An update for those of you who may have heard about the Oakland High incident where the Secret Service interrogated 2 Southeast Asian youth after their white English teacher reported them for making alleged anti-Bush comments like "Bush is whack"     Montclarion 5/31/03 District faces civil-rights charges By Matthew Leising STAFF WRITER Several Bay Area civil rights groups are planning legal action against the Oakland school district after U.S. Secret Service agents interrogated two Oakland High School students for allegedly making threats against President George Bush. The students, whose identities have not been revealed, were questioned separately by two Secret Service agents for about an hour on April 23. Their parents were not notified of the interrogation. According to the students' attorney and teachers at the school, the agents threatened the students and their families with deportation and told the pair they had no rights. Both students are of Southeast Asian descent, were born in the United States and are American citizens. "This is sort of a civics lesson from hell," said their attorney, Gen Fujioka, a member of the San Francisco-based Asian Law Caucus. The students' 10th-grade English teacher, Sandy Whitney, called the Secret Service after she felt the pair made threats against the life of the president during a classroom discussion on the war in Iraq. Whitney declined to be interviewed for this article and said Oakland High principal Clement Mok had prohibited her from speaking to the press. According to an account in the Oakland Tribune, Whitney said one student said, "We need a sniper to take care of Bush" while the other student replied, "Yeah, I'd do it." The students, both 16, have denied threatening the president, and insisted their classroom comments were not serious. Fujioka did not allow his clients to be interviewed for this story. "They certainly didn't make any threat about the president," Fujioka said. One of the students "made a prediction that someone is going to shoot Bush" because of the war in Iraq and the U.S. response to terrorism, he said, while the other said "Bush is 'whack.'" "That's a colloquial expression" and not a threat, said Ishmael Tarikh, director of Bay Area Police Watch, a program run by the San Francisco-based Ella Baker Center for Human Rights. "When you say someone is 'whack' you're saying someone is beyond the pale of acceptable behavior or strange." Both students have been transferred out of Whitney's class. Tarikh is working with the East Bay Educators for Justice Network, a teachers' group, along with the National Lawyers Guild and the Asian Law Caucus to address what they see as a violation of the students' civil rights. "Legal action is going to take place," Tarikh said. Members of the coalition are "considering filing in federal district court for what we see as violations to the Sixth Amendment (right to legal counsel) and even the First Amendment," he said. The issue in the case, Tarikh said, was that the students' parents were not notified when the two boys were interrogated. "The school district did not contact the parents about these activities until two to three weeks after this occurred. You have to wonder what is going on with the Oakland school district," he said. Teachers and civil rights advocates have sharply criticized Whitney's actions. "Why didn't the teacher talk to the kids, talk to the parents?" asked Cassie Lopez, a Spanish teacher at Oakland High. "The kids feel beaten-down and defeated. I don't know if they will say anything anywhere ever again. That's what's so scary." The two students told Lopez what had happened the day after the interrogation. "The kids were really upset," she said. "They were shaking as they talked to me." "The response of the teacher was way out of line," Tarikh said. It is "part and parcel of a new McCarthyism." According to Fujioka, the students and their families were threatened with deportation by the Secret Service agents. In the national environment after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Fujioka said, the threats against his clients were being taken seriously. "Given what has happened to other lawful permanent residents -- the indefinite detentions, the arrests and detentions without trial -- I think we have reason to be concerned when a threat like that comes from a federal officer," he said. Secret Service spokeswoman Jean Mitchell said: "That is not our policy on how we conduct an interview" and added that she found it "hard to believe" that agents made those threats to the students. Mitchell said the agents were following their duty to protect the president. "As an agency, we're mandated to respond anytime anybody reports a threat to the president. We take all these cases seriously," she said. In general, Secret Service visits to high schools are "rare," she said, but they have occurred previously. The students were not arrested after the interrogation, an indication that the agents did not take the perceived threat seriously, Mitchell said. She added that under these circumstances, no Secret Service file would be created for the boys. Some teachers at Oakland High say the incident came amid a larger atmosphere of intolerance to anti-war views at the school. According to teacher Lopez, anti-war signs put up by students were taken down by order of Mok, the principal. "It's been a struggle" to discuss international issues on campus, Lopez said, because the administration under Mok has not been supportive of dissenting views. Mok said the school has a dual responsibility to its students. "On the one hand, we're encouraging our students to be critical thinkers and have an open mind," he said. "But on the other hand, we as a school have a responsibility to teach having respect for authority and our leaders even if we don't agree with all of their policies." Asked whether he had restricted students from passing out anti-war leaflets, Mok said, "I don't recall." As to the effect the Secret Service visit might have on other students and the expression of their views, Mok said, "This situation points out that there are limits, and that there's a line that students now know they shouldn't cross that they didn't know before." The principal declined to discuss the specifics of Whitney's decision to call the Secret Service. "These are circumstances where we don't have a school policy on what to do in cases of questions about national security," he said. Mok, who was present during the interrogations, said it was up to the Secret Service to decide whether to notify the students' parents. "They were handling the investigation, and we were following their instructions," he said. Mitchell, though, said the school -- through Whitney -- had requested that agents come talk to the students. "It was reported to us by the school, otherwise we wouldn't have been there," she said. "That's ridiculous," said Michael Haddat, a civil rights lawyer in Oakland not involved in the case. "They both had a responsibility to contact the parents." Haddat said schools must act as guardians of students in their custody. "The school had a duty to ensure that, if law enforcement is brought in, to notify the parents," he said. "(The Secret Service) should know better than to intimidate children." Others have questioned Mok's response to the incident. "His lack of understanding of constitutional rights is disturbing," Tarikh said. He added that other Oakland High students have been penalized for anti-war views. "They've been placed in the back of the classroom, they've been admonished," he said. "Mr. Mok not only tolerated that but encouraged that." Others said the situation was indicative of a larger issue now facing the country. "This is another example of the hysteria that people are going through regarding 'terrorism,'" Haddat said. "I can't imagine this happening three years ago .... A lot of people have lost their common sense." The California State Assembly was set to vote yesterday on a bill that would require a high school principal to notify a student of their right to request that a parent or other adult be present during questioning by law enforcement officials. Currently, California parents do not have to be notified if their children are interviewed by police at school. Yet civil rights attorneys said a state law would not apply to federal Secret Service agents. Mok said he is in the early stages of discussions with the school board to develop guidelines on how to handle similar situations in the future. For some students, though, the atmosphere at Oakland High has already changed. "I think the teacher was over-reacting because kids say things like that everyday," said Joe Jackson, a ninth-grader at the school. "It makes you cautious about what you say in front of certain teachers, but not all teachers," Jackson said. "You just can't come out and say what you want in class." -------------- Matthew Leising can be reached at 510-339-4061 or mleising@cctimes.com. Oakland Tribune and SF Bayview articles are also available on sf.indymedia.org (check the archive pages) For more info about the Coalition Against Repression of Students that formed in response, contact jzern1@yahoo.com Community Jenni/Tony Homepage