Nelson Mandela is at the end of his life. He is dying of a lung infection. The reason he is susceptible to these infections is that he contracted tuberculosis during his 27 year imprisonment in a white racist political prison on Robben Island.
He ended up in that prison because the CIA told the South African apartheid secret police where they could locate him.
The U.S. media is unanimous in hiding this fact from the people it is their alleged duty to "inform"
And no, Obama probably isn't going to apologize for that.
This is what the CIA does. It goes around the world, infiltrating people's struggles against oppression, making lists of people to kill, helping keep this planet from evolving into a world fit for human beings to live in.
In Indonesia they instigated the extermination of 800,000 in the early 1960s.
They gave Saddam Hussein lists of alleged communists for him to torture and kill. (In the early days when the U.S. liked him.)
As former CIA officer Philip Agee revealed, the CIA through Latin America had as its primary task the prevention of social progress. It identified names of people for arrest, torture, and murder. Agee's own crisis of conscience came when he heard the screams of someone being tortured, and realized he could no longer aid and abet such crimes.
This is why I refer to the CIA as a global Gestapo.
Saturday, June 29, 2013
Thursday, June 20, 2013
The Real Role of the Police in Society
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The actual main function of police,
their primary duty, is not “fighting crime” or “law
enforcement.” It is enforcement of the social order and the defense
of the power structure. At times, especially in despotic regimes, the
defense of the power structure extends to the defense of particular
individuals in power, or is even the primary function.
This general statement is true in most
countries, and certainly in the U.S. A few years or so of close
observation of reality and reading newspapers should make this basic
truth apparent. But since people are so heavily indoctrinated not to
see this, most people never come to understand this, at least not
consciously, although by their behavior one suspects that they
subconsciously intuit it. People who act as if it isn't so, and “talk
back to” or “argue” with police, frequently get “taught a
lesson,” which may be a violent “lesson,” by the police. Of
course, you are not supposed to say the lesson out loud. That
angers the police, who want you to “respect” them, that is, pay
homage to the mythology about them. Such “disrespect” is liable
to earn you an additional beating/ pepper spraying/ tasering/ night
in jail/ additional charges or whatever.
It is unfortunate that instead of being
able to learn this from other people's experiences (accounts of which
are readily available, and now with youtube we have voluminous,
graphic visual evidence of unjustified violent police brutality and
other misconduct) people have to experience it personally to see it.
And even then, many don't learn. They naively think they can “seek
justice through the system.” Yes, sometimes they can win some
money, if they're lucky. It's very difficult, and expensive in itself
to even try. Of course, if some is permanently injured or killed,
obtaining money (from taxpayers, not from the police, and certainly
not from the individual criminal policeman) is not properly called
“justice.” It is monetary compensation for physical injuries or
death. (The dead of course cannot be compensated at all, just their
survivors.)
Furthermore, we often hear that parents
or other relatives of police murder victims seek via lawsuits to
“make sure this never happens to anyone else again.” Funny how
they never heard of the innumerable previous survivors of
police murders who said the same thing, and yet “it” “happened
again.” (Most often the “it” is a brutal assault or murder of a
black or Hispanic person, but sometimes whites, especially poor ones,
are victims. This goes to the enduring racism embedded in the U.S.
repressive apparatus in particular. The entire “drug war” has
been a cover for racist repression, in point of fact. By enforcing
repressive drug laws selectively, even nominally non-racist cops are
engaging in objectively racist behavior.)
Another common trope of victims and
their families when the police get away with brutality and murder is
that “God” will render judgment. This is a throwing up of hands a
surrender, a refusal to struggle against an oppressive system,
instead falling back on a superstitious belief in an imaginary
omnipotent being who is just. (A few obvious questions for the
primitives who hold these magical beliefs: if your imaginary saviour
is just and omnipotent, and omniscent to boot, why does “He”
allow injustices in the first place? And when exactly does he
compensate you for your suffering and punish the wrongdoers? They
have an answer for the second questions, at least: the answer is
after everybody dies. They don't really die, they go to
imaginary rewards or punishments. Sooo childish. Grow up, stop being
apolitical. You cannot avoid politics. Politics is about power, and
you can no more ignore power than you can ignore the air or earth or
water.)
As for the “few bad apples” line,
that is the fallback position of police defenders when they can no
longer sweep a particular atrocity under the rug, hiding it, then
denying it, and minimizing it as much as possible; if that were so,
how come the same “bad apples” commit atrocity after atrocity
without punishment? Why aren't they weeded out? Why do
the police all close ranks behind their “bad apple”
sadists and murderers? Why do hundreds turn out in protest and
solidarity on the exceedingly rare occasions when one of their
homicidal number is actually brought to trial?
The indoctrination to perceive police
as authority figures to be deferred to and submitted to, who are
imbued with presumptive moral legitimacy and indeed superiority,
begins in childhood. Two factors make this brainwashing nearly
impervious to evidence (i.e. actual facts and experience, that is,
reality); the persistence of mental patterns ingrained in the brain
from indoctrination (which is constantly reinforced with booster
shots of propaganda courtesy of the media and entertainment arms of
the propaganda industry), and the preference people have for
comforting propaganda myths over harsh, awful realities. People
naturally gravitate towards the comforting illusion. Hewing to the
officially-promoted illusion is doubly safe. It's safe
psychologically, to avoid psychic pain (at great material, that is,
real existential, cost) and to avoid punishment for dissent, or
mere conformance, for marching out of step.
A dozen states made citizens' recording
of police in their public actions a felony. It has to go to the
Supreme Court to be “legalized.” That hasn't stopped police from
continuing to attack people recording their actions, beating them,
arresting them, confiscating their equipment and recordings- as
numerous videos on youtube document.
One particularly outrageous case of
attempted repression is illustrated by “75 Years in Prison ForVideotaping Police,” an establishment TV news report. (And a follow-up, “State Appeals Decision in Michael Allison Case, 75 years in prison for recording.”)
One note
on the case they mention near the end referring to a cop serving two
years for shooting a man. That was the infamous killing of Oscar
Grant by transit cop Johannes Mehserle in Oakland, California.
Merserle only did a year for that blatant execution of his victim,
who was sitting on the floor in a rapid transit station surrounded by
cops, doing nothing. If there weren't numerous cellphone videos taken
by bystanders, there would have been no punishment at all for the
murderer.
Mehserle is currently on trial in a
civil case (no criminal charges) since he is being sued by another of
his victims, who he brutally beat just two months prior to his
execution of Grant. Once again this shows the culpability of the
bosses of the police, who should have disciplined or fired him after
that incident. In case after case through the U.S., brutal and
sadistic cops face no repercussions at all until they actually murder
someone, and even then usually not. [See for example “Johannes Mehserle, BART Cop Convicted Of Shooting Oscar Grant, On Trial For Police Brutality In Separate Case,” Huffington Post San
Francisco, 11/21/11. BART stands for Bay Area Rapid Transit, a rail
system connecting San Francisco with localities across the San
Francisco Bay such as Oakland. Mehserle was employed by BART. A
fellow officer who was cashiered after the Grant murder went on to
join the U.S. Army- notice his firing didn't prevent the Army from
accepting him- and he is currently in Afghanistan, no doubt seeking
fresh victims. He's been charged with fraud for taking unemployment
checks when he was actually employed. This is the ethical caliber of
some of the people tasked with “law enforcement.” “Cop fired for role in Oscar Grant killing charged with fraud,” rt.com,
May 03, 2013.]
Here's a good one: a Florida cop picked up an 84 year old man and threw him head first onto the ground, breaking his neck. "Cop Breaks 84 Yr Old's Neck For Touching Him," a news clip from Fox News.
I could cite numerous cases from memory that are even worse.
Thursday, June 13, 2013
Carl Levin's Latest Crime
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U.S. Senator Carl Levin, a Democrat
from Michigan who is chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee,
is, we're told, a “liberal.” As with most U.S. politicians who
are so labeled, the designation is highly misleading. Many of the
worst crimes in U.S. history have been committed by alleged
“liberals.” [1]
Levin is the guy who brought us
“legalized” indefinite imprisonment (euphemized as “detention”)
for American citizens, in military gulags, without charges or trials,
so long as the government calls them “terrorists,” is at it
again. [2] Once again, using his authoritarian power
as chairman of the Armed Services Committee, he has committed another
crime against human rights. This time he had rushed to rescue
military rapists. He removed an amendment from a pending bill, the
2014 “defense authorization” law that funds the military, an
amendment that was the work of a bipartisan group spearheaded by
Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) designed to reform the way the
military handles sexual assault cases by taking the the power to
decide to investigate and prosecute cases out of the hands of
commanders- the people who notoriously protect the sex criminals-
just as in the Roman Catholic Church with pedophile priests- and
giving it to military prosecutors
The War Department itself admits to
26,000 sexual assaults against military members by others in the
military in the most recent year it tabulated. (Of course, as with
rape and other sexual assault in society generally, this is an
understatement of the actual frequency. Given the horrible history of
how sexual assault is dealt with in the military, which is that is
victims say anything, they are targeted for retaliation, if anything
the degree of underestimation is probably greater in the military.)
Just in the last few months we've had the spectacle of military
personnel given newly created roles to supposedly crack down on
sexual abuse themselves arrested for sex crimes. (Nothing like hiring
foxes to guard a hen house!)
The military has proven itself over the
past few years of growing scandal to be incapable of internal reform.
Reform must be imposed from without. Levin is trying to block that
reform. Like Obama, Levin's words were the opposite of his action.
Here's what this evil cynic had to say:
“We have a problem with the
underreporting of sexual assaults,” Levin said. “We have a
problem with the inadequate investigation of sexual assaults. We have
a problem with the lack of support for victims of sexual assaults. We
have a problem with retaliation, ostracism and peer pressure against
such victims. And we have a problem with a culture that has taken
inadequate steps to correct this situation.”
You'd think he was the one doing the
reforming, not blocking reform, just as the general staff and their
nominal civilian boss, War Secretary Chuck “Wagon” Hagel, wanted-
and said so publicly.
And Levin managed to top even his own
ludicrous reformer burlesque by claiming that the Gillibrand
reforms would “likely weaken” the response to sexual assaults
in the military!!
Might as well have Republicans running
the U.S. Senate. Having Democrats in some ways is worse in that it
fools people who would otherwise make a fuss.
Same as having Obama doing the dirty
work of repression keeps various liberals or whatever we should call
them, quiet.
1] For example, the “liberal”
Woodrow Wilson was a virulent racist who purged the Federal
Government of all black employees, brought us the “Espionage Act”
used to imprison dissidents then and now, took the U.S. into World
War I, and the infamous Palmer raids, a mass roundup and deportation
of thousands of leftists. Truman was a fanatical anti-Soviet crusader
who initiated the purges and repression of the misnamed “McCarthy
era.” Kennedy was the Godfather of U.S. death squad operations by
so-called “Special Forces” throughout the world, and hid a
torture training program in Latin America inside his so-called
“Alliance for Progress.” His bloody legacy lives on today. Lyndon
Johnson brought us the Vietnam War, the fascist military takeover of
Brazil, and invasion of the Dominican Republic, and vicious domestic
repression, including the use of the U.S. military for this purpose.
As best as I can tell, “liberal”
these days applies to anyone who isn't overtly racist, and/or who
isn't a social Darwinist who believes anyone who can't get rich
should be allowed to die rather than have retirement money or medical
insurance provided by the government, or who doesn't want to outlaw
women's right to control their own bodies and terminate pregnancies,
or who thinks the U.S. shouldn't be the Wild West with people packing
guns in schools, bars, churches, restaurants, everywhere, with the
right to shoot (black) people on sight in “self-defense.” Notice
that these are all “domestic” issues. There is no discernible
difference on “foreign policy” (U.S. Imperialism) except that
Republicans are always trying to raise the ante on U.S. violence and
aggression over what Democrats are bidding.
2] Levin (and the U.S.
Congress) abolished all rights for those called “terrorists,”
which he did by inserting a provision in the yearly military spending
law (officially the “National Defense Authorization Act,”- it
sounds so grand!) which President “Ignore What I Say Because I Lie,
Just Look At What I Do” Obama signed into law after pretending he
opposed it. He said not to worry, he wasn't going to use the law.
Why, he is so opposed to it that he is currently appealing a
decision by a Federal District Court judge that ruled the law
unconstitutional, in a suit brought by prospective victims including
Noam Chomsky and Chris Hedges. During the trial, the government's
lawyers refused to say that the plaintiffs would not ever be thrown
into the military gulag. That is very telling, if hardly revelatory.
So there's one more example of cynical
con man Obama trying to fool people with obvious lies, delivered with
the smooth self-assurance of the practiced hustler.
Keep in mind that, contrary to the
impression the propaganda system and government strives to create, a
“terrorist” isn't necessarily a Muslim with a bomb. A terrorist
is whoever the secret police and military say is a terrorist.
The FBI says the Occupy Movement people are terrorists- and they so
(dis)informed the police departments tasked with the violent
repression of that movement. The FBI designates environmental
activists as “terrorists.” They designate certain animal rights
activists as terrorists. They just fulminated about the “terrorist
ideology” of Assata Shakur, an escaped political prison and
frame-up victim.
“Terrorists” aren't just jihadists.
Nor are they necessarily people who use force for their political
ends (as the government does). They're whoever the reactionaries who
control the repressive apparatus hate because of their political
beliefs and activities.
In fact, sometimes “terrorists” are
people with the power apparatus itself who run afoul of it for being
too conscientious, like Julia Davis, a former DHS employee [see "] or too punctilious about law and civil
rights, like William Binney, a four-decade NSA veteran.
They are quite indiscriminate about
targeting people, just as in past when the “communist” label was
used as the Mark of Cain on their victims. The number of names on
their various “terrorist” lists and the no-fly list is closing in
on one million. Well that's enough fodder to keep their “War on
Terrorism” going for decades.
They always have an excuse for
repression and Imperialism. Before “terrorism,” it was
“communism.” Before the Soviet Union existed, it was the Hun
threat to “our” hemisphere. Drugs, crimes, foreign bogeymen,
anything to create fear and loathing among the populace to march to
the establishment's martial music.
Tuesday, June 4, 2013
Supreme Court Okays Using DNA To Frame Up Innocent People
No, that's not what they say they did. But whether they realize it or not, that is now what's going to happen.
What the Supreme Court just ruled, 5-4, is that police can take DNA from people they arrest (not convicted yet, obviously) and add it to a database, just as they do with fingerprints. The case involved a Maryland defendant who was identified as a rapist after he was arrested for assault, as a result of the swab of cells taken from inside his cheek and tested against a DNA database including evidence samples from unsolved crimes including rapes.
This is an example of how hard cases make bad law. A scumbag like this needs to be captured and imprisoned. [1] But the precedent it establishes tightens the screw of police power around everyone's necks yet another notch.
The decision split the court in an unusual way. The "conservatives" (reactionaries) and "liberals" (conservatives) didn't line up on opposite sides from each other, but rather some were on each side of the decision. Antonin Scalia, in the minority, decried the decision, so it must be really awful!!
The reason I say this opens the door to DNA frame-ups is because that is what the police and FBI ALWAYS do with their powers. That is what they have done, over and over, with fingerprint evidence, for example.
What? you say. How is that possible?
Very easily, actually.
In the case of fingerprint frame-ups, there is a nearly foolproof method. The police merely claim they lifted a fingerprint of their chosen victim from a crime scene or from a piece of evidence such as a weapon or whatever.
There have been a few cases where the police got caught doing this. In California in the early 1970s there was a case that made the newspapers of a hapless ice cream vendor framed up who served 8 years until the frame-up was unraveled.
More recently, in New York State the State police were caught using planted prints in this manner. [2]
It must happen thousands of times that we don't know about. Since the public is brainwashed to believe that fingerprint evidence is infallible, no one believes someone who protests that that can't be their print. (Ah, it was their print, it just wasn't where the cops said it was!)
Back in the 1970s I read a textbook on fingerprint "science" by one of the recognized experts in the field, Andre A. Moessens. One section dealt with the issue of faking fingerprint evidence. He described a number of methods and why each one could be exposed. Then he came to the last one, where the police could "theoretically" claim to have lifted a print from a place they didn't. He said in that case we just have to trust the integrity of the police not to do that.
Right. Ever hear of "testilying," pal? [3]
Besides claiming to have lifted prints from sites they actually didn't obtain them from, police also misidentify prints, sometimes in good faith, sometimes accidentally. Frontline had a pretty good documentary a few years ago about the unreliability of so-called forensic science. [4] (It's more of a pseudo-science, actually. First, they claim an exactitude that is just false. Then they transfer the inculcated belief in the infallibility and precision of fingerprint "matching" to all manner of things that is just fraudulent, like hair, handwriting, tire tracks, tool marks, barrel marks on bullets, paint chips, even bite marks! There were numerous bogus murder convictions in Georgia based on bite marks on victims' bodies allegedly "matching" a defendant's teeth! You'd think common sense would be enough to refute such nonsense!)
Fingerprint "matching" is actually more of an art than a science, but the police will never admit that, since it would undermine their undeservedly ironclad credibility. The FBI claimed they had a "100 percent positive" fingerprint match to an Oregon lawyer, Brandon Mayfield, who just happened to be Muslim, between him and a print from the 2004 Madrid railway bombing. He had a hellish few weeks, until the Spanish police announced that they arrested the person who actually had the finger the print came from. And since the finger was attached to that man's hand, and not to Mayfield's, it was a bit of an OOPS moment for the FBI.
The FBI had insisted the prints were an "absolutely incontrovertible match." And the FBI touts itself, and with longtime media cooperation has created the myth, that it is some kind of elite police force, the creme de la creme of "law enforcement." So imagine how competent the thousands of state, county, and local police departments are in America. Imagine how it is in poorer countries.
Well, in the Mayfield matter, the FBI apologized, and paid some money (which their victim had to sue them to get, of course- Gee, why are Americans "so litigious?" Could it be because that's the ONLY WAY to get redress for wrongs? Just wondering). Usually the FBI gets away with this sort of thing, and much worse, including political assassinations.
So now they can do the same things with DNA. Since a swabful of inner cheek cells contains a huge amount of detectable DNA molecules, there is plenty to use for purposes of "finding" some at crime scenes, etc. Just like taking a fingerprint and putting it on an evidence card. If the FBI agent or police officer says he got this sample he's submitting to the database for matching from such-and-such a spot, that is very hard to disprove. He merely has to assert it. And in U.S. courts, there is a presumption that police don't lie- even after so many years of evidence to the contrary. (And people not blindly hypnotized by authority are systematically weeded out from jury pools in advance of trials, so there is little skeptism among jurors towards police testimony and "evidence.")
To be sure, DNA could have been used anyway to frame people up, without the Supreme Court's help, by surreptitiously obtaining people's DNA. Perhaps a femme fatale or fake "friend" could serve a victim a drink, and the saliva left on the glass taken, a trick police already use against people in custody. Or government burglars could swab your toothbrush when you're not home. There are myriad possibilites for such a "dirty trick." But it would have also been necessary to "officially" get DNA from the target's body directly, in order to "prove" a "match." So without this legalization of taking DNA from arrestees- and the FBI has arranged countless tens of thousands of pretext arrests, for example the late political activist Abbie Hoffman alone was arrested over 50 times- it would have been harder to frame the person. They would have first had to be convicted of a felony to overtly take DNA from their body. (That was already allowed.)
The number of victims of just FBI political frame-ups is too numerous to list here. Two prominent ones are Elmer "Geronimo" Pratt (eventually exonerated after 30 years in a dungeon) and Leonard Peltier, who is destined to die in a Federal "supermax" torture prison. Peltier was framed with fake FBI "forensic science" evidence that claimed ballistic tests matched his rifle to a bullet taken from a dead FBI agent who had attacked American Indian Movement members. (One of whom, Joe Stuntz, was killed by the agents in the attack, a fact that never gets mentioned for some reason, so I'm mentioning it right here, and secret policemen who don't like it and monitor this site can lump it- I'm sorry, "lump it" won't translate well for those who use the Translate widget on this page. It means "too bad for you, I don't care.")
During appeals, the FBI was forced to admit that the ballistic "match" was bogus, but of course the appeals court let the conviction stand anyway, despite the utter absence of any other evidence proving Peltier shot the agent. The FBI has made clear over the years that releasing Peltier is absolutely unacceptable to it, and people IN the establishment know enough not to mess with the FBI, which has blackmailed and imprisoned many politicians and judges over the years. Plus Federal judges are ideologically hostile to anyone who forcibly resists the oppression of the system.
But a legal system that is part of the enforcement machinery of an oligarchy cannot be relied upon as a vehicle for justice. That means that almost anyone, at any time, not just opponents of the system, can be victimized by such a judicial system- and many are, both those who are victims of criminals where the perpetrators are overlooked, and those framed up as criminal culprits- framed up by lazy and indifferent police and prosecutors, or framed up by criminals with state power.
1] Rapists are particularly dangerous as they are usually repeat offenders. Except maybe for Bill Clinton, who raped Juanita Broaddrick, as a story on NBC revealed some years ago. Clinton had thugs threaten women he'd sexually used or abused- one had her cat killed, and a goon then accosted her while she was jogging and terrified her, for example. His right-hand woman, Betsy Wright, had as one of her tasks suppressing "bimbo eruptions," that is, ensuring that his past paramours would maintain omerta (silence). So it is impossible to know if he only raped one woman in his entire life.
However we do know that he's committed mass murder more than once.
-In Haiti, where he overthrew Aristede and had the CIA create a death squad called FRAPH. (FRAPH stands for "The Front for the Advancement and Progress of Haiti," an amazingly cynical and Orwellian title. It was like a successor to the murderous Tonton Macoute of the Duvalier dictatorship.)
-In Sudan, where he blew up the country's only pharmaceutical manufacturing plant, newly built, which meant death for thousands of poor Sudanese.
-In Iraq, where the sanctions he maintained are credited with killing 500,000 Iraqi children. When Leslie Stahl confronted his Secretary of State, the evil harridan Madeleine Albright, about this on the TV show 60 Minutes, asking "was it worth it?" Albright didn't even dispute the half million dead children Stahl cited and ended her answer with "We think it was worth it." What the "it" was that was allegedly achieved, I still can't figure out. Of course, their goal was to overthrow Saddam Hussein, which was not accomplished until Clinton's successor Bush the Younger invaded Iraq.
-In Rwanda, where he ordered UN Secretary General Kofi Annan* to pull out UN troops instead of sending requested reinforcements, which led directly to the genocide there. The commander of the troops said he could have easily prevented the slaughter with relatively few reinforcements. (Most of the killing was by machete and burning people alive. These were mobs, mostly, not modern military forces committing the massacres.) That last one is maybe more of a failure to prevent, although it wasn't mere passivity, but active interference that in effect aided and abetted the murderers.
So that's four mass murders on Clinton's head, three of them very directly and deliberately by him. If you want to add one more failure-to-prevent mass murder to his account, there's his failure to kill Osama bin Laden when numerous opportunities presented themselves, according to former CIA officer Michael Scheuer. Scheuer also faults Bush II for similar failures. (See youtube.com interviews with Scheuer, especially "Conversations With History.") Of course this one wasn't foreseeable, as the Rwandan one was, and is speculative, as killing bin Laden would not have necessarily prevented the destruction of the World Trade Center Towers. We're told the "mastermind" of that is Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, currently on "trial" in a kangeroo pseudo-court on the military base in occupied Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. It's not that I necessarily doubt his guilt. I just don't like Stalinist-style show trials that make a mockery of justice and legal process. In fact, such show trials are highly destructive to law and justice, not only in the particular instance, but by discrediting law and justice conceptually and delegitimating them in the eyes of the people.
* Annan was a willing U.S. stooge, in the tradition of UN Secretary Generals. In fact, those aren't so pliable risk death, as happened to Dag Hammarskjold, who was murdered in 1961 when the CIA sabotaged his plane, to prevent him from interfering with U.S. designs in the Congo. See the BBC News magazine story "Dag Hammarskjold: Was his death a crash or a conspiracy?" Also CIA assassin Dean Selmier, in his book Blow Away, which describes his career as a killer for the CIA, recounts a conversation with a French intelligence officer who tells him Hammarskjold was murdered, and that the Frenchman said he opposed the hit. Barnes and Noble is selling the book online for $1.99. A bargain for a hardcover!
2] Here is an excerpt from the Wikipedia article, "Fingerprints." I recommend the article to interested readers.
"In April 1993, in the New York State Police Troop C scandal, Craig D. Harvey, a New York State Police trooper was charged with fabricating evidence. Harvey admitted he and another trooper lifted fingerprints from items the suspect, John Spencer, touched while in Troop C headquarters during booking. He attached the fingerprints to evidence cards and later claimed that he had pulled the fingerprints from the scene of the murder. The forged evidence was presented during John Spencer's trial and his subsequent conviction resulted in a term of 50 years to life in prison at his sentencing. Three state troopers were found guilty of fabricating fingerprint evidence and served prison sentences."
I wonder who did more time in prison, the victim or the police criminals? Wikipedia doesn't say. I don't have time to research it at the moment- but you can.
Of course, the real solution to all this is honest, ethical police and prosecutors with checks on their ability to pursue ideological vendettas and political agendas (whether of personal aggrandizement or repression of dissent and resistance to injustice). That won't happen until they are less powerful and under more external controls. "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely," as Lord Acton famously phrased it. The problem isn't so much the tools of law enforcement as who wields them, and for what ends.
3] There are so many examples of blatant frame-ups by venal cops and prosecutors over the years, in numerous states, that it would take a large tome just to cover the ones that became prominent in the media. Right now in New York, there is an ongoing review of murder convictions engineered by a Brooklyn, NY detective, who for example used the same drug addict as an "eyewitness" in numerous separate murder cases! The only reason the cases are "under review" is because the New York Times, to their credit, exposed some of the "questionable" cases, thus forcing the venal Brooklyn District Attorney, Charles Hynes, to order a "review." He's up for reelection yet again, but he needn't worry: TV network CBS has rushed to his rescue with a suspiciously timely multi-episode TV series lionizing his office, including portraying as heroic a vicious prosecutor in his employ who was revealed by the Times series as a frame-up artist. If I had to speculate as to why, I'd say it's because Hynes has made himself useful to the powerful Jewish Hasidic community in Brooklyn (which votes as a bloc) and CBS is a key organ of Jewish power in the U.S. This kind of cohesiveness is one key to Jewish power in America. (Contrast that with the fractiousness of African-Americans, who daily gun down other African-Americans for no good reason.)
There are a number of stories on the NYT website, such as "Review of 50 Brooklyn Murder Cases Ordered," "Scrutiny on Prosecutors After Questions About Brooklyn Detective’s Work," "Jailed Unjustly in the Death of a Rabbi, Man Nears Freedom," and "In Review of Brooklyn Cases, So Many Obstacles." You can search their website for more. And that's just one example in the U.S. This happens all over, all the time. With the increase in police and prosecutorial power over the last few decades, and the evisceration of rights and protections for the people, we should expect it to get worse.
4] See "Judge Harry T. Edwards: How Reliable is Forensic Evidence in Court?" In fact, there are a number of relevant stories at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/ Search with the keywords "forensic science on trial."
What the Supreme Court just ruled, 5-4, is that police can take DNA from people they arrest (not convicted yet, obviously) and add it to a database, just as they do with fingerprints. The case involved a Maryland defendant who was identified as a rapist after he was arrested for assault, as a result of the swab of cells taken from inside his cheek and tested against a DNA database including evidence samples from unsolved crimes including rapes.
This is an example of how hard cases make bad law. A scumbag like this needs to be captured and imprisoned. [1] But the precedent it establishes tightens the screw of police power around everyone's necks yet another notch.
The decision split the court in an unusual way. The "conservatives" (reactionaries) and "liberals" (conservatives) didn't line up on opposite sides from each other, but rather some were on each side of the decision. Antonin Scalia, in the minority, decried the decision, so it must be really awful!!
The reason I say this opens the door to DNA frame-ups is because that is what the police and FBI ALWAYS do with their powers. That is what they have done, over and over, with fingerprint evidence, for example.
What? you say. How is that possible?
Very easily, actually.
In the case of fingerprint frame-ups, there is a nearly foolproof method. The police merely claim they lifted a fingerprint of their chosen victim from a crime scene or from a piece of evidence such as a weapon or whatever.
There have been a few cases where the police got caught doing this. In California in the early 1970s there was a case that made the newspapers of a hapless ice cream vendor framed up who served 8 years until the frame-up was unraveled.
More recently, in New York State the State police were caught using planted prints in this manner. [2]
It must happen thousands of times that we don't know about. Since the public is brainwashed to believe that fingerprint evidence is infallible, no one believes someone who protests that that can't be their print. (Ah, it was their print, it just wasn't where the cops said it was!)
Back in the 1970s I read a textbook on fingerprint "science" by one of the recognized experts in the field, Andre A. Moessens. One section dealt with the issue of faking fingerprint evidence. He described a number of methods and why each one could be exposed. Then he came to the last one, where the police could "theoretically" claim to have lifted a print from a place they didn't. He said in that case we just have to trust the integrity of the police not to do that.
Right. Ever hear of "testilying," pal? [3]
Besides claiming to have lifted prints from sites they actually didn't obtain them from, police also misidentify prints, sometimes in good faith, sometimes accidentally. Frontline had a pretty good documentary a few years ago about the unreliability of so-called forensic science. [4] (It's more of a pseudo-science, actually. First, they claim an exactitude that is just false. Then they transfer the inculcated belief in the infallibility and precision of fingerprint "matching" to all manner of things that is just fraudulent, like hair, handwriting, tire tracks, tool marks, barrel marks on bullets, paint chips, even bite marks! There were numerous bogus murder convictions in Georgia based on bite marks on victims' bodies allegedly "matching" a defendant's teeth! You'd think common sense would be enough to refute such nonsense!)
Fingerprint "matching" is actually more of an art than a science, but the police will never admit that, since it would undermine their undeservedly ironclad credibility. The FBI claimed they had a "100 percent positive" fingerprint match to an Oregon lawyer, Brandon Mayfield, who just happened to be Muslim, between him and a print from the 2004 Madrid railway bombing. He had a hellish few weeks, until the Spanish police announced that they arrested the person who actually had the finger the print came from. And since the finger was attached to that man's hand, and not to Mayfield's, it was a bit of an OOPS moment for the FBI.
The FBI had insisted the prints were an "absolutely incontrovertible match." And the FBI touts itself, and with longtime media cooperation has created the myth, that it is some kind of elite police force, the creme de la creme of "law enforcement." So imagine how competent the thousands of state, county, and local police departments are in America. Imagine how it is in poorer countries.
Well, in the Mayfield matter, the FBI apologized, and paid some money (which their victim had to sue them to get, of course- Gee, why are Americans "so litigious?" Could it be because that's the ONLY WAY to get redress for wrongs? Just wondering). Usually the FBI gets away with this sort of thing, and much worse, including political assassinations.
So now they can do the same things with DNA. Since a swabful of inner cheek cells contains a huge amount of detectable DNA molecules, there is plenty to use for purposes of "finding" some at crime scenes, etc. Just like taking a fingerprint and putting it on an evidence card. If the FBI agent or police officer says he got this sample he's submitting to the database for matching from such-and-such a spot, that is very hard to disprove. He merely has to assert it. And in U.S. courts, there is a presumption that police don't lie- even after so many years of evidence to the contrary. (And people not blindly hypnotized by authority are systematically weeded out from jury pools in advance of trials, so there is little skeptism among jurors towards police testimony and "evidence.")
To be sure, DNA could have been used anyway to frame people up, without the Supreme Court's help, by surreptitiously obtaining people's DNA. Perhaps a femme fatale or fake "friend" could serve a victim a drink, and the saliva left on the glass taken, a trick police already use against people in custody. Or government burglars could swab your toothbrush when you're not home. There are myriad possibilites for such a "dirty trick." But it would have also been necessary to "officially" get DNA from the target's body directly, in order to "prove" a "match." So without this legalization of taking DNA from arrestees- and the FBI has arranged countless tens of thousands of pretext arrests, for example the late political activist Abbie Hoffman alone was arrested over 50 times- it would have been harder to frame the person. They would have first had to be convicted of a felony to overtly take DNA from their body. (That was already allowed.)
The number of victims of just FBI political frame-ups is too numerous to list here. Two prominent ones are Elmer "Geronimo" Pratt (eventually exonerated after 30 years in a dungeon) and Leonard Peltier, who is destined to die in a Federal "supermax" torture prison. Peltier was framed with fake FBI "forensic science" evidence that claimed ballistic tests matched his rifle to a bullet taken from a dead FBI agent who had attacked American Indian Movement members. (One of whom, Joe Stuntz, was killed by the agents in the attack, a fact that never gets mentioned for some reason, so I'm mentioning it right here, and secret policemen who don't like it and monitor this site can lump it- I'm sorry, "lump it" won't translate well for those who use the Translate widget on this page. It means "too bad for you, I don't care.")
During appeals, the FBI was forced to admit that the ballistic "match" was bogus, but of course the appeals court let the conviction stand anyway, despite the utter absence of any other evidence proving Peltier shot the agent. The FBI has made clear over the years that releasing Peltier is absolutely unacceptable to it, and people IN the establishment know enough not to mess with the FBI, which has blackmailed and imprisoned many politicians and judges over the years. Plus Federal judges are ideologically hostile to anyone who forcibly resists the oppression of the system.
But a legal system that is part of the enforcement machinery of an oligarchy cannot be relied upon as a vehicle for justice. That means that almost anyone, at any time, not just opponents of the system, can be victimized by such a judicial system- and many are, both those who are victims of criminals where the perpetrators are overlooked, and those framed up as criminal culprits- framed up by lazy and indifferent police and prosecutors, or framed up by criminals with state power.
1] Rapists are particularly dangerous as they are usually repeat offenders. Except maybe for Bill Clinton, who raped Juanita Broaddrick, as a story on NBC revealed some years ago. Clinton had thugs threaten women he'd sexually used or abused- one had her cat killed, and a goon then accosted her while she was jogging and terrified her, for example. His right-hand woman, Betsy Wright, had as one of her tasks suppressing "bimbo eruptions," that is, ensuring that his past paramours would maintain omerta (silence). So it is impossible to know if he only raped one woman in his entire life.
However we do know that he's committed mass murder more than once.
-In Haiti, where he overthrew Aristede and had the CIA create a death squad called FRAPH. (FRAPH stands for "The Front for the Advancement and Progress of Haiti," an amazingly cynical and Orwellian title. It was like a successor to the murderous Tonton Macoute of the Duvalier dictatorship.)
-In Sudan, where he blew up the country's only pharmaceutical manufacturing plant, newly built, which meant death for thousands of poor Sudanese.
-In Iraq, where the sanctions he maintained are credited with killing 500,000 Iraqi children. When Leslie Stahl confronted his Secretary of State, the evil harridan Madeleine Albright, about this on the TV show 60 Minutes, asking "was it worth it?" Albright didn't even dispute the half million dead children Stahl cited and ended her answer with "We think it was worth it." What the "it" was that was allegedly achieved, I still can't figure out. Of course, their goal was to overthrow Saddam Hussein, which was not accomplished until Clinton's successor Bush the Younger invaded Iraq.
-In Rwanda, where he ordered UN Secretary General Kofi Annan* to pull out UN troops instead of sending requested reinforcements, which led directly to the genocide there. The commander of the troops said he could have easily prevented the slaughter with relatively few reinforcements. (Most of the killing was by machete and burning people alive. These were mobs, mostly, not modern military forces committing the massacres.) That last one is maybe more of a failure to prevent, although it wasn't mere passivity, but active interference that in effect aided and abetted the murderers.
So that's four mass murders on Clinton's head, three of them very directly and deliberately by him. If you want to add one more failure-to-prevent mass murder to his account, there's his failure to kill Osama bin Laden when numerous opportunities presented themselves, according to former CIA officer Michael Scheuer. Scheuer also faults Bush II for similar failures. (See youtube.com interviews with Scheuer, especially "Conversations With History.") Of course this one wasn't foreseeable, as the Rwandan one was, and is speculative, as killing bin Laden would not have necessarily prevented the destruction of the World Trade Center Towers. We're told the "mastermind" of that is Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, currently on "trial" in a kangeroo pseudo-court on the military base in occupied Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. It's not that I necessarily doubt his guilt. I just don't like Stalinist-style show trials that make a mockery of justice and legal process. In fact, such show trials are highly destructive to law and justice, not only in the particular instance, but by discrediting law and justice conceptually and delegitimating them in the eyes of the people.
* Annan was a willing U.S. stooge, in the tradition of UN Secretary Generals. In fact, those aren't so pliable risk death, as happened to Dag Hammarskjold, who was murdered in 1961 when the CIA sabotaged his plane, to prevent him from interfering with U.S. designs in the Congo. See the BBC News magazine story "Dag Hammarskjold: Was his death a crash or a conspiracy?" Also CIA assassin Dean Selmier, in his book Blow Away, which describes his career as a killer for the CIA, recounts a conversation with a French intelligence officer who tells him Hammarskjold was murdered, and that the Frenchman said he opposed the hit. Barnes and Noble is selling the book online for $1.99. A bargain for a hardcover!
2] Here is an excerpt from the Wikipedia article, "Fingerprints." I recommend the article to interested readers.
"In April 1993, in the New York State Police Troop C scandal, Craig D. Harvey, a New York State Police trooper was charged with fabricating evidence. Harvey admitted he and another trooper lifted fingerprints from items the suspect, John Spencer, touched while in Troop C headquarters during booking. He attached the fingerprints to evidence cards and later claimed that he had pulled the fingerprints from the scene of the murder. The forged evidence was presented during John Spencer's trial and his subsequent conviction resulted in a term of 50 years to life in prison at his sentencing. Three state troopers were found guilty of fabricating fingerprint evidence and served prison sentences."
I wonder who did more time in prison, the victim or the police criminals? Wikipedia doesn't say. I don't have time to research it at the moment- but you can.
Of course, the real solution to all this is honest, ethical police and prosecutors with checks on their ability to pursue ideological vendettas and political agendas (whether of personal aggrandizement or repression of dissent and resistance to injustice). That won't happen until they are less powerful and under more external controls. "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely," as Lord Acton famously phrased it. The problem isn't so much the tools of law enforcement as who wields them, and for what ends.
3] There are so many examples of blatant frame-ups by venal cops and prosecutors over the years, in numerous states, that it would take a large tome just to cover the ones that became prominent in the media. Right now in New York, there is an ongoing review of murder convictions engineered by a Brooklyn, NY detective, who for example used the same drug addict as an "eyewitness" in numerous separate murder cases! The only reason the cases are "under review" is because the New York Times, to their credit, exposed some of the "questionable" cases, thus forcing the venal Brooklyn District Attorney, Charles Hynes, to order a "review." He's up for reelection yet again, but he needn't worry: TV network CBS has rushed to his rescue with a suspiciously timely multi-episode TV series lionizing his office, including portraying as heroic a vicious prosecutor in his employ who was revealed by the Times series as a frame-up artist. If I had to speculate as to why, I'd say it's because Hynes has made himself useful to the powerful Jewish Hasidic community in Brooklyn (which votes as a bloc) and CBS is a key organ of Jewish power in the U.S. This kind of cohesiveness is one key to Jewish power in America. (Contrast that with the fractiousness of African-Americans, who daily gun down other African-Americans for no good reason.)
There are a number of stories on the NYT website, such as "Review of 50 Brooklyn Murder Cases Ordered," "Scrutiny on Prosecutors After Questions About Brooklyn Detective’s Work," "Jailed Unjustly in the Death of a Rabbi, Man Nears Freedom," and "In Review of Brooklyn Cases, So Many Obstacles." You can search their website for more. And that's just one example in the U.S. This happens all over, all the time. With the increase in police and prosecutorial power over the last few decades, and the evisceration of rights and protections for the people, we should expect it to get worse.
4] See "Judge Harry T. Edwards: How Reliable is Forensic Evidence in Court?" In fact, there are a number of relevant stories at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/ Search with the keywords "forensic science on trial."
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