Commentary On The Jerry M Blanchard Case
First Published: October 23, 2008
In regards to your satire on the Secret Service (SS) persecution of Jerry M. Blanchard: I believe it's very serious issue and here is my commentary.
First of all, I would like to take issue with the entire assumption that the equivalent of a national police force should be permitted to investigate anonymous tips which do not explicitly allege violence against a candidate for president of the United States. I believe that in this instance, the charge was made that this person expected to see Obama dead. That is not the same as a person stating they were going to harm a candidate, so we come pretty close to agreement here. While the tip is anonymous to the person being checked out, it is not anonymous to the Secret Service. That's where I would hope some sanity would come into this. Is the complainant above reproach? What is their station in life? What might their motive be?
The alternative is to accept an increased degree of risk of the assassination of the candidate. Which is the higher societal value? Is it more risky to representative government to increase the risk of assassination of the president or to permit secret investigations by a national police force, based on anonymous tips, coming from a partisan source, which do not explicitly alleged violence? I am inclined to think that the latter is more dangerous to our constitutional government. What if a person were to say that they expected to see George Bush dead in short order? Should that be checked out? What would the Secret Service look like if a person who was reported to have said something like this were later found to be close to individuals who assassinated the President? I realize the person being checked out didn't (allegedly) make a statement like this, but the Secret Service has been mislead to think they did. What choice to they have really? My main problem with the Secret Service here is their attitude while confronting the person being checked out. Even then they may be trying to purposefully push the buttons of the individual trying to see if there is any indication that this person may be on the edge, almost unable to hide their passionate almost out of control hatred for Obama.
The system has proven many times that it can cope with the assassination of the president. It is anticipated, the Constitution provides for it. The horror of assassination is that it is the ultimate voter fraud. It deprives the majority of the right it won in the election. There is also the factor of the threat of an assassination as a means to shape policy contrary to the will of the majority. You have mentioned several reasons why assassination is not appropriate, outside the normal aspect of murder. There is also the continuity of governance. We must have a government that is stable enough to conduct policy both foreign and domestic. We cannot tolerate total chaos at the highest levels of our government. Even the mere possibility of it, could cause chaos at the wrong moment internationally, for purposes of advantage to a foreign government.
But is the only and unavoidable alternative to these Stalinist investigations the assassination of the President United States? I think not. After all, there are other lines of defense which protect the president. The president is shielded by layer after layer of protection. This layer is probably the outer perimeter and the least likely to lead to the prevention of an assassination. By definition, it will only identify a blabbermouth bent on assassination. In this case a blabbermouth who allegedly betrays herself over the phone in an unsolicited call from a stranger. So by stopping blabbermouths who would assassinate the president, we are dealing with the lunatic fringe. A serious, professional assassin, a jackal for instance, will not be unearthed because he is a blabbermouth. He might be betrayed by a Confederate, but that is an entirely different set of facts. I don't disagree with this. Still, do you dismiss the blabbermouth? I don't believe you do. I believe you check out any individual who has been brought to your attention, that could constitute a serious threat, or could possibly know of a serious threat. That being said, I also expect the Secret Service to recognize a false report for what it is. It is an attempt to use the Secret Service to get even with a political enemy (in this instance). It is also a hindrance to the Secret Service because it ties up it's staff on a wild goose chase, just for the meanness of it. "I'll show you Mr. or Mrs. Conservative!" Anyone found to be playing this game should spend a year or two in prison.
Short of encouraging a Gestapo state, the following protections could be put in place: Explicit threats might be investigated. The name of the tipster could be made public. The tipster could be subject to criminal sanctions or at least civil penalties if the claim is manufactured. The object of the investigation could have the right to the identity of the tipster. The object of the investigation could have the right to view the entire contents of investigators file. A tribunal could be established to adjudicate claims that the entire investigation should be expunged. At some time the object of the investigation should be informed that he is being investigated-even a murderer gets that protection when the cops are closing in on him. Explicit threats must be investigated. I also believe expressions of knowledge of a certain outcome must be investigated. If we compare this to organized crime, we understand why tipsters cannot be outed. I most certainly agree that tipsters should be vulnerable to serious penalties for false reports. I believe the Justice Department should assign a department to review any such occurrences, to make sure the process worked the way it should, and that the Secret Service hadn't abused it's power on a whim. It should also look for evidence of manipulation by an informant. A follow-up interview of the person accused might not be a bad idea.
Are the feds now identifying potential assassins by eavesdropping? Are they about to? If they have reasonable cause, I hope they are. I don't consider this case to meet that level of reasonable cause. If the interview with the person being charged went poorly, I might consider it for a short period of time. If the person being charged did exhibit an extreme level of hatred for Obama, I might think it worthy of more investigation including a wire tap.
We are now vulnerable to a secret system which is obviously liable to be perverted by a tyrant who gets his hands on the levers of power. I will not mention names, but his initials could be Barak Obama. I understand that many investigations are kept secret: for example, grand jury investigations are not revealed. But theoretically grand juries have no warrant to investigate "intentions" or the mental eccentricity of citizens. Grand juries are there to investigate crimes or, at worst, conspiracies to commit crimes in which there is a least some overt act. That is not the case here. The case here involves the possible foreknowledge of an impending attempt to end the life of the candidate. If a false report was made here, a crime was committed. The burden is still on the Secret Service to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the person being charged did constitute a threat. While it's not the same as a Grand Jury, there is still the development of evidence to prove the assumption. This person would still have their day in court, in the worst case. At that point they would get to see their accuser. Still, under these circumstances the Secret Service should be as anxious to convict a person filing a false report as they would be to convict a person being charged like this. One of these two should take the fall IMO. If the party being charged is innocent, guess what. It would be time to take that informant into a dark room and rip them to shreds to find out what the hell really happened. And then they should be prosecuted.
We are weighing the threat of the commission of a crime, in this case assassination of the president, against individual liberties and the potential for tyranny which secret investigations represent. We make these judgments all the time and often weigh on the side of individual liberty. For example, we conclude that the price of racial profiling is not worth its obvious crime prevention dividends. The individual liberties protected in that case are hardly more than the feelings of minorities who are innocent and not guilty and are investigated only because of their race. I don't think there is much societal benefit in protecting the feelings of the guilty ones. Yet we have as a society decided to accept an increase crime rate to protect the feelings of innocent minority members. If a higher level of crime is being perpetrated in a racially segregated area of the city, then that area is where the focus of the police should be. If the people in that area disagree with this premise, then it's up to them to make sure the level of crime in that area ceases to be a problem. Otherwise, it's open season on criminals, and let the chips fall where they will. That is why we have so many minorities in prison. I don't apologize to anyone that it is. People in high crime areas have a right to be free from crime, just like the folks in low crime areas do. The loud mouths who claim racial profiling, are in effect pleading for the local authorities to please allow the crime to remain high, for the victims to remain victims, and for the youth in those areas to be condemned to growing up without hope. To a certain degree I think you have a point. I know the police do avoid certain areas because of a safety factor. The fact is though, the police do continue to arrest higher volumes of individuals from high crime areas, generally in the racially segregated areas. I'm not convinced your argument holds water here as much as you might think. Minorities are still vastly over represented in prison. I don't say that to complain. I don't say it because I am happy about it either. I state that as a recognition that criminals are being caught in the most lucrative of fishing holes.
The value to be protected against arising out of these kinds of investigations by a KGB-like national police force is very, very high on the scale: A police state. So we must ask ourselves where lies the greater risk to the greater value? Is the higher risk that a blabbermouth might get through many layers of protection and succeed in assassinating the president of the United States resulting in a catastrophic failure of our democracy rather than merely the constitutional remedy provided, the accession of the vice president? Or is the greater risk the imposition of a police state from which our democracy might never recover? I believe there is a significant difference between what the Secret Service has done here, and what happens in states with a KGB-like presence. In states with a KGB-like presence, evidence is manufactured, the judge is a part of the overall system, and people are railroaded from start to finish, generally involving prison on the whim of the government. And in these instances, political motives are often all that is required. We do have criminal courts. Evidence is reviewed. People still have a jury of their peers. A political whim is not going to cause someone to wind up in prison.
Defenders of these intrusions will no doubt point to the war on terrorism to justify them by having resort to argument by analogy or by a relativism. Essentially the argument is, we tolerate intrusions on our liberties out of necessity to prevent terrorist attacks. The assassination of President United States is the equivalent of a terrorist attack. Because we tolerate intrusions in one place we should tolerate intrusions in another place. The Secret Service has been doing interviews like the one mention here since it's inception. Now all of a sudden we are supposed to tell the Secret Service to stand down no matter what the informant has charged? I am troubled by some of the anti terrorism legislation. It has been my premise that in the wrong hands, those statutes could be misused to terrible ends. I still don't believe that we just surrender to potential assassins because we don't want to be accused of abusing power. There has to be some reasoning here. To my way of thinking, if a person has expressed foreknowledge of an assassination, they need to be checked out. I've already explained what I think should happen to a false informant. Their fate should be announced far and wide if they are convicted of having done so. Let people be forewarned what will happen to them if they try to bludgeon a fellow citizen over the head with a federal agency on a whim.
One need only consider the consequences of the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand to recognize how very, very dangerous the assassination of a potential head a state can be. That assassination led to upward of 20 million dead, the destruction of several empires, and the end of at least four dynasties. But the assassination of the Archduke did not do these things in itself there was an intervening cause, the war waged in the aftermath. No assassination of an American president has ever led to a war or a civil war. Historians could rightly argue that the assassination in Sarajevo was only a catalyst but not the proximate efficient cause of The Great War. I appreciate the point you are trying to make, the downside of assassinations not being as bad as some might think, but your focus is very fuzzy IMO. I'm not going to argue that we should relax our efforts to prevent our elected officials from being assassinated. I may not like Obama, but I'll be damned if I would ever make the case that assassinations are probably preferable to a citizen being confronted on the premise they may have foreknowledge of a plan to assassinate a political figure.
Do the intrusions of our liberties which we tolerate in the war against terrorism justify similar intrusions to protect the president- or viewed from another perspective, are the risks similar enough to justify similar intrusions? The answer to the first question is without question, no. One intrusion cannot be cited to justify another intrusion anymore than one wrong can be raised to justify another. The question is not whether the government has done wrong elsewhere but whether the risks justify an intrusion here. So all of the references to the war on terrorism are simply irrelevant unless you believe that precedent should take precedence over reason. I think you've really gone down the wrong road here. This interrogation of a person charged by an unnamed informant, is not tantamount to the revelation of a police state. It is a reasonable precaution based on the information provided. The Secret Service conducts these types of interviews as a normal course of their mandate. Has that turned into a wholesale conviction mill where innocent citizens have been tossed into prisons all over the U.S.? Please provide any evidence you can to support that premise. I'm not aware of any.
A legitimate question is, indeed the only legitimate question, do the risks of potential assassination of a potential president justify intrusions which can lead to a potential tyranny? In my view, they do not unless the most stringent safeguards are put in place. We have many safeguards in place to protect us from intrusions generated by the war on terrorism. One wonders whether the left will be so clamorous for restrictions on government intrusions when they are doing the intruding for values which they peculiarly hold dear as leftists. I'm going to continue to address the core issue here, whether the U.S. Secret Service should be investigating individuals reportedly having prior knowledge of a planned assassination. The answer in my opinion is unquestionably yes. If however it is found the charged person did not do what the informant said, then a false report has been filed for ulterior motives. And when that is recognized, the informant should be subject to the full extent the law provides, including a long period of incarceration.
Whatever the greater risk, this current secret procedure is entirely alien to our tradition of individual liberties.
First of all, I would like to take issue with the entire assumption that the equivalent of a national police force should be permitted to investigate anonymous tips which do not explicitly allege violence against a candidate for president of the United States. I believe that in this instance, the charge was made that this person expected to see Obama dead. That is not the same as a person stating they were going to harm a candidate, so we come pretty close to agreement here. While the tip is anonymous to the person being checked out, it is not anonymous to the Secret Service. That's where I would hope some sanity would come into this. Is the complainant above reproach? What is their station in life? What might their motive be?
The alternative is to accept an increased degree of risk of the assassination of the candidate. Which is the higher societal value? Is it more risky to representative government to increase the risk of assassination of the president or to permit secret investigations by a national police force, based on anonymous tips, coming from a partisan source, which do not explicitly alleged violence? I am inclined to think that the latter is more dangerous to our constitutional government. What if a person were to say that they expected to see George Bush dead in short order? Should that be checked out? What would the Secret Service look like if a person who was reported to have said something like this were later found to be close to individuals who assassinated the President? I realize the person being checked out didn't (allegedly) make a statement like this, but the Secret Service has been mislead to think they did. What choice to they have really? My main problem with the Secret Service here is their attitude while confronting the person being checked out. Even then they may be trying to purposefully push the buttons of the individual trying to see if there is any indication that this person may be on the edge, almost unable to hide their passionate almost out of control hatred for Obama.
The system has proven many times that it can cope with the assassination of the president. It is anticipated, the Constitution provides for it. The horror of assassination is that it is the ultimate voter fraud. It deprives the majority of the right it won in the election. There is also the factor of the threat of an assassination as a means to shape policy contrary to the will of the majority. You have mentioned several reasons why assassination is not appropriate, outside the normal aspect of murder. There is also the continuity of governance. We must have a government that is stable enough to conduct policy both foreign and domestic. We cannot tolerate total chaos at the highest levels of our government. Even the mere possibility of it, could cause chaos at the wrong moment internationally, for purposes of advantage to a foreign government.
But is the only and unavoidable alternative to these Stalinist investigations the assassination of the President United States? I think not. After all, there are other lines of defense which protect the president. The president is shielded by layer after layer of protection. This layer is probably the outer perimeter and the least likely to lead to the prevention of an assassination. By definition, it will only identify a blabbermouth bent on assassination. In this case a blabbermouth who allegedly betrays herself over the phone in an unsolicited call from a stranger. So by stopping blabbermouths who would assassinate the president, we are dealing with the lunatic fringe. A serious, professional assassin, a jackal for instance, will not be unearthed because he is a blabbermouth. He might be betrayed by a Confederate, but that is an entirely different set of facts. I don't disagree with this. Still, do you dismiss the blabbermouth? I don't believe you do. I believe you check out any individual who has been brought to your attention, that could constitute a serious threat, or could possibly know of a serious threat. That being said, I also expect the Secret Service to recognize a false report for what it is. It is an attempt to use the Secret Service to get even with a political enemy (in this instance). It is also a hindrance to the Secret Service because it ties up it's staff on a wild goose chase, just for the meanness of it. "I'll show you Mr. or Mrs. Conservative!" Anyone found to be playing this game should spend a year or two in prison.
Short of encouraging a Gestapo state, the following protections could be put in place: Explicit threats might be investigated. The name of the tipster could be made public. The tipster could be subject to criminal sanctions or at least civil penalties if the claim is manufactured. The object of the investigation could have the right to the identity of the tipster. The object of the investigation could have the right to view the entire contents of investigators file. A tribunal could be established to adjudicate claims that the entire investigation should be expunged. At some time the object of the investigation should be informed that he is being investigated-even a murderer gets that protection when the cops are closing in on him. Explicit threats must be investigated. I also believe expressions of knowledge of a certain outcome must be investigated. If we compare this to organized crime, we understand why tipsters cannot be outed. I most certainly agree that tipsters should be vulnerable to serious penalties for false reports. I believe the Justice Department should assign a department to review any such occurrences, to make sure the process worked the way it should, and that the Secret Service hadn't abused it's power on a whim. It should also look for evidence of manipulation by an informant. A follow-up interview of the person accused might not be a bad idea.
Are the feds now identifying potential assassins by eavesdropping? Are they about to? If they have reasonable cause, I hope they are. I don't consider this case to meet that level of reasonable cause. If the interview with the person being charged went poorly, I might consider it for a short period of time. If the person being charged did exhibit an extreme level of hatred for Obama, I might think it worthy of more investigation including a wire tap.
We are now vulnerable to a secret system which is obviously liable to be perverted by a tyrant who gets his hands on the levers of power. I will not mention names, but his initials could be Barak Obama. I understand that many investigations are kept secret: for example, grand jury investigations are not revealed. But theoretically grand juries have no warrant to investigate "intentions" or the mental eccentricity of citizens. Grand juries are there to investigate crimes or, at worst, conspiracies to commit crimes in which there is a least some overt act. That is not the case here. The case here involves the possible foreknowledge of an impending attempt to end the life of the candidate. If a false report was made here, a crime was committed. The burden is still on the Secret Service to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the person being charged did constitute a threat. While it's not the same as a Grand Jury, there is still the development of evidence to prove the assumption. This person would still have their day in court, in the worst case. At that point they would get to see their accuser. Still, under these circumstances the Secret Service should be as anxious to convict a person filing a false report as they would be to convict a person being charged like this. One of these two should take the fall IMO. If the party being charged is innocent, guess what. It would be time to take that informant into a dark room and rip them to shreds to find out what the hell really happened. And then they should be prosecuted.
We are weighing the threat of the commission of a crime, in this case assassination of the president, against individual liberties and the potential for tyranny which secret investigations represent. We make these judgments all the time and often weigh on the side of individual liberty. For example, we conclude that the price of racial profiling is not worth its obvious crime prevention dividends. The individual liberties protected in that case are hardly more than the feelings of minorities who are innocent and not guilty and are investigated only because of their race. I don't think there is much societal benefit in protecting the feelings of the guilty ones. Yet we have as a society decided to accept an increase crime rate to protect the feelings of innocent minority members. If a higher level of crime is being perpetrated in a racially segregated area of the city, then that area is where the focus of the police should be. If the people in that area disagree with this premise, then it's up to them to make sure the level of crime in that area ceases to be a problem. Otherwise, it's open season on criminals, and let the chips fall where they will. That is why we have so many minorities in prison. I don't apologize to anyone that it is. People in high crime areas have a right to be free from crime, just like the folks in low crime areas do. The loud mouths who claim racial profiling, are in effect pleading for the local authorities to please allow the crime to remain high, for the victims to remain victims, and for the youth in those areas to be condemned to growing up without hope. To a certain degree I think you have a point. I know the police do avoid certain areas because of a safety factor. The fact is though, the police do continue to arrest higher volumes of individuals from high crime areas, generally in the racially segregated areas. I'm not convinced your argument holds water here as much as you might think. Minorities are still vastly over represented in prison. I don't say that to complain. I don't say it because I am happy about it either. I state that as a recognition that criminals are being caught in the most lucrative of fishing holes.
The value to be protected against arising out of these kinds of investigations by a KGB-like national police force is very, very high on the scale: A police state. So we must ask ourselves where lies the greater risk to the greater value? Is the higher risk that a blabbermouth might get through many layers of protection and succeed in assassinating the president of the United States resulting in a catastrophic failure of our democracy rather than merely the constitutional remedy provided, the accession of the vice president? Or is the greater risk the imposition of a police state from which our democracy might never recover? I believe there is a significant difference between what the Secret Service has done here, and what happens in states with a KGB-like presence. In states with a KGB-like presence, evidence is manufactured, the judge is a part of the overall system, and people are railroaded from start to finish, generally involving prison on the whim of the government. And in these instances, political motives are often all that is required. We do have criminal courts. Evidence is reviewed. People still have a jury of their peers. A political whim is not going to cause someone to wind up in prison.
Defenders of these intrusions will no doubt point to the war on terrorism to justify them by having resort to argument by analogy or by a relativism. Essentially the argument is, we tolerate intrusions on our liberties out of necessity to prevent terrorist attacks. The assassination of President United States is the equivalent of a terrorist attack. Because we tolerate intrusions in one place we should tolerate intrusions in another place. The Secret Service has been doing interviews like the one mention here since it's inception. Now all of a sudden we are supposed to tell the Secret Service to stand down no matter what the informant has charged? I am troubled by some of the anti terrorism legislation. It has been my premise that in the wrong hands, those statutes could be misused to terrible ends. I still don't believe that we just surrender to potential assassins because we don't want to be accused of abusing power. There has to be some reasoning here. To my way of thinking, if a person has expressed foreknowledge of an assassination, they need to be checked out. I've already explained what I think should happen to a false informant. Their fate should be announced far and wide if they are convicted of having done so. Let people be forewarned what will happen to them if they try to bludgeon a fellow citizen over the head with a federal agency on a whim.
One need only consider the consequences of the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand to recognize how very, very dangerous the assassination of a potential head a state can be. That assassination led to upward of 20 million dead, the destruction of several empires, and the end of at least four dynasties. But the assassination of the Archduke did not do these things in itself there was an intervening cause, the war waged in the aftermath. No assassination of an American president has ever led to a war or a civil war. Historians could rightly argue that the assassination in Sarajevo was only a catalyst but not the proximate efficient cause of The Great War. I appreciate the point you are trying to make, the downside of assassinations not being as bad as some might think, but your focus is very fuzzy IMO. I'm not going to argue that we should relax our efforts to prevent our elected officials from being assassinated. I may not like Obama, but I'll be damned if I would ever make the case that assassinations are probably preferable to a citizen being confronted on the premise they may have foreknowledge of a plan to assassinate a political figure.
Do the intrusions of our liberties which we tolerate in the war against terrorism justify similar intrusions to protect the president- or viewed from another perspective, are the risks similar enough to justify similar intrusions? The answer to the first question is without question, no. One intrusion cannot be cited to justify another intrusion anymore than one wrong can be raised to justify another. The question is not whether the government has done wrong elsewhere but whether the risks justify an intrusion here. So all of the references to the war on terrorism are simply irrelevant unless you believe that precedent should take precedence over reason. I think you've really gone down the wrong road here. This interrogation of a person charged by an unnamed informant, is not tantamount to the revelation of a police state. It is a reasonable precaution based on the information provided. The Secret Service conducts these types of interviews as a normal course of their mandate. Has that turned into a wholesale conviction mill where innocent citizens have been tossed into prisons all over the U.S.? Please provide any evidence you can to support that premise. I'm not aware of any.
A legitimate question is, indeed the only legitimate question, do the risks of potential assassination of a potential president justify intrusions which can lead to a potential tyranny? In my view, they do not unless the most stringent safeguards are put in place. We have many safeguards in place to protect us from intrusions generated by the war on terrorism. One wonders whether the left will be so clamorous for restrictions on government intrusions when they are doing the intruding for values which they peculiarly hold dear as leftists. I'm going to continue to address the core issue here, whether the U.S. Secret Service should be investigating individuals reportedly having prior knowledge of a planned assassination. The answer in my opinion is unquestionably yes. If however it is found the charged person did not do what the informant said, then a false report has been filed for ulterior motives. And when that is recognized, the informant should be subject to the full extent the law provides, including a long period of incarceration.
Whatever the greater risk, this current secret procedure is entirely alien to our tradition of individual liberties.
*Editorial Note: This article was posted by DoughtyOne at the Free Republic website and concerned a Texas woman harassed by the SS. I'm allowing the article to stay published for the moment because DoughtyOne addresses well a topic that needs to be looked at with an Eagle Eye -- "Has the U. S. Secret Service become a secret police force that harasses and imprisons American citizens at will for their political views some in its leadership element find offensive?"
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