http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20061013.wmyspace1013/BNStory/International/home
Isn’t it ironic that SS stands for secret service?
She broke the law, and the Secret Service had to intervene. That said, I doubt that they’re going to actually prosecute the girl, or that the interview consisted of much more than a couple of short questions - it’s easy to overexaggerate when someone as intimidating as a G-Man shows up to ask you some questions.
The real question is whether or not the law that caused them to have to interview the girl is a good law or not. In any case though, comparing the Secret Service to the death squads of Nazi Germany is a bit extreme.
What the story fails to mention is that the girl is also involved in a huge counterfeiting ring. That’s double the reason to be interviewed.
The Secret Service hasn’t been part of the treasury department since the Homeland Security Bill was enacted, so it must have been one hell of a counterfeiting ring to get their attention! I had no idea how big this whole thing really was!
Doesn’t matter. The Secret Service is still involved in counterfeiting investigations.
Really? How odd!
Guess how it started out in Nazi germany.
Where’d you find the sotry that she was involved in a counterfeit ring?
It was a joke. 
oh. 'Cause that would have made their actions more justifiable.
It was pretty clear from the start what the Schutzstaffel were. The guys in the German SS were no law enforcers. They were hand selected thugs and murderers.
They didn’t just shoot out of the ground like mushrooms and one day they were there. It was a gradual development, The SS were actually the “winners” of the dispute with the SA after their leader, Roehm, as well as many SA- people were murdered in june '34 after they became dangerous to Hitler. The selection of an “Elite”, the SS, turned the whole thing around. It might be more accurate to compare the secret service to the Gestapo though, agreed. But it’s not entirely true to say that the SS were “no law enforcers”.
Quite the opposite actually, they were used to protect Hitler and other high politicians from the NSDAP and were a distinct part of the state under Hitler. As also mentioned in the article you posted, SS- functionaires were sitting in all important positions of the third reich, and were parted into 5 groups: the general SS, which had normal civil jobs, the SS- secret service which was the “news agency” of party and state, the “Rasse- und Siedlungshauptamt” for racial affairs, the skull- SS which were mostly low- life nazis used to monitor the concentration camps, and the Verfuegungstruppe you’re talking about, which was actually trained for the upcoming war. They were trained to be a handful of murderers, but that came a bit later and was not what the SA had started out as. The SS consisted of more than just a handful of elite fighters as people often wrongly presume, they were a vital part of all organs of the state and thus, the national socialist reign of terror. Thanks for educating me about German history though.
My point was that it started out the same: people were being scared into not making political statements alltogether, because they had to fear to have the secret service (Gestapo) come knocking at their door- which was later on directly associated to the SS. Welcome to step 1 of psychological dictatorship.
Hi GM.
What, they didn’t send her off to a nice little “detainment camp”? 
Flips the double deuce to the collective of initials
that must have been rather frightening… and probably unnecessary. Think about it: how many people say “death to Bush?” How many of them are actually in a position in which they can actually do something to Bush? Sure, I can advocate monitoring in this case, but pulling her out of school? By the Secret Service? That just seems a bit extreme.
Paranoia. Go, go.
Silly girl. If she had said “Kill Chavez” none of this would have happened. Pulling her out of class was unneeded but I wouldn’t rely on Gov men for politeness.
As Nazi Germany seems to come up often: 1 2
The first one is far more important, because the depiction of Nazi as heartless monsters who fell out of the sky when a 1000 year circle closed doesn’t really help our understanding. But we quite fucked up that chance.
While I can understand a possible line of reasoning that would argue the Secret Service’s investigation into various little not-so-serious death threats could result in fewer political statements, death threats aren’t political statements. They’re threats. Yeah, a good deal of those made are honestly not meant to be taken seriously or were said by stupid people who didn’t know better (see this girl being an eighth grader when the comment was made). However, those comments DO need to be investigated if possible. The Secret Service probably could’ve and should’ve had a little more tact about them, but they found, and rather quickly at that, that the girl posed no threat. It’s a routine procedure the Secret Service has been doing ever since they’ve been assigned to protect the President; they investigate all threats and determine whether they’re serious or not. There’s a distinct difference between making a valid political statement and saying “I wish the President were killed.”
I think that the very fact anyone can find this kind of action by a government acceptable is repugnant. This is a naive 14 year old airhead that doesn’t know about any of this and putting her through this kind of completely inapropriate experience in the completely inapropriate way that was done; this doesn’t need to be confronted like an actual serious and violent threat.
I agree, its their job to investigate. How they go about investigating, the things they do during the investigation, how they address the suspect and the witnesses and anyone else related, how their rights (where were her parents, where was the consent? Where were the lawyers?) are addressed are things that matter. Everything they did was overblown and unacceptable and it should be denounced for the grave misapplication of justice that it is. This isn’t about the law, this is about a systematic problem in the way that things are done by these individuals, since this is not the first time that we see these people do exactly what they have done with this girl. Every action that they have taken is meant to maximize the psychological effects of what it is they want to do and thus it is completely unacceptable. It is not their job to dispense justice, that’s the job of the courts. Their job is to investigate and take her in once they have the information required to build a case and present it. Instead, these guys went out, took her out of class at random and intimidated and threatened her, not only while she was completely incapable of defending herself, but making her helpless because of the shock and fear that is created by their choice of actions. This is state sponsored psychological warfare.
Wow, Godwin’s Law in the first post… While our government is a touch insane these days, that may be a touch overkill.