photographed naked, as iconic images of that Holocaust reiterated.

One of the most terrifying moments for me when I visited Guantanamo prison in 2009 was seeing the way the architecture of the building positioned glass-fronted shower cubicles facing intentionally right into the central atrium – where young female guards stood watch over the forced nakedness of Muslim prisoners, who had no way to conceal themselves. Laws and rulings such as this are clearly designed to bring the conditions of Guantanamo, and abusive detention, home.

I have watched male police and TSA members standing by side by side salaciously observing women as they have been "patted down" in airports. I have experienced the weirdly phrased, sexually perverse intrusiveness of the state during an airport "pat-down", which is always phrased in the words of a steamy paperback ("do you have any sensitive areas? … I will use the back of my hands under your breasts …"). One of my Facebook commentators suggested, I think plausibly, that more women are about to be found liable for arrest for petty reasons (scarily enough, the TSA is advertising for more female officers).

I interviewed the equivalent of TSA workers in Britain and found that the genital groping that is obligatory in the US is illegal in Britain. I believe that the genital groping policy in America, too, is designed to psychologically habituate US citizens to a condition in which they are demeaned and sexually intruded upon by the state – at any moment.

The most terrifying phrase of all in the decision is justice Kennedy's striking use of the term "detainees" for "United States citizens under arrest". Some members of Occupy who were arrested in Los Angeles also reported having been referred to by police as such. Justice Kennedy's new use of what looks like a deliberate activation of that phrase is illuminating.

Ten years of association have given "detainee" the synonymous meaning in America as those to whom no rights apply – especially in prison. It has been long in use in America, habituating us to link it with a condition in which random Muslims far away may be stripped by the American state of any rights. Now the term – with its associations of "those to whom anything may be done" – is being deployed systematically in the direction of … any old American citizen.

Where are we headed? Why? These recent laws criminalizing protest, and giving local police – who, recall, are now infused with DHS money, military hardware and personnel – powers to terrify and traumatise people who have not gone through due process or trial, are being set up to work in concert with a see-all-all-the-time surveillance state. A facility is being set up in Utah by the NSA to monitor everything all the time: James Bamford wrote in Wired magazine that the new facility in Bluffdale, Utah, is being built, where the NSA will look at billions of emails, texts and phone calls. Similar legislation is being pushed forward in the UK.

With that Big Brother eye in place, working alongside these strip-search laws, – between the all-seeing data-mining technology and the terrifying police powers to sexually abuse and humiliate you at will – no one will need a formal coup to have a cowed and compliant citizenry. If you say anything controversial online or on the phone, will you face arrest and sexual humiliation?

Remember, you don't need to have done anything wrong to be arrested in America any longer. You can be arrested for walking your dog without a leash. The man who was forced to spread his buttocks was stopped for a driving infraction. I was told by an NYPD sergeant that "safety" issues allow the NYPD to make arrests at will. So nothing prevents thousands of Occupy protesters – if there will be any left after these laws start to bite – from being rounded up and stripped naked under intimidating conditions.

Why is this happening? I used to think the push was just led by those who profited from endless war and surveillance – but now I see the struggle as larger. As one internet advocate said to me: "There is a race against time: they realise the internet is a tool of empowerment that will work against their interests, and they need to race to turn it into a tool of control."

As Chris Hedges wrote in his riveting account of the NDAA: "There are now 1,271 government agencies and 1,931 private companies that work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States, the Washington Post reported in a 2010 series by Dana Priest and William M Arken. There are 854,000 people with top-secret security clearances, the reporters wrote, and in Washington, DC, and the surrounding area 33 building complexes for top-secret intelligence work are under construction or have been built since September 2011."

This enormous new sector of the economy has a multi-billion-dollar vested interest in setting up a system to surveil, physically intimidate and prey upon the rest of American society.

Now they can do so by threatening to demean you sexually – a potent tool in the hands of any bully.

Despair You Can Believe In

Just Do Something

by ROB URIE
In ways that will have long-term consequences for most Americans, the policies of economic and political subjugation of the last forty years, particularly of the 2000s, are being carried forward into this decade by an economic and political elite protected and supported by the Federal government. Apparent from the relative calm of the polity is that most people have no idea what the implications of current policies are.

Two examples before diving deeper: the student loan crisis and the policing tactics around the G-8 Summit, recently moved from Chicago to Camp David at Barack Obama’s request. The student loan crisis is generally framed as the case of students who graduate from four-year colleges being unable to find jobs to repay the loans they took out to attend college. The policing tactics, which according to polls are supported by a majority of Americans, are framed as tools to keep order in the face of a permanent group of malcontents intent on forcing their agendas on honest civil servants pursuing the people’s business. The facts tell a different story.

In 2008 the Federal government took over the student loan business from corrupt private lenders as a stealth stimulus that had the added benefit of creating a sub-class of permanently indentured citizens, debt slaves if you will. These loans have funded the massive expansion of for-profit schools that do little in the way of actual education because a majority of their students attend for a few semesters but never graduate. As for helping people find jobs, the U.S. is four years into the third “jobless recovery” in as many decades—there are no jobs for the class attending for-profit trade schools.

With about $1 trillion in student loans outstanding, the question is: what is the government doing? Three answers occur—the first is that the Obama administration is gutting the public education system by shifting resources away from it to the overwhelmingly corrupt for-profit education system. (This isn’t an elite conceit—the public Community College system has successfully supported the portion of the population that wouldn’t have attended four-year colleges with technically oriented education for decades). The second is that student loans, under the impossible-to-get-out-of terms that exist, create a class of people economically subjugated to the point of remaining politically complacent and compliant. The third is that it supports an economic predator class that satiates itself on the economic misery of others.

Lest these seem like empty conspiracy theories—Mr. Obama’s Secretary of Education Arne Duncan cut his eyeteeth shifting resources from public education to for-profits schools in Chicago. Second, the onerous terms that force repayment of student loans under all circumstances were well known before the Obama administration chose to take over and expand the business in 2008. Third, were the bank bailouts not evidence enough, the recent 50 state Attorney’s General mortgage “settlement” formally institutionalizes economic predation without recourse (see www.nakedcapitalism.com archives for details).

And Fourth, the recently passed bill signed by Mr. Obama, H.R 347, loosens language around one of a long list of laws designed to make protest illegal in the U.S. The bill reduces the burden of proof required to prosecute protesters who knowingly or unknowingly enter an area protected by the Secret Service or areas and events designated as protected by the Federal government. The best that the ACLU and other legal liberties organizations could say about the bill is that the U.S. was already a police state before the bill was passed.

But my point is not that the U.S. is rapidly becoming (has long been) a police state. My point is that increasingly institutionalized economic predation against U.S. citizens combined with advanced police state powers will make life even more untenable for some fair number of us in coming years. Even if one bought the “law and order” rationale for expanding the police state, the institutionalization of economic predation creates a tiered society where socially destructive behavior receives support and protection from the state while all efforts to end it face the full wrath and repressive power of the state.

For a nation founded on slavery and genocide against the native population, progress is apparently now being measured in terms of how technologically sophisticated the mechanisms of predation and repression can be made. Every American should educate her/himself on the so-called mortgage settlement for insight.

Briefly, the offices of the 50 state Attorneys General who signed the settlement were individually paid large sums of money for doing so. The settlement supposed to be paid by the banks will instead be paid out of a taxpayer funded bailout fund (HAMP) and by non-bank investors (pension funds, etc.). The banks received blanket retroactive immunity for taking very large numbers of houses from people when they had no legal basis for doing so. Because there was no legal sanction for doing this, economic predators, including the banks that just “settled,” now know officially that no acts of economic predation in the future, no matter how egregious, will be prosecuted. And Obama administration officials like Housing Secretary Shaun Donovan have been sent forward to actively misrepresent the terms of the settlement.

But again, my point here is not that institutionalized economic predation is being supported and protected by the Federal (and state) government. It is that the nexus of economic predation and police state powers has, and will increasingly, destroy the lives of a very large group of Americans. Black, brown and native Americans, along with poor whites, have long been subject to these conditions and have long seen themselves on the wrong side of police power. What has changed is the reach up the socio-economic order deep into the middle class.

Lest readers still be incredulous as to the scale of what is happening, half of the car loans made since the bailouts of the auto companies in 2008 have been sub-prime (the same proportion that led to the crisis). Briefly, Democrat Barack Obama forced tiered wages on autoworkers that has those who build the cars earning half as much as they previously would have while leaving the wages and bonuses of those who make the auto loans untouched. Subsequently, half of the loans made have been to people who are economically marginal (sub-prime) and at risk of not being able to repay them. The executives at the auto companies are once again paying themselves tens of millions of dollars in annual compensation for having rendered their workforces impoverished and their customers at risk of permanent debt servitude.

On the policing side, in anticipation of a rowdy G8 Summit in Chicago Rahm Emmanuel, Barack Obama’s former Chief of Staff and current Mayor of Chicago, has continued the practice of recent decades of making all effective protest illegal and subject to heavy legal sanction. Put another way, the patricians of predator capitalism (G8 attendees) are being held remote and protected from the victims of their policies with increasingly restrictive and oppressive police powers. Moving the G8 summit from Chicago to Camp David only increases the impunity that remoteness from social / political consequences brings.

To tie this together, in recent decades the Federal and state governments of the U.S. have facilitated and protected a system of institutionalized economic predation and have built out increasingly intrusive and restrictive police powers to maintain it and to crush resistance. With the economic crisis of 2008 the government at various levels took direct control of an increasing proportion of the means of economic predation and has demonstrated that it will use its power, including creating new and enhanced laws, to force compliance with the often patently illegal terms of public and private creditors under the full coercive and repressive apparatus of the state.

Last, accept this trajectory of despair or do something. A few (tens of thousands) malcontents including labor unions, Occupy Wall Street, immigrant rights groups, artists, musicians, the unemployed, the foreclosed upon etc. plan to celebrate another set of possibilities on Mayday, May 1st 2012. If no march or celebration is scheduled for your town, make one happen. In New York, we meet at Union Square at 4:00 PM and march at 5:00 PM.

Obama signs anti-protest Trespass Bill

Published: 10 March, 2012 - RT

Only days after clearing Congress, US President Barack Obama signed his name to H.R. 347 on Thursday, officially making it a federal offense to cause a disturbance at certain political events — essentially criminalizing protest in the States.

RT broke the news last month that H.R. 347, the Federal Restricted Buildings and Grounds Improvement Act of 2011, had overwhelmingly passed the US House of Representatives after only three lawmakers voted against it. On Thursday this week, President Obama inked his name to the legislation and authorized the government to start enforcing a law that has many Americans concerned over how the bill could bury the rights to assemble and protest as guaranteed in the US Constitution.

Under H.R. 347, which has more commonly been labeled the Trespass Bill by Congress, knowingly entering a restricted area that is under the jurisdiction of Secret Service protection can garner an arrest. The law is actually only a slight change to earlier legislation that made it an offense to knowingly and willfully commit such a crime. Under the Trespass Bill’s latest language chance, however, someone could end up in law enforcement custody for entering an area that they don’t realize is Secret Service protected and “engages in disorderly or disruptive conduct” or “impede[s] or disrupt[s] the orderly conduct of Government business or official functions.”

The Secret Service serves as the police that protects not just current and former American presidents, but are also dispatched to monitor special events of national significance, a category with a broad cast of qualifiers. In the past, sporting events, state funerals, inaugural addresses and NATO and G-8 Summits have been designated as such by the US Department of Homeland Security, the division that decides when and where the Secret Service are needed outside of their normal coverage.

Mara Verheyden-Hilliard of the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund tells the International Business Times that the Trespass Bill in its current form “means it's easier to prosecute under 'knowingly,'” instead of both knowingly and willfully, “which is an issue because someone could knowingly enter a restricted but not necessarily realize they are committing a crime.” Speaking with IB Times, Verheyden-Hilliard tries to lay to rest claims that the Constitution will be crippled by the Trespass Bill, but acknowledges that it does indeed allow law enforcement to have added incentive to arrest protesters who could be causing a disturbance.

"[HR 347] has been described as a death knell for the First Amendment, but that isn't supported by the facts,"Verheyden-Hilliard adds. "This has always been a bad law."

Gabe Rottman of the American Civil Liberties Union adds to IB Times, "Bottom line, it doesn't create any new violations of the law.” So far, however, it has raised awareness of the levels that the US government are willing to go to in order to make it harder to express ones’ self.

Under the act, protesting in areas covered by Secret Service could land a demonstrator behind bars, and the thing about the Secret Service (in case you couldn’t tell by their name), is that they don’t always make it clear where they are. You could even say that the service they provide, at times, is kept secret.

Presidential hopefuls Newt Gingrich, Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum are now officially covered under Secret Service protection, making it a federal offense to disrupt a campaign stop. That means whether it’s by way of a glitter bomb protest or causing a disturbance on the same Holiday Inn hotel floor that Santorum is staying in, doing such could cause a bit of a legal battle for the persons involved.

Although the G-8 Summit originally scheduled for Chicago this spring would have made much of the Windy City a protected area where crimes could easily be tacked on to arrested protesters, the event was moved this week to the presidential retreat at Camp David. In turn, many have suggested that the White House is only going out of their way to limit protesting rights. While a Chicago summit would have meant the Trespass Bill could have been enforced in the same area where thousands of demonstrators were expected to protest, moving the event to a heavily fortified rural location will instead deter protesters from likely coming close atto the meeting at all.

And before you forget, the president can now detain you for getting too close to his front yard, order your assassination if the country considers you a threat and lock you away for life with no charge if you’re alleged to be a terrorist. You, on the other hand, can’t yell obscenities at Newt Gingrich without risking arrest.