John and Patsy Ramsey

Words fail me.

USA and Global Mass Murder

Another fact that Americans can’t be proud* of is knowing that the most warring nation on earth just since World War II alone has murdered up to 30 million people around the globe with an estimated 90% of them being civilians.

Although I use the above sentence as a teaser, it is in fact one of the few points I might take exception to. Not I add, the figure of thirty million, but that Americans actually give a toss.

Understand as you read, Hagopian is a West Point graduate and former US Army officer, so the article carries a little more weight for my money.

*Rhetoric only.

Says it all really don't it?

It’s Time to Stop “Supporting Our Troops”

By Joachim Hagopian
December 13, 2015

With the 115 year old tradition of the annual Army-Navy football classic on Saturday, the so called “America’s game” and “rivalry for the ages” is now once again upon us. This occasion never fails to pay reverent homage to America’s so called “cream of the crop” elitist military academies and always from the president to celebrities Americans give tribute to our armed forces. At this time we hear that familiar patriotic mantra “support our troops” mindlessly repeated. So it seems appropriate now to take a cold hard look to examine what it actually means to “support our troops.”
As both a West Point graduate and critic of the American Empire, to me the “support our troops” sentiment has long outworn its propagandized welcome. US Empire has been using that contrite expression to brainwash Americans and justify its wars and violence for far too long. It sprang up during this last decade’s protracted war losses in Iraq and Afghanistan. Never was it ever heard during the Vietnam War when our combat veterans returned home feeling defeated and suffering from untreated PTSD symptoms, shunned by a nation that had bitterly turned against them and their war, particularly by their own peer group. Fast forward to four decades and three war defeats later, and our government is still sending Americans off to fight and die in Afghanistan (9800 currently) and Iraq (3500 with another 100 on the way), and now in Syria (50 just proposed with more on the way while war-hawk Bobbsy twins McCain and Graham are calling for 20,000 more troops in Syria). But this century's wars we keep hearing red, white and blue, flag waving Americans urging us to “support our troops.”

Over the long haul, supporting our troops has resulted in the United States being the most warring, aggressive nation on earth, bar none. As we’re about to enter 2016, our ultraviolent country will be killing other human beings somewhere on this planet for 223 out of the last 240 total years the US has been in existence. That’s 93% of our time as a nation-turned-Empire we’ve been destroying human life. That’s certainly nothing to be proud of. Yet it’s “our troops” who’ve been the murdering culprit. No compassionate, rational person could possibly place blindly obedient support behind such rampantly wanton disregard and contempt for fellow human life.

Another fact that Americans can’t be proud of is knowing that the most warring nation on earth just since World War II alone has murdered up to 30 million people around the globe with an estimated 90% of them being civilians. Having initiated 201 out of the total of 240 armed conflicts from the end of WWII to 2001, it then follows that between those years the US Empire of Chaos and Destruction has murdered 27 million innocent people whose lives have tragically been cut short through no fault of their own for simply living in the wrong place at the wrong time belonging to the wrong ethnic nationality targeted by America’s full spectrum dominance and global superpower hegemony. And that was before the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

And what does it take to be targeted as a US foreign enemy? Any country whose leaders choose to support their own citizens’ well-being, independence and quality of life over US Empire’s fascist transnational corporate interests is attacked economically through sanctions and embargos, politically through propaganda lies and threats, or militarily though unnatural disasters/weather warfare, occupied invasions involving long term bloody conflict or acts of terrorism, coups and assassinations. Just ask Cuba, Venezuela, Haiti, Panama, Iran, Syria, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Sudan, Congo North Korea, Donbas, Palestine or Russia just to name more than a dozen.

People around the world have been victimized for well over a century by American Empire’s willful rape and pillage of their lands in the name of stolen natural resources and inhumane forced slave labor, and those are the nations whose puppet dictators willingly succumbed and acquiesced to US demands and pressures. In fact in the tradition of the British Empire, North America’s entire domestic and foreign history has been made of genocidal killing, enslaving, stealing and subjugating other darker-skinned races into death and submission. Given this context with the bigger picture perspective, “supporting our troops” is really supporting mass murder around the world. So bearing that sobering, grim reality in mind, it’s time for Americans to cease and desist with their jingoistic rah-rah that only adds insult to injury to the rest of the victimized world.

In 2008 the US spent more money every 5 seconds to wage an immoral, unlawful war in Iraq than the average working American earned all year long. 80% of America’s taxes are earmarked towards funding the annual Pentagon budget to wage war around the world. When that kind of war investment misappropriating US citizenry’s hard-earned tax dollars places such lopsided priority over the well-being of its own people, with over a decade of wearing down an overextended military forced into fighting three, four and even five consecutive combat tours on two simultaneous warfronts, it also overburdened and decimated America’s middle class. And now for the first time in nearly a half century, the US middle class is no longer a majority in the United States. A large chunk of it died when sinking into an expanding lower class of impoverished, poverty-stricken Americans barely making ends meet. Half the respondents in a recent survey say they either break even or make less than their cost of living expenses. As an oligarchy the US federal government no longer acts in the best interests of its citizens.

But considering the costs of war to victim nations where since 2003 the US has killed over a million people in Iraq alone, this figure released from a study earlier this year is admittedly a conservative estimate. The study concludes that up to two million in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan have been killed by America’s wars. These colossal crimes against humanity constitute supporting the US federal government as well as its military troops a moral crime. America’s complete and utter destruction of the world’s second and third largest oil producers in Iraq and Libya, turning them into failed states because their one time US allied leaders moved away from the US petrodollar is unconscionable, yet that’s the tragic outcome of blindly supporting our troops. More than any other single country, the US today is responsible for allowing ISIS to make billions in profit from stolen oil from Iraq and Syria financing the biggest terrorist group on the planet. And US partners-in-crime Turkey and Israel are the two biggest buyers of terrorist oil. So in effect supporting our troops is also supporting both crimes against humanity as well as worldwide terrorism.

Supporting our troops has contributed to the world becoming far more armed and dangerous today than at any prior time in our recorded human history. Our nation is also responsible for spearheading the biggest arms race in history where it’s not just the US Empire spending so many billions on weapons of mass destruction but due to Empire aggression it has forced Russia and China to answer by also significantly increasing their military spending. A dozen years ago the US defense budget nearly equaled the rest of the world combined. But during this century’s two protracted US wars plus smaller secret ones around the world, America’s military expenditures have soared to $682 billion in 2012 from $417.4 in 2003. The exponential rise of American aggression likewise has pressured the unilaterally declared US enemies Russia and China to significantly increase their military spending as well. The US has gone from spending near half (46%) of the world’s military amount in 2003 to just 35% in 2014 due to Russia and China dramatically expanding their military budgets. In fact following America’s lead, both the world’s annual arms sales as well as its military budgets have exponentially skyrocketed amongst dozens of countries all seemingly gearing up for “the big one.” Not surprisingly, at 31% the US is also the biggest arms dealer on the planet followed by Russia’s 27% with China accounting for 5% during the period from 2010-2014 that totaled a 16% increase from arms sold from 2005-2009.

Events and developments have escalated tensions and confrontations between the US and Russia and China in recent weeks. With the US backing NATO member Turkey recklessly shooting down a Russian fighter jet resulting in a Russian rescue helicopter also brought down last month, in addition to the probable ISIS bomb taking down the Russian airliner killing all 224 onboard a month and a half ago, the US Navy destroyer skirting inside the twelve nautical mile range of built up Chinese islands in the South China Sea, the United States and the West appear to be baiting Putin and the East into World War III. And with nuclear powers going directly head-to-head in Syria, Ukraine and Asia, self-annihilation of the human race becomes a very real and grave risk culminating after a quarter century of US Empire belligerently operating as the sole global superpower and "global village" bully.

Out of nearly 200 countries no other nation on earth has more than a few military bases outside its own country except the United States. In contrast to the rest of the world, the US sends 1.5 million military occupiers on active duty to over a thousand military installations on every continent throughout the globe. Just this week the Pentagon announced a worldwide expansion of military bases without specifying a total number under the auspices of secrecy. West Africa, East Africa and Afghanistan are slotted for full scale bases. Meanwhile US Special Forces that covertly operate by stealth surprise often at night in guerilla-type, fast strike operations are busily secretly committing acts of terror in over 135 nations globally, that’s about 75% of the all world’s nations.

Let’s look at the way our federal government supports our troops. After sending over 6800 US soldiers (along with 7000 civilian contractors) to their early graves fighting in America’s two longest running wars in the nation’s history, leaving one million wounded personnel filing VA claims ranging from life threatening physical injuries to emotionally crippling PTSD traumas and scars, the feds have betrayed our patriots serving our country by treasonously targeting all returning combat veterans as the biggest enemy threat on American soil. Indeed veterans, gun owners and dissidents are deemed to pose a greater danger than even the feds' own created terrorist monster ISIS that Obama's open border policy facilitates easy access to establishing terrorist cells inside America.

Those veterans seeking help are customarily snowed under by lethal Big Pharma poison, fast becoming addicted and even more unstable. Many are haplessly waiting and dying on lists for medical services that often don’t come soon enough. Exposing forty veterans who died awaiting services on invisible lists at the Phoenix VA hospital alone triggered a major scandal last year. For several years running on average twenty-two veterans have been killing themselves each and every day in the United States. The overloaded Veterans Administration has been caught grossly ill-prepared to adequately deal with the sheer enormity of the problem with so many severely damaged ex-soldiers in dire need of long term assistance and care. One study predicts that up to nearly a half million veterans will end up with criminal cases in the court system.

With nearly half (44%) of Congress millionaires and so few (19%) ever serving in uniform now, the DC warmongers are ever-at-the-ready to send young men and women from America’s lower class into harm’s way fighting Obama’s dirty little secret wars in multiple combat zones around the world that the public never even hears about. Yet you’ll see next to none of their own sons or daughters fighting in some far off war. The way our own government has used, abused and not supported our troops is despicable.

And then a sizeable percentage of those Americans who are so vocal in their claims of “supporting our troops,” are too frequently disingenuous. Often hypocrites merely mouth the same banal platitudes year after year from their ivory-towered, pretend world, living so far removed and disaffected from actual war conditions or even knowing anyone who wears a military uniform. Never fathoming the tragic insanity or bloody lifelong consequences that US wars ravage on millions worldwide, permanently damaging all involved, Americans who haven’t a clue will glibly pay lip service, “We owe so much to our soldiers who fight to keep us safe and free.” What bubble, planet or century are they living on or in?

Since the inside coup of 9/11 was perpetrated, US citizens have become the murderous neocons’ war on terror victims as well, terrorized by their own international crime cabal government and militarized police state that’s effectively stolen their freedom and civil liberties while the guilty treasonously continue violating sworn oaths to uphold and protect both the Constitution and American people. Yet too many brainwashed, dumbed down and clueless in America don’t seem to get it. Maybe it’s because they’re bombarded 24/7 by MSM lies and disinformation that never expose the ugliness of war as it really is. The ruling elite controls all aspects of mass media, engaging in widespread censorship of films, television and video games where violence and war are only glorified. Military, CIA and FBI liaisons control every aspect of what comes out of Hollywood these days.

But over four decades of a volunteer army comprised of less than half of one percent of the total US population also contributes greatly to the widening disconnect between the 99+% civilian population and the less than 1% Americans in uniform. The atrocities and horror that the imperialistic Empire’s killing machine has inflicted on Third World nations half a world away may as well be billions of miles away on another planet or galaxy. Out of sight, out of mind goes many civilians’ insulated, tunnel version reality.

Those currently in uniform need to be reminded that they have a sworn duty to protect America from domestic and foreign enemies. As citizens who no longer live in a democratic republic but now a totalitarian police state, they need to recognize that their federal government has a diabolical agenda to enslave and eliminate fellow Americans. Instead of criminalizing dissent, the real domestic enemy has become the federal government and all Americans need to accept this tragic development. Therefore, both those already in uniform as well as those ready to sign up and allow themselves to become their crime cabal’s latest cannon fodder in the elite’s wars need to stand up and be counted as patriots loyal to their nation and fellow citizens rather than adhere to blind obedience to their psychopathic masters. It’s no longer okay to support the troops when they’re misdirected into committing treason against their own citizenry. Military personnel need to take responsibility for their actions and do what’s right by both their Constitution as well as humanity.

2015 has been a tumultuous year when by globalist design terrorism has expanded to all corners of the earth, spreading death, war and destruction in its wake. Meanwhile, feeling its economic prowess slipping away in the face of the emerging power of Eastern rivals China and Russia, the United States government has already conceded losing its war to retain the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency. The DC crime syndicate knows its days in power are numbered. Since the psychopaths ruling the planet are unwilling to relinquish their ruthless power of absolute control, they realize that using their Manchurian puppet president and his overstretched US Empire to recklessly do their dirty planetary bidding to successfully destroy the world’s most powerful nation sending Empire into rapid freefall decline on the way to one world government can only be achieved by igniting World War III against the Eastern powers just as their Ponzi-rigged, house of cards, debt-based global economy implodes on itself. So this late in the power elite’s endgame when we’re still hearing “support the troops,” in actuality it’s time to fight for our lives in support of humanity’s struggle for survival and good ultimately triumphing over evil.

Joachim Hagopian is a West Point graduate and former US Army officer. He has written a manuscript based on his unique military experience entitled “Don’t Let The Bastards Getcha Down.” It examines and focuses on US international relations, leadership and national security issues. After the military, Joachim earned a master’s degree in Clinical Psychology and worked as a licensed therapist in the mental health field for more than a quarter century. He now concentrates on his writing and has a blog site at http://empireexposed.blogspot.co.id/.

Haute de la Garenne a Place of Evil

This article and video speak for themselves, anything I might have to say is superfluous.

Reblogged for posterity.

Exclusive Footage of "Eddie" Cadaver Dog at Haute de la Garenne

Voice For Children Blogspot
Saturday, 10 March 2012

Lenny Harper

Once more VFC is able to bring its readers/viewers another, what we are told is, a world exclusive.

With the assistance of Former Senior Investigating Officer of the Jersey Child Abuse Investigation, and Former Deputy Chief Police Officer Mr. Lenny Harper, we are able to bring you exclusive video footage of arguably the world's most renowned Cadaver Dog "Eddie" not only working at the crime scene of the Former Jersey Children's Home, Haute de la Garenne, but alerting to the scent of human death.

Not a great deal of these Cadaver dogs work has been reported in the State Media, other than to discredit them, so we asked Mr. Harper to document for us just exactly what is happening in the video below, what does a Cadaver dog do? How significant to the investigation the dog was? What, if anything did he (the dog) find?The results, it has to be said were astounding. Mr. Harper agreed to our request and once again we thank him for his commitment to the truth and justice.

For viewers information "JAR/6" is the fragment of child's skull.

00.00.0 Getting ready. I was reluctant to let the dog inside as I did not feel that it would do much good. In truth, I was a little sceptical – I had not felt a favourable impression from the handler (Martin Grimes) at our initial meeting and I was dubious, although my opinion of his qualities and integrity was to markedly change as events unfolded. I began to realise as I worked closely with him over a period of months that what I originally took as arrogance was simply supreme confidence in the ability of his dogs in the face of jealous, empire protecting rivals who were not as professionally capable. Throughout the investigation, we subjected Martin and his dogs to many ‘verifying’ tests, from burying swabs in sand (which he always found no matter how large an area), to minute blood stains. The dogs never failed. Many of these tests were carried out in front of Jersey politicians and media, including Channel Television and Diane Simon of the JEP. Frank Walker and Andrew Lewis were only two of the politicians who witnessed the ability of the dogs in hugely impressive displays. Funny how they all forgot this when they jumped on the bandwagon which sought to ruin Martin Grime’s reputation. One of the most spectacular exercises occurred when one of the Anthropologists brought a vial of sand back that she had removed from the tomb of a mummy in Egypt. We put this vial on a beach, below the sand, and let Eddie off to look for it. The dog amazingly sought it out in a few minutes and gave us the reaction you will see in this video. To get back to the start of the video and my initial doubts, after a few days outside I had at least gained a grudging respect for Martin’s hard work and dedication. I still was not keen to extend the search inside the house with the dog; however, I reluctantly conceded that we should look at all our possibilities so that we could walk away and say that we had given it a good shot. You can see me standing looking less than confident.

00.00.45 The first indication that the dog (Eddie) is finding something amiss. His behaviour has changed, and is remarked on by the handler. He is initially reacting further down from where we were to eventually find the initial fragment, (which ILM and others still incorrectly claim to be definitively identified as coconut) and in the flow of the drainage from the area where it was found. To clarify, Eddie is trained to trace the scent of dead human flesh. He will react where this scent is found, not necessarily where it was originally located. His strongest reaction will normally be where that scent is strongest, which will usually be where the dead flesh has lain longest, but he will sense it in areas where the scent has been carried, for instance, by drains.

00.01.08 Eddie is starting to react strongly now. Although still some yards from the finding of JAR/6, he smells something which has been carried down in the drainage from the original source. We were later to find that the drain ran down from where we found JAR/6 and where the bones were found by the builders, who suspected that they were also the bones of juveniles. One of them identified a child’s pelvic bone from the internet. These bones were found with children’s’ shoes which were to be later the source of interesting conflicts between the evidence of the pathologists and the staff at the Jersey Museum.

00.01.50 The doors and wall where Eddie is reacting so strongly now lead into the room where the top wall adjoins the stair area where JAR/6 (the infamous initial fragment) was found. Note the change in the dog’s behaviour, and the strong indication from his that there is something to be investigated here. It is important to note at this point, that the dog is only telling us that the scent of human death is here. He is not telling us that there has been a murder; he is not telling us that this is the spot where a body has been buried. He is only telling us that the scent of human death is at this spot. He is saying, “There is something here for you to investigate.” It is worthy of note, that this is also next to the location where builders found the bones which they thought were human juveniles, and where they were told that if they found bones to let “bygones be bygones.”

00.02.25 Eddie is now at the doors leading to the stairwell where both JAR/6 and the “builders’ bones” were found. Note that he is reacting strongly. To corroborate Eddie’s reaction we used the most up to date geological equipment supplied to us by the British Army and the Metropolitan Police (more services obtained through the use of contacts and a hospitality budget!) for which we paid nothing. These surveys confirmed inconsistencies in the sub floor levels.

00.02.39 Eddie is telling us that there is something we need to investigate on the other side of the door and he wants through to indicate this to us.

00.02.58 Eddie is now reacting very strongly and indicating to us that the scent of dead human flesh is in this location. This is where we were to find JAR/6, which the establishment continue to say was only coconut, but cannot explain how Eddie reacted as he did, nor indeed, how the lab at Oxford found Collagen.

Collagen is not found in coconut or wood, it is only present in mammals, which would seem to destroy the claims of the Jersey establishment, aided and abetted by the Jersey Evening Post and Channel Television, that JAR/6 is coconut or wood. Again, it is worthy of recall, that the builders who found the bones at this location thought they were human, and that one of them actually identified a bone as that of a child’s pelvic bone from the internet. Additionally, the police officer who was called to the scene was also dubious of the bones’ origins, as was the female pathologist who attended. She “did not like” the situation and referred the matter to her boss who said the bones where not consistent with being human. However, an Anthropologist later stated that he was incorrect and the measurements he quoted were entirely consistent with the bones being children’s’ pelvic bones as identified by one of the builders. The Anthropologist further stated that the Pathologist was not qualified to make the statement that he had.

00.04.06 Now Eddie has just left the wall adjoining the stair area where he reacted earlier. The drains in the building run from those stairs, under the adjoining wall, and down the room where we are now standing. As the dog is trained to detect the scent of dead human flesh, he is now following the strong scent emanating from the other side of the wall and being carried in the drains under the floor of this room and down the room towards the corridor seen earlier in the video.

00.04.15 Note the dog’s return to the wall. This was almost the exact spot where JAR/6 was found. It is a few inches from where the builders found the bones which they thought were human and which they were told about, “Let bygones be bygones.” If this dog was a waste of money, then how did he lead us to this exact spot? How did he later, in the ‘live’ presence of Wendy Kinnard (the then Home Affairs Minister) and Graham Power (the then Chief Police Officer), lead us to the bones in the cellars which an Anthropologist in the United Kingdom said were “fleshed and fresh” when burnt and buried? It cannot be a co-incidence that this dog, trained to detect the scent of dead human flesh, reacted so strongly in an area where we were to find a fragment of substance initially identified by a professional, accomplished, Anthropologist, as a part of a child’s skull, and right beside the spot where builders found bones and children’s shoes which they thought were human bones. No amount of spin by Le Marquand and others can contradict this, and no amount of misinformation from Warcup and Gradwell can conceal this truth.

00.04.41 Eddie still on stairs, right above the location where JAR/6 was found. He comes down again to the exact spot.

00.05.20 Eddie still reacting strongly at the spot where JAR/6 was found.

This is the live video, filmed on a mobile phone as it happened. The film was made by the Homicide Search Advisor of the National Policing Improvement Agency, on his mobile phone. He was to later say that the way we had carried out the search of HDLG was a “shining example” and should be documented as an example of good practice. Where has this recommendation been lost in the mists? The reactions of the dog speak for themselves. Eddie is not telling us that murder was committed at HDLG. He is telling us that somewhere in the floor-space of the premises; the scent of human death has been present. He is telling us that there is something there for us to investigate. His findings have been corroborated by the finding of the bones and teeth, by the results of the surveys carried out by the most sophisticated of electronic geological equipment, and by the evidence of builders and former residents and victims of abuse in HDLG. This video totally contradicts the spin of Frank Walker, Andrew Lewis and Diane Simon of the Jersey Evening Post, all of whom were taken on a tour of the building and given a demonstration of the ability and capability of Eddie and his companion "Keela" the blood detection dog. All of them were aware of the true situation relating to the dog and the finds. All of them, for their own reasons, chose to ignore the truth and to peddle the myths of those seeking to discredit the victims of the horrific abuse within HDLG. They are now, in my opinion, exposed as craven cowards and not fit to lick those victims’ boots. As for Martin Grimes and the dogs that they have tried to discredit, they are now working full time for one of the best Law Enforcement Agencies in the world in the USA.(END)


We will publish some of the documented evidence concerning the finds of human remains in the comment section of this post.

voiceforchildren10 March 2012 at 17:22

As mentioned in the main posting.

Some documented evidence.

JAR/30: 3-4; 1940s to 1980s. Two fragments of burnt bone one is fragment of longbone? Tibia. Submitted to University of Sheffield with KSH/158. Origin confirmed as human. Submitted for dating awaiting results.

JAR/33: 3-4; 1940s to 1980’s.
Calcined fragment of bone. ?human.

JAR/53: 183. Cellar 3 Dark char rich deposit equivalent to 169.
4 / 5: 1960s to present date.
5 fragments of calcined long bone ?human.

JAR/54: 183. Cellar 3 Dark char rich deposit equivalent to 169.
4 / 5: 1960s to present date.
4 fragments of calcined bone ?human.

JAR/55: 183. Cellar 3 Dark char rich deposit equivalent to 169.
4 / 5: 1960s to present date.
1 fragment of calcined bone ?human.

JAR/57:183. Cellar 3 Dark char rich deposit equivalent to 169.
4 / 5: 1960s to present date.
2 fragments of bone of unknown origin.

JAR/56: 183. Cellar 3 Dark char rich deposit equivalent to 169.
4 / 5: 1960s to present date.
1 fragment of bone ?human.

JAR/67: 183. Zone 3 East Cellar 3.
4 / 5: 1960s to present date.
Human Tooth: deciduous left maxillary first molar, age 9 yrs ± 3 yrs. Could have been shed naturally (Anthro exam).
Submitted to odontologist, see report.

JAR/69: 183. Zone 3 East Cellar 3.
4 / 5: 1960s to present date.
Fragments x 3 of possible human cortical bone.

JAR/61: 183 Zone 4 East Cellar 3.
4 / 5: 1960s to present date.
23 Fragments of bone:
1 Burnt fragment which closely resembles a human juvenile mastoid process.
2. Burnt fragment of ?human mandible.
3. Fragments of burnt long bone x 3 measuring between 11.3 and 16.3 mm.
4. Fragments of unidentified burnt cortical and trabecular bone x 7.
5. Fragment of slightly burnt long bone measuring 33 mm. The cortex of the
bone resembles human but it is quite thick and the trabeculae can not be seen because it requires cleaning. It appears to have been cut at one end.
6. Fragments of unburnt unidentified long bone. x 3 The appearance and texture of the cortex of the fragments appears more animal than human but it is advised that further examination should be undertaken in order to confirm this.
7. Fragments of unidentified long bone x 7. 5 have been burnt and 2 haven’t. Species
uncertain although two of the burnt fragments could possibly be human

JAR/90: 183 Cellar 3 Zone 3 East.
4 / 5: 1960s to present date.
Fragments of unidentified bone of unknown species. One which is calcined is possibly human bone.

Cellar 4 Context 169 (redeposited char material from fire elsewhere. Unsealed)

JAR/36: 169. Cellar 4 E. Charred material at southern end of Zone 4. Equivalent to 127.
4 / 5: 1960s to present date.
Fragment of bone ?human.

JAR/37: 169. Cellar 4 E. Charred material at southern end of Zone 4. Equivalent to 127.
4 / 5: 1960s to present date.
Fragment of burnt bone. ?human mastoid process

JAR/39: 169. Cellar 4 E. Charred material at southern end of Zone 4. Equivalent to 127.
4 / 5: 1960s to present date.
Fragment of burnt bone ?human.

JAR/40: 169. Cellar 4 E. Charred material at southern end of Zone 4. Equivalent to 127.
4 / 5: 1960s to present date.
Fragment of bone ?human.

GMK/18: 169. Cellar 4 E. Charred material at southern end of Zone 4. Equivalent to 127.
4 / 5: 1960s to present date.
Human tooth. Anthro exam – deciduous left maxillary lateral incisor. Age range 6 yrs ± 2yrs

More comments

Related: Madeleine McCann Was Not Abducted

"September 11 - The New Pearl Harbor" Physics Over Fiction

No hype required, for what I must assume, is the definitive 9/11 investigative documentary.

All I will say, apart from mentioning the sheer hubris and audacity of the scheme, is that the "Debunkers" come across as extremely fervent and extremely well funded. But of their arguments? I shall leave you to draw your own conclusions.

And lastly, but still staying with the debunkers, Popular Mechanics is owned by the Hearst Corporation, if you get to wondering.

eta My original title was to be:  "September 11 - The New Pearl Harbor"  Facts  Over Fiction But the term Fact leaves itself open to interpretation and to argument. But not so with our old friend Physics. Physics is fact, undeniable and unarguable.

View here, or view at source, where you will find an index of the film's contents.

The thing is lengthy, five hours in total, but in truth, the time flew by, it didn't seem five minutes, such was the quality of both research and content.

"September 11 - The New Pearl Harbor" is a 5 hour documentary that summarizes 12 years of public debate on 9/11. While aimed primarily at a general, uninformed audience, the film also contains some new findings that may be of interest to advanced researchers.

This film is intended as an educational, non-profit operation, and must remain so in order to fulfill all the requirements for the usage of copyrighted material. As such, the entire film is made available online for free from day one. Any purchase of the actual DVD will be considered as a form of donation to the author, in recognition of the time spent to put together this material. Free duplication and distribution of all DVDs is encouraged.

You can also purchase the 5-hour film in a 3 DVD set. Free duplication and distribution of all DVDs by Massimo Mazzucco is encouraged. Italian and French versions also available.To see the fully indexed film in one page go to  luogocomune.net

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

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.

Page 2

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.

Bush, Blair Wanted For War Crimes

Bush, Blair wanted for war crimes: Boyle
 Oct 20, 2012

A prominent international lawyer says former US President George W. Bush, and former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair stand guilty of crimes against peace, war crimes and torture, Press TV reports.

In November 2011, the Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Tribunal, in which Francis Boyle, a professor of international law at the University of Illinois, led the prosecution team, convicted Bush and Blair of crimes against peace and humanity, and genocide over their roles in the Iraq war.

On May 11, 2012, the tribunal also found Bush, former US Vice President Dick Cheney and former US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld guilty of the crime of torture.

"We will keep after Bush and Blair for sure for crimes against peace, war crimes and torture in general," Boyle told Press TV in a recent interview.

"We got them both convicted of a Nuremberg crime against peace," he added while referring to the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the principles of international law recognized in the Charter of the Nuremberg Tribunal.

According to Principles of the Nuremberg Tribunal, planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression or a war in violation of international treaties, agreements or assurances are crimes "punishable" under international law.

In September, Archbishop Desmond Tutu said Blair and Bush should be taken to the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague over their roles in the Iraq war. "We are making efforts now to do this," Boyle stated, adding, "We tried to get Bush in Switzerland, but his lawyers advised him not to go to Switzerland. I tried three times to get Bush in Canada, but unfortunately the Canadian government protected Bush."

"The wheels of justice might turn slowly, but they do turn."

Boyle also criticized the ICC for its failure to bring to justice US, UK and Israeli criminals.

"So far, they are just going after black thugs from Africa and not dealing with this wholesale mass murderers and criminals from the United States, Britain and Israel," he said.

Boyle condemned the Israeli regime for "inflicting outright genocide on the Palestinians in Gaza," adding that there will be hearings in November in Malaysia on the issue of Palestine. Press TV

The Man Who Volunteered for Auschwitz: Read of the Year

The Man Who Volunteered for Auschwitz

Why a member of the Polish underground sent himself into the infamous prison camp

David de Sola 5 Oct 2012

WARSAW -- There are very few places that can accurately be described as hell on Earth. One of these is the Auschwitz concentration camp during World War II, where as many as 1.5 million people died during the five years the camp was in operation.

The Polish resistance had been hearing horrific first- or second-hand accounts about the conditions inside Auschwitz. These early accounts came primarily from released prisoners, but also from casual observers like railway employees and residents of the nearby village of Oswiecim. The resistance decided they needed someone on the inside.

 It is into this environment that Witold Pilecki, a 39-year old veteran of the Polish-Soviet War of 1919-1921 who fought against the initial Nazi invasion and a member of the Polish resistance, volunteered himself in 1940. Pilecki's mission was to allow himself to be arrested and, once inside Auschwitz, to collect intelligence for the Polish resistance in the country and the government-in-exile in London, and to organize a resistance from inside the camp.

"I think he knew, he realized what he was getting himself into," said Jacek Pawlowicz, a historian at Poland's Institute of National Remembrance. "But even so, he was not prepared for the things he was actually able to witness."

During the next three years, Pilecki was involved in one of the most dangerous intelligence-gathering and resistance operations of the war. He authored three reports about life inside the camp for the Polish resistance. During his incarceration, Pilecki witnessed from the inside Auschwitz's transformation from a detention facility for political prisoners and Soviet soldiers into one of the Nazis' deadliest killing machines.

An English translation of Pilecki's third and most comprehensive report -- a primary source for this article -- was recently published as a book titled The Auschwitz Volunteer: Beyond Bravery . It is a fascinating first-hand account of virtually all aspects of life inside the camp. The original document is in the custody of the Polish Underground Movement Study Trust in London.

"He was there in all of Auschwitz's worst periods, because he arrived at the moment when the camp was being created and was there until [1943]," Pawlowicz explained. "So while there he saw the camp growing, he saw [Birkenau] being built -- where the ovens were. But the ovens were not only in [Birkenau], there were gas chambers and crematoria on the territory of Auschwitz I.

" Pilecki's family was kept out of the loop regarding his activities for security reasons. His son Andrzej Pilecki recalls, "There was secrecy because of the danger, so that the children would know as little as possible. But I felt something. My father was in Warsaw. We were 100 kilometers away. We came to visit him sometimes and my father would teach us how to behave during the occupation."

Pilecki began preparations for his mission in the late summer of 1940. While staying at a safehouse, he found identity papers belonging to a man named Tomasz Serafinski, who was erroneously presumed killed in September of 1939. Because the Nazis asked for the names and addresses of inmates and their relatives as a method to keep the population under control, Pilecki wisely decided not to give his real name or those of his immediate family. Pilecki placed his photograph on Serafinski's papers and memorized his details. His plan was to be arrested and booked under the Serafinski alias.

In the early morning hours of September 19, Nazis did a roundup in Warsaw and arrested as many as 2,000 people. According to Adam Cyra and Wieslaw Wysocki's 1997 biography Rotmistrz Witold Pilecki, Pilecki was in the apartment of Eleonora Ostrowska the morning of the roundup. A caretaker and member of the resistance came in and made several suggestions to Pilecki for how to avoid being caught. According to Ostrowska, "Witold rejected those opportunities and didn't even try to hide in my flat." When a German soldier knocked on the door and asked who lived there, Pilecki walked out. As he was saying goodbye to Ostrowska, he quietly whispered to her, "Report that I have fulfilled the order."

Wladyslaw Bartoszewski, who later became Foreign Minister of Poland, was arrested in the same roundup and taken to Auschwitz in the same transport as Pilecki, which left the morning of September 21 and arrived at the prison camp at 10 p.m. that same day.

"At the time we were not aware of what Auschwitz was," he wrote. "The underground movement was compelled to investigate what was happening to those people, to check the possibilities of organizing them somehow, possibly of helping them. And Witold Pilecki embarked on that tremendous task. It was his aware and voluntary decision to join another huge round up in Warsaw."

Pilecki was not happy with the behavior he saw of his fellow Poles. "What really annoyed me the most was the passivity of this group of Poles," he later wrote. "All those picked up were already showing signs of crowd psychology, the result being that our whole crowd behaved like a herd of passive sheep."

"A simple thought kept nagging me: stir up everyone and get this mass of people moving."

Pilecki was booked under the Serafinski alias, and was assigned the prisoner number 4859. Once inside, Pilecki immediately began work on organizing a network among the inmate population. In his own words, his objective was to set up a military organization on the inside to keep up morale, provide news from the outside world, distribute food and clothing to members, smuggle camp intelligence to the outside world, and to prepare detachments to take control of the camp by force if the order were given.

He called his network the Union of Military Organization, known by its Polish acronym ZOW, and would be part of the Home Army, the Polish resistance. The secrecy of the ZOW's existence was paramount. To ensure its continuity in the event of discovery by Nazi guards or informants, Pilecki created a highly compartmentalized system of five-man cells. The leader of each cell would be people of utmost confidence, committed to the Polish resistance and able to withstand possible interrogation or investigation by the German guards. Each cell leader swore an oath to Pilecki himself and only knew of the four men under his command, but not of the existence of any other cells. By doing so, Pilecki effectively minimized the risk of exposure to the entire network.

 Pawlowicz estimates that Pilecki's network included some 500 inmates at Auschwitz by March of 1942, but notes this number may have doubled by the time of Pilecki's escape the following year. In time, Pilecki was able to place informants and allies in key positions throughout the camp. In time, these would prove crucial for Pilecki and other ZOW members. more 

Witold Pilecki's Auschwitz Report, translated from Polish.
H/T Maren.

Shocking Plight of Women in North Korea's Concentration Camp Gulag

I'm not totally unaware as to what goes on in North Korea, writing these few words back in 2007, but nothing prepared me for this report from Women Under Siege.

2007: These camps are massive, holding hundreds of thousands in each and where for such a simple thing as complaining about the food ration (in civilian life) whole extended families are rounded up and incarcerated for life.
Given this fear combined with the harsh realities of life, millions malnourished and dying of starvation (three million died in the last recent famine) and juxtapose this with the Dear Leader's god-like status and a whole nation that can only be described as the greatest cult the world has ever seen, or likely to see, I just find the whole thing so mind blowingly bizarre.
The narrator asked the question, 'how much is fear and how much is conditioning?' irrespective of either there appear to be masses that are genuinely on the full kool aid diet. This man is as near to being a god as it gets.

I grant there will be many very quiet dissidents but the reality of North Korea makes Orwell's 1984 read like a fairy story. more

The fine line between ‘obedience’ and rape in North Korea

By Michele Lent Hirsch
May 17, 2012

When Shin Dong-hyuk was 10 years old, he watched his mother be raped by her boss.

In an attempt to fetch her for dinner, Shin approached the office where he had been told she would be. The door was locked. Through a window he saw her kneeling as she washed the floor, then saw her boss approach and grope her. Shin’s mother and the man took off their clothes, and the boy watched the rest unfold.

But this was no ordinary case of sexualized violence in the workplace. Shin was born into a North Korean concentration camp, where he lived by the whims of guards and could be killed in an instant for any small behavior deemed wrong. His mother worked in a rice field within the camp, and her boss, one of the prison guards, did whatever he wished to as many women as he wanted. Shin’s mother “complied”—though by international standards, the term “rape” would apply—because she knew the alternative was death.

The Committee for Human Rights in North Korea estimates that up to 200,000 North Koreans are imprisoned in concentration camps—camps that are meant to stamp out every trace of individuality and destroy three generations of “impure” citizens. Citizens are first captured by veritable “thought police” and hauled off for any number of alleged crimes. Captives are “re-educated,” tortured, starved, beaten, and murdered.

Though there is no way of knowing how many prisoners are raped each year (just as there is no way of knowing how many prisoners are hung above a fire and burned, as Shin reportedly was), escapees report that guards attack women and girls frequently.

These attacks take place in a very casual, routine manner, says Blaine Harden, author of Escape From Camp 14, the recent bestseller that chronicled Shin’s life. Once girls reach their mid-teens, Harden told me, patrolmen begin to rape them. As in the Holocaust and in refugee camps around the world, North Korean inmates are often coerced into sexualized violence in exchange for food rations and other meager aid. During their days or weeks as a guard’s target of rape, Harden says, their abuse brings trauma, but also vital nutrients.

As if enduring repeated sexualized violence were not enough, Harden continues, teen girls and women are “disappeared” or murdered the minute they are discovered pregnant.

“It’s an awful game that they are forced to play,” says Harden. No matter how “obedient” a girl has been, no matter how many days or weeks she quietly suffers sexualized abuse in an attempt to survive and please the guards—it is the rape survivor who is punished.

“The theory behind the camps was to cleanse unto three generations the families of incorrect thinkers,” a former guard interviewed in Harden’s book recalls. “So it was inconsistent,” he explains drily, “to allow another generation to be born.”

In other words, because a prisoner is deemed to be of “impure” stock, she and her fetus are destroyed. This is consistent with what Women Under Siege has found in conflicts that utilize sexualized violence as a means of ethnic cleansing, from the Holocaust to Darfur—that women’s bodies are controlled to temper the threat their ability to reproduce poses.

All of this happens with a backdrop of physical austerity for prisoners. Harden writes that individuals held in camps may not so much as hold hands without threat of death. “Should sexual physical contact occur without prior approval,” goes one of the rules Shin had to memorize growing up, “the perpetrators will be shot immediately.” Even “conversing between the sexes without prior approval” is forbidden. As such, only those prisoners “rewarded” with arranged marriages can sleep together a few times a year. Children produced through these marriages are approved. All other births are not.

In a perverse twist, says Harden, a woman’s poor health can become an advantage. If she is malnourished enough to be rendered infertile, and can endure rape without pregnancy, her life is usually spared.

Many raped women, however, do not have such “luck.” Women Under Siege.

For more information on North Korea’s concentration camps, see the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea’s recently updated report.

The Murder of Shafilea Ahmed

I reported this story briefly in 2008. Now with the conviction of the parents four years on, I can, with not a small amount of sadness, put the thing to bed.

A young girl murdered, the parents jailed for twenty five years and the remaining kids scarred for life. All for what?

The judge hits the nail on the head I think, applying the same reasons to the murder of Shafilea Ahmed as applies to all the other horror stories one reads about concerning the fate of these girls unfortunate to be born of parents, and into families that can't, or more accurately won't, assimilate into a civilised modern society. Somehow thinking that they are doing the righteous thing by maintaining a village lifestyle, attitude and values, that are entombed in the dark ages.

Mr Justice Roderick Evans told them: "Your concern about being shamed in your community was greater than the love of your child." He went on "You chose to bring up your family in Warrington but although you lived in Warrington your social and cultural attitudes were those of rural Pakistan and it was those which you imposed upon your children."*

Shafilea Ahmed

Shafilea Ahmed murder trial: Parents guilty of killing

The parents of Shafilea Ahmed have been jailed for life after being convicted of her murder.
3 August 2012

The 17-year-old went missing from her home in Warrington, Cheshire, in 2003 and her body was found in the River Kent in Cumbria six months later.

Iftikhar, 52, and Farzana Ahmed, 49, had denied her murder but the jury at Chester Crown Court returned guilty verdicts against them both.

Mr Justice Roderick Evans said they would both serve a minimum of 25 years.

The judge told them: "Your concern about being shamed in your community was greater than the love of your child."

The couple suffocated Shafilea with a plastic bag after years of abuse.

After the trial. Det Supt Geraint Jones described the killing as a "vile and disgraceful act against someone they should have been very proud of".

He added: "For me this is not an 'honour killing', it's a clear case of murder."

The police and Crown Prosecution Service said they will review conflicting evidence that emerged during the trial and later make a decision on whether any further action will be taken.

The prosecution claimed she was murdered by her parents because they believed she brought shame on the family.

Shafilea went missing on 11 September 2003 and was reported missing by a teacher a week later.

After several police appeals to find her, workmen found her decomposed remains in February 2004 and she was identified by her dental records and jewellery.

Two post-mortem examinations failed to determine how she died but a verdict of unlawful killing was recorded at her inquest in 2008.

Police investigating the murder were so convinced her parents had killed the teenager they "bugged" the family home to listen in on their conversations.

The breakthrough came when Shafilea's younger sister, Alesha Ahmed, was arrested in connection with an armed robbery at the family home in August 2010.

It was in a police interview that she said she had seen her parents kill her sister seven years earlier.

During the trial, she told the court her parents pushed Shafilea on to the settee in their house and she heard her mother say "just finish it here".

She said the parents then forced a plastic bag into the teenager's mouth and killed her in front of their other children.

Taxi driver Mr Ahmed had claimed Shafilea ran away from home in the middle of the night and he never saw her again.

Mrs Ahmed had denied claims that they had attacked Shafilea, but during the three-month trial she changed her account, claiming she saw her husband beat their daughter on the night of the murder.

She also claimed he had threatened to do the same to her and their other children if she ever asked him what happened to Shafilea.

As the verdicts were delivered by the jury after two days of deliberations, Iftikhar Ahmed stood impassively. Mrs Ahmed wiped tears from her eyes with a tissue.

As Mr Ahmed was taken down to the cells, he swore at police officers.

Their children Junyad, Mevish and the youngest, who cannot be named for legal reasons, all broke down in tears.

During the trial, Alesha Ahmed had told the court how her parents repeatedly attacked and abused Shafilea.

She said Shafilea was torn between the allure of a Western lifestyle and their demands she wear traditional clothes and agree to an arranged marriage.

Speaking about the night her sister died, she said: "You could tell she was gasping for air."

Alesha went on to describe how the other children ran upstairs to their bedrooms in shock and she saw her father carry Shafilea's body to the car wrapped in a blanket.

The children were later told to say nothing to the authorities amid a fear that they would suffer the same fate as their sister.

Alesha's story was corroborated in writings her younger sister Mevish gave to her friend Shaheen Munir in 2008.

The writings emerged shortly after Alesha began giving evidence at the trial.

Mevish, who supported her parents' defence, said the writings were a "fiction" which Alesha used to base her story on.

Speaking after the verdicts, close friend of Shafilea Melissa Powner paid tribute to her and spoke about the pain of having to watch as her killers avoided justice.

She said: "We have waited for this day for many years.

"We have watched as her killers roamed free.

'Destructive and cruel'

"Yet today we heard those important words - words that have finally brought our friend the justice she deserves."

On sentencing, Mr Justice Evans told the couple: "A desire that she understood and appreciated the cultural heritage from which she came is perfectly understandable, but an expectation that she live in a sealed cultural environment separate from the culture of the country in which she lived was unrealistic, destructive and cruel."

He added: "You killed one daughter, but you have blighted the lives of your remaining children.

"Alesha escaped but she is unlikely to be able to avoid the legacy of her upbringing.

"Mevish, after a period of trying to live independently, was recaptured and brought home, and has since become compliant with your wishes."

He added: "As to Junyad, he remains supportive, especially of you Iftikhar Ahmed.

"Whether that is simply out of filial affection or the result of the warped values you instilled in him is impossible to tell.

"There is only one sentence that I can impose upon you and that is a sentence of imprisonment for life." BBC and two short clips

* Text taken from this report from Channel 4

Invited in for tea by Shafilea's murderers

As a court finds Shafilea Ahmed's parents guilty of her murder, Channel 4 News correspondent Darshna Soni recalls being invited into their family home - where no trace of Shafilea was on view.
03 August 2012 Report

Wikileaks - Diego Garcia Judge Orders Questioning of William Hague

You may think this is a pretty obscure subject to blog about, but not so if you had previously blogged or watched John Pilger's excellent documentary Stealing a Nation.

Posted originally in 2007 under my own title: Diego Garcia: Chagoans "They Died Of Sadness" it is now part of a larger post: John Pilger: The World War on Democracy.

At the time, I had this to say:

John Pilger exposes the inhumane and shameful actions of successive British Governments in their treatment of the dispossessed, indigenous population of Diego Garcia, the main island of the Chagos group.

The film is testimony to just how little people are worth when the "Land of Hope and Glory" colludes with the "Home of the Brave and the Land of the Free" in pursuing global expansion.

The conduct of the British, still to this day, can only be described as sordid.

With that in mind, read on. But if you have the bandwidth and the inclination, then do please try to watch the thing.

Senior Government officials to face cross-examination over Wikileaks cable
John Ashton
25 July 2012

A top judge has taken the unprecedented step of ordering two senior Government officials to face cross-examination in court over a classified US document leaked by WikiLeaks.

Despite strong objections from lawyers acting for Foreign Secretary William Hague, the High Court judge ruled today the move was necessary to resolve "fairly and justly" a claim launched against the Government by exiled residents of the Chagos Islands.

The judge declared the leaked US cable - alleged to relate to a private US-UK diplomatic meeting - could be investigated in court even though it must have been obtained unlawfully by "the notorious internet organisation".

The groundbreaking ruling will come as a blow in Whitehall, which argued the courts should not entertain any applications for cross-examination in relation to documents unlawfully obtained by WikiLeaks.

The British expelled the Chagos islanders between 1965 and 1973 in order to allow the US to establish an airbase on Diego Garcia, the largest island in the Chagos archipelago in the British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT).

The expulsion has been described by critics as one of the most shameful episodes of modern colonial history.

The islanders have been fighting a long campaign, which has included a string of court cases, for the right to return to at least some of the islands.

Today's hearing relates to a new High Court application by the Chagos Refugees Group for judicial review of the Government's decision to create a Marine Protected Area (MPA) round the islands.

Commercial fishing is banned within the MPA. The islanders say the MPA was created for the "improper purpose" of preventing resettlement of the islands.

The UK Government denies anything improper and maintains the MPA was created for environmental reasons.

But the islanders say their case is supported by the cable obtained by WikiLeaks. It was sent by the US embassy in London to the US State Department in Washington in May 2009.

The MPA was established in 2010 by a proclamation made by Colin Roberts, Commissioner for the BIOT, acting upon the directions of the British government.

The court heard that, in the leaked cable, Mr Roberts asserted at the May 2009 diplomatic meeting with the Americans that creating the MPA would not adversely affect US defence interests - but it would the islanders.

Mr Roberts is reported in the cable to have asserted "establishing a marine park would, in effect, put paid to resettlement claims of the (Chagos) archipelago's former residents."

Nigel Pleming QC applied on behalf of the Chagossians earlier this month for permission to cross-examine Mr Roberts when the Chagossian judicial review application comes on for hearing in the near future.

He also applied for permission to cross-examine Joanne Yeadon, a civil servant at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office at the talks with the Americans.

Mr Pleming said it was not suggested that the WikiLeaks cable was not a genuine document, but the Government was hiding behind a "neither confirm nor deny" policy.

Mr Pleming said he wished to question Mr Roberts in the witness box about his discussions with his US counterparts and to test the denial that an improper motive drove the creation of an MPA.

Steven Kovats QC, appearing for the Government, said the High Court was in "a novel situation" with regard to WikiLeaks disclosures.

Mr Kovats said: "My clients are not opposing cross-examination because they have anything to hide.

"We are opposing it because, as a matter of principle, it does not seem right in relation to an improperly leaked document.

"We, as a matter of principle, do not accept that WikiLeaks can effectively compel the Government to defend something which - absent WikiLeaks - there would be no question of it coming before the court at all."

Today Mr Justice Stanley Burnton rejected the Government's objections and ordered that cross-examination should go ahead.

The judge said he acknowledged that the US document "must have been obtained unlawfully, and in all probability by the commission of a criminal offence or offences under the law of the United States of America".

He added: "I understand why it is the policy of HM Government neither to confirm nor deny the genuineness of leaked documents, save in exceptional circumstances, particularly where, as here, the documents in question are not those produced or received by the UK Government.

"However, the documents have been leaked and indeed widely published."

No application had been made for a public interest immunity certificate to prevent the courts openly investigating the genuineness of the cable.

He ruled: "I do not see how the present claim can be fairly or justly determined without resolving the allegation made by the claimant, based on the WikiLeaks documents, as to what transpired at the meeting of 12 May 2009, and more widely whether at least one of the motives for the creation of the MPA was the desire to prevent resettlement.

"Given the conflicting evidence, in my judgment, in order to resolve the dispute, oral evidence will be necessary, including cross-examination of Mr Roberts and Ms Yeadon." Independent

Summary Execution on the Streets of Anaheim California?

In the main, and for reasons that matter not, I stopped doing 'police brutality' videos quite sometime ago. That doesn't mean however that there aren't sufficient examples under the sidebar tags of Police and Fascist.

This story of the cops in Anaheim California, is a day or two old. I was in two minds whether to run it or not, because I have to say, I did find it particularly disturbing. Bad enough that the cops feel they have the right to shoot, often in the back, just who they please, but it was the brutality with which the police set about the citizens of the community of Anaheim that was particularly concerning.

The community, involving women and babies and kids, was just that, the community, not the enemy; but watching the cops go into action, you would think that the Berserkers had put in an appearance. Well I suppose they had in a way, they were the ones in uniform, and boy oh boy, did they live up to the name or what?

But watching the footage surrounding the latest shooting* I couldn't help but be reminded of something that I had previously found equally disturbing, the summary execution of a young man on the streets of Rio de Janeiro by the local cops. If the details are to be believed, then this shooting itself is little different than the execution witnessed on the streets of Rio by Ross Kemp in his television series, Gangs.

Now I'm not that naive that I don't think this kind of thing goes on all the time, a dark alley, two in the head, and a throw away gun (do read) in place by the time an investigation appears at the scene. And thanks to Democracy Now, the details of a previous shooting were elucidated, and if that doesn't sound like summary execution, I don't know what does.

The forty two second clip of the Rio shooting, I had originally intended to embed at the end of the post, but perhaps it might be better to lead with the thing, it certainly helps put things in perspective.

*There was a second, unrelated fatal shooting by the Anaheim cops, before the first vic had cooled off. Details in the main clip.

Ross Kemp on gangs - Rio 42secs, caution advised.




Update: Anaheim police fire on media as unrest continues

Police Brutality in Anaheim Sparks Outrage After 2 Latinos Shot Dead and Demonstrators Attacked

Democracy Now: Police in the California city of Anaheim are facing allegations of murder and brutality after fatally shooting two Latino men over the weekend and firing rubber bullets at crowds of protesters. On Saturday, Anaheim police shot and killed 24-year-old Manuel Diaz after he reportedly ran away from a group of officers who confronted him in the street. Diaz was unarmed.

Hours after his death, a chaotic scene broke out when police fired rubber bullets and tear gas at a crowd of local residents protesting the shooting. Another Latino resident, Joel Acevedo, was shot dead by police the following day. Police say Acevedo was suspected in a car robbery, but the circumstances around his death remain unconfirmed.

We discuss the situation in Anaheim with Gustavo Arellano, editor of the alternative newspaper, OC Weekly, and Theresa Smith, who has worked with families to call for police accountability in Anaheim since 2009, when officers shot and killed her son, Cesar Cruz, a 35-year-old father of five. "Given the fact that this is the eighttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifhth officer-involved shooting within one year in the city of Anaheim ... the community is going to be very upset," Arellano says. "There’s a lot of angry residents, and rightfully so." transcript

Previous related articles, all featuring, and not by accident I suppose, Paul Craig Roberts

Tyranny In The Heartland

America’s Police Brutality Pandemic

Americans Are Oppressed, Too

Criminals With Badges