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Shoot First, Ask Questions Later ... the U.S. Police State emerges
(Charles Sheehan-Miles, AlterNet, December 4, 2002)
Bush's political appointee intends to claim our government has the right to coerce information from a witness . . . Olsen plans to argue the police can detain or arrest anyone for any reason and then beat you up or even shoot you to get information, even if there are no emergent circumstances. . . . In other countries, this is called torture. . . . Five years ago, Oliver Martinez was riding his bike down a path when he came upon two police officers questioning another man. The officers ordered Martinez to stop, forcibly stopped him, frisked him, wrestled him to the ground, and then shot him five times at point-blank range. Martinez was blinded and paralyzed and screamed for medical care. . . . A police officer, Sergeant Ben Chavez, kept the injured passerby in police custody. Chavez climbed into the ambulance with the paralyzed and blind man and interrogated him for 45 minutes in the ambulance and at the hospital. Chavez tape recorded the injured man's pleas to leave him alone and stop questioning him. . . . After the incident, Martinez hired an attorney and sued the police for illegal arrest, use of excessive force, and coercive interrogation while in police custody. Though he was shot five times, no charges were ever filed against him, and the police department never provided any assistance or compensation. . . . Bush, through Olsen, makes the argument there is no constitutional guarantee against coercive police questioning, even when medical personnel are telling the police to move back. . . . In other words, Bush says it is okay for the police to grab citizens off the street, shoot them, question them without an attorney, keep medical assistance away, and try to cover up a police shooting with impunity. . . . In essence, Bush says beat them and shoot them, because the ends justify the means. . . . Will innocent civilians, under the Patriot Act and the Homeland Security Act and the end of Miranda warning, have to submit to a beating before they get their one phone call? . . . Has the U.S. political leadership in Washington, DC gone crazy? . . . And, I ask, why is this news, and the broad impact it may have on liberty, limited to the Los Angeles Times and the alternative press? . . . Now is the time to stand up and stop these horrors, before President Bush completes his plan to turn America into a police state, where anyone, anywhere, can be picked up off the street, shot, beaten, questioned without an attorney, and not told why we are in custody.

posted by LoZo 9:29 AM