Shouldn't this come with a warning...
Something along the lines of: may offend those, without a sense of humor.
US tweet deportation: Chilling behind-the-scenes photos
The story earlier this week on the deportation from the US of A of two Brits who ill-advisedly tweeted they were off to "destroy America" left a few readers pretty shaken up at the way the Department of Homeland Security handles potential terrorist threats. Trust us, you don't know the half of it. Today, we publish exclusive …
-
-
Sunday 5th February 2012 12:27 GMT Asgard
@"without a sense of humor"
Ruthless state officials (in every country) don't have a sense of humor. They have a "more than its their jobs worth attitude". The state officials are not thinking about other people, they are thinking about themselves. They take the very literal line, that if something were ever to go wrong, (that the person they should have stopped done wrong), then however unlikely that is, they risk being told off about letting that person through. So to defend against that ever happening, (no matter how remote a possibility it could ever be), they therefore behave with an absolute ruthlessly unthinking attitude in their clamp down to control what anyone says (and can possibly do), in case it could ever reflect badly on them being told they have not done their job.
Even worse they also want to show they are doing their controlling job, because ultimately they want to keep their position of power to be able to control others. Worse still they can (and all too often do) even just pick on people to make examples of them, to make themselves look like they are doing their job. Even worse is how so often these punishment methods don't even require a court of law to decide the punishment. The officials are judge and jury and the punishments are already allowed to be given out by the officials rules and regulations which give them power, (which they don't use against most people), but always have the option to choose to use against almost anyone, if they wish.
Added to this (as the news keeps showing), these ruthless state officials are able to act these days with almost impunity and that has to be stopped. These ruthless bastards are increasingly making our world a growing endlessly controlled nightmare for all of us and their power to control is growing year by year. But then the more knowledge they have on people the more ways they have to punish people and they are using their ability to punish as far as they can to twist laws and rules to suit whatever they want to do.
-
-
Friday 3rd February 2012 18:13 GMT Anonymous Coward
imagine if they had been....
Asian?
We would never have heard the story
We would never had known their names
As far as we know they would never have existed
While being flown on a whistle stop tour of the worlds torture centres by unlisted aircraft on unlisted routed with unlisted flight plans.
Because rendition does not and has never existed.
-
Monday 6th February 2012 10:21 GMT Richard 120
Re: imagine if they had been....
Asian,
We probably would not have heard about the story unless maybe we lived in Asia and they reported it in the Asian press, never having been there I assume they have newspapers and the like.
I'm not sure why you'd expect to hear about incidents involving Americans and Asians in the European press?
Similarly, I had a friend who mentioned that during the reporting of the Costa Concordia incident that the numbers breakdown mentioned Spanish, British, Italians etc. the rest of them were apparently Asian.
I would expect the Asian press to break it down similarly, so there were Chinese, Korean, Indian etc., the rest were from somewhere else.
I think you may be a British with Asian origins or an Asian living in Britain who's a bit disgruntled about the lack of Asian reporting, don't take it so personally, it's just a different part of the world.
-
-
-
-
-
This post has been deleted by its author
-
-
-
-
-
-
Friday 3rd February 2012 17:24 GMT Steve Knox
Schema Validation Error on Line 1
near '<accent type="american">'
Error 531: "american" is not a valid value for enumeration accent.type. Perhaps you meant one of:
american.canadian.french_canadian
american.canadian.nova_scotian
american.canadian.newfoundlander
american.us.downeastah
american.us.midwesterner
american.us.southerner
fake.uk.stereotypical_american_gay_texan_rancher
or the other 231 accents which contain the text "american"?
Please consult FakeTML Schema Reference Addendum 26, "Exhaustive List of Accent Types (English Language)".
-
-
Friday 3rd February 2012 16:57 GMT AdamWill
not U.S. citizens
They're not U.S. citizens. American law enforcement agencies - and, in fact, Americans in general - have long been very clear that all those nice rights belong to *Americans*. No-one else has any rights other than to do exactly as the nice Homeland Security agent tells them to.
-
-
-
Friday 3rd February 2012 22:27 GMT Charlie Clark
Sort of
For a while US courts took pains to interpret "citizen" literally so there was a reasonable trade in medical experiments non-citizens, ie. immigrants. But some courts did develop cold feet / grow a pair depending on your perspective and so the authorities rediscovered the joys of extra-territoriality and extraordinary rendition to keep those pesky human (note not citizen's) rights people at bay and thus was born Guantanamo and lots of containers at foreign aiports...
@ Lester: fan-fucking-tastic collection of piciures. Who says investigative journalism is dead?
-
Friday 3rd February 2012 23:30 GMT Chris_Maresca
Border area 'not US soil'
The courts have ruled (oddly, I might add) that border areas are not US soil and constitutional rights don't apply. Even if it's in the middle of the airport in the middle of the US..... This is true for both citizens and non-citizens, it's why they can search your laptop and you have no rights.
I would point out that this has always been the case in most countries, but it has only recently been actually clarified by US courts. Previous to those rulings, it was sorta a gray area...
Besides, it's also the case that border control in the US is a Faraday cage, so you have no way to contact outside help - you're pretty much at the mercy of whoever is detaining you.... constitutional rights or not.
-
Saturday 4th February 2012 07:41 GMT Irony Deficient
clarification requested
Chris_Maresca, would you please provide a case name having a judgement that determined that US border areas are not US soil?
The reason why certain searches and seizures in the US are considered reasonable at ports of entry (including inland international airports), yet unreasonable elsewhere in the country, ultimately dates back to the First Congress: namely to the Act of July 31, 1789 (two years before the ratification of the US Bill of Rights). The powers of border guards approached their current scope with the McCarran-Walter Act of 1952, enacted by overriding Truman’s veto during the era of McCarthyism.
-
-
-
This post has been deleted by its author
-
-
Sunday 5th February 2012 00:42 GMT Irony Deficient
evidence requested
AdamWill, would you please provide evidence that a person going through immigration at a US port of entry on US soil (including inland international airports) is not in the US?
Regarding the Fourth Amendment right of anyone in the US, citizen or not, to be "secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures", US ports of entry on US soil are places where a different standard of "unreasonable" has applied since there were only eleven states in the Union.
-
Sunday 5th February 2012 01:59 GMT Daniel 4
@Irony Deficient
"AdamWill, would you please provide evidence that a person going through immigration at a US port of entry on US soil (including inland international airports) is not in the US?"
I'm not AdamWill, but I will offer a reference that at least clarifies the claim. As near as I can tell - and this isn't my field much less am I the specialist who should be answering this question - the points of entry in question are most definitely U.S. soil - but a number of what the standard American assumes applies to them ANYWHERE in America (if not the whole damn world in some cases) is totally meaningless until you've been cleared for entry. If you want more information, reference the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), § 235 [8 U.S.C.].
-d
-
Sunday 5th February 2012 05:47 GMT Irony Deficient
out standing in our fields
Daniel 4, thanks for your reply. You are certainly correct in noting that the typical Yank tends to believe that his constitutional rights remain the same at all times and places in the US, despite common knowledge of situations where this is not the case, e.g. freedom of speech not extending to causing panic by shouting “Fire!” in a packed movie theater. (Cue the Big Brother icons decrying the imminent annihilation of the First Amendment.) A person’s Fourth Amendment rights are similarly curtailed at US ports of entry on US soil, and are restored once one passes through CBP’s gate.
Please note that the formal name of McCarran-Walter (in my reply above to Chris_Maresca) is the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952. (There was a large amending act of the same name in 1965.) I’ll point you in turn to §287 (a) of McCarran-Walter for a list of powers that the immigration people can wield without requiring warrants, or even probable cause.
-
-
-
-
Monday 6th February 2012 10:51 GMT Anonymous Coward
Same rights as US citizens? Under 2012 NDAA act...
....so that'll be.....fuck all then! Behaved `belligerently` towards the state? I reckon these two probably qualify.
Good luck lads, they're going to make a massive mountain out of this! Be prepared to become an example to the rest of us! Time to go back to the oldschool - Get out there with stencils and spraypaint and posters. The internet is a dangerous place to post political polemic - too many paranoid freak governments these days... feeling control slipping away from them....they don't like it!
-
-
This post has been deleted by its author
-
-
-
-
Friday 3rd February 2012 20:28 GMT laird cummings
"...head in hands..."
"Yes, yes there is - scores of them. But as they have clues, they're not permitted anywhere near policy-makers nor allowed to be part of decision making processes.
Mostly, they're exiled to squalid little cubbies, where they crank out reams of analysis reports - which are then used to fuel the furnaces.
-
-
-
Friday 3rd February 2012 22:36 GMT Charlie Clark
Pretty vacant
Another pretty unambiguous collection of two words. Maybe you can have a t-shirt made with them printed on it?
You need to read more headlines and look up the term "crash blossoms" while you're at it.
All terrorists must, by law, wear clothing that clearly identifies them as such and behave in the prescribed manner.
-
-
Friday 3rd February 2012 18:48 GMT ItsNotMe
The REALLY scary part about this whole thing is...
...the Troglodites who arrested these folks carry loaded weapons. Those idiots are FAR MORE dangerous than those two kids.
And by the way...just because it's "beer time" on YOUR side of the pond...have a little pity on those of us who still have 5 hours to go. OK? Cheers everyone!!
This topic is closed for new posts.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
