Patriot Act Used to Take 10th Grader into Custody as Potential Terrorist

This really is a remarkable story on several levels.

If you consider the potential abuse this enables, that alone would suggest the need for significant change in the legislation. We may have won the "efficiency" battle in pursuing potential terrorism leads, but you have to ask at what cost?

Next, am I the only one who finds the conversion of potential criminal misconduct by a teenager into acts of terrorism a far cry from what most think is meant by the term "terrorism"?

Who have we become as a nation? I wonder...

[edit on 6-5-2009 by loam]

All I could think of watching that is the FBI coming out and saying "We were just sure there were WoMD in that tenth graders home, and we're still very suspicious there is!"

I can kind of understand, but the extensive search and arrests make it very unreasonable, I wouldn't be surprised to see this happening multiple times a day till we just, you know, get used to it.

I know i'm a terrorist, i'm on ATS I have to be assumed as a terrorist, even worse I'm an american citizen, ergo i'm a terrorists. Least I'm not an al qaida member then i'd just be an enemy combatant.

The federal government is getting out of hand now this is really ridiculous, the only true terrorist is our own government.

Here is the written version:

Mom says Patriot Act stripped son of due process

Sixteen-year-old Ashton Lundeby's bedroom in his mother's Granville County home is nothing, if not patriotic. Images of American flags are everywhere – on the bed, on the floor, on the wall.

But according to the United States government, the tenth-grade home-schooler is being held on a criminal complaint that he made a bomb threat from his home on the night of Feb. 15.

...

Around 10 p.m. on March 5, Lundeby said, armed FBI agents along with three local law enforcement officers stormed her home looking for her son. They handcuffed him and presented her with a search warrant.

The article continues:

...Agents seized a computer, a cell phone, gaming console, routers, bank statements and school records, according to federal search warrants.

Ashton now sits in a juvenile facility in South Bend, Ind. His mother has had little access to him since his arrest. She has gone to her state representatives as well as attorneys, seeking assistance, but, she said, there is nothing she can do.

Lundeby said the USA Patriot Act stripped her son of his due process rights.

"We have no rights under the Patriot Act to even defend them, because the Patriot Act basically supersedes the Constitution," she said. "It wasn't intended to drag your barely 16-year-old, 120-pound son out in the middle of the night on a charge that we can't even defend."

I find it interesting that this child was removed from his North Carolina home to an Indiana juvenile incarceration facility. Was there not somewhere more local the child could have been kept?

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Mom says Patriot Act stripped son of due process

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