If following procedure means beating someone senseless and trying to get them to waive their legal rights, then procedure is fucked. Yes, I am taking Watts' story at face value, and I could be wrong in that, but given my experiences, it seems much more likely that border crossing guards acted out of line than the alternative.
I have had incidents with the Canadian guards at the Windsor border... Not as extreme as Watts' case, but I did nothing more than take a call on my cell phone for 5 seconds (to tell the person I'd call back later), and then say "This is bullshit" when the car was turned away from Canada b/c of the phone usage.
This was before 9/11 and I am an utterly harmless, good natured person who is about the most obviously non-criminal one could possibly imagine. It is absurd any border guard anywhere would feel the need to ramp up the testosterone in response to me.
Law enforcement of any kind (police up to military) are trained to be 'in control' of their situation. When you start asking questions (or getting out of your car or whatever) you are being proactive for yourself. You're trying to take control of a situation so that you understand what's going on and that you don't have to accept everything at face value. But this contradicts all of their training that they need to control the situation. Even though you might be unarmed and they are armed (meaning that no matter how verbal you might get they still have control... they can f-cking kill you) they react to gain complete and utter control over the situation.
I'm not saying I like this. To be truthful, I absolutely hate this. But it is the way it is. Their training is f-cked. (or at least there are a majority of people that take the training past the point of (un)common sense).
I realize that under some circumstances the training is beneficial, but I have seen way too many examples of various armed officials using excessive verbal/physical force with obviously harmless people.
I think of it this way: If you're in law enforcement, the real bad guys are very scary, so you would start to feel like a real wimp after a while. The way I think many of them deal with this is by over-controlling obviously harmless, law-abiding people.
