No bail for man in attempted cockpit entry

AP – In this image captured by citizen journalist Andrew Wai, passengers, top right, subdue a man identified …

By TERRY COLLINS, Associated Press Terry Collins, Associated Press – Tue May 10, 9:35 pm ET

SAN FRANCISCO – A Yemen native who disrupted a San Francisco-bound flight was portrayed by prosecutors Tuesday as a dangerous and erratic passenger who tried to barge into the cockpit twice, did not carry any luggage and yelled "God is great" in Arabic.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Elise Becker said Rageh Al-Murisi, 28, was carrying several valid and expired forms of identification from New York and California, $47 in cash and two postdated checks totaling $13,000 in his wallet. One check was made out to himself, she said, but did not specify where the other was from.
She also said he didn't tell his relatives in California that he was traveling there.

Al-Murisi faces one count of interfering with flight crew members and attendants as pilots on American Airlines Flight 1561 were preparing to land in San Francisco on Sunday, one week after the death of Osama bin Laden at the hands of the U.S. military that has raised fears of a possible retaliation.

"He attempted to enter the cockpit right before a critical part of the flight," Becker said in prosecution arguments to withhold bail for Al-Murisi.

In the court affidavit filed Monday, air marshal Paul Howard said after being told the cockpit door wasn't the restroom, Al-Murisi made eye contact with a crew member, lowered his shoulder and rammed the door. The crew member told Howard he then got between Al-Murisi and the door, but Al-Murisi kept yelling and pushing forward in an attempt to open it, according to the affidavit.

Court documents say Al-Murisi repeatedly yelled "Allahu Akbar," or Arabic for "God is great," and tried twice to open the cockpit door before being subdued by a crew member and several passengers, including a former Secret Service agent and retired San Mateo police officer Larry Wright. The flight landed safely at San Francisco International Airport, but not without frightening passengers who became alarmed as he yelled unintelligibly and tried to rush the cockpit.

Becker said that the same Arabic phrase was uttered by the hijackers of Flight 93 as they took over the plane that eventually went down in Shanksville, Pa., on Sept. 11, 2001, and by a Nigerian man who allegedly tried to detonate explosives in his underwear on a Detroit-bound flight on Christmas 2009.

Wright said Tuesday that he jumped out of his seat after he heard a scream and Al-Murisi trotted past him yelling "Allahu Akbar." The man was tackled, and Wright put Al-Murisi in a "control hold" as others tied his arms and legs in plastic handcuffs, he said.

"I felt he was trying to take on the flight crew and possibly try to crash the airplane," he said.
The man screamed "Allahu Akbar" at least 30 times while in custody, he added.

Al-Murisi's lawyer, Assistant Federal Public Defender Elizabeth Falk, argued that her client was not a public danger, but Judge James Larson disagreed and denied bail. He planned to revisit the issue on Friday.

Authorities have said Al-Murisi has no clear or known ties to terrorism and investigators have not established a possible motive. He was not on any terror watch list, according to a U.S. official briefed on the investigation who spoke on condition of anonymity because the probe is ongoing.

Yemen, a nation at the southern tip of the Arabian peninsula, has been a focus of U.S. officials because one of the most active branches of al-Qaida operates in the remote part of the country. Al-Murisi's wife and children live in Yemen, Becker said.

His cousin, Ahmed Almoraissi, described the passenger as a "normal guy" who taught math in Yemen.
"He has no intention of hurting nobody," he said. "I don't know what happened on the plane. It doesn't make sense."

Officials say he had been living in the San Francisco suburb of Vallejo until moving recently to join his brother in New York. He was unable to find work in Vallejo, a town of 100,000 across the bay from San Francisco hit hard by the real estate bust, said another cousin of Al-Murisi.

Rageh Almoraissi said his cousin did not show an interest in politics and was not intensely religious.
___
Associated Press writer Eileen Sullivan in Washington, D.C., contributed to this story.


http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/us_flight_disturbance;_ylt=AtaHBsVzeXL65hWpI5VrQ6Os0NUE;_ylu=X3oDMTNwYTltMWZrBGFzc2V0A2FwLzIwMTEwNTEwL3VzX2ZsaWdodF9kaXN0dXJiYW5jZQRjY29kZQNtb3N0cG9wdWxhcgRjcG9zAzYEcG9zAzMEcHQDaG9tZV9jb2tlBHNlYwN5bl9oZWFkbGluZV9saXN0BHNsawNub2JhaWxmb3JtYW4

Momentum builds in al Qaeda funding litigation

5/10/2011

(An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that Sudan is the only government still included in the case. Iran is also included. The version also said the U.S. government has asserted that the defendants continue to provide funding to al Qaeda. The assertion applies to only some of the defendants.)

NEW YORK, May 10 (Reuters) - Osama bin Laden is dead, but the search for al Qaeda's funding sources is only now starting to gain momentum.

Litigation brought by victims of the Sept. 11 attacks was consolidated in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York in 2003. It has been slowed by the deaths of two presiding judges and by motions that have eliminated scores of foreign governments, banks, and purported terrorist fronts as defendants.

Now, almost a decade after the attacks, lawyers for family members of Sept. 11 victims have finally begun to gather evidence directly from groups they accuse of financing al Qaeda. U.S. District Judge George Daniels last October authorized the victims' lawyers to start collecting financial records and other evidence from such groups as the International Islamic Relief Organization, the Muslim World League, the World Assembly of Muslim Youth, and the al-Haramain USA Foundation. The U.S. government has cited all those groups as conduits of al Qaeda funding.

"The cost of maintaining a global infrastructure to support acts of terror is massive," said Sean Carter of Cozen O'Connor, whose firm represents insurance companies and other commercial plaintiffs. "Al Qaeda relied on such a global infrastructure to plan, coordinate, and execute its acts."

Carter said lawyers for the victims have demanded not only records of the defendants' finances -- including their sources of funding and outgoing payments -- but also all records of their relationships with alleged al Qaeda associates. The deadline for the groups to turn over such materials is August. Plaintiffs lawyers said they also plan to depose officials from the defendant organizations beginning this summer. A trial date could be as early as 2012.


STILL FUNDING AL QAEDA

According to Carter and other victims' lawyers, including Robert Haefele of Motley Rice and James Kreindler of Kreindler & Kreindler, the U.S. government has asserted as recently as 2009 that some of the remaining defendants in their civil cases continue to provide financial support to al Qaeda and the Taliban.
Diplomatic dispatches released by Wikileaks support that assertion. In a memo about Saudi Arabia's efforts to restrict the flow of funds from Saudi-based charities, a State Department official wrote that Riyadh had failed to cut off funds from multilateral organizations such as the International Islamic Relief Organization, Muslim World League, and the World Assembly of Muslim Youth. "Intelligence suggests that these groups continue to send money overseas and, at times, fund extremism overseas," the memo, dated Dec. 28, 2009, said.

Osama bin Laden's death will have little effect on the litigation, according to lawyers for both the victims and for bin Laden family interests. Allegations against a company controlled by bin Laden's family, the Mohammed bin Laden Co, have already been dismissed, as have allegations against several of bin Laden's relatives. A motion to dismiss the allegations against another company controlled by the bin Laden family, Saudi bin Laden Group, is pending before Judge Daniels.

An attorney for the bin Laden family entities, James Gauch of Jones Day, said the businesses have no ties to the financing of terrorism. "The plaintiffs' lawyers won't accept that," Gauch said. The family expelled Osama bin Laden from the businesses in the early 1990s, and yet victims' lawyers "keep trying to make the allegation that the expulsion wasn't real," Gauch said.


EXCEPT SUDAN AND IRAN, FOREIGN GOVERNMENTS DISMISSED

Only a dozen defendants remain of the 300 originally named by lawyers for the victims.
Most of the foreign governments and officials, including Saudi Arabia and Iraq, were dismissed from the litigation because foreign governments have broad protection from civil liability in U.S. courts. Sudan and Iran, however, remain defendants in the case. If southern Sudan splits from the north, after voting to secede in February, plaintiffs' lawyers may be able to obtain additional information about Sudan's alleged financial sponsorship of terrorism, said victims' counsel Kreindler.

Also still in the case is the Dubai Islamic Bank. Several other banks, including Arab Bank and National Commercial Bank, and Saudi American Bank were dismissed.

The International Islamic Relief Organization and the Muslim World League are represented in the funding litigation by Martin McMahon of McMahon and Associates, who did not return a call for comment. Nor did counsel for the World Assembly of Muslim Youth, Omar Mohammedi of O'Bryan Baun Karamanian. Alan Kabat, who represents al-Haramain USA, said his client disputes allegations of helping to fund terrorism. "We look forward to showing there's no proof of that at the summary judgment stage," he said.

The case is in Re: Terrorist Attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, No. 03-MD-1570.

(Reporting by Alison Frankel)

The Bullied Nation

When Obama inaugurated a conference on bullying by announcing that he too had been bullied, he made the one confession that no world leader should ever make. At least not a world leader who ever hopes to be taken seriously. But by this time it was doubtful that there was a world leader who didn't know that Obama could be bullied. Many of them had been rather successful at bullying him already.

The goal of the conference, according to Obama, was to dispel the myth that bullying is "an inevitable part of growing up". But of course it is an inevitable part of growing up. And of being grown up too. If you don't learn how to handle bullies while growing up, you'll have to learn those same lessons later on in life.

We may grow up, but we never entirely leave who we were behind. The bullies will always be with us. Their bullying may become more sophisticated, but the old dynamic never really goes away.

When Obama spent half his correspondents dinner taunting Trump, it was a sight you could easily see in any school cafeteria. The difference is that he chose to do it in a forum where he had no fear of being answered back, using lines written for him by a writer from the Daily Show. It was bullying of the cowardly sort. Which just goes to show you that some of the bullied, harbor a secret wish to be bullies themselves. But when they get the chance to be bullies, they still practice it in a cowardly way.

Compare Bush's willingness to laugh at himself in a double act with Colbert at that same dinner years earlier, to Obama taunting his rivals when they're prevented by decorum from answering back. Just as he did to Paul Ryan. This is how a man who can dish it out, and can't take it, acts. And that's the difference between a man and an insecure child who never really grew up, whose emotional compass is still tethered to his childhood memories. Who still dreams of repaying minor slights and takes every criticism personally.

Obama may hold conferences on bullying, but he is the worst sort of bully, too cowardly to do it without a lot of protectors and plausible deniability standing between him and his targets. How many Republican car dealerships were targeted under O's car company regime, and what about the pass given to the New Black Panther party's voter intimidation tactics, or launching Operation Rushbo against one of his more vocal critics. Or using 'teabaggers' to describe his opponents. To say nothing of the thuggishness by teachers in Wisconsin. Strip away the billion dollar political machine and you're left with something that looks a lot like High School.

The obsession with childhood bullying is another misguided application of social engineering to children. Obama may speak of creating "an atmosphere at school where children feel safe". But no amount of government intervention can prevent kids from being bullied. And no government officials can teach them to stand up for themselves. Children and teenagers have their own culture apart from adults, and no matter how many bureaucrats poke and pry into their lives, they can never find their way inside. Instead of protecting them against bullies, the injection of bureaucracy becomes its own form of bullying.

After the Columbine Massacre, all the conferences on bullying yielded a Zero Tolerance madness that criminalized everything from toy soldiers to plastic knives to playing cops and robbers. Six year old cub scouts have been suspended for bringing camping equipment to school. Arrests have been made for shooting rubber bands. Advil and Midol have become controlled substances. An 11 year old was suspended because the chain on her Tweety bird wallet was found to be long enough to qualify as a weapon. Another 11 year old died because zero tolerance policies prevented him from carrying an inhaler. A National Merit Scholar was arrested and expelled because she had misplaced a kitchen knife on the floor of her car.

There will be no conferences held on this type of bullying, because it is practiced by the conference attendees, the school bureaucrats and teachers, and the public officials who enable them, against the children placed in their care. And their only solution to every problem is more of the same. More bureaucracy and more regulations. It is a form of bullying that most Americans have become terribly familiar with. And it is worse than any ordinary bullying, because while you can stand up to an ordinary bully, defying the government bureaucracy at every level is much harder.

As go the schools, so goes a nanny state in which everyone is treated like children. Subjected to constant regulation and supervision. Treated like incompetent wards of the state who need to be told what to do at all times. The cradle to grave state treats those at the grave, much as it does at the cradle, as nuisances who need to be brought into conformity with paragraph 19, section 32, subsection 92B of their marching orders circa this week. American history is the story of people who tried to escape the governments that were making them miserable, only for the bureaucrats to make it over anyway.

The nanny state promises that we will no longer be bullied by big business, and then gets down to the job of bullying us so thoroughly and relentlessly that the only escape is death. And not even then. For dying doesn't free you of the tangle of laws and regulations. It just puts your conscious mind beyond their reach. Like the protagonist of 'Brazil' your soul may escape, but your body is left behind under their authority.

Obama's promise of a safe atmosphere for every student reeks of the same thing. A paranoid hothouse in which a wrong word, a wrong look or a wrong implication can result in criminal prosecution under a new wave of Zero Tolerance enforcement. This vision of PS Stalag 17 is being realized not just in schools, but everywhere. The EUSSR has its political prisoners, and so will we, as any hindrance to public order becomes a crime. Bad ideas are held responsible for causing violence. The logic of Crimethink that arrests students for having something that is not a weapon, but has some common conceptual resemblance to one, dictates that a bullseye on a political map is the same thing as an assassination plot.

In the name of maintaining that hothouse atmosphere, independent traits or atavistic behaviors must be rooted out. The only properly safe nation is one in which all the people are sheep, and the guns are in the hands of the ranchers and the wolves. But from a sheep's perspective, the only difference between the ranchers and the wolves, is that the ranchers keep them alive longer than the wolves. Once the wolves come or the ranchers grow tired of them, the sheep have no survival skills left. Those were wiped out in order to keep a safe atmosphere for the herd.

European newspapers frowning at the sight of Americans loudly celebrating the end of Bin Laden posit that Americans and Europeans have different values. But it's not so much a matter of different values, as of different governments. European governments have built their stifling nanny states and declared many normal human behaviors to be against their values. But their ancestors would have taken issue with such a characterization of European values. As would the Italians who spat on Mussolini's upside down dangling corpse. American values are individualistic. And though the chains of political correctness creep over their shoulders, they still react like free men and women, rather than children afraid of being taken to task by their elders.

The new European values say that violence is bad regardless of its attribution. That only savages kill and relish a victory over an enemy. But when the traits of the fighter and the warrior are rooted out, then you are left with a nation of sheep. Ready for the taking. Europe has made itself safe enough to attract a southern and eastern breed of wolf. Lupine immigrants whose values are genuinely atavistic and who eagerly feed on nations of sheep.

That is the problem with locking up combative instincts and confiscating guns. Sooner or later you will need them. The world is not a hothouse, it is an ongoing struggle for land, life and resources. Countries do not exist because the UN mandated it, but because their people fought and died to make it so. Teach the people to be sheep, and the countries will not long survive their first encounter with the wolves. The American violent now atavism frowned on by the elites of the EUSSR is what stood between them and the wolves. It may end up doing that again before another centuries comes to its end.

The hue and cry over bullying carries an echo of that same fussiness. A philosophy in denial about human nature. Every defense against oppression ultimately becomes its own force of oppression. Books of regulations can be a far more ruthless form of oppression than a punch in the face. And a bureaucracy charged with rooting out modes of behavior quickly becomes the worst bully of all.

But the real danger of such a system is the learned helplessness that it teaches. When you are taught that it is better to submit than to fight, better to come over to the other point of view than stand up for your own, and better to be agreeable than make a fuss no matter what is being done to you-- then you are being taught to be a victim. People who think this way cannot be members of a free society, only frightened people looking for someone to protect them. They are victims looking for a predator. And a society of victims will attract predators.

The editor of the French left wing paper, Libération, wrote of "this base, uncomfortable joy, unprecedented in a democracy, that blew yesterday over the streets of New York." But such joy is rooted in democracy. The French ought to know that better than anyone else. Or has Monsieur Demorand completely forgotten the words of his own national anthem, that speaks of triumphantly watering the fields of France with the "impure blood" of her enemies. Freedom, national and personal freedom, is fought for by men and women who are not only willing to die for it, but are willing to kill for it. Not with the mechanical distance of bomber pilots, but the violent passion of human beings who refuse to submit to their enemies.

No democracy will survive for long without that "uncomfortable joy". It will either be consumed by the wolves from without or from within. The hothouse society is a nation of wimps. Easily bullied, always looking to some authority, some international law for its protection. When it is struck, then it takes refuge in its own moral superiority for not resorting to violence. Eventually it forgets how to hate and remembers only how to fear.

For a nation not to be bullied, its people must know how to stand up to bullies. Not to go along with them. Not how to understand their point of view. Or how to run and tell someone in authority about them. But how to fight back against them and win.


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Coming Soon: New York Metropolitan Museum’s Massive Mohammadism Galleries!

May 11, 2011

By admin

I am sorry to report a second occasion this week to announce yet another “coming soon” event in which non-Muslims are taking arazor blade to the veins of life as we know it. As soon as the Islamic community feels they have have used their non-Muslim supporters for all they are worth, they will instill the final cuts! Following in the footsteps of the NY Public Library, the Met is proudly in the process of putting together a massive Islamic art show.

New York Metropolitan Museum’s New Islamic Art Galleries to “Dwarf Rivals”
The Metropolitan Museum of Art is in the final stages of a US$40 million expansion. The project will introduce 15 new galleries to display art of Islamic cultures from the Iberian peninsula to India.

The Met puts the number of Islamic objects in its collection at some 12,000 – including 78 manuscript pages from the magnificent Iranian Book of Kings, or Shahnama, and the finest holdings of Islamic textiles in the West.

“It’s exceeded in numbers by the British Museum and the Berlin Museum for Islamic Art,” says Sheila Canby, the curator-in-charge who heads the Met’s department of Islamic art, “but those collections are formed of huge numbers of archaeological finds. The premise is a bit different here. We are a museum of art. Things have been collected in order to be shown, and not just as research material with drawers and drawers of shards.”

About 1,200 works will be on view in the new galleries at any given time, a fraction of the total holdings.
Nevertheless, it represents a huge increase over the 60 pieces exhibited on the balcony of the Met’s Great Hall during the eight years that the wing has been closed for renovation.

The New York museum has owned objects from the Islamic world since the 1890s. For decades, their place within the museum’s collections shifted – literally – from one gallery to another.

The Met, a private museum that gets a fraction of its annual budget from government sources, opened its galleries for Islamic art in 1975. A steady flow of visitors began. Then in 2003, the museum emptied that space to build Greek and Roman galleries beneath it.

SNIP

With the reopening planned for 1 November , final touches are being applied before the art goes in.

“The big issue was, ‘what are we going to call it?’,” says Navina Haidar, a curator who oversees the renovation and reinstallation. “Are we going to call it Islamic art, or are we going to name it in another way?”

Canby explains: “There’s a growing realisation that the Islamic world is larger than the territories that are covered by our collection, so we wanted to be accurate about what we are showing and where what we’re showing comes from.”

That’s the root of the problem! Islam is taking over more and more of the world’s population. Here in America, the Met promotes Islamic culture instead of ignoring it or even having displays that would show just how forcefully Islam is a religon/ideologyhellbent on world domination!

Hence a new name. “Above the door you will have the words, ‘Arab Lands, Turkey, Iran, Central Asia, and Later South Asia’. And, believe it or not, it does all fit,” says Haidar.
Inside the building, the acronym is a mouthful – ALTICALSA. To the side of the door, says Haidar, will be a map called The Islamic World.

The galleries take the visitor through time, patrons and geography, with portals conceived to favour cross-cultural perspectives. You’ll be able to go from a display of objects from the early caliphate into adjacent galleries exhibiting Orientalist paintings from 19th-century Europe. Non-Islamic objects from India that were made under Islamic rule are part of the wing and will have a separate entrance.

I wonder if they will show objects from the Islamoslaughter of the Hindus of India? The horrific event was dubbed the “Hindu Kush”. Of course the Met will ignore all of tha.

Iraq - A Province of Iran?

by Daniel Pipes
The Washington Times
May 12, 2011

http://www.danielpipes.org/9790/iraq-province-of-iran

After American forces leave Iraq at the end of 2011, Tehran will try to turn its neighbor into a satrapy, i.e., a satellite state, to the great detriment of Western, moderate Arab, and Israeli interests.

Intense Iranian efforts are already underway, with Tehran sponsoring militias in Iraq and sending its own forces into Iraqi border areas. Baghdad responds with weakness, with its chief of staff proposing a regional pact with Iran and top politicians ordering attacks on the Mujahedeen-e-Khalq (MeK), an Iranian dissident organization with 3,400 members resident in Camp Ashraf, 60 miles northeast of Baghdad. The MeK issue reveals Iraqi subservience to Iran with special clarity. Note some recent developments:
On April 7, the MeK released intelligence exposing Iran's growing capacity to enrich uranium, a revelation the Iranian foreign minister quickly confirmed.

Still from a Fox News video of Iraqi military forces assaulting Camp Ashraf.

 

On April 8, even as U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates visited Iraq, the country's armed forces attacked Ashraf. Fox News and CNN footage shows Iraqis in U.S.-supplied armored personnel carriers, Humvees, and bulldozers running down unarmed residents as sharpshooters shot at them, killing 34 people and injuring 325. The top secret plan-to-attack order of the Iraqi military, "Iraqi Security Forces Operation Order No. 21, Year 2011," reveals how Baghdad sees the Ashraf residents as "the enemy," suggesting collusion between Baghdad and Tehran.

This incident took place despite fresh pledges by Baghdad to treat the Iranian dissidents humanely and to protect them. U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman John Kerry rightly described the attack as a "massacre" while former governor Howard Dean called the Iraqi prime minister a "mass murderer." The U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights "condemned" the attack and the U.N. Assistance Mission for Iraq (UNAMI) expressed "deep concern."

Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki and Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

On April 11, the advisor for military affairs to Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamene'i (according to a news report) "praised the Iraqi Army for its recent attack on the strongholds of [the MeK] and asked Baghdad to continue attacking the terrorist base until its destruction."

On April 24, despite United Nations insistence that "Camp Ashraf residents be protected from forcible deportation, expulsion or repatriation," Baghdad and Tehran signed an extradition agreement which state-controlled Iranian media interprets as a mechanism forcibly to transfer MeK members to Iran, where they anticipate a horrific fate.

Iraqi maltreatment of Iranian dissidents both raises humanitarian concerns and points to the MeK's larger importance as a mechanism to thwart the U.S. goal of minimizing Tehran's influence in Iraq.

That said, Washington – which granted "protected persons" status to the Ashraf residents in 2004 in exchange for their surrendering arms – bears partial responsibility for the attacks on Ashraf; in 1997, it threw a sop to Tehran and, contrary to both fact and law, wrongly listed (and continues to list) the MeK as a "Foreign Terrorist Organization."

Baghdad exploits this terrorist tag. For example, Congressman Brad Sherman (Democrat of California) reports that "in private discussions the Iraqi ambassador's office has said the blood is not on the hands of the Iraqi government but is at least partially on the hands of the State Department because the MeK is listed as a terrorist group and accordingly, Iraq doesn't feel that it has to respect the human rights of those in the camp." The terrorist designation also offers Baghdad a pretext to expel Ashraf's residents and possibly extradite them to Iran.

UNAMI was founded in 2003 and is headed by Dutch politician Ad Melkert.

At this time of crisis, how to achieve Senator Kerry's call for "all the relevant parties … to seek a peaceful and durable solution"? Some recommendations:

• The U.S. Government should delist the MeK as a terrorist organization, following the wishes of a large bipartisan majority in Congress, of Barack Obama's former national security adviser, and of prominent Republicans.
• The European Union should impose economic sanctions on Iraq if Baghdad continues to block an EU parliamentary delegation from visiting Ashraf. (The EU is Iraq's second largest trading partner).
• The United Nations should station a UNAMI delegation in Ashraf, guarded by a small U.S. force, to deter future Iraqi attacks and to fulfill the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights' demand for "a full, independent and transparent inquiry" into the Ashraf assault so that "any person found responsible for use of excessive force" be prosecuted.

Now is the time urgently to act on Camp Ashraf - a bellwether of growing Iranian influence over Iraq - before Tehran turns Iraq into a satrapy.

Mr. Pipes is director of the Middle East Forum and Taube distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University.

Attorney to argue Fantasy Springs Resort Casino security illegally searched man

11:06 AM, May. 11, 2011  | 

A defense attorney is expected to argue today that a local casino violated his client's Fourth Amendment rights when security officers searched the man and found him to be in possession of an illegal drug.
Steven Hill, 62, is facing a felony charge of possessing a controlled substance and a misdemeanor count of trespassing stemming from a Nov. 13 visit to Fantasy Springs Resort Casino.


Previously banned from casino grounds, security personnel cited Hill for trespassing when they saw him playing a slot machine, according to defense attorney Roger Tansey. The security guards then brought Hill back to their office and searched him, uncovering a small amount of methamphetamine, the attorney said.

Tansey said he will argue that the guards' actions violated the Fourth Amendment, which prohibits unreasonable search and seizures. Casino security guards do not possess the power to make arrests as do police officers, and thus are not permitted to perform such searches, Tansey claims.


"They had every right to go up to him and tell him he had to leave and they had every right to cite him for trespassing, but what they did do instead was critical," Tansey told City News Service.


Tansey said he will argue that because the guards found Hill to be in possession of drugs based on an illegal search, the felony count against him should be dismissed.


"What do you do if the police unreasonably come into your house and search it?" Tansey said. "Any evidence you find, you can't use in court."


Deputy District Attorney Amity Armes said she did not want to comment until the case was argued in court.

Tansey said he expects prosecutors to argue that the Cabazon Band of Mission Indians, which operates the Indio casino, are not governed by the Fourth Amendment. However, he said he found court cases that mandate that Indian tribes are subject to the U.S. Constitution.


Tansey said the search would have been lawful had the Indian tribe given its security guards the power to arrest or if there existed a reasonable suspicion that Hill was committing a crime.


"Any time an officer sees somebody committing a crime, they arrest them, and any time an officer arrests somebody, they can search," Tansey said. "But the tribe has specifically chosen not to give (security guards) that power, and they acted as if they did."


Hill had been banned from the casino because its operators accused him of taking another patron's drink during a separate visit, Tansey said.


Last September, Tansey said, a drug possession charge against another one of his clients, Daniel Shelton, was tossed out on the grounds the attorney will argue in the Hill case. The District Attorney's Office has appealed that decision, he said.

Justice Thomas: making waves in First Amendment jurisprudence

David L. Hudson Jr.
First Amendment Scholar

Tuesday, May 10, 2011

Justice Clarence Thomas continues to strike his own jurisprudential path on the U.S. Supreme Court – whether it be his oft-noticed reticence at oral argument or his penchant for overruling precedent.
The Court’s ultimate originalist believes strongly in applying the original views of the Founding Fathers in interpreting the Constitution. In First Amendment law, Thomas has taken bold stances that distance him from his colleagues. Usually, in separate concurring opinions, he explains why he would overrule a leading First Amendment decision or why the Court has gone astray.

Sometimes, Thomas’ positions cause him to advocate for greater protection for certain types of speech, such as commercial speech and campaign finance as speech. Other times, Thomas’ views would dramatically curtail First Amendment freedoms – student speech, prisoner speech and the establishment clause. Suffice it to say, Thomas has gone his own way in many areas of First Amendment law. Five examples illustrate the Thomas way.

Commercial speech
Thomas is known as the Court’s premier free-speech defender of advertising or commercial speech. Relying on historical evidence that showed government acceptance of advertising, Thomas questions why commercial speech is subject to much more regulation than political speech. In modern First Amendment law, political speech receives much more protection. For example, content-based restrictions on political speech are subject to the highest form of judicial review, known as strict scrutiny. But content-based restrictions on commercial speech are subject to a lesser form of judicial review, known as intermediate scrutiny, under Central Hudson Gas & Electric v. Public Service Comm’n of New York (1980). Thomas has called for Central Hudson’s demise and greater protection for commercial speech.

In a concurring opinion in a case about liquor advertising – 44 Liquormart v. Rhode Island (1996), Thomas boldly questioned the distinction: “I do not see a philosophical or historical basis for asserting that ‘commercial’ speech is of ‘lower value’ than ‘noncommercial’ speech. Indeed, some historical materials suggest to the contrary.”

Campaign-finance laws
Thomas also questions laws that regulate political contributions and spending. He has consistently stressed that spending by candidates and contributing money to candidates are pure political speech. The Supreme Court in Buckley v. Valeo (1976) ruled that “money is speech” but created a system that allowed greater government regulation over contributions than over spending. Thomas has repudiated Buckley and called for its explicit overruling. He famously referred to the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 – a major piece of campaign-finance legislation – as “the greatest speech abridgement since the Civil War.”


The establishment clause
The area in which Thomas diverges from his colleagues perhaps more than any other is the establishment clause, the first 10 words of the First Amendment: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.” In its 1947 decision Everson v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court extended the establishment clause to state and local governments and began its modern church-state separation jurisprudence.

Thomas views the Everson foundation as faulty and says the establishment clause should not apply to limit state and local government officials. In his concurring opinion in the Pledge of Allegiance decision, Elk Grove Unified School District v. Newdow (2004), Thomas wrote: “I would acknowledge that the Establishment Clause is a federalism provision, which, for this reason, resists incorporation.” That means Thomas would not apply the establishment clause to the states – a view not shared by the other members of the Court.


Student speech
Clarence Thomas argues that the seminal student-speech case – Tinker v. Des Moines Independent School Dist. (1969) – should be overruled. “Tinker effected a sea change in students’ speech rights, extending them well beyond traditional bounds,” he wrote in his concurring opinion in Morse v. Frederick (2007). “As originally understood, the Constitution does not afford students a right to free speech in public schools.” Thomas would turn the clock back to the early 20^th century and before when students had no First Amendment rights. As he wrote in his Morse concurrence, “Teachers taught and students obeyed.”

Prisoner speech
The Supreme Court wrote in Turner v. Safley (1987) that “Prison walls do not form a barrier separating inmates from the protections of the Constitution.” The Court has ruled that inmates do retain some First Amendment rights – though prison officials receive much deference from reviewing courts. Justice Thomas has written in concurring opinions in Overton v. Bazzetta (2003) and Beard v. Banks (2006) that the proper inquiry for prisoner challenges is the Eighth Amendment “cruel and unusual punishment” clause, not the First Amendment. In Overton, he said states were free to “define and redefine all types of punishment, including imprisonment, to encompass various types of deprivations — provided only that those deprivations are consistent with the Eighth Amendment.” (emphasis in original). Thomas views Turner v. Safley as unworkable and prisoners should have no First Amendment rights.


http://www.firstamendmentcenter.org/justice-thomas-making-waves-in-first-amendment-jurisprudence