February 2010 Archives

Wearing a clown mask with red and orange wig puts teen afoul of city ordinance forbidding wearing of masks or hoods by anyone over 16.

TampaBay.com reports

An 18-year-old Tampa man was jailed Tuesday afternoon, charged with wearing a clown mask on a public road.

Deputies say Matthew David Lopez, of 7003 Ponderosa Drive, was seen with two other people walking south on N 58th Street, just north of E Fowler Avenue. What caught a deputy's attention was Lopez's masked face with a bright red-and-orange wig, according to an arrest affidavit.

The deputy followed the group in an unmarked car as the group walked west through a slightly wooded path behind several business offices.

A marked Temple Terrace police cruiser showed up soon after, and the group ran away before deputies could question them.

They were found near N 58th Street and E 122nd Avenue.

Lopez was taken to the Hillsborough County Jail on charges of wearing a mask or hood on a public road after the age of 16 and resisting arrest without violence.

He was released on $750 bail.

Hillsborough County Sheriff's Office spokeswoman Debbie Carter said any disguise in public is illegal. Even on Halloween, adults aren't allowed to enter any businesses or stores with their faces covered.

Thanks to Jonathan Turley

Writing "I love my friends abby and Faith", "Lex was here, 2/1/10' and a smiley face get 7th grader hauled to police station.

Alternet reports

On February 1, in Forest Hills, Queens, 12-year-old Alexa Gonzalez was arrested after she was caught doodling on her desk. Profanity? Threats against her teacher? No, the middle school student had written, with an erasable marker, "I love my friends Abby and Faith," along with "Lex was here. 2/1/10"  and a smiley face, according to the New York Daily News.

This, apparently, was a criminal act in the eyes of her teacher. She called school security -- New York police officers -- who promptly cuffed her and hauled her across the street, to the local precinct,

"I started crying, like, a lot," Alexa told the Daily News. "I made two little doodles. It could be easily erased. To put handcuffs on me is unnecessary."

Nevertheless, in addition to being handcuffed and held at the police station, Alexa was also suspended and "assigned eight hours of community service, a book report and an essay on what she learned from the experience." Alexa's suspension was eventually lifted. But she still missed three days in school, days she spent "throwing up," according to her mother, Moraima Tamacho.

Birth control organization one of many domestic American groups targeted by spy operation designed to secure 2002 Salt Lake City Olympics. 

Raw Story reports

United States military intelligence spied on Planned Parenthood and other domestic groups as part of US security preparations for the 2002 winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, according to a recently declassified military document obtained by a civil liberties group Thursday.

The document (PDF - page 98), drafted by a Pentagon Deputy Inspector General whose name is redacted, was included in more than 800 pages released to the Electronic Frontier Foundation as part of a Freedom of Information Act Request. They include reports from the Pentagon's Intelligence Oversight Board that were submitted to the Defense Secretary from 2001 to 2007.

Referring to an incident where military intelligence personnel distributed information about FBI spying on the 2002 Olympics, the inspector general's office tersely remarked that an "intelligence oversight violation occurred."

"The document... contained US Persons data in referring to an reporting on organizations (Planned Parenthood, the white supremacist group National Alliance) and their involvement in protests and literature distribution," the inspector's office wrote. "Also noted was the report contained a large section labeled "GENERAL CRIMINAL ACTIVITY." Collection and dissemination of US Persons information by military intelligence assets is not allowed unless this information constitutes "Foreign Intelligence."

Texas cops empowered by state law can walk into bars at will to make preemptive arrests.

Mother Jones reports

ATE ON A BALMY Saturday night last June, six Fort Worth cops and two officers from the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission went looking for trouble. They had just raided two Hispanic bars in an industrial stretch of town and nine detainees now sat in the paddy wagon (pdf), hands bound with plastic ties. The rest of the city's bars would soon shut down. It seemed like the night was over, except for the paperwork. Then Sergeant Richard Morris had an idea. "Hey," he said. "Let's go to the Rainbow Lounge."

A half-dozen police cruisers, an unmarked sedan, and the prisoner van slid to a stop in front of the Rainbow Lounge, Fort Worth's newest gay club, at about 1:30 a.m. on June 28, 2009--40 years, almost down to the minute, after New York City police raided the Stonewall Inn with billy clubs and bullhorns. Inside the bar, the officers fanned out, grabbing and arresting six patrons for public intoxication. Benjamin Guttery, a 24-year-old Army vet, says an officer told him to put down his drink, then "bulldozed" him through the crowd to the paddy wagon but then let him go. "I'm 6'8", 250 pounds, and I had just finished my second drink," Guttery told a local reporter. "I might have had enough to have a loose tongue, but not a loose walk or anything like that." Another man alleges that he was slammed against a wall, elbowed, and fell on the ground, landing him in intensive care for a week with bleeding in his brain. He was charged with public intoxication and assault.

Thanks to the Agitator

Civil libertarians have gotten acclimated to a pattern with the Obama administration of supportive rhetoric followed by equivocations, symbolic measures or outright backtracking on campaign promises and supposed first principles. Despite all that, however, in the area of torture, at least, current thinking goes, the administration, though failing to adequately address Bush administration crimes, HAS accomplished decisive and substantive change.

In a recent piece perennial civil liberties watchdog Nat Hentoff warns that on the issue of torture as well, despite sweeping pronouncements to the contrary, facts suggest the administration's real accomplishments are far less than meets the eye.

Nat Hentoff writes

Some of the increasing number of critics, from the left and the right, of President Barack Obama's abuses of civil liberties and human rights make an exception by praising his executive order in the first month of his term banning torture as a form of interrogation on matters of national security. There is credible reason, however, to dispute the credibility of that presidential pledge.

"Torture's Loopholes" (New York Times, Jan. 20) is by Matthew Alexander, a 14-year veteran of the U.S. Air Force and Air Force Reserves. In 2006, he led the U.S. interrogation team that tracked and found Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the insatiable killer who commanded al-Qaida in Iraq and was then terminated by coalition forces. Alexander went on to write a book that was not endorsed by Dick Cheney: "How to Break a Terrorist: The U.S. Interrogators Who Used Brains, Not Brutality, to Take Down the Deadliest Man in Iraq."

This is what Alexander, who describes himself as "an investigator turned interrogator," has to say about Obama allegedly banning torture -- and the accompanying decision last August by Attorney General Eric Holder to remove responsibility for interrogating detainees to a new FBI-directed High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group that will constrain itself to use only "noncoercive" methods or those approved by the Army Field Manual.

Unequivocally, Alexander states: "If I were to return to one of the war zones today...I would still be allowed to abuse prisoners." How come? In August, Holder's task force on interrogation, commissioned by the president, "recommended no changes" to the Army Field Manual, thereby retaining the torture loopholes focused on now by the tracker of al-Zarqawi.

Montgomery Middle school teacher obviously not aware of West Virginia Board of Education vs. Barnette, decided back in 1943.

Raw Story reports

A middle school teacher in Montgomery County, Maryland, will have to apologize to a 13-year-old student after yelling at her and having her escorted out of class by school police when the student refused to recite the Pledge of Allegiance.

According to the ACLU of Maryland, a 13-year-old female student at Roberto Clemente Middle School in Germantown refused to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance on Jan. 27. The teacher reportedly ordered the girl out into the hallway, where he threatened the girl with detention and then sent her to the school counselor's office.

The next day, when the student again refused to stand for the pledge, the teacher called school officers to remove her from the classroom and take her to the counselor's office once again.

"When the student's mother reached out to an assistant principal for help in dealing with the teacher's abusive and improper actions, the official said her daughter should instead apologize for her 'defiance.' The student did apologize, twice," the ACLU states.

The right to sit silently during the Pledge of Allegiance has been held up by the US Supreme Court, and is enshrined in Maryland state law and Mongtomery County Public Schools' own policies, reports the Washington Post.

37 lbs. girl throwing 1st grade hissy fit deemed security risk by Port Lucie, Fla. school.

Right Pundits reports

Haley Shalansky's parents are furious with Parkway Elementary School in Port St. Lucie, Fl.
The six ( yes, 6 ) year old girl was handcuffed on Monday after a temper tantrum and deemed such a threat by Tuesday that the school had her committed to a mental facility!
Appropriate classroom behavior excludes tantrums, obviously, but how necessary was it to handcuff a 6 year old and have her committed?
Florida girl handcuffed, committed by school.

Haley Shalansky, 6 years old, allegedly became upset when her teacher asked her to "do something" and had a temper tantrum. The tantrum escalated in the principal's office, becoming a full blown hissy fit. The incident report from the Sheriff's Dept states that Haley
"kicked the wall, went over to the desk and threw the calculator, electric pencil sharpener, telephone, container of writing utensils and other objects across the desk."

Haley was placed in handcuffs after police were called. She weighs a mere 37 pounds, and her wrists are so tiny that both hands were put in one handcuff.

But wait there's more.
This "Florida girl handcuffed, committed by school" was actually committed to a mental institution on Tuesday! I guess calling Mom or Dad was too difficult a task for the brilliant employees of Parkway Elementary.
What an innovative way to deal with disruptive students! Such genius!

The US government has been known in the past to tap esoteric academic expertise in the service of counter-terrorism and counter-insurgency programs. Such appears to have been the idea of the Human Terrain Systems (HTS) program,  in which  anthropologists, ethnographers and other social scientists were embedded with combat brigades in Afghanistan and elsewhere to help troops understand and win the hearts and minds of local populations, thereby, in theory, reducing violence.

Whatever role they may play in foreign policy, it's curious to hear of  such a counter-insurgency program being exercised for potential "wargaming" scenarios in the United States, as John Allison, an anthropologist involved with HTS, describes to Counterpunch writer David Price.

Counterpunch reports

John's last day of HTS training was the first day of MARDEX, a military role playing exercise designated as "Weston Resolve."  For the exercise, the class was presented with a training scenario in which the fictional nation of "Lakeland" was located in an area to the northeast of Kansas City was the focus of operations.  John wrote that,

"In the PowerPoint slide presentation laying out the background for the "operations", the Wargame role-playing is represented by staff as merging into the real world drug, crime, and environmental "contention" within the community. The whole mission is represented as bringing a military state control of the local population which has recently elected a local government that is a "permissive" (supportive) environment for US Army activities after the previous local government had withdrawn from the US as a sovereign society. Now the US military is taking over the area to reestablish public security."

The class was then told that the mission they were training to support was one in which the military was establishing order in a setting where environmentalist-separatists had taken over.  John explained that in this hypothetical training scenario,

"IATAN, a coal-fired power plant on the Missouri side of the river is one of the main military foci due to "contention within the community" over the environmental pollution it is causing. Sierra Club and other, more radical groups have been active in this area: ELF is one such radical group.  Even though there is an elected government and rule of law in Lakeland, there are some 'insurgents' who are opportunistic.' That is why the US Army has moved into this area that has broken away from US control.

Staff Assignment to the several Human Terrain Teams that make up the class of the November Cycle were issued as follows: 1. 'Find out more details on the criminal activity.'  2. Find out the best conduits to pass 'information'(PsyOps and InfoOps) to the local population.  3. HTT is assigned to produce a 'Research Plan' to understand the situation at the IATAN power plant - people's concerns, desires, etc., and identify those who were 'problem-solvers' and those who were 'problem-causers,' and the rest of the population whom would be the target of the information operations to move their Center of Gravity toward that set of viewpoints and values which was the 'desired end-state' of the military's strategy.

As I thought about what was being done in this activity, and the way it adapted COIN strategy for Afghanistan/Iraq to be applied by the US military in situations in the USA where the local population was seen from the military perspective as threatening the established balance of power and influence, and challenging law and order, I began to think back on stories that circulated among the ant-war movement in the 1960s-70s, about concentration camps being developed just for imprisoning such protestors an "problem-causers". And I wondered who would be working on the Human Terrain Teams to enable the US military's actions against unruly segments of their own countrymen; perhaps Afghan and Iraqi anthropologists who had specialized in US ethnography?"

 

Next Tuesday February 23^rd will loom large in the history of civil liberties in the US.  For on that day the case of Holder v. The Humanitarian Law Project, described by Adam Liptak in the NY Times last week as " the court's first encounter with the free speech and association rights of American citizens in the context of terrorism since the September 11 attacks" is considered in oral arguments before the Supreme Court.

At issue will be the constitutionality of the federal government "material support" laws, which bans organizations from assistance to groups designated by the State Department as terrorist organizations.

In a useful primer on the law and the stakes of the Supreme Court debate Ahilan T. Arslananthan explains how the use of the material support doctrine threatens to criminalize humanitarian relief and chill human rights activism.

ACS Blog writes

It was the late President Ronald Reagan who courageously declared that "a

hungry child knows no politics," in order to justify his decision to send food

aid to the Communist dictatorship in Ethiopia at the height of the Cold War.

Although he no doubt believed that defeating the communist regime in that country

was important to our national security, he was not willing to forego feeding starving

civilians on that basis.

Like most Americans, President Reagan would probably be quite shocked to learn

that our current government has cast aside his teaching and actually criminalized humanitarian

relief to victims of war and natural disaster in the name of the war on terror.

As I learned first-hand while doing tsunami relief work in Sri Lanka, that is exactly

what has happened under the so-called "material support of terrorism" laws.2 The

material support laws are a constellation of statutes found in the federal criminal code,

immigration code, and elsewhere, whose ostensible purpose is to enhance our national

security by stopping aid to terrorist groups. However, because of the enormous breadth

of these laws, humanitarian organizations and volunteers operating throughout the

world in conflict zones and natural disaster sites have scaled back and in some cases,

simply abandoned their efforts to aid those in greatest need of help.

 

 

Non uniformed "decoy" police squad stakes out cross-walks in
pursuit of stop sign violations AND disorderly pedestrians (aka jaywalkers).

KCBY.com reports

Coos Bay Police were kept busy Tuesday targeting drivers who didn't comply with crosswalk safety laws during a pedestrian safety operation in Empire.

For three hours Tuesday morning, officers were staked out at the intersection of Cammann Street and Newmark Avenue, while a non-uniformed decoy pedestrian used the crosswalk.

According to Officer Ken Labrousse, the goal of the operation is to raise awareness of pedestrian safety and reduce auto-pedestrian collisions.

"Today so far, we've pulled over approximately 20 vehicles. We've issued about four or five citations for failing to stop and remain stopped for a pedestrian," he said. In addition to that, we've also issued some citations for driving suspended and driving uninsured."

Labrousse said the city funded safety operation also helps ticket drivers who have outstanding warrants.

But he says it's not just the drivers that are targeted.

"We're also watching the pedestrians. We've had two instances where pedestrians have crossed in the middle of the street without a crosswalk, right in front of traffic, causing traffic to slow down," he said. "That's actually a crime called disorderly conduct. We did contact those pedestrians and they were given verbal warnings today."

Each driver pulled over was given a pamphlet by police on crosswalk safety laws.

About 75 percent of the drivers pulled over Tuesday, were given verbal warnings instead of tickets.

Thanks to the Agitator

Administration presses legal claim that government can track cell users at will without such pesky constitutional formalities as warrants and probable cause.

CNET reports

The FBI and other police agencies don't need to obtain a search warrant to learn the locations of Americans' cell phones, the U.S. Department of Justice told a federal appeals court in Philadelphia on Friday.

A Justice Department attorney told the Third Circuit Court of Appeals that there is no constitutional problem with obtaining records from cellular providers that can reveal the approximate locations of handheld and mobile devices. (See CNET's previous article.)

There "is no constitutional bar" to acquiring "routine business records held by a communications service provider," said Mark Eckenwiler, a senior attorney in the criminal division of the Justice Department. He added, "The government is not required to use a warrant when it uses a tracking device."

This is the first federal appeals court to address warrantless location tracking, which raises novel issues of government surveillance and whether Americans have a reasonable expectation of privacy in their--or at least their cell phones' --whereabouts.

Judge Dolores Sloviter sharply questioned Eckenwiler, saying that location data can reveal whether people "have been at a protest, or at a meeting, or at a political meeting" and that rogue governments could misuse that information. (See transcript excerpts below.)

Just a few years ago, tracking phones was the stuff of thrillers like "Enemy of the State" or "Live Free or Die Hard." Now, even though police are tapping into the locations of mobile phones thousands of times a year, the legal ground rules remain unclear, and federal privacy laws written a generation ago are ambiguous at best.

"When the government acquires historical cell location information, it effectively commandeers our cell phones and turns them into electronic trackers that report, without our knowledge or consent, where we have been and how long we have spent there," Susan Freiwald, a law professor at the University of San Francisco, told the court on Friday. "We should be able to use our cell phones without them creating a virtual map of our every movement and association."

Freiwald, the ACLU, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and the Center for Democracy and Technology filed briefs



Thanks to Jonathan Turley

College student Nicholas Goerge was handcuffed and interrogated for four hours at Philadelphia airport for carrying a set of English-Arabic flashcards.

The San Bernadino Sun reports

The American Civil Liberties Union has filed a lawsuit on behalf of a Pomona College student who alleged he was mistreated at a Philadelphia airport.

According to the lawsuit, the Transportation Security Administration, Philadelphia police and the FBI violated Nicholas George's Fourth Amendment rights to be free from unreasonable seizure as well as his First Amendment rights to freedom of speech.

A TSA spokeswoman told a Philadelphia newspaper that George, 22, was causing a disturbance while he was being screened at the airport.

"I don't think it's just a couple of dumb agents that screwed the pooch on this one - it's a bigger problem," said George, a physics and Middle Eastern studies senior at the Claremont college.

George was detained for several hours in August after he tried to pass through a screening checkpoint at Philadelphia International Airport with Arabic-English language flash cards as well as a book critical of American foreign policy, according to the lawsuit.

TSA officials detained George for 30 minutes and "abusively interrogated" him for another 15 minutes, according to the lawsuit that was filed Wednesday in the U.S. District Court for the eastern district of Pennsylvania.

George was later taken to an airport police station and jailed for about four hours. He was handcuffed for two hours.

Over the past several years the phrase "criminal alien" has been blared so promiscuously, and disingenuously, that the fact that simply being undocumented is NOT a crime is often conventiently forgotten.

This obfuscation is harmful enough for the damage it has caused media and political discourse. But what's worse, the ACLU reminds us in a new issues brief, is the fact that states and locales are increasingly translating dubious rhetoric into even more dubious law, by imposing criminal penalties on  people simply for undocumented presence in the US.

The ACLU writes

Over the past several years, states and localities around the country have increasingly

considered and used state and local laws to impose criminal penalties on undocumented

immigrants. At the same time, the federal government has increasingly chosen to criminally

prosecute individuals who enter or reenter the United States illegally rather than rely on the

extensive civil enforcement scheme under the federal immigration laws.

In public policy debates about criminalizing undocumented immigrants, anti-immigrant

lawmakers and groups often throw around terms like "criminal alien" and other misleading

rhetoric and statistics suggesting that all undocumented immigrants are criminals or a

dangerous threat to the community. Such language can distort debates about the appropriate

use of local criminal laws and of federal prosecutorial resources. Local and state officials

also often misunderstand the nature of the criminal provisions in federal immigration law

and the authority of states and local governments to criminalize undocumented status. In

this issue brief, we discuss questions that arise when a state seeks to enact new criminal

laws or proposes using existing state criminal laws to punish individuals for being

undocumented.

Dwight Eisenhower famous valedictory warning of the emergence of a "military-industrial complex", is often cited, but still not widely enough read.

Eisenhower  advised that in weighing responses to chronic crises we must struggle to achieve "balance between actions of the moment and the national welfare of the future."

"Down the long lane of history yet to be written," Eisenhower concluded, " America knows that this world of crisis, ever growing smaller, must avoid becoming a community of dreadful fear and hate, and be instead, a proud confederation of mutual trust and respect."

In his analysis of the case of Aafia Siddiqui, the Pakistani neuroscientist convicted last week of attempting to shoot a US soldier  while being held Bagram prison in Afghanistan, Chris Hedges argues that the War on Terror has spawned a "Terror-Industrial Complex", a bizarre offshoot of the Military-Industrial Complex.

Chris Hedges writes:

I spent more than a year covering al-Qaida for The New York Times in Europe and the Middle East. The threat posed by Islamic extremists, while real, is also wildly overblown, used to foster a climate of fear and political passivity, as well as pump billions of dollars into the hands of the military, private contractors, intelligence agencies and repressive client governments including that of Pakistan. The leader of one FBI counterterrorism squad told The New York Times that of the 5,500 terrorism-related leads its 21 agents had pursued over the past five years, just 5 percent were credible and not one had foiled an actual terrorist plot. These statistics strike me as emblematic of the entire war on terror.

Terrorism, however, is a very good business. The number of extremists who are planning to carry out terrorist attacks is minuscule, but there are vast departments and legions of ambitious intelligence and military officers who desperately need to strike a tangible blow against terrorism, real or imagined, to promote their careers as well as justify obscene expenditures and a flagrant abuse of power. All this will not make us safer. It will not protect us from terrorist strikes. The more we dispatch brutal forms of power to the Islamic world the more enraged Muslims and terrorists we propel into the ranks of those who oppose us. The same perverted logic saw the Argentine military, when I lived in Buenos Aires, "disappear" 30,000 of the nation's citizens, the vast majority of whom were innocent. Such logic also fed the drive to root out terrorists in El Salvador, where, when I arrived in 1983, the death squads were killing between 800 and 1,000 people a month. Once you build secret archipelagos of prisons, once you commit huge sums of money and invest your political capital in a ruthless war against subversion, once you empower a network of clandestine killers, operatives and torturers, you fuel the very insecurity and violence you seek to contain. 

I do not know whether Siddiqui is innocent or guilty. But I do know that permitting jailers, spies, kidnappers and assassins to operate outside of the rule of law contaminates us with our own bile. Siddiqui is one victim. There are thousands more we do not see. These abuses, justified by the war on terror, have created a system of internal and external state terrorism that is far more dangerous to our security and democracy than the threat posed by Islamic radicals.