Kill the president

[mattd]

Waco president arbusto e nuemann today let on he was pissed that the secret 
way he wants his death squads to operate leaked(see below for background) 
He was also said to be put off his banana's and peanuts by the suspicion 
directed toward an arab-american oberstumtrooper of the SS.The SS are my 
ubermench gibbered the loopy ruprecht.(see below,below.)

Subject: hoover fine example of seppo hero
Nazi Tribunal Is Model of Deception
Commentary. Ann Woolner is a columnist for Bloomberg News. The opinions 
expressed are her own.

By Ann Woolner
Atlanta, Nov. 23 (Bloomberg) -- President George W. Bush cites the 1942 
military tribunal convened to prosecute eight Nazis plotting attacks on 
U.S. soil to show how he wants to prosecute present-day terrorists.
It's a model, all right.
It's a model of a powerful government official using the secrecy of a 
military tribunal to deceive the public, falsely embellish his reputation, 
break promises to a whistleblower and sit by while a 30-year prison 
sentence is given to the man who thwarted the Nazi sabotage, a man to whom 
the agency had promised a presidential pardon.
That official was Federal Bureau of Investigation Director J. Edgar Hoover.
His aim was glory for cracking this hugely important case. The problem was 
that it took no detective work whatsoever to crack the case.
All it took was for FBI agents to believe a man, George Dasch, who twice 
called and then walked into FBI headquarters to tell them about the plot.
Dasch told them that Nazi submarines had deposited him and seven other 
Germans at U.S. shores in New York and Florida in recent days. Supplied 
with explosives and timing devices, their mission was to blow up certain 
U.S. military equipment factories, transportation structures and 
Jewish-owned department stores.
Dasch, aided by another would-be saboteur, Ernst Burger, led the FBI to the 
other six Germans, 14 American collaborators, $174,588 and a cache of 
explosives.
Pardon Promised
In return, FBI agents promised Dasch that if he pleaded guilty to his role 
in the plot, he'd get a prison sentence of no more than six months followed 
by a presidential pardon.
It didn't turn out that way.
During the 18-day trial, held in an FBI training room at the Justice 
Department building, agents played down Dasch's and Burger's cooperation, 
although one agent acknowledged Dasch had been promised the pardon.
This was not reported, since no journalists were allowed to cover the 
trial. Secrecy was necessary, Attorney General Francis Biddle explained 
beforehand, to prevent America's enemies from learning ``how our 
intelligence services are equipped to work against them.''
All eight Germans were convicted and six were executed, less than two 
months after Dasch arrived by submarine. Burger got a life sentence; Dasch 
got 30 years.
Hoover Censors Report
Even after the war ended and a new attorney general, Tom Clark, wanted to 
disclose what had happened at the trial, Hoover intervened.
He censored the report the Justice Department produced, cutting out 
information that could ``discredit or embarrass the bureau,'' Hoover wrote 
in a memo. Left out was any mention of the pardon promise and the fact that 
Dasch's own confession sparked the investigation.
Decades passed and Hoover died before the full story came out. Through 
Freedom of Information Act requests, Atlanta Constitution reporter Seth 
Kantor obtained the trial transcript, FBI reports and other documents and 
wrote a series of stories in 1980.
Those stories, on which this account is based, were recounted in an article 
this week by Cox News Service.
Prison Riot
As for Dasch, he'd been sent to the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary where his 
presence prompted a prison riot in 1944. Dasch, whom inmates threatened to 
throw off a five-story building, had been the principal target of the 
rioting prisoners, according to Biddle.
He survived and was transferred to Leavenworth prison in Kansas.
With pressure from new lawyers to release Dasch and Burger, President Harry 
Truman in 1948 ordered them deported to West Germany where they'd 
eventually be free. The White House statement continued the deception in 
explaining Truman's generosity toward these infamous Nazis: ``After their 
arrest, Burger and Dasch gave full and complete identities of all connected 
with the sabotage plot.''
This implied it was only after the FBI had tracked them down that they 
confessed.
Nor did this version help Dasch in post-war Germany. Nazi sympathizers 
threatened to avenge the executions of the other six saboteurs and the 
thwarting of Hitler's sabotage plans, prompting Dasch to move from city to 
city, job to job. By 1980, his trail had vanished, Kantor wrote. He has 
since died, according to news reports.
`Museum Piece'
Bush has ordered the creation of military commissions to conduct tribunals 
for the prosecution of non-U.S. citizens accused of terrorism against the 
United States. The speed of such tribunals, their portability, the 
availability of the death penalty and their looser rules make them a good 
option, in Bush's view.
But looser rules also mean a greater likelihood that the innocent would be 
convicted and the system manipulated by officials. Secrecy would mean no 
public scrutiny.
``To do this in a healthy fashion, one has to make trials as open as 
possible,'' says Ruth Wedgwood, a Yale law professor teaching international 
law and criminal procedure.
Bush's order describes ``a pre-1950 format'' for military tribunals, says 
Eugene Fidell, a Washington lawyer and president of the National Institute 
of Military Justice.
``This is a museum piece that's being trotted out,'' says Fidell. ``The 
question is whether it's being properly brought back.''
Presscott's Reincarnation gets what PR wants.
A Durham student activist gets a visit from the Secret Service
B Y J O N E L L I S T O N
A.J. Brown, a 19-year-old freshman at Durham Tech, was thanking God it was 
Friday. It was 5 p.m., the school week was over, and in an hour she'd be 
meeting her boyfriend to unwind.
November 21, 2001
T R I A N G L E S
Then: Knock, knock ... unexpected guests at Brown's Duke Manor apartment. 
Opening the door, she found a casually dressed man, and a man and woman in 
what appeared to be business attire. Her first thought, she says, was, "Are 
these people going to sell me something?"
Photo By Alex Maness
Threat or dissent? A.J. Brown and her anti-Bush poster
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
But then the man in the suit introduced himself and the woman as agents 
from the Raleigh office of the U.S. Secret Service. The other man was an 
investigator from the Durham Police Department.
"Ma'am, we've gotten a report that you have anti-American material," the 
male agent said, according to Brown. Could they come in to have a look around?
"Do you have a warrant?" Brown asked. They did not. "Then you're not coming 
in my apartment," she said. And indeed, they stayed outside her doorway. 
But they stayed a while--40 minutes, Brown estimates--and gave her a taste 
of how dissenters can come under scrutiny in wartime.
And all because of a poster on her wall.
Though she's still a teenager, Brown is already more informed about 
political repression than most Americans. She's been politically aware and 
involved since grade school. "In second grade, I saw the Gulf War on 
television, and seeing those bombs drop, it did something to me," she says. 
"I knew from some news reports that there were innocent people dying."
In middle school, Brown became interested in environmentalism and civil 
liberties. She made the shift to full-fledged activist at Jordan High 
School when she became involved with Youth Voice Radio, a media collective 
with a leftist bent. Most recently, she's been involved with the movement 
against the war in Afghanistan.
Brown and fellow activists often discuss government encroachments on free 
speech and political organizing, she says, as do some of her favorite 
hip-hop artists. She loves her music--and that may have been what sparked 
the turn of events that brought the Secret Service to her door.
Brown suspects it began with the noise complaints. On Oct. 22, a Monday 
evening, she stayed up late playing some new CDs for her boyfriend. By her 
own admission, she was playing them too loud. Around midnight, a Durham 
police officer came by to tell her to turn it down, and she obliged.
Two nights later, someone from Duke Manor called in another noise 
complaint, and again a police officer came to Brown's door. This time, she 
says, her music wasn't playing at an offensive volume. The police officer 
speculated that the call may have been about someone else's stereo. During 
this visit, and unlike the first, the officer had a full view of the wall 
that faces Brown's front doorway, a detail that would become relevant two 
days later: On that wall hung The Poster.
Brown got it at an "anti-inauguration" protest in Washington, D.C. 
Distributed to hundreds of activists, it depicts George W. Bush holding a 
length of rope against a backdrop of lynching victims, and reads: "We hang 
on your every word. George Bush: Wanted, 152 Dead"--a reference to the 
number of people executed by the state of Texas while Bush was governor. 
Brown believes that the message caused the Durham policeman who paid the 
second visit to her apartment to recommend a third.
On Friday, Oct. 26, two Secret Service agents, along with Durham police 
investigator Rex Godley, came to Brown's apartment. Special Agent Paul 
Lalley, who did most of the talking, spoke first. "Ma'am, we've gotten a 
report that you have anti-American material, or something like that, in 
your apartment," he said, according to Brown. Then the female agent asked 
if they could come inside.
When Brown pressed them for a warrant and refused to allow them in, she 
says, "They started to talk to me about how, 'We're not here to take you 
away or put you in jail.' They were like, 'We need to follow up on every 
report we get.' I said, 'That's understandable, but how would you even know 
what's in my apartment?'
"They just said they had gotten information from some place," she says. She 
speculates that it was from the police officer who visited for the second 
noise complaint.
Godley, the Durham police investigator, won't say where the authorities got 
their tip about Brown's poster. "The only thing I can tell you is that we 
were assisting the Secret Service on one of their cases," he says.
Lalley referred questions about the visit to Special Agent Craig Ulmer, who 
heads the Secret Service office in Raleigh.
"We went in the first place because we received a tip about a threat 
against the president," Ulmer says. He refuses to identify the source of 
the tip, except to say that it was a "concerned citizen" and not a law 
enforcement officer. It's Secret Service policy to keep such sources 
confidential.
"We can't discuss who gives us information like that, because we want 
people to bring us information," Ulmer says. "If we burn our bridges, so to 
speak, we're not going to get help from the public."
Ulmer added that the poster "was in plain view, even from the window, so 
anyone could have tipped us off."
The agents persisted in their effort to get a peek inside the apartment. 
"They were being friendly, trying to get me to let them in," Brown says. 
After a while, Brown called her mother, an IBM employee who is in the Army 
Reserve. "She said to absolutely not let them in," Brown says. Not sure 
what else to do, Brown passed the phone--with her mother still on the 
line--to one of the agents.
The standoff continued, and eventually the agents explained why they had 
come by: "We already know what it is; it's a target of Bush," one of them 
said, according to Brown--apparently a reference to the poster. She 
informed them it was no such thing. They then said, "Well, it's Bush 
hanging himself." Nope, she told them.
Finally, Brown relented a bit, agreeing to open the door and show them her 
poster wall. "They looked in, and the lady was like, 'Ohhhh, that's not 
that bad.'" The male agent added, "We've seen worse."
Still, Brown's brush with the authorities wasn't over. "Since they were 
just gawking at my wall, I decided to explain it."
The wall features Brown's favorite art and mementos: a high-school photo 
project showing the perils of smoking cigarettes; a Pink Floyd poster ("It 
has that phrase, 'Mother should I trust the government,' so I had to get 
it"); posters for two Japanese cartoon shows; several pictures she took at 
protests and rallies; and a headband with "Democracy" on it. And, of 
course, the Bush-as-hangman poster.
Having seen the poster, Brown says, the agents questioned her further, 
asking: "Do you have any Afghanistan stuff in your apartment, or anything 
pertaining to that? Any pro-Taliban stuff?"
"I kept saying no," Brown says, "and I was like, personally, I think the 
Taliban are a bunch of assholes." With that, the investigator and the 
agents bid her adieu.

Brown was temporarily rattled by the visit from the Secret Service, she 
says, but the poster's still up, and she's still committed to her activism. 
"I'm definitely going to be vocal," she says. "If things get really hairy 
and they decide to come after activists, then I'd have to just grit my 
teeth and go through it."
Ulmer rejects the notion that Brown was targeted because of her politics, 
and he insists that the Secret Service would have checked this tip out even 
if it had come in before the events of Sept. 11. "We were doing our job in 
this particular case," he says, "and I don't think we could have done it 
any better."
"The Secret Service takes all threats against the president seriously, and 
we go out to check on every one. A citizen thought that there was a threat, 
and we went and talked to Ms. Brown and we found that there was not a 
threat." The poster, he says, was "misconstrued" by the tipster. "So it's 
not a big issue. The issue is that someone misinterpreted some writing."
But when "some writing" on a poster is investigated by federal authorities, 
constitutional issues come into play. Some legal analysts are warning that 
the new national security vigilance, and new laws passed to counter 
terrorism, might impinge on free speech in big and small ways.
"A poster of Bush, even if he's in a noose, is protected speech during 
wartime or peacetime," notes Alex Charns, a Durham attorney who specializes 
in civil rights. Such speech is all the more protected, he points out, when 
it's displayed within a person's home.
"If a trained police officer doesn't know the difference between political 
speech and a threat to the president, then we're all in trouble," Charns 
says. "If the Secret Service has nothing better to do than check on 
political posters, that's a bad sign."
The Web sites of the American Civil Liberties Union (www.aclu.org) and the 
National Lawyers Guild (www.nlg.org) offer analysis of the changing legal 
climate and advice for what to do if local or federal authorities come 
knocking.