Monday, December 18, 2006

One more no-knock mess

in Georgia, early news article here, later followup here(courtesy of Publicola). This has been bouncing around some gunboards and blogs the last couple of days, with the various reactions you would expect.

I'm not going to say much about it, there's still a lot of uncertainty in the 'who & when'. I will note a couple of things. From the first article:
“They knocked and announced their presence,” Jackson said. After they entered the apartment, he said, “they were met with gunfire from within the residence.” Which sounds nice. But later we read:
Edward said he received a phone call from a neighbor saying, “Someone’s kicking in your door.” He said the neighbor screamed and told him, “Somebody’s shooting.”
'Knocked, announced and entered' sounds not too bad; neighbor's report doesn't sound nearly so nice.

And from the second article, from the 'informant':
“I’m confused,” Reed said. “They came to me out the blue, to my parents house, asking me questions about what was supposed to have happened with the gun, and I was frightened. I told the truth about what I knew, but I was scared into telling them.”

Reed says she told the ATF a different story than what they used to issue the warrant.

“No, I never told them that he stole the gun from me, because he stayed at the same house. They implied that someone had got killed with one of the guns, is what they said. They wouldn’t tell me which one, basically saying he stole the first one, trying to say he still had it.”

Which does not sound good at all. If accurate, it means a couple of agents basically intimidated this woman into telling them something they could use, and may have lied about what she said in getting the warrant.

Happily, nobody's dead. Unhappily, without the kind of noise and attention generated by a death, I very much doubt the full truth of all this will every be known.

Yeah, I have become cynical about things like this.

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