TheAgitator.com
First, They Came for the White Supremacists
Monday, May 19th, 2003OK, so hate groups aren’t exactly the poster children for civil liberties, but don’t these details of a raid on a hate group leader’s home make you a bit uneasy?
Armed federal agents slipped silently into place around Byron Calvert Cecchini’s Leesburg home. They pounded on the door, rousing the self-described white supremacist from bed. For several hours, the agents scoured the house, loading his computer, Rolodex and files into a Ryder truck.The FBI began investigating Cecchini because of his ties to one of the largest neo-Nazi groups in the United States. In an affidavit seeking a warrant for the pre-dawn raid this year, an agent wrote that Cecchini had a “violent criminal history” and probably owned weapons.
Agents found no weapons, but they found something they were looking for — T-shirts with a Nike swoosh logo that substitutes the word “Nazi” for Nike. Cecchini is facing possible charges of trademark violations, said law enforcement sources, who spoke on the condition that they not be named.
“You prosecute what you can prosecute,” one law enforcement source said.
So cops raid the guy’s house on a baseless warrant, find nothing the warrant was gratned for, and instead arrest him on pissant trademark violations — all because he holds views most of us find repugnant.
Seems to me that this is one of those cases everyone dogs the ACLU for taking, but that it’s good we have the ACLU around to take.
God bless the government for their tireless efforts to stamp out the thing that most threatens the peace and prosperity of America: violations of “intellectual property” laws.
The article is supposedly about anti-terrorism on the domestic front, but no link to terrorism is even hinted at.
It could have been worse, he could have been designated an enemy combatant.
Good catch.
It pains me to take the swine’s side, but clearly the feds were in the moral wrong here. Yeah, it’s unsettling.
Check the abuse Hatfill is getting - at taxpayer’s expense, too. Maybe he is the perp, but until the feds have something real, I believe they should back the f*ck off. Likewise in Cecchini’s case.
BTW, you’ve had over 40 hits at Hit & Run…
Well? They nabbed Al Capone on tax-evasion charges, when they couldn’t get him on anything else, right?
Butch, Al Capone was a criminal. Holding disgusting thoughts is not a crime.
Federal law enforcement, in its infinite wisdom, has figured out that the best way to deal with people who think the government is out to get them is to set the government out to get them. How this makes any of us any safer is not clear.
Swoosh! There Go Your Rights
If you pass enough laws anyone will be breaking at least one at any given time. Laws needn’t be passed with malicious intent to construct a web of laws that can be used as an abusive instrument of control. Isn’t this really a thought crime?…
Swine? Aww, I’m not that bad….
My wife found this thread and sent it to me…..I have always thought the “left” and “right” are much closer to each other than either are to the “center”, if we have to use those terms. Like Ken from Brutal Attack said at a show in Germany a few years ago, “The skinheads are the hippies of the 90’s.”
You have to be forward thinking about these things: I find no pleasure in seeing black kids given drugs and guns by the CIA so the gov’t can make money and then has the bonus of trying out it’s bullshit new laws on the marginalized in society. Most of you guys criticize yesterday’s racists.
It’s a new day, and we are more likely to cooperate with black muslims or other ethnonationalists. I know the same gov’t. that screwed Leonard Peltier into prison shot Weaver’s wife in the face and roasted kids in Waco.
It’s ironic, people in my circle are much more tolerant of others and their views than theso-called “open minded” liberal types that rail against us.
In fact the feds are currently freaking out because of a growing trend of “eco racism” and other examples of seemingly different groups teaming up against the real enemy.
BTW I was not arrested for anything. They found some silly t-shirts (obvious parodies of a major shoe company) and that’s what a federal judge signed off on, but they still couldn’t arrest me, because there was no crime. If they find what they say they are looking for and can’t make an arrest, how did they get permission to look for it? All they did was terrorize my wife and 2 toddlers, who awoke with men in black ninja suits taking flash photography of them in bed
with Mom and Dad nowhere in sight.
I would not think it was funny if it happened to one of you. Although I guess I’m lucky, compared to what they are doing to innocent civilians in Iraq I got off lucky, so far.
Dammit Byron, havent I told you that your fascination for the perfect running shoe would get you in deep shit heheh. But hell , Ive never seen you run from anything my friend.