"If you don't put those children back in the car, I'll shoot your husband "

[Are_grits_groceries]

by teacherken

Those words were spoken by a white cop to black woman in Florida. The year was 1970. The Levi family's Lincoln Continental was pulled over by the cop late at night and Walter, the husband, was made to get out. Eileen, who died this past year, got out with her three boys to try to protect her husband when they heard the words in the title of this diary.

If you want, you can read about the life of Eileen Levi here in the Washington Post, as one of Nine Stories (you can access them all by clicking on the pictures across the top.
======================================================================================================
This diary is not about Eileen Levi, even though I admire her as a teacher. It is about those who have power and can abuse it, and why we must always have oversight. It was reading the words with which I titled this that convinced me I had to write this diary.
======================================================================================================
Yesterday I posted several comments in open threads about post from Andrew Sullivan at his blog at The Atlantic, The Daily Dish. He was looking back at several posts in October, one of which was an email from a reader in response to what he posted, and finally an email from a reader in response to his reposting of those two October pieces. In order, they are

1. Posts Of The Year: They Tortured A Man They Knew To Be Innocent, October 1, 2009:
http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2010/01/posts-of-the-year-they-tortured-a-man-they-knew-to-be-innocent-october-1-2009.html

2. Email Of The Year: October 2, 2009:
http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2010/01/email-of-the-year-october-2-2009.html

3. Torture Will Stay With Us:
http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2010/01/torture-will-stay-with-us.html

I strongly urge reading all three, in order. In the first, Sullivan provides links to a Huffington Post piece by Andy Worthington and to Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly of the U. S. District Court in DC, who also served 9 years as chief judge of the FISA Court, appointed by CJ Rehnquist to that position, and to the Federal Bench by Bill Clinton. The case in question involved a Kuwaiti man named Fouad al-Rabiah, taken into custody in Afghanistan, transported to Guantanamo, where he was tortured (using "enhanced interrogation methods"). Those holding him eventually determined he was innocent. And then? Read the following from p. 41 of the Judge's opinion, something quoted in the 2nd post by a Justice Department trial lawyer: al-Rabiah was told by his principal interrogator
===================================================================================================
"There is nothing against you. But there is no innocent person here. So, you should confess to something so you can be charged and sentenced and serve your sentence and then go back to your family and country, because 'you will not leave this place innocent'."
====================================================================================================
(the italics were added by the Justice Department lawyer)

There is more to consider. The third post was from someone who reminded Sullivan of the Chicago police commander who had tortured people in interrogations to get false confessions, which also meant the real perpetrators were still walking free, and how those in the State Legislature of Illinois, including a young State Senator named Barack Obama, had moved to require all interrogations be videotaped to prevent such abuses in the future.
<snip>
Perhaps it is our human weakness. We are tempted to wield power, to intimidate, because we can, because it seems more efficient.

I am then reminded of an ancient Latin phrase, from the poet Juvenal, Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? I have reflected on this phrase before, in this diary from February 22, 2009. I will not repeat here what I wrote then.

The phrase is important. Who watches those who watch us? We give people authority to keep us safe, orderly secure, to be certain. But we are supposed to be a government of laws, not of men. That is in part because we are not angels.
<snip>
But we do need more. No one should ever have power that is unchecked. That includes presidents, be they named Truman (steel seizure case), Nixon (Watergate), Bush (take your pick), or Obama (whose administration continued to prosecute the al-Rabiah case until the judge granted the defendants habeas request).

And that sure as hell should include cops who say things like If you don't put those children back in the car, I'll shoot your husband.

Whatever we do in our politics, we should never lose sight of the idea that in our system of government, we acknowledge that men are not angels, that there must be restraints on their actions, that there must be oversight, and accountability for abuses of power.

That should apply to nations as well, but unfortunately we still have such an excess of military and economic power that the abuses by various administrations in the application of that power are not subject to oversight and accountability from other nations. That makes it even more incumbent upon "We the People of the United States" who are the ultimate sovereign to insist upon it ourselves.

We must be faithful in this in little things as well as big things. If we ignore the little things, we will embolden ever more people to abuse what powers they have.

If we don't, then it will not just be a black family on a rural road in Florida that hears such horrifying words as these:

If you don't put those children back in the car, I'll shoot your husband

Peace

Eileen Levi's story in the WaPo:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/artsandliving/magazine/2009-lives-to-remember/levi.html

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2010/1/3/821486/-If-you-dont-put-those-children-back-in-the-car,-Ill-shoot-your-husband

I read that story and put my head on my desk for a long time. I don't think anybody is watching the watchers. At least, nobody in a position of power to make a difference. They are entrenched, and even more so because of Cheney.
If you read 'Angler', you will see he had his paws in every department of government on every level. He also knew what positions really wielded power or at least could gum up the works. Cheney knew where to place people in lower levels to really keep an eye on things.

[Cassandra2010]

1. Wow

Tales from The Homeland.

Peace to you as we strive towards justice.

[asdjrocky]

2. This is where we really see the two Americas become clear and evident.

The people I know who trust the police are predominantly white, middle to upper class -what few of those are left around- and they grew up in fairly nice neighborhoods.

I grew up on the wrong side of the tracks, and we know the watchers a little bit differently then the people from the other side. I grew up poor white, in a very mixed neighborhood and something we all learned here at an early age, poor people are all equal in the eyes of the law. Equally fucked, that is. I've seen people beaten, brutalized, and battered. I've been beaten. I've had cops steel from me. A few months ago I watched my neighbor pulled out of his front yard so cops could arrest him for being drunk in public, of course he lost his job as a result because his employer found out he was arrested. (We couldn't bail him out in time.)

I'm back in my old neighborhood after being away for nearly 20 years, and things have not changed. When things go wrong around here, the last people we call are the police.

[tosh]

3. K,R & bookmark.

[arcadian]

4. kick

so I can read later

[asdjrocky]

5. kick

[reggie the dog]

6. this kind of abuse is horrible

I grew up in a white middle class suburb of Chicago but the cops beat me for talking back and generally fucked with us for being teenagers when we looked too working class while out riding our bikes. We were hardly dangerous for other people but the cops would stop us, search us, and get angry when we DIDNT have drugs or liquor on us. I knew from 13 that I could be killed by the cops when undercover cops pulled guns on us in a park for playing tag under already lit stadium lights in an open field and a playground because it was after dark. It was summer vacation and around ten pm....they drew their guns, then showed us they were cops, for tresspassing in a park which had no fence......Once they cops tried to plant crack on us while we were riding in my cousins car. We were 16 and my cousin, who was upper middle class and white, had a low rider chevy beretta I think, with a booming bass sound system, rims and the like. It was 1995 and I was dressed like a metal head greaser one girl in jeans and a sweater, and one girl and my cousin were wearing baggy clothes like they saw in hip hop videos. The cops searched and found 2 cell phones and 3 pagers in the car and said that meant we were dealers and one cop threw a bag of crack on the backseat so the other could find it. They asked us where it came from and we had seen the cop throw it in the car so we told the cop that and they told us we were all going to jail, one girl started to explain that her dad was a politician in some suburb and my cousin and I told him, when he said drugs were the only way to have such a car, that my uncle owned a business and bought a nice car for his son. We got him on the phone and he treatened them with a lawsuit and the cops told us we could leave. Money and color helped us all not go to jail that day....how fucked up is the usa??