How to Perform a Citizen's Arrest of A Bush Administration Official

How to Perform a Citizen's Arrest of A Bush Administration Official
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Posted July 27, 2008 | 05:22 PM (EST)
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Read More: Citizen's Arrest, Iowa, Justice, Karl Rove, Law, Obstruction Of Justice, Politics News

The news that 4 people had been arrested in Iowa while trying to perform a citizen's arrest on Karl Rove got me wondering: Can we arrest Bush administration officials ourselves? So I slogged through a slew of state statutes, and as it turns out, the answer is yes. But only if you live in certain particular states.
Citizen's arrests have a long, rich tradition dating back hundreds of years. Because the power of ordinary people to help law enforcement execute its duties is important, nearly every state has some sort of statute on the books permitting citizen detentions of suspected criminals.
However, while most states allow citizen's arrests, the majority require the presence of the citizen performing the arrest during the crime. A number of states have more flexible language in their laws, though. The California Penal Code, for example says the following:
837. A private person may arrest another:
1. For a public offense committed or attempted in his presence.
2. When the person arrested has committed a felony, although not
in his presence.
3. When a felony has been in fact committed, and he has reasonable cause for believing the person arrested to have committed it.

Alabama and Kentucky have similar wordings. Montana phrases things thusly:
A private person may arrest another when there is probable cause to believe that the person is committing or has committed an offense and the existing circumstances require the person's immediate arrest.
The dispute here will likely arise over the definition of the words "require the person's immediate arrest." I'd argue that if anyone needed to be immediately arrested, it's Karl Rove, but a Montana judge might disagree. And one of the main downsides to citizen's arrests is that if you're in the wrong, you have almost no legal protection (and depending on state law, may have committed a crime tantamount to kidnapping).
Don't let that deter you, though! If there are reasonable grounds to suspect a felony has been committed by the person arrested, then a citizen's arrest is perfectly legally justified. Just don't go and arrest the man behind the counter at the sandwich shop who gave you the wrong change.
What the four Iowans did is courageous, and is exactly how we should use the citizen arrest power. A citizen's arrest is a peaceful, lawful, old-fashioned, and charmingly Midwestern way to hold government criminals accountable. I suggest that we start a nationwide movement. We will turn any suspected government criminals over to the police. Just wait until a Bush administration official shows up in your town.
Figure out whether they can reasonably be considered guilty of a felony. Check the US Code to see who's guilty of what, and then perform a citizen's arrest.
Rove, for example, could likely be detained on suspicion of obstruction of justice, having violated Title 1, Section 18, Chapter 73, S. 1505:
Whoever corruptly... obstructs, or impedes or endeavors to influence [or] obstruct...the due and proper exercise of the power of inquiry under which any inquiry or investigation is being had by either House, or any committee of either House or any joint committee of the Congress...[s]hall be fined under this title, imprisoned not more than 5 years or, if the offense involves international or domestic terrorism...imprisoned not more than 8 years, or both.
I would think that one's fairly cut-and-dry. I'm not a lawyer, however, and I don't know whether this would interfere with, or be superseded by, the pending contempt of Congress citation. Still, I think it gives plenty of "reasonable suspicion," and if Rove is in California, that's all you need. You might pick up Miers or Bolton as well with that statute.
It doesn't take much perusing of the U.S. Code to find violations that administration officials are surely guilty of (the Elections and Political Activities section is one particular goldmine), and if you live in a state with lax state laws regarding citizen's arrests, detaining these people is perfectly within your right. It's just important to follow a few key steps.
1. Check your state laws first. This can be done by entering the name of your state and "statutes" into a search engine. An official online copy of existing state law will usually be the first result. The process for citizen's arrests will usually be located in the section under Crimes > Criminal Procedures > Arrests > Arrests by Private Persons, or something similar. Sometimes statutes are incredibly confusing to navigate through, but there will often be a search function somewhere on the page.
2. Check to make sure the particular person in question can be suspected of committing a felony (make sure it's a felony, though this depends on state law also).
3. Detain the person, without using physical force of any sort. Announce that you are performing a citizen's arrest, and cite the crime they are suspected of.
4. Call the police. Make sure you know the relevant citizen's arrest statute number and the U.S. Code number. You don't want to be the one being arrested.
5. This is risky, and all depends on your state. Make sure you're on solid legal ground first. It is best to consult a lawyer. WikiHow has an informative article on citizen's arrests in general.
We really ought to be inspired by the 4 courageous Iowans who dared to try to hold Rove accountable for his crimes. Government officials, no matter how high-ranking, should be prevented from even walking the street without fear of arrest, if they are guilty of a crime. Whether or not justice is done should not depend on how politically influential the accused is. If the Justice Department will not do its job, then let citizens uphold the law. Citizen's arrests are a powerful yet peaceful way to show the strength and defiance of the American people.

the Bush administration would seek congressional approval to bail out Fanny Mae and Freddy Mac

Last year, for example, the Chair of Freddie Mac took home a cool $18,289,575.Fannie Mae CEO Daniel Mudd reaped a 7 percent rise in pay to $13.4 million in 2007 while the company lost $2/1 billion and its shared fell 33%. Nice work if you can get it.

Robert L. Borosage

Wall Street Socialism

Posted July 15, 2008 05:19 PM (EST)

This weekend, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, former head of the Goldman Sachs investment house, provided us with a perfect demonstration of Wall Street socialism.
He announced that the Bush administration would seek congressional approval to bail out Fanny Mae and Freddy Mac, the government created, but privately owned, profit-making housing finance companies that hold or guarantee nearly half of the US mortgage market -- some $5 trillion in debt. Paulson seeks and will get an unlimited line of credit to guarantee their debt, as well as authority to purchase their shares to supplement their capital base. The Federal Reserve announced it was ready to provide lending while waiting for Congress to act. Paulson said the new subsidies were designed to sustain the two institutions in "their current form."
Perfect. The two institutions have always been more foul than fish. Created by the government in the 1930s to help lubricate the US mortgage market by buying mortgages from the banks so they would have the cash to make more mortgages, Fanny and Freddy were able to borrow money at a discount because of a widely shared assumption that the government would stand behind their debts if push came to shove. Their operations were regulated, limited by laws detailing what mortgages they could assume (They were essentially prohibited from diving directly into the subprime muck). But as they grew and profited, their executives pocketed lavish salaries and bonuses -- giving them an incentive to grow even more (and as we discovered earlier this decade, to cook the books). Last year, for example, the Chair of Freddie Mac took home a cool $18,289,575.Fannie Mae CEO Daniel Mudd reaped a 7 percent rise in pay to $13.4 million in 2007 while the company lost $2/1 billion and its shared fell 33%. Nice work if you can get it.
Now with the bursting of the housing bubble, push surely has come to shove. Foreclosures are soaring, the two institutions have sustained billions in losses, their shares have plummeted, and, according to former St. Louis Federal Reserve President William Poole, one and possibly both would be bankrupt if their assets were marked down to their current market value.
So now the Bush administration proposes to make the federal guarantee explicit and even to offer taxpayer money to help recapitalize the two banks if needed. Everything has been nationalized -- except the profits and the pay scales of the bank's executives.
That's right. If the guarantees work, private speculators, having driven the stock down, will clean up on the upside. And the bank's CEO's will continue to pocket the multi-million dollar salaries that are de rigueur on Wall Street. Call it Wall Street socialism. Their losses are socialized; their profits are pocketed. You and I will pay for their failures. And if conservatives have their way, their families will pocket their successes, without even having to pay a tax for the transfer of the estates we've helped to create.
These enterprises are operating on our tab now -- completely. Why not just nationalize them, as even that font of economic convention, Sabastian Mallaby suggested yesterday in the Washington Post. Sure, we'd have to add the $5 trillion in debt to the federal balance sheet, but we could add the assets also. And after Paulson's announcement, global investors are already toting up their debts onto the federal balance sheet.
Why pay dividends to shareholders when they are essentially playing with our money? Why pay managers of public enterprises the bloated pay packages of Wall Street speculators? Why allow them to finance lobbyists to shield them from accountability? The fiction of their separate existence has been exploded; let's save the dough and run them efficiently.
Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac are only the most recent and extreme version of Wall Street socialism. The Bush administration has done essentially the same for private providers of college loans. The Federal Reserve has made taxpayers the guarantor not simply of the banks that it regulates, but the shadow banking system of hedge funds and investment houses that it doesn't regulate. After the bailout of Bear Sterns, they basically are gambling with our money. The Federal Reserve has now traded more than $500 billion in federal bonds for the toxic paper of private banks and investment houses, some $200 billion of it in mortgage backed securities, worth dimes on the dollar. This massive subsidy -- justified as necessary to keep the banking system afloat -- is not accompanied by limits on what gambles the speculators can make, how much debt they can take on, what rewards they can pocket. They are playing with house money -- not exactly an incentive for prudence.
Republicans seem ideologically committed to these kinds of arrangements. In Medicare for example, conservatives have demanded that the government subsidize private insurance companies to compete with public Medicare, even though Medicare provides healthcare much less expensively. When Bush and the DeLay Congress drove through the prescription drug bill, they included a provision that PROHIBITS Medicare from negotiating cheaper prices for drugs, effectively turning the bill from a benefit to Seniors to a multi-billion subsidy to private drug companies (not surprisingly, after Wall Street, the drug companies finance one of the most lavish and powerful lobbies in Washington).
Now it makes sense to me for the government to subsidize housing mortgages and college loans. Encouraging home ownership and higher education are central to sustaining the broad middle class that is America's triumph. But I can't imagine why we need to let bankers and investors pocket the upside, when they are playing with our money and we're covering their losses. Public enterprise may be staid and bureaucratic, but it's a lot cheaper and more efficient than the perils of Wall Street socialism.

"We no longer have a free press. We have a brainwashing machine stuck on spin."

An American general accuses the Commander-in-Chief of committing war crimes, and it doesn't even make the news.

There is a sad joke from the Holocaust era where two Jews are standing in front of a Nazi firing squad. One shouts out to the S.S. officer, "You rotten bastard, you will burn in hell!" Whereupon, his companion next to him says, "Shhh! Don't make trouble."

[I can identify. I was supposed to leave Maine Public Radio quietly. humble]

How We Can Break the Soundless Barrier and Bring Down the Irony Curtain

July 3, 2008

by Steve Bhaerman

"We no longer have a free press. We have a brainwashing machine stuck on spin."

In case you missed it, there was a front page story two weeks ago that most newspapers -- like our own "liberal" San Francisco Chronicle -- treated as a no-page story. While those of us in the Bay Area were offered a front page analysis of Tiger Woods' injury and the latest doings of penguins at the zoo, a former commanding general in Iraq accused the Bush Administration of war crimes.

You didn't hear about it? Well, obviously you weren't supposed to. In the preface to a report prepared by Physicians for Human Rights, Maj. General Antonio Taguba (USA-Ret.), who led the U.S. Army's investigation into the Abu Ghraib detainee abuse scandal, wrote: "After years of disclosures by government investigations, media accounts, and reports from human rights organizations, there is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes. The only question is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account."

So, let's see. An American general accuses the Commander-in-Chief of committing war crimes, and it doesn't even make the news. The last time an American general accused the President of committing war crimes was ... uh ... never. In other words, something truly new happens, and it's not even "news." Our so-called "free press" is free to report freely on any story it likes, provided it doesn't rock the ship of state. I've said it before, but it -- sadly -- bears repeating. The main difference between the corporate media and Pravda is that the Soviet citizens knew they were being lied to.

We no longer have a free press. We have a brainwashing machine stuck on spin.
So if we're wondering why impeachment and war crimes have gotten no traction, well ... welcome to Not-See America, where the press makes it easier and easier for Americans to "not see" what should be all too obvious. Fortunately, as the "up-wising" continues, Americans across the political spectrum are waking up and wising up. Unfortunately, they are finding their voices intentionally silenced by a media monopoly that does more than "cover" the most important stories of our day -- it smothers them to death. I guess that's what they mean by "blanket coverage."

However, there is one way to break the story of the most dangerous and toxic regime in American history through the "soundless barrier." It can be done without demonstrations (one of the lessons the powers in power learned in the Vietnam War is to pay no attention to them), petitions, civil disobedience, fasting, etc. It is using the two weapons we the people still have in our arsenal -- the marketplace and the meeting place.

Vincent Bugliosi, the former Los Angeles County prosecutor who helped convict the Manson family and wrote a book about it, Helter Skelter (touted as the # 1 True Crime Bestseller of all time) has written a new book called The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder. In it, he lays out what the book jacket describes as "a nonpartisan argument, free from party lines, based upon hard facts and pure objectivity." In other words, the very book America needs right now. Needless to say, finding a review of this book ... well, it's like finding those weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Writes Suzanne O'Keeffe in the Huffington Post, "With the exception of the valiant Democracy Now and C-Span ... there is a desert of coverage about a meticulously researched case that surely ranks at the very top of the scale for 'change.' Bugliosi said last night that he'd been told it was now #12 on the NY Times Bestsellers List."

That's where we come in.

The job of the 70-100 million Americans who are hip to the neocon con is to make sure that Vincent Bugliosi's new book replaces his old one as the best-selling true crime book of all time, or at least our time. What if during the ten day period between Independence Day and Bastille Day, we the American people storm the gates of the marketplace and buy copies of this book both on Amazon.com and at book stores? And then we read the book, and discuss it on the outernet, with family, friends and neighbors. Imagine if we were all familiar with the evidence, and the implications. It would no longer matter what the mainstream media did or did not report. We the people would become the story.

Here is a simple plan for the next ten days:

1. Buy or order your copy or copies of this book now. (I'm getting one at Barnes & Nobles, and ordering another via Amazon, and I'm doing it today.) In fact, buy two and give one to someone who promises to read it.

2. If you're part of an activist political organization, or even a professional or spiritual one, consider asking your constituency to do the same. Paul Hawken estimates there are at the very least some 100,000 such organizations. As for the objection that this book is "political," I would suggest it is much, much bigger than politics, and is about the most pivotal moral issue of our time. Dare to make people uncomfortable. (There is a sad joke from the Holocaust era where two Jews are standing in front of a Nazi firing squad. One shouts out to the S.S. officer, "You rotten bastard, you will burn in hell!" Whereupon, his companion next to him says, "Shhh! Don't make trouble.") Enough said.

[I can identify. I was supposed to leave Maine Public Radio quietly. humble]

3. Call the news editor at your local paper -- call, don't write -- and politely yet firmly request that he or she cover the story of Bugliosi's book, the story of Gen. Taguba's history-making charges, or this other story about the George Bush War Crimes Conference that will convene this September at the Massachusetts School of law in Andover. Remind them of the responsibility of the press, and ask them what they will tell their grandchildren when they are asked what role they played during America's darkest days. To get the ball rolling, for those folks in the San Francisco area, the World and National News editor is Brad Brown, and his direct line is (415) 777-7074. I suggest we make these calls right after this July 4th weekend. Again ... polite yet firm.

4. Contact your favorite radio hosts on Air America (they may already be covering it), and NPR, who like the Democratic Party has responded to the Bush Administration playing hard ball by playing hardly-have-balls. Speaking of media, the one mainstream magazine that has continuously spoken out against the Bush regime -- long before it was as safe as it is now -- is Vanity Fair. If you need to see an example of what is innocuously called "water boarding" (sounds like something you do in gentle surf), here is Vanity Fair's Christopher Hitchens (who has been a vociferous supporter of the so-called War on Terror) being water-boarded. It may be helpful in putting torture "in the face" of those who have the luxury of turning away from it.

5. Ultimately, the most constructive way to deal with the mainstream media is to do an end run around them, and make ourselves the story. First step is to declare independence from mainstream news, and "buy"our truth elsewhere. That's why it's so important to read and discuss the book in groups, so that a new and necessary moral courage may emerge. This is not about showing up somewhere with a bunch of signs. This is about empowering a field of heart-based truth so powerful that the wall of lies shatters and crumbles from its own weight.
Two more thoughts. First, I am fully aware there are bad guys out there. It's the bad guy "in here" I'm concerned about, the one who justifies doing bad things because we are the good guys. Not to mention learning directly from the bad guys how best to do bad.

We can no longer afford to practice terror in order to "defeat" it. As we are learning in every area from biology to psychology to spirituality, it is always more efficient, effective and beneficial to build health instead of trying to destroy illness.

Second thought is in regards to the cabal of sociopathogens that has had its death grip on America. In the documentary, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, we see the two non-heroes, Jeffrey Skilling and Ken Lay, running their number until the very last second. They look, act and sound like legitimate business folk until the manacles are slapped on and they are frog-walked to the paddy wagon. We can expect Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and the rest to play it legit until the very end.

But just as surely as the Iron Curtain came down, the Irony Curtain must come down, too.
The wall of lies will topple just as the Berlin Wall did two decades ago. Only this time, it will be we the people who topple it from the bottom up. It is the only way it can happen
Happy Independence Day.

P.S. Finally, if you find nothing to laugh at in these serious times, try this. It's a video clip from The Onion, called "Bush Tours America to Survey Devastation Caused by His Presidency."

George W. Bush: Heir to the Holocaust

According to classified documents from Dutch intelligence and US government archives,

President George W. Bush’s grandfather,

Prescott Bush made considerable profits off Auschwitz slave labor.

Heir to the Holocaust

originally published in Clamor Magazine by Toby Rogers

While the Enron scandal currently unfolds, another Bush family business scandal lurks beneath the shadows of history that may dwarf it. On April 19, 2001, President George W. Bush spent some of Holocaust Remembrance Day in the Capital Rotunda with holocaust survivors, allied veterans, and their families. In a ceremony that included Jewish prayers and songs sung by holocaust victims in the camps, Benjamin Meed, a survivor of the Warsaw ghetto uprising, movingly described to the gathering what he experienced on April 19, 1943.”I stood outside a Catholic church, which faced the ghetto,” Mr. Meed said, “a young Jewish boy posing as a gentile. As I watched the ghetto being bombarded by the German artillery, I could see many of the Jews of my community jumping out of windows of burning buildings. I stood long and mute.” The survivor concluded his reminiscence saying, “We tremble to think what could happen if we allow a new generation to arise ignorant of the tragedy which is still shaping the future.”President Bush, appearing almost uncomfortable, read a statement that saidthat humanity was “bound by conscience to remember what happened” and that “the record has been kept and preserved.” The record, Mr. Bush stated, was that one of the worst acts of genocide in human history “came not from crude and uneducated men, but from men who regarded themselves as cultured and well schooled, modern men, forward looking. Their crime showed the world that evil can slip in and blend in amid the most civilized surroundings. In the end only conscience can stop it.”But while President Bush publicly embraced the community of holocaust survivors in Washington last spring, he and his family have been keeping a secret from them for over 50 years about Prescott Bush, the president’s grandfather. According to classified documents from Dutch intelligence and US government archives, President George W. Bush’s grandfather, Prescott Bush made considerable profits off Auschwitz slave labor. In fact, President Bush himself is an heir to these profits from the holocaust which were placed in a blind trust in 1980 by his father, former president George Herbert Walker Bush.Read more

“Bush - Nazi Dealings Continued Until 1951” - Federal Documents

“Bush - Nazi Dealings Continued Until 1951” - Federal Documents

If George W. Bush had been born poor he never would have been made president. Where did his family’s money come from?

By John Buchanan and Stacey Michaelfrom The New Hampshire Gazette Vol. 248, No. 3, November 7, 2003

After the seizures in late 1942 of five U.S. enterprises he managed on behalf of Nazi industrialist Fritz Thyssen, Prescott Bush, the grandfather of President George W. Bush, failed to divest himself of more than a dozen “enemy national” relationships that continued until as late as 1951, newly-discovered U.S. government documents reveal.

Furthermore, the records show that Bush and his colleagues routinely attempted to conceal their activities from government investigators.

Bush’s partners in the secret web of Thyssen-controlled ventures included former New York Governor W. Averell Harriman and his younger brother, E. Roland Harriman. Their quarter-century of Nazi financial transactions, from 1924-1951, were conducted by the New York private banking firm, Brown Brothers Harriman.