Their Crime? Breathing While Muslim
"When a man who is honestly mistaken hears the truth, he will either quit being mistaken or cease to be honest!" -- Source Unknown
60 Minutes - Guitly Until Proven - on the crimes of Ashcroft's Injustice Department post 9/11.
More than a thousand people were detained as suspected terrorists after 9/11, and none has been charged with being a terrorist so far. Three such detainees tell correspondent Bob Simon their stories.I sent (via snail mail) the following letter to 60 Minutes:
Hady Omar came to the United States from Egypt three and a half years ago. He lives in Arkansas with his wife Candy, an Arkansas native, and their daughter Jasmine.
He's never been charged with any criminal offense, but he says he was held in custody in a maximum-security prison for 73 days because he is a Muslim.
Thank you for broadcasting "Guilty Until Proven".
John Ashcroft and company continue their post-9/11 push to eliminate our civil rights, rights which are possessed by all U.S. residents, citizen or not.
A class action lawsuit may help the victims, but at the expense of we the tax slaves. Mr. Ashcroft and everyone in the Justice Department who was part of imprisoning anyone without trial should be brought before a federal grand jury to consider an indictment under 18 USC 242 for the crime of deprivation of rights under color of law.
Maybe a year or ten in Club Fed will teach them to honor their oaths to protect and defend the Constitution.
William Stone, III at The Libertarian Enterprise - Criminal Justice - Mr. Stone uses the recent likely vehicular manslaughter of a motorcycle rider by a corrupt former South Dakota congress critter to extol the virtues of justice "in a free society in which individuals self-govern guided by the Zero Aggression Principle." (The motorcycle rider is dead. Whether the alleged tyrant should be indicted for manslaughter is, or should be, the decision of a grand jury). [tle]
Regardless, in a free society, Janklow need not worry about being raped and killed in prison. A free society is disinterested in exacting revenge or punishing force initiators. Rather, a free society exacts restitution to return a victim to the state he was in prior to the initiation of force.
Should Janklow fail to attempt to provide restitution to his victim, a free society would employ a form of "excommunication." Bereft of immoral laws that require individuals to associate with one another, laws that manufacture crimes in which there are no victims, and crimes designed simply to regulate behavior, the number of force initiators becomes a very small group. The overwhelming majority are individuals who have initiated force by accident or, like Janklow, through negligence. Intentional force initiators will be a dying breed -- literally. As Robert A. Heinlein noted, an armed society is a polite society: without immoral laws that disarm the average individual (gun control laws), most sociopaths will find honest work rather than risk death. Those few who can't control their impulses will eventually be killed by an intended victim.
Vin Suprynowicz at The Las Vegas Review-Journal - We have succeeded in passing laws ... - Vin comments on some mail he received about child-safety "laws". I'm with him. If people want to recommend safe ways to travel with my child, good for them. If they pass laws to put me in jail if I decide to secure my children differently, hang 'em.
Who in the heck employs people called "Certified Child Passenger Safety Technicians," anyway? Why do I suspect that once again we're dealing here with people being subsidized with OUR taxes to lobby OUR legislatures to pass laws which will get US handcuffed and jailed for making our OWN educated judgments about what's the best way to look after OUR kids?
Ron Paul's Texas Straight Talk - Trust Us, We're the Government - Dr. Paul chimes in on Herr Ashcroft's speaking tour.
Attorney General John Ashcroft has embarked on a bizarre promotional tour to counter growing public opposition to the Patriot Act. The administration clearly is worried by recent votes in Congress to limit the scope of the Act, votes that reflect the willingness of even GOP loyalists to buck the president on the issue. So Mr. Ashcroft is visiting several cities to give a stump speech that essentially says this: Trust us- we're the government, and we say the Patriot Act does not threaten civil liberties.
But the attorney general misses the point. Government assurances are not good enough in a free society. The overwhelming burden must always be placed on government to justify any new encroachment on our liberty. Now that the emotions of September 11th have cooled, the American people are less willing to blindly accept terrorism as an excuse for expanding federal surveillance powers.
Furthermore, Mr. Ashcroft is an administrator, not a legislator. It is not his job to write laws or say what the law should be. His job is to execute the laws passed by Congress. It is not his place to chide Congress or the American people for not supporting his viewpoint. He certainly should not be spending taxpayer money to lobby for his political positions.
PENGON/Anti-Apartheid Wall Campaign Press Release via Rense.com - Israel Destroys Entire Commercial Market In One Day - 100 shops and 5 homes destroyed by 15 bulldozers. Photos here. [whatreallyhappened]
The Anti-Apartheid Wall Campaign emphatically reiterates that this act is a crime and calls for the worldwide declaration to Stop the Wall!
The Shootists - John Taffin's Letter that Started the Shootists' Holiday - from way back in 1985. Mr. Taffin sent a letter to 11 fellow sixgunners asking them to choose two handguns for a fictional gathering with unknown events. This page contains that letter and his story from The Sixgunner including their answers and an account of the fictional gathering. They have held regular real gatherings since then. Photos are available for this year and last year. [gunblast]
Gun Week has part of their content on-line. They also have a listing of gun shows, a few links, and archives of their magazine. You can subscribe to the dead trees version for $35/year. Added to my links page in the "Weekly" column of the "News" section.
Will Cox at Gun Week - Modern Semi-Auto Rifles Do Deliver Long-Range Accuracy - Mr. Cox got an Armalite AR-10T in .308 and fired over 500 rounds through it over several months. He liked it.
I downloaded and installed the latest version of Freenet (0.5). As usual, it's a neat idea, and there is evidence of content out there, but it's too slow to use.
