Showing posts with label crime. Show all posts
Showing posts with label crime. Show all posts

24 June 2016

US police arbitrarily stop, detain anyone

The Blog


US police have been given authority to stop, search, and detain any US citizen without any legitimate suspicion.


As shown in a recent Supreme Court ruling, police can stop a vehicle without cause, as long as they are able to scour it and find something suspicious. The police stop is therefore itself arbitrary and illegal - up until the moment the police find something illegal on the vehicle they have stopped.

In the case in question, US police in Salt Lake City stopped a vehicle illegally - without any explanation - and used an outstanding traffic warrant later discovered in the vehicle as evidence against the driver. The Supreme Court was willing to accept this after-the-fact reason for stopping the vehicle, along with looking for anything else in the vehicle as evidence of some wrongdoing by the driver. The goal of the evidence was to later justify the police's then-unjustified actions.

Anti-state news analyst Thomas Knapp wrote in a post that the Supreme Court ruling is a "clear and present danger to the public", setting the regime on a path to greater hostility against its citizens. The analyst notes that such repressive behavior by the regime can only lead to increasing preparations by the population for violent resistance.

Distrust in the US police state is growing. On 1 June, leading social historian Immanuel Wallerstein noted that the US regime is increasingly unstable, filled with tensions exploding into open violence. This is accompanied by the growing capacity for citizen warfare and resistance against the state, motivated by exactly the criminal rulings described in Knapp's post.


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Islamic faith irrelevant to Omar Mateen

The Blog


Commenting on the work of investigators looking at the attack by US citizen Omar Mateen that took the lives of a high number of LGBT people in Orlando, Florida, Beliefnet's Hesham Hassaballa argued it was nothing to do with Islam.


Investigators currently believe even the connection between the gunman and the ISIS terrorist group was nothing more than posing for publicity at best. The shooter had his own reasons for committing his crime. With extremist ideology not an important motivation for Mateen, his Islamic faith was even more irrelevant.

Nevertheless, many other commentators in the media are convinced the attack is just additional evidence to claim all Muslims are terrorists in waiting. The rhetoric of politicians such as Donald Trump is therefore likely to take a boost in popularity, as a result of the shooting.

In conclusion, Hassaballa writes, "it is becoming increasingly clear that this crime had nothing to do with terrorism and ISIS. Omar Mateen fit the typical profile of a mass shooter, and this time, he happened to be Muslim."

Many critics of western media and legal responses to mass murder sprees focus on how Middle Eastern attackers are quickly judged to be religious terrorists even if they were mentally ill, whereas white attackers are only ever judged to be mentally ill or incorrectly medicated.


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7 June 2016

Game over! America can't be great again

The Blog


A return to the "golden era" promised by Donald Trump when he says he will "make America great again" is not historically possible. The world has changed, and it hasn't changed to America's advantage.


Furthermore, all Trump's opponents, including Hillary Clinton, are no different than him in longing for a return to America's past glory days. America's stature in the world, in the eyes of ally and enemy alike, has degenerated and cannot be recovered

Such facts are recently articulatated by global top social historian Immanuel Wallerstein. Wallerstein's commentary appeared at his website on 1 June 2016, and argued the top social scientist's judgment again that America has already long lost its crown as a hegemonic superpower. As asserted in the commentary:
Life in the United States is not as good as it once was. Trump has used as his slogan “make America great again.” The “again” refers to the golden era. And Sanders also seems to refer to a previously golden era in which jobs were not exported to the global South. Even Clinton now seems to look back at something lost.
Looking at escalating gun violence in America (mainly confined to Black ghettos and ignored by the national media, insofar as middle class whites aren't the victims), Wallerstein speaks of a cycle of social instability in the US that will only increase in coming years. Such violence may reach non-Black areas of US society soon on a large scale, causing a vicious circle of insecurity that panics everyone and feeds back on itself, leading to increasing numbers of people leaving America and fewer migrants entering. It also feeds into another pattern of force, already inflamed to levels that made the US government tremble recently.

Wallerstein writes of a "very small band of deeply anti-state militias, who call themselves the Citizens for Constitutional Freedom (CCF)".

Unsurprisingly, the regime considers such ranchers and militiamen to be a greater "threat" than foreign terrorists, although these alleged "domestic terrorists" largely seek only to reclaim the original Republic formed by George Washington. And the biggest way the regime acknowledges the magnitude and prestige of this threat is by negotiating with them, rather than simply killing them as it does with other enemies.

Although the regime has in fact used force against homegrown militias if "negotiations fail", it has set itself on a grave path by doing so. Alluding to various standoffs between militias and the government, Wallerstein believes, "This more extreme version of action may soon spread. It is not a question of moving to the right but of moving towards more violent protest, towards a civil war".

With the paranoid regime ignoring increasing gun crime expanding beyond ghettos and threatening to inflame community tensions, together with anti-Federal militias taking matters into their own hands to restore order, the country's future as a failed state seems frighteningly certain.

It is not that left-wing sociologist Wallerstein means to endorse right-leaning militia forces like the CCF by ideology, but that he sees them playing an essential historic role in the demise of the US regime and ending its global oppression starting at home. Of that demise, Wallerstein promises we can "make the world a better place for everyone... only if we stop longing to go back to a golden era, which was not so golden for most of the world."


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13 May 2016

UK drone strike legality questioned

The Blog


A UK Parliamentary committee report published on 9 May 2016 calls for more "accountability" in extrajudicial executions conducted by the human rights-abusing British regime overseas.


The report originates with the Joint Committee on Human Rights, and, although not condemning the state assassinations of British subjects without trial, makes a number of requests for the Government to explain itself.

Questioning the legality of UK drone assassinations, such as the one that killed Reyaad Khan on 21 August 2015, the report requested to know "the legal basis on which [Britain] provides any help which facilitates the use of lethal force outside of armed conflict by the US, or any other country which takes the same or a similar view to the US... with regard to the use of lethal force".

Regarding accountability, the report stated as follows:
There must also be a mechanism for effective independent investigation capable of leading to accountability... Independent scrutiny is a means of ensuring that decision-makers keep to the relevant standards; is a safeguard against the danger of mission creep, when broad powers are exercised in ever wider circumstances; and gives the public the confidence that it is necessary to entrust such exceptional powers to ministers.
With the so-called "war on terror" still a menace to human rights, many people still do not realize that the British regime, obeying the orders of the American regime, has carte blanche to kill anyone without trial if they are perceived or even mistakenly identified as a threat to the regime.


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1 April 2016

Clinton to be "forced to resign" if elected

The Blog


Writing at OpEdNews recently, the Garrison Center's Thomas L. Knapp launched criticisms of US presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.


Noting the scandal surrounding Clinton's use of a private email address while working as US Secretary of State, Knapp suggested it is possible Clinton will face prosecution even if she is elected as President. If winning the top job doesn't shield her from the sword of justice, she could be forced to resign shortly thereafter.

This is an example of how serious breaches of security - no matter how petty these seem for a name as big as Hillary Clinton's - should be taken into account by voters.

147 FBI agents are presently investigating Clinton's use of a private email address for state purposes. Prosecution is not off the table. In view of this, Knapp asks, "Do Democrats really want to go all in on Hillary Clinton’s narcissistic sense of self-entitlement, especially when it’s looking more and more likely that the next card the dealer turns up will be grand jury indictments?"

The scandal surrounding Clinton's emails cannot be underestimated, despite how dismissive she and her supporters have been of it. "Even if Clinton herself escapes prosecution, it’s worth remembering that Richard Nixon was never indicted either, but was forced to resign after several of his closest aides were", Knapp warns US voters in the post at the Garrison Center.

Also worth considering is that, while this reckless use of a private email address may seem a minor infraction by someone as high up as Secretary of State when the offense is reported to the public, it is sufficient grounds to get any other civil servant sacked and barred from the job. Any government worker will tell you so.

Why should a presidential candidate be excluded from the penalties applied to other government workers or job candidates? Arguably, the most important job in the United States needs to exercise even harsher penalties against candidates than all the lower jobs in government departments - not let people off just because their name seems too big to be prosecuted.


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25 March 2016

FBI exposed as child pornographers

The Blog


Decrying the FBI's "law enforcement gone rogue", Garrison Center director Thomas L. Knapp points out that the Federal Bureau of Investigation broke the law by running an illegal website distributing child pornography.


Similar to other sting operations, in which a large amount of the harm is done by the FBI itself, (such as persuading extremists to commit acts of terror so they can then be arrested) this one involved the FBI taking it upon itself to run an illegal website - a type of cyber sting operation.

Choosing not to "cheer on the white knights who protect society from the scourge of child pornography" this time, considering their methods, the Garrison director sums up how the scandal transpired in a recent March 22 post, as follows:
The Federal Bureau of Investigation, it seems, has been moonlighting as a provider of child pornography. After locating and seizing the servers of a child porn site on the “dark web,” known as Play Pen and reachable only via the Tor browser, the FBI decided not to shut the site down. Instead, they kept it running for two weeks, using it to spread malware that could identify and locate a handful of the site’s visitors. The vast majority of the 200,000 people downloading child porn from the site went on their way unmolested (pun intended). A few whose computers were mis-configured so as to be vulnerable to the FBI’s trick were arrested.
Whistle-blowers (this time Free Talk Live), as usual, came under attack by US law enforcement for exposing the government's tactics. Knapp deems the FBI, in light of these revelations, to be "child pornographers" while "their victims are journalists who exposed the FBI’s role" in the scandal.


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15 March 2016

Paid $1500 in jail fees, not even guilty

The Blog


Indicating more unfairness in the US jail system, a man was deprived of a large sum of money in jail fees during the time he stood merely accused of a crime.


Thomas L. Knapp relays the story in a column, available at the Garrison Center and also published via the Mesa Independent and Citizens Journal.

The man, who isn't mentioned by name, was acquitted, but not without being charged "$1,500 he was required to pay just to remain in a place he would cheerfully have walked right out of if allowed."

In his conclusion, Knapp comments that as an antistatist, he doesn't believe in the present government prison system - but, while one exists, taxpayers should really shoulder the costs. He asks, "shouldn’t “we” pick up the check for keeping people — even guilty people — in jail if that’s where “we” want them kept?"


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11 December 2015

Blair rants to defend himself in article

The Blog


Wanted war criminal Tony Blair ranted in a recent article published at the UK magazine Spectator, in an attempt to defend himself.


Blair avoided mentioning Iraq or his crimes in that country throughout his article, instead focusing on what he called the "tragedy of the Labour party's current position".

Most of Blair's article was vacant and avoided making any particular statement other than vague references to his own ideas being more "realist", despite them leading to failures, humiliation and defeats such as the Iraq War or strongly related ongoing Syrian conflict. At one point, Blair almost mentioned the Iraq War, stating as follows:
Post 9/11 I became convinced that Islamist extremism was the security issue of our time. People can agree or disagree with the decisions which I took and the emphasis I put on the partnership with the USA, but I took them not in defiance of progressive politics but in furtherance of them.
In essence, Blair was trying to conflate illegal British aggression in support of right-wing American thuggery with "progressive politics". Other commentators may see Blair's article as Nineteenth Century imperialist drivel trying to portray the West as a superior civilization that is morally compelled to conquer others.

To date, Tony Blair and others who helped his regime commit a war of aggression in Iraq in 2003 have so far escaped trial or execution by international authorities for their crimes, despite overwhelming demands for neocon criminals to face justice.


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8 December 2015

Media wants "batsh*t" fear of dark skin

The Blog


Garrison Center director Thomas L. Knapp has commented on the irresponsible and provocative way some media, in particular the Daily Mail, responded to a recent terrorist incident in California.


Media quoted some residents from the scene of the crime in San Bernardino, California. Some of them were reported stating that they knew "middle easterners" were receiving many deliveries and working at night, but that they did not report it to law enforcement for fear of racial profiling. Knapp was quick to point out that they were correct: their refusal to racially profile the killers for having dark complexions cannot be blamed for the killings.

Syed Rizwan Farook, 28, and Tashfeen Malik, 27 committed what is now considered to be an ISIL-inspired terrorist attack on US soil on December 2 using pipe bombs and semi-automatic weaponry. Both were eliminated by US security forces at the scene of the crime, but had managed to murder 14 civilians during the tragic events.

Earlier on The clubof.info Blog: US wants a terror attack to justify spying

Thomas L. Knapp, who goes by the nickname KN@PPSTER and is also part of the Mont society which recently declared a revolutionary value system in October, wrote on his blog Friday that the media's biased comments amount to "encouraging everyone else to go batsh*t insane if a swarthy new neighbor orders too much stuff from Fingerhut". KN@PPSTER argues the reports were presented in such a way that they imply racial profiling is an acceptable standard for judging someone's guilt and reporting them to the police. This much is apparent in the comments section of the Mail article, in which users condemn "political correctness" for enabling the attack.

In full, the director offered this commentary obtained by The clubof.info Blog's network:
If you think your neighbors tinkering in their garage at night and receiving lots of packages is "suspicious," you're paranoid... And if your reason... is that they look like "middle easterners,"... what you are doing is racial profiling...
Further information can be found at knappster.blogspot.uk


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10 July 2015

"Dread Pirate Roberts" can't be caught

The Blog


Whilst Ross Ulbricht was imprisoned for founding and maintaining the Silk Road darknet market, the threat he represents to the statist elite can't be defeated.


Center for a Stateless Society (C4SS) writer Ryan Calhoun argued in a post on  that Ross Ulbricht, who allegedly used the shared pseudonym Dread Pirate Roberts, defied the US state and that his trial was based upon the fears of the ruling political elite rather than any crime committed by Ross himself. From Calhoun's emotive account:
By placing him in your torture chamber known colloquially as the U.S Prison System you have broadcast your hatred and your fear of what he represents to the world once more. “Here remains The Dread Pirate Roberts, Defiler of the Narrative of Necessity”. He may remain there for a time, but his story cannot. The truth cannot. There are no cages that can hold the truth and I will do whatever I can to spread it. Ross was not the first nor is he the last. The people have been striking out against this bogus fiction since it was first taught to them. You called them criminals. You called their actions violent and you call your own violence necessity.
In many cases, the rationale for banning websites and services has more to do with conserving power in the hands of the state and traditional economic elites rather than actually preventing social harms. Calhoun sees this as the case in the prosecution of Ross Ulbricht. The analysis is in agreement with many other antistatist writers, who regard the Silk Road as one in a long projected trend of web-borne rebellions against traditional state power.

Describing the US prison system as a "torture chamber", Calhoun stated that the life imprisonment of Ross Ulbricht is no less than a cynical death sentence against a bright and principled man whose only crime was threatening the ruling US mafia state's grasp on power.

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30 June 2015

5 outrageous recent police killings

The Blog


American police officers kill with impunity, but perhaps more outrageous is how they try to justify getting away with murder.


From Counterpunch's 26 June issue:
  1. "On June 9, 2015 an unarmed man, Ryan Bollinger, was shot by police in Des Moines after “walking with a purpose” towards the police car after he exited his vehicle after a low speed chase started when he was observed dancing in the street and behaving erratically. The deceased was shot by the police through the rolled up cruiser window. The murder is under investigation."
  2. "An unarmed man, Eric Harris, ran from the police in Tulsa Oklahoma on April 2, 2015. After he was shot in the back by a Taser by one officer and was on the ground, another 73 year old volunteer reserve officer shot and killed him, all captured by video. While dying he was yelling that he was losing his breath, to which one of the officers responded “F*ck your breath.” The police said the officer thought he was shooting his Taser and “inadvertently discharged his service weapon.” The officer has been charged withsecond degree manslaughter. Running away from the police so often provokes police overreaction that the aggressive police response has several names including the “foot tax” and the “running tax.”"
  3. "Naked Man Refused to Stop. A naked unarmed mentally ill Air Force Afghanistan veteran, Anthony Hill, was shot and killed March 9, 2015 by DeKalb County Georgia police after police said he refused an order to stop. The killing is under investigation."
  4. "On March 6, 2015 Aurora Colorado policeshot and killed unarmed Naeschylus Vinzant while taking him into custody. For the last three months, while the investigation into the killing continues, the police have refused to say what compelled the officer to shoot Vinzant."
  5. "Five Police Felt Threatened by One Unarmed Homeless Man. March 1, 2015 Los Angeles police shot and killed an unarmed homeless man Charly Leundeu Keunang after five officers went to his tent and struggled with him. One unarmed homeless man threatened five armed LAPD officers? Los Angeles police have killed about one person a week since 2000. An investigation is ongoing."
After penning a further ten examples, Counterpunch writer Bill Quigly concludes that "These outrages demand massive change in the way lethal force is used, reported, justified and prosecuted."

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9 January 2015

“Protect and Serve” or Hate and Fear?

. @KevinCarson1. #icantbreathe. #policebrutality. #occupation.


The recent trajectory of events leading up to the shooting of NYPD officers Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos, and the nationwide police backlash afterward, have made it clearer than ever how police feel about the public they supposedly protect and serve: they’re terrified of us. For more than twenty years, the Drug War and associated police militarization encouraged an increasing tendency of urban police to see local populations as a dangerous occupied enemy. In Radley Balko’s Rise of the Warrior Cop they admit to stopping and exiting patrol cars randomly in non-white neighborhoods solely to make a show of force, reminding cowed residents who’s boss. And thanks to the mushroom proliferation of SWAT teams (originally designed for use in rare situations like hostage crises) even in small towns, and the enormous flow of surplus military equipment to local police forces like Ferguson, that hostile and fearful attitude towards the local population has spread downward into suburbs and towns.

Meanwhile internal police culture has taken on the same paranoid coloring that caused Lt. Calley and his men to snap and massacre the population of My Lai. Since Hill Street Blues days, cops have commonly described their jobs patrolling the community using “Band of Brothers” rhetoric reminiscent of extended recon missions in Vietnam. But these self-perceptions are utterly detached from reality. Soldiers in Vietnam actually had a high risk of getting killed. But police on-duty casualty rates have fallen steadily for decades. Policing is the ninth-most dangerous job (the top two are logging and fishing); sanitation work is twice as deadly.

That embattled self-image has been the police norm, to an increasing extent, for the past twenty years or more. In recent years police resentment ratcheted further upward over the “chilling effect” of widespread citizen recording of brutality with smart phones, and social media criticism after the Occupy camp shutdowns. But internal police culture went into full-blown panic mode in response to protests over the shooting of Michael Brown, and to the nationwide #WeCantBreathe and #BlackLivesMatter demonstrations after the verdicts in the Michael Brown and Eric Garner shootings.

On police-only message boards, off-duty cops feel free to admit how they really see us: a bunch of sniveling ingrates too spoiled to appreciate the “thin blue line” protecting them from chaos. Virtually any unarmed non-white person killed by a cop is referred to in such venues as a “criminal” or “thug.” Police apologists go frantically to work digging up dirt on the victims. They depict the victims in language appealing to the most bestial, menacing stereotypes of black men (like the fixation on 12-year-old Tamir Rice’s height and the description of Michael Brown as a hulking linebacker grunting like an animal).

Poul Anderson once wrote that government is the only institution that’s entitled to kill you for disobeying it. That comes through loud and clear with the police — especially the “entitled” part. A police union spokesman flat-out said, if you don’t want to get killed, obey police orders without question. (As if even that were a sufficient guarantee, considering the people having epileptic seizures or in diabetic comas who were killed for “resisting arrest.”) Among the general public “Stop resisting! Stop resisting!” is a punchline, but police even joke among themselves about literally getting away with murder (for example those “We Show Up Early to Beat the Crowds” t-shirts).

To police any criticism at all, even a suggestion that police may sometimes engage in racial profiling or excessive force, is seen as an existential threat. Those same police message boards mentioned above were rife with complaints that protests over the Brown and Garner verdicts were creating an “open season” on cops. The NYPD union gave Mayor Bill de Blasio notice, after he mentioned warning his biracial son to be especially careful around cops, that he would not be welcome at police funerals.

Police paranoia increased its simmer to a boil in response to the protests over Brown’s death and the verdicts; the shooting of Liu and Ramos made it an exploding pressure cooker. Internal NYPD emails accused de Blasio of having “blood on his hands” for his remarks, and implicated protestors as accomplices. Police nationwide have echoed the sentiments.

In short, the cops blame everyone for the hostility that led to Liu’s and Ramos’s death except themselves. Police are professionals at playing the victim card.

The NYPD now considers itself at war. Cops only patrol in pairs, serving warrants and summonses only when absolutely necessary to make an arrest. After decades of asserting how inconceivably dangerous their jobs are, the NYPD responds to two line-of-duty deaths in a force of thousands — the first in THREE YEARS — like it was Pearl Harbor. That speaks volumes about how privileged and entitled they really are.

We can safely assume that, NYPD officers minimize interactions with the public to when an arrest is absolutely necessary, rates of crime by both the public and the cops themselves can only decrease. While they’re at it, maybe they can go on strike — another phenomenon that’s historically associated with drastic drops in the crime rate. That’s one good way of taking criminals off the street.

By Kevin Carson - More articles by Kevin Carson

Originally published at the Center for a Stateless Society on 23 December 2014.

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