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Innocence of Muslims Filmmaker Arrested, Jailed
sycodon writes "Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, the man behind the film Innocence of Muslims, has been arrested and jailed in Los Angeles for probation violations. The situation is a win-win for the Obama administration, who can now appear to be punishing the man whose film sparked protests and riots around the world, but at the same time simply enforcing the law, as all evidence indeed suggests Nakoula violated the terms of his probation."
What does his apparently violating parole have at all to do with this site?
They should have done this weeks ago. It was clear he violated his probation from the beginning.
It's very important for Muslims across the world to understand that he was NOT arrested and jailed for the CONTENT of that movie, but because he continually provided false aliases to the judge and the police in violation of his probation.
I wonder if the protesters in Egypt will understand this...my guess is probably not.
The situation is a win-win for the Obama administration, who can now appear to be punishing the man whose film sparked protests and riots around the world.
This is outrageously ridiculous. Why would it be a "win-win" for the Obama administration to appear to be punishing someone for exercising his First Amendment right to free speech?
It didn't spark riots around the world. At least the ambassador in Libya was killed in a targeted attack by Al Qaeda. The ambassador was worried about his safety for weeks before his death. We know this because CNN reporters walked into the compound and looked around. Security was NOT good at this place.
I'll be so fucking glad when we kick Bush out of office....
Clearly, he's a dirtbag
It is not illegal to be a dirtbag.
"The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all." -- H. L. Mencken
Hope they have enough on him to keep him locked up.
Is he really being locked up for violating his probation, or is that just a justification to arrest someone for saying something inconvenient? Supposedly he as arrested for making false statements to his probation officer. Is that something that a normal person would be jailed for?
Are you suggesting it's possible to have free speech and yet ban hate speech? That's highly offensive to me. You should be arrested!
So to you, the application of justice should be dependent on the political views someone espouses? The law should treat someone differently based on what he's said in public? How did you get from free speech to there?
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
Yes, he really is being jailed for his actual wrongdoings. You are not allowed to use aliases on probation. He used an alias and did something infamous with it.
Certainly, I imagine people do this all the time and are not caught, usually because it simply does not come to light, particularly since an alias has the effect of making it harder to tie a person to what they do under their alias. In this case, what he did is not the issue, it is that it was infamous enough for him to be caught violating his probation. It would be a very, very dumb Probation Officer who, when faced with his convict's publicly obvious non-compliance, did not enforce the conditions of Probation.
Remember, he's already a convicted criminal who is only free on probation on the guarantee of good behavior and specific provisions meant to ensure he remains on good behavior. He's not so much being thrown in jail as simply returned to jail.
Is this incredibly convenient for the Obama Administration? Hell, yes. Is it a matter of silencing him? Not at all.
That's how parole works...
They set up enough hoops and demands that you have to spend all your time keeping up. Mostly, that's to keep you out of trouble.. But it also provides plenty of technicalities when you become a nuisance. There's something you missed for them to violate you over whenever they need it.
That would make sense...except that the violations at issue occurred during the investigation of whether or not he posted the video, which itself would have violated the terms of his probation.
Its not about violations known in advance and held in reserve and then used as retribution for a "perfectly legal" act, "uppity" or otherwise.
He's locked up because he violated the terms of his probation. He apparently has a pathological tendency to refuse to give his real name to authorities or anyone else for that matter, and the Judge had enough of it.
At the court hearing about his parole violation he told the Judge that the original name he used during his criminal prosecution and incarceration wasn't his real name.
Think about that for a minute, he's jailed for fraud and ordered as a condition of probation not to use aliases, only his legal name and he tells the judge evaluating his compliance that the name he used in the previous trial was a fake. It's highly unusual in situations like this for a judge to incarcerate a parolee before the hearing, she threw him in jail because she said the court has no confidence he's not a liar and flight risk.
And might I add, just because you haven't bothered to follow the case that it makes your assertion that no one believes this isn't political asinine. Obama and the state department has almost zero influence over department of federal paroles (it's mostly courts administered). His parole conditions were public nearly a day after the whole thing went public, including links to all the PDFs on popehat.
He was convicted for bank fraud. And then he goes and writes checks to pay for employees using an alias, and his probation conditions make it perfectly clear that the use of any sort of alias violates probation. The guy really stepped in it. This isn't some case of over sleeping and missing a check up with his probation officer.
Clearly you see the word "illegal" everywhere, even when it hasn't been written.
It's not illegal to see the word illegal everywhere.
William of Ockham had no beard. The most likely explanation is that it was chewed off by squirrels every morning.
Not arrested for parole violations? He had two parole conditions and he violated both!! In fact he told the judge yesterday that the name he used during his original trial and incarceration was a fake. This is on the order a sex crime parolee with a condition not to have unsupervised contact with children running a bloody day care. They absolutely put people in jail all the time for violating parole. It's so common it's a daily occurrence for nearly every single parole officer.
Last I heard, they still haven't got Hoffa.
William of Ockham had no beard. The most likely explanation is that it was chewed off by squirrels every morning.
He's a scumbag con man that violated the terms of his probation. I think we can come to an agreement on the word, "illegal" here.
As for the rest of your rant, start reading:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech_in_the_United_States#Categorical_exclusions
Absolutely correct. California could be better using their time and effort protecting us from Linsey Lohan and others like her, but they release them after 45 minutes because the jails are too full. But this guy said something (supposedly) unpopular, so the system is going after him with everything they can come up with. This is clearly an effort to appease a supposedly religious group by further eroding basic American freedoms.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
He's locked up because he violated the terms of his probation. He apparently has a pathological tendency to refuse to give his real name to authorities or anyone else for that matter, and the Judge had enough of it.
If you had people who wanted to kill you and had the means to falsify badges/I.D./uniforms you would be giving out false names too. I concede that his own actions caused his current predicament and I don't condone anything he has put out but I can understand his motivations for lying about his name..
Beware of those who profit off the docile and persecute the unbelievers.
I thought it was for the criminally bad acting and scripting of the movie. If you jail people for lying then we have to put all of Congress in jail.
Shouldn't be a problem. Islam is a religion of peace.
Some men have had their fucking head cut of and sewn back on again without losing the ability to fuck. Having your regular head cut off is much worse. You are not guaranteed to survive, even if it is sewn on again immediately.
I can understand his motivations for lying about his name.
He had used fake names as part of his original scamming, and one condition of his probation was NOT to use false names.
I think he started giving out false names BEFORE people wanted to kill him. Sure NOW he has a good reason to do it, but that was his own choice. He knew that he was prohibited from using aliases for his past crimes, so prison shouldn't come as much of a shock to him (at least until the muslim inmates figure out who he is).
The only killing we have seen was from a terrorist attack on an embassy, not from a protest.
How many "protests" also involve quiet ambushes on secret safe-houses?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
This guy is completely 100% irrelevant to anything that's happening in the Middle East. Go to youtube and in one minute you can find a dozen anti-Islam videos made by various random people. When certain extremist groups in the Middle East want to incite violence for their own political purposes, they will find a catalyst easily enough, just like with Mohammed cartoons etc, it doesn't matter what that catalyst is. The biggest issue here for me is that the administration is still talking about the stupid irrelevant film instead of the fact that the Libya attack was obviously a planned and successful Al Qaeda operation to assassinate a US ambassador and that we didn't do enough to prevent it. But that wouldn't look good, would it, so better to focus everybody's attention on a particular US citizen and make him take the blame. Shameful.
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
The trouble with freedom of speech is that speech isn't just words. Otherwise Islam's fatwahs are merely free speech.
Fatwahs are murder contracts, that offer a reward for murder. Soliciting murder is a crime.
The video may have offended some, but was not a direct request for criminal activity.
He's locked up because he violated the terms of his probation. He apparently has a pathological tendency to refuse to give his real name to authorities or anyone else for that matter, and the Judge had enough of it.
If you had people who wanted to kill you and had the means to falsify badges/I.D./uniforms you would be giving out false names too. I concede that his own actions caused his current predicament and I don't condone anything he has put out but I can understand his motivations for lying about his name..
I understand his motivations. I also understand that providing false identities to LEOs while on legal probation is a crime in itself, and that if a person commit a crime, they will be punished accordingly.
This is all much ado about nothing.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
I'm a firm believer in freedom of speech, but there is still such a thing as having some taste, and having some common sense. Clearly this guy has, at the very least, poor judgement, and perhaps poor impulse control, and while I'm not going to lay 100% of the blame on him for the violence in the Middle East due to his ill-advised (and poorly produced, from what I hear) video, he certainly is guilty of being the catalyst.
That's very loaded language. He's not "guilty" of anything - at least in the context of the Islamic hissy-fit business. He is a catalyst, like that teacher who sparked an armed and angry lynch mob in Sudan.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudanese_teddy_bear_blasphemy_case
Granted, his actions were provocative, while the teacher's were not. While his actions were inadvisable, 100% of the blame lies with the angry nutjobs and the rabble rousers. If we apportion any blame at all to this guy then we may as well issue mitigation points to anyone taking offence. If some guy in the street says that my mother is a scabby whore, should he share the blame if I were to then pull out a knife and cut out his liver? He's a factor in what happened, but what he did is rendered academic by my crazy response. Staying with that example, if I reacted so badly, is it possible that this reaction is based on more than just this single incident? There's way more happening here than just a bunch of cavemen getting worked up over a video.
-- Using the preview button since 2005
If you jail people for lying then we have to put all of Congress in jail.
You say that, but I'm sure that there are downsides as well.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Ah, the apologist logic here is pathetic.
That doesn't change the definition of Free Speech. That just means that if you have threats along with your Free Speech, then it changes the issue entirely. It's the threat that is the issue, and not the speech itself.
The issue at hand is from a terribly low budget movie's trailer, which is insulting to Muslims. It is not threatening. Calling for the destruction of Israel is threatening, particularly when said Imam is calling upon his followers to make it happen.
This is no different than the Westboro Baptists that go around protesting at military funerals. They can get away with it it because it's not threatening anybody, and that's why it is the unfortunate side of acceptable Free Speech.
The issue to them is very cut and dry, but it is far from not being hypocritical. You cannot insult Islam in any way. But the reverse is completely acceptable; they can insult your nation (e.g, Great Satan, which also associates religious aspects to it), or your religion (e.g, Jews), and you had better accept it. And they're going to do it while they destroy your embassy, even if your nation wasn't involved at all (e.g., German Embassy protests).
But you're right, I guess I don't see any hypocrisy in there. Keep running around with your blinders on.
read the damn article. He was told not to use false aliases.
During the course of the investigation, the prosecutor said he had duped multiple people with false bank accounts, bad checks, and misrepresenting himself to people with business dealings. Being a "Danger to Society" doesn't have to mean being a violent thug. People who make a living by hoodwinking others at every opportunity are just as bad.
The authorities DID NOT KNOW he had been violating his parole after 2010; the interest surrounding the movie brought this to their attention.
So again, I call bullshit.
I can understand that, given the amount of publicity both nationally and worldwide, the government really had little choice but to enforce the probation terms once it came out who the filmmaker really was and that he must have violated the terms to go on YouTube to upload it.
But when is someone going to point out that probation terms like these are absurd on their face? The Internet is a basic part of modern life. Everyone uses it, and even someone who tries to avoid it might well find themselves violating the terms by accident. (For instance, is using a GPS device counted as using the Internet? From a technical standpoint, that's often what is happening.) Probation terms ordering people to stay away from computers might have made some sense back in the days of Kevin Mitnick and Captain Crunch, but they are utter nonsense in 2012. You might as well make a probation term telling someone they can't watch TV or read a newspaper.
He's a felon on parole. There are conditions to that parole. If a felon offered parole doesn't want to agree to the conditions of his release, he is welcome to stay in prison, where he can continue to say whatever he would like.
Being on parole and violating the conditions of your parole in a spectacular manner and NOT expecting to be put back in prison as a result is ridiculously dumb.
For example, one of the conditions of his parole that he not use the internet unsupervised.
If he goes to the library and uses the internet unsupervised, likely no one notices and nothing happens.
If he goes to the library and uses the internet to start a blog claiming Mitt Romney is a polygamist, and it gets picked up by the media, he's going back to prison.
Parolees should not violate parole. Parolees who do not want to go back to prison should definitely not get CAUGHT violating parole.
You don't get a free pass just because you say something extremely objectionable while violating your parole.
paintball