Our Awful Situation

Archive for the ‘Civil Rights’ Category

For Your Forth of July Enjoyment…Stories of Gun Confiscation After Hurricane Katrina

Posted by Charlie Kilo on July 3rd, 2008

Land of the free…

The gun-rights fight isn’t over

Posted by Charlie Kilo on June 28th, 2008

Leading gun-control advocates, such as the Brady Center, are already spinning Heller as a victory: They claim the gun-rights lobby’s strength is based on stoking the public’s slippery-slope fears that any gun regulation is a forerunner to a total ban. With that ban now impossible, gun-control advocates believe they’ll have more ability to restrict sales, possession and carrying in ways short of prohibition.

More FLDS fallout - will this ever get resolved?

Posted by Charlie Kilo on May 25th, 2008

Lawyers cry foul in FLDS seizures:

Many lawyers for children and parents in a Texas polygamist sect are boiling mad about the growing number of legal errors they claim the state has made in seizing and holding more than 460 children.

From the way officials handled an April anonymous phone tip about a sexually abused girl allegedly at the sect’s ranch, the seizure of the children, the court hearings and the questioning of children and parents alike, many attorneys are crying foul.

The lawyers breathed a slight sigh of relief Thursday when some of their cries seemed answered by an Austin appeals court. The 3rd Court of Appeals said the state had no right to seize most of the children and the local trial judge incorrectly left them in the custody of Child Protective Services.

But by Friday, CPS and its umbrella agency asked the Texas Supreme Court to overturn the appeals court decision and leave the children where they are — in foster homes and camps around the state, most far from their home at the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints’ Yearning for Zion Ranch in West Texas.

“They have created chaos. They don’t know what to do. This case has holes in it the size of the Grand Canyon,” said Laura Shockley, a Dallas family law specialist with six clients in the case. “There is no way to fix this.”

She and other lawyers say some of the seized people, especially those who it turns out are 18 or older, have potent federal civil rights lawsuits against the state.

And from the “cry me a river” files - FLDS sect case hits CPS staff in wallet:

The strain of handling the huge child custody case involving a polygamous sect in West Texas is trickling down through the ranks of Child Protective Services caseworkers who are pinching pennies while waiting for the state to repay them for overdue travel expenses.

Officials from the Texas Department of Family Protective Services say the agency is struggling to reduce a growing backlog in reimbursement requests for out-of-pocket expenses from caseworkers in the field who say the skyrocketing price of gasoline is hampering their ability to do their jobs.

Darrell Azar, a spokesman for the agency that oversees Child Protective Services and Adult Protective Services, blamed the backlog in part on the ongoing operations at the West Texas polygamist ranch where more than 460 children have been taken into state custody. But he also said the agency will soon hire an additional auditor and as many as eight temporary employees to process the avalanche of expense reports being filed not only from the West Texas operations but also from caseworkers statewide.

Does anyone really care if some bureaucrat can’t get their money back from expense incurred during an illegal police action? If they’re complaining now just wait until they’re personally named in a civil rights lawsuit.

Breaking: Texas wrongly seized sect children

Posted by Charlie Kilo on May 22nd, 2008

Appeals court ruling applies to 48 mothers from polygamist sect:

A state appellate court ruled Thursday that child welfare officials had no right to seize hundreds of children from a polygamist sect’s ranch on April 3.

It was unclear how many children were affected by the ruling. The state took 464 children into custody, but Thursday’s ruling directly applied to the children of 48 sect mothers represented by the Texas Rio Grande Legal Aide, said Cynthia Martinez of the agency.

The Third Court of Appeals in Austin ruled that the grounds for removing the children were “legally and factually insufficient” under Texas law. The ruling did not immediately order the return of the children.

Child Theft, “Concentration Camps”: It’s Happening Here

Posted by Charlie Kilo on May 15th, 2008

If it can happen to the FLDS, it can happen to anyone…

Even before Dan Jessop’s son was born, the State had already made a proprietary claim to him because of the supposed sins of his parents.

I say “sins” because as of yet, neither 24-year-old Dan Jessop, Sr., nor his 22-year-old wife Louisa, has been charged with a crime.

This didn’t prevent the instrument of totalitarian malice called the Texas Department of Child Protective Services from trying to seize control over both the child and his mother as soon as delivery was accomplished.

It is definitely fascism when it happens to you

Posted by Charlie Kilo on May 15th, 2008

This editor visited the USSR and draconian nations such as Paul Kagame’s Rwanda, Yoweri Museveni’s Uganda, Hun Sen’s Cambodia, the former military junta’s Thailand, surveillance society Singapore, and Muslim monarchy Brunei Darussalam. Nothing compares to what occurred at Washington National Airport. It is yet another sign of the fact that the United States has entered a phase of fascist control. There’s only one question that remains: Is the slide reversible?

In Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff’s world of an “Israelized” America, the terms SPOT (Screening Passengers by Observation Technique) and BDO (Behavior Detection Officer) are the new acronyms of Stasi-like control of the American citizenry by a government that treats anyone as a suspicious person in the same manner that Israel mistreats its own Arab citizens and Palestinians.

Sunday, this editor and his colleague faced the Chertoffian menace at Washington’s Reagan National Airport while heading to the gate to board a flight to Houston.

It is now clear from a review of the events that unfolded that I was pre-selected for an intensive search and battery of questions even before arriving in line for the security screening. A Transportation Security Administration (TSA) screener was overheard saying, “the guy with the beard.” Since I was the only person in line who also had a beard, it was evident that a red flag had earlier been raised.

What followed, was worse than anything I had previously encountered while leaving Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion Airport, itself a revolting display of ingratitude to citizens of the country that bankrolls Israel, or the Israeli-run screening process at Amsterdam’s Schipol Airport.

First, I was instructed to enter a glass isolation chamber and point out my belongings that were exiting the X-ray machine. Anyone with claustrophobia would really enjoy being placed in such a chamber and have to speak to the screener through small holes in the glass.

I was then led to an area where all my carry-on bags were emptied. I was also forced to empty my pockets of everything. A bevy of screeners then proceeded to go through my wallet examining everything: cash, credit cards, VA medical benefits card, National Press Club card, voter’s registration card, and driver’s license. Then came an examination of my press credentials and related IDs: Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE) card, Society of Professional Journalists card, National Archives research card, Library of Congress card, three press credentials, and membership card in Association for Intelligence Officers (AFIO).

In a blatant violation of the First and Fourth Amendments, my reporter’s notebooks, containing names of contacts in Houston and around the world were paged through by the screeners. Another screener asked if I minded being probed in “certain private areas.” He then asked if I’d like the examination to be conducted in private. I replied, “No, let everyone see this.” He then proceeded to examine my groin area.

Then came the battery of questions.

Feds to Collect Millions of DNA Profiles Yearly, Stay Out if You Can

Posted by Charlie Kilo on May 13th, 2008

Sorry, I know I’ve used this line before but its a “brave new world”, ur…maybe its 1984…or Minority Report…

The feds will soon be collecting about one million DNA samples a year under a new program that lets federal agents collect cheek swabs from citizens merely arrested for any federal crime or from any non-citizen detained by federal agents — including visitors to the country who have visas.

The intent is build a massive database of DNA samples (.pdf) that police can use to catch rapists and murderers, but even the innocent should fear being in the database, due to the vagaries of how cold case DNA searches can easily pinpoint an innocent person.

Thanks to an amendment in the Violence Against Women Act of 2005 that was sponsored by Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Arizona), the feds now have the authority to immediately take DNA from any arrestee or ‘detained’ non-citizen and immediately upload it to the FBI’s CODIS database. That database is currently fed by federal law enforcement agencies and all 50 states, a few of which collect and upload DNA samples from people arrested, but not convicted of a crime.

ACLU weighs in on FLDS raid

Posted by Charlie Kilo on May 7th, 2008

What! I’m shocked, shocked that it took the ACLU this long to weigh in:

The American Civil Liberties Union said it has “serious concerns” about the way the government is handling the massive child custody case over the Fundamentalist LDS Church’s YFZ Ranch.

“The ACLU has serious concerns that the state’s actions so far have not adequately protected the fundamental rights at stake,” the national organization said in a statement recently posted on its Web site.

The ACLU said children have a right not to be abused or forced into marriages by their parents or anyone else, parents have a constitutionally protected right to free exercise of religion and to raise their children in their faith, as well as a fundamental right to due process of the law.

“Children may not be separated from their parents based solely on the state’s disagreement with a group’s thoughts or beliefs, religious or otherwise,” the ACLU said.

The civil rights group said it is concerned about Texas authorities’ justification for placing 464 children in foster care, by saying that all children at the ranch were at risk because they were exposed to FLDS beliefs on underage marriage.

“Religion is never an excuse for abuse,” the ACLU said. “But, exposure to a religion’s beliefs, however unorthodox, is not itself abuse and may not constitutionally be labeled abuse.”

Using clergy during times of martial law

Posted by Charlie Kilo on April 19th, 2008

It shouldn’t surprise anyone that the government is enlisting the help of clergy members to help control the population in times of martial law. Watch this:

Polygamist sect hearing in Texas descends into farce

Posted by Charlie Kilo on April 18th, 2008

You could have seen this coming from a mile away:

A court hearing to decide the fate of the 416 children swept up in a raid on a West Texas polygamist sect descended into farce Thursday, with hundreds of lawyers in two packed buildings shouting objections and the judge struggling to maintain order.

The case - clearly one of the biggest, most convoluted child-custody hearings in U.S. history - presented an extraordinary spectacle: big-city lawyers in suits and mothers in 19th-century, pioneer-style dresses, all packed into a courtroom and a nearby auditorium connected by video.

At issue was an attempt by the state of Texas to strip the parents of custody and place the children in foster homes because of evidence they were being physically and sexually abused by the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, a renegade Mormon splinter group suspected of forcing underage girls into marriage with older men.

As many feared, the proceedings turned into something of a circus - and a painfully slow one.

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