Scientology activist arrested
p2pnet.net News:- “Keith Henson is a longtime acquaintance of mine,” Maggie emailed on the weekend. “Nobody knew where he was for a few years until yesterday when he was arrested: he’d fled the country in fear of his life in 2001.
“Please help me spread the word. I’m really afraid for him.”
An outspoken anti-Scientology activist, Hensen is an electrical engineer, “and writer on life extension, cryonics, memetics and Evolutionary psychology,” says the Wikipedia.
He was arrested Saturday night on a bench warrant and at a hearing today (February 5), Henson’s lawyers said they’re fighting for his release.
Hensen fled to Canada after death threats and his wife says she’s still afraid he’ll be murdered.
Why has hebeen targeted by the cult, founded by sci-fi writer L. Ron Hubbard in 1952 and which today boasts actor Tom Cruise among its members?
Seven years ago Hensen was innocuously watching another critic mock Scientologists on a Net newsgroup,” says 10 Zen Monkeys, going on:
In a gonzo discussion about procuring a ‘Tom Cruise missile,’ they`d joked about working with ‘Secret Agent 99, wearing a stunning black leather biker outfit.’ Other posters joined in the internet discussion, asking whether Tom Cruise missiles are affected by wind.No way, Keith joked. Modern weapons are accurate to a matter of a few tens of yards.
The police were informed of his ‘threatening’ posts, and Henson was arrested.
The police tipsters were the Scientologists themselves, who had already been the targets of an annoying picketing campaign by Henson over the death of a woman near their complex. Besides Henson`s inability to acquire long-range missiles, his wife notes bitterly that it would be impossible for any church members in the complex to feel threatened by the internet posts, since they aren’t even allowed to access the internet. Scientology officials have also claimed Henson followed their employees home _ though Henson counters that ‘the same people who claimed to have been ‘terrorized’ by the picketers offered to take them to lunch on June 25, 2000, evidently to distract them from the death scene being cleaned up.’
Though Henson was found innocent of long-range missile terrorism, for his activities he was convicted of interfering with a church – a California hate crime for which he received a six-month misdemeanor prison sentence. But Henson said he feared his life would be in danger from Scientologists if he were imprisoned – and he fled to Canada in 2001.
He was already bankrupt from an earlier ruling that he`d infringed on Scientology copyrights. But Henson continued picketing Scientologists in Toronto, and they apparently retaliated by informing Canadian police of his presence. (Henson believes the Scientologists told police he was a terrorist and bomb maker.) L.A. Weekly reported two unmarked vans pulled up and ‘a handful of emergency-services task-force officers – Canada`s version of a police SWAT team – spilled out, wearing body armor and carrying submachine guns.’ Describing the event, the EFF reported Henson was ‘arrested in a shopping mall parking lot, by a heavily armed paramilitary unit.’
EFF Executive Director Shari Steele argued that Free speech was at stake in his case: ‘This trial seems intended to punish Mr. Henson for his opposition to a powerful organization using the barest thread of legal justification to do so.’
His wife added in an interview with a Canadian newsweekly that It`s horrifying to me and to his friends how they`ve managed to twist his words.
Henson was ultimately released from a Canadian jail after filing an application for political asylum â reportedly the first ever accepted for review by the Canadian government, and for the next three years he lived as an expatriate in Canada, awaiting their decision.
“Besides being a digital encryption and free speech advocate, he’s one of the original Burr-Brown/Texas Instruments researchers and a co-founder of the Space Colony movement,” says a slashdot post.
Click here for usenet posts.
Also See:
10 Zen Monkeys – ‘Scientology Fugitive’ Arrested, February 4, 2007
slashdot – Scientology Critic Arrested After 6 Years, February 5, 2007
Want to subscribe to p2pnet by email with Feedburner? Just click here.
rss feed: http://p2pnet.net/p2p.rss | | Mobile – http://p2pnet.net/index-wml.php | | And use our own p2pnet newsfeeds for your site
If your Net access is blocked by government restrictions, try Psiphon from the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto’s Munk Centre for International Studies. Go here for the official download, here for the p2pnet download, and here for details. And if you’re Chinese and you’re looking for a way to access independent Internet news sources, try Freegate, the DIT program written to help Chinese citizens circumvent web site blocking outside of China. Download it here.
February 5th, 2007 at 10:03 pm
Mr. Henson is a human rights activist who was picketing the deadly cult’s homicides of Stacy Moxon and another young girl who had been decapitated by a tractor working on the heavily armed and fortified cult compound.
Stacy Moxon was the daughter of Kendrick Moxon, the named unindicted co-coinspirator who was part of the syndicate’s “operation snow white,” the (at the time) single most largest and widespread incident of domestic espionage against the United States in its history.
Moxon also works with Eliot Abelson, alleged lawyer for the Gambino family.
It’s also important to point out that Kendrick Moxon still works for the Scvientology enterprise and that when they murdered his daughter he did allegedly absolutely nothing about it.
February 6th, 2007 at 3:50 pm
Dear Readers,
I am a member of the Church of Scientology. I find it abhorrent that people like Mr. Henson picket my church in a way that is designed to smear us and to try to get us to react in some way.
I, myself, have witnessed pickets against Scientology where I was threatened with a bullet in my head by Anti-Scientology picketers. Another parishioner was browbeaten and told that he would find himself through the front window of our shop in Dublin. We were even told that Scientologists wouldn’t be able to walk around without a paper bag over there head.
This is the kind of Rhetoric that the likes of Henson and his bully-boys on the Internet promote and it is the kind of thing that always catches up on one one way or the other.
I am proud to say that I am a Scientologist and It has changed and saved my life in ways I can’t even tell on a Submission commentary as this.
Dermot Ryan
Dublin
February 7th, 2007 at 12:52 pm
L. Ron Hubbard was a moron and so are you if you willingly believe his “teachings”. I’m sorry to say it this straight, but that’s how it is.
I don’t understand how you scientologists can close your eyes from what your “church” has done to people.
Scientology summed up:
SCIENTOLOGY DESTROYS PEOPLES LIVES!
May 8th, 2007 at 8:37 pm
Did you call the police if someone threatened you? I hope you did, because that’s wrong.
However, in more than a decade of picketing Scientology at its heart in Clearwater and Los Angeles, the only violence I’ve ever seen was perpetrated by Scientologists on wogs, though.
And the videos are all over YouTube to prove it.
Keith Henson was jailed today, through a corrupt court system in Riverside County, CA. He has had his life threatened by your cult, told if he went to jail he wouldn’t come out alive.
Is this what you’re proud of? Where does all the money go? Do you have any idea?
September 24th, 2007 at 12:22 am
[...] the United States. More information available on the Henson story at CNET News, All Headline News, p2p.net, Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, The Press-Enterprise, as well as sites 10 Zen [...]