Friday, July 12, 1985
The Nebraskan
Page 5
lloom smuggler punts 4tk m&em&memt to test
Herewith a short course on the
constitutional law of the alimen
tary canal.
. The question confronting customs
officials when passengers deplaned at
Los Angeles from Bogota, Columbia,
was whether the woman was a "balloon
smuggler." Such people smuggle co
caine by swallowing balloons contain
ing the stuff, balloons that are passed
through the smuggler's alimentary canal
after the smuggler has passed through
customs.
Two years later, the question con
fronting the Supreme Court was whether
the Fourth Amendment's protection
against "unreasonable" searches and
seizures was violated by the customs
officials' method of ascertaining the
contents of her alimentary canal.
One inspector, who had caught many
such smugglers, had reason for suspi
cion when he saw in her passport that
she had made at least eight recent
trips to Miami or Los Angeles from
Bogota, capital of the cocaine industry.
The lady spoke no English, had no fam
ily or friends here, had $5,000 in cash
but no billfold, could not recall how her
ticket had been purchased and said
she planned to travel around Los
Angeles by taxi, buying goods for her
husband's store in Bogota.
The inspector requested a female
colleague to conduct a "patdown" and
strip search. It revealed that the worn
an's abdomen had "a firm fullness."
She consented to a X-ray, but when
asked said she was pregnant. And when
she learned she would be handcuffed
while traveling to the hospital, she
withdrew consent.
She was given three choices. She
could return to Bogota on the next
George
available flight, or receive an X-ray, or
remain in detention until she produced
a monitored bowel movement. She
chose the first, but could not get a seat
on the flight leaving the next morning.
Sixteen hours after landing from her
10-hour flight, she was showing signs of
what an appeals court called "heroic
efforts to resist the usual call of nature."
Then officers sought and received from
a federal magistrate authorization for a
rectal examination and involuntary X
ray. Before the X-ray results were in on
the pregnancy test that proved she was
lying, a physician removed from her
rectum a balloon containing a foreign
substance.
She was arrested. During the next
four days she passed 88 balloons con
taining 528 grams of cocaine.
The appeals court reversed her con
viction, arguing that although cus
toms officials had "justifiably high"
suspicions, they should have quickly
sought authority for a X-ray rather than
waiting for natural processes to con
firm their suspicions. The court said
the indications of smuggling were not
sufficiently clear to justify the pro
tracted detention, which was "humi
liating" to the woman.
The Supreme Court has now dis
agreed. It notes that the Fourth Amend
ment is more permissive of police
power at the nation's border (where,
for example, cars can be searched at
random, or on the basis of the pas
senger's ethnicity) than in the interior
of the country.
Justice Brennan disagrees. To say
that he just dissents is to match the
understatement with which Japan's
emperor announced surrender after
two atom bombs. ("The war situation
has developed not necessarily to Japan's
advantage.")
Brennan has an Olympic-class capac
ity for alarm and for finding portents of
a police state in police procedures. His
dissent packs two walloping words
("disgusting" and "saddening") into
its first six, and then shifts into high
gear, describing what the customs offi
cials did as "the hallmark of a police
state" and "unbridled authoritarian
ism" in "an authoritarian twilight zone
on the border."
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Reagan ever popular
Critics throw in the towels'
We know the sounds of summer. A
basketball going cleanly through
a hoop is "swish," a nice wet
dive is "splash," the frog in the pond
croaks "ribbit" and a ball hits the mitt
with a "thunk." These are things we
know. But what is the sound of Washing
ton throwing in the towel to Ronald
Reagan?
Richard
Cohen
Whatever the sound, you could hear
it repeatedly in recent weeks. One by
one, towels came flying from the hands
of Reagan critics. From Atlanta and the
convention of the National Women's
Political Caucus, came a towel from
outgoing president Kathy Wilson. Al
though she is a Republican, Wilson led
her organizaton to an endorsement of
Walter F. Mondale and to implacable
hostility towards Reagan. Yet, in her
farewell speech, Wilson said the Presi
dent is not the anti-feminist he used to
be and that she once said he was.
Some people in the hall, knowing the
sound of a towel, booed.
Hardly had Wilson dismounted her
platform then Mary Hatwood Futrell
mounted hers. The president of the
National Education Association said
she had something for the President
her hand: "Mr. President, we have
disagreed with you in the past, and we
will undoubtedly disagree with you in
the future. But as the Bible tells us,
there is a time to mend and a time to
heaL" And a time to throw in the towel.
What is going on here? The quick
answer is: Ronald Reagan. By now is ought
to be clear that he is not a mere politi
cian, not even simply a political genius,
but a genuine political force. He was,
we were told, mortally wounded by Bit
burg and would, lame duck that he was,
limp to the end of his term a genial
but irrelevant old man.
Later came the hostage crisis. Crit
ics from the left and (even) from the
right volleyed and thundered but Rea
gan, as in a movie, rode through to even
greater popularity. Indeed, it's possi
ble that most people neither approve
nor disapprove of the way he handled
the hostage crisis but simply feel that
u" Reagan could not have done better,
then no one could have done better.
This, in politics, is the highest praise of
all.
I leave it to history to say whether
Reagan's near-total dominance of this
town and its political agenda is a
reflection of the man or the times or, as
is probably the case, a combination of
the two. Whatever Reagan's political
gifts, it seems indisputable that the
country is tired, bored and somewhat
cynical. A harrowing report on child
hood poverty is a newspaper story one
day, carpeting for the birdcage the
next and, soon, is forgotten. Like a
jazz-age flapper, we only want a good
time.
Over at Democratic Party headquar
ters, they must be out of towels alto
gether. A gaggle of governors and other
officeholders traipse around the coun
try proclaiming that they are an echo
not a choice to Reagan Republicanism.
On Capitol Hill, the towels come fast
and furious. After making a stand on
Nicaragua, the House caved and gave
the President most of what he wanted.
Ditto the MX and, give or take several
billion, the arms budget. Everyone
knows that the only way to substan
tially reduce the deficit is by raising
taxes, yet no one thinks that's going to
happen as long as Reagan opposes it.
Even fiscal reality has thrown in the
towel to Ronald Reagan.
Ironically, the biggest and fluffiest
towel of all may have come from the old
civil rights coalition. It managed to kill
the confirmation of William Bradford
Reynolds, but not on the issues that
mattered to it his civil rights record
but on the somewhat extraneous
issue of character. Even so, Reynolds
remains in charge of precisely the area
in which his insensitivity is civil
rights and there, to the general
silence of his critics, he says he will
remain.' Gag me with a towel.
Old-timers may contend that Franklin
Roosevelt or Dwight D. Eisenhower
dominated their eras the way Reagan
does his. Maybe. But the fact remains
that in what was predicted to be the
beginning of the end of the Reagan Era,
his political presence is commanding.
One by one his political and ideological
opponents seem to have concluded
that criticizing the President is the
task for Sisyphus, the legendary king
condemned to roll a heavy rock up a
hill in Hades only to have it roll down
again as it nears the top.
Listen. The sound of the Washington
summer is the soft flutter of many tow
els. It's what Simon and Garfunkel
would call the sounds of silence.
1S85, Washington Post Writers Group
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Brennan charges that the customs
officials had "at most, a reasonable
suspicion." But why the "at most"? The
Fourth Amendment is founded on the
idea of reasonableness, no matter what
the Court has said. And the suspicion
was not just reasonable, it was right.
The woman had a painful, humiliat
ing experience as the customs officials
did their job, which is to prevent her
from practicing her chosen profes
sion. She made a bad choice. And Jus
tice Rehnquist, writing for the major
ity, cites an early Court opinion that
"creative judges, engaged in post-hoc
evaluations of police conduct, can al
most always imagine some alternative
means by which the objective of the
police might have been accomplished."
The unpleasant facts of this case
deserve dissemination so Americans
can contemplate the nasty details of
the fight to protect the nation from
pandemic poisoning by drugs. Balloon
smugglers are not the core of the prob
lem. The core is the millions cf stupid
and criminal Americans who comprise
a brackish pool of addiction and money.
The law should attack demand as well
as supply, and do so by making the lives
of drug users as unpleasant as that
woman's experience at Los Angeles
airport.
01985, Washington Post Writers Group
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