This Is How They Protect Us!
Dr. Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal. He was columnist for Business Week, Scripps Howard News Service, and Creators Syndicate. He has had many university appointments. His internet columns have attracted a worldwide following. Roberts' latest books are The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism and Economic Dissolution of the West, How America Was Lost, and The Neoconservative Threat to World Order.
This Is How They Protect Us!
The Latest TSA Horror
“These people think they are God. They think they can do anything they want.”
A partially blind, partially deaf young woman returning home from treatment for a brain tumor was brutally smashed to the ground by goon tug TSA “security” while her mother, a nurse, was shoved away.
The good tugs responsible should get at least 30 years in a maximum security prison for assault with intent to kill. But nothing will happen to them. Their corrupt bosses always cover up for the psychopaths who occupy so many “security” and police positions from which they exercise unaccountable brutality over those of us forced to pay their salaries.
This is America today. We are forced to pay for our own brutilization by a criminal element that has taken refuge in “security” that “protects us.” We are in far more danger from the security forces allegedly protecting us than we are from terrorists. Indeed, the security forces are the terrorists.
Remember, during eight years of the Iraq War, US police killed more Americans than the US lost troops in combat. We needed our soldiers at home protecting us from the police, not over there “protecting” us from Iraqis who were not bothering us at all.
The only way to stop the continuous murder and brutalization of American citizens by “security” is to give the same jail sentences to the psychopaths, who comprise a large percentage of police, as are given to criminals without badges to hide behind. Until this happens, no one is safe, not even a handicapped young women traveling home from a hospital with her mother.
The same prison sentences should be given to executive branch officials who initiate wars of aggression on the basis of lies and fraud. These officials are criminals, not “world leaders.”
Read the article from the Guardian and weep for your lost country in which we are far less safe from “our” government than we were under King George. Indeed with Washington’s record of destroying seven countries in 15 years, no one in the world is safe from the government of “the land of liberty.”
America is now justice proof. “Security” has so thoroughly inoculated us against justice that justice cannot happen in America. Winning some taxpayer money in a civil lawsuit is not justice. Justice is prison for the goon thug criminals with badges.
Disabled cancer patient slammed to the ground by TSA guards, lawsuit claims
Hannah Cohen, 18, was on her way home from St Jude’s Hospital when a scanner went off and led to incident that left her ‘physically and emotionally’ injured.
A 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. Photograph: Courtesy of Shirley Cohen
Matthew Teague in Chattanooga, Tennessee
Saturday 2 July 2016 14.17 BSTLast modified on Saturday 2 July 201617.42 BST
A disabled teenage cancer patient was injured during a violent arrest by security agents at Memphis international airport, her family has alleged in a lawsuit filed against the Transport Security Administration.
Hannah Cohen, 18, at the time of her arrest on 30 June 2015, and her mother had been on their way home to Chattanooga from St Jude’s hospital in Memphis, where Hannah underwent her final treatment for a brain tumor.
Hannah and her mother, Shirley, told the Guardian that the pair had made the trip hundreds of times, and knew the airport security routine well. Shirley would usually go through the scanner first and wait for Hannah on the other side, since Hannah’s tumor, and numerous surgeries and treatments since she was two years old, had left her easily confused and frightened in unfamiliar situations.
According to the complaint, the warning alarm was triggered when Hannah passed through the body scanners. Hannah attributed the alarm to her shirt’s design.
“My shirt – it had sequins,” Hannah told the Guardian, laboring to speak. According to the complaint:
“You could see on the screen what it was pointing out,” Shirley said. She stood to the side, watching, wearing an immobilization boot on a broken foot.
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 ofHannah on the floor: handcuffed, weeping and bleeding.
“Another guard pushed me back 20ft, in my boot, and told me I couldn’t be nearby,” said Shirley, a professor of nursing at a university in Chattanooga.
“I felt so helpless. I sat down on a bench facing away so I couldn’t see what they were doing to my daughter.”
The lawsuit alleges that the TSA did not give Hannah adequate accommodation to screen her, and discriminated against her because of her disability. It names the TSA and the Memphis-Shelby County airport authority and seeks damages that include medical expenses and for personal injury, both physical and emotional. It calls for a “reasonable sum not exceeding $100,000 and costs”, and an undisclosed punitive amount.
The TSA has not yet responded to the complaint.
Hannah disappeared behind a door, then went to a hospital, and finally to the Shelby County jail. After 24 hours apart, the mother and daughter were reunited in the parking lot of the jail.
Shirley said she held her daughter, who sobbed, “I’m sorry, Mama.”
The next morning – now two days without their belongings, which had made the flight home –the pair appeared before a local judge, who asked the accused to explain herself.
When Hannah responded, the judge said: “You’re going to have to speak up.”
That’s when Hannah looked up and her hair fell back from her face, revealing her unseeing eye, surrounded by cuts and contusions.
Hannah Cohen Photograph: Courtesy of Shirley Cohen
“The judge’s eyes got big and round,” Shirley said.
After inquiring if the pair were from Memphis, the judge recommended they get legal representation.
The charges were all dropped two days later, and the court refunded the $250 in costs the family had paid.
The TSA did not immediately return a request for comment. But 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”.
“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.”
Dr. Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal. He was columnist for Business Week, Scripps Howard News Service, and Creators Syndicate. He has had many university appointments. His internet columns have attracted a worldwide following. Roberts' latest books are The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism and Economic Dissolution of the West, How America Was Lost, and The Neoconservative Threat to World Order.
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