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Terrorism charge outrageous
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More from OpinionAug. 3, the Ventura Police Department served a search warrant at my home.
I assumed they had made a mistake and were at the wrong house. They met me by shoving an automatic rifle in my face and commanding me to lie face down on the floor. Others stepped around me and went after my wife, bringing her into the living room and forcing her to lie face down on the floor with a rifle pointed at her. They then brought our two children into the room, allowing them to see the shameful act the police were performing.
I have four sons. My oldest is a sergeant in the Marines. He has been to Iraq three times. My second son was a Marine and served in Kuwait and Iraq in the opening days of the war.
Only my third son has had any trouble with the law. He was caught with some marijuana in his car. The search did not produce anything concerning him.
What was found was a very small explosive device my fourth son allegedly had. I found out neighborhood boys set these things off in the barranca, like fireworks. The boys say the devices have hardly any destructive power at all.
The District Attorney's Office has charged my youngest son — he turned 18 in June — with a terrorist crime: possession of a destructive device. The minimum sentence is three years in state prison — no probation, just prison.
My son had never been in trouble for anything in his life. His dream was to follow his brothers into military service. Now, the District Attorney's Office is attempting to take his future away. I am ashamed of our Police Department. How does it justify its actions? Will it pad its résumés to get a young kid on a terrorist charge?
— The Rev. Kent Williams lives in Ventura.
Posted by laura_54321 on December 11, 2007 at 6:26 a.m. (Suggest removal)
Star: I would love to see some coverage on this case. Please.
Posted by sslocal on December 11, 2007 at 11:34 a.m. (Suggest removal)
And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling in terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?
The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt!
-- Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, "The Gulag Archipelago"
Posted by jdg on December 13, 2007 at 12:21 p.m. (Suggest removal)
Remember this idiocy the next time the Keystone Gestapo ask for greater powers.
I want our constitutional form of government back.
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