Letter of the Week: Prosecutors on the Make

America, Free Speech, Government, IMMIGRATION, Individual Rights, Religion

James Huggins writes:

David Koresh was living in peace and bothering nobody, as I recall. That family up on Ruby Ridge in Idaho was living in peace and bothering nobody. Richard Jewell down in Atlanta was living in peace and bothering nobody. What do they, and no doubt many others, have in common? They were all a little weird and a lot “different.” Therefore, all were fair game for media assassination and perfect targets for ambitious prosecutors and federal officers.

Remember, prosecutors are politicians and are usually using their jobs as stepping stones to higher elected office. Ranking police officers are political hacks who owe their jobs to politician bosses. People who are not perceived positively by the public, such as white supremacists, religious fanatics, good ol boy rednecks, or rich white boy college students in a black town are perfect grist as these elected swine grind their way upward to better things. The only trouble is that it is not against the law to be a white supremacist, religious fanatic, good ol boy redneck or a rich white boy. Aren’t they protected by the constitution just like your average Muslim Jihadist or illegal Mexican migrant?

I don’t know too much about Mr. Jeffs. I am against polygamy and against older men having their way with young girls. But, in this day and time I would have to look long and hard at the evidence before automatically condemning any person on the say-so of a prosecutor.

As far as the Muslims are concerned, if they are practicing polygamy in this country, I’m sure they won’t be hindered. The big mistake these fundamentalist Mormons made was not publicly supporting Al-Qaeda and actively demonstrating for open borders with Mexico.

—James Huggins

Further reading: “‘Mad Dog’ Sneddon Vs. Michael Jackson” And “Patricide & Prosecutorial Misconduct“

Shades of Waco?

America, Criminal Injustice, Law, libertarianism, Media, Morality, The State

Another prosecutorial team is on the make, this time in Utah, where the state has been pursuing Warren Jeffs, the leader of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Prosecutors have been egged on by a histrionic media—cable coquettes, especially, with their mangled maternal instincts.

First came District Attorney Michael Nifong of the Duke “rape” case fame. By the admission of the accuser’s co-striper, her story lacks credibility. The accused has an alibi. The DNA found on the accuser is not his. And the lineup was in violation of procedures. Yet this DA run amok forges on, oblivious to the constitutional and procedural safeguards to which an accused is entitled. (Here’s another superb source on the case.)

Mary Lacy, Boulder County’s inept DA, arrested a man in the murder of JonBenet Ramsey, based on no other corroborating evidence than a confession, a practice that was once prohibited, for obvious reasons. Lacy attended Patsy Ramsey’s funeral and was clearly personally invested in the intruder-theory of the case. Lacy and Nifong appear to represent a decaying legal system festooned with incompetents, who substitute the constraints of the law with their “grand” visions.

As to Jeffs, the mindless media has always been enthralled by child-abuse crusaders. Janet Reno, one of the most murderous DAs, established her career by launching the day care child sex abuse witch hunt that gripped the nation in the 1980s. She used fabricated accusations elicited from children (who never lie, right?) with the aid of highly suggestive techniques, to imprison her victims absent corroborative evidence. These cases served as a professional stepping stone for Reno, who went on to commit even greater crimes.

Here are the Jeffs arrest warrant and affidavit. It’s ludicrous. He is charged with being an accomplice to rape, no less. Such an accusation conjures visions of Jeffs holding the victim down while another commits the act. Jeffs, however, is charged, based on hearsay, with encouraging a girl, then under 18, to submit to intercourse with her husband, who was a little older. How does urging someone to consummate a marriage amount to being complicit in a rape, a very brutal crime indeed? By this standard or test, aren’t the girl’s parents also complicit?

The sect is wealthy and owns large compounds in Utah, Nevada, Arizona, Texas, Colorado, South Dakota, and British Columbia. Despite the fact that they live in peace and are non-violent, the federal government has described Jeffs, who was unarmed and did not resist arrest, as extremely dangerous.

The polygamist was placed on the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted list in May, alongside Bin Laden. In this way, presumably, when the federal and state police storm these compounds and remove the children (with a view to seizing the valuable property too, no doubt), the public, dimmed and dulled by state-worshipping media, will shrug it off. After all, it’s all for “The Children,” isn’t it?

Question: Islam permits multiple marriages, doesn’t it? I have no doubt that devout American Muslims follow the dictates of their faith here in the US. Have you ever heard of any such prosecutions against members of that community?

Adam Yahiye Gadahn Pearlman?

Government, Islam, Terrorism

The individual I mentioned in “Lunatic Government Occupies Airports” has surfaced again. Adam Yahiye Gadahn, now a propagandist for Al-Qaida in Pakistan, is originally a Pearlman from California.

Gadahn has called on Americans and other unbelievers to convert to Islam. You can read more about it here. I mentioned him in that column in the context of rational profiling at airports. I said that,

“If young Jews were as well-represented among suicide bombers and airline hijackers as Muslims are, I’d want the TSA’s canine teams to sniff them out instead of being sicced on Joe Scarborough’s baby girl. Remember Adam Yahiye Gadahn of Al-Qaida, Pakistan? He turned out to be a Pearlman from California. Had Gadahn, aka Pearlman, represented the tip of a Jewish Jihadist iceberg, I’d recommend that young Jews be frisked. So far, this (partly) Jewish John Walker Lindh has proven to be an extreme exception to the rule, like the Tamils.â€?

A few readers wrote to correct me. For the purpose of the column, I had treated Gadahn as a Jew. But, they said, only his grandfather (and father too, until conversion, it would appear) were Jewish. That’s perfectly true: By rabbinical law, Gadahn was not Jewish. By Hitlerian law, he was and still is Jewish.

Although his Jewish lineage is indeed weak, had I not introduced him in the context of profiling, I’d have been accused of conveniently ignoring the possibility that young Jews, especially members of the left-liberal faith, could join a terrorist group and might need to be profiled. As I suggested to a law professor from the “Volokh Conspiracy,” I needed to rule out that eventuality.

Hamas Leader Hammers Palestinians

Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

Can this be? A Hamasnik—a rather remarkable individual, at that—has had it with blaming Israel for what he sees around him in Gaza and the West Bank. PA Government Spokesman Dr. Ghazi Hamad writes the following in the PA daily Al-Ayyam:

“We are always afraid to speak honestly about our mistakes, as we have become accustomed to placing the blame on other factors. The anarchy, chaos, pointless murders, the plundering of lands, family feuds… what do all of these have to do with the occupation? We have always been accustomed to pinning our failures on others, and conspiratorial thinking is still widespread among us…”

“When you walk around in Gaza, you cannot help but avert your eyes from what you see: indescribable anarchy, policemen that nobody cares about, youth proudly carrying weapons, mourning tents set up in the middle of main streets, and from time to time you hear that so-and-so was murdered in the middle of the night, and the response comes quickly the next morning. Large families carry weapons in tribal wars against other families. Gaza has turned into a garbage dump, there is a stench, and sewage flows [in the streets]…â€?

“The government cannot do anything, the opposition [Fatah] looks on from the sidelines, engaged in internal bickering, and the president has no power… We are walking aimlessly in the streets. The reality in which we are living in Gaza can only be described as miserable and wretched, and as a failure in every sense of the word. We applauded the elections and the unique democratic experience, but in reality there has been a great step backwards. We spoke of national consensus, [but] it turned out to be like a leaf blowing in the wind…”

Well, well, Dr. Ghazi Hamad and Ilana Mercer are not that far apart on the matter of self-determinism, causality, and culpability. Read “Gaza Goes to the Dogs (of War),â€? “Reality On The Palestinian Ground,â€? “Qassam Rockets ‘R’ Us,â€? “Savage Society,” and then return to Hamad:

“It is strange that when a great effort was made to reopen the Rafah Crossing in order to make [life] easier for the residents, somebody fires a missile towards the crossing, or that when there is talk about the need for tahdiah [“calm”], somebody fires another missile… “I have asked myself: What does the resistance gain if the country is all chaos, replete with corruption, crime, and futile murder? Isn’t the building of the homeland part of resistance? Isn’t cleanliness, order, and respect for the law part of resistance? Isn’t strengthening social relations part of the policy of shortening the life of the occupation? We have lost the connection between the resistance and other aspects of life. There is an abyss between the resistance, politics and the people. That is why the people are scattered, with no unifying or organizing [hand]…â€?

Now that a bright Hamasnik has broken with their Israel-ate-my-homework philosophy of Palestinian failing, what oh what will Pat Buchanan, his American Conservatives and Charlie Reese do? The Counterpunch crop? Koffey Annan and the Eurabians? The libertarians who’ve toiled to refine the liberal root-causes rot, rejected by Hamas’ Hamad? What will they do? Declare a fatwa on the man?

My guess is that the Palestinians’ western enablers will ignore Hamad and dissolve into more high-flown banalities about blaming the victims—and by so doing, they’ll continue to maintain the philosophical scaffolding that immobilizes the Palestinians.

(A doff of the hat to Dr. Daniel Pipes for the link.)