Category: Law Enforcement Misconduct

Truths in Life: Law Enforcement Agencies will ALWAYS Abuse Survelliance Abilities

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In this case, we have the FBI using national security letters, which require no judicial review, as a giant Hoover to spy on tens of thousands of Americans illegally.

What’s more, when they were informed that this was illegal, they engaged in an orgy of illegal ass-covering:

This created a backlog of records that the F.B.I. had obtained without going through proper procedures. In response, the letter said, the F.B.I. devised a plan: rather than issuing national security letters retroactively for each individual investigation, it would issue the blanket letters to cover all the records obtained from a particular phone company.

Lets be clear. This is not the exception, this is the rule. It is the basic place that any part of the state security apparatus is coming from, and it has been since well before the founding of the Republic.

These sorts of situational ethics are simply part of the mindset.

Torture Comes Home

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There is a very good that Darius Rejali, Author of ‘Torture and Democracy’ makes in this interview:

Yes, torture does migrate, and there are some good examples of it both in American and French history. The basic idea here is that soldiers who get ahead torturing come back and take jobs as policemen, and private security, and they get ahead doing the same things they did in the army. And so torture comes home. Everyone knows waterboarding, but no one remembers that it was American soldiers coming back from the Philippines that introduced it to police in the early twentieth century. During the Philippine Insurgency in 1902, soldiers learned the old Spanish technique of using water tortures, and soon these same techniques appeared in police stations, especially throughout the South, as well as in military lockups during World War I. Likewise, the electrical techniques used in Vietnam appeared in the 1960s appeared in torturing African Americans on the south side of Chicago in the 1970s and 1980s, and, as I argue in the book, that wasn’t just an accident.

So torture always comes home. And the techniques of this war are likely to show up in a neighborhood near you. Likewise, the techniques that appeared in the War on Terror were already documented in INS lockups in Miami in the 1990s. There is no bright line between domestic and foreign torture; the stuff circulates.

Next time you talk with a wingnut, mention that.

And go read the full interview.

Weapons of Mass Digestion*

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Your tax dollars at work.

FBI Hoped to Follow Falafel Trail to Iranian Terrorists Here

By Jeff Stein, CQ National Security Editor
Like Hansel and Gretel hoping to follow their bread crumbs out of the forest, the FBI sifted through customer data collected by San Francisco-area grocery stores in 2005 and 2006, hoping that sales records of Middle Eastern food would lead to Iranian terrorists.

The idea was that a spike in, say, falafel sales, combined with other data, would lead to Iranian secret agents in the south San Francisco-San Jose area.

The brainchild of top FBI counterterrorism officials Phil Mudd and Willie T. Hulon, according to well-informed sources, the project didn’t last long. It was torpedoed by the head of the FBI’s criminal investigations division, Michael A. Mason, who argued that putting somebody on a terrorist list for what they ate was ridiculous — and possibly illegal.

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If Mudd and Hulon are still working for the FBI, something is deeply wrong.

*That title is not my idea. It comes from the guy who runs MyNuMo, who, like everyone on the bloody internet, writes better than I do.

Surprise, If Nifong Had Done This to Poor Black Men, He’d Still Have His Law License.

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The state bar is broken in the case of prosecutorial misconduct, period, full stop.

What Nifong did was not as bad as mistakenly sending a guy to death row. It wasn’t as bad as mistakenly sending a guy to jail.

This was because the defendants were white and rich.

Prosecutor Becomes Prosecuted
By ADAM LIPTAK

THE misconduct that cost the prosecutor in the Duke lacrosse case his career certainly seemed to call for a severe penalty: he withheld evidence from the defense, misled the court and inflamed the public.

Yet other prosecutors found by the courts to have done similar things have almost never lost their jobs or their licenses to practice law. Even in the aftermath of prosecutorial wrongdoing that helped put innocent men on death row, discipline has been light or nonexistent.

What makes Michael B. Nifong different?

The answer, it appears, is that he got a taste of something like his own medicine, a trial in the court of public opinion.

“The very same facts that made this case attractive to a prosecutor up for election and a huge publicity magnet — race, sex, class, lacrosse stars, a prominent university — also led to his undoing when the case collapsed and his conduct was scrutinized in and beyond North Carolina,” said Stephen M. Gillers, a law professor at New York University and the author of “Regulation of Lawyers: Problems of Law and Ethics.”

“If the same case had involved three poor men, instead of defendants with private counsel and families that supported them financially and publicly,” Mr. Gillers continued, “we would not likely see a disbarment, in North Carolina or anywhere. I’d be surprised if there were even serious discipline.”

There is widespread agreement that sanctions for prosecutorial misconduct are quite unusual, but heated dispute about why.

Prosecutors say they seldom face discipline because conduct like Mr. Nifong’s in this sexual-assault case is exceptional.

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The Chicago Tribune, for instance, analyzed 381 murder cases in which the defendant received a new trial because of prosecutorial misconduct. None of the prosecutors were convicted of a crime or disbarred.

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Indeed, the North Carolina disciplinary commission that disbarred Mr. Nifong faced criticism for its handling of two recent cases involving charges of misconduct in death-penalty cases.

In one, Alan Gell was sentenced to death after prosecutors withheld witness statements from the defense. The witnesses said they had seen the victim alive after Mr. Gell had been jailed on other charges and was physically unable to have committed the murder. Mr. Gell was acquitted at a retrial.

Two prosecutors received a reprimand.

Last year, the commission dismissed charges, largely on statute of limitations grounds, against two prosecutors accused of withholding evidence in the 1996 capital trial of Jonathan Gregory Hoffman. Mr. Hoffman has been granted a retrial.

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In America, Leaving a Tip is Felony Support of Terrorism

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Someone needs some face time on the nightly news, and this guy is brought up on charges.

I wish I lived in America, but that place seems to be gone now.

Loose mouth and loose change – $5 tip leads to terror finance rap

By George Smith, Dick Destiny
Published Thursday 12th April 2007 13:15 GMT

In the terror case against Hassan Abujihaad, formerly known as Paul R. Hall – sailor on the destroyer Benfold, the US government has another mangy cat in the GWOT.

“Material support of terrorism and disclosing previously classified information” are the beefs in the indictment against Abujihaad, according to a government press release from March. It sounds serious and the newsmedia did its usual listless job in reporting on it.

“Hassan Abujihaad, 31, is accused of supporting terrorism by disclosing secret information about the location of Navy ships and the best ways to attack them,” wrote Associated Press. “Investigators say he provided those secrets, in classified documents, to a suspected terrorism financier.”

If one looks at the indictment and evidentiary exhibits logged against Abujihaad, it’s thinner cloth.

Abujihaad bought videos from Azzam Publications and Babar Ahmad*, a London computer programmer locked up since 2004 and awaiting extradition for trial to the US, for running a website that promoted Islamic fighters in Bosnia, Chechnya, and Afghanistan, according to the press.

As for sending classified documents to Ahmad, what Abujihaad did do, and we’ll get to it in detail in a bit, is send rash e-mail, including video orders from the Benfold, an Arleigh Burke-class destroyer upon which he served.

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Apparently, no plot. Abujihaad received an honorable discharge from the Navy in 2002 and wound up in Arizona, perhaps an unhappy young man, eventually acutely aware that he might be in trouble for his e-mails to Azzam.

However, when the US government argues that Abujihaad gave material assistance to Ahmad, one expects not to see the equivalent of mail order of three videos reclassified as terrorist activity. Yet this is exactly what is meant.

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In August, Abujihaad sends Ahmad thirty dollars for another video, Bosnian War.

In this order, he has overspent by five dollars. Ahmad writes “Please tell us what you want done with the remaining $5.”

“Dear Brothers, you guys can keep the remaining $5.00 and [add it] to the funds that you Brothers are spending in the way of Allah and the great Websites .. Azzam Pub.”

Material assistance to terror groups is, you read right, ordering three videos, overpaying slightly and telling the seller to keep the change. “By stating that he watched the video, [Abujihaad] demonstrated that he knew Azzam supported acts of terrorism.” Hmmm, maybe, but logically it seem to indicate many people not normally considered terrorists must now be included in the definition, too.

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It is a tale, and a bit of a sad one, in which someone which the book against, so far, does not show any serious involvement in terrorism. It is the story of a man who ordered videos and had loose lips when he should have kept his virtual mouth shut, a case of extraordinarily bad timing just prior to 9/11.

But since there is no shortage of experts who can be called upon by the government to insist, true or not, that Azzam Publications was allied with al Qaeda for the courts, Abujihaad’s fate looks grim.

Texas cops taser diabetic seizure man

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What the hell is wrong with these cops?

Texas cops taser diabetic seizure man

By Lester Haines
Published Wednesday 20th June 2007 12:25 GMT

A Texas man who called 911 to request medical assistance for a diabetic seizure earned a tasering from local cops for his trouble, the Waxahachie Daily Light reports.

Allen Nelms, 52, was suffering said seizure “during the early morning hours of April 28 when his girlfriend, Josie Edwards, called 911 to request paramedics”.

A police officer duly turned up at the house on Waxahachie’s east side, “inquired as to what was going on”, then called for back-up. Shortly after, and as Nelms was “in his bed in the couple’s bedroom”, cops “burst in with their guns drawn and yelling at him to get on the floor”.

Edwards recalled “about six or seven police officers kicked the front door in and stormed the back bedroom where she said she could hear one telling Nelms to get on the floor”. Her statement, which forms part of an written complaint made by Nelms to the Waxahachie police department, says: “Allen was shouting, ‘Please don’t do me like this. I just need help.’ Next thing I heard some ‘zing’ noise and Allen was shouting. I asked what were they doing to him. One policeman replied, ‘We just took care of him.’ … After they did their shooting and laughing, they came out [of] the rooms. The paramedics had to pull out the Tasers.”

Nelms claims he was “struck by Taser barbs on his left side, his back and his shoulder” as he went to roll over, and subsequently handcuffed, with “paramedics intervening when the officers began trying to yank the Taser barbs from his skin”. The paramedics removed the barbs, checked Nelms’ blood sugar level, and the cuffs came off. He was neither arrested nor charged.

In an interview with the Daily Light, Nelms added: “One of the officers said I ‘lunged’ at him. I asked him, ‘How can I lunge at you from my back and on my bed?'” He said he had “never had a problem in calling for paramedics before, and there is no history of his becoming violent when he is having a diabetic seizure”.

Edwards’ statement says: “Of the 16 years that we [have] lived here and called for paramedics, police decide to come and take over and try to almost kill the man. They never asked any questions [like] did he have a heart pacer, they just wanted to have fun by shooting Tasers and handcuffing the man after he was shot.”

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