Nipple ring search procedures faulty, TSA admits

Apparently a woman, Mandi Hamlin, recently had an embarrassing incident in airport security screening. She has several body piercings, including nipple rings, which set off the metal detectors in the airport screening. The TSA officials forced her to remove the nipple rings so they could inspect them and determine that she isn't a dangerous terrorist. Geez.

I have metal rods in my legs and almost every time I go through screening the metal detector goes off, giving me a detour into the area for extra screening. I can sympathize with the lady. It's not the nicest place to go regardless that usually the TSA agents are very friendly, respectful, helpful, and considerate.

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"Ms. Hamlin did not want to remove her nipple piercings," Allred said, reading from a letter she sent TSA. "After nipple rings are inserted, the skin can often heal around the piercing and the rings can be extremely difficult and painful to remove. In addition, once removed, the pierced skin may close up almost immediately, making it difficult and painful to reinsert the piercing."

More officers were called over, and the group grew to four male and two female TSA officers, according to Hamlin. Also, a small crowd of onlookers had started to gather. The officers insisted that Hamlin remove the nipple rings...Had she been told that she had a right to a pat-down, she would have chosen that option.

What usually happens to me is a "pat down", though this does vary from officer to officer. Because in my case my metal is buried inside my legs it's impossible to remove the metal, giving them no option to request, as they did for this woman, to directly inspect the metal.

The TSA Travel Assistant has guidelines on traversing the airport screening with the least pain. The key is "dress the part", which means wearing clothes and shoes which are most easily removed for screening, to not wear jewelry or piercings, etc. So they would tell Ms. Hamlin to remove her nipple rings before travel and reinsert them after travel. However the article says:

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"After nipple rings are inserted, the skin can often heal around the piercing and the rings can be extremely difficult and painful to remove. In addition, once removed, the pierced skin may close up almost immediately, making it difficult and painful to reinsert the piercing."

This implies nipple rings are in the same category as the rods in my legs. They are essentially nonremovable and it's best if the TSA learns to accomodate these accessories.

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Nipple ring search procedures faulty, TSA admits

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TSA Travel Assistant

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airport_security

External Media

BROADCAST EXCLUSIVE: Yemeni Man Imprisoned at CIA “Black Sites” Tells His Story of Kidnapping and Torture

BROADCAST EXCLUSIVE: Yemeni Man Imprisoned at CIA “Black Sites” Tells His Story of Kidnapping and Torture is an interview with Mohamed Farag Ahmad Bashmilah concerning his imprisonment and torture by U.S. forces. It appears from this interview that the treatment by U.S. forces did not include beating or physical torture, but psychological torture. In the earlier article, Inside the CIA's notorious "black sites", it appeared from the Salon.com article that U.S. forces had done beating and other physical torture. Instead he described that the Americans recognized he was not in a condition for rough treatment, and that psychologists were frequently with him.

There has been a controversy over the participation by psychologists in torture. Perhaps psychologists don't swear the Hippocratic Oath, but "first, do no harm" is a very good attitude to have regardless of whether they do or not. It appears that psychologists are involved with the military in designing torture techniques that don't require physical beatings, but instead work towards inducing insanity in the prisoner. Mohamed Farag Ahmad Bashmilah describes the techniques as sleep deprivation and playing loud raucous music constantly, and how it drove him to suicide attempts and to hitting his head against the walls.

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BROADCAST EXCLUSIVE: Yemeni Man Imprisoned at CIA “Black Sites” Tells His Story of Kidnapping and Torture

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Inside the CIA's notorious "black sites"

Inside the CIA's notorious "black sites" is, for me, an introduction to one of the Extraordinary Rendition cases. Extraordinary Rendition is a U.S. Government (CIA) practice of essentially outsourcing torture. A person will be captured somewhere and then enter into a system of secretly operated airplanes being flown around the world to secret prisons operated by the CIA.

This article deals specifically with Mohamed Farag Ahmad Bashmilah. He is a 38-year-old Yemeni national who lived with his wife Zahra in Indonesia, where he ran a small clothing store with his uncle. In October 2003 he flew to Jordan to visit his mother, and through a series of misunderstandings became implicated as a terror-activist trained in Afghanistan, which led the Jordanians to turn him over to the CIA who flew him to Baghram Air Force Base in Afghanistan for "interrogation".

The interrogation which ensued included some standard techniques of psychological manipulation which tend to incite psychological damage to the point of becoming crazy. Many believe these techniques are torture. The techniques include sleep deprivation, beatings, threats against his family members, threats against himself, playing loud music constantly, and more. At one point he signed a confession, which he did not read, just due to the promise that the treatment would end.

'The American Civil Liberties Union has filed a federal suit claiming Jeppesen Dataplan Inc. enabled the clandestine transportation of five terrorism suspects to overseas locations where they were subjected to "forms of cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment."...The U.S. government has asked a federal judge to throw out the lawsuit on the basis that trying the case would result in the release of sensitive state secrets....The ACLU countered in its filing Friday that the clandestine transfer of terrorism suspects to U.S.-run overseas prisons or foreign intelligence agencies, known as extraordinary rendition, is already a matter of public record "confirmed by documentary evidence and eyewitness testimony," along with Federal Aviation Administration records.'

Amnesty International: United States of America / Yemen: Secret Detention in CIA "Black Sites" 'The goal of the network is not just to hold terrorist suspects and their supporters, but to collect intelligence through long-term interrogation, free from any legal restrictions or judicial oversight. The bulk of the work is carried out at facilities under US military control in Afghanistan, Guantánamo Bay in Cuba and Iraq, which together hold at least 11,000 people.6 Most of them were detained in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq, but others were transferred from countries including Albania, Bosnia, Croatia, Gambia, Indonesia, Italy, Jordan, Kenya, Libya, Pakistan, Macedonia, Malaysia, Sudan, Tanzania, and Zambia... Long before Guantánamo opened its gates to “war on terror” detainees, however, the USA had been secretly transferring terror suspects into the custody of other states, states where physical and psychological brutality feature prominently in interrogations. Known to the US Administration as “extraordinary rendition,” and to its critics as the “outsourcing of torture”, the program has expanded considerably, reportedly under a classified directive signed by President Bush in late September 2001.8 It has been estimated that the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), often using covert airplanes leased by fictional front companies,9 has flown hundreds of war on terror suspects to countries including Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, Pakistan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and Syria.10'

This fellow is not the only such person held in U.S. Custody, as you can see in the Wikipedia page for Category:Yemeni extrajudicial prisoners of the United States

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Inside the CIA's notorious "black sites"

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Biography of Plaintiff Mohamed Farag Ahmad Bashmilah

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohamed_Farag_Ahmad_Bashmilah

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Ex-Worker: Air Firm Aided CIA Renditions

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Iraqi, Yemeni men join lawsuit over CIA flights

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Detainees and the "War on Terror"

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DOJ urges court to dismiss lawsuit against Boeing subsidiary for CIA rendition role

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Jeppesen Dataplan

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Rendition Lawsuit Against Boeing Subsidiary Grows

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Amnesty International: United States of America / Yemen: Secret Detention in CIA "Black Sites"

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Category:Yemeni extrajudicial prisoners of the United States

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http://ghostplane.net/yemen

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orture Taxi: Extraordinary Rendition in the Crosshairs

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United Kingdom: Deportation of terror suspects

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Secret Prisons Timeline

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Headlines for August 02, 2007

External Media

Iraq's Laboratory of Repression

The current U.S. strategy in Iraq is called "The Surge", and the idea is to bring more forces into Baghdad to stop the violence that's threatening to destabilize the U.S. puppet government, and give that government breathing room within which to establish stability. The "Surge" has been going for several months and in the news are many articles glowingly claiming there is a decrease in violence and therefore that means The Surge is working.

The linked article offers a different view: "The Bush administration is turning Iraq into a test tube for modern techniques of repression, from sophisticated biometrics that track populations to devastating weapons systems that combine night-vision optics from drone aircraft, heat resonance imaging and deadly firepower from the sky to kill suspected insurgents."

They claim The Surge is "working" because U.S. forces are terrorizing the Iraqi's into submission. Or: "loose rules of engagement that allow U.S. troops to kill Iraqis at the slightest sign of hostility, have contributed to what U.S. generals and a growing number of American journalists are hailing as an improving security situation."

The pattern is similar to "operations used in El Salvador and Guatemala in the 1980s to eradicate leftist guerrillas and their political backers." In Iraq there are groups which are effectively death squads being led by Sunni Sheiks.

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Iraq's Laboratory of Repression

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"We have written a blank check on drawn our liberties"

This is Olbermann commenting on the recent law, the Military Commissions Act, which suspended Habeas Corpus. George W Bush and others lied to us a string of claims, lies, that led to the recent signing of this law which suspends Habeas Corpus and other guarantees. It was sold to us as a way to protect freedoms, but are we free if the government can just lock us up with no just cause, not required to show proof of our existence, etc? This has happened in the past, in the United States, when Habeas Corpus was suspended. At times Newspaper journalists and editors have been imprisoned, by the government, for the things they wrote in their newspapers. And more famously during World War II the Japanese descendants living in the U.S. were imprisoned, not because of anything they did, but because they were Japanese. We have entered a new era where the government is now free to do this again.

Here's another video talking about what Habeas Corpus is. It's pointed out the U.S. says, about Habeas Corpus, that it cannot be suspended unless the country finds itself in grave danger such as invasion or rebellion. Now, is the U.S. in actual danger of any invasion?

Secret CIA Prisons in Your Backyard

The CIA is running secret prisons around the world where they are sending prisoners for torture. These prisons are not new, the infrastructure for these prisons have been under construction since the 1970's. Secret CIA Prisons in Your Backyard is an interview of two journalists who have been researching the story. They have published Torture Taxi: On the Trail of the CIA's Rendition Flights to document the results of their research.

The CIA have set up shell corporations who own airplanes. The airplanes are flown under contract from the CIA shuttling people and equipment around the world in secret flights. However since these are civilian owned airplanes, they are required to file flight plans and leave other bits of paper trail. That paper trail is trackable by individuals.

Beginning in 2002 flight watchers began noticing this series of flights that would, for example, start at Andrews Air Force base, stop somewhere and end up in Afghanistan.

Speaking as an average American citizen I am not in support of our government torturing people, and violating normal legal procedures. Secret prisons are completely in violation of the habeas corpus legal precedent, where the government is required to show the body when they are holding someone. Holding people in secret is in violation of that legal precedent, which is a core value of American Justice. How dare our government leaders violate this.

When will the "war on terror" be over?

The 'war on terror' is being used as the justification for removing our civil liberties. Okay, so in previous wars civil liberties had been removed, and then put back into place after the war. But this kind of war has a nameless enemy and a seemingly endless timeline, so how can you know when the war is 'over' so you can replace the lost liberties?

Court: Terror Fears Can't Curb 'Liberty' (Sun Oct 17, 6:50 AM ET) By C.G. WALLACE, Associated Press Writer (
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news)

The above story is about protesters making their annual trek to the School of the Americas for their protest against its apparently eggregious practices. They claim the school has been training the ugly dictator regimes in Central and South America in their ugly torture habits and death squads and the whole rest of the nasty ugly mess that's gone for decades by U.S. supported regimes.

However... the local police wanted to restrict their right to protest, and to make them pass through metal dectors before being allowed to protest, etc. The claim? In a time of war, one has to be more careful.

However... the judicial panel which heard the case said:

"We cannot simply suspend or restrict civil liberties until the War on Terror is over, because the War on Terror is unlikely ever to be truly over," Judge Gerald Tjoflat wrote for the panel. "Sept. 11, 2001, already a day of immeasurable tragedy, cannot be the day liberty perished in this country."

Yay! a voice of reason!