USA Using Patriot Act Against Its Own Citizens: Teen "Black Bagged" in Middle of the Night

Below is a disturbing video interview of a North Carolina woman who's 16 year old son, a home schooler in the 10th grade, was grabbed up in the middle of the night at gun-point by a dozen FBI agents (assisted by the state Highway Patrol), accused of being a terrorist, under the USA PATRIOT Act, and whisked away to Indiana where he is being held:



Here is an article on this case:

Oxford, N.C. — 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.

WATCH VIDEO
Teen's mom questions Patriot Act

The family was at a church function that night, his mother, Annette Lundeby, said.

"Undoubtedly, they were given false information, or they would not have had 12 agents in my house with a widow and two children and three cats," Lundeby said.

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.

"I was terrified," Lundeby's mother said. "There were guns, and I don't allow guns around my children. I don't believe in guns."

Lundeby told the officers that someone had hacked into her son's IP address and was using it to make crank calls connected through the Internet, making it look like the calls had originated from her home when they did not.

Her argument was ignored, she said. Agents seized a computer, a cell phone, gaming console, routers, bank statements and school records, according to federal search warrants.

"There were no bomb-making materials, not even a blasting cap, not even a wire," Lundeby said.

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."

Passed after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the U.S., the Patriot Act allows federal agents to investigate suspected cases of terrorism swiftly to better protect the country. In part, it gives the federal government more latitude to search telephone records, e-mails and other records.

"They're saying that 'We feel this individual is a terrorist or an enemy combatant against the United States, and we're going to suspend all of those due process rights because this person is an enemy of the United States," said Dan Boyce, a defense attorney and former U.S. attorney not connected to the Lundeby case.

Critics of the statute say it threatens the most basic of liberties.

"There's nothing a matter of public record," Boyce said "All those normal rights are just suspended in the air."

Read the rest here.

FURTHER COMMENTS BY STEWART RHODES: When people are afraid, they tend to support the erosion of due process in the name of having more security, but they wind up being far, far less secure. Surely all the scared people who supported the USA PATRIOT Act did not expect it to be used to black bag American teenagers, but that is just an example of the unintended consequences that comes from doing away with normal due process.

As the boy's mother says, "Never in my worst nightmare did I ever think that it would be my own government that I would have to protect my children from," Lundeby said. "This is the United States, and I feel like I live in a third world country now."

Her message to you: they can come and take anyone in your family, even your children, at any time, even if they are innocent. That sounds like something out of a book about Nazi Germany or the USSR under Stalin, not something you expect an American mother to say about this nation.

The war on terrorism is increasingly being turned inward, on us. This is only the beginning. Expect it to get far, far worse before we finally get this nation back to liberty under the Constitution. - Stewart Rhodes

NOTE: in anticipation of the trolls who will ask "where were you when Bush was violating the Constitution for eight years" here is my answer:

Government Supremacists: Neocons, the National Security New Dealers by Stewart Rhodes

I wrote that article in 2006. It is just one of many I wrote during the Bush years criticizing the dangerous expansion of government power in the name of fighting terrorism.