See something? Say something!
I've written before about what looks like the beginning of a new wave of far-right terrorism -- the Tiller murder, the Austin plane attack, and so on. With the outbreak of vandalism and threats following the passage of HCR, and the more-hysterical-than-ever rhetoric on much of the right, the danger of terrorism or violence directed against the political leadership and institutions of this country seems more serious than ever.
If you see or hear anything that suggets a serious threat, report it. The Secret Service and the FBI are helped in their work by an alert public. You could save a life, or many.
Link to FBI contact information
Link to Secret Service field office phone numbers
If you see or hear anything that suggets a serious threat, report it. The Secret Service and the FBI are helped in their work by an alert public. You could save a life, or many.
Link to FBI contact information
Link to Secret Service field office phone numbers
posted by Infidel753 at 9:01 AM
7 Comments:
Excellent PSA. Do you mind if I post this at my place with attribution of course?
Please go ahead -- the more people are aware, the better.
Excellent advice - we need to remember that death threats are not protected speech, and that there have been many violent plans which have successfully been thwarted by someone reporting the intent (some students who planned shootings or other violence come to mind).
The only problem I see is that it would be nearly impossible to sift through all the chatter about violent acts to find the ones who have actually crossed the line and are directly expressing intent, and those who are just chiming in with Rush or Beck or Malkin.
There's just so much of this type of thing being said these days. We'd have to let all the non-violent pot-smokers out of prison to even hold them all, ya know?
Of course I would only advocate that people contact the authorities when they believe there's a genuine threat. Even so, I imagine most tips that come in to those agencies turn out to be nothing serious, but they're probably pretty good at filtering out what's most important to follow up with.
Thanks for this, Infidel.
Would be nice to do something about this guy: http://sipseystreetirregulars.blogspot.com/2010/03/to-all-modern-sons-of-liberty-this-is.html
But this is all over the news media (WaPo and Kos at least), Democratic leaders have called for his arrest, but apparently it's ok to do that? He's "unapologetic" and seems to be unarrested as well: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/03/25/AR2010032501722_pf.html
There's so much crazy out there.
There's certainly plenty of crazy out there.
Protections for freedom of speech, even outrageous speech, are very broad in this country, and I think rightly so; in cases of doubt we should always err on the side of tolerance, so long as only expression of opinion is involved. This case does seem to cross the line into incitement of actual violence against specific people or places, but I'm not sure how the First Amendment has been interpreted in such cases.
People who pose a threat of the kind of actions I had in mind with this posting -- large-scale terrorist attacks or assassinations of political leaders -- are, unfortunately, not very likely to shoot their mouths off about it too much beforehand. But it's always possible they might slip up and say or do something which would provide a clue. Imagine if the Oklahoma City bombing or the Kennedy assassination could have been stopped before they happened. The more people are alert, the better the chance that something really nasty might be prevented.
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