End the War on Freedom

# Lisa Guliani at Coalition for Free Thought in Media Yahoo Group - Rick Stanley RAIDED in Colorado by Federal Agents - Below is the article in its entirety. You can listen to the WING TV interview here or download it here (44.5 megs). Requires Real Player. The server was very slow for me last night, only about 7 kbytes/second, so it took me two hours to download, and my first copy was bad, so I had to do it again (while I slept). It's an interview with Victor Thorn and Lisa Guliani as talking heads on the video and Rick on the phone. I sampled the audio track and put it up as seven files here. Each file is about 3 minutes in length and 360K in size, meaning 2K/second, so it should play over a modem. No sign of this story at stanley2002.org, likely because Rick's computers were in his office when the raid happened. At least the site is still up, so we can expect updates from another computer soon. [smith2004]

From: Lisa Guliani <wingedpiper@y...>
Date: Wed Jun 9, 2004 4:44 pm
Subject: Rick Stanley RAIDED in Colorado by Federal Agents

Our friend and fellow activist, Rick Stanley, (former Libertarian Senatorial candidate for the state of Colorado) was lured away from his business at approx. 9:15 a.m. this morning by a federal agent posing as a customer.

At 9:30 a.m., a multitude of law enforcement agents swarmed Stanley's business and seized control of the property.

These agents included: Denver SWAT Team, U.S. Marshals, the FBI, IRS and the Joint Terrorist Task Force. They had a warrant and are still at the property, seizing all Rick's records, his computers, etc.

They are not allowing him to enter the property or answer his telephone. Just minutes prior to his telephone call to me earlier this afternoon, I had called Rick Stanley's business and left a couple of messages on his machine. These were received by FEDS.

This latest incident supposedly revolved around his issues with the IRS, yet look at all the law enforcement agents involved. Please note: Rick Stanley has not had a hearing, yet these sob's managed to get a warrant and illegally enter his property.

When Rick called me today, he asked me to contact several people on his behalf, since his phone numbers are in the hands of the government and he cannot access them.

Please watch today's show. In spite of this raid-in-progress while we filmed/recorded, Rick still did the guest spot on our program.

He has some very important things to say to Americans everywhere.

I hope you'll catch the show and PLEASE stand up and support your fellow citizens who are being seriously SCREWED.

These things are allowed to continue because Americans do not stand up and FIGHT them TOGETHER.

Don't miss it - it's IMPORTANT.

Should be online by 5:30.... http://www.wingtv.net.

thanks, everyone.

Lisa

# Elena Lappin at Guardian Unlimited - Welcome to America - another journalist forgets to get an I-Visa before visiting the U.S. and is treated like dirt by the INS goons. [root]

Since September 11 2001, any traveller to the US is treated as a potential security risk. The Patriot Act, introduced 45 days after 9/11, contains a chapter on Protecting The Border, with a detailed section on Enhanced Immigration Provision, in which the paragraph on Visa Security And Integrity follows those relating to protection against terrorism. In this spirit, the immigration and naturalisation service has been placed, since March 2003, under the jurisdiction of the new department of homeland security. One of its innovations was to revive a law that had been dormant since 1952, requiring journalists to apply for a special visa, known as I-visa, when visiting the US for professional reasons. Somewhere along the way, in the process of trying to develop a foolproof system of protecting itself against genuine threats, the US has lost the ability to distinguish between friend and foe. The price this powerful country is paying for living in fear is the price of its civil liberties.

...

"Yes, I understand," I sighed, and signed the form. The instant faxed response was an official, final refusal to enter the US for not having the appropriate visa. I'd have to go back to London to apply for it.

At this moment, the absurd but almost friendly banter between these men and myself underwent a sudden transformation. Their tone hardened as they said that their "rules" demanded that they now search my luggage. Before I could approach to observe them doing this, the officer who had originally referred me to his supervisor was unzipping my suitcase and rummaging inside. For the first time, I raised my voice: "How dare you touch my private things?"

"How dare you treat an American officer with disrespect?" he shouted back, indignantly. "Believe me, we have treated you with much more respect than other people. You should go to places like Iran, you'd see a big difference." The irony is that it is only "countries like Iran" (for example, Cuba, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Zimbabwe) that have a visa requirement for journalists. It is unheard of in open societies, and, in spite of now being enforced in the US, is still so obscure that most journalists are not familiar with it. Thirteen foreign journalists were detained and deported from the US last year, 12 of them from LAX.

...

As documented by Reporters Without Borders and by the American Society of Newspaper Editors (Asne) in letters to Colin Powell and Tom Ridge, cases such as mine are part of a systemic policy of harassing media representatives from 27 friendly countries whose citizens - not journalists! - can travel to the US without a visa, for 90 days. According to Asne, this policy "could lead to a degradation of the atmosphere of mutual trust that has traditionally been extended professional journalists in these nations". Asne requested that the state department put pressure on customs and immigration to "repair the injustice that has been visited upon our colleagues". Someone must have listened, because the press office at the department of homeland security recently issued a memo announcing that, although the I-visa is still needed (and I've just received mine), new guidelines now give the "Port Directors leeway when it comes to allowing journalists to enter the US who are clearly no threat to our security". Well, fine, but doesn't that imply some journalists are a threat?

Maybe we are. During my surreal interlude at LAX, I told the officer taking my fingerprints that I would be writing about it all. "No doubt," he snorted. "And anything you'll write won't be the truth."

# The Independent (UK) - Lockdown on Sea Island - a report on the G8 summit, which started on Tuesday in Sea Island, Georgia. Most of the locals have left. [root]

St Simons, however, has also traditionally attracted a Bohemian fringe of artists and writers. At Beachview Books, a gathering place for embattled, vociferous liberals, attitudes are is less gung-ho. Larry, editor of The Great Speckled Seagull, a "semi-underground" periodical, is a gentle radical who wears a cowboy hat with a feather in it and carves weirdly beautiful faces in the island's trees. He has just heard a rumour that 2,000 body bags have been delivered to the clapboard Chamber of Commerce across the road from the bookstore. This intelligence is passed around like a joint at a fortysomething party, a delicious whiff of recreational danger. Five minutes later, one of the island's fire chiefs drops by, fresh from a briefing. It's not a rumour. The body bags are here, together with a refrigerated lorry to take away the corpses. "I liked it better when it was a rumour," says Larry.

The fire chief is glad to take the weight off his feet and shoot the breeze. All leave at the island's 13 fire stations has been cancelled for the last three weeks. Firefighters, who double on St Simons as the ambulance service, have received intensive training in dealing with "biological, chemical and explosive emergencies". Public and official nervousness was not helped by the announcement, last week, of a planned al-Qa'ida attack on "significant events in the US", but the fire chief considers they've got things taped. He reckons you'd need a crop duster to deliver significant amounts of chemical/biological weapons and all air traffic, apart from government aircraft and the three daily commercial flights from Atlanta, has been suspended for the duration of the summit. Just in case, there are Patriot missiles parked on the beach, ready to shoot suspects out of the sky. The fire chief is someone you'd want around in a crisis, a big, comfortable man who manages to make Patriot missiles sound kinda friendly, but not all his inside information is so reassuring. The firefighters, he confides, will be issued with a biological antidote for their personal use. There won't be any antidote for members of the public, but at least the firemen will be around to shovel up the remains and stop disease spreading in the 90-degree heat.

# Trigger Finger - The Canaries Are Dying - a different take on the armored bulldozer driver in Colorado. [geekwitha.45]

# Murray N. Rothbard at LewRockwell.com - The Reagan Phenomenon - written during Raygun's first term, this piece exposes his habit of saying one thing while the government he claimed to be leading did exactly the opposite. [lew]

But Reagan is even more curious a phenomenon. For he has the astounding capacity, not just to continue the old rhetoric, but to levitate above the action, to act as if he is not sitting in the Oval Office at all, but is somehow still out there giving his little semi-libertarian, semi-warmongering homilies, using his 3x5 cards with all the fake little anecdotes that he has collected from dumbright sources over the decades. And somehow he is able to convince the public that he is not really in the White House, doing monstrous things as Head Honcho of the most powerful State apparatus in the world; but that he is still outside the State, a private citizen inveighing and leading a crusade against Big Government.

And so it goes -- a winning combination that can only become unraveled in the unlikely event that the conservative masses realize they have been had, and "go on strike" and stop voting for Reagan. And what of the man himself? What explains him? There are only two logical explanations of the Reagan phenomenon. Either he is a total cretin, a dimwit who really believes in his own lies and contradictions. Or, he is a consummate and conniving politician, the shrewdest manipulator of public opinion since his hero FDR. Or is he some subtle combination of both? In any case, Reagan continues to enjoy enormous personal popularity, the nice guy and the soothing-syrup voice topped by that truly odious jaunty smirk of self-satisfaction, that smile that says that he is objectively lovable and that the public adulation is only his due.

# Coolsoft - Power MP3 Recorder records sound direct to MP3. It was the one I liked best of those I tried last night. I used it to record the audio track of the Real Video presentation of the Rick Stanley interview above. Unfortunately, you have to pay for it to take away the three minute recording limitation. $19.95 for the registration code by email. They also have a nice looking FTP program, though I haven't tried it yet for anything big, which is where lots of GUI FTP programs fail.

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