This is more repulsive than your average use of in-home terrorism by the party in power. First, you stop letting people use colloquealisms in protest. Then you stop all protest on biased allegations of perceived threat with only slightly less realism than this. After that, it’s a couple short jumps and you have people with M-16s looking over your shoulder in the voting booth.
Besides, “I wish the president were killed” is a perfectly valid political statement if you actually wish him to be killed. It’s only a threat if you say you are going to do it or orchestrate it being done. Otherwise, it is a statement of desire. “I wish I had some waffles,” is not taken as identical to “I am going to go right now and make some waffles,” nor is wishing someone were killed the same as saying you will perpetrate the deed.
According to the SS logic, the fact that I wish I could fly means I’m going to go jump off the roof and not hit the ground. Or, there is a sizable enough chance that it should be investigated whether or not I am to jump off this roof and miss the ground or not.
It has never been legal to say you want to kill the President, so the Secret Service wasn’t really acting out of line. After all , it is their job to protect the President. Granted the situation could have been handled better, but they were still just doing their job. You can’t dismiss someone just because of their age. Just because the girl didn’t know she couldn’t say that doesn’t mean she shouldn’t have been investigated. Ignorance has never been an excuse for any crime. Besides the threat was done in a public area, so it isn’t like the Secret Service invaded her privacy to find the threat.
I honestly see no short jump from desiring a president’s death that could potentially lead to M-16s in the voting booth. Besides, the Secret Service is hardly party affiliated. I imagine all of these investigations aren’t given the go-ahead by some party affiliated/appointed position (attorney general or somesuch office). They’re routine investigations, and the less likely ones, such as this girl, have only a few agents (probably not the most experienced/tactful ones at that) sent to investigate.
But yes, the agents could’ve handled this case, and ones like it, with more tact. It’s obvious it was made by some stupid little teenager, so, while it should still be investigated, tact and some modicum of respect should be used.
The girls parents should definitly, without a shadow of a doubt, been present at her questioning. I see the way it was handled as a violation of not only the girl’s civil liberties but also the parent’s.
You stop allowing people to use “I could just kill him” and every other death related colloquealism in our vocabulary under some pretense of threat. Then, you widen the scope of “theat”; saying you want the president out of office becomes a threat because you could, possibly, mean to remove him by killing him. The M-16 remark was more a philosophical statement on the nature it would take democracy to than a realistic thought.
Infonick: Legality does not equal morality. Back when it had never been legal for slaves to run away, were the lynch mobs acting out of line? Just because something complies with or even enforces the law does not mean it isn’t very out of line and immoral.
Still, in the ~105 years the Secret Service has been protecting the president, there’s really been no trend towards the Secret Service suppressing political thought. Every death related colloquealism should be treated as a threat, although some more seriously than others, just to ensure the president’s safety. They’re, ideally, non-political. Part of their job is to protect the president from death, kidnapping, and the like. It’s honestly a delusional, conspiratorial thought to believe the Secret Service, under its current setup, could and would be used to arrest people just for saying they want somebody out of office, and your jump from “kill the president” to “I want the prez out of office” as both truly threatening is a larger jump than you make it out to be. Besides, there’s only around two thousand agents; the vast majority of them are involved in counterfeiting, fraud, etc. It would be a logistical nightmare to make them a true secret police without increasing their numbers quite a bit.
Honestly, how do you judge every threat’s credibility without at least some short Q&A session? You can’t just dismiss a MySpace page by a supposed 14 year old (all women on the internet are men) as a non-threat without ensuring it at all. Their method of ensuring the non-threat was rough, heavyhanded, and quite rude, but they still had to do it.
But this is also dealing with wanting someone dead. Is it really moral to wish somethng bad to happen to someone? I know laws aren’t always morally right, I never said they were. I said that ignorance isn’t an excuse for breaking a law, but that is quite different from knowingly breaking a law because you believe it si wrong. I’m just saying that there was a very good reason for the Secret Service to investigate the threat. The Secret Service could have and should have handled it better, but they weren’t being oppressive to investigate the threat.
Why do you 2 keep arguing the law we all know about and not address the claims against the rights of the girl and the specifics of the way it was handled. This is more than just “this could’ve been handled better”. Irregardless of whether or not they’re not supposed to be political, what they’re doing now is unusual and unspeakable in terms of who is being targeted and how its being done.
I’m pretty sure I’ve stated the method this case was handled was irresponsible, in other terms at least. Wait, yeah, I have. Info did too.
Arac’s not just saying it was an irresponsible handling of the sit’iation. He’s partially arguing that investigating this case could lead to an oppressive organization. He went beyond questioning the methods to questioning investigating “colloquealisms in protest.” That’s two distinct concerns.
If you wish someone is dad because that’s a way you see a greater good for the world, then I’d say, yes, it is moral. Anyway, I was objecting to your comment about what the Secret Service did being out of line. They were very much out of line, I believe, not only in the way they handled the investigation, but in the existance of the particular investigation in general. Additionally, I do believe this law is socially irresponsible to enforce; Pat Robertson, I believe it was, suggested the murder of Hugo Chavez, and nothing was done to him. It’s only illegal to state you wish our leader dead, but other ones are just fine? Other people are just fine? Robertson was arguably much more serious and had a much more viable position for achieving his goal. When you note that, this sure seems damning to anyone who wants to protest something here.
the 984: What Sin is saying, I believe, is that calling this “irresponsible” is like saying that it is “impolite” to urinate down another person’s throat against their will.
Also, I think saying that the methods are inconceivably heinous goes without saying. I’m pointing out that I think the law is socially cripppling because it targets a common, slang remark as a viable threat as a means to silent dissenting voices against the administration, and as a result, is another arc in the downward curve of free speech and at least an illusion of some manner of democracy in this country. This case serves as a precedent for using a legitimately founded law illegitimately to enforce one’s authority on the people.
As I said before, it wouldn’t be hard to argue someone should be imprisoned because their statement of “I wish Bush were no longer in power,” left out how he should be removed, and thus could be and insinuation that he should be slain. We can’t risk it when the life of the leader of the “free” world is at stake, can we?
Before you tell me people wouldn’t believe it, I remember when a damn good number of peopel believed we were going into Iraq because there were weapons of mass destruction. I remember hearing about people believing the Lucetania story enough to start a war over it.
Before you tell me people won’t let it happen, I remember when America allowed our government to vote torture as a means of questioning like it was the middle fucking ages, I remember when people called me un-American for thinking it was wrong to sign all my fucking rights away in the name of safety from an abstract idea.
This sets a precedent of action regardless of whether or not the threat should be believed and whether or not it violates constitutional rights, it’s not a big deal, but like peopel talking about the SS were saying, it’s a start. Objecs in motion stay in motion. Fires spread. It’s not hard to prevent something from happening, but once it starts, it can build enough momentum you could never build a blockade thick enough to stop it.
Nobody would have cared if she wrote “I want to kill Randy Jackson”. Granted, a person of high political status requires protection. But it surprises me that apparently nobody seems to be bothered by the fact that they took her out in the first place, only the way they did so. If a government reserves the right to intervene in the private lives of its citizens without actually checking whether a real threat was posed or not, no less doesn’t even have to justify itself, than that’s more than just looking ridiculous. And if in addition to that people actually accept the fact as legal and normality, and just, ironically, wish to be “treated with respect” when they’re bureaucratically being kicked in their faces, then I don’t know about you but I see that as one hell of a concerning development for a country.
Taking her out of her class was their process of checking whether it was a real threat or not. The way they treated her was the wrong way. You can’t, though, criticize them for “intervening” in private lives without checking if the threat was real when the intervention in the first place is them checking if the threat was real.
They had the information that she’s an eigth grader beforehand. Not only that, but they spoke with her parents and most likely already got an insight into her personal background etc. Leaves the question if questioning/bothering her at all would have been necessary. If they feel the need to question an eighth grader personally instead of, say, passing it on to the regular police first who come knocking at her door in the afternoon and maybe ask a few questions, even taking a myspace- ‘threat’ into consideration as a serious threat to the future of the country, then that’s paranoia at the expense of privacy and actually the security you wanted to preserve in the first place.
I agree with GreenMage.
I mean, look at all those child soldiers. Not only are there a ton of them in America who could easily kill the president at the drop of a hat, but I’m sure they’re all also getting a good education to be in an eight-grade civics class, who would want uneducated soldiers, after all, and I’m certain a veritable ton of those soldiers have Myspace accounts they frequently post in.
Good point, GreenMage, all those myspace-junkie, eighth-grader child-soldiers are a serious threat to our country.
In all honesty, I agree with DT, and that’s what I have been saiyng; the action, not merely method, is extremely ominous. I mean, were this a novel, it would be critiqued for using far too heavy-handed forshadowing, yet, because it is real life, people don’t see the direction this is pointing in with a big fucking neon sign.
And Arac, trying for the break-away, uses Strawman to clear out the way with a red-herring juke! Looks like he’s all alone out there folks, looks like he’s going to make it! NO! He completely misses the point! What horrible luck!
I put the link to the children soldiers page up to make it very clear that just because someone is a child, doesn’t necessarily mean that they are harmless, or that aren’t being manipulated by someone else. Using Myspace and going to Gradeschool is no indicator that a person is sane. Not making public comments about killing people is a much better indicator, and I hope you would agree.