Uncle Sam goes hunting for local government crooks
I suspect 99 percent of what the Federal government does is unconstitutional.Robert Robb gives the nitty gritty details!!!
Yes, Ben Arredondo, Sheriff Joe, and Tom Horne are all probably big time crooks that belong in prison. But by both the Federal and Arizona Constitutions I think the job of arresting and jailing these government crooks belongs to the local cops, not Uncle Sam.
Robert Robb | azcentral opinions
Reach Robert Robb at robert.robb@arizonarepublic.com or 602-444-8472.
Posted on February 22, 2013 2:13 pm by Robert Robb
Feds go hunting for local officials
The federal Department of Justice makes investigating and prosecuting public corruption, including by state and local officials, a major priority.
And the focus is not just on major corruption with national implications or involving federal programs. Acting principally through local branches of the FBI and U.S. Attorney’s Office, DOJ views any corruption by any state or local official, regardless of how small or distant from federal operations, as its business.
The justification is that corruption, regardless of how small, robs the public of the honest administration of their government, and local law enforcement is frequently conflicted, complaisant or complicit.
There is a superficial sensibility to this justification. But there are substantial problems with the role DOJ has arrogated both in theory and in practice, as illustrated by the recent raft of such cases in the Phoenix metro area.
In the first place, there is nothing in the U.S. Constitution that can be even remotely argued to assign the task of policing the integrity of state and local officials to the executive branch of the federal government. Such a role would have been anathema to the framers. In fact, it’s fair to say that if policing the integrity of state and local officials had been an enumerated executive branch responsibility, the Constitution would never have been ratified.
So, how has DOJ managed to assume this extra-constitutional role? Congress has enacted some highly elastic statutes that permit DOJ to turn practically any malfeasance by state and local officials into federal crimes. The most elastic are the federal crimes of bribery, mail fraud and wire fraud.
Bribery involving a state or local official working for an entity that takes at least $10,000 from the federal government can become a federal crime. Since the federal government doles out over $600 billion a year to state and local governments, basically there are no state or local officials not subject to a federal bribery charge, irrespective of how profoundly local the venality.
If any element of the misdeed involved sending something through the mail, it can be mail fraud. Through the Internet, it’s wire fraud.
When federal judge Fred Martone gave former Tempe City Councilman Ben Arredondo a relatively light sentence, it was generally assumed that he did so in part because he thought that the federal government had wasted resources in pursuing such a small-potatoes case. And, indeed, Martone said words to that effect in open court.
But perhaps Martone was also influenced by how much the federal government had stretched these elastic statutes. Although Arredondo was initially charged with an independent count of bribery, that accusation was folded into one of the two counts of mail fraud to which he actually pled. One involved receiving sports tickets through the mail. The other was for sending a letter to ASU saying none of the recipients of the scholarship fund he sponsored were relatives.
The conclusion of the Arredondo case is highly unsatisfying. Was he on the take, explicitly selling his official services to special interests outside the sting operation conducted by the federal government? If so, he got off much too lightly. Or was he just a political hustler, maneuvering aggressively in the gray areas but stopping short of an illegal quid pro quo, despite his plea agreement? If so, he was wrongly subjected to the heavy hand of the federal government, which ultimately threatened to criminally prosecute his wife.
The pursuit of Attorney General Tom Horne also yields disturbing questions. After an intense investigation by the FBI, Horne has been charged by Maricopa County Attorney Bill Montgomery with the civil state offense of illegally coordinating with an independent campaign conducted on his behalf.
So, why was it the FBI that launched the investigation, if it involved the violation of a civil state statute? Initially, the FBI thought the elastic mail and wire fraud statutes could apply, but apparently that was too much of a stretch for the local U.S. Attorney’s Office.
If Horne did violate state law about coordination with an independent campaign, the offense took place in a very few days toward the end of the 2012 campaign, and involved just a handful of people. Yet the FBI, in a sprawling investigation, developed an extraordinary interest in the interpersonal relationships between people in Horne’s Attorney General’s Office. Although the details are pretty salacious, they have no obvious connection to a campaign finance law violation that is alleged to have occurred before Horne was ever elected to the office.
A staffer to former state House Speaker Jim Weiers, John Mills, has been charged with federal wire fraud for taking money from Weiers’ campaign account for personal uses, and then returning it. His attorney is asking that the case be dismissed because the federal government is stretching the wire fraud statutes too far.
The Mills case best illustrates the practical problem with the role the federal government has arrogated. Arizona has very robust state statutes against bribery, fraud and embezzlement. If the facts against Mills are as alleged, he could be prosecuted under some of them without any question that they were being stretched beyond reason.
So why, if state statutes are so much more apropos, are the feds pursuing an iffy wire fraud case rather than turn it over to state or local prosecutors? Impossible to say for sure. But the feds do seem to like to mount their own trophies.
Now there have been several local public corruption cases in which the federal role was unarguably appropriate. Some of the illegal Fiesta Bowl campaign contributions went to candidates for federal office. Former state legislator Richard Miranda embezzled from a federal non-profit and engaged in federal tax evasion in the process.
And the federal government, or at least the U.S. Attorney’s Office, has shown some restraint. Federal charges weren’t filed against Horne. After investigating Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio for criminal civil rights violations, which is something the federal government is uniquely empowered to do, the U.S. Attorney’s Office made a rare public announcement that charges wouldn’t be filed.
Arizona is not being picked on, as some allege. The raft of local public corruption investigations isn’t because Arizona passed SB 1070 or because Gov. Jan Brewer wagged her finger at President Obama.
The investigatory targets in Arizona are a bipartisan lot. And similar small-potatoes federal investigations and charges are occurring all over the country. The feds recently busted some traffic court judges in Philadelphia for fixing tickets for friends and relatives.
The Department of Justice just sees policing the integrity of state and local officials as its job. But is justice truly being served by turning what are really state crimes into federal offenses?
The folks at the Arizona State Prison classified the Wiccan religion as a gutter
religion that wasn't allowed to be practiced in the prison because of all the
sadistic, barbaric things the religion preaches.
Sadly those bureaucrats at the Arizona State Prison were not smart enought to
realize the the Old Testament, which is used by the Jewish, Christian and Muslim
religions preaches the same sadistic, barbaric things.
Does this broomstick go with my prison stripes?
Debra J. Saunders
Updated 9:28 am, Sunday, February 24, 2013
In its wisdom - and yes, I am being ironic - the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco issued a ruling Tuesday that revives a California inmate lawsuit to force the state Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation to hire a paid, full-time Wiccan chaplain. Oddly, the three-judge panel found that the complaint "did not contain sufficient facts to support a cognizable legal theory under the First Amendment." Nonetheless, the court overturned a federal judge's 2011 dismissal of the lawsuit.
It's enough to make you wonder if Samantha twitched her nose and cast a spell on the robed wonders. Or, mayhap, the jurists are wizards who found no solid legal case but still chose to conjure up a trial reset just for the fun of it. It's not as if the public has to pay for a new trial. Judicial rulings, they're like magic.
How many Bathilda Bagshots are there in California prisons? In their complaint, inmates Shawna Hartmann and Caren Hill claim that Wicca has more adherents in the Central California Women's Facility than Catholicism, Islam or Judaism.
A 2007 Corrections survey found 183 Wiccan inmates - compared with 42,666 Protestant, 28,884 Muslim, 23,160 Catholic, 8,296 Native American and 2,678 Jewish inmates. Those are the big five religions for which the department hires paid, full-time chaplains. A survey five years earlier found 598 Wiccans, which suggests witchcraft could be melting in the California prison community.
Wiccan Rev. Patrick McCollum, who has served as the prison's unpaid volunteer chaplain, told me the department skewed its survey because it "did not want to facilitate nor allow the Wiccans to practice at all."
Why? "Because they thought that they were evil." And: "They had a lot of misconceptions."
You can put me on the record as a Wicca skeptic. When I read the complaint that Wiccans aren't treated the same as adherents to mainstream religions, I figure that's what you get when you join what for some is a do-it-yourself theology. It's like atheists suing because they aren't welcome in church.
For his part, McCollum is quite serious about Wicca.
I wish the Ninth Circuit were as serious. Federal jurists complain about clogged courts. They should look at the mirror, mirror on the wall. They've created their own curse.
Inmate Hartmann first filed this suit in 2008. She since has been released from prison. The complaint is so flimsy that her attorneys actually argued that it was wrong for the judge to dismiss the case because their complaint was "unduly long or poorly written."
Hill is serving a 29-year sentence for possession of a controlled substance for sale. According to court documents, she is a repeat offender with felonies and misdemeanors dating back to 1976.
Criminal Justice Legal Foundation President Michael Rushford observed that he has seen this kind of "there are raisins in the tapioca pudding" inmate nuisance claims before. It's a game life-sentence criminals play "to amuse themselves. They play this game because stupid courts let them get away with it."
"Do you do spells?" I asked McCollum. "Yes," he answered, "a spell is a prayer." He offered up an example: "Great mother whose love encircles the earth, please let this reporter print the truth, and let her be blessed for doing so."
If I turn into a frog over the weekend, I take back this column. Until then, I'm just a chump who pays taxes so the Ninth Circuit can pull rabbits out of hats.
Ask a Wiccan
I asked Wiccan Rev. Patrick McCollum of Moraga: Are you a wizard, and are women witches? "Not all Wiccans are witches and not all witches are Wiccans."
What do Wiccans believe?
"It's a real good analogy to compare Wicca with Christianity. Christianity has the most distinct denominations. ... Christ is involved in their theology. There is a God. Some believe in the trinity. Some don't."
In Wicca, "there is a central theology, there is a divine divinity. Some of them would call it God. Some of them would call it the god and goddess. And some of them might call it the goddess only."
"We don't do anything bad. We don't sacrifice animals. We don't kill babies. That's a bunch of crap. We don't worship the devil. That's a bunch of crap."
What happens at a Wiccan rite?
"We create sacred space, which for us means we create a circle, and ask that everything negative be taken out of that circle so that we can commune with God."
Isn't Wicca a do-it-yourself religion? Can anyone serve as a chaplain?
No, there are Wiccan seminaries, taught by Ph.Ds. Not something a lay person can do. "No. I've had 40 years of training."
Debra J. Saunders is a San Francisco Chronicle columnist. E-mail: dsaunders@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @DebraJSaunders
The law doesn't apply in Phoenix, Tucson, Flagstaff, Prescott or any other Arizona cities and only applies to rural areas.
The law would continue to create a jobs program for cops in schools, because only cops would be allowed to carry guns.
Arizona bill to arm teachers returns to Senate for public hearing
By Alia Beard Rau The Republic | azcentral.com Mon Feb 25, 2013 10:17 PM
Efforts to arm teachers in schools and to “sweep” public-campaign finance revenue to hire more school-resource officers were among 15 Senate bills granted special permission on Monday to move forward with public hearings.
Although Friday was the deadline for bills to get hearings, Republican leadership usually gives some bills an extra week, and the Senate Appropriations Committee will today hear the Senate bills granted an extension.
Senate Bill 1325, introduced by Sen. Rich Crandall, R-Mesa, would allow school governing boards to authorize a teacher or administrator to carry a concealed gun on campus if the school has fewer than 600 students, is more than 30 minutes and 20 miles away from the closest law-enforcement facility, and does not have its own school-resource officer.
A proposed amendment would allow any school governing board to allow a retired law-enforcement officer who is an employee of the school to carry a gun on school grounds.
Crandall’s bill was thought to be dead. A similar bill pushed by Attorney General Tom Horne that would have allowed school districts to arm any teacher or administrator went nowhere.
But Crandall said late last week that he worked with Senate leadership on the amendment and convinced them to give the bill a hearing.
Senate Concurrent Resolution 1017, also introduced by Crandall, would ask voters to allow the state to use excess Clean Elections money to help schools pay for resource officers, counselors and behavioral-health services.
The program’s sources of revenue include a surcharge on civil penalties and criminal fines, $5 donations collected by candidates, and taxpayer donations. Currently, Clean Elections money not used to fund participating candidates goes into the state’s general fund.
Arizona Education Association President Andrew Morrill said his organization opposes SB 1325.
“I think Sen. Crandall is trying to be about as reasonable as anybody down there and I know he’s trying to look at some of the unique rural needs,” he said. “But we have drawn a pretty firm line to say there is no substitute for the school-resource officer program.”
He said he’d rather see lawmakers focus on helping schools make their campuses safer, whether that’s by hiring school-resource officers or better securing a school’s perimeter with fencing.
But Morrill said there may be a compromise in allowing retired law-enforcement officers to help schools with safety, especially if they were required to go through the school-resource officer training.
“That’s one of the few suggestions I’ve heard down at the Legislature that could actually work and would have the effect of increasing school safety,” he said.
He said the AEA supports increasing funding for the school-resource officer program but hasn’t researched SCR 1017 enough to know if it may be a viable solution.
Arizonans for Gun Safety President Hildy Saizow, whose group worked with the Obama administration earlier this year on its gun reform proposals, said she has concerns about both bills.
“We don’t agree at all that teachers or administrators or any civilians in the school should be carrying weapons,” she said, saying she even has concerns if the bill does limit who can carry weapons. “There are just too many variables that can lead to a bad outcome.”
She said the organization supports creating a safe environment in schools and supports school-resource officers, but said it does not believe that boosting funds for the schools addresses the issue of gun violence.
“If you look at the 900 gun deaths that took place (in Arizona) last year, not one of them occurred on school grounds,” she said.
She said it would be more helpful if the Legislature would toughen background-check requirements for gun buyers or take weapons away from individuals with mental illnesses.
The Citizens Clean Elections Commission is not opposed to Crandall’s bill to use excess funds to help schools.
Executive Director Todd Lang said Crandall has introduced an amendment that would remedy an administrative problem the Clean Elections bill would have caused. “So in that case ... we’re fine with it,” he said.
Other bills to be heard today would give more adopted children access to behavioral-health services, give the Legislature more oversight over Arizona Department of Transportation highway construction projects and establish a performance-based funding program for schools.
Wednesday, the House Appropriations Committee will hear seven bills granted extensions in that chamber. They include efforts to expand mental-health services funding.
Does this broomstick go with my prison stripes?
In the past I have posted an article like this about the Arizona State Prison system
and the Wiccan religion.
Sen. Rich Crandall wants to create a jobs program for cops???
While this law at first sounds like it will allow ALL the teachers in Arizona to be armed it doesn't.
I certainly support the rights of gay folks, but a law requiring businesses not to discriminate against gays is almost certainly a violation of the First Amendment.
While I am an atheist and don't believe in the Bible, and while I think that discriminating against people for their sexual orientation is wrong, I certainly think people should have the right to practice their religion even if I disagree with it.
Most people don't know it but the Old Testament is shared by the Christian, Jewish and Muslim religions as the basis of all three religions faith. And of course the God in the Old Testament hates gay.
And these Christians, Jews, and Muslims who take the Old Testament literally should not be discriminated against and force to love gays whom their God hates.
Stanton: Phoenix's anti-bias push will be good for economy
By Greg Stanton My Turn Tue Feb 26, 2013 7:33 AM
Phoenix is a big city with people from all walks of life.
Our diversity is an asset we must embrace for the good of our people and our shared economic future. Our economic success depends on unleashing the talents of all our people and businesses.
That’s why today at 2:30 p.m., the Phoenix City Council will consider an amendment to existing ordinances to prohibit discrimination against the disabled community and the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community in employment, public accommodations, housing and city contracts.
Diversity is important to Phoenix’s economic development, but we have some catching up to do.
About 90 percent of Fortune 500 companies already have these policies, as do all the major employers in Phoenix. More than 160 U.S. cities already have the same ordinances, and Flagstaff joined the ranks last week, in addition to Tucson (since 1999).
Just about every major city in the United States — and every one of the cities with which Phoenix competes, such as Salt Lake City, Austin, Denver, Dallas and San Diego — has these ordinances as a business-development tool.
LGBT and disability non-discrimination ordinances are good for business because they send a clear message that we value all our citizens and their contributions.
Phoenix needs to update its non-discrimination ordinances to remain economically competitive.
Our neighbor Salt Lake City adopted these ordinances in 2009.
It turns out it has been so good for business that the statewide Chamber of Commerce is pushing for a statewide non-discrimination law.
Salt Lake’s experience is the same as the more than 60 cities with similar ordinances.
It has been great for economic development.
High-tech companies and employees looking to relocate place a premium on diversity and supporting laws. Study after study confirms that a diverse workforce is more creative than a homogenous one.
The proposed changes simply add LGBT and disability to our existing discrimination ordinances that have served Phoenix so well for several decades.
Nothing else is changing.
Our primary enforcement mechanism is mediation, to bring the parties together and work out an agreement. Our businesses have been comfortable with Phoenix’s non-discrimination ordinances in the past, and that will continue in the future.
I’m confident that Phoenix will take this next step. It’s an important step for our economic future.
Greg Stanton is the mayor of Phoenix.
DiCiccio: Stanton's anti-bias bid would hurt small businesses
By Sal DiCiccio My Turn Tue Feb 26, 2013 7:35 AM
Mayor Greg Stanton is pushing through an ordinance that will subject every single business in Phoenix to criminal penalties and open the door to civil litigation. This ordinance will require all business to accommodate gender identity and gender expression or face criminal penalties and civil lawsuits.
The new ordinance being fast-tracked by Mayor Stanton is a disaster for Phoenix small businesses. For the first time, any business with one or more employee will be subject to criminal penalties of up to a Class 1 misdemeanor, the highest misdemeanor one can receive.
The proposal requires all businesses that operate in Phoenix to accommodate any individual who wants to express his or her personal gender or identity. If, for example, a man wants to use the women’s bathroom in order to express himself, then the business owner will be required to allow him to do that or face a criminal penalty and civil litigation. A criminal penalty that will be enforced by Phoenix.
This is a difficult thing to discuss. It opens the door to individuals claiming you are a bigot, old-fashioned and someone who condones discrimination. Nothing could be further from the truth.
I believe in full transparency, and you, the citizens, have every right to know what your leaders are up to. And you need to know about it before it passes.
The language of the ordinance is so broad, the floodgates of litigation against businesses will be opened. What’s worse, the business community has not been made aware of this. Almost all elected leaders in the city were unaware of these proposed changes until last week.
This tactic of ramming through such dramatic changes without input from the community that will be impacted the most, our local small businesses, shows a total disregard for our business community. This lack of transparency must stop immediately. I have sent a letter and called on the city manager to immediately notify all businesses in Phoenix of these changes before the vote next week.
This proposed ordinance should be continued to allow all affected parties an opportunity to comment and have their voices heard.
Discrimination is deplorable, and we should not stand for it. However, the proposed changes are poorly crafted and go after a non-existent problem.
If this ordinance passes, as it is expected to do, business will be forced to hire more lawyers than employees.
This moves Phoenix toward a radical social agenda and away from job creation and job retention, which should be our focus.
Sal DiCiccio represents Council District 6, which includes the Biltmore, Arcadia and Ahwatukee Foothills areas.
As an atheist I have never had a problem with gay folks. And I demand that the government not discriminate against gays.
But the God [or more likely the men] who wrote the Old Testament seem to have a real hate for gay folks. And of course the Old Testament is a major part of the Christian, Jewish and Muslim religions and many of these religious folks who take the Old Testament seriously hate gay folks because their God hates Gay folks.
I suspect one of the reasons Mayor Greg Stanton voted to pass the law
was to get the vote of the gay special interest groups.
Phoenix City Council votes to amend discrimination law
By Dustin Gardiner and Amy B Wang The Republic | azcentral.com Wed Feb 27, 2013 12:55 AM
After more than five hours of heated testimony, Phoenix City Council members voted Tuesday to broadly outlaw discrimination against gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender residents.
Gay-rights advocates said the move was a long time coming. They said Phoenix, the sixth-largest city in the country, is playing “catch-up” with at least 166 other U.S. cities and counties that have adopted similar laws.
An estimated 500 people packed the Orpheum Theatre, and dozens of people spoke on both sides of the issue. Many supporters wore “yes” stickers and rainbow pins.
“I’m here to convince you to be on the right side of history today,” Dale Heuser, president of the gay-rights group Equality Maricopa, told the council. “This is a basic human-dignity issue.”
The issue lit up Twitter, with one observer calling the meeting “the longest, most intense, and in the end, the most inspiring show ever seen at the Orpheum.”
Once it became clear the reforms had passed, supporters jumped to their feet and erupted in applause. Some of the Valley’s longtime gay-rights leaders hugged, reflecting on their victory 21 years after Phoenix leaders shot down a similar proposal.
Mayor Greg Stanton fast-tracked the reforms, which ban discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity or expression — those who identify as a different sex than they were born as.
The changes approved Tuesday would prohibit discrimination in housing, employment and public accommodations, such as restaurants and hotels. Businesses and individuals that don’t comply could be criminally prosecuted and face a misdemeanor charge, punishable by a $2,500 fine.
Phoenix currently offers few such safeguards for gay people but bans discrimination based on race, sex, religion, national origin, age and marital status.
Ultimately, council members approved the changes 5-3, with the majority saying Phoenix would benefit from projecting an image that it welcomes diversity. Stanton, Thelda Williams, Tom Simplot, Daniel Valenzuela and Michael Johnson voted for the measure. Councilmen Sal DiCiccio, Jim Waring and Bill Gates voted against the item.
Councilman Michael Nowakowski supported the ordinance, but he did not vote because he was traveling.
Opposition to the proposal has intensified in recent days, with some religious and conservative business leaders raising concerns that it would create a regulatory burden for small businesses or allow transgender men to share public bathrooms with women. They have labeled it the “Bathroom Bill.”
“This is a significant extension of city policy,” Cathi Herrod, president of the conservative Center for Arizona Policy, said in pushing for the council to table the issue. “We have many questions that go beyond the bathroom issue.”
However, Herrod also cited language in the ordinance that included public accommodations. “How does that not include bathrooms?” she asked.
DiCiccio and other critics also questioned whether religious organizations would be fully exempt from criminal penalties attached to the law. He has said the public was “purposely misled” on that aspect.
In response to those fears, the council amended the law to clarify that religious groups are exempted, meaning they can exclude gay and transgender residents because of their religious principles. City officials had different interpretations about whether an earlier version would have allowed churches to exclude transgender people.
Supporters said the bathroom issue had become a red herring. Several council members pointed to other major cities and counties they said had similar laws, such as Salt Lake City, Philadelphia and Denver, saying expanding civil-rights protections to gay residents has not created problems.
Emotions on both sides escalated throughout the evening.
When a father brought up his fear of the law unleashing sexual predators in bathrooms, someone in the audience yelled an expletive at him. Several times, the crowd booed DiCiccio when he said the ordinance vote was being rushed.
Simplot, the city’s first openly gay elected official, said Phoenix had not been a leader on the issue. He said the move is merely catching up with public opinion. Other cities and corporate America began favoring gay-friendly policies many years ago, he said.
“With all due respect, those may have been valid arguments back in 1977,” Simplot told opponents concerned about the impact on small businesses. “They’re not valid today.”
Many residents told the council they have often faced discrimination in Phoenix. A lesbian schoolteacher said she left her job after a principal demanded she not “out” herself to students; a transgender woman said she had been evicted from her apartment; a gay man said he had recently been fired from his job.
Phoenix’s existing ordinance, which was approved in 1992 as a compromise on broader protections, only prohibits workplace discrimination against gays and lesbians who work for the city or at companies that have city contracts and at least 35 employees.
The council shot down broader civil-rights protections for gays and lesbians.
Phoenix’s ordinance still includes exemptions for religious organizations, small private landlords, senior housing and private clubs, among others.
The council also approved changes outlawing discrimination against disabled residents in the areas of employment and public accommodations. Federal law gives protections to the disabled in those areas, so the ordinance would not have as much impact on them.
The city’s gay residents largely don’t have state or federal laws that protect them against common types of discrimination.
Utah liquor bill aims to take down ‘Zion curtains’
Associated Press Tue Feb 26, 2013 9:39 PM
SALT LAKE CITY — Wine spritzers are a favorite at Rovali’s near Salt Lake City. Behind the bar, in full view of patrons, waiters siphon soda and syrup into glasses of ice — then they duck behind a fake olive tree and a barricade to add the chardonnay.
Utah’s famously strict liquor laws forbid the restaurant from pouring alcohol in front of customers. The ban is based on the idea that the state should shield the mixing of cocktails and pouring of drinks from children. “Zion curtains” went up around the state as part of a compromise after lawmakers lifted a mandate in 2010 requiring bars to operate as members-only social clubs.
But this year, the curtains may be coming down.
Utah lawmakers are considering whether to repeal the requirement, a move that would ease restrictions and encourage new business. Right now, the requirement applies to restaurants that are less than 3 years old.
Doing away with the curtain would mark yet another small step by the state to relax its liquor laws.
Lawmakers have introduced a handful of pending bills this year that would ease Utah liquor regulations, including a measure allowing customers to order a drink before they order food and another to make more liquor licenses available to restaurants.
They are scheduled to discuss whether to do away with the curtains Wednesday; the measure has not yet been voted on by either chamber.
The so-called Zion curtains have a long history in the state. The nickname nods to Utah’s legacy as home to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The barriers first went up decades ago in the social clubs that existed before bars were legalized in 2009, unmistakable glass walls separating customers from bartenders.
Those who oppose today’s Zion curtains say the law forces restaurant owners to waste money and space on configurations to keep bartenders out of sight of patrons using barriers or strategically positioned service bars. Curtain opponents also say the law hinders tourism by annoying outsiders and reinforcing their perception of Utah as staunchly sober.
Rovali’s, an Italian restaurant in Ogden, opened in 2010. When waiters there explain the state’s befuddling liquor laws to out-of-towners, Montanez said, “You see the eye roll.”
“That kind of stifles guests,” he said. “They’re a little rankled by these weird laws.”
Some lawmakers warn that removing the mandate could encourage underage drinking and influence customers to drink too much.
The majority of Utah legislators and residents belong to the Mormon church, which teaches its members to abstain from alcohol.
“Alcohol is a drug,” said Sen. John Valentine, R-Orem, who opposes the law. “It has social costs. We have DUIs. We have underage drinkers. We have problems that are caused by drinking.”
Valentine said he would consider supporting the proposal if the state promised trade-offs such as bulking up police presence around restaurants and nearby roads, or a measure keeping children from entering restaurants serving liquor.
For restaurant owners moving into existing spaces, the law presents a nightmare, said Rep. Ryan Wilcox, R-Ogden. Restaurants sometimes have to cut into floor space, he said, where more tables should be.
“It really just hampers the new guys, the little guys,” Wilcox said. “A lot of these guys, too, they’re not large operators. They’ve got one shop: ‘This is my restaurant. My lifelong dream. I’ve invested everything into this.’”
At Rovali’s, Montanez plays sommelier for guests who order wine service, setting off a presentation that underscores the patchwork nature of current laws. Montanez opens the wine at the table and invites guests to sniff the cork. If they purchase the bottle, he can pour and serve the bottle. If they order by the glass, however, he must slip away to pour the drink behind a partition.
“Everything we do is show,” Montanez said, likening the visible pouring of drinks to a dessert cart.
The display of pastries and sweets bolsters dessert sales at the restaurant by about 15 percent, he said. And Montanez estimates that taking the curtain down would boost wine sales by a similar margin.
“You can’t get creative, that’s for sure,” he said of the partition. “You have to stick with the rules.”
Melva Sine, president of the Utah Restaurant Association, said the curtain mandate confuses diners and raises eyebrows. Utah should impose one set of rules for all restaurants, regardless of their start date, Sine said.
“It lessens consumer confidence: What’s the reason that you’re doing this in the back room?” she said.
Sine rejects the notion that the visible flow of liquor would tempt youngsters to drink.
“We have got to stop feeling like everyone who drinks alcohol is doing something wrong,” she said. “We all want people to go out and enjoy themselves and be responsible.”
———
Associated Press writer Michelle L. Price contributed to this report.
Annals of Crime
Do Fingerprints Lie?
The gold standard of forensic evidence is now being challenged.
by Michael Specter May 27, 2002
Late one afternoon in the spring of 1998, a police detective named Shirley McKie stood by the sea on the southern coast of Scotland and thought about ending her life. A promising young officer, the thirty-five-year-old McKie had become an outcast among her colleagues in the tiny hamlet of Strathclyde. A year earlier, she had been assigned to a murder case in which an old woman was stabbed through the right eye with a pair of sewing scissors. Within hours of the killing, a team of forensic specialists had begun working their way through the victim’s house. Along with blood, hair, and fibres, the detectives found some unexpected evidence: one of the prints lifted from the room where the murder took place apparently matched the left thumb of Detective McKie.
Crime scenes are often contaminated by fingerprints belonging to police officers, and investigators quickly learn to eliminate them from the pool of suspects. But McKie said that she had never entered the house. Four experts from the Scottish Criminal Record Office—the agency that stores and identifies fingerprints for Scotland’s police—insisted, however, that the print was hers. Though McKie held to her story, even her father doubted her. “I love my daughter very much,’’ Iain McKie, who served as a police officer in Scotland for more than thirty years, told me earlier this year. “But when they said the print was Shirley’s I have to admit I assumed the worst. My entire career I had heard that fingerprints never lie.”
Nobody actually suspected McKie of murder, and in fact the victim’s handyman, David Asbury, was charged with the crime. The sole physical evidence against him consisted of two fingerprints—one of his, lifted from an unopened Christmas gift inside the house, and one of the victim’s, found on a biscuit tin in Asbury’s home. The last thing prosecutors needed was for their own witness to raise questions in court about the quality of the evidence. Yet McKie did just that—repeating under oath that she had never entered the house. Asbury was convicted anyway, but Scottish prosecutors were enraged by McKie’s testimony. As far as they were concerned, McKie had not only lied; she had challenged one of the evidentiary pillars of the entire legal system. Despite their victory in the murder trial, they charged McKie with perjury.
Desperate, she went to the public library and searched the Internet for somebody who might help her. Among the names she came upon was that of Allan Bayle, a senior forensic official at New Scotland Yard and perhaps the United Kingdom’s foremost fingerprint expert. (It was Bayle’s expertise and supporting evidence that helped convict one of the principal Libyan suspects in the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103, over Lockerbie, Scotland.) He agreed to review the prints, and what he saw astonished him. “It was obvious the fingerprint was not Shirley’s,’’ Bayle told me recently. “It wasn’t even a close call. She was identified on the left thumb, but that’s not the hand the print was from. It’s the right forefinger. But how can you admit you are wrong about Shirley’s print without opening yourself to doubt about the murder suspect, too?” Bayle posted a comment on Onin.com, a Web site trafficked regularly by the world’s fingerprint community. “I have looked at the McKie case,’’ he wrote. “The mark is not identical. I have shown this mark to many experts in the UK and they have come to the same conclusions.”
Bayle’s assertion caused a furor. He was threatened with disciplinary action, shunned by his colleagues, and, after a quarter century with the Metropolitan Police, driven from his job. But in the end McKie was acquitted, and Bayle’s statement helped challenge a system that had, until then, simply been taken for granted.
For more than a century, the fingerprint has been regarded as an unassailable symbol of truth, particularly in the courtroom. When a trained expert tells a judge and jury that prints found at a crime scene match those of the accused, his testimony often decides the case. The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s basic text on the subject is entitled “The Science of Fingerprints,’’ and a science is what F.B.I. officials believe fingerprinting to be; their Web site states that “fingerprints offer an infallible means of personal identification.’’ The Bureau maintains a database that includes the fingerprints of more than forty-three million Americans; it can be searched from precinct houses and properly equipped police cruisers across the country. Fingerprints are regularly used to resolve disputes, prevent forgery, and certify the remains of the dead; they have helped send countless people to prison. Until this year, fingerprint evidence had never successfully been challenged in any American courtroom.
Then, on January 7th, U.S. District Court Judge Louis H. Pollak—a former dean of the law schools at Yale and at the University of Pennsylvania—issued a ruling that limited the use of fingerprint evidence in a drug-related murder case now under way in Philadelphia. He decided that there were not enough data showing that methods used by fingerprint analysts would pass the tests of scientific rigor required by the Supreme Court, and noted the “alarmingly high” error rates on periodic proficiency exams. Although Judge Pollak later decided to permit F.B.I. fingerprint experts to testify in this particular case, students of forensic science felt his skepticism was justified. “We have seen forensic disciplines which focus on bite marks, hair analysis, and handwriting increasingly questioned in the courts,” Robert Epstein, who had argued for the exclusion of fingerprint testimony in the case, told me. “But we have accepted fingerprinting uncritically for a hundred years.’’
Epstein, an assistant federal public defender in Philadelphia, was responsible for the first major court challenge to the discipline, in 1999, in U.S. v. Byron Mitchell. In that case, Epstein showed that standards for examiners vary widely, and that errors on proficiency tests—which are given irregularly and in a variety of forms—are far from rare. The critical evidence consisted of two fingerprint marks lifted from a car used in a robbery. To prepare for the trial, F.B.I. officials had sent the prints to agencies in all fifty states; roughly twenty per cent failed to identify them correctly. “After all this time, we still have no idea how well fingerprinting really works,’’ Epstein said. “The F.B.I. calls it a science. By what definition is it a science? Where are the data? Where are the studies? We know that fingerprint examiners are not always right. But are they usually right or are they sometimes right? That, I am afraid, we don’t know. Are there a few people in prison who shouldn’t be? Are there many? Nobody has ever bothered to try and find out. Look closely at the great discipline of fingerprinting. It’s not only not a science—it should not even be admitted as evidence in an American court of law.”
Fingerprints have been a source of fascination for thousands of years. They were used as seals on legal contracts in ancient Babylonia, and have been found embossed on six-thousand-year-old Chinese earthenware and pressed onto walls in the tomb of Tutankhamun. Hundreds of years ago, the outline of a hand with etchings representing the ridge patterns on fingertips was scratched into slate rock beside Kejimkujik Lake, in Nova Scotia.
For most of human history, using fingerprints to establish a person’s identity was unnecessary. Until the nineteenth century, people rarely left the villages in which they were born, and it was possible to live for years without setting eyes on a stranger. With the rise of the Industrial Revolution, cities throughout Europe and America filled with migrants whose names and backgrounds could not be easily verified by employers or landlords. As the sociologist Simon Cole made clear in “Suspect Identities,” a recent history of fingerprinting, felons quickly learned to lie about their names, and the soaring rate of urban crime forced police to search for a more exacting way to determine and keep track of identities. The first such system was devised in 1883 by a Parisian police clerk named Alphonse Bertillon. His method, called anthropometry, relied on an elaborate set of anatomical measurements—such as head size, length of the left middle finger, face height—and features like scars and hair and eye color to distinguish one person from another. Anthropometry proved useful, but fingerprinting, which was then coming into use in Britain, held more promise. By the eighteen-sixties, Sir William J. Herschel, a British civil servant in India, had begun to keep records of fingerprints and use them to resolve common contract disputes and petty frauds.
Fingerprinting did not become indispensable, however, until 1869, when Britain stopped exiling criminals to Australia, and Parliament passed the Habitual Criminals Act. This law required judges to take past offenses into account when determining the severity of a sentence. But in order to include prior offenses in an evaluation one would need to know whether the convict had a previous record, and many criminals simply used a different alias each time they were arrested. The discovery that no two people had exactly the same pattern of ridge characteristics on their fingertips seemed to offer a solution. In 1880, Dr. Henry Faulds published the first comments, in the scientific journal Nature, on the use of fingerprints to solve crimes. Soon afterward, Charles Darwin’s misanthropic cousin, Sir Francis Galton, an anthropologist and the founder of eugenics, designed a system of numbering the ridges on the tips of fingers—now known as Galton points—which is still in use throughout the world. (Ultimately, though, he saw fingerprints as a way to classify people by race.)
Nobody is sure exactly how Mark Twain learned about fingerprints, but his novel “Pudd’nhead Wilson,” published in 1894, planted them in the American imagination. The main character in the book, a lawyer, earned the nickname Pudd’nhead in part because he spent so much time collecting “finger-marks”—which was regarded as proof of his foolishness until he astounded his fellow-citizens by using the marks to solve a murder. If you were to walk into a courtroom today and listen to the testimony of a typical forensic expert, you might hear a recitation much like Pudd’nhead Wilson’s:
Every human being carries with him from his cradle to his grave certain physical marks which do not change their character, and by which he can always be identified—and that without shade of doubt or question. These marks are his signature, his physiological autograph, so to speak, and this autograph cannot be counterfeited, nor can he disguise it or hide it away, nor can it become illegible by the wear and the mutations of time. . . . This signature is each man’s very own. There is no duplicate of it among the swarming populations of the globe!
Some things have changed since Pudd’nhead Wilson, of course. A few weeks ago, I visited the headquarters of the Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification Systems, the F.B.I.’s billion-dollar data center, just outside Clarksburg, West Virginia—a citadel of the American forensic community. After driving past a series of shacks and double-wides and Bob Evans restaurants, you come upon a forest with a vast, futuristic complex looming above the trees. (I.A.F.I.S. moved from more crowded quarters in the Hoover Building in 1995, thanks to the influence of the state’s senior senator, Robert C. Byrd.)
Clarksburg is home to the world’s largest collection of fingerprints; on an average day, forty thousand are fed into the system. The I.A.F.I.S. computers, which can process three thousand searches a second, sort through the database in a variety of ways. For example, they compare complete sets of fingerprints in the files with new arrivals—as when a suspect is held in custody and the police send his “ten-prints” to I.A.F.I.S. The computer hunts for shared characteristics, and then attempts to match the prints to a record on file. “We identify about eight thousand fugitives per month here,’’ Billy P. Martin, the acting chief of the Identification and Investigative Services Section, told me. Martin said that eleven per cent of job applicants whose fingerprints are entered into the system—they could be day-care workers, casino staff, federal employees—turn out to have criminal records; as many as sixty per cent of the matches are repeat offenders.
The center looks like a NASA control room, with dozens of people monitoring the encrypted network of fingerprint machines sending in data from police stations throughout the country. The main computer floor is the size of two football fields and contains sixty-two purple-and-gray “jukeboxes,” each filled with two hundred compact disks containing fingerprints. (There are three thousand sets on each CD.) When someone is arrested, his prints are initially searched against a state’s computer files. If the search finds nothing, the information is forwarded to the federal database in Clarksburg. To make a match, the I.A.F.I.S. computer analyzes the many points on the ridges of every fingerprint it receives, starting with the thumb and working toward the pinkie; only when the data produce prints that match (or several prints that seem similar) is the original print forwarded to an analyst for comparison.
”We used to go to a file cabinet, pull out paper cards. If it was all loops—which is the most common type of print—you could spend an hour,’’ Martin said. “Now a computer algorithm does it in seconds. The system searches the electronic image against the database and pulls up the image onto the screen. The accuracy rate on first run is 99.97 per cent.’’ Still, this would mean that the I.A.F.I.S. computers make three hundred mistakes in every million searches. That is where trained examiners come in. The patterns on fingertips are more like topographical maps or handwriting than, say, bar codes. They can be so similar that even the most sophisticated computer program can’t tell them apart; it takes a trained human eye to detect the subtle differences.
I sat with one of the examiners in a dim, nearly silent room lined with what seemed like an endless series of cubicles. At each station, someone was staring at a monitor with two huge fingerprints on it. No two people—not even identical twins—have ever been shown to share fingerprints. The friction ridges that cover the skin on your hands and feet are formed by the seventeenth week in the womb; at birth they have become so deep that nothing can alter them, not even surgery. Look at your fingertips: the patterns resemble finely detailed maps of the bypasses and exit ramps on modern roads. Experts use the nomenclature of the highway to describe them: there are spurs, bifurcations, and crossovers. Some people have fingertips that are dominated by “loops,” others by “tented arches” or small circles that examiners call “lakes,” or smaller ones still, called “dots.” Collectively, these details are referred to as minutiae—an average human fingerprint may contain as many as a hundred and fifty minutia points. To identify fingerprints, an expert must compare these points individually, until enough of them correspond that he or she feels confident of a match.
When fingerprints are properly recorded (inked, then rolled, finger by finger, onto a flat surface, or scanned into a machine that captures and stores each finger as a digital image), identification works almost flawlessly. The trouble is that investigators in the field rarely see the pristine prints that can be quickly analyzed by a computer; most of the prints introduced at criminal trials are fragments known as “latent prints.” Crime scenes are messy, and the average fingerprint taken from them represents only a fraction of a full fingertip—about twenty per cent. They are frequently distorted and hard to read, having been lifted from a grainy table or a bloodstained floor. “It is one thing to say that fingerprints are unique and quite another to suggest that a partial latent print, often covered in blood or taken from an obscure surface, is unique, identical, or easy to identify,’’ Barry Scheck told me. In the past decade, Scheck, who directs the Innocence Project, has used DNA evidence to exonerate more than a hundred prisoners, some of them on death row. “We have always been told that fingerprint evidence is the gold standard of forensic science. If you have a print, you have your man. But it is not an objective decision. It is inexact, partial, and open to all sorts of critics.’’
Police use several methods to discover latent fingerprints. First, they shine a flashlight or a laser along the clean, solid surfaces on which a print may have been left by the perspiration and oil on a fingertip. When a print is discovered, detectives use a brush and powder to mark it, much as they did in the nineteenth century; the powder clings to the perspiration. (The method works best on smooth surfaces, like glass.) The print is then photographed and lifted with tape.
The technology for retrieving partial and obscure fingerprints keeps improving. On a recent episode of the television program “C.S.I.,” you might have seen detectives using a technique called superglue fuming to reveal the outline of a face on a plastic bag—an unconventional use of a common practice. In order to find difficult prints on an irregular surface, such as the human body, crime-scene investigators blow fumes of superglue over it. As the fumes adhere to the surface, the ridges of any fingerprint left there turn white and come clearly into view. Another common method involves ninhydrin, which works like invisible ink: when you douse paper with it, the chemical brings out any sweat that may have been left by fingertips. Ninhydrin is particularly useful with old prints or those covered in blood.
F.B.I. fingerprint examiners have a variety of computer tools—a sort of specialized version of Photoshop—to help them compare rolled prints with those in their system. In front of me, an I.A.F.I.S. examiner stared at his computer screen as a training instructor, Charles W. Jones, Jr., explained the process. “He is looking for ridges that form dots,’’ Jones said. “Bifurcations. Usually they look for six or seven of those.’’ The examiners work around the clock, in three shifts, and are required to evaluate at least thirty prints an hour. They know nothing about the people attached to the fingers on their screens; the prints could be those of a rapist, a serial killer, Osama bin Laden, a woman applying for a job in the Secret Service, or a bus driver from Queens. (“Yesterday I did fifty-one for a couple hours in a row,’’ an examiner told me proudly.)
At the bottom of the screen there are three buttons—”Ident,” “Unable,” and “Non-Ident”—and the examiner must click on one of them. If he identifies a finger, the print goes to a second analyst. If the two examiners independently reach the same conclusion, the fingerprint is considered to have been identified. If not, it gets forwarded to an analyst with more experience. “We have a pretty good fail-safe system,’’ Jones said. “Computers help immensely. But in the end they can’t pull the trigger. That’s our job.’’
Only a human being can make critical decisions about identity, and yet the talent, training, and experience of examiners vary widely. “The current identification system . . . is only as genuine as the knowledge, experience, and ability of the specialist carrying out the comparison,’’ David R. Ashbaugh, a staff sergeant with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, writes, in “Quantitative-Qualitative Friction Ridge Analysis,” which is considered the Bible of the field. And although fingerprint analysis has been in use for decades, there has never been any consensus about professional standards. How many distinct characteristics are necessary to prove that a latent fingerprint comes from a specific person? The answer is different in New York, California, and London. In certain states, and in many countries, fingerprint examiners must show that prints share a set number of Galton points before they can say they have made an identification. Australia and France require at least twelve matching Galton points; in Italy, the number is sixteen. In America, standards vary, even within a state. The F.B.I. doesn’t require a minimum number of points; all such regulations were dropped fifty years ago, because, according to Stephen B. Meagher, the chief of the Bureau’s latent-print unit, the F.B.I. believes that making an identification using Galton points alone can cause errors.
Meagher says that fingerprint analysis is an objective science; Robert Epstein, the Philadelphia attorney who has led the fight against presenting fingerprint evidence in court, says it is not a science at all. Neither is exactly right. Examining the many contours of a human finger is not as objective as measuring someone’s temperature or weight, or developing a new vaccine. But it’s not guesswork, either. It involves, inevitably, human judgment, and most people agree that when it is done well it is highly accurate. The difficulty is in determining whether it has been done well.
Scientific methodology is based on generating hypotheses and testing them to see if they make sense; in laboratories throughout the world, researchers spend at least as much time trying to disprove a theory as they do trying to prove it. Eventually, those ideas that don’t prove false are accepted. But fingerprinting was developed by the police, not by scientists, and it has never been subjected to rigorous analysis—you cannot go to Harvard, Berkeley, or Oxford and talk to the scholar working on fingerprint research. Yet by the early twentieth century fingerprinting had become so widely accepted in American courts that further research no longer seemed necessary, and none of any significance has been completed.
David L. Faigman, who teaches at the Hastings College of the Law and is an editor of the annually revised forensic text “Modern Scientific Evidence,’’ has spent most of his career campaigning to increase the scientific literacy of judges and juries. Faigman likens the acceptance of fingerprint evidence to the way leeches were once assumed to be of great medical value. “Leeches were used for centuries,’’ he told me. “It was especially common for the treatment of pneumonia and it was considered an effective therapy. It wasn’t till late in the nineteenth century that they did the clinical tests to show that leeches did not help for pneumonia, and they may have actually hurt. Fingerprinting is like that in at least one crucial way: it is something we assume works but something we have never properly tested. Until we test our beliefs, we can’t say for sure if we have leeches or we have aspirin”—an effective remedy that was used before it was understood. “One of the things that science teaches us is that you can’t know the answers until you ask the questions.’’
The discussion of fingerprinting is only the most visible element in a much larger debate about how forensic science fits into the legal system. For years, any sophisticated attorney was certain to call upon expert witnesses—doctors, psychiatrists, Bruno Magli shoe salesmen—to assert whatever might help his case. And studies have shown that juries are in fact susceptible to the influence of such experts. Until recently, though, there were no guidelines for qualification; nearly anybody could be called an expert, which meant that, unlike other witnesses, the expert could present his “opinion” almost as if it were fact. Experts have been asked to testify about the rate at which a tire would skid, and the distance blood would splatter when a certain calibre bullet smashed into a skull. They have lectured scores of juries on the likelihood that a medicine could cause a particular side effect; they have interpreted polygraphs and handwriting, and have pronounced on whether a bite mark was made by one set of teeth to the exclusion of all others.
Although forensic evidence has proved particularly powerful with juries, it is particularly weak as a science. By the nineteen-eighties, the kind of evidence that was routinely admitted into court without any statistical grounding or rationale had earned a name: “junk science.” And junk science had become ubiquitous. With the problem growing out of control, in 1993 the Supreme Court took up a lawsuit called Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals. The case involved a child who suffered from serious birth defects. His lawyers claimed that the defects were caused by Bendectin, a drug that was for many years routinely prescribed for morning sickness, which his mother took while she was pregnant. The company argued that no valid evidence existed to support the claim. The Court’s decision set a new standard for scientific evidence in America: for the first time, it held that it was not permissible for expert witnesses to testify to what was “generally accepted” to be true in their field. Judges had to act as “gatekeepers,” the Court said; if an expert lacked reliability he was no longer allowed in the courtroom. The ruling, and others that expanded upon it, laid down clear guidelines for the federal bench, requiring judges to consider a series of questions: Could a technique be tested or proved false? Was there a known or potential error rate? (DNA identification has provided the model, because experts have gathered enough statistical evidence to estimate the odds—which are astronomical—that one person’s DNA could be traced to another.) The Court also instructed judges to consider whether a particular theory had ever been subjected to the academic rigor of peer review or publication.
The Daubert ruling forced federal judges to become more sophisticated about science, which has not been easy for them. “Daubert changed everything,” Michael J. Saks, a law professor at Arizona State University, who has written widely on the subject, told me. “And it is pretty clear when you look at those criteria that fingerprinting simply doesn’t satisfy any of them.’’ Since the Daubert ruling, federal courts have judged handwriting evidence and hair identification to be unscientific. The use of polygraph data has also been curtailed. Questions have been raised about ballistics—say, whether a bullet can be traced back to a particular gun. Somehow, though, until Judge Pollak came along, challenges to fingerprinting continued to be regarded as heresy.
Relying largely on testimony presented by Robert Epstein in U.S. v. Byron Mitchell, the first post-Daubert case involving fingerprint testimony, Judge Pollak ruled in January that an expert could say whether he thought fingerprints belonged to the people accused of the crime, but he could not say that the fingerprints he had examined were, beyond doubt, those of the defendant.
Pollak is one of the federal judiciary’s most respected judges. Federal prosecutors were so concerned that any ruling he issued would carry a significance even greater than its legal weight that they asked the Judge to reconsider his precedent-shattering decision. Pollak agreed.
Late in February, Pollak held a hearing on the reliability of fingerprint evidence. For three days, several of the world’s most prominent experts discussed their field in his courtroom. The F.B.I.’s Stephen B. Meagher testified that no Bureau analyst had ever misidentified a person in court, and that the Bureau’s annual proficiency test was among the reasons that the Judge should be confident about admitting expert testimony. Allan Bayle, the British forensic specialist, flew in from London at the request of the defense. He had a different view. He told Pollak that the F.B.I.’s proficiency test was so easy it could be passed with no more than six weeks of training. “If I gave my experts [at Scotland Yard] these tests, they would fall about laughing,” he told Pollak in court. Later, in conversation with me, he expanded on those comments. “The F.B.I. are conning themselves and they are conning everybody else,’’ he said. “They don’t even use real scene-of-crime marks for the fingerprint tests.” He pointed out that the fingerprints used in the exams were so different from each other that almost anybody could tell them apart. “Let’s say I asked you to look at a zebra, a giraffe, an elephant, and a lion. Then I asked you to find the zebra. How hard would that be? What the Bureau should be doing is comparing five zebras and selecting among them.” Bayle and other critics stopped short of calling fingerprint evidence junk science, but they noted that there are few data showing how often latent prints are properly identified.
By February 27th, the final day of the hearing, the fissures in an old and accepted discipline had become visible, and Judge Pollak promised to issue a final ruling within a couple of weeks.
A few days after Pollak’s hearing ended, I flew to Cardiff to attend the annual meeting of the Fingerprint Society. It was raining in Wales, and the members of the society were deeply unsettled because their profession was under assault. Each year, the society gathers for a few days to listen to lectures and to talk about developments in the field. The society has always been a club—the type where you might expect to stumble upon Sherlock Holmes or G. K. Chesterton. The bar at the Thistle Hotel, where the conference was held, was filled with police officers from Sussex, Aberdeen, and most places in between. The conference was well attended by representatives of the United States Secret Service and the F.B.I. There were also a few stray academics interested in the latest obscure technology, such as magnetic nanoflake powders, which are able to capture fingerprints without disturbing whatever traces of DNA may be present. (With conventional methods, an investigator has to choose: either swab a mark to harvest the DNA or lift it to find the print.)
By the time I arrived, the society was preoccupied by two issues: the Pollak hearings and the lingering ill will from the McKie case, in Scotland. One of those in attendance was Meagher, the lead F.B.I. witness in Judge Pollak’s courtroom. I introduced myself, and told him that I understood he couldn’t discuss the Philadelphia case while it was under review, but asked if we could talk about the field in general. “No,’’ he said, without a moment’s hesitation.Iain McKie had also come to Cardiff that weekend, as had Allan Bayle. McKie, a tall, reedy man with a great nimbus of curly white hair, presented a lecture on the ethics of fingerprinting. He remained livid about the fact that a fingerprint had destroyed his daughter’s career; although she had been acquitted of perjury, she felt unwelcome on the police force after having been strip-searched and jailed by her colleagues, and had resigned soon after her trial. She never returned to work. Today, she spends much of her time trying to force Scottish authorities to admit that what they did to her was wrong. “I believe a person made a mistake, and instead of admitting it they were prepared to send me to jail,’’ Shirley McKie said after she was acquitted of perjury. “It ruined my life, and now I am trying to pick up the pieces.”
The Scottish Criminal Record Office has never acknowledged the error, nor has the Fingerprint Society issued any statement about the incident. (David Asbury, the man convicted of the murder, was released in August of 2000, pending an appeal. As expected, the judge in the case questioned the validity of the fingerprint evidence that had led to his conviction.) In Cardiff, McKie told the Fingerprint Society that the system they represented was “incestuous, secretive, and arrogant. It has been opened to unprecedented analysis and it’s sadly lacking. It pains me to say that, because I was a police officer for thirty years. You are indicted on the basis of a fingerprint. You are not innocent till proven guilty; if the police have a print, you are assumed to be guilty. We need to start a new culture. The view that the police and fingerprint evidence are always right, the rest of the world be damned, has to end.’’
Afterward, the corridors and conference rooms were buzzing; it was as if somebody had challenged the fundamentals of grammar at the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association. But McKie was far from the only speaker at the conference to raise questions about the field. Christophe Champod, who works for a British organization called the Forensic Science Service, has long attempted to apply rigorous statistical methods to fingerprinting. Champod spoke in an understated and academic manner, but what he had to say was even more forceful than McKie’s presentation. He told the audience that they had only themselves to blame for the state of the field, that for years they had resisted any attempts to carry out large trials, which would then permit examiners to provide some guidance to juries about the value of their analysis, as is the case with DNA. “What we are trying to do in this field is reduce, reduce, reduce the population so that there is only a single individual that can possess a set of fingerprints. . . . But we can never examine the fingerprints of the entire universe. So, based on your experience, you make an inference: the probability that there is another person in the universe that could have a good match for the mark is very small. In the end, it’s like a leap of faith. It’s a very small leap, but it is a leap nonetheless.”
Half an hour had been allotted for questions, but there was only silence. Afterward, one of the organizers explained it to me: “He was using the terms of religion to describe our science. That’s just not fair.”
Allan Bayle invited me to visit him in London after the meeting. Bayle is six feet five with sandy hair and flecks of gray in his blue eyes. He had recently married and he lives with his wife, child, and mother-in-law just steps from the M1 motorway entrance in Hendon, on the northern edge of the city. We sat in his conservatory on a cloudy day while his five-month-old boy slept in a stroller beside us.
Bayle was frustrated. For the past five years, he had worked mostly as a lecturer on fingerprints for the Metropolitan Police. “I taught advanced forensic scene examination, and I loved it. Once I said I would give evidence in the McKie case, though, I was no longer allowed to go to meetings. But that is not why I left. They did nothing about this mistake in identity. When you know something is wrong, how can you stay silent?” He told me he was particularly upset that Shirley McKie’s career as a police officer had ended for no reason. Bayle’s life, too, has changed. He now works as an independent consultant. Although he has been portrayed as a critic of fingerprint analysis, he is critical only of the notion that it should never be questioned. “It’s a valuable craft,” he said. “But is it a science like physics or biology? Well, of course not. All I have been saying is, let’s admit we make errors and do what we can to limit them. It is such a subjective job. The F.B.I. want to say they are not subjective. Well, look at what David Ashbaugh—certainly among the most noted of all fingerprint analysts—said when he testified in the Mitchell case.” Ashbaugh had clearly stated that fingerprint identification was “subjective,” adding that the examiner’s talents are his “personal knowledge, ability, and experience.”
Bayle took out a large portfolio containing dozens of fingerprints, as well as gruesome pictures of crime scenes. “Look at the mess,’’ he said. He showed me a series of photographs: jagged fingerprints—black smudges, really—recovered from the scenes of several murders he had investigated. “With all that information, you then come to your conclusions. You have to somehow match that to this clean image’’—he handed me a picture of a perfect print, taken at a police booking—”and say, finally, it’s one man’s print. You have got to look at everything, not just points. The Bureau has not had a missed ident in all their years of working, and I applaud that. But they are not testing their experts’ ability. And that is dangerous.’’
The following week, Stephen Meagher agreed to speak with me at the F.B.I. headquarters, on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington. Meagher is perhaps the best known and most forceful advocate for the view that fingerprint evidence is scientifically valid and that it ought to be welcome in courts.
”But is it really a science?” I asked as soon as we settled down to talk in his office. Meagher said that he didn’t think of science as a term that could be easily defined or tailored to fit all disciplines in the same way. “There is academic science, legal science, and forensic science,’’ he told me. “They are different. You can be an expert in the field and give testimony without having an academic level of scientific knowledge. . . . It is not achievable to take pure science and move it into a legal arena.’’ This seemed surprising, since Meagher had often argued that, when performed correctly, fingerprint analysis is an “objective’’ science. In 1999, when he was asked in court whether, based on the unique properties of fingerprints, he had an opinion of the error rate associated with his work, he said, “As applied to the scientific methodology, it’s zero.” (Scientists don’t talk this way; it is an axiom among biomedical researchers that nothing in biology is true a hundred per cent of the time.)
Later, when I asked David Faigman, the Hastings law professor, whether it made sense to divide science into legal, academic, and forensic subgroups, he laughed.
”Of course it makes no sense,’’ he said. “Mr. Meagher operates on a sixteenth-century notion—a Francis Bacon idea—of what science is all about. To me, the analogue for law is meteorology. It deals with physics and chemistry—the most basic sciences. Yet it has to make predictions and empirical statements regarding complex reality. That is because so many factors determine the weather that it’s really a probabilistic science. And I think fingerprinting is the same.”
”Most fields of normal science could pull from the shelf dozens or hundreds, if not thousands, of studies testing their various hypotheses and contentions, which had been conducted over the past decades or century, and hand them to the court,’’ Michael Saks wrote in “Modern Scientific Evidence.” For fingerprinting there was nothing. In 1999, the F.B.I. conducted its study in preparation for the Byron Mitchell trial. The study asked examiners to match the two actual latent prints taken from the car in the Mitchell case with the known set of fingerprints of the man on trial. Both sets of prints were sent to the crime laboratories of fifty-three law-enforcement agencies. Of the thirty-five agencies that examined them and responded, most concluded that the latent prints matched the known prints of the accused; eight said that no match could be made for one of the latent prints, and six said that no match could be made for the other print. The F.B.I., realizing it had a problem, sent annotated enlargements of all the prints to those examiners who had said the fingerprints couldn’t be matched. In these photographs, the points of similarity on the fingertips were clearly marked. This time, every lab adopted the F.B.I.’s conclusions.
When I asked Meagher about the study, he told me that the test was supposed to demonstrate the uniqueness of the prints; it was not meant to be a test of competency. He claimed opponents have used the data unfairly. At the same time, he conceded that it would not matter how clean a fingerprint was if the person examining it hadn’t been trained properly. “Our system is a huge statistical-probability model, but it doesn’t make identifications, because it doesn’t have all the information that is needed,” he said. “It’s a job for human beings.”
On March 13th, Judge Pollak vacated his earlier order. He issued a new opinion, in which he stated that the defense had succeeded in raising “real questions about the adequacy of the proficiency tests taken annually by certified F.B.I. fingerprint examiners.” Yet he was persuaded by the F.B.I.’s record of accuracy, and wrote that “whatever may be the case for other law-enforcement agencies” the Bureau’s standards seemed good enough to permit F.B.I. experts to testify in his courtroom. “In short,’’ he concluded, “I have changed my mind.’’ It was, naturally, a blow to the opposition—though Pollak was careful to rule only on the case before him and only with regard to the F.B.I.
I met with the Judge shortly after he issued his decision. Having arrived early for our meeting, I watched as he led the jury-selection process in the case in which Meagher will now be permitted to testify. Like most courtrooms, it was decorated with an American flag, but it was filled with art as well: prints by Matisse, Cézanne, and Eakins and drawings by Victor Hugo lined the walls.
During the lunch break, we sat in his ramshackle office. The stuffing was falling out of both of our chairs. Pollak, a lively man in his late seventies, declined to talk specifically about the case, but was happy to consider the broader issues it raised. “The most important question here, of course, is, Am I the right person to be a gatekeeper?’’ he said. “I, who know little of science. . . . As society comes to rely more fully on technology, the question will become acute.’’ Pollak said that he found it worrisome that the Supreme Court ruling in the Daubert case meant that he could rule one way on an issue like fingerprints and another federal judge in a different jurisdiction could do the opposite, and neither ruling would be reversed (the Court will hear appeals only on procedure, not on the law). He was frank about how poorly prepared most judges are for making decisions based on scientific issues.
”I want to tell you that shortly after I got into this line of work there was no more unqualified district judge”—for making such decisions—”in the United States,’’ Judge Pollak said of himself. He told me that in the early nineteen-eighties he had met a former chief executive of DuPont at a reception. “He asked me how it can be that people like me are entrusted to make such major scientific decisions. He wasn’t questioning my good faith. But by virtue of my job I have been asked to make decisions that are out of the range of any competence that I have.” Pollak conceded that the DuPont chairman had a point. I asked if he felt scientifically competent to rule on the current case in Philadelphia. He laughed but didn’t answer. “I knew when I decided the thing there was going to be some surprise,’’ he said, referring to his initial opinion. “Honestly, I don’t think I had anticipated the degree to which people would be startled. . . . Other lawyers in fingerprint situations are now almost duty bound to raise these questions and challenges again. How could they in good faith act in any other way? This decision is certainly not the end. I think we can be certain of that.’’
In Texas, Public School Bible Classes Inch Toward Evangelism
By MARK OPPENHEIMER
Published: March 1, 2013
It may be a little late for the holiday of Purim, but this coming Tuesday, in Eastland, Tex., Gay Hart will be baking hamantaschen — the traditional doughy, triangle-shaped pastries accented with dollops of prune, Nutella or some other delectable paste — for the mostly Protestant students in her class on the Bible at Eastland High School. Her curriculum also includes latke recipes for Hanukkah, “challah-days” and the Hebrew melody “Hava Nagila.”
Mrs. Hart, a Baptist, offers such tidbits of Jewish folk culture to help make her class, offered at a public school, welcoming to people of all beliefs. But according to a new study by Mark A. Chancey of Southern Methodist University, such efforts are not enough to make her class pass Constitutional muster.
Dr. Chancey asserts that Mrs. Hart’s class, while offering what he calls a “sympathetic appreciation” of differing points of view, is taught from an evangelical Christian perspective and probably runs afoul of the Constitution.
And Dr. Chancey says that Mrs. Hart, 77, is not alone in using a high school elective to pole-vault the wall between church and state. “Reading, Writing and Religion II,” released Jan. 16 by the Texas Freedom Network Education Fund, a watchdog organization focused on the separation of church and state, is Dr. Chancey’s second study of public school Bible courses in Texas. He wrote the first in 2006, after becoming intrigued by a lawsuit in Odessa, Tex., brought on behalf of a Jewish student concerned about her public high school’s evangelical Bible curriculum.
That case was eventually settled, but in 2007, Texas passed a law requiring school districts to pay attention in their curriculums to religious literature, including the Bible, and its “impact on the history and literature of Western Civilization.” The requirement can be met through classes specifically on the Bible or through readings in other classes, like social studies or English.
There has long been disagreement about the legitimate place of religion in student-led and extracurricular activities, like after-school prayer groups, and at public school sporting events. But the new trend is to push the Bible into the heart of the instructional day. Since 2006, public schools in four other states — Arizona, Georgia, Oklahoma and Tennessee — have passed laws similar to the one in Texas, and North Carolina is considering such a bill. South Carolina allows students to receive credit for Bible courses taken off campus, for example, at a church or a Christian college.
It is not illegal to read the Bible as part of a public school curriculum, but it should be “presented objectively as part of a secular program of education,” as the Supreme Court held in 1963. “The Court’s ruling,” Dr. Chancey writes in his new report, “means that Bible courses in public schools are constitutionally permissible as long as they are taught in an academic manner that does not cross the line into religious instruction or religiously biased presentation.”
Dr. Chancey read materials from 60 courses taught in Texas. Teachers may, he said, try to approach the Bible in an academic manner: as a work of literature that has influenced history, but that makes many claims incompatible with the best findings of science, archaeology and other scholarship. But many find it impossible, Dr. Chancey said, to offer a non-Christian perspective.
“So many people who love the Bible and read the Bible, especially in America, under the influence of Protestant sensibilities, read it as a historically accurate text,” he said. “For example, ‘The Exodus happened.’ ‘The miracle stories happened.’ A lot of school districts portray this straightforwardly as history, confidently.”
Many of those hired to teach Bible classes, Dr. Chancey points out, are themselves ministers, trained in spreading the Gospel. Marvin McHargue, a former dean of a Baptist college in Dallas, will retire this spring after 12 years teaching high school Bible in Duncanville, Tex. In an interview on Wednesday, Mr. McHargue said he never forced religion on his students.
“Creation?” Mr. McHargue asked. “Well, the Bible says God did it. It’s not for me to tell the kids they have to believe it. I have never used coercion.”
He uses the King James Version of the Bible, which is beautifully written and beloved of evangelicals, but a poor translation from Hebrew and Greek. He also uses workbooks from the Moody Bible Institute, a conservative evangelical seminary in Chicago.
On crucial points of theology, Mr. McHargue seemed content with a conservative Protestant interpretation. For example, when asked if he taught that the New Testament “fulfilled” the prophecies in the Jewish book of Isaiah, he said that he did.
“Well, it does, as far as I’m concerned,” Mr. McHargue said.
But Jews, it was pointed out to him, do not believe that Isaiah’s teachings were fulfilled by Jesus. “In New York, they don’t,” he said, somewhat oddly.
Mrs. Hart, the hamantaschen maven of Eastland, said that Dr. Chancey, who never visited her class, got the wrong impression from the smattering of curricular materials she had sent him. For example, she said, she does show an evangelical documentary — but only a few seconds of it and only for some information on the Hebrew alphabet.
And when she talks about the Creation story in Genesis, she stresses that many religious people believe the six days are a metaphor for much longer epochs, and that many people do not believe the Bible story at all. She also said she uses many non-Christian readings, including the Koran.
Mrs. Hart is not, she said, just some small-town church lady.
“I go to First Baptist,” she said. “I wear a Pentecostal hairdo. I play the organ at the Episcopal church. When I could sing, I was the alto at Church of Christ. I have taught in a Catholic school. I am 77, and I am not a little old lady with a 15-year-old car that has 3,000 miles on it. I sky-dived last summer. I have a life, and I love this class.”
mark.e.oppenheimer@gmail.com; twitter: @markopp1
Congress uses secrecy to flush the Constitution down the toilet???
First the government used the "Interstate Commerce" clause of the Constitution to justify them doing anything under the sun.
Now the government is using the "it's secret" card to claim citizens can't sue the government for unconstitutional acts.
Sadly the Supreme Court is buying that line of BS, just like the Supreme Court bought the BS line of using the "Interstate Commerce" clause to justify the government doing anything under the sun.
Supreme Court rules out secret surveillance lawsuits
By David G. Savage, Washington Bureau
February 26, 2013, 6:50 p.m.
WASHINGTON — No one can sue the government over secret surveillance because, since it's secret, no one can prove his or her calls were intercepted, the Supreme Court ruled Tuesday, throwing out a constitutional challenge to the government's monitoring of international calls and emails.
The 5-4 decision is the latest of many that have shielded the government's anti-terrorism programs from court challenge, and a striking example of what civil libertarians call the Catch-22 rule that blocks challengers from collecting the evidence they need to proceed.
Over the last decade, the justices or lower court judges have repeatedly killed or quietly ended lawsuits that sought to expose or contest anti-terrorism programs, including secret wiretapping, roundups or arrests of immigrants from the Mideast and drone strikes that kill American citizens abroad.
The court's conservative majority believes that matters of national security and the fight against terrorism are properly decided by the president and Congress, not through lawsuits. They have erected procedural barriers to block such suits. The only exception has been lawsuits brought on behalf of the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, which have won new appeal rights for inmates.
The intense wiretapping of international electronic traffic began shortly after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. President George W. Bush was determined to detect secret terrorist plots, if possible, and ordered the National Security Agency to intercept calls and messages coming into and out of the country. Bush chose to bypass a special court created to oversee "foreign intelligence surveillance."
When Bush's order was revealed, civil libertarians called the mass surveillance unconstitutional. But Congress, with the support of Democrats and Republicans, approved even broader electronic surveillance in 2008. By law, the targets of that surveillance must be outside the United States, but lawmakers acknowledged that calls and messages of some Americans would be inadvertently intercepted.
Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and other groups began a new challenge, suing on behalf of lawyers, journalists and human rights advocates. They argued the expanded surveillance was unconstitutional because it would chill free speech and permit illegal searches of "purely domestic communications."
They won a preliminary victory when the U.S. 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals in New York said they had standing to sue. Because the plaintiffs had clients and contacts abroad, they had a "reasonable fear" their calls would be intercepted, the appeals court said.
The Obama administration appealed last year, and the Supreme Court tossed out the suit Tuesday in the case of Clapper vs. Amnesty International.
Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. said the lawsuit was based on speculation, not evidence of how the program worked. The plaintiffs "have no actual knowledge of the government's targeted practices. Instead, [they] merely speculate and make assumptions," he said. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Antonin Scalia, Anthony M. Kennedy and Clarence Thomas joined his opinion.
Alito cited the Supreme Court's strict rules on standing, which hold that a case cannot go forward unless a complaining party can show he or she has suffered an "actual or imminent" injury. Alito said that this approach prevented judges from "usurping the powers of the political branches" of government.
In dissent, the court's four liberal justices said the lawsuit should have gone forward because the plaintiffs had to alter their work practices to avoid having their confidential calls overheard. "In my view, this harm is not 'speculative,'" Justice Stephen G. Breyer said.
The PEN American Center, which represents writers, called it a "Kafkaesque holding.... The U.S. government is running a secret program that monitors people. In order to challenge the legality of the program, the court's majority says you have to show that you're being monitored. You can't show this, of course, because the program is secret," said Peter Godwin, the group's president.
Jameel Jaffer, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union, called the decision disturbing. It "insulates the statute from meaningful judicial review and leaves Americans' privacy rights to the mercy of the political branches."
But a lawyer for six former U.S. attorneys general applauded the decision. It "sends a clear message that politically motivated litigation over national security is untenable," said Megan L. Brown, a Washington attorney who represented them. The courts should not "second-guess" the president and Congress on "sensitive national issues," she said.
david.savage@latimes.com
Inmate sues Will County Jail over non-kosher food
By Dennis Sullivan Special to the Tribune
12:06 p.m. CST, March 2, 2013
A 24-year-old man linked to a series of Chicago-area burglaries that targeted elderly residents has filed a federal lawsuit against the Will County Adult Detention Facility alleging his civil rights were violated in 2012 while he was being held on a charge of burglarizing a New Lenox home.
Sal V. Auditore, whose recent residences include Carol Stream, Joliet and Mesa, Ariz., alleges the food he was served from Sept. 15 to Oct. 15 either used pork for the main dish or featured side dishes that hadn't been prepared according to kosher rules.
Auditore claims in the suit filed on Jan. 23 that he previously had informed staff he was Jewish and required the special diet. The suit claims jail officials typically ignored his objections to the non-kosher food he was served, however, one corrections officer allegedly responded: "I don't care about your religion. If you don't like it, don't eat it."
Auditore is seeking actual, compensatory and punitive damages and has requested a jury trial.
Ken Kaupas, spokesman for the Will County sheriff's office, declined to comment, citing department policy on lawsuits.
Will County Circuit Court records show Auditore was sentenced to four years in prison on Feb. 8 after pleading guilty to burglarizing a New Lenox home in June 2010.
In August 2010, Auditore and an accomplice were charged in Cook County in connection with a series of ruse entries and thefts involving seniors.
The charge alleges he and the other man targeted three senior residents of an assisted living center in Palos Park, gaining entry to their homes by saying they were working on a high school project and needed help.
Sheriff's police said they "would talk about the project, then one would ask to use the restroom, and proceed to steal money, checks, credit cards and other items."
Of course I am an atheist and to me this is nothing but superstitious rubbish.
Underworld saint becoming more popular in U.S.
Associated Press Mon Mar 4, 2013 2:51 PM
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — A follower in New Orleans built a public shrine in her honor. An actor in Albuquerque credits her with helping him land a role on the TV show “Breaking Bad.” She turns up routinely along the U.S.-Mexico border at safe houses, and is sighted on dashboards of cars used to smuggle methamphetamine through the southwest desert.
Clad in a black nun’s robe and holding a scythe in one hand, Santa Muerte appeals to people seeking all manner of otherworldly help: from fending off wrongdoing and carrying out vengeance to stopping lovers from cheating and landing better jobs. And others seek her protection for their drug shipments and to ward off law enforcement.
“Her growth in the United States has been extraordinary,” said Andrew Chesnut, author of “Devoted to Death: Santa Muerte, the Skeleton Saint” and the Bishop Walter F. Sullivan Chair in Catholic Studies at Virginia Commonwealth University. “Because you can ask her for anything, she has mass appeal and is now gaining a diverse group of followers throughout the country. She’s the ultimate multi-tasker.”
Exact numbers of her followers are impossible to determine, but they are clearly growing, Chesnut said.
The saint is especially popular among Mexican-American Catholics, rivaling that of St. Jude and La Virgen de Guadalupe as a favorite for miracle requests, even as the Catholic Church in Mexico denounces Santa Muerte as satanic, experts say.
Her image has been used on prayers cards citing vengeance and protection, which are sometimes found at scenes of massacred bodies and on shipments of drugs.
U.S. Marshal Robert Almonte in West Texas said he has testified about La Santa Muerte in at least five drug trafficking cases where her image aided prosecutors with convictions. Last year, Almonte testified that a Santa Muerte statue prayer card, found with a kilogram of methamphetamine in a couple’s car in New Mexico, were “tools of the trade” for drug traffickers to protect them from law enforcement. The testimony was used to help convict the couple of drug trafficking.
Almonte has visited shrines throughout Mexico, and given workshops to law enforcement agencies on the cult of the saint.
“Criminals pray to La Santa Muerte to protect them from law enforcement,” Almonte said. “But there are good people who pray to her who aren’t involved in any criminal activity so we have to be careful.”
Devotees say La Santa Muerte has helped them find love, find better jobs and launch careers.
Gregory Beasley Jr., 35, believes he landed acting roles on “Breaking Bad” and the 2008 movie “Linewatch” after a traditional Mexican-American healer introduced him to La Santa Muerte.
“All my success … I owe to her,” he said. “She cleansed me and showed me the way.”
Some devotees pray to the saint by building altars and offering votive candles, fruits, tequila, cigarettes — even lines of cocaine in some cases — in exchange for wishes, Chesnut said. A red La Santa Muerte, her best-selling image, helps in matters of love. Gold ones aid with employment and white ones give protection. Meanwhile, a black Santa Muerte can provide vengeance.
“She’s my queen,” said Arely Vazquez Gonzalez, a Mexican immigrant and transgender woman who oversees a large altar inside her Queens, New York apartment. Against one wall of her bedroom altar is a tall, sitting Santa Muerte statue in a black dress surrounded by offerings of tequila.
Gonzalez, who sports a tattoo of La Santa Muerte on her back, holds an annual event in August in the saint’s honor, with mariachis and a feast.
“All I have to do I ask for her guidance and she provides me with what I need,” she said.
The origins of La Santa Muerte are unclear. Some followers say she is an incarnation of an Aztec goddess of death who ruled the underworld. Some scholars say she originated in medieval Spain through the image of La Parca, a female Grim Reaper, who was used by friars for the later evangelization of indigenous populations in the Americas.
For decades, though, La Santa Muerte remained an underground figure in isolated regions of Mexico and served largely as an unofficial Catholic saint that women called upon to help with cheating spouses, Chesnut said.
It wasn’t until 2001 when a devotee unveiled a public La Santa Muerte shrine in Mexico City that followers in greater numbers began to display their devotion for helping them with relationships and loved ones in prison. Economic uncertainty and a violent drug war against cartels that has claimed an estimated 40,000 lives also are credited for La Santa Muerte’s growth.
Oscar Hagelsieb, assistant special agent in charge for Homeland Security Investigations in El Paso, said agents have found that most members of the Gulf and Zeta Cartels mainly pray to Santa Muerte while those from the Sinaloa and Sonora Cartels honor folk saint Jesus Malverde.
“Altars are very intricate. We have found some with food and others with blood from animals,” Hagelsieb said.
The association with cartels and denunciations by some priests has resulted in some non-devotees destroying makeshift roadside altars. Recently, assailants smashed a life-size statue of La Santa Muerte in a South Texas cemetery. Police in Pasadena, California, recently found human bones at a home with a Santa Muerte altar outside. The owners say they bought the bones online.
But the vast majority of devotees aren’t crooks.
Kiko Torres, owner of the Masks y Mas art store in Albuquerque, said sales of La Santa Muerte statues, incense, and oils have skyrocketed in recent months.
“Most people who buy the stuff are regular people who just recently found out about her,” he said. “Some probably have no idea about her connection to that other world.”
One such devotee is Steven Bragg, 36, who said he was introduced to La Santa Muerte in 2009 and began praying to her for a variety of different reasons, including a plea for a life companion. Recently, the New Orleans man built a public chapel to her and holds rosary services that attract around a dozen people.
He also just formed a nonprofit to support the “New Orleans Chapel of the Santisima Muerte,” the official name of his public altar.
“It’s something I decided to do after all that La Santa Muerte has provided,” Bragg said. “She has never failed me.”
New Charges Against Alleged Christian Mingle Rapist
LA MESA — New charges involving two different alleged victims have been filed against a man accused of sexually assaulting a woman he met through the dating website ChristianMingle.com.
Sean Patrick Banks, 37, a former lieutenant in the U.S. Navy, is charged with the alleged rape of an intoxicated person, as well as a separate incident where he allegedly tried to dissuade a witness from talking to police.
The alleged assault happened in November at the home of a woman, who Banks met on the website using the name ‘Rarity.’
Now, a second woman has come forward claiming she narrowly escaped becoming his next victim.
“I want other women out there to know they should come forward,” said Victoria Kinney, a former Miss Irvine.
He and Kinney never met but talked by phone a handful of times.
Banks told her he was arrested, but not guilty.
“He said he’d been arrested for rape, that the police were saying that’s his MO and it wasn’t true,” she said.
Kinney said she went to police, and that’s when Banks started harassing her with threats and intimidation.
Police say they later learned that Banks used other names on the dating site, including Rarity, Rylan, Rylan Butterwood and Rylan Harbough.
The number of aliases led investigators to suspect that Banks may have assaulted other women, and may have used other dating sites under additional false names.
Banks is being held without bail pending a review hearing Wednesday. If convicted, he faces 44 years to life in prison.
Anyone with information is urged to call the La Mesa Police Department, Detective Scott at (619) 667-7538.
I guess this means that Black, Mexican, Latino and woman who work for the Phoenix PD are no longer being discriminated against???
And of course the Blacks, Mexicans, Latinos and women who work for the Phoenix PD have become so powerful that White, male cops are being discriminated against???
Just joking, but I bet that is how the police union feels.
I have heard the same story from Christians who
are complaining about religious discrimination.
These Christian nut jobs who are probably around
90 percent of the population say they are being discriminated
by atheists who are 10 percent of the population and
who are demanding that the First Amendment be honored
and that religion and government be kept separate.
Of course the real question here isn't why are White,
male Phoenix police officers being discriminated against,
but why the hell is Phoenix wasting our tax dollars sending
Phoenix police officers to Washington D.C. to police the
presidential inauguration????
I suspect this is just a 100 percent free paid vacation paid for
by the tax payers of Phoenix for all these Phoenix cops that
went to Washington D.C. for this pork trip.
Letter of concern placed in 2 police supervisors’ files
By Cecilia Chan The Arizona Republic-12 News
Breaking News Team Wed Mar 6, 2013 9:11 AM
Phoenix administrators have determined that two high-ranking police supervisors discriminated against White officers when they chose women and minorities to work the presidential inauguration.
City leaders placed a “letter of concern” in the supervisors’ personnel files, but the union that represents 2,500 rank-and-file officers say the discipline measure falls short.
Five White officers logged a complaint in October with the city Equal Opportunity Department, saying the selection process using race and gender unfairly excluded them.
The department investigation concluded that Assistant Chief Tracy Montgomery and Cmdr. Geary Brase violated the city’s administrative regulation that prohibits discrimination based on factors including race, color, religion, gender and age.
“Using race, national origin and gender for the selection process was not appropriate,” the investigative report states.
Police spokesman Sgt. Trent Crump said neither Montgomery nor Brase will comment.
EOD director Lionel Lyons and Assistant City Manager Ed Zuercher, point out that because the Police Department re-selected the team based on seniority prior to the inauguration, no harm was done to the White officers.
Four women and five minority men made up the original group from the patrol division's Neighborhood Enforcement Team. Three White men were picked as alternates. The new team included one woman, six White men and a Hispanic man.
Four of the five officers who filed the grievance made the trip to the nation’s capital in January for a four-day security detail, which included traffic control. One officer lacked the seniority to qualify for the assignment.
“I’m very disappointed in the outcome,” Joe Clure, president of the Phoenix Law Enforcement Association, said of the discipline. “It’s a complete failure, not holding folks accountable to policy.”
Clure had asked the city for an independent investigation, which was not done.
Clure said although four of the complaining officers served on the inaugural detail, it doesn’t excuse the fact that they “were discriminated against and suffered indignation by having to file a grievance.”
Clure said the city also should have investigated Chief Daniel Garcia because he requested the inaugural detail reflect diversity.
In a memo, Lyons said Garcia’s directive was not discriminatory because diversity is one of the city’s core values. He also said Montgomery and Brase could have used “legitimate non-discriminatory methods” to accomplish Garcia’s goal.
Zuercher, who oversees the Police Department, credited Garcia with scrapping “the flawed selection method” and directing staff to re-select the team.
“As a result, the selection was in conformance with city policy and no officers' rights were harmed in the assignment to the inaugural detail,” Zuercher said Thursday. “Additionally, the chief consulted with the assistant chief and the commander and removed them from the detail assignment.”
Taking all that into account, Zuercher said he issued the letter of concern. He said he also consulted with the city’s human-resources director on the appropriate level of discipline.
“A letter of concern is within city policy,” Zuercher said. “It is a record of supervisory counseling. It puts in writing the discussion with an employee that an action has happened that should be corrected.”
Zuercher said the letter stays in an employee's file for one year. Garcia, who acknowledged that he could have better monitored the selection process, also received a letter of concern.
The five officers who filed the complaint can pursue the issue with the Arizona Attorney General’s Office and and U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
Clure said he was unsure of the officers’ intentions. Attempts to reach the officers for comment were not successful.
Clure said the supervisors should have gone before the Police Department’s Disciplinary Review Board, composed of citizens, peer employees and police commanders who review cases of serious misconduct.
Clure points to the Police Department’s disciplinary policy that stipulates that supervisors found in violation of equal-employment opportunity regulations face suspension without pay.
However, Crump said the process was handled by the EOD and city management, not the Police Department.
Crump also said the investigative report was sent to the Professional Standards Bureau, the department’s internal affairs unit that reviews and investigates officers’ conduct.
“It was sent to them for review,” Crump said. “There is no action being taken on their part.”
Clure said the city “wants to play it off as nothing happened and that no harm had occurred.”
“I disagree,” Clure said. “There was reputational harm to the department and the city” and the officers felt humiliated.
Clure said he plans to press the issue with the mayor and City Council.
He said if city leaders fail to do anything, it will send a wrong message to rank-and-file officers, that there are two standards, one for them and one for upper management.
A total of 40 Phoenix police officers went to Washington, including those from the chief's office, the Gang Enforcement Unit, the Major Offender Unit and the Downtown Operations Unit.
Of course any sane person knows that it's YOUR body
and YOU should be the one to decide if you are going
to have an abortion, not some government nanny in
Little Rock or Washington D.C.
Arkansas adopts U.S.’s most restrictive abortion law
Associated Press Wed Mar 6, 2013 9:24 PM
LITTLE ROCK, Arkansas — Lawmakers in the southern state of Arkansas passed on Wednesday the most restrictive abortion law in the United States — a near-ban on the procedure from the 12th week of pregnancy onward that is certain to end up in court.
A day after the Republican-led state Senate voted to override Democratic Gov. Mike Beebe’s veto, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives voted to do the same. Only a simple majority was needed in each chamber.
The 56-33 vote comes less than a week after the Legislature overrode a veto of a separate bill banning most abortions starting in the 20th week of pregnancy. That bill took effect immediately after the final override vote, whereas the 12-week ban wouldn’t take effect until this summer.
Abortion rights proponents have already said they’ll sue to block the 12-week ban from taking effect. Beebe warned lawmakers that both measures are likely to fail in court and that the state would end up wasting money defending them if they became law.
So far, other recent attempts to similarly restrict abortion in other states have fallen short.
In Mississippi state, voters rejected a so-called “personhood amendment” at the polls. In Ohio, a similar measure was defeated in the legislature, but they represent a growing trend in conservative states to chip away at abortion rights under the Supreme Court’s landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling that legalized abortion until a fetus could viably survive outside the womb. A fetus is generally considered viable at 22 to 24 weeks.
Beebe rejected both measures for the same reasons, saying they were unconstitutional.
The measures’ supporters, who expected court challenges, were undaunted.
“Not the governor, nor anyone else other than the courts, can determine if something is constitutional or unconstitutional,” Rep. Bruce Westerman, said in urging his colleagues to override Beebe.
Bill sponsor Sen. Jason Rapert, watched the vote from the House gallery and said a number of law firms have offered to help the state defend the laws in court, if it comes to that.
“The Arkansas Legislature has once again disregarded women’s health care and passed the most extreme anti-women’s health bill in the country,” said Jill June, the CEO of Planned Parenthood of the Heartland. “With this bill, the Arkansas Legislature will force many women to seek unsafe care.”
The 12-week ban would prohibit abortions from the point when a fetus’ heartbeat can typically be detected using an abdominal ultrasound. It includes exemptions for rape, incest, the life of the mother and highly lethal fetal disorders. The 20-week prohibition, which is based on the disputed claim that a fetus can feel pain by the 20th week and therefore deserves protection from abortion, includes all of the same exemptions except for fetal disorders.
Six Democrats joined with Republicans in voting to override the veto of the 12-week ban. Last week, only two Democrats voted to override the veto of the 20-week ban.
In vetoing both measures, Beebe has cited the costs to the state if it has to defend either ban in court. The American Civil Liberties Union of Arkansas has vowed to sue if the state enacts the 12-week ban and the group said it was considering legal action over the 20-week restriction as well.
“I think today, for whatever reason, the Arkansas House turned its back on the women of Arkansas and said we don’t think you’re capable of making your own decisions,” said Rita Sklar, ACLU of Arkansas’ executive director. Sklar said the group planned to file suit in federal court in the next couple weeks.
The original version of Rapert’s bill would have banned abortions as early as six weeks into a pregnancy, but he changed the measure after facing resistance from some lawmakers worried that it would require the use of a vaginal probe.
Women who have abortions would not face prosecution under Rapert’s bill, but doctors who perform abortions in violation of the 12-week ban could have their medical licenses revoked.
———
Follow Andrew DeMillo on Twitter at www.twitter.com/ademillo
Of course the cops will use any lame excuse to justify their actions,
and that excuse is always that it making it safer for the children
or some other lame excuse along those lines.
I suspect the reals reason for this is to make the police less accountable for their actions and prevent the public from knowing bad things the police do.
As the cops say when they question us, we must have something to hide if
we exercise our constitutional rights take the 5th Amendment and refuse to
answer police questions.
So I suspect the police have something to hide from the public if they want to
make their radio transmissions secret.
Phoenix to shield police radio traffic
Officials: Rise in listeners jeopardizing crime scenes
By JJ Hensley The Republic | azcentral.com Thu Mar 7, 2013 11:25 PM
When Mike Ormandy was growing up in Indiana in the 1970s, it was not uncommon for the adults to gather at a home on a weekend evening to play cards and have a few drinks with an odd soundtrack in the background: police-scanner traffic.
The sounds of static and police-radio transmissions infected Ormandy with the scanner bug, and he brought it with him to Arizona, where he invested in high-powered antennas and radios to capture the sounds of emergency responders communicating in the field.
The proliferation of websites and smartphone applications that stream police-radio traffic to hundreds of thousands of users, and a handful of recent instances in which scanner listeners have beaten police to crime scenes, are threatening what Ormandy and others view as a hobby — one that is as much about public safety as it is about infotainment.
“It’s kind of nice for safety reasons to know when there’s something major going on. ... I think it keeps officers honest, and I really think the public listening allows them to have a respect for the kind of danger these guys face every day,” Ormandy said.
“Police want you to share what you see and not get involved. That’s where the smartphone users get it wrong. From what I’ve found, the biggest culprit is people listening on smartphones and hearing something big going on and running out to the scene.”
Phoenix police last month decided to encrypt emergency police-radio traffic related to crimes in progress, a move that will reduce by about 18 percent the agency’s scanner traffic audible to the public, said Sgt. Trent Crump, a department spokesman.
The decision for Phoenix to encrypt more dispatch calls and conversations between officers comes after recent incidents:
About an hour after a Jan. 30 office shooting in central Phoenix, police broadcast over their radios the address of a possible suspect’s home.
The information was picked up by media outlets and others monitoring scanners, and some posted the address on social-media sites. Media crews and others arrived at the home before police tactical teams could get there, Crump said, setting up to wait for the shooter, Arthur Harmon.
Police believe media coverage of his home may have caused Harmon to flee as he was on his way there, spurring a manhunt that ended the following morning when he was discovered dead in a Mesa parking lot. However, evidence found in Harmon’s rental car, including cash, hygiene products and clothes, could indicate that he had intended to go on the run after his carefully planned murders.
On Feb. 8, police responded to a home-invasion call in west Phoenix where the suspects turned out to be juveniles, including a 16-year-old boy who was fatally shot by the homeowner. Police broadcast information about the suspects, including the school they attended, over their radios, prompting some media members to go to the school and attempt to interview students and staff even before investigators had arrived, Crump said.
On Feb. 11, police broadcast information about tactical positions and response plans as they closed in on a man suspected of robbing more than a dozen pharmacies and grocery stores, potentially jeopardizing their ability to capture the “Calligraphy Bandit,” Crump said. Tomas Garcia-Mancinas was arrested without incident. That day, police administrators made the decision to move more calls to encrypted channels, Crump said.
The California manhunt for fugitive ex-police officer Christopher Dorner brought the issue into sharp focus nationally on Feb. 12, after police were reportedly heard on radios discussing plans to burn the cabin Dorner was hiding in. A California sheriff later denied that the fire was intentionally set and said police used pyrotechnic tear gas called “burners” in an attempt to flush Dorner from the cabin.
“I think a lot of police agencies looked at that in horror realizing that this website Radio Reference had their agency on a worldwide Internet feed,” Ormandy said. “The natural response is to go ahead and encrypt it and keep it all secret.”
Crump said the Phoenix police decision was simply about safety for officers and the public.
“There are several large agencies across the nation that have gone completely encrypted, and more agencies are going in this direction because of the low cost and the ease for suspects to (otherwise) have this access,” he said.
The digital system that opened up a host of new radio channels for Phoenix police and fire agencies and allowed for easy encryption was part of a $120 million upgrade in 2004.
Other Valley cities acquired similar systems at the same time, and many took advantage of the new technology to begin securing calls on crimes in progress, conversations between detectives and tactical calls on private frequencies.
It was a sign of things to come.
“Back when they had the old system and you could put an antenna up and hear basically everything that happened — detectives doing surveillance, car-to-car stuff — I’m sure they longed for the day when they had more security,” Ormandy said.
Phoenix initially followed the lead of other agencies and encrypted those same calls at the time, Crump said, but it opened up some calls shortly after. Still, a lot has changed in the past nine years, he said.
“A scanner used to sit on a desktop and have an antenna on the roof. Now, everyone is on the move with us with their smartphone,” Crump said. “Those that we’re fighting against have the same access.”
Lindsay Blanton, founder and president of a company that broadcasts police-radio traffic over the Internet, wrote on his website that police arguments about emerging technology interfering with their work have been around for decades.
“In the ’90s, when an agency did go encrypted and members of the media and public complained, the standard response from the agencies was, ‘Hey, any criminal can go down to Radio Shack and purchase a scanner to listen to all our comms,’” Blanton wrote. “Now, that argument has just shifted to ‘Anyone with a smartphone can.’”
But as emerging technology threatens to close one door that allowed public access to what police are doing on a day-to-day basis, it will likely open others, though the access won’t be as instant as scanners.
Police departments in Phoenix, Mesa, Surprise and Peoria are among the agencies testing or implementing digital cameras that officers wear to record virtually everything an officer does during a shift.
And police-scanner traffic will still be available several weeks or months after most incidents through Arizona’s Public Records Law.
“Everything techwise has gotten more and more efficient for the user. But by the same token, we can’t have it jeopardizing our work,” Crump said. “This doesn’t eliminate transparency. You can still ask for any radio tape you want.”
But when you look at how our government masters actually operate, it looks more like they consider themselves royal rulers who have a God given right to micromanage our lives and steal our money.
In this article it sounds like these royal rulers are attempt to change the recall process making it more difficult for us serfs to recall them.
This law also seems to be an attempt by our royal rulers to prevent us from recalling Sheriff Joe,
or to help Sheriff Joe get reelected if he is recalled.
Arizona recall bill could aid targeted politicians
By Mary Jo Pitzl The Republic | azcentral.com Fri Mar 8, 2013 12:44 AM
Arizona’s recall elections would take on a partisan cast that could help the targeted politician survive under a bill approved by the state House of Representatives on Thursday.
According to its critics, House Bill 2282 also could cut a break to Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who is the target of an ongoing recall drive. A last-minute amendment would make the changes retroactive to Jan.1, which would cover the period within which the Arpaio recall was launched.
The bill would carve out a primary and general election from the recall process, which currently consists of a single election in which all candidates compete and all voters cast ballots.
Most political observers believe the two-step process would help the recalled official, since a primary election could clear out the challenger most likely to appeal to voters from all parties. For example, former Senate President Russell Pearce, R-Mesa, lost in a 2011 recall election to a more moderate Republican who had Republican and Democratic support. It was widely believed a Democrat could not defeat him, given the political makeup of his legislative district.
Republican lawmakers argued the bill simply makes recall elections mirror the same process by which other candidate elections are conducted.
Rep. John Kavanagh, R-Fountain Hills, who added the retroactive clause, said the failure last fall of the single-primary ballot measure only reinforces the argument for the bill. Proposition 121 would have scrapped partisan primaries and made all candidates compete in the same election, regardless of party. Voters rejected it by a ratio of 2 to 1.
“This is just an extension of that mandate,” Kavanagh said.
But Democrats argued the framers of Arizona’s Constitution carefully considered the issue and decided a single recall election was needed.
That’s because in a recall election, voters are deliberating whether to retain a given politician, and not doing a rerun of a candidate vs. candidate competition, said Rep. Andrew Sherwood, D-Tempe.
“It is sufficiently difficult to recall an official,” he said, noting only one lawmaker — former Senate President Pearce — has been recalled in the state’s 101 years. There’s no need to change the process, he said.
Besides, the bill doesn’t address what would happen if the recalled official loses in a primary, Sherwood said. Would that person’s name advance to the general election ballot, so all voters could decide? If so, isn’t that what the recall system does already? he asked.
Rep. Steve Smith, R-Maricopa, introduced the bill this year after seeing it fail to become law last year. In 2012, the bill passed both the House and Senate, but foundered in a conference committee, where lawmakers tried to reconcile differences in their respective versions of the bill.
This year’s version passed the House on a 36-23 party-line vote, with Republicans in support and Democrats opposed. It now moves to the Senate for consideration.
Reach the reporter at 602-444-8963.
Google says the FBI is spying on some of you
By Chris Gayomali | The Week
For millions of Americans, Google is the fabric that weaves the various threads of our digital lives together: Gmail, Gchat, Google Voice, search queries, YouTube, Maps, Chrome — you name it. So it shouldn't really come as a surprise that the Federal Bureau of Investigation has repeatedly tapped the tech company for otherwise-private information concerning a small percentage of Google's users.
But let's put it more plainly: The FBI has been spying on some of you.
In a new Transparency Report announced in an official blog post, Google has released previously unseen information about the number of National Security Letters (NSLs) it has received from the FBI in the past couple of years. According to Wired, these letters "allow the government to get detailed information on Americans' finances and communications without oversight from a judge." Needless to say, the FBI sends NSLs out all the time — hundreds of thousands of them, in fact — to internet service providers, banks, credit companies, and other businesses. Unsurprisingly, organizations like the American Civil Liberties Union have accused the FBI of abusing the letters' power post-9/11.
Until recently, it's been unlawful for a company to disclose when it has received an NSL. Now, thanks to a new deal with the Obama administration, Google is able to publish a broad range of instances in which it has received such FBI requests.
The table below provides a range of how many National Security Letters (NSLs) we've received and a range of how many of the uers/accounts were specified each year since 2009. For more information about NSLs, please refer to our FAQ. These ranges are not included in the total sum of user data requests that we report biannually
As you can see, Google says it receives between 0 and 999 NSLs from the government each year. In 2009, those letters contained requests asking for information concerning between 1,000 and 1,999 users/accounts. In 2010, the FBI was slightly busier — 2,000 to 2,999 different users/accounts were requested. Then in 2011 and 2012, that range dipped back down.
The search giant doesn't comply with every NSL it receives, and claims to carefully vet each request. "We review it carefully and only provide information within the scope and authority of the request," writes Google. "We may refuse to produce information or try to narrow the request in some cases." Google also says that the standard practice is to notify users when an NSL has been received concerning them, although the FBI has the power to nullify the disclosure if it may result in "a danger to the national security of the United States, interference with a criminal, counterterrorism, or counterintelligence investigation, interference with diplomatic relations, or danger to the life or physical safety of any person."
You can read Google's Transparency Report for yourself
here.
And it's worth remembering: The FBI and other government agencies can still access your email without a warrant as long as the information been stored on a third-party server for 180 days or more (per a convoluted and terribly antiquated 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act). A new email and phone tracking bill introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives yesterday seeks to make it harder for authorities to snoop around without a judge's order.
Holder letter ignites new debate on drones
By Richard A. Serrano, Washington Bureau
March 6, 2013, 7:07 p.m.
WASHINGTON — Can the president legally order a drone strike to kill an American on U.S. soil?
Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr. wrote this week in a letter to Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) that he could envision "an extraordinary circumstance in which it would be necessary and appropriate" to use such lethal force.
Those words touched off a heated debate Wednesday in the Senate over when and where the president can order the killing of U.S. citizens designated as "enemy combatants."
President Obama and his aides have said that targeted killings of Americans must be governed by some due process. But they have resisted public disclosure of their rules. Until this week, the administration had refused to allow even members of the Senate Intelligence Committee to read most of the legal opinions that justified the one known drone killing of an American, the attack on Anwar Awlaki in 2011 in Yemen.
The debate burst into public view on Capitol Hill. On the Senate floor, Paul filibustered the nomination of John Brennan to be the new director of the CIA, imploring colleagues to join him in criticizing Obama for refusing to rule out the use of lethal force against terrorism suspects in this country. Brennan has been a chief architect and defender of the administration's drone program.
"Are we so complacent with our rights that we would allow a president to say he might kill Americans?" Paul asked. "No one person, no one politician should be allowed … to judge the guilt of an individual and to execute an individual. It goes against everything we fundamentally believe in our country."
Paul showed no sign of giving up, holding the floor for more than eight hours and continuing to talk into the night. He demanded a public promise from the White House to never target drones against Americans in the United States. Paul said that he was not objecting to the use of lethal force to repel an attack, but that the administration was claiming a far broader power.
"Do we want martial law in this country?" Paul asked, mocking the claim that the entire world could be considered a battlefield in the war against Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups. "The hell this is a battlefield! This is our country."
"If there was an ounce of courage in this body, I would be joined by others in telling the president that no president has the authority to kill Americans without trial," Paul declared to a near-empty chamber. As the afternoon wore on, his words appeared to have had an effect, as several Republican colleagues and Democrat Ron Wyden of Oregon joined the filibuster, delaying a final vote on Brennan's nomination at least until Thursday.
Simultaneously, Holder was testifying to the Senate Judiciary Committee, where senators tried to pin him down about the limits of the power the government was claiming.
In his letter, Holder had said he hoped "no president will ever have to confront" the need to order the killing of an American on U.S. soil.
But, he added, "it is possible, I suppose, to imagine an extraordinary circumstance in which it would be necessary and appropriate under the Constitution and applicable laws for the president to authorize the military to use lethal force within the territory of the United States." He mentioned the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001, as a possible example.
That explanation did not satisfy several members of the committee. The letter "raises many questions for citizens on when the government can kill them," said Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa). Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) demanded to know what in the Constitution gives the president or anyone else the power to kill an American terrorist suspect "sitting quietly in a cafe in the U.S." who at that time is not posing an immediate threat.
After initially saying only that killing a suspect in that sort of circumstance would not be "appropriate," Holder eventually told Cruz that such an attack would not be constitutional. He also said that he expected Obama to speak more publicly about the issue soon. "I think there is a greater need for transparency —a greater need for appropriately sharing information — and we are struggling with how to do that, but it is something that the president feels strongly about," he said.
Although Republicans asked most of the questions, the issue did not break down cleanly on partisan lines.
Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) applauded the administration's drones policy. "In every war we've had, unfortunately, American citizens have sided with the enemy. They've been few in number, but that does happen," he said.
A battery of Patriot missiles now guards the U.S. Capitol against attack, he noted. "Let's go back in time," he said. "What would we all give to have those Patriot missile batteries available" on Sept. 11?
Using them to blow up one of the airliners aimed at the World Trade Center or the Pentagon "would have meant that we would have lost a planeload of American citizens, but we'd save thousands more. That's the world in which we live in," Graham said.
"I want to stand by you and the president to make sure that we don't criminalize the war and that the commander in chief continues to have the authority to protect us all," he told Holder. "And I've got a lot of my colleagues who are well-meaning, but there is only one commander in chief in our Constitution."
Holder, appearing uncomfortable before the committee, repeatedly told its members that his letter merely dealt with the unlikely possibility of an extreme event. He emphasized that there was no plan to broaden the administration's drone program to aim at targets inside the U.S.
"It's hard for me to imagine a situation where that would occur," he said.
Finding and isolating terrorists abroad is much harder than in the U.S., often making capturing a suspect impractical, he said. In the U.S. many law enforcement tools exist that allow officials to capture suspects without killing them.
"Thus the use of drones is entirely, entirely hypothetical" for this country, he said.
Holder added, "The government has no intention to carry out any drone strikes in the United States."
richard.serrano@latimes.com
Michael A. Memoli of the Washington Bureau contributed to this report.
More of the old "Do as I say, not as I do" from our government masters???
Our royal government rulers and bureaucrats like former Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and astronaut Mark Kelly seem to think it's OK for them to have guns, but want to prevent the rest of us serfs from having guns.
Sorry guys, but I am sure the reason the Founders created the Second Amendment was to allow us serfs to protect ourselves from royal government rulers.
Giffords' husband buys assault weapon to make point
By Catalina Camia USA Today Mon Mar 11, 2013 1:54 PM
Retired astronaut Mark Kelly, husband of former congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, recently purchased an assault weapon to make a point about the ease of background checks for gun owners.
Kelly posted on his Facebook page on Friday that he bought an AR-15, one of the 157 military-style weapons that would be banned under a bill pending before the Senate Judiciary Committee. The panel is set to consider three gun bills Tuesday, including the proposed assault weapons ban authored by Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif.
"Even to buy an assault weapon, the background check only takes a few minutes," Kelly said. "Scary to think of people buying guns like these without a background check at a gun show or the Internet. We really need to close the gun show and private seller loophole."
Kelly, who is also a retired Navy captain, and Giffords are both gun owners who have been outspoken about the need for new gun-control measures. Americans for Responsible Solutions, their super PAC, has been running ads featuring Giffords that tout the proposed assault weapons ban and universal background checks.
Kelly said on his Facebook page that he plans to give the AR-15 to the Tucson Police Department when he receives the weapon.
Giffords was shot in the head January 2011 in a Tucson rampage that left six people dead. President Obama and others have been pushing for new gun legislation in the wake of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Newtown, Conn., in December that left 20 students and six of their educators dead.
Like lie detector tests I suspect getting a doped up person to talk MIGHT uncover some truths, but I also suspect that like a lie detector test the results are pretty unreliable.
'Truth serum' may be used to assess Holmes' sanity, court says
By Dan Elliott and P. Solomon Banda, The Associated Press
Posted: 03/12/2013 09:29:49 AM PDT
DENVER -- The defendant in the deadly Colorado theater shooting could be given "truth serum" under a court order issued Monday to help determine whether he is insane if he pleads not guilty by reason of insanity.
Suspect James Holmes could be required to submit to a "narcoanalytic interview" as part of an evaluation to determine if he was legally insane at the time of the July 20 shootings, Arpahoe County District Judge William Sylvester said.
A narcoanalylitic interview is a decades-old process in which patients are given drugs to lower their inhibition. Academic studies have shown that the technique has involved the use of sodium amytal and pentothal, sometimes called truth serum.
The prospect of such interviews that may ensue under such a plea alarmed defense attorneys, who filed documents opposing the technique.
Holmes, 25, is scheduled to enter a plea Tuesday to multiple counts of murder and attempted murder. He is charged with killing 12 people and injuring 70 at a midnight showing of "The Dark Knight Rises" in the Denver suburb of Aurora.
If Holmes pleads not guilty by reason of insanity, he would be examined by doctors at the state mental hospital.
In an advisory that Holmes would have to sign if he enters an insanity plea, Sylvester didn't specify what type of drugs would be used but said the examination could include "medically appropriate" ones.
Sylvester said Holmes also could be given
a polygraph examination as part of the evaluation.
After reading a draft of the advisory, Holmes' lawyers objected, saying a narcoanalytic interview and a polygraph would violate their client's rights.
In the final version of the advisory, Sylvester said he had incorporated some suggestions from the defense and the prosecution, but he did not address the defense objections to a narcoanalytic interview and polygraph.
Karen Steinhauser, a former prosecutor who is a law professor at the University of Denver and a defense attorney, said she could not find any case law about use of the narcoanalytic interview.
"It comes up so rarely," she said, adding she knows nothing about it.
She noted the technique is clearly allowed by Colorado law.
------
Associated Press writer Nicholas Riccardi contributed to this report
Last survivor of plot to kill Hitler dies at 90
By David Rising Associated Press Tue Mar 12, 2013 12:48 PM
BERLIN — As a 22-year-old German army lieutenant, Ewald-Heinrich von Kleist volunteered to wear a suicide vest to a meeting with Adolf Hitler and to blow himself up along with the Nazi dictator.
The assassination didn’t come to pass, but von Kleist went on to play a key role in the most famous attempt on Hitler later that same year, and was the last surviving member of the group of German officers who tried and failed to kill the Fuehrer on July 20, 1944.
Von Kleist died Friday at age 90 at his home in Munich, his wife Gundula von Kleist told The Associated Press.
Von Kleist was born July 10, 1922, on his family estate Schmenzin in Pommerania in an area of northeastern Germany that is today Poland.
The von Kleist family was a long line of Prussian landowners, who had served the state for centuries in high-ranking military and administrative positions.
Von Kleist’s father, Ewald von Kleist, was an early opponent of Hitler even before he came to power, and was arrested many times after the Nazi dictator took control in 1933. The elder von Kleist famously traveled to England in 1938, the year before World War II broke out, to try and determine whether other Western nations would support a coup attempt against Hitler, but failed to get the British government to change its policy of appeasement.
Despite his family’s opposition to the Nazis, younger von Kleist joined the German army in 1940, and was wounded in 1943 in fighting on the Eastern Front.
During his convalescence, he was approached in January 1944 by Col. Claus von Stauffenberg, another officer from an aristocratic family, and presented with a plan to kill Hitler. Von Kleist had been chosen as the officer to model a new uniform for Hitler, and von Stauffenberg proposed that he wear a suicide vest underneath, and detonate it when he stood next to the dictator.
Years later von Kleist remembered explaining the suicide plot to his father, who paused only briefly before telling his 22-year-old son: “Yes, you have to do this.”
“Fathers love their sons and mine certainly did, and I had been quite sure he would say no,” von Kleist recalled. “But, as always, I had underestimated him.”
The suicide attack plan never came to fruition.
Months later, however, von Kleist was approached again by von Stauffenberg to take part in what would become known as the July 20 plot — for the day in 1944 that the assassination was attempted — which was brought to the big screen in 2008 in “Valkyrie,” starring Tom Cruise as von Stauffenberg.
Von Kleist was supposed to play a key role as the person who was to carry a briefcase packed with explosives to a meeting with Hitler. In a change of plans, however, von Stauffenberg decided to plant the bomb himself.
Von Stauffenberg placed the bomb in a conference room where Hitler was meeting with his aides and military advisers at his East Prussian headquarters. Hitler escaped the full force of the blast when someone moved the briefcase next to a table leg, deflecting much of the explosive force.
Von Kleist remained in Berlin, charged with overseeing the arrest of officers and officials loyal to Hitler in the city.
But when news spread that Hitler had survived, the plot crumbled and von Stauffenberg, von Kleist’s father, and scores of others were arrested and executed in an orgy of revenge killings. Some were hanged by the neck with piano wire. Von Stauffenberg was shot by firing squad.
Von Kleist himself was arrested, questioned at length by the Gestapo, and sent to a concentration camp, but then inexplicably let go and returned to combat duty.
Following the war, von Kleist founded the Ewald von Kleist publishing house, and became involved in public education on security issues and trans-Atlantic relations. In 1952 he founded the independent defense affairs association known as the Society for Military Studies, and the European Military Studies magazine in 1954.
In 1963 he founded what would become the annual Munich Security Conference — a forum that still today brings together the world’s top diplomats and defense officials, in an informal setting for talks on global security policy, and has long been considered the preeminent conference on NATO issues.
Von Kleist served as the conference’s moderator until 1998, before handing it over to Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s longtime foreign policy adviser Horst Teltschik, who has also since stepped down.
For his efforts leading the Munich Security Conference, von Kleist was awarded the U.S. Department of Defense’s Medal for Distinguished Public Service in 1991, its highest award for a civilian.
His other decorations include Germany’s Federal Order of Merit and France’s Officier de la Legion d’Honneur.
His wife said funeral services would be private.
“My husband didn’t want anything big,” she said.
Mark Kelly’s purchase of rifle draws criticism
Associated Press Tue Mar 12, 2013 4:50 PM
The husband of former U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords generated nearly 4,000 comments on Facebook from people on both sides of the gun debate after he posted a photo of himself buying a military-style rifle — a purchase he made to demonstrate how easy it is to obtain the kind of firearms he’s lobbying Congress to ban.
A background check took only a matter of minutes to complete, Mark Kelly said in the Facebook post, adding that it’s scary to think people can buy similar guns without background checks at gun shows or on the Internet.
It didn’t take long for gun-rights supporters to accuse Kelly of being a hypocrite for buying an AR-15-style rifle and a 45.-caliber handgun. Many of the Facebook comments focused on his motivations and the rules for purchasing such guns.
Kelly and Giffords started a gun control advocacy group, Americans for Responsible Solutions, amid the wave of recent mass shootings. They have been touring the country in recent months in support of expanded background checks for gun purchases.
Kelly bought the guns at a Tucson shop the day before he appeared with his wife at the supermarket where she was wounded during a shooting rampage that left six dead and 12 others injured two years ago.
The public event last week was the first time the survivors had come together since the January 2011 shooting.
Giffords resigned from Congress last year as she continues to recover from her injuries.
The AR-15 is among 157 military-style weapons that would be banned under a bill pending before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee. Kelly, a former astronaut, said he intends to eventually hand in the rifle to Tucson police.
Doug MacKinlay is the owner of Diamondback Police Supply, the shop where Kelly bought the guns. He said Kelly bought the rifle on March 5 but couldn’t immediately take possession of it because the shop had bought it from a customer. As a result, the store is required by a Tucson ordinance to hold the gun for 20 days to give the city enough time to make sure the weapon wasn’t used in a crime, MacKinlay said.
MacKinlay said Kelly never revealed to the store’s staff why he was buying the guns and added that it would be wrong to refuse to sell a gun to someone because of their personal views.
“He is a U.S. citizen, an Arizona citizen and expressing his Second Amendment right to purchase and own a firearm,” MacKinlay said.
Todd Rathner, a lobbyist for the National Rifle Association’s affiliate in Arizona and a national NRA board member, questioned the point that Kelly was trying to make in buying the guns, saying a model citizen such as Kelly should be able to buy a gun relatively quickly. He also noted that such a purchase could have been a good investment as the value of those types of weapon soars amid heightened demand from gun owners.
“If you believe him, it’s a cheap publicity stunt,” Rathner said. “If you don’t, then he was speculating on the value of the rifle because he knew the prices would be inflated.”
The advocacy group started by Giffords and Kelly had no immediate comment Tuesday on Kelly’s gun buys.
But the group released a statement from Kelly on the Senate Judiciary Committee’s approval Tuesday of a proposal to expand federal firearms background checks to nearly all gun purchases. Kelly said the 10-8 vote was a huge step in keeping guns out of the hands of criminals and mentally ill people. Kelly’s statement didn’t address the controversy over his own gun buys.
Kelly, a former astronaut who plans to keep the handgun, told CNN on Monday that it was important for him to have firsthand information on the ease of buying guns such as the AR-15 and that he looks forward to buying a firearm at a gun show in the future. Kelly and Giffords have long been supporters of gun rights and owned handguns themselves.
Utah lawmakers keep ‘Zion curtains’ in place
Associated Press Tue Mar 12, 2013 4:30 PM
SALT LAKE CITY — A measure that would have scaled back one of Utah’s offbeat liquor laws died in the state Legislature on Tuesday.
Lawmakers killed a proposal that would remove barriers in Utah restaurants that shield patrons from seeing servers mix and pour drinks. The Senate replaced the repeal with other minor liquor regulations in a preliminary vote of 24-2.
Republican Sen. John Valentine, of Orem, said the move to keep the barricades stemmed from lawmakers’ fear that taking them down would foster a bigger culture of drinking in Utah.
“We have restaurants. And we have bars,” Valentine said, emphasizing a clear distinction between the two. “And we do not want to foster the culture of alcohol in those restaurants.”
The barriers, known as “Zion curtains,” went up around the state in 2010. They materialized as part of a compromise after lawmakers lifted a requirement for bars to operate as members-only social clubs.
The curtains go back decades in the state’s history, and the nickname nods to Utah’s legacy as home to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The majority of Utah legislators and residents belong to the Mormon church, which teaches its members to abstain from alcohol.
A former incarnate of the barriers went up in the late 1960s in social clubs serving alcohol, and stood until the state legalized bars in 2009. Those former barriers took the form of glass walls separating customers from bartenders.
Opponents of today’s Zion curtains say the law forces restaurant owners to waste money and space on configurations to keep bartenders out of sight. Some construct wall-like barriers, and others put up strategically positioned service bars. Curtain opponents also say the law hinders tourism by annoying outsiders and reinforcing their perception of Utah as staunchly sober.
Rep. Ryan Wilcox, a Republican from Ogden, is one of those critics. He sponsored the bill to take down the barricades, saying the barrier rule treats new restaurant owners unfairly. The patchwork nature of Utah’s liquor laws, Wilcox contends, makes them difficult for the state to enforce.
Lawmakers replaced the measure to take down the barriers with a measure that includes a smaller step to ease up on liquor restrictions. The new bill would free up some of the state’s limited liquor licenses, which it restricts based on a population quotas, by creating a master liquor license for chain restaurants. It would allow them to hold one permit for multiple restaurants, rather than gobble up a license for each site.
The Senate is set to cast a final vote on the bill before it adjourns Thursday. After that, the governor would have to approve for it to become law.
D.A.: Boy, 7, beaten to death for lying about Bible
Wed Mar 13, 2013 10:42 AM
LAS VEGAS — Prosecutors are considering the death penalty for a mother and stepfather who pleaded not guilty to murder and felony child abuse in a case alleging they beat the woman’s 7-year-old son to death for lying about reading the Bible.
An aide to Clark County District Attorney Steve Wolfson said Wednesday that a decision could be made next week about whether Dina Palmer and Markiece Palmer will face capital murder charges in the death of Roderick “RJ” Arrington.
The boy died last Nov. 30 at a Las Vegas hospital, after authorities say child welfare investigators failed to respond to school officials’ concerns about his injuries.
Dina Palmer and Markiece Palmer entered their pleas Tuesday in Clark County District Court. A judge scheduled a March 27 hearing to set a trial date.
Accused cop shooter: God made me do it
Wed Mar 13, 2013 9:24 AM
DINWIDDIE, Va. — The man charged in the shooting death of a Virginia state trooper told investigators God made him do it, according to court papers.
Russell E. Brown also said one of the investigators interviewing him would be the next to die. His grandmother told police that Brown had called her several times in the weeks leading up to the killing to talk about the Bible, which was uncharacteristic of him.
“Rose Brown stated that he would not make much sense during their conversations,” state police Special Agent J.M. Gunderson wrote in an affidavit that was used to search Brown’s Chesterfield County apartment.
According to media reports, Brown also appeared to be acting strange to apartment complex manager Mary Wilson. She told investigators that when she called to inform him that his rent was past due, “He replied, ‘you do you’ and hung up,” the affidavit says.
Court papers say Brown, 28, was naked when he was caught hiding in the back of a car at a towing business a few minutes after the fatal shooting of Master Trooper Junius A. Walker on Interstate 85 in Dinwiddie County. Brown exchanged shots with another trooper who came to Walker’s aid before dropping his gun and magazine and fleeing, disrobing as he ran, the affidavit says.
Brown was taken to the Dinwiddie Sheriff’s Office to be interviewed, and after he waived his rights, he spoke with state police special agents about the killing.
“Russell Brown stated that he knew this was going to happen because God told him to do it,” Gunderson wrote. “Russell Brown stated that the Virginia State Police Special Agent that was interviewing him was next (as in killing him).”
Brown is charged with capital murder, two firearms counts and attempted capital murder. Prosecutors have said they will seek the death penalty.
Experts: Phoenix ethics rules for elected leaders lag
By Dustin Gardiner The Republic | azcentral.com Wed Mar 13, 2013 11:02 PM
Phoenix’s ethics rules for its elected leaders significantly lag the best practices of large U.S. cities, a task force of legal experts has found.
That’s the conclusion reached by a group of prominent attorneys and judges who spent four months reviewing the city’s ethics policies, also determining that Phoenix employees are often held to a “higher standard” than City Council members.
Topping the group’s list of concerns is Phoenix’s lack of a legal mechanism to investigate or sanction council members who potentially violate its conflict-of-interest or gift policies.
On Wednesday, former Maricopa County Attorney Rick Romley, who led the task force, gave the critique to a subcommittee of City Council members. He said that “most levels of government,” including the state, already have processes to sanction elected officials through a vote of their peers.
“The area of greatest weakness is with the elected officials,” Romley said of the city’s ethics safeguards. “We were quite surprised that there was nothing in place (to enforce rules) on elected officials.”
Phoenix’s Ethics Review Task Force, which Mayor Greg Stanton created last fall, has released 27 recommendations to improve overall policies for elected officials, board members, employees and volunteers.
Perhaps the most controversial measure calls for the creation of an independent ethics commission to oversee investigations of potential violations by elected officials. Residents would have to approve the move through a ballot measure because it requires an amendment to the City Charter.
Task-force members said other shortcomings they found were inconsistencies between the city’s rules for elected officials and general employees, who can be fired or disciplined for violations.
For example, state laws restrict council members from participating in deals in which a relative’s involvement could present a conflict of interest. But employees are restricted from directly doing business with anyone with whom their relationship “may create the appearance of a conflict.”
Council members so far haven’t been overtly enthusiastic about the task force’s recommendations. Wednesday’s subcommittee praised the group’s work but wanted more time to mull the issue before deciding whether to advance it to the full council for a vote.
“I know that from experience it sounds simple, but it’s not,” Councilwoman Thelda Williams said. “Ethics is kind of a personal perception for me and most people, I truly believe.”
Councilmen Daniel Valenzuela said he supports the aim of the task force but wants to ensure there’s no ambiguity in defining “unprofessional conduct” of elected officials, which could be investigated by the ethics panel. He said he does not want it to become an “overused tool” for tarnishing city leaders.
Romley said the task force hopes the council will approve the recommendations and convene another group to flesh out guidelines for elected officials.
“The City Council has the opportunity to walk the walk,” said Ernest Calderon, a task- force member and longtime Phoenix attorney. “I believe that the citizens of Phoenix don’t want a good council. They want a great council.”
Meanwhile, Stanton told The Arizona Republic that he will not take a stance on the specific recommendations until the subcommittee acts, though he supports the overall message.
Although the lack of a way to investigate council ethics violations was the task force’s main concern, it seeks other changes. Other key recommendations:
Require elected officials and board members to report within 48 hours gifts, including food, that exceed $50. Gifts that create an appearance of undue influence or conflict of interest would be banned entirely.
Create a uniform gift policy that applies to elected officials and employees, banning gifts that create an appearance of undue influence and gifts of entertainment, such as tickets to sporting or cultural events.
Establish ethics policies for the use of social media by elected officials and employees. These policies would likely vary for the two groups.
Conduct a city review and update of ethics policies at least every four years. The city’s policies haven’t been updated since 2005.
OK, the article didn't once mention the word religion, Muslim or anything else, but I suspect this was a result of religious superstitions.
I suspect religion was involved first because the Old Testament, which Christians, Jews and Muslims believe in orders people to be stoned to death for many religious crimes, which are often victimless crimes such as adultery or homosexuality.
Pakistani soldier stoned to death over romance
Associated Press Wed Mar 13, 2013 9:43 AM
PESHAWAR, Pakistan — Tribesmen tied a Pakistani soldier to the hood of a car and stoned him to death in the country’s restive northwest for allegedly having a romantic relationship with a local woman, government officials and a tribal elder said Wednesday.
The grisly incident took place Tuesday in Parachinar, the capital of the Kurram tribal area. Kurram is part of Pakistan’s semiautonomous tribal region, which runs along the country’s border with Afghanistan and is dominated by conservative Pashtun tribesmen.
The soldier, Nooruddin Aalam, allegedly began his relationship with the woman during a previous posting in the area, said a local government official. He was transferred elsewhere three months ago but returned to see the woman in recent days, said the official.
Residents allegedly caught the couple dating, said a local tribal elder. Leaders of various tribes met Monday and decided the soldier should be executed according to Islamic law, said the elder.
A second government official said locals took Aalam to a graveyard, tied him to the hood of a car and stoned him to death, then shot him.
One resident also shot the soldier, said the tribal elder. The woman allegedly involved in the incident is with the family of a local tribal elder, and her fate will be decided later, he said.
The government officials and tribal elder spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retribution from local tribesmen.
A military official confirmed the death of the soldier but did not provide any additional details. He spoke on condition of anonymity in line with official policy.
It is quite rare for people to be stoned to death in Pakistan, but when it does occur, the victim is more often a woman than a man.
Now if the US. Veterans Administration is going to do this don't you
think that other government agencies like the DEA and FDA are also
going to do it???
Researcher alleges VA covered up adverse consequences to toxic exposures
Posted by Steve Vogel on March 13, 2013 at 3:04 pm
A senior epidemiologist for the Department of Veterans Affairs who resigned in December told a congressional committee Wednesday that the agency has covered up data showing adverse consequences for veterans who were exposed to toxic materials from burn pits and other environmental hazards in Iraq, Afghanistan and the first Gulf War.
Steven S. Coughlin testified that he resigned from the VA’s Office of Public Health in December “because of serious ethical concerns” about the agency’s conduct, which he said included not releasing study results that point to a connection between environmental exposures and illnesses.
“On the rare occasions when embarrassing study results are released, data are manipulated to make them unintelligible,” Coughlin said in his testimony to the House Committee on Veterans Affairs’ oversight and Investigations subcommittee.
Coughlin said during his work studying the relationship between exposure to burn pits and asthma and bronchitis among Iraq and Afghanistan veterans, his supervisor told him not to look at data regarding hospitalizations and doctors’ visits.
“When I advised him I did not want to continue as a co-investigator under these circumstances, he threatened me,” Coughlin said.
Secretary of Veterans Affairs Eric Shinseki has directed the Office of Research Oversight to review the allegations, according to the VA.
“Research on the health of Gulf War Veterans has been and continues to be a priority for VA,” the agency said in a statement. “The Department depends on this research to inform our decisions and guide our efforts in caring for Gulf War Veterans. All allegations of malfeasance are taken seriously and are investigated fully.”
During the hearing, several speakers said the VA has been slow to clearly acknowledge research that has validated Gulf War illnesses as a serious medical condition.
“There are many examples large and small of the VA minimizing Gulf War illness,” said Lea Steele, a professor of biomedical studies and director of the Veterans Health Research Program at Baylor University.
Victoria Davey, chief officer for the VA’s Office of Public Health and Environmental Hazards, told the subcommittee that the department takes the ailment seriously.
“We do not believe it is psychological,” she said.
VA doctor: Health data suppressed, manipulated
By Patricia Kime - Staff writer
Posted : Wednesday Mar 13, 2013 21:25:01 EDT
The Veterans Affairs Department has suppressed and manipulated data that would support claims from Iraq, Afghanistan and Persian Gulf veterans that they’ve contracted illnesses from environmental pollution while serving in theatre, a high-level whistleblower told a House Veterans Affairs panel on Wednesday.
Dr. Steven Coughlin, an epidemiologist formerly with the VA’s Office of Public Health, told the House Veterans Oversight Committee that when results of research he conducted didn’t gel with unwritten department policies on the health consequences of oil-well fires, burn pits, pesticides, nerve agents and other pollutants, the information disappeared.
“This applies to data regarding adverse health consequences of environmental exposures, such as burn pits in Iraq and Afghanistan, and toxic exposures in the Gulf War. On the rare occasions when embarrassing study results are released, data are manipulated to make them unintelligible,” Coughlin said.
Coughlin worked on two large population studies for VA, including a Gulf War study and the National Health Study of a New Generation before he resigned in protest last December over the handling of his work, he said.
Coughlin’s laundry list of charges against the Office of Public Health also included the loss of data from a congressionally-mandated study on Gulf War family members and the failure of VA to reach out to 2,000 participants of the New Generation survey who, in the course of the survey, said they’d experienced suicidal thoughts in the weeks preceding the survey.
“Some of those veterans are now homeless or deceased,” he charged.
Coughlin was not alone in testifying that VA is failing to serve Gulf War veterans and their successors.
Similar to the government’s long battle against acknowledging the health consequences of Vietnam veterans’ exposure to Agent Orange, VA still “ignores the science of research” into Gulf War Illness that it is a serious medical condition with neurological and physical components, said Lea Steele, a professor of biomedicine at Baylor University.
She said VA’s survey of 30,000 Gulf War veterans included scores of questions on psychological stress, substance abuse and alternative medicine but none on basic symptoms of the illness, which include memory and processing difficulties, pain, fatigue and digestive disorders.
“This pattern of chronic symptoms has been well documented. … We also know that Gulf War Illness is not a stress-induced or psychiatric disorder,” Steele said.
About a third of the nearly 700,000 U.S. troops who deployed to Operation Desert Shield and Desert Storm in 1991 suffer from an array of symptoms of unknown origin. Once referred to as Gulf War Syndrome, it now commonly is known as Gulf War Illness, although the Institute of Medicine and Veterans Affairs call it Chronic Multisymptom Illness.
Coughlin told the panel that the VA’s obfuscation of data includes information on troops who deployed in the past decade. He said he was asked to include additional information when compiling tables to downplay the prevalence of respiratory illnesses like asthma and chronic bronchitis in those who served near open air burn pits.
“I urge you to initiate legislation to cure the epidemic of serious ethical problems in the VA’s Office of Public Health,” Coughlin told the congressional oversight committee.
VA officials did not respond directly to the explosive allegations. Victoria Davey, chief officer for public health at the Veterans Health Administration testified that the department has a 22-year history of treating Gulf War veterans and is committed to serving those with Gulf War Illness.
“Veterans with CMI, like all veterans enrolled in VA care, receive personalized, proactive patient-centered care,” she said.
She added that VA’s three War-Related Illness and Injury Study Centers provide specialized care tailored specifically to individual patients. More than 130,000 Gulf War veterans have received health exams under the department’s Gulf War registry program, Davey said.
Rep. Michael Coffman, R-Colo., subcommittee chair and retired a Marine who served in the Gulf War, promised further investigation.
“I find the conduct of the Veterans Administration embarrassing on this issue in terms of their treatment. If there were any Gulf War veterans in senior positions at VA, I don’t’ think we’d be here today,” he said.
Anthony Hardie, a Gulf War veteran who serves in an advisory capacity with the congressionally directed Gulf War Illness Research Medical Program, said new laws are needed to force VA to release findings, improve research and ensure that affected veterans receive the benefits and treatment they rate.
“Help right these ongoing wrongs, including comprehensive legislation and criminal sanctions for such behavior,” Hardie, who suffers from ongoing ailments related to service, said.
Researcher says officials covered up vets' health data
Kelly Kennedy, USA TODAY5:52p.m. EDT March 13, 2013
WASHINGTON — Department of Veterans Affairs officials purposely manipulate or hide data that would support the claims of veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan to prevent paying costly benefits, a former VA researcher told a House subcommittee Wednesday.
"If the studies produce results that do not support the office of public health's unwritten policy, they do not release them," said Steven Coughlin, a former epidemiologist in the VA's public health department.
"This applies to data regarding adverse health consequences of environmental exposures, such as burn pits in Iraq and Afghanistan, and toxic exposures in the Gulf War," Coughlin said. "On the rare occasions when embarrassing study results are released, data are manipulated to make them unintelligible."
Coughlin testified before the House Committee on Veterans Affairs that VA routinely minimizes research that would bolster the claims of veterans suffering from the series of symptoms associated with Gulf War illness, as well as health issues linked to exposure to large burn pits and dust in Iraq.
Victoria Davey, chief officer of VA's office of public health and environmental hazards, told the committee that veterans receive personalized, proactive care. She did not directly address critics' accusations, and instead talked about the VA's care for veterans and the "cutting-edge" research it has conducted.
Rep. Mike Coffman, R-Colo., and a Marine who served during 1991 war, called VA's handling of Gulf War illness "embarrassing." He asked VA why they changed Congress's charge to ask the IOM to do research on treatments, to which she said VA let the experts decide what should be looked at. He also asked why VA had spent money meant for Gulf War vets on other programs, but Davey said she was not prepared to respond to that question.
"If you had anyone on your panel who was a Gulf war vet, I don't think we'd be here today," Coffman said.
Lea Steele, a researcher at the Veterans Health Research Program at Baylor University, backed Coughlin's claims, saying, "In some sectors within VA, there appears to be backward movement."
Steele also charged that VA has used money meant for Gulf War illness to fund other programs. For example, $1 million went to a Lou Gehrig's disease post-mortem brain bank. The majority of samples are not from Gulf War vets, she said.
VA spent $120 million on Gulf War illness, but just five programs focused on treatments, and two of those were for psychiatric care.
"Studies consistently show Gulf War illness is not due to war trauma," she said. She told the committee that VA has not managed an effective program.
Coughlin's allegations echo previous cases in which the VA was slow to respond to health problems in veterans, ranging from exposure to the chemical defoliant Agent Orange in Vietnam, to Gulf War illness, to post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and traumatic brain injury from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
In 2010, Coughlin participated in a study of recent veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan that linked exposure to burn pits to greater incidences of asthma or bronchitis. His request to see their medical records was denied, Coughlin said, and the results of the study were never published.
"I was very concerned they were withholding data or misleading people," he told USA TODAY. "I don't want to speculate about why."
Coughlin said a 2012 panel of outside experts hired to help the Institute of Medicine study neurological connections to Gulf War illness was stacked in favor of those who believed the disease is psychological.
"There was no one to present the opposing side — that it's neurological," Coughlin said. "Science is self-correcting, but if people don't publish data that doesn't support an opposing hypothesis, then it's a huge problem."
The IOM research included veterans from the past 20 years, rather than just Gulf War veterans, and "lumped" their symptoms together, according to Steele. Bernard Rosof, head of the IOM committee, said they found no one cause to what they called "chronic multisymptom illness," and that there was no one treatment for all of those veterans.
Steele agreed that VA excluded data from the research, and that it was "akin to medical malpractice."
It's doubly important because today's veterans are coming back with the same symptoms as the Gulf War veterans did, he said.
"Anything that supports the position that Gulf War illness is a neurological condition is unlikely to ever be published," Coughlin said.
Anthony Hardie, a Gulf War veteran and appointed member of the Congressionally Directed Gulf War Illness Research Medical Program, said Coughlin's testimony confirms what veterans have been saying for years.
"There are staff within VA who are working against Gulf War veterans," Hardie said. "It puts focus on the specifics and details on the generalities that were already clear."
Hardie said he knows and respects VA Chief of Staff John Gingrich, and he feels, based on Coughlin's testimony, that Gingrich was lied to by his staff. Those people should be "punished with criminal sanctions," he said.
"I hope there's a shake-up at VA," said Hardie, who has been completely disabled by Gulf War illness. "I hope the leadership takes this seriously."
Coughlin will also testify that after a study determined that more than 2,000 Iraq and Afghanistan veterans said they had considered suicide during the previous two weeks, no VA official had reached out to them.
"Some of them are now deceased or homeless," Coughlin said. "No one reached out to them to see how they could help them."
Coughlin said he complained about the veterans' treatment to his supervisor, who did nothing. He then took the matter to the VA's inspector general, who decided not to pursue the case.
After the 1991 Gulf War, a series of research reports raised concerns that the veterans' children were more likely to be born with defects, and that veterans' spouses were also becoming ill. Congress mandated that the VA maintain a registry of Gulf War veterans' family members. The data has never been released, and Coughlin said he has "been advised that these results have been permanently lost."
He said his supervisors told VA's chief of staff that restructuring a survey for Gulf War veterans so it did not focus on psychosomatic issues would cost more than $1 million and delay the study for a year — neither of which was true.
Coughlin said he was told to retract his claims and admit that he had made a mistake.
He refused, adding that he kept a document trail of e-mails and reports to support his claims. "I thought, 'I don't want to work for these people,' so I left."
Coughlin, who was a senior cancer epidemiologist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the director of the public health ethics program at Tulane University, said continuing to work for the VA was "against my conscience."
Phoenix Mayor Stanton to pass an unconstitutional law to get the gay vote????
Phoenix Mayor Greg Stanton to pass an unconstitutional law to get the gay vote????
Phoenix - Love gays or go to jail???
I suspect this law violates the First Amendment because it forces people who hate gay folks because of their religious beliefs to love gay folks.
Utah liquor bill aims to take down ‘Zion curtains’
Source
Do Fingerprints Lie?
Source
In Texas, Public School Bible Classes Inch Toward Evangelism
Source
Congress - It's secret, you can't sue us!!!!
Supreme Court rules out secret surveillance lawsuits
Inmate sues Will County Jail over non-kosher food
I don't really like criminals, but they are entitled to the same First Amendment rights as everyone else.
Santa Muerte patron saint of dope dealers???
I am surprised that they didn't mention Jesus Malverde
or San Jesus Malverde in this article.
He is the patron saint of dope dealers and drug runners in Mexico.
Popular in Mexico, and sometimes linked to the illicit drug trade, the skeleton saint known as La Santa Muerte in recent years has found a robust and diverse following north of the border: immigrant small business owners, artists, gay activists and the poor, among others — many of them non-Latinos and not all involved with organized religion.
New Charges Against Alleged Christian Mingle Rapist
Jesus loves you and so does Sean Banks (in a biblical sense!!)
White, male police officers discriminated against???
White, male piggies discriminated against???
Arkansas adopts U.S.’s most restrictive abortion law
Remember woman, government bureaucrats think they own your body!!!
Secret Police in Phoenix????
Phoenix Police to encrypt radio transmissions making them secret
Phoenix Police to encrypt radio transmissions and make them secret.
Politicians making it harder for us to recall them?
Politicians passing a retroactive law making it harder to recall Sheriff Joe Arpaio?
Our government masters love to tell us they are "public servants" who work for us.
Google says the FBI is spying on some of you
Source
Year National
Security
Letters Users
Accounts2009 0-999 1000-1999 2010 0-999 2000-2999 2011 0-999 1000-1999 2012 0-999 1000-1999 This is also at here on the web.
AG Holder - Obama OK to murder Americans with drones!!!!!
Attorney General Eric H. Holder says Obama is allowed to murder American citizens!!!!!
Gabrielle Giffords' husband, Mark Kelly buys AR-15
Astronaut Mark Kelly, husband of Gabrielle Giffords, recently purchased an assault weapon.
'Truth serum' may be used to assess Holmes' sanity
This sounds more like witchcraft then sound science.
Ewald-Heinrich von Kleist - Freedom fighter or criminal???
Source
How do you spell hypocrite - Gun grabber Mark Kelly
It's seems like Mark Kelly and his wife U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords are gun grabbers who want to keep us from having guys, while they have their own private arsenal.
No separation of Church and State in Utah - Zion curtain stays up!!!
Source
Boy beaten to death for lying about Bible
Not reading the Bible could get you killed - Honest
Accused cop shooter: God made me do it
God's followers are often real nut jobs!!!!
No ethics for Phoenix City Council members???
Source
Pakistani soldier stoned to death over romance
When you mix government and religion the results are not pretty
VA suppresses and manipulates health data???
Researcher alleges VA covered up adverse consequences to toxic exposures
Veterans Administration suppresses and manipulates health data for political reasons???
VA doctor: Health data suppressed, manipulated
Source
Researcher says officials covered up vets' health data
Source
Whistleblower: VA Hiding Veteran Health Data
Source
Whistleblower: VA Hiding Veteran Health Data
Mar 14, 2013
Military.com
by Bryant Jordan
A former epidemiologist for the Department of Veterans’ Affairs told lawmakers on Wednesday that the agency’s Office of Public Health buries or obscures research findings on veterans exposed to environmental toxins and hazards going as far back as the Persian Gulf War.
Steven Coughlin, who had worked more than four years for the VA before quitting over “serious ethical concerns” in December, said in testimony that leadership in the agency’s public health office did not want to find or reveal evidence that Gulf War illness and other sicknesses were linked to troops’ military experience.
"On the rare occasions when embarrassing study results are released, data are manipulated to make them unintelligible,” he told the House Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations. Coughlin said his former office never released findings of a $10 million study that produced data on 60,000 Iraq and Afghan war vets – of which up to 30 percent were Gulf War vets – that revealed exposures to pesticides, oil well fires and more.
He said the results of a congressionally mandated study on Gulf War veterans and their family members also was never released, and claims he was advised that “these results have been permanently lost.”
“Anything that supports the position that Gulf War illness is a neurological condition is unlikely to ever be published,” he said. One of Couglin’s former supervisors, Dr. Aaron Schneiderman, threatened retaliation against him after he balked at the idea of deliberately leaving out certain relevant data in a research project, Coughlin said.
Victoria Davey, chief of the VA’s public health and environmental hazards office, told lawmakers that the office follows strict guidelines in analyzing and publishing its work. However, but she never directly addressed Coughlin’s allegations.
In a statement released after the hearing on Wednesday, the VA said VA Secretary Erik Shinseki has ordered the VA’s Office of Research Oversight to review Coughlin’s claims, including the alleged threat.
Any retaliation against VA employees is against the law and is not tolerated, the statement said.
“The Department of Veterans Affairs has a decade’s long history of conducting world-class research studies that meet accepted and rigorous scientific standards,” the statement read. “All allegations of malfeasance are taken seriously and are investigated fully.
Coughlin said Schneiderman told him not to look at data regarding hospitalizations and doctors’ visits while he was working on research into the health effects of burn pits on troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. Veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars have reported serious respiratory problems that they believe are connected to inhaling smoke from the massive trash burn pits found in combat zones.
Coughlin told the House panel that when he said he did not want to continue in the project under those conditions, Schneiderman threatened him.
As with Vietnam veterans before them, large numbers of Gulf War veterans became ill in the years following the 1991 war. Those Gulf War veterans were told their problems were psychological.
The VA has said it does recognize there are health issues associated with Gulf War service, and notes that Shinseki formed a task force to conduct a comprehensive review of VA programs to help improve care and services for Gulf War vets.
The VA says in 2010 it recognized nine diseases linked to experience in the Gulf War.
According to Lea Steele, an epidemiologist with the Institute of Biomedical Studies at Baylor University, the VA still has serious problems in its approach – and funding – of Gulf War research.
She told Congress on Wednesday that scientific advances over the past 10 years have provided important insights into Gulf War illness. Steele has been studying Gulf War illness since 1998.
“After so many years of waiting, there is finally some hope for Gulf War veterans,” she said. “Hope that they will have answers that are long overdue and hope that treatments will be found that can meaningfully improve their health and their lives.”
“What is not acceptable is federal research that is poorly informed, based on notions developed in the early years after the Gulf War rather than on the scientific evidence now available,” she said.
VA has reportedly spent $120 million over the past decade on Gulf War illness research, but some of that money never went to Gulf War research, Steele said.
In one instance, $10 million was earmarked for something called a “Gulf War Biorepository Trust” that had nothing to do with Gulf War veterans. It was, instead, used to fund a brain bank for veterans who had ALS, or Lou Gehrig’s disease.
As of 2010, only one of the 60 brains in the brain bank had come from a Gulf War veteran, Steele said. The others were those of older veterans.
VA Covered Up Data on Mental Health
SourceWhistleblower: Veterans Affairs Covered Up Data on Mental Health, Gulf War Syndrome
Mar 13, 2013 1:09 PM EDT
A former Veterans Affairs researcher turned whistleblower tells Congress the department repeatedly withheld data on Gulf War syndrome and neglected suicidal vets. Jamie Reno reports.
The Department of Veterans Affairs routinely disseminated false information about the health of America’s veterans, withheld research showing a link between nerve gas and Gulf War syndrome, rushed studies out the door without taking recommended fixes by an independent board, and failed to offer crucial care to veterans who came forward as suicidal.
These are the allegations of Steven Coughlin, an epidemiologist who worked at the VA’s Office of Public Health until he resigned last year, citing “serious ethical issues.” On Wednesday Coughlin will testify at a congressional hearing on the health of Gulf War veterans.
“What I saw [at VA] was both embarrassing and astonishing. I couldn’t stay any longer,” says Coughlin, who left the VA in December, just four and a half years into the job.
Coughlin was previously associate professor of epidemiology and director of the program in public-health ethics at Tulane University and is a former chair of the writing group that prepared the ethics guidelines for the American College of Epidemiology.
In an interview with The Daily Beast, Coughlin said that whenever he spoke out about any alleged unethical activity, his bosses “intimidated and admonished” him. He says they first tried to silence him after he spoke out about a major health study of 60,000 Iraq and Afghanistan veterans. Coughlin believed that the nearly 2,000 subjects who self-identified as suicidal should have been checked up on afterward by mental-health clinicians. Instead, he says, the researchers interviewed them and moved on.
Coughlin says his supervisors also frequently “obscured the facts” about the impact of toxic exposures on troops in Iraq and Afghanistan and the causes of Gulf War illness.
“Many of those veterans are now homeless or deceased,” he says. “It’s very unfortunate. My supervisors did all they could to block my efforts.”
After getting nowhere with his superiors, Coughlin says, he contacted the chairman of the VA’s Institutional Review Board and the VA inspector-general to request that the study be put on hold until his supervisors could identify clinicians to call back suicidal veterans.
“That’s when all hell broke loose,” he says. “My supervisors tried to remove me from the study, and I received a written admonition. It was shocking. All I was trying to do was help ensure the safety of the veterans participating in our study.”
Coughlin says he was unsuccessful in getting OPH to address the problem in the study of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans, but he managed to incorporate clinician callbacks in a separate Gulf War survey, and he says those calls “saved lives.”
The VA declined to comment specifically for this story, but in a statement released Wednesday, it said the department has a "decades long history of conducting world-class research studies that meet accepted and rigorous scientific standards." The statement, which noted that "all allegations of malfeasance are taken seriously and are investigated fully," also said that the Obama Administration in 2010 recognized nine new diseases as associated with Gulf War Illness.
"VA agrees with Gulf War veterans that there are health issues associated with service in the Gulf War," the statement read. "That is why Secretary (Eric) Shinseki formed a Task Force to conduct a comprehensive review of VA's programs to help improve the care and services we provide to Gulf War Veterans. We will continue to learn and examine ways to improve treatment, process claims, and better care for these veterans.”
Coughlin says his supervisors also frequently “obscured the facts” about the impact of toxic exposures on troops in Iraq and Afghanistan and the causes of Gulf War illness, which afflicted as many as 250,000 veterans, according to the Institute of Medicine.
While the cause of Gulf War illness has been debated for years, a number of peer-reviewed scientific studies have concluded that it is a neurological condition caused by exposure to nerve gas, pesticides, and other toxic elements.
However, says Coughlin, “the people I worked for refuse to release any information to the public that reaches that conclusion. They insist on holding on to the outdated theory that Gulf War illness is psychosomatic.”
He says there is VA data on adverse health consequences of toxic exposures in the Gulf War that “the public has never seen, and I’m sure will never see.”
He says his supervisors paid the Institute of Medicine $1 million to review the latest literature on Gulf War illness, but the first five outside experts they invited to the IOM committee all reported that it was psychiatric and not neurological. “This understandably outraged Gulf War advocates,” Coughlin says. “It was so obviously biased.”
Anthony Hardie, a Gulf War veteran and advocate who will also be testifying at the congressional hearing, tells The Daily Beast that Coughlin’s story “only confirms what Gulf War veterans have believed all along: this cabal of federal bureaucrats and contractors who continue to obfuscate, manipulate, and lie remain a serious obstacle to ill Gulf War veterans’ legitimate quest for treatments and justice.”
Coughlin says the OPH’s 2009–10 National Health Study of a New Generation of U.S. Veterans, which targeted 60,000 post-9/11 veterans, cost $10 million, plus the salaries of those who worked on it. He says 20 percent to 30 percent of these veterans were also Gulf War veterans, and the study produced data regarding their exposures to pesticides, oil-well fires, and pyridostigmine-bromide pills.
OPH never released any data from the study, or even the fact that it exists, Coughlin says. The VA’s official position on pyridostigmine-bromide pills, which the Department of Defense says Gulf War veterans took as protection against nerve gas, did not cause Gulf War illness. But a 2008 study by Beatrice Golomb at the University of California, San Diego, “thoroughly, conclusively shows that this class of chemicals actually are a cause of illness in Gulf War veterans.”
Coughlin also says the OHP released a major survey on Gulf War veterans without fixing it as recommended by the Research Advisory Committee on Gulf War Veterans’ Illnesses, which was mandated by Congress in 2002. Coughlin says his supervisors told the VA that implementing the fixes would cost the government $1 million and delay the study for a year or longer.
“None of this was true. It would not have cost nearly that much to restart the study,” Coughlin says. “But as a result of the false statements made by my supervisors, the chief of staff ordered the survey to proceed without the changes.”
Coughlin says he’ll ask Congress to initiate legislation to cure the “epidemic” of ethical problems at the OPH and urge the committee to direct the VA to identify procedures to ensure that veterans who participate in large-scale epidemiologic studies receive appropriate follow-up care to prevent possible suicides.
“The VA is the nation’s largest health-care provider, and these large studies cost taxpayers tens of millions of dollars and are so important to veterans’ health,” says Coughlin, who is currently looking for another job. “My only motivation for coming forward is to help veterans. That’s the only reason I paid for my own flight to come to Washington. I think the attention from the House committee and the media will lead to positive changes. It will hopefully help veterans.”
Like The Daily Beast on Facebook and follow us on Twitter for updates all day long.
Jamie Reno, an award-winning correspondent for Newsweek for 17 years, has also written for The New York Times, Sports Illustrated, Rolling Stone, People, Men’s Journal, ESPN, Los Angeles Times, TV Guide, MSNBC, Newsmax, Entertainment Weekly, and USA Today. Reno, who’s won more than 85 writing awards, was the lead reporter on a Newsweek series on the 9/11 terrorist attacks that earned him and his colleagues the National Magazine Award for General Excellence, the highest award in magazine journalism. Reno, who’s also an acclaimed author, singer-songwriter, and 15-year cancer survivor, lives in San Diego with his wife, Gabriela, and their daughter, Mandy.
For inquiries, please contact The Daily Beast at editorial@thedailybeast.com.
Church teachings do shift
Wed Mar 13, 2013 7:43 PM
A letter writer stated that the Catholic Church’s teachings were “unchanged teaching for 2,000 years” (“Church will survive this,” Opinions, Monday).
Let’s examine that statement. Clerical celibacy was first mandated by Pope Callistus II at the First Lateran Council in 1123.
It was at the Fourth Lateran Council, which convened in 1215, that it was declared that the bread and wine were “transubstantiated” into the body and blood of Christ.
There is evidence of the doctrine of papal infallibility from medieval times, but it was not stated as official doctrine until the First Vatican Council of 1869-70.
The doctrine of the Immaculate Conception (that the Virgin Mary was kept free of original sin from conception) was not proclaimed as doctrine until 1854 by Pope Pius IX.
Unchanging for 2,000 years indeed!
— Jay Alderson, Phoenix
Phoenix Mayor Stanton outlines aggressive plan to fight gun violence
By Dustin Gardiner and Amy B Wang The Republic | azcentral.com Fri Mar 1, 2013 4:42 PM
Phoenix Mayor Greg Stanton on Thursday outlined an aggressive plan to combat violence in the city, vowing to stage what he called the largest gun buyback in Arizona history and double the number of police officers in schools citywide.
The mayor’s comments during his second State of the City speech stoked the debate over firearm safety a month after a string of deadly shootings killed four people and thrust Phoenix into the national news.
“Recently, we have felt pain and grief too often and too deeply,” Stanton said, naming several shooting victims, including a lawyer and businessman. “Violence has no place in our city.”
Police Chief Daniel V. Garcia said Phoenix will destroy the guns, an approach often criticized by gun-rights groups. A state law that took effect in August is designed to prohibit Arizona police agencies from destroying weapons they confiscate, but Garcia said the law does not apply to voluntary gun buybacks.
Jennifer Longdon, a gun-violence survivor who is paralyzed from a spinal cord injury, was sitting in the audience for Stanton’s speech. She wrote on Facebook that she began to sob “like a baby” when he made the announcement.
“Every gun we take off the streets is one gun that won’t rob a son like mine of his healthy, able-bodied mother,” wrote Longdon, who uses a wheelchair. “I wonder how different my life would be if I had been attacked by knives or bats or fists. (Guns) do damage that no other tool or weapon can ever hope to inflict.”
Stanton noted the politics surrounding such a hotly contested issue — his speech instantaneously sparked protests from gun-rights advocates on social media. He said the buyback effort would make the city safer without curtailing the Second Amendment rights of responsible gun owners.
“Why risk the controversy?” Stanton asked. “Because I respect Chief Garcia, who told me, ‘Every unwanted gun we take off the street is one less gun out there to harm our officers or hurt our residents.’”
Gun violence and school safety were just a piece of Stanton’s speech, which focused on Phoenix’s need to develop a modern, diverse economy that can weather the ups and downs of the real-estate market. He spoke about other familiar hurdles: building a vibrant downtown, larger transit system and skilled workforce.
But the emphasis on gun violence was the mayor’s boldest new policy initiative debuted for the year ahead. It will likely continue to draw jeers from some right-leaning leaders who view buybacks as an ineffective tool for reducing violence.
“These criminals are really going to be running down there to turn in their guns for a Safeway card,” joked Charles Heller, spokesman for the Arizona Citizens Defense League, a non-profit that advocates for gun rights. “What the city of Phoenix is doing is interfering in the market.”
The buyback program, a partnership between Phoenix police and the non-profit Arizonans for Gun Safety, allows residents to drop off unwanted weapons with no questions asked. The effort is being funded with $100,000 from an anonymous donor, Stanton said.
Police officers will host the buybacks every Saturday during May, except Memorial Day weekend. The city will return stolen guns to their owners, and the police will keep those they suspect were used in a crime for investigation.
The program will compensate gun owners for their weapons, but officials have not yet determined the form and amount of payment. With past buybacks in Phoenix, Garcia said owners typically received about $100 per firearm.
Stanton also announced a new school-safety program that seeks to double the number of police officers in public, private and charter schools across the city.
“Education can only succeed if kids feels safe at school,” Stanton said, adding that he and Garcia had met with Phoenix-area superintendents and other education leaders earlier in the week. “We heard them loud and clear. The risk of school violence is one we cannot take.”
Under the program, each Phoenix police precinct commander would meet with superintendents in their district at least twice a year. The plan also proposes that districts hire off-duty police officers to patrol their schools as “school safety officers,” less expensive alternatives to traditional school-resource officers.
“We don’t need Steven Seagal to keep our kids safe,” said Stanton, a jab at Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who recently announced that the action star would help train his volunteer posse to patrol schools.
According to the city, school-safety officers would cost less than half of what traditional resource officers would
— about $42,000 per year to staff a high school and $35,000 a year to staff a middle or elementary school.
These costs would include coverage for seven hours a day, five days a week.
That sounds like an outright LIE!!!!!
Most Phoenix area police officers
start at about $50,000 a year, which is about $25/hr, before benefits.
And of course many cops
make $100,000 or more a year, before you add in the benefits.]
Like traditional school-resource officers, school-safety officers would be responsible for monitoring student activity, training staff on safety mandates and enforcing criminal laws on campus.
[Do we really need a FULL TIME cop on every high school and elementary school campus
who is making between $50,000 and $100,000 a year before benefits to enforce the law??? I doubt it.
Even if we do need one we could certainly get by with a rent-a-cop that is being paid $10 an hour,
instead of a full time Phoenix police officer who is being paid between $25 and $75 an hour]
“This is no-nonsense community policing — boots on the ground ... We need real cops doing real police work,” Stanton said.
[And real police work is NOT handcuffing 10 year olds for chewing bubble gum or talking in class. Real police work is hunting down dangerous criminals, something these Phoenix police officers who are working at their
cushy school resource officer job won't be doing]
Well sadly there isn't a dime worth of difference between Emperor Obama and Emperor Bush.
Emperor Obama has continued Bush's illegal unconstitutional wars, and is continuing to turn America into a police state like Emperor Bush did.
US citing security to censor more public records, analysis finds
Published March 11, 2013
Associated Press
The U.S. government, led by the Pentagon and CIA, censored in the name of national security files that the public requested last year under the Freedom of Information Act more often than at any time since President Barack Obama took office, according to a new analysis by The Associated Press.
Overall, the Obama administration last year answered its highest number of requests so far for copies of government documents, emails, photographs and more, and it slightly reduced its backlog of requests from previous years. But it more often cited legal provisions allowing the government to keep records or parts of its records secret, especially a rule intended to protect national security.
The AP's analysis showed the government released all or portions of the information that citizens, journalists, businesses and others sought at about the same rate as the previous three years. It turned over all or parts of the records in about 65 percent of requests. It fully rejected more than one-third of requests, a slight increase over 2011, including cases when it couldn't find records, a person refused to pay for copies or the request was determined to be improper.
The government's responsiveness under the FOIA is widely viewed as a barometer of the federal offices' transparency. Under the law, citizens and foreigners can compel the government to turn over copies of federal records for zero or little cost. Anyone who seeks information through the law is generally supposed to get it unless disclosure would hurt national security, violate personal privacy or expose business secrets or confidential decision-making in certain areas.
The AP's review comes at the start of the second term for Obama, who promised during his first week in office that the nation's signature open-records law would be "administered with a clear presumption: In the face of doubt, openness prevails." The review examined figures from the largest federal departments and agencies. Sunday was the start of Sunshine Week, when news organizations promote open government and freedom of information.
White House spokesman Eric Schultz said in a statement that during the past year, the government "processed more requests, decreased the backlog, improved average processing times and disclosed more information pro-actively." Schultz said the improvements "represent the efforts of agencies across the government to meet the president's commitment to openness. While there is more work to be done, this past year demonstrates that agencies are responding to the president's call for greater transparency."
In a year of intense public interest over deadly U.S. drones, the raid that killed Usama bin Laden, terror threats and more, the government cited national security to withhold information at least 5,223 times — a jump over 4,243 such cases in 2011 and 3,805 cases in Obama's first year in office. The secretive CIA last year became even more secretive: Nearly 60 percent of 3,586 requests for files were withheld or censored for that reason last year, compared with 49 percent a year earlier.
Other federal agencies that invoked the national security exception included the Pentagon, Director of National Intelligence, NASA, Office of Management and Budget, Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, Federal Communications Commission and the departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Energy, Homeland Security, Justice, State, Transportation, Treasury and Veterans Affairs.
U.S. courts are loath to overrule the administration whenever it cites national security. A federal judge, Colleen McMahon of New York, in January ruled against The New York Times and the American Civil Liberties Union to see records about the government's legal justification for drone attacks and other methods it has used to kill terrorism suspects overseas, including American citizens. She cited an "Alice in Wonderland" predicament in which she was expected to determine what information should be revealed but unable to challenge the government's secrecy claim. Part of her ruling was sealed and made available only to the government's lawyers.
"I find myself stuck in a paradoxical situation in which I cannot solve a problem because of contradictory constraints and rules — a veritable Catch-22," the judge wrote. "I can find no way around the thicket of laws and precedents that effectively allow the executive branch of our government to proclaim as perfectly lawful certain actions that seem on their face incompatible with our Constitution and laws, while keeping the reasons for their conclusion a secret."
The AP could not determine whether the administration was abusing the national security exemption or whether the public was asking for more documents about sensitive subjects. Nearly half the Pentagon's 2,390 denials last year under that clause came from the National Security Agency, which monitors Internet traffic and phone calls worldwide.
"FOIA is an imperfect law, and I don't think that's changed over the last four years since Obama took office," said Alexander Abdo, an ACLU staff attorney for its national security project. "We've seen a meteoric rise in the number of claims to protect secret law, the government's interpretations of laws or its understanding of its own authority. In some ways, the Obama administration is actually even more aggressive on secrecy than the Bush administration."
The Obama administration also more frequently invoked the law's "deliberative process" exception to withhold records describing decision-making behind the scenes. Obama had directed agencies to use it less often, but the number of such cases had surged after his first year in office to more than 71,000. After back-to-back years when figures steadily declined, the government cited that reason 66,353 times last year to keep records or parts of records secret.
Even as the Obama administration continued increasing its efforts answering FOIA requests, people submitted more than 590,000 requests for information in fiscal 2012 — an increase of less than 1 percent over the previous year. Including leftover requests from previous years, the government responded to more requests than ever in 2012 — more than 603,000 — a 5 percent increase for the second consecutive year.
The Homeland Security Department, which includes offices that deal with immigration files, received more than twice as many requests for records — 190,589 new requests last year — as any other agency, and it answered significantly more requests than it did in 2011. Other agencies, including the State Department, National Transportation Safety Board and Nuclear Regulatory Commission performed worse last year. The State Department, for example, answered only 57 percent of its requests, down from 75 percent a year earlier.
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services drove a dramatic increase in the number of times DHS censored immigration records under exceptions to police files containing personal information and law enforcement techniques. The agency invoked those exemptions more than 136,000 times in 2012, compared with more than 75,000 a year earlier. Even though USCIS is not a law-enforcement agency, officials used the exceptions specifically reserved for law enforcement.
The AP's analysis also found that the government generally took longer to answer requests. Some agencies, such as the Health and Human Services Department, took less time than the previous year to turn over files. But at the State Department, for example, even urgent requests submitted under a fast-track system covering breaking news or events when a person's life was at stake took an average two years to wait for files.
Journalists and others who need information quickly to report breaking news, for example, fared worse last year. The rate at which the government granted so-called expedited processing, which moves an urgent request to the front of the line for a speedy answer, fell from 24 percent in 2011 to 17 percent last year. The CIA denied every such request last year.
Under increased budget pressure across the government, agencies more often insisted that people pay search and copying fees. It waived costs in 59 percent of requests, generally when the amount was negligible or the release of the information is in the public interest, a decline from 64 percent of cases a year earlier. At the Treasury Department, which faced questions about its role in auto bailouts and stimulus programs during Obama's first term, only one in five requests were processed at no charge. A year earlier, it granted more than 75 percent of fee waivers. The CIA denied every request last year to waive fees.
The 33 agencies that AP examined were: Agency for International Development, CIA, Agriculture Department, Commerce Department, Consumer Product Safety Commission, Defense Department, Education Department, Energy Department, Department of Health and Human Services, Department of Homeland Security, Department of Housing and Urban Development, Interior Department, Justice Department, Labor Department, State Department, Transportation Department, Treasury Department, Department of Veterans Affairs, Environmental Protection Agency, Federal Communications Commission, Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, Federal Election Commission, Federal Trade Commission, NASA, National Science Foundation, National Transportation Safety Board, Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Office of Management and Budget, Office of the Director of National Intelligence, Securities and Exchange Commission, Small Business Administration, the Social Security Administration and the U.S. Postal Service.
Four agencies that were included in AP's previous analysis of FOIA performance did not publicly release their 2012 reports. They included the Office of National Drug Control Policy, the Office of Science and Technology Policy, the Council on Environmental Quality and the Office of Personnel Management.
Mar 11, 2013, 1:15pm EDT Updated: Mar 11, 2013, 1:30pm EDT
White House censors more public records, citing security concerns
Staff Washington Business Journal
The Obama administration is citing security concerns more often as a reason to keep the public in the dark, according to a new analysis by The Associated Press, Federal News Radio reports.
The Pentagon, intelligence community, NASA, Office of Management and Budget and several other agencies invoked the national security exemption last year in rejecting Freedom of Information Act requests.
The government is answering more open-records requests overall, having released two-thirds of the documents requested by the public last year. The other third included cases where agencies couldn't find records, a person refused to pay for copies or the request was improper.
The Pope is infallible??
The Pope is infallible?? - Church teachings do shift??
Phoenix Mayor Greg Stanton is a gun grabber???
From this article it sure sounds like Phoenix Mayor Greg Stanton is a gun grabber.
US citing security to censor more public records
Remember how George W. Bush was the "police state" President and Obama was going to change all of that.
US citing security to censor more public records,
Source
White House censors more public records, citing security concerns
Source
Media blackout: Obama censors more documents, citing national security
Source
Media blackout: Obama censors more documents, citing national security
By Susan Crabtree
The Washington Times
Monday, March 11, 2013
Amid intense public interest over drones, the Osama bin Laden raid and other terrorism-related news, the U.S. government cited national security as its reason for refusing to release documents requested by the public last year more often than in any year since President Obama took office, according to a study released Monday.
The Associated Press reviewed and analyzed the Obama administration’s level of responsiveness to Freedom of Information Act requests, giving the administration credit for answering its highest number of requests for copies of government files and slightly reducing the backlog of requests from previous years.
But the survey also faulted government agencies, led by the Pentagon and the CIA, for increasing the number of times they invoked legal reasons to keep records secret or redact them.
According to the AP analysis, the U.S. government last year turned over all or parts of the records requested in roughly 65 percent of requests, while rejecting more than one-third of requests, a slight increase over 2011. Over the last fiscal year, the government cited national security to withhold information at least 5,223 times — an increase over 4,243 such cases in 2011 and 3,805 cases in 2010.
Not surprisingly, the CIA was the most secretive agency. It denied 60 percent of 3,586 requests for information, compared to 49 percent a year earlier.
The stepped-up secrecy flies in the face of Mr. Obama’s pledge during his first week in office to run the “most transparent government in history.” He promised at the time that the nation’s open-records law would be “administered with a clear presumption — in the face of doubt, openness prevails.”
Watchdogs organizations and others who regularly make FOIA requests offered some praise for the Obama administration’s progress on open-government issues, but they say government agencies still have an abysmal record when it comes to responding to public requests for information.
Tom Blanton of the National Security Archive at George Washington University said Mr. Obama has declassified such items as the national intelligence budget, the so-called “torture memos” and information about the Justice Department’s warrantless wiretapping program. But the openness on big issues has not filtered down to the agencies dealing with FOIA requests.
“We have just not seen the agencies respond to the Obama and [Attorney General] Eric Holder presumption of disclosure. … You see a real hangover of regular bureaucratic behavior,” he said.
Others point to a growing trend among government agencies to refuse to waive the costs of responding to request, even for those applicants whose eligibility for a public-interest fee waiver seems clear.
The Obama administration “has been responsible for a growing trend in which agencies issue baseless denials of public-interest fee waiver requests,” said Julie Murray, an attorney at the watchdog group Public Citizen.
Melanie Ann Pustay, who heads the Justice Department’s Office of Information Policy, on Monday defended the administration’s record on transparency.
Even though agencies received more requests than in previous years, Ms. Pustay said, government officials “rose to the challenge” and processed more requests than ever before. The government as a whole processed more than 665,000 request in fiscal year 2012, which is 34,000 more than they processed in fiscal year 2011 and 65,000 more than they processed two years ago.
As a result, the government reduced its backlog of pending requests by 14 percent over the last fiscal year and 45 percent since Mr. Obama took office, she said.
Mesa Police Sergeant Russell Dean Millsaps arrested on sex abuse charges.
More of the old "Do as I say, not as I do" from our government masters.PD: Ex- Mesa cop arrested on sex charges
Posted: Thursday, March 14, 2013 6:08 pm
ABC15.com
Police say a former Mesa Police Sergeant has been arrested on sex abuse charges.
Mesa police spokesman Tony Landato said detectives and Homeland Security Investigators served a search warrant at the former officer’s home near Horne and Brown Road Thursday afternoon.
Landato said 66-year-old Russell Dean Millsaps was arrested on charges of sexual exploitation of a minor.
Officials said Millsaps retired from the force in 1995.
Mixing government and religion in Mississippi
Source
Mississippi Tells Public Schools to Develop Policies Allowing Prayers
By KIM SEVERSON
Published: March 15, 2013
Gov. Phil Bryant of Mississippi has long wanted children to pray at public schools. This week, with his grandmother’s worn Bible on his desk, he signed a bill that gets him closer to that goal.
The new law requires public schools to develop policies that will allow students to pray over school intercoms, at assemblies and at sporting events.
While not allowing school-sanctioned prayer, the law permits students to offer public prayers with a disclaimer by the school administration. “You might put on the program that this is not a state-sanctioned prayer if a prayer does break out at a football game or graduation,” Mr. Bryant said.
Although the state is not in the business of establishing religion, he said, “we are about making sure that we protect the religious freedoms of all students and adults whenever we can.”
For groups trying to keep prayer and public education separated, the law was the latest legislative action aimed at moving the two closer together without violating the Constitution.
“A bunch of states this year are pushing corrosive religious legislation of all kinds,” said Joe Conn, a spokesman for Americans United for Separation of Church and State.
The bills have become more prolific in part, he and others say, because conservatives control both the governorships and legislatures in 24 states.
Several bills use tax money to finance private religious schools, and efforts to bring prayer to public schools have been introduced in states around the country, most noticeably in the South.
Lawmakers in South Carolina this year introduced legislation that would allow for prayer during a mandatory minute of silence at the start of the school day, provided that students who do not want to hear the prayer can leave the classroom.
Last year, Florida approved a bill to allow students to read inspirational messages at assemblies and sporting events, which prompted groups like the American Civil Liberties Union and Mr. Conn’s organization to send letters to every school district in the state threatening legal action if the law was put into practice.
In Missouri, voters in 2012 approved a constitutional amendment that gives residents the right to “pray and acknowledge God voluntarily in their schools,” and in Virginia this year, State Senator Bill Stanley has introduced a similar amendment.
The laws follow a 2000 United States Supreme Court ruling that stopped student-led prayers over public address systems at high school football games in Texas, said Daniel Mach, director of the A.C.L.U. program on freedom of religion and belief.
“These laws go further, requiring public schools to create opportunities for proselytizing from the school’s official podium during events that students must attend,” he said.
School prayer has become a touchstone in the nation’s divide over religion.
In the days after the December school shooting in Newtown, Conn., former Gov. Mike Huckabee of Arkansas, who is a minister, advocated school prayer.
“We ask why there is violence in our schools, but we have systematically removed God from our schools,” he said in a television interview. “Should we be surprised that schools would become places of carnage?”
In Mississippi, local A.C.L.U. leaders said the new law would prove unconstitutional if challenged in court, a move the group would not make until a school instituted the new policy, which takes effect in July.
Mr. Bryant, anticipating a legal challenge, said, “We would be honored to spend it in defending religious freedoms for the people of the state of Mississippi.”
Under the law, Mississippi school districts would have to follow guidelines allowing a “limited public forum” at school events for students to express religious beliefs. For example, the districts must include a disclaimer that says the students’ prayers do not reflect an endorsement or sponsorship by the district.
But that still exposes children who might not share the religious views of the students expressing themselves, said Bear Atwood, legal director of the Mississippi A.C.L.U.
“People never think, what if it’s a different religious prayer than my child’s faith?” she said.
Fighting to keep religion out of schools is a frequent task for the group. In October, the group sent a letter to the Lincoln County School District asking that a school remove Christian symbols and stop prayers before events.
“Mississippi is a very religious state,” Ms. Atwood said. “There are always people who are going to push back.”
North Dakota Senate approves 6-week abortion ban
By JAMES MacPHERSON Associated Press Fri Mar 15, 2013 11:53 AM
BISMARCK, N.D. — The North Dakota Senate on Friday approved banning abortions as early as six weeks into a pregnancy, sending what would be the most stringent abortion restrictions in the U.S. to the state’s Republican governor for his signature.
The measure would ban most abortions if a fetal heartbeat can be detected, something that can happen as early as six weeks into a pregnancy. The House already approved the measure. Gov. Jack Dalrymple generally opposes abortion but has not said whether he will sign the bill into law.
It’s one of several anti-abortion measures the state Legislature has weighed this session. The vote came with almost no debate in the Senate and after the same chamber approved another measure that would make North Dakota the first to ban abortions based on genetic defects such as Down syndrome.
That measure would also ban abortion based on gender selection. The Guttmacher Institute, which tracks abortion laws throughout the country, says Pennsylvania, Arizona and Oklahoma already have such laws.
Some supporters of the so-called fetal heartbeat measure have said they hope to send a message that North Dakota is anti-abortion and aims to challenge the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling that legalized abortion up until a fetus is considered viable, usually at 22 to 24 weeks.
Abortion-rights advocates say the state should expect a costly legal fight if the bill becomes law.
Arkansas passed a 12-week ban earlier this month that prohibits most abortions when a fetal heartbeat can be detected using an abdominal ultrasound. That ban is scheduled to take effect 90 days after the Arkansas Legislature adjourns.
A fetal heartbeat can generally be detected earlier in a pregnancy using a vaginal ultrasound, but Arkansas lawmakers balked at requiring women seeking abortions to have the more invasive imaging technique.
North Dakota’s measure doesn’t specify how a fetal heartbeat would be detected. Doctors performing an abortion after a heartbeat is detected could face a felony charge punishable by up to five years in prison and a $5,000 fine. Women having an abortion would not face charges.
A spokeswoman for the Guttmacher Institute, which tracks abortion laws across the country, said North Dakota’s measures are the latest in a “tidal wave of abortion restrictions” in the U.S.
“We have seen efforts to ban abortion entirely and those attempts have failed,” spokeswoman Elizabeth Nash said. “Now they’re moving toward banning abortions as early as possible.”
Abortion-rights advocates say the anti-abortion measures in the North Dakota Legislature are attempt to close the state’s sole abortion clinic, in Fargo. They also say the so-called fetal heartbeat bill is a direct challenge to Roe v. Wade, and its supporters should expect a costly legal fight if it becomes law.
Republican Rep. Bette Grande, an ardent opponent of abortion from Fargo who introduced the fetal heartbeat bill, said fears about potential litigation should not prevent lawmakers from approving the measure.
“Whether this is challenged in court is entirely up to the abortion industry,” Grande told lawmakers this week. “Given the lucrative nature of abortion, it is likely that any statute that reduces the number of customers will be challenged by the industry.”
OK, I guess if you spend 20 hours a day monitoring these striker bills you could figure out what the crooks in the Arizona legislator are doing, but for most of us that takes too much time.
It’s 'striker' season at the Capitol
By Alia Beard Rau The Republic | azcentral.com Sat Mar 16, 2013 10:18 PM
Watch out, it’s striker season.
No, that’s not some obscure reference to spring training or a new term for haboobs, but a favorite subversive tactic of Arizona lawmakers at the Capitol this time of year.
About halfway through the legislative session, as proposed bills get bogged down in the politics or lawmakers come up with a bold new idea they neglected to introduce in January, they begin to file what are called strike-everything, or “striker,” amendments.
Lawmakers take a bill that offers only a technical change or that they don’t mind sacrificing and propose an amendment that strikes out all the existing language and replaces it with an entirely different proposal.
The motivation varies. Strikers can revive an idea that was voted down in its original bill form, introduce an entirely new idea or allow a controversial idea to skip parts of the public-hearing process.
House Minority Leader Chad Campbell, D-Phoenix, is critical of the tactic.
“One strike-everything is one too many,” he said. “I don’t think it’s an appropriate way to do business. It’s not a transparent process.”
[Well then why haven't you introduced a bill to out law this practice??? Probably because you like this tactic because it keeps the people you pretend to represent from knowing what you are doing!!!!]
But Rep. Debbie Lesko, R-Glendale, said the tool has value, such as in a situation where a particular committee chairman refuses to hear a bill that’s vital to a lawmaker’s constituents.
[Well if that is the case then the system is NOT working and needs to be change!!!]
Striking that bill for another that’s been past the chairman can keep the bill alive.
“It’s kind of like attorneys. You don’t always like them until you need one,” she said. “In some cases, it’s not fair that one person can block an important bill. A striker allows you to get around that person and get a fair hearing.”
[Again, if that is the case then the system is NOT working and needs to be change!!!]
Lawmakers introduce dozens of strikers each year.
This year, 75 have already been approved, covering topics that include boosting campaign contributions, establishing a Cowboy Day, creating tax incentives for employers and tax exclusions for religious institutions, and banning goldfish prizes at school fairs.
The Cowboy Day striker appears to be a case of timing as opposed to trying to avoid a public hearing or certain committee.
[What rubbish!!! That is the whole purpose of these "striker bills", to keep the public from hearing about the bills]
Senate Bill 1139 started out proposing technical changes to existing state law regulating the sending of unsolicited goods.
At some point after the session deadline for introducing new bills, Republican lawmakers decided they wanted legislation honoring cowboys as a symbol of Arizona’s culture.
Sen. Gail Griffin, R-Hereford, allowed a striker to SB 1139 declaring the fourth Saturday of July as Cowboy Day during a Senate Government and Environment Committee hearing.
The revised bill passed that committee, the full Senate and then the House Energy, Environment and Natural Resources Committee. It still needs a final vote of the full House before going to the governor.
If the trend follows prior sessions, hundreds more strikers will be introduced over the next month. All but two striker bills already approved belong to Republicans.
So far, nothing enormously controversial has emerged. But that’s not always the case.
Last year, Sen. Kimberly Yee, R-Phoenix, then a state representative, and Sen. Steve Yarbrough, R-Chandler, replaced a House bill addressing attorney fees with a striker making numerous changes to state abortion laws.
They added the striker after the more mundane bill had already passed the House Government Committee and the full House, meaning the more controversial abortion bill only had a public hearing in the Senate instead of both chambers.
Strike-everything amendments
Arizona lawmakers each session propose dozens of strike-everything, or "striker," amendments. The amendments propose to replace all of the wording in an unrelated bill with an entirely different proposal. This year, lawmakers have already approved 75 strikers. Here are some of them:
Tax credits: Converted House Bill 2037 from making technical corrections to malpractice law to a proposal to allow school tax-credit money be spent on certain sports programs.
Animal prizes: Converted HB 2121 from funding security barriers at the Capitol to banning live-animal prizes.
Tax incentives: Converted HB 2264 from making technical corrections to mobile-home-park law to creating tax benefits for businesses that create new jobs and for the self-employed.
Drones: Converted HB 2269 from a technical correction on liquor-supplier law to a proposal creating a study committee on the use of drones.
HOAs: Converted HB 2371 from a technical correction on construction materials to proposing numerous changes to homeowners-association regulations, including limiting local government ability to require planned communities, allowing HOAs to vote by e-mail and prohibiting HOAs from charging extra fees to renters.
Special education: Converted HB 2395 from a technical correction on medical-malpractice laws to proposing limits on civil lawsuits based on negligence by private schools that provide special-education services.
Religious exemption: Converted HB 2446 from a technical correction on limited partnership laws to proposing property-tax exemptions for religious institutions.
Contribution limits: Converted HB 2593 from technical correction on veterans issues to proposing an increase on campaign-contribution limits.
Early ballots: Converted Senate Bill 1003 from a technical correction on agricultural regulations to proposing restrictions on who can return an early ballot for another person.
Cowboy Day: Converted SB 1139 from a technical correction on unsolicited merchandise to a proposal to make the fourth Saturday of July Cowboy Day.
Adoption subsidies: Converted SB 1062 from a technical correction on boating laws to proposing expanded behavioral-health services for adoptees.
Independent expenditures: Converted SB 1336 from regulating the election commission to a proposal to make it a felony to violate independent-expenditure regulations.
Women, it's not YOUR body, it's the GOVERNMENT's body!!!!
Well at least that's what these twits in North Dakota think!!
Strikers bills - how our elected officials prevent us from knowing what they are doing.
The elected officials who pretend to work for us and who claim to be "public servants" routinely use this tactic to pull the wool over our eyes and prevent us from knowing what they are doing.
Other articles on mixing religion and government
Previous
article
on mixing religion and government.
More artilces on mixing religion and govenrment.