DHS Sends Tourists Home Over Twitter Jokes 709
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Unknown Lamer
from the it's-not-like-anyone-would-miss-la dept.
from the it's-not-like-anyone-would-miss-la dept.
itwbennett writes "In a classic case of 'we say destroy, you say party hard,' the U.S. Dept. of Homeland Security detained a pair of British twenty-somethings for 12 hours and then sent them packing back to the land of the cheeky retort. At issue is a Tweet sent by Leigh Van Bryan about plans to 'destroy America,' starting with LA, which, really, isn't that bad an idea."
Context is important (Score:5, Informative)
'They asked why we wanted to destroy America and we tried to explain it meant to get trashed and party.
Source: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2093796/British-tourists-arrested-America-terror-charges-Twitter-jokes.html [dailymail.co.uk]
Context is very important. Especially when dealing with a different culture, even though they may share a common language
Of course, as these young Brits discovered, this works both ways.
Re:The next time... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Zeig Heil (Score:5, Informative)
"Requiring a warrant" is a joke. The FISA courts approve about 99.5 percent of requests: http://epic.org/privacy/wiretap/stats/fisa_stats.html
Re:I'm not convinced we have the whole story (Score:4, Informative)
Bryan's charge sheet read: "During secondary examination Mr Bryan was placed under oath and his sworn statement was taken by CBP Officer Wahmann. Mr Bryan confirmed that he had posted on his Tweeter website account that he was coming to the United States to dig up the grave of Marilyn Monroe.
"Also on his tweeter account Mr Bryan posted that he was coming to destroy America."
No sign of any other reasons.
Re:Hrmm (Score:5, Informative)
Oh, we vets have been speaking out pretty much nonstop since 9/11. We have gotten drowned out, unfortunately, by the likes of Karl Rove, Rupert Murdoch, Rumsfeld, Obama, Bachmann, and all the others who claim to be on our side. :(
Re:Zeig Heil (Score:4, Informative)
Re:What Disgusting Moderation (Score:5, Informative)
I live in Arizona with our lovely Sheriff Joe Arpaio, and I assure you that (brown) people are "getting thrown on the ground on the side of the road for not producing "papers" fast enough". And with the anti-illegal alien sentiment that seems to pervade the country (for no obvious reason), I don't think the rest of you are far away from it.
Re:What Disgusting Moderation (Score:0, Informative)
Are you fucking stupid? We are treating Middle Easterners and Muslims anywhere near how Nazis treated jews??? That would be news to some of my Muslim co-workers, that best that I can tell are not cowering in fear at being shipped off to Gitmo or even that they would be treated any worse than any other American.
Gitmo prisoners number around 500. How can you begin to compare them to the concentration camps?
In short, you are an idiot. Please go back to school, read a newspaper, before you spout these opinions in real life and prove yourself moron in people.
Re:Zeig Heil (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Zeig Heil (Score:5, Informative)
You are obviously forgetting McCarthy, who was doing his best to protect America from subversive elements.
McCarthy was obsessed about Soviet spies in the State Department and the Venona files pretty much showed he was right. Like most people you've probably confused Senator McCarthy, who was mainly just guilty of being a jerk, with the truly noxious House Un-American Activities Committee.
Re:The next time... (Score:5, Informative)
Dude, it wasn't even a bad joke - that's just how the Brits talk. When a young Englishman says "I'm going to destroy X", he is colorfully indicating his intention to "party hard at X". It doesn't have the slightest connection to terrorism, it's just slang for getting wasted & having a good time. It took me about 30 seconds of being around drunk, excited British tourists to figure this out - it tends to be pretty obvious from context.
Re:What Disgusting Moderation (Score:5, Informative)
Fascism is not "rooted in socialism". Fascism is at its core a nationalist authoritarian ideology. One of the core concepts of every fascist ideology is that the people must rally around the leaders and follow them without question. Now, there have certainly been regimes that have called themselves socialist but in practice behaved more like fascists (come, you know you were going to drag that one out there) but that does not mean fascism is rooted in socialism.
Fascism is also a very conservative ideology (socially).
How far to the right a fascist party has been has varied, the Nazis were pretty staunchly to the right as were Mussolini's Italian fascists (although they did have some fringe "national syndicalists". Other fascist parties have outright denied being on the classic left-right scale instead basically positioning themselves as an "alternative" to democracy. Also, keep in mind that many of these parties are at their core dependent on popular support from the masses and thus are likely to remain fairly vague on these issues (to get support from as large a portion of the population as possible).
they pretty much showed he was an opportunist (Score:5, Informative)
the film J Edgar got it right. the Venona files would make incredibly poor evidence in a courtroom. many of them are partial and/or missing huge bits. if you just go and read them, and read the FBI papers on the surveillance done of some of the suspected agents, a large amount of it is a waste of our police time. "sep 1943. ms x went to get groceries. she went to visit mr y. she came home. dec 1943. ms x went to a book store. jan 1944. ms x had a baby. surveillance stopped."
of course, one of the major problems was that Wild Bill Donovan, the head of the OSS (prototype of the CIA) believed that the soviets were great allies, and wanted to invite the NKVD to come collaborate with the FBI. of course the congress would never go after the CIA - that would be unpatriotic or something. but they would go after some third string hollywood writer who had attended a meeting 10 years ago during the great depression, when people were dying in the street from malnutrition in Los Angeles county.
there were actual Soviet agents in the government and many were caught. they weren't caught because of mccarthy, they were caught because of ordinary police men doing their job, which is to gather evidence and present it to a court, not play hero in front of the media.
the other problem is the people like William Shirer, a journalist and historian of the Nazis, and Carl Foreman, the man who wrote High Noon, were kicked out of the US for basically no reason. they had nothing to do with actual soviet infiltration.
Re:What Disgusting Moderation (Score:4, Informative)
No, they were invented by the British in the Boer War.
Re:What Disgusting Moderation (Score:5, Informative)
Re:What Disgusting Moderation (Score:4, Informative)
If I understand correctly, that extra revenue from 'taxing the Rich' won't even make a tiny dent in our deficit.
You don't understand correctly [cbpp.org]. The extra revenue would cut the deficit to less than half of what it is. If you look at the graphs on that page, you should be able to see that the Bush tax cuts are more than half of the structural deficit and will increase over time.
If that is true then it really illustrates what an empty "class warfare" argument this is.
It's not true, and it really illustrates how empty the "class warfare" argument is.
It's just a smoke screen to hide the failings of congress and the president to cut expenses and balance the budget.
Yes and no. Cancelling the tax cuts would help balance the budget, however, the Republican controlled congress refused to accept a budget that included a mixture of cuts and reversing the Bush tax cut on people earning over $250,000. So there is an impasse here because the Republicans refuse to seriously consider any budget that includes new tax revenue. The Democrats, on the other hand, are willing to negotiate and actually had worked out a deal that included both with the Republican leadership, however, the "Tea Party" Republicans revolted against the deal and sunk it.
BTW, I think it would be better to cut out the loopholes and simplify the tax code.
The Repbulicans can't do that either, again because of Grover Norquist. He considers "closing loopholes" to be "raising taxes". Republicans aren't allowed to do that unless they lower taxes by more than the closed loophole would raise in revenues.
Re:What Disgusting Moderation (Score:4, Informative)
If I recall, a good part of the founding of our country was because it was believed that the laws werent actually being followed by the British government, our rights were being violated, and that that was a just provocation for us to sever ties.
These might be good for brushing up on the details:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_Tea_Party [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intolerable_Acts [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_taxation_without_representation [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consent_of_the_governed [wikipedia.org]