Abby Martin cites a new report by the Arizona Republic about the Phoenix International Airport about TSA misconduct, highlighting instances where agents have abused the elderly and the disabled.
Federal air marshal arrested for taking cell phone photos up women's skirts (Video)
A federal air marshal was arrested in Nashville,
Tenn., Thursday for allegedly taking cell phone photographs up women
passengers' skirts. Adam Bartsch, 28, was arrested after another male
passenger noticed him taking the inappropriate photos, and wrestled the
federal air marshal's cell phone from his hands, according to ABC News2 on Oct. 17.
Passenger
Rey Collazo said he first saw Bartsch, who he did not know was an
on-duty air marshal, taking the pictures while boarding the plane.
He
described how he reached over and grabbed the cell phone from Bartsch.
Collazo said he had to twist the phone out of the marshal's hand, and
after a short struggle he shoved him back and took the phone away from
him.
Collazo notified the flight crew, who in turn called
authorities, after first calling Bartsch a "disgrace" to men and human
being.
Marte Deborah Dalelv says she is "very nervous and tense" but remains hopeful she can overturn the sentence on appeal.
Interior designer Marte Deborah Dalelv was on a business trip in Dubai when she says she was raped.
The
24-year-old reported the March attack to the police but found herself
charged with having extramarital sex, drinking alcohol, and perjury.
Convicted earlier this week, she says she is appealing against the verdict.
The appeal hearing is scheduled for early September.
Describing
the sentence as "very harsh", she told the AFP news agency: "I am very
nervous and tense. But I hope for the best and I take one day at a time.
I just have to get through this."
The case has angered rights groups and the authorities in Norway.
'Wanted'
Ms Dalelv says she had been on a night out with colleagues on 6 March when the rape took place.
She
reported it to the police, who proceeded to confiscate her passport and
seize her money. She was charged four days later on three counts,
including having sex outside marriage.
Her alleged attacker, she said, received a 13-month sentence for extra-marital sex and alcohol consumption.
The
Norwegian government had secured Ms Dalelv's conditional release so,
since being charged, she has been living under the protection of the
Norwegian Seamans' Centre in Dubai.
By Josh Voorhees
Posted Monday, July 22, 2013, at 8:48 AM
Marte
Dalelv from Norway flashes a smile at the Norwegian Seamen's Center in
Dubai, on July 22, 2013 after she was pardoned by Dubai ruler Sheikh
Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum of an extramarital sex charge and allowed
to fly home
Photo by KARIM SAHIB/AFP/Getty Images
A
Norwegian woman at the center of a Dubai rape claim dispute said Sunday
that officials have dropped her 16-month sentence for having sex
outside marriage and she is free to leave the country. "I am very, very
happy," Marte Deborah Dalelv told The Associated Press. "I am
overjoyed." ...
[Norwegian Foreign Minister]
Barth Eide told the Norwegian news agency NTB that international media
attention and Norway's diplomatic measures helped Dalelv, who was free
on appeal with her next court hearing scheduled for early September.
Norway also reminded the United Arab Emirates of obligations under U.N.
accords to seriously investigate claims of violence against women.
NEW
YORK – Around the world, people’s understanding of why rape happens
usually takes one of two forms. Either it is like lightning, striking
some unlucky woman who was in the wrong place at the wrong time (an
isolated, mysterious event, caused by some individual man’s sudden
psychopathology), or it is “explained” by some seductive transgression
by the victim (the wrong dress, a misplaced smile).
Illustration by Barrie Maguire
But
the idea of a “rape culture” – a concept formulated by feminists in the
1970’s as they developed the study of sexual violence – has hardly made
a dent in mainstream consciousness. The notion that there are systems,
institutions, and attitudes that are more likely to encourage rape and
protect rapists is still marginal to most people, if they have
encountered it at all.
That
is a shame, because there have been numerous recent illustrations of
the tragic implications of rape culture. Reports of widespread sexual
violence in India, South Africa, and recently Brazil have finally
triggered a long-overdue, more systemic examination of how those
societies may be fostering rape, not as a distant possibility in women’s
lives, but as an ever-present, life-altering, daily source of terror.
The
latest “rape culture” to be exposed – in recent documentaries,
lawsuits, and legislative hearings – is embedded within the United
States military. As The Guardian reported in 2011,
women soldiers in Iraq faced a higher likelihood of being sexually
assaulted by a colleague than they did of dying by enemy fire.
So
pervasive is the sexual violence aimed at American women soldiers that a
group of veterans sued the Pentagon, hoping to spur change. Twenty-five
women and three men claimed that they had endured sexual assaults while
serving, and lay the blame at the feet of former US Defense Secretaries
Donald Rumsfeld and Robert Gates. The reason, the lawsuit claims,
is that these men oversaw an institutional culture that punished those
who reported the assaults, while refusing to punish the attackers.
When
Maricella Guzman reported a sexual assault in her first month of
service in the Navy, instead of being “taken seriously,” she says, “I
was forced to do sit-ups.” Women soldiers who had served in Afghanistan
came forward to speak with the filmmakers Amy Ziering and Kirby Dick,
whose Oscar-nominated film The Invisible War
exposed the scale of the problem. The fear of rape at US-held
battlefields led directly to endemic illnesses caused by dehydration:
women at the front, serving in 110-degree heat (43 degrees Celsius), did
everything possible to avoid drinking, because rape was so common in
the latrines.
The tales of
colleagues, and even superiors, assaulting soldiers whose lives they
are supposed to protect – stories that reveal the license that the
attackers must have felt they had – are harrowing enough. What becomes
clear from story after story in The Invisible War is a
consistent – indeed, nearly identical – narrative of concealment,
cover-up, and punishment of alleged victims, for whom justice was almost
impossible to obtain through institutional channels.
James
Taranto has decided to inject himself into the military rape issue;
problem is, his ideas are all of the antiquated ‘blame the victim’
variety. Image @PSAWomenPolitics
An
Air Force commander exercised her discretion in a sexual-assault case.
Now her career is being blocked by Sen. Claire McCaskill. Why?
JAMES TARANTO
Lt.
Gen. Susan Helms is a pioneering woman who finds her career stalled
because of a war on men—a political campaign against sexual assault in
the military that shows signs of becoming an effort to criminalize male
sexuality.
Gen. Helms is a 1980 graduate of the Air Force Academy
who became an astronaut in 1990. She was a crewman on four space-shuttle
missions and a passenger on two, traveling to the International Space
Station and back 5½ months later. Two days after arriving at the station
in 2001, she, along with fellow astronaut Jim Voss, conducted history's
longest spacewalk—8 hours, 56 minutes—to work on a docking device.
In
March, President Obama nominated Gen. Helms to serve as vice commander
of the Air Force Space Command. But Sen. Claire McCaskill, a Missouri
Democrat who sits on the Armed Services Committee, has placed a
"permanent hold" on the nomination.
Associated Press Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo.
At
issue is the general's decision in February 2012 to grant clemency to
an officer under her command. Capt. Matthew Herrera had been convicted
by a court-martial of aggravated sexual assault. Ms. McCaskill said
earlier this month that the clemency decision "sent a damaging message
to survivors of sexual assault who are seeking justice in the military
justice system."
Associated Press Lt. Gen. Susan Helms
To
describe the accuser in the Herrera case as a "survivor" is more than a
little histrionic. The trial was a he-said/she-said dispute between
Capt. Herrera and a female second lieutenant about a drunken October
2009 sexual advance in the back seat of a moving car. The accuser
testified that she fell asleep, then awoke to find her pants undone and
Capt. Herrera touching her genitals. He testified that she was awake,
undid her own pants, and responded to his touching by resting her head
on his shoulder.
Two other officers were present—the designated
driver and a front-seat passenger, both lieutenants—but neither noticed
the hanky-panky. Thus on the central questions of initiation and
consent, it was her word against his.
On several other disputed
points, however, the driver, Lt. Michelle Dickinson, corroborated Capt.
Herrera's testimony and contradicted his accuser's.
Capt. Herrera
testified that he and the accuser had flirted earlier in the evening;
she denied it. Lt. Dickinson agreed with him. The accuser testified that
she had told Lt. Dickinson before getting into the car that she found
Capt. Herrera "kind of creepy" and didn't want to share the back seat
with him; Lt. Dickinson testified that she had said no such thing. And
the accuser denied ever resting her head on Capt. Herrera's shoulder
(although she acknowledged putting it in his lap). Lt. Dickinson
testified that at one point during the trip, she looked back and saw the
accuser asleep with her head on Capt. Herrera's shoulder.
