On Thursday, November 21, 2002, at 09:33 AM, Greg Broiles wrote:
(I could check with Google, but wasn't Trott once a musician, in something like "The Four Horsemen" or "The Information Highwaymen"? Insert Hettinga-like grin symbols here if desired.)At 06:34 PM 11/20/2002 -0800, Lucky Green wrote:I recently obtained an illuminating recording of a speech by a judgeTo flesh this out a little more - the judge was Stephen Trott, speaking on
sitting on the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals which was given before the
San Francisco Commonwealth Club. In said recording, the honorable judge
proposes the issuance of formal federal torture warrants. The reader may
or may not take comfort in the fact that the honorable judge firmly
insists that the needles he proposes to be inserted under the
fingernails of suspects should be sterile.
Clearly, at least hygiene has progressed in the last 300 years.
September 18 2002 at the Commonwealth Club. Trott credits the torture
warrant idea to Alan Dershowitz, whom he describes as a good friend and a
"great civil libertarian".
Hey, why not? Considering the state of the Bill of Rights and of liberty in general, why shouldn't the USG be torturing perpetrators until they confess additional sins?
We've got secret courts, secret appeals courts, secret laws, warrantless searches, roving wiretaps, so many laws that nearly everyone is a felon in one way or another, selective prosecution, Orwellian gibberings from FL about "The Evil Ones," proposals to data mine every customer purchase record (*), cooperation agreements between the IRS and other government agencies (so much for tax returns being not used except for taxes), more secret trials, persons being held without access to lawyers and without charges being filed, and on and on.
(* Not being a lawyer, though reading widely, I have never understand this crap about how "the 4th Amendment does not apply to Alice if Bob has the records." Perhaps _Alice_ cannot assert a 4th A. right, but _Bob_ still has all 4th A. rights to be secure in his papers and possessions, including his business records! If I have a letter sent by Greg, Greg may not be able to assert a 4th A. right about his letter, but Tim sure can! It became one of Tim's "papers and possessions" once he received it. Ditto for business records, purchase records, etc. This notion that K-Mart and Costco will be "sharing" customer purchase records with the Heimatsecuritat and that the 4th Amendment does not apply is ludicrous. Customers should, I think, organize boycotts of K-Mart and have K-Mart eventually tell Big Brother "show us the specific warrant based on probable cause for a specific customer." I doubt this will happen.)
--Tim May
"To those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty, my message is this: Your tactics only aid terrorists." --John Ashcroft, U.S. Attorney General
