Garvey's Ghost: Black Talk

Filming While Innnocent

In America one can be stopped, searched, arrested, put in police line ups for simply, walking while black. Since 9-11 one can be detained for simply Walking While Turbaned. Today the NYT gave us an example of Filming While Innocent. This is a nice example of why the Supreme Court is asleep at the wheel.

quote:

e was a Buddhist from Nepal planning to return there after five years of odd jobs at places like a Queens pizzeria and a Manhattan flower shop. He was taping New York street scenes to take back to his wife and sons in Katmandu. And he had no clue that the tall building that had drifted into his viewfinder happened to include an office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation..

the Nepalese man, who spoke almost no English, had been placed in solitary confinement at a federal detention center in Brooklyn just because of his videotaping...

Mr. Bajracharya was finally returned to Nepal on Jan. 13, 2002. By then he had spent almost three months in a 6-by-9-foot cell kept lighted 24 hours a day. The unit of the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn where he was kept has become notorious for the abuses documented there by the Justice Department's own inspector general, who found a pattern of physical and mental mistreatment of post-9/11 detainees. Videotapes showed officers slamming detainees into walls, mocking them during unnecessary strip-searches, and secretly taping their conversations with lawyers....

Mr. Bajracharya recalled the fear, humiliation and despair he had experienced in prison. "I had nothing but tears in my eyes," he said through a translator. "The only thing I knew, I was innocent, but I didn't know what was happening."

He said he was stripped naked in the federal jail. "I was manhandled and treated badly," he said, becoming agitated. "I was very, very embarrassed even to look around, because I was naked."

The ordeal began when his videotaping aroused the suspicions of two detectives from the Queens district attorney's office, which has space in the same 12-story building where the F.B.I. occupies three floors. After taking him inside for questioning, they called upstairs to the F.B.I., and Mr. Wynne was dispatched to take over the interrogation. With no translator, Mr. Bajracharya tried to explain himself to half a dozen law enforcement officers, including two federal agents from the Immigration and Naturalization Service who verified his illegal immigration status.

It was Mr. Wynne, as the lead F.B.I. agent, who sent him to the federal detention center in Brooklyn pending a thorough investigation. The F.B.I. agent, now 50, describes himself as a lifelong New Yorker who does not take illegal immigration lightly. His specialty is international art fraud, not terrorism.[but he apparently is qualified enough to grab up a man off the street -GG] But at a time of heightened anxiety about another terrorist attack, he maintained, it was reasonable to suspect the worst until he could check the man's history, discrepancies in his identity documents and questions about money wired to Nepal....

How is this really different from KGB secret police that Americans loved to thumb thier noses at Russia about? The whole thing stinks because he did not commit a crime. There was no probable cause to even take the man inside. Filming, regardless of purpose is not a crime. Why not just arrest people for driving their cars since driving could be a way to kill many people at one time. You think that won't happen?
Check This from Alternet:

Quote:
Legislation weaving its way through the US Congress demands all 50 states pass laws granting police the power to drug test drivers and arrest anyone found to have "any detectable amount of a controlled substance ... present in the person's body, as measured in the person's blood, urine, saliva, or other bodily substance." Though the expressed purpose of the law is to target and remove drug-impaired drivers from US roadways, the proposal would do nothing of the sort.

Most troubling, the proposed law -- H.R. 3922 -- does not require motorists to be identifiably impaired or intoxicated in order to be criminally charged with the crime of "drugged driving." Rather, police have only to demonstrate that the driver has detectable levels of illicit drugs or inactive drug metabolites in their blood, sweat, saliva or urine. As many pot smokers know, marijuana metabolites are fat soluble, and remain identifiable in the urine for days and sometimes even weeks after past use. Consequently someone who smoked a joint on Monday could conceivably be arrested on Friday and charged with "drugged driving," even though they are perfectly sober!

Again, Where is the probable cause? So you're speeding and an officer will demand a sample of your blood or urine? For what? Speeding is not indicative of illicit drug use. In fact other than a demonstrated impairment of ability you cannot have probable cause to believe someone may be on drugs. But ahaaa we gave that one up when we approved of random DUI checks didn't we? And we thought it would stop there. it is a very dangerous thing when government get's expanded "judicial" and "enforcement" powers. to paraphrase an IBM commercial:

"But you don't get it, so you fret"

Links:
http://www.alternet.org/drugreporter/19008/
http://nytimes.com/2004/06/30/nyregion/30deport.final.html?hp