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2009-05-03T16:38:00.000-07:00

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Program aims to mold former soldiers into teachers

2009-05-03T16:29:00.000-07:00

[article]

BARSTOW • When Sidney Tharpe exited the military after 20 years, he had to find something else to do.
So Tharpe headed for the classroom.

“I just like working with kids,” said the Apple Valley resident, who was stationed at Fort Irwin from 1996 to 2004, and is now in his third year of teaching elementary special education students.

Tharpe made the transition from the military to the classroom with the help of Troops to Teachers, a federal program run by the U.S. Department of Education, which is holding an informational sessions at Fort Irwin and the Marine Corps Logistics base on Wednesday.

Robert Bartron, military transition recruitment specialist with Troops to Teachers who will be at Wednesday’s session, said that education and the military share some similar qualities.

You will be successful in teaching if “you’re effective in a large bureaucratic association,” said Bartron.

“Not everybody in the military makes a good teacher. Those [who do] are who we’re seeking,” said Bartron.

The program also offers compensation of up to $10,000 for teachers who work in economically disadvantaged districts.

While about 85 percent people who express interest are retirees, Bartron said the program also aims to recruit active duty soldiers three or four years before they leave the military since the process to become a credentialed teacher can a few years.

Jim Ybarra, a teacher at Peary Middle School in Gardena, flew Apache and Black Hawk helicopters for 24 years before becoming a history and English teacher.

While his habit of early mornings and personnel management skills have translated directly to the classroom, Ybarra said he has to be more conventional with aspects like discipline.

“You can’t put everybody in a push-up position,” he said.

The program focuses on helping teachers get jobs in high demand subjects, such as math, science and special education, according to Bartron.

Contact the writer:
(760) 256-4122 or elee@desertdispatch.com

Troops to Teachers Information Session
Where: Education building at Fort Irwin, and McTureous Hall (Bldg. 218) at the Marine Corps Logistics Base.
When: Wednesday. One hour sessions start at 8 a.m. at Fort Irwin, and 2:30 p.m. at the MCLB.
Questions: Call Fort Irwin’s education office at (760) 380-4218, or the MCLB Education Services Office at (760) 577-6118.
Website: www.caltroops.org

[comments]

cwatch wrote:

4/15/2009 5:23:15 PM

cwatch wrote:

The Educational System Was Designed to Keep Us Uneducated and Docile: http://bbvm.wordpress.com/2009/03/11/the-educational-system-was-designed-to-keep-us-uneducated-and-docile/

4/15/2009 1:59:57 PM

amcr17 wrote:

Wow. WORDPRESS. Free blog for anyone who wants to rant about whatever they want. Brilliant. I'm very impressed. Check mine out...wordpress/imagination of rainbows and aliens.com.

P.S. Who RAISES their kids to be DISOBIDIENT?

4/15/2009 1:21:12 PM

cwatch wrote:

4/15/2009 12:54:41 PM

longtimeago wrote:

cwatch- I live in fear of people like you. I'm sure that your kids are the ones in wal-mart running and yelling and makeing everyone wish they had stayed home. "My kids do NOT obey orders; they act upon their own ethics and instincts." This is a direct quote from you. It speaks volumes about your values.
Also, you're remarks about soldiers being the dirt of the earth was so over the top I can't even respond to it.
Let's just say that I would like it very much if you kept your kids home and out of the public school. Just out of public all together. People like you make the day too hard to get through and we all have enough problems.

4/15/2009 8:43:47 AM

joevh04 wrote:

You should thank a soldier for your exercising of free speech cwatch, however crazy it is

4/14/2009 4:43:41 PM

cwatch wrote:

Man, I'm glad I kept my children out of the "education" system.

It is bad enough that the state tries to take your children, at gunpoint if necessary, and subject them to social and intellectual deprivation and programming during the most sensitive years of their lives, showing them a "reality" of authoritarianism... But to put "soldiers," the dirt of the earth, in charge... That's too much. My kids do NOT obey orders; they act upon their own ethics and instincts.

The "Big 3" which I taught them were:

1. ALWAYS have a questioning mind. NEVER believe. You may know something or you may not. You may suspect something or you may doubt. You may wonder or you may not care. But NEVER believe.

2. Be true to yourself. NEVER take orders or obey. Act from your own personal decisions.

3. ALWAYS treat others as you would want them to treat you.

Now, think about a "soldier," and what the world would be like without him. He prostitutes himself. He disarms his people, then claims to "protect" them - from the wrath of his victims...

4/14/2009 4:39:12 PM

whatdoyousay wrote:

Great my High School Biology teacher was a PHD, a helicopter pilot in the NG and was featured in National Geographic magazine for his Doctoral work. We need good veterans back into our classrooms. Nice article.

4/14/2009 7:19:28 AM

At least our Mexican neighbors are still standing up for their freedom (and ours)

2009-02-18T09:15:00.000-08:00

February 16, 2009: The government has 45,000 troops and 5,000 police battling several thousand cartel gunmen in 18 states. But most of the action is in a few states along the U.S. border. Two years of violence have left over 8,000 dead. The drug cartels are not strong enough to defeat the government, but they are determined to keep fighting to preserve their lucrative drug business. It’s all about ambition, greed and no inhibitions when it comes to killing. You can’t make this stuff up. The government is apparently going to keep at it until the cartels are destroyed, or adopt a much more low profile way of operating.

February 14, 2009: For the past three months Mexican and U.S. security officials have openly discussed increased U.S. support for Mexico in its war against drug gangs. This is being called, “the Cartel War”. The U.S. is concerned about “spill-over” violence. Politicians in El Paso, Texas, are worried about it, and they are concerned for their Mexican neighbors in Ciudad Juarez (Chihuahua state). Both Mexico and the U.S. are pushing “intelligence sharing” (intel on smuggling, drug gangs, weapons, finances, etc). One criticism from some sectors in Mexico is that intel sharing will likely lead to “American contractors” (meaning military or intelligence service companies). This is “contractors” used in a very negative sense, suggesting American mercenaries. Apparently the Mexican government thinks hiring expertise to support Mexican operations is a good option. Are joint operations by the U.S. and Mexico possible? Sure – but as both the U.S. government and Mexican government have stressed, such operations have to be very carefully planned and approved by both governments. At the moment Mexican-U.S. joint military operations are very unlikely, but it is a good bet that planning officers in Mexico and the U.S. are looking at “what can we do for each other” if cartels launch attacks in the U.S., or tried to create a situation where Mexican military units cross the border in the midst of a combat operation. Some joint operations well short of combat and “increased security presence” operations make a lot of sense. Joint communications operations are one example, and “joint liaison teams” manned by experienced military personnel from both countries another. You can bet any joint team will operate on both sides of the border. Political cover is one reason – Mexicans are sensitive to “affronts to sovereignty.” However, a “both sides” joint operation is also common sense since the violence and drug smuggling has transnational effects. Ad hoc arrangements and relationships already exist, but it appears both governments are interested in more formal and permanent cooperation.

February 10, 2009: At least 21 people died in a firefight in Chihuahua state (130 kilometers south of Ciudad Juarez) between Mexican soldiers and cartel gunmen. The confrontation began as a “stand-off” between soldiers and gang members who had kidnapped nine people. The gangsters executed six of the kidnap victims during the battle. Soldiers lost one of their own, and killed 14 gang members.

February 9, 2009: Troops took control of police headquarters in Cancun and arrested the local police commander and 36 policemen. The military announced that it believes the policemen are “connected” to the murder of retired Mexican Army Brigadier General Mauro Enrique Tello in Cancun.

February 5, 2009: Mexican soldiers and federal police participating in Joint Operation Chihuahua raided a drug warehouse in Ciudad Juarez. The police seized around two tons of marijuana.

February 4, 2009: A retired senior Mexican military officer, Brigadier General Mauro Enrique Tello, was murdered in Cancun in what authorities said was likely an assassination by a drug cartel hit team. Two bodyguards were killed along with the general. The murders were “execution-style”?the men were tortured then shot in the head. Tello had retired recently and after his retirement had take charge of a special counter-cartel security force authorized by the mayor of Cancun. Tello had also been in charge of operations in western Mexico in 1997 (Michoacan state) that amounted to a crackdown on drug traffickers and local gangsters – something of a “preview” of the Cartel War. The government is paying close attention to the murders, for several reasons. The Mexican Army plays a central role in the Cartel War – it is the government’s chief counter-cartel organization. Cancun is also an international tourist resort and a source of good jobs. Tourist revenues have declined since violence began increasing. So far the worst violence has been in northern Mexico, though the Acapulco region, which is also a tourist resort, has been plagued by inter-gang “turf wars” and shootouts between the police and drug gangs.

January 30, 2009: Demonstrators gathered in Mexico City to protest a government decision to “freeze” gasoline prices but not freeze prices for diesel. Most of the protestors were farmers who were complaining that the cost of farm machinery (most of the farm machines run on diesel) had increased prohibitively.

January 27, 2009: The government said 22 people were killed in northern Mexico over a 48 hour period. Four of the victims were killed at a PEMEX oil facility. They had “tape over their eyes” and they were shot in the head (more “execution-style” murders). Three more people were murdered in Chihuahua City.

January 24, 2009: The government reported thirteen people were slain in drug violence in the state of Chihuahua. Nine of the 13 were killed in the city of Ciudad Juarez (across the border from El Paso, Texas). A “semi-official” figure for murders in Chihuahua state during 2008 is now making the rounds: 2400. That means about 40 percent of the Cartel War deaths in 2008 occurred in Chihuahua state..

January 20, 2009: The U.S. Marine Corps is implementing new travel policies to Mexico for Marine Corps personnel. Marines stationed in Yuma, Arizona must get command permission before they cross the border (either on leave or off-duty pleasure travel). This is similar to the policies implemented by Ft Bliss, Texas, a U.S. Army post..The State Department has raised its “caution-level” for visiting Matamoros, Monterrey, Nogales, Tijuana, Nuevo Laredo, and Ciudad Juarez.

January 16, 2009: Is imitation the sincerest form of flattery? The Zetas have roots in the Mexican military and have operated as a para-military force. Now Mexican Army troopers have arrested three drug cartel gang members in Tijuana. The military report said that the gang members had “uniforms” with a patch featuring a skull and crossed crutches. A “gang faction” in the area is run by a gang leader who has the nickname “Muletas” (crutches). The men arrested were identified as being part of the faction’s “special forces.” Uniforms for cartel gunmen isn’t new – police and soldiers have found real military uniforms and modified uniforms in arms caches. “Paramilitary gear” also crops up in news and government reports, and that can refer to clothing as well as tactical gear. But it looks like at least one gang really wants to “play soldier.”

January 15, 2009: The U.S. Homeland Security Department said that it would send Border Patrol SWAT teams and even military units if “drug gangs” (term used in the report) crossed the U.S.-Mexican border and confronted U.S. police. Homeland Security stressed that this is “a contingency plan” only – implying local authorities (police, sheriff, state police) are the first responders to such an incident. The head of Homeland Security repeated this – that this is a plan, not a prediction. A senior official said the contingency plan can be “scaled” to meet the emergency, meaning that if local authorities only needed “back-up” (support) that would be made available, but if the situation escalated a larger rapid reaction force could be organized and sent.

January 14, 2009: The military said it was sending 2000 more army soldiers to Ciudad Juarez.

Girl, 16, found dead in Fort Lewis barracks

2009-02-18T09:14:00.000-08:00

A 16-year-old girl has died and another was in stable condition after they were found unresponsive Sunday in a barracks on Fort Lewis, Wash., according to a press release.

Emergency response personnel responded to a 911 call about 3:30 a.m. Sunday to a barracks on post. They found the girls, and one of them was pronounced dead at the scene by a doctor from Madigan Army Medical Center. The other girl was taken to Madigan for treatment and she was in stable condition as of Monday evening.

The circumstances and cause of the death are under investigation by Criminal Investigation Command special agents.

The names of the girls, who are civilians, were not released. Officials cited their age, their civilian status and the ongoing investigation as reasons for not identifying them.

Leaders at Fort Lewis are monitoring the investigation and a review of installation policies and procedures is already underway, according to the press release.

US soldiers investigated over ‘fraud’ bigger than Madoff

2009-02-18T09:13:00.000-08:00

In what could turn out to be the greatest fraud in US history, American authorities have started to investigate the alleged role of senior military officers in the misuse of $125bn (£88bn) in a US -directed effort to reconstruct Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein.

The exact sum missing may never be clear, but a report by the US Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR) suggests it may exceed $50bn, making it an even bigger theft than Bernard Madoff’s notorious Ponzi scheme.

“I believe the real looting of Iraq after the invasion was by US officials and contractors, and not by people from the slums of Baghdad,” said one US businessman active in Iraq since 2003.

In one case, auditors working for SIGIR discovered that $57.8m was sent in “pallet upon pallet of hundred-dollar bills” to the US comptroller for south-central Iraq, Robert J Stein Jr, who had himself photographed standing with the mound of money. He is among the few US officials who were in Iraq to be convicted of fraud and money-laundering.

Despite the vast sums expended on rebuilding by the US since 2003, there have been no cranes visible on the Baghdad skyline except those at work building a new US embassy and others rusting beside a half-built giant mosque that Saddam was constructing when he was overthrown. One of the few visible signs of government work on Baghdad’s infrastructure is a tireless attention to planting palm trees and flowers in the centre strip between main roads. Those are then dug up and replanted a few months later.

Iraqi leaders are convinced that the theft or waste of huge sums of US and Iraqi government money could have happened only if senior US officials were themselves involved in the corruption. In 2004-05, the entire Iraq military procurement budget of $1.3bn was siphoned off from the Iraqi Defense Ministry in return for 28-year-old Soviet helicopters too obsolete to fly and armored cars easily penetrated by rifle bullets. Iraqi officials were blamed for the theft, but US military officials were largely in control of the Defense Ministry at the time and must have been either highly negligent or participants in the fraud.

American federal investigators are now starting an inquiry into the actions of senior US officers involved in the programmed to rebuild Iraq, according to The New York Times, which cites interviews with senior government officials and court documents. Court records reveal that, in January, investigators subpoenaed the bank records of Colonel Anthony B Bell, now retired from the US Army, but who was previously responsible for contracting for the reconstruction effort in 2003 and 2004. Two federal officials are cited by the paper as saying that investigators are also looking at the activities of Lieutenant-Colonel Ronald W Hirtle of the US Air Force, who was senior contracting officer in Baghdad in 2004. It is not clear what specific evidence exists against the two men, who have both said they have nothing to hide.

The end of the Bush administration which launched the war may give fresh impetus to investigations into frauds in which tens of billions of dollars were spent on reconstruction with little being built that could be used. In the early days of the occupation, well-connected Republicans were awarded jobs in Iraq, regardless of experience. A 24-year-old from a Republican family was put in charge of the Baghdad stock exchange which had to close down because he allegedly forgot to renew the lease on its building.

In the expanded inquiry by federal agencies, the evidence of a small-time US businessman called Dale C Stoffel who was murdered after leaving the US base at Taiji north of Baghdad in 2004 is being re-examined. Before he was killed, Mr Stoffel, an arms dealer and contractor, was granted limited immunity from prosecution after he had provided information that a network of bribery – linking companies and US officials awarding contracts – existed within the US-run Green Zone in Baghdad. He said bribes of tens of thousands of dollars were regularly delivered in pizza boxes sent to US contracting officers.

So far, US officers who have been successfully prosecuted or unmasked have mostly been involved in small-scale corruption. Often sums paid out in cash were never recorded. In one case, an American soldier put in charge of reviving Iraqi boxing gambled away all the money but he could not be prosecuted because, although the money was certainly gone, nobody had recorded if it was $20,000 or $60,000.

Iraqi ministers admit the wholesale corruption of their government. Ali Allawi, the former finance minister, said Iraq was “becoming like Nigeria in the past when all the oil revenues were stolen”. But there has also been a strong suspicion among senior Iraqis that US officials must have been complicit or using Iraqi appointees as front-men in corrupt deals. Several Iraqi officials given important jobs at the urging of the US administration in Baghdad were inexperienced. For instance, the arms procurement chief at the centre of the Defense Ministry scandal, was a Polish-Iraqi, 27 years out of Iraq, who had run a pizza restaurant on the outskirts of Bonn in the 1990s.

In many cases, contractors never started or finished facilities they were supposedly building. As security deteriorated in Iraq from the summer of 2003 it was difficult to check if a contract had been completed. But the failure to provide electricity, water and sewage disposal during the US occupation was crucial in alienating Iraqis from the post-Saddam regime.

Source: Independent

Coast Guard chief charged with rape, cruelty

2009-02-18T09:11:00.000-08:00

A Coast Guard chief will be arraigned Friday in Alameda, Calif., on charges of rape and assault of a female subordinate while on liberty in Golfito, Costa Rica.

Chief Yeoman Royce G. Clifton is being charged with five counts of rape and carnal knowledge, one count each of assault, cruelty and maltreatment, and failure to obey an order, said Lt. Dave Oney, Pacific Area spokesman.

Clifton was stationed on aboard the cutter Chase at the time of the alleged incident in January 2008. Coast Guard Investigative Service began investigating the incident in September, and Clifton was reassigned to Sector San Diego at that time, Oney said.

It is not clear whether alcohol was involved in the alleged attack. Also unclear is where the alleged attack is supposed to have occurred.

A general court-martial is scheduled for March 30 in Alameda, Oney said.

Army recruiting stand-down ordered after suicides

2009-02-18T09:01:00.000-08:00

Army Secretary Pete Geren has ordered a stand-down of the Army’s entire recruiting force and a review of almost every aspect of the job is underway in the wake of a wide-ranging investigation of four suicides in the Houston Recruiting Battalion.

Poor command climate, failing personal relationships and long, stressful work days were factors in the suicides, the investigation found. The investigating officer noted a “threatening” environment in the battalion and that leaders may have tried to influence statements from witnesses.

See also:

4 Recruiter Suicides Lead to Army Probe

Army Manual Promotes Christianity to Combat Epidemic of Suicides

America’s Child Soldiers: US Military Recruiting Children

“No Child Left Behind “: “Trojan Horse” for Pentagon Recruiters

New Army Recruiting Tactic: Obama will “Get Us Out of Iraq”

Pentagon Targets Afro and Hispanic Youth to Fight Its Wars

Army’s New Recruiting Tool - Video Arcade for Mallrats

Feds Act Against Eureka, Arcata Over Voted Measures to Restrict Military Recruiter Access to Minors

“There were some things found that are disturbing,” said Brig. Gen. Del Turner, deputy commanding general for Accessions Command and the officer who conducted the investigation.

While he declined to discuss what action might be taken, Turner has recommended disciplinary action against battalion- and brigade-level commanders. He declined to discuss what action might be taken.

The report was not made public, with officials citing extensive personal information contained in the report.

The four recruiters who killed themselves were all combat veterans of Iraq or Afghanistan. The Army did not identify them.

The Army Inspector General’s office has been asked to conduct a command-wide assessment of Recruiting Command to determine if conditions uncovered in Houston exist elsewhere.

The one-day stand-down of all 7,000 active Army and 1,400 Army Reserve recruiters will be Feb. 13.

The soldiers will receive training on leadership, a review of the expectations of Recruiting Command’s leaders, suicide prevention and resiliency training, coping skills and recruiter wellness, Turner said.

“It’s significant,” Turner said about the stand-down. “It is not routinely scheduled. It normally occurs after some sort of major event like this.”

Turner was appointed to conduct the investigation on Oct. 14 by Lt. Gen. Benjamin Freakley, commanding general of Accessions Command. The investigation was sought by Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, who heard from soldiers and family members after the Houston Chronicle in 2008 reported the suicides.

“I think that when you have something like this happen that’s this serious and has such a huge impact on families and loved ones, of course people will ask what’s going on,” Freakley said.

Recruiters and soldiers who are going to be recruiters, their families and the public are going to want to know what’s happening and what’s being done, he said.

“We’re very aware of our soldiers’ concerns and we want to make it better,” Freakley said.

USAREC is a strong command with good leaders and exceptional soldiers, Freakley said.

“I do not believe for a minute that this is endemic of the entire command whatsoever, but I do believe that one [suicide] is too many, and we had four,” he said. “So let’s fix this and move forward and grow from this in a positive way. It’s hard work, but the whole Army has hard work right now.”

Turner’s investigation was completed Dec. 23, and Turner said his work revolved around the four suicides that occurred between January 2005 and September. Findings from the investigation were released Jan. 21.

“It’s a very tough and very tragic thing,” he said. “But I’m focused on what good can come out of this and that’s where our focus is right now.”

There were 17 suicides within Recruiting Command between fiscal years 2001 and 2008, said Col. Michael Negard, a Training and Doctrine Command spokesman.

There were more than 500 suicides by active-duty soldiers across the Army from Jan. 1, 2003, through Aug. 31, according to data from the Army G-1. Another 31 cases were pending final determination, as of Aug. 31.

The Army’s suicide rate increased from 12.4 for every 100,000 soldiers in 2003 to 18.1 in 2007, an all-time high for the service. Nationwide, the suicide rate for every 100,000 people was 19.5 in 2005, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Gen. Pete Chiarelli, vice chief of staff of the Army, voiced his concern in a Jan. 23 interview with Army Times.

“We need to move out as quickly as we can to do those things that are going to lower the numbers,” Chiarelli said. “That’s the best we can do. We can’t eliminate suicide.”

“I believe there are certain things leaders can do in the short run to reverse the trend and I’m going to talk about those next week,” Chiarelli said.

Turner said he examined the four soldiers’ personal lives, from their financial and medical histories to their performance at work. He also studied organizational factors such as command climate, leadership within the battalion, brigade and Recruiting Command. He looked at screening soldiers for recruiting duty, the impact of assigning soldiers directly to that duty after they return from combat tours, the adequacy of the Army’s suicide prevention training, and soldiers’ access to mental health care.

Here is what Turner said he found:

• There was poor command climate in the recruiting battalion, one of 38 in the Army.

Morale was low among the unit’s 200-plus recruiters, who routinely worked 12- to 14-hour days. They had unpredictable work schedules, frequently working on weekends. There was a “threatening type of environment” established by certain leaders throughout the battalion’s chain of command.

Monthly missions assigned by USAREC were bumped up, violating Army regulations and adding stress. For example, in July 2008, the battalion’s 205 recruiters each had to recruit two new soldiers a month, even though the battalion’s mission was 360 contracts, which is roughly the equivalent of 1.5 or 1.6 new contracts each.

“I don’t think it was malicious necessarily,” Turner said, “but what that does is it artificially ups their work load.”

• All four soldiers who killed themselves suffered from “troubled” or “failing” personal relationships.

Turner said he did not find any common thread of significant financial stress among the four men and none had been diagnosed with PTSD.

At least seven months had passed between the time each man returned from combat to the U.S. and when they were assigned to USAREC.

• Regarding witness statements, Turner noted “inappropriate comments by leaders before investigations were done and before mine started.” He added: “It may have been construed by recruiters as attempts to influence their statements.”

Recruiters who felt their commanders may have been trying to influence their statements were given the opportunity to change their statements during Turner’s investigation.

• There were no inherent problems with assigning soldiers to recruiting duty after they returned from combat, but the assignment process must be improved.

Soldiers now can get approval from the first lieutenant colonel in their chain of command to waive the 90-day stabilization period required of them after returning from a deployment. Sometimes, problems stemming from a soldier’s experience in the war zone may not present themselves immediately, so the Army G-1 is reworking the waiver policy so that soldiers must now get approval from a general officer.

• Almost 50 percent of prospective recruiters were not fully vetted by their chain of command, as required by USAREC.

Soldiers who are nominated for recruiting duty must complete financial disclosure forms and statements declaring that they understand that recruiting is sensitive duty, they may be assigned to remote locations and they must be able to work independently.

They also must complete a mental health evaluation and be interviewed by their current battalion commander, command sergeant major and company commander, who must determine whether the soldier would be a successful recruiter. Input from this command team must include comments on the prospective recruiter’s leadership ability and potential, physical fitness, character, integrity, ability to perform in stressful situations and any incidents of abuse. All negative evaluations must include a full explanation.

Turner said he found that almost half the soldiers who went on to be recruiters did not have a complete nomination packet, and that soldiers were not taking a standardized mental health evaluation.

To correct that, HRC on Jan. 13 sent a message reinforcing the need for a complete nomination packet and instituted a policy that prohibits soldiers from being assigned to recruiting battalions until their completed packet has been reviewed, Turner said.

Also, the Army surgeon general, G-1 and USAREC are creating a mental health evaluation form specific to recruiters, Turner said, and officials are working on a catalog to track the adequacy of medical and mental health care and the access soldiers have, regardless of where they are stationed, to that care.

Turner said “the Army is moving in a very quick way in taking concrete action” and to “improve the climate and leadership inside that battalion and other organizational, institutional factors that will improve recruiting operations.”

Freakley said the Army is listening to Turner’s advice and taking immediate and long-term steps to correct any problems.

“I want to ensure we have a climate where our recruiters know how important they are, are well led in a positive command climate, are well supported by the systems that we put in place to help them in their very important mission of recruiting an all-volunteer force … and that we learn and really grow from this experience,” he said.

Recruiting is a very stressful job, said Bret Moore, a former captain and clinical psychologist who served twice in Iraq.

“I know that recruiting duty is one of the most stressful jobs, alongside drill sergeants,” he said. “They have quotas to meet and there’s a lot of pressure.”

Turner, who briefed the four soldiers’ families and Cornyn before releasing the findings of his investigation, said “all these [deaths] are tragic, but the one thing the Army does extremely well is learn from itself,” he said.

Maj. Gen. Thomas Bostick, commanding general of USAREC, will send a team to Houston this summer to conduct a follow-on assessment of the command, Turner said.

There also is a move to balance suicide prevention training with resiliency training and coping skills, he said.

“[Instead] of trying to recognize that [a soldier] is exhibiting risk factors, this is more toward helping [a soldier] cope with the stresses in his life,” he said.

Bostick is calling for a review of the current USAREC policies on duty hours for each of the five recruiting brigades and their 38 battalions.

For example, the Houston battalion’s policy called for a maximum work day of 13 hours, and recruiters had to seek approval from their chain of command if they worked beyond that, Turner said. However, the 13-hour maximum was interpreted as the expected norm, and the policy could have been written more clearly, Turner said.

Bostick also is directing a review of how missions are assigned to recruiters, so what happened in Houston, where commanders were assigning a higher mission to recruiters, would not be repeated, Turner said.

What is critical in all of this is leadership, Turner said.

“It requires compassionate leaders caring for their soldiers, hitting that sweet spot between accomplishing the mission and caring for soldiers.”

Let My Students Drink

2009-02-18T08:57:00.000-08:00

John McCardell, the former president of Middlebury College, says his time on campus taught him that trying to stop college students from drinking was a fool’s errand. The 1984 federal law raising the minimum drinking age to 21 not only wasn’t working; it was encouraging more reckless consumption.

Two years ago, McCardell started an organization called Choose Responsibility, which waged a national campaign to lower the drinking age to 18. The soft-spoken scholar soon found that many other campus executives felt the same way. In early 2008 he started the Amethyst Initiative, a collective of college presidents urging a public discussion about the drinking age. At press time, the Amethyst Initiative had 130 signatories, including the presidents of Duke, Tufts, Dartmouth, and Johns Hopkins.

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Senior Editor Radley Balko spoke with McCardell in October.

Q: Why lower the drinking age?

A: We’ve had a law on the books for 24 years now. You don’t need an advanced degree to see that the law has utterly failed. Seventy-five percent of high school seniors have consumed alcohol. Sixty-six percent of high school sophomores have.

The law abridges the age of majority. It hasn’t reduced consumption but has only made it riskier. Finally, it has disenfranchised parents and removed any opportunity for adults to educate or to model responsible behavior about alcohol.

Q: Do you favor setting the federal drinking age at 18 or removing federal involvement altogether?

A: I would defer to the Constitution, which gives the federal government no authority to set a national federal drinking age at all. It’s clearly supposed to be left to the states. So the first thing we need to do is cut out the 10 percent penalty [in federal highway funds to states that refuse to adopt the minimum age of 21], then let the states make their own policies.

Q: Supporters of the law say it has led to a reduction in highway fatalities.

A: If you look at the graphs for about 30 seconds, you might draw that conclusion. There has been a decline in traffic fatalities. But it began in 1982, two years before the law changed. It has basically been flat or inching upward for the last decade.

More interestingly, the decline has come in every age group, not just people between 18 and 21. And if you look at Canada, where the minimum drinking age is 18 or 19 [depending on the province], the trend in highway fatalities has almost exactly paralleled ours. It’s far more likely that the reduction in deaths is due to seat belt use, airbags, and safer cars.

Q: How has Mothers Against Drunk Driving responded to the Amethyst Initiative?

A: MADD’s response has been disappointing and is unbecoming for an organization as revered as they are. They spammed the email boxes of college presidents, called them “shirkers,” and encouraged parents not to send their kids to those colleges. All this for nothing more than a call for discussion. If this question is as settled as they say it is, why such an exaggerated response?

I think their tactics backfired. MADD tried to bully these presidents into removing their names. We lost three presidents as a result, but we gained 20 more. And I think it actually strengthened the resolve of the presidents who stayed on.

Q: MADD and other opponents of your objectives say the college presidents are just trying to pass on their own responsibility to enforce the minimum drinking age. But is it really a college president’s responsibility to enforce criminal law?

A: That’s a great point. It’s about as logical as asking a couple of state troopers to come onto campus to teach calculus.

Military to bribe foreigners with citizenship for service

2009-02-16T09:12:00.000-08:00

Those who are in the US on temporary visas will have a chance to acquire citizenship, if they enter military service as little as six months.

According to a Sunday New York Times report, for the first time since the war in Vietnam the US army has expressed willingness to recruit the immigrants who long for US citizenship.

Skillful immigrants who have lived at least for two years in the US can enroll in military to help the already exhausted army worn out by two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and pave the way for their own permanent citizenship.

“The Army will gain in its strength in human capital,” said Lt. Gen. Benjamin C. General Freakley, the top recruitment officer for the US army, “and the immigrants will gain their citizenship and get on a ramp to the American dream.”

“The American Army finds itself in a lot of different countries where cultural awareness is critical,” said Gen. Freakley, which is in charge of the pilot program. “There will be some very talented folks in this group.”

The Times said the program could help the military fill shortages in medical care, language interpretation and field intelligence analysis. It will be limited to 1,000 enlistees in its first year, most for the Army and some for other services.

The self-proclaimed US-led “war on terror” has worn out the strength of the military, prompting demoralization and suicides among the US soldiers, while leaving the army in dire need of new recruitments. Critics, however, say the program could provide for the terrorist to penetrate the army.

The Pentagon, though silent on the issue of recruiting foreigners, is striving to rehabilitate the army and find new solutions as it mulls opening new fronts in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Filipino court orders Marine rapist into custody

2009-02-13T09:10:00.000-08:00

MANILA, Philippines — The Philippine Supreme Court on Wednesday ordered a U.S. Marine convicted of rape to be moved from the American Embassy into Philippine custody, reopening an emotional case that has become a rallying point for anti-American protests.

The court ruled that a deal allowing Lance Cpl. Daniel Smith to stay at the embassy while appealing his 40-year jail term was contrary to the Visiting Forces Agreement, which governs the conduct of U.S. forces in the country.

The justices instructed Foreign Secretary Alberto Romulo to negotiate Smith’s transfer to an appropriate detention facility. Pending such an agreement, Smith can remain at the embassy, the court said.

It also directed the Court of Appeals to quickly resolve Smith’s appeal.

The U.S. Embassy issued a statement saying it would consult with legal experts in Washington.

The rape case has stirred emotions in the former U.S. colony and became a rallying point for activists demanding an end to U.S. military counterterrorism exercises.

Smith, 23, from St. Louis, Missouri, was detained and put on trial in 2006 after a woman accused him of rape. After sentencing, he was transferred from a local jail to U.S. custody while his case was on appeal.

When a Filipino judge initially ordered Smith be detained in a suburban Manila jail, the U.S. government temporarily suspended joint, large-scale military exercises in protest. Washington agreed to proceed with the annual Balikatan war exercises with the Philippines only after Smith had been transferred to the embassy.

President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo backed the U.S. position and said Smith’s embassy detention was necessary to avoid complications in relations with its key ally.

A provision in the 1998 Visiting Forces Agreement states that any accused U.S. service member shall remain in American custody until all judicial proceedings are exhausted.

But there are differing interpretations of when that is. The Filipino woman’s lawyer, Evalyn Ursua, and the left-wing alliance Bayan claim Smith should be serving his sentence in a Philippine jail, regardless of his appeal.

Smith’s lawyer, Jose Justiniano, said he explained the implications of the decision to his client. He said Smith has no choice but to comply.

Rucker soldier charged with death of son, 5 months old

2009-02-13T09:09:00.001-08:00

FORT RUCKER, Ala. — A Fort Rucker soldier charged with manslaughter in the death of his 5-month-old son has admitted to shaking the infant in the past.

Dedrick Fisher Sr. attended a hearing on post Wednesday to determine if there was enough evidence to continue through court proceedings against him.

Federal authorities charged Fisher with involuntary manslaughter the day after Dedrick Jr. died Feb. 2.

According to testimony, Dedrick Fisher Jr. suffered injuries as severe as those an older child would have suffered from a television falling on his head.

A Fort Rucker special agent said Fisher admitted he was irritated when he shook Dedrick Jr. at least once in November.

Rucker soldier charged with death of son, 5 months old

2009-02-13T09:09:00.000-08:00

FORT RUCKER, Ala. — A Fort Rucker soldier charged with manslaughter in the death of his 5-month-old son has admitted to shaking the infant in the past.

Dedrick Fisher Sr. attended a hearing on post Wednesday to determine if there was enough evidence to continue through court proceedings against him.

Federal authorities charged Fisher with involuntary manslaughter the day after Dedrick Jr. died Feb. 2.

According to testimony, Dedrick Fisher Jr. suffered injuries as severe as those an older child would have suffered from a television falling on his head.

A Fort Rucker special agent said Fisher admitted he was irritated when he shook Dedrick Jr. at least once in November.

Sheriff’s deputy must stand trial for alleged death threat, judge rules

2009-02-11T09:08:00.000-08:00

Following more than two hours of testimony, a judge ruled Tuesday that a San Bernardino County sheriff’s deputy must stand trial on criminal charges for allegedly holding a gun to another man’s head while off duty.

Richard Heverly, 42, who works at West Valley Detention Center in Rancho Cucamonga, must stand trial on four felony counts, ruled Judge Arjuna T. Saraydarian: assault with a semi-automatic firearm, assault by a public officer, criminal threats and false imprisonment.

All four charges carry sentencing enhancements because Heverly used a gun.

Sheriff’s deputy accused of death threats, gun charges returns to work

Back in court: Sheriff’s depupty accused of assault, threats while off duty

San Bernardino County Sheriff’s deputy Richard Heverly

The man Heverly allegedly threatened testified for about an hour and a half Tuesday in Palm Springs Superior Court about his encounter last year with Heverly, a La Verne resident.

Roger Ross Gilstrap Jr., 33, testified that Heverly handcuffed him, drove a pistol into his head, and flashed his sheriff’s deputy badge, telling Gilstrap the badge “entitles me to do whatever the (expletive) I want to do.”

On Aug. 10, 2008, Gilstrap said he was working as a tow-truck driver for Blythe Freeway Towing, Inc.

While responding to a call for service, Gilstrap said he saw a smoking big-rig at about 6:15 p.m. on the shoulder of the westbound 10 Freeway about 50 miles east of Indio.

Gilstrap, of Blythe, testified that he maneuvered his truck to block the shoulder and right lane of the two-lane freeway. He testified that he was talking to a California Highway Patrol dispatcher on his cell phone about the burning big-rig.

Heverly’s pickup truck was parked 10 to 15 feet to the left of Gilstrap’s truck, Gilstrap testified.

As Gilstrap remained on the line with CHP and monitored the now-flaming big-rig, he said he noticed Heverly walking towards him, flashing something he couldn’t see clearly and saying something he couldn’t hear.

Gilstrap said Heverly, wearing a white tank-top and shorts, approached and told him to get off the phone. Gilstrap told Heverly he was on the phone with the highway patrol, Gilstrap testified.

Heverly repeated his command, sometimes using profanity, and Gilstrap repeated his response, keeping his cell phone to his ear, Gilstrap testified.

Heverly grabbed Gilstrap’s shirt and tried to pull him out of the truck, but was unsuccessful, Gilstrap testified. He said Heverly went back to his truck and retrieved handcuffs and again demanded that Gilstrap leave his truck.

Either before or after Heverly retrieved the handcuffs - Gilstrap said he couldn’t remember the exact sequence of events - Heverly grabbed Gilstrap’s cell phone and disconnected the call.

Heverly, now holding handcuffs, again demanded that Gilstrap get off his truck. Gilstrap said he again refused, and Heverly returned to his truck and retrieved a handgun from a black bag on his dashboard.

Heverly pointed the gun at Gilstrap and again demanded that he leave the truck. This time Gilstrap complied, he testified.

Heverly grabbed Gilstrap’s right arm and handcuffed his wrist, cutting Gilstrap’s wrist, Gilstrap testified.

“My hand immediately went numb,” he said.

He said Heverly then walked him to the back of his tow truck and brandished his handgun.

“He put his pistol in my ear and started pushing me down over my (truck) bed,” Gilstrap testified.

Heverly forced Gilstrap’s head onto the bed of his truck, Gilstrap testified, and twisted the barrel of the gun into Gilstrap’s head.

“Do you feel that?” Heverly asked, according to Gilstrap’s testimony. “I have a (expletive) gun to your head and I will kill you.”

Shortly after, fire trucks approached the scene of the burning big rig, and when Heverly noticed them coming his demeanor changed, Gilstrap testified.

He walked Gilstrap back to the driver’s side of the tow truck and told Gilstrap he would take the handcuffs off. He asked Gilstrap if he was going to do anything after the handcuffs were removed, Gilstrap testified.

“Not until CHP gets here,” Gilstrap said he responded.

Heverly repeated his question - this time with an angrier, more aggravated tone - and Gilstrap repeated his response, Gilstrap testified.

They repeated the exchange a third time before Heverly took off the handcuffs, Gilstrap testified.

After Gilstrap left the witness stand, three California Highway Patrol officers involved in the investigation of Heverly’s alleged crimes testified.

Officer Brandon Reynolds testified that he arrived at the burning-big-rig scene at about 6:30 p.m., and noticed that Gilstrap’s right wrist - which Heverly handcuffed - was bleeding and swollen.

The officer said that when he recovered Heverly’s gun, it had a full magazine but did not have a bullet in the chamber.

Reynolds testified that he asked Heverly why he handcuffed Gilstrap and held and gun to Gilstrap’s head.

Heverly responded that he felt threatened by Gilstrap when Gilstrap turned toward him. Gilstrap was as big, if not bigger, than Heverly, Heverly said, according to Reynolds’ testimony.

The other two CHP officers who testified Tuesday repeated witnesses’ accounts of the events, and testified about details contained in audio recordings of Gilstrap’s phone calls to CHP dispatchers.

After the hearing, Heverly and his attorney, Michael Schwartz, declined to comment. When asked to elaborate on Heverly’s feelings of being threatened by Gilstrap, Schwartz responded: “You’ll find out at trial.”

He prosecutor, Deputy District Attorney Joanna Daniels, said she didn’t believe Heverly’s statement about Gilstrap being a threat is credible.

Heverly is set to next appear in court on March 3.

Attorney: shooting of victim in Chino “intentional”

2009-02-11T09:07:00.000-08:00

An attorney for the family of a Rubidoux man shot to death by a Chino police officer on Sunday night said the shooting was intentional. Mark Algorri, a Pasadena attorney speaking on behalf of the family of Daniel Balandran, anticipates filing a wrongful death claim with the city after his firm’s investigation is complete.

Balandran was a bystander when he was shot and killed by the police officer who apparently thought he was involved in a robbery at the Papa John’s shop at 12615 Central Ave.

“I have been in discussion with the attorney representing the city of Chino and I expect, in this case, that we will expect reasonable cooperation from the city of Chino,” Algorri said.

He said it was too early to respond to questions regarding a settlement with the city.

On Friday, Balandran’s family, still grieving over the loss, stood silently with Algorri at a news conference.

“To them, it will always remain a completely senseless shooting and death and it is something, needless to say, they will never get over,” Algorri said.

As Algorri spoke about the shooting death, an emotional Ariceli Millan, Balandran’s fiancee, held their four-month-old infant Manuel Balandran in her arms while Balandran’s 5-year-old daughter listened.

“This was not a young man caught in a crossfire,” Algorri said. “Daniel was shot intentionally, it turns out, by the Chino Police Department, quite a distance from where the actual robbery was taking place and what we know, and our investigation has just begun, is that he was shot in a face-to-face confrontation.

“He was not given a warning, not told to put his hands up, and not told to lie on the ground. And that is really what we have at this point in time.”

On Sunday night, Balandran went to Chino to visit a local skate park with a friend and later ordered from a McDonald’s drive-through.

Balandran and his friend parked their vehicle to eat, but left after hearing commotion from the robbery, Algorri said.

Balandran was shot just south of the pizza shop, Algorri said.

Chino Valley spokeswoman Michelle Van Der Linden confirmed that the city’s attorney has been in discussions with Algorri’s office, but she could not comment on the accuracy of his descriptions of the incident.

A Chino police officer wounded in the shootout is in stable condition at a hospital, Van Der Linden said.

On Friday, the robbery suspects — Edward Cisneros, 28, of La Mirada, and Joel Anthony Jaquez, 28, of Hacienda Heights — remained hospitalized at Arrowhead Regional Medical Center in Colton.

(Riverside) Justice for Annette García: Community responds to police murder of activist mother

2009-02-02T09:06:00.000-08:00

RIVERSIDE, California - January 29, 2009 The Brown Berets of Aztlán led a march from the César Chávez Community Center at the Bobby Bonds Park to the Riverside Sheriff’s Department, where they held a candlelight vigil and demonstration.

They convoked the assembly to build momentum for the movement for justice for Annette García, a Perris resident, Brown Beret member, and mother of six, who was shot in the back on January 23 by a Riverside sheriff’s deputy.

The Brown Berets were joined by mourners, anti-police brutality activists, community members, and immigrant rights activists, many of also protested today’s simultaneous immigration raids in many communities across the Inland Empire.

Brown Berets de Aztlan are recruiting and forming new chapters

Brown Berets de Aztlan protest the police murder of one of their own

ALIPAC - Brown Berets De Aztlan Hold Protest Over Shooting

(Border Patrol agents were reported to have done sweeps in the cities on Rialto and Fontana, as well as paying visits to the Riverside Home Depot and the San Bernardino Greyhound station. See the calendar for information about tomorrow’s emergency press conference.)

But the focus of the evening fell mainly on Annette García, and the need for organization, unity, and action to prevent such acts of state-perpetuated cruelty.

Organizers asked the nearly fifty people present to return on Saturday at 10:00 am for another, larger march and press conference. “Go back, tell people about it. If you’ve got some websites, jump on the websites. On MySpace, send out your bulletins. Tell ‘em how it was today, tell them what you expect to happen Saturday. We wanna raise hell over there at Bobby Bonds Park before we get here. Then we’re gonna close this place down for several hours.”

The impact of the police presence on the local community was underscored by the nearly constant procession of sad-faced family members, some of whom seemed surprised to see protesters upon arriving at the detention center to attempt to free their loved ones.

After several moving speeches and raucous chants, we were all provided rides back to the Chávez center.

“This is not the first time we’ve marched on Riverside,” said one veterano at the initiation of the march.

Nor will it be the last.

CHP kills three boys, ages 15, 11 and 9, in high speed chase

2009-02-02T09:05:00.000-08:00

FONTANA - Three boys fleeing a California Highway Patrol officer were killed late Wednesday when they crashed a car into a brick wall and the vehicle landed in a yard.Two of the boys - the 15-year-old driver and an 11-year-old passenger - died at the scene when they were thrown from the vehicle. A 9-year-old passenger, who was wearing a seatbelt, died at Arrowhead Regional Medical Center.

San Bernardino coroner’s officials identified the driver as Devon R. Keeten and the 9-year-old as Devon’s brother Dylan R. Green, both of Fontana. The 11-year-old remained unidentified.

A California Highway Patrol officer pulled over the 15-year-old boy behind the wheel of a silver Nissan Altima after he ran a red light at 8:55 p.m., said Officer Steven Cuevas. When the officer walked up to the vehicle, the driver sped away.

He led the officer on a short chase, running several red lights and speeding at 90 mph, until he lost control of the car at the corner of Alder and Shamrock avenues and crashed into the wall. The vehicle flipped over the wall and ended up in the front yard of a home.

Several people were in the house at the time of the accident but they were not injured, authorities said.

Dolores Pimentel, who was at home with her husband Edward and two young grandchildren, said they were watching television when the vehicle crashed. At first, they thought it was an earthquake.

“It was a horrible accident,” Pimentel said. “We thought the house was falling apart.” She and her husband ran outside and saw a body on their porch. They ran back inside to keep their grandchildren, ages 3 and 1, from seeing it.

Dust filled the house as it continued to crumble. The couple moved their grandchildren to a back room to keep them safe.

It wasn’t until later they discovered that all occupants of the vehicle were also children. Despite their deaths, she was grateful no one was harmed in her house.

“Thank God they were all O.K. inside,” she said.

Since then, the family has not been able to sleep due to emergency and television crews surrounding their home.

Code enforcement personnel arrived at the scene this morning and red-tagged the home, meaning the home has been deemed unsafe.

Devon attended Wayne Ruble Middle School and Dylan attended Juniper Elementary School, both within the Fontana Unified School District, according to Robert Ratcliffe, district police chief.

Ratcliffe said counselors have been sent to both schools to offer grievance counseling to students and staff.

Staff writer Debbie Pfeiffer-Trunnell and the Associated Press contributed to this report.

The US military and its cult of cruelty

2009-02-02T09:04:00.000-08:00

In the week that George Bush took to fantasizing that his blood-soaked “war on terror” would lead the 21st century into a “shining age of human liberty” I went through my mail bag to find a frightening letter addressed to me by an American veteran whose son is serving as a lieutenant colonel and medical doctor with US forces in Baghdad. Put simply, my American friend believes the change of military creed under the Bush administration - from that of “soldier” to that of “warrior” - is encouraging American troops to commit atrocities.

From Abu Ghraib to Guantanamo to Bagram, to the battlefields of Iraq and to the “black” prisons of the CIA, humiliation and beatings, rape, anal rape and murder have now become so commonplace that each new outrage is creeping into the inside pages of our newspapers. My reporting notebooks are full of Afghan and Iraqi complaints of torture and beatings from August 2002, and then from 2003 to the present point. How, I keep asking myself, did this happen? Obviously, the trail leads to the top. But where did this cult of cruelty begin?

So first, here’s the official US Army “Soldier’s Creed“, originally drawn up to prevent anymore Vietnam atrocities:

“I am an American soldier. I am a member of the United States Army - a protector of the greatest nation on earth. Because I am proud of the uniform I wear, I will always act in ways creditable to the military service and the nation that it is sworn to guard … No matter what situation I am in, I will never do anything for pleasure, profit or personal safety, which will disgrace my uniform, my unit or my country. I will use every means I have, even beyond the line of duty, to restrain my Army comrades from actions, disgraceful to themselves and the uniform. I am proud of my country and it’s flag. I will try to make the people of this nation proud of the service I represent for I am an American soldier.”

Now here’s the new version of what is called the “Warrior Ethos“:

“I am an American soldier.
I am a warrior and a member of a team. I serve the people of the Unites States and live the Army values.
I will always place the mission first.
I will never accept defeat.
I will never quit.
I will never leave a fallen comrade.
I am disciplined, physically and mentally tough, trained and proficient in my warrior tasks and drills. I always maintain my arms, my equipment and myself.
I am an expert and I am a professional. I stand ready to deploy, engage and destroy the enemies of the United States of America in close combat. I am a guardian of freedom and the American way of life.
I am an American soldier.”

Like most Europeans - and an awful lot of Americans - I was quite unaware of this ferocious “code” for US armed forces, although it’s not hard to see how it fits in with Bush’s rantings. I’m tempted to point this out in detail, but my American veteran did so with such eloquence in his letter to me that the response should come in his words: “The Warrior Creed,” he wrote, “allows no end to any conflict accept total destruction of the ‘enemy’. It allows no defeat … and does not allow one ever to stop fighting (lending itself to the idea of the ‘long war’). It says nothing about following orders, it says nothing about obeying laws or showing restraint. It says nothing about dishonorable actions …”.

Each day now, I come across new examples of American military cruelty in Iraq and Afghanistan. Here, for example, is Army Specialist Tony Lagouranis, part of an American mobile interrogation team working with US marines, interviewed by Amy Goodman on the American Democracy Now! program describing a 2004 operation in Babel, outside Baghdad: “Every time Force Recon went on a raid, they would bring back prisoners who were bruised, with broken bones, sometimes with burns. They were pretty brutal to these guys. And I would ask the prisoners what happened, how they received these wounds. And they would tell me that it was after their capture, while they were subdued, while they were handcuffed and they were being questioned by the Force Recon Marines … One guy was forced to sit on an exhaust pipe of a Humvee … he had a giant blister, third-degree burns on the back of his leg.”

Lagouranis, whose story is powerfully recalled in Goodman’s new book, Static, reported this brutality to a Marine major and a colonel-lawyer from the US Judge Advocate General’s Office. “But they just wouldn’t listen, you know? They wanted numbers. They wanted numbers of terrorists apprehended … so they could brief that to the general.”

The stories of barbarity grow by the week, sometimes by the day. In Canada, an American military deserter appealed for refugee status and a serving comrade gave evidence that when US forces saw babies lying in the road in Fallujah - outrageously, it appears, insurgents sometimes placed them there to force the Americans to halt and face ambush - they were under orders to drive over the children without stopping.

Which is what happens when you always “place the mission first” when you are going to “destroy” - rather than defeat - your enemies. As my American vet put it: “the activities in American military prisons and the hundreds of reported incidents against civilians in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere are not aberrations - they are part of what the US military, according to the ethos, is intended to be. Many other armies behave in a worse fashion than the US Army. But those armies don’t claim to be the “good guys” … I think we need… a military composed of soldiers, not warriors.”

Winston Churchill understood military honor. “In defeat, defiance,” he advised Britons in the Second World War. “In victory, magnanimity.” Not any more. According to George W. Bush this week “the safety of America depends on the outcome of the battle in the streets of Baghdad” because we are only in the “early hours of this struggle between tyranny and freedom”.

I suppose, in the end, we are supposed to lead the 21st century into a shining age of human liberty in the dungeons of “black” prisons, under the fists of US Marines, on the exhaust pipes of Humvees. We are warriors, we are Samurai. We draw the sword. We will destroy. Which is exactly what Osama bin Laden said.

Recruiters banned at RIT

2009-01-28T09:03:00.000-08:00

ROCHESTER, N.Y.–Members of the Campus Antiwar Network (CAN) at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) are celebrating a significant victory after the director for Campus Life issued the order to stop allowing military recruiters in the Student Alumni Union.

On January 15, CAN members were promoting an upcoming meeting calling for the U.S. to immediately withdraw from Afghanistan when an ally who works at the information desk told us that military recruiters were arriving in half an hour. An emergency message was immediately sent out to CAN members for a counter-recruitment action.

When two members of the National Guard arrived, one of them laid out their tablecloth and the other went to reserve a table. CAN members went over to one of the recruiters and asked him questions about Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine. The recruiter portrayed the National Guard as “the good guys,” who “help out with Hurricane Katrina and stuff.” He also claimed that the National Guard is not deployed overseas, which is false.

When the other Guardsman returned, he said that they couldn’t have a table because of “something that happened before with the Marines or whatever.”

The recruiters may have been clueless about why they couldn’t have a table, but CAN members were very much aware. On October 24, CAN at RIT held a counter-recruitment action with over two dozen protesters, including members of the Iraq Veterans Against the War. Antiwar protesters chanting prevented recruiters from recruiting, and even talking. We forced them to pack up.

ACLU files suit to allow counter-recruiting

Feds Act Against Eureka, Arcata Over Voted Measures to Restrict Military Recruiter Access to Minors

“No Child Left Behind “: “Trojan Horse” for Pentagon Recruiters

Pentagon Targets Afro and Hispanic Youth to Fight Its Wars

America’s Child Soldiers: US Military Recruiting Children

New Army Recruiting Tactic: Obama will “Get Us Out of Iraq”

When the National Guard took off this time, our ally from the information desk told us that her supervisor told the National Guard recruiters that they and other branches of the military were not allowed to recruit in the building because the administration didn’t want “another riot.”

They may have been banned from the busiest place on campus, but they will find an alternative location to recruit. CAN has no problem with changing accommodations. We’ll keep fighting.

This victory for the CAN chapter is also one for the student antiwar movement because this is what it means when we say activism matters. Organizing matters. Educating ourselves matters. Protest certainly does matter because it’s the best weapon we have in combating budget cuts, recruiters, war profiteers, discrimination and any struggle that lies ahead.

Marine sentenced to 6 years in prison for rape

2009-01-27T09:02:00.000-08:00

SAN DIEGO — A lance corporal at Marine Corps Air Station Miramar has been sentenced to six years in prison for rape.

Leland Kee pleaded guilty to two counts of rape, one count of breaking and entering and one count of attempting to destroy evidence. He pleaded on Jan. 5 and the Marines announced the sentence Friday.

Court documents show Kee was playing video games with the victim on Nov. 2 in his barracks room. She then returned to her room and fell asleep. Kee admitted sneaking into her room and raping her. The woman called military police to report the attack.

The San Diego Union-Tribune says Kee’s prison term was limited to 40 months because of a pretrial agreement with prosecutors. He will received a dishonorable discharge at the end of his sentence.

Suit filed in killing by deputy

2009-01-25T08:59:00.001-08:00

ADELANTO - The family of a man shot and killed last year by a sheriff’s deputy during a desert struggle filed a $10 million civil lawsuit Friday in U.S. Federal District Court in Riverside.

San Bernardino County sheriff’s Deputy Joseph Janowicz was following up on a theft case Jan. 17 when he drove down Topaz Drive into a rural area. It was there that he found 35-year-old Donald James Hottinger.

Officials say the father of three was “uncooperative,” providing a false name and date of birth. The attorney who filed the lawsuit said Hottinger hadn’t committed a crime and the deputy should not have tried to detain him.

The shooting “was unjustified and they’ve tried to come up with an excuse to explain it,” said attorney Dale K. Galipo. “It adds insult to injury that the Sheriff’s Department tried to fabricate evidence in the way it happened.”

Hottinger grabbed a gasoline can from his truck and doused himself and Janowicz, threatening to light them on fire, officials said.

Then “he grabbed onto the deputy’s arm, got into his car and took off, dragging the deputy with him,” said sheriff’s spokeswoman Cindy Beavers. “At that point, the deputy’s life definitely was in danger.”

Janowicz opened fire, hitting Hottinger. The deputy fell to the ground and the truck continued rolling until it hit a pile of construction debris.

As per procedure, a sheriff’s homicide team investigated the shooting and turned their findings over to the District Attorney’s Office.

Prosecutors have not yet released a report on the incident so the details surrounding the shooting remain unknown.

“We think the evidence will show that he did not run the police officer over nor did he try to set him on fire,” Galipo said.

Hottinger’s family could not be reached for comment Friday. Sheriff’s officials said they cannot comment on lawsuits.

Police “High-Speed Chases:” Another Innocent Life Taken

2009-01-25T08:59:00.000-08:00

A 67-year-old San Bernardino woman died early Saturday when a man fleeing police slammed into her car, police said.

Ruby Lene Johnson was driving a 1995 Toyota Camry west on Base Line at about 12:30 a.m. when a speeding 2007 Scion traveling north on Mount Vernon Avenue ran a red light and hit her car, authorities said. She was pronounced dead at the scene, the San Bernardino County coroner’s office said.

Jose Palacios, 20, was arrested on suspicion of vehicular manslaughter, driving under the influence of drugs or alcohol and failing to stop for police. Police said they believe Palacios, whose residence was unknown, was traveling more than 100 mph.

Police were chasing Palacios after another hit-and-run at Foothill Boulevard and Riverside Avenue in Rialto, said police Lt. Gwendolyn Waters.

Victims of that hit-and-run followed Palacios into San Bernardino and flagged down police, who tried to catch up with Palacios near Mount Vernon and Fifth Street, she said. Palacios initially slowed down, then accelerated and attempted to flee, she said.

After the Camry and Scion collided, both vehicles hit two other vehicles in the intersection of Base Line and Mount Vernon before coming to rest about 60 feet north of the intersection, police said. A driver and passenger in one of those other vehicles were injured and taken to Arrowhead Regional Medical Center in Colton.

–David Olson

dolson@PE.com

Wisconsin takes action to fight domestic abuse among cops

2009-01-23T08:55:00.000-08:00

Editor’s note: Recently, a New York City police lieutenant stabbed and shot his wife to death, bringing up the important issue of acknowledging that police officers can be abusers or can be abused by another family member, regardless of age or gender. When Tyler Peterson killed his ex-girlfriend, along with five others, Force Science News consulted 3 prominent authorities on police psychology for their professional insights. Read the article here: Experts look at a young officer’s murderous rampage

MADISON, Wis. — Christmas has twice come and gone since Wayne Coulter last saw Lindsey Stahl alive.

The hurt hangs in his voice as he talks about life without the girl he helped raise since she was a toddler. Words of anger, frustration and sadness come next. They catch in his throat as he tries to rationalize how Lindsey’s life and the lives of five others were taken in Wisconsin’s most extreme, deadly case of officer-involved domestic violence.

Fourteen-year-old Lindsey died on Oct. 7, 2007, in the small, northern Wisconsin town of Crandon. Jarred by the news that his former girlfriend was seeing someone new, 20-year-old Tyler Peterson, an officer employed by the Crandon and Forest County departments, went to the home of his former girlfriend. Upon entering the apartment, he opened fire with an assault rifle on all seven people who were there for a pizza party. A standoff ensued between Peterson and his friends on the force. Peterson eventually killed himself with a pistol.

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Now, the families of three of the six victims and the sole survivor of the shooting have filed a civil suit against the police departments that employed Peterson. The suit charges that the police chief and sheriff knew that Peterson had shown a pattern of domestic violence and abuse of authority but did nothing about it.

Before Forest County denied the initial claim that preceded the lawsuit. County Corporation Counsel Paul Payant told the Associated Press that the Sheriff’s Department had no way of knowing that Peterson was capable of such violence.

Bitter feelings continue to swirl around the community, even toward the families of the victims. Coulter said they have anonymously been receiving “nasty letters saying we should drop the suit, and we should be hanging our heads in shame.

“It’s pretty rough living up here now.”

News of the crime in Crandon rang out far beyond the small town’s borders; even the Los Angeles Times reported on the story. The crime not only received national exposure, but put faces to a grim reality of the law enforcement community, a reality seldom discussed outside internal affairs offices or among officers themselves.

Yet those in the know — the officers, prosecutors and domestic violence advocates — have become increasingly aware of the higher prevalence of domestic violence in the families of law enforcement officers.

The National Center for Women and Policing cites two studies from the mid-1990s that have found at least 40 percent of police officer families experience domestic violence, defined as verbal, psychological or physical abuse, in contrast to 10-20 percent of families in the general population. The studies are well-regarded and often cited by law enforcement and domestic violence advocates locally and nationally.

In the Madison area, Dane County Sheriff Dave Mahoney said two officers had been disciplined internally for domestic violence incidents in the past year, but no criminal charges were brought against them. They are still on the force. Following an open records request, the Madison Police Department reported that one officer has been fired or suspended for domestic violence in the past five years. That was Russell Henderson, who was fired in 2006.

In Wisconsin, nobody is keeping track of the problem. Unless an officer shoots or severely abuses someone, news about an incident will rarely make its way out of internal affairs, and no state agency collects the data.

But state law enforcement officials are concerned about the problem, and this summer, the Law Enforcement Standards Board approved a new policy and 99-page training manual. All new law enforcement recruits will now learn about how officer-involved domestic violence cases should be handled from the moment a call is received, on through how an allegation is vetted and potentially prosecuted in court. Current officers don’t have to take the training, but they can do so by attending a training seminar, one of which was held Tuesday in Green Bay. Another is being held in Oconomowoc on Thursday.

“This is no longer law enforcement’s dirty little secret,” said Michael Serpe, a board member of the Law Enforcement Standards Board since 2003 and the Door County administrator. “The research has been out there for years. Police officers are more inclined than other groups to be involved with domestic violence themselves. It is time to raise the public’s awareness on this issue.”

Reasons for the prevalence of domestic abuse among officers are numerous. Historically, police were reluctant to pursue domestic violence cases, seeing them more as lovers’ quarrels meant for social workers to handle rather than police officers. While this viewpoint has evolved over the years with the criminalization of domestic violence crimes, some officers remain reluctant to crack down on their own. Even the state’s own training manual reads: “Officers’ reluctance to consider officer-involved domestic violence as a crime remains the final obstacle to overcome.”

The reluctance may be a consequence of one of the central tenets of police culture.

“The first rule is a code of silence,” said Diane Wetendorf, an independent consultant on officer-involved domestic violence based in Arlington Heights, Ill. “They don’t rat on each other.”

There is a logical reason for the protective atmosphere. The culture not only builds trust and security among those in a department, but is necessary in a profession that can be extremely stressful and dangerous.

“Not all police officers are abusers. Nobody ever said they were,” said Dottie Davis, a deputy chief of the Fort Wayne, Ind., Police Department and keynote speaker at this week’s training sessions in Wisconsin. “But for those who are, we have to police our own and hold officers to the same standards as the average citizens.”

For those who do turn abusive, combat skills taught at the police academy can be used to grim effect at home.

Prosecutors say former Wausau police officer Chueng Lee used intimidation tactics and expertise he gained from investigating accidents in an attempt to kill his wife in a car crash on Sept. 18, 2007.

On that night, Lee, 47, dropped the speed of his truck down from the posted 55 mph limit to between 25 and 30 mph on a rural country road, Shawano County District Attorney Gregory Parker said in an interview. Lee then turned the car into one of only two concrete bridge abutments in Shawano County. Parker described the concentrated impact to the passenger-side headrest, where Lee’s wife was sitting, as “astounding.”

“He was a cop. He knew what he was doing and he knew how to drive that vehicle,” Parker said. “There were a lot of us — investigators and such — that thought that’s what was going on in relation to how he crashed the vehicle.”

Parker said he had officers within Lee’s jurisdiction set to testify at the jury trial. Had those officers had a chance to take the stand, they would have told of another incident in which Lee followed his wife and repeatedly nudged her car with his vehicle, Parker said.

“Officers had contacted him and told him he needed to cease this type of behavior or he would be charged,” Parker said. Several days later, Lee drove into the bridge.

Before those officers had a chance to testify, Lee accepted a plea deal. When he did, his wife recanted her story. She told the judge she still loved her husband and still wanted to be with him. She said she was joking when officers interviewed her about the incident and told the judge that Lee wasn’t trying to kill her, Parker said.

Despite that, Lee was sentenced to three years in prison followed by two years of extended supervision.

Having a victim recant is always a concern for prosecutors in domestic violence cases, but particularly so in cases involving police officers. A domestic violence conviction is a career killer for them. A misdemeanor or felony conviction means the officer can no longer use or own a firearm. No gun, no job. If money and financial security are issues for the abused, this reality may push a victim toward recanting their story.

“It is great to have a policy, but if the victim will suffer a financial toll, too often the victim is silenced,” said Margie Moore, director of the National Center for Women and Policing. “We really need to look at financial solutions for those who come forward.”

Wetendorf, who has worked with domestic violence victims for nearly 30 years, said the knowledge police officers have of how victims typically seek help also makes coming forward more difficult for victims. The advice she usually gives to victims — call the police, seek assistance at a shelter — doesn’t work. Officers know the locations of domestic abuse shelters. They know if a call is placed to police. If the officer works undercover, they are trained to deceive people, which helps them hide their abuse from others. Then there’s the credibility issue. Wetendorf said officers commonly warn their victims that it will be their word against the word of an officer.

“Domestic abuse is about power and control,” Wetendorf said. “And policing is about gaining and maintaining power and control. The skills that can make a competent police officer can make a dangerous abuser.”

In the early 1980s, Deputy Chief Davis of the Fort Wayne Police Department was in an abusive relationship with her husband. He was also a police officer. The two worked in different departments, which Davis never names in her frequent public lectures on officer-involved domestic violence.

In her case, the verbal and psychological abuse started when he began to tell her she was “wasting a man’s job.”

Tactics he had learned at the academy came next. He would sweep his leg under her to knock her to the floor and then pin her down. The move is used to bring someone under control quickly in the field and to leave no visible signs of injury. The tactics had the same effect on her.

But a female sergeant who worked with Davis recognized signs of domestic abuse. When confronted, Davis denied it. The female officer ordered her into counseling. Meanwhile, her husband was promoted. She stayed with her husband until the abuse turned toward their young daughter. Then she left him.

Because Davis called 911 on several occasions, she knew others were aware of the abuse. She never pressed charges and her ex-husband was never reprimanded or criminally charged. Davis said the police never wrote reports and that the dispatch reports, which at the time were paper cards, were destroyed by fellow officers.

“In other words, it never happened,” Davis said.

She feels safe to talk about her experience now because most of the officers connected to her ex-husband are either dead or retired.

While the incidents occurred some 25 years ago and awareness about domestic violence is greater, a perception in the community persists that law enforcement officers are not held to the same standards as private citizens when it comes to domestic violence. Even Wisconsin’s new training manual on officer-involved domestic violence references the belief, and some recent examples give it credence.

On Dec. 15, 2005, David Riedel, a former Sauk County deputy, attended a party with his girlfriend and other law enforcement officers in Wisconsin Dells. The night turned violent after Riedel’s girlfriend, former Stoughton police officer Sonya Flower, talked with other officers, court records say. After fighting in a hotel room, Riedel tried to leave. To prevent him from driving drunk, Flower laid down behind his truck and he drove over her.

He then shouted: “You crazy f—— b—-, move,” Flower told investigators.

Flower passed out for awhile. She then dragged herself to a nearby hotel where she received help. Her liver was cut and her ribs and arm were bruised.

The next morning, Riedel admitted to officers he had been drinking. According to court documents, he said he didn’t remember running over Flower.

At one point, Riedel faced a felony hit-and-run charge. These days, his record is clean, thanks to Columbia County District Attorney Jane Kohlwey and Riedel’s attorney, Bruce Rosen of Madison.

Rather than potentially stand trial on the charges, Riedel was offered a deferred prosecution agreement. Under Wisconsin law, a deferred prosecution agreement allows a person facing criminal charges to fulfill certain conditions in return for a dismissal of the charges against them. To be eligible, the offender, in this case Riedel, usually does not have a criminal record, must be willing to participate in the agreement and accepts responsibility for the crime.

An investigation by the Baraboo News Republic, a sister publication to The Capital Times, revealed that Kohlwey pledged to destroy documents that detailed what Riedel would do to get the charges against him dismissed. Meanwhile, Flower was kept in the dark.

Last August, the manner in which this case was handled caused the Crime Victims Rights Board, an independent agency with staff support from the Wisconsin Department of Justice, to reprimand Kohlwey for her handling of the case.

With no felony conviction, Riedel could continue to own and operate a gun. The deal saved his career.

In an interview with the News Republic in December, Kohlwey said saving Riedel’s career was not her intent and that entering into the “secret agreement” to keep the conditions of the deferred prosecution agreement confidential was a “serious judgment error.”

While the charges against Riedel still were pending, Hillsboro Police Chief Thomas Richardson needed to fill a part-time spot on his small staff, a staff that included himself, another full-time officer and two part-time officers. Richardson said when he called Riedel’s attorney and authorities in Sauk County, he was told the charges against Riedel were going to be dismissed. With no conviction pending, Richardson said he felt comfortable hiring Riedel as his third part-time officer.

“He is a very good officer, and therefore he is still working here,” Richardson said. “From what I understand, he got messed up with the wrong girl.”

Like Riedel, Henderson — the Madison officer who was fired — also received a deferred prosecution deal. He pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct and making a telephone threat connected to an incident with his stepson and was terminated from the department in 2006, but the charges against him were dismissed after he completed the terms of a deferred prosecution agreement.

Henderson’s domestic violence issues came to light after he allegedly put his wife’s 15-year-old son in a headlock and slammed him into a door in 2004. His wife told officers investigating the incident with her son that she had twice called police to report domestic violence incidents, but when they arrived, she told them that nothing happened because she feared Henderson would lose his job. One incident allegedly occurred Nov. 3, 2003, when Henderson grabbed his wife by the hair and pulled her across the floor. She fell to the floor, then called police. The second incident occurred in May 2002 when Henderson allegedly shoved her to the ground with enough force to bruise her chest.

In Wisconsin Dells, the fallout from Riedel’s night out in Wisconsin Dells a little over three years ago continues.

On Dec. 11, 2008, Flower filed a civil suit in Sauk County against Riedel and several insurance companies. The lawsuit says Riedel caused pain and suffering as well as physical injury to Flower and should have to pay her medical expenses and lost wages.

With the civil suit now pending against Riedel and another one pending in Crandon, some departments are finding it may not be financially worth their while to keep quiet when it comes to officer-involved domestic violence.

The city of Tacoma, Wash., learned this lesson to the tune of a $75 million wrongful death suit when the city’s police chief shot himself and his wife on April 26, 2003. David Brame died instantly. His wife, Crystal Judson Brame, died a week later. The extremely public murder-suicide occurred a day after Tacoma city officials publicly stated they would not investigate Crystal’s claims of domestic abuse. On behalf of the couple’s two young children, Lane Judson, Crystal’s father, filed the suit.

Lane Judson said the secrecy had gone on long enough.

“It was never about the money,” Judson said. “It was meant to get their attention, and it did.”

The suit was settled for $12 million. In addition, the municipalities paid for the construction of the Crystal Judson Family Justice Center.

Lane Judson also pushed for the passage of a law in Washington that requires each police department to have an officer-involved domestic violence policy in place. Washington is the first and only state to have a mandated policy.

Wisconsin’s new policy differs in that departments do not have to adopt it. The number of police departments in Wisconsin that choose to adopt the policy remains to be seen.

On the national level, the Crystal Judson Brame Domestic Violence Protocol Program, an amendment to the federal Violence Against Women Act, provides access to upward of $180 million annually to law enforcement agencies to use in training their officers in the area of domestic violence. After reading Wisconsin’s policy, Lane Judson said Wisconsin was on the right track.

“They are making a heck of a good attempt to get something accomplished,” Judson said. “You can always improve on what you do.”

While some find fault with the policy, saying it doesn’t go far enough to protect the victims and has only been introduced for liability reasons, others see it as a first step toward increasing awareness on the issue.

“Is it the cure-all? No,” said Patti Seger, executive director of the Wisconsin Coalition Against Domestic Violence and a member of the Law Enforcement Standards Board. “But instead of sitting and watching these tragedies happen over and over again, we took action.”

Recent examples of officer-involved domestic violence in Wisconsin

Ten days before Christmas, Thomas Hutchins, an off-duty Milwaukee County sheriff’s deputy, became upset when his girlfriend started disciplining their child. After striking his girlfriend in the face, Hutchins was asked to leave. When he refused, she started to call 911. Hutchins pulled the phone out of the wall, then pointed his handgun at her saying, “You take my job, I’ll take your life,” according to the criminal complaint.

Two shots were fired before his girlfriend ran to a nearby apartment. Hutchins then fired through the door. A 12-year-old girl was shot three times. Hutchins is now charged with first-degree intentional homicide, first-degree reckless injury and reckless use of a firearm. He has resigned from his job.

Robert E. Hietala, 36, a former Sheboygan Falls police sergeant, was off duty on Oct. 2, 2005, when a fight broke out between him and his wife.

Police were called to Hietala’s home after his son called 911 and told a dispatcher that Hietala was threatening his mother with a gun. The argument was about the working hours of Hietala’s wife. Hietala told his wife to leave the home, which she refused to do, police said. The former police sergeant told his wife if she didn’t leave “he would have no choice but to hit her and throw his cell phone at her,” the criminal complaint said.

Hietala resigned from the police department several days after he was charged on Oct. 3 with misdemeanor disorderly conduct/domestic abuse while armed. Hietala’s resignation came in the midst of an internal investigation. He was later found guilty of the crime.

In May 2005, Beloit police officer Sheldon Kroning, 27, was arrested and given a one-day suspension following an incident of domestic-related disorderly conduct.

The verbal fight occurred between Kroning and a live-in girlfriend.

According to court records, Kroning participated in a deferred prosecution agreement and charges against him were dismissed.

Galesville police officer James T. Brudos, 39, was put on administrative leave after he was found trespassing on a former girlfriend’s home in Jackson County. He was found guilty of disorderly conduct on April 16, 2004. Through a plea deal, the Jackson County District Attorney’s Office agreed to dismiss the domestic violence enhancer to the disorderly conduct and bail-jumping charges if Brudos stayed out of trouble for nine months and agreed to meet other conditions. Within a month, Brudos was reinstated to his job in law enforcement.

Creating Prisoners is a Booming Industry in Need of a Bust

2009-01-23T08:54:00.000-08:00

In 2008, the United States passed a benchmark previously unheard of. For the first time in the nation’s history, every one in 100 adults was behind bars, making it no question that the USA is number one in the world when it comes to making people prisoners.

Since 1980, the overall prison population has seen a 400 percent surge.

For almost 30 years the people of this nation have watched blindly as state and federal legislatures composed hyperbolic crime-fighting schemes with euphemistic titles like: “tough on crime,” “truth in sentencing,” “three strikes,” or “The War on Drugs.”

We ate up the façade of security while they scaled back the evolution of the American justice system.

There exists, in this country, a prison industrial-complex.

An organized and systematic network of interest groups, lawyers, politicians, prison guard unions and construction companies, who form the cyclic mechanisms which hold the socially destructive machine in place.

They are the profiteers of imprisonment, bound not by the desire to correct or rehabilitate, but by the scent of big business.

The Militarization of our Local Police

How you became the enemy

Prisoners In 2007: 1 in 31 American Adults Now in Prison, Jail or on Parole

Democracy’s Ghosts: How 5.3 Million Americans Have Lost The Right To Vote

November Coalition

We sat around and watched as they built them up, one by one. Big concrete blocks built to hold as many human bodies as they could.

In some cases private companies built their for-profit prisons before they had even received a contract from the government.

In one such case in 1997, a company called Corrections Corporation of America (a major contributor to the American Legislative Exchange Council) built a 2,000-bed facility in California at a cost of $80-$100 million with no contract from the California Department of Corrections.

“If we build it, they will come,” said one of the company officials.

They did come, and that is the problem.

The prison industry has seen a massive boom in last few decades, and when the industry that symbolizes crime-fighting sees a boom, we are led to believe that it is crime that suffers.

Politicians gawk at the chance to rubber stamp their name on anything that will equate to positive crime-fighting statistics.

Yet, is it logical to believe that the true path to achieving a society less rampant with crime is to lock up one of every 100 citizens?

The state of California has been a prison playground for this past boom in corrections.

However, with the economy $41 billion in the hole, and prison overcrowding increasing faster than they can build prisons, it is incredibly imperative that action be made to twinge the machine rightward.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger wants to eliminate parole for all offenders not convicted of violent or sex-related crimes, reducing the parole population by about 70,000.

He also wants to divert more petty criminals to county jails and grant early release to more inmates - steps that could trim the prison population by 15,000 over the next 18 months.

These actions may very well represent the light at the end of a tunnel, an indirect chance for Legislature to stop concurring with those out to make money in the “prison business” and a chance to bring the cogs of the complex to a complete stop.

If Schwarzenegger makes these changes then there is hope.

Our fiscal troubles as a state put us in a position to stand up to those lobbying for the imprisonment of more and more Americans in order to tell them that the expense will no longer be paid.

One of 100 is a number that will not be accepted, no one has that many criminals.

SB County violates Brown Act

2009-01-23T08:42:00.000-08:00

San Bernardino County is being accused of violating the Brown Act, California’s open-meeting law, as it challenges the state’s medical marijuana user program.

San Bernardino County joined San Diego County three years ago in challenging the program, which requires it to issue medical-marijuana identification cards to patients.

The counties petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court to review the case last week. The courts have so far ruled against them, upholding the medical marijuana law approved by voters in 1996.

The Marijuana Policy Project, a national marijuana policy reform organization, said Wednesday that the San Bernardino County Board of Supervisors has failed to keep the public informed of its decisions to appeal.

Lawsuit filed over refusal to issue medical marijuana card

County no friend to medical pot patients

The group filed a complaint with the district attorney’s office in September after an Aug. 26 meeting where the board discussed the lawsuit in closed session but made no announcement of any action taken.

That same day, a sheriff’s spokeswoman announced that the county was appealing the case to the California Supreme Court.

Aaron Smith, California policy director for the Marijuana Policy Project, said his group has been stymied in its attempts to find out the status of the case.

“They seem to have a certain arrogance where they feel like they can flout any state law, including the open-meeting laws,” he said.

The county counsel’s office was given the authority to pursue the case as far as necessary when the county joined the lawsuit in January 2006, county spokesman David Wert said.

No announcement was necessary at the Aug. 26 meeting because no action was taken, he said.

Terry Franke, general counsel for Californians Aware, an open government advocacy group, said the board must report on any decisions made in closed session about whether to pursue the appeals.

The district attorney’s Public Integrity Unit is reviewing the complaint, said spokeswoman Susan Mickey.

Reach Imran Ghori at 951-368-9558 or ighori@PE.com

Malmstrom airman found guilty of larceny

2009-01-23T08:41:00.000-08:00

GREAT FALLS, Mont. — A Malmstrom Air Force Base airman has pleaded guilty in a military court martial to bilking friends out of more than $53,000 and participating in a scam to overcharge the federal government in purchases from a sporting goods store.

Sgt. Jonathan Harpole used the money to pay off gambling debts at local casinos, according to a news release issued by Malmstrom.

Base officials say Harpole pleaded guilty to 19 charges related to larceny and obtaining loans under false pretenses. He was sentenced to 18 months in confinement, given a bad-conduct discharge and his rank was reduced to airman basic.

The Malmstrom release says Harpole got loans from 11 military members by lying about illnesses and financial hardships in his family. He also shared in the money obtained when employees of a sporting goods store overcharged the government for purchases.

Someone else is spying on YOU. And it isn’t the NSA. Fusion Centers.

2009-01-22T16:09:00.000-08:00

JaciCee
Daily Kos
January 22, 2009

Ever hear of a Fusion Center?

They are run by the Department of Homeland Security and are locally based across the country.

A fusion center is an effective and efficient mechanism to exchange information and intelligence, maximize resources, streamline operations, and improve the ability to fight crime and terrorism by merging data from a variety of sources.

At first blush this sounds good. After 9/11 discussions were had about how to streamline communication between local and federal law enforcement agencies.

From the Department of Homeland Security website:

Many states and larger cities have created state and local fusion centers to share information and intelligence within their jurisdictions as well as with the federal government. The Department, through the Office of Intelligence and Analysis, provides personnel with operational and intelligence skills to the fusion centers. This support is tailored to the unique needs of the locality and serves to:

help the classified and unclassified information flow,
provide expertise,
coordinate with local law enforcement and other agencies, and
provide local awareness and access.

But, it is being alleged that something has gone wrong along the way. Fusion centers have now come under the scrutinizing eye of the ACLU, and for good reasons.

Who is spying in your neighborhood?

These centers have been placed in our neighborhoods. Our local fusion center is located on Bataan Boulevard in Santa Fe, New Mexico. You can find the fusion center nearest you by clicking on this interactive map. The ACLU has also set up a site that tracks camera surveillance. Video surveillance is nothing new, but:

Video surveillance is not a new phenomenon, but the amount of attention that the federal government has been paying is. In the past five years, the Department of Homeland Security has awarded $300 million in grants to state and local governments, all in the name of public video surveillance.

From the same article:

Meanwhile, a timely University of California study has found that San Francisco’s $700,000 ‘Crime Camera’ program has had no impact on violent crime since its 2005 installation. The study also states that robberies dropped significantly within each camera’s radius, but notes that this finding is inconclusive.

These two paragraphs beg some further discussion. Is the surveillance arm of the Department of Homeland Security working in conjunction with the fusion center in this California neighborhood? If surveillance cameras aren’t reducing crime significantly, what other purposes are they serving?

From California again:

The Electronic Frontier Foundation and the ACLU of California have filed a federal lawsuit against the FBI and local authorities over the seizure and search of two organizations’ computers, they jointly announced Wednesday.

…

On August 27, 2008, the University of California Police, the Alameda County Sheriff’s Department and the FBI took part in a raid of the Berkeley offices of two politically active groups, Long Haul Infoshop and East Bay Prisoner Support Group (EBPS), seizing every computer in the building, even those behind locked doors, which were opened by force. The raid was conducted despite no allegations of wrongdoing on the part of either organization or any of their members, and the complaint questions the legality of the warrant obtained by authorities.

Why search and seize at the Long Haul Infoshop or the East Bay Prisoner Support Group? Was the FBI working in conjunction with the local fusion center? More questions.

The neighborhood spying isn’t limited to California.

From the Washington Post:

Organizational meetings, public forums, prison vigils, rallies outside the State House in Annapolis and e-mail group lists were infiltrated by police posing as peace activists and death penalty opponents, the records show. The surveillance continued even though the logs contained no reports of illegal activity and consistently indicated that the activists were not planning violent protests.
…
The records show that undercover agents collectively spent 288 hours on surveillance activities over 14 months from March 2005 until May 2006.

The fusion center in New Mexico is known as a "cut and paste" shop. Analysts peruse media, in all forms (print and electronic), clipping information that they feel is "important" or "questionable." It is also alleged that they peruse the internet. It wouldn’t surprise me if they were reading this diary, now.

Their peering eyes are looking into the private sector:

A new institution is emerging in American life: Fusion Centers. These state, local and regional institutions were originally created to improve the sharing of anti-terrorism intelligence among different state, local and federal law enforcement agencies. Though they developed independently and remain quite different from one another, for many the scope of their mission has quickly expanded - with the support and encouragement of the federal government - to cover "all crimes and all hazards." The types of information they seek for analysis has also broadened over time to include not just criminal intelligence, but public and private sector data, and participation in these centers has grown to include not just law enforcement, but other government entities, the military and even select members of the private sector.

Legislation has been drafted, and will be presented to the New Mexico State Legislature, addressing concerns over the fusion center in Santa Fe.

A draft of the ACLU legislation, sponsored by Rep. Antonio "Mo" Maestas, D-Albuquerque, would prohibit a law enforcement agency from collecting, maintaining and sharing "with any other law enforcement agency, information about the political, religious or social associations, views or activities of a person unless" they are suspected of committing a crime.

That is the kicker…they aren’t watching American citizens who are suspected of committing crimes. They are watching whoever they want to.

A quick summary:

But in a democracy, the collection and sharing of intelligence information - especially information about American citizens and other residents - need to be carried out with the utmost care. That is because more and more, the amount of information available on each one of us is enough to assemble a very detailed portrait of our lives. And because security agencies are moving toward using such portraits to profile how "suspicious" we look.

American citizens aren’t being spied on just by the NSA. They are being spied on by the fusion center office around the corner.

Pinal County, AZ, shelves speed-camera program

2009-01-22T16:08:00.001-08:00

Pinal County supervisors Wednesday bid goodbye to photo enforcement.

Their vote to terminate their contract with Redflex, the company that operates the cameras, came at the recommendation of the county's top law-enforcement official, new Pinal County Sheriff Paul Babeu.

"I'm against photo speed enforcement completely," Babeu said, walking the three-member panel through a detailed PowerPoint presentation. "Here in Pinal, it's failed miserably."

Babeu said speed cameras created dangerous road conditions and offered little financial benefit for the county. He plans to boost traffic enforcement through additional manpower.

Although Pinal County's contract with Redflex wasn't set to expire until Feb. 20, two mobile speed cameras have not been in operation on Pinal roads since Babeu took office Jan. 1.

The speed vans had been roadside in some of Pinal's most populous areas, including Apache Junction, Gold Canyon and unincorporated areas near Queen Creek, since mid-2007.

The county's program is separate from the one operated by the Arizona Department of Public Safety on freeways statewide.

The supervisors two weeks ago had tabled a vote on the Redflex contract because they wanted Babeu to prepare a report on camera enforcement in Pinal, including the financial impact on the county.

He reported Wednesday that the two cameras were activated 11,416 times from September 2007 through last month. Of those activations, 7,290 resulted in citations, but only 3,711 were paid.

Babeu said most of the total $134,199.43 in fines and fees from the paid citations covered administrative and operational costs, leaving the county with a net profit of $12,391.58 that Babeu dismissed as paltry.

Moreover, Babeu said, total motor-vehicle accidents increased by 16 percent in the same time period, and fatal collisions in the Queen Creek area doubled from three to six.

The sheriff said he couldn't be certain that speed cameras were to blame for the crashes, but he believes they were a factor.

Collisions were said to be the reason Redflex was implemented on county roads. Former Sheriff Chris Vasquez initiated the contract to minimize an increasing number of crashes on Hunt Highway, the main thoroughfare connecting north-central Pinal County with Maricopa County.

Babeu thinks that putting more deputies on patrol offers the best way to improve safety, instead of relying on cameras that "can't catch drunk drivers" or stop motorists involved in illegal or dangerous activities.

The sheriff has increased his traffic-enforcement unit from two to four deputies, and a fifth will join the team soon. Babeu said the changes were made at no county cost as part of a departmentwide reorganization.

Babeu estimated that the volume of citations issued annually by the Sheriff's Office would increase sharply as a result of having more deputies on the streets. He said the five-member team alone could generate 10,400 to 20,800 citations a year.

Supervisor Bryan Martyn, whose district was the primary operating area for the speed vans, said he received a number of letters from residents who favored speed-camera enforcement, but he "doesn't presume to tell the sheriff how to do his job."

"He believes he has a better solution to this public-safety concern," Martyn said. "What he's proposing is prudent and seems to make sense. If it goes as sold, you may be praying for photo radar again."

Babeu may answer those prayers in a different way. He wants to bring red-light cameras to the county.

Speedball Beer Facing Sales Ban

2009-01-22T16:06:00.000-08:00

HEY! I wanted drugs, not beer…

A beer called Speedball has been criticised amid claims it promotes the drugs mix that killed actors John Belushi and River Phoenix. Speedballing is the name given to combining heroin and cocaine.

A complaint has been upheld against Fraserburgh’s BrewDog under the drinks industry watchdog the Portman Group’s code of practice.

However, a BrewDog spokesman said Speedball was “for those who enjoy a quality beer responsibly”.

David Poley, Portman Group chief executive, said the marketing was grossly irresponsible.

He said: “The blurring of alcohol and illicit drugs fosters unhealthy attitudes to drinking and trivialises drug misuse.

“BrewDog is profiteering from the scourge of illegal drugs, mocking the misery caused by misuse”

But is the beer any good?

Breathalyzer Source Code Required for Use as Evidence

2009-01-22T16:03:00.000-08:00

Posted on: January 21, 2009 9:30 AM, by Ed Brayton

Here's a very interesting case from Florida, where an appeals court has upheld a lower court ruling that threw out evidence from a breathalyzer test in a drunk driving case because the manufacturer of the device refused to release the source code and allow defense experts to analyze the accuracy of the machines.

The results of breath tests in more than 100 local drunken-driving cases will not be allowed at trial, a judge announced Tuesday.
The validity of those breathalyzer tests has been challenged for more than three years because of the Intoxilyzer 5000, a machine that uses a breath sample to measure a person's blood-alcohol content.

Manatee County Judge Doug Henderson ruled two years ago that any Intoxilyzer 5000 tests were inadmissible in trial, but prosecutors appealed. On Tuesday, Henderson told lawyers that his ruling had been affirmed by the Second District Court of Appeal and Circuit Court.

Breath analysis machines are notoriously inaccurate and this has been a problem for a very long time. Dr. David Hanson, a sociologist who has written on this issue for decades, writes:

Breath analyzers (Breathalyzer, Intoxilyzer, Alcosensor, Alcoscan and BAC Datamaster are common brand names) don't actually test blood alcohol concentration (BAC), which requires the analysis of a blood sample. Instead, they estimate BAC indirectly. Different types of machine use different techniqes and larger machines generally yield better estimates than do hand-held models. Therefore, some states don't permit data or "readings" from hand-held machines to be presented as evidence in court. South Dakota does not even permit evidence from any type or size breath tester but relies entirely on blood tests to ensure accuracy and protect the innocent.
A major problem with some machines is that they not only identify the ethyl alcohol (or ethanol) found in alcohol beverages, but also other substances similar in molecular structure. Those machines identify any compound containing the methyl group structure. Over one hundred compounds can be found in the human breath at any one time and 70 to 80 percent of them contain methyl group structure and will be incorrectly detected as ethyl alcohol. Important is the fact that the more different ethyl group substances the machine detects, the higher will be the false BAC estimate.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has found that dieters and diabetics can have acetone levels hundreds and even thousand of times higher than that in others. Acetone is one of the many substances that can be falsely identified as ethyl alcohol by some breath machines.

One investigator has reported that alcohol-free subjects can generate BAC readings of about .05 after eating various types of bread products.

Substances in the environment can also lead to false BAC readings. For example, an alcohol-free subject was asked to apply a pint of contact cement to a piece of plywood and then to apply a gallon of oil-base paint to a wall. The total activity lasted about an hour. Twenty minutes later the subject was tested on an Intoxilyzer, which registered a BAC of .12 percent. This level is 50% higher than a BAC of .08, which constitutes legal intoxication in many states.

Similarly, a painter with a protective mask spray painted a room for 20 minutes. Although a blood test showed no alcohol, an Intoxilyzer falsely reported his BAC as .075.

Any number of other products found in the environment can cause erroneous BAC results. These include compounds found in lacquers, paint removers, celluloid, gasoline, and cleaning fluids.

Other common things that can cause false BAC levels are alcohol, blood or vomit in the subject's mouth, electrical interference from cell phones and police radios, tobacco smoke, dirt, and moisture.

Breath testers can be very sensitive to temperature and will give false reasings if not adjusted or recalibrated to account for ambient or surrounding air temperatures. The temperature of the subject is also very important. Each one degree of body temperature above normal will cause a substantial elevation (about 8%) in apparent BAC.

Many breath testing machines asume a 2,100-to-1 ratio in converting alcohol in the breath to estimates of alcohol in the blood. However, this ratio varies from 1,900 to 2,400 among people and also within a person over time. This variation will lead to false BAC readings.

Physical activity and hyperventilation can lower apparent BAC levels. One study found that the BAC readings of subjects decreased 11 to 14% after running up one flight of stairs and 22-25% after doing so twice. Another study found a 15% decrease in BAC readings after vigorous exercise or hyperventilaion.

Some breath analysis machinnes assume a hematocrit (cell volume of blood) of 47%. However, hematocrit values range from 42 to 52% in men and from 37 to 47% in women. A person with a lower hematocrit will have a falsely high BAC reading.

It's about time a judge took a stand on this issue.

Ex-NSA analyst: Agency spied on news organizations

2009-01-22T16:02:00.001-08:00

A former National Security Agency analyst told MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann Wednesday night that the Bush Administration targeted and eavesdropped on the conversations of American journalists.

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Russell Tice, one of the sources who revealed the secret NSA warrantless wiretapping program to The New York Times in 2005, gave harrowing details about the NSA’s wiretapping program in an interview less than 24 hours after President George Bush left office.

He told Olbermann that the NSA collected all communications from various U.S. groups, many of which had nothing to do with terrorism:

Tice: Now, what I was finding out, though, is that the collection on those organizations was 24/7, and you know, 365 days a year, and it made no sense. And that's -- I started to investigate that. That's about the time when they came after me, to fire me. But an organization that was collected on were U.S. news organizations and reporters and journalists.

Olbermann: To what purpose? I mean, is there a file somewhere full of every e-mail sent by all the reporters at the "New York Times?" Is there a recording somewhere of every conversation I had with my little nephew in upstate New York? Is it like that?

Tice: If it was involved in this specific avenue of collection, it would be everything. Yes. It would be everything.

When Bush defended the secret wiretapping program after it became public a little more than three years ago, he said that only international communications were monitored as a way to collect terrorism intelligence. But Tice said that was not true.

“The National Security Agency had access to all Americans' communications, faxes, phone calls, and their computer communications. And that doesn't -- it didn't matter whether you were in Kansas, you know, in the middle of the country, and you never made a communication -- foreign communications at all. They monitored all communications,” he said.

Additionally Tice told Olbermann that "the agency would tailor some of their briefings to try to be deceptive” to congressional committees so that no one would know exactly what the NSA was collecting.

Olbermann asked Tice if President Barack Obama could, and would, stop the NSA from continuing to spy on Americans. Tice responded that he had tried to reach out to the Obama Administration and was still hoping he could work with the White House on intelligence issues.

The American Civil Liberties Union is challenging the NSA wiretapping program, as legalized by the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, in federal court in Manhattan. The Reporters Committee filed a friend-of-the-court brief in the case, Amnesty International v. McConnell, arguing that the law violates the First Amendment rights of journalist to conduct interviews with their sources.

— Samantha Fredrickson, 3:48 pm · Comments: 0

Intelligence Agencies' Databases Set to Be Linked

2009-01-22T15:58:00.000-08:00

WASHINGTON -- U.S. spy agencies' sensitive data should soon be linked by Google-like search systems, nearly five years after the intelligence community was rebuked by the 9/11 Commission for failing to "connect the dots" and detect the attack.

Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell has launched a sweeping technology program to knit together the thousands of databases across all 16 spy agencies. After years of bureaucratic snafus, intelligence analysts will be able to search through secret intelligence files the same way they can search public data on the Internet.

Mr. McConnell's new technology program is also addressing a more basic problem: Spies often have trouble emailing colleagues in other U.S. intelligence agencies, because email addresses aren't readily accessible, and messages sometimes get eaten by security filters. Mr. McConnell aims to solve that by uniting the agencies' email systems into a single system with a full directory that links names, expertise and addresses.

Linking up the 16 agencies is the challenge at the heart of the job of director of national intelligence, created after 9/11. Dennis Blair, nominated by President Barack Obama to succeed Mr. McConnell, faces a confirmation hearing Thursday where senators are likely to ask how he will make agencies with different histories and missions work together.

The new information program also is designed to include Facebook-like social-networking programs and classified news feeds. It includes enhanced security measures to ensure that only appropriately cleared people can access the network. The price tag is expected to be in the billions of dollars, but much of that money will be reallocated from existing technology programs.

The impact for analysts, Mr. McConnell says, "will be staggering." Not only will analysts have vastly more data to examine, potentially inaccurate intelligence will stand out more clearly, he said.

Today, an analyst's query might scan only 5% of the total intelligence data in the U.S. government, said a senior intelligence official. Even when analysts find documents, they sometimes can't read them without protracted negotiations to gain access. Under the new system, an analyst would likely search about 95% of the data, the official said.

Several similar efforts have been aborted in the past decade, because cultural divides couldn't be bridged between rival agencies. Some of those efforts predated 9/11, and many intelligence agencies have botched their own technology programs since 2001.

Mr. McConnell's team says this effort, called the Information Integration Program, has experienced officials working on it full-time and is designed to deliver tangible products every few months. "There really is a very different spirit about doing all these things than there was, I think, in the past," said Prescott Winter, a senior National Security Agency official who is directing the program for Mr. McConnell.

The program is likely to get a review from Mr. Blair. The new administration is expected to make sure it is adequately funded, effective and protects privacy.

The initiative grew out of discussions more than a year ago between the Pentagon's intelligence chief and Mr. McConnell's top deputy, who were concerned that military and civilian intelligence data couldn't be easily tapped. They asked the chief information officers at the six largest intelligence agencies to develop a solution.

Over the summer, the officers began to sketch out the technology and policy problems to be solved, including protecting sources and connecting systems at different levels of classification. They also assembled case studies, which showed that the typical analyst is using technology that is about a decade old, a senior intelligence official said.

In September, all 16 agencies agreed to the goal of creating one searchable data and email system, and Mr. McConnell borrowed Mr. Winter from the NSA to get the program under way.

The first stage of the initiative is to merge the email systems of the six largest intelligence agencies, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Central Intelligence Agency and the NSA. Mr. Winter said that is on track to be largely completed by the end of the month. Then, they will expand to the other 10 agencies. By 2010, the intelligence agencies and the Pentagon would have a single email system.

With the Google-like system, intelligence officials would like to connect the bulk of the databases by the end of the year, though no firm date has been set. The system would search all intelligence data, and quickly determine which data an analyst is permitted to see. Someone focused on one corner of the world may be allowed to see everything available on the countries in the region, but not other regions.

Currently, an analyst might run a search but not be able to open a document without negotiating for access. "You don't want to sort of have to play Twenty Questions to figure out where it is hidden," Mr. Winter said.

Write to Siobhan Gorman at siobhan.gorman@wsj.com

U.S. Must Back Down on Iranian Uranium Enrichment

2009-01-22T15:57:00.000-08:00

by Gary Leupp / January 22nd, 2009

There’s really only one solution. Only one way for Obama to get himself out of the box his predecessor Bush, Dick Cheney and the neocons have put him in. He has to affirm Iran’s inalienable right under the Non-Proliferation Treaty to enrich uranium.

Somewhere along the road American public opinion, which history shows can be easily persuaded of things that just aren’t true, has bought several highly questionable propositions:

1. Iran has a nuclear weapons program.

2. Iran’s nuclear program can have only one purpose, the production of nuclear weapons.

3. The Iranian leadership wishes to, and has threatened to, wipe Israel off the face of the map.

4. Given all of the above, Iran’s progress towards nuclear enrichment must be stopped in order to prevent a second, “nuclear” Holocaust.

These propositions — Big Lies that that become better established with each retelling — are in fact easily refutable.

1. The U.S. intelligence community itself doesn’t believe that Iran has an active nuclear weapons program. In November 2007 all 16 U.S. intelligence agencies produced a National Intelligence Estimate that declared “with high confidence” that Iran had suspended any such program as of 2003. Dick Cheney’s office tried to suppress that report and with George Bush told the chagrined Israeli government he would ignore it. (Recall that Cheney and the neocons surrounding him insisted with equal vigor in opposition to IAEA evidence to the contrary that Iraq had an active nuclear program in 2001 that could produce a “mushroom cloud over New York City”?)

We’re not talking about some liberal blogs challenging the Bush-Cheney claims here. We’re talking about the Central Intelligence Agency, Army Military Intelligence, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, the National Reconnaissance Office, the National Security Agency, etc. Highly trained, professional, critically-thinking researchers whose best judgment is: Iran doesn’t have a nuclear weapons program.

Repeat (because this is so important): U.S. intelligence doesn’t believe Iran has a nuclear weapons program.

2. Cheney on many occasions insisted that Iran, with its vast petroleum wealth, could only have one reason to seek nuclear power. But successive U.S. administrations from the 1960s urged Iran, when it was ruled by the Shah (whom the CIA had placed in power), to develop a nuclear energy program. U.S. corporations such as General Electric were deeply invested in that program.

3. Iran has rarely attacked another country in the last thousand years, and never in modern times. On the contrary it has been the victim of aggression, most notably in the Iran-Iraq War, when Saddam Hussein, attacked in 1980. The U.S. supported Iraq; Donald Rumsfeld visited Saddam twice, offered aid including satellite intelligence crucial to the Iraqi war effort. The idea that Iran aspires to initiate war with a country a thousand miles away because of ingrained anti-Semitism among the leadership is very questionable. Iran has the largest Jewish population in the Middle East outside of Israel, with representation in the Parliament (Majlis). Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has not called for Israel to be “wiped of the map” but once quoted Ayatollah Khomeini (who died in 1989) as stating that “this regime occupying Jerusalem must [vanish from] from the page of time.” As Professor Juan Cole explains, “Ahmadinejad was not making a threat, he was quoting a saying of Khomeini and urging that pro-Palestinian activists in Iran not give up hope — that the occupation of Jerusalem was no more a continued inevitability than had been the hegemony of the Shah’s government.” The claim that Iran has “repeatedly stated its intention to destroy the state of Israel” is pure alarmist propaganda peddled by those calling openly for the bombing of Iran!

4. Iran’s advancement towards nuclear enrichment is a progress towards something realized not only by countries with nuclear weapons (including, one must emphasize, Israel, which unlike Iran never signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty) but by Brazil, Argentina, South Africa, Australia, Japan, Germany, and the Netherlands. Again: nuclear enrichment is not a crime but an inalienable right under the Non-Proliferation Treaty whereby nations agree not to produce nuclear weapons in exchange for assistance in developing peaceful nuclear programs under carefully monitored conditions. The rules allow them control over the entire “nuclear fuel cycle” under IAEA inspections.

The idea that Iran is a special exception to the rules is an obvious conceit of the Bush-Cheney era propaganda. The idea that if normal rules apply, and Iran proceeds as usual and gets its nuclear reactors online, nukes will forthwith rain down on Israel (with its 200 warheads) and produce a second Holocaust (frying Israeli Jews and Palestinian alike) is wild, paranoid fantasy.

So let Obama say, unequivocally: We recognize and respect Iran’s right to have a peaceful nuclear program monitored by the IAEA, to enrich uranium, to master the nuclear cycle—just like any other normal nation.

Should he not do so, the burden is on him to explain why, as the candidate of “change” and “hope,” who on Inauguration Day told the Muslim world he would seek “a new way forward, based on mutual interest and mutual respect” he continues the Bush-Cheney policy of vilification, insinuation, and Zionist pandering in connection with this issue.

Gary Leupp is a Professor of History, and Adjunct Professor of Comparative Religion at Tufts University, and author of numerous works on Japanese history. He can be reached at: gleupp@granite.tufts.edu. Read other articles by Gary.

Riverside County DA: 4 Marines accused of killing sergeant, wife in Winchester could face death penalty

2009-01-22T15:55:00.000-08:00

10:00 PM PST on Wednesday, January 21, 2009
By TAMMY J. McCOY
The Press-Enterprise

Prosecutors will seek the death penalty for four Marines charged with the execution-style slaying of their sergeant and his wife inside their Winchester home.

District Attorney Rod Pacheco said Wednesday that he considers many factors in deciding when to seek the death penalty. What stood out in this case was the love between Sgt. Jan Pietrzak and Quiana Jenkins-Pietrzak and the heinousness of the crime.

"How innocent they were and you compare and contrast that with the butchery that occurred that night in their very home," Pacheco said. "That kind of stands out."

Newlyweds Pietrzak, 24, and Jenkins-Pietrzak, 26, were found bound, gagged and shot in the head inside their two story home in a quiet neighborhood in southwest Riverside County on Oct. 15. The house had been ransacked, she had been sexually abused and the intruders had set a fire to destroy evidence.

When reached by phone Wednesday afternoon, Quiana's mother, Glenda Jenkins, said she was at the cemetery and did not comment further.

Each of the four defendants is charged with two counts of murder: Lance Cpl. Tyrone Miller, 21, Lance Cpl. Emrys Justin John, 19, , Pvt. Kevin Darnell Cox, 21, and Lance Cpl. Kesaun K. Sykes, 21, The defendants were stationed at Camp Pendleton where Miller and John were assigned to Pietrzak's unit, according to court records. Jenkins-Pietrzak worked for the Riverside County Department of Health.

All four defendants have pleaded not guilty.

Defense attorneys for two defendants said they were disappointed.

"My client did not kill anyone," said Jeff Zimel, attorney for Miller.

Defense attorneys have the opportunity to present reasons to prosecutors why a defendant shouldn't get death. Sykes' attorney, Pete Morreale, said he did not make a presentation to the prosecutor's office on behalf of his client.

"Knowing our DA's office, anything I would have said would have fallen on deaf ears," said Morreale, adding that he wasn't surprised by Pacheco's decision.

"I knew it would go death. I just wish they would look at this -- these are kids, these are Marines," the defense attorney said. "This case is horrific, but seeking death on a bunch of kids ... I'm very disappointed."

Since taking office in 2007, Pacheco has pursued the death penalty in 36 other cases and life in prison without parole in 52, according to data from January 2007 to Dec. 4, 2008, provided by the prosecutor's office.

Of 677 inmates on California's death row, 64 were sentenced in Riverside County, according to a state Department of Corrections report dated Dec. 31, 2008.

John's defense attorney, Mark Johnson, said his client, the youngest of the group, has no prior criminal record.

Prosecutors allege that John fired the fatal gunshots. He is the only defendant charged with using a gun, the court records show.

Riverside County sheriff's deputies were sent to the Pietrzaks' Bermuda Street home after Camp Pendleton officials reported that he didn't show up for duty, according to authorities.

All the defendants except for John said they went to the Pietrzaks' home to rob them, according to court records. Once they arrived, Miller and John discussed killing the couple and John pulled the trigger, according to court records quoting Miller.

The defendants are scheduled to appear Feb. 2 for a hearing at the Southwest Justice Center in French Valley.

Reach Tammy J. McCoy at 951-375-3729 or tmccoy@PE.com

S.B. County accused of violating Brown Act

2009-01-22T15:46:00.000-08:00

10:00 PM PST on Wednesday, January 21, 2009
By IMRAN GHORI
The Press-Enterprise

San Bernardino County is being accused of violating the Brown Act, California's open-meeting law, as it challenges the state's medical marijuana user program.

San Bernardino County joined San Diego County three years ago in challenging the program, which requires it to issue medical-marijuana identification cards to patients.

The counties petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court to review the case last week. The courts have so far ruled against them, upholding the medical marijuana law approved by voters in 1996.

The group filed a complaint with the district attorney's office in September after an Aug. 26 meeting where the board discussed the lawsuit in closed session but made no announcement of any action taken.

That same day, a sheriff's spokeswoman announced that the county was appealing the case to the California Supreme Court.

Aaron Smith, California policy director for the Marijuana Policy Project, said his group has been stymied in its attempts to find out the status of the case.

"They seem to have a certain arrogance where they feel like they can flout any state law, including the open-meeting laws," he said.

The county counsel's office was given the authority to pursue the case as far as necessary when the county joined the lawsuit in January 2006, county spokesman David Wert said.

No announcement was necessary at the Aug. 26 meeting because no action was taken, he said.

Terry Franke, general counsel for Californians Aware, an open government advocacy group, said the board must report on any decisions made in closed session about whether to pursue the appeals.

The district attorney's Public Integrity Unit is reviewing the complaint, said spokeswoman Susan Mickey.

Reach Imran Ghori at 951-368-9558 or ighori@PE.com

Leonard Peltier beaten in prison

2009-01-22T15:43:00.000-08:00

Posted by Brenda Norrell - January 22, 2009 at 2:29 pm

By Brenda Norrell

Photo LPDOC

CANAAN, Penn. -- Leonard Peltier was jumped and beaten after being transferred from a prison in Lewisburg to Canaan on January 13. The family, however, was not notified by the prison and received the information by way of a letter from Peltier. Peltier, 64, was placed in solitary confinement and it is not known if he has received medical attention.

"Once Mr. Peltier arrived at the Canaan prison facility, he was jumped by younger inmates, severely beaten, put in solitary confinement and placed upon meal restrictions despite his having diabetes and other medical conditions," the Leonard Peltier Defense Offense Committee said in a statement ."The family has requested copies of the video tapes of that incident to no avail. It is as if the whole scenario was contrived to detract from the fact that Mr. Peltier has been a model prisoner having more than enough points to qualify for parole," LPDOC said.

Recently, the amount of hate mail circulated on the Internet regarding Peltier and appeals for his release has increased and could have played a role in the attack on Peltier.

The LPDOC said, "Retired, former and actively employed FBI agents have taken action against the release and parole of Leonard Peltier time and again. While it is their right to speak their opinion, it is not right to do so on federal time and at the taxpayer’s expense. Their letters, writings, articles, books, protests, outcries and interviews concerning Mr. Peltier, are a conflict of interest and tip the scales against him unfairly. In addition, it is certainly questionable as to the timing of a letter written by a former FBI Agent to Representative John Conyers and the beating Mr. Peltier received at Canaan."

The LPDOC said the attack on Peltier comes on the heels of the FBI's recent letter, prompting this attack by FBI supporters as an attempt to discredit Peltier as a model prisoner. "Anyone who has been in the prison system knows well that if you refuse to name your attackers or file charges against them, then you lose your status as a victim and/or given points against your possible parole and labeled as a perpetrator. It is not uncommon, in fact is quite common for the government to use Indian against Indian and they still operate under the old adage "it takes an Indian to catch an Indian," LPDOC said.

In 1978, the US government made an attempt to assassinate Peltier, offering another Indian inmate at Marion prison with Leonard Peltier, a chance at freedom. The man was Standing Deer. Standing Deer befriended Peltier in prison and exposed the plot to assassinate him. Standing Deer was murdered in Houston after his release from prison.

LPDOC said, "Standing Deer chose to reveal the plot to him instead of taking his life in exchange for a chance at freedom. When Standing Deer was released in 2001, he joined the former Leonard Peltier Defense Committee as a board member. He also began to speak on Leonard's behalf until his murder six years ago today. Prior to his murder, Standing Deer confided with close friends and associates that the same man who visited him in Marion to assassinate Peltier, had came to Houston and told him that he had better stay away from Peltier and anything to do with him," the LDPOC said. (An interview with Ben Carnes on Standing Deer and Peltier can be heard at Censored News Blog Radio or at Earthcycles on Longest Walk.)

Micheal Kuzma, an attorney for Leonard Peltier's defense, described the attack on Peltier in prison, during an interview with American Indian Airwaves on Wednesday, Jan. 21. Kuzma said Peltier's sister Betty Peltier-Solano, executive coordinator of the Leonard Peltier Defense Offense Committee,
received a letter from Peltier, but was never notified by prison officials of the attack. Peltier was transferred from Lewisburg to Canaan prison during the week of Jan. 12th and attacked on the 13th, by other inmates.

Kuzma said, "According to the letter, he thinks he might have a concussion. His middle finger on his left hand is either broken or badly injured. He has a large bump near his right wrist. The right side of his rib cage and chest are in pain. He also has a bruise on the right side of his chest. He also has a bruise on his left knee, and is suffering from headaches. These headaches are a direct result of the Jan. 13 beating."
Listen (last 20 minutes of program) on Jan. 21 at:
http://archive.kpfk.org/parchive/xml/americanindian.xml

AIM West plans a protest in solidarity with Peltier to draw attention to the attack and call for his release on Friday in San Francisco. http://www.aimwest.info/

For more information: LPDOC: http://www.whoisleonardpeltier.info/

Updates at Censored News: http://www.bsnorrell.blogspot.com

The Freedom of Information Act is Back Memorandum for the Heads of Executive Departments and Agencies

2009-01-22T15:41:00.000-08:00

By Barack Obama
President of the United States

January 21, 2009

Publisher’s note: This newspaper, like all investigative journalists, has utilized the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), begun under President Johnson and amended by Presidents Clinton and Bush, to obtain many government documents that have exposed official wrongdoing. In particular, journalist Bill Conroy’s reports on corruption in US law enforcement agencies along the US-Mexico border have made many such documents available to the public for the first time. At our Schools of Authentic Journalism in Mexico and Bolivia, journalist Jeremy Bigwood trained others in the vital tools of how to utilize FOIA.
But in recent years, US government agencies have often delayed, denied and otherwise stonewalled our requests under this law.

Today’s official memorandum signed by US President Barack Obama brings a long overdue and welcome sea change to our work and that of all investigative journalists. Concretely, it means that in the coming months and years, you, the reader, are going to gain access through the FOIA requests we will now be able to submit to uncover many hidden US government activites related to Latin America, the so-called “war on drugs,” official corruption in US agencies, and interventions in the affairs of other nations.

The ground, indeed, has been moved under our feet, and in the most positive way.

We publish the President’s memorandum today so that all journalists and citizens can have access to this landmark executive order.

-Al Giordano

January 21, 2009

MEMORANDUM FOR THE HEADS OF EXECUTIVE DEPARTMENTS AND AGENCIES

SUBJECT: Freedom of Information Act

A democracy requires accountability, and accountability requires transparency. As Justice Louis Brandeis wrote, “sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants.” In our democracy, the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), which encourages accountability through transparency, is the most prominent expression of a profound national commitment to ensuring an open Government. At the heart of that commitment is the idea that accountability is in the interest of the Government and the citizenry alike.

The Freedom of Information Act should be administered with a clear presumption: In the face of doubt, openness prevails. The Government should not keep information confidential merely because public officials might be embarrassed by disclosure, because errors and failures might be revealed, or because of speculative or abstract fears. Nondisclosure should never be based on an effort to protect the personal interests of Government officials at the expense of those they are supposed to serve. In responding to requests under the FOIA, executive branch agencies (agencies) should act promptly and in a spirit of cooperation, recognizing that such agencies are servants of the public.

All agencies should adopt a presumption in favor of disclosure, in order to renew their commitment to the principles embodied in FOIA, and to usher in a new era of open Government. The presumption of disclosure should be applied to all decisions involving FOIA.

The presumption of disclosure also means that agencies should take affirmative steps to make information public. They should not wait for specific requests from the public. All agencies should use modern technology to inform citizens about what is known and done by their Government. Disclosure should be timely.

I direct the Attorney General to issue new guidelines governing the FOIA to the heads of executive departments and agencies, reaffirming the commitment to accountability and transparency, and to publish such guidelines in the Federal Register. In doing so, the Attorney General should review FOIA reports produced by the agencies under Executive Order 13392 of December 14, 2005. I also direct the Director of the Office of Management and Budget to update guidance to the agencies to increase and improve information dissemination to the public, including through the use of new technologies, and to publish such guidance in the Federal Register.

This memorandum does not create any right or benefit, substantive or procedural, enforceable at law or in equity by any party against the United States, its departments, agencies, or entities, its officers, employees, or agents, or any other person.

The Director of the Office of Management and Budget is hereby authorized and directed to publish this memorandum in the Federal Register.

BARACK OBAMA

Mexican Drug War Violence Is Going off the Charts

2009-01-22T15:38:00.000-08:00

President-elect Barack Obama met Monday with Mexican President Felipe Calderón to discuss bilateral issues of major importance for the two countries. In addition to NAFTA and immigration policy, Mexico's ongoing plague of prohibition-related violence was high on the agenda.

More than 5,400 people were killed in the violence last year, and more than 8,000 in the two years since Calderón ratcheted up Mexico's drug war by sending thousands of troops into the fray. The multi-sided conflict pits rival trafficking groups -- the so-called cartels -- against each and the Mexican state, but has also seen pitched battles between rival law enforcement units where one group or the other is in the pay of the traffickers.

The Obama-Calderón meeting comes as the violence in Mexico is creating increasing concern among US policy and defense analysts. Last month, the National Drug Intelligence Center warned in its National Drug Threat Assessment 2009 that "Mexico drug trafficking organizations represent the greatest organized crime threat to the United States."

In a December report to the US Military Academy at West Point, former drug czar retired Gen. Barry McCaffrey warned dramatically that even the $1.4 billion, three-year anti-drug assistance plan approved by Congress and the Bush administration last year was barely a drop in the bucket, noting that it was only a tiny fraction of the money spent on the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

"The stakes in Mexico are enormous," McCaffrey warned. "We cannot afford to have a narco state as a neighbor. Mexico is not confronting dangerous criminality -- it is fighting for its survival against narco-terrorism."

The consequences of US failure to act decisively in support of Calderón's drug war would be dire, McCaffrey warned. "A failure by the Mexican political system to curtail lawlessness and violence could result in a surge of millions of refugees crossing the US border to escape the domestic misery of violence ... and the mindless cruelty and injustice of a criminal state."

This week, the US Joint Chiefs of Staff jumped on the bandwagon. In their report, The Joint Operating Environment 2008, which examines global threats to the US, the Joint Chiefs warned that Mexico was one of the two countries most in danger of becoming a failed state. The other was Pakistan.

"The Mexican possibility may seem less likely," the report noted, "but the government, its politicians, police, and judicial infrastructure are all under sustained assault and pressure by criminal gangs and drug cartels. How that internal conflict turns out over the next several years will have a major impact on the stability of the Mexican state. Any descent by Mexico into chaos would demand an American response based on the serious implications for homeland security alone."

But for all the dire warnings of doom, the incoming president gave little sign that he would do anything other than stay the course. Nor did he suggest in any way that he would make a radical break with US drug policy on the border. Obama has stated publicly that he supports the Mérida Initiative aid package, and Monday he limited his public remarks to generalities.

Noting the "extraordinary relationship" between the US and Mexico, Obama added: "Not only did we talk about security along the border regions, how the United States can be helpful in Mexico's efforts, we talked about immigration and how we can have a comprehensive and thoughtful strategy that ultimately strengthens both countries."

Despite taking his first meeting with a head of foreign state with President Calderón and pledging renewed cooperation, and despite the chorus of cassandras crying for more action, analysts consulted by the Drug War Chronicle said that given the raft of serious problems, foreign and domestic, facing the Obama administration, Mexico and its drug war are likely to remain second-tier issues. Nor is the Mérida Initiative going to be much help, they suggested.

"Obama is busy with other pressing issues," said Sanho Tree, drug policy analyst for the Institute for Policy Studies, a Washington, DC-based think tank. "He just doesn't have the space and will to take on this other fight in Mexico."

On the other hand, the border violence frightening US policy makers is largely "a self-inflicted wound," Tree said. "Mix together high domestic demand here, prohibition economics, and a tough law and order approach, shake vigorously, and you have a disaster cocktail. It's not like we didn't warn them," he said.

Also, Tree noted, despite the rising alarm in Washington, there is little interest in opening a new front on the southern border. "Who has the stomach to take this on right now?" he asked. "Who is clamoring for this outside of institutional actors who want to protect their budgets? There is a lot of war-weariness and budget shock in this city, and that might leave some openings" for reform, he said.

"Probably not much will come of that meeting," said Tomás Ayuso, Mexico analyst for the Council on Hemispheric Affairs. "Calderón was pleading for Obama to put Mexico at the top of his list of priorities, but given what Obama is facing, the Mexican drug war is not at the top of his agenda."

Still, the situation in Mexico is serious and could get worse, Ayuso said. "If this isn't addressed now, Mexico could really descend into chaos. The drug cartels have virtually unlimited funding, their coffers are overflowing. The shadow economy in which they operate is booming, their operatives are armed to the teeth, and the next step is to set up a shadow government. It's very easy for them to influence people. They say: 'Accept our bribes or we'll kill you and your family.'" Ayuso said. "It's pretty effective."

"This meeting looked mostly like generalities, but Obama has said repeatedly during the campaign that he supports the Mérida Initiative, and that will most likely continue during his administration," said Maureen Meyer, Mexico analyst for the Washington Office on Latin America. "With more and more reports lately painting Mexico as a security crisis, we are seeing a recognition by the new administration that this is a priority, and it will continue cooperating with Mexico."

But the looming crisis on the border and in Mexico could provide openings for reform, Meyer said. "We hope to have more openings to reopen the debate on US drug policy internationally, and Mexico could give us the opportunity to look at what has and has not worked in the Andean region and Mexico as well," she said.

That debate could include modifications to the Mérida Initiative, which is heavily weighted toward military and law enforcement equipment and training, said Meyer. "Congress has reiterated its support for the Mérida Initiative, but we've also seen a tendency to redirect funding toward arms trafficking going south and demand here in the US. The Congress will also, we hope, start to look away from sending more equipment and toward more support for institutional reforms. Helicopters aren't going to have any impact on Mexico's underlying problems," she said.

The violence in Mexico could help further weaken already eroding support for US drug policy in the hemisphere as a whole, said Ayuso. "In Latin America, where most of the suffering is happening, many countries are asking whether the Washington-led war on drugs is the answer," he said. "That's something Calderón himself has brought up, but Obama is probably not going to budge on that. Still, the chorus is growing. More and more people want to re-evaluate the drug war."

Politics Trumps Science as DEA Rejects Researcher's Request to Grow Marijuana for FDA-Approved Studies

2009-01-22T15:37:00.000-08:00

The US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) Wednesday blocked the years-long effort of a University of Massachusetts-Amherst researcher to end the federal government's monopoly on the supply of marijuana available for research. In doing so, the agency overruled its own Administrative Law Judge, Mary Ellen Bittner, who nearly two years ago formally recommended that the project be approved.

Lyle Craker (courtesy aclu.org/drugpolicy/)

UMass-Amherst Professor Lyle Craker initially filed a petition in June 2001 seeking to cultivate research-grade marijuana for use by researchers in Food and Drug Administration (FDA)-approved studies aimed at developing the plant as legal prescription medicine. Currently, the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) is the sole source of marijuana for researchers, but that agency has repeatedly refused to make it available for privately-funded, FDA-approved studies seeking to develop smoked or vaporized marijuana into a prescription medication. Researchers have also complained about the quality of the marijuana produced at the federal government's Mississippi pot farm.

From the beginning, Bush administration officials have been unresponsive or sought to delay the proceedings in the Craker case. The DEA first did not respond to Craker's requests for status reports on his request, then told him it had lost his filing. When he submitted a photocopy, the DEA rejected that as improper. It took until 2004 for the agency to get around to rejecting Craker's request, and ever since then for that rejection to go through the administrative appeal process.

It was during that process that DEA Administrative Law Judge Bittner made her formal recommendation supporting Craker's request: "I conclude that granting Respondent's petition would not be inconsistent with the Single Convention, there would be minimal risk of diversion of marijuana..., that there is currently an inadequate supply of marijuana available for research purposes, that competition in the provision of marijuana for such purposes is inadequate, and that the Respondent has complied with applicable laws and has never been convicted of any violation of any law pertaining to controlled substances," Bittner wrote as she weighed the factors involved in her decision. "I find there that Respondent's registration to cultivate marijuana would be in the public interest."

Judge Bittner's recommendation was based largely on the fact that marijuana is the only Schedule I drug that the DEA prohibits from being produced by private laboratories for scientific research, which has resulted in a unique government monopoly that fundamentally obstructs appropriate research and regulatory channels. Other controlled substances, including LSD, MDMA, heroin and cocaine, are available to researchers from DEA-licensed private laboratories.

In contrast, the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) remains scientists' sole source of marijuana, despite the agency's repeated refusal to make marijuana available for privately-funded, FDA-approved studies that seek to develop smoked or vaporized marijuana into a legal, prescription medicine.

As Judge Bittner concluded, "NIDA's system for evaluating requests for marijuana has resulted in some researchers who hold DEA registrations and requisite approval from [HHS and FDA] being unable to conduct their research because NIDA has refused to provide them with marijuana. I therefore find that the existing supply is not adequate."

But just as was the case with DEA Administrative Law Judge Francis Young's famous 1988 recommendation that marijuana was among the safest therapeutically active substances known to man and should be rescheduled, Bittner's recommendation was also ignored by her own agency. In the final decision issued this week, the DEA simply rejected most of Bittner's findings, and rejected Craker's petition.

"I am saddened that the DEA is ignoring the best interests of so many seriously ill people who wish for scientific investigations that could lead to development of the marijuana plant as a prescription medicine," said Professor Craker. "Patients with serious illnesses deserve legitimate research that might establish medical marijuana as a fully legal, FDA-approved treatment. Today, that effort has been dealt a serious blow."

Craker wasn't the only one protesting. The ACLU Drug Law Reform Project, the Marijuana Policy Project (MPP), and the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) all supported Craker's quest, and all blasted the DEA decision.

"It's no surprise that an administration that has rejected science again and again has, as one of its final acts, blocked a critical research project," said MPP director of government relations Aaron Houston. "With the new administration publicly committed to respecting scientific research and valuing data over dogma, this final act of desperation isn't surprising, but the true victims are the millions of patients who might benefit."

"With one foot out the door, the Bush administration has once again found time to undermine scientific freedom," said Allen Hopper, litigation director for the ACLU Drug Law Reform Project. "In stubbornly retaining the unique government monopoly over the supply of research marijuana over the objections of DEA's own administrative law judge, the Bush administration has effectively blocked the proper regulatory channels that would allow the drug to become a wholly legitimate prescription medication."

"The DEA and NIDA, but not the FDA, are clearly frightened of permitting privately-funded, scientific research into the risks and benefits of the medical uses of marijuana," said Rick Doblin, president of MAPS. "We need the Obama Administration to reverse this egregious suppression of scientific research that the outgoing administration so fears will reveal inconvenient truths."

Despite the DEA rejection, these are the waning days of the Bush administration, and this isn't over yet. Look for another lawsuit or an appeal to the Obama administration, said Doblin.

County no friend to medical pot patients

2009-01-22T15:33:00.000-08:00

By Joe Nelson on January 21, 2009 5:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A marijuana advocay group is alleging the Board of Supervisors violated the state's open meeting law by failing to disclose publicly its decision to appeal its lawsuit challenging California's medical marijuana law to the U.S. Supreme Court.

The nonprofit Marijuana Policy Project maintains that the board, at its Aug. 26 meeting, voted in a closed-door session to appeal its joint lawsuit with San Diego County to the state Supreme Court after a San Diego County judge ruled in favor of the state.

When the board returned to the dais to continue its meeting, it failed to mention its decision to those in attendance, the nonprofit alleges.

If the two counties prevail in their lawsuit, neither would be required to issue identification cards to legitimate medical marijuana patients.

The state Supreme Court declined to hear the appeal, so, the counties' appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which received the case on Jan. 12, county spokesman David Wert said. He said the county expects to learn of the court's decision within 90 days.

Wert said the board did not violate California's open meeting law, the Ralph M. Brown Act. He said when the two counties teamed up in 2006, it was with the understanding that the litigation would be appealed all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. No further action was required, Wert said.

"They're assuming . . . that the board took some action in that closed session, and there was no action taken," Wert said.

Since September, the nonprofit has sent two letters to the District Attorney's Office requesting an investigation, said Aaron Smith, California policy director for the Marijuana Policy Project.

The complaints are currently under review.

"If they find enough to look into they'll open up an investigation," said Susan Mickey, spokeswoman for the District Attorney's Office.

If an investigation is launched, the county will be completely vindicated, Wert said.

"The DA's office will quickly find that there was no violation of the Brown Act," Wert said.
In response to allegations that the lawsuit is a waste of time, taxpayer money and county resources, Wert said San Diego County has conducted all the legal research and all the court filings.

"They've gone through all the expense in this case," he said.

joe.nelson@inlandnewspapers.com

Kentucky Court of Appeals Overturns Domain Name Seizure Order [updated]

2009-01-22T15:29:00.000-08:00

Legal Analysis by Matt Zimmerman

The Kentucky Court of Appeals today granted petitions by the Interactive Gaming Council (IGC) Interactive Media Entertainment and Gaming Association, Inc. (iMEGA) to overturn an earlier trial court ruling authorizing the seizure of domain names owned by operators of overseas gambling websites. While challenged on several additional fronts -- including on a wide range of Constitutional grounds by EFF and its fellow amici the ACLU of Kentucky and the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT) -- the Court overturned the prior ruling based on an interpretation of Kentucky's "gambling device" forfeiture statute:

[I]t stretches credulity to conclude that a series of numbers, or Internet address, can be said to constitute a "machine or any mechanical or other device ... designed and manufactured primarily for use in connection with gambling."

The Court of Appeals suggests that the Kentucky legislature might be able to amend the statute (KRS 528.010) to cover domain names, but even if it did, the Commonwealth would likely still be out of luck. In addition to this type of domain name seizure still raising serious First Amendment, due process, and other constitutional problems, Kentucky courts (as pointed out in our joint amicus brief) also lack the authority to directly order out-of-state registrars to turn over customer domain names.

Update: The Commonwealth of Kentucky filed a notice of appeal with the Kentucky Supreme Court on January 21, 2009.

Attachment	Size
Order Granting Consolidated Petitions for Writ of Prohibition	1.89 MB
Notice of Appeal to the Kentucky Supreme Court	1.11 MB

Related Issues: Free Speech

Marijuana pipe shielded leg during 2004 drive-by, man testifies

2009-01-22T15:16:00.000-08:00

By Will Bigham on January 21, 2009 4:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The bullet tore through his jeans, ricocheted off a marijuana pipe in his pocket, and exited his jeans without hurting him.

That was the testimony Wednesday of one man who was shot during a drive-by shooting in Montclair that killed 20-year-old David Velez and injured one other man.

Wednesday was the third day of testimony at the West Valley Superior Court trial of the alleged gunman, Jose Laguna, 23, who is facing one count of murder and two counts of attempted murder for the June 19, 2004 shooting.

Velez and about a half-dozen other people were socializing shortly after midnight in the front driveway of a home in the 9500 block of Helena Avenue.

A black Jeep Cherokee drove by slowly and opened fire, the witness testified.

Velez was standing on the street when the Jeep passed, and he fell to the ground when the shooting started, the witness testified.

Velez then stood up and walked toward the house, but collapsed near the sidewalk and held his chest.

"He just said, 'I'm shot'," the witness recalled.

Later the witness realized a bullet had struck his leg, shattering a glass marijuana pipe in his pocket but otherwise leaving him unharmed.

The bullet that struck Velez passed through his heart and grazed part of his lung, according to testimony Wednesday from Steven Trenkle, the forensic pathologist who performed Velez's autopsy.

Police arrested Laguna two days after the shooting and found evidence in his black Jeep Cherokee that linked him to the shooting, including the murder weapon, Deputy District Attorney Mike Dowd said during his opening statement last week.

Laguna faces up to 110 years to life in prison if convicted on all counts.

Other people who testified Wednesday include another man present at the house during the shooting, and one of Laguna's friends.

A former San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department crime lab employee who performed gunshot-residue tests on the Jeep also testified.

Bush says farewell

2009-01-22T13:25:00.000-08:00

Marquee sign draws fire

2009-01-22T08:35:00.000-08:00

As the country prepared to welcome the 44th president of the United States, Monica Marini at Big Bear Convention Center was fielding calls and hate mail.

The marquee at the Convention Center read “THANK YOU PRESIDENT BUSH.” A second line read “GOD HELP US NOW.”

The marquee raised eyebrows and caused community members to call Marini and The Grizzly. Marini and her husband, Anthony, own the Convention Center at the corner of Division Drive and Big Bear Boulevard.

The sign was removed on Jan. 20 after Marini said she fielded calls and e-mails she referred to as “hate mail.” Marini said she was shocked at the amount of mail and calls opposed to the sign. She said she also received as many in support of the sign.

Don Jordan of Sugarloaf shared a letter he sent to the Convention Center regarding the sign. Jordan said the marquee was in place on Jan. 19, and he believes in everyone’s right to express his or her opinion. Jordan’s letter stated the marquee was in poor taste because while the Convention Center is privately owned, “it is still Big Bear Lake’s Convention Center, and therefore most observers would assume that this is the official position of the city of Big Bear Lake.”

Jordan went on to state that a quasi-public marquee shouldn’t be a place to express private opinions.

A caller to The Grizzly said she had also fielded calls about the sign from friends and fellow members of American Association of University Women. The caller said the word “now” made it sound like the country is in trouble under Obama’s administration.

Marini said the sign was a way of simply thanking the outgoing president. When asked about the second line, she said it was just asking for prayer. “We’re in two wars,” Marini said.

When asked if the words might imply that the Convention Center owners were intimating the prayers were due to Barack Obama being sworn in as president of the United States, Marini said the sign had nothing to do with that. The words were what they (the owners) felt, Marini said.

Following Sept. 11, Marini said “God Bless America” was placed on the marquee. And every year they put “Merry Christmas” on the sign. Neither generated any negative comments, Marini said.

“I’m amazed how many people have hatred for this man (Bush),” Marini said. As for Obama, “we wish him well,” Marini added.

Jordan, in his letter to the Convention Center, also resigned from Wyatt’s Posse, which is a group associated with the facility. “In expression of my private opinion, I also will no longer attend events at the Convention Center except for the Farmer’s Market, which is only in your parking lot,” Jordan’s letter stated.

Current, Future Justice Officials Clash Over OLC Proposal

2009-01-19T14:52:00.001-08:00

In a revealing conflict of views between outgoing and incoming Justice Department officials, Attorney General Michael Mukasey recently told Congress that a proposal that was conceived by Prof. Dawn Johnsen to require expanded reporting to Congress concerning Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) opinions is unconstitutional. Prof. Johnsen has been designated by President-elect Obama as the new OLC head.

The dispute concerned “The OLC Reporting Act of 2008″ (S.3501) that was introduced by Sen. Russ Feingold last September.

“The bill would require the Attorney General to report to Congress when the Department of Justice issues a legal opinion concluding that the executive branch is not bound by a statute,” Sen. Feingold explained last year. Currently, no such notification to Congress is required, and the executive branch may silently interpret a seemingly straightforward statute as non-binding.

The Feingold bill emerged from a suggestion offered by Prof. Johnsen at an April 30, 2008 hearing on “Secret Law.”

The OLC Reporting Act, which would not require disclosure of the actual legal opinions, “strikes a sensible and constitutionally sound balance between the executive branch’s need to have access to candid legal advice… and the legislative branch’s need to know the manner in which its laws are interpreted,” Prof. Johnsen wrote in a September 15 letter with former Bush White House Associate Counsel Brad Berenson.

It’s not constitutionally sound at all, objected Attorney General Mukasey in a November 14 letter (pdf) to Congress that was disclosed this week. The bill is unconstitutional because it improperly seeks to mandate the timing and extent of disclosure of classified information, and because it infringes on the constitutional doctrine of executive privilege, he said.

The legislation would require that Congress be notified of “many legal opinions” that fall within its terms, the Attorney General wrote. And it would mistakenly lead legal advisers to tailor their advice in such a way as not to trigger the reporting requirements of the Act, he warned.

Accordingly, Attorney General Mukasey said, “the Department strongly opposes this legislation, and if it were presented to the President, his senior advisers would recommend that he veto it.”

But the Department’s strong opposition to the bill is likely to fade very soon, considering that one of the new President’s “senior advisers” is also one of the bill’s authors.

ODNI Denies Release of 2006 Intelligence Budget Figure

2009-01-19T14:51:00.001-08:00

Speaking of overclassification and mindless adherence to obsolete secrecy standards, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence today denied a request to release the size of the 2006 National Intelligence Program budget.

The size of the 2007 budget (pdf) for the National Intelligence Program has been formally declassified and released ($43.5 billion). And so has the figure for the 2008 budget ($47.5 billion).

But “the size of the National Intelligence Program for Fiscal Year 2006 remains currently and properly classified pursuant to Executive Order 12958, as amended,” wrote Lt. Gen. Ronald L. Burgess, Jr. (pdf), director of the ODNI Intelligence Staff.

“In addition, the release of this information would reveal sensitive intelligence sources and methods,” he wrote.

New Guidelines Define NCTC Access to Non-Terror Databases

2009-01-19T14:49:00.000-08:00

The National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), a component of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, may obtain access to federal databases containing non-terrorism-related information in order to acquire information needed for authorized counterterrorism purposes, pursuant to a recent memorandum of agreement (pdf) between the Director of National Intelligence and the Attorney General.

“NCTC will access information in such datasets identified as containing non-terrorism information… only to determine if the dataset [also] contains terrorism information,” the memorandum states.

“NCTC is not otherwise permitted under these guidelines to query, use, or exploit such datasets (e.g., analysts may not ‘browse’ through records in the dataset that do not match a query with terrorism datapoints, or conduct ‘pattern-based’ queries or analyses without terrorism datapoints),” the memo directs.

The seven-page Memorandum of Agreement has not been approved for public release, but a copy was obtained by Secrecy News. It took effect on November 4, 2008.

“Most of the terrorists arrested in the U.S. have supported themselves with common criminal activities” and therefore NCTC would have a legitimate need for access to related law enforcement information, a senior intelligence official from another agency told Secrecy News.

The new memo “regularizes the process by which NCTC can access information not originally collected for intelligence purposes,” the official said. It also “inserts the ODNI Civil Liberties Protection Officer into the process with an affirmative role for the first time — I think.”

The memorandum makes the ODNI Civil Liberties Protection Officer responsible for ensuring that NCTC complies with privacy guidelines when accessing non-terrorism-related databases.

The rise and fall of Bill Postmus unraveled

2009-01-19T14:33:00.000-08:00

MORE COVERAGE

Video: Assessor Bill Postmus leaving West Valley Detention Center

Photo galleries: Assessor Bill Postmus leaving West Valley Detention Center, The San Bernardino County District Attorney's investigation

Bill Postmus swiftly rose through San Bernardino County political ranks, gaining the confidence of seasoned politicos who admired the energy, ambition and fearlessness they associated with his youth.

Upstart

A booking photo shows Assessor Bill Postmus after his arrest Thursday by San Bernardino County district attorney's investigators on suspicion of possession of methamphetamine and possession of drug paraphernalia for unlawful use. (Courtesy photo)

college students eager to get a foothold in the county political scene flocked to him, attracted by the promise his career held and the pledges he made to bring them within the fold of his elected office.

Until his 7:10 a.m. arrest Thursday at his home on drug charges by district attorney's investigators serving a search warrant, Postmus was seemingly immune to political scandal and initially billed a reformer. It was widely believed that by 40, he might attain a seat in Congress.

But at 37, less than 10 years after launching his first bid for political office, Postmus' political career crashed hard as reports mounted of a methamphetamine addiction and unethical, even criminal, behavior in the elected position he holds as

county assessor.

The disgraced county assessor's political allies are abandoning him. In his personal life, there are few who call him a friend. And business relationships he cultivated on the side have disintegrated. On Dec. 16, the Board of Supervisors launched proceedings to remove Postmus from office.

A yearlong grand jury investigation led to a criminal investigation by the district attorney and the arrest June 30 of Adam Aleman, once Postmus' most trusted confidante and top assistant. Aleman is standing trial on six felonies, from destroying evidence to falsifying documents, in what investigators say was an attempt to mislead the grand jury.

"Put two and two together," said Scott Becker, whose friendship with Postmus reaches back to high school. "Bill was behind him. Adam is a sweet, innocent guy, and he should not be taking the rap."

Many of those interviewed for this story requested anonymity, either because of the ongoing investigation by the district attorney or out of fear that their reputations and careers would be destroyed by any appearance of connection with Postmus. They described a man who is untrustworthy and breaks promises, who attempts to buy his friends by showering them with sports tickets and campaign money, who wins their confidence through the allure of investment deals and high-paying jobs.

One of his closest friends said Postmus' meth addiction stems from the years he has spent hiding his sexual orientation, attempting to resist "carnal pleasures" and cloaking his sexual identity as a gay man from not only voters, but his family, friends and political allies.

Postmus' family moved to the San Bernardino Mountains when he was a child. He graduated from Serrano High School in Phelan, where he had a small circle of friends. He then earned an associate's degree from Victor Valley College, followed by a bachelor's degree from the University of Redlands.

After college, Postmus began climbing the political ladder, working as a legislative assistant for Assemblyman Keith Olberg, a Republican then based in Victorville.

In 1999, at age 28, Postmus burst onto the county political scene when he announced his campaign for a seat on the Board of Supervisors. At the time, he also held some low-profile, yet influential, positions as vice chairman of the county Republican Central Committee and vice chairman of the Victorville Planning Commission.

Within county government that election season, a corruption scandal involving bribery was festering, and Assemblywoman Kathleen Honeycutt presented Postmus with a golden plunger, declaring he was the man to clean up the county.

During this time, Postmus was often attending political conventions and rallies, flanked by young men. In the coming years, he would develop a reputation for hiring twenty-something worshippers who blithely followed him, sources said. Among them was Aleman, then a teenager.

In 2000, Postmus was sworn in on the Board of Supervisors as the representative of the immense 1st District, which encompasses much of the High Desert.

Those who worked closely with Postmus while he was supervisor say he was a hard worker, dedicated to the job.

But over the seven years he served on the board, his career was riddled with controversies and scandal - the most prominent being the secret negotiations Postmus engaged in that led to the $100 million Colonies settlement, which government watchdogs criticized for being excessive and illegal. Postmus and Supervisor Paul Biane reached the settlement with The Colonies Partners LP, a major Upland developer in a closed-door deal after banishing county attorneys from the room.

It was during his term as board chairman that Postmus lost the tenuous control he held over an addiction to pain medication. On July 14, 2006, he embarked on his first trip to rehab, multiple sources said. The timing of Postmus' absence, however, was unfortunate.

The county's top leader could not be reached as the Sawtooth and Millard fires raged across Yucca Valley, threatening lives and homes. The massive wildfires scorched at least 85,000 acres of land.

Treatment for chemical dependency at the Sundown M Ranch in Washington State may have steered Postmus back on course for a while. His struggle with addiction remained out of the public eye, thanks to loyal county staffers, sources said.

"I was led to believe that Mr. Postmus had received the help he needed, and because I saw no signs of the problem in Mr. Postmus' behavior, I believed the issue had been resolved," Supervisor Brad Mitzelfelt said in a statement. Mitzelfelt served as Postmus' chief of staff from 2000 to 2006 when Postmus left the board and Mitzelfelt was appointed to replace him. "According to county policy, the issue was appropriately handled as a medical, and therefore confidential matter."

But midway through 2007, Postmus returned to rehab, this time at the Pine Ridge Treatment Center in Victorville, multiple sources said.

During 2007, Postmus' career started to fizzle. He was deposed as the chairman of the county Republican Central Committee, after draining Republican party funds and running up an exorbitant tab on a party-issued credit card. He launched a campaign to run for county assessor, an obscure elected position that political insiders say Postmus sought in order to regroup for a run at a Congressional seat.

It is unclear how Postmus transitioned from abusing prescription pain killers to methamphetamine, but those close to him have said they are terrified of the hold the drug has over him, and they fear it may cost him his life. One source said from 2005 on, the soaring highs and desperate crashes brought on by methamphetamine use began to take over Postmus' life.

As fragile control over drug addiction slipped from his grasp, Postmus' routine work habits became erratic, sources say.

After winning the post of county assessor, Postmus rarely showed up for work, instead issuing orders to Aleman by means of his Blackberry, sources said.

Still, despite being embroiled in political turmoil and suffering the ravages of a meth addiction, Postmus has managed to hold onto some close friends.

Dino Defazio, Postmus' business partner and friend, put in considerable effort to find a Russian mail-order bride for Postmus, hoping that a wife would give Postmus' political career more legitimacy and dispel swirling rumors that he was gay, sources said. But Postmus refused to go along with the plan, and Defazio gave up, sources said. When Defazio was married this summer, Postmus stood in as his best man, sources said.

Just as in his personal life, some of Postmus' business relationships have run aground.

It might seem like a conflict of interest for the county assessor, a man tasked with setting property taxes, to have development interests in the High Desert. But that hasn't stopped Postmus. A source familiar with the properties Postmus owns in the desert said only an expert would be able to uncover all of the land interests he holds.

Another business partner who participated in land deals in the High Desert with Postmus described him as a "high roller" who engages in "wheeling and dealing" to the detriment of his business partners.

The business partner said he worries that more innocent investors might be lured into land deals and taken advantage of by Postmus.

The grand jury report released in June chronicled misuse of power in the assessor's office - how Postmus spent $1.2 million to hire under-qualified executive level staff who had little role in the day-to-day operations of the office, how he ordered the transfer of campaign money on county time and engaged in partisan politics during work. The report questioned a $64,000 contract given to political consultant Mike Richman and gave a hefty severance package to former assistant assessor Jim Erwin.

The hard-hitting grand jury inquiry spun off a criminal investigation by the district attorney that culminated Thursday in Postmus' arrest.

Sources confirmed that mere days before the district attorney raided the assessor's office in April and seized documents and computers, Postmus attempted to set up a meeting with District Attorney Michael J. Ramos.

A source said the situation reminded him of "classic Bill," that when he perceives a looming confrontation, he reaches out to that person. Ramos says a meeting never took place.

But on the day of the raid, Postmus made a rare appearance in the office. It was 7 in the morning, sources said.

Ramos said he had only one conversation with Postmus, urging him to comply with the grand jury investigation.

Ramos was a political ally with whom Postmus had traded campaign contributions over the years. In 2006, he endorsed Postmus in his bid to become assessor.

But Ramos says their relationship was not close.

"I had a political acquaintance with him as he was the chairman of the board that oversaw my budget," Ramos said. "It was all business."

Still, Ramos' relationship with Postmus has led some to question why the district attorney was slow to charge Postmus.

Meanwhile, two key witnesses in Aleman's prosecution confirmed they have yet to be interviewed.

Although the grand jury investigation was far reaching, there was one detail it failed to uncover - that among Postmus' reportedly unethical employment practices in the assessor's office was the hiring of Jonathan Stucker, a man with whom he had an intimate relationship, multiple sources said. Stucker left county employment July 7, said David Wert, county spokesman, who declined to disclose the circumstances surrounding Stucker's departure. Stucker did not return calls seeking comment.

Postmus has long sought to keep his sexual orientation out of the public eye, driving to West Hollywood, Palm Springs and Laguna Beach in order to party and get high where he would not be recognized as an elected official, multiple sources said.

Sources also say Postmus has been completely undone by the arrest of Aleman.

"He seems to have shut down from the things that gave him pleasure - politics, sex and drugs," one source said. "His soul mate has been ripped apart from him."

Postmus adored Aleman because he was young, good looking, astute and politically aggressive, the source said.

Postmus had, in a sense, swooped in to rescue Aleman, catapulting him, in the short span of a few years, from manager of an Outback Steakhouse to assistant assessor, the second highest position in the assessor's office.

"Bill would shower Adam with gifts, trips, money," the source said, adding that the two men had traveled together to such destinations as Seattle, China, Chicago and Washington, D.C.

Those trips appear to be over. With his political career in tatters and the loss of his most trusted companion, Postmus now seems to be facing an uncertain future, virtually alone.Postmus decline four requests to be interviewed for this story. He could not be reached for comment Thursday. His sister Holly, Defazio and Stucker also declined to be interviewed.

City Editor George Watson contributed reporting.

lauren.mcsherry@inlandnewspapers.com
(909) 386-3875

TIMELINE

NOVEMBER 2000: Postmus, 28, defeats 1st District Supervisor Kathy Davis.

DEC. 13, 2000: Postmus crashes into the back of a van on Bear Valley Road, damaging the county vehicle he was driving.

JUNE 2004: Postmus is re-elected.

2005-06: Postmus chairs the San Bernardino County Board of Supervisors.

NOVEMBER 2006: Postmus defeats a 12-year incumbent for county assessor.

NOV. 28, 2006: The Board of Supervisors ends the county's feud with developer Jeff Burum over the Colonies project. Postmus and Supervisor Paul Biane reach a closed-door deal with the development company after banishing the county's lawyers from the room. The Colonies received $102 million.

APRIL 2008: Documents and computers are seized in a raid of the Assessor's Office.

JUNE 2008: The grand jury chronicles mismanagement and a political shop at the Assessor's Office. Postmus' top assistant, Adam Aleman, is charged with six felonies for allegedly destroying or altering evidence.

JULY: Postmus begins a 12-week leave of absence for unspecified medical problems.

OCT. 10: Postmus announces his return to work.

OCT. 23: Postmus declines a request to appear before the supervisors to answer questions about the controversy surrounding his office.

NOVEMBER 2008: County supervisors censure Postmus for failing to appear before them to answer allegations of methamphetamine abuse and unethical conduct.

DEC. 16: Supervisors vote unanimously to begin proceedings to remove Postmus from office.

JAN. 6: Postmus appears before the supervisors, admits he had a substance-abuse problem but had kicked the habit. He said he would not seek re-election.

JAN. 15: Investigators arrest Postmus at his Rancho Cucamonga home on suspicion of possession of methamphetamine and drug paraphernalia.

- Staff Report

County Asks U.S. Supreme Court To Erase State's Medical Marijuana Law

2009-01-19T14:30:00.000-08:00

San Diego County filed papers this week asking the U.S. Supreme Court to erase California's medical marijuana law, arguing that federal prohibitions outlawing the substance supersede California's law allowing sick people to use it.

The county is asking the nation's highest court to overturn a state appellate court's July decision upholding the voter-approved law legalizing marijuana use for medicinal purposes.

"You have a conflict here between federal and state law, and we are in the middle," 5th District Supervisor Bill Horn said Friday. "What we have been asking all along is which takes precedence here. We will take it as far as we can take it and get a definitive answer."

Horn's district encompasses much of North County.

County officials sued the state in 2006, arguing that federal law that makes marijuana illegal should trump the 1996 passage of state Proposition 215, which legalized it for patients to use with a prescription. Patients who use marijuana say it helps them treat chronic pain.

In July, California's 4th District Court of Appeal handed medical marijuana users a victory when it rejected the county's contention that the state law flies in the face of federal pot prohibitions. The appellate court found that the purpose of the federal law "is to combat recreational drug use, not to regulate a state's medical practices."

In October, the California Supreme Court rejected the county's request that it review the ruling. That left the county with the option of asking the nation's highest court to step in.

San Diego Deputy County Counsel Tom Bunton said the U.S. Supreme Court might decide by June if it will take the case.

The county's filing was met with a thumbs down but no surprise from Adam Wolf, the lead attorney for medical marijuana patients opposed to the challenge. Wolf on Friday called the county's request "a waste" of taxpayers' money.

"This is an ill-fated and doomed lawsuit," Wolf said. "These are the same recycled arguments that have been rejected by the Superior Court, the Court of Appeals and the California Supreme Court.

"With each day that San Diego does not comply with the state's medical marijuana laws, the medical marijuana patients needlessly suffer."

Wolf, with the American Civil Liberties Union, represents the San Diego chapter of NORML, the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws. NORML is a defendant in the county's suit.

San Bernardino County, which has worked with San Diego during the battle, also filed a similar writ.

There also is a battle over a 2003 directive from state legislators calling for counties to create medical marijuana identification cards. Thus far, San Diego County has declined to issue such cards, even though the appellate court said in its July ruling that issuing the state-mandated cards would not put counties in conflict with federal law.

County attorney Bunton said "the state has not established any deadline whereby the counties have to begin issuing the ID cards."

Wolf said that as many as two-thirds of California's counties have started issuing ID cards to medical marijuana patients.

News Hawk- Ganjarden http://www.420Magazine.com
Source: North County Times
Author: Teri Figueroa
Contact: North County Times
Copyright: 2009 North County Times
Website: County Asks U.S. Supreme Court To Erase State's Medical Marijuana Law

__________________
420 Magazine News Team
Creating Cannabis Awareness Since 1993
http://www.420Magazine.com

"Prohibition... goes beyond the bound of reason in that it attempts to control a man's appetite by legislation and makes a crime out of things that are not crimes. A prohibition law strikes a blow at the very principles upon which our government was founded"
-Abraham Lincoln

Hearing set in case against former assistant assessor

2009-01-19T14:29:00.000-08:00

A judge set a preliminary hearing date Wednesday in the case against former Assistant Assessor Adam Aleman, according to prosecutors.

Aleman is charged with three counts of preparing false evidence and one count each of offering false evidence, destruction of property and vandalism.

The preliminary hearing will be March 26 in San Bernardino Superior Court, confirmed Deputy District Attorney John Goritz. A pre-preliminary hearing, to determine the lawyers' readiness, will be held March 24.

At the preliminary hearing, a judge will listen to witness testimony and review exhibits to determine whether sufficient evidence exists to hold over the defendant for trial.

Aleman was arrested June 30, 2008, the same day the county Grand Jury's report was released. The report examined potentially illegal operations in the Assessor's Office, and prosecutors were concerned he was trying to mislead that investigation.

Ex-SoCal officer pleads guilty in violence case

2009-01-19T14:28:00.000-08:00

The Associated Press

Posted: 01/18/2009 10:42:22 AM PST

SAN BERNARDINO, Calif.—A former police officer has pleaded guilty to misdemeanor charges of hitting his girlfriend and putting a gun to her head.

Gregory White Jr. pleaded guilty Friday to corporal injury charges and will serve 60 days in jail and participate in domestic violence court. An assault with a firearm charge was dismissed against the 32-year-old.

White was arrested on Wednesday following the Jan. 4 incident. Authorities say his live-in girlfriend needed medical attention but wasn't admitted to a hospital.

Prosecutors say White no longer works for the San Bernardino Police Department.

———

Information from: Inland Valley Daily Bulletin, http://www.dailybulletin.com

Temecula Clinic Offers Consultations on Medical Marijuana

2009-01-19T14:27:00.000-08:00

A clinic specializing in medical marijuana treatment has opened in Temecula. This is the first time such a clinic has opened in the Temecula Valley.

On Oct. 11, Alternative Care Clinics ( ACC ), a San Diego-based medical group, opened an office on Enterprise Circle.

The clinic looks like any other medical office except for a statue of Buddha sitting on a shelf in the back of the waiting room. Magazines on alternative healing sit around the reception area.

The doctors who work with ACC aren’t your typical doctors who want to shove pills down your throat,” said Jonathan Arbel, ACC’s director of operations, as he poured himself a cup of tea. “They try to find a more holistic approach.”

The clinic, which operates by appointment only, offers evaluations to explore whether a medical marijuana treatment plan is right for their patients.

The clinic requires its patients to bring in a Californian identification and all medical documentation showing marijuana could benefit them. The doctor goes over the documents and decides whether the patient qualifies.

The patient and doctor then work out what the clinic calls a “treatment plan” and the doctor writes a letter of recommendation in place of a prescription.

The types of conditions that qualify a patient for the use of medical marijuana include cancer, anorexia, AIDS, chronic pain, spasticity, glaucoma, arthritis and migraines, according to an ACC information packet.

According to Arbel, the term “prescription” does not apply to medical marijuana.

ACC issues a card to their patients as evidence they have a letter of recommendation. The card is designed to assure police the holder has a legal right to possess marijuana.

The card states a phone number police may call to reach ACC’s automated 24-hour confirmation service.

Using this service, a police officer would be able to confirm whether the card holder is a legitimate medical marijuana patient.

California law allows a patient to grow at least six mature cannabis plants – or 12 immature plants – and possess at least eight ounces of dried marijuana, according to an ACC information packet.

ACC goes to court frequently to defend its clients, Arbel said.

We take that responsibility seriously,” he said. “It’s amazing how a letter from a doctor can stop somebody from doing some serious jail time.”

In addition, the clinic educates the patient about the laws regarding marijuana’s medical uses.

The clinic does not sell marijuana or keep any at the office, Arbel said.

Smoking is barred in the clinic as it is in other medical offices, said Arbel. He leaned on his desk and smiled as he talked about what he thinks many people’s assumptions are about ACC clinics.

He speculated some may visualize a smoking den with beaded curtains and lava lamps.

His doctors never encourage a patient to smoke, he said. They encourage patients to use either edible pills or a vaporizer.

He lifted up a vaporizer from next to his desk. It was a stainless steel cone with a loose plastic bag attached to the top.

The user places the marijuana on the top of the cone and puts the bag over it, Arbel explained as he mimicked with his hands.

The vaporizer heats the plant until the THC – marijuana’s active ingredient – evaporates into the plastic bag. The patient then inhales the vapor from the bag.

In fact, said Arbel, the clinic has little to do with the consumption of medical marijuana outside of developing the treatment plan. The clinic is barred by law from even telling the patients where they can get marijuana.

I just recommend the patient Google the words ‘medical marijuana dispensaries,’” Arbel said.

Legal status of cannabis

In 1996, California voters approved an initiative exempting medical marijuana users from criminal liability for possessing and cultivating marijuana, according to department of justice documents.

In 2003, the state legislature enacted additional legislation to ensure police refrained from arresting or otherwise harassing medical marijuana users.

There’s been a lot of mishandling of the patient population,” Arbel said.

On Dec. 1, Americans for Safe Access, an organization dedicated to promoting access to marijuana for medical uses, sent out an e-mail announcing a victory for medical marijuana patients in Southern California.

On Nov. 28, the e-mail stated, a California state court ruled Federal law has no effect on California’s law making marijuana legal for medical use. The decision took the right away from police to arrest medical marijuana users.

On Dec. 1, the US Supreme Court reinforced that decision by refusing to hear an appeal that would undo the California court’s decision.

This ruling came as a blow to San Diego County and San Bernardino County authorities. The two counties had been involved in numerous court battles over the legality of medical marijuana.

In several court cases, county authorities argued the state law was illegal and contradicted federal law. So far, the counties’ arguments have failed to convince each judge to hear their case.

To the medical marijuana-using community, this was a big victory, said Arbel.

This cleared the air and said all state officials are not to enforce federal laws. They’re to enforce state laws,” he said.

For more information on Alternative Care Clinics, visit www.accsocal.com or call ( 866 ) 420-7215.

Some in Sheriff's Department are cops gone wild

2009-01-19T14:26:00.001-08:00

Joe Nelson, Staff Writer

Posted: 01/18/2009 07:05:27 AM PST

A New Year's resolution for some of the rank and file at the San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department may be to stay out of trouble and avoid being arrested.

Since August, two sheriff's deputies and a sergeant have been arrested or cited on suspicion of assault, disorderly conduct and solicitation of prostitution.

Of the Sheriff's Department's approximately 3,600 sworn and civilian employees, it's not uncommon for some to err, as is human, said Lt. Rick Ells, who heads the Sheriff's Department's public affairs division.

Ells did acknowledge, however, that having four sworn employees accused of or charged with criminal conduct over a five-month period could be considered excessive. He said deputies are held to a higher standard of conduct when they're off duty.

"We shouldn't be getting in trouble, and I think this is an aberration ...," Ells said.

About 1:15 a.m. on Dec. 30, Ontario police arrested Chino Hills sheriff's Deputy Michael Bada on suspicion of picking up a prostitute in the 3000 block of East Shelby Street, said Ontario police Sgt. Mike Caldera.

The case has been submitted to the District Attorney's office and is pending review, said Susan Mickey, spokeswoman for the District Attorney's office.

About 5 p.m. on Dec. 30, Sgt. Mark Martinez, who's currently assigned to the West Valley Detention Center in Rancho Cucamonga, was cited for misdemeanor battery during a football game at San Diego's Qualcomm

Stadium. He allegedly punched Ontario police Officer Noah Robson and San Diego firefighter Daniel Eddy in the face during an altercation, said Monica Munoz, spokeswoman for the San Diego Police Department.

Both Robson and Eddy refused medical treatment. The case will be reviewed by San Diego's city attorney, who handles misdemeanor cases, Munoz said.

On Aug. 30, Lake Havasu City police arrested Deputy Joseph Catalano II on suspicion of beating a man into unconsciousness outside a BJ's Tavern in the 2100 block of North McCulloch Boulevard.

According to a Lake Havasu City police report, at least three witnesses reported seeing Catalano approach a man as he sat on a bench outside the bar and punch him in the left eye. The punch knocked the man to the ground, and Catalano reportedly punched the man twice more in the face before running off.

The responding police officer found the victim, identified as Derek Harlin, laying unconscious on the ground, a pool of blood forming under his head, according to the police report.

Another officer detained Catalano, and later noted in his report he could smell alcohol on Catalano's breath and Catalano's speech was slurred.

Catalano was subsequently charged with misdemeanor assault and disorderly conduct.

Police learned the alleged assault stemmed from a verbal exchange between Catalano and Harlin inside the bar.

During an interview, Catalano told police that Harlin "got crazy" and tried to "get him" inside the bar. He said Harlin threw a punch at him and missed, so he punched Harlin in the face. He said he then heard someone say "just go," and so he ran.

Catalano's story conflicts with that of other witnesses, who told police they saw Catalano exit the bar and punch Harlin "for no reason."

Catalano turned down a plea bargain with Lake Havasu City prosecutors, and has a bench trial scheduled for Jan. 26, said Kristin Rienfeld, assistant city prosecutor for Lake Havasu City.

Rienfeld said she wasn't at liberty to discuss the terms of the plea bargain Catalano rejected.

Catalano faces a maximum of 180 days in jail if convicted, Rienfeld said.

Neither Catalano nor his attorney, Kenneth Sondgeroth, could be reached for comment Friday.

Martinez and Bada also could not be reached for comment.

Martinez, Catalano and Bada all remain on active duty, Ells said.

Martinez has worked for the Sheriff's Department since 1992, Catalano since May 2000 and Bada since December 2005, Ells said, adding that the department has launched administrative investigations into all three employees.

Carona acquitted of conspiracy

2009-01-19T14:25:00.001-08:00

By Gillian Flaccus, The Associated Press

Posted: 01/16/2009 10:14:02 PM PST

SANTA ANA - A jury acquitted former Orange County Sheriff Michael Carona of charges that he took bribes in exchange for the power of his office, a verdict that stunned the courtroom and was hailed by the elated defendant as "an absolute miracle."

Carona was convicted of one witness-tampering count, but the jury rejected the heart of a case that federal prosecutors spent five years assembling against the former head of the nation's fifth-largest sheriff's department.

He had been accused of doing favors for a multimillionaire businessman and appointing him assistant sheriff in exchange for hundreds of thousands of dollars in gifts. Several jurors said they believed Carona was involved in misconduct but the government didn't prove its case.

Carona, 53, began shaking as the verdicts were being read in U.S. District Court, then put his head down on the counsel table and sobbed.

In the gallery, his wife, Deborah, and friends gasped. "Oh my God!" said his wife who, along with her husband's ex-mistress, faces related charges.

The conspiracy charge alone alleged 64 overt criminal acts. The statute of limitations expired on most of those acts, but the jury only had to find one of the remaining acts true for a conspiracy conviction.

"If you all don't believe in miracles, if you don't believe in God, what you just witnessed was an absolute miracle and God is watching over me," Carona said later. "Based on what you heard in this trial, some of the salacious stuff, there's a lot of things I need to apologize for in my life.

"I've made some mistakes along the way. The good news is God forgives people and apparently I'm one of the people he forgave."

If convicted of all counts, Carona could have spent the rest of his life in prison. He instead faces up to 20 years, but is likely to get only two or three, said Assistant U.S. Attorney Ken Julian. The defense said probation is possible.

SB police officer loses job after pleading guilty to attacking girlfriend

2009-01-19T14:24:00.001-08:00

Jason Pesick, Staff Writer

Posted: 01/17/2009 07:05:54 AM PST

A San Bernardino police officer pleaded guilty Friday to misdemeanor charges of corporal injury after prosecutors say he hit his live-in girlfriend and put a gun to her head.

Sheriff's officials arrested 32-year-old Gregory White Jr. of Rancho Cucamonga Wednesday on suspicion of corporal injury to a cohabitant and assault with a firearm after the Jan. 4 incident. He was booked at Central Detention Center and held on $1 million bail. Because of the incident, White lost his job with the Police Department, said deputy District Attorney Michele Daly.

"He's no longer a police officer, which we thought was important under the circumstances," she said.

San Bernardino Police Chief Michael Billdt said he could not commment on White's status with the department or how long he worked there because the issue was a personnel matter.

Daly said White will serve 60 days in jail on weekends and will participate in domestic violence court. The assault with a firearm charge was dismissed.

After the incident earlier this month, White's girlfriend needed medical attention but did not need to be admitted to the hospital, said Sheriff's spokeswoman Cindy Beavers. The investigation began at the beginning of last week because of a delay before the incident was reported, Beavers said. As of Friday afternoon, White was still being held at Central Detention Center.

Postmus follows long line

2009-01-19T14:23:00.000-08:00

10:00 PM PST on Sunday, January 18, 2009
MARK MUCKENFUSS

San Bernardino County got off to a rocky political start.

So maybe it's no wonder we find ourselves looking at a long line of officials who have brought, if not disgrace, certainly the continuance of a questionable tradition, upon us in recent years.

Bill "Poster Boy" Postmus is just the latest to step to the fore.

The former county supervisor and current county assessor joins the ranks of such familiar names as Jerry Eaves, Robert Hlawek and Harry Mays.

A little less familiar may be Frank Noyes.

Noyes never actually made it into political life, but he came close. It seems a problem with substance abuse, in this case alcohol, brought an early downfall.

The year was 1855. The county was just two years old. And we all know how terrible that age can be.

The previous state election had, believe it or not, brought the Know-nothings to power -- proving that the more things change, the more they stay the same.

The Know-nothings actually was the nickname of the American Party, which had outpolled both the Democrats and Republicans. Noyes apparently was happy to align himself with the party of power, for a price.

It seems that Mormon leader Jefferson Hunt, the county's only state representative, wasn't keen to retain his seat in the coming election. Noyes, a recent Mormon convert, had made a name for himself in the San Bernardino community and was being positioned as a successor.

This was at a time when elections consisted of the Mormon leaders issuing a slate of uncontested candidates and allowing the populace to approve it.

Noyes even had traveled to Sacramento to cement a secret deal.

On a return layover in Los Angeles, he reportedly drank himself into a very un-Mormon-like state and boasted that the Know-nothings were paying church leaders in San Bernardino $7,000 to elect him to the Legislature. He, in turn, would vote with the Know-nothings.

Noyes never returned to San Bernardino after his drunken confession. He dropped from sight, reportedly devoting his career to alcohol and living on the streets of Los Angeles.

It's hard to know where Postmus will end up at this point. But things don't look good.

The assessor has been under an ever-darkening cloud of suspicion since August 2007, when prosecutors began looking into questionable campaign activities connected to his office. In June, those offices were searched and his right-hand man was arrested. Shortly after that, Postmus took an unexplained medical leave of nearly 12 weeks amid rampant rumors.

On Jan. 6, he addressed the Board of Supervisors, claiming a "successful struggle" against a "previous battle with substance abuse."

Postmus may have a different idea of success than the rest of us.

On Thursday, officials searched his Rancho Cucamonga apartment and reportedly found methamphetamine and drug paraphernalia.

When Postmus came to the Board of Supervisors as a fast-rising Republican star in 2000, his desert district was plagued with meth lab activity.

Can you blame a guy for trying to represent his constituency?

In 2001, when Supervisor Jerry Eaves was charged with accepting bribes, Postmus joined calls for his resignation, saying, "I think it's time for Mr. Eaves to consider that his presence on the board harms all of San Bernardino."

It's hard to imagine what good Postmus can do at this point. Like Noyes, he might do best to simply fade away.

Reach Mark Muckenfuss at 951-368-9595 or mmuckenfuss@PE.com

From the PE: Investigators searched S.B. county supervisor’s office

2009-01-19T14:22:00.000-08:00

From the PE: Investigators searched S.B. county supervisor’s office

It will be interesting to find out what the investigators were looking for that Jim Erwin might have had. Supervisor Derry seems confident that the search involved only the assessor’s activities.

Investigators searched S.B. county supervisor’s office

San Bernardino County Supervisor Neil Derry said this afternoon that his top aide’s office was searched by investigators this morning as part of the investigation into Assessor Bill Postmus.

Jim Erwin, Derry’s chief of staff, is a longtime Postmus ally who served as assistant assessor until late 2007 when the two had a falling-out.

Derry said he was personally notified that the search was going to take place by District Attorney Michael Ramos at 7:05 a.m.

“He wanted to give me a heads-up that this investigation is strictly related to the assessor’s office,” Derry said.

The supervisor said he does not know what investigators were looking for or if they found anything during the 90-minute search.

“I’m pleased that the DA’s office is aggressively pursuing this matter,” he said.

Derry said he did not want to comment on the allegations against Postmus so as not to compromise the board’s recent decision looking into the possible removal of Postmus from his position.

However, Derry said the arrest and any evidence that may come to light as a result could speed up that process if the board decides to go forward.

County Counsel Ruth Stringer told the board that the removal process could be lengthy and expensive, requiring the board to present evidence of wrongdoing against Postmus.

“If it’s very clear and the evidence is on its face evident that laws were broken that would be a different story,” Derry said.

The board may not have to do its own investigation, he said.

Derry noted that Postmus would be removed from office by law if convicted.

Assessor Postmus jailed on felony drug charge

2009-01-19T14:20:00.000-08:00

06:56 AM PST on Friday, January 16, 2009
By DUANE W. GANG and IMRAN GHORI
The Press-Enterprise

Survey: Should Bill Postmus resign?

PDF: Read a statement from San Bernardino County Supervisors Chairman Gary Ovitt about the assessor's arrest

PDF: Read statement from the San Bernardino County Assessor's Office about the assessor's arrest

PDF: Read Supervisor Brad Mitzelfelt's statement about the assessor's arrest

PDF: Read statement from the San Bernardino County District Attorney's Office about the assessor's arrest

Special Section: San Bernardino Co. Assessors Probe

The San Bernardino County district attorney's office arrested Assessor Bill Postmus on suspicion of drug offenses Thursday amid a sweeping inquiry that took investigators to six Southern California cities.

The arrest came as 50 officials from the district attorney's office served search warrants at homes, offices and government buildings throughout the region.

While searching Postmus' Rancho Cucamonga apartment, investigators found what they believe to be methamphetamine and drug paraphernalia and arrested the assessor shortly after sunrise.

As part of a yearlong investigation, prosecutors on Thursday sought documents related to two political action committees, Postmus' election campaign, his ties to a High Desert land-development company and the sale of his former Hesperia home, records show.

Less than two weeks ago, Postmus, 37, appeared before the Board of Supervisors and claimed that he had overcome a battle with drugs and apologized for past mistakes in his office. Postmus said his "successful struggle" did not interfere with his duties and added that he would not seek re-election in 2010.

Word of the arrest rattled county government as supervisors continued researching their options for removing Postmus from office.

"Today's arrest makes it difficult to believe the assessor's illegal and intolerable drug use has stopped," Supervisor Brad Mitzelfelt, once Postmus' chief of staff, said in a statement.

Supervisors said they were saddened and embarrassed by the morning's events. Supervisor Josie Gonzales said she felt insulted.

"If what the county assessor came and stated on Jan. 6 before the county Board of Supervisors was in fact a lie based on his arrest today, I am outraged. I am thoroughly outraged," Supervisor Josie Gonzales said.

Postmus was arrested at 7:10 a.m. and booked into the West Valley Detention Center at 10:47 a.m. on suspicion of felony possession of a controlled substance and a misdemeanor paraphernalia possession.

He left after posting bond on his $11,450 bail, walking out the main exit at 3:30 p.m.

Dressed in slacks and a tucked-in dress shirt, Postmus, once considered one of the most promising politicians in San Bernardino County, walked past a group of reporters without speaking.

He entered a white sedan with three other people inside and left.

It is unclear whether investigators searched Postmus' home specifically looking for illegal drugs. But during the raid at the assessor's home, an unknown quantity of a substance believed to be methamphetamine was found, along with drug paraphernalia, officials said.

Susan Mickey, a spokeswoman for District Attorney Mike Ramos, would not say whether investigators served the search warrants as part of a larger investigation not focused on drugs.

She also declined to state the amount of drugs found.

Since Postmus is out of custody, prosecutors don't have a deadline for deciding whether to file charges based on the drug arrest. No arraignment is scheduled.

The Investigation

Postmus and his office have been under a cloud of scrutiny for months.

Prosecutors began looking into the possible misuse of public resources for political activity in August 2007. In April, district attorney investigators raided the assessor's office. In June, Adam Aleman, a top Postmus aide, was arrested on six felony charges of providing false evidence to a grand jury and destroying public records.

By last fall, supervisors began pressing Postmus to explain himself and started researching ways to remove him from office.

In Thursday's searches, investigators carted away boxes of documents from homes, offices and government buildings in Rancho Cucamonga, San Bernardino, Highland, Victorville, Apple Valley and Rancho Santa Margarita in Orange County, the district attorney's office said.

They sought financial and banking records, checks and other documents related to Conservatives for a Republican Majority, the Inland Empire Political Action Committee, and the Committee to Elect Bill Postmus, according to one of the search warrants.

In addition, prosecutors sought documents related to Tri-Land Inc., a company he and a partner formed five months after Postmus took office in January 2007, and Postmus' former Sunny Ridge Street home in Hesperia.

Postmus' Tri-Land partner is longtime friend Dino Defazio. Through the company, Postmus has a financial stake in six vacant properties in the Lucerne Valley and west of Adelanto, records show.

Investigators sought information on those six parcels, according to the warrant.

Defazio, who was served with a warrant, said Tri-Land has done nothing wrong.

When first reached by telephone Thursday, Defazio said, "The only thing I can comment on is they were looking for documents pertaining to the sale of his house he owned in Hesperia."

Defazio declined further comment but defended Tri-Land.

"We bought a couple of pieces of property," he said. "It was all done legally. Everything was done up and above board."

Thursday's raids also touched the Board of Supervisors. Investigators served a warrant at the office of Jim Erwin, a former Postmus ally and current chief of staff for Supervisor Neil Derry.

Erwin was Postmus' assistant assessor until late 2007, when he had a falling out with the assessor.

Derry said he was notified by Ramos about the search at 7:05 a.m.

"He wanted to give me a heads-up that this investigation is strictly related to the assessor's office," Derry said.

The supervisor said he does not know what investigators were looking for or if they found anything during the 90-minute search.

"I'm pleased that the DA's office is aggressively pursuing this matter," he said.

Removing Postmus

Supervisors for months have discussed using their power under the county charter to remove Postmus from office. The county has launched a search for a special independent prosecutor to investigate the assessor.

San Bernardino County Board of Supervisors Chairman Gary Ovitt said Postmus' arrest doesn't necessarily mean the board will hasten its review. The matter comes before the board again on Jan. 27.

"I think it's still important to follow through on the process that's been initiated by the district attorney's office, see that to its conclusion and do what we need to do then," Ovitt said in an interview.

The board must give Postmus a chance to answer the charges in a hearing if it decides to remove him, he said.

Ovitt said he is aware that the case hurts the county's image but said officials can't let that affect their investigation.

"We as a board have to remain independent of that and have to afford the assessor due process," he said.

Supervisor Paul Biane said Postmus appears to still be struggling with drugs and should "devote his full time and attention to overcoming the demons that are apparently continuing to haunt him."

Although all the supervisors expressed dismay about Postmus, they declined to comment extensively, saying they did not want to prejudice themselves should they follow through with a removal vote.

"I must remain impartial as the investigation by the district attorney and county counsel's review for potential removal proceedings are ongoing," Mitzelfelt said.

Staff Writers Richard Brooks, Mike Perrault, Paul LaRocco and Jim Miller contributed to this report.

Reach Duane W. Gang at 951-368-9547 or dgang@PE.com

Reach Imran Ghori at 951-368-9558 or ighori@PE.com

OC Sheriff unveils new concealed weapons policy, again…

2009-01-19T14:18:00.000-08:00

January 13th, 2009, 5:57 pm · 75 Comments · posted by NORBERTO SANTANA JR.

Since Orange County’s new Sheriff Sandra Hutchens unveiled a more restrictive concealed weapons policy following her appointment by county supervisors this summer, she has explained it again, and again, and again.

Yet every time Hutchens goes before the board of supervisors, the policy change comes under more fire and yields more questions.

Tuesday was no different, except for the armed guards.

Responding to concerns about an unspecified protest involving unloaded guns, sheriff’s officials were out in force at the weekly meeting of the board of supervisors. Large placards advised those entering that they had to consent to searches and that firearms were not allowed in the meeting.

Hutchens left the meeting surrounded by nearly two dozen uniformed and plain clothes officers.

Hutchens has been walking a political minefield on the issue since she moved to change a decade-old concealed gun permit policy created by former Sheriff Mike Carona, who resigned earlier last year in the wake of a federal indictment. Jurors are expected to decide Carona’s fate as early as this week.

Hutchens said she moved to revise the policies because the indictment against Carona mentioned specific instances of gun permits being exchanged for campaign contributions. Similar accusations also surrounded the badges given out to reserve deputies, which Hutchens also scrapped.

Hutchens tightening of the gun policies has run afoul of gun activists and the National Rifle Association, which have vowed to oppose her re-election as well as those of any county supervisor responsible for supporting her. That kind of backlash has caused supervisors to become very vocal in their statements against her gun policies.

“I’ve encouraged her to be more flexible,” said Supervisor John Moorlach from the dais as he noted his private discussions with Hutchens.

That is a stark difference in approach, publicly, than was first perceived by gun activists from Moorlach’s office. In fact, his chief of staff, Mario Mainero first argued that county supervisors shouldn’t give Hutchens any public direction because that would be “unconstitutional, illegal and void.”

While Hutchens has listened to supervisors, she has politely said they will have to agree to disagree. She said her view of state law doesn’t allow the latitude normally associated with CCW policies.

During her long anticipated update, Hutchens told county supervisors that she had tweaked her policy to take into account their concerns and expanded slightly the good cause standard for issuing concealed gun permits.

She also told supervisors that she had found a way to remove permits that don’t meet her standards without damaging the reputations of gun owners. Her new approach is to simply allow gun owners to have their concealed gun permits expire early, as opposed to being revoked.

Hutchens said she has added two more causes that can qualify a resident for a concealed gun permit. Showing documented instances of threats to personal safety, and threats to a person’s safety by the nature of their “profession, business or status.”

Gun activists took issue with Hutchens revisions immediately arguing that the expiration route, instead of revocation, doesn’t comply with state law. Supervisors asked Hutchens about the legality of the revision and instructed county counsel to research the issue and come back with an update.

To another CCW meeting, on Jan. 27.

While supervisors thanked Hutchens for listening to their concerns, many are still frustated by the surprise issue of their appointed Sheriff.

“It is still problematic,” said Supervisor Pat Bates, ”and we’ll continue to deal with it.”

Mehserle Charged with Murder but Oakland Isn’t Celebrating Yet

2009-01-19T14:13:00.000-08:00

The morning news reports from last night’s rally in Oakland led with the 18 arrests made after a couple stragglers smashed several storefront windows, but the big news from last night is that over a thousand people came together to demand justice for Oscar Grant and all young men of color who are brutalized at the hands of police officers every day. The crowd was outraged but peaceful, solemn and unified while they called for systemic change: an overhaul of the criminal justice system, the dismantling of the prison industrial complex, the disarming of police officers.

On New Year’s Day, 22-year-old Oscar Grant was shot in the back by BART police officer Johannes Mehserle while he was held face down on a BART platform. The shooting, caught on cell phone video, burned across the Internet and galvanized a community that’s all too familiar with police brutality and the privilege of impunity.

Last night the crowd was abuzz with the news that Mehserle, who for two weeks refused to participate in both internal BART and criminal investigations, had been arrested and charged by the district attorney’s office with murder. Folks were cautiously celebrating the news.

“I think it’s a first step,” said activist Eddie Zheng. “But it’s kind of late. [Mehserle] had an obligation to acknowledge that he killed someone as soon as it happened.”

“I was ecstatic,” said Savannah Shange, a teacher at the June Jordan School for Equity. “It was almost like when Obama got elected. For one brief moment, there’s the possibility of justice prevailing.”
Several companies in the downtown area urged their employees to head home early in anticipation of the protest. And along the streets of the protest route, most storeowners boarded up their shop windows in fear of vandalism from protesters.

Graffiti artists set to work quickly, turning the floor-to-ceiling raw wood panels into murals emblazoned with demands for justice. “I’m out here because change needs to come from the community,” said Desi, who stood in front of his spray painted portrait of Grant. Passersby congratulated him, snapped photos of his work. “But the only reason this is a big deal right now is because they caught it on tape,” he reminded. “This has been happening for years.”

Other protesters were similarly hesitant to call Mehserle’s arrest a victory that would have a meaningful impact on police conduct. “The only thing that will affect how they treat us is how we stand up and demand justice,” said Aku Bundu, a professor at San Jose State University. “As the father of a 22-year-old, I want the police to stop shooting our young brothers.”

Protesters vowed to keep the pressure on public officials so that Mehserle would be brought to justice. Beyond Oscar Grant’s death, though, protesters who described the kinds of reform they want to see laid out clear demands that included a community-based, zoned police force of members who live in the neighborhoods they patrol and do not carry guns.

“Until we have a salient community-based policing system, incidents like [Grant’s shooting] are going to happen over and over again,” said Shange. “They’re not a mistake. They’re not an anomaly. They’re built into the system.”

Posted at 11:59 AM, Jan 15, 2009 in Police | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

South Carolina Seeking To Outlaw Profanity

2009-01-19T14:12:00.002-08:00

It looks like in an act that defies common sense, a bill has been introduced in the South Carolina State Senate that seeks to outlaw the use of profanity. According to the bill it would become a felony (punishable by a fine up to $5000 or up to 5 years in prison) to 'publish orally or in writing, exhibit, or otherwise make available material containing words, language, or actions of a profane, vulgar, lewd, lascivious, or indecent nature.' I'm not sure if 'in writing' could be applied to the internet, but in any event this is scary stuff."

US Senate & House Create YouTube Channels

2009-01-19T14:12:00.001-08:00

Following an election in which online videos played an important role, the United States House of Representatives and United States Senate have opened YouTube channels (or 'hubs') advertised to be a 'backstage pass to your government.' Ideally this will bring transparency to citizens and inform them of their senators' & representatives' positions and ideas.

Breathalyzer Source Code Ruling Upheld

2009-01-19T14:11:00.001-08:00

In a follow up to a 2005 story where Florida judge Doug Henderson ruled that breathalyzer evidence in more than 100 drunk driving cases would be inadmissible as evidence at trial, the Second District Court of Appeal and Circuit Court has ruled on Tuesday to uphold the 2005 ruling requiring the manufacturer of the Intoxilyzer 5000, Kentucky-based CMI Inc, to release source code for their breathalyzer equipment to be examined by witnesses for the defense of those standing trial with breathalyzer test result being used as evidence against them. '"The defendant's right to a fair trial outweighed the manufacturer's claim of a trade secret," Henderson said Tuesday. In response to the ruling defense attorney, Mark Lipinski, who represents seven defendants challenging the source codes, said the state likely will be forced to reduce charges — or drop the cases entirely.' ... What this really means is that outside corporations cannot sell equipment to the state of Florida and expect to hide the workings of their machine by saying they are trade secret. It means the state has to give full disclosure concerning important and critical aspects of the case.

Germany Legislates For Mandatory Web Filters

2009-01-19T14:09:00.000-08:00

Germany's Minister for Families has announced a legislative initiative to force ISPs to implement a government-mandated block list (in English), which will be updated daily. The BKA (Germany's equivalent of the FBI) will be in charge of generating and maintaining the list. As usual, this is being brought in under the 'fight child porn' guise. The minister is quoted as saying: 'We must not water down the problem' in reply to being challenged that this law and technology could be used to censor other content. She then went on to say: 'I can't know what wishes and plans future governments will develop.' She has agreed the principle of the legislation with the interior minister and the technology minister, which in German coalition government terms means it's pretty much a done deal.

Outrage in Oakland After Cop Kills Unarmed Man: Piecing Together the Story

2009-01-19T14:07:00.000-08:00

Johannes Mehserle, the former BART police officer who shot and killed Oscar Grant, an unarmed African-American man on New Year's Day, has been arrested on homicide charges.

The arrest came as somewhat of a surprise; on Monday BART officials completed their probe into the incident but refused to recommend whether Mehserle should be charged with a crime. Although Alameda County had launched a separate investigation, few expected an arrest so soon. Distict Attorney Tom Orloff stated Thursday that he would decide if Mehserle should be charged within two weeks.

At a news conference today, Orloff said Mehserle was being charged with murder because the evidence shows "an unlawful killing done by intentional act."

According to the San Francisco Chronicle, which broke the story, Grant’s family’s lawyer said late Tuesday night “ ... the family is delighted, and it will really help with the healing process ... This is also very important for the community. This had to occur; it was almost a no-brainer.”

***

On Jan. 1, Oscar Grant, an unarmed 22-year-old African American man, was shot and killed by a white Bay Area Rapid Transit police officer.

Videos of the shooting, which show Grant pinned facedown on the ground shortly before being shot in the back, catapulted the story to national attention and sparked community outrage that boiled over into violent protests last Wednesday night.

Nevertheless, authorities dawdled in investigating the crime -- Johannes Mehserle, the officer who killed Grant, was only detained yesterday.

What Happened Jan. 1

BART police officers, who had received reports of fighting aboard a BART train headed for the East Bay, detained a group of men, including Grant, at the Fruitvale BART Station. George Ciccariello-Maher, writing in the San Francisco Bay View, describes what happened next:

Several of the men, all young and mostly black, were lined up, seated, along the platform. Some were cuffed, Oscar Grant was not. As he was attempting to defuse the situation, BART police decided to detain him, placing him facedown on the platform, with one officer kneeling near his neck and another straddling his legs.
For some still unexplained reason, one officer, now identified as Johannes Mehserle stood up, pulled his gun and fired a shot directly into Oscar Grant's back.

The bullet went through Grant's back, ricocheting off the platform and puncturing his lung. There are gasps from the bystanders and shock on the faces of the other officers, who clearly didn't expect the shot to be fired. Grant, who was begging not to be Tasered at the time of the shot, clearly didn't expect it either.
But this surprise notwithstanding, the decision was then made to cuff the young man as he lay dying.

A friend of Grant’s, interviewed by KTVU, says Grant had tried to calm the situation and begged officers not to hurt him:

"Oscar yelled, 'You shot me! I got a 4-year-old daughter,' " said Fernando Anicete. "Oscar was telling us to calm down, and we did. We weren't looking for any trouble."

Kristina Vargas, an eyewitness who recorded the incident with her camera phone, relates her impressions of the shooting in a video interview:

When the gunshot went off, I turned to the boy, and saw the smoke from the gun, so I know it was the boy that was shot. The police were standing over him at that point. And I look at the officer … and his eyes are like -- he’s in shock for what he just did.
And you see another officer nudge him on the shoulder and ask, 'Why did you do that? What happened?' And the officer who shot the boy was like, 'I don’t know,' just looking at him like he couldn’t believe what he had done.
Wow. I was in shock … I cannot believe that in a couple of seconds you just draw your gun out and shoot somebody who’s just lying on the floor with his hands behind his back.

Following the shooting, BART police tried to confiscate all the videos taken by witnesses. They failed. Three clips videos made it onto YouTube, where they were viewed hundreds of thousands of times and eventually picked up and played on the news, bringing the story to national attention.

As Valleywag notes, without those videos, the story would have quickly faded from public attention -- "Another death by cop in America's inner cities, rendered in bloodless black-and-white text, would go unremarked by readers. But the video, which shows Mehserle, seemingly unprompted, reaching for his gun and shooting Grant, is chilling."

Rumors have circulated that Mehserle mistook his gun for a Taser and shot Grant by accident. But experts claim the scenario is unlikely.

The Associated Press reports:

George Kirkham, a professor of criminology at the Florida State University who also viewed the footage, said he finds that hard to believe because most Taser stun guns do not look or feel like pistols, and the officer fired in a manner consistent with a handgun, not a Taser.
"It's not believable that any officer can mix up a Taser and a firearm," said Kirkham, who has examined almost 500 police shootings over the past 30 years. "It's like looking for your steering wheel on the right side of your car rather than the left side."

Despite ample evidence of wrongdoing, officials did not press criminal charges against Mehserle, who resigned from the BART police and refused to be questioned by BART officials.

The glacial pace of the investigation has infuriated many in the community. Last Wednesday, a peaceful protest starting at the Fruitvale station where Grant was shot, boiled over into vandalism and destruction as some protesters set trash cans and cars on fire and smashed store windows. More than 100 people were arrested.

At CounterPunch, Kara N. Tina describes the protest:

As the march reached the Lake Merritt BART Station and headquarters of BART police downtown, clashes immediately broke out, leaving one police cruiser destroyed alongside a burning dumpster. Marchers dispersed down side streets to the sounds of police weapons discharging and the sting of tear gas in the air. … Hundreds of businesses and cars were damaged or destroyed, and dumpsters were left burning. The next day, a BART board of directors meeting was filled beyond capacity and overwhelmed with community members expressing indignant rage, clearly feeling validated and empowered to speak up by the previous night's rebellion.

But some residents were angered that protesters targeted local businesses and landmarks. Officials claim that more than 300 businesses were vandalized.

The San Francisco Chronicle reports that at one point the protesters:

... smashed a hair salon, a pharmacy and several restaurants. Police in riot gear tried to control the crowd, but some people retreated along 14th Street and bashed cars along the way. The mob smashed the windows at Creative African Braids on 14th Street, and a woman walked out of the shop holding a baby in her arms.
"This is our business," shouted Leemu Topka, the black owner of the salon she started four years ago. "This is our shop. This is what you call a protest?"

Some witnesses claim that the protests became violent at the behest of outsiders -- mostly white anarchists who do not live in Oakland. In indybay.org, an anonymous poster writes:

When the masked young people (who, in their great majority, were white kids) started burning the first garbage dumpster near Laney College, about half the black folks in the crowd said, "Aw fuck this! I'm outta here! I ain't getting caught up in the middle of that, those cops'll be shooting soon!" and left.
Then later, at 14th and Broadway, many black youths joined in the demonstration. They were chanting slogans like, "We're all Oscar Grant!" These black youth were very militant, they were facing down the riot cops and defiantly raising their fists in anger and solidarity.

Meanwhile, behind them on 14th Street, east of Broadway, masked white punks proceeded to smash car windows, shop windows, etc. After a couple of trash cans were turned over and lit on fire on the northeast and southeast corners of 14th and Broadway, the police began pushing the crowd down 14th. More cars were smashed, one SUV was set ablaze, and I clearly saw a small group of masked white kids smashing the windows of the three storefronts on the southeast corner of 14th and Webster.
All the way down 14th to Madison, black youth continued to face down the police, legitimately but militantly protesting, exercising their First Amendment rights. And the white punks continued to break shit.

Grant's family and friends begged protesters to stop writes the Mercury News:

"I am begging the citizens to not use violent tactics anymore," said Grant's mother, an emotional Wanda Johnson, who appeared with about 30 of Grant's relatives and friends at a news conference called by attorney John Burris at his East Oakland office.
"I know it's a very frustrating time," Johnson said, referring to the protracted police investigation into the shooting. "But Oscar would not want to see the violence and the fires. We believe this situation is going to come to a close, and justice will be served. I'm asking you, please, please stop it and let justice prevail. Please stop it."

The Chronicle writes the incident has incited a strong reaction because so many African Americans daily face the threat of police brutality.

"When is this going to stop?" the 29-year-old [African American man] shouted. "I'm sick of people acting like we deserve what we get, that because we are black, they can shoot us in the back and get away with it."

…

The [Grant] case has elicited a strong reaction, especially among African Americans, who long have said they frequently are stopped, handcuffed, beaten -- and even shot -- because of their race. Grant's attorney believes race played a role in how he and the other young men were treated by the BART police.

"I don't think the officer shot the gun because Oscar was black, but I think the way he approached the situation in an aggressive way was based on race," said attorney John Burris, who is representing Grant's family in their claim against BART. "If they were white, the officer might have asked them what was going on, rather than throw them in handcuffs."

Mark Harrison, a police-procedure consultant who has testified in use-of-force cases, said he, too, thinks the situation at the BART station escalated because of race.

"If they were kids from Orinda being rowdy on the way home from a Raiders game, I don't think it would have gone down the same way," Harrison said. "Police are supposed to be trained to deal with everyone. A pinstripe suit doesn't mean someone won't kill you, and baggy pants and a down jacket do not mean he will."

As in most cities throughout America, trouble between black youth and police has a long history Oakland. The Mercury News writes:

"Historian [Steven] Lavoie said you can trace the history of troubled relations between Oakland minorities and police to the 1950s, when the lure of post-World War II jobs brought African Americans from the South, as well as white Southerners, many of whom would put on uniform and badge.

"The tension that resulted had a lot to do with who was hired, because a lot of the people from the South brought attitudes with them," he said. "Blacks, but also whites not willing to be as tolerant as Oakland historically had been."
Lavoie says relations between police and minorities have dramatically improved since the 1960s, when the Black Panthers formed to patrol the streets, ostensibly to police the police. Despite this week's flare of street violence, "what you should look at is how police responded Wednesday night, versus how they went after peace marchers in the '60s. There's a huge difference."

Patrice O’Neill, executive producer of the Working Group, writes about how to go forward:

I don’t think any of us have a road map for change here, but we have learned some things from the Not In Our Town movement that might be useful: Silence is Acceptance. We can’t stay quiet about a police killing, or more pervasively, about the out-of-control killings of our youth.
In the absence of leadership, ordinary citizens need to take nonviolent action. Maybe our elected officials and other self-appointed leaders will do something if the rest of us start getting creative. [Barack] Obama can’t fix this, we have to do it. The best ideas emerge from local action. We live in one of the most creative, wealthy, generous and diverse areas in the world. If we tried, we could be a model for the country.

As the community rebuilds and the investigation goes forward, it is essential that the case stay in the national spotlight and that authorities know people are still paying attention.

So far, community outrage does not seem to have changed the authorities' approach to the case: on Monday, BART completed an internal investigation of the incident, but declined to recommend whether charges should be brought against Mehserle. Alameda County District Attorney Tom Orloff says he'll decide by next week whether to bring criminal charges against the shooter.

Racewire has posted five things you can do right now, to help Oscar Grant and his family get justice:

1. Digg the story so the national media can pick up on it.

2. Contact BART Director Carole Ward Allen and demand that: 1) The officers involved be taken off duty without pay and charged and fully prosecuted; 2) There be an independent investigation of the shooting that includes a review of training and hiring practices; and 3) BART establish an independent residents’ review board for the police. Call her at (510) 464-6095 or e-mail the BART board of directors at boardofdirectors@bart.gov.

3. Call the BART police to complain about the officers’ conduct and demand immediate action -- Internal Affairs: Sgt. David Chlebowski, (510) 464-7029, dchlebo@bart.gov; Chief of Police Gary Gee, (510) 464-7022, ggee@bart.gov. Call them toll free at (877) 679-7000 and press the last four digits of the phone number you wish to reach.

4. Talk it up on your blogs, networks and talk radio shows (call Michael Baisden (877) 622-3269 or Rev. Al, et al. to get this on the national radar).

5. Stay tuned for other actions, protests, etc., especially if you are in the Bay Area.

COUNTY SHERIFF BILL MASTERS CELEBRATES THREE DECADES WITH THE DEPARTMENT

2009-01-19T13:55:00.001-08:00

Once A Drug Buster, Now A Prominent Critic Of The 'War On Drugs'

When he's hiring new deputies, the test is simple. The sheriff asks them to write their life stories. "Most of this job is writing," Bill Masters says. "If they can't write, they're a constant pain in the ass." So if Masters wrote his own life story, what would he write?

Masters grew up a straight-laced kid in L.A., joined the Coast Guard, kicked around and decided he didn't want to go back to L.A. It was hot there, and you had to wear a tie to job interviews. So he said screw this, "I'm going to Telluride and go ski for a year."

He was a liftie who helped build Lift 7. Then fate intervened. Driving down valley, a rock careened down the hill and smashed the top of his Volkswagen Bug. Crushed the roof. Crushed the groceries. So he hitchhiked. One day, the Telluride Marshal picked him up, and offered him a job. Masters was only 23 years old.

Shortly thereafter, he was named Sheriff. He got along well with the old miners, though they occasionally stole the lights off the top of his cop car and joyrided it down the street. The hippies were less tolerant of the new, short-haired, rednecky sheriff. Telluride was a famous drug spot, and Masters was determined to clean it up. He set up an elaborate sting involving all kinds of Dragnet devices -- wiretapping, undercover police officers, and he arrested some druggies/town board members.

I thought we could arrest our way out of this problem," Masters says.

Pro-druggers organized a party and burned Masters in effigy. Sky Walters, now the undersheriff, worried they'd burn him in person. Masters thought he'd never get re-elected sheriff. Since then, he's won seven elections.

Since those early anti-drug days, Masters has changed his thinking, changed his party -- from Republican to Libertarian, and now to Democrat -- and become one of America's most outspoken and honest critics of the War on Drugs. His 2001 book, "Drug War Addiction," argues that police departments are addicted to the money they get for the War on Drugs, despite all the damage it does to otherwise decent people. He talks about wrestling down heroin addicts with his wife Jill, a paramedic and now a town council member. He also edited a book called "The New Prohibition," which includes Ron Paul and Jesse Ventura. It was well reviewed.

Sheriff of a small county, Masters doesn't make bank. In the old days, for dough, he worked at a gas station. Now, he co-owns an alarm company and works security for the family of Tom Cruise, whom Masters calls "a great guy, great family." Masters, 57, plans to run for sheriff again in 2010. "What else would I do?" Masters laughs. "I'm completely unskilled."

When you write it down on paper, his life story says otherwise.

UAB STUDY FINDS COCAINE RESIDUE ON MORE THAN HALF $1 BILLS SURVEYED

2009-01-19T13:54:00.001-08:00

As much as 65 percent of $1 bills in the Birmingham area could be contaminated with trace amounts of cocaine, according to a set of experiments conducted by forensic science students at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

The students tested different methods of measuring the amount of cocaine on money. They looked at 40 $1 bills - half collected from a Regions Bank and half from a Wachovia branch - and found that the more effective testing method revealed 65 percent had cocaine on them. Professor Elizabeth Gardner, who oversaw the research, said the figure matches tests other students conducted in her class with individual $1 bills collected from stores and restaurants around the Birmingham area.

More comprehensive data collected in other cities usually finds between 80 and 90 percent contamination, she said, although those studies usually use higher-denomination bills.

"I have talked to people who say that basically 100 percent of currency is contaminated and if you get any negatives, it's in dollar bills," Gardner said.

As far as she knows, she said, this is the first time the tests have been done on money in Birmingham. However, she cautioned that the research, which was printed in UAB's undergraduate journal Inquiro, was done on a small scale and isn't as complete as previously published studies elsewhere.

The paper was written by student Jeremy Felix for an internship in chemistry with a forensic science track and as an independent honors project by student Rena Hammer. Felix plans to present the results at a meeting of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences.

Gardner also has students in her Justice Science 250 class, titled "Criminalistics: An Overview," conduct similar experiments to trace the amount of cocaine on bills with gas chromatography-mass spectroscopy, a technique commonly used in forensics.

"I think this is something I'm going to have my students do every year," she said. "It is great fun and I think the students really enjoy it, and it is good science."

It's one of several "CSI"-style projects she assigns the class. Others include an analysis of rope and a study of how dog hairs could be transferred from a person petting a dog to a crime scene.

Gardner said she came up with the idea for the cocaine test before coming to UAB last year. She never conducted it at her previous school, but did check with authorities there to make sure it wouldn't get anyone in trouble.

Tiny amount:

She emphasized that the amount of cocaine in question is so tiny that it couldn't possibly affect people who handle the money. Researchers suspect most of the cocaine comes from counting machines at banks, which have been shown to have cocaine dust in them. In addition, Gardner said, the paper U.S. currency is made of seems to attract and trap cocaine residue and other contaminants.

"Money is really dirty," she said.

The first way Gardner had the students test the money - by soaking it in a methanol solution to extract all the contaminants - created a brown liquid too filthy to run through the lab's sensitive machines.

So the students tested three other methods - one in which they used chloroform and water to extract the residues, one in which they used chloroform alone, and one in which they used chloroform and an acid/base wash. They found the latter method produced the cleanest sample, but multiple steps meant a loss of some measurable cocaine. Those samples tested 35 percent positive for cocaine.

SUPREME COURT EASES LIMITS ON EVIDENCE

2009-01-19T13:53:00.001-08:00

WASHINGTON -- The Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that evidence obtained from an unlawful arrest based on careless record keeping by the police may be used against a criminal defendant.

The 5-to-4 decision revealed competing conceptions of the exclusionary rule, which requires the suppression of some evidence obtained through police misconduct, and suggested that the court's commitment to the rule was fragile.

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., writing for the majority, said that the exclusion of evidence should be a last resort and that judges should use a sliding scale in deciding whether particular misconduct by the police warranted suppressing the evidence they had found.

"To trigger the exclusionary rule," Chief Justice Roberts wrote, "police conduct must be sufficiently deliberate that exclusion can meaningfully deter it, and sufficiently culpable that such deterrence is worth the price paid by the justice system."

That price, the chief justice wrote, "is, of course, letting guilty and possibly dangerous defendants go free."

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, writing for the dissenters, argued for "a more majestic conception" of the exclusionary rule, and a more categorical one.

The rule requires more than a cost-benefit calculus to deter police misconduct, Justice Ginsburg wrote. It also protects defendants' rights, she said, and prevents judicial complicity in "official lawlessness."

The case began when methamphetamines and a gun were found after Bennie D. Herring, an Alabama man, was arrested based on police officers' mistaken belief that he was subject to an outstanding arrest warrant.

That belief was based on incorrect information in the computer files of a neighboring county's police department. The warrant had been withdrawn, but the database had not been updated.

Calling the error "isolated negligence attenuated from the arrest," Chief Justice Roberts said the lower courts had been correct in allowing the jury in Mr. Herring's case to consider the evidence. He was convicted and sentenced to 27 months in prison.

The ruling itself is relatively narrow and is arguably merely a logical extension of a 1995 decision, Arizona v. Evans, which recognized an exception to the exclusionary rule for arrests resulting from erroneous computer records kept by court employees ( as opposed to the police ).

The decision in the case, Herring v. United States, No. 07-513, may have broad consequences, said Craig M. Bradley, a law professor at Indiana University.

"It may well be," Professor Bradley said, "that courts will take this as a green light to ignore police negligence all over the place."

Chief Justice Roberts, who was joined by Justices Antonin Scalia, Anthony M. Kennedy, Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr., said the exclusionary rule was unlikely to deter isolated careless record keeping and should be reserved for "deliberate, reckless or grossly negligent conduct, or in some circumstances recurring systemic negligence."

"The deterrent effect of suppression must be substantial and outweigh any harm to the justice system," the chief justice wrote. "Marginal deterrence does not 'pay its way.' "

Justice Ginsburg, joined by Justices John Paul Stevens, David H. Souter and Stephen G. Breyer, wrote that the majority "underestimates the need for a forceful exclusionary rule and the gravity of record keeping violations," particularly given the heavy reliance by law enforcement on the electronic databases that "form the nervous system of contemporary criminal justice operations."

In a separate dissent, Justice Breyer, joined by Justice Souter, called for a "clear line" to be drawn between "police record keeping errors and judicial ones."

That, Justice Breyer said, "is far easier for the courts to administer that the chief justice's case-by-case, multifactored inquiry into the degree of police culpability."

The decision in the Herring case divided along familiar lines. A second case, about the role of the jury in sentencing decisions, was also decided Wednesday by a 5-to-4 vote, but it had a less predictable lineup.

That decision marked either a pause or a stopping point in a judicial march that began with the court's 2000 decision in Apprendi v. New Jersey that the Constitution bars judges from making factual findings leading to increased sentences.

The question in the new case, Oregon v. Ice, No. 07-901, was whether the requirement established in Apprendi applied to the decision whether a defendant convicted of multiple crimes must serve consecutive or concurrent sentences if the harsher punishment required a judge to find facts not determined by the jury.

Justice Ginsburg, joined by Justices Stevens, Kennedy, Breyer and Alito, wrote that the Apprendi rule did not apply to that situation "in light of historical practice and the authority of the states over the administration of their criminal justice systems."

It was undisputed in the case that some state systems that give judges discretion on this point are constitutional, including those in which judges have complete freedom and those in which they are allowed to opt for more lenient concurrent sentences.

The system used in Oregon, however, introduced an additional element in allowing judges to impose harsher sentences. The Oregon law required judges wishing to impose consecutive sentences in some cases to make factual findings about, for instance, the defendant's "willingness to commit more than one criminal offense," before imposing the longer prison terms.

An Oregon judge did so in the case of Thomas E. Ice, who was convicted of sexually assaulting an 11-year-old girl on two occasions. The judge effectively increased Mr. Ice's sentence to 340 months from 90 months.

Justice Antonin Scalia, joined by Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Souter and Thomas, dissented, saying the majority opinion was "a virtual copy of the dissents" and filled with "repeated exhumation of arguments dead and buried" in the Apprendi line of cases.

"I do not understand," Justice Scalia wrote, "why we would make such a strange exception to the treasured right of trial by jury."

NURSE BRINGS THE MEDICINAL CANNABIS FIGHT TO THE FEDS

2009-01-19T13:51:00.000-08:00

Psychiatric nurse Bryan Krumm's opinion of the state's medical marijuana program is not an uncommon one. "Until they can keep the federal government out of the program, they are not going to be able to make our program functional."

The Department of Health established regulations regarding the growth and distribution of medical marijuana last week. The department accepting applications from nonprofit businesses interested in producing medical marijuana.

Krumm filed suit against the U.S. attorney and others general in District Court to combat federal interference, and he's using a stipulation in the Controlled Substances Act to do it.

The act is broken into "schedules," which are classifications for various drugs. Marijuana is listed in the most restrictive category, Schedule I. According to the act, these drugs have no medical uses. Cocaine and opiates are listed as Schedule II drugs, because they have medical applications.

Krumm works at Sage Neuroscience Center in Albuquerque. He argues that once California created a medical marijuana program in 1996, cannabis should have been bumped to a less restrictive schedule. "Once it has accepted medical use," says Krumm, "it no longer meets criteria for placement in Schedule I." Krumm says his is the first lawsuit in the country that is using the Controlled Substances Act itself to justify the removal of marijuana from Schedule I.

He tried asking the state to move marijuana to a lower schedule in the state's Controlled Substances Act, but the New Mexico Pharmacy Board refused. "It was just an attempt to get it out of this arbitrary placement," he says. "Right now in the state of New Mexico, it's listed both in Schedule I and Schedule II."

William Harvey, executive director of the Pharmacy Board, says it's not up to the board to move a drug from one schedule to another. It's up the the Legislature, he says."The Legislature has given the board the ability to schedule substances that aren't recognized yet-like there's always chemicals or drugs that are invented. But the board can't take something that's already in a schedule and move it to another one unless the Legislature has given us the authority. And it hasn't."

But Harvey added there's no doubt state law permits medicinal marijuana through the Department of Health. Marijuana is listed in Schedule I under the state's Controlled Substances Act. It's also part of Schedule II, but only for use by certified patients in the state's medical cannabis program. Marinol, which is synthetic THC, is categorized in Schedule III.

Krumm will argue his case against the federal government in a couple of months. If he succeeds in proving the Drug Enforcement Administration has been illegally maintaining Schedule I placement of marijuana, it would open options for people around the country.

Rescheduling would prevent the federal government from saying it's against federal law for these state programs to operate, he says. "There are so many people who are suffering needlessly for lack of a needed medication," Krumm adds. "Marijuana has unique therapeutic value that can't be mimicked by any other class of medication. It's one of the safest therapeutically active substances known to man."'

The state's Medical Advisory Board will hold a hearing Thursday, Jan. 15, to consider adding illnesses to the list of those that qualify patients for the state's medical cannabis program. Go to Los Griegos Community Center at 1231 Candelaria NW at 9 a.m.

JUDGE QUEST TO DECRIMINALIZE MINOR DRUG USE GETS SUPPORT

2009-01-19T13:50:00.000-08:00

As the Texas Legislature begins its session, a Houston judge is again arguing to end jail time for criminals caught with small amounts of cocaine and crack, but this time he has the support of 15 colleagues.

State District Judge Michael McSpadden on Wednesday sent a letter to the state's top officials and Houston's senators and representatives asking for a change in what he called "draconian" laws.

During the last session, McSpadden stood alone when he asked that charges for possession of a controlled substance of less than 1 gram be reduced from a state jail felony to a misdemeanor. Two years later, judges from both major political parties are joining the Republican who has been on the bench for more than 20 years.

"Sixteen of us feel that it's just unfair to be convicted for a residue amount and be labeled a felon, which changes your whole life," McSpadden said. "We're not talking about legalizing it; we're talking about making it a misdemeanor."

Harris County District Attorney Pat Lykos said the problem is multifaceted, and she is studying the best ways to solve the problems associated with drug abuse, including pre-trial diversion and residential treatment centers.

She said she was looking at the "big picture" and noted that Class A misdemeanors could still involve jail time, which wouldn't help jail overcrowding, and that small drug arrests lower other crimes in neighborhoods.

Lykos also pointed out that any drug user contributes money to criminal empires, including drug lords in Mexico and terrorists worldwide.

"Anyone who uses illicit drugs has blood on their hands," she said.

In his letter, McSpadden suggested reducing the charge and mandating drug treatment. He also recommended funding misdemeanor drug courts.

McSpadden said 25 percent to 30 percent of Harris County's 22 criminal district court dockets are felony charges for less than 1 gram of a controlled substance.

The change, McSpadden argues, would lower dockets and create uniform enforcement across the state. He noted that Dallas County police and prosecutors place a lower priority on these offenses, leading to disparate treatment between counties.

McSpadden said his concerns come from fielding complaints about the system from juries and residents.

"The 'War on Drugs' isn't working, and we as judges realize it," McSpadden said. "And the public realizes it."

During the last session, the proposal didn't make it out of committee.

Chairman of the Senate Criminal Justice Committee, Sen. John Whitmire, D-Houston, didn't return calls for comment on the proposal late Wednesday.

Judges who signed on with McSpadden include fellow Republicans Debbie Mantooth Stricklin, Jeannine Barr, Vanessa Velasquez, Denise Collins, Marc Carter, Belinda Hill, Joan Campbell and Jim Wallace.

Democrats supporting the initiative, who were all elected in November, include Ruben Guerrero, Shawna Reagin, Kevin Fine, David Mendoza, Randy Roll, Hazel Jones and Maria Jackson.

Supervisors halt search for new sheriff, has one candidate

2009-01-17T12:02:00.001-08:00

By ZEKE MINAYA
The Press-Enterprise

A call for applicants to fill the remaining two years of the retiring San Bernardino County sheriff's term was scrapped Tuesday by the Board of Supervisors, which instead will consider only one candidate for the job.

The board will vote on appointing Assistant Sheriff Rod Hoops to Sheriff Gary Penrod's remaining term at its Jan. 27 meeting.

Board Chairman Gary Ovitt had proposed opening an application period to candidates from San Bernardino County, which would have begun this week with board approval.

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Even with that process, Hoops would have been considered a front-runner because he is a 30-year department veteran and was named by Penrod as his choice as successor. Two supervisors stated that he is an excellent candidate.

At Tuesday's board meeting, Supervisor Neil Derry suggested that the selection process be eliminated because it appeared that the board favored Hoops.

Derry referred to a Jan. 10 news report that said "several county supervisors have endorsed" Hoops for the position. Derry later said he was referring to story in The Press-Enterprise.

Ovitt took issue with the word endorsed, saying it incorrectly characterized support for Hoops among the five board members. While Hoops is respected, "we still haven't voted for him yet," Ovitt said.

The question of the method of appointment aside, Supervisor Paul Biane maintained his support for Hoops.

"The most important thing to note is that Rod Hoops is the best person to be the sheriff of San Bernardino County," Biane said.

Reach Zeke Minaya at 951-368-9539 or zminaya@PE.com

Upland YMCA teacher pleads guilty to molestation, gets 3 years in prison

2009-01-17T12:01:00.000-08:00

An Upland YMCA teacher accused of touching a 4-year-old boy's genitals agreed to plead guilty to one count of felony child molestation Monday in West Valley Superior Court.

Garrett Wayne Ammon, 30, of Rancho Cucamonga, will be sentenced to three years in state prison on Feb. 10, said Deputy District Attorney Karen Schmauss.

Ammon initially faced two felony counts of lewd act on a child under 14 years old. One count will be dismissed as part of Ammon's plea agreement, Schmauss said.

Schmauss said Ammon will have to register as a sex offender for the rest of his life as a result of his conviction.

"His career as a preschool teacher is over forever, as it should be," Schmauss said.

A 4-year-old boy in one of Ammon's classes at the Scheu Family YMCA of Upland told police that Ammon touched his genitals in the classroom and in the school's bathroom.

When he was arrested on Dec. 12, Ammon told police he abused the boy on at least seven different occasions.

"I was curious, but I knew it would end up bad and knew it was wrong," Ammon told police, according to police reports in Ammon's case file.

Before his arrest, Ammon had worked as a child-care teacher for nine years at various businesses.

The 4-year-old boy told police there were other students in the class who Ammon abused. Ammon denied molesting other children.

Ammon was one of two Upland schoolteachers charged with child molestation in December.

Andy Megaw is accused of inappropriately touching six students in his class of second- and third-graders at Valencia Elementary School.

Megaw, the former head of Upland's teachers' union, has pleaded not guilty to charges and is next due in court Jan. 22.

Supervisors vote to circumvent process for appointing Rod Hoops sheriff

2009-01-17T11:59:00.001-08:00

Retiring Sheriff Gary Penrod has recommended Assistant Sheriff Rod Hoops fill the remaining two years of his term.

This morning, the San Bernardino County Board of Supervisors heeded Penrod's advice and voted to circumvent the interview process for finding an interim replacement for Penrod.

Because the position of county sheriff is an elected office, Penrod's replacement would be an appointee who would only serve until the 2010 election.

The board plans to vote Jan. 23 on appointing Hoops, a 30-year veteran in charge of operations, to the position. If the vote goes through, Hoops would be sworn in on Feb. 3.

Normally, the board would collect applications from interested candidates and hold a public hearing to interview them. That process will not be conducted, the supervisors decided Tuesday.

Military District of San Bernardino County

Big Bear Observation Post

Program aims to mold former soldiers into teachers

At least our Mexican neighbors are still standing up for their freedom (and ours)

Girl, 16, found dead in Fort Lewis barracks

US soldiers investigated over ‘fraud’ bigger than Madoff

Coast Guard chief charged with rape, cruelty

Army recruiting stand-down ordered after suicides

Let My Students Drink

Military to bribe foreigners with citizenship for service

Filipino court orders Marine rapist into custody

Rucker soldier charged with death of son, 5 months old

Rucker soldier charged with death of son, 5 months old

Sheriff’s deputy must stand trial for alleged death threat, judge rules

Attorney: shooting of victim in Chino “intentional”

(Riverside) Justice for Annette García: Community responds to police murder of activist mother

CHP kills three boys, ages 15, 11 and 9, in high speed chase

The US military and its cult of cruelty

Recruiters banned at RIT

Marine sentenced to 6 years in prison for rape

Suit filed in killing by deputy

Police “High-Speed Chases:” Another Innocent Life Taken

Wisconsin takes action to fight domestic abuse among cops

Creating Prisoners is a Booming Industry in Need of a Bust

SB County violates Brown Act

Malmstrom airman found guilty of larceny

Someone else is spying on YOU. And it isn’t the NSA. Fusion Centers.

Pinal County, AZ, shelves speed-camera program

Speedball Beer Facing Sales Ban

HEY! I wanted drugs, not beer…

Breathalyzer Source Code Required for Use as Evidence

Ex-NSA analyst: Agency spied on news organizations

Intelligence Agencies' Databases Set to Be Linked

U.S. Must Back Down on Iranian Uranium Enrichment

Riverside County DA: 4 Marines accused of killing sergeant, wife in Winchester could face death penalty

10:00 PM PST on Wednesday, January 21, 2009

S.B. County accused of violating Brown Act

10:00 PM PST on Wednesday, January 21, 2009

Leonard Peltier beaten in prison

The Freedom of Information Act is Back Memorandum for the Heads of Executive Departments and Agencies

By Barack ObamaPresident of the United States

Mexican Drug War Violence Is Going off the Charts

Politics Trumps Science as DEA Rejects Researcher's Request to Grow Marijuana for FDA-Approved Studies

County no friend to medical pot patients

Kentucky Court of Appeals Overturns Domain Name Seizure Order [updated]

Marijuana pipe shielded leg during 2004 drive-by, man testifies

Bush says farewell

Marquee sign draws fire

Current, Future Justice Officials Clash Over OLC Proposal

ODNI Denies Release of 2006 Intelligence Budget Figure

New Guidelines Define NCTC Access to Non-Terror Databases

The rise and fall of Bill Postmus unraveled

County Asks U.S. Supreme Court To Erase State's Medical Marijuana Law

Hearing set in case against former assistant assessor

Ex-SoCal officer pleads guilty in violence case

Temecula Clinic Offers Consultations on Medical Marijuana

Some in Sheriff's Department are cops gone wild

Carona acquitted of conspiracy

SB police officer loses job after pleading guilty to attacking girlfriend

Postmus follows long line

10:00 PM PST on Sunday, January 18, 2009

From the PE: Investigators searched S.B. county supervisor’s office

From the PE: Investigators searched S.B. county supervisor’s office

Assessor Postmus jailed on felony drug charge

06:56 AM PST on Friday, January 16, 2009

OC Sheriff unveils new concealed weapons policy, again…

January 13th, 2009, 5:57 pm · 75 Comments · posted by NORBERTO SANTANA JR.

Mehserle Charged with Murder but Oakland Isn’t Celebrating Yet

South Carolina Seeking To Outlaw Profanity

US Senate & House Create YouTube Channels

Breathalyzer Source Code Ruling Upheld

Germany Legislates For Mandatory Web Filters

Outrage in Oakland After Cop Kills Unarmed Man: Piecing Together the Story

1. Digg the story so the national media can pick up on it.

COUNTY SHERIFF BILL MASTERS CELEBRATES THREE DECADES WITH THE DEPARTMENT

UAB STUDY FINDS COCAINE RESIDUE ON MORE THAN HALF $1 BILLS SURVEYED

SUPREME COURT EASES LIMITS ON EVIDENCE

NURSE BRINGS THE MEDICINAL CANNABIS FIGHT TO THE FEDS

JUDGE QUEST TO DECRIMINALIZE MINOR DRUG USE GETS SUPPORT

Supervisors halt search for new sheriff, has one candidate

By Barack Obama
President of the United States