"Some members of Congress freely acknowledge that their information on the case comes from Dobbs"
The above is one of many bits of information provided in today's article in Salon.com on two border agents. Alex Koppelman has written an excellent (and very long article) on Ramos and Compean.
If that statement is true, what does it say about our way of making laws in this country? What was this about the rule of law?---you make laws from information you get from a journalist-entertainer?
Its really shameful. And I totally believe what Koppelman is saying. I watched the Senate hearings on immigration in spring and summer of this year... and I am very embarrassed that we have lawmakers that know so little and pontificate so much.
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The ballad of Ramos and Compean
By Alex Koppelman
Salon.com
September 4, 2007
Two years ago, in the Texas desert southeast of El Paso, two U.S. Border Patrol agents fired 15 bullets at a suspected drug dealer who was fleeing on foot toward the border. The man, a Mexican national, was hit once in the buttocks but made it across the Rio Grande. The agents who fired their weapons, Ignacio Ramos and Jose Compean, were sentenced to more than a decade in prison for firing on an unarmed man and then trying to cover up the crime.
For the prosecutors and the jury, the shooting of Osvaldo Aldrete-Davila near Fabens, Texas, was a clearly unlawful use of force. But the conviction of Ramos and Compean was just the beginning of the agents' story. Within months, they had become the center of a dubious political crusade that would energize the furthest reaches of the right, dominate one of CNN's most popular news programs, and persuade a quarter of the U.S. House of Representatives -- and one prominent Democratic senator -- to reject the findings of a federal court.
For complete article: http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2007/09/04/ramos_compean/index.html
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