Organizations active in the effort:
International Answer – Los Angeles 213- 487- 2368
Refuse and Resist – Los Angeles 323-962-8084
South Asia Network (SAN): 562-403-0488
Coalition for Humane Immigration Rights LA
United Teachers L. A. Human Rights Committee
National Lawyers Guild
American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC)

Main stream media chimes in:
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/21/politics/21JUST.html?ex=1059772218&ei=1&en=7d66e75634160646

==== see comment section, "Main stream media chimes in" if above link is dropped ------

“Right now the INS has plans to extend a border wall two hundred and fifty-five miles. A border wall; that will seal off seventy-five percent of the Arizona border and be fifteen feet tall… The border plans need to go away… Did anybody know that they are planning on basically connecting California to Texas, did anybody know? Seven-hundred and fifty million dollars, meanwhile we don’t have healthcare… meanwhile more and more people can’t even conceive of sending their kids to college…”

“We are having a human rights crisis on the border. Since the inception of OPERATION GATE KEEPER and all these other polices over two thousand immigrants Mexicanos, Central Americans, …, South Americans have died on our borders and it makes a horrible, horrible death. To die by the desert has been described by one doctor as being crushed by a large weight. That’s the way your organs shut down when you are denied water and you’re out there in the desert which is a 110 degrees… More and more we’re seeing women and children who are coming, trying to be with their families. Please join us in supporting the struggle against the wall, against the border plans.”

Note: If you would like to help save lives contact - WATER STATION PROJECT 213-346-0123

The boulevard is transformed as word is spread, REPEAL THE PATRIOT ACT!

“Here’s what’s important to remember. When John Ashcroft got that Patriot Act passed they said they were doing it to make you and me safer. They were doing it to make you and me safer. So when they read your check out list at the library do you feel safer? Do you feel safer when they read your messages to your friends on the internet? When the brother that spoke to you before lands in solitary confinement just because he’s a Muslim does that make you feel safer? Is there anything at all in that GOD DAMN PATRIOT ACT that makes you and I any safer or feel any safer?”

-- Jim Lafferty of The Lawyers Guild

“Let’s be clear. Let’s be clear. The Patriot Act wasn’t passed to make you and I safe from terrorism. It was passed to make the terrorist who run this country safe from you and I!!! But they can’t be safe from you and I if you and I remember something very essential. It’s all well and good to talk about the same congress that passed the damn act in the first place is maybe going to do by way of tinkering with it. It’s all well and good when lawyers from the Lawyers Guild and ACLU and others go into court, Republican court and get defeated. We should keep trying to do that. But that’s not our salvation. That’s not what’s going to protect us from this Patriot Act. YOU AND I ARE ALL THAT STANDS BETWEEN TRYANNY IN THIS COUNTRY AND FASCISM IN THIS COUNTRY AND THAT PATRIOT ACT. If we depend on the Bill of Rights the Republicans in congress won’t have any better luck this time then they had during the 50’s under McCarthyism…”

-- Jim Lafferty of The Lawyers Guild

“McCarthyism, the witch-hunt of the fifties was not defeated by the politicians. They weren’t defeated by the courts. They were defeated because there were enough people brave enough and tough enough and determined enough not to let their voices be silenced! So, we can defeat the patriot act … They want empire, they want world conquest and they know they can’t have it if there is an aroused opposition united in this country. That is our salvation, it is the world’s salvation, so together let’s remember. Keep speaking up, refuse to be quiet, refuse to be intimated, history is on our side. OUR DAY WILL COME. WE WILL PREVAIL! Thank-you.”

-- Jim Lafferty of The Lawyers Guild

United Teachers L. A. says yes to Students and no to the ROTC build up on campus.

Librarians - one of the first to stand up to the Patriot Act.

error

great keep it up spread the word no more dictators...!!!!

But if you want a date, all you have to do is beg.

Study the chart. (photos later if you wish)
As you can see there's no resemblance.
I'm far more handsome.

The photos and the commentary need to get a lot better.

Report on USA Patriot Act Alleges Civil Rights Violations

WASHINGTON, July 20 - A report by internal investigators at
the Justice Department has identified dozens of recent
cases in which department employees have been accused of
serious civil rights and civil liberties violations
involving enforcement of the sweeping federal antiterrorism
law known as the USA Patriot Act.

The inspector general's report, which was presented to
Congress last week and is awaiting public release, is
likely to raise new concern among lawmakers about whether
the Justice Department can police itself when its employees
are accused of violating the rights of Muslim and Arab
immigrants and others swept up in terrorism investigations
under the 2001 law.

The report said that in the six-month period that ended on
June 15, the inspector general's office had received 34
complaints of civil rights and civil liberties violations
by department employees that it considered credible,
including accusations that Muslim and Arab immigrants in
federal detention centers had been beaten.

The accused workers are employed in several of the agencies
that make up the Justice Department, with most of them
assigned to the Bureau of Prisons, which oversees federal
penitentiaries and detention centers.

The report said that credible accusations were also made
against employees of the F.B.I., the Drug Enforcement
Administration and the Immigration and Naturalization
Service; most of the immigration agency was consolidated
earlier this year into the Department of Homeland Security.


A spokeswoman for the Justice Department, Barbara Comstock,
said tonight that the department "takes its obligations
very seriously to protect civil rights and civil liberties,
and the small number of credible allegations will be
thoroughly investigated."

Ms. Comstock noted that the department was continuing to
review accusations made last month in a separate report by
the inspector general, Glenn A. Fine, that found broader
problems in the department's treatment of hundreds of
illegal immigrants rounded up after the terrorist attacks
of Sept. 11, 2001.

While most of the accusations in the report are still under
investigation, the report said a handful had been
substantiated, including those against a federal prison
doctor who was reprimanded after reportedly telling an
inmate during a physical examination that "if I was in
charge, I would execute every one of you" because of "the
crimes you all did."

The report did not otherwise identify the doctor or name
the federal detention center where he worked. The doctor,
it said, had "allegedly treated other inmates in a cruel
and unprofessional manner."

The report said that the inspector general's office was
continuing to investigate a separate case in which about 20
inmates at a federal detention center, which was not
identified, had recently accused a corrections officer of
abusive behavior, including ordering a Muslim inmate to
remove his shirt "so the officer could use it to shine his
shoes."

In that case, the report said, the inspector general's
office was able to obtain a statement from the officer
admitting that he had verbally abused the Muslim inmate and
that he had been "less that completely candid" with
internal investigators from the Bureau of Prisons. The
inspector general's office said it had also obtained a
sworn statement from another prison worker confirming the
inmates' accusations.

The report did not directly criticize the Bureau of Prisons
for its handling of an earlier internal investigation of
the officer, but the report noted that the earlier inquiry
had been closed - and the accused officer initially cleared
- without anyone interviewing the inmates or the officer.

The report is the second in recent weeks from the inspector
general to focus on the way the Justice Department is
carrying out the broad new surveillance and detention
powers it gained under the Patriot Act, which was passed by
Congress a month after the 9/11 attacks.

In the first report, which was made public on June 2, Mr.
Fine, whose job is to act as the department's internal
watchdog, found that hundreds of illegal immigrants had
been mistreated after they were detained following the
attacks.

That report found that many inmates languished in unduly
harsh conditions for months, and that the department had
made little effort to distinguish legitimate terrorist
suspects from others picked up in roundups of illegal
immigrants.

The first report brought widespread, bipartisan criticism
of the Justice Department, which defended its conduct at
the time, saying that it "made no apologies for finding
every legal way possible to protect the American public
from further attacks."

Ms. Comstock, the spokeswoman, said tonight that the
department had been sensitive to concerns about civil
rights and civil liberties after the 9/11 attacks, and that
the department had been aggressive in investigating more
that 500 cases of complaints of ethnic "hate crimes" linked
to backlash from the attacks.

"We've had 13 federal prosecutions of 18 defendants to
date, with a 100 percent conviction rate," she said. "We
have a very aggressive effort against post-9/11
discrimination."

A copy of the report, which was dated July 17 and provided
to the House and Senate Judiciary Committees, was made
available to The New York Times by the office of
Representative John Conyers Jr. of Michigan, the ranking
Democrat on the House panel.

"This report shows that we have only begun to scratch the
surface with respect to the Justice Department's disregard
of constitutional rights and civil liberties," Mr. Conyers
said in a statement. "I commend the inspector general for
having the courage and independence to highlight the degree
to which the administration's war on terror has misfired
and harmed innocent victims with no ties to terror
whatsoever.`

The report is Mr. Fine's evaluation of his efforts to
enforce provisions of the Patriot Act that require his
office to investigate complaints of abuses of civil rights
and civil liberties by Justice Department employees. The
provision was inserted into the law by members of Congress
who said they feared that the Patriot Act might lead to
widespread law enforcement abuses.

The report draws no broad conclusions about the extent of
abuses by Justice Department employees, although it
suggests that the relatively small staff of the inspector
general's office has been overwhelmed by accusations of
abuse, many filed by Muslim or Arab inmates in federal
detention centers.

The inspector general said that from Dec. 16 through June
15, his office received 1,073 complaints "suggesting a
Patriot Act-related" abuse of civil rights or civil
liberties.

The report suggested that hundreds of the accusations were
easily dismissed as not credible or impossible to prove.
But of the remainder, 272 were determined to fall within
the inspector general's jurisdiction, with 34 raising
"credible Patriot Act violations on their face."

In those 34 cases, it said, the accusations "ranged in
seriousness from alleged beatings of immigration detainees
to B.O.P. correctional officers allegedly verbally abusing
inmates."

The report said that two of the cases were referred to
internal investigators at the Federal Bureau of
Investigation because they involved bureau employees. In
one case, the report said, the bureau investigated - and
determined to be unsubstantiated - a complaint that an
F.B.I. agent had "displayed aggressive, hostile and
demeaning behavior while administering a pre-employment
polygraph examination."

The report said that the second case involved accusations
from a naturalized citizen of Lebanese descent that the
F.B.I. had invaded his home based on false information and
wrongly accused him of possessing an AK-47 rifle. That
case, it said, is still under investigation by the bureau.

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/21/politics/21JUST.html?ex=1059772218&ei=1&en=7d66e75634160646

WASHINGTON, D.C., July 23 (IPS) -- Taking a clear stand against anti-privacy provisions in the Patriot Act, the U.S. House of Representatives in an overwhelmingly bipartisan effort last night agreed to an amendment that would bar federal law enforcement from carrying out secret ”sneak and peek” searches without notifying the target of the warrant.


• American Civil Liberties Union
• Lawyer's Committee for Human Rights
• Tom Paine
• OneWorld on United States


Supported by
Cable & Wireless


The Otter Amendment, added to the Commerce, Justice and State Departments funding bill and named after Rep. C.L. ”Butch” Otter, an Idaho Republican, passed by an extraordinary margin of 309 to 118, with 113 Republicans voting in favor.


”Not only does this provision allow the seizure of personal and business records without notification, but it also opens the door to nationwide search warrants and allowing the CIA (news - web sites) (Central Intelligence Agency (news - web sites)) and NSA (National Security Agency) to operate domestically,” Otter said.


The Patriot Act, which significantly expands the government's domestic spying powers, was passed within weeks of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. The House amendment represents the first major change to the act since it was signed into law by Pres. George W. Bush.


Civil liberties activists immediately hailed the decision as a huge win.


”Congress took a courageous stand last night in its response to widespread public concern over civil liberties--hopefully this is the first trickle in a flood of Patriot fixes,” said Laura W. Murphy, director of the American Civil Liberties Union (news - web sites)'s Washington Legislative Office.


”Congress is beginning to respond to what regular Americans have been saying at backyard barbecues and across their kitchen tables for months now: we can--and must--be both safe and free,” she said.


The amendment would effectively prohibit any implementation of the controversial section 213 of the Patriot Act, which enables federal agents to obtain so-called ”sneak and peek” warrants with far less evidence than was required before the bill was passed..


Under these warrants--also referred to as ”black bag” warrants--agents have the permission to search homes, confiscate certain types of property and monitor computers, without notifying the subject of the search.


The amendment still has to get past the Senate and Pres. Bush before it becomes law.


Yesterday's House vote was preceded by a unanimous vote in the Senate last week to deny funding for the domestic cyber-surveillance system known as the Terrorism Information Awareness (TIA) project-- recently renamed from ”Total Information Awareness”.


A provision blocking funding for the program was included in the Senate version of a military spending bill currently being considered in Congress. In contrast to the House version, which only restricted TIA's use against U.S. citizens, the Senate version denies funding for ”research and development on the Terrorism Awareness System.”


The program would use data-mining technology to scan vast amounts of personal ”transactional” data, including looking for and monitoring suspicious patterns in telephone records, credit card transactions, broadcasts, internet use, medical files, relationships, travel details and legal information, among others.


Democratic Senators Ron Wyden, from Oregon, and Russ Feingold, from Wisconsin, had pledged last winter to block funding of TIA until Congress has a chance to thoroughly review the project's implications.


A fellow senator, Jon Corzine of New Jersey, has complained that TIA takes an ”Orwellian approach”--in fact, one of the program's first logos (since discarded) featured an all-seeing eye casting its gaze out over the globe.


The language agreed to in the Senate last week is even more forceful than that suggested by Wyden and Feingold, and stands in clear contrast to the Bush administration's active support for the program and the Pentagon (news - web sites)'s aggressive lobbying on behalf of TIA.


”Make no mistake, the Pentagon can't erase history by changing a name--it's the same program and contains the same pitfalls,” said Barry Steinhardt, director of the ACLU's Liberty and Technology Program. ”Luckily the Senate historically stood up to the administration and Pentagon and said 'no' to a surveillance society.”


”Terrorism Information Awareness, as it's now called, seeks to catch bad guys by spying on law-abiding Americans, making it ineffective and inherently offensive to civil liberties,” Steinhardt added. ”Those lawmakers who sought to shut it down deserve applause for supporting Americans' right to privacy.”

Opposition to the program, as well as to several sections of the Patriot Act, is growing and has been unusually broad, including groups as diverse as the ACLU and the American Conservative Union.

Earlier this week, the ACLU kicked off a ”Campaign to Defend Our Libraries,” with the aim of warning patrons about Section 215 of the Patriot Act. The section grants law enforcement the ability to obtain--without an ordinary criminal subpoena or search warrant and without probable cause--a court order giving them access to ”business records” and ”any tangible thing,” including records from libraries, booksellers, doctors, universities, Internet service providers and financial institutions.

Critics see the section as too broad and structured in a way that allows ordinary citizens to be caught up in the net of intelligence investigations.

”The New Mexico Library Association is on record expressing its concerns about the Patriot Act,” said Eileen Longsworth, president of the association. ”The NMLA encourages the library community to educate itself and library customers about the Patriot Act, and the potential dangers to individual privacy and confidentiality of library records resulting from the enforcement of this act.”

Bills are currently pending in the House and Senate that seek to restore privacy in libraries and bookstores.

Opposition to the Patriot Act is also coming from state legislatures. Yesterday, the city council of Charlottesville, Virginia blocked some implementation of the act, joining more than 140 communities, encompassing more than 16 million people in 27 states, that have passed resolutions against it.

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__________________________________

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/oneworld/20030724/wl_oneworld/4536642391059052136

Builder - Just looking at the photos above, I wonder if that might not be you in the red shirt?

Is he a teacher? I'm scared.

My van Gogh imitation.

It's too bad I put Mr. Red Shirt in the photo essay. He's just a hard working teacher and doesn't deserve the redicule. But hey, what do you expect from the toilet joke crowd.

teeHee-teeHee-giggle-giggle

I don't care about the toliet joke crowd. If you can't do any better than this crap you've been posting..... let's just say, don't quit your day job.

Give me a call.
Daytime 310-753-3841

You call here.
213.485.3294

---- just another night on the newswire ----

I think I just saw a Communist outside my window!!!

He's wearing a red T-shirt and looks like an alcoholic Krusty the Klown.

Who Made George W. Bush Our King?
He Can Designate Any of Us an Enemy Combatant
By Nat Hentoff
VillageVoice.com


Friday 25 July 2003




Courts have no higher duty than protection of the individual freedoms guaranteed by our Constitution. This is especially true in time of war, when
our carefully crafted system of checks and balances must accommodate the vital needs of national security while guarding the liberties the Constitution promises all citizens. -- Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals
judge Diana Gribbon Motz, dissenting, Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, July 9.

Some of the most glorious illuminations of the Bill of Rights in American history have been contained in Supreme Court dissents by, among others, Louis Brandeis, William Brennan, Hugo Black, and Thurgood Marshall. Equal to those was the stinging dissent by judge Diana Gribbon Motz when the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals (8 to 4) gave George W. Bush a fearsome power that can be found nowhere in the Constitution--the sole authority to imprison an American citizen indefinitely without charges or access to a lawyer.

This case is now on appeal to the Supreme Court, which will determine whether this president--or his successors until the end of the war on terrorism--can subvert the Bill of Rights to the peril of all of us.

Judge Motz began her dissent--which got only a couple of lines in the brief coverage of the case in scattered media reporting--by stating plainly what the Bush administration has done to scuttle the Bill of Rights:

"For more than a year, a United States citizen, Yaser Esam Hamdi, has been labeled an enemy combatant and held in solitary confinement in a Norfolk, Virginia, naval brig. He has not been charged with a crime, let
alone convicted of one. The Executive [the president] will not state when, if ever, he will be released. Nor has the Executive allowed Hamdi to appear in court, consult with counsel, or communicate in any way with the outside world."

I have not seen what I am about to quote from her dissent anywhere in the media. You might want to send what follows to your member of Congress
and senator. Judge Motz said accusingly:

"I fear that [this court] may also have opened the door to the indefinite detention, without access to a lawyer or the courts, of any American citizen, even one captured on American soil, who the Executive
designates an 'enemy combatant,' as long as the Executive asserts that the area in which the citizen was detained was an 'active combat zone,' and the
detainee, deprived of access to the courts and counsel, cannot dispute this fact." (Emphasis added).

As I have detailed in two previous columns ("A Citizen Shorn of All Rights," Voice, January 1-7, 2003, and "Liberty's Court of Last Resort," Voice, January 29-February 4, 2003), Hamdi was taken into custody by the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan, and then declared an "enemy combatant" by order of George W. Bush on the flimsies of "evidence" that he had been a soldier of the Taliban--an accusation that Hamdi has not been able to rebut in a court of alleged law.

Judge Motz is not engaging in scare tactics when she says that with the president having assumed the powers of an absolute monarch, in this kind of
case, any American citizen can be hauled off an American street and stripped of all his or her rights. On June 5, Attorney General John Ashcroft unequivocally told the House Judiciary Committee that the streets of America are now "a war zone."

Furthermore, The Washington Post--in a July 13, 2002, lead editorial, a year before the Motz Fourth Circuit dissent--warned of the increasing tendency of the courts to defer to the dangerously overreaching executive branch:

"FBI Director Robert Mueller has said that a sizable number of people in this country are associated with terrorist groups, yet have so far done nothing wrong [so] there is therefore no basis to indict them. How many of them, one wonders, might the government [by bypassing the courts] hold as enemy combatants? And how many of them would later turn out to be
something else entirely?"

But how much later would these innocent citizens--locked away until the war on terrorism is over--be let out?


This is an unprecedentedly serious assault, folks, on the core of our system of justice. As Judge Motz said in her passionate dissent, "[This court's] decision marks the first time in our history that a federal court has approved the elimination of protections afforded a citizen by the Constitution solely on the basis of the Executive's designation of that citizen as an enemy combatant, without testing the accuracy of the
designation. Neither the Constitution nor controlling precedent sanctions this holding." (Emphasis added).


As for the government's "evidence" that Hamdi is an enemy combatant, Judge Motz emphasizes that all the Defense Department offered is a
two-page, nine-paragraph statement by Michael Mobbs, a special adviser for policy in the Defense Department. The buck stops with Donald Rumsfeld.

As Judge Motz points out, the majority of the Fourth Circuit, in its "breathtaking holding" relying on the Mobbs declaration, ruled that it is "undisputed" that Hamdi was captured in a zone of active combat. This, she charges, is "pure hearsay . . . a thin reed on which to rest abrogation of constitutional rights, and one that collapses entirely upon examination. For Hamdi has never been given the opportunity to dispute any facts."


Before this case reached the Fourth Circuit, it was heard in Federal District Court--with Hamdi unable to be present or to communicate at all with his public defender, Frank Dunham, who therefore could not contest the Mobbs declaration. Nevertheless, Judge Robert Doumar, a Reagan appointee, scathingly demolished the government's "evidence."

"A close inspection of the [Mobbs] declaration reveals that [it] never claims that Hamdi was fighting for the Taliban, nor that he was a member of the Taliban. . . . Is there anything in the Mobbs declaration that says
Hamdi ever fired a weapon?" (Emphasis added.)

In the January 9 New York Times, Elisa Massimino of the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights exposed an earlier decision by a panel of the Fourth Circuit to bow to Bush and to continue the stripping of Hamdi's
citizen's rights. "[The Fourth Circuit] seems to be saying that it has no role whatsoever in overseeing the administration's conduct of the war on terrorism . . . the beginning and end of which is left solely to the
president's discretion."

Now, the full Fourth Circuit bench has handed George W. Bush the crown that George Washington disdained. What if the Supreme Court agrees? Bush
will be King George IV.