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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Raymond Duray who wrote (274237)	7/12/2002 3:28:08 PM
From: bonnuss_in_austin	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 769670

Man Who Taped Police Beating Arrested in L.A. MORE evidence of the police state: By Reuters \| New York Times Friday, 12 July, 2002 LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - The man who videotaped a police beating near Los Angeles that enraged black leaders and then dodged a grand jury inquiry into the matter was arrested on Thursday as he prepared to grant a television interview. Mitchell Crooks was taken into custody on warrants issued in northern California for petty theft and drunken driving. Authorities also served him with a subpoena to testify before the Los Angeles County grand jury. Crooks' arrest was videotaped and broadcast on local KCAL-TV, showing undercover officers hustling him into a sports utility vehicle with tinted windows outside the studios of CNN as the 27-year-old man repeatedly screamed for help. Crooks had failed to appear on Thursday morning at Los Angeles Superior Court, where the grand jury was meeting, after telling a local radio program that he feared for his life. ``All we're doing is arresting him on the basis of a warrant,'' Los Angeles County District Attorney's spokeswoman Sandi Gibbons said. ``If there had not been a warrant, we would have escorted him to the grand jury.'' ``He is a witness and we need him to authenticate the tape recording, otherwise its value in court would be greatly diminished,'' Gibbons said. Crooks shot his videotape from a motel room across the street from the scene of the incident in Inglewood, which abuts south-central Los Angeles. Crooks called a KFI-AM talk radio show hosted by John Kobylt and Ken Chiampou on Wednesday to discuss the case and said he was afraid that officers would be ``coming after'' him for videotaping the beating of 16-year-old Donovan Jackson. 'I FEAR FOR MY LIFE' ``I fear for my life,'' Crooks said. ``They're going to kick my ass in a cell and take turns on me, probably.'' Deputy District Attorney Kurt Livesay, who was also a guest on the show, then told Crooks over the air that authorities did not want to hurt him, and asked that he give his address to investigators. Instead, Crooks hung up the phone. The videotape, first broadcast on Sunday, shows Inglewood Police Officer Jeremy Morse picking up Jackson and slamming him face-first onto a patrol car. Several seconds later, Morse is seen slugging Jackson in the face with a closed fist. The tape sparked cries of racism and comparisons to the incendiary 1991 beating of Rodney King, which was also videotaped. The acquittal of four Los Angeles officers in that case led to the worst urban riots in modern U.S. history. Several local law enforcement agencies and the Federal Bureau of Investigation were investigating the altercation between Jackson and Morse, a three-year veteran of the Inglewood Police Department. U.S. Attorney John Ashcroft sent his top civil rights deputy to Los Angeles on the case. Jackson and his 41-year-old father, Coby Chavis, who was present during the incident, filed a federal civil rights lawsuit on Wednesday against the officers involved in their arrest, the city of Inglewood and the County of Los Angeles. Black leaders, including congresswoman Maxine Waters, a Democrat who represents the area, and Inglewood Mayor Roosevelt Dorn have called for Morse to be immediately fired and broughtup on state or federal charges. ATTORNEY: OFFICER DESERVES DUE PROCESS But Morse's lawyer told Reuters in an interview that the 24-year-old officer had been condemned by public officials before all of the facts were known or the probes even begun. ``I think it's quite unfortunate that people who have sworn to defend and uphold the Constitution would ignore the presumption of innocence and find individuals guilty before there's even been a trial,'' attorney John Barnett said. ``I thought we stopped doing that a couple hundred years ago.'' Barnett, who also represented one of the officers acquitted in King's beating, said public officials were offering inappropriate assurances that his client was guilty. ``This very same thing happened (in the King case),'' he said. ``That's why it was such a big surprise when they were acquitted with tragic, tragic consequences.'' Barnett said that Morse lifted Jackson from the ground and heaved him onto the car because the teen had let his legs go limp in an effort to resist. ``After his hands were cuffed, Jackson was able to reach out and grab my client's testicles,'' he said. ``And on that occasion the punch was seen in order to make that activity cease.'' In Oklahoma, meanwhile, civil rights activists called for immediate disciplinary action against two white police officers who were videotaped beating a prone black suspect with batons. The officers, Greg Driskill and E.J. Dyer, were to remain on regular duty pending the results of a probe. Oklahoma City police have asked the FBI to investigate. (In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.) 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To: Raymond Duray who wrote (274237)	7/12/2002 6:07:17 PM
From: MSI	Respond to of 769670

"Police State: Can It Happen Here?", Jules Archer An extension of the Nixon years... I just happen to be reading this part of an out-of-print book (which is also not available in most libraries, oddly enough): --------------- "A large number of Americans, both in the general populace and at the highest levels of government, are behaving as if we already had a police state in America," worried Senator Weicker in May 1973. "What we are witnessing is the development of a style of repression that is new to us, the establishment in this country of conditions -- technological, psychological and legal -- making government by police state possible through an apparatus of total surveillance that seldom would need the reinforcement of a political trial." Wayne Morse of Oregon also warned his countrymen, "What you are faced with is the steady erosion of the Constitutional safeguards of the American people. The result is that we are fast approaching a police state; we are getting ominously close to where the German people stood just before Hitler's Third Reich." At first, many Americans refused to believe the truth about President Nixon and his aides, who indignantly denied any involvement. In private, however, they held frantic conferences seeking to cover up everything they had done to suppress the truth. The acting director of the FBI was ordered to destroy crucial evidence. These attempts at cover-up were thwarted when the Senate decided to hold public hearings. Alarmed, Nixon ordered all his aides and bureau chiefs to refuse to testify... on the grounds of "national security". Such testimony, he argued, would reveal secret information which would be harmful to our interests... -- Police State: Can it Happen Here, Jules Archer