Well, the Transportation Safety Administration—the dreaded “TSA”—has done a lot of publicly embarrassing things in its time (I myself have been goosed by its agents innumerable times), but this is the worst incident yet, and should prompt some major soul-searching at that odious agency.
According to both WREG in Memphis and the Guardian, the TSA did some very bad things to a disabled cancer patient. Nineteen-year-old Hannah Cohen, who has been suffering from a malignant brain tumor for 17 years, which has left her partly blind, deaf, and paralyzed, was trying to fly home to Chattanooga, Tennessee after treatment at St. Jude Children’s Hospital, a cancer facility in Memphis.
Hannah had apparently made that flight hundreds of times over the years for treatment, but this time something went wrong: the scanner went off. The culprit, it seems, was her sequined shirt. Here’s what happened next (from the Guardian):
Agents told Hannah they needed to take her to a “sterile area” where they could search her further. She was afraid, Shirley said, and offered to take off the sequined shirt as she was wearing another underneath, but a female agent laughed at her.
Seeing the scene begin to unfold, Shirley hobbled to a supervisor standing nearby. “She is a St Jude’s patient, and she can get confused,” she said. “Please be gentle. If I could just help her, it will make things easier.”
But soon, a voice on the public address system requested more agents to report to the checkpoint, Shirley said. “That’s when the armed guards came.”
The brain tumor had left Hannah blind in one eye, deaf in one ear and partially paralyzed, so when the guards grabbed each of her arms, it startled her, she said. “I tried to push away,” she said. “I tried to get away.”
The guards slammed Hannah to the ground, her mother said, smashing her face into the floor, which the complaint alleges left her “physically and emotionally” injured.
Shirley had just picked up her phone from the conveyor belt, and she snapped a photo of Hannah on the floor: handcuffed, weeping and bleeding.
Voilà:
Hannah went to the hospital, and then to jail, for crying out loud! I’m not sure what the charges were, but when the judge got a look at Hannah and her disabilities, he dismissed the case. Now the family is suing the TSA for $100,000 (I think they should go for more). When the TSA was asked for comment, this was their response—completely unfeeling:
. . . a TSA spokeswoman, Sari Koshetz, said in a statement that “passengers can call ahead of time to learn more about the screening process for their particular needs or medical situation”.
Hannah’s mother responded:
“Why should I do that when we’ve been going through that airport for 17 years?” Shirley said.
“These people think they are God. They think they can do anything they want,” she said. “Well, in this country we have the Americans with Disabilities Act. And if they will do this to a disabled girl, does that mean they’ll do it to an 80-year-old grandmother? It’s time for justice.”
Yep, the TSA roughs up a disabled, long-term cancer patient who got confused, slamming her to the ground and bloodying her, and doesn’t even apologize. What are these people thinking? Did they really think they had to use that kind of force?
All they say is “call ahead to learn about the screening.” I wish someone would sue them out of existence.
When government thugs do this sort of thing, they always insist they were ‘ following proper procedures ‘ sheesh
… all it takes is careful writing of the procedures, avoiding worrying about the consequences of following them.
Best to privatise the function that the TSA is “performing”.
I really wonder what sort of person is attracted to working for the TSA. I’d rather be a politician – some of them are competent, decent human beings.
That’s worked appallingly in US prisons, they are worse not better since they were privatised. I don’t think I would trust that privatising security would work any better at an airport.
Sub. The panacea of privatizing government functions has mostly cost more and made services worse, while enriching a few investors. They would hire the same people who work there now. Who else would they get?
Using private military organizations has not been such a wonderful thing either. Gives our government deniability, but what kind of control over actions?
I’m not saying privatisation is a panacea for everything, just in this particular case. I’d rather let airports and airlines be responsible for security – they have a powerful incentive to get it right. If I fly with United and am unhappy with their service I can switch to BA or someone else, and the airlines know that. If the airlines hire inept pilots and cabin staff they know it will cost them. If they hire inept screening staff they will get the same result. Something has to be done – I know not all TSA staff are this bad but if there are no signals then there is little incentive to get things right.
When it was first set up, the TSA was privatized. The complaints were so loud that Congress required the agency to be government run by government employees.
And before the TSA was set up? This problem simply has to be fixed. Why not outsource TSA functions to Israel?
If it’s worth doing it’s worth doing properly. Much of what the TSA does is just ineffective theatre. The TSA are like the cops – many effective decent people leavened with some power hungry misfits.
You are too polite with”embarrassing”.
Their behavior was obscene.
+ 1
I think “embarrassing” is too nice as well. This is appalling, disgusting, and ignorant. I don’t know what sort of training TSA agents undergo, but it’s clearly lacking.
Criminal.
Unprovoked assault and disproportionate violence are crimes in the USA, I presume?
I don’t know. If you consider that the purpose of the TSA (and it does have one – it’s a designed object whose designers had aims and intentions) is to, for example suppress dissent by a combination of theatrics and fear, then I’d argue that its training has been effective at achieving the designer’s aims.
I frequently travel to the US with my parents and the whole immigration process is nothing short of degrading. If I were there with that girl, I think I’d have lost my mind and tried to kill the c*nts.
I am at the point where I am suspicious of ANY person working in any kind of law enforcement or quasi-law enforcement position…. I think those positions attract a much more aggressive personality type which is enabled and exacerbated by the authority of the position.
I don’t think so. At least not these low-paying (I’m guessing), low-status jobs (nobody is going to brag about being a TSA agent).
I think the problem is giving authority to people who may not have the personality, or experience to have it. I also don’t think you can become a warm, calm, and authoriative person with just some training and education.
You need to find the right sort of personality types for these kinds of jobs, just as what is done when they’re looking for people to be austronauts, or future martians.
Our police officers have to pass personality tests to ensure they’re not the sort that just wants to throw their weight around. They’re expected to behave in a way that’s beyond reproach. Recruitment posters show them helping people. They’re also very well trained and well paid.
Of course, they’re human and not perfect, and there’s always the odd bad apple, but on the whole they’re worthy of respect. I think it helps that every police officer in the country goes through the same training at the same police college, which of course, they have to graduate from, and it’s no easy ride.
The reality tv show about the NZ traffic cops certainly reflects that. 😉
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To tell the truth, I’ve only ever watched that once, and that was because I was at someone else’s home and that was what they were watching.
I have always found them good in real life though.
I have no data, but I can certainly see how law enforcement would be attractive to aggressive, confrontational authoritarians, despite mild-mannered recruitment posters. TV and film are riddled with glorifications of aggressive, confrontational, authoritarian LEOs. Those are the recruitment posters people actually see.
Yeah, but personality tests get those types rejected. Then they apply to the TSA.
Personality tests get the “aggressive, confrontational authoritarian” types who aren’t capable of masking their aggression, confrontation and authoritarian tendencies for the duration of the test for the duration of the test. The world has an abundance of people who successfully pass all sorts of screenings for various personality traits. Generally, this doesn’t end well.
Who can be fooled? Well I’d guess any group who devote fewer resources for screening in less skilled hands than the CIA. Or MI6.
Are those films and TV made in “Hollywood” for the US market, or in (whatever the NZ equivalent of Hollywood is – I guess “Sheepyfield”?) for the NZ market?
Brown Shirts, Black Hearts.
This is terrible, worse than I could have imagined. (I have not traveled in the USA since 2011. Seems like I should continue.)
WHY does TSA precheck cost so damn much? Is this to make up for inadequate funding? In such a technologically advanced country, there must be a better way of doing this.
Poor Hannah. For more reasons than one…
It probably improves their profit figures?
I assume they turn a profit. If not, then perhaps the Republican Party can be told, and unleashed upon them.
It’s becoming more and more difficult to think of the US as not being a police state.
I mean, yeah, lots of cops (of whatever force) are basically good guys working hard to do what police are supposed to do…but that statement held true for all the horrific police states of the past. We identify those police states by the too-frequent abuse of power by the police, whether those abuses were written into the law or simply common-but-illegal custom. And those police states pretty much universally excused such abuses in the name of security, too.
There’s probably no clear line demarcating a free society from a police state, but we clearly have far more characteristics of the latter than we did when I was growing up. And, worse, we seem hellbent on moving even farther in that direction.
At some point we’re going to realize that “evildoers” are much, much less worrisome than the solution we’re implementing to “protect” ourselves from them. My great fear is that, historically, such realizations are nearly always accompanied by bloody revolt and carry no guarantee that the problem will be resolved. Too often, a cycle erupts whereby the reigning despots are replaced by more despots — look at the history of Russia over the past couple centuries. And Germany only escaped their similar cycle after they were utterly defeated in war.
b&
In Canada there is a worrying issue right now with police having devices that allow them to listen to your cell phone. When the press asked for information about this under the freedom of information act, the police denied the request. Now the press is appealing to the government. Troubling times! Makes me want to go all dark and live in a faraday cage sometimes.
Those would be “Stingray” devices. Portable contraptions that masquerade as legitimate cellphone towers that police use to play man-in-the-middle attacks…on everybody close enough to the device for its signal to be stronger than the nearest cell tower. They don’t even pretend to pay tribute to the spirit of wiretap laws because, if they did, the terrorists who hate us for our freedom would win.
b&
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Yeah it tricks your cellphone into passing along the lower key once the device spoofs a cell tower.
“Germany only escaped a similar cycle after they were utterly defeated in the war.”
Referring to the Kaiser’s Empire with its nationwide universal suffrage as despotic is exaggerated.
The Kaiser wasn’t even commander-in-chief of all German troups in times of peace.
As for the political system: At the beginning of the 20th century some federal states (e.g. Kingdom of Wuerttemberg, Grand Duchy of Baden) were probably more democratic than Britain: government based on parliamentarian majorities (one man one vote in both chambers); hereditary peers a minority in the first chamber.
Yeah, they can hear your thoughts by tuning into the electromagnetic radiation given out by the induction of fields within the fillings in your teeth.
If you’re being sarcastic in a way to suggest these devices do not exist, you are sadly mistaken as they do exist and they can actually do what I say they can do.
Dear John,
You are a fount of knowledge. Tell us what you know.
I agree.
Did you notice in the Dallas situation they had a killer robot ready and functional.
As the saying suggests, give a little mind a little power.
I’m starting to think TSA is a Zimbardo experiment gone wrong.
You may have meant that half jokingly, but I think that is exactly what is happening. And I think that is always a danger for any type of organization that is given the ability to have authority of some sort over others. Particularly when that authority is of a physical nature.
I had the same thought! My comment when I posted this story on Facebook was, “Are we living in a real-life Stanford prison experiment?”
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Horrible, and they should apologize.
That is a legitimate point. During 17 years the scanner hadn’t been activated, yet when it was activated the passenger didn’t know the procedures.
But I rather suspect TSA procedure isn’t that well regulated that it is some sort of viable excuse for treating confused – or non-confused – passengers badly.
Until about four years ago, I used to often fly out of Memphis for business. Many of the TSA employees were obviously barely competent, which they tried to cover up by being excessively rude. The screeners at many other airports seemed to be competent and courteous, at least in comparison to Memphis.
I agree that the whole think is a joke, and needs to be redesigned. At the very least, the employees need better screening and better training. More money might help to attract better employees.
No; it needs to be scrapped. The only national interest in aviation security is to prevent hijackings, since an hijacked airliner makes a very, very, very effective cruise missile. But hijackings can be 100% prevented by a solid bulkhead between the pilots and the rest of the cabin, with separate entrances for the pilots. The cost is trivial; a bit more fuel to carry the extra weight, and a bit less revenue from losing a passenger seat or three.
Once the aircraft themselves are thus secured, the pre-boarding security chokepoints become much more devastatingly vulnerable targets for terrorists. Crash a plane and you’ll only kill one plane’s worth of people; cut loose with AK-47s and shrapnel bombs before anybody’s gone through a metal detector and you’ll kill much more than just one plane’s worth of people.
As such, the TSA makes us substantially less safe, and we should eliminate that liability altogether.
We don’t actually need any more security to board a plane than we do to go to a movie theater or get on a city bus — and pretending we do has caused all sorts of horrific damage to our society. Poor Hannah is the latest and most sympathetically visible victim, but we’re all impoverished by training people to passively accept being sexually assaulted by uniformed strangers.
Cheers,
b&
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Completely ignores the psychology at play. Once you are airborne inside a plane you are going to die if it is sufficiently damaged. There is at least the possibility of survival on the ground. Allow enough mere plane loads of people to die and you can kiss the passenger aviation industry goodbye. Not such a dramatic effect on supermarkets,banks and buses.
I’m going to mail Jerry the last Washington Spectator (a newsletter) with a short editorial called “Republicans Are Starving the TSA to Privatize It.”
It explains a lot.
I suspected as much. There’s money to be made.
As I pointed out, at the start, the
TSA was privatized. There is nothing new here, the Rethuglicans in Congress are doing the same thing with the Post Office.
Disgusting and infuriating. The assholes who roughed this young woman up should be criminally charged and likely several other people should be fired. There is precisely no valid excuse for this shit. But I have little doubt that someone will disagree with me on that.
Indeed. It’s so disheartening. Slamming her face to the ground until she is bleeding! What the hell is happening?! This is the US for crying out loud!
It’s beginning to look like a slide down into darkness for the US. That sounds over the top, but damn. The pot seems to be coming to a boil.
Yes. This is a country that’s just celebrated its freedom, but it doesn’t look too free from the outside.
Unless you mean the freedom to live in the streets or starve to death because of an insufficient safety net, go bankrupt to get adequate health care if you can get it at all, or be molested and abused at the airport to give a false appearance of safety.
The judge who dismissed the charges suggested to Hannah and her mom to get a lawyer and sue them.
Do those people get no training at all about how to treat people? That is, beyond biffing them around and putting handcuffs on them? What an indictment.
With its long coastline and two long borders and busy air traffic to supervise does the US Government believe that the TSA or Border Guards really have had any effect on terrorist activity since 2001?
Considering the huge quantities of drugs which are smuggled with ease daily into the US and the steady flow of migrant workers looking for a better life, has the terrorist network just not noticed how it is done?.
Perhaps things are different in the US but in most countries such over the top security is viewed as a PR exercise for the benefit of the airlines.
That photo of Hannah is going to be a very powerful tool for change. No amount of TSA PR can outweigh that image.
I emailed Jerry about this incident a week ago. I’m glad he spread the story about it, as it’s a poignant example of the lunacy, harm, and ineffective screening policies at the TSA.
In the days after 9-11, I saw them putting women with underwire bras through hell. But this beats everything.
I’ve got no beef with TSA patting me down. I just explain to ’em real clear what’s been my rule since I took little Suzie to the junior prom — you wanna touch me down there, ya gotta kiss me first.
At least buy me a drink first, eh?
This is some Catholic Church levels of bullshit. Your agents just beat the shit out of a crippled cancer patient. Even when she was struggling, that partial paralysis should have made it obvious that no excessive force was necessary.
And that’s assuming there was a good reason for her to be there in the first place. She had another shirt underneath the sequined shirt. Let her take the sequined shirt off, let her walk through the metal detector again, and when she doesn’t set it off, double check the sequin shirt.
Worst case scenario, they take away the shirt and don’t give it back. That’d be bad, but “We can’t prove this shirt doesn’t have a weapon in it” while absurd, is technically true.
Pretty much the only explanation I can think of at this point is that these agents were just outright sadists.
The TSAs response to this should have been groveling. “What these agents done is unacceptable. We will be investigating the exact events, firing the individuals responsible, and will offer full assistance to any criminal charges the victim wishes to pursue.”
But if you can’t even give lip-service… what the fuck. If it were just these agents, I couldn’t indict the whole organization. It’s not that I like the TSA, but if they just cut these people off and made no attempt to defend them, then I couldn’t necessarily say they reflect on the TSA.
But nope. Unless there’s more to this, the TSA has gone full-on Catholic Church, and decided to defend the monsters it employs, ensuring us that that the employers are also monsters.
If the TSA did this to my daughter I would be in jail for attempted murder.
Observation/question…
American law enforcement, military, and other security offices such as the TSA seem to have a very exaggerated sense of their own righteousness. I think it was Warren Buffett, when commenting on CEOs, who said “they mistake the importance of their position for the importance of themselves”. This seems apt for security officers in the US. Whereas elsewhere in the West there appears to be a greater sense of responsibility and humility with the power given to them.
Is this a facet of the sense of “greatness” that is inculcated in US citizens? (And does that same sense of unquestioned “greatness” lead to people putting the law into their own hands, like in the recent Dallas event?)
Meanwhile we are forgetting what led to the TSA in the first place:
Koran 8:12 “Instil terror in the hearts of the unbelievers. Strike off their heads and cut off fingers and toes.”
Perhaps our anger is better directed to that plague – the source code.
I think you might have noticed that there is a considerable volume of anger directed that way.
But the TSA isn’t a necessary response to that.
Nor should that stop us being angry at the frankly violent behaviour of those meant to ensure our safety.
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Anger that is delegitimized, stigmatized, marginalized, ignored, ridiculed, suppressed and labeled “gross and racist” by the regressive left, POTUS and the likes of madscientist below who tells us that the TSA has victimized more people than other forms of terrorism therewith throwing under the bus the biggest victims of Islam: Muslims.
Eh, I think you two might be typing past each other.
In both the Western and Islamic worlds, the biggest threats to the residents are domestic and mostly institutional. There it’s religiously motivated; here, it’s more political. Both are reactionary to the other direction; Muslim fundamentalists terrorize their own in the name of stopping the Western devil and a global caliphate; the TSA terrorizes Americans in the name of protecting us from Muslims.
That it’s overall worse (much worse) in the Islamic world doesn’t mean it’s not unacceptably bad here.
Cheers,
b&
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So you’re shifting the blame to others and excusing these brutal beasts? Since November 2001 there have been far more civilian victims of the TSA than victims of other forms of terrorism in the USA.
I am so sorry about what happened to Hannah. It should not happen to anyone, especially not to a person with the health problems Hannah has. Were these TSA agents blind, deaf and dumb or just sociopathic retards? It makes me wish that people in the lines had come to Hannah’s aid and given the TSA idiots a taste of their own medicine. I, too, wish that the law suit had been for more. If it goes to a jury, maybe they will determine that Hannah deserves much more. I seriously doubt that she will be able to feel safe traveling on a plane again.
Failed football wannabes and roid-heads have always been like that. The difference is that 40 years ago society would condemn them, but these days governments promote them and society in general turn a blind eye.
TSA does not have armed guards, do you mean the police????
What I have seen in the news and Utube is appalling and I believe that they need to be held accountable for their actions..
100 is not enough in my opinion.
It is time to le the people know that they don’t have to give up their God given tights to be safe.
William Fleming
All societal knowledge about politeness discovered over the last few hundred years were thrown right out the window in the blink of an eye.
Galling. Inexcusable.
Mike
To The point about $100,000 being a low figure for damages, I also saw from another source that there was an additional undisclosed amount for punitive damages. I hope the TSA agents in question get fired, charged, and imprisoned, and that the institution has to apologize and pay through the nose.
Everyone must comply no matter what it takes I guess. Gosh we can’t have anyone not complying can we.
$100,000,? it needs to be $100,000,000 and lets hope the Jury feels the same way,despicable people. We have a saying here in the UK “pissed with power” very apt in this instance.
There is always an attempt by whatever law enforcement is at play that they will charge someone they abuse. Resisting arrest is the goto.
They always do it.
Michael Hart tried it to cover smashing a women’s face to pulp. But it was on tape.
Unfortunately since the armed goon squads became a fad in 1980s California the disease has spread globally. These days it seems that every paramilitary group sees itself above the law, and we see governments protecting their behavior. I hope the TSA loses in court and has to pay a punitive fee of a few tens of millions. Unfortunately I doubt that such a thing would make the monkeys in charge change their selection and training procedures, but at least they won’t be able to hire as many monkeys for a year.
All brawn and no brains. Civil servants are suppose to be professionals … not professionally inadequate.
Horrible, just horrible. I am always angered also by the fact that it seems to require a lawsuit to get any where in cases like this. (I say this in the church-and-state things, especially, since it really does deprive others of services.)
Seattle TSA Worker Arrested on Voyeurism Charge
http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/seattle-tsa-worker-arrested-voyeurism-charge-n613711