39 Replies to “Freedom vs. Security”

  1. this sort of thing always seems to happen under a Democrat administration – Waco, Ruby Ridge, etc. coincidence?

  2. Watched the video. It wasn’t clear (to me) if the police had a warrant or not. Or probably cause.
    I also did not see the police breaking down doors on every house on the street.
    People are right to scrutinize the details of the 4th amendment, especially in circumstances as what happened in Boston. The author is right to point out that the 4th was intended to keep soldiers out of yer home.
    But I really don’t think that video proves we have come a full 180.

  5. there is no conversation between opening the door and extracting the 1st individual from the home
    True that. But I do question what happened 5 minutes before that video started. Was there an attempt to serve by the cop already there?
    I would want to know more. While I am a small government type, and not a lawyer, I wonder if the Boston lockdown qualifies as an “Exigent circumstance” ?
    That being said, locking a whole city down did make me feel uncomfortable…

  6. Designating the little dirt bag as an “enemy combatant” would have precluded the necessity to read him his rights. They could have interrogated him to their hearts content. By reading him his rights, he immediately clams up and any intelligence the authorities could have gleaned, disappeared. Of course depending on that band of bozos to obtain useful intelligence is doubtful.

  7. 454guy – the rights involved are mine, not the bombers. I have the right to refuse entry to the cops without a warrant. Just because the muslim guys are acting under special permission does not give our authorities the right to also acting under special permission.

  8. The police overstepped on this one. Knock on the door, ask permission to enter without a warrent. 99% of people would grant permission. Yes, something bad happened, but that isn’t an excuse to suspend all rights. Or, you could declare War Measures Act like PET did and approach it from that angle, if they have a similar thing in the USA.
    But then, as someone else observed, it always seems as though the “progressives” are the most willing to use the Jackboot method.

  9. Interesting. But for all you that think this is just an isolated incident,so did the German people and the Jews,Poles,Romny,etc.

  11. I saw a picture of the family. Maybe a bad shot but they looked like they have diversity credentials and perhaps had previously drawn attention. Why wasn’t everyone in the neighborhood taken out with hands over their head?

  12. Bread and Circuses,
    I watched appalled at the population of Boston cheering the capture of the Terrorist.
    They all just submitted to marshall law, gave away all their rights. cowered in their homes at government edict because of one admittedly very ugly soul.
    Nero would be proud at how it was all orchestrated,

  13. Did the police go to every house in Watertown and raid it? NO. Look at the first guy in that video. Look at what he’s wearing. Do you think that maybe it’s possible someone phoned in and said they saw the bomber going into that house? If so that’s probable cause and completely 100% normal and constitutional.
    As to claims of martial law etc there was only a request that people “shelter in place”. People were free to leave their homes, many businesses were open etc. Most people chose to stay home though.

  14. Totally agree.
    Fox, Limbaugh and many other “conservatives” like big government when it wears a uniform and holds a gun.
    The US is experiencing the militarization of all civilian police forces — a consequence of having so many post-military people entering these workforces and unquestioning cheerleading from the right and left.
    Just a few examples:
    -the Dept of Education (!!) has a SWAT team;
    -the Boston transit police has a SWAT team (does every US transit police have a SWAT team?!);
    -the DEA is one massive SWAT team. If you have Netflix, watch an episode or two of the show called “DEA” — you’d swear it was parody.
    That this kind of force is used and accepted tells you that America has clearly chosen security over liberty.

  15. So what use were the police in catching Dzokhar? He was found by a private individual, and would NOT have been found if the individual had already been removed by “police” (government goons in reality). If the populace had been armed, the matter would have ended right there. The government goons were not necessary re Dzokhar. As for the killing of Tamerlan, they played a part, but the good deed was done by Dzokhar
    We don’t need government goons, and “security” is merely giving them an opportunityto flex their muscles.
    In WWII, when we were up against a clever as well as powerful enemy, we had real spies and subversives in our midst; and the police (while they certainly used force on occasion) were very discrete in dealing with them.

  16. Compliance with the 4th Amendment was clearly sidestepped here and for no apparent reason, other than the authority decided it was justified. There’s a serious problem when that judgement is made by the same body that is implementing the activity. If you remove the independent assessment, you are asking for abuse. In any event, the police/FBI should have anticipated what their tactical application was and followed protocol.
    Had this door to door frenzy taken place in Texas instead of the far left girly state of Mass., it may have played out very differently.

  17. Rights are not lost all at once but by one small step at a time. What happened in Boston is just another step in the progressives long step to convince people the bill of rights is not necessary. I’m hoping there is a massive civil rights lawsuit to push back against this abuse.
    What really annoyed me was all the gun-pointing by the police. Rule 2 of gun safety is ‘never point the muzzle at something you’re not willing to destroy’. They’re lucky no one sneezed.

  19. Locking-down an entire city for what would be considered a bad weekend in Chicago is overkill. The public turned in both Islamist losers after they had been captured on camera. The security role of government could have been confined to legitimacy without the drama.
    The Islamists are winning thanks to those that defend the supremacy of the state while tripping over themselves to avoid offending Muslims.

  20. I agree with most of you guys. When rights are suspended for one group it’s not long until they are suspended for another. We are only a vote away from gun owners being that next group.
    454guy: seriously you’re turning this place into Stormfront, and it’s driving intelligent people away, Kate take note. The young criminal that bombed the marathon is an American. Muslim or not he has the same rights of the rest. I know lots of Muslims who think these bombers are garbage, don’t want a Shariah state, and left that part of the world to get away from the idiocy.

  21. This article is especially pertinent give the passage of S-7 in parliament, whereby cops can preventatively detain people and otherwise sidestep constitutional rights. If the Supremes have any sense-and they do-this will get struck down.
    By reading him his rights, he immediately clams up and any intelligence the authorities could have gleaned, disappeared.
    Thankfully, America still has a tenuous connection with the rule of law and this did not happen.

  23. BINGO! Martin. I thought that at the time when I saw the grim and oh so easy ‘locktown’ of the city of Boston
    Like you Grey Lady, I was shocked and amazed to see the citizens of Boston submit to the brute force unleashed on their privacy under the guise of looking for a scrawny guy with a pressure cooker.
    This article is excellent – it is a warning. The video is only one of many that surfaced from the brute force shakedown foisted on private citizens; people stood by and let it happen..and Fox News was silent. People do not have to be Muslims or immigrants to be ‘enemies of the people’ (Ken (kulak) has reiterated this fact so many times here)…first they came for the smokers, then they came for the pop/booze drinkers, then they came for the automobile drivers…they will come for you! This was also a ‘terrorist’ damp run, IMO.
    If people will allow a swat team into their private homes, armed people that they do not know and hence do not trust, will they hand over their own defense weapons to avoid harassment by swat teams looking for guns and baseball bats that ‘would only be owned by a potentially violent person?’ Remember the silence when the farmers from Sask were chained and charged for selling their own grain?? Where was the msm ‘outrage’; where was citizen outrage? And we had the gun confiscation movement..many people folded like cheap card tables..and the smoking ban where business men/women folded like cardboard boxes and lost their businesses.
    In the words of Benjamin Franklin: “They who give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty no safety”

  24. LAS: actually just because someone doesn’t read the Miranda, doesn’t mean you aren’t covered by the Bill of Rights and the right not to incriminate oneself. The Supreme Court only held that most people don’t know they have rights, hence people are read these rights such as the right to remain silent.
    Not that I agree with suspension of anyone’s rights but technically just because you aren’t read the miranda doesn’t mean that you have to answer any questions.
    As to S-7 I beleive the Supreme Court has already provided it’s opinion that it doesn’t violate charter rights of Canadians to appear before a investigation panel and be compelled to provide information. Not that I agree with that, I think the Supreme court has failed more than once.
    @454guy: I’ve live amongst Muslims as well. You’re wrong about all of them. I am not denying that some people interpret their religion to allow them to perform acts of violence, and this is something they should address. However your effor to paint the entire group of people this way is bigotted.

  25. 454guy: It doesn’t matter. An American has rights as defined by law and fought for by our ancestors.
    Rights don’t get suspended because the offender believes in crazy things. (the Bible has some crazy stuff in it as well)
    Otherwise, you’re next, 454guy, when the government decides what you do or think is against national security.
    The fact that you don’t understand this is makes you like the Islamic fascists.

  26. Apparently 454guy is a psychic.
    you afford full civil rights to those who want you dead.
    That’s what makes them rights stupid.

  27. Yet even a PM like Harper who recognizes Islamic Jihad as the biggest treat to civilization. Wants to allow 120,000 fakenstiens into Canada. How do you counter this kind of ignorance?It seems they bury any common sense, no matter what these People do. Bomb, kill threaten, riot. Its all hidden away.I mean like they never even read the koran to see what this Global Jihad is about. Nor listen to the endless screaming of “death to the infidels” Imams.
    As for the force used it was excessive. I don’t blame the police ,but I do the MUslim in Charge along with his Alinsky enablers.

  28. Johnston is right on the money, even if he soft-soaps the abysmal behaviour of government and police. What happened in Boston was unprecedented in American history. If government and police heads don’t roll over this, the republic has officially died. If this happened in my country I would consider the government to be officially at war with the free citizens and their ballistic vest,combat-geared goons an occupying army.

  29. I am torn on this. One one hand I agree that his is massive overkill. On the other hard Abe Lincoln did not try and arrest the rebels. They went to war against them and fought them. The problem is that no one in government is prepared to admit that Muslims are the enemy. This all started when the war was christened “the war on terror”, not the war on Islam. I know that most people, when talking about WW2 talk about the war against the nazis, but it wasn’t. It was a war against Germany. I know not all Germans were Nazis, but we killed their soldiers and bombed their houses anyway. To win this we have to do the thing. .We have to at least differentiate between citizens and non citizens. Non citizens should have no bill of rights rights. Those are a privilege of citizenship.

  30. I can see by the willingness to dismiss this gross excessive use of foece and arbitrary suspension of the 4th amendment (FYI this was a 20 bloc house to house unwarranted no-knock search without a declaration of martial law – currently the news is trickling out the scene in the video was repeated more than a dozen times). The cops were obviously using the innocent residents in an improv drill to practice martial law tactics – without the trouble of actually having martial law declared and the actors held responsible to FEMA regulating. Whre has a city been put into arbitrary curfew, had mobility and commerce suspended and defacto martial law invoked t chase down one wounded brain dead punk? This crap never even happened during the great wars.
    Obviously all the MSM/Medaia/police conditioning of the public to accept overbearing excessive use of force and military tactics (by escalating superfluous SWAT assaults on domestic residences and unarmed civilians) , has softened our disgust for excessive unwarranted force and sot tyranny.

  31. Just wait til the drones are everywhere…
    Jema54@4:12 Here! Here! Spot on comment!

  32. I wonder if the Boston lockdown qualifies as an “Exigent circumstance” ?
    There is a very fine line here.
    I remind all of you that the Obama administration’s Dept of Homeland Security (DHS) has basically classified anyone even showing the slightest semblance of conservative thought and behavior as a possible terrorist. The Army recently gave a presentation listing Evangelical Christians (?!) as a big terror threat in America.
    So I see how easily we could go from the exigent circumstance of a legitimate terror attack (Boston Marathon bombing) to the “exigent circumstance” of a TEA Party rally that just happens to end when the government rounds a few of us up…or comes knocking on our door to “inspect” for weapons, food supplies, etc.
    Either we are nation with the rule of law or we aren’t. As much as it sucks to play by the rules sometimes — especially in the face of Islamic jihadists who blew up an 8 year old kid and 200+ others — if the rules don’t apply when the fit hits the shan (so to speak) the rules won’t apply when the government decides it’s simply had enough of us pesky right-wingers.

  33. The problem is that no one in government is prepared to admit that Muslims are the enemy.
    That’s because ‘War on Islam’ is insane and the rest of us aren’t interested in indulging your hyperviolent hate-fantasies.

  34. Islam’s ongoing 14 century war on the rest of the world. Fixed it for someone.

  35. You mean to tell me that the was between Islam and Christiandom (we might not look at ourselves like that anymore but the Islamic world still does)that has been going on since the revelation of Mohamad is just a figment of the historical imagination? You mean to say that we shouldn’t take the many imams who have vowed to wipe us of the earth or make us submit to islam at their word? We should ignore the 20,000 odd attacks my muslims in the past decade and pretend that they didn’t happen? We should look at the experience of Europe since WW11 and see how a massively increasing muslim population is leading to instability and probable societal collapse and not use it as an example to avoid? Because if you are, you should really pull your head out of your ass and get some air.

  36. Again, not interested in indulging your eschatological fantasies resting on baseless assertions like “a massively increasing muslim population is leading to instability and probable societal collapse”. You know what you should do? Get a sword and go to Europe and restart The Crusades. Or something. By yourself.

  37. yeah well, when “the fit hits the shan” as somebody said these useful idiots for islam will be the first put to the sword.
    One thing about the USSR, they for the most part kept this millenial menace in check.
    Assuming the jihadi’s abide by the Marquis of Queensbury or the Geneva Accords is just beyond naive. They have made the rules, or lack thereof, and not acknowledging that is suicide….personaly probably rather than as a society.
    There will probably be friendly fire losses, but in war that happens.
    First recognize the enemy….
    The islamist wants to kill us and the moderate islamic wants him too…. and facilitates and funds him.

  39. Thanks Kate, I cross posted this to my blog.
    To me, the writer is right on point. And for you folks who think that what happened in Boston was OK, there are no words that will describe the contempt I have for your beliefs.
    You would be 1933 Germans.

Proudly powered by WordPress & Skyrocket Themes

MENU

Navigation