Characterization was reprisal for open records request, charges Elbert County man
Paul Joseph Watson
Infowars.com
October 12, 2012
A 55-year-old disabled veteran was labeled a “terrorist”
by three county commissioners after he photographed security cameras at
the Elbert County administration building in Colorado as part of an
investigation, a designation the man claimed was retribution for him
filing multiple open-records requests.
Elbert County resident Don Pippin took pictures of the
security cameras back in April as part of an open-records request that
sought to discover the cost of the surveillance system. An employee
immediately reported Pippin to the commissioners for engaging in
suspicious activity.
“After the commissioners met on the issue,
“(Commissioner Kurt) Schlegel asked for and received a temporary court
order barring Pippin from the building, saying the back of his hair
stood up when he saw what he says was footage of Pippin “casing” the
building for a possible attack,” reports the Denver Post.
Schlegel called Pippin a “terrorist” and attempted to secure a permanent protection order against him, but a judge threw the request out, noting that Pippin posed no threat to anybody.
Pippin charges that the commissioners were attempting to
frame and demonize him as a terrorist as a reprisal for his routine
filing of open records requests.
Pippin and his attorney are now seeking $2.4 million in
damages from the three commissioners who characterized him as a
terrorist, $1 million for emotional distress, $500,000 for loss of
enjoyment of life and $900,000 for impairment of future earning
capacity.
“It’s been a very emotional thing for him,” Pippin’s
attorney, Terry Wallace, told the Denver Post. “When that county judge
said, ‘You’ve been accused of being a terrorist — are you aware of
that?’ That’s when it set in.”
As we have previously documented, the characterization
of people who both film surveillance cameras and those who ask questions
of their government as terrorists is rampant in America.
A 2011 Department of Homeland Security PSA depicted
photographers who “hang around for no apparent reason” as terrorists
and encouraged the public to report them to authorities.
Recent federal training manuals and other documents have
characterized those suspicious of government or people who ask
questions as potential terrorists.
A recent DHS-funded study produced
by the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to
Terrorism at the University of Maryland characterizes Americans who are
“suspicious of centralized federal authority” as “extreme right-wing”
terrorists.
Americans “frustrated with mainstream ideologies” were also identified as possible terrorists in a recent U.S. Army training document.
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Paul Joseph Watson is the editor and writer for Prison Planet.com.
He is the author of Order Out Of Chaos. Watson is also a regular
fill-in host for The Alex Jones Show and Infowars Nightly News.
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