Clarence Thomas’ Strip Search Fetish

The Naked Truth
by CHRISTOPHER BRAUCHLI

Except for Clarence Thomas, things are not nearly as bleak as commentators would have had us believe after the U.S. Supreme Court announced its decision in the recent case of Florence v. County of Burlington. Strip searches, some feared, would run wild.

Albert Florence had received and paid a fine for a traffic offense some years prior to the incident that gave rise to the case that went before the Court. When his wife was stopped for speeding and he was in the car, his identification was checked and through a computer error the officer was led to believe Albert had an unpaid fine that had, in fact, been paid years earlier. Since it appeared to be unpaid, he was taken to the Burlington County Detention Center where he was forced to shower with a delousing agent and carefully examined as he disrobed prior to showering and again while nude. Subsequently he was transferred to the Essex County Correctional Facility and, since the Essex County folk lacked confidence in the Burlington folks’ strip search and showering admission procedures, he was strip-searched a second time. Following his release, Albert sued, among others, the government entities that ran the jails.

The Federal District Court that first heard the case entered a summary judgment in Albert’s favor, holding that strip-searching a “nonindictable offender” without reasonable suspicion deprived him of his Fourth Amendment right to be protected from an unreasonable search. The Obama administration was distressed at this holding and joined the defendants in urging the U.S. Supreme Court to uphold the actions of the jailers in subjecting Albert to two strip searches. The Supreme Court sided with the administration and held that the strip searches were just fine. Since the Court has now opened the door wide to strip searches of everyone admitted to a jail for whatever reason there are some who wonder if there are any arenas in which strip searches would be frowned upon by the conservative majority on the court that dislikes government intrusion in private lives except when it doesn’t. The historical answer is there is one sacred area-the school. We learn that from a case that involved then-13-year old Savana Redding, Safford Unified School Dist. #1 v. Redding.

Savana attended a school that has a zero tolerance for drugs. In 2003 a classmate told school officials that Savana had proscribed drugs in her possession. Without calling her parents, the school officials did what any reasonable school official would do under those circumstances. They ordered Savana to remove her outer garments and pull out her underwear to see if she was concealing drugs in her private parts, thus “exposing her breasts and pelvic area to some degree” as Justice Souter who wrote the majority opinion for the U.S. Supreme Court explained. In discussing whether the search was reasonable Justice Souter said: “Here, the content of the suspicion failed to match the degree of intrusion. Wilson [the school official] knew beforehand that the pills were prescription-strength ibuprofen and over-the-counter naproxen, common pain relievers equivalent to two Advil, or one Aleve. He must have been aware of the nature and limited threat of the specific drugs he was searching for, and while just about anything can be taken in quantities that will do real harm, Wilson had no reason to suspect that large amounts of the drugs were being passed around, or that individual students were receiving great numbers of pills. . . . “In sum, what was missing from the suspected facts that pointed to Savana was any indication of danger to the students from the power of the drugs or their quantity, and any reason to suppose that Savana was carrying pills in her underwear. We think that the combination of these deficiencies was fatal to finding the search reasonable.” The opinion in that case was, insofar as strip searches were concerned, eight opposed and one in favor.

Clarence Thomas, whose function on the Court is to arrive at such bizarre conclusions that they make his conservative colleagues seem to speak with the voice of reason, applauded strip searches. He lamented the fact that his colleagues did not apply the common-law view that “parents delegate to teachers their authority to discipline and maintain order,” a principal known as “in loco parentis.” When that rule was applied, he happily observed, parents transferred to teachers the authority to “command obedience, to control stubbornness, to quicken diligence, and to reform bad habits” a quotation from the 1837 North Carolina Supreme Court decision of State v. Pendergrass. In addition to looking to that case for support, he also cited, a 1765 treatise by W. Blackstone and an 1873 treatise by J. Kent. He observed that if the reasoning of these old authorities had been accepted by his colleagues, strip searches of school children would be fine. Since parents are not restricted by the Fourth Amendment, teachers and other school officials would not be restricted by that Amendment and would have “almost complete discretion to establish and enforce the rules they [believe] necessary to maintain control over their classrooms.” To that one can only say Wow!! and perhaps express gratitude that he’s a Justice and not a school administrator. On the other hand. . . .

Kurt Vonnegut and the American Police State

Just Say "Hi-Ho!" as They Strip Search You

by DAVE LINDORFF

 

Back in the early 1980s, I had the extraordinary good fortune to get to meet one of my literary heroes, Kurt Vonnegut, up close and personal. We shared a police wagon, sitting next to each other for a ride to the station to be booked for blocking the door to the South African consulate in a demonstration against that country’s then policy of white rule and apartheid.

I can’t say I got to know the author very well, but he was quite friendly and interesting to talk to, and after our arrest and booking was over, and we were released, I shared a cab as far as his house.

I got to thinking that thanks to the latest outrageous 5-4 decision by the US Supreme Court (supported fully<> by our Constitutional law-teacher President Barack Obama and his Solicitor General), which says it is now perfectly okay for police to strip-search innocent people picked up on any charge — even a traffic offense or a leash-law violation, or alleged failure to clear a warrant for a bald tire — had Kurt and I been busted for the same kind of protest today, we’d “know” each other much more intimately. For example I’d probably know if Vonnegut had hemorrhoids, and he’d know about a patch of skin discoloration on my balls.

Is this a great country or what?

But seriously, we have really reached a pretty grim point when the court that is supposed to be protecting our rights under the Constitution, and the president, who is supposed to uphold and defend that document, collude in saying that once a person has been taken into custody by police, she or he really has no rights. The 4th Amendment about being “secure in your person”? Forget it. The cops can now strip you, grope you, check your butthole and humiliate you all they want, even if you are innocent of any charge. And by the way, they can lock you up with hardened convicts and hold you after they do that, until you get a lawyer or post bail. No “cruel and unusual punishment”? Well, I think most people would agree that getting stripped and intimately searched by some leering cop when you hadn’t done anything would qualify as punishment, and it certainly is cruel, so the Eighth Amendment is in the toilet too. (We already knew the First Amendment — the one about freedom of speech and assembly and the right to petition over grievances — was toast. Just ask Mayor Mike Bloomberg or any of the other mayors who ordered the brutal crushing of dozens of Occupation encampments over the past half year.)

As for that old relic of British Common Law, “innocent until proven guilty,” which supposedly is imbedded in our legal system, forget it, too. Justice (sic) Anthony Kennedy, who wrote the court’s majority opinion, drove a stake through that foundation principle of jurisprudence when he wrote that “The search procedures [at issue in the trial] struck a reasonable balance between inmate privacy and the needs of the institutions.” Kennedy’s opinion, which must have jurists like Earl Warren, Thurgood Marshall and William O. Douglas puking in their graves, leaves me wondering what horrible alternative this legal midget thought was being balanced against the alternative of not strip searching the appellant, Albert Florence.

A black New Jersey resident who was stopped for no reason by while driving with his wife and two small kids, was arrested by a New Jersey traffic cop who ran a “make” and found a court contempt warrant for an allegedly unpaid fine. Though the fine had actually been paid two years earlier, Florence was strip-searched by prison guards before being locked up in a cell together with convicted criminals.

I guess the other side of Kennedy’s legal teeter-totter must have been having Florence get raped by a broom handle, as some sick New York City cops did to Haitian immigrant Abner Loima after arresting him outside a Brooklyn bar where he had tried to intercede to break up a sidewalk fight.

We are reaching the point where I suspect Occupy movement and anti-war activists who protest against Wall Street crimes and planned war crimes by the the US government against Iran should be prepared to be strip-searched if they get hauled off to jail.

That would have sure changed my first experience of being arrested, back during the 1967 Mobilization against the War march on the Pentagon. Along with several hundred other protesters who occupied the Mall of the Pentagon overnight back in October of that year, I was clubbed by US Marshals and then hauled off to Occoquan Federal Prison in Virginia, where I spent three days in a dormitory cell with about 100 other guys. It was a radicalizing experience for me to be locked up as an 18-year-old kid with people were veterans of the Freedom Riders in Mississippi and other early civil rights struggles. Today, we’d probably all have been strip-searched, which would have made the whole experience a lot more negative. It probably would have radicalized me even more, but I surely wouldn’t have quite the same fond memories of my incarceration.

Other arrests would have been less fondly remembered too, if Kennedy’s strip-searching were the rule, including my night in a Concord jail on a charge of “trespassing” at night (actually trying to camp out) at the park at Walden Pond, my bust for panhandling (actually playing guitar for tips tossed in my case) in the Yosemite Park main parking lot), and of course, my anti-apartheid arrest with Vonnegut.

The country seems to have crossed over a dark threshold. We are now a police state in all but name. Cops and wannabe cops are shooting innocent people and nothing gets done — the latest being the tragic slaying, by a shot to the head, of Rekia Boyd, a young black woman in Chicago. In this case, we had a drive-by shooting of a completely innocent person, not by a gang member but by an off-duty cop, who claims he was “threatened” by a man in a group of people who had a cell-phone to his ear. The likelihood of this out-of-uniform killer’s being charged with anything is small, and of his being convicted of anything for this outrage, virtually zero.

Many white people may think that they don’t have to worry, because it’s mostly blacks and Latinos and other minorities who suffer this kind of treatment and abuse, but they are deceiving themselves. As a white guy who got plenty of cop abuse back in the ‘60s and ‘70s just for having a beard and long hair, I can assure you that when police are given a free rein, they use it against everybody except the rich white guy in a fancy suit and an expensive car, and even then, he’d better not mouth off.

There is a dangerous change in the wind, and it’s not just strip searches and random shootings of innocents by rogue cops. Police across the country, since 9-11, have morphed from public safety workers to paramilitary occupiers, and from law enforcement officers to The Law.

Consider that we have word that the Department of Homeland Security, a mega umbrella agency created in the wake of the 9-11 attacks which oversees most of the federal security apparatus, and which supplies state and local police through federal grants, along with the FBI, have purchased an astonishing 750 million rounds of ultra-deadly hollow-point bullets and 40 caliber ammo. As well, Homeland Security has reportedly purchased a large number of semi-portable steel checkpoint guardhouses, complete with high-impact bulletproof glass windows and doors.

What is an agency that is responsible not for war but for domestic security doing buying such lethal gear and structures that would clearly be used for controlling free transit?
One can only wonder. I spoke with a government flak at Homeland Security, and was told he couldn’t have an answer for me until Monday regarding those contracts.

And of course, there is also the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012, signed by President Obama when nobody was looking, or even sober, on Dec. 31. That act, among other things, says that for the first time, the military can arrest people within the borders of the US, including US citizens, and allows them to be held indefinitely without trial, which is about as far from any Constitutional government and Bill of Rights as you can get.

Meanwhile, as my friend and co-author of The Case for Impeachment, Barbara Olshansky, once said, after being strip-searched repeatedly by Transportation Security Administration goons during her travels by air on business for the Center for Constitutional Rights where she was an assistant director, it might be a good idea to buy some new clean underwear, “just to make sure you look good for your next arrest.”

If he were still around to see this day, my old paddy wagon colleague Kurt Vonnegut would probably just smile wryly and say, “Hi-ho!”

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.

Funny, but not funny "ha ha"