Pirate's Cove

Perhaps you heard about the hysterical story from April 29th about a boy arrested using the Patriot Act

Sixteen-year-old Ashton Lundeby’s bedroom in his mother’s Granville County home is nothing, if not patriotic. Images of American flags are everywhere – on the bed, on the floor, on the wall.

But according to the United States government, the tenth-grade home-schooler is being held on a criminal complaint that he made a bomb threat from his home on the night of Feb. 15.

Ashton now sits in a juvenile facility in South Bend, Ind. His mother has had little access to him since his arrest. She has gone to her state representatives as well as attorneys, seeking assistance, but, she said, there is nothing she can do.

Lundeby said the USA Patriot Act stripped her son of his due process rights.

“We have no rights under the Patriot Act to even defend them, because the Patriot Act basically supersedes the Constitution,” she said. “It wasn’t intended to drag your barely 16-year-old, 120-pound son out in the middle of the night on a charge that we can’t even defend.”

Except, see, there are a few issues that with the overwrought story by Amanda Lamb and WRAL, which was also a TV report, which made it on to the national ABC radio feed the other day, as well, leading to thison the 6th

The bottom line is we don’t know what happened.  Neither does his mother, Annette Lundeby.  She believes her son is innocent, but because the entire situation has been shrouded in secrecy presumably under the auspices of the Patriot Act, there is no public record of what her son did or what legal hurdles he is facing.

We don’t know what happened, but, because we do not know, and the government isn’t yammering, we speculated that it was that evil Patriot Act (which President Obama voted for) to increase our ratings. And this led to a “woops, our bad!” story on the 7th

Responding after nationwide media attention following the story, the U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Indiana said in a news release that the charge is based on federal law prohibiting bomb and death threats.

“This charge is unrelated to the Patriot Act,” U.S. Attorney David Capp said.

Capp and the FBI initially declined to talk about the case, citing a gag order and law that prohibits disclosure of information in federal cases involving juveniles.

But in Thursday’s release, he said, the arrest stems from a false bomb threat directed at Perdue University and similar threats to other schools.

Interestingly, the online magazine Wired, which had already called out a good chunk of the Internet for going crazy on the story, both right and left, sane and loony tunes, beat WRALand most others to the punch line that, oops, this kid was a renouned Internet prankster, who had moved from prank calls to calling in bomb scares for money. Mommy dearest said that someone had spoofed and hijacked his IP address to make the bomb threats. Might it be that mommy dearest might know a bit more about what was going on, and could be the next person arrested, since, as reported by Wired (the second link in this paragraph,) the main person who helped lead the FBI to Lundeby says he heard her on the calls. And, BTW, he has LOTS of recordings.

Bennett says Lundeby knew her son had made bomb threats. “His mother knew that he was making calls, because she’d come on the microphone when he was talking and tell him not to do any bomb threats because the house was going to get raided,” he says. “He said he wasn’t going to do any more bomb threats because his mom didn’t approve of them. But then he did them anyway.”

Perhaps WRAL can make another uncritical, biased, and hysterical report when mommy dearest takes her own trip in handcuffs to Indiana.

This is what happens when people, read primarily the Credentialed Media and the Left, jump to conclusions without all the facts over issues they hate.