Yearly Archives: 2007

This is Wiretapping?

This entry was posted in Government Privacy on by

We should have a reasonable expectation of privacy when we are in a private place. Say our home, in our car with the windows closed, etc.
There is no way, though, that police should ever have any expectation of privacy while performing duties on behalf of their public employers. It is pretty ludicrous that in one jurisdiction police have charged someone with wiretapping when he recorded them while being investigated for drunk driving:

Police say they were patrolling the downtown area at 2:54 a.m. when they discovered Christopher A. Power of 52 Chestnut St. sitting in the driver’s seat of a vehicle with its motor running at the Rochester Common.
After speaking with Power, police began investigating him for driving while intoxicated and arrested him. During the arrest an audio recording device was discovered.
“During a search after the arrest an audio recorder was discovered on the driver’s seat cushion,” Capt. Paul Callaghan said. “The officer noticed that the recorder was recording.”
Power was charged with driving while intoxicated and wiretapping, which is a Class B felony.

Perhaps they were doing their investigation via cell phone. Or perhaps they live in an alternate universe where wiretapping means something very different.
That aside, police must always expect to be audio- or videotaped when they are on duty.

Via Balko.

Were the Kent State Shootings Murder?

This entry was posted in Government US History US Politics on by

Recently released audio tapes suggest that the 4 Dead In Ohio were murdered 37 years ago:

The 1970 killings by National Guardsmen of four students during a peaceful anti-war demonstration at Kent State University have now been shown to be cold-blooded, premeditated official murder.
….
For 37 years the official cover story has been that a mysterious shot rang out and the young Guardsmen panicked, firing directly into the “mob” of students.
This week, that cover story was definitively proven to be a lie.
Prior to the shooting, a student named Terry Strubbe put a microphone at the window of his dorm, which overlooked the rally. According to the Associated Press, the 20-second tape is filled with “screaming anti-war protectors followed by the sound of gunfire.”
But in an amplified version of the tape, a Guard officer is also heard shouting “Right here! Get Set! Point! Fire!”
The sound of gunshots follow the word “Point.”

If true this is not a big surprise. I doubt that there are many who were active at the time who accepted that it was anything other than government sanctioned murder.

Yea, it was 37 years ago but this cold case deserves a rehearing and any perps who are still available should be nailed. Including any of the folks that were pulling their triggers!

Via The Distributed Republic.

What, tenet Should Have Resigned?

This entry was posted in bush bush administration Federal Government Iraq on by

Nora Ephron is right that we set our expectations too high if we expect government officials to resign as a matter of principle:

The notion that George Tenet — or Colin Powell, to take another example of a person we keep asking this question about — would have resigned just because he knew that the administration was lying about weapons of mass destruction, is truly laughable. …
…
We have such affection for the idea that people will quit on a matter of principle that it’s almost sweet. We believe that they quit for moral reasons, that they quit because they want to take a stand against impropriety, that they quit, willingly quit, because they know right from wrong. Once again, let me say this: no one quits.

This administration doesn’t even fire people until the last ounce of incompetence is wrung out of them.*
Unfortunately she becomes an apologist for the bush war when she says:

And in fairness to Tenet and Powell, what’s clear now wasn’t so clear back in the day. That image of the two of them at the United Nations is today such an indelible marker on the road to war. But they couldn’t have known at that time that the war would be such an unmitigated disaster; they surely couldn’t have known that there wouldn’t even be a July 4th sparkler found in all of Iraq;

Sure, the full scope of the bush administration’s incompetence was not yet obvious but, yes, they should have known the sparkler bit. That was tenet’s job….
More importantly even if they had found sparklers that would not have provided a moral excuse for the invasion, for the wasted Iraqi and American lives.

*Given how many of the incompetents are left this is a truly depressing thought.