Canada Forcing Wounded Vets To Sign Agreement Not To Criticize The Military On Social Media

Rob Hyndman alerts us to yet another attack on free speech up in Canada. The Canadian Armed Forces are apparently forcing wounded veterans to sign a form promising not to criticize the military on social media. In fact, they're told they should "discourage others in uniform." They're also told not to discuss "your views on any military subject." Not surprisingly, many of those receiving these forms are not too pleased about it. The military claims that it's just been designed to "educate" veterans. The statement to the Ottawa Citizen is quite incredible:

In an email to the Citizen, the JPSU denied that the creation of the policy and document was designed to stifle criticism of politicians and senior military staff. It was created “in an effort to educate our members and personnel on what constitutes the appropriate and inappropriate use of social media and the possible ramifications for a CAF member,” the email added.

But, many others quoted in the same article note that it goes way beyond an education effort, and is clearly much more of an attempt to stifle free speech and criticism of the military.

Ottawa lawyer and former military officer Michel Drapeau said the form is an obvious attempt to intimidate those who were injured and prevent them from speaking out about ill treatment.

“It’s not illegal but it’s obviously a threat,” said Drapeau, who has represented injured soldiers as they try to get benefits from the federal government. “The criticism about the leadership’s failure to take care of the wounded is obviously hitting home.”

There is, of course, a fine line -- especially with military personnel -- about what they can and should communicate with the rest of the world. But this really does seem like a way to try to silence wounded vets who might have very legitimate criticisms as to how they've been treated.

Why Have 1.5 Million Floridians Been Banned from Voting?

By Nancy Abudu

The struggle to protect the fundamental right to vote for people with a felony conviction is nothing new in this country, but has now reached a crisis level. Almost six million people are denied the right to vote because of felon disfranchisement laws that perpetuate racial and economic disparities by excluding citizens from the democratic process even after they have paid their debt to society. Last week none other than Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) came out in favor of restoring the right to vote for the formerly incarcerated.

The result is of the injustice of felony disenfranchisement is that people, especially people of color, are legally barred from participating in our system of government, and denied a say in the issues that impact their communities. Factors that contribute to so many people's involvement in the criminal justice system in the first place are then rarely addressed. Florida, unsurprisingly, has one of the worst records when it comes to felon re-enfranchisement. While other states revoke the right to vote of a person convicted of a felony most states restore voting rights once a person has completed his or her sentence, and provide a streamlined process for restoration of rights. Florida, in contrast, has erected a convoluted, antiquated and ineffective system which makes it virtually impossible for anyone to get his or her rights restored. The result is that tens of thousands of applications for rights restoration have remained in limbo for years. Election after election passes, with fewer and fewer Florida citizens able to participate.

Earlier this month, the ACLU and other civil rights organizations detailed the crisis of felon disfranchisement and the barriers to rights restoration in a Shadow Report submitted to the UN Committee on Human Rights, explaining U.S. non-compliance with its obligations as a signatory to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR). The report highlights how, as of 2010, Florida has disfranchised more than 1.5 million citizens due to a felony conviction – amounting to 10.42 percent of the state's voting age population and 23.3 percent of Florida's African-American voting age population.

The arbitrary nature of Florida's rights restoration process is best illustrated by how the change in the state's administration – from Gov. Charlie Crist to Gov. Rick Scott – resulted in a shift from 115,000 grants of rights restoration in 2007 to a shutdown in the process in 2011, with the current governor denying or rendering ineligible the overwhelming majority of applications. The backlog of applications – some 100,000 in all – pending when Governor Scott took office does, however, belie the notion that people in the U.S., especially those with criminal convictions, do not want to participate in elections

For decades, the ACLU also has been at the forefront of this issue, advocating for legislative and public policy changes and bringing cases to dismantle this unfair system. The clients we have represented are men and women who want to be productive citizens, contribute to improving how our society functions and have a say in the issues that impact them and their communities.

The U.S. prides itself on having a participatory form of government, but the truth is that we still have a long way to go. Because of the difficulties people in Florida and around the country have had when it comes to restoring their voting rights, to combat this issue and bring about real positive change, we need to increase international pressure by assuring compliance with the ICCPR.

What is Going on With Usage Restrictions on Media from Congress and the White House?

By Michael Weinberg

The White House and Congress are trying to restrict use of public domain photos and videos.

As two of the three branches of the US government, Congress and the Administration have key roles in creating and enforcing our copyright law. So why are they trying to restrict what people do with public domain material?

Believe it or not, copyright law actually has a specific section addressing the Federal Government’s ability to get a copyright. The section is pretty straightforward: the Federal Government does not get copyright on the works that it produces. You don’t need to be a lawyer to understand the first part of 17 U.S.C. § 105:

Copyright protection under this title [which pertains to copyright] is not available for any work of the United States Government.

This means that works created by the US Government receive no copyright protection. These works do not pass go nor do they collect $200 – they automatically enter the public domain the moment they are created, freely available for anyone to do whatever they want with them. And yet strangely there are parts of the US government that do not seem to understand that.

This is not new. Back in 2009 our friends over at Creative Commons and EFF pointed out that the official White House flickr stream was using a CC-Attribution license – a license that requires some sort of underlying copyright to enforce. To their credit, shortly after this concern was raised, the White House and flickr responded to this criticism and made it clear that the works are in the public domain.

Those United States Government Work "licenses" still appear on White House Flickr photos. But the licenses are not alone. They are joined by a prominent alert:

This official White House photograph is being made available only for publication by news organizations and/or for personal use printing by the subject(s) of the photograph. The photograph may not be manipulated in any way and may not be used in commercial or political materials, advertisements, emails, products, promotions that in any way suggests approval or endorsement of the President, the First Family, or the White House.

What? This extra language has been noted multiple times, but for some reason persists. Whenever you see a restriction like this, the first question you should ask yourself is “or what?” What happens if I use these photos outside of the scope of the restriction? In most cases, if you saw this type of restriction the “or what” would be “you will be sued for copyright infringement for exceeding the scope of this license.” But without copyright protection, that “or what” is simply not available. The White House is not explicitly claiming copyright on these photos (the license makes that clear), but this type of scary quasi-legal language gets awful close to flirting with a bit of light copyfraud. I could reproduce entire photos here on the PK blog – neither the site for a news organization nor my personal website - without fear of any sort of repercussion.

The White House clearly understands its relationship to copyright. The copyright policy of whitehouse.gov makes it clear that nothing that the White House generates for the site is protected by copyright. And the White House YouTube channe makes it clear that its videos are in the public domain and even makes it easy for you to download them.

Wake Up America: The Rise of the Police State

15-year-old student arrested for ‘terrorizing school’ with YouTube video of phone app

Student could face up to 20 years in prison if convicted

GRAY, LA — A 15-year-old student has been arrested after uploading a YouTube video of gameplay from a phone application. Authorities said his video “terrorized and interfered with operation of his school” and charged him with offenses that could give him a maximum of 20 years in prison if convicted.

The boy, who has not been named, was a student at H.L. Bourgeois High school. He had downloaded a phone application called “The Real Strike” which utilizes the camera on a smart phone and superimposes a picture of a gun over the live-feed video. Whatever the camera phone points towards shows up on the screen with a graphic of a gun pointed towards it. The user can then use the app to simulate a mock shootout, and can record and share the results.

The student used his phone at school to record some of his classmates, allegedly making a video of a mock shootout at school. He took his phone home and uploaded the video to YouTube. Worried parents reported him to the police and he was arrested. He was charged with “terrorizing and interference with the operation of a school,” according to WGNO.

A video app that anyone can download for $2.99 and use in under 5 minutes, that harmed no one, can now be considered terrorism.



Still shot of the app in use

“You can’t ignore it,” says Major Malcolm Wolfe of the Terrebonne Parish Sheriff’s Office. “We don’t know at what time that game becomes reality.”

According to Wolfe, “He said it was a result of him being frustrated and tired of being bullied. He said that he had no intentions of hurting anybody. We have to take all threats seriously and we have no way of knowing that without investigating and getting to the bottom of it.”

Terrorizing in Louisiana (RS 14:40.1) is punishable by a maximum of 15 years in prison, with or without hard labor, and up to $15,000 in fines. Unlawful disruption of the operation of a school (RS 14:40.6) carries a minimum sentence of 1 year in prison and a maximum of 5. A maximum combined sentence, if convicted, would be 20 years in prison.

The video has been taken down so nobody else will be terrorized, and the school will no longer be disrupted from operation.

The boy has no access to firearms, according to parents. He has been jailed at the Terrebonne Parish Juvenile Detention center, according to Houma Today. Here is an application review of “The Real Strike.” Browsing YouTube will produce other videos of the same app being used to point at real people.

Pirate Parties Blocked From WIPO After US & Other Countries Complained That They Don't Support WIPO's Mission

A little over a year ago, the Pirate Parties International (a group representing various different local Pirate Parties) asked for permission to have "observer" status at WIPO, the UN-based World Intellectual Property Organization, an operation somewhat renowned for its generally maximalist agenda. Last year, we noted that, after complaints from Swiss, French and US delegations to WIPO, the PPI request was delayed for an entire year. Well, that year is up... and WIPO has officially rejected the request while it approved all other requests except for the Pirates and Kenya Innovation Council.

Once again, US officials were among the folks trying to block PPI from becoming an observer, expressing concerns that the Pirate Parties "don't support the objectives" of WIPO. So who did get approved? Well, among others, there was the International Society for the Development of Intellectual Property (ADALPI). So it's not like WIPO rejected organizations that came into things with a clearly biased perspective. It just wanted to reject organizations whose position WIPO officials don't like. Ridiculously, as Jamie Love points out, the US State Department first talked about being able to discuss things "free from undue interference or censorship" and then went out and blocked the Pirate Parties from being able to join WIPO as observers. Hypocritical as always. And, if you're wondering, other political parties have been allowed into other UN organizations in the past, so it's not just because the Pirates are a political party.

Once again, we see that WIPO is not actually focused on determining the most effective intellectual property regime, but rather they'll push for protectionism and maximalism because a few countries benefit strongly from such positions. And they'll even go so far as to lock out organizations that have other viewpoints.

"Ignorance of the law is no excuse."?

"It will be of little avail to the People, that the laws are made by men of their own choice, if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood; if they be repealed or revised before they are promulgated, or undergo such incessant changes that no man, who knows what the law is to-day, can guess what it will be to-morrow. Law is defined to be a rule of action; but how can that be a rule, which is little known, and less fixed?" ~James Madison

Why Is Kyle Thompson Under House-Arrest?

By Diana Scholl

Kyle Thompson likes playing football, playing video games, and hanging out with his friends. The Michigan student has also been under house arrest since last March and barred from school for six months. Why? His teacher wanted to see a note he had written, and she tried to take it from him. He thought she was teasing him about it and was playfully trying to get the note back. When he realized this wasn't play, he immediately let her have the note. That misunderstanding got Kyle thrown in jail, and placed under house arrest.

Kyle is part of a national trend where children are funneled out of public schools and into the juvenile and criminal justice systems. Many of these children have learning disabilities or histories of poverty, abuse or neglect, and would benefit from additional educational and counseling services. Instead, they are isolated, punished and pushed out. "Zero-tolerance" policies criminalize minor infractions of school rules, while cops in school lead to students being criminalized for behavior that should be handled inside the school. Students of color are especially vulnerable to push-out trends and the discriminatory application of discipline.

The ACLU believes that children should be educated, not incarcerated. We are working to challenge policies and practices that contribute to the school to prison pipeline.

Watch Kyle's video below, and to learn more about the school-to-prison pipeline here.

Solitary confinement for students will continue: Oregon schools easily bypass ban on “isolation booths”

"You have two adults dragging you into a room and locking the door behind you," described one student who had been locked up hundreds of times

PORTLAND, OR — Last year, a parent’s outrage over a government school locking her child a padded cell without her knowledge or permission caused so much outrage that a new state law was passed, prohibiting schools from purchasing or using free-standing “seclusion cells” or “isolation booths,” as they are called. With the new taking effect, some schools are scrambling for a way around the provisions, so they can continue to place students in solitary confinement at their discretion.

In November 2012, KATU News broke a story about the use of an isolation booth at Mint Valley Elementary School in Longview, WA. Concerned parent, Ana Bate, said her son saw students being locked in the booth at school and was traumatized.

“[He was] thinking it was scary, it was abusive, are they gonna do this to me?” Bate said.

School administrators defended locking children in padded cells, saying that it had “therapeutic purposes” for some children.

“How come they’re not providing documentation about how this ‘therapeutic booth’ is beneficial?” said Bate. “Show me some real numbers. Show me something from the medical community that says more times than not and all the documentation that backs it up. Don’t tell me ‘well, their parents said we could do it.’”

“I have a 20-year-old daughter who’s actually been institutionalized, medicated heavily, ADD, ADHD, RAD, OCD, among other things,” Bate said. “I never had to have anybody put her in a box. I didn’t have any problems dealing with the situation, so I do know both sides.”

The outrage over the story grew, with the help of the alternative media. And more stories came forth.

Jared Harrison, a 7th grader at the McCornack school in the Eugene district, testified in front of legislators that he was placed in an isolation room hundreds of times — “at least every day” — as a punishment for the smallest things. His punishments began in the 1st grade, and continued for years. Anything from not following directions, to throwing paper balls, could earn Jared time in the cell.

Jared’s confinement sessions were so frequent, and begun at such a young age, that he thought that spending time in the cell was part of a normal day at school. So normal, that he never even thought to tell his mother about it. To a child it had been normal, but to those hearing the testimony, the stories were shocking.

“You have two adults dragging you into a room and locking the door behind you and you’re just a little kid and you don’t know what’s going on,” Harrison told lawmakers. “You’re not going to be calm. And I know no one else in the room was calm. They were all freaking out because their friend’s being locked in a room. It didn’t help the situation at all. It made it worse – much worse than it would’ve been if I had just sat in a timeout chair for five minutes.”

Jennifer Harrison, Jared’s mother, told lawmakers that these kind of isolation punishments were more commonly found in prisons and mental health facilities.

“I don’t think that schools are jails. I hope they’re not,” said Jennifer Harrison.

By February 2013, a bill in Oregon was introduced to prevent these controversial measures from being used on students in their state. Oregon’s House Bill 2756 prohibits government schools from purchasing, building or installing seclusion cells, and prohibits their use. By April, it had been passed and signed by the governor.

The new law defined the cells as free-standing units — like the one used in Longview, WA — to avoid the unintended prohibition of using rooms in the school for normal purposes.

Therefore, in order to get around the new law, schools simply need to lock students in isolation rooms, instead of isolation booths.

And voilà! A well-intentioned, albeit reactionary, law is being easily circumvented. The same policy of locking children in solitary confinement will continue, as long as the cells are built-in to the building, rather than in free-standing booths.

An audit of records from Oregon earlier this year showed that eight school districts had used their isolation booths 791 times, reported OregonLive.com. One Portland school had alone used theirs 100 times since the beginning of the school year.

Some of the newly outfitted isolation rooms were explored by KATU News. Compliant with the new law, the solitary confinement will no longer be performed in a free-standing booth. One school, Cherry Park, converted part of a locker room into isolation rooms for students. Now there is an observation window, a light, and ventilation.

To see what the new cells will look like, view KATU’s coverage below.


Jared Harrison’s mother is right; isolation rooms belong in prisons, not schools. But the parallels of between schools and prison go well beyond throwing children into solitary confinement for misbehavior. The whole education system is modeled to achieve conformity and obedience. Institutions are lined with live-feed cameras. Students are subjected to warrantless searches and often forced to give urine. Police presence in schools is becoming more pervasive and lockers and backpacks can be sniffed with dogs. Attendance is compulsory. Students are having to carry RFID badges or give biometric identification. Even the parking lots are subject to warrantless searches. And that’s without even touching on the curriculum, which is very pro-statism.

As we see with the new law in Oregon, it is difficult to legislate even one aspect of the problem away, let alone all these prison-like characteristics. Only your vigilance and public pressure can reverse these problems, but ultimately the system always retains the systemic problems created by its Prussian roots. Many parents would just as soon not let the government raise their children for 12 years of their young lives, resorting to home schooling or carefully-chosen private schools.

Intelligence Colossus a Costly Failure

by K. Lloyd Billingsley at 9:10am PDT • 0 Comments 176 5 7

U.S. spy agencies call themselves an “intelligence community” (IC). The Washington Post has good reason to dub it an intelligence “colossus,” with 16 spy agencies and 107,035 employees. The IC “black budget” for fiscal year 2013 is $52.6 billion, a lot of money even by Washington standards, and that figure is separate from $23 billion for intelligence directly supporting the U.S. military. The biggest spender is the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) at just short of $15 billion, almost 50 percent above the figure for the National Security Agency (NSA), much in the news of late for its domestic surveillance. While 2.4 percent below fiscal 2012, the 2013 numbers are about twice the 2001 budget and 25 percent higher than 2006.

As the Post noted, “the result is an espionage empire with resources and a reach beyond those of any adversary, sustained even now by spending that rivals or exceeds the levels at the height of the Cold War.” But what is the result of all that spending? The spy agencies “remain unable to provide critical information to the president on a range of national security threats.” That sounds like a major failure.

The IC’s primary target is terrorism, but the community remains tight-lipped about successes. All that remains “classified.” On the other hand, the IC and other federal agencies have failed to stop acts of terrorism within the United States, but not for lack of information. Russian intelligence warned U.S. officials about Tamerlan Tsarnaev but took no action that might have prevented the Boston Marathon bombings that killed and maimed innocent civilians. Likewise, U.S. intelligence picked off emails that U.S. Army psychiatrist Maj. Nidal Hasan sent to terrorist capo Anwar al-Awlaki, discussing the prospect of killing Americans. But U.S. officials did nothing to prevent Hasan from killing 13, more victims than the first attack on the World Trade Center in 1993. The IC also failed to prevent the attacks of September 11, 2001, and the terrorist attacks on American diplomats in Libya on September 11, 2012.

A $52.6 billion 16-agency intelligence colossus is no guarantee of safety against terrorism. But regardless of its effectiveness, the colossus does strive to increase its funding, courtesy of U.S. taxpayers, and to abuse those same taxpayers by spying on them.

Maine law allows police to arrest victims to make sure they testify

"They parked down the street, they pounded on her door and they arrested her," the victim's lawyer explained.

CHELSEA, ME — A battered woman was arrested by police in an effort to force her to testify against her abuser. She was detained without charges, locked in a cage, and a bail was set. The startling practice of arresting the victim is actually legal in Maine, thanks to a seldom used statute.

Jessica Ruiz, 35, was the alleged victim of domestic violence at the hands of 45-year-old Robert Robinson, Jr., in an April incident. On September 17, police arrested Ruiz to make sure she testified against Robinson.

“They parked down the street, they pounded on her door and they arrested her,” explained Lisa Whittier, Ruiz’s appointed lawyer, according to the Kennebec Journal.

Ruiz was taken to jail, subjected to a warrantless pat-down search, locked in a cage with a bail set at $5,000. She was locked up without charges, with two other women, for 17 hours.

While she was detained, officers served Ruiz with two subpoenas, ordering her to come to two separate trials of Robert Robinson on domestic violence and witness tampering.

Whittier called the incident “outrageous conduct on the part of the state.”

Maeghan Maloney, district attorney in Kennebec and Somerset counties, was elected last year after campaigning on a zero-tolerance policy on domestic violence. She defended her decision to arrest the victim, saying “I would rather have to explain why she was arrested than why she was dead.”

“I know there’s a lot of people who disagree with it, but I don’t know how else to keep the victim safe other than to take every step that I possibly can to prosecute it,” Maloney said to WMTW.

But Maloney’s apparent concern for Ruiz’s well-being did not placate the distraught victim or civil libertarians. Zachary Heiden, legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union of Maine, was shocked at the arrest, remarking, “If the concern was for the witness’ safety, it seems there should be other ways of keeping her safe.”

The practice appears to be legal in Maine, under Title 15 §1104, regarding Material Witnesses.

If it appears by affidavit that the testimony of a person is material in any criminal proceeding and if it is shown that it may become impracticable to secure the presence of that person by subpoena, the court may order the arrest of that person and may require that person to give bail for that person’s appearance as a witness…

The feigned concern for Ruiz’s safety might have been a excuse all along. Robinson was already incarcerated, has a long criminal history, and was facing multiple charges.

“There’s no possibility that Mr. Robinson could have gotten out of jail,” said Lisa Whittier. “He’s being held on a probation hold and he’s being held on another charge, so they were not protecting her safety.”

“She has never said she wouldn’t testify,” explained Whittier. “She was always willing to testify and she would have honored a subpoena, had she been served a subpoena.”

Even Robinson’s lawyer stuck up for Ruiz. William Baghdoyan, who represents Robinson, assured reporters that Ruiz’s testimony was not the only thing keeping Robinson incarcerated. “If the domestic-violence charges disappeared, he’s not going anywhere,” Baghdoyan said. “He’s not a danger to anyone. He will continue to remain incarcerated.”

“My interest in this is professional, as a former prosecutor and a member of the Maine bar,” Baghdoyan continued. “She’s gone through unnecessary trauma. She is a very nice young woman, and she has been treated shabbily.”

Witness safety can be a real concern in cases like these. But there are other, more appropriate methods of protection. Slapping a traumatized victim in handcuffs and then into a jail cell is not an appropriate act of compassion. It is emotionally stressful, damages the arrestee’s reputation, interferes with their job and family life, among other inconveniences that come with being involuntarily locked in a cage.

Maine residents should tell their state representatives that Title 15 §1104 needs to be repealed. It is inexcusable to treat victims this way.

"You Know How to Leave": Scenes from a Police Riot in Idaho Falls

By William Norman Grigg


Part 2
Part 3
 
“You’re under arrest!” snarled Officer Clark Lund as he lunged into Victor Madrigal’s home, his Taser at the ready. Madrigal had triggered that response by moving to comply with the officer’s unconstitutional demand that he produce his driver’s license. Seconds later, Madrigal – who put up no resistance – was being swarmed by police as his brother Delosanto (known to friends and family as Dindo) was writhing on the floor as a result of an unprovoked Taser strike.

Madrigal, a resident of Idaho Falls, Idaho, was not a criminal suspect, nor had he been accused of a traffic violation. He and his wife Alissa were having a Saturday evening barbecue on August 31st to celebrate their daughter’s sixth birthday, and a woman who lives a block and a half away from their home called to complain about the noise. None of the family’s immediate neighbors was troubled by the festivities. Chantal Meek, a young mother who lives next door, had no complaints about the party, but was terrorized when two cops burst into her home with their guns drawn after Lund called for backup.

According to multiple witnesses on the scene, and a video record of the event, from the time Officer Lund arrived he was visibly hostile and suspicious.

“It was pretty clear he didn’t intend to leave without arresting somebody,” Alissa Madrigal told me when I visited the family’s home. “He and two other officers came right to our backyard. They never knocked on the front door – they just walked into the yard. Lund, who was the oldest of the three, stood off in the corner with his hand on his Taser the whole time, staring at Victor.”

Alissa’s name is on the lease to the home, and she tried to speak with the officers. This is in part because Victor, a retired professional baseball player from the Dominican Republic, still has occasional difficulty with English, and also because he has a deep, resonant voice that carries very well in the stillness of a late-summer evening. Alissa was also aware that Victor has a very negative opinion of the Idaho Falls Police Department, in large measure because of what he describes as routine harassment at their hands (such as a recent citation he received for driving without headlights – at about 7:00 on an August morning). But the officers repeatedly told Alissa that they wanted to speak to Victor, rather than to her.

“Victor has a loud voice, and since there were concerns about noise I wanted to be the one who interacted with the police,” Alissa told Pro Libertate. “But the officer who spoke with me kept saying, `I don’t want to talk to you, I want to talk to him’ – meaning Victor. I told them that we would turn down the music and be as quiet as possible. But it was obvious that the cops didn’t come to issue a citation. It seems that within minutes of arriving here they had decided that Victor was going to be arrested. And the older cop [Lund] had his hand on his Taser practically from the moment he walked into our backyard.”

The announcement that the Madrigals would receive a citation for disturbing the peace prompted Victor to unleash an admittedly vulgar expression to express his frustration. Rather than trying to maintain the peace and de-escalate the situation – which is how a peace officer would have responded – Lund treated Victor to a racially charged taunt.

“If you don’t like it, you know how to leave,” sneered Lund, a comment that was not merely unprofessional but an unambiguous provocation. Several of the guests criticized Lund’s remark, some of them pointing out that Madrigal is a U.S. citizen (he was naturalized in 2007) and had every right to be where he was.

At that point, Lund announced he was leaving, and Mr. Madrigal said he was glad to see him go. According to several witnesses I interviewed, it was after Lund had ended his investigative contact that he called for backup, removed his Taser from the over-burdened belt straining to contain his tax-fattened girth, and demanded that Madrigal show his ID. As Madrigal moved to comply Lund responded by bellowing that Madrigal was “under arrest.”

According to the official account, Lund and his comrades were obstructed by a “blockade” as they tried to follow Victor into the living room, and Dindo supposedly shoved Lund as he pursued his brother. A video of the incident documents that nobody obstructed the police when they illegally invaded the Madrigal residence, nor did Dindo – or anybody else- shove Officer Lund, who was the first through the door.

“I was inside the house, and too far away to touch Lund,” Dindo recounted to Pro Libertate. “I was shot in the back with the Taser, and hit the floor face-down. How could that have happened if I had been facing him and pushing him?”

There were more than a dozen guests – including several small children – at the Madrigal home at the time of the police riot. On his way inside the house, Lund made a threatening gesture to Sara Horne, a young mother holding a newborn baby in her lap. One witness recalled that Lund “made like he was going to back-hand” the terrified woman. Horne told me that Lund pointed his flashlight and Taser into her face.

Maria Madrigal, the brothers’ 79-year-old mother, had been sleeping before the police surged into the home. Summoned by loud noises, Maria came into the living room to find Dindo on the ground and Victor in handcuffs with a Taser in his face. Concerned for her sons’ safety yet displaying eerie composure, Maria repeatedly reached out to calm and reassure Victor and Dindo. One of the officers guarding Victor shoved Maria in the chest.

“Don’t push my mother!” exclaimed Victor, instinctively rising to his feet to defend. As he did so, his head made incidental contact with one of the officers assaulting him. That act would later be described as “battery on an officer.”

Letty Hernandez, a pregnant mother, was also shoved by an officer – most likely Lund – just before a Taser was fired a few inches from her face. As she was knocked to the floor, her abdomen struck the corner of a couch. After paramedics arrived, Letty was told that she should go to the hospital for an examination. To minimize expenses – since her family doesn’t have health insurance — she drove herself to the emergency room.

On the Monday following the police riot, Letty called the department to find out how the medical expenses would be dealt with. She was brusquely informed that she should be abjectly grateful that she wasn’t arrested, like her husband who had “interfered” with the police. Letty’s husband, Miguel, was not arrested that evening. Like their comrades elsewhere, police in Idaho Falls aren’t fastidious about such details.

The initial police contact – to investigate a noise complaint, recall – occurred at around 10:49 PM. Within about twenty minutes, the air was thick with shouting and screaming, and a fleet of about a dozen police cars had converged on the address. Lund’s attack on Dindo left the living room floor filled with shattered furniture. So in the interests of preserving the “peace,” Lund and his costumed buddies assaulted two unresisting men, committed felonious battery on a 79-year-old woman and a pregnant mother, destroyed property, terrorized a completely innocent next-door neighbor, and disrupted an entire city block.

Dindo was charged with resisting and obstructing an officer. Victor was likewise charged with resisting arrest, as well as battery on an officer. Their grim mugshots were prominently displayed on the local Sunday Evening News, along with a police-provided summary asserting that Victor “began yelling and swearing” the moment police arrived. The local ABC affiliate claimed that the brothers had been arrested “in a fight with police.”

“I didn’t struggle with the police at all,” Victor told Pro Libertate. “I was sitting on the couch with my hands behind my back, saying, `Here, go ahead’ — and you can see in the video that I’m not resisting. Dindo was facing away from the officer when he was tazed. The only time I didn’t cooperate was when one of them shoved my mother, and all I did was stand up and say, `Don’t push my mother.’”

Within a few days of the assault on their home, the Madrigals were able to post unedited video of most of the episode on-line. They were also able to get at least a portion of their story into the local press.

“We have a friend who contacted the Post-Register and persuaded them to send a reporter to come and interview us, as well as our neighbors,” Alissa explained to me.

“It was never that invasive,” said neighbor Chantal Meek, referring to the noise from the birthday party. “I’m 20 feet from where they were outside.” However, she did regard as “invasive” the actions of the two Idaho Falls police officers who barged into her home with their guns drawn after Lund had called for backup.

Amanda Saxton, another witness who was visiting a next-door neighbor on the night of the party, also told the Post-Register that she had her door open “and didn’t hear anything that would justify a noise complaint.” According to Saxton, “Victor came over and invited our kids over [to the party]. They seem nice.”

After the Post-Register published its report, Idaho Falls Police Chief Mark McBride demanded space on the opinion page to reiterate the discredited official account – and to traduce the Madrigal family by repeating unsubstantiated gossip as if it were actual evidence.

Chief McBride claimed that the “regular activities” at the Madrigal home include “loud music, yelling, shouting, arguing and fighting until late hours of the night all summer long” – something denied by both the family’s immediate neighbors, and the Madrigals themselves.

“We had three parties this summer, all of them for children’s birthdays,” Victor pointed out to me.

“I work two jobs, and so does Victor,” added Alissa. “I’m rarely home during the weekends, and during the weeknights we have no time for the kind of parties they claim go on here all the time.”

If those parties went on all summer long, why didn’t the police receive a complaint prior to August 31st? According to McBride, the neighbor who spoke to him “never reported any of these parties because of fear of retaliation.”

During my September 13 visit to the Madrigal home, the family hosted a large number of neighbor kids – happy, well-dressed, well-behaved children from good homes presided over by responsible parents who obviously would not send their children to a house filled with angry, violent people of the kind depicted in McBride’s dishonest little screed.

According to McBride, “officers have the authority to make an arrest for a public offense committed in their presence and to use the force necessary to affect [sic – he’s a police officer, after all, and therefore a stranger to literacy] the arrest. Running into one’s house or into a crowd does not prevent the arrest. People and things usually get knocked around when the arrest is made.”

What was the “public offense” that supposedly justified that armed incursion? Recall that Lund had said he was leaving before he returned to arrest Madrigal, who – according to every non-police witness present — was complying with the unjustified demand to produce ID. It wasafter he turned to leave that Lund called for backup and drew his Taser. All of this happened after Victor Madrigal, replying to Lund’s statement that he was going, said, in a conversational voice: “All right, then – go.”

Prior to this, Lund had made a deliberately antagonistic remark to Victor that had an unmistakable racial subtext. In an interview with the Post-Register McBride claimed: “There was [sic, again] no racial comments made in the video until they [the Madrigals and guests] brought it up.” Calling this assessment disingenuous is an act of tremendous generosity. Like his minion Clark Lund, Chief McBride is bright enough to recognize what it means to tell a large brown man with an exotic accent that he doesn’t belong in Idaho Falls.

“Idaho Falls police officers are not racist,” McBride insisted in his op-ed column. “We are biased against crime and disorder. We have a responsibility to the citizens of Idaho Falls to keep the community free from crime and disorder.”

“I don’t see why race wouldn’t be an issue with the police,” she told the Post-Register. Referring to Victor and Delosanto, Meek observed that they “are obviously not from Idaho. I think it was uncalled for.”

According to McBride, an official review board ruled that the actions of Lund and his comrades were appropriate. The board somehow reached that conclusion without interviewing any of the witnesses to the incident.

It is entirely possible that the actions of Lund and his comrades were not motivated by racial bigotry, but by a different form of tribalism — the shared conceit that as members of the punitive caste they are entitled to slap down impudent Mundanes for the grievous offense commonly called “contempt of cop.”

All Government Policies Succeed in the Long Run

By Robert Higgs

A crazy claim you are probably thinking after reading my title. After all, “failed policies” are a staple of discussions and debates about government actions in the United States. Everybody, regardless of political preferences, has a list of what he regards as the most glaringly failed policies. This way of looking at the matter, however, is all wrong.

People label a policy as a failure because it does not bring about its declared objective. For example, drug policies do not reduce drug use; educational policies do not educate children better; national-security policies do not make Americans more secure; and so forth. The mistake is to take seriously the announced policy objectives, to forget that virtually everything the government does is a fraud. The best way to document the government’s nearly unblemished record of policy success is to follow the money. With very little trouble, you will be able to follow the trail to the individuals and groups who benefit from the policy. Occasionally the true beneficiaries do not benefit in the form of augmented income or wealth, but in other forms of reward, yet the principle remains the same.

When I first studied economics and began to practice as an economist, back in the sixties and seventies, I learned how markets and the market system as a whole operate. With this understanding in mind, I was able to identify a number of reasons why a particular policy might fail: it might be based on insufficient or incorrect information; it might give rise to unintended consequences; it might receive inadequate funding for its implementation; it might be based on unsound theory or mistaken interpretation of historical experience; and so forth.

Analysts who approach the question of failed policies along these avenues can rest assured that they will never lack for new studies to perform and new measures to propose to legislators, regulators, administrators, and judges. For example, if government fiscal or monetary policy fails to stabilize the economy’s growth because it derives from unsound macroeconomic theory, then the analyst attempts to identify the ways in which the received theory is unsound and to formulate a sounder theory, on the basis of which a more successful policy may be carried out. This sort of back and forth between theoretical tinkering and policy appraisal fills many pages in mainstream economics journals.

But it’s all a waste of time insofar as the attainment of the ostensible policy objectives is concerned, because these objectives are not the policy-makers’ real objectives, but only the public rationales they use to disguise their true objective, which invariably is to bring about the enrichment, aggrandizement, and other benefit of the politically potent individuals and interest groups that pack the decisive punch in the policy-making process—for example, those who can most effectively threaten legislators with affirmative punishments or the withdrawal of financial support for the legislators’ reelection if the string pullers’ interests are not served.

Almost twenty years ago, I wrote an article on this subject called “The Myth of ‘Failed’ Policies,” commenting briefly on how seven different areas of important, obvious policy failure illustrate my thesis. Looking back at my 1995 article, I can say now that in each case the apparent “failure” and the actual success have only grown. In each case, much more money is being poured down the rat hole of a failed policy now than was being poured down it then—which is only to say that the American political process is at least as corrupt now as it was then, and probably even more so. Despite various surface changes in policy details, none of the ostensible “failures” has been repaired in the least, even though the apparent failure has become only more blatant and undeniable.

Many people, for good reason, have concluded that the surest test of whether a politician or public official is lying is to ask, Are his lips moving? An equally simple test may be proposed to determine whether a seemingly failed policy is actually a success for the movers and shakers of the political class. This test requires only that we ask, Does the policy remain in effect? If it does, we can be sure that it continues to serve the interests of those who are actually decisive in determining the sorts of policy the government establishes and implements. Now, as before, “failed” policies are a myth in regard to all policies that persist beyond the short run. The people who effectively run the government, whether from inside or outside the beast, do not run it for the purpose of hampering the attainment of their own interests; on the contrary. Everything else in the policy process is, as Macbeth would put it, “a tale told by an idiot [augmented by economists, lawyers, and public-relations flacks], full of sound and fury signifying nothing.”

France unveils new school 'secularism charter'

France unveiled its new “secularism charter” in publicly-funded schools on Monday in a move that has caused some tension within the country’s Muslim and other minority religious communities.

France on Monday unveiled a new charter designed to reinforce rules banning religion from schools which have been a recurring cause of tension with Muslims and other faiths.

The "Charter for Secularity in School," is to be displayed in poster form in every state-funded school in the country in a move pioneered by the Socialist government's education minister, Vincent Peillon.

The 15-point statement contains nothing new in legal terms.

Instead, Peillon says, it represents an attempt to promote better understanding, and more consistent enforcement, of long-established principles which have their roots in the anti-clericalism of the French revolution and the country's 1905 law enforcing a strict separation of church and state.

Peillon's initiative was greeted coolly by leaders of France's five million Muslims, some of whom see the aggressive promotion of secularity as an assault on their culture and traditions.

Recent years have seen a string of legal disputes arising from the exclusion from school of girls wearing headscarves in defiance of a 2004 law which prohibits the wearing of "ostentatious" religious symbols.

Dalil Boubakeur, the chairman of the French Muslim Council, said the charter's emphasis on that law and to the equality of girls and boys amounted to "allusions" to Islam which would trigger concern in the community.

"Ninety percent of Muslims are going to have the feeling they are being targeted by this charter," Boubakeur told AFP.

That interpretation was rejected by Peillon. "Secularity is about the equality of everyone in the Republic. There are those who think it is all about banning things. In fact it was what allows us to live together freely."

The charter starts out by emphasising that France "respects all faiths" and that the state is neutral in regard to them.

It goes on to explain, in child-friendly terms, that the absence of religion from schools affords pupils the conditions to forge their own personality, exercise free will and become citizens in an environment free from pressure or proselytising.

In practice, that means that teaching staff must never give any indication of their religious (or political) convictions during lessons and that pupils cannot use their faith as a reason to challenge the content of the national curriculum, the manner of teaching or the rules of the school.

The notion of the "Ecole laique" (secular school) as one of the cornerstones of the Republic and a guarantee of the universal right to the freedom of expression and thought is one that is cherished by France's intellectual elite.

Outside minority faith communities, it also enjoys strong support among the population.

"To me it's not right people coming to school with religious symbols," said 16-year-old Arthur Rivelois outside his Parisian Lycee. "Their faith is their business, it's nothing to do with the rest of us."

But critics wonder whether the model is suitable for modern-day, multicultural France and accuse the government of double standards.

They question whether a truly secular school system would allow Christmas trees or December visits by Santa Claus, and whether it would still observe holidays on Christian Saints days.

While the vast majority of school canteens dish up fish every Friday – in keeping with Roman Catholic tradition – any principal who provides halal meat for Muslim students risks incurring the wrath of militant secularists, whose cause is enthusiastically backed by the far-right, anti-immigration Front National.

Interpreting the rules correctly has proved a headache for school leaders.

Earlier this year a Muslim girl was excluded from her school after a headband and long skirt were deemed to constitute overtly religious garb. The exclusion was overturned on appeal and her parents are now suing the school for racial discrimination.

The legislation has also caused much anguish among France's 30,000 Sikhs, whose male children are required by their faith to cover their hair from an early age.

In practice, many primary schools have continued to allow younger Sikh boys to wear the Rumal, a handkerchief-type covering, but turbans are banned – a situation that effectively results in many Sikh teenagers giving up school earlier than they otherwise would.

Don't Cage My Speech! A Student Schools His College

CA School District Announces It's Doing Round-The-Clock Monitoring Of Its 13,000 Students' Social Media Activities

The Glendale School District in California is facing some backlash from the recent news that it has retained the services of Geo Listening to track its students' social media activity. The rationale behind the program is (of course) the students' safety.

After collecting information from students' posts on social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Twitter, Geo Listening will provide Glendale school officials with a daily report that categorizes posts by their frequency and how they relate to cyber-bullying, harm, hate, despair, substance abuse, vandalism and truancy.

Glendale Unified, which piloted the service at Hoover, Glendale and Crescenta Valley high schools last year, will pay the company $40,500 to monitor posts made by about 13,000 middle school and high school students at eight Glendale schools.

It would appear that the school district knew there would be some backlash, hence its decision to delay this announcement until the beginning of this school year, rather than "last year," when the program was actually put into place. (The date stated in this article may be incorrect. The founder of Geo Listening's LinkedIn page says the company formed in January -- unless "last year" means "last school year.") Administration officials are already on the defensive.

Glendale Unified Supt. Dick Sheehan said the service gives the district another opportunity to "go above and beyond" when dealing with students' safety.

"People are always looking to see what we're doing to ensure that their kids are safe. This just gives us another opportunity to ensure the kids are safe at all times," he said.

A rather overwrought paragraph on the company's About Us page attempts to sell fear and monitoring system at the same time, much as Superintendent Sheehan did in the above paragraph.

The Facts

Your students are crying for help. We have heard these cries of despair, and for help and attention, loud and clear from students themselves via their public postings on social networks. Many feel as though no one is listening, and they are falling away from societal connections. This trend can be reversed with more timely information that we can provide to the appropriate school staff.​

What Geo Listening appears to do is nothing more than aggregate public social media posts linked to either the students or school district. Geo Listening repeatedly points out that it doesn't "monitor email, SMS, MMS, phone calls, voicemails or unlock any privacy setting of a social network user."

This seems to be true, but not necessarily because Geo Listening is concerned about privacy. In its privacy policy, it breaks down exactly what it does monitor.

Geo Listening is a social media monitoring system that allows school districts to locate and process publicly available social media content. School districts use the Geo Listening Services to access and aggregate publicly available content on the Internet into regular reports and dashboards. Public content is collected and provided to school districts from the following websites:

·         Twitter;
·         Facebook;
·         Instagram;
·         Picasa;
·         Vine;
·         Flickr;
·         Ask.fm;
·         YouTube; and
·         Google+.

By monitoring only public posts on social media services, Geo Listening is able to provide the district with reports on 13,000 students. Without having access to a report, it's tough to say exactly what Geo Listening is turning over to the district. Here's what it says it's looking for:

Geo Listening provides social media monitoring services (“Geo Listening Services”) that enable school districts to locate and process publicly available information about their students for the purposes of combating bullying, cyber-bullying, hate and shaming activities, depression, harm and self harm, self hate and suicide, crime, vandalism, substance abuse and truancy.

There are some very broad terms in that list and without more information on how Geo Listening tracks or aggregates posts that fall into this very wide net, it looks as though the system is apt to produce a lot of false positives.

Then there's the question about how it searches for offending posts. Does it only run current students through its digital sifter or does it include anyone who lists a Glendale school on their profile? Does this dragnet also capture comments, tweets, etc. from non-students who interact with Glendale students? If a student interacts with a non-student's post that falls afoul of the guidelines, can they be punished? These are just a few of the many questions this monitoring service raises.

Beyond that, there's the fact that the service, as it's currently implemented, is incredibly easy to circumvent, something Geo Location's site even discusses in its privacy policy.

How to Opt Out

If you would like to ensure content that you post through a social media platform or profile is not monitored by Geo Listening, you should ensure that your social media posts are non-public. Geo Listening only collects publicly available information. Therefore, if a social media platform includes settings that allow you to designate your posts as private, doing so will ensure your posts will not be collected.

It would seem that stating this openly somewhat defeats the purpose of the program, but it does give Geo Listening a pretty strong defense against privacy violations. Geo Listening, however, seems fairly confident that most students won't "opt out," according to this answer in its FAQ.

Most users below the age of 25 do not utilize the available privacy settings because they are seeking to be recognized for their respective posts. They have chosen to post in the public domain in exchange for popularity and a decreasing ability to communicate effectively face to face.

Personally, I feel Geo Listening is underestimating the teens it's monitoring and the little dig it throws in during the last sentence is unseemly. Insulting the people you're spying on is the sort of thing that comes back to haunt you.

Geo Listening doesn't address one of the biggest flaws in its system anywhere in its statements: trolling. Once students realize their public posts are being monitored, they're likely to respond with deliberately objectionable statements in order to trigger a response from the school system. Once this starts happening with any frequency, it will be much harder to separate the legitimate problems from the fake, while also providing legitimate bullies with a handy excuse.

Then there's the fact that the monitoring makes no distinction between posts made at school (where the school should presumably have some sort of say, especially if these are made using school equipment) and those made outside of school, away from the school's jurisdiction. Some will argue that the type of behavior being monitored crosses both boundaries and therefore should be the concern of the school. But opening this door will lead to more monitoring of kids' (theoretically) private lives rather than what should actually be under the school's purview.

Also of some concern is Geo Listening's mobile app, which basically turns any phone possessed by a student, parent or school staff member into a "Report" button.

Geo Listening also provides a free mobile application to each respective school's parents, students and staff. This mobile application provides each stakeholder the ability to anonymously report incidents that are experienced or witnessed.

While having an easy way to collect anonymous tips on incidents of bullying is a theoretically good idea, in practice it often just becomes another avenue of abuse. The district may have thought it was offloading something it didn't have the time and resources for (monitoring students' social network use 24/7) to a third party, but the exploitable flaws in the system indicate a significant amount of investigative and followup work will be generated -- all of which will have to be handled by school administrators.

If administrators are sluggish in their response to reported issues, it will give the appearance that they only really care about appearing to do something, rather than actually doing something. And Geo Listening's rationale ("only public posts") for tracking students off-campus isn't really that much different than the FBI, NSA, et al abusing the Third Party Doctrine in order to hoover up huge amounts of metadata. Just because it's been created doesn't automatically mean it should be collected.

It's another bad administrative decision based on an impossibility (keeping children safe "all the time"), one that's likely to hurt the school in the long run. Unfortunately, this news has attracted the attention of another California school district, one which obviously hasn't read the comments attached to the dozens of stories about the monitoring system.

Burbank’s schools chief said she plans to keep an eye on neighboring Glendale Unified, who recently hired a Hermosa Beach-based company to monitor the public social networking accounts of its middle and high school students.

“We do not currently monitor students’ social media sites and we have not yet researched the program that Glendale Unified has implemented, but we will be gathering more information,” Burbank Unified Supt. Jan Britz said in an email Thursday.

No one "keeps an eye" on something like this unless they think it's a good idea, but just need some additional justification or a lower bidder. Officials don't "keep an eye" on ideas they've dismissed out of hand as being "terrible" or "not for us." The expectation of privacy as it pertains to public posts is very limited, but as diminished as it is, it's not completely unwarranted for the student body to feel they should be able to leave campus without the school following it around and reading its posts over its shoulder.

[More excellent posts on the same subject at Free Range Kids and Popehat.]

Obama's rogue state tramples over every law it demands others uphold

For 67 years the US has pursued its own interests at the expense of global justice – no wonder people are sceptical now

George Monbiot

You could almost pity these people. For 67 years successive US governments have resisted calls to reform the UN security council. They've defended a system which grants five nations a veto over world affairs, reducing all others to impotent spectators. They have abused the powers and trust with which they have been vested. They have collaborated with the other four permanent members (the UK, Russia, China and France) in a colonial carve-up, through which these nations can pursue their own corrupt interests at the expense of peace and global justice.

Eighty-three times the US has exercised its veto. On 42 of these occasions it has done so to prevent Israel's treatment of the Palestinians being censured. On the last occasion, 130 nations supported the resolution but Barack Obama spiked it. Though veto powers have been used less often since the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the US has exercised them 14 times in the interim (in 13 cases to shield Israel), while Russia has used them nine times. Increasingly the permanent members have used the threat of a veto to prevent a resolution being discussed. They have bullied the rest of the world into silence.

Through this tyrannical dispensation – created at a time when other nations were either broken or voiceless – the great warmongers of the past 60 years remain responsible for global peace. The biggest weapons traders are tasked with global disarmament. Those who trample international law control the administration of justice.

But now, as the veto powers of two permanent members (Russia and China) obstruct its attempt to pour petrol on another Middle Eastern fire, the US suddenly decides that the system is illegitimate. Obama says: "If we end up using the UN security council not as a means of enforcing international norms and international law, but rather as a barrier … then I think people rightly are going to be pretty skeptical about the system." Well, yes.

Never have Obama or his predecessors attempted a serious reform of this system. Never have they sought to replace a corrupt global oligarchy with a democratic body. Never do they lament this injustice – until they object to the outcome. The same goes for every aspect of global governance.

Obama warned last week that Syria's use of poisoned gas "threatens to unravel the international norm against chemical weapons embraced by 189 nations". Unravelling the international norm is the US president's job.

In 1997 the US agreed to decommission the 31,000 tonnes of sarin, VX, mustard gas and other agents it possessed within 10 years. In 2007 it requested the maximum extension of the deadline permitted by the Chemical Weapons Convention – five years. Again it failed to keep its promise, and in 2012 it claimed they would be gone by 2021. Russia yesterday urged Syria to place its chemical weapons under international control. Perhaps it should press the US to do the same.

In 1998 the Clinton administration pushed a law through Congress which forbade international weapons inspectors from taking samples of chemicals in the US and allowed the president to refuse unannounced inspections. In 2002 the Bush government forced the sacking of José Maurício Bustani, the director general of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. He had committed two unforgiveable crimes: seeking a rigorous inspection of US facilities; and pressing Saddam Hussein to sign the Chemical Weapons Convention, to help prevent the war George Bush was itching to wage.

The US used millions of gallons of chemical weapons in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. It also used them during its destruction of Falluja in 2004, then lied about it. The Reagan government helped Saddam Hussein to wage war with Iran in the 1980s while aware that he was using nerve and mustard gas. (The Bush administration then cited this deployment as an excuse to attack Iraq, 15 years later).

Smallpox has been eliminated from the human population, but two nations – the US and Russia – insist on keeping the pathogen in cold storage. They claim their purpose is to develop defences against possible biological weapons attack, but most experts in the field consider this to be nonsense. While raising concerns about each other's possession of the disease, they have worked together to bludgeon the other members of the World Health Organisation, which have pressed them to destroy their stocks.

In 2001 the New York Times reported that, without either Congressional oversight or a declaration to the Biological Weapons Convention, "the Pentagon has built a germ factory that could make enough lethal microbes to wipe out entire cities". The Pentagon claimed the purpose was defensive but, developed in contravention of international law, it didn't look good. The Bush government also sought to destroy the Biological Weapons Convention as an effective instrument by scuttling negotiations over the verification protocol required to make it work.

Looming over all this is the great unmentionable: the cover the US provides for Israel's weapons of mass destruction. It's not just that Israel – which refuses to ratify the Chemical Weapons Convention – has used white phosphorus as a weapon in Gaza (when deployed against people, phosphorus meets the convention's definition of "any chemical which through its chemical action on life processes can cause death, temporary incapacitation or permanent harm").

It's also that, as the Washington Post points out: "Syria's chemical weapons stockpile results from a never-acknowledged gentleman's agreement in the Middle East that as long as Israel had nuclear weapons, Syria's pursuit of chemical weapons would not attract much public acknowledgement or criticism." Israel has developed its nuclear arsenal in defiance of the non-proliferation treaty, and the US supports it in defiance of its own law, which forbids the disbursement of aid to a country with unauthorised weapons of mass destruction.

As for the norms of international law, let's remind ourselves where the US stands. It remains outside the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court, after declaring its citizens immune from prosecution. The crime of aggression it committed in Iraq – defined by the Nuremberg tribunal as "the supreme international crime" – goes not just unpunished but also unmentioned by anyone in government. The same applies to most of the subsidiary war crimes US troops committed during the invasion and occupation. Guantánamo Bay raises a finger to any notions of justice between nations.

None of this is to exonerate Bashar al-Assad's government – or its opponents – of a long series of hideous crimes, including the use of chemical weapons. Nor is it to suggest that there is an easy answer to the horrors in Syria.

But Obama's failure to be honest about his nation's record of destroying international norms and undermining international law, his myth-making about the role of the US in world affairs, and his one-sided interventions in the Middle East, all render the crisis in Syria even harder to resolve. Until there is some candour about past crimes and current injustices, until there is an effort to address the inequalities over which the US presides, everything it attempts – even if it doesn't involve guns and bombs – will stoke the cynicism and anger the president says he wants to quench.During his first inauguration speech Barack Obama promised to "set aside childish things". We all knew what he meant. He hasn't done it.

Philadelphia Family Loses Home Over A Single Drug Charge

By Radley Balko

Sam Leino was ultimately convicted on a single charge of possessing prescription drugs with intent to distribute. For that, his wife and their three children are homeless. Welcome to the wonderful world of asset forfeiture.

From the Philadelphia City Paper:

The Philadelphia DA brings 300 to 600 real-estate forfeiture cases per year, and thousands of cases against small amounts of cash seized in police stops that sometimes, but not always, result in arrests — together bringing nearly $6 million into its coffers annually.

In a series of reports for City Paper [“The Cash Machine,” Nov. 29, 2012] and ProPublica, this reporter has documented how the Philadelphia DA has made civil forfeiture into a vast, unaudited revenue stream, profiting from an upside-down legal process through which the DA has the power to bleed property owners dry of financial resources and imperil homeowners with minimal or no evidence of criminal wrongdoing.

Sandra Leino’s is just one of these stories — but one that casts in sharp relief the difference between the way the District Attorney’s Office describes the goals of its forfeiture programs to the public and the way those targeted by forfeiture experience it.

The Philadelphia DA characterizes its forfeiture program not as a revenue generator but as a public service: depriving criminals of the spoils of their crimes, abating “nuisance properties” that terrorize neighborhoods and, according to a recent statement, working to “establish responsible property ownership.” But Sandra Leino’s story paints a very different picture of how the DA uses forfeiture — less like a scalpel than a battering ram.

Because the owner of a piece of property -- be it land, cash, a car, or a home -- needn't even be charged to lose the property under forfeiture laws, the Leinos had already lost their home by the time Sam Leino was convicted on that single charge. (Despite the conviction, the family maintains that he possessed the drugs for personal use after an automobile accident.) In fact, the government can actually freeze your assets before any proceedings begin, making it difficult to hire legal representation for either your criminal trial, or to go to court to reclaim your property. In this case, the Philadelphia DA's office actually evicted Sandra Leino and her children from their home, rendering them homeless until a relative took them in.

The office of Philadelphia District Attorney R. Seth Williams eventually withdrew the claim on the Leino home, but only after the family had fallen behind on their mortgage payments and the bank foreclosed, meaning that the home was no longer theirs for the government to take from them.

According to the Institute for Justice, a libertarian public interest law firm that has been challenging asset forfeiture laws across the country, Pennsylvania's law is among the worst in America.

Law enforcement agencies can forfeit property based on a mere “preponderance of the evidence,” which is a much less stringent standard than the “beyond a reasonable doubt” standard used in criminal convictions.

Plus, property owners have to prove their innocence, reversing both the burden of proof and centuries of jurisprudence. In other words, in civil forfeiture proceedings, property owners actually have fewer protections than accused criminals.

Not only that, under Pennsylvania state law, police can keep 100 percent of all proceeds seized from civil forfeiture. In fact, the Philadelphia DA has raked in more than $6 million a year in civil forfeiture proceeds.

Most of this policing for profit is from cash seizures. But “the average amount of cash seized by Philadelphia police was $550 — hardly the proceeds of a Pablo Escobar or a Walter White.” No wonder a Pennsylvania judge has lambasted civil forfeiture as “little more than state-sanctioned theft.”

That kind of perverse incentive seems like an invitation for corruption.

And wouldn't you know it . . .

Four of the police officers who surveilled and arrested Sam Leino are among a group of six narcotics officers whose credibility has been effectively dismissed by the DA’s Office itself after allegations were made in open court that they were part of a drug-dealing ring within the Philadelphia Police Department.

The DA has been systematically dropping cases brought by these officers, including about 285 prosecutions mostly related to felony drug arrests. But Sam Leino’s conviction still stands. How many times the DA’s forfeiture unit has seized property based on the testimony of these officers is not presently clear.

According to the City Paper, Leino's conviction was based on police officers who testified they "observed Sam handing over small objects in exchange for money outside the house." It isn't clear if the specific officers dismissed for corruption were the same officers who testified against Leino. But it also isn't difficult to see how a policy that basically amounts to legalized theft could quickly undermine respect for the rule of law among the public servants we ask to enforce it.

The author of the City Paper piece, Isaiah Thompson, then points to more stories from Philadelphia in an article for the Pacific Standard.

In October 2009, police raided the house and charged her son, Andrew, then 24, with selling eight packets of crack cocaine to an undercover informant. (Upon entering the house, police reported finding unused packets, though not drugs, in a rear bedroom.) Rochelle Bing was not present and was not accused of a crime. Yet she soon received a frightening letter from the Philadelphia district attorney’s office. Because Andrew had sold the drugs from inside his mother’s house, a task force of law enforcement officials moved to seize Bing’s house. They filed a court claim, quickly approved, that gave Bing just 30 days to dissuade a judge from granting “a decree of forfeiture” that would give the DA’s office title to the property. Bing was devastated.

“For me to lose my home,” she recalled recently, “for them to take that from me, knowing I had grandchildren—that would have hurt me more than anything.” And so Bing resolved to do what whatever was necessary to keep the house.

She had no idea how long and how difficult that fight would be . . .

Other similar cases reviewed by ProPublica include an elderly widow, two sisters who shared a house, a waitress and hospital worker caring for two children, and a mother of three whose family wound up homeless. All stemmed from drug charges brought against a family member.

The cost of hiring an attorney to win the money back is well over that average seizure of $550. According to Thomas, one family was forced to go to court 17 times in an effort to win their house back. Fortunately, that particular family had an attorney who had agreed to take their case for free. But that attorney also told Thomas that had he charged them his regular rate, the bill would have exceeded the value of the house. And because these are civil proceedings, in many states indigent property owners have no right to a court-appointed attorney.

All of which means there's really no recourse for most people facing forfeiture of their property. Which may be why, according to author Isaiah Thompson, of the 2,000 claims filed in the city between 2008 and 2012, only 30 saw the property returned to its owner. To be fair, in a high percentage of those cases, that may well be because the owner was indeed guilty. But most people who lose property from civil asset forfeiture are never criminally charged. Civil asset forfeiture also provides a strong incentive to profile, pull over, and harass motorists, then violate their Fourth Amendment rights with car searches based on alerts from unreliable drug-sniffing dogs. (I've written here at HuffPost about police agencies who have used drug dog alerts to actually seize bail money brought in by the family of the accused.) It's one of the driving forces behind the mass militarization of America's police forces. It's really one of the most awful, destructive, unfair policies to be spit out by the modern drug war. And that's saying something. There's been a hell of a lot of competition.

Private pilots chafe at illegal searches

BY DAVID PATCH

Texas businessman Danny Zimmerman was preparing to fly a private airplane from his home airport in San Antonio to Houston — and hoping to get out before bad weather moved in — when a plainclothes officer walked up to him and flashed a badge.

“He asked to look around, checked in the baggage area,” Mr. Zimmerman said, adding that the encounter became uncomfortable when the pilot advised the lawman that he was carrying a pistol as allowed by a concealed-carry license.

“It was right after the Boston [Marathon] bombing, and the excuse was to check all the aircraft on the field,” he said. The delay ended up being about 20 minutes.

Mr. Zimmerman says he didn’t think much of it at the time, but three months later, he was at Rockport, Texas, after a flight with his two young children, his brother, and a nephew when four police vehicles surrounded the plane after he parked it near a fixed-base operator — an airport business that sells fuel and other aviation services.

The officers had been asked by Customs and Border Protection to intercept the plane and check it out, Mr. Zimmerman said, describing his own demeanor as “courteous, but still a little agitated.”

“They didn’t draw any weapons, and they didn’t seem to know what they were looking for,” Mr. Zimmerman recalled. “It was probably only five or 10 minutes. They didn’t ask to search the plane, and this time I wasn’t going to give them permission.”

Mr. Zimmerman isn’t the only private pilot who has reached that conclusion after being stopped unexpectedly and searched in recent months by law enforcement — searches conducted either by federal agents or by local officers whom the pilots believed to be working at the feds’ direction.

The Aircraft Owners’ and Pilots’ Association, which represents small-plane owners and operators across the United States, said it has received dozens of complaints from members “subjected to random searches” by Customs and Border Protection, local police, or both.

“None of the stops resulted in anything being found,” said Steve Hedges, a spokesman for the owners and pilots association.

“In most cases, the pilots were stopped and held while their planes were searched. … I’m told one pilot was asleep in a motel room with his wife when agents kicked the door down and took them back out to the airport to search his plane, only to find nothing there.”

Information sought

The pilots’ group has filed freedom-of-information requests for documentation about the searches, but Mr. Hedges said the association has been told it would take at least six months to get a response — if pertinent records even can be found.

In a blog published last month by its editor, Robert Goyer, Flying magazine reported extensively on email and telephone conversations with an unnamed “law enforcement source … who is knowledgeable about aviation matters” who described his 2009 training to participate in a federal drug interdiction program targeting private pilots.

Flying’s source said he was taught that pilots were to be treated as though they had no right to refuse the search.

“What they taught law enforcement officers and agents was that all aircraft can be detained since they fall under the … authority of the FAA [Federal Aviation Administration],” Mr. Goyer quoted the source. “This, in effect, gives them complete search authority of any aircraft.”

Instructors conceded, however, the searches’ success rate was expected to be low but yield “a big bite” when they succeeded, the source told the magazine editor.

Flying said neither Customs and Border Protection nor Homeland Security representatives had responded to its requests to confirm or comment on that account.

In response to an inquiry from The Blade, Jenny L. Burke, branch chief of Customs’ media relations division, issued a statement:

“CBP’s primary mission is to protect the American public while facilitating lawful travel and trade. This includes ensuring that all persons and cargo enter the U.S. legally and safely through official ports of entry, preventing the illegal entry into the U.S. of persons and contraband at and between POEs [points of entry], ensuring the safe and efficient flow of commerce into the United States, and enforcing trade and tariff laws and regulations.

“We have deployed a multilayered, risk-based approach to enhance the security of our borders while facilitating lawful travel and trade.”

Ms. Burke did not respond to a follow-up request for explanation of how stopping and inspecting aircraft that have not crossed international borders is consistent with that mission.

In a separate letter to the owners and pilots association, Thomas S. Winkowski, the acting commissioner of Customs and Border Protection, said the agency has authority “to inspect a pilot’s operating certificate and related aircraft documents” on the basis of federal code governing the licensing of pilots and registration of aircraft.

“In the course of conducting a pilot certificate inspection, facts may arise meriting further investigation or search to the extent authorized under the Constitution and consistent with federal law,” Mr. Winkowski wrote. “Each interaction and event must be evaluated independently based on the facts present at the time of the encounter.”

Such searches, he continued, could include a “limited search” of a person if there is “reasonable suspicion” the person is armed and dangerous; a “protective sweep based on reasonable suspicion that a person is hidden who intends to impede or harm the law enforcement officer,” or a search of the vehicle “based on probable cause that contraband or evidence is onboard the aircraft.”

Cause disputed

The owners and pilots association said that all of the members who have made reports to it — 42 confirmed as of Friday — disputed that any probable cause or reasonable suspicion existed for the searches conducted on their planes. None of the pilots had crossed a U.S. border during a recent flight.

Melissa Rudinger, the association’s senior vice president of government affairs, said one search involved a law officer who removed an “inspection plate” from an aircraft in order to peer inside its structure. That, she said, is “something they’re really not supposed to do,” as those portals are intended only for access by qualified mechanics.

Otherwise, she said, the searches did not include any teardown or dismantling of airplanes.

The National Association of Business Aviation, which represents corporate aircraft operators and owners, said it had received no complaints from its members about improper searches.

The owners and pilots association said it was not aware of any pilots from the Toledo area being involved in any protested searches.

Staff at fixed-base operator companies at Toledo’s airports also said they were not aware of any such searches involving local pilots.

Scott Trumbull, the general manager at Suburban Aviation in Whiteford Township, said he believed some pilots there might be unhappy with federal law enforcement in general, but declined to refer any for comment and predicted none would speak for fear of retaliation.

David Brodsky said he and an uncle flew in March in his uncle’s plane from Concord, Calif., to Boonville, Mo., near Mr. Brodsky’s home in Columbia, Mo. The trip included a fuel stop in Pueblo, Colo.

Upon arrival in Boonville, he said, a police officer came over to the plane.

“I didn’t really think much of it,” Mr. Brodsky recalled. “But all of a sudden, four unmarked cars came out of nowhere and surrounded the airplane.”

The local police reported having received a call from the Border Patrol that “we were under suspicion of transporting large amounts of marijuana,” he said.

The only thing that could have remotely suggested the flight might be involved with drugs, Mr. Brodsky said, was that it originated in California.

Mr. Brodsky said the police started asking what he considered to be “stupid questions,” such as asking why anyone would have reported him if he weren’t up to something.

Having heard through owners and the pilots association about other pilots’ experiences, Mr. Brodsky said he described those reports to the officers.

The pilot said he asked if he was being formally detained, and the officers said he wasn’t, so he told them he needed to put the plane away.

No search was performed.

“They think people are flying pot out of California,” Mr. Brodsky said. “They’re casting a wide net and hoping to catch something — and trampling people’s civil rights in the process.”

Mr. Zimmerman said that during both of his police encounters, those officers, too, mentioned they suspected the plane “had been involved in drug trafficking.”

But the circumstances of his travels, he said, made that highly unlikely: Mr. Zimmerman flies from a major, controlled airport, never makes private flights out of the country, and habitually files flight plans from which he doesn’t deviate.

Air-traffic controllers “knew who I was and where I was going.”

The plane involved was on a “dry lease,” with others having access to it, but its flight logs and engine hours were inconsistent with any unsavory activity, Mr. Zimmerman said.

The pilot said he intends to “comply, be courteous” with future lawman requests, but won’t consent to any searches.

“At that point, I’ll get legal counsel if they do,” he said.

“I don’t think there’s any reason why a U.S. citizen should be searched, or ask to search, unless they [law enforcement] have a warrant or probable cause,” he said.

Gabriel Silverstein, a national land developer from New York who also professes to fly on flight plans as standard procedure, said the Iowa state troopers who detained him in Iowa City this spring were more blatant.

“It was, ‘We are inspecting your plane,’ not, ‘May we search your plane?’ ” Mr. Silverstein said.

Later in the two-hour encounter, he said, one of the lawmen advised him to confess to possessing “a little personal-use dope and it’ll be all over and easy.”

Mr. Silverstein said he was hardly about to make such a confession, considering that he refrains from drinking coffee, much less anything illegal.

The Iowa City stop was the second for him in four days. Mr. Silverstein also had been visited by two Customs agents in Hobart, Okla., during a fuel stop on the outbound leg of a business trip from New Jersey to California and back with his husband.

They checked his paperwork and quickly inspected his baggage while he fueled the plane, he said.

His flight home had included a fuel stop in Colorado before the stop in Iowa City.

Mr. Silverstein said the Colorado stop seemed to be of particular interest to the agents because that state has recently liberalized its marijuana laws.

Terror fight

As a New Yorker, Mr. Silverstein said he believes in a strong counterterrorism effort, but in this instance the authorities have overstepped their bounds.

It has now been nearly 12 years since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, he said, but law enforcement’s attitude has become, “We’re still going to use that to have unrestrained, undocumented authority to do whatever we want to.”

The searches, Mr. Silverstein said, were “a pretty clear and blatant violation of the Fourth Amendment,” though he considers other pilots’ experiences, about which he has since heard after publicizing his own, to be “far more disturbing.”

He likened the campaign to the “stop-and-frisk” tactics the New York Police Department has used during the past decade to check pedestrians for weapons or drugs — a practice a U.S. district court judge ruled earlier this month is unconstitutional, although city officials have vowed to appeal.

“They’re actually ruining their own case” against actual criminals by establishing a pattern of questionable behavior, Mr. Silverstein said.

Mr. Brodsky said the airplane searches suggest to him a law-enforcement apparatus that is losing its bearings.

“When they got all this Homeland Security money, well, there are only so many terrorists out there to fight,” he said, so it was predictable that it “would be turned on our own citizens.”