You Can Have Your Rights Back When We're Done

[Tim May]

On Tuesday, October 16, 2001, at 09:30 PM, Declan McCullagh wrote:

> On Mon, Oct 15, 2001 at 12:24:28PM -0400, Steve Furlong wrote:
>> I normally attribute acts like this to incompetence rather than malice,
>> but this is really pushing it. Could someone be ensuring there'd always
>
> It might not be malice or incompetence but simple vindictiveness. The
> WashPost article reports this is happening in NYC, where there's no lack
> of angry police and government prosecutors around. Not saying this kind
> of secret detention is right, of course, but if you're looking
> for explanations...


They have every right to be angry.

However, they have no right to sweep the streets and arrest 500-600 
persons and throw them in a hole for 5 weeks. Arab students who merely 
lived in the same garden apartment complexes in San Diego as one of the 
hijackers were arrested, not charged, thrown in a small cell, and are 
being held for some kind of grand jury investigation.

What ever happened to "taking a statement" and releasing them if there 
is no evidence they were complicit? Fear that they'll leave their 
student lives in San Diego and fly back home? (Probably a good bet for 
some fraction of the 500, some fraction who will be so radicalized by 
their treatment that they sign on to participate in a vengeance act.).

Due process has been thrown out the prison windows (oops, there aren't 
any...) in this one.

Amerika is shown to be a nation of angry cops, not a nation of laws.

The next suspect held indefinitely in a stinking jail cell on "material 
witness" grounds could be me, you, or any of us.

--Tim May


--Tim May
"Gun Control: The theory that a woman found dead in an alley, raped and
strangled with her panty hose,  is somehow morally superior to a woman 
explaining to police how her attacker got that fatal bullet wound"