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Good...he should sue them.

Those cops are nothing but thugs with a badge.

Lyin' down on the floor when a cop tells you to stand?

That's a taserin'.

Its fun too see a liberal haven like UCLA get sued by a muzzie.

How ironic.

They really should have just hog-tied him and dragged him out. By the cops letting him lay on the floor and take the taser, he fabricated a victim out of himself.

So many moonbats, so few tasers.

Since when is it reasonable not to comply to a reasonable request to present identification? I wannabe on this jury when this case comes to trial.

More on that tasered Kostard

When Tabatabainejad, 23, refused to provide his ID to the community service officer, the officer told him he would have to show it or leave the library, the report said.

After repeated requests, the officer left and returned with campus police, who asked Tabatabainejad to leave "multiple times," according to a statement by the UCLA Police Department.

Now, my question here is why didn't the student either produce his ID or just leave? What makes him different than any other student that is asked to show proof that they have the authority to be there after 11 pm? This is a symptom of a much larger problem and that is students, children, deciding that they do not have to follow the rules, they are "above the law" so to speak.

"Tabatabainejad encouraged library patrons to join his resistance," police said. "The officers deemed it necessary to use the Taser."

Now HERE is where my thinking is far different than those claiming this kids rights were denied and he should not have been tasered.

Have we all forgotten that University kids can get out of control and having someone deliberately try to incite a riot could be a very dangerous thing?

"If someone enters a library or computer lab, starts screaming and carrying-on like a maniac, you'd fully expect the authorities to control the situation. You'd want him to be removed from the premises. Right?"

Well yes, if someone was just being a dumbass carrying on in the library when you're trying to study, you probably would hope someone would get the person out of there. However, no one at all would be hoping the person would get TAZERED of all things! Besides that, he wasn't even carrying on and yelling so much until AFTER they tazed him. I think I'd be yelling and crying and mad too if someone had just tazed me.

It goes on to say "So, when this individual was asked to leave, threatened to be tasered but continued to rant, he suffered the consequences. This isn't about inappopriate action by the police, it's about inappropriate behavior by a vitriolic student who was all worked up and yelling anti-establishment rhetoric..."

Now watch the video again closely...
In the first few seconds of it...
You hear them asking him to leave and get up
You hear him yelling "don't touch me"
You hear them saying again to "get up"
Then they taze him and he starts screaming
He yells something about that he has "a medical condition"...
I'm not sure what that's about since no articles about the whole incident have touched on that particular point heard in the tape.
But anyway, he doesn't start yelling about the patriot act and what not until after he's been tazed...

Now it does seem silly if he didn't opt to show his ID when they asked to see it, he was kind of inviting trouble. But the question I have, which the news articles aren't making entirely clear, is whether or not he even had his ID on him, and how much time did they even give him to present it, explain his situation, or try to get up and leave before they tazed him? Could it be his ID was out in his car or something and he could have gone and gotten it? Could it be he could have presented a drivers license or some other form of ID and the library staff could have double-checked his name in their system and proven he was a student? There's so many other ways how the whole situation could have been dealt with. The whole "tazer" thing just seems so quicky a knee jerk reaction... especially to all the people who witnessed the event
.
If, as some articles have reported, he was causing "resistence" by going limp when they tried to get him to leave... why could they not have just used "force" in the sense of grabbing him and dragging him out, like bouncers do at clubs and such? Surely those 4 or 5 big policemen could handle a 23 year old college student?
Also there are some arguing that it was all a setup conspiracy somehow to bring in race relations and lawsuits and essentially frame the police and so forth..... but even if some students had masterminded that they were going to upset the police by not showing a library ID card and then videotape what would happen next... tazing the guy, (and not only that but doing it repeatedly!) pretty much has the cops framing themselves! I doubt even students masterminding some test of trying to see how the police might act to an unidentified middle eastern guy in the library could have anticipated he'd get hurt with such a weapon in the process.
Bottom line is regardless of whether it was the student being stubborn and inviting trouble or not... the use of a tazer so quickly and so many times was undoubtably excessive and an overuse(abuse) of power/force on the cop's part!

He sounds like a spoiled rotten punk to me. I'm only sorry he didn't get tasered 3 or 4 times.

It appears some of his friends are getting pissed because of this, now read this carefully:

IT WAS A SETUP!

He planned it, days in advance and told his friends about it ... he likes to provoke and get attention, he was looking for a way to get easy money and the camera was a part of the setup. The news is circulating around campus even now that he set it up.

I see the UC police and the library doing their jobs, which is to make sure the safety of everyone is not compromised. Mostafa Tabatabainejad could have easily made everyone's job easier by showing his ID or leave the library peacefully. He didn't have to be combative, go limp, argue, or try to incite the crowd to riot against the police. He chose his actions and he paid for it. This has nothing to do with his race or how he looks like. As a member of the minority myself, I am ashamed of his actions before and after. He got off too lightly and is still trying to cause troubles. UCLA should seriously consider disciplinary action against this trouble maker. In additional, he should be charged and jailed for interferring with the duties of the law enforcement officers and assault and battery on the law enforcement officers. All I got to say to this pathetic trouble maker is "SHUT UP AND GROW UP".

Apparently he did plan on leaving after he was instructed to do so seeing as how in the video he repeatedly said that he was leaving. Only on his way out did an officer grab his arb and so started the screams at the officers to stop touching him.

Whether it is proven or not because medical information is confidential the student says after his first taze that he was a medical condition.

The following link will take you to a fully subtitled audio video of the incident wher eyou can hear and read the student saying he has a medical condition.

Whether he was resisting to leave or not, another problem occurs when he is tasered for not standing up.

Police are on the earth to inforce crime. I don't see the crime or danger in not standing up. Especially since tazers are meant to still a person. What sense does that make?

Since when are the officers' words what should be obeyed. If an officer tells someone to do unlawful, cruel, unusual, unneccessary, etc. things you should not be punished for not doing so.

This quote taken from http://www.taser.com, an established taser vendor company, regarding their ADVANCED TASER® M26 ,which has not been designated as the tasers used by the police in the video, but will only serve as a model to give information on the general taser product in my post, "The ADVANCED TASER uses technology that will stop a focused, goal oriented subject from up to 35 feet away."

A weapon used to "stop a focused, goal oriented object" should not be used if the wishes of the police are to get the victim, i.e. the Iranian-American Student, to cooperate and make use of his limbs. This product is used to "incapacitate dangerous, combative, or high-risk subjects that may be impervious to other means", and when viewing the video the student at hand does not appear to be dangerous, combative, or impervious to other means considering he was restrained and still.

Excessive use of tasers has been linked or been unable to be ruled out of the cause of death of 167 cases of death in Arizona as reported from http://www.azcentral.com.

Such a serious instrument should not be used to make a student, or any other person, stand up after being arrested for lack of ID. Such harsh measures are not taken when a minor is found in a bar an asked for ID, and in the case of a minor in a bar not being able to prove ID they are defying the law by putting themselves in a situation involving alcohol, or even consuming alcohol. The same consequences apply to a minor buying cigarrettes. If minors drinking and buying cigarettes are not tasered when not being able to produce ID, such cruel and unusual punishment should not be issues to a student during a random identification check.

Sources include:

http://www.taser.com/law/product_info/index.htm

http://www.azcentral.com/specials/special43/articles/1224taserlist24-ON.html

Of course it was a setup. The guy tried to make a display of the incompetence of the authorities and pick up a little attention and maybe some cash. He succeeded on all counts.
It's always fun to watch you copsuckers defend the thugs who you don't think will do it to you some day.

Sorry libs, not falling for your "poor little victim" claims.

He knew what he was doing.

The Torture Society
The long slog of rebuilding American democracy
By Ted Rall
NEW YORK--The military tribunal lasted a week. At the end the 17 defendants were permitted to make a closing statement. Alexei Shestov, 41 years of age, stood up and admitted to being a terrorist and traitor.
"In that struggle," he confessed, "I employed every loathsome, every filthy and every destructive method." Coercive interrogation techniques--what effete and weak-stomached liberals would call torture--loosened the terrorist's tongue. "For five weeks I denied everything," he said. "For five weeks they kept confronting me with one fact after another, with the photographs of my dastardly work and when I looked back, I myself was appalled by what I had done."
Unlike his cowardly co-conspirators, Shestov proclaimed himself ready to face the ultimate sanction. "Now I have only one desire, to stand with calmness on the place of my execution and with my blood to wash away the stain of a traitor to my country." He got his wish. The Military Collegium of the Supreme Court ordered him to be shot.
The great Moscow "show trials" of 1937, officially bringing to justice the nefarious agents of the "Anti-Soviet Trotskyite Centre," were the centerpiece of Stalin's campaign to terrorize Soviet citizens from their previous state of basic subjugation to absolute submission. In truth, there was no such thing as the Anti-Soviet Trostskyite Centre. Shestov wasn't even an opponent of the regime. On the contrary, he was an NKVD (predecessor to the KGB) employee, his bosses ordered to pose as a suspect in order to inculpate the other men. Stalin, as thorough as he was diabolical, had him executed anyway.
A trial without due process isn't justice. It's farce.
Newly leaked audiotapes of military tribunals held at the Guantanamo Bay concentration camp shared the eerie quality of the Soviet show trials of the 1930s. Once again, the men are accused of membership in a shadowy terrorist conspiracy. The evidence against them consists of hearsay--the testimony of other miserables giving them up in order to save themselves. They have been beaten, abused and probably tortured.
Murat Kurnaz, 24, a German cititzen held for four years without being charged with so much as a traffic violation, described life at Gitmo to CNN after being sent back to Germany. Among the "many types of torture" he endured were "electric shocks to having one's head submerged in water, (subjection to) hunger and thirst, or being shackled and suspended [hung from the ceiling]."
"They tell you 'you are from al-Qaeda', and when you say 'no' they give the (electric) current to your feet ... As you keep saying 'no' this goes on for two or three hours."
In testimony consistent with that of other Gitmo survivors, Kurnaz said he was suspended from the ceiling for at least four days. "They take you down in the mornings when a doctor comes to see whether you can endure more. They let you sit when the interrogator comes ... They take you down about three times a day so you do not die."
Such precautions weren't 100 percent effective. "I saw several people die," he said.
Now the United States is trying to burnish its nasty image as one of the world's leading torture states--not by eliminating torture, but by silencing its victims. In a remarkable bit of legal sang-froid, the Bush Administration has filed a brief in its case against Majid Khan asking a federal court to seal its torture of him as "top secret."
Khan is one of 14 alleged al-Qaeda suspects transferred earlier this year from secret CIA torture chambers in Eastern Europe, Central Asia and Pakistan to Gitmo. CIA official Marilyn Dorn said in a Bush Administration affidavit that Khan should be silenced lest he reveal "the conditions of detention and specific alternative interrogation procedures."
"If this argument carries the day," The Washington Post wrote in an editorial, "it will make virtually impossible any accountability for the administration's treatment of top al-Qaeda detainees."
"Sausage making," a right-wing blogger calls it. We abandon American values to protect the American way of life. But we don't want to hear about it, much less watch it. A YouTube video of a volunteer undergoing waterboarding--an illegal but frequently used CIA torture technique that Dick Cheney agreed was a harmless "dunk of water," a "no-brainer"--vanished hours after being posted.
When political leaders justify torture, it isn't long before it goes mainstream. Mostafa Tabatabainejad, a 21-year-old college student at UCLA, was typing away in the back of a campus library computer lab when security guards demanded that he produce ID for a "random check."
What happened after he refused was caught on eight agonizing minutes of video shot by another student's cellphone. As he screamed and convulsed on the floor, rent-a-cops repeatedly shot Tabatabainejad with a Taser stun gun.
"Any student who witnessed it was left with an image you don't want to remember," a witness told the UCLA student newspaper. Asked whether Tabatabainejad resisted, the witness said, "In the beginning, no. But when they were holding onto him and they were on the ground, he was trying to just break free. He was saying, 'I'm leaving, I'm leaving.' It was so disturbing to watch that I cannot be concise on that. I can just say that he was willing to leave. He had his backpack on his shoulder and he was walking out when the cops approached him. It was unnecessary."
The video captures the security men ordering Tabatabainejad to "get up or you'll get Tased," shooting him when he complies and laughing as they repeat their demand. "Here's your Patriot Act, here's your f---- abuse of power," he shouted at bystanders who were visibly upset but too cowed to intervene.
The Democratic takeover of Congress has seen high hopes of national moral redemption downgraded to more modest goals: raising the minimum wage, allowing the Medicare program to negotiate lower drug prices with the pharmaceutical companies. No leading Democrat has called for impeaching Bush, closing Guantanamo and other torture camps or outlawing spying on American citizens without a warrant. There is, however, a sign that something remains of American morality.
Connecticut Senator Chris Dodd has introduced a bill to defang the neofascist Military Commissions Act, signed into law by Bush shortly before the elections. Under the MCA, the president or secretary of defense can declare anyone, including a U.S. citizen, an "enemy combatant" and toss them into a secret prison for the rest of their life, where they can legally be tortured. The MCA eliminates habeas corpus, a legal right enjoyed by Westerners since the 13th century that forces police to file charges against an arrestee or let him go.
"People have no idea how significant this is," said Jonathan Turley, professor of constitutional law at George Washington University. "What the Congress did and what the president signed ... essentially revokes over 200 years of American principles and values."
Dodd's Effective Terrorists Prosecution Act (S. 4060) would eliminate the most heinous aspects of the MCA and begin the restoration of American democracy before 9/11, when it was supplanted by our current police state.
"I strongly believe that terrorists who seek to destroy America must be punished for any wrongs they commit against this country," said Dodd.
"But in my view, in order to sustain America's moral authority and win a lasting victory against our enemies, such punishment must be meted out only in accordance with the rule of law."
As we've seen in Iraq, it's easier to destroy a society than to rebuild one. Seven decades after Stalin's Great Terror, Russia is still struggling to establish democratic institutions. Unraveling the oppressive legacy of Bush's post-9/11 security apparatus won't be easy either. Even if it passes, Dodd's Bill faces an almost certain presidential veto--yet another reason impeachment should be Democrats' top priority in January.