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Church
According to sworn affidavits of eye-witnesses and victims of the affair, the raiders charged through the main entrance beside which was a large plaque reading: FOUNDING CHURCH OF SCIENTOLOGY. In jackboot Gestapo style, they "burst into the church offices ... and loudly if incoherently demanded and threatened all in sight; observed absolutely no courtesies except for not actually shooting the guns they carried, and denied to the Church administrators any opportunity to arrange that students and Church members not be disturbed, upset or terrorized.
"Showing no legal warrant, the agents and heavy deputies pounded their way up stairways, bursting into confessional and pastoral counselling sessions, causing disruption and violently preventing the quiet pursuit of the normal practice of religious philosophy. They broke into classrooms.
"They seized all the publications and all the confessional aids called E-meters they could find in desks, in ladies' handbags, in students' briefcases and in the session rooms."
"Gradually, the agents removed from the church to the waiting vans some tens of thousands of copies of over twenty Church books, texts, recorded sermons; even the Church archives were sacked. The confiscated material was handled roughly, and when ministers of the Church asked that their property be handled more carefully, the 'deputies' from Baltimore gave only sneering illiteracies for answer."
It is quite possible that the quasi-official raiders were not troubled by conscience in thus violating Church premises because the Founding Church of Scientology did not conform to the stereotype image of a place of worship steeple, stained-glass windows, altar, pews, etc. Yet, the simple brick structure, like the earliest Quaker meeting houses of America indeed, of even the lowliest private dwelling used for religious purposes, is as inviolate under U.S. laws as the most majestic cathedral in the land.That federal functionaries, acting in response to secret vested interests, could arrogate to themselves as they have done and daily continue to do, the right to decide matters of religious faith is but an indication of the dangerous public apathy and secular temper of our time.What the indifferent or irreligious American public does not recognize is the fact that the primary legal principle here involved is not an attack on religion, per se. It is, rather, an attack on the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which protects the freedom of the believer and non-believer alike and is therefore an attack on the supreme law of the nation.During the past two decades, I have witnessed assaults not only on this pillar of American liberty, but on others as well, met with limp acquiescence by the majority of people, who speak of their cherished freedoms safeguarded by the Bill of Rights, as though such freedoms still exist. The cold-eyed fact is that despotic vandals have long since sacked and pillaged that noble edifice, which today presents to the careful observer the same picture of desolation as marble columns and crumbling pediments of the Roman Forum.
The federal judicial machinery which was intended to crush Scientology was set in motion when FDA filed in the U.S. District Court what is called a "libel of information" praying for the seizure and condemnation of the E-meter.On the strength of that libel and without any kind of adversary hearing or prior notice of violation, judge William B. Jones ordered a warrant to be issued. Accordingly, the court clerk issued a warrant authorizing the arrest of the meters. (The layman may wonder how the U.S. Marshals could arrest an inanimate object like an E-meter; but that is the quaint legal euphemism employed and one that in the present case concealed the fact that it was a church and its adherents who were to be the real victims of the raid.)Although in their libel of information, the FDA did not ask for seizure or condemnation of alleged labelling - that is, literature - when the warrant was issued, it also authorized the arrest of "an undetermined number of items of written, printed or graphic matter".
In the raid on the church, which was carried out as soon as FDA officials had the warrant in their hands, federal agents seized not only the E-meters, but the entire stock of Scientology books and creedal literature. An FDA spokesman later boasted to newsmen that the agency's enforcers had seized and carted away three tons of equipment and printed material.