Homeless in Arizona

Uncle Sam goes hunting for local government crooks

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.

Source

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?

Sen. Rich Crandall wants to create a jobs program for cops???

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.

Source

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.

Do Fingerprints Lie?

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.’’

Chicago mom sues over duct taping of boy, 11

Source

Chicago mom sues over duct taping of boy, 11

Associated Press Sat Mar 2, 2013 10:49 AM

CHICAGO — A suburban Chicago woman has filed a lawsuit accusing a teacher of duct taping her 11-year-old son’s face after telling him to stop talking in class.

The lawsuit filed this week in U.S. District Court in Chicago by Princess Dempsey on behalf of her son says the Lindrop School teacher put an index card on the boy’s mouth, then wrapped tape around his head.

When it was removed 45 minutes later, it allegedly tore out chunks of his hair and injured his face. The suit says the incident took place in February 2012.

Dempsey’s attorney, Standish Willis, says Dempsey is on Lindrop’s school board. She has also run unsuccessful races for Illinois state representative.

The suit seeks more than $100,000 in damages.

Messages seeking comment from the district weren’t returned.

Boy suspended for chewing pastry into ‘gun’

Boy suspended for chewing pastry into ‘gun’

By Donna St. George Washington Post Mon Mar 4, 2013 4:40 PM

A 7-year-old Anne Arundel County (Md.) boy was suspended for two days for chewing his breakfast pastry into the shape of a gun and saying, “bang, bang”— an offense that the school described as a threat to other students, according to his family.

The pastry “gun” was a rectangular strawberry-filled bar, akin to a Pop-Tart, that the second-grader had tried to nibble into the shape of a mountain Friday morning, but then found it looked more like a gun, said his father, William “B.J.” Welch.

Welch said an assistant principal at Park Elementary School in Baltimore told him that his son pointed the pastry at a classmate — though the child maintains he pointed it at the ceiling.

“In my eyes, it’s irrelevant; I don’t care who he pointed it at,” Welch said. “It was harmless. It was a danish.”

The boy’s suspension comes amid heightened sensitivity about security and guns— even pretend guns — in the aftermath of the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., which left 20 children and six staff members dead.

In the 11 weeks since the massacre, at least two young children in the Washington, D.C. region have been suspended for pointing their fingers like guns, and a 10-year-old in Alexandria, Va., was arrested by police for showing a toy gun to others on his school bus. In Pennsylvania, a 5-year-old was suspended for talking to classmates about shooting her Hello Kitty gun that blows bubbles.

Anne Arundel officials declined comment because of confidentiality laws, said schools spokesman Bob Mosier, who added that a letter about the incident was sent home to families Friday and is posted on the school’s web site ( www.aacps.org/html/schol/Elementary/Parkes.asp ).

In the letter, Myrna Phillips, the assistant principal, informed parents that a student “used food to make inappropriate gestures that disrupted the class” but said no “physical threats” were made and no one was harmed.

If children remain troubled by the incident, Phillips wrote, parents should “help them share their feelings.” A counselor would also be available to students, the letter said. “In general, please remind them of the importance of making good choices,” she wrote.

For the Welch family, the episode started Friday morning, when the 7-year-old was given the pastry as part of a schoolwide breakfast program. By about 9:20 am, the boy was being suspended and his father was called in.

Welch said he asked the assistant principal if anyone had been scared by the pastry. Someone could have been, he said he was told.

The father said he had high regard for the school, so the episode was puzzling.

“I feel this is just a direct result of society feeling that guns are evil and guns are bad . . . and if you make your pastry into a gun, you’re going to be the next Columbine shooter,” Welch said.

Welch has followed news accounts of other suspensions in recent weeks and contends educators are going overboard, which he said led him to go public.

“Kids are losing time in school for nothing more than playing,” he said, pointing out that there is a danger of long-term effects when gun-involved incidents are written into students’ permanent records.

He wondered: What if his son gets turned down for a security clearance when he’s in his 20s because of a pretend gun offense at age 7? “That may sound far-fetched but, you know what, in today’s world, it’s possible,” he said.

Welch said his 7-year-old has three brothers, and all are “typical” boys. The children have Nerf guns at home, and their grandfather is an avid hunter. Welch is a strong supporter of gun rights.

On Monday, Welch asked the school principal to strike references to guns from his son’s records. The principal looked into the idea, and said it could not be done, he said.

Welch said school leaders also told him Monday — as the case made national news — that the suspension was related to ongoing behavior, not guns, an idea he said is at odds with what he was told Friday and the letter sent to school families.

“Honestly, I think he was just kind of doing what kids do,” Welch said of his son. “To him, it was just a game, and to the school it was more than that.”

Secret Police in Phoenix????

Phoenix Police to encrypt radio transmissions making them secret

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.

Source

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.”

Politicians making it harder for us to recall them?

Politicians passing a retroactive law making it harder to recall Sheriff Joe Arpaio?

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.

Source

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.

Richard Nixon wished for total handgun ban

Of course the reason the Founder created the Second Amendment was to protect us from tyrants like Nixon, Bush and Obama.

Source

Richard Nixon wished for total handgun ban

Associated Press Sat Mar 9, 2013 11:24 AM

WASHINGTON — Few presidents in modern times have been as interested in gun control as Richard Nixon, of all people. He proposed ridding the market of Saturday night specials, contemplated banning handguns altogether and refused to pander to gun owners by feigning interest in their weapons.

Several previously unreported Oval Office recordings and White House memos from the Nixon years show a conservative president who at times appeared willing to take on the National Rifle Association, a powerful gun lobby then as now, even as his aides worried about the political ramifications.

“I don’t know why any individual should have a right to have a revolver in his house,” Nixon said in a taped conversation with aides. “The kids usually kill themselves with it and so forth.” He asked why “can’t we go after handguns, period?”

Nixon went on: “I know the rifle association will be against it, the gun makers will be against it.” But “people should not have handguns.” He laced his comments with obscenities, as was typical.

Nixon made his remarks in the Oval Office on May 16, 1972, the day after a would-be assassin shot and paralyzed segregationist presidential candidate George Wallace. As president, Nixon never publicly called for a ban on all handguns. Instead, he urged Congress to pass more modest legislation banning Saturday night specials, which were cheaply made, easily concealed and often used by criminals.

Not all of the president’s men appeared to share his passion on the issue. The recordings and memos show that Nixon administration officials saw gun control as a political loser.

Nixon, a Republican, did say publicly that if Congress passed a ban on Saturday night specials, he would sign it. But in a sign of how potent the NRA was even 40 years ago, this narrow piece of legislation never made it to his desk, and there is no sign that he ever sent a draft bill to Capitol Hill.

Today, President Barack Obama faces similar hurdles in trying to ban assault weapons and large-capacity ammunition magazines. Gun control advocates say no one needs such powerful weapons to kill an intruder or take down an animal. In Nixon’s time, the argument of such advocates was that Saturday night specials were too poorly made to be relied on for self-defense or hunting.

“Let me ask you,” Nixon said to Attorney General John Mitchell in June 1971, “there is only one thing you are checking on, that’s the manufacture of those $20 guns? We should probably stop that.” Saturday night specials sold for $10 to $30 at the time. Mitchell responded that banning those guns would be “pretty difficult, actually,” because of the gun lobby.

“No hunters are going to use $20 guns,” Nixon countered.

“No, but the gun lobby’s against any incursion into the elimination of firearms,” said Mitchell.

The term Saturday night special originated in Detroit, where police observed the frequency with which the guns were used to commit weekend mayhem. Lynyrd Skynyrd memorialized the weapon in its 1975 song, “Saturday Night Special,” in which the Southern rock band sang: “Ain’t good for nothin’/But put a man six feet in a hole.”

Nixon’s private comments were not always supportive of gun control, particularly measures that would go beyond handguns. For example, in a taped conversation just a few days after saying that people shouldn’t have handguns, the president asked rhetorically, “What do they want to do, just disarm the populace? Disarm the good folks and leave the arms in the hands of criminals?”

But most of his comments on the tapes, available at the websites of the National Archives and of the University of Virginia’s Miller Center, were in favor of stronger gun control.

At a June 29, 1972, news conference, about six weeks after Wallace’s shooting, Nixon said he’d sign legislation banning Saturday night specials. Later that year, the Senate did pass such a bill, but the House never acted on the legislation.

The bill’s sponsor, Indiana Democrat Birch Bayh, said in a recent interview that the NRA helped prevent his bill from getting through Congress. The Nixon administration supported an unsuccessful Republican alternative Senate bill on Saturday night specials that had a definition the NRA preferred.

The shooting of another politician put gun control back on the radar the following year. On Jan. 30, 1973, two robbers shot Sen. John Stennis, D-Miss., and surgeons initially thought he would die. Stennis survived and lived until 1995.

The day of the shooting, Nixon told White House special counsel Charles Colson, “At least I hope that Saturday night special legislation, at least we’re supporting that, you know. We’re not for gun control generally, but we are for that. God damn it that ought to be passed. Or was it passed?”

When Colson told him it hadn’t, Nixon instructed his counsel, “We better damn well be for it now, huh?”

At a news conference the next day, the president repeated his call to ban Saturday night specials. He also volunteered a comment that few national politicians would make today: “Let me say, personally, I have never hunted in my life. I have no interest in guns and so forth.”

By March 1973, aide John Ehrlichman was telling Nixon that gun control was a “loser issue for us.”

“You’ve got a highly mobilized lobby,” he told the president. “I think what we have to do is carve out a little piece of it, and Saturday night specials, of course, has been our tactic.”

Other White House officials also argued against doing much, including Tom C. Korologos, a White House deputy assistant for legislative affairs who later was an outside lobbyist for the NRA and ambassador to Belgium under President George W. Bush.

“The thing that worries me is that the president’s hard-core support comes from the gun-folk and obviously we need support these days,” Korologos wrote in an Aug. 31, 1973 memo, referring to the Watergate scandal that would undo Nixon’s presidency.

“Lurking in the background is the president’s personal statement: ‘I’m a liberal on gun control,’” Korologos said. Nixon might have made this statement privately; there is no record of him saying it publicly.

Korologos’ conclusion: “I vote for a ‘talk’ meeting and then ‘tough it out’ by doing nothing and hope nobody gets shot in the next three years.”

The effort to ban Saturday night specials receded in recent decades as the focus of gun control advocates shifted to rein in more powerful weapons.

Nixon’s focus soon shifted, too.

In June 1972, a little over a month after his chat about banning handguns, Nixon had a recorded conversation that showed him trying to get the FBI to stop investigating the break-in at Democratic offices at the Watergate office building by burglars tied to his re-election committee.

Few remember the tapes about handguns. History forever remembers the tape that gave Nixon’s Watergate pursuers their “smoking gun.”

———

Follow Fred Frommer on Twitter: http://twitter.com/ffrommer

Google says the FBI is spying on some of you

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.

AG Holder - Obama OK to murder Americans with drones!!!!!

Source

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.

Gabrielle Giffords' husband, Mark Kelly buys AR-15

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.

Source

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.

'Truth serum' may be used to assess Holmes' sanity

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.

Source

'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

Ewald-Heinrich von Kleist - Freedom fighter or criminal???

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.

How do you spell hypocrite - Gun grabber Mark Kelly

Source

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.

No ethics for Phoenix City Council members???

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.

VA suppresses and manipulates health data???

Researcher alleges VA covered up adverse consequences to toxic exposures

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???

Source

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

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

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."

Whistleblower: VA Hiding Veteran Health Data

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

Whistleblower: 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.

Phoenix Mayor Greg Stanton is a gun grabber???

Source

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]

Strikers bills - how our elected officials prevent us from knowing what they are doing.

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.

Source

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.

Previous articles on the government schools or public schools as our government masters like to call them.

More articles on the government schools or public schools as our government masters like to call them.