On Sept. 20 there was a march in Port Angeles in protest of the U.S. Border Patrol’s increased presence and activity in this area.
According to Paul Richmond, an attorney who also ran against Norm Dicks as a Democrat and lost in the primary, Border Patrol agents were seen videotaping the event. Richmond said an agent later confirmed at a community meeting that they had recorded the march. Richmond said he filed a Freedom of Information Act request for copies of the video and photos taken.
This morning Richmond sent a follow-up e-mail, saying video footage of the protest had been posted on YouTube. Richmond wrote that the footage is from the agent. I’ve contacted him asking how he might know that. The video itself is designed to mock those in the march. And it’s pretty clear by watching it that some of the footage is not from the Port Angeles event at all. Richmond wrote:
The agent appears to have taken the footage they shot while on duty, intermixed it with some homo-phobic video from a gay pride event, and added some strange signs to the demonstrators, through photoshop or a similar program.
This would simply be tacky were it not done by a federal agent. Is this illustrative of the respect they have for the “war on terror” and our tax dollars?
Again, I don’t know that the footage in the video was shot by the agent. Here’s the video:
Dismiss Richmond and others as “dingbats” as the videographer does, but it’s pretty apparent from the comments after the story linked above that many in this area do not take a kind view to the checkpoints and other border patrol activities that having six times as many officers allows.
After leading in with the Alan Parsons Project music, the soundtrack shifts to “Yakety Sax,” which most of you will know from Benny Hill. There are other YouTube videos in which “Yakety Sax” is used as an experiment to prove that putting that as the soundtrack makes anything, and I mean anything, funny. Some don’t agree. Whoever did post the video, by the way, has another video of cats fighting on his porch. I thought that one was pretty funny, probably because “Kung Fu Fighting” was the music behind it..
I like the music – it fits with the video.
That said….there is no way the Border Patrol made this video as ‘evidence’ – or made it at all.
Someone is pulling your leg and whoever ‘doctored’ up the signs needs a job away from people and his camera confiscated.
Wherever this video came from…it was not from the Border Patrol.
I agree with the Border Patrol activities but if a Border Patrol officer taped the protest…it is not this tape.
In my opinion… Sharon O’Hara
The Border Patrol has an important job to do- however- free people should not expect to stop and explain themselves as they go about their business far from the nearest international border.
Alex…it seems that the ‘free people’ you speak of are the folks here illegally.
You give them the ‘right’ to travel without being stopped anywhere in our country… the ‘freedom’ then is theirs.
Few people have a problem with being stopped occasionally…other than illegal aliens and criminals. The Border Patrol is protecting our country against your wishes, it seems.
From PA it is a two-three hour boat ride to Canada and, I’m told, the hotbed of illegal drug smuggling. Port Angeles borders Canada. Only a body of water separates them.
Alex,
Sorry, but Port Angeles is a border crossing and the border is about 7 miles away.
What, you think that illegals only come across the border in the South? The Canadian border is longer and even more unsecured than than the Mexican border.
We are to be treated as innocent until proven guilty.
If we got out of our car at the checkpoint- near the Hood Canal bridge- and walked back to the border- how far would we travel? What route would we take? How many counties would we pass through? Would we need a map to plan our route?