by Paul Craig Roberts Americans traditionally thought of their country as a "city upon a hill," a "light unto the world." Today only the deluded think that. Polls show that the rest of the world regards the U.S. and Israel as the two greatest threats to peace.
This is not surprising. In the words of Arthur Silber:
"The Bush administration has announced to the world, and to all Americans, that this is what the United States now stands for: a vicious determination to dominate the world, criminal, genocidal wars of aggression, torture, and an increasingly brutal and brutalizing authoritarian state at home. That is what we stand for."
Addressing his fellow Americans, Silber asks the paramount question: "why do you support" these horrors?
His question goes to the heart of the matter. Do we Americans have any honor, any humanity, any integrity, any awareness of the crimes our government is committing in our name? Do we have a moral conscience?
How can a moral conscience be reconciled with our continuing to tolerate our government which has invaded two countries on the basis of lies and deception, destroyed their civilian infrastructures and murdered hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children?
The killing and occupation continue even though we now know that the invasions were based on lies and fabricated "evidence." The entire world knows this. Yet Americans continue to act as if the gratuitous invasions, the gratuitous killing, and the gratuitous destruction are justified. There is no end of it in sight.
If Americans have any honor, how can they betray their Founding Fathers, who gave them liberty, by tolerating a government that claims immunity to law and the Constitution and is erecting a police state in their midst?
Answers to these questions vary. Some reply that a fearful and deceived American public seeks safety from terrorists in government power.
Others answer that a majority of Americans finally understand the evil that Bush has set loose and tried to stop him by voting out the Republicans in November 2006 and putting the Democrats in control of Congress – all to no effect – and are now demoralized as neither party gives a hoot for public opinion or has a moral conscience.
The people ask over and over, "What can we do?"
Very little when the institutions put in place to protect the people from tyranny fail. In the U.S., the institutions have failed across the board.
The freedom and independence of the watchdog press was destroyed by the media concentration that was permitted by the Clinton administration and Congress. Americans who rely on traditional print and TV media simply have no idea what is afoot.
Political competition failed when the opposition party became a "me-too" party. The Democrats even confirmed as attorney general Michael Mukasey, an authoritarian who refuses to condemn torture and whose rulings as a federal judge undermined habeas corpus. Such a person is now the highest law enforcement officer in the United States.
The judicial system failed when federal judges ruled that "state secrets" and "national security" are more important than government accountability and the rule of law.
The separation of powers failed when Congress acquiesced to the executive branch's claims of primary power and independence from statutory law and the Constitution.
It failed again when the Democrats refused to impeach Bush and Cheney, the two greatest criminals in American political history.
Without the impeachment of Bush and Cheney, America can never recover. The precedents for unaccountable government established by the Bush administration are too great, their damage too lasting. Without impeachment, America will continue to sink into dictatorship in which criticism of the government and appeals to the Constitution are criminalized. We are closer to executive rule than many people know.
Silber reminds us that America once had leaders, such as Speaker of the House Thomas B. Reed and Sen. Robert M. LaFollette Sr., who valued the principles upon which America was based more than they valued their political careers. Perhaps Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich are of this ilk, but America has fallen so low that people who stand on principle today are marginalized. They cannot become speaker of the House or a leader in the Senate.
Today Congress is almost as superfluous as the Roman Senate under the caesars. On Feb. 13 the U.S. Senate barely passed a bill banning torture, and the White House promptly announced that President Bush would veto it. Torture is now the American way. The U.S. Senate was only able to muster 51 votes against torture, an indication that almost a majority of U.S. senators support torture.
Bush says that his administration does not torture. So why veto a bill prohibiting torture? Bush seems proud to present America to the world as a torturer.
After years of lying to Americans and the rest of the world that Guantanamo prison contained 774 of "the world's most dangerous terrorists," the Bush regime is bringing six of its victims to trial. The vast majority of the 774 detainees have been quietly released. The U.S. government stole years of life from hundreds of ordinary people who had the misfortune to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and were captured by warlords and sold to the stupid Americans as "terrorists." Needing terrorists to keep the farce going, the U.S. government dropped leaflets in Afghanistan offering $25,000 a head for "terrorists." Kidnappings ensued until the U.S. government had purchased enough "terrorists" to validate the "terrorist threat."
The six that the U.S. is bringing to "trial" include two child soldiers for the Taliban and a car-pool driver who allegedly drove bin Laden.
The Taliban did not attack the U.S. The child soldiers were fighting in an Afghan civil war. The U.S. attacked the Taliban. How does that make Taliban soldiers terrorists who should be locked up and abused in Gitmo and brought before a kangaroo military tribunal? If a terrorist hires a driver or a taxi, does that make the driver a terrorist? What about the pilots of the airliners who brought the alleged 9/11 terrorists to the U.S.? Are they guilty, too?
The Gitmo trials are show trials. Their only purpose is to create the precedent that the executive branch can ignore the U.S. court system and try people in the same manner that innocent people were tried in Stalinist Russia and Gestapo Germany. If the Bush regime had any real evidence against the Gitmo detainees, it would have no need for its kangaroo military tribunal.
If any more proof is needed that Bush has no case against any of the Gitmo detainees, the following AP report, Feb. 14, 2008, should suffice: "The Bush administration asked the Supreme Court on Thursday to limit judges' authority to scrutinize evidence against detainees at Guantanamo Bay."
The reason Bush doesn't want judges to see the evidence is that there is no evidence except a few confessions obtained by torture. In the American system of justice, confession obtained by torture is self-incrimination and is impermissible evidence under the U.S. Constitution.
Andy Worthington's book, The Guantanamo Files, and his online articles make it perfectly clear that the "dangerous terrorists" claim of the Bush administration is just another hoax perpetrated on the inattentive American public.
Recently the nonpartisan Center for Public Integrity issued a report that documents the fact that Bush administration officials made 935 false statements about Iraq to the American people in order to deceive them into going along with Bush's invasion. In recent testimony before Congress, Bush's secretary of state and former national security adviser, Condi Rice, was asked by Rep. Robert Wexler about the 56 false statements she made.
Rice replied: "[I] take my integrity very seriously, and I did not at any time make a statement that I knew to be false." Rice blamed "the intelligence assessments" which "were wrong."
Another Rice lie, like those mushroom clouds that were going to go up over American cities if we didn't invade Iraq. The weapon inspectors told the Bush administration that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, as Scott Ritter has reminded us over and over. Every knowledgeable person in the country knew there were no weapons. As the leaked Downing Street memo confirms, the head of British intelligence told the UK cabinet that the Bush administration had already decided to invade Iraq and was making up the intelligence to justify the invasion.
But let's assume that Rice was fooled by faulty intelligence. If she had any integrity she would have resigned. In the days when American government officials had integrity, they would have resigned in shame from such a disastrous war and terrible destruction based on their mistake. But Condi Rice, like all the Bush (and Clinton) operatives, is too full of American self-righteousness and ambition to have any remorse about her mistake. Condi can still look herself in the mirror despite one million Iraqis dying from her mistake and several million more being homeless refugees, just as Clinton's secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, can still look herself in the mirror despite sharing responsibility for 500,000 dead Iraqi children.
There is no one in the Bush administration with enough integrity to resign. It is a government devoid of truth, morality, decency, and honor. The Bush administration is a blight upon America and upon the world.
Re:Big up, USA !
« Reply #16 on: 2008-02-29 03:04:55 »
[Blunderov] Legalize it, dammit! You'da thunk the nation that attempted the prohibition of alchohol and utterly failed would know when to stop flogging a dead horse...
Number 1, We’re Number 1 [ by Michael T] [News You Can Abuse]
February 28, 2008
The AP is reporting that America has broken a new record - the highest ratio of Americans in prison in history. More than 1 in every 10 adults. Take a bow America.
Worse yet, by any margin we are the country that imprisons the most people. By ratio or by total - 2.3 million people, roughly 800,000 more than our closest competitor China. Many states are now grappling with the runaway growth of prisons and the concurrent costs. For example, Kentucky has had a 3% increase in crime in the last 30 years and a 600% increase in their prison population. That’s twisted.
California is another disaster. The state routinely releases prisoners early from its overpopulated prisons. Last year it spent $8.8 billion on the prison system, an unsustainable amount considering its looming $16 billion deficit.
We also executed 53 people last year, with only China, Iran, Pakistan, Iraq and Sudan killing more prisoners. That’s fine company to be in.
A couple answers are obvious - get small time crooks out of the system by focusing on education and job training and also legalize marijuana. Marijuana users are rarely at risk for violent crime and the cost to society for our failed drug war is too great. With a huge racial disparity, it also seems we have to go back to the drawing board and focus on breaking inner city youth from the cycle of crushing poverty. All of this will take money and determination. About time we started, don’t you think?
Re:Big up, USA !
« Reply #17 on: 2008-04-29 01:35:31 »
[Blunderov] As Little Richard once remarked "I've bin gone. I'm back!" Major upgrade to 'puter. Quad core. 45nm. DDR 3 RAM. Nvidia GF 9800 GX2 video. Kicks ass.
I suppose the phrase "non-lethal force" which is invoked so often in connection with tasers must refer to the reduced risk of harm that is afforded to the police and not to the (non) safety it offers to their victims. So far it does not seem that any cops have died wielding their tasers but the populace appear to be dying like flies on the other side of the electrodes. I suppose too that attaching battery cables to a prisoners testicles might be referred to as a "non lethal interrogation" method in Amerika - the new home of the heart of darkness.
Another American has been murdered by the police with a "non-lethal" taser.
From The Charlotte Observer:
A 17-year-old died at Carolinas Medical Center Thursday after a Charlotte-Mecklenburg police officer shocked him with a Taser during a confrontation at a grocery store in northeast Charlotte.
...
Turner had worked as a cashier and bagged groceries at the Food Lion at 3024 Prosperity Church Road, where the incident happened.
Officers responded to a disturbance call at the grocery store about 1:15 p.m. When they arrived, they saw Turner throwing something at a store manager, according to a CMPD news release issued Thursday night. The release does not say what the object was, and a police spokeswoman could not be reached.
...
A preliminary check of N.C. criminal records did not turn up any criminal convictions for the teen.
Turner graduated from Crossroads Charter High School last year, his mother said. He had wanted to go to Central Piedmont Community College and be a personal trainer. He didn't have any health problems and had never been in trouble, she said. Can you imagine what might have happened if the cops hadn't had tasers? I mean, here's a kid throwing food items at his manager! The cops might have had to like grab him or something. WOW! Thank goodness for tasers, right?
With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
He was a carefree Italian with a recent law degree from a Roman university. She was "a totally Virginia girl," as she puts it, raised across the road from George Washington's home. Their romance, sparked by a 2006 meeting in a supermarket in Rome, soon brought the Italian, Domenico Salerno, on frequent visits to Alexandria, Va., where he was welcomed like a favorite son by the parents and neighbors of his girlfriend, Caitlin Cooper.
But on April 29, when Mr. Salerno, 35, presented his passport at Washington Dulles International Airport, a Customs and Border Protection agent refused to let him into the United States. And after hours of questioning, agents would not let him travel back to Rome, either; over his protests in fractured English, he said, they insisted that he had expressed a fear of returning to Italy and had asked for asylum.
Ms. Cooper, 23, who had promised to show her boyfriend another side of her country on this visit - meaning Las Vegas and the Grand Canyon - eventually learned that he had been sent in shackles to a rural Virginia jail. And there he remained for more than 10 days, locked up without charges or legal recourse while Ms. Cooper, her parents and their well-connected neighbors tried everything to get him out.
Mr. Salerno's case may be extreme, but it underscores the real but little-known dangers that many travelers from Europe and other first-world nations face when they arrive in the United States - problems that can startle Americans as much as their foreign visitors.
"We have a lot of government people here and lobbyists and lawyers and very educated, very savvy Washingtonians," said Jim Cooper, Ms. Cooper's father, a businessman, describing the reaction in his neighborhood, the Wessynton subdivision of Alexandria. "They were pretty shocked that the government could do this sort of thing, because it doesn't happen that often, except to people you never hear about, like Haitians and Guatemalans."
Each year, thousands of would-be visitors from 27 so-called visa waiver countries are turned away when they present their passports, said Angelica De Cima, a spokeswoman for Customs and Border Protection, who said she could not discuss any individual case. In the last seven months, 3,300 people have been rejected and more than 8 million admitted, she said.
Though citizens of those nations do not need visas to enter the United States for as long as 90 days, their admission is up to the discretion of border agents. There are more than 60 grounds for finding someone inadmissible, including a hunch that the person plans to work or immigrate, or evidence of an overstay, however brief, on an earlier visit.
While those turned away are generally sent home on the next flight, "there are occasional circumstances which require further detention to review their cases," Ms. De Cima said. And because such "arriving aliens" are not considered to be in the United States at all, even if they are in custody, they have none of the legal rights that even illegal immigrants can claim.
Government officials have acknowledged that intensified security since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks has sometimes led to the heavy-handed treatment of foreigners caught in a bureaucratic tangle or paperwork errors. But despite encouraging officers to resolve such cases quickly, excesses continue to come to light.
One recent case involved an Icelandic woman who was refused entry at Kennedy Airport because, a dozen years earlier, she had overstayed her visa by three weeks. The woman, Erla Osk Arnardottir Lillendahl, was deported Dec. 10 after what she described as 24 hours of interrogation and humiliating treatment - locked in a cell and barred from making phone calls. The Department of Homeland Security later issued a letter of regret.
In questioning Mr. Salerno, customs agents seemed to suspect that he intended to work here. Ms. Cooper, a copy editor for an educational publication, said she was in the airport lobby when an agent called to ask about Mr. Salerno's income and why he visited so often.
The youngest son of a prosperous contractor in Calabria, Mr. Salerno helps out in his brother's law firm in Rome and is able to visit the United States several times a year. Neighbors said he joined volunteers in refurbishing the Wessynton recreation center in 2006, then became one of its summer attractions, kicking a soccer ball with the kids and playing tennis with the adults.
"He just is a very open, fun and helpful guy," said Christopher M. Porter, a resident of Wessynton.
Ms. Cooper said that at the airport, when she begged to know what was happening to Mr. Salerno, an agent told her, "You know, he should try spending a little more time in his own country."
Another agent eventually told her to go home because Mr. Salerno was being detained as an asylum-seeker.
"The border patrol officer said to my face that Domenico said he would be killed if he went back to Italy," she recalled, voicing incredulity that, in his halting English, he could express such a thought. "Also, who on earth would ever seek asylum from Italy?"
Twelve hours later, when Mr. Salerno was granted a five-minute phone call, he called Ms. Cooper and denied saying anything of the kind. Instead, he said, the asylum story seemed to be retaliation for his insisting on speaking to his embassy.
After being turned over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, he was taken to the Pamunkey Regional Jail in Hanover, Va., where he ended up in a barracks with 75 other men, including asylum-seekers who told him they had been waiting a year.
Ten days after he landed in Washington, Mr. Salerno was still incarcerated, despite efforts by Senator John W. Warner, Republican of Virginia, and two former immigration prosecutors hired by the Coopers.
"He's just really scared," Ms. Cooper said in an interview last Thursday. "He asked me if Virginia has the death penalty."
Luis Paoli, a lawyer hired by the Coopers, said there was no limit on detention while waiting for an asylum interview. But even after officials agreed the asylum issue had been a mistake, Mr. Salerno was not released.
"Now an innocent European, who has never broken any laws, committed any crimes, or overstayed his visa, is being held in a county jail," Ms. Cooper wrote in an e-mail message to The New York Times last Wednesday, prompting a reporter's inquiries.
Less than 24 hours later, immigration officials intervened and arranged to deliver Mr. Salerno to Dulles, where last Friday he flew to Rome. Ms. Cooper, who said she was now considering moving to Italy, was by his side.
Mr. Salerno was still shaken. "In America," he said, "there are so many good people and beautiful people that don't deserve to be showing these terrible things to the world."
With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
Re:Big up, USA !
« Reply #21 on: 2008-12-30 17:40:49 »
[Blunderov] Some cops are old school. Some cops valiantly resist the inexorable march of godless liberal progress and eschew the Taser * in favour of a good ol' hands on rambunctious stomping. Tradition. Motherhood. Apple pie. Mmm.
It was a great bust by all accounts, or at least the accounts of the officers involved. Called to a neighborhood to arrest three white prostitutes, Narcotics Division boss Sgt Gilbert Gomez and Officers David Roark and Sean Stewart found an even more enticing target, Dymond Larae Milburn, a 12-year-old black honors student.
Officers with lesser training might have missed the suspicious nature of her activities, but not your intrepid trio. They saw a pre-teen, standing in her front yard when white prostitutes were about. It could mean only one thing: she, too, must be a prostitute.
Upon seeing young Ms Milburn, their training kicked in. They jumped her, beat her, and arrested her for prostitution. Of course, her family, not being as well trained as your officers, objected to her treatment. They pointed to her sprained wrist, two black eyes, bloody nose, and blood in an ear as evidence that your officers had gone too far. Even worse, they wondered aloud if standing in one's front yard was indeed a criminal offence.
That posed a problem for your department. Although the prostitution charge was a matter of who a jury would believe--three cops or a black kid--the physical injuries were harder to explain. Summary beatings of suspected prostitutes is illegal (even in Texas).
You responded the only way you could--by dispatching officers to the young honor student's middle school and arresting her again--this time for resisting arrest.
I'm sure you're very proud of these officers. Given your departments response to the family's complaints, you obvious believe the officers met your expectations in making this arrest in the way they did. But I have to wonder if your guidelines might need revision. I'm worried that your department might be getting a little soft. If this had happened in Florida, the officers would have tased her first to facilitate the beating.
Heterosexually yours,
Gen. JC Christian, patriot
Posted by Gen. JC Christian, Patriot at 12:01 AM Labels: Police
Teen Arrested for Farting at School Arrested for Serving Salt Racy Prom Dress Gets Teen Arrested 7-Year-Old Nearly Locked Up for Riding Dirt Bike 5-Year-Old 'Cuffed Over Kindergarten Tantrum Brothers Fight, One Gets Arrested Cops Break Teen's Arm in Arrest Over Dropped Cake Very special 10-Year-Old Cuts Her Sandwich With a Knife...and Breaks the Law? Teen Arrested for Creative Writing Assignment
With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
Re:Big up, USA !
« Reply #23 on: 2009-01-15 02:13:52 »
Autistic child taken from school in handcuffs
[ Hermit : Aspergers often travels in tandem with exceptionally high intelligence, the ability to see through the BS and sometimes regrettably, an inability to ignore it. It is a really sad commentary on the teachers and the school that they didn't know to back off from imposing stupid meaningless rules on an identified autistic child, that they exacerbated the situation till it became violent, and then they still didn't back off but instead, "held her down" leaving bruises. I really hope the family does sue them individually and as an organization and win. Because they - and their child clearly deserve to. The fact that the police have no better answer than to handcuff an 8 year old (presumably with adult cuffs which would definitely be unsafe) is another disgrace, compounded by a County Attorney dumb enough to charge an 8 year old with battery when she has the bruises. Hopefully they will figure out a better option for educating her with the settlement award I suspect they will negotiate. ]
A Ponderay mom was left outraged when school officials ordered her autistic 8-year-old daughter handcuffed and taken from the school in a police car.
Outside her Ponderay home, 8-year-old Evelyn Towry, in her pink boots and favorite sweatshirt explains why she's now suspended from school.
"Because I was trying to leave and they hold me down," Evelyn said.
Evelyn is a third grader at Kootenai Elementary and has Asperger's Syndrome, a high functioning form of Autism. On Friday she started to act out.
"She wanted to attend a Christmas party in her cow sweatshirt and they told her she couldn't that she would have to tuck the tail in and put ears down and she dug her heels in the way she does quite often and said she wouldn't take it off," Evelyn's mom Spring said.
Spring says that when Evelyn tried to leave anyway two teachers restrained her, which is when Evelyn began kicking, pinching and spitting on the teachers.
"Well, I kicked because I was upset they were holding me down and I got thumb bruises on me," Evelyn said.
School officials then called the police and Evelyn's mom. When Spring got to school to pick her daughter up police were already escorting Evelyn in handcuffs out of the building and into a police cruiser. Police then took her to a local juvenile detention center where she stayed for an hour, after which she was allowed to go home.
"I was terrified and I was scared and I was hurt and I wanted to throw up. I wanted to take my baby with me," Spring said.
School officials responded to a request for an interview for this story by e-mail, with the district superintendent saying they followed a specific safety plan for Evelyn which was agreed upon by the district and her mental health provider.
The plan, according to the district, says that "If a student assaults staff it is appropriate to call parents, involved support agencies, and local law enforcement officials if needed. All of the above occurred regarding this unfortunate incident."
"I never saw the plan, I never signed the plan," Spring said.
On Tuesday morning the Bonner County prosecutor charged Evelyn with one count of battery.
By Tuesday afternoon the charge was dropped.
"I think it's absolutely ridiculous. She doesn't even know what battery is," Spring said.
Spring Towry and her husband are now pursuing civil action. While they don't excuse their daughter's behavior Spring says it didn't have to go this far.
"I don't want this to happen to another child or another parent," she said.
With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
Re:Big up, USA !
« Reply #24 on: 2009-04-08 13:54:58 »
Fusion center declares nation's oldest universities possible terror threat
Source: RawStory Authors: Stephen C. Webster Dated: 2009-04-06
A newly leaked terrorism assessment from a law enforcement fusion center in Virginia highlights US universities as potential "radicalization nodes" for terrorists.
A wide variety of terror or extremist groups have links to [a highlighted area of Virginia]. This area not only has a diverse population due to the strong military presence, but it is also the site of several universities. While most of these universities are considered urban, two are designated as a Historically Black Colleges and Universities, while Regent University is a private, evangelical Christian institution. While the majority of individuals associated with educational institutions do not engage in activities of interest to the VFC, it is important to note that University-based students groups are recognized as a radicalization node for almost every type of extremist group.
Though the report singles out "historically black colleges" early on, it also contains an extensive list of peaceful American and International activist groups from nearly all cross-sections of political engagement, placing them side-by-side with groups that have long been known for resorting to violence.
The list of groups the fusion center considers potential terrorist threats is as follows:
Al-Qa’ida
Al-Shabaab
HAMAS
Hizballah
Jama’at al-Tabligh
Jama’at ul Fuqra
Lashkar-e Tayyiba
Muslim Brotherhood
Anarchist Extremists
Green Anarchism Movement
Anonymous Well, what can I say?
Black Separatist Extremists
Five Percent Nation
Nation of Islam
New Black Panther Party
New African Black Panther Party
Homegrown Islamic Extremism
As-Sabiqun
Iqaamatiddeen Movement
Lone Wolf Extremists
Militia Extremists
Anti-Abortion Extremists
Army of God
Animal Defense League
Animal Liberation Front
Stop Huntington Animal Cruelty
Earth First!
Katuah Earth First
Blue Ridge Earth First
Earth Liberation Front
Sovereign Citizen Extremists
Moorish Science Temple of America
Neo-Nazis
Racist Skinhead Movement
White Supremacists
The memo also calls out "hacktivism" as a potential terrorist threat.
"Also of note is the phenomenon of hacktivism, defined as 'the nonviolent use of illegal or legally ambiguous digital tools in pursuit of political ends. These tools include web site defacements, redirects, denial-of-service attacks, information theft, web site parodies, virtual sit-ins, virtual sabotage, and software development,'" the memo reads. "On March 28, 2008, Wired News reported that 'Internet griefers'—a makeshift term for people who cause grief—posted code and flashing computer animations with the intention of triggering migraine headaches and seizures. Hacktivism and griefing incidents have ranged from minor inconveniences involving modified website content and denial-of-services to potentially dangerous scenarios, such as the modification of electronic traffic safety signs."
The center's graphic example of the "dangerous" scenario of altered traffic safety signs was culled from a Wired magazine report on an incident in Austin, Texas, where a hacker changed a sign to warn of a coming zombie infestation.
The report also discusses numerous potential areas of fraud which could allow a terrorist to integrate with society, including document fraud, student visa fraud, marriage fraud and employer fraud.
"If we are to believe this exaggerated threat assessment, Virginia's learning and religious institutions must be hotbeds of terrorist activity,' said Caroline Fredrickson, Director of the ACLU Washington Legislative Office, in an advisory. "This document and its authors have displayed a fundamental disregard for our constitutional rights of free expression and association. Unfortunately, it's not the first time we've seen such an indifference to these basic rights from local fusion centers. Congress must take the necessary steps to institute real and thorough oversight mechanisms at fusion centers before we reach a point where we are all considered potential suspects."
"There is an appalling lack of oversight at these fusion centers and they are becoming – as the ACLU has repeatedly warned – a breeding ground for overzealous police intelligence activities," said Michael German, ACLU Policy Counsel and former FBI Agent, in a release. "The Virginia threat assessment isn’t just disturbing for encouraging police to treat education and religious practices with suspicion, it's bad law enforcement. Lawmakers from all levels of government need to enact legislation to protect against these spying activities that threaten our democracy while doing nothing to improve security."
Recently, a Department of Homeland Security-funded fusion center in Missouri was accused of blatant disregard for the United States Constitution after one of its memos encouraged the surveillance of third party activists, Christians and supporters of Congressman Ron Paul, for their alleged potential status as illegal militia.
The center retracted its memo and publicly apologized when Congressman Paul, along with former presidential candidate Chuck Baldwin and former Congressman Bob Barr, sent a letter to Missouri Governor Jay Nixon (PDF link), demanding an about-face.
In 2007, the ACLU published a study called "What's Wrong with Fusion Centers?," exploring the troubling aspects of the post-9/11 law enforcement aparatus, which are designed to facilitate communication between local agencies.
With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
Police have released surveillance video showing a sheriff's deputy slamming a man head first into a wall, leaving him in a coma. The 29-year-old had been pursued by deputies after a witness wrongly...
[ Hermit : In Seattle no less (See post 1 to understand the relevance). ]
With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
WAUSAU, Wis. – An American flag flown upside down as a protest in a northern Wisconsin village was seized by police before a Fourth of July parade and the businessman who flew it — an Iraq war veteran — claims the officers trespassed and stole his property.
A day after the parade, police returned the flag and the man's protest — over a liquor license — continued.
The American Civil Liberties Union of Wisconsin is considering legal action against the village of Crivitz for violating Vito Congine Jr.'s' First Amendment rights, Executive Director Chris Ahmuty said.
"It is not often that you see something this blatant," Ahmuty said.
In mid-June, Congine, 46, began flying the flag upside down — an accepted way to signal distress — outside the restaurant he wants to open in Crivitz, a village of about 1,000 people some 65 miles north of Green Bay.
He said his distress is likely bankruptcy because the village board refused to grant him a liquor license after he spent nearly $200,000 to buy and remodel a downtown building for an Italian supper club.
Congine's upside-down-flag represents distress to him; to others in town, it represents disrespect of the flag.
Hours before a Fourth of July parade, four police officers went to Congine's property and removed the flag under the advice of Marinette County District Attorney Allen Brey.
Neighbor Steven Klein watched in disbelief.
"I said, 'What are you doing?' Klein said. "They said, 'It is none of your business.'"
The next day, police returned the flag.
Brey declined comment Friday.
Marinette County Sheriff Jim Kanikula said it was not illegal to fly the flag upside down but people were upset and it was the Fourth of July.
"It is illegal to cause a disruption," he said. [ Hermit : The problem this sheriff has is that unless I have the right to say things that people do no want to hear, I have no right to speak. If people respond to my saying things they don't want to hear by causing a disruption, then the problem is with the people causing the disruption, not with my speech. No matter how the District Attorney and County Sheriff might hate dealing with this consequence of the First Amendment, it comes with their jobs. I do hope the ACLU goes ahead and wins and that the results are well publicized. ]
The parade went on without any problems, Kanikula said.
Village President John Deschane, 60, an Army veteran who served in Vietnam, said many people in town believe it's disrespectful to fly the flag upside down.
"If he wants to protest, let him protest but find a different way to do it," Deschane said. [ Hermit : The Village President apparently has a similar problem with the First Amendment. Perhaps it is something to do with the water. Given that the cognitive impairment is as widely spread as it it, it is more likely to do with the abysmal education system. ]
Congine, a Marine veteran who served in Iraq in 2004, said he intends to keep flying the flag upside down.
"It is pretty bad when I go and fight a tyrannical government somewhere else," Congine said, "and then I come home to find it right here at my front door."
With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
Re:Big up, USA !
« Reply #27 on: 2009-07-28 18:22:54 »
Deadly Force
What a SWAT team did to Cheye Calvo's family may seem extreme. But decades into America's war on drugs, it's business as usual.
Source: Washington Post Authors: April Witt (Staff writer) Dated: 2009-02-01
Payton swung his big, goofy head onto the bed, worked his snout under a pillow and gave a gentle bump. The mayor's wife, nudged awake, opened her eyes and smiled. Payton, the couple's playful No. 1 dog, was letting her know that he and his timid little brother, Chase, needed their morning walk. As the mayor's wife stirred, the two black Labs -- known collectively as "the boys" -- panted and bounded round the bed gleefully. "Get up! Get up! Get up! Get Up!" the boys seemed to be saying. They did this every morning. Inside this sunny red-brick house on a well-tended corner lot in the tiny town of Berwyn Heights in Prince George's County, the family routines were precise from thousands of loving retracings; and they almost all revolved around the boys.
After six years of marriage, Trinity Tomsic and her husband, Berwyn Heights Mayor Cheye (sounds like "Shy") Calvo, still hoped for children. As the couple waited, the boys were more than a balm; they were a shared joy. Cheye, 37, and Trinity, 33, had even bought this quaint little house because it had a fenced yard with an expansive lawn where the boys could romp -- dog heaven. On this morning, Tuesday, July 29, Trinity fed the boys by 5 a.m., then planned to take Chase running before walking Payton. Running was the one activity at which shy Chase bested Payton, who had long ago been slowed by a leg injury. "Chase knew we were going to go running before I even had my tennis shoes on," Trinity later recalled. "I don't know how he knew. He just always did."
Trinity snapped Chase in his running harness, then reconsidered. She was a finance officer for the state of Maryland. She had a stack of crucial reports awaiting her approval. Maybe she should just leave for the office now. "I came very close to telling him that we'd have to run later," she recalled. But Chase looked so ridiculously excited that Trinity couldn't stand to disappoint him. "He was jumping up and down, up and down, like, 'We're going to go running! We're going to go running.' It was the best thing to see him so happy."
And so, they ran out from their tidy house with the pretty mailbox made to match, down familiar streets where they knew neighbors by name and habit, past the home of the sweet old man who always joked when he saw them running: "They went that-a-way." They ran until Trinity tired, and Chase looked back at her with an expression she read as, "Mom, could you speed it up?"
"It's so important to me that we ran," Trinity says now. "I would feel so terrible if, on that last day, the thing he loved most I bailed on because I wanted to get to the office a few minutes early."
***
Payton and Chase spent the day outside together in their fenced run. Weekdays in good weather, they'd loll there until they heard the R12 bus grinding down Edmonston Road -- bringing Trinity's mother home to feed them dinner. Then Payton, 7, would jump up on the fence and bark until Chase, 4, who copied everything Payton did, joined in. On this day, Trinity's mom, Georgia Porter, surprised the boys. She got home an hour early, pulling into the driveway at 5:30 p.m. in the used Toyota she'd bought two days before.
Down the street, a stranger sitting in a parked car noted that a lone female had just arrived at the residence.
Unaware they were being watched, Georgia fed the dogs, then knelt beside the lush organic vegetable garden that Trinity tended meticulously. Georgia, feeling celebratory, wanted to make their favorite summer pasta dish for dinner. She picked cherry tomatoes with one hand while tossing a ball to Chase with the other.
It had been a year since Georgia, 50, had left her lifelong home of Price, Utah -- widowed, jobless, feeling defeated -- and moved in with Cheye and Trinity to try to begin again. It had been hard leaving her rural home, her beloved horses and mountain views, to commute three hours roundtrip daily -- by bus, then Metro, then bus again -- to a job in Takoma Park for a commercial floor estimator. She felt proud of her new used car and what it signified: She was, finally, moving ahead.
The dogs followed Georgia inside. Maneuvering around the kitchen as she cleaned and chopped vegetables, Georgia had to keep stepping over them. She didn't mind. Georgia had bought Chase as a puppy as a surprise gift for Trinity and Cheye. Georgia, who is Greek by heritage, thought of herself as both dogs' "yaya," Greek for grandmother. "They were always right there with me when I cooked," she recalled. "Dogs who are loved like to be right by their people."
At about 6:30 p.m., Cheye came home. He had just one hour to change into shorts, take the boys for their evening walk, change back into business clothes, eat, then head to the town center to chair a community meeting. He'd be gone before Trinity got home. At 33, Cheye had become the youngest mayor ever elected in Prince George's County. It was a part-time job that paid an honorarium of $150 a month. Cheye -- once voted "most school-spirited" in the class of '89 at Riverdale's Parkdale High School -- turned out to be a natural. A policy wonk, he had a passion for the minutiae of local governing. For weeks, he'd been drafting and redrafting a letter laying out precise arguments on why the state should crack down on a developer who had fouled Indian Creek. Tonight, mayors and council members from three neighboring towns were coming to sign Cheye's letter. Cheye was upstairs changing, thinking through the key points of his letter, when the dogs began barking downstairs.
Georgia, talking on the phone as her pasta sauce bubbled on the stove, went to investigate. A man holding a big white box was on the front stoop. Georgia could barely see the man, who seemed, oddly, to be standing off to one side. She noticed a white van at the curb. Deliveryman, she thought. She motioned for the man to leave the box on the stoop.
"Boys!" Cheye called as he came downstairs into the kitchen a few minutes later. He grabbed their leashes from twin hooks. The boys raced to the appointed spot near the back door, sat side by side and waited for Cheye to snap on their leashes. Together they stared up eagerly, tails fanning the kitchen floor in unison.
"We had our routines, and they loved them," Cheye recalled. "They'd plop right down side by side. Payton always on the left, Chase on the right. I loved that little line."
Cheye loved security and stability. In childhood, his family had moved around a lot, primarily in Prince George's, and struggled financially. Creating peace, security and stability not just for Trinity, Georgia and himself, but for all the families of Berwyn Heights, was deeply satisfying to him. He subscribed to the broken-window theory of community-building: If you let little problems slide, big problems follow. People here seemed to like the order. Berwyn Heights enjoyed 30 percent voter turnouts for town elections, a full calendar of community events and one of the lowest crime rates in Prince George's. When one of Berwyn Heights' eight police officers knocked on a homeowner's door to make an inquiry, he just might find himself invited in to dinner. Cheye liked to think of the town, population 3,000, as a diverse modern-day Mayberry.
As Cheye and the boys took an evening constitutional, Cheye waved at the driver of every car that passed. He had a theory about waving; it is psychologically dissonant for drivers to speed if a smiling man walking two cheerful black Labs is standing in the street waving at them.
Close to home again, Cheye noticed an SUV parked on the left side with a man sitting at the wheel. Cheye waved at the man. Behind that SUV was one with dark tinted windows, and Cheye couldn't make out who was inside.
A few minutes earlier, he'd come across a car parked facing the wrong way on the street. It was in front of a fire hydrant. The motor was running, but Cheye couldn't see anyone inside the car. "That's three violations right there," he recalled thinking. "That's, like, $200 in tickets if you add them all up. I remember thinking: I hope an officer comes by here. We need to ticket that car."
But officers were already there, all around them, watching. And before they left that night, Cheye, Trinity and Georgia would wonder if they could ever feel safe again.
***
"Okay," Cheye said, as he reached his front gate and let Payton and Chase off lead. They raced ahead as Cheye stopped to lift the big white box from the front stoop. It was addressed to Trinity.
"Trinity must have ordered something for the garden," Cheye remembered telling Georgia as he came in the back door. He left the big box on a table in their book-lined living room and went upstairs to change.
It was past 7 p.m., but late sun still streamed through the large kitchen window as Georgia stood at the stove stirring her simmering tomato-artichoke sauce. Georgia turned, catching a glimpse of something out the window that sent a jolt of fear through her. Hooded, armed men, dressed in black, were fanning across the back yard. Still more men, crouching low, moved around the side of the house. Georgia's mind raced to make sense of the strange tableau. Was someone playing an elaborate practical joke?
One of the men spotted Georgia gaping out the window. He lifted his high-powered assault rifle and pointed it directly at her, she recalled. Georgia -- still clutching her wooden spoon -- threw both hands up in the air and screamed. "Cheye, I think it's SWAT!"
Cheye was sitting on the edge of his bed in his boxers. He was just about to put on his black dress socks, when he heard Georgia scream something that made absolutely no sense. He looked out a bedroom window to see armed, masked men running. He was still wondering if they were home invaders when he heard his front door shatter.
In the kitchen, Georgia spun to face the sound of the splintering door. Men in black burst through the front door and into the living room.
Georgia stood trembling in front of the kitchen stove. Payton, who had been stretched out in a corner of the living room farthest from the front door, his head resting near the threshold to the kitchen "turned toward the front door when I turned," Georgia recalled. "He didn't have time to do anything else." Almost instantly, men in black ran forward and shot Payton in the face, Georgia said. "They kept shooting," she recalled. "I didn't know how many times they shot Payton because there was so much gunfire."
"Down on the ground!" Georgia recalled someone screaming at her. She was too terrified to move.
Chase, always timid even when there was nothing to fear, did what he did best -- he ran. He ran away from the men in black, zipped past Georgia at the stove, Georgia recalled. The screaming, running men followed Chase, shooting as he tried escaping into the dining room, Georgia said. She watched in horror as men in black rushed the dining room from all directions. "I could hear Chase whimpering," Georgia said. Then she heard someone shoot at Chase again, she said.
Men kept yelling at Georgia to get down, but she couldn't budge. "Somebody pushed me on the ground, and they put a gun to my head," she said. Face down on the kitchen floor, Georgia felt someone yank her hands behind her, rip the spoon away and secure her hands. When she lifted her eyes, she could just see Payton's big head resting near the kitchen threshold. He wasn't moving.
"Where are they?" one of the men screamed at Georgia. "Where are they?"
She had no idea what he was talking about. Georgia says she felt the barrel of an assault rifle against her left ear. "Where are they?" a man demanded.
"In the basement?" Georgia remembers saying. Some of the men thundered down the basement steps.
"It was a question, 'In the basement?' Because, if somebody puts a gun to your head and asks you a question, you better come up with an answer. Then I shut my eyes. Oh, God, I thought they were going to shoot me next."
Upstairs, Cheye fell to the bedroom floor at the sound of gunfire. He heard: bang, bang, bang, bang, undecipherable shouts, bang, bang.
"Downstairs!" Cheye heard men call to each other as they began to search the house. Then, more ominously, they yelled: "Upstairs! Upstairs!"
Somebody ordered Cheye to come down. He stood gingerly and peered down the stairwell. "I remember turning and seeing the barrels of two shotguns pointed at me," he said. "I don't know what kind. I'm not a gun person."
"Turn around and walk down the stairs backwards," someone demanded.
So, he did. Clad only in his boxer shorts, the mayor of Berwyn Heights walked slowly down his staircase backwards, his open hands held high. Ever so slowly, he felt for each tread before lowering his weight. "Somewhere around the bottom half of the stairs, someone came to get me," he recalled. "They led me down, pulled my hands down behind my back, bound me with those plastic cuffs very tightly, then pulled me across the living room."
Cheye turned his head and saw Georgia facedown on the kitchen floor. She must be alive, he reasoned, because there was a man holding a gun to her head.
He saw Payton slumped on the living room floor near the threshold to the kitchen. "I knew he was bleeding," Cheye recalled. "I knew he'd been shot. Nothing was processing. I saw Georgia, Payton, blood. No Chase."
Men spun him around and forced him to kneel facing the shattered front door. Behind him, he could hear people ransacking his house. Drawers were yanked out. Cabinets opened and closed. Dazed and sick with terror, he also felt a dawning, helpless grief. All this, for what? Racking his brain for anything they owned worth stealing, all he could think of was Trinity's dual-chamber, rotating garden composter.
As Cheye knelt, bound and half-naked, on his living room floor, "no one spoke to me about why they were here," Cheye recalled. "No one said, 'Prince George's County police' or 'Prince George's County sheriffs.' They never made that kind of announcement, just simply didn't do it."
Out his ruined front door, Cheye could see that people were gathered on his front lawn. Some wore jackets with official-looking insignias as if they could be police officers in street clothes. "That was my first clue that these men might be law enforcement," he would later recall. "My thought was: If this were a home invasion, people wouldn't just be standing out there on the lawn. They'd be hiding."
It wasn't a home invasion. It was a raid by the Prince George's County Police Department and the county Sheriff's Office. Both agencies declined to discuss specifics of the raid for this story.
At one point, Cheye recalled, he noticed a familiar uniform in the growing crowd on lawn. Berwyn Heights police officer Pvt. Amir Johnson had been patrolling the neighborhood when he passed the mayor's house and saw officers dressed in tactical uniforms coming out the front door. He stopped. (Berwyn Heights and Prince George's police have overlapping jurisdictions within town limits.)
"The guy in there is crazy," Johnson remembered a Prince George's County officer telling him when he arrived. "He says he is the mayor of Berwyn Heights."
"That is the mayor of Berwyn Heights," Johnson replied.
The detective looked very surprised, Johnson later recalled: "He had that 'Oh, crap' look on his face."
Alarmed, Johnson used his cellphone to notify Berwyn Heights Police Chief Patrick Murphy that, as improbable as it sounded, the Sheriff's Office SWAT team had apparently broken down the mayor's door, shot his dogs and confiscated a box containing 32 pounds of marijuana.
Murphy -- home gardening 54 miles away in St. Mary's County -- sat down, stunned. The 35-year veteran of law enforcement searched his memory for any clue he might have overlooked that the nice young mayor who loved his wife, those two goofy Labs and code enforcement could be involved with drugs. He couldn't come up with anything.
The chief told Johnson to go find their department's second-in-command, Det. Sgt. Ken Antolik, who was moonlighting a few blocks away from Calvo's house at the Blue Bird Driving School, to help him find out what in the heck was going on.
Inside the house, Cheye was starting to ask questions, too.
"Do you have a warrant?" he recalled asking more than once, until someone said:
"It's en route."
"I kept saying: 'This is a very terrible thing. This is just horrible.' The context in which I told them I was the mayor, I said, 'I'm the mayor of Berwyn heights, and I have to get to a community meeting tonight.' " Finally, one of the deputies, the men in black, nodded to the recently delivered big white box on the living room table and barked accusingly, "Do you know what is in this box?"
"A box," Cheye recalled thinking. "This is about the box?"
Someone shifted Cheye, his hands still bound behind him, into a chair. He could see blood pooling from beneath Payton's head. An officer picked up one of the boys' dog beds and used it to cover Payton's corpse. Cheye asked if they'd killed Chase, too, and someone said that they'd called animal control to remove two dead dogs.
"You shot my dogs," Cheye recalled saying over and over. "You shot my dogs. You shot my dogs. You shot my dogs."
At home in St. Mary's, Murphy dialed the cellphone of his second-in-command, now standing on the mayor's front lawn. Murphy's officer handed the phone to a Prince George's narcotics investigator, Det. Sgt. David Martini.
This is how Murphy later recalled their conversation:
"Martini tells me that when the SWAT team came to the door, the mayor met them at the door, opened it partially, saw who it was, and then tried to slam the door on them," Murphy recalled. "And that at that point, Martini claimed, they had to force entry, the dogs took aggressive stances, and they were shot."
"I later learned," Murphy said in an interview, "that none of that is true."
Martini said he was not free to comment for this article.
***
It was about 7:45 p.m. when Trinity turned her 1997 Suburu Outback with the kayak rack on top onto Edmonston. The road was so jammed with police vehicles that she couldn't reach her driveway. Assuming that the house had been robbed, Trinity abandoned her car and searched frantically for any sign of an ambulance.
"Is my husband okay?" she asked when Ken Antolik met her near her front gate. "Is my mom okay?
"Yes," he told her. "They are in the house.
Then it struck her. It was too quiet. She didn't hear dogs barking. She knew, even before she asked: "Payton and Chase?"
"I'm sorry," he said.
Trinity collapsed against his chest. A female officer eventually came and led her gently around to the back door. Trinity started in to find her husband and mother, then saw blood. There was so much blood. There was blood pooled near the door. Officers were tracking her dead dogs' blood all over the house. She backed outside.
"I remember sitting on the steps thinking, 'I'm never going to be able to live here again,' " Trinity recalled.
"I found something," Georgia heard a detective yell excitedly. The woman held a white envelope filled with cash. Inside, was $68. Across the front of the envelope were written two words: "yard sale."
The detective seemed crestfallen, Georgia said. Georgia, who had been moved, still bound, into the downstairs bedroom, says she overheard the woman saying something like: "It's my first raid, and we got the mayor's house."
Cheye, struggling to understand, pieced together questions officers asked him and comments he overheard. Narcotics investigators for the Prince George's police had apparently left that white box on his front step, then sent SWAT officers from the Sheriff's Office to retrieve it. The box contained marijuana. Officers from the two county law enforcement agencies had apparently been parked watching his house all day. Yet they had apparently done so little investigatory work -- they hadn't even taken 30 seconds to Google Cheye -- that they didn't know they were launching a paramilitary attack on an elected official's home until after they'd broken down the door and shot the dogs. Cheye was particularly disturbed when he discovered that narcotics investigators seemed to have known that criminals had been mailing drugs addressed to innocent people, in hopes of intercepting the packages before the addressees claimed them.
Yet, here he was, hands bound behind him, trying to convince county police that he and Trinity were not drug lords. "Look around," he tried arguing. "We own almost nothing but books. We live on 70 percent of our salary and bank the rest." Do drug lords tend organic gardens and store the decorations for the community's holiday parties in their garage?
In fact, the officers searching his house were unable to find any evidence of drugs other than the box they'd delivered. They didn't find gun caches or, aside from the yard sale money, stacks of cash. Cheye and Trinity didn't have a bong or hookah, not a single rolling paper, stem or seed. Cheye watched their search efforts grow halfhearted, he said.
Nobody seemed to know how to remove the plastic cuffs still binding his and Georgia's hands behind their backs. The deputies from the SWAT team who had put them on were gone. When Georgia and Cheye complained to detectives that the cuffs were cutting off their circulation, they said the detectives just shrugged. After awhile, the officer moved Cheye into the kitchen. From his new vantage, he could see into the dining room. Chase was lying dead in a pool of blood.
The scene at the house was so terrible and odd to Berwyn Heights officer Johnson that he planted himself in the living room. He couldn't see a search warrant posted anywhere. The mayor looked so vulnerable that Johnson wanted to make sure nothing even worse happened to him, such as getting shot. "Not that I didn't trust the police," Johnson would later say. "But I wanted to personally witness what is going to happen to my mayor, so if they try to say this guy went for a gun -- and he didn't -- it's not going to happen on my watch."
When animal control officers finally came for Payton and Chase, Cheye lost it. Payton's big head tumbled limply off the stretcher as they lifted it to take him away. "I roared," Cheye later recalled. "I broke down sobbing." Cheye had named his big boy for the late, great Chicago Bear Walter Payton, whose nickname was "Sweetness." Cheye's Payton ran more like a 350-pound lineman than like Walter Payton. But he was the sweetest, most wonderful dog Cheye had ever known, and strangers were taking him away forever. "My hands were still bound, so I couldn't get my hands to my face as tears just flowed down. I remember turning, and looking away."
Out on the back stoop, it seemed to Trinity that the detectives in their house had shifted into damage control. One pleasant woman, trying to make pleasant conversation, asked Trinity if she and Cheye ever planned to have children.
"All I could think was, Our dogs were our kids, and I can't believe you are asking me that," Trinity recalled. "I let it go and said that we were thinking about adopting."
***
Nearly four hours after the SWAT team broke down the front door, the detectives were ready to leave. Someone had figured out how to cut the cuffs off Cheye and Georgia. They had led Georgia outside to Trinity. Georgia was still so hysterical that she could barely speak.
Cheye says the lead officer at the scene, Prince George's Det. Shawn Scarlata, told him and Trinity that he could haul them all into jail because the box had been addressed to Trinity. But he said he wasn't going to as long as they cooperated. (Scarlata later said he could not comment on the case for this article.)
Johnson stayed to help Cheye lift the splintered door back into its frame and prop it there. There was no way to make the lock work. "I just felt so sorry for them," Johnson recalled. "I didn't know what to say. I told them I'd keep an eye on the house."
Cheye grasped Trinity by the shoulders. "Whatever happens," he said. "I don't want this to affect us." He was a romantic idealist. He had proposed to Trinity at the Jefferson Memorial. But he wasn't naive. This night had been so terrible, Cheye knew that it would change each of them forever in ways they couldn't predict. He felt only a determination not to allow this horror to creep inside their love.
Trinity, sobbing, said nothing could ruin their marriage, but they might have to move. She didn't know if she could live in this house. She didn't think she could stay in Prince George's County. They toured their home room by room. Everything they owned was thrown on the floor, a table or a bed. Their meticulous files had been dumped, the paper scattered. But the blood was the worst.
Exhausted, Cheye telephoned a friend and asked him to come over and help him scrub the blood off the floors. They had to do it for Trinity. It was after 1 a.m. when the two men stopped scrubbing.
Cheye dragged an air mattress into the living room so that he, Trinity and Georgia could huddle together through the night. Nobody slept. Somewhere out there was a drug dealer who might be thinking that they had his box of pot, and they couldn't lock their front door.
About 3:30 a.m., Cheye typed an e-mail on his Treo trying to explain why he wouldn't be coming to the office that morning.
"I'm on the Beltway," Cheye's boss, Rajiv Vinnakota, said, when he called at 7:30 the next morning and said he was on his way. "My only question is, 'Do I bring bagels?' "
Cheye earned his living working for SEED, a District-based educational foundation trying to expand its network of schools to several states. There was no way a drug raid on a mayor's house where police broke down the door and shot the family dogs wouldn't become news. Cheye's boss counseled him to get a lawyer, because innocent people go to jail all the time, and to be proactive about reaching out to the media.
Cheye felt confident that people who knew him and Trinity would know they'd never have anything to do with drugs. But what about everyone else?
As they talked, it dawned on Cheye that police hadn't just killed his dogs, terrorized his family and destroyed his once-happy, pretty home. They might just have ruined his life.
By mid-morning, Cheye had agreed to let a television reporter tour the house and had sent a mass e-mail to everyone he knew and the entire town of Berwyn Heights' mailing list.
"We try to make sense of it," Cheye wrote in the e-mail. "They invaded our home and killed our dogs! That above all else, can't be undone."
The Berwyn Heights annual employee-appreciation luncheon was scheduled for noon. Cheye went, feeling unsteady from lack of sleep and wondering if he were still in shock. He sat next to Murphy, who Cheye felt was acting cool toward him.
"I'm always highly suspicious because of all the things I've seen in 35 years in law enforcements," the chief later said. "Sometimes, I look at the priest in church, and I wonder what his thing is, which isn't all that healthy. But there's always a suspicion there. At the same time, I think I'm a pretty good judge of character."
Cheye, he concluded, couldn't have been the criminal the county detective had described on the phone.
As Cheye implemented his plan to let people know that they were innocent, Trinity labored to make their house minimally habitable. Her father -- Georgia's first husband -- flew in from Wyoming to help. One of the first things they did was throw away the blood-soaked dining room rug.
At bedtime, Trinity and Cheye stared at each other. Trinity had always gone upstairs first, leaving Cheye reading downstairs, Chase at his feet. Payton had always followed Trinity, crept onto Cheye's side on the bed, snoozed until he heard him coming, then jumped down guiltily. Now their hearts sank, not just at all they'd lost, but at how everything either of them said or did, anyplace they looked in the house, was a reminder.
They got into bed, but kept the lights on. Trinity was afraid now to sleep in the dark. After a few minutes, Cheye got up and turned off the fan. They wanted to be able to hear in case someone broke in again.
***
The first news reports on the raid at the Berwyn Heights mayor's house quoted spokesmen for the Prince George's police saying that the mayor and his family remained "persons of interest" in an ongoing drug-smuggling investigation. Police said they became aware of the box addressed to Trinity when a drug-sniffing dog had alerted them to it at a package hub, and authorities notified the county police. A police spokesman told reporters that Prince George's narcotics investigators had sought, and been granted, a "no-knock" warrant before searching Cheye and Trinity's house. Maryland law authorizes police to request a no-knock warrant, one intended to be served by force and unannounced, if they have a "reasonable suspicion" that evidence would be destroyed or officers' lives placed in danger if they knocked on a suspect's door and demanded entry.
Those same news reports quoted law enforcement officials around the region saying it was a known tactic of traffickers to ship a package containing drugs to an innocent stranger's home, planning to retrieve it before the recipient opened the box. In fact, law enforcement officials told reporters, recent incidents in College Park and Dunn Loring had been foiled when surprised innocents alerted police after opening the packages before the dealers could snatch them. Cheye was flabbergasted. Given that, how could the police who had broken down his front door with a battering ram, terrorized his family and killed his dogs not at least have considered the possibility, even the likelihood, that he might be innocent?
On Friday, Aug. 1 -- 71 hours after the raid -- the lead detective, Scarlata, returned to their home. He came alone. Cheye met him at the fence. The detective handed Cheye the warrant he had first asked to see while handcuffed in his living room. Scarlata also gave Cheye a list of what they'd confiscated in the raid. It consisted of a single item: the box police had brought there in the first place.
After the detective left, Cheye studied the document. There was nothing anywhere to indicate that Scarlata had asked the judge who signed it for permission to break his door down for a no-knock search. He hadn't presented the judge with evidence that anyone in the household was armed and dangerous. He'd basically said that police had intercepted a box of drugs addressed to Trinity, delivered the box and watched as it was taken inside.
The tomatoes still hung ripe and sweet in the garden. The sun still streamed prettily through the kitchen window. The thought still came to Cheye each time he walked through the kitchen: I need to fill the boys' water bowl. Then he remembered. Everything had changed. He left the water bowl unfilled where it had always sat. He left the leashes hanging on two hooks by the back door.
The first Saturday after the raid, during that happy stretch of time when Cheye would have taken his dogs on an extra-long walk looking for would-be speeders to wave at, there was now a void so large that he was only beginning to take its measure. Trinity was downstairs, still trying to right the house, when she heard a strange and terrible sound. She raced upstairs to find Cheye, sitting naked on the shower floor, letting the water stream over his head as he sobbed.
"I just want to walk my dogs," he told her. "I just want to walk my dogs."
Trinity's father had to leave Sunday afternoon to go back to Wyoming. He spent his last day with them scrubbing the front walk. He scrubbed until he'd erased the last traces of the blood that had dripped there as animal control had carried the boys away. In late afternoon, Cheye and Trinity were driven to a local ballpark where Berwyn Heights activists had organized a community rally to support them. Rally organizers presented Cheye and Trinity with a banner signed by hundreds of people who had written messages of support and encouragement. Speaker after speaker expressed certainty that the mayor and his family were innocent and outrage at the death of the dogs. Police Chief Murphy was angry that Prince George's police hadn't given him the courtesy of notifying him before their raid, allowing him to help them execute their search warrant peacefully and avert tragedy. "I never imagined, when I set out to protect people from the crooks and the criminals, that I would have to protect them from my fellow police officers," Murphy told the crowd.
Cheye thanked the townspeople he'd served for five years as mayor. "Injustice in this county, in this country, in this world happens every day," he said. "But people who experience it most often don't have the support, don't have the community, don't have the resources that we do."
***
Cheye and Trinity flipped channels waiting for the 5 o'clock news, certain that -- finally -- they would be officially cleared. It was Wednesday, Aug. 7, more than a week after the raid. Then-Prince George's Police Chief Melvin C. High and Sheriff Michael Jackson held a joint news conference to announce the arrests of a FedEx deliveryman and a second man alleged to be involved in a scheme to smuggle marijuana by shipping packages addressed to unsuspecting recipients, including the one to Trinity. Police refused to release their names.
Yet neither High nor Jackson apologized to Cheye, Trinity and Georgia or declared their absolute innocence.
The mayor of Berwyn Heights and his family "most likely, they were innocent victims" of the drug traffickers' scheme, High said. "But we don't want to draw that definite conclusion at the moment."
High and Jackson defended the raid on the mayor of Berwyn Heights as reasonable and restrained, given the information they had at the time. "In some quarters, this has been viewed as a flawed police operation and an attack on the mayor, which it is not," High said. "This was about an address; this was about a name on a package . . . and, in fact, our people did not know that this was the home of the mayor and his family until after the fact."
The chief and sheriff admitted to what Cheye had already deduced: They did not specifically seek a no-knock warrant before breaking down the mayor's door. Jackson said his deputies were justified in entering the house so forcefully because Georgia screamed when she saw them outside the house, and her cries could have alerted any armed occupants of the home to attack police or destroy evidence.
Deputies were justified in killing Payton and Chase because the dogs had "engaged" them, Jackson said, although he acknowledged under questioning that neither dog had bitten anyone.
Watching accounts of the news conference on television, Cheye grew livid. Not only had the brass refused to apologize or clear them, they were now blaming poor Georgia's terrified scream for the botched raid. They were saying dogs barking at masked men justified slaughter.
Georgia could not be consoled later that night. Was everything her fault because she'd screamed? Trinity held her close. She and Cheye tried to explain that the police were trying to get themselves out of trouble.
If they were ever going to reclaim their lives, Cheye was now certain, they were going to have to make the story of their exoneration bigger than the story of the drug raid on their home. Cheye held a news conference the next morning on their front lawn. As Cheye spoke -- "We have witnessed a frightening law-enforcement culture in which the law is disregarded, the rights of innocent occupants are ignored and the rights of innocent animals mean nothing." -- Trinity began to sob at his side.
By the next morning, the story of the nice attractive young mayor and his photogenic family who were terrorized by police was traveling the globe. Cheye turned on the radio at 5 a.m. to find the BBC leading off the world news with his story. As Cheye fielded interview requests from Paris, sympathy cards, letters and flowers arrived from all over.
Cheye opened the door one day to find a DHL deliveryman holding a box. Cheye froze.
"I'm going to need you to open the box," Cheye recalled telling the shocked deliveryman. "This may seem silly to you, and I'm not going to go into details, but I'm going to need you to open the box."
The deliveryman opened the box so Cheye could peer at the contents: a spray of roses.
***
Cheye and Trinity arranged for the frozen corpses of Payton and Chase to be transferred to a University of Maryland laboratory for animal autopsies. They were examined Aug. 11, and the veterinarian later issued a report consistent with Georgia's account and the physical evidence inside the family home: Payton had been shot four times, twice in the chest/flank region, once in the jaw and once in the neck. Chase was shot twice: once in his rear left legs, once in the chest. The shot to Chase's legs had been fired from behind. After the shot to his chest, he bled to death.
If angry dog lovers around the world puzzled over why police had behaved as they did, Cheye thought he was beginning to understand. Someone mailed Cheye a copy of a 2006 Cato Institute report, "Overkill: The Rise of Paramilitary Police Raids in America." Trinity found the cover photo of a SWAT officer wielding an automatic assault rifle so unsettling that she asked Cheye not to leave it around the house. So, he made his way through the report as he rode the Metro to and from his office in the District. The report's author, a civil liberties advocate named Radley Balko, offered a context for the raid.
Americans have defended their right to privacy and the sanctity of their homes since Revolutionaries denounced British soldiers entering homes and businesses with impunity to search for contraband rum and tea and generate taxes for the British Crown. The Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution prohibits unreasonable government searches and seizures. But civil libertarians argue that this constitutional protection has been seriously eroded in recent decades, largely as an unintended consequence of the nation's war on drugs.
In Balko's summary, paramilitary police units called Special Weapons Attack Teams, or SWATS, grew out of the social unrest of the 1960s. They were used to quell protesting migrant farm workers led by Cesar Chavez, then against urban rioters and in a shootout with the Black Panthers in Los Angeles. Balko writes: "Until the 1980s, SWAT teams and other paramilitary units were used sparingly, only in volatile, high-risk situations such as bank robberies or hostage situations. Likewise, 'no-knock' raids were generally used only in situations where innocent lives were determined to be at imminent risk. America's War on Drugs has spurred a significant rise in the numbers of such raids, to the point where in some jurisdictions drug warrants are only served by SWAT teams or similar paramilitary units, and the overwhelming numbers of SWAT deployments are to execute drug warrants."
Federal policies and funding stemming from the war on drugs gave local police financial incentives for making a high volume of drug arrests, even if they netted only users and low-level dealers, not drug kingpins, and spurred the military to arm SWAT teams with its excess military equipment. Laws allowing police to seize -- and add to their own budgets -- cars, cash, jewels and other items gathered during drug raids, even if nobody was convicted of any crime as a result of their search and seizures, became further incentive for police to use military-style raids against suspected drug traffickers, Balko argues. In a landmark 1995 case, Wilson v. Arkansas, the U.S. Supreme Court held that the longstanding common-law endorsement of the knock-and-announce approach to serving search warrants was enshrined in the Fourth Amendment. But it also recognized significant exceptions to the knock-and-announce approach. In a unanimous opinion, Justice Clarence Thomas wrote that police could enter a home unannounced under "exigent circumstances." Among them: if police had a reasonable belief that their safety would be imperiled by announcing themselves, if they were pursuing a fleeing suspect or if an announcement would allow suspects to destroy evidence. In the Berwyn Heights raid, police appeared to suggest that Georgia's terrified scream created the kind of exigent circumstance envisioned by the court.
Last year, Prince George's police deployed SWAT teams to serve search warrants more than 400 times, a police spokesman said. The department's narcotics unit now deploys its SWAT team to serve the overwhelming majority of its search warrants, Maj. Andy Ellis said. The Prince George's Police budget shows that the county expects to spend at least $2.5 million this year reaped from assets seized in drug raids.
Ellis, like police nationwide, defends the burgeoning use of paramilitary-style units to serve routine search warrants, arguing that the increase of force has been necessary to counteract more violent, and better armed, drug dealers. Prince George's SWAT officers recovered 241 firearms while serving search warrants last year, Ellis said. "Conducting narcotics is very dangerous work," Ellis said. "The officers who conduct narcotics search warrants never know what's on the other side of the door."
Civil libertarians argue that military-style raids escalate the level of violence in what could be routine police action, and are leaving a growing number of innocents terrorized, wounded or dead. "Botched raids are a staple of law enforcement," said Graham Boyd, director of the American Civil Liberties Union's Drug Law Reform Project. "There is a never-ending stream of ruined homes, ruined lives and innocent people who are killed or terrorized." The Cato Institute Web site features an interactive map tracking hundreds of botched paramilitary police raids nationwide beginning in the late 1990s, including dozens of instances in which innocent people were killed.
Many victims of botched or abusive drug raids are poor minorities whom the public is unlikely to hear about or rally around, Boyd said. Legal immunity granted to police makes it difficult for victims to successfully sue for compensation, he said.
Cheye's reading and research on botched drug raids left him chilled. "This wasn't just about me and Trinity and Georgia anymore," Cheye said. "It was about my community."
Cheye decided that he would push the Maryland state legislature to require police to track, report and curtail the indiscriminate use of SWAT teams to force entry into people's homes unannounced to serve routine search warrants.
***
On a Saturday morning in mid-August, Cheye, Trinity and Georgia parked in a lot outside a pet store in Northern Virginia. They walked down a line of excited Labs available for adoption from a rescue organization, stroking noses, offering treats and asking the handlers about temperaments. Then they spotted a small black Lab who seemed calmer than the others, and they knew their search was over. He looked like Chase. Cheye went inside the pet store to try to buy the newest member of their family, Marshall, a leash and a toy. The woman behind the counter recognized him from the TV news and wouldn't let him pay.
"Marshall doesn't make us miss the boys less, but he steps into a void," Cheye later said. "I think we would have gone crazy if we didn't adopt him."
When the first chills of October came, Trinity lifted a jacket that had hung unused for months on a coat rack by the back door. One sleeve was spattered with blood. Another night, Trinity awakened to get some cold medicine and heard her mother having a nightmare. "Oh, no," Trinity heard Georgia murmuring. "Oh, no. Oh, no."
Georgia had suffered the worst violence during the raid. She was having the toughest time recovering. Outside by a garden bench, a flower pot stood testament to Georgia's state of mind. It was filled to overflowing with the butts of the cigarettes she had smoked.
She kept replaying in her mind the police claim that her terrified scream was their justification for breaking down the front door. She kept replaying the first awful seconds and wondering what she could have done to save Chase and Payton. Trinity and Cheye told her over and over that there was nothing she could have done, but consolation eluded her.
In that strange way that every loss in life evokes every other loss, the helplessness and self-blame Georgia felt the night she had lost her husband 16 years ago haunted her now. Bradley Porter, 37, was a helicopter pilot caught in heavy fog outside Price, Utah. He radioed the airport for someone to telephone Georgia to drive out and pick him up along with his passenger. By the time Georgia reached the distant field, Bradley had a new plan. He wanted Georgia to shine her headlights on power lines that ran parallel to the road. If he safely cleared those lines, he told her, he could follow the road to fly the helicopter in rather than leave it overnight where vandals might damage it. Georgia urged him to leave the helicopter until morning, but he insisted. So Georgia did as he asked. She maneuvered her car to light up the power lines, then watched as the helicopter lifted slightly. Investigators would later determine that one of the helicopter skids struck a knoll on the uneven, snow-covered field. Georgia watched helplessly as the helicopter flipped, crashed and exploded in flames, killing her husband and his passenger.
"I couldn't get to him," Georgia said. "For the longest time, I thought I should have tried harder to talk him out of trying to follow the road that night. It was just that terrible feeling. I could have done so many things differently."
Determined to recover for her children's sake, Georgia enrolled in college in Colorado, hoping to get her degree and become a veterinarian. But the science courses defeated her, and dissecting dead animals in the lab broke her heart. "I was sick of dead animals."
The lagging economy in Utah left Georgia with so few job prospects that she came to live with Cheye and Trinity to begin again. She thought she was finally making her way, and then the front door shattered.
Trinity took most of November off from work to reclaim the house. She cleaned every surface and reorganized every corner the raid had disturbed. She not only was no longer interested in moving; she was changing jobs so she could work from home. They were going to do what it took to be happy there again. "We love our life," Cheye said. "We love our marriage. We love our home. We are determined not to let it slip away."
They were also determined to hold the police accountable. Through a lawyer, Cheye, Trinity and Georgia have filed a notice of intent to sue the Prince George's County Police Department and the Sheriff's Office.
By the time, Cheye and Trinity hung ornaments on the Christmas tree in December, their sunny little brick home seemed almost as cozy as it used to, but different. Some damage couldn't be repaired. Georgia couldn't live in the house any longer and moved to an apartment in the area. Payton and Chase's ashes rested in a wooden chest, topped by their framed photo.
Cheye likes to sit near the chest on winter nights, Marshall at his feet, as he reads. Often, he sits up late researching Supreme Court rulings on police searches and seizures.
He's read the court's decision in one 2006 case, Hudson v. Michigan, more than once. In Hudson, the court found that even when police make a clearly illegal no-knock raid, the evidence they seize can still be used against a defendant at trial.
"In other words, police can do what they did to us with impunity" Cheye concluded. "There are no consequences, not for them."
With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
Re:Big up, USA !
« Reply #28 on: 2009-07-28 18:56:50 »
Today, Henry Gates; Tomorrow, You
Source: Antiwar.com Authors: Kelley B. Vlahos Dated: 2009-07-28
After a week, the turbid tale of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates and the Cambridge police has finally settled into the tedium of the 24-hour news cycle, singularly focused – but predictably superficial – in its debate over whether race played a prevailing role in Gates’ doorstep arrest on July 16.
That happens when a black, liberal scholar charges the white police officer who arrested him with racial profiling, and when the president, who happens to be black, says the police acted "stupidly" for doing so. The debate has thus found its shopworn but comfortable partisan trajectory, with Democrats using Gates to reopen a "dialogue" on race relations that forever churns but goes nowhere, and Republicans, largely represented by the right-wing blogosphere, loyally falling in behind the cops, holding the Thin Blue Line on the political front.
It has become a timeless political and media waltz, one that serves neither side, especially the actual victims of racial profiling.
But an interesting and even momentarily hopeful thing happened in that fertile space of time between when a news story breaks and the mainstream media’s wagons circle a simple, safe narrative. People started talking about the police. And civil liberties. The phrase "contempt of cop," referring to bogus arrests triggered when an officer perceives a challenge to his authority (typically when an individual in an exchange refuses to fully cooperate, is deemed disrespectful, asks too many questions, or asserts his rights), was invoked in relation to Gates in places as mainstream as National Public Radio.
On both the Left and the Right, commentators and bloggers were reflecting – however briefly – on their own relationships with police, and the ever widening gulf between “civilians” and cops, made more pronounced by post-9/11 hyper-criminalization and 21st-century communications like cell-phone cameras and YouTube. Early critics wondered openly not only about racial profiling – which remains an important touchstone here – but about police egos and the punishment for not keeping one’s mouth shut.
“What I see as more significant [than race] is the phenomenon of persons being arrested who challenge the authority of police,” David Rudovsky, senior fellow at the University of Pennsylvania Law School in Philadelphia, told the Christian Science Monitor on July 24, in a discussion of "contempt of cop" charges. “It’s street punishment.”
Former congressman and federal prosecutor Bob Barr agrees. "Reducing this simply to a racial conversation pretty much guarantees future problems," he said in an interview with Antiwar.com. "The fact of the matter is, this situation raises troubling questions about citizens being required to be overly submissive and condescended to by police." Sure, the badge should be respected, he added, but if the police are acting unreasonably, "I don’t think the citizenry ought to sit back and take it."
Frustratingly, others suggest passivity is the only viable approach when dealing with police: "So you want to make friends, join the glee club," writes Neely Tucker at the Washington Post. "You want to yell at people who are lousy at their jobs, go to a Redskins game. But, all things considered, Don’t Mess With Cops. It usually works out better that way."
Michael Mechanic cuts to the quick in his own take for Mother Jones: "I understand Gates’ indignance and what he must have been feeling at that moment. … But get righteous on a street cop and you will lose every single goddamn time. Gates should have known as much."
So we have become a nation of passive, potential suspects, and often it is the random circumstance like a jammed door that can bring it all down, superseding in an instant everything else – background, race, social class, pristine criminal records – everything.
One year ago Wednesday, Berwyn Heights Mayor Cheye Calvo [ Hermit : Previous story on this thread ] found this out most horrifically while he and his mother-in-law were restrained with cuffs by county police and shoved onto his kitchen floor. As he lay face-to-face with the bloody corpses of the beloved family dogs – which had been summarily shot by police moments earlier – Calvo must have wondered how his own seemingly solid identity as good neighbor and community leader had so quickly evaporated with the firepower of the SWAT team now swaggering around his Maryland home.
Unlike Gates, Calvo was in plastic handcuffs before he could even demand, "Do you know who I am?!"
The cops had busted down the Calvo’s door on a no-knock warrant (that we know now never existed) with the intent of arresting him for the 32-pound package of marijuana that had been delivered by the mailman and was sitting on his doorstep. But the package wasn’t meant for him; it was part of a drug dealer’s mail-order scheme (that the police were already aware of), involving unwitting residential addressees. The mayor and his wife were later cleared, but to date the police have not apologized for killing the dogs and have maintained the circumstances at the time warranted the paramilitary response. The Calvos are reportedly suing the Prince George’s County Police and Sheriff’s Office, but as this February recount suggests, the psychological trauma is enduring.
In a separate request for a civil rights inquiry last August, Calvo invoked a 2006 study by Radley Balko and Joe Berger that found botched law enforcement raids had increased across the country, along with the frequency of SWAT "call-outs" – 3,000 a year to 40,000 in 2001:
"More disturbing, we now have received reports of similar misconduct involving other innocent homeowners, including invasion of the homes of other innocent county residents and killing of other innocent family pets. This appears to be a pattern and practice in our law enforcement agencies where a lack of training and supervision is apparent."
Patti Davis, daughter of the late president Ronald Reagan, gave voice to what many law-abiding, white suburbanites were likely thinking when they eyed the clean-cut images of the pre-raid Calvos, smiling as they walked the black Labradors they had loved as their own children:
"We have all been living in a climate of ’shoot (or accuse) first, ask questions later.’ And that attitude is contagious. … Prince George’s official county Web site defines itself as ‘a county of livable communities.’ That’s what we all wish for – a livable community, a home where we feel safe. We want to feel that if the bad guys come, we can call the police and they will be the good guys. We want to believe that if we’re innocent, armed men with government badges won’t handcuff us and shoot our pets and wave their weapons in our faces.
"But more and more of us don’t believe that."
Just a month ago, a 72-year-old grandmother was tased by a patrolman twice her size after she refused to cooperate during a routine traffic stop. As the video shows, grandma was being stubborn, used at least one expletive, and would not comply with the officer’s request to sign a speeding ticket and stand two steps away, behind her truck. He tased her, leaving her writhing on the ground, mewling eerily like an injured animal.
This recalls the case of 71-year-old Eunice Crowder in Portland, Ore., in 2003. Allegedly hard of hearing and vision, she tangled with a city worker who was cleaning up her yard on a warrant. Police were brought in. Her glass eye popped out when they hit her in the head. She was pushed to the dirt and tased three times. She eventually settled for $145,000 in a suit against the city.
Of course, not all Taser tales end with a fat check for the victim. In the now infamous "Don’t Tase Me Bro!" incident at the University of Florida in 2007, school officials determined the police were quite right in tasing student Andrew Meyer, who refused to stop shouting questions at John Kerry after the senator gave a speech. Meyer might have been the butt of a few jokes (a 50,000-volt shock to the body is funny!), but the fact that police and other government officials continue to defend the growing use of Tasers to immobilize individuals, even children and the mentally ill, even when it kills people, is nothing to laugh at.
Surely outrage is in short supply. Often it seems futile. Public officials more often than not take the side of police, maintaining a nearly religious deference to law enforcement that cannot be brooked by video evidence or a disgruntled citizenry.
Take this guaranteed url=http://www.examiner.com/x-6121-Oklahoma-Crime-Examiner~y2009m6d13-Oklahoma-Highway-Patrol-finally-releases-video-of-trooper-attack-on-paramedic]cringe-worthy video[/url]. It depicts clearly unhinged Oklahoma state trooper Daniel Martin choking paramedic Maurice White while a patient waits inside an idling ambulance on the way to the hospital. While it is obvious to anyone watching that Martin had no regard for the fate of the patient (he even appears to threaten her family members as they beg him to release White) his ego-driven, unprovoked physical attack on the paramedic lands him a mere five-day suspension and an anger management class.
"There are no more checks and balances in these sorts of situations, and there need to be," charges Barr. "Public officials need not be afraid to say, yes, we respect our police, but they make mistakes and we need to look into this."
Journalists aren’t immune either, like Asa Eslocker, who was manhandled and arrested by Denver police while he was trying to cover a story during the Democratic National Convention last November. His alleged crime? Refusing to leave a public sidewalk in front of a hotel where a number of VIPs were gathering.
Not surprisingly, after being hauled to jail in handcuffs, the charges were dropped.
Carlos Miller, a Miami journalist, recently started a blog describing his own arrest after he refused to cease photographing a traffic stop on a public street. In April, he linked to a video of two El Paso journalists being arrested for covering the scene of an accident (in other words, doing their jobs), and more recently, a tape of an Idaho man being sodomized by a police Taser. The officers in that case have been "disciplined," according to news reports.
Unfortunately, while members of the so-called elite media like James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal, acknowledge that "arresting Professor Gates was an unwise use of the officer’s authority," exploring this theme further seems unworthy of their attention. If they had, they’d easily find a body of case law defending Gates’ position. See Poocha and Duran for examples of men who were much more belligerent toward police than Gates but whose First Amendment right to free speech ultimately shielded them from conviction.
Now that should be the story. But as of Sunday, Gates has merely sparked what the Washington Posttiredly calls "a national conversation on race and law enforcement." Baloney. The "national conversation" merely allows the media to go on virtual autopilot while the he-said-she-said/black versus white narrative takes over, leaving any analysis of the law enforcement part a lifeless afterthought.
Even Taranto’s explanation, that the original Sturm und Drang occurred between "two stubborn men," is a cop-out. As Maureen Dowd said Saturday, "the strong guy with the gun has more control than the weak guy with the cane." That might be the best place to start, if a real conversation is what we’re after.
With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
Re:Big up, USA !
« Reply #29 on: 2009-08-16 02:12:57 »
Outrage in India over Detention of Popular Actor at US Airport
Source: Antiwar.com Authors: Jason Ditz Dated: 2009-08-15
Indian Press Slams “American Paranoia” in Wake of Detention
The Indian government has formally demanded an explanation from the US for the detention of Shahrukh Khan, one of India’s most famous actors, at a Newark Airport. Khan was traveling to Chicago to attend an event related to India’s independence day.
Khan, who ironically enough has just finished production of the much-hyped movie “My Name Is Khan,” which details racial profiling of people with Muslim surnames in the United States, was held by immigration officials for an undisclosed reason and was only released after the Indian embassy had been informed of his mysterious capture.
The strange case of life imitating art has caused enormous outrage in India, and Indian newspapers are chastising it as a case of “American paranoia.” The incident comes with last month’s public frisking of former Indian President APJ Abdul Kalam when he tried to board of flight to the US still fresh in the minds of many Indians.
US Ambassador to India Timothy Roehmer said the embassy was looking into the incident but denied that anything untoward had occurred, insisting Khan is “a very welcome guest in the United States.” It just didn’t seem like that when they were dragging him into a back office for interrogation.
With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
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