German government deleted Wikileaks.de after Nazi-style raid

Germany deletes WikiLeaks.de domain after raid

4.9.09 / Wikileaks.org

WIKILEAKS PRESS RELEASE

On April 9th 2009, the internet domain registration for the investigative journalism site Wikileaks.de was suspended without notice by Germany’s registration authority DENIC.

The action comes two weeks after the house of the German WikiLeaks domain sponsor, Theodor Reppe, was searched by German authorities. Police documentation shows that the March 24, 2009 raid was triggered by WikiLeaks’ publication of Australia’s proposed secret internet censorship list. The Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) told Australian journalists that they did not request the intervention of the German government.

The publication of the Australian list exposed the blacklisting of many harmless or political sites and changed the nature of the censorship debate in Australia. The Australian government’s mandatory internet censorship proposal is now not expected to pass the Australian senate.

On March 25 the German cabinet finalized its own proposal to introduce a nation-wide internet censorship system. Australia and Germany are the only Western democracies publicly considering such a mandatory censorship scheme.

While last week German police claimed to the news magazine Der Spiegel that they had been ignorant about WikiLeaks’ role as an international press organization, this “excuse” is surely no longer valid. Despite being questioned by the press, German authorities have still not contacted WikiLeaks or its publishers to resolve the issue, or indeed, at all. The lack of contact is inexcusable.

The situation is similar to the legal dispute between WikiLeaks and the Swiss bank Julius Baer last year. WikiLeaks had published documents exposing hundreds of millions dollars hidden by Baer under Cayman Islands trusts. That case saw the “wikileaks.org” domain temporarily disabled by a California judge following an ex-parte hearing by the bank. Publishing continued on other WikiLeaks domains and following representations by WikiLeaks lawyers and 20 major media and civil liberties organizations, including the American Civil Liberties Union, the Reporters Committee for the Freedom of the Press, the EFF, the Associated Press and Public Citizen, the judge admitted his error and rescinded his orders.

Like the Swiss bank, German authorities have attempted to silence an entire press outlet over their objection to a handful of documents or articles.

WikiLeaks continues publishing on its other (non-German) domains. If the German cabinet’s censorship proposal passes the Bundestag, presumably those WikiLeaks domains would be added to Germany’s secret blacklist.

Germany and China are now the only two countries currently censoring a WikiLeaks domain.

We are investigating the matter and expect to have further updates soon.

To assist us in our fight against censorship in Germany and elsewhere you can make a donation.

Violent G20 provocateurs run free, peaceful protesters restricted – Sumptin’s up!

Who Controls The Black Bloc Anarchists?

Government Decides Who Protests At G20: Violent anarchists allowed to smash up buildings despite announcing target in advance, yet anti-poverty group barred from protesting

4.2.09 / Paul Joseph Watson / Propaganda Matrix

The British authorities seemed to have little problem with allowing a group of violent black bloc anarchists smash up the RBS building while provoking police yesterday, despite the group announcing their target in advance, yet a legitimate anti-poverty organization has had its “accreditation” to protest at the G20 removed on the orders of Downing Street.

This once again underscores the completely undemocratic power of the government to decide who is allowed to protest against them and who is not. When you have to get permission from the government to exercise a God-given right, as in China or Russia, then we know we are already living in a police state. The freedom to protest is not one that has to be “accredited” by the state, a license to protest as it were, it is an innate human right.

Apparently, if you wear black hoods and scarves, smash up private property and provoke police, then that’s absolutely fine and you’ll be left largely untouched. But God forbid if you’re a middle of the road anti-poverty group that just wants to peaceably march down the street.

“An anti-poverty group expressed “outrage” after its accreditation to attend Thursday’s G20 summit was suddenly withdrawn on Wednesday,” reports the Telegraph.

“The World Development Movement said it had no idea why the decision was taken but claimed it was on the orders of 10 Downing Street.”

“The group, which was part of last weekend’s huge (and peaceful – ed) Put People First Alliance which held a rally in London, said the Foreign Office received a note from 10 Downing Street telling it to revoke the accreditation.”

Benedict Southworth, the group’s director, said that the decision was part of the government’s plan to “stage-manage events and prevent voices of dissent and disagreement being heard.”

The black bloc anarchist assault on the Royal Bank of Scotland building yesterday certainly had an air of being stage-managed. The target was announced in advance, the authorities knew that the building was a prime target, and yet it was the only one in the street not boarded up. A cafe across the street was boarded up and yet the RBS building was left completely vulnerable to attack.

Stage-managed? Press photographers outnumber anarchists as the RBS siege is perfectly “produced” for a live television audience.

Cue a relatively small gaggle of black-bloc anarchists, followed by an similarly sized press corps to photograph every angle of every smashed window, and you have the makings of a stage-managed event to instantly be consumed by the watching middle classes thus enlisting their support for a police state crackdown. In this instance, the police stood back and let them do pretty much whatever they liked, which is highly suspicious within itself, but the week is far from over and a wider crackdown could ensue now that public acquiescence has been garnered through repeated footage showing the hostility of the anarchists.

We’re not saying for a minute that every anarchist group is working at the behest of the authorities as provocateurs, nor that the majority are not legitimate protesters expressing their right to free speech, but as we have documented, this particular black bloc sect are at best completely infiltrated by provocateurs who can routinely be relied upon to provide the media with violent footage with which to demonize legitimate protesters at every major global summit stretching back nearly two decades.

To emphasize our point that a lot of these people are merely hired thugs, whenever someone asks them what they are actually proposing to replace the evils of capitalism, they have no idea, as the video below highlights.

Meanwhile, people who actually have a defined cause and merely want to exercise their right to free speech as a public platform to draw attention to the issue, and have already proven they are a peaceable group, are barred from doing so by the government removing their “accreditation” to protest.

Why are the authorities so keen on stifling peaceful protesters while giving free reign to people who dress up like terrorists, attack buildings and provoke cops? Whose interests do the violent actions of the black bloc benefit? The interests of the general public in using free speech as a means of political change? Or the interests of the authorities in providing the perfect pretext with which to crush and outlaw that free speech?

You can’t overthrow the entire system by smashing one bank and starting a bonfire. Real political change takes generations of struggle, decades of building respected educational platforms, and a gargantuan grass-roots movement focused on taking power on the local level and expanding upwards. Throwing a brick through a window isn’t going to achieve anything other than making the vast majority of the general public despise you even more, and support the very systems of power that you are supposedly opposing.

We have documented numerous different occasions where the leadership of the black bloc anarchists were actually working with the authorities to provide a pretext for a police state crackdown.

Following the SPP protests in Canada two years ago, Quebec provincial authorities were forced to admit that three rock-wielding black mask-wearing “anarchists” were in fact police infiltrators used to gather information on protesters.

Video shows two of the provocateurs pick up rocks and try to incite violence before they are outed as cops by legitimate demonstrators. The two thugs then tried to slip behind police lines before their fellow officers were forced to stage their arrest. Again, the fact that they were cops in disguise was later admitted by authorities. Watch the video.

Alex Jones’ film Police State 2: The Takeover exposed how the black bloc anarchists were completely infiltrated and provocateured by the authorities during the violent 1999 WTO protests in Seattle.

The authorities declared a state of emergency, imposed curfews and resorted to nothing short of police state tactics in response to a small minority of hostile black bloc hooligans. Police allowed the black bloc to run riot in downtown Seattle while they concentrated on preventing the movement of peaceful protestors. The film presents clear evidence that the black bloc anarchist group was actually controlled by the state and used to demonize peaceful protesters. Watch the video below.

At the WTO protests in Genoa 2001 a protestor was killed after being shot in the head and run over twice by a police vehicle. The Italian Carabinere also later beat on peaceful protestors as they slept, and even tortured some, at the Diaz School. It later emerged that the police fabricated evidence against the protesters, claiming they were anarchist rioters, to justify their actions. Some Carabiniere officials have since come forward to say they knew of infiltration of the so called black bloc anarchists, and that fellow officers acted as agent provocateurs.

At the Free Trade Area of Americas protests in Miami in late November 2003, more provocateuring was evident. The United Steelworkers of America calling for a congressional investigation, stated that the police intentionally caused violence and arrested and charged hundreds of peaceful protestors. The USWA suggested that billions of dollars supposedly slated for Iraq reconstruction funds are actually being used to subsidize “homeland repression” in America.

The leadership of the black bloc has been completely usurped by the authorities and anyone who still professes to be a member of the group is either supremely naive or completely stupid. To dress up like terrorists, all in black with ski masks and bandanas (like the police) immediately sends out a negative message to the watching public and demonizes legitimate protesters.

More violence is expected throughout the rest of the week in London and if the police are ordered to institute a brutal crackdown on peaceful demonstrators then we can thank the black bloc anarchists, both the provocateurs and the useful idiots who ape their violence, for providing them with the perfect pretext to do so.

New York Times: Definite police aid given to G20 provocateurs

Scroll down to Update April 3 to see the relevant info.

Did Costumes and Props Undercut the Seriousness of the G-20 Protests?

4.2-5.09 / Robert Mackey / New York Times The Lede Blog

Updated | April 5 The following blog post about the tactics of the protesters at the G-20 summit in London last week has been modified in response to some confusion among readers of the original version. The post’s original headline, intended to parody news reports that focused mainly on the outlandish costumes worn by some protesters — “Protesters Fail to Bring Down Global Capitalism With Costumes, Puppets” — led some readers to take it as a serious attack on the protesters, rather than as an Onionesque joke about the media’s reporting on the protesters. The headline was revised to clarify that the author was trying to ask if the tactics of the demonstrators, who used costumes and acts of street theater to attract cameras, might have had the unintended effect of distracting the media from the substance of their objections to the economic policies of the world leaders gathered for the summit. Thanks to readers for their feedback on the first version of the post.

A look through the photographs in the slide show above, all shot during the protests in London against the G-20 summit — showing protesters who carried an effigy of a giant dead canary, and others who dressed like The Joker from “Batman,” a Storm Trooper from “Star Wars,” Jesus in a police helmet, a nightmare version of Mickey Mouse, a horse with a flower in his nose, a gorilla in a bathing suit — raises this question: Is it possible that by going to such great lengths to draw the attention of the world’s photographers and camera crews, these protesters managed to get photographed but also undermined the seriousness of their protest against the world’s current economic system?

Whatever the lasting economic impact of the $1.1 trillion deal among world leaders at the Group of 20 summit, the fact that the world’s news media and a diverse array of anti-globalization protesters converged in England did lead to thousands of new images of outlandishly dressed demonstrators, many of whom would not have seemed out of place at a rave, on news Web sites around the world. But did these images of the protesters — with their costumes and puppets and burning effigies — help or hurt the cause of antiglobalization?

From a distance, trying to make sense of what the protests were all about was difficult, and it seems fair to ask if the protesters made a tactical error by playing so much to the cameras that they failed to use the media to communicate a coherent message. Looking at those images above, most of which moved across the world’s new wires, you get the sense that the protesters seized the word’s attention but communicated little more than if they had decided to stage an Ionesco play in, say, Old English.

Given the well-known propensity for the visual media to be drawn to visual spectacle, it might of course be that some of the protesters were trying to use these costumes and acts of street theater to find their way on to television, and hence get a few minutes, or seconds, to explain their unhappiness with the globalized financial system. But the silliness of many of these displays made it easy for many observers to dismiss the protests entirely. That can’t be a good tactic.

The Guardian in London provided near-saturation coverage of the G-20 summit — including a live blog and text, Twitter and video reports on Wednesday’s protests (during which one man died of what was suspected to have been a heart attack).

The newspaper’s green-technology correspondent, Alok Jha, filed an audio report on Thursday morning in which he tried to get to the bottom of what the protesters were thinking. Mr. Jha’s report included interviews with two protesters — one dressed as the grim reaper, and another who helped carry a huge puppet of a dead canary through the streets — and he asked them what their acts of street theater were all about.

A man named Harry explained that he was dressed as Death to represent “the death of the economy” and “the death of the English pound.” He was also concerned with the micro-economic problem that he was in danger of losing the deposit he’d left on the grim reaper costume he’d rented, since the police had confiscated the mask that went with it, arguing that people with covered faces were trouble.

One of the people carrying the canary (see the slide show above) said that he had brought the huge bird effigy to the demonstration “to symbolize the death of Canary Wharf,” a former dockyard area that was redeveloped to become a center of London’s financial industry, and also the death of “the current financial system.”

After giving an articulate analysis of the problems with the current global economic system, the canary-bearer told Mr. Jha that the demonstrators were all gathered “in the service of finding a new system that puts people before profit.” While he had thus succeeded in getting his message out by way of The Guardian — and perhaps validated the strategy of using an outlandish visual as catnip for the media — he then acknowledged that the rest of his day would consist largely of carrying the bird around, getting it photographed, and then storing it away until another economic summit meeting later this year.

The singer and political activist Billy Bragg — who made an appearance at the protest outside the Bank of England yesterday, as he tweeted he would — once sang that just pinning on peace buttons was not going to get the job done. As Mr. Bragg noted, “wearing badges is not enough” to effect political change. After this latest round of anti-globalization protests, it seems fair to ask if marches that draw attention mainly to men bearing symbolic canaries, or dressed like pink storm troopers, are really helping to advance the cause of those who want to fundamentally change the world’s economic system.

What do readers think, is the media to blame for focusing so much on what is most visually arresting, or are the protesters at fault for spending too much energy attracting attention and not enough articulating practical steps that might actually change the system?

Update | April 3 | 11:33 a.m. A friend who is a photographer in London writes in to share some observations on shooting the protests, and has something very interesting to say about the violence that broke out on Wednesday night.

Since he needs to maintain a good working relationship with the police, he asked not to be named, but I’d like to share some of what he, and another photographer he was with for part of Wednesday observed while working.

He writes that it appeared to at least these two photographers that most of the much-photographed violence on Wednesday evening was caused by people who looked like “agent provocateurs,” who “were going from police line to police line baiting the police — and they were the ones who instigated the push against police lines that kicked off the evening violence.” This photographer adds that “There was another guy baiting the police and whipping up the crowd to rush the police, he got a hundred or so protesters to follow him and then sneaked off as they reached police lines.” He also writes that the second photographer, who is a reliable reporter, “saw a bunch of protesters trying to stop a guy in black throwing bottles at the police, the protesters had an argument him and then accused him of being a policeman, whereupon he ran to the police cordon, showed some I.D. and was let through!”

Finally, my friend says: “I should point out that the only reason that we were able to spot these guys so easily was because the protest at that point was so peaceful, they really stuck out, so we followed them from one police line to another as they tried to start trouble.”

Maryland horror story – Berwyn Heights mayor gets brutal SWAT team visit, called crazy by cop for “thinking he’s the mayor”

The Raid on Mayor Cheye Calvo’s Home

From makemarylandgreat.com

Berwyn Heights Mayor Cheye Calvo’s mother-in-law, Georgia Porter, was stirring her spaghetti sauce when suddenly she saw armed, masked men in black swarming across their backyard.  One of the men saw her and pointed his high-powered assault weapon directly at her through the window.  She screamed.  Suddenly the front door shattered, and men in black burst into the house.

Payton, one of the family’s two black Labrador Retrievers, was lying stretched out on the living room floor.  As he turned his head towards the door, the terrified Georgia watched as the men shot him in the face multiple times.  The other family dog, Chase, ran into the dining room in an attempt to escape from the screaming men, but they rushed the dining room from all directions and shot him also.

Someone pushed Georgia face-down on the ground and put a gun to her head.  They bound her hands behind her and started screaming “Where are they?”  She had no idea what they were talking about, and shut her eyes, thinking they were going to shoot her next.

Upstairs, 37-year-old Cheye Calvo was getting dressed for a community meeting when he heard the shouting and gunfire.  He fell to his bedroom floor.  When he heard the men ordered to come upstairs, he called out ”I’m up here.  Please don’t shoot.  Please don’t shoot!”

They told him to come downstairs.  He looked down the staircase into the barrels of two shotguns pointed at him.  Gingerly, he walked slowly down his staircase backwards, clad only in his boxer shorts.  When he neared the bottom, someone led him the rest of the way down, pulled his hands behind his back, and bound his wrists very tightly.

Cheye saw Georgia on the kitchen floor with a man holding a gun against her head.  Then he saw his beloved dog, Payton, slumped on the living room floor in a huge puddle of blood.  As he knelt on the floor, he could hear his house being ransacked top to bottom.  And he struggled to try to figure out what they could possibly own that was worth stealing.

As time passed, Cheye could see people gathering on his front lawn, including some wearing official-looking jackets.  Through his fear and his sorrow, Cheye tried to make sense of what was happening.  He thought, “if this were a home invasion, people wouldn’t just be standing out there on the lawn.  They’d be hiding.  Does that mean these men could be law enforcement?  Whatever for?”

Meanwhile, the crowd on the lawn was growing.  Pvt. Amir Johnson, a Berwyn Heights police officer, was on patrol when he saw officers in tactical uniforms coming out of his mayor’s house.  One of the Prince George’s County officers told him, “The guy in there is crazy.  He says he is the mayor of Berwyn Heights”.  When Johnson told him, “That is the mayor of Berwyn Heights”, the detective looked shocked.

Cheye started asking questions.  He had to ask several times “Do you have a search warrant?” before finally being told “it’s en route”.  Eventually one of the men in black pointed to the big white box addressed to Trinity that had been delivered earlier and asked threateningly, “Do you know what is in this box?”

“A box?”, Cheye thought.  “This is about a box?”

45 minutes after the raid had started, Cheye’s wife arrived home.  Seeing the road jammed with police vehicles, Trinity assumed her house had been robbed.  “Is my husband OK?  Is my mom OK?” she frantically asked the Berwyn Heights detective who met her at the gate.  After being assured they were in the house, she realized that it was too quiet.  There were no dogs barking.  She asked about Payton and Chase, and collapsed against the detective’s chest when told they were dead.

Eventually an officer came and led her to her back door.  She tried to go in the house to find her husband and mother, but was overwhelmed by the blood — blood pooled by the back door, blood tracked all over the house by the SWAT team, blood everywhere.  She backed out and sat in a daze on the steps, thinking “I’m never going to be able to live here again”.

The Prince George’s County Police Department had intercepted a package addressed to Trinity containing 32 pounds of marijuana and delivered it to the house earlier that evening.  But despite it being common knowledge among narcotics officers that criminals were sending drugs to innocent people in the hopes of grabbing the packages before they got home, nobody bothered to do even the most basic background research into the Calvo’s before invading their house.

When animal control officers came to take Payton’s and Chase’s bodies away, Cheye broke down.  “I roared,” Cheye later recalled.  “I broke down sobbing.  Payton was the sweetest, most wonderful dog I had ever known.  Our lives revolved around our two dogs.  They were our kids”.

The SWAT team spent almost four hours ransacking the house.  They found no sign of drugs, no guns, no stacks of cash, not even a single rolling paper.  It took hours before someone figured out how to cut the tight handcuffs off Cheye and Georgia.  In the end, after threatening that the family could still be hauled into jail, the SWAT team finally left.

All three family members were in shock.  In fact, Georgia was so hysterical she could barely speak.  With no way to lock their front door, fear of a drug dealer missing his marijuana, and a totally destroyed house, no one slept that night.

Picking Up the Pieces

By the next morning, Cheye realized that the doubts cast by the raid could ruin their lives.  Cheye’s boss suggested that he be proactive in reaching out to the media and, since innocent people go to jail all the time, that he get a good lawyer.   As Cheye, Trinity and Georgia tried to deal with their grief, the Berwyn Heights community reached out to them.  Among many other acts of kindness, a memorial was held for Payton and Chase.

Seventy-one hours after the raid, Cheye was finally provided with the search warrant which supposedly gave the police the justification for their actions.   Shockingly, he discovered that it was not the no-knock warrant required to forcefully enter someone’s house.  Instead, the judge had approved a standard search warrant designed to be handed to someone at their front door.\

Cheye’s anger reached the boiling point as he watched a news conference held more than a week after the raid by Prince George’s Police Chief Melvin C. High and Sheriff Michael Jackson.  While the police officers announced the arrest of two men for shipping packages of marijuana to unsuspecting recipients, they refused to apologize to Cheye’s family or to unequivocally declare their innocence.

The Search for Justice

The following morning, Cheye held a press conference on his front lawn, Trinity sobbing by his side.  As word spread about their traumatic experience, Cheye began to hear from many others with similar stories.  And he realized that this was no longer just about him, his wife and his mother-in-law.  It was his duty to do everything in his power to try to stop this from happening to another innocent family.

To combat the secrecy surrounding SWAT raids, Cheye has been working with sympathetic legislators in Maryland to pass a law requiring monthly reporting of the number of SWAT team deployments and their results to the Attorney General.  Once this data is available, it is anticipated that the police will recognize that SWAT teams are regularly being used inappropriately in some counties and will implement standards for their use.  If this does not occur, additional legislation may be required.

Since this is not a problem limited to Maryland, Cheye is also working with other legislators in other states to introduce similar legislation.

Investigative journalist Wayne Madsen details his arrest and upcoming trial

BULLETIN: Busted while reporting in Alexandria, Va.

3.18.09 / Wayne Madsen / Online Journal

(WMR) — This editor has covered the news in nasty dictatorships and corruption-ridden countries from Rwanda and Uganda to India and Thailand. I have also reported on journalists like our colleague John Caylor, who was arrested in Panama City, Florida, while trying to obtain public documents, pursuant to Florida’s open government law, on that state’s abuse and even murder of prison inmates.

In the eight years of the Bush-Cheney administration, I covered anti-war protests in Washington and never once did I face an arrest situation, although there were some close calls. My arrest-free journalism record was shattered last night in Alexandria, Virginia, while meeting a confidential source.

I hoped to report today on a significant link between “Sir” Allen Stanford’s collapsed Stanford Financial Group and a top Democratic Party lobbyist who is close to the Obama administration. I also hoped to report on the covert activities of Stanford’s operations in Venezuela and Panama.

That story will have to wait, unfortunately.

Last night, while meeting the source in O’Connell’s Irish pub in Alexandria, Alexandria police, who apparently had plainclothes police inside the St. Patrick’s Day-jam packed establishment, arrested my source for no apparent reason while I and the source’s wife looked on in shock. When I asked one of the men who forced the source to the ground outside why they were placing him under arrest, he shouted to me to “back off.” I asked the man if he was a police officer. His response was, “No, I’m a fireman.”

I then told the “fireman” that I was a member of the press, produced my credentials, and wanted to know what the charges were against my source. He then motioned to someone behind me who shoved me up against a police SUV and placed me in handcuffs.

I was taken to Alexandria city jail and booked for “drunk in public.” Of course, there was no blood test or field sobriety test administered by anyone, police or “firemen,” to prove the spurious charge.

Then again, I did not have it as bad as some people who have been victims of America’s “justice” system. I was not hooded, chained, placed on a plane for God-knows-where and subjected to torture by brutish Third World interrogators. Nor was I placed in solitary confinement without seeing the light of day. However, I was not permitted to speak to an attorney nor was I read my Miranda rights in this Kafkaesque post-Miranda era.

I am also quite concerned about the fate of my source whom I only saw once in the “lockup.” The cops were extremely physically rough with him for some unknown reason.

There was also something very unsettling about the police retaining custody of my reporter’s notebook for some three hours while I was under arrest.

In a way, I should not be surprised that this arrest took place in Alexandria. The town has always crawled with intelligence types and other covert players, from neo-Confederates involved with the global small arms business to the CIA-linked International Association of Chiefs of Police and the infamous U.S. Court for the Eastern District of Virginia national security “rocket docket” team of Chief Judge James Cacheris and his attorney brother, Plato. Alexandria is only outdone by trendy McLean for the greatest number of spooks per square mile.

Editor’s bagged personal effects. While a number of items were listed with detailed descriptions, such as “black belt,” “green sweater,” and “silver watch,” several press passes were listed as “4 plastic pouches with various cards.” The reporter’s notebook (seen above the inventory list] emblazoned with “PR Newswire,” was described as “1 notepad [and pen].” Clearly, someone did not want any references made to “journalist” or “media.”

However, Alexandria was not always a center for right-wing ne’er-do-wells. Alexandria was once the home of George Washington, the leader of the American Revolution. Its inns and meeting halls once attracted such revolutionary Virginia notables as Patrick Henry, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and George Mason.

In 1735, New York publisher John Peter Zenger was charged with seditious libel and in a case many thought he would lose, he was acquitted of all charges. The Zenger case later spurred the founders of this nation to enshrine the freedom of the press in the First Amendment to the Constitution.

My trial is scheduled for March 25 at 9:30 am in the Circuit Court in Alexandria at 520 King Street in Room 201. I intend to plead not guilty to the charge against me and cite the First Amendment of the Constitution in my defense. I invite all those in the Washington area who value a free press to attend what I will simply call “mini-Zenger II.”

I, for one, will not see a free press in this nation go down without a fight. And I must also say that even in Uganda, a dictatorship, President Yoweri Museveni’s security agents never tried to stage an incident while I met opposition leaders at the Sheraton Hotel in Kampala. Although the agents were intently interested in whom I was meeting, they had much more class than the brutish Alexandria police and the “fireman.”

UPDATE 1X: WMR can report that our source was released from Alexandria jail and is doing fine today.

Highway robbery? Texas town’s police seize black motorists’ cash, cars

Highway robbery? Texas police seize black motorists’ cash, cars

Suit says cops force motorists, largely black, to forfeit cash and cars—or be charged with trumped-up crimes

3.10.09 / Howard Witt / Chicago Tribune

A Texas senator aims to rein in search-and-seizure practices like those used in Tenaha, where scores have been targeted but never charged with any crime. (San Antonio Express-News photo by Lisa Sandberg / February 6, 2009)

TENAHA, Texas— You can drive into this dusty fleck of a town near the Texas-Louisiana border if you’re African-American, but you might not be able to drive out of it—at least not with your car, your cash, your jewelry or other valuables.

That’s because the police here allegedly have found a way to strip motorists, many of them black, of their property without ever charging them with a crime. Instead they offer out-of-towners a grim choice: voluntarily sign over your belongings to the town, or face felony charges of money laundering or other serious crimes.

More than 140 people reluctantly accepted that deal from June 2006 to June 2008, according to court records. Among them were a black grandmother from Akron, who surrendered $4,000 in cash after Tenaha police pulled her over, and an interracial couple from Houston, who gave up more than $6,000 after police threatened to seize their children and put them into foster care, the court documents show. Neither the grandmother nor the couple were charged with any crime.

Officials in Tenaha, situated along a heavily traveled highway connecting Houston with popular gambling destinations in Louisiana, say they are engaged in a battle against drug trafficking and call the search-and-seizure practice a legitimate use of the state’s asset-forfeiture law. That law permits local police agencies to keep drug money and other property used in the commission of a crime and add the proceeds to their budgets.

“We try to enforce the law here,” said George Bowers, mayor of the town of 1,046 residents, where boarded-up businesses outnumber open ones and City Hall sports a broken window. “We’re not doing this to raise money. That’s all I’m going to say at this point.”

But civil rights lawyers call Tenaha’s practice something else: highway robbery. The attorneys have filed a federal class-action lawsuit to stop what they contend is an unconstitutional perversion of the law’s intent, aimed primarily at blacks who have done nothing wrong.

Tenaha officials “have developed an illegal ’stop and seize’ practice of targeting, stopping, detaining, searching and often seizing property from apparently non-white citizens and those traveling with non-white citizens,” asserts the lawsuit, which was filed in U.S. District Court in the Eastern District of Texas.

The property seizures are not just happening in Tenaha. In southern parts of Texas near the Mexican border, for example, Hispanics allege that they are being singled out.

According to a prominent state legislator, police agencies across Texas are wielding the asset-forfeiture law more aggressively to supplement their shrinking operating budgets.

“If used properly, it’s a good law-enforcement tool to see that crime doesn’t pay,” said state Sen. John Whitmire, chairman of the Senate’s Criminal Justice Committee. “But in this instance, where people are being pulled over and their property is taken with no charges filed and no convictions, I think that’s theft.”

David Guillory, an attorney in Nacogdoches who filed the federal lawsuit, said he combed through Shelby County court records from 2006 to 2008 and discovered nearly 200 cases in which Tenaha police seized cash and property from motorists. In about 50 of the cases, suspects were charged with drug possession.

But in 147 others, Guillory said the court records showed, police seized cash, jewelry, cell phones and sometimes even automobiles from motorists but never found any contraband or charged them with any crime. Of those, Guillory said he managed to contact 40 of the motorists directly—and discovered all but one of them were black.

“The whole thing is disproportionately targeted toward minorities, particularly African-Americans,” Guillory said. “None of these people have been charged with a crime, none were engaged in anything that looked criminal. The sole factor is that they had something that looked valuable.”

In some cases, police used the fact that motorists were carrying large amounts of cash as evidence that they must have been involved in laundering drug money, even though Guillory said each of the drivers he contacted could account for where the money had come from and why they were carrying it—such as for a gambling trip to Shreveport, La., or to purchase a used car from a private seller.

Once the motorists were detained, the police and the local Shelby County district attorney quickly drew up legal papers presenting them with an option: waive their rights to their cash and property or face felony charges for crimes such as money laundering—and the prospect of having to hire a lawyer and return to Shelby County multiple times to attend court sessions to contest the charges.

The process apparently is so routine in Tenaha that Guillory discovered pre-signed and pre-notarized police affidavits with blank spaces left for an officer to describe the property being seized.

Jennifer Boatright, her husband and two young children—a mixed-race family—were traveling from Houston to visit relatives in east Texas in April 2007 when Tenaha police pulled them over, alleging that they were driving in a left-turn lane.

After searching the car, the officers discovered what Boatright said was a gift for her sister: a small, unused glass pipe made for smoking marijuana. Although they found no drugs or other contraband, the police seized $6,037 that Boatright said the family was carrying to purchase a used car—and then threatened to turn their children, ages 10 and 1, over to Child Protective Services if the couple didn’t agree to sign over their right to their cash.

“It was give them the money or they were taking our kids,” Boatright said. “They suggested that we never bring it up again. We figured we better give them our cash and get the hell out of there.”

Several months later, after Boatright and her husband contacted an attorney, Tenaha officials returned their money but offered no explanation or apology. The couple remain plaintiffs in the federal lawsuit.

Except for Tenaha’s mayor, none of the defendants in the lawsuit, including Shelby County District Atty. Linda Russell and two Tenaha police officers, responded to requests from the Tribune for comment about their search-and-seizure practices. Lawyers for the defendants also declined to comment, as did several of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit.

But Whitmire says he doesn’t need to await the suit’s outcome to try to fix what he regards as a statewide problem. On Monday he introduced a bill in the state Legislature that would require police to go before a judge before attempting to seize property under the asset-forfeiture law—and ultimately Whitmire hopes to tighten the law further so that law-enforcement officials will be allowed to seize property only after a suspect is charged and convicted in a court.

“The law has gotten away from what was intended, which was to take the profits of a bad guy’s crime spree and use it for additional crime-fighting,” Whitmire said. “Now it’s largely being used to pay police salaries—and it’s being abused because you don’t even have to be a bad guy to lose your property.”