If your time tonight allows, you can leave messages at the numbers above (an ask the human on the other end of the line at the jail to respect the inmates’ humanity).

Thursday morning, as your time allows, you can call when everyone’s back at work.

The Bushies thought — wrongly — they could slide the Constitution, the Republic, and the Rule of Law off a cliff.

We’re stopping them and we’re NOT being silent: please add your voice to ours. When enough of us speak, they won’t need to wait for a 3 AM phone call: their consciences won’t allow them to sleep.

Thank you.

You have left me weeping with gratitude.

The Honorable Susan Gaertner
Ramsey County Attorney
PO Box 64326
St. Paul, Minnesota 55164-0326

Dear Ms. Gaertner:

I am a retired U.S. Department of Justice prosecutor.

As General Counsel of the INTERPOL U.S. National Central Bureau (1997-1999) I worked closely with the FBI, the Secret Service, and most other federal law enforcement agencies.

I am also an active fellow Democrat.

Obviously lawless actions by law enforcement personnel videotaped near the Republican National Convention, and which witnesses report as occurring in the Ramsey County Jail, concern me deeply.

These include:

* using tear gas on children attending an SEIU event with their families;

* torture, with repeated electroshocks (usually 50,000 volts each, I believe) of an unresisting demonstrator named Jason, whom police also beat and to whom they denied medical treatment (I saw a video of Jason when police had him down and restrained on the street, with an observer protesting that Jason was not resisting);

* denying medical treatment to a young man named Elliot Hughes, who spit up blood all night in Ramsey County Jail from thoracic trauma after police stomped on his chest (this is cruel; it could also prove fatal);

* about a dozen officers entering Elliot Hughes’s cell in the Ramsey County Jail and attacking Hughes with Taser, chemical weapons, and beatings after he’d mentioned not having had food for 12 hours; and

* using chemical weapons known to cause respiratory arrest, permanent brain damage, and even death in those with pulmonary disease. (Asthma is a nasty pulmonary disease. It is common among Americans. I have it.)

None of this could be imposed as a sentence for someone convicted in an American court.

Yet the police are doing it in Ramsey County, on your watch, to Americans entitled to a presumption of innocence. I would hate to think that you are indifferent to it.

The potential for civil liability seems very clear.

So is the potential for publicity highly damaging to Ramsey Country. It’s your jail, after all.

Furthermore, such police abuse can scarcely help your own campaign for any higher office. Most Democrats and Independents are appalled by what police are doing in St. Paul. Many Republicans are appalled, too.

Even after police have seized numerous cameras and laptops (and without probable cause, as far as I know), there yet are countless videos. Call it the Twitter Effect.

Numerous such videos show black-clad police (Blackwater, too?) in riot gear and on horseback on Ramsey County streets. The police are terrifying peaceful people, manhandling women and men who offer no resistance, and obviously arresting them without probable cause.

Victims include medics, and credentialled reporters (e.g., Amy Goodman, Sharif Abdel Kouddous, and Nicole Salazar of the fine program, Democracy Now!).

The victims, and thus those in the Ramsey County Jail, are almost certainly Americans. Most if not all were merely exercising their 1st Amendment rights. That’s no crime.

Obviously, I support arresting and prosecuting those who damage property or hurt others.

But in videotapes of arrests I have seen, the only violence — and there is a lot — is by police.

Please therefore exert all of your authority and persuasiveness to restrain police operating in Ramsey County from

* arresting without articulable probable cause;
* torturing arrestees with pepper spray and tear gas, with Tasers, and by beating them;
* preventing arrestees’ consultation with attorneys; and
* denying medical care to arrestees.

And please exercise your prosecutorial discretion to dismiss promptly

* all charges against reporters doing their jobs; and
* all charges for which you lack solid probable cause.

This will undoubtedly include most, if not all, of the felony ‘conspiracy to riot’ charges.

If we Americans abandon the Rule of Law, what are we?

Sincerely,

Thank you, gracious Moderators, for every time you deign to allow such a lowly one as myself to post my humble comments in your quasi-public, quasi-free forum.

I doubt you will post this, but can you clarify, even to yourself, why you are imposing this pre-emptive, presumptive censorship of posts that contain no insults or banned words?

oh well He must be supported no matter what, anyway.

* = “When the Nazis came for the communists,
I remained silent;
I was not a communist.

When they locked up the social democrats,
I remained silent;
I was not a social democrat.

When they came for the trade unionists,
I did not speak out;
I was not a trade unionist.

When they came for the Jews,
I did not speak out;
I was not a Jew.

When they came for me,
there was no one left to speak out.”

The medical examiner’s report on Manadel al Jamadi (the so-called Ice Man) at Abu Ghraib was that he died from pulmonary trauma caused by being stepped on during arrest, followed by being put in a position known as “Palestinian Hanging” (M.E.’s words, the original name for it is strappado), and so died from positional asphyxiation. Errol Morris wrote it up in May, and Jane Mayer’s book has a description, too.

The U.S. got heavily criticized for some of its practices in 2006 by the Committee Against Torture (the body that is the equivalent with respect to the CATCIDT of the ICRC for the Geneva Conventions), and not just in Afghanistan and Iraq, either.

Thanks, Kirk, for framing this the way it deserves to be framed.