There have been some terrible miscarriages of justice due to proceeds of crime legislation in other countries.

Whether Canada will do better remains to be seen.

To the surprise of at least one legal expert, the Supreme Court of Canada last week unanimously gave the provinces incredible powers to seize assets allegedly connected to crime.

For a country that has gained the reputation, whether deserved or not, of protecting the rights of the accused over the rights of victims, it’s quite an about-face.

As one worried reader e-mailed the other day: “This is a terrifying development. If the police even suspect you of a crime, they can take all your stuff. They don’t have to prove it.”

Is he right? “Yes and no,” says University of Manitoba law professor Michelle Gallant. The cops can take your car, for instance, if they think you’re using it to sell drugs.

But the police have to persuade a judge that, on a balance of probabilities, the vehicle is connected to crime. And that’s much easier to show than providing evidence beyond a reasonable doubt that someone is guilty of a crime.

In other words, if the police want your car, house, money or any other assets, they can get away with it without even arresting you as long as they convince a judge something doesn’t smell right. No conviction necessary.

“It’s kind of scary,” says Gallant, an expert in proceeds of crime, who never thought Canada would embrace such wide-ranging legislation.

While the goal — going after assets associated with crimes like drug trafficking — is laudatory, it’s an awful lot of leeway to give the government, she says.

At least Britain brought in a more narrowly defined law, limiting proceeds of crime proceedings to assets over 10,000 pounds ($18,000 Canadian).

“It does strike me as quite radical,” says Gallant, of the top court ruling. “Now the state can sue anybody — any asset — and if it proves on a balance of probabilities that it’s connected to crime, it can take it. That’s quite an extraordinary power.”

She would have been more comfortable with more restrictive proceeds of crime laws limited to assets over $100,000 and involving only serious crimes such as drug trafficking.

In the U.S., she adds, there have been shocking abuses of the system. She cites the case of a poor woman who lost her house because her son had been dealing drugs out of the place. And a lot of marginalized people have no control over what goes on around them.

Listen up, folks. Most of the provinces have similar provisions in their proceeds of crime legislation. If your kid is selling drugs out of your car, and you don’t know it, the state could still seize the vehicle as an instrument of crime.

Imagine another scenario. A new immigrant flying back to his native country with a thick wad of cash for his relatives. “We use banks. They use envelopes,” Gallant says of certain immigrant groups.

PANDORA’S BOX

That’s the kind of money the government might decide, on a balance of probabilities, is connected to crime.

The optimistic view is the provinces examined the U.S. and European proceeds of crime laws and got rid of “the worst bits,” says Gallant.

On the other hand, we may have unleashed a Pandora’s Box of potential abuses. We’ll just have to keep our fingers crossed that Canadian judges have a finely honed sense of fairness.

“I’m ambivalent,” Gallant says of the Supreme Court decision. “I’m not sure if I have a lot of faith in our proceeds of crime units (and) government’s ability to apply these laws.”

Source: Toronto Sun

The brutal treatment of terror detainees and prisoners by members of the military followed directly from the CIA’s use of harsh interrogation techniques, according to a Senate report that is likely to add fuel to the debate over the United States’ use of torture.

The 232-page report released Tuesday by the Senate Armed Services Committee came less than a week after President Barack Obama released Bush-era memos that justified the use of harsh tactics by the CIA.

The report documents the Bush administration’s growing reliance on harsh interrogations that began just two months after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks. It also ties those unyielding interrogation policies to the abuses of Iraqi prisoners by U.S. military authorities at the Abu Ghraib prison as well as to interrogations at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and in Afghanistan.

Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., the chairman of the Armed Services Committee, said the report shows that abuse of terror detainees and combat prisoners was systematic.

“Authorizations of aggressive interrogation techniques by senior officials resulted in abuse and conveyed the message that physical pressures and degradation were appropriate treatment for detainees in U.S. military custody,” Levin said.

The Senate investigation has been in a Pentagon security review since Nov. 21, 2008. Its findings were drawn from more than 70 interviews and 200,000 pages of classified and unclassified documents.

“In my judgment,” Levin said, “the report represents a condemnation of both the Bush administration’s interrogation policies and of senior administration officials who attempted to shift the blame for abuse such as that seen at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay and Afghanistan to low-ranking soldiers.”

Source: AP

Paranoid anti-government radicals used to have to rely on crude, inefficient methods of communication. Now they have Fox News.

Imagine if Fox News had been on the air back on February 28, 1993, just months into the new Democratic president’s first term, when agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms attempted to serve warrants on David Koresh’s Branch Davidian compound, located on the outskirts of Waco, Texas. Agents arrived because federal authorities got a tip that Koresh and the followers of the misguided messiah were stockpiling weapons.

The authorities were right. Outgunned, ATF agents quickly met resistance from the Davidians, who had a .50-caliber rifle, machine guns, and more than a million rounds of ammunition at their disposal. The shootout lasted hours and became the longest in American law-enforcement history. In the end, four ATF agents were killed, and 16 were wounded. Inside the compound, five Davidians were killed and scores more injured, including Koresh, who was shot in the hip and the wrist. The gunbattle signaled the start of a 51-day standoff between Koresh and federal authorities.

Rupert Murdoch’s all-news channel didn’t debut in America until October 1996, but it’s chilling to consider the what-ifs of how today’s Fox News lineup of doomsday, anti-government prophets would have reacted to controversial and defining news events in the early 1990s — like Waco.

As news of the failed Waco raid broke, would Fox News’ notoriously weepy and apocalyptic host Glenn Beck have broken down on the air and wept for the tyranny that he saw unfolding in the government’s raid? While FBI negotiators tried to win the release of Koresh’s followers, would Beck have warned viewers that the president would “take your gun away one way or another“?

Amidst the 51-day siege, would Beck have warned against the creeping “totalitarian state” inside America? Would the host have gravely announced that we’d “come to a very dangerous point in our country’s long, storied history“?

Would Beck have routinely vilified President Clinton as a fascist? Would he have told viewers that he wanted to debunk the militia-movement conspiracy theory that the federal government was building prison camps, but that he just couldn’t knock the story down — and that, at first glance, it appeared to be “half true”?

And can you even imagine Beck’s on-air reaction when the FBI’s final, failed assault on the Waco compound unfolded on live TV on April 19, 1993? As the horrific images of the compound going up in flames and the grim realization spread that Koresh’s followers were not coming out — that they had staged a mass suicide (and in some cases, executions), rather than surrendering to federal officers — would Beck have claimed that the scene of destruction reminded him of the “early days of Adolf Hitler”?

Would he have invited self-styled militiamen onto his show to game out how the pending civil war against the Clinton-led tyranny was likely to play out and to ponder whether members of the U.S. military would fire on American citizens when the blood began to flow in the streets? And setting aside all decency, would Beck — post-Waco — have pretended to douse a Fox News colleague in gasoline and, lamenting how the government was disenfranchising its citizens, then urged Clinton to just “set us on fire,” or pleaded that it would be better if Clinton had just shot Beck “in the head”? (That’s how Koresh died inside the Waco compound: from a bullet to the head.)

Based on the paranoid, anti-government rhetoric that Fox News has embraced since President Obama’s inauguration, it’s no leap to suspect that if Murdoch’s outlet were broadcasting in the early 1990s — and if it were broadcasting the same fringe message it’s echoing today — that the militia movement would have found a friend in Fox News during the Waco era and throughout Clinton’s first term, when the conspiratorial patriot movements flourished.

And that’s the chilling significance of what’s now unfolding. Last week, I wrote about the inherent dangers and irresponsibility of Fox News consciously shaping itself into a kind of militia news outlet and how it’s impossible to ignore the anti-government message some viewers such as Richard Poplawski, the man accused of shooting and killing three Pittsburgh police officers, might be taking from Fox News.

But let’s take a step back and see just how extraordinary Fox News’ latest lurch to the revolutionary right really is. And let’s clearly understand how Fox News is actively trying to mainstream fringe allegations, how Murdoch’s outlet functions as a crucial bridge — a transmitter — between the radical and the everyday.

What Fox News, and specifically Beck, is doing in early 2009 is giving a voice — a national platform — to the same deranged, hard-core haters who hounded the new, young Democratic president in the early 1990s in the wake of Waco (i.e. the Clinton Chronicles crowd). What Fox News is doing today is embracing the same kind of hate rhetoric and doomsday conspiratorial talk that flourished during the ’90s, and Fox News is now dumping all that rancid stuff into the mainstream. It’s legitimizing accusatory hate speech in a way no other television outlet in America ever has before.

Today’s unhinged, militia-flavored attacks from the right against Obama are clearly reminiscent of 1993 and 1994 and the kind of tribal reaction conservatives had to the Democratic White House. What’s different this time around is that that it’s being adopted and broadcast nationally by Fox News, as it proudly mainstreams and validates the fringe.

Back in the early 1990s, marginal critics, militiamen, and so-called “Patriots” had to rely on somewhat crude methods of communications to spread their conspiratorial distrust of government. They used grassroots fax networks, the very early days of online bulletin boards, and even passed around copies of The Turner Diaries. At the top of their media pyramid were right-wing talk-radio hosts as well as the writers on The Washington Times‘ and The Wall Street Journal’s editorial pages, who eagerly disseminated the culture of partisan paranoia.

But in terms of television, the most influential mass medium in America, nowhere on the TV landscape in the early 1990s were rabid government haters able to hear their message of fear amplified on a nightly or weekly basis the way Obama haters are able to today via Fox News. Even Rush Limbaugh, who from 1992 to 1996 hosted a syndicated television show, didn’t go there. Limbaugh’s purely partisan television program avoided describing the new Democratic administration with the same doomsday language that’s now casually thrown out about Obama: that he’s a Marxist or a fascist, or that totalitarian rule remains a real and imminent threat. Even Limbaugh (or his producers) thought that kind of rhetoric was too much for American television.

Fast-forward two administrations, and that kind of talk has become Fox News’ signature.

To be accurate, there was one person with a national television audience back then who did regularly promote outlandish conspiratorial claims about Clinton: the Rev. Jerry Falwell. He actively pushed the now-infamous Clinton Chronicles documentary on his Old Time Gospel Hour television show. The Clinton Chronicles, which was produced by Citizens for Honest Government, which in turn paid off key Clinton critics who cooperated with the house-of-mirrors film, claimed that the new president had accumulated a long criminal record while governor of Arkansas and continued his lawbreaking ways as president, that the Clintons were associated with drug-running, prostitution, murder, adultery, money laundering, and obstruction of justice, just to name a few.

Playing that hypothetical card again today, is there anyone who doubts that if Beck were broadcasting on Fox News back in 1994 that Citizens for Honest Government reps would have been ushered onto his program to discuss Clinton’s alleged depravities? I don’t doubt it, simply because Beck has, at times, become the voice of the militia this year — and the militia devoured The Clinton Chronicles. As author David Neiwert, an expert on the right wing, reported, “The militia movement provided most of the early audience for The Clinton Chronicles; large stacks of the books and videos sold well at Patriot gatherings.”

What’s so startling today is that the unhinged, irrational attacks being leveled against Obama sound so similar to the unhinged, irrational attacks leveled against Clinton more than a decade ago. For instance, here’s a line from the introduction to The Clinton Chronicles: “The hijacking of America was under way, and its impact on future generations would be incalculable.”

That claim would sound familiar to any casual viewer who has tuned into Fox News since Obama’s inauguration.

Here’s what Neiwert highlighted in 2003:

Had you gone to any militia gathering — held usually in small town halls or county fairgrounds, sometimes under the guise of “preparedness expos,” “patriotic meetings” or even gun shows — you could always find a wealth of material aimed at proving Clinton the worst kind of treasonous villain imaginable. Bill and Hillary Clinton, after all, occupy a central position in Patriots’ “New World Order” paranoiac fantasy.

You’ll note that Obama today occupies the same central position in the Patriots’ Fox News-fed paranoiac fantasies.

And media critics Jeff Cohen and Norman Solomon wrote this more than a decade ago:

“Patriots” rail against Bill Clinton and the plot toward global government known as the “New World Order”; they see gun control as a Big Brother conspiracy.

Again, that type of rhetoric has become synonymous with Beck, who recently claimed the Second Amendment is “under fire” and that the “Big Brother” government will soon dictate what its citizens can eat, what temperature their house can be, and what kind of cars they’re allowed to drive.

Hearing the attacks on Obama, it’s déjà vu all over again. The key difference this time around the right-wing hate track is that Fox News has signed on as a TV partner and has agreed to embrace — and air to a national audience — the militia-like allegations about Obama. Fox News has agreed to descend into the right-wing conspiracist subculture in order to portray the new president as the worst kind of villain imaginable: somebody who’s plotting take away guns and who’s not above employing fascism to obtain his goals.

On the two-year anniversary of the Waco inferno, militia admirer Timothy McVeigh, feeding off his hatred for the government, drove his rented 20-foot Ryder truck and parked it across the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in downtown Oklahoma City. At 9:02 a.m. on April 19, 1995, the truck’s three-ton ammonium nitrate bomb detonated and sheared the north side off the Murrah Building, killing 168 people and injuring hundreds more.

McVeigh later wrote, “I reached the decision to go on the offensive — to put a check on government abuse of power.” McVeigh wanted to “send a message to a government” by “bombing a government building and the government employees within that building who represent that government.”

The Oklahoma City bombing story broke 18 months before Fox News made its cable-news debut. But if Murdoch’s team maintains its current course — if Beck and company insist on irresponsibly fanning the militia-type flames of distrust — there’s the danger Fox News might soon have to cover other episodic gestures of anti-government payback.

Source AlterNet

Former presidential candidate Alan Keyes has given perhaps his most dire warning yet, saying that the Obama administration is preparing to stage terror attacks, declare martial law and cancel the 2012 elections, which is why they are demonizing their political enemies as criminals and terrorists.

Keyes is best known for his performance during the 2000 Republican presidential debates, when he was accredited by many media outlets as being the clear winner during a series of debates with George W. Bush and John McCain.

“It’s obvious that they will stop at nothing,” Keyes told attendees of a reception in Fort Wayne, adding, “We may wake up one day and there’s a series of terrorist attacks, the economy is paralysed….martial law will be declared everywhere in the United States and it won’t end until the crisis ends.”

Keyes said that Americans should be thankful if they even see another election in 2012, stating, “If we don’t wake up and work to see that it happens, we will not see another election.”

“The minute they think they can get away with it, they will end this system of government and that is their intention,” added Keyes, noting that everyone acting as if the time we are in was just “business as usual” reminds him of the attitude of politicians in the Weimar Republic when Hitler was rising to power or eastern Europe when the Communists were taking over after the second world war.

Keyes said that because the majority of people are decent-minded, they believe others will play by the rules when this simply isn’t the case, warning that this attitude will allow evil to take over before we can do anything about it.

“It is so clear hat we have now put a faction in place – they are not playing by the rules and they don’t intend to play by the rules – if they were playing by the rules they wouldn’t have tried to identify their opposition as criminals,” added Keyes, making reference to the recent controversy surrounding the release of the MIAC and Homeland Security reports, which implied that Americans who exercise and are knowledgeable about their constitutional rights are a threat to law enforcement and potential domestic terrorists.

Keyes said that the only solution was from the bottom up because our leaders “are so gutless that they won’t even ask that the Constitution be enforced for clear, plain, absolutely unequivocal requirements,” and respond meekly with “their lips shut and their hearts terrorized.”

Keyes also warned of Obama’s agenda to create a civilian security force and said it was part of the ultimate agenda to disarm American citizens and create a police state.

Keyes has been a vocal critic of Obama, warning that he is a radical Communist who is determined to destroy America, and that if his agenda is not stopped then the country as we know it will cease to exist.

Watch the clip below – please forgive the poor sound and video quality.

Thanks Prison Planet

An ABC-7 crew covering a crash on I-10 on Monday unwillingly became part of the story.

Motorists stuck in traffic witnessed veteran journalist Darren Hunt and photojournalist Ric Dupont being handcuffed and detained.

Just after 1:30 p.m., the two arrived to report on a flipped semi-truck on I-10 West near the Sunland Park exit. They parked on the left shoulder of the eastbound lanes of I-10 as witnesses ran toward victims to offer help.

A pregnant woman sat on the side of the freeway, sobbing, and, according to a witness, several men in military fatigues helped pull the driver of the semi-truck out of the cab.

As emergency crews tended to the driver, police Sgt. Raul Ramirez told the ABC-7 crew from across the barrier to leave. Several people and half a dozen cars were also stopped on the eastbound shoulder.

Darren continued to try to get information from the men in fatigues when the situation began to escalate. The sergeant jumped the barrier and told Darren to get in the truck (an ABC-7 news unit) and leave, then held Darren with his hands behind his back to the side of the truck belonging to a witness that was parked on the shoulder.

“I’m not doing anything,” Darren said repeatedly.

Darren and Ric were handcuffed, read their Miranda rights and taken to the Westside Regional Command Center. They were released within a few minutes. The entire incident lasted about an hour.

The El Paso Police Department has launched an investigation.

“It’s unfortunate that any time the member of the public or the news media feels that they’ve been treated unfairly by any member of our department, and so, that’s a very serious type of allegation – something that we have to ensure that we investigate completely, and that’s what we’re doing here and conducting an investigation,” said El Paso police spokesman Javier Sambrano said.

Two members of the El Paso Police Department reviewed the video at ABC-7 studios and took a copy for Police Chief Greg Allen. Their department of internal affairs is reviewing the incident.

Sgt. Ramirez has been placed on administrative duty pending the outcome of the investigation.

Police ask anyone who witnessed the incident to call them at 564-7000.

Watch the video for yourself by clicking on the video link with this story.

RBN