ospam (Jerome Bibuld) wrote in message ...
When I was in the sixth grade, I had a teacher, Mrs. Wilson, who used to tell
us how wonderful it was to live in the United States. her favorite reason
was that, while people had to carry identification at all times in other
countries, we could walk the streets with no identification at all and,
as long as we were peaceful, we were safe from governmental interference.
Oh, well, tempus fugit.

"The author of the saying 'Tempus fugit' was, I think, an idle man.
The more I have to do, the readier Time is to wait for me."
--Wilkie Collins (The Legacy of Cain)

Dear Mr. Bibuld,

According to "Decade of Betrayal: Mexican Repatriation in the 1930s" by
Francisco Balderrama and Raymond Rodriguez (1995: University of New Mexico
Press), the United States summarily (without due process of law) deported
about one million persons of Mexican heritage (*most* of whom were United
States citizens, who *should* have been legally protected from being deported)
to Mexico in order that more jobs could become available for "real Americans"
in the 1930s. Many of the deported persons lost their homes and properties
in the United States without being given any compensation. In some cases,
even seriously ill persons were forcibly removed from hospitals in the United
States and then dropped off across the border in Mexico.

Infringement of Human Rights and False Arrest in Grand Central Station
(snipped)
The poor man was most annoyed. Here, he was, stuck arresting a 75-year-old
eccentric, when, as he told me, he was needed for more important duties, like
"the war on terrorists"....

In the United States, there are some honest people who are still prepared to
stand up and fight to uphold the principles of the United States Constitution
against the continuing evident abuses of them by the United States government.
To these hard-pressed champions of 'civil rights and liberties', your case may
appear as a distraction from their much more important cases.

I plan to plead, "Not guilty", of course. I also plan to sue the MTA for
infringement of my human rights and for false arrest. (If anyone knows a
lawyer who is willing to take these cases on a pro bono basis, I would
appreciate a contact.)

In any general conflict, operational decisions should be made according to the
priorities of need. With all due respect, your case seems near the end of the
queue. Perhaps you should approach the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).
Yet please consider whether a 'civil rights' lawyer's (limited) pro bono time
could be better spent on your case or someone else's.

Here's an excerpt from an article, 'Big Brother takes grip on America' by
Paul Harris, in 'The Observer' (7 September 2003):

"The US's response to 11 September has been an unprecedented clampdown on
the rights of its own citizens....

The government refuses to number the amount of foreign nationals it holds
without charge. But even those released and deported are still victims.
The shadow of being detained for suspicion of terrorism is not easily lifted.
Certainly Akil Sachveda is suffering. He is now a part-time pump attendant
in Toronto. He used to own a petrol station, a bar and a pool hall in New
Jersey, until one day the FBI came looking for an ex-employee who was a Muslim.
The man had left but they arrested Sachveda instead on suspicion of Islamic
terrorism, despite the fact he is a Hindu. He was held for five months and
given no access to a lawyer. Prison guards threatened his life. Eventually
he was deported to Canada. He was never charged, but he had lost everything.
'It is so painful. It was terrifying, but you can't fight the government',
he said. Sachveda now can't get a full-time job. His spell in prison puts
off employers....Sachveda is not adjusting well to his newfound poverty and
exile from his adopted home. 'I lost everything. It would have been better
if I had never come to America', he said."

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/inter...037090,00.html

(Was 11 September 2001 Kristaloncht or the date of the Reichstag fire?)

Please consider the differences in historical context between Germany in the
1930s and the United States today.

"The attraction of a Marxist theory of history is that it appears to offer an
explanation for a very wide range of phenomena in terms of a comparatively
small number of basic factors. The importance of Marxism for non-Marxist
historians is obvious; and it has changed fundamentally and irreversibly the
kind of questions which historians ask. What it does *not* always do is to
supply the answers. When, for example, we look at which economic groups stood
to gain from war and which to lose, we are struck not only by the difficulty
of determining the exact points at which these groups actually influenced
governments but also by the complexity and divergence of interests within the
capitalist world, a divergence which by no means corresponded to the divisions
between national states. Even if it were accepted that war is inherent in the
nature of capitalism, because capitalism developed the spirit of competition
and the conditions for an armed struggle for the maintenance of profits by a
fe financiers and other capitalists, there is still a gap between this type of
explanation and the analysis of July 1914 in terms of specific decisions by
particular individuals. While Rosa Luxemburg's argument that imperialism
colours the whole range of moral as well as economic values of a society draws
attention to the connections between imperialism, protectionism and militarism,
it still leaves many stages to be filled in before one can decide in what
precise way Wilhelmine Germany or Edwardian England were imperialist societies
and how this explains the actual decisions of 1914."
--James Joll (The Origins of the First World War, pp. 204-5)

'The great end of history is to show how much human nature can endure or
perform.'
--Charlotte Lennox (The Female Quixote)

--Nick