Posted on 05/04/2006 11:26:45 AM PDT by SandfleaCSC
Excerpt
As it emerges as our country's first national police force, Michael Chertoff's Department of Homeland Security is becoming notorious for abuses of power — and even depraved crimes against children.
The school day had ended and the parking lot at Englewood Elementary was full of energetic kids eager to go home when Leander Pickett saw a late model car obstructing the school bus loading zone. Pickett, a teacher's assistant at the Jacksonville, Florida, grade school, strolled over to the car, which had made a wrong turn into an exit lane, and told its occupants they had to move.
Pickett's reward for looking after the safety of the schoolkids was to be thrown face-down onto the hood of the car, handcuffed, and held for more than a half-hour as students, teachers, and parents looked on in horror.
"I walked up to [the driver] and said, 'Sir, you need to move,'" Pickett told a television reporter. "That's when he said 'I'm a police officer. I'm with Homeland Security. I'll move when I want to.' That's when he started grabbing me on my arm."
"Mr. Pickett asked the guy blocking the bus loading zone to move, and the guy told him he would move his car when he got ready to move it," confirmed eyewitness Alton Jackson, a coach at the school. A second eyewitness, school employee Terri Dreisonstok, added: "At that point I intervened, and I went up to the gentleman and said, 'Mr. Pickett is an employee here,' and they said it didn't matter."
At the time Pickett was assaulted by the Homeland Security agents, school principal Gail Brinson was in the cafeteria. Summoned by an anxious student, Brinson raced to the parking lot and found an agitated Pickett being yelled at by the Homeland Security officials.
"I told them Mr. Pickett was an employee, and asked what he had done," Brinson recalled to The New American. "One of them told me that he had been 'abusive, aggressive, and belligerent,' but wouldn't say what else he had done to deserve being handcuffed. They just insisted over and over that it was 'Homeland Security business.' As I looked at Leander standing there in handcuffs without being told what he had done wrong, I said to the agents, 'Well, if you had treated me like this I would be belligerent, too.'"
Brinson demanded names and badge numbers, but the agents refused to provide them.
"They told me they didn't have to give me anything," she recounts. "They said that they were 'bigger than the FBI' and that they wouldn't let [Mr. Pickett] go until they thought it was okay. And all the time we had teachers crying, children screaming — Leander is really popular with the kids — and parents shouting at us." Finally, after an anguished half-hour, Pickett was set free without any charges being filed against him, and the federal agents drove away.
"You know what I think happened?" Brinson said to The New American. "I think they simply got lost, made a wrong turn into our parking lot, and when Mr. Pickett exercised his proper authority by telling them to move, the two things the Devil likes most took over — pride and arrogance." With the help of an acquaintance who works for the federal government, Brinson pursued a complaint through the Homeland Security Department's civil liberties section, but it availed her nothing.
"You can't get anywhere with these people," she points out. "When something like this happens nobody [in the federal bureaucracy] will listen unless you have a connection. Well, I had a connection, and it still didn't help. I just kept getting transferred around from desk to desk, and finally I spoke with some official who just told me that they 'stand behind our men.'"
Leander Pickett hired a lawyer and prepared to file a civil rights lawsuit. "You know you hear these stories every day and say, 'This will never happen to me,' but … it happened to me," comments Pickett. "If this is Homeland Security, I think we ought to be a little afraid."
Corruption and Perversion
When sheriffs or local police abuse their power, local remedies are available. But agents of the Department of Homeland Security are accountable only to the agency itself. As is shown by the incident at Englewood Elementary, the impunity enjoyed by Homeland Security agents can extend to the most obvious abuses of power committed for the pettiest reasons.
Ping
What has this hysterical piece have to do with Chertoff and how does the writer know they were Homeland Security if they showed no identification?
Leander Pickett hired a lawyer and prepared to file a civil rights lawsuit.
Makes me doubt his motives.
agents of the Department of Homeland Security are accountable only to the agency itself
Pure BS......
Bush's fault, don't you get it????
This is the kind of story you get when you give people with adolescent brains jobs as ahem...journalists.
The birchers have been known to flub a subject or two.
What a load of garbage!!! I see the Birchers are still trying to conjure up boogeymen where none exist.
If this accurately portrays what actually happened and if there really are folks with Homeland Security claiming to be "Bigger than the FBI"
... all of which I'm a little dubious about ...
but if it really did happen this way then we need to be more than a little concerned about it.
So basically, it could of just been some normal everyday mafia thugs out for a drive who happened to use Homeland Security as their cover? The complainants didn't get an id off either of the occupants and just assumed they were telling the truth? I'll have to try that sometime...why the heck didn't the principal call the local police dept?
Did I miss it? Where was the "depraved crimes against children" in this story?
And no one got a license number, etc. BSALERT
"why the heck didn't the principal call the local police dept?"
Very good question.
I can't believe no called the county Sheriff...Apparently they still can't be sure these were federal agents...
Meanwhile in another case dealing with DHS:
Homeland Security Press Aide In Sex Case 'Nightmare'
POSTED: 1:51 pm EDT May 4, 2006
UPDATED: 2:13 pm EDT May 4, 2006
BARTOW, Fla. -- A judge set bond at $230,000 Thursday for a former Department of Homeland Security press aide accused of having sexually explicit conversations with someone he thought was a teenage girl but was actually an undercover detective.
Dressed in orange jail garb, Brian J. Doyle, 55, appeared before state Circuit Judge J. Dale Durrance after being extradited Wednesday from Maryland, where he has been held without bond since his arrest April 4.
Doyle faces 23 felony charges, including 16 counts of sending pornographic movie clips to a minor. His arraignment is set for May 23.
"This is a nightmare for anyone," his attorney, Barry H. Helfand, said outside court. "He was depressed when he left Maryland. He is just as depressed now. To say the least, he is very, very frightened about what is going to happen."
Doyle, who resigned from the department, allegedly provided an undercover Polk County sheriff's detective with his government-issued office phone and cell phone numbers, showed off his department ID and may have used his official computer in the communications.
"Very graphic descriptions were sent by Mr. Doyle to the 14-year old about what he wanted to do to her sexually," the detective, Sandy Scherer, told the judge during the hearing.
Scherer said she talked to Doyle on the phone posing as a 14-year-old girl after Doyle made initial contact with another detective on the Internet March 12. She said Doyle tried to arrange a meeting with her in Florida on a date when she wouldn't be menstruating.
Doyle did not speak in court except to answer "yes, sir" when the judge asked if he understood his rights.
Helfand said he would get at least two mental health professionals to examine Doyle as part of his defense.
If convicted, he could spend the rest of his life in prison, Helfand said.
It was DHS. Here is an except from an article previously posted:
'However, Homeland Security tells a different story.
The department said the only reason the officers were at the school was because they pulled over to look at a map.
The department also said it's looking into what happened, and that Pickett's version is wrong. It claims he was antagonizing the officers.
Several people were outside of the school, watching the incident take place, and those witnesses agree with Pickett's story.'
http://www.news4jax.com/news/8490280/detail.html
Chertoff was riding shotgun!
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