A while back I wrote an essay here titled Angry about the “Lockerbie bomber” getting released? because, well, the media was able to ramp up quite a spectacle of anger and indignation regarding the dying man who was convicted of the attack being released.  

The whole case has been fishy from the very beginning, and now?   Well, flying well under the radar of the so-called “media” in this country (after all, a juicy blackmail story involving a celebrity is far more important than anything else in the world) are new revelations that key witnesses in Megrahi’s conviction were paid just a TON of money for their testimony.

Once again, it’s the UK media, and not the American, that actually manages to cover this:

Two key figures in the conviction of the Lockerbie bomber were secretly given rewards of up to $3m (£1.9m) in a deal discussed by Scottish detectives and the US government, according to legal papers released today.

The claims about the payments were revealed in a dossier of evidence that was intended to be used in an appeal by Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, the Libyan convicted of murdering 270 people in the bombing of Pan Am flight 103 in 1988.

Megrahi abandoned his appeal last month after the Libyan and Scottish governments struck a deal to free him on compassionate grounds because he is terminally ill with prostate cancer. Now in hospital in Tripoli, Megrahi said he wanted the public to see the evidence which he claims would have cleared him.

“I continue to protest my innocence – how could I fail to do so?,” he said. “I have no desire to add to the upset of many people I know are profoundly affected by what happened in Lockerbie. My intention is only for the truth to be made known.”

The documents published online by Megrahi’s lawyers today show that the US Department of Justice (DoJ) was asked to pay $2m to Tony Gauci, the Maltese shopkeeper who gave crucial evidence at the trial suggesting that Megrahi had bought clothes later used in the suitcase that allegedly held the Lockerbie bomb.

The DoJ was also asked to pay a further $1m to his brother, Paul Gauci, who did not give evidence but played a major role in identifying the clothing and in “maintaining the resolve of his brother”. The DoJ said their rewards could be increased and that the brothers were also eligible for the US witness protection programme, according to the documents.

The previously secret payments were uncovered by the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC), which returned Megrahi’s conviction to the court of appeal in 2007 as a suspected miscarriage of justice. Many references were in private diaries kept by the detectives involved, Megrahi’s lawyers said, but not their official notebooks.

So the money came from the United States.  Gee, what a surprise.

Wow.  So this is what can happen if you’re a woman, you get assaulted, and you call the police for help.   The police come and arrest you, then hold you down while male cops forcibly strip search you, and someone videotapes the whole process.

From Cleveland Ohio.  

Cops in this country are absolutely out of control.  They’ll taser anyone, mothers in front of their kids, grandmothers, they don’t care, a cop with a taser is a fucking menace to society.  

And now male officers forcibly strip searching women?  This is in direct violation of the Sheriff Department’s own official policy on strip searches.  

Videotaping this was fuel on the fire of this woman’s humiliation, but at the same time, it’s the only evidence we have as to what really happened.   According to the news report, the police are holding back other video, not providing it to the woman’s lawyers.

It’s the little things in life that turn out to be the big things.  By that I mean — as the cliche goes — what breaks the camel’s back is usually a mere straw.

I remember realizing one day that I would move back to Los Angeles when I was driving up into the Hollywood Hills after a rain, and smelled the Eucalyptus trees.  I realized I was going to move back there.  It just hit me.

I realized one day that I was finally going to escape from a bad relationship when my girlfriend made a very unusual but weirdly insignificant demand of me that she claimed would “fix” the entire relationship.   Later I was sitting out on the porch watching the sunset and it hit me — I had to get out.  

And in Afghanistan, what do we make of a leaflet drop killing a young Afghan girl?

I’m not making this up but I wish I were.

If you really want to see some horrifying developments in the Pentagon’s War On All That Is Decent, just google DARPA sometime and see what they’re up to.  

One of the things they’re working on is creating cyborg insects.   (Cyborg soldiers are on their plate as well).    They seem to have succeeded with a Cyborg Beetle, able to control the bug with remote-control.  

I suppose for those on whom Fox News doesn’t work, people will soon be manipulated in other, more direct ways (that’s a joke, sort of).

The creation of a cyborg insect army has just taken a step closer to reality. A research team at the University of California Berkeley recently announced that it has successfully implanted electrodes into a beetle allowing scientists to control the insect’s movements in flight. “We demonstrated the remote control of insects in free flight via an implantable radioequipped miniature neural stimulating system,” the researchers reported in their new paper for Frontiers in Integrative Neuroscience. ” The pronotum mounted system consisted of neural stimulators, muscular stimulators, a radio transceiver-equipped microcontroller and a microbattery.”

The research, supported by the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, is part of a broader effort, called the HI-MEMS program, which has been looking specifically at different approaches to implanting micro-mechanical systems into insects in order to control their movements.

A number of research teams working on this ambitious project have reported specific successes. For example, researchers at the University of Michigan have demonstrated implants in a flying moth, but the Berkeley scientists appear to have demonstrated an impressive degree of control over their insect’s flight; they report being able to use an implant for neural stimulation of the beetle’s brain to start, stop, and control the insect in flight. They could even command turns by stimulating the basalar muscles.

Eventually, the mind-controlled insects could be used to “serve as couriers to locations not easily accessible to humans or terrestrial robots,” they note.

Just another lovely development in the War On terror drugs humanity.

For more nightmare-inducing DARPA projects, just click here:

http://gizmodo.com/tag/darpa/

Keep in mind, this is the stuff they LET us know about.

One of my daily hits on the internet is Cryptogon.   The site is run by a fellow who was lucky enough to be able to leave the country and set up a self-sustaining farm out in the middle of nowhere in New  Zealand.  Now did he pull this off?   Well, he married a woman from New Zealand.   That’s step one that not everyone can do of course.  🙂  

He has a knack for finding the out-of-the-way story, and has a unique perspective on the world.

Usually he posts articles and information with just a few comments, sometimes none, but today he has a post which is pure commentary.   And I just have to share it because it’s brilliant.

A few people seem surprised that the U.S. is a police state.

Oh the cops. Oh the poor students. Oh boo hoo, we just want to wave our signs.

The don’t taze me bro generation is obviously going to have to figure this one out the hard way.

My position has always been that people who wave signs at fascists are clinically nuts; holy roller, speaking in tongues, batshit crazy nuts.

Sign waving is not resistance. Sign waving is part of the problem in the same way that voting is part of the problem. How’s that Change working out for the Obama supporters? (Some of those bozos are already talking about how they’re going to get it right in 2012…)

In the few video clips of the G20 protests that I watched, I saw a bunch of zombies with iPhones, running around like chickens with their heads cut off, as the Legion of Doom tested out its new sonic weapons and tear gas lobbing skills.

WTF is the matter with these people? Where does someone get the idea that the way to deal with Darth Vader is to wave a sign at him? Maybe a few, “Fuck the police” tweets will do the trick? Send out invites to join revolutionary sign waving groups on Facebook?!

The Twitbook aspect of this is, frankly, bizarre. Maybe I’ve been out here in the bush too long, but it looks like powerlessness is manifesting itself into a sort of flaccid, me-too technophelia, crossbred with a hamster wheel. This is more embarrassing than anything else.

The U.S. is no longer a country. It’s a company town. If waving signs at the company’s goon squad just makes people look stupid, what does twitbooking about it amount to?

Here are some other ideas:

Eliminate your debt. Take your money off the table. Stop buying stuff that you don’t need. Live well on very little. Grow your own food. Participate in alternative and/or outlawed food economies for what you don’t produce yourself. Barter, or use cash. Support people who do good work. Finally, draw a line in the sand. Don’t tell anyone where that line is, or what the consequences will be if it’s crossed. Don’t wave a sign about it. Don’t twitbook about it. Let the fascists figure it out the hard way.

The U.S. is no longer a country. It’s a company town.    That’s just stating the obvious so perfectly that I wish I’d thought of it.  

Just had to share.    

Jeremy Scahill is, to my mind, the finest journalist working today.   There are very few real journalists left, I could probably count them on one hand, and Scahill is simply on fire.  

I wanted to share his latest, from his website where he simply destroys the whole notion of ACORN being any kind of a real scandal.

Here is the jist of his article:

How could any sane person put even the wildest allegations against ACORN up against the systematic misconduct and criminality of war corporations and gigantic multi-nationals?

This, considering the way the media has covered this, the way our politicians have such a terrible, palpable fear of any real Democracy that they all, including our complicit Democrats, have decided that Acorn is the real enemy and worthy of being punished, to the point where they are trying to pass legislation called “The Defund Acorn Act”.

If you just put ACORN up against Blackwater, the charges are absolutely ludicrous.   Acorn received $53 million over 15 years, most of which went to support housing for low-income people.   Blackwater has received over a BILLION in government contracts in the last few.  

And check this out:

The GOP smear machine tries to link ACORN to prostitution. Beyond the hypocrisy of Republicans denouncing prostitutes (long history of using them), do they really want talk of prostitution? One former Blackwater employee recently stated in a sworn declaration that Blackwater owner Erik Prince “failed to stop the ongoing use of prostitutes, including child prostitutes, by his men.” Another former employee described “having young girls provide oral sex to Enterprise members in the ‘Blackwater Man Camp’ (in Iraq) in exchange for one American dollar.” (PDF links to these affidavits are here) Even if ACORN did provide inappropriate tax advice to a prostitute, is that really on the same level as this conduct being conducted on a huge US government contract? If you think these are just the allegations of disgruntled employees, read the Justice Department’s perspective on Blackwater’s crimes and how its men “specifically intended to kill” Iraqi civilians as “payback for 9/11.”

As Scahill notes in his previous work on the website, Where is the “Defund Blackwater Act”?     Where, indeed?    Supposedly Democratic and supposedly liberal and supposedly “for the people” Barack Hussein Obama has decided to keep using Blackwater until, well, god only knows how long.   Yet what do we hear about in the press?   How bad and terrible and corrupt Acorn is.  

Nobody talks about defunding the real criminals, others of which are mentioned here:

Beyond the question of innocent until proven guilty, these questions must be asked of Democratic lawmakers who support this punitive legislation against ACORN: Where is your legislation to defund the companies whose men are indicted by actual, real life prosecutors for manslaughter; who are accused by the IRS of tax fraud and whose North Carolina compound has been raided by the ATF for possessing unauthorized, automatic weapons? What about the move to defund KBR, which has provided polluted drinking water to US troops and installed faulty electrical wiring that has resulted in the electrocution deaths of US soldiers? What about the move to defund the massive US-funded mercenary force DynCorp in Iraq, Colombia and Afghanistan? A company whistleblower alleged that in Bosnia he “witnessed coworkers and supervisors literally buying and selling women for their own personal enjoyment, and employees would brag about the various ages and talents of the individual slaves they had purchased.” What about defunding Armor Group, which employed security guards at the US embassy in Kabul who were throwing fraternity-style parties, complete with disgusting hazing of new recruits in the form of alcohol shots off of butt cracks and the fondling of genitals?

You really just need to read the whole thing.   I can’t possibly do it justice in lame attempts to paraphrase.    And read the rest of his stuff, too, give his site a visit.   He’s amazing.   We need hundreds of Jeremy Scahills in the world, sadly there is just one.

I am not making this up.

A pair of cops tasered a legless black man.  

They tried to pull his two-year-old daughter out of his lap, he resisted (who WOULDN’T??) and they got nasty on him and fucking tasered him, leaving lying on his side, NAKED FROM THE WAIST DOWN, outside of his apartment for all to see.

I wish I was making this up.   Because it’s just godawful.

http://rawstory.com/blog/2009/…

The incident began when police responded to a call claiming an argument had broken out at Williams’ home. One of the officers involved, John Pinnegar, claims Williams’ wife said Williams had hit her, a charge Williams denies. Police say when they tried to take his two-year-old daughter from his lap to hand her over to Child Protective Services, Williams resisted. That’s when the violence allegedly began.

In an emotional video interview, Williams said: “I’m not a violent person, I do not have a criminal background.”

Added Williams: “How much resisting am I going to do with no legs, no feet? How much resisting am I going to do?”

“Williams said Pinnegar unholstered his Taser, jammed it into his rib cage and shocked him twice. Williams said he fell from his chair onto his stomach on the ground outside his doorway,” the Sun-Star reports.

Williams also says an officer put his knee on Williams’ neck after he was already on the ground, even though “I can’t get up now — I don’t have any feet to get up with,” Williams said.

He added: “And they tell me that I’m doing stupid stuff in front of my kids? These are cops and they come in my house — what if they had accidentally tased my kid because of their [stupidity]?”

The Sun-Star reports that a “hostile” crowd gathered around the apartment building during the incident. The “apartment complex came to a roar because they were tasing a guy in a wheelchair and it was for no reason,” said one witness interviewed on video.

Williams was arrested on suspicion of domestic violence and resisting arrest. He spent six days in lock-up before he was released, and the county prosecutor has laid no charges.

A legless black guy, tasered, humiliated by police, locked in jail for six days.

No charges filed.

Cops are just way out of control with these tasers.  Tasers can kill you.   That kind of electric shock is downright dangerous, anyone who has to do any kind of professional safety training regarding electricity KNOWS that.   They can kill you.   But cops are tasering people just for the sheer rollicking hell of it, constantly, tasering old women, legless men, pretty much everybody who is already helpless against them.

This is disgusting.

I’m way too tired to really develop this any more, just wanted everyone to know about it.    Pass it along.   I won’t post it anywhere else.

There’s really nothing I can say to comment on this.   You just have to read it.  

It happened in America: Katrina’s secret jail

When the storm hit, Zeitoun stayed, to protect his house, help friends and clients, and watch over properties he and Kathy owned: their office building and houses bought as investments. Kathy and their four children evacuated to Baton Rouge.

Zeitoun weathered the storm’s harrowing landfall, and ended up in a tent on his house’s roof. He dug a secondhand canoe out of the garage and began paddling around, seeing how he could help. He spent the first days aiding neighbors and strangers, saving the life of at least one person trapped in her house, and even feeding stranded dogs.

Then the standing feet of water became toxic with organic material and spilled pollutants, his meetings with people became more fraught and weird, he saw his first body and his first criminal entrepreneurs, and decided it was time to go. And that’s when the unnatural disaster happened.

On Tuesday, Sept. 6, 2005, armed and badged black-uniformed men and a tall woman in a power boat appeared at the door of one of his properties that he, his tenant, and two others were using as a meeting place because it still had a working phone. Zeitoun was in the middle of a call with his brother Ahmad, a ship captain, calling from Spain to repeat his pleas to Zeitoun to leave town.

With no questions asked and no questions allowed, Zeitoun and the others were handcuffed and shackled at automatic weapon-point, dropped into the boat, and taken away; the officers didn’t secure the house or treat it as a crime scene and left it unlocked, which meant it was eventually completely stripped and looted.

Zeitoun documents a little-known fact: the existence of “Camp Greyhound,” an outdoor jail built in New Orleans’ central bus station within hours of the hurricane’s landfall at the behest of the federal Department of Homeland Security and FEMA. Similar to Guantanamo Bay, Camp Greyhound (the guards’ name for it) was a kennel, runs of wire fencing and concrete flooring; there was nothing to sit or sleep on, and toilet facilities were portables outside the enclosures. Power was provided by a running diesel locomotive parked within yards of the cages, providing a continuous deafening hum and diesel pall.

Zeitoun was not formally charged, was not read Miranda rights, was not allowed a phone call. He was physically and verbally abused, pepper sprayed, strip-and body-cavity searched; and was accused of being a “terrorist” during his processing at the “camp.” The details of his captivity only become increasingly outrageous.

Fellow prisoners he was able to talk to included a New Orleans firefighter ordered to stay in the city to work who was arrested in his own yard, and a Houston sanitation worker whose company contracted to help in the cleanup effort – arrested wearing his work uniform, possessing ID, and with the keys to his garbage truck in his hand.

Prisoners included Marlene Maten, 73-year-old diabetic deaconess at Resurrection Mission Baptist Church, arrested as she carried a package of sausages from a cooler in her car, parked beside the hotel to which she was returning.

Marlene, along with Zeitoun and hundreds of others from Camp Greyhound, ended up at maximum security Elayn Hunt Correctional Center, in St. Gabriel, La., 70 miles from New Orleans. They were FEMA prisoners: FEMA rented state prison space and Camp Greyhound transfers were, according to prison staff, “FEMA’s problem.” Again: transferred with no charges, no information, no opportunity to make a phone call or talk to a lawyer.

Thanks to a volunteer prison missionary who agreed to call Kathy, she found out Zeitoun was alive. (His family had assumed him dead once contact was broken for weeks.) She immediately hired a lawyer, who found out there would finally be a hearing on Zeitoun’s “case.” However, when Kathy contacted the Hunt center to find out where the hearing would be held, she was told that location, and whether Zeitoun was even at the prison, was “private information.”

Released from Hunt on Sept. 29, 2005 – after paying a $75,000 bail – Zeitoun was lucky, compared with the three men he was arrested with. Todd, Nasser and Ronnie spent, respectively, five months, six months and eight months in maximum security Hunt prison. All charges against all of them were dropped.

Nobody in this country is going to care, and I’m sure this will never see the light of day here, either, but I just have to applaud this:

British trade unions to boycott Israeli goods

Britain’s Trades Union Congress has approved a call for a targeted, consumer-led boycott and sanctions campaign against Israel and to work closely with a radical anti-Israel group.

The decision was announced on Thursday at the 6.5-million member labor federation’s annual conference in Liverpool.

The new policy calls on the British government to condemn the “Israeli military aggression and the continuing blockade of Gaza,” and to end arms sales to Israel, which it said totaled £18.8 million in 2008.

It also advocates a ban on import of goods originating in settlements and an end to the European Union’s preferential trading terms for Israel.

Yeah, right, a “radical anti-Israel group”.  If you’re most of the people in Israel, especially the ruling politicians and the media, anyone who objects to anything Israel does, no matter how heinous, is a “radical anti-Israeli”.  

I wish this boycott would spread.   It already seems to be right down the old Memory Hole, the way the IDF committed atrocity after atrocity in Gaza, and continues to threaten World War Three with its belligerence against Iran.  

Israel is probably the greatest threat to world peace, and it’s all because it has blind, unequivocal support from the United States.