Human Shield to Be Prosecuted

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What are your thoughts on this?

 

My very first thought is that the Treasury is going after the wrong people. Why bother with small potatoes like this lady when they let the Ken Lays and Dick Grassos of the world get away with their antics?

My second thought is that anyone who is going to take strong action based on their personal convictions had better understand the potential consequences and be willing to face them.

That said, the administration had better have a clear goal in mind if they pursue this prosecution and give Ms. Flippinger more than a slap on the wrist. I have a feeling if could backfire pretty seriously.

 

It's great abuse and clearly signifies that the government has nothing better to do.

1) There's a penalty for just being there. Actually this exceeds the habits of mediaeval feudal rulers.

2) 12 years *and* $1M for that? It serves no other purpose than sheer discipline. It's not even about the law. It's do as we say or perish from your own government to whom you are employer.

Well, and I won't miss an oppurtunity to say how outraged I am by the US practice of adding skyhigh fines to prison sentences. Prison terms are no shorter than elsewhere in the civilised world but there are also those fines that make you pauper for life. Get a job after being in prison for years and make it profitable enough to pay such loads of cash. Easy, isn't it? And there are families who have done nothing wrong. Especially in this case, if the woman has a family. There's no justification for a fine so high. Any material harm she might have possibly done (if any) doesn't even remotely approach $1M, no matter how you put it.

 

Dick Grasso is gone, and did not take that money. He didn't do anything remotely illegal, people just got mad because of his reward for service.

According to the topic of your thread, Ragusa, this woman was a human shield. If that is true, then she deserves this. Nothing in the article indicated that, though.

She violated the embargo, which has been in place for over a decade, so that would be true. As to the penalty, while it seems a little steep, I don't really have a problem with it.

@chevalier
Don't you see the high penalties for breaking crimes in the US to be an incentive to people not to commit crimes?

 

The government is there to govern the people not control them completely. As living, sentinent creatures we reserve the right to travel wherever we damn well please and it's not the government's business.

 

Another interesting article about a teacher who decided to quit rather than work on - she encouraged her kids to sing songs about peace and no-more war. And that in the eyes of some people was probably hampering the war effort, like perhaps: subversibely undermining the bellicosity of the youth but I'll stop mocking, and get to the point

Is that a Monty Python quote?

from: http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/jamieson/141016_roberto24.html

 

Marginally so, only. But if people should see it as unjust, it would do even more harm to the society's respect for law and judicial system.

Besides, it's not good to do something unjust only to scare people away from breaking the law. Besides, there's a lot of disparity here: a middle class convict will be made pauper, a lower class convict will never get out of debts and a rich convict will not have an 8th sports car. All this in addition to standard length of prison sentence (standard for civilised world). Imagine getting a job after prison. Especially a profitable (and thus responsible) one. It doesn't serve to correct people, it serves to break their lives. If they have broken the law once, they will do it again if they're ripped off of all money as a result of the sentence. And so on and so forth - it may actually lead to more crime.

Another thing is how big damages in civil lawsuits are awarded. Like $150K per download aimed for by RIAA. If they get it is a different thing, but it's not like the sum is going to be lowered all that much. So, it's not compensation - it's ripping off, on the verge of stealth (in moral sense it doesn't matter that it's legal, law is only a tool used in extortion), especially in such controversial matters as copyrights etc. Big business of music creates the market, boosts it, brainwashes people with advertisement, drives them into sort of addiction, makes all that idol thing (it's just a means of getting cash, not so much a social issue)... and then they feel outraged because someone is copying the music onto his computer (not selling on his own or using it in a club) or even taping it from the radio. They use vivid moral argumentation against the 'stealth' of 'intellectual property' and have themselves problems with copyright infringement lawsuits - even with Kazaa - it's bad of Kazaa that it's users use it to download music, without Kazaa being intended for that purpose, but it's not bad of RIAA to use illegal versions of Kazaa. This way, RIAA should be sued for every crime or infringement where their music is involved anyhow (like a kid lifting money from his parents to buy CDS - after all, it's RIAA's CD's). But, of course, logic is relative when money gets involved Bacause money isn't relative...

 

Personally, I think all the people that went over there as human shields should be punished for it. Why? I think its treason. They went over to a country and helped protect the enemy. Yeah, sure they weren't standing in front of an Iraqi soldier, but they knew the US would try to avoid dropping bombs if there were US citizens around.
They were helping an enemy of the United States.
But the US would have a hard case to go after them for treason, so we find a loophole somewhere else and get them for another crime.
I have nothing against people speaking out against our government, that's part of what makes America great. But its different when you help out an enemy of our country.

 

What exactly is helping the enemy in risking the own life passively by speaking out against war and placing oneself in the line of fire as a display of pacifism, playing the human shield?

It can hardly be a moral issue for the bomber pilots who should know that their load kills people anyway, eventually it's just made for that single purpose and a pilot who isn't aware of that shouldn't be allowed to fly at all. So what difference does one more victim make? Or is the difference that it is an american victim?

In the end it is as much a conscious decision as refusing to do military service in times of draft based on religious faith or conscience, actually, as it risks ones life it is much more so.
There's a fundemantal difference here that becomes apparent when you compare it, let's say, to visiting enemy troops and wishing them luck in downing US pilots - that is what Jane Fonda did in Vietnam.

Besides, lacking a law to punish them and taking something else that is just as fine isn't worthy of a state under the rule of law, but so is circumventing the law by detaining people in oversea miltary installations, fearing that the own rule of law might hinder their efforts to fight terror. We live in weird times.

Claiming that weird times require weird methods is always, and has always been, a comfortable excuse to abuse the law.

[ September 25, 2003, 21:56: Message edited by: Ragusa ]

 

Well, if you want to punish someone, you have congress to make laws with which you actually can punish someone. So either pass a law or let it be. Is it so hard to pass a law which forbids travel to countries with which a war is planned ?

I actually have the feeling that the claim of this agency is nothing but hot air. But very hot air indeed. Indifferent if they in the end find a judge backing their claim, which I doubt, because a law concerning international trade being applied on an elderly woman who did kind of social work seems to me very far stretched. But the on-going process and it's cost may hurt this woman badly. It sounds to me like bad case of arbitrariness. Or at least they didn't filed suit versus the red cross yet, which must have been breaking economic embargos verus Iraq like hell.

I looked uo on the internet, there were plenty of people from different countries doing the very same thing. And nearly every country on this earth has about the same sanction-laws versus Iraq in place, yet that seems to be the only case, were someone actually was threatend with prosecution.

 

*sigh* She's not being nailed for speaking out passively. That is not a crime. She's being arrested for breaking the UN sanctions against Iraq which have been in place for over a decade.

There is a law. It's been around since the early 1990s.

I don't believe the Red Cross bought Iraqi products, which means that they did not break any law.

@chev
Don't commit the crime and you won't get the penalty. It's not a hard concept to grasp. Besides, I can think of plenty of unjust things about putting a person in jail rather than doing far more harsh things to them.

 

A US citizen goes over to Iraq as a human shield. They know the US won't attempt to drop a bomb if their own citizen is in the way. The Iraqi's knew this too. I lost track of the reports that Saddam was going to send his troops to locations were human shields were. His troops wouldn't get bombed. Seems like helping the enemy to me.
I know in the US if there is a criminal hiding in a building, and say the police are ready go into the building up and someone goes and stands in front of the building, that person gets arrested.

You said it, its an American victim. As sad as it may be, the American population would care more if one of their own citizens got killed. An Iraqi citezen is just collatoral damage. Unfortunately.

 

And what about the embargo itself?

Embargo is not only a simple word it is a list of things you can't do.

Was there a clause that directly prohibited visiting Iraq with non-bussines purpose ?
Was there a clause that directly prohibited taking a job within Iraq ?
Was there a clause that directly prohibited spending money for living in Iraq ?

Was there a clause that directly prohibited anything the old lady did ?

If it was there then she should be punished for breaking the embargo. I expect there should be a law or other clause(s) in the embargo that would state the type and extent of punishment (for breaking such embargo).

If there was none such clause, let us ask the same questions about indirect prohibition. That would be a problem for a judge or a jury.

What I need to say here:

• I see a difference between spending money in a country for living and exporting money to this country
• I didn't read this embargo - I can't answer these questions
• I don't like any regime that is despotic, e.g. I didn't like Husajn's regime

We should know what exactly this old lady did. Teaching in schools ? OK. Directly helping in war effort (guarding installments, giving informations about US or other military) ? Bad.

 

Rastor - and to a point Elios,
the UN hired Iraqis. The red cross and the red crescend did so. A lot of other aid organisations did so. They relied on them as translators, guides and hands to unload the aid in the storehouses and Basra harbour. They didn't work for free.

The few bucks the lady left there to pay for her hotel bill certainly fuelled Saddam's war mashine The laws now applied weren't made for that, rather for real money infusion and business transactions.

What I wanted to point out is that the authorities are pretending to only do their duty. In fact they are pissed about her lack or patriotism and bringing America in a silly situation and it's about punishment or revenge. Nothing else.

That's it just about violating this embargo law is chance, they could probably also get her because of violation of immunisation rules, you know that you can't be careful enough in times of SARS, just look close and you'll probably find an excuse to sent her to jail for 2 more years. Not to mention that the chance her visum and her passport expired a week ago could offer to punish her for running around with faulty papers. And how about the amount of parking tickets she accumulated in her life ... maybe she has been dishonest with her tax in the past? There HAS to be a way ...

You know, it's all about obeying the law. Enforcement of the law is paramount. So, there are iirc a couple of states in the US penalising oral sex as ungodly or whatever. I bet there are a few practicioners of such evil in the US. How many people are trialed because of this every year? Why isn't this rule enforced properly?

 

Ragusa, I agree with you fully that the only reason this woman got that letter is because of her being a human shield. If she went to any other country we had an embargo on, but didn't go there in an unpatriotic way, no one would probably even blink at her. That I think is wrong. If the US government wants to go after her for being a human shield, do so. Don't try and hide behind some other law. Personally, I never saw anything about this woman, until I read this thread. But I am willing to bet that if the Gov. went after her for something like treason or something more directly related, it would have been all over the news, the ACLU would be on it, etc. I think the only reason its the Treasury Dept is because its less of a media story.

 

According to this article from find law, the agency hasn't a case at all (here) :

 

@Yago
She can't be prosecuted without a trial anyway, so she'll get that lawyer and the government will present its argument to that judge.

No.

Yes.

Yep.

The above should answer that.