Commentary on Ashcroft v: Greenpeace

Re:LISNews.com Librarian and Information Science N
It is a fair and well balanced piece

This sounds like FoxNews, “fair and balanced”. Is that where you got it from?

I’ll bite and quibble with a few points of this “fair and well balanced piece”.

Ashcroft grew up in a family of devout Pentecostal fundamentalists in Missouri.

Ashcroft’s religious background is completely irrelevant. Substitute Jew of Muslim and see how silly and inflamatory it is. What difference does his religion have to do with the prosecution of Greenpeace members for violating a federal statute? Is Ashcroft or the US Attorney alleging that the Greenpeace members violated the Sabbath when they boarded the ship?

Ashcroft…instituted a Justice Department prayer group

So what if he set up a voluntairy and informal prayer group in the Department of Justice? If he were a devout Muslim, would it be wrong for him to make his daily prayers even if he was at work? Should the government prevent him from exercising his religious beliefs?

More fair and balanced.

As that state’s attorney general, he opposed school desegregation.

Ah, the Kansas City School District desegregation case. It took 2 billion dollars down the hole to screw up an already screwed up school district. There was also the St. Louis School Desegregation case. The Cato Institute has a wonderful Policy Analysis entitled “Money And School Performance:
Lessons from the Kansas City Desegregation Experiment”. Perhaps Ashcroft opposed it for reasons other than racism? This was a pretty complex issue and opposing the deseg cases in Missouri didn’t mean you were a racist.

Are these minor points? Perhaps. But it does go to the claim that this is a fair and balanced piece.

I think a more important allegation in this article concerns the federal statute that the defendants are charged with violating. The article claims:

The obscure law has been enforced only twice. The New York judge who presided over the first conviction called the language “inartistic and obscure.” In 1890, a second conviction followed the boarding of a ship by seedy characters at the mouth of Oregon’s Columbia River. For the next 112 years, the law remained unused and obsolete, until the Greenpeace arraignment in Miami.

This statute was used in California in 1998 against a couple of Greenpeace Activists who pulled the same stunt in Long Beach. Bernard Mcleod, Omi Morning Song Hodwitz,Patrick Michael Finnand, and Madeleine Habib were arrested at approximately 2:10 p.m. on October 22, 1998 by the Long Beach Police Department in California after boarding a vessel transporting newsprint made from rain forest pulp and protesting the savaging of the rain forest. Three of Greenpeace members were charged with conspiracy to violate 18 United States Code, Section 2279, predicated upon use of the California Penal Code Section 182(a)(1) definition of conspiracy. All three defendants were convicted. The fourth was deported. So much for this obscure law that hadn’t been used since 1890. This article is factually incorrect.

Here is the relevant statute 18 U.S.C. 2279:

Whoever, not being in the United States service, and not being duly authorized by law for the purpose, goes on board any vessel about to arrive at the place of her destination, before her actual arrival, and before she has been completely moored, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than six months, or both.

The master of such vessel may take any such person into custody, and deliver him up forthwith to any law enforcement officer, to be by him taken before any committing magistrate, to be dealt with according to law.

This statute was enacted into positive law by the Congress in 1948 (62 Stat. 805) and was subsequently amended in 1994 (108 Stat. 2146). So much for being unused. If it was so insignificant, why did Congress amend it in 1994?

This is a friggin’ press release for Greenpeace.