Texas: More School To Prison Pipeline

I had thought to write a few words on this latest perversion, for it can be called nothing other, this latest perversion to come out of America, specifically Texas. But it would appear that I said all that needed saying back in January last year.

What begins immediately below is just as applicable to the latest report as it was to the original, published under the same header.

Texas: How Many Kids Lives Can We Destroy Today?

I have in the past ran a similar story: Texas: Ticket The Children Not but that article didn't come anywhere near this one below, inasmuch that this story delves into the implications of the consequences of receiving a ''ticket'' or being arrested within the Texas school system.

Simply put, if the child holds his hand up in court and pleads guilty to behaving like a child, then his academic career is as good as over. To say nothing of the rest of his life being marred by a criminal conviction.

Or in the case of the very young, primary school kids, who refuse to answer charges, (because they are not legally binding) will find themselves arrested when they turn seventeen, effectively resulting in, the end of a productive life and career.

But it is the same American psyche running through this over-reaction to childhood behaviour, that runs through every walk of American society, punish, punish, punish, destroy all the lives we can. That they do so for trifles, (destroy lives) matters not one iota.

The whole society is perverted and sick, it's on par with the backward theocratic states of the middle east. In fact it's worse, it's a western industrialised nation, it should know better.

When you read on, just take note of the pettiness of some of the ridiculous things that constitute misdemeanours/felonies that are applied to these kids. Stroll on!  Just what kind of society is it that  does this to its children? link

The crux of both this and the previous article.

The complaint also adds that the problems often don’t end there. If students fail to appear in court, or if their parents can’t afford to pay fines, then the state issues an arrest warrant for them when they turn 17. Thus, these tickets “can follow students past high school into their adult lives with many of the same consequences as a criminal conviction for a more serious offense, including having to report their convictions on applications for college, the military or employment.”

In Texas, Police in Schools Criminalize 300,000 Students Each Year

The "good guy with a gun" seems to do a lot more policing than protecting.
By Steven Hsieh
April 12, 2013

In Texas, hundreds of thousands of students are winding up in court for committing very serious offenses such as cursing or farting in class. Some of these so-called dangerous criminals (also known as teenagers) will face arrest and even incarceration, like the honors student who spent a night in jail for skipping class, or the 12-year-old who was arrested for spraying perfume on her neck. These cases have at least one thing in common in that they were carried out by special police officers walking a controversial beat: the hallways and classrooms of public schools.

As political pressure from both sides of the aisle mounts to increase police presence in American schools, evidence suggests adding armed guards will only thrust more disadvantaged youth into the criminal justice system. Civil rights groups say policing our schools will further the institutionalization of what's known as the "school-to-prison pipeline."

To understand the potential consequences of putting police inside public schools, we can take a look at Texas, where students face one of the most robust school-to-prison pipelines in the country. According to the youth advocacy group Texas Appleseed, school officers issued 300,000 criminal citations to students in 2010, some handed to children as young as six years old.

As the New York Times notes, Texas Appleseed and a local NAACP chapter filed a complaint in February against a school district with a particular knack for criminalizing children, especially minorities. The complaint says Bryan Independent School District of Texas’ Brazos County, disproportionately ticketed black students for misdemeanors, potentially violating the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Black students accounted for 46 percent of tickets issued in 2011 to 2012, despite only making up 21 percent of the student body.

Most of the criminal citations levied against students were for “Class C” misdemeanors, compelling them to miss classes in order to attend court, and often face addition disciplinary action from the district. As the complaint notes, “These students can then face sentences including fines, court costs, community service, probation and mandatory participation in ‘First Offender’ programs.”

The complaint also adds that the problems often don’t end there. If students fail to appear in court, or if their parents can’t afford to pay fines, then the state issues an arrest warrant for them when they turn 17. Thus, these tickets “can follow students past high school into their adult lives with many of the same consequences as a criminal conviction for a more serious offense, including having to report their convictions on applications for college, the military or employment.”

Advocacy groups add that many behavioral problems warranting tickets in Texas schools seem to be rather trivial for something that can lead to a criminal conviction. For example, some “Class C” misdemeanors under the state’s penal code include using profanity, making offensive gestures, creating “by chemical means” an “unreasonable odor” and “making unreasonable noise in a public place” In other words, yelling, farting, wearing Axe body spray and generally being a teenager is officially illegal in Texas.

Many commentators and several Democratic lawmakers scoffed when NRA executive vice president Wayne LaPierre suggested in the wake of the Newtown shooting that armed guards in schools is “the one thing that would keep people safe,” notoriously adding that “the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.” Yet, not long after LaPierre’s press conference, the White House released a plan calling for an additional 1,000 “specially trained police officers that work in schools.” And just last week, an NRA task force released a report fleshing out its proposal to put armed guards in every school. The head of that task force, former GOP Congressman Asa Hutchinson, announced his intentions to run for Arkansas Governor days after the report was released. Go to page two

Needless to say, there is much in a similar vein throughout this blog and can be found under the relative tags.

Fred Reed: Three Short Essays

There aren't many right-wing writers who warrant their own tag on this here blog, in fact I would say Fred Reed is quite unique in that respect.

Three short essays, enjoy, no matter what your political persuasion.

The View from Abroad

The World is not Billy Bob's Rib Pit
March 10, 2013

The United States is the most hated country in the world, followed closely by Israel, and then by nobody. Why? Why not Ecuador? China? Russia? East Timor? The hostility puzzles many Americans, who genuinely believe their country to be a force for good, a pillar of democracy, a defender of human rights.

To the rest of the world, none of this is even close.

If you have lived abroad, as so very few Americans have, the explanation for the hatred is obvious: Meddling. Relentless, prideful, uncomprehending meddling, frequently military, often with horrendous death tolls. Americans, adroitly managed by a controlled press, historically illiterate, incurious, decreasingly educated, either have never heard of the American behavior that angers others, or believe it to have been inspired by virtuous motives. Nobody else thinks so. Add to unfamiliarity with the wider world the constantly inculcated assertion that America is the greatest, most wonderful nation ever to exist, a light to the world, a shining city on a hill, and you get a dangerously delusional state. Especially now. In the past, American economic and military supremacy were such that the US didn’t have to care what others thought. The times, they are a-changing.

It might be wise to compare briefly the view through American and foreign eyes. Consider Iraq. To most of the world, the war on Iraq was brutal, unprovoked, and murderous. More than a few, looking at the ruins of Fallujah, thought of Guernica—of which few in the States have ever heard.

Many Americans do not believe that we destroyed Iraq for oil, empire, and the Israel lobby, as was in fact the case. No. We wanted to topple an evil dictator and dispense the precious gift of democracy. It was a question of goodness. Many apparently still believe that Iraq had something to do with the attacks on New York. Again, controlled press, poor schooling, little curiosity.

Similarly, Americans tend to see the war on Afghanistan as having to do with ending Terror or sprouting democracy—not as the Great Game (“Hanh?”) redux, or the quest for the TAPI pipeline (“Say whuh?”) or Caspian hydrocarbons. (“Caspian? You mean the Friendly Ghost?”) To most of the world, Afghanistan is just another sorry spectacle of American fighter-bombers killing peasants, of gutted children and drone attacks on half-identified targets. This, the merciless use of overwhelming firepower against lightly armed campesinos, is what the world sees, over and over. Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan. It isn’t pretty.

I live in Mexico. In countless towns, probably in every city of any size, you see streets named Niños Heroes, Heroic Children. In Guadalajara there is a traffic circle with an imposing monument to them. These things commemorate the children who tried to fight the American soldiers invading Mexico City. In that (purely acquisitive) war Mexico lost half its territory. Yet how many gringos know that it ever happened, or when, or for that matter have ever heard of the bombardment of Veracruz or Pershing’s incursion?

Americans who have some grasp of history sometimes say of the Mexican-American War that Mexicans should “get over it.” Some might tell the Jews to get over the Holocaust, or Americans to get over 9/11. It is much easier to tell people to get over what you have done to them than to get over things they have done to you.

Then there is the War on Drugs. Americans believe this to be a campaign against Evil—best conducted, of course, in other people’s countries.

There are other views. Thoughtful Mexicans (all I know, but I haven’t taken a poll) do not see why drugs are Mexico’s problem. If gringos don’t want drugs, why do they buy them? Why don’t they solve their own problems? It is no secret internationally that American students in high school and universities use drugs. Why don’t the Americans put their college kids in jail? And, they say, probably correctly, that Washington, by sponsoring the elimination of big drug lords, caused the current fighting among littler lords to control the trade, thus creating carnage. Predictably, the flow of drugs northward was not affected.

Truculent patriots at Billy Bob’s Rib Pit know none of this. The combination of clueless ignorance and a sort of Walmart-parking-lot arrogance make mysterious to them much behavior of other countries. Consider their view of Iran, an evil Arab country, somewhere, that wants the Bomb so it can blow up Israel and New York. No explanation occurs to them for Iran’s hostility to the US, which wants regime change so Iranians can be democratic and have freedoms. Ask Billy Bobbers whether they have even heard of, much less been in, major Iranian cities like Tehran, Sulawesi, Sidon, or Tbilisi. No. Yet they are sure the inhabitants are dangerous and un-American.

Iranians may perhaps see things differently. They know that in 1953 the democratically electeed prime minister Mohammed Mossadeg (“Mossy what?” they ask in the Rib Pit.) was overthrown by the CIA leaving the Shah (“Is that, like, a person?”), a routinely ghastly dictator, in control. This had much to do with the occupation of the US embassy in 1979, which was sold in the US as evidence of the badness of Iranians.

Later, in 1988, the US Navy, in the form of the USS Vincennes, shot down an Iranian airliner and killed everyone aboard. Americans shrugged it off: Such things were doubtless necessary to stop terrorism. But imagine the outrage if the Iranian navy shot down a US airliner.

Nobody beyond the borders buys our song about spreading freedom and human rights. America has supported countless sordid dictators rulling by army and torture chamber (the Saudis being a current example). We have put many dictators on their thrones, such as Pniochet (“That little wooden guy, his nose got long when he told a lie, right?”) in Chile. (“Isn’t that Texmex soup with beans in it?”) Others notice that the only country that openly and proudly tortures prisoners is…us.

Always, the underlying problem is meddling. Bin Laden’s guys didn’t attack New York because it was a slow morning and they couldn’t think of anything else to do. They were furious at US meddling in Moslem lands. You may think, and I may think, that Islam is a primitive faith not well adapted to the modern world. Fine. I may think that hornets do not have an ideal social organization. But I know better than to poke their nest.

This is why they hate us—meddling, bombing, invading, droning, telling them how to run their countries. No, George, it is not because of our freedoms. Fred Reed




Machismo, Sort Of

Social Philosophy, and the Grape
March 3, 2013

I’m sitting on the veranda and drinking Padre Kino red and trying to figure out purdah. There is nothing like really awful red wine to inflame the wellsprings of cosmic insight, or engender criminally mixed metaphors. The dogs lie about, looking at me strangely. Why? I’m almost pathologically normal, I tell them.

Anyway, purdah is what useless rich Indians, rajahs and sultans and majarogers did with women, which was to keep them locked up in a forbidden part of the palace where they couldn’t ever do anything but play poker and maybe smoke dope and pray to Hindu gods, of whom there are about seven hundred. Purdah was a really dumb-ass idea. I mean, what was the point of having women around if you couldn’t go swing-dancing with them, or talk politics pointlessly because governments only get worse but at least it’s interesting, or lie on remote Mexican beaches and supervise the sunset? But I guess it was hard to get to Michoacan from Hyderabad.

It wasn’t just the Indians. Sultans in Istanbul and satraps or rattraps or whatever they were in Persia did the same thing, stuffing women into harems. What the hell was that for? And you see sort of the same thing today in places like Morocco. Mostly you don’t see women on the street, and when you do they are wrapped up in chadors or burgers or things about like sleeping bags and you can’t really be sure there’s anyone inside. There’s an eye slit at the top, like a World War Two pillbox, but that’s the only sign of life. I reckon Moslems haven’t figured out that the Thirteenth Century ran out a while back. These things can slip by if you aren’t alert.

Padre Kino, the Great Purple Father, may be the worst red wine in Christendom. Instead of grapes they probably ferment old boot soles. If it weren’t for its philosophic properties, I’d use it to poison roaches. more



Your Papers, Citizen

Gun Control and the Changing American Character
February 19, 2013

A staple of American self-esteem is that we Yanks are brave, free, independent, self-reliant, ruggedly individual, and disinclined to accept abuse from anyone. This was largely true in, say, 1930. People lived, a great many of them, on farms where they planted their own crops, built their own barns, repaired their own trucks, and protected their own property. They were literate but not educated, knew little of the world beyond the local, but in their homes and fields they were supreme.

If they wanted to swim buck nekkid in the creek, they swam buck nekkid. If whistle pigs were eating the corn, the family teenager would get his rifle and solve the problem. Government left them alone.

Even in the early Sixties, in rural King George County, Virginia, where I grew up, it was still mostly true. The country people built their own boats to crab in the Potomac, converted junked car engines to marine, made their own crab pots, planted corn and such, and hunted deer. There was very little contact with the government. One state trooper was the law, and he had precious little to do.

I say the following not as an old codger painting his youth in roseate hues that never were, but as serious sociology: We kids could get up on a summer morning, grab the .22 or .410, put it over our shoulder and go into the country store for ammunition, and no one looked twice. We could go by night to the dump to snap-shoot rats, and no one cared. We could get our fishing poles—I preferred a spinning reel and bait-casting tackle—and fish anywhere we pleased on Machodoc Creek or the Potomac. We could drive unwisely but joyously on winding wooded roads late at night and nobody cared.

Call it “freedom.” We were free, and so were the country folk on their farms and with their crabbing rigs. Because we were free, we felt free. It was a distinct psychology, though we didn’t know it.

Things then changed. The country increasingly urbanized. So much for rugged.

It became ever more a nation of employees. As Walmart and shopping centers and factories moved in, the farmers sold their land to real-estate developers at what they thought mind-boggling prices, and went to work as security guards and truck drivers. Employees are not free. They fear the boss, fear dismissal, and become prisoners of the retirement system. So much for Marlboro Man.

Self-reliance went. Few any longer can fix a car or the plumbing, grow food, hunt, bait a hook or install a new roof. Or defend themselves. To overstate barely, everyone depends on someone else, often the government, for everything. Thus we became the Hive.

Government came like a dust storm of fine choking powder . . . more

Solitary Confinement Policy Bites Colorado Corrections on the Arse

Unfortunately it bit the wrong fellow, for the recently murdered, Colorado Department of Corrections Director Tom Clements, had set to and instrumented changes to the very system that invariably killed him, that being the release of prisoners from years in solitary confinement, straight onto the street.

But before you read the article, might I ask you to read my introduction to this previous post, for it is what I have to say there that is the essence of not just that post, but this one as well.

‘He Was Freaking’: Friend Says Clements Suspect Flailed from Years of Isolation

Former inmate dismisses gang-hit theory in shooting death of Colorado Corrections chief
By Susan Greene
March 26, 2013

DENVER– In the weeks before his death, Evan Ebel, suspected killer of Colorado Department of Corrections Director Tom Clements, had broken ties with white supremacist prison gang 211 Crew and was debilitated by the transition from prolonged isolation to social contact, according to a friend and former fellow inmate.

In a series of interviews conducted with The Colorado Independent, parolee Ryan Pettigrew dismissed widespread media speculation that Ebel shot Clements as part of an orchestrated 211 Crew “gang hit.” He said that, over the course of the last few weeks, Ebel was growing increasingly agitated in his adjustment to life outside of prison and beyond the tiny “administrative segregation” cells in which he spent years deprived of regular human contact.

“Trust me, this was no gang hit. This was about what was haunting Evan Ebel,” Pettigrew says. “Clements’ name never came up.”

Pettigrew supported his statements by producing dozens of text messages he exchanged with Ebel over the last two months. The messages reveal Ebel as wrestling with anxiety about his freedom and grappling with the urge to ease that anxiety through violence. The texts span from February 1, four days after Ebel’s release from prison on January 28, to March 5, less than two weeks before Ebel is alleged to have killed pizza delivery man Nathan Leon and then murdered Clements before he led Texas authorities on the high-speed highway gun battle that left Ebel clinically dead last week.

Pettigrew, 33, is on parole and studying to become a real estate investor. He was released in August from a ten-year sentence on a witness intimidating conviction. He served most of his time in Colorado State Penitentiary, the state’s highest security prison, where he befriended Ebel.

Ebel was released from Sterling Correctional Facility at the end of January after serving roughly nine years for a series of stick-ups and assaults.

Both of the men served long periods of their sentences in solitary confinement. As practiced in Colorado, so-called administrative segregation isolates prisoners for months, years and even decades with virtually no human contact other than with corrections officers who pass meals through their food slot and escort them to a room where they exercise alone.

Pettigrew and Ebel didn’t know each other face to face. But over their years at the State Penitentiary, they exchanged frequent notes called “kites” sent through an elaborate delivery system called “fishing.” It entails a chain of prisoners passing notes through plumbing and sliding them under doors in cell-block pods.

In their notes, Pettigrew and Ebel discussed books, philosophy, their families, frustrations with the prison system and plans for businesses they would start when they got out.

Life on the Outside

They kept in touch by mail while Pettigrew served out his last months at Centennial Correctional Facility and Ebel served out his at Sterling Correctional Facility. Once Ebel was released, they spoke by phone almost every day during Ebel’s first several weeks on the outside.

“At first he was telling me how he was freaking out, just freaking out,” Pettigrew recalls. “He was saying that he couldn’t sleep and [was] having a hard time eating and being around people. He didn’t want to have any associations with anybody. He was feeling extremely anxious. It was all the same stuff I was experiencing when I got out. He was a lot like me.”

In one text to Pettigrew from mid February, Ebel said he wanted to get into a fight as a form of coping.

“…im just feeling peculiar & the only way i know i know to remedy that is via use of ‘violence’ even if that ‘violence’ be something as petty & inconsequential as a fist fight which id prefer be with someone i can trust as opposed to some renegade civilian who odds are will tell.”

Pettigrew said that, coming from Ebel, he understood the sentiment.

“He told me that he needed to release some anxiety. He needed that violence as a release so he could calm down. He didn’t know any other way.”

The text messages between the two men — and obtained by The Independent — detail Ebel’s plans to get a tattoo and his thoughts about setting up a for-profit website for inmates and for members of the public interested in news with “street cred” about contemporary prison culture. He planned to post correspondence between prisoners and their attorneys, columns authored by inmates, roundups of actions taken by authorities against prisoners and resistance mounted by prisoners in the form of hunger strikes, for example. Ebel’s promotional strategy was to “advertise by way of regular mail and word of mouth (not a problem).” “Maybe we’ll do a whiteboy discount as an additional selling point,” he wrote.

In one text, Ebel said he was spending most of his evenings since his release “reading & talking to folks on the phone.”

Pettigrew said Ebel was living in a house in Commerce City and that Ebel’s father Jack, an attorney, paid at least part the rent. Pettigrew also said Ebel was working as a researcher at a law office.

He said Ebel and several gang members recently had broken with the 211 Crew over disagreements that Pettigrew, who is still a member, would not discuss. Ebel’s apparent suicide-by-cop was motivated by his own struggles, he said, not out of allegiance to his former gang.

Pettigrew sensed early on that Ebel and he didn’t share the same goals for their lives after incarceration.

“I’m trying to get on with my life, leave [the Department of Corrections] behind me and make a living. [Ebel] seemed still pretty focused on what happened in prison.”

Clements Anxious about Abrupt Transitions

Pettigrew laments the death of Clements, a reform-minded chief who was particularly concerned with the negative effects of solitary confinement.

“It sucks for the inmates he was changing the system for,” he wrote last week in a text to The Independent.

“I’d say there [would be] something pretty ironic [if Ebel] killed the guy who was trying to fix things. It’s unfortunate, because Clements was in a position to help,” Pettigrew elaborated in a phone interview Monday.

Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper, in revealing his longtime friendship with Ebel’s father, said in a statement last week that Evan Ebel had a “bad streak” and, assuming he in fact murdered Clements, was “hell-bent on causing evil.”

It’s exactly that kind of violent tendency that Clements was hell-bent on preventing, especially among prisoners being released from solitary.

In an exclusive interview last spring, Clements said that, immediately after Hickenlooper recruited him from Missouri to run the Colorado corrections department, he found disturbing “one very alarming statistic” he said kept him up at night — that 47 percent of Colorado prisoners being released from isolation were walking directly out onto the streets without help reintegrating into social environments and interacting with people.

Clements wanted longer transition periods and step-down programs before setting isolated prisoners free. As Pettigrew tells it, Ebel said he had little help making that transition. He said altercations during his brief period in a step-down program landed him back in isolation.

“You have to ask yourself the question – How does holding inmates in administrative segregation and then putting them out on a bus into the public, [how does that] square up?” Clements said.

“We have to think about how what we do in prisons impacts the community when [prisoners] leave,” Clements continued. “It’s not just about running the prison safely and securely. There’s a lot of research around solitary and isolation in recent years, some tied to POWs and some to corrections. My experience tells me that long periods of isolation can be counter-productive to stable behavior and long-term rehabilitation goals.”

Soon after taking office, Clements launched a study of solitary confinement and decided to close Colorado State Penitentiary II, the state’s two-year-old supermax prison, which was designed and built entirely for isolation. By last spring’s interview, Clements said he had reduced the 47 percent isolation-to-streets release to 22 percent. His goal, he noted, was to drive to zero the number of isolated prisoners being released without step-down programs.

Pettigrew said he thought many corrections officers weren’t receptive to the reforms Clements was making.

“The old school guards in there, they just hated what he has doing and would come down even harder on us. You develop such a hatred not only from being in solitary but from having been pocked with a stick that long.”

‘It’s Hate that’s Building up in You’

Those sentiments were echoed by Colorado State Penitentiary prisoner Josue Gonzales in National Geographic Channel documentary that showed him walking into freedom after five years in isolation.

“I think 90 percent of the people that are locked up here, if they ran into a staff member on the streets, they’d hurt ‘em,” Gonzales was quoted to say in the film.

“It’s hate that’s been building up in you. And you kind of just kind of try to just swallow it down. That stuff builds up. The tension builds up, builds up, builds up, and I still have them thoughts still, though, that I want to basically get into it with somebody.

“Those are the things that I want to get away from. But I still deal with them all the time.” Colorado Independent

Colorado Independent: Suspect in Killing of Prisons Chief Tormented by Years of Solitary Confinement

A Hidden World Of Astonishing Violence: America's Brutal Prisons Re-Up

I am re-upping this 2007 post to accompany the post above.


A Hidden World Of Astonishing Violence: America's Brutal Prisons

This is not a film about prisoner on prisoner violence it's guard on prisoner abuse.
There would be those among society that would say the inmates deserve all they get but, given how easy it is to get arrested and incarcerated in America that's not an argument that holds much water.


There are segments in this Channel Four documentary that feature the testimony of ex cons regarding their brutal treatment by guards including the almost institutionalised excessive use of pepper sprays.
There are also those that cannot speak out like the inmate who died at the hands of the guards whilst serving a six month sentence for shoplifting.

It is said that the measure of a society reflects in the way it treats animals, this is patently obvious when we look say at the Japanese and the way it slaughters, to the world's horror, hundreds of whales, or the regard, or should I disregard that the Chinese treat both animals and people alike.
But another measure of that society is the way it treats those that it incarcerates.

How easy the good citizenry of America might dismiss what goes on behind bars as out of site out of mind, but given that the Prison Nation has a budget of forty billion tax payer dollars, the good citizenry should be asking their congress critters just what kind of person is the Department of Corrections putting back on the street after an inmate has served his time.


There is one thing I can say without fear of contradiction is that having suffered such systematic and institutionalised abuse over months or years the inmate on his release might just tend to be a little more anti-social than when he first entered the system, and just might be inclined to vent his anger and exact revenge on the softer target of society in general.

I have argued before about the bullshit surrounding the limitations that certain states and communities impose on sex offenders. Making a man a pariah and restricting his ability to seek employment or put a roof over his head and in some cases the heads of his family is nothing more than a recipe for disaster and if not a guarantee of re-offending then at least making the likelihood more than probable.


Yet for those that are held in the most inhumane of conditions, the Secure Housing Units or SHU's, often to include the mentally ill, banged up for twenty three hours a day, restricted severely in the kind of stimulating material that is available to them and in some institutions never seeing the light of day or being able to speak to another human being for years on end.

Statistics show that some eighty five to ninety percent of these inmates will one day be released.
Having been abused in this manner for God knows how many years they will be tossed out of the front door of the prison with no aftercare or supervision and with little or no chance of receiving any meds or anti-psychotics that they probably so desperately need, they will be left to their own devices.


Given the choice of who I would want living next door to me, the already violent con that has been incarcerated for years under such conditions or the sex offender, there's just no contest.

Torture Inc. Americas Brutal Prisons
by Deborah Davies

Savaged by dogs, Electrocuted With Cattle Prods, Burned By Toxic Chemicals, Does such barbaric abuse inside U.S. jails explain the horrors that were committed in Iraq?

They are just some of the victims of wholesale torture taking place inside the U.S. prison system that we uncovered during a four-month investigation for Channel 4 . It’s terrible to watch some of the videos and realise that you’re not only seeing torture in action but, in the most extreme cases, you are witnessing young men dying.video

Eastern State Penitentiary was the world's first true Penitentiary. In order to encourage penitence - or true regret - in the hearts of criminals, inmates would spend their entire sentence in solitary confinement. On the rare occasion when an inmate left his cell, a hood was placed over his head to ensure his identity would remain anonymous. Ideally, no inmate would ever see the face of another inmate.

Not come very far have we.

Chris Hedges Looks at Nick Turse's Book "Kill Anything That Moves" American War Crimes in Vietnam

It was after watching a Democracy Now piece, back in January of this year, "Kill Anything That Moves": New Book Exposes Hidden Crimes of the War Kerry, Hagel Fought in Vietnam that I tried to write a follow up article. But for reasons I mention here,* it never got off the ground. However, not all is lost, for Chris Hedges, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, has taken up the challenge and produced a much better and far more comprehensive report than I could ever hope to achieve.

Firstly, and before moving on to horrors and inhumanity that are describe in the article, let me offer up in Hedges' quite polite words, his observations of the American psyche. I say polite, because in normal circumstances, if it is I that writes about such things, I can't get much further than employing such words as Cant and Hypocrisy, not to mention the  total indifference Americans have to the suffering of others. And not least, wrapping the whole thing in sugar-coated religious piety that I, and many Europeans alike, find truly nauseating; it is after all, the American way.

Turse’s book (Kill Anything That Moves) obliterates the image we have of ourselves as a good and virtuous nation. It mocks the popular belief that we have a right to impose our “virtues” on others by force. It exposes the soul of our military, which has achieved, through relentless propaganda and effective censorship, a level of public adulation that is terrifying. Turse reminds us who we are. And in an age of expanding wars in the Middle East, routine torture, murderous air and drone strikes and targeted assassinations, his book is not so much about the past as about the present. We have worked, consciously and unconsciously, to erase the terrible truth about Vietnam and ultimately about ourselves. This is a tragedy. For if we were able to remember who we were, if we knew what we were capable of doing to others, then we might be less prone to replicating the industrial slaughter of Vietnam in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen.

Should you wish, you can meet the author Nick Turse, "Kill Anything That Moves" in this Democracy Now clip, about fifteen minutes.

Don't Look Away: We Must Confront the Horrific Industrial Violence the American Military Is Capable of

Nick Turse's Vietnam War book, 'Kill Anything That Moves,' shows how the trauma that plagues most veterans is tied to the horrors they inflicted.
by Chris Hedges
March 14, 2013

Nick Turse’s “ Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam” is not only one of the most important books ever written about the Vietnam conflict but provides readers with an unflinching account of the nature of modern industrial warfare. It captures, as few books on war do, the utter depravity of industrial violence—what the sociologist James William Gibson calls “technowar.” It exposes the sickness of the hyper-masculine military culture, the intoxicating rush and addiction of violence, and the massive government spin machine that lies daily to a gullible public and uses tactics of intimidation, threats and smear campaigns to silence dissenters. Turse, finally, grasps that the trauma that plagues most combat veterans is a result not only of what they witnessed or endured, but what they did. This trauma, shame, guilt and self-revulsion push many combat veterans—whether from Vietnam, Iraq or Afghanistan—to escape into narcotic and alcoholic fogs or commit suicide. By the end of Turse’s book, you understand why.

This is not the book Turse set out to write. He was, when his research began in June 2001, a graduate student looking at post-traumatic stress disorder among Vietnam veterans. An archivist at the U.S. National Archives asked Turse whether he thought witnessing war crimes could cause PTSD. He steered Turse to yellowing reports amassed by the Vietnam War Crimes Working Group. The group, set up in the wake of the My Lai massacre, was designed to investigate the hundreds of reports of torture, rape, kidnapping, forced displacement, beatings, arson, mutilation, executions and massacres carried out by U.S. troops. But the object of the group was not to discipline or to halt the abuses. It was, as Turse writes, “to ensure that the army would never again be caught off-guard by a major war crimes scandal.” War crimes, for army investigators, were “an image management” problem. Those charged with war crimes were rarely punished. The numerous reports of atrocities collected by the Vietnam War Crimes Working Group were kept secret, and the eyewitnesses who reported war crimes were usually ignored, discredited or cowed into silence.

Turse used the secret Pentagon reports and documents to track down more than 100 veterans—including those who had reported witnessing atrocities to their superiors and others charged with carrying out atrocities—and traveled to Vietnam to interview survivors. A decade later he produced a masterpiece. Case after case in his book makes it painfully clear that soldiers and Marines deliberately maimed, abused, beat, tortured, raped, wounded or killed hundreds of thousands of unarmed civilians, including children, with impunity. Troops engaged in routine acts of sadistic violence usually associated with demented Nazi concentration camp guards. And what Turse describes is a woefully incomplete portrait, since he found that “an astonishing number of marine court-martial records of the era have apparently been destroyed or gone missing,” and “most air force and navy criminal investigation files that may have existed seem to have met the same fate.”

The few incidents of wanton killing in Vietnam—and this is also true for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—that did become public, such as My Lai, were dismissed as an aberration, the result of a few soldiers or Marines gone bad. But, as Turse makes clear, such massacres were and are, in our current imperial adventures, commonplace. The slaughters “were the inevitable outcome of deliberate policies, dictated at the highest levels of the military,” he writes. They were carried out because the dominant tactic of the war, as conceived by our politicians and generals, was centered on the concept of “overkill.” And when troops on the ground could not kill fast enough, the gunships, helicopters, fighter jets and bombers came to their assistance. The U.S. Air Force contributed to the demented quest for “overkill”—eradicating so many of the enemy that recuperation was theoretically impossible—by dropping the equivalent of 640 Hiroshima-sized atomic bombs on Vietnam, most actually falling on the south where our purported Vietnamese allies resided. And planes didn’t just drop bombs. They unloaded more than 70 million tons of herbicidal agents, 3 million white phosphorus rockets—white phosphorous will burn its way entirely through a body—and an estimated 400,000 tons of jellied incendiary napalm. “Thirty-five percent of the victims,” Turse writes, “died within fifteen to twenty minutes.” Death from the skies, like death on the ground, was often unleashed capriciously. “It was not out of the ordinary for U.S. troops in Vietnam to blast a whole village or bombard a wide area in an effort to kill a single sniper,” Turse writes.

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Murder is an integral part of war. And the most disturbing form of murder, because it is so intimate, is carried out by infantry troops. The god-like power that comes with the ability to destroy anything, including other human beings, along with the intoxicating firepower of industrial weapons, rapidly turns those who wield these weapons into beasts. Human beings are reduced to objects, toys to satiate a perverse desire to dominate, humiliate, control and kill. Corpses are trophies. Many of the Vietnamese who were murdered, Turse relates, were first subjected to degrading forms of public abuse, gang rape, torture and savage beatings. They were, Turse writes, when first detained “confined to tiny barbed wire ‘cow cages’ and sometimes jabbed with sharpened bamboo sticks while inside them.” Other detainees “were placed in large drums filled with water; the containers were then struck with great force, which caused internal injuries but left no scars.” Some were “suspended by ropes for hours on end or hung upside down and beaten, a practice called ‘the plane ride.’ ” Or they “were chained with their hands over their heads, arms fully extended, so their feet could barely touch the ground—a version of an age-old torture called the strappado. Untold numbers were subjected to electric shocks from crank-operated field telephones, battery-powered devices, or even cattle prods.” Soles of feet were beaten. Fingernails were ripped out. Fingers were dismembered. Detainees were slashed with knives, “suffocated, burned by cigarettes, or beaten with truncheons, clubs, sticks, bamboo flails, baseball bats, and other objects. Many were threatened with death or even subjected to mock executions.” Turse found that “detained civilians and captured guerrillas were often used as human mine detectors and regularly died in the process.” And while soldiers and Marines were engaged in daily acts of brutality and murder, the Central Intelligence Agency “organized, coordinated, and paid for” a clandestine program of targeted assassinations “of specific individuals without any attempt to capture them alive or any thought of a legal trial.”

“All that suffering,” Turse, writes, “was more or less ignored as it happened, and then written out of history even more thoroughly in the decades since.”

Turse, in one of many accounts, describes a string of atrocities committed in the Duc Pho/Mo Duc border region in spring 1967 by Charlie Company, 2nd Battalion, 35th Infantry under the command of Capt. James Lanning. A wounded detainee, Turse writes, was dumped into a boat and pushed into a rice paddy where he was riddled with bullets and finished off with a grenade. A wounded woman was covered with a straw mat and set on fire. Paul Halverson, a soldier and military combat correspondent who accompanied the unit, when asked about the total number of civilians killed by Lanning’s force, stated in the book: “The entire time I was over there—just by Charlie Company—I’d say it would be in the hundreds.”

Maj. Gordon Livingston, a regimental surgeon with the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment, in 1971 testified before Congress that he witnessed “a helicopter pilot who swooped down on two Vietnamese women riding bicycles and killed them with the helicopter skids.” The pilot, after being grounded briefly and investigated, was soon exonerated and allowed back in the air.

Soldiers and Marines, as is common in all wars, collected body parts of dead Vietnamese—heads, noses, scalps, breasts, teeth, ears, fingers, genitals—and displayed them or wore them in necklaces. “There was people in all the platoons with ears on cords,” Jimmie Busby, a member of the 75th Rangers during 1970-1971, told an Army criminal investigator. Corpses were dressed up and twisted into comic poses for photographs or gruesomely mutilated. Severed heads of Vietnamese were mounted on pikes or poles in Army camps. The dead were lashed onto Army vehicles—which at times ran over Vietnamese civilians for sport—and driven through villages.

Go to page 3

* Were you to follow the link, a series of John Pilger "Outsider" interviews will be revealed. Interviewees include: Jessica Mitford, Wilfred Burchett, Martha Gellhorn and Costa-Gavras. Recommended.

How Did the Alleged Abductor Snatch Madeleine McCann?

This is a re-up for this 2010 article by Barbara Nottage, and probably the best place, rather than being directed to the case files, for any newbie to get an understanding of the physics of the thing.

Because let's face it, you don't actually need the case files, it's all here, for it covers the the most fundamental premiss of the case, the "jemmied shutters." Because no jemmied shutters means no abduction; period.

And as well we know, jemmied shutters were there not. Something Leicester Police and Scotland Yard seem unable to grasp.

Or choose to ignore.

Originally posted under the title: Madeleine McCann Was Not Abducted: The Shutters Revisited at Good Quality Wristbands. A place where making use of the search bar, particularly using the same keywords, jemmied shutters, will bring a host of results.

How did the alleged abductor snatch Madeleine in a time slot of no more than 3-4 minutes?
by Barbara Nottage

One of the curious aspects of the alleged abduction of Madeleine McCann is the extraordinarily tight timetable in which the abduction is supposed to have taken place. Dr Gerald McCann says he went to check on the children at about 9.05pm on 3 May 2007. He also said elsewhere that he had been an unusually long time in the apartment toilet, and that he had been inside all four rooms of the apartment. In addition, he told the world that he had had time during his visit to gaze down on Madeleine, whom he was to describe as ‘lying in the recovery position’, and think how lucky he was to have such a beautiful daughter. By this reckoning, He could not have left the apartment until around 9.10pm or several minutes later.

Meanwhile Jane Tanner, a close friend of the McCanns, has given statements saying that she saw what she thought was a male abductor carrying Madeleine away in his arms from the apartment at around 9.15pm - although we might note here that in August 2009 at a press conference, the McCanns’ chief private investigator, former Detective Inspector Dave Edgar, said that Jane Tanner might have seen a woman, not a man.


The abduction scenario

So let’s examine this situation more closely.

The scenario put forward by the McCanns and their friends runs as follows:


· The abductor must have been watching the apartment for several days before snatching Madeleine on 3 May.

· The McCanns went down to the ‘Tapas bar’ at the Ocean Club at around 8.30pm that evening, with other members of the group arriving during the next half-an-hour or so.

· Dr Matthew Oldfield ‘checked the apartment from the outside’ at around 9.00pm to 9.03pm.

· Dr Gerry McCann returned to his apartment (5A) from the Tapas bar to check on his children at around 9.05pm. The walk to the apartment would have taken one to two minutes. So on his own timing, he would have arrived there around 9.07pm.

· Dr Gerry McCann was briefly in all four rooms of their holiday apartment, during which time he checked his children. He also says he spent an unusually long time in the toilet - maybe up to 5 minutes, though we have never been told why. He tells us that he paused briefly over Madeleine’s bed and thought to himself how very lucky he was to have such a beautiful child.

· Dr Gerry McCann says he noticed that the door to the children’s room was ‘wider open than before’. He says that at 8.30pm it had been open at an angle of about 45 degrees (half open). He remembers (he says) that when he went to check the children at 9.05pm, the door was now open at an angle of 60 degrees (two thirds open).

· The fact that the door - according to Dr Gerald McCann - was now (at 9.05pm) more open more than it was before (at 8.30pm), has been used by him to suggest the possibility that the abductor may have been already in the apartment when he checked on the children, although he says he only realised this possibility some months after the events of the day. Dr Gerry McCann has said that the abductor might have been hiding behind a door or in a wardrobe while he spent several minutes doing his ‘check’ on the children.

· Dr Gerry McCann must have left the room, on his own account, at between 9.10pm and 9.15pm. He then says he encountered a TV cameraman, Jeremy (‘Jes’) Wilkins, on the road back to the Tapas bar at the Ocean Club, and was talking to him for several minutes between 9.10pm and 9.25pm (Jeremy Wilkins confirms the meeting, but says it only lasted three minutes).

· Ms Jane Tanner (partner of Dr Russell O’Brien) says she left the Tapas bar at around 9.15pm and saw a man walking ‘purposefully’, with a child in his arms, along the top of the road running alongside the McCanns’ apartment. She has maintained throughout that she saw this man at almost exactly 9.15pm.

· The McCanns maintain that they left their apartment unlocked. This contrasts however with what they said during the might of 3 May/4 May. In telephone calls to relatives, Dr Gerald McCann told them that an abductor had forced entry into the apartment by jemmying open the shutters. They appear to have changed this story after both the Manager of Mark Warners, Mr john Hill, and the police, found no evidence whatsoever of the shutters having been forced open.

· The McCanns now say, therefore, that the abductor must have entered their apartment through the unlocked patio door. But they maintain that the windows and shutters that they say they found open on Dr Kate McCann checking the children at 10.00pm were because the abductor must have made his escape via that route. They say the abductor must have opened the window and the shutters (which the McCanns say they had had left closed) from the inside, climbed through the window, and taken Madeleine through that window.

· Dr Kate McCann says she returned to the apartment to check on the children at 10.00pm. She says she ‘knew instantly’ that Madeleine had been abducted - and then so did Dr Gerald McCann, minutes later, when he says he arrived at the apartment. Dr Kate McCann later told a TV interviewer that because of the requirement for secrecy about the police investigation, she could not explain why she ‘knew instantly’ that Madeleine had been abducted. She has never explained this, even 2½ years later.



The photographs of the apartment taken by the Portuguese police on the day after Madeleine was reported missing do not show anything which would clearly point to an abduction, certainly not damaged shutters. No forensic evidence whatsoever of the alleged abductor has been found. There were no forensic traces in the room, and no fingerprints on the window, window frame or shutters except for one of Dr Kate McCann’s fingerprints. The lichen on the windowsill was undisturbed.


Going by the above scenario, which the McCanns and their ‘Tapas 9’ friends have maintained, the abductor (if there was one) must have either entered the apartment before Dr Matthew Oldfield’s check at around 9.03pm and Dr Gerry McCann’s check which began at 9.05pm/9.07pm – a version put forward by the McCanns months after Madeleine was reported missing - McCanns now want us to believe - or after Dr Gerry McCann left at 9.10pm to 9.15pm and before he was (allegedly) seen by Jane Tanner at 9.15pm.

The problems with this abduction scenario

There are many problems associated with this specific abduction scenario above that the McCanns and their ‘Tapas 9’ friends have generated.

As we have seen just now, there is no forensic evidence that the alleged abductor was even in the McCanns’ apartment, still less that an abductor climbed in or out of the window.

Further, the window is high enough in the children’s room to make it physically very difficult for an abductor to climb through it. It was reported to be 91cm. above the floor - exactly three feet. The window itself is only around 60cm x 60cm (2ft x 2ft). The abductor would therefore have had to climb some three feet, with Madeleine with him, in his arms or over his shoulder. In addition, he would have to have managed this feat without leaving any forensic traces on the window-sill.

Madeleine must have weighed at least two stone (12kg). A task such as this would have meant balancing against the window frame itself, in which case traces of clothing fibres would surely have been found. Even then, it would have been almost impossible to climb through this window even if Madeleine had been asleep. It is surely even more unlikely that the abductor could have laid Madeleine down on the floor or a bed in the children’s bedroom, then climbed out of the window, and then reached back inside the bedroom to pick Madeleine out of the room - all of this without Madeleine or either of the twins waking up.

This whole abduction operation would clearly have been still more difficult either if Madeleine had woken up whilst being abducted, or one or both twins had done so. To maintain the abduction scenario, therefore, it is necessary to believe that Madeleine slept through the entire abduction operation. The description given by Jane Tanner of an alleged abductor carrying a child also describes the child as quiet and presumably asleep.

Moreover, to escape via the window, as the McCanns claim, the abductor would have had to open the shutters. Mark Warners, however, explained that it was only possible to open the shutters from the inside. They are operated by pulling a cord, or strap, on the inside. It is a highly relevant fact (again confirmed by Mark Warners) that when these heavy metal shutters were opened, the whole process is extremely noisy.

But no-one heard the shutters being opened. Moreover, the children’s room was directly overlooked by a tall block of apartments on the other side of the street. Had the abductor really climbed out of that window, he would have been in the view of dozens of windows overlooking Apartment 5A. We now know that the shutters to Apartment 5A were actually closed when the police and Mark Warners’ staff arrived to check them. The McCanns’ initial explanation for this fact were that the shutters ‘must have been closed by the abductor as well as opened by him’. We have seen that the shutters could not be opened from the outside. This claim by the McCanns that the abductor ‘must have tried to close the shutters behind him’ prompts two related and very obvious questions:





1) having gained entry through an open patio door, what would possess an abductor to leave via a three-foot high, two-foot square closed window, with the shutters also closed? The McCanns’ abduction scenario would require him to have opened the windows and shutters, then tried to close the shutters behind him, when he could have simply walked through the already-open patio doors.


2) why and how, having allegedly scooped up Madeleine in his arms and opened the window and the shutters, would he have had the time and the physical ability to then close the shutters, all without making any sound or leaving any trace, without being seen by anyone, and without waking either Madeleine or the twins?



Moreover, all this would have had to have been accomplished in the dark - unless the alleged abductor switched the lights on when he entered the apartment and then remembered to switch them off again as he was making his exit. No-one saw any lights on in the apartment. The McCanns have admitted that they left the children in the darkness, with the shutters and curtains closed, when they went out for their evening’s entertainment.





Therefore, to sum up - according to the McCanns’ scenario, the abductor would have to have:


* First - either picked an opportunity to enter the apartment after the McCanns had left for the Tapas bar at between 8.30pm and 9.00pm - or entered the apartment immediately after he had seen first Dr Matthew Oldfield and then Gerry McCann enter and leave the apartment at around 9.05pm to 9.15pm;


[NOTE: if the former of these two alternatives, then the abductor must have been in the apartment with Dr Gerry McCann during the five to ten minutes or so he was checking on the children - as Dr McCann indeed claimed last year]


* Second - walked through the open patio door without being seen;


* Third - found Madeleine in the dark;


* Fourth - picked her up, without waking her or the twins, and without leaving any forensic trace on the bed;


* Fifth - opened the window - without leaving any fingerprints;


* Sixth - opened the shutters from the inside (with nobody hearing him doing so, and once again without leaving any fingerprints);


* Seventh - climbed through the window, somehow carrying Madeleine with him - again without being seen by anyone, and again without leaving any fingerprints;


* Eighth - he would then have had to close the very noisy shutters, using controls operated from the inside - while still having Madeleine in his arms, or having laid her down on the patio, and


* Ninth - he made his escape without being seen by anyone except for afew fleeting seconds by Jane Tanner at around 9.15pm.





The operation of climbing through the window would have been physically very difficult, if not impossible, to do without (a) even brushing away even a tiny piece of the years-old lichen growing on the window-sill or (b) leaving any clothing fibres or other forensic evidence.


He must in addition have accomplished this whole operation in near total darkness and without being seen or heard by anyone except Jane Tanner. At the very moment that Jane Tanner says she saw the alleged abductor, Dr Gerald McCann was chatting away to holiday friend Jeremy (‘Jez’) Wilkins. Neither man saw or heard the alleged abductor despite being so close.

If the abductor had Madeleine in his arms as he climbed out of the window, and bearing in mind he was in near darkness, he would have been unable to see anything below her or much to either side as he fumbled through the window and shutters and tried to escape from the apartment precincts. Why he would do this when there was an open patio door to walk back through is incomprehensible. The McCanns only came up with the scenario of the abductor entering the unlocked patio door and then escaping via the window after learning that there was no evidence that the shutters had been tampered with, as they had told their relatives the night Madeleine disappeared.


Finally let us look for a moment at another aspect of the McCanns’ scenario. They have claimed on many occasions that an abductor must have been ‘casing the joint’ for several days beforehand - and then pounced and abducted Madeleine when he had the chance. The McCanns claim that he would have been closely watching them, including observing what the McCanns claim as their routine of half-hourly checking.


The McCanns have gone further and have suggested - in a lengthy TV interview for the BBC’s Panorama programme - that the abductor must have been making notes on their movements, allegedly carefully observing the times of their departures from the apartment. But this does not seem plausible given that neither the McCanns, nor their ‘Tapas 9’ friends, have given any details of how often (if at all) they were checking on their children whilst out wining and dining – apart from on the night Madeleine was reported missing.

Another problem about the McCanns’ abduction scenario is that there is nowhere that the abductor could have been observing the McCanns’ apartment without being seen - unless, that is, he was living or operating from one of the flats opposite the McCanns’ apartment, some of which overlooked it. It is understood that the occupants of these flats have all been investigated and their statements corroborated. None of them had anyone in their flat who was watching the McCanns’ apartment, nor was anyone seen acting suspiciously or hanging around in that area during the week the McCanns and their friends were there, except for one man who has been identified and eliminated from police enquiries.


The other obvious problem about the claim of an abductor ‘casing the joint’ is this:- Suppose an abductor had been watching the McCanns’ apartment day in and day out. On the McCanns’ own timeline, he would have seen the McCanns leave for the Tapas bar at 8.30pm. If, therefore, as claimed, an abductor had been watching the premises, he would presumably have chosen a moment as soon as possible after 8.30pm to abduct Madeleine - i.e., immediately after Drs Gerry and Kate McCann had left for the Tapas bar (on their own account) at around 8.30pm.


Yet, if he had entered the flat just after the McCanns left at 8.30pm, how come he was not long gone 35-40 minutes later when Dr Gerald McCann did his check? After all, Dr McCann now believes that the abductor may have even been present for the entire five to ten minutes or so that he was doing his check i.e. between 9.05pm and 9.10pm/9.15pm.





Yet a further difficulty for this improbable scenario is that Dr Matthew Oldfield claims that he did two checks - one at around 9.00pm, (various times have been given for this alleged check) and the other around 9.30pm. Dr Oldfield claims that during his 9.00pm visit he ‘checked’ from the outside but saw and heard nothing. He also said that the shutters were ‘tight shut’. If indeed the abductor really had entered before both Dr Matthew Oldfield’s alleged check (around 9.00pm) and Dr McCann’s check (around 9.05pm), then he was exceptionally lucky, to put it mildly, not to have been detected by either man.


There are equal if not even greater problems with the suggestion that the abductor entered the apartment and removed Madeleine only after Drs Oldfield and McCann had done their checks. Would any abductor really have dashed into the apartment after first seeing Dr Oldfield checking the outside of the apartment at around 9.00pm - and then seen Gerry spending five to ten minutes checking between 9.05pm and 9.15pm? It would surely have been far too risky.


And if he entered the apartment after Dr Gerry McCann left at say 9.10pm at the earliest, he would scarcely have had time to enter the flat, remove Madeleine, open the window and shutters, close them behind him etc. and then be seen by Jane Tanner at 9.15pm.





Sadly, no British newspaper or magazine has offered an analysis, like the one above, of the unlikelihood of the abduction having occurred in the way the McCanns and their ‘Tapas 9’ friends claim it ‘must have’ happened.


I conclude by saying that I am not saying the abduction of Madeleine never happened. But I confess I do find it very difficult to understand, given all that has been said about it, how it could have happened."

Critical Thought I know Thee Not: Srinagar Kashmir

Srinagar, Kashmir
Feb. 1, 2013

Kashmiri Muslims react as an unseen priest shows a relic believed to be a hair from the beard of Prophet Mohammed.

I Love The Echo of Jackboots in the Morning It Sounds Like America

I do like stories like this, it gives me something to point to when I get fuckwit visitors, leaving their fuckwit comments, extolling the Home of The Brave, Land of the Free, Greatest Nation on Earth nonsense.

Not to mention, One Nation Under Jackboots God.

Arkansas town enacts martial law

Officers with AR-15s will patrol Paragould, stopping everyone out walking for their IDs
By Natasha Lennard
Jan 29, 2013

Following a rise in violent crime in Paragould, an Arkansas town of around 26,000 residents, the mayor and police chief announced that starting this month police in SWAT gear carrying AR-15s would patrol the streets.

“If you’re out walking, we’re going to stop you, ask why you’re out walking, and check for your ID,” police chief Todd Stovall told a December town hall meeting. As if to render the implementation of a visible police state more palatable, Stovall assured residents that police stops would not be based on any profiling: “We’re going to do it to everybody,” he said.

Stovall also told residents he had not consulted an attorney before instituting the plan. HuffPo’s Radley Balko noted that Paragould is not the first town to bring in such measures:

Using SWAT teams for routine patrols isn’t uncommon. Fresno did this for several years in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The city sent its Violent Crimes Suppression Unit into poorer neighborhoods and stopped, confronted, questioned, and searched nearly everyone they encountered. “It’s a war,” one SWAT officer told Christian Parenti in a a report for The Naiton (not available online). Another said, “If you’re 21, male, living in one of these neighborhoods, and you’re not in our computer, then there’s something definitely wrong.”

Balko picked up on interesting detail in Stovall’s comments. The police chief said, “This fear is what’s given us the reason to do this. Once I have stats and people saying they’re scared, we can do this.” As Balko pointed out, although there was an uptick in violent crime in Paragould, “fear” of crime was used as the pretext to implement martial law — based on such troubling reasoning, there is never not fear in U.S. towns today and so there is never not a pretext to introduce patrolling SWAT teams. Salon

Just in. (and I must go and look for another pearl)

Police state gone wild: Couple facing 60 days in jail for rescuing injured baby deer
by Mike Adams
January 29, 2013

(NaturalNews) An Indiana couple saved a wounded baby deer and nursed it back to life, saving its life and giving it a home. They named it "Little Orphan Dani." When Indiana state officials got word of this courageous act of compassion, they ordered the deer euthanized. (Because government wants to kill everything you love.)

When the deer "escaped" right before it was schedule to be killed -- and yes, I think the couple probably set it free rather than have it killed -- the man and woman were charged with unlawful possession of a deer.

They now face $2,000 in fines and 60 days in jail.

This is yet another example of the government police state gone wild, and it's on top of seemingly countless other stories of similar police state insanity such as armed government raids on raw milk distributors.

Previous: Indiana Official Police State Just one of dozens under the Police tag.

The World Fiddles While The Planet Burns: Fukushima

Update: Depleted Uranium, Diabetes, Cancer And You


A short video delivering an even shorter sharper shock. Do I think it's doom-mongering, not a bit?

A couple of short podcasts below that report on what, due to the criminal conspiracy between TEPCO and the Japanese Government, was inevitable, the massive rise in Thyroid cysts, particularly in the most vulnerable segment of the population, the young girls of Fukushima Prefecture.

And it is this collusion between TEPCO and the Japanese Government in playing down the dangers faced by that same vulnerable group, the children, that has from day one, stuck in my craw.

There is much in the sidebar under the Japan tag, but if only to exercise the point, I'm sure, criminal japanese government in the search bar will render a few results. 




With thanks to the compiler, but on a first search I could find little, other than the Youtube account of, Rosy Heart

Terribly alarming what’s happening in Japan — Signs of radiation sickness reported in children after 3/11 — Lies are being fed to the people

Dr. Helen Caldicott: It’s terribly alarming what’s happening, and the ignorance of the population, and the lies that are being fed to the people.

I’ve just been in Japan for 10 days doing a speaking tour and I had audiences of 400 people and I’d give them the medical data and statistics about radiation and then it’d turn into a medical consultation. […]

Indeed many children were reported to have had nose bleeds which means their platelets are low which is a sign of radiation sickness.

And there have been a lot of viral illnesses as well. Of course your immune system is depleted by radiation.

There’s little being done to collect the medical data. short podcast

“Continually, radioactive elements are being flushed into the Pacific” — “The Fukushima accident will never end, they have no idea how to clean it up”

Dr. Helen Caldicott: The Fukushima accident will never end. They have no idea how to clean it up because there’s never been three nuclear meltdowns in history.

Continually, radioactive elements are being flushed into the Pacific Ocean.

. . . the accident never ends because the food will continue to be radioactive as the plants suck up the radioactive elements from the soil, concentrate it, and then people will eat it — and that will go on for generations and generations. So nuclear accidents never end. short podcast

There's not much that surprises me about TEPCO, but even for them, the last sentence in this grim bit of reading, really takes the biscuit.

Tepco plans to dump ‘cleaned’ Fukushima No. 1 water

Kyodo
Jan 25, 2013

Tokyo Electric Power Co. plans to dump contaminated water from its crippled Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant into the Pacific Ocean after removing radioactive substances to reduce contamination to legally permissible levels.

Tepco said Thursday the measure is necessary because the utility fears it will eventually run out of capacity to store radioactive water that continues to accumulate at the plant due to water being injected to help cool the three reactors that experienced core meltdowns in March 2011.

Despite the plan, the utility acknowledged it needs the approval of local governments and other parties before it actually discharges the water into the ocean. “Nothing specific has been decided at this moment,” one Tepco official said.

Water that has been used to cool the damaged reactors is recycled and used as coolant after radioactive levels in it have been lowered in a water-processing facility. But the total amount of contaminated water is increasing because the existing water flow allows an influx of about 400 tons of groundwater a day.

Tepco is increasing the number of storage tanks to deal with the situation, but warns they will eventually reach full capacity.

As a key step in the water release, Tepco will operate a new facility that can remove about different 60 types of radioactive substances, more than the existing water processing facility that has mainly worked to reduce the concentration of cesium. But as the new facility is not capable of removing radioactive tritium, an official said Tepco will consider diluting the processed water before releasing it to the sea. The Japan Times

Probably the most informative site around for all things nuclear is that of Maggie and Arnie Gundersen, Fairewinds Energy Education. http://www.fairewinds.com/video

I normally, on post like this, recommend another site, that of Alexander Higgins. Tragically however, it appears that the fellow has lost everything. Alexander Higgins House, Blog Destroyed by Sandy Flooding.

Much sympathy, I couldn't begin to imagine a disaster of such scale.

"Kill Anything That Moves" American War Crimes in Vietnan - Democracy Now

I was my original intention to carry this post on in the same vein as this recent Democracy Now offering, specifically, the circumstances surrounding the rise of the Kmher Rouge in Cambodia. The principal cause being, as I'm sure many of you are aware, the illegal bombing (back to the Stone Age) of Cambodia by Nixon and Kissinger.

But having watched two documentaries on the subject, sourced from the only place you can if you want the truth of the matter, John Pilger.com, I do have to say, I found it all so terribly dismal and not a subject that I felt I could readily offer up to a reader.

But what I have done as an alternate over this last couple of days, is to watch a series of 1983 Pilger interviews all under the generic title of The Outsiders. Of the nine interviews on offer, I watched eight, the subject matter of one of them not appealing to me by any means, and of the eight I offer up four, and present them in a loose kind of viewing order.

I hope you enjoy.

But firstly.

"Kill Anything That Moves": New Book Exposes Hidden Crimes of the War Kerry, Hagel Fought in Vietnam

Two of the leading figures nominated to head President Obama’s second-term foreign policy establishment have their political roots in the Vietnam War. If confirmed, Chuck Hagel will become the first Vietnam War veteran to head the Pentagon, while John Kerry will helm the State Department after becoming one of the most prominent veterans to oppose the Vietnam War upon his return from duty. Although Vietnam is far behind them, Kerry and Hagel will now have to contend with the longest-running war in U.S. history: Afghanistan. We’re joined by Nick Turse, managing editor of TomDispatch.com and author of the new book, "Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam." The title is taken from an order given to the U.S. forces who slaughtered more than 500 Vietnamese civilians in the notorious My Lai massacre of 1968. Drawing on interviews in Vietnam and a trove of previously unknown U.S. government documents — including internal military investigations of alleged war crimes in Vietnam — Turse argues that U.S. atrocities in Vietnam were not just isolated incidents, but "the inevitable outcome of deliberate policies, dictated at the highest levels of the military." transcript

The Outsiders: Jessica Mitford 26 minutes, as all

983. John Pilger interviews author, journalist and political campaigner Jessica Mitford

The Outsiders: Wilfred Burchett

1983. John Pilger interviews Australian journalist Wilfred Burchett

The Outsiders: Martha Gellhorn

The Outsiders: Martha Gellhorn from John Pilger on Vimeo.

1983. John Pilger interviews Martha Gellhorn, the American novelist, travel writer and journalist considered to be one of the greatest war correspondents of the 20th century

The Outsiders: Costa-Gavras

1983. John Pilger interviews political film-maker Costa-Gavras

http://johnpilger.com/videos

Welcome To The Shammies - Quintessential John Pilger

Drive straight on.

Welcome To The Shammies, The Media Awards That Recognize Truly Unsung Talent

By John Pilger
January 16, 2013

There are awards for everyone. There are the Logies, the Commies, the Tonys, the Theas, the Millies (“They cried with pride”) and now the Shammies.

The Shammies celebrate the finest sham media. “Competition for the 2013 Gold Shammy,” said the panel of judges, “has been cutthroat.” The Shammies are not for the tabloid lower orders. Rupert Murdoch has been honoured enough. Shammies distinguish respectable journalism that guards the limits of what the best and brightest like to call the “national conversation”.

The Shammy judges were especially impressed by a spirited campaign to rehabilitate Tony Blair. The winner will receive the coveted Jeremy Paxman Hoodwink Prize, in honour of the famous BBC broadcaster who says he was “hoodwinked” over Iraq – regardless of the multiple opportunities he had to challenge Blair and expose the truth and carnage of the illegal invasion.

Short-listed for Hoodwink is Michael White, the Guardian’s political editor, whose lament for Blair’s “wasted talent” is distinguished by his defence of Blair as the victim of a “very unholy alliance between a familiar chorus of America-bashers and Blair bait[ers]”. (I am included).

On 19 December, another contender, White’s colleague, Jane Martinson, was granted a “rare” interview with Cherie Blair in her “stately private office” with its “gorgeous views over Hyde Park” and “imposing mahogany furniture”. In such splendour does Mrs. Blair (she prefers her married name for its “profile”) run her “foundation for women” in Africa, India and the Middle East. Her political collusion in her husband’s career and support for adventures that destroyed the lives of countless women was not mentioned. A PR triumph and odds-on for a Shammy.

Also nominated: the brains behind the Guardian’s front page of 8 November: “The best is yet to come”, dominated by a half-page picture of the happy-huggy-droney Obama family. And who could fail to appreciate the assurance from the BBC’s Mark Mardell that, in personally selecting people to murder with his drones, “the care taken by the president is significant”?

Matt Frei, formerly of the BBC now of Channel 4 News, drew commendation for his reporting of Obama as a “warrior president” and Hugo Chavez as a “chubby-faced strongman”. A study by the University of the West of England found that, of the 304 BBC reports on Venezuela published in a decade, only three mentioned the Chavez government’s extraordinary record in promoting human rights and reducing poverty.

In the Gold Shammy category, the judges were struck by the outstanding work of the Guardian’s Decca Aitkenhead. “Everywhere we went, before my eyes people fell in love with him … no one seemed to be immune.” This was her memorable encounter with Peter Mandelson in 2009. She described his “effortless allure … the intensity of his theatre is electrifying to behold … His skin is dewey, as if fresh from a spa facial, and his grooming so flawless he looks almost hyper-real, the cuff links and tie delicately co-ordinated, with their detail inversely echoed in his socks … His whole body seems weirdly untroubled by the passage of time …”

Aitkenhead had previously “profiled” Alistair Darling, the Chancellor who presided over the worst financial collapse in memory. Greeted as “old friends” by Darling and his “gregarious” wife Maggie “who cooks and makes tea and supper while Darling lights the fire”, Aitkenhead effused over “a highly effective minister …he seems almost too straightforward, even high-minded, for the low cunning of political warfare.”

The judges were asked to compare and contrast such moments of journalistic ecstasy with the same writer’s profile of Julian Assange on 7 December. Assange answered her questions methodically, providing her with a lot of information about the state’s abuse of technology and mass surveillance. “There is no debate that Assange knows more about this subject than almost anyone alive,” she wrote. No matter. Rather than someone who had exposed more state criminality than any journalist, he was described as “someone convalescing after a breakdown”: a mentally ill figure she likened to “Miss Havisham”. Unlike the alluring, electrifying, twice disgraced Mandelson, and the high-minded, disastrous Chancellor, Assange had a “messianic grandiosity”. No evidence was offered. The Gold Shammy was within her grasp.

Then, on Christmas Eve, the BBC News magazine published an article marking the 40th anniversary of the 1972 Christmas bombing of Hanoi. The bombing, wrote Rebecca Kesby,“was President Richard Nixon’s attempt to hasten the end of the Vietnam war, as the growing strength of the Viet Cong caused heavy casualties among US ground troops”.

In fact, Nixon promised “an honourable end to the war” four years earlier. His 1972 Christmas bombing of Hanoi in the north was as much concerned with peace as Hitler’s bombing of Poland: a cynical, vengeful act of barbarism that changed nothing in the stalled Paris talks. Kesby cites Henry Kissinger’s absurd claim that the North Vietnamese “were on their knees”. Far from hastening “the end of the Vietnam war”, America’s savagery ensured the war went on for another two a half years, during which more Vietnamese were killed than during the previous decade.

Kesby claimed that previous US targets had been “fuel depots and munitions stores”. On my wall is a photograph I took of a hamlet in the north obliterated by F-105 and Phantom fighters flying at 200 feet in order to pick off “soft targets” – human beings. In the town of Hongai, I stood in the debris of churches, hospitals, schools. A new type of “dart bomb” was used; the darts were made from a plastic that did not show in X-rays, and the victims, mostly children, suffered until they died. Filmed by Malcolm Aird and James Cameron, a news report on this type of terror bombing was suppressed by the BBC.

Today our memory of all of this is sanitised. America and its allies, using even more diabolical weapons, continue to “hasten to the end of war”. Such has been the BBC’s unerring theme since Vietnam. The Gold Shammy is richly deserved. www.johnpilger.com

Ray Wyre Exposed

Firstly, let me apologise to the author for pasting the whole article here. It's not something I advocate or support, but there are odd occasions when I feel an article should be kept whole and presented as such.

Let me also admit, the primary reason for posting this rather bizarre history of Ray Wyre, is to draw attention to the even more bizarre and unequivocal support of the Doctors McCann by Ray Wyre. Not that he is alone in this by any means, there are far more than he alone, but of those I shall furnish links at the bottom of the page.

Germane to this post is this 2007 article by Ray Wyre immediately below. Whether you chose to read it in its entirety prior to reading the main body of this post, or afterwards, is entirely your choice, but no matter, it should be read.

 "McCanns are totally innocent" Not the first time I have come across those very words, I heard them previously from Mirror hack and McCann sycophant, Rod Chaytor. Quit a statement to make you must admit, well it is for two fellows who weren't within a thousand miles of Praia da Luz at the time Madeleine McCann met her demise whilst in the care of her parents, Doctors Kate and Gerry McCann.

Perhaps that should read three fellows, because we mustn't ignore another fellow of their ilk, another "child protection expert" who from the same thousand  mile distance, could swear categorically to the innocence of the parents, ex Detective Constable, Mark Williams-Thomas.

Of course there are more I could add to the list, the odious Clarence Mitchell would probably be the first on anybody's list. But I think Mitchell's performance over these five years past, speaks volumes enough without me having to reiterate here once more.

But no article that makes mention of unprecedented support for the transparent Doctors McCann, would be in the least complete, without naming that other big gun, Jim Gamble, formerly of the Child Exploitation and Online Protection. (CEOP)

Surpassing anything that could be said about our previously mentioned four fellows, Gamble really pushed the boat out in the display of unprecedented, if not actually illegal support of the McCanns.  Not only did Gamble, with all the power of the CEOP behind him, initiate a campaign of propaganda, it can't be called anything less, he did so a month after the McCanns were declared 'Arguido' persons of interest in the disappearance of their daughter Madeleine.

But of Gamble I have already written reams, so of him I will say no more, other than to leave the relative links below.

So a little taster of "Top UK Crime Cracker" Ray Wyre.

EXCLUSIVE: MCCANNS ARE 'TOTALLY INNOCENT'
By Marcello Mega And Daniel Jones
 Jan 27 2008

EXCLUSIVE TRUTH ABOUT THE McCANNS: BY TOP UK CRIME CRACKER

Kate and Gerry played NO part in the disappearance of their daughter Madeleine, one of the world's top crime experts declared last night.

Ray Wyre - who has given Cracker-style testimony to courts since the 1970s - said: "It is absolutely IMPOSSIBLE for them to have been involved."

He insisted the grief-stricken parents were incapable of doing anything to harm their children. more

Ray Wyre exposed, the article in question. Author's emphasis.

A Live Wyre
Penny Campbell
15 February 2006

"False Allegations Action Scotland" re: Ray Wyre, the "Expert"

Ray Wyre credited as a child protection expert and a sex crime consultant. He began his current career as a probation officer trained in social work in UK prisons, in his past he trained to become a Baptist Minister. It is during his time at HMS Albany, that Wyre began to branch away from accepted methods for handling those convicted of sex offences.

It was normal for a convicted person to meet on a one to one basis with the Probation Officer, Wyre chose instead to give 3 or 4 the same appointment, though he denied that he considered this to be a group. At the time, the Prison Officer's Association were unhappy with this, as they felt it introduced unnecessary risks to the meetings.

The value of group therapy in these situations is also disputed by research. It has been found in at least one study (Romero and Williams, 1983) that "the addition of group psychotherapy to conventional probation supervision did not significantly reduce sex offender recidivism".

Wyre continued to pursue his own methods and in the 1980's began to influence social work child protection practices more heavily. In 1988 he introduced the satanic ritual abuse (SRA) element to the large scale Nottingham case. Having been contacted by Tim Tate, journalist, Wyre passed on lists of 'satanic indicators' (lists of symptoms which are claimed to indicate the child has been a victim of SRA) to the children's foster parents. He also briefed them on what to look for, encouraging the foster parents to keep journals on the children's behaviour and anything the children discussed.

In the subsequent enquiry into the case, Wyre was heavily criticised for his actions and influence on the case. As the bizarre allegations became more and more fantastic, a rift formed between police investigating the case, who could find no evidence supporting the allegations, and the social workers, who were adamant that this abuse had occurred. Police refused to accept any further allegations, and refused to accept as evidence the journals that Wyre had urged the foster parents to keep.

A committed believer in the SRA movement, Ray Wyre continued to spread his beliefs, as did other workers swept up in the tide of hysteria. An associate of Wyre's, Pamela Klein, also lectured at joint training conferences for police and social workers on the subject of SRA. Originally from Illinois, and a rape crisis worker, Klein's activities had previously been criticised by an Illinois judge, who stated that she "was not a legitimate therapist" and that she was not licensed to practice.

Wyre and Klein both were instrumental in spreading the SRA movement through Australia and New Zealand. Klein's list of indicators included bedwetting, a fear of ghosts and nightmares. Four of those involved in the infamous McMartin pre-school scandal in the US, also targeted Australia and New Zealand. Almost immediately cases with strikingly similar allegations to those already seen in the US and UK sprang up.

Despite being criticised for his influence on the Nottingham case, and warnings that training workers to look for these indicators, and the methods used to elicit the desired responses from the interviewees were dangerous and should be stopped, Wyre continued.

In June 1994, another satanic ritual abuse case broke in Pembroke, Wales. It was revealed that workers in the case had attended a 3-day conference held by Wyre.

It was in 1988 that Wyre set up the Gracewell Clinic in Birmingham, the first clinic designed to treat men convicted of sex offences.

Men were referred to the Clinic for treatment following an assessment, it also required - as with all SOTPs (Sex Offender Treatment Program) - that the men voluntarily agree to receiving treatment, and that in doing so they admit guilt and responsibility for the offences of which they have been accused. In the case of a man who has been sentenced, a refusal to admit guilt and to participate in a treatment programme can see him returned to court and re-sentenced. A claim of innocence is never accepted as such, and instead is always considered as a denial by the accuser to accept what he did.

In 'Men and Crime', Issue 13, summer 1992, Wyre admitted that a form of treatment used at the Gracewell Clinic, was that of 'masturbation satiation'. A technique originally devised by W.L. Marshall, which makes us of deviant or illegal material as part of the therapy, and claimed by some to be effective in reducing re-offending. It is a form of therapy which any innocent man would likely find upsetting and disturbing.

Though alternative therapies such as electro-shock aversion and foul odour are reported to be successful, researchers want to see verbal or masturbatory satiation become a standard treatment. Wyre further recommends that treatment is mandatory.

Opinions on Wyre's methods include the following; "cognitive therapies have become confrontational and frankly coercive." "(T)here is something of a culture shock for those with a foundation in traditional psychotherapy when confronted with Wyre's methods." It is pointed out that there is no doctor-patient relationship, and none of the confidentiality that medical ethics normally require.

Wyre claimed that at that time, no one who had been treated at Gracewell had re-offended. This is not the achievement that it appears to be. Wyre excludes from the outset, via the assessment, anyone who he feels he cannot work with. If he chooses to refuse to treat someone who's behaviour is so far detached from what would be expected from an average member of society, that there is little or no hope of rehabilitation, and instead chooses to treat men who have little or no criminal evidence against them, it is no surprise that he can claim that none have gone on to re-offend.

Incredibly, he has also admitted that the questionnaire which was used in the assessment pack he provided the men with, received similar responses from the accused and from ordinary men in the community. Exactly what value and purpose this questionnaire had if the answers were the same from all men is unclear. You could assume from this that all men have the potential to act on deviant fantasies, or the accused he is treating are innocent.

Further indication that Wyre seems to have difficulty in differentiating between those who are innocent and those who are guilty is shown in his list of 'characteristics of child sexual abusers', on an information leaflet published for child care organisations in Australia.

pro-offending attitudes
insensitivity to child issues
desires to work with vulnerable children
excessive attention given to a particular child or group of children
gift giving
taking children on trips
isolates children from other adults
photographs children
use of contact therapies, massages, etc.
regular trips to known "child sex tourism" countries
appears to have no adult social life
heavily involved in work but has poor relationships with colleagues
gaps in references
uses questionable language or phrases

Some of these indicators would clearly apply to genuine offenders, however, most of these characteristics can also be applied to any normal, innocent person. How many parents take their children on holiday, photograph them and buy them gifts? Some now use baby massage as a way of soothing fretful infants. Social workers and child protection experts (of which Wyre is considered to be one) have desires to work with vulnerable children. How many adults now have two or more jobs? With financial demands increasing, this is more common, these adults, whether single, in a relationship or parents could be considered to have no social life or heavily involved in work.

This list of indicators is at best unhelpful, at worst, dangerous.

Another controversial aspect of Wyre's treatment regards the conversion of some alleged abusers, into men with homosexual relationships. He considers that it is better for men who are believed to have abused boys, and who appear to be unable to conduct a relationship with a woman, to enter into homosexual relationships.

Gracewell continued to treat men until it's closure in 1993, however Ray Wyre was not the only person working at Gracewell whose methods have been considered controversial.

In August 2003, a woman (whose name was changed to prevent her being identified) who had volunteered at Gracewell in the 1980's and continued to work there until it's closure, revealed what most people would consider an unhealthy obsession with convicted men.

It was claimed that she was in love with the men, some of whom where convicted child killers, with which she regularly corresponded and sometimes visited. She claimed to provide them with emotional and financial support and that this benefited the men. Amongst those whom she considered to be her friends, were Sidney Cooke and Robert Maudsley, who ate part of his victims brain with a spoon.

She also admitted to writing to Ian Huntley, charged with murdering the two Soham schoolgirls.

This woman, who was a psychology student at the time of the report, also claimed to have been abused as a child, and who had fallen in love with her abuser. The desire to befriend men such as Robert Maudsely came following her abusers rejection of her. "I love men because of - not in spite of - what they have done." she said.

The fact that Wyre allowed a person with what appear to be extremely bizarre, unresolved personal issues volunteer at Gracewell, is in stark contrast to the opinion he voiced during a Care Standards Tribunal hearing last year.

A social worker who had worked in social care with children for 30 years, brought an appeal against the decision made by Charles Clarke to place his name on the Protection of Children Act List.

Though this social worker did not have any allegations made against him, and had no convictions for any offences involving children, he had admitted to a colleague that he considered himself to be a paedophile, stressing that he meant this in the literal sense of the word.

He had on one occasion considered seducing a young boy who had been cleaning the social worker's car. It was also claimed that the social worker would have liked to access child pornography, but never had done so.

Ray Wyre was called to give evidence as an expert witness. His evidence was described as both "illuminating and unhelpful". Wyre's continual reference and comparison to other men he was working with was considered a hindrance to understanding the case before the tribunal. It was pointed out that Wyre's agency had not been involved in assisting the social worker, and the focus had to be on his case alone.

Wyre considered that the possibility that the social worker had abused in the past was small and even less so with regard to the chance of his abusing in the future. At the same time, Wyre did accept that the element of sexual attraction towards boys was "quite high".

His evidence then was favourable towards the social worker. Despite this, Wyre admitted that he could not employ this person in his agency. He considered that he employs people to do a job and does not expect them to bring "additional baggage". He would expect someone with personal problems to get professional help.

This did not prevent him continuing to allow the female volunteer referred to above, to assist at the Clinic, with whom he had 'agreed to disagree' over their respective therapy techniques.

Though the appeal was won by majority, the Chair took the unusual step of recording his dissenting views.

Wyre's opinions were further questioned regarding snuff videos. He is quoted as having viewed snuff films first hand in America. Apparently however, when contacted, he denied having seen one, and claimed that what he saw was instead a sophisticated simulation. Though he insists that the FBI did have such films in their possession and claimed that they were available in England, both the FBI and Scotland Yard dispute this.

The cult expert at the FBI's training academy at Quantico, Virginia, Ken Lanning, has stated that in 20 years of searching, he has never found a documented case of a snuff film anywhere in the world.

Scotland Yard also denied their existence in England, a detective in the Obscene Publications Division is quoted as saying "I'd be the first to know if there were any in Britain. There just aren't."

His current organisation, Ray Wyre (UK) Ltd., is based in Milton Keynes and claims to provide services to the accused and their families. He and his associates are regularly called to provide expert evidence in criminal cases in the UK and beyond. They claim to recognise the importance for independent assessment and that this also leaves "the possibility that the alleged offender is innocent of the allegations." The requirement for the accused to admit his guilt, together with Wyre's all-encompassing indicators make this meaningless.

One former associate, Charles Fortt, was also a probation officer and had been the principal therapist and clinic manager at Gracewell, is now an independent consultant on sex crime and domestic violence.

Ray Wyre continues to be a regular speaker in conferences regarding child protection or the management of sex offenders (though he does not consider an adult abuser who was abused as a child to be a 'sex offender'), in the UK and worldwide.

This month Wyre was in the news again, calling for a new organisation to be formed to tackle self-employed persons who may be considered a risk to children. Working with him is Labour MP Dan Norris. Norris has a background in social work and child protection. His allegations against colleagues whilst working as a teacher in a care home prior to his training as a social worker, resulted in dismissals and the closure of the home.

Wyre is currently involved in a prominent residential school case in Scotland.

Penny Campbell
15 February 2006
Source FBGA

Mark Williams-Thomas on Only in America

Mark Williams-Thomas on Good Quality Wristbands

Mark Williams-Thomas on The McCann Gallery


Rod Chaytor on Good Quality Wristbands

Rod Chaytor on The McCann Gallery


Jim Gamble on Only In America Please enter name in search bar.

Jim Gamble on Good Quality Wristbands

Jim Gamble on The McCann Gallery Please enter name in search bar.

For blogs that don't carry tags, you can enter all kinds of names in the search bars, you never know who you may come across.

Hat tip reader Maren.