Official TGF Conspiracy Thread

[Chickadee]

Lord Ashcroft gets his revenge on David Cameron: #piggate

Given that Lord Ashcroft and David Cameron are known not to be on the friendliest of terms, the former Conservative Party deputy chairman’s biography of the Prime Minister was never going to be a puff piece. Yet Steerpike suspects that even Cameron will be taken aback by today’s Daily Mail front page:

 

The first part of the paper’s serialisation of Call Me Dave looks into a young Cameron’s days at Oxford university. First though Ashcroft details his feud with Cameron, explaining that their relationship turned sour after he failed to make good on a promise to offer the Tory donor a top job if elected. However, after today’s excerpt Mr S suspects that Cameron may have made a wise call by not appointing Ashcroft to a senior government role. His response to the snub appears to be to publish a story from an unnamed source on Cameron’s alleged intimate relations with a dead pig.

 

Ashcroft writes that as well as the Bullingdon Club, Cameron got involved in the Piers Gaveston dining society which ‘specialises in bizarre rituals and sexual excess’:

 

‘A distinguished Oxford contemporary claims Cameron once took part in an outrageous initiation ceremony at a Piers Gaveston event, involving a dead pig. His extraordinary suggestion is that the future PM inserted a private part of his anatomy into the animal’s mouth. The source — himself an MP — first made the allegation out of the blue at a business dinner in June 2014. Lowering his voice, he claimed to have seen photographic evidence of this disgusting ritual.’

 

Ashcroft says he had presumed the claim was a joke until the same source later repeated the story on two more occasions:

‘Some months later, he repeated it a third time, providing a little more detail. The pig’s head, he claimed, had been resting on the lap of a Piers Gaveston society member while Cameron performed the act. The MP also gave us the dimensions of the alleged photograph, and provided the name of the individual who he claims has it in his keeping. The owner, however, has failed to respond to our approaches. Perhaps it is a case of mistaken identity. Yet it is an elaborate story for an otherwise credible figure to invent. Furthermore, there are a number of accounts of pigs’ heads at debauched parties in Cameron’s day.’

With a No.10 spokesman declining to comment on the alleged incident, Steerpike suspects that if the original tip had made it’s way to a tabloid they may have required more evidence before going to print with the claim. Still, should Jeremy Corbyn decide to revert to ‘Punch and Judy’ politics at the next PMQs he now knows where to begin.

 

http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/steerpike/2015/09/lord-ashcroft-gets-his-revenge-on-david-cameron-piggate/

[Chickadee]

U.S. Soldiers Told to Ignore Sexual Abuse of Boys by Afghan Allies

By JOSEPH GOLDSTEIN SEPT. 20, 2015

 

KABUL, Afghanistan — In his last phone call home, Lance Cpl. Gregory Buckley Jr. told his father what was troubling him: From his bunk in southern Afghanistan, he could hear Afghan police officers sexually abusing boys they had brought to the base.

 

“At night we can hear them screaming, but we’re not allowed to do anything about it,” the Marine’s father, Gregory Buckley Sr., recalled his son telling him before he was shot to death at the base in 2012. He urged his son to tell his superiors. “My son said that his officers told him to look the other way because it’s their culture.”

 

Rampant sexual abuse of children has long been a problem in Afghanistan, particularly among armed commanders who dominate much of the rural landscape and can bully the population. The practice is called bacha bazi, literally “boy play,” and American soldiers and Marines have been instructed not to intervene — in some cases, not even when their Afghan allies have abused boys on military bases, according to interviews and court records.

 

 

Dan Quinn was relieved of his Special Forces command after a fight with a U.S.-backed militia leader who had a boy as a sex slave chained to his bed. Credit Kirsten Luce for The New York Times

 

Gregory Buckley Sr. believes the policy of looking the other way was a factor in his son's killing. Credit Kirsten Luce for The New York Times

 

The policy has endured as American forces have recruited and organized Afghan militias to help hold territory against the Taliban. But soldiers and Marines have been increasingly troubled that instead of weeding out pedophiles, the American military was arming them in some cases and placing them as the commanders of villages — and doing little when they began abusing children.

 

“The reason we were here is because we heard the terrible things the Taliban were doing to people, how they were taking away human rights,” said Dan Quinn, a former Special Forces captain who beat up an American-backed militia commander for keeping a boy chained to his bed as a sex slave. “But we were putting people into power who would do things that were worse than the Taliban did — that was something village elders voiced to me.”

 

The policy of instructing soldiers to ignore child sexual abuse by their Afghan allies is coming under new scrutiny, particularly as it emerges that service members like Captain Quinn have faced discipline, even career ruin, for disobeying it.

 

After the beating, the Army relieved Captain Quinn of his command and pulled him from Afghanistan. He has since left the military.

 

Four years later, the Army is also trying to forcibly retire Sgt. First Class Charles Martland, a Special Forces member who joined Captain Quinn in beating up the commander.

“The Army contends that Martland and others should have looked the other way (a contention that I believe is nonsense),” Representative Duncan Hunter, a California Republican who hopes to save Sergeant Martland’s career, wrote last week to the Pentagon’s inspector general.

In Sergeant Martland’s case, the Army said it could not comment because of the Privacy Act.

 

When asked about American military policy, the spokesman for the American command in Afghanistan, Col. Brian Tribus, wrote in an email: “Generally, allegations of child sexual abuse by Afghan military or police personnel would be a matter of domestic Afghan criminal law.” He added that “there would be no express requirement that U.S. military personnel in Afghanistan report it.” An exception, he said, is when rape is being used as a weapon of war.

 

 

 

he American policy of nonintervention is intended to maintain good relations with the Afghan police and militia units the United States has trained to fight the Taliban. It also reflects a reluctance to impose cultural values in a country where pederasty is rife, particularly among powerful men, for whom being surrounded by young teenagers can be a mark of social status.

 

Some soldiers believed that the policy made sense, even if they were personally distressed at the sexual predation they witnessed or heard about.

“The bigger picture was fighting the Taliban,” a former Marine lance corporal reflected. “It wasn’t to stop molestation.”

 

Still, the former lance corporal, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid offending fellow Marines, recalled feeling sickened the day he entered a room on a base and saw three or four men lying on the floor with children between them. “I’m not a hundred percent sure what was happening under the sheet, but I have a pretty good idea of what was going on,” he said.

 

But the American policy of treating child sexual abuse as a cultural issue has often alienated the villages whose children are being preyed upon. The pitfalls of the policy emerged clearly as American Special Forces soldiers began to form Afghan Local Police militias to hold villages that American forces had retaken from the Taliban in 2010 and 2011.

 

By the summer of 2011, Captain Quinn and Sergeant Martland, both Green Berets on their second tour in northern Kunduz Province, began to receive dire complaints about the Afghan Local Police units they were training and supporting.

 

First, they were told, one of the militia commanders raped a 14- or 15-year-old girl whom he had spotted working in the fields. Captain Quinn informed the provincial police chief, who soon levied punishment. “He got one day in jail, and then she was forced to marry him,” Mr. Quinn said.

 

When he asked a superior officer what more he could do, he was told that he had done well to bring it up with local officials but that there was nothing else to be done. “We’re being praised for doing the right thing, and a guy just got away with raping a 14-year-old girl,” Mr. Quinn said.

 

A portrait of Lance Cpl. Gregory Buckley Jr. in his family's home in Oceanside, N.Y. He was shot to death in 2012 by a teenage "tea boy" living on his base in Helmand Province. Credit Kirsten Luce for The New York Times

 

Village elders grew more upset at the predatory behavior of American-backed commanders. After each case, Captain Quinn would gather the Afghan commanders and lecture them on human rights.

 

Soon another commander absconded with his men’s wages. Mr. Quinn said he later heard that the commander had spent the money on dancing boys. Another commander murdered his 12-year-old daughter in a so-called honor killing for having kissed a boy. “There were no repercussions,” Mr. Quinn recalled.

 

In September 2011, an Afghan woman, visibly bruised, showed up at an American base with her son, who was limping. One of the Afghan police commanders in the area, Abdul Rahman, had abducted the boy and forced him to become a sex slave, chained to his bed, the woman explained. When she sought her son’s return, she herself was beaten. Her son had eventually been released, but she was afraid it would happen again, she told the Americans on the base.

 

She explained that because “her son was such a good-looking kid, he was a status symbol” coveted by local commanders, recalled Mr. Quinn, who did not speak to the woman directly but was told about her visit when he returned to the base from a mission later that day.

 

So Captain Quinn summoned Abdul Rahman and confronted him about what he had done. The police commander acknowledged that it was true, but brushed it off. When the American officer began to lecture about “how you are held to a higher standard if you are working with U.S. forces, and people expect more of you,” the commander began to laugh.

“I picked him up and threw him onto the ground,” Mr. Quinn said. Sergeant Martland joined in, he said. “I did this to make sure the message was understood that if he went back to the boy, that it was not going to be tolerated,” Mr. Quinn recalled.

 

There is disagreement over the extent of the commander’s injuries. Mr. Quinn said they were not serious, which was corroborated by an Afghan official who saw the commander afterward.

 

(The commander, Abdul Rahman, was killed two years ago in a Taliban ambush. His brother said in an interview that his brother had never raped the boy, but was the victim of a false accusation engineered by his enemies.)

 

Sergeant Martland, who received a Bronze Star for valor for his actions during a Taliban ambush, wrote in a letter to the Army this year that he and Mr. Quinn “felt that morally we could no longer stand by and allow our A.L.P. to commit atrocities,” referring to the Afghan Local Police.

 

The father of Lance Corporal Buckley believes the policy of looking away from sexual abuse was a factor in his son’s death, and he has filed a lawsuit to press the Marine Corps for more information about it.

 

Lance Corporal Buckley and two other Marines were killed in 2012 by one of a large entourage of boys living at their base with an Afghan police commander named Sarwar Jan.

Mr. Jan had long had a bad reputation; in 2010, two Marine officers managed to persuade the Afghan authorities to arrest him following a litany of abuses, including corruption, support for the Taliban and child abduction. But just two years later, the police commander was back with a different unit, working at Lance Corporal Buckley’s post, Forward Operating Base Delhi, in Helmand Province.

 

Lance Corporal Buckley had noticed that a large entourage of “tea boys” — domestic servants who are sometimes pressed into sexual slavery — had arrived with Mr. Jan and moved into the same barracks, one floor below the Marines. He told his father about it during his final call home.

 

Word of Mr. Jan’s new position also reached the Marine officers who had gotten him arrested in 2010. One of them, Maj. Jason Brezler, dashed out an email to Marine officers at F.O.B. Delhi, warning them about Mr. Jan and attaching a dossier about him.

 

The warning was never heeded. About two weeks later, one of the older boys with Mr. Jan — around 17 years old — grabbed a rifle and killed Lance Corporal Buckley and the other Marines.

 

Lance Corporal Buckley’s father still agonizes about whether the killing occurred because of the sexual abuse by an American ally. “As far as the young boys are concerned, the Marines are allowing it to happen and so they’re guilty by association,” Mr. Buckley said. “They don’t know our Marines are sick to their stomachs.”

 

The one American service member who was punished in the investigation that followed was Major Brezler, who had sent the email warning about Mr. Jan, his lawyers said. In one of Major Brezler’s hearings, Marine Corps lawyers warned that information about the police commander’s penchant for abusing boys might be classified. The Marine Corps has initiated proceedings to discharge Major Brezler.

 

Mr. Jan appears to have moved on, to a higher-ranking police command in the same province. In an interview, he denied keeping boys as sex slaves or having any relationship with the boy who killed the three Marines. “No, it’s all untrue,” Mr. Jan said. But people who know him say he still suffers from “a toothache problem,” a euphemism here for child sexual abuse.

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/21/world/asia/us-soldiers-told-to-ignore-afghan-allies-abuse-of-boys.html?_r=1

[Chickadee]

Syrians see impostors, interlopers among migrants around them

 

TOVARNIK, Croatia (Reuters) - Love brought Nizar Shoukry from his native Syria to Croatia and eventually a dental practice in the border town of Tovarnik. Thirty years later, war is bringing his countrymen, in a chaotic, desperate tide flowing past Shoukry’s door en route to Germany and a promise of asylum.

 

But the 50-year-old dentist – now an informal liaison between police and refugees – says his sees impostors among them.

“I see so many people from Africa, Afghanistan, Pakistan saying they come from Syria and many do not speak Arabic at all,” he said in his adopted Croatian.

“It really bothers me that so many people abuse the misfortune of the Syrian people to get a toehold in western Europe.”

 

It’s a charge that is feeding tensions and sometimes violence within the determined ranks hitting Europe’s shores and trekking through cornfields across Balkan borders.

Half of the 350,000 who have landed in Greece by boat from Turkey this year before heading north through the former Yugoslavia are registered as Syrians, fleeing a four-year war that has put four million to flight abroad and displaced 11 million within the fractured country.

 

As refugees from conflict, the Syrians know they can expect to win asylum in western Europe; they have been told by Germany it will take them in, regardless of European Union rules that they register and stay in the first EU country they enter.

 

But many Syrians feel the Afghans, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis and others – thrown together by fate in a jumble of languages and cultures – are slowing them down, stealing their seats and jeopardizing their chances of reaching Germany before Europe’s economic powerhouse says it can take no more.

"TOLD WE HAVE PRIORITY"

 

Tensions have spilled over in Tovarnik and in nearby Beli Manastir, another gathering point for migrants pouring into Croatia from Serbia since last week, when Hungary barred the main route into the EU over its southern border with a metal fence, tear gas and water cannon.

 

On Friday, groups of Syrians and Afghans fought with stones and bottles over who would get to board a train from Beli Manastir. There and in Tovarnik, crowds run and jostle to board buses and trains, throwing themselves and their belongings through carriage windows. On Sunday, a fight almost broke out between Arabs and Afghans over a box of blankets brought by aid workers.

 

“This is not fair,” said Aida, a 28-year-old woman from the southwestern Syrian town of Deraa, after sitting out a stampede for a train in Tovarnik, her only chance to escape after nights spent under open skies with little to eat or drink.

 

We (Syrians) were told we would have priority,” she said. “They are using this opportunity that Europe gave to our countrymen to make gain at our expense, and all we want is to run away from the war and make our future somewhere where we will be appreciated.”

The EU says many among the migrants stand little chance of being granted asylum, including those fleeing poverty in Africa, Pakistan and Bangladesh.

View gallery

 

Afghans and Iraqis will base their claims on the dangers they face at home from the likes of the Taliban or Islamic State insurgents. But the Syrians say they are the most deserving, and at various points on their route through the Balkans have been given priority by police trying to control passage.

 

Identification documents discarded along the route, and the accounts of migrants given to Reuters, suggest some people may be trying to conceal their true identity, claiming they are fleeing Syria in the hope they will be given quicker passage.

 

“I believe many even come from Kosovo and Albania,” said Shoukry, the Tovarnik dentist. Kosovars and Albanians make up a large proportion of asylum seekers in the EU, despite the peace in Kosovo 16 years since its own war and consolidation of democracy in ex-Communist Albania.

 

 

PREJUDICE

“Many people here pretend to be Syrians and I am getting worried whether we will make it,” said 23-year-old Ahmed, who said he had graduated in English language and literature from the University of Damascus. “My family is not rich. My mother gave me all her savings to send me on this hazardous journey. I hope I will make it.”

 

The squalor, exhaustion and dangers of their sometimes perilous journeys have fed anger and suspicion, and a fear among families and friends of being split up in the chaos and crush for transport.

 

Many of the Syrians Reuters journalists have spoken to are young adults, professionals or students from cities such as Damascus and Aleppo, in most cases more urban and apparently prosperous than migrants from Africa or Asia, playing into prejudices and resentment.

“They are bad people; they steal from us and they are poor,” 49-year-old Anwar from Aleppo said of the Afghans. “We are noble people, educated. They come from a country that is backward.”

 

Rahim Shah, a 35-year-old ethnic Hazara from the Afghan capital Kabul, accused the Syrians and other Arabs of patronizing his countrymen.

“They cannot treat us as small boys; we are smart people, we are not sheep,” Shah said in English. “I was studying technical sciences in Kabul, I was working for an American company, I was singing under the Taliban when singing was not allowed.”

 

Another Kabuli, 32-year-old Mahboob Faqiry, said he feared Afghans would lose out.

“We are not safe in Afghanistan any longer,” he said.

 

“We have to be given a chance. I understand that every country has its rules that we have to respect but I am now getting worried that Germany will not accept us, it looks like nobody cares about us.”

(Additional reporting by Gergely Szakacs in BELI MANASTIR, Croatia; Writing by Matt Robinson; Editing by Peter Graff)

 

http://news.yahoo.com/syrians-see-impostors-interlopers-among-migrants-around-them-194308424.html

[Chickadee]

Delaware cops beat mentally ill man when his quadriplegic wife was unable to follow order to stand up

 

A physically and mentally disabled couple said Delaware police beat the husband during an early morning drug raid at a relative’s home.

 

The Rehoboth Beach couple said state police found Ruther Hayes, a disabled veteran who takes medication for schizophrenia, giving a sponge bath to his wife, Lisa, when they burst into her mother’s home June 30, 2014, looking for two relatives, reported The News Journal.

 

Police arrested two nephews at the home, but only one of them was charged with a drug crime, and he eventually pleaded guilty to one count of possession of drug paraphernalia.

 

Officers with the Special Operations Response Team found the disabled couple, who were staying with Lisa Hayes’ mother for two weeks while their daughter attended an ice skating camp, in a back bedroom of the home, according to a lawsuit.

Five family members had already told police that Lisa Hayes, a quadriplegic with cerebral palsy, was unable to use her legs, and the lawsuit claims officers should have seen her wheelchair in the bedroom where her husband bathed her.

 

But state troopers pointed their guns at the disabled woman and “shouted at her to do that which she could not: stand up,” the lawsuit claims.

 

Ruther Hayes tried to cover his partially nude wife with a sheet, but the lawsuit shows that police shoved him to the ground and repeatedly punched him before shocking the mentally ill man twice with a stun gun.

 

State police detained Ruther Hayes and charged him resisting arrest, although the charge was later dropped.

“I feel not only degraded, humiliated — I feel like they didn’t treat me as a human being,” Lisa Hayes said. “I relive that day when they came in on me and them yelling at me to get up when they knew that I couldn’t get up.”

 

Both of her nephews, as well as other family members, told police their aunt was disabled before they entered the back bedroom — but officers dismissed their claims.

 

“That’s enough out of you,” one said, according to the lawsuit.

 

The troopers — identified in the lawsuit as a trooper named Christopher Popp, a Cpl. Doughty and a Cpl. Torres — rammed open the bedroom door and ordered Lisa Hayes to “get the f*ck up.”

 

Ruther Hayes told the officers he was a disabled veteran and showed his military ID before trying to lay a sheet over his wife, who was naked from the waist down.

 

That’s when police grabbed his arms and began to punch him repeatedly.

“Because Mr. Hayes (a disabled veteran) did not immediately fall, an (officer) said, ‘He must have been well trained,’” said Cpl. Doughty, according to the lawsuit.

 

Another officer shocked Ruther Hayes on the shoulder, and he fell to the ground and bloodied his nose, but officers continued to beat him and stunned him a second time.

 

Lisa Hayes watched helplessly from the bed before crying out that she was having a heart attack, the lawsuit claims, and police ended the beating and called an ambulance.

 

Lisa Hayes said her husband’s schizophrenia has grown more acute since the raid, and she’s now afraid to enter her mother’s home.

“When I do go there now, I don’t go in the house,” Lisa Hayes said. “My mom goes to the car to see me.”

 

The lawsuit, filed by the American Civil Liberties Union, names as defendants Popp, Doughty, Torres and a Cpl. Ballinger, as well as Nathaniel McQueen Jr., superintendent of Delaware State Police, and Delaware State Police.

 

The suit asks a federal judge to award damages to the couple and to force state police to change its policies and training on excessive force and dealing with disabled people.

 

http://www.rawstory.com/2015/09/delaware-cops-beat-mentally-ill-man-when-his-quadriplegic-wife-was-unable-to-follow-order-to-stand-up/

[Chickadee]

The Untold Story of the Texas Biker Gang Shoot-Out

 

It was supposed to be a quiet meeting of regional clubs at a local Waco breastaurant. Instead, nine men were killed, 20 were wounded, and 177 wound up in jail. Was it a turf war gone mad? Or a botched police response? Nathaniel Penn reports on how the bloodiest day in biker history went down

 

http://www.gq.com/story/untold-story-texas-biker-gang-shoot-out

[Chickadee]

More women accuse Saudi prince after his arrest on sex crime charge, LAPD says

 

A Saudi prince who allegedly tried to force a female worker to perform a sex act on him inside a Beverly Glen residence has now been accused of attacking other women in the home, according to Los Angeles police and court records.

Majed Abdulaziz Al-Saud, 29, was arrested Wednesday on suspicion of forced oral copulation of an adult.

Police said Friday that they are investigating claims that Al-Saud also preyed on other women on the estate.

Detectives “found more victims who were also alleging crimes against Mr. Al-Saud,” Officer Drake Madison said.

Al-Saud, 28, was detained by police for hours Wednesday afternoon as officers investigated a reported disturbance inside the 22,000-square-foot residence about 12:45 p.m., Madison said.

 

He was held on suspicion of false imprisonment, sexual assault and battery. He was booked on suspicion of forcing the oral copulation of a worker inside the residence, Madison said. He could not be reached for comment Friday.

 

A civil lawsuit filed in L.A. County Superior Court on Friday claims he attacked other women inside the home for several days.

The suit, filed by three women only identified as Jane Does, accuses him of “extreme,” “outrageous,” and “despicable” behavior that started Monday and ended in his arrest.

 

The lawsuit seeks unspecified damages and claims Al-Saud inflicted emotional distress, assault and battery, sexual discrimination and retaliation against the workers, among other allegations. The attorneys who filed the suit did not return calls seeking comment.

 

When officers arrived at the home Wednesday, they found a “party atmosphere” inside the compound, Lt. John Jenal said.

Neighbors reported seeing a bleeding woman screaming for help as she tried to scale an 8-foot-high wall that surrounds the property, at the end of a cul-de-sac in the 2500 block of Wallingford Drive. The home is within a gated community near Beverly Hills.

 

Officers escorted about 20 people out of the house, many of them staff, Collins said.

Al-Saud was freed Thursday afternoon after posting $300,000 bail, jail records show.

The Saudi Embassy in Washington did not respond to a request for comment.

The U.S. State Department said it did not appear Al-Saud has any diplomatic immunity and referred further questions to the LAPD.

 

http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-saudi-prince-arrest-beverly-hills-20150924-story.html

[Chickadee]

[Chickadee]

U.S. Senators Hem and Haw on Saudi Arabia’s Human Rights Abuses

 

...Given the news this week that Saudi-led forces bombed a wedding party in Yemen, killing scores of civilians, as well as the decision by the Saudi government to behead and then crucify Ali Mohammed al-Nimr, the son of a government critic arrested as a teenager, I attempted to talk about the Saudi Arabian human rights record to a number of politicians at the Washington Ideas Forum, an event hosted by The Atlantic and the Aspen Institute to discuss “this year’s most pressing issues and ideas of consequence.”

 

Former Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney smiled and repeatedly said, “Nice to see you,” when I asked if he had any concerns about the Saudi-led bombing campaign in Yemen.

 

...

Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., spent the most time discussing the issue with me. But his answers were perplexing.

“They may be bombing civilians, which is actually not true,” McCain said, when asked about civilian casualties in Yemen.

“Civilians aren’t dying?” I asked.

“No, they’re not,” the senator replied. “Oh, I’m sure civilians die in war. Not nearly as many as the Houthis have executed,” McCain continued, referring to the Shiite militia waging an insurgency against the Sunni government in Yemen.

 

[Chickadee]

Grandmother with AK-47 saves cops being attacked by street gang

 

Los Angeles| Officers of the LAPD received some totally unexpected backup yesterday, during a fire fight with local gang members in the Watts neighbourhood, as an elderly lady with an assault rifle showed up and scared the criminals away.

Officers Ricardo Cordova and Frank Cho were responding to a call concerning a presumed drug deal in a parking lot, when they came under fire from members of a local street gang. The policemen rapidly found themselves in a perilous situation, being inferior to their attackers in both numbers and firepower.

 

Fortunately for them, 79-year old Wendy Robinson was watching the events from her kitchen window and decided to intervene. The elderly woman equipped herself with her personal bulletproof vest and an AK-47 assault rifle, and ran to the officers’ rescue, firing more than 160 rounds in the direction of the assailants, injuring two of them.

 

“There was ten of twelve of these scumbags, firing with Uzis and shotguns at these two poor officers who had only pistols, so I really had to do something,”

she says.

 “I got my vest and gun, a few extra clips of ammo, and I went out the house. As soon as I began shooting at them, the look on these thugs’ face changed and they began to run for their lives. The policemen also seemed really surprised to see me, but they were definitely relieved when they saw I was there to help them.”

 

Two of the assailants were injured and were arrested on the site. They were transported to the Martin Luther King community hospital. Their state is considered serious, but doctors don’t fear for their lives.

 

Officers Cordova and Cho say they owe their lives to the rapid intervention of Ms. Robinson, and have decided to recommend her for the prestigious Presidential Medal of Freedom.

 

 

The LAPD fears the elderly woman could now face some form of retaliation from the criminals, for helping the police and humiliating them, but the threat doesn’t seem to bother Ms. Robinson at all.

The sector of the Watts neighbourhood in which Ms. Robinson lives is known to be dominated by a primarily African-American gang known as the Crips.

 

“They told me that these punks might try to attack me because of what I did,” she told reporters. “Well, let them come! I have never been afraid of anyone in my life, and I am not going to start now! These kids think these streets belong to them, but I have been here for 53 years, and I don’t intend to leave. I am ready to defend myself and my house, don’t worry about me.”

 

They are one of the largest and most violent associations of street gangs in the United States, with an estimated 30,000 to 35,000 members, and have been involved in murders, robberies and drug dealing, among other crimes.

 

 

[Chickadee]

Crystal Meth User Eats Own Neighbor Believing He Was ‘A Broccoli’

 

Springfield, MO | A 26-year old resident of Springfield has been gruesomely murdered in what local authorities call “the most terrifying act of cannibalism” the area has ever been involved in.

 

Billy James Suthern, a 44-year old crystal meth user who possibly suffers from a serious mental disorder believe experts, murdered Jamal Huntington, his 26-year old neighbor, before proceeding to butcher the man and to eat his flesh believing he was “a piece of broccoli” report local authorities.

“This is clearly an act of racism despite the psychological issues the murderer obviously suffered” accuses Anthony J. West, spokesman for the Afro-American Justice Foundation.

Anthony J. West, spokesman for the Afro-American Justice Foundation, believes the event attests to the “the state of racial tensions in modern America”

 

Although police officer John Valentino responded to the call within a manner of minutes, there was nothing law enforcement agents could do to save the man’s life.

“I can barely talk about this, what I saw was so horrid” he told local reporters. “I am sick to my stomach, this is such a barbarous act. The memory of this man eating the victim’s brains out as if it where Jell-o will stick with me until I die” commented the officer that is now on leave for psychological trauma.

A giant piece of Broccoli

 

Sheriff deputy Alan Wattsons first reported that the murderer “seemed confused” and “distraught” he wrote in the official police report. “The man believed he was eating a giant piece of broccoli and was obviously under the influence of drugs” he explained. “When he was notified that he was arrested for murdering his neighbor, he started crying, realizing the tragic ‘incident’ which had occurred” he told journalists.

 

The state of Missouri has seen an escalation of crystal meth labs since 2002, giving it the unpopular claim of being America’s crystal meth capital. A recent statewide survey revealed one adult in three has used crystal meth in his lifetime or knows someone who consumes the drug, a dramatic situation that calls for “immediate action” has warned the Drug Enforcement Agency’s (DEA) newly appointed Director of operations, Chuck Rosenberg.

[milwaukee mike]

that dude kind of does look like a piece of broccoli

[redstripe]

to much to read. nice pictures though 

[milwaukee mike]

to much to read. nice pictures though 

 

sounds like the American way! 

 

can watch a 4 hour baseball or football game with 2 minutes of action, but can't take 5 minutes to read something

[Big Bear]

SWAT Team Raids Home, Kills Man Over $2 Worth of Pot

 

TOPICS:Jay SyrmopoulosPolice

September 1, 2015

 

A Florida family seeks justice after their son, Jason Westcott, was killed by members of a SWAT team during a “drug raid” on his house which yielded only $2.00 worth of marijuana.

An ‘internal investigation’ absolved officers of any wrongdoing though police only found .2 grams of marijuana in Westcott’s home.

“They have IA, they have internal investigations but when you police yourself, you have that veil of concern by the outsider,” said attorney T.J. Grimaldi.

On Tuesday, attorney T.J. Grimaldi, representing the family of Westcott, informed the city that family would be filing a lawsuit, after finding numerous “glaring inconsistencies” in police statements in the aftermath of the killing.

 

“We have developed and seen what we view to be significant inconsistencies with the way that the police department portrayed this case from the get-go all the way to its conclusion,” he said. “We have put the city and the police department on notice that we are going to be filing a lawsuit,” Grimaldi said.

Westcott became the target of an intense drug trafficking investigation after a confidential informant led investigators to believe that Westcott was a dealer, as opposed to the casual cannabis smoker he was in reality. The informant has since gone public and admitted that he was lying to police in the case.

According to the Tampa Bay Times report:

A 50-year-old felon and drug addict, Ronnie “Bodie” Coogle, was the principal Tampa Police Department informer against at least five suspects this year. He conducted nine undercover operations. In their probable-cause affidavits, his handlers called him reliable. Even Tampa’s police chief praised his “track record.”

Coogle said they were all wrong. He said he repeatedly lied about suspects, stole drugs he bought on the public’s dime and conspired to falsify drug deals.

“He wasn’t a drug dealer. He sold a few grams of pot to smoke pot and stay high,” Coogle said of Westcott. “If you could even label Jason a drug dealer, he was the lowest level drug dealer.”

Peter Zwolinski, Westcott’s landlord, told the Times that when a Tampa police officer told him on the night of the raid that Westcott and Reyes were drug dealers, he “basically laughed in his face.”

 

“A drug dealer is paying his rent on time, and he doesn’t have me bothering him for money every week,” Zwolinski said. “You ever see a drug dealer whose phone was disconnected for a week at least every other month? I don’t.”

After seeing a news report about Westcott’s death, Coogle decided to come clean about his complicity in the situation and expose the lies that the police were attempting to forward in the case.

 

“They’re making statements that are lies, that are absolute untruths, that are based on shady facts,” Coogle said of Tampa police. “Everything they’re saying is based on the informant. And I was the informant.”

Coogle said he decided to step forward and reveal his identity, risking retribution from drug dealers, because of his remorse over Westcott’s death. “I’ve got morals, and I feel compassion for this guy’s family and for his boyfriend,” he said. “It didn’t have to happen this way.”

Westcott’s live-in boyfriend, Israel Reyes, 22, elaborated telling the Tampa Bay Times that he and Westcott were marijuana smokers, who sometimes sold to acquaintances, not drug dealers. He said they never kept more than 12 grams — a misdemeanor possession amount — in the house.

“We would just sell a blunt here and there to our friends or whatever. It was no crazy thing. There weren’t people coming in and out of our house every day,” Reyes said. “It wasn’t paying any bills. We were still broke . . . going to work every day.”

 

Nonetheless, on May 27, 2014, a Tampa Police SWAT team raided Westcott and Reyes’s home, killing Jason Westcott. Officers claim they announced the warrant and proceeded to clear the house, when they encountered an armed Westcott pointing his gun at police. Officers proceeded to fatally shoot him.

“I knew what they were saying from the moment it happened was a lie,” explained Patti Silliman, Westcott’s mother.

The stench of a police cover-up is strong in this case.

 

Initially, police claimed that a neighbor’s complaints led to the raid. After further investigation revealed that information to be false, police then attempted to say that the information was from an undercover officer. Finally, after being pressed by a relentless investigation into the facts, police revealed they used a confidential informant.

The fact that a young man with his whole life to live was killed by police, over a $2 dollars worth of a plant, is a direct statement on the absurdity of the “War on Drugs.” The practice of trusting the word of individuals who have a vested interest in alleviating their own criminal charges is a practice that is contrary to the highest ideals of justice.

wow this is sad

[Big Bear]

sounds like the American way!

 

can watch a 4 hour baseball or football game with 2 minutes of action, but can't take 5 minutes to read something

are you un-American?

 

you dont like baseball and you think pussy stinks?

[milwaukee mike]

are you un-American?

 

you dont like baseball and you think pussy stinks?

 

i like baseball, and some pussy stinks

 

maybe you've never smelled one

[Chickadee]

http://www.businessinsider.com/how-daniel-rigmaiden-discovered-stingray-spying-technology-2015-6

 

How an obsessive recluse blew the lid off the secret technology authorities use to spy on people's cellphones

• Cale Guthrie Weissman

 

Over the last year the world has learned a lot about a jarring surveillance technology.

It's called "Stingray," and it's a device used by both federal and state law-enforcement agencies to gain access to citizens' cellphone data.

Even though we’re now getting a better sense of what Stingray does, we still know little about how this technology became known to the public.

Daniel Rigmaiden

 

A new radio interview, however, has tracked down the man who first discovered the clandestine technology.

Stingray works by mimicking cellphone towers. The authorities drive around with them sending out signals and all mobile devices in the vicinity are forced to connect to it. It has reportedly been used by numerous enforcement agencies for years, thousands of times. But the problem is that any organization signing on to use the device is forced to sign a nondisclosure agreement.

 

This means that if a group is asked to divulge details of Stingray in court, they must drop the case.

Given all this, it's quickly become clear that the authorities never wanted people to know that Stingray existed. In fact, according to the latest episode of the WNYC radio show "Note To Self," it took an obsessed man in prison to comb through thousands of documents to piece together what was going on.

 

 

A reclusive fraudster

 

Daniel Rigmaiden is the man who first discovered Stingray while he was in prison facing charges of tax fraud. In an attempt to live off the grid, Rigmaiden had concocted a scheme where he would file tax returns for dead people. He did so for quite a while — making sure to cover his tracks — and was able to rake in thousands of dollars.

 

Despite his intense meticulousness with the details, Rigmaiden was ultimately caught by the authorities. Yet he didn’t understand how they became hip to his ways. He used a slew of fake IDs, maintained almost no public identity, and even lived in the woods.

The only weak link, he thought, was the cellular AirCard he used to access the internet. But, given that he only used fake identities and anonymized his web browsing, Rigmaiden did not understand how they tracked him down

 

And so he began to research.

 

They sent "rays into my living room"

 

Rigmaiden had a hunch of how he was caught. He told his lawyer, "I think they tracked me down by sending rays into my living room." At the time — over five years ago — this seemed unheard of. No one had ever claimed that the police could surveil citizens in such a capacity.

 

The Stingray surveillance tool allows police to track a cellphone's location down to the very room it's in.

 

Unable to convince a lawyer to defend him with such a claim, Rigmaiden decided to represent himself. The man requested thousands of documents pertaining to his case, and slowly combed through any mentions of new technologies. According to the "Note To Self" episode, he read over 15,000 pages of court documents.

Finally, Rigmaiden discovered a few allusions to new "investigative techniques" associated with cell towers.

 

And this is where things get even more miraculous. Rigmaiden didn’t have internet access in prison, so for months he called a court-appointed paralegal to do his online searching. He gave this person detailed instructions about what to Google, and they would then send him the appropriate documents. Rigmaiden spent hours on the phone with this paralegal trying to describe whatever it was he was looking for.

 

Putting the pieces together

 

Conducting his own investigation for years, Rigmaiden slowly amassed enough proof via formal documents and transcripts from local meetings to get a sense for what Stingray really was: A secret new technology that intercepted cellphones so authorities could gather data from them. With this new information he assembled, he made a dossier of his findings.

 

Finally, the prisoner contacted the American Civil Liberties Union’s Christopher Soghoian, who ultimately helped illuminate the public about what Stingray is and how it was being used by authorities.

 

Since then, numerous probes have been made about the constitutionality of Stingray, and slowly documents are surfacing detailing just how widespread it is. We now know Stingray has been used thousands of times in numerous states, and is even beginning to be trialed in the UK.

 

Of course, the irony is that if a suspect discovers the authorities used Stingray against them, they will likely be set free because those using Stingray aren't allowed to disclose any information about the technology.

 

And all of this information is thanks to one man who was obsessive enough to spend years combing through documents to fully understand what led to his arrest.

[Smoke]

Chickles!!

[Chickadee]

Declassified Hillary Clinton e-mail reveals that NATO killed Omar Gaddafi to stop creation of Pan-African Gold-Backed Currency

 

https://archive.is/00e6Q#selection-687.0-687.100

 

 

[Big Bear]

SWAT Team Raids Home, Kills Man Over $2 Worth of Pot

 

TOPICS:Jay SyrmopoulosPolice

September 1, 2015

 

A Florida family seeks justice after their son, Jason Westcott, was killed by members of a SWAT team during a “drug raid” on his house which yielded only $2.00 worth of marijuana.

An ‘internal investigation’ absolved officers of any wrongdoing though police only found .2 grams of marijuana in Westcott’s home.

“They have IA, they have internal investigations but when you police yourself, you have that veil of concern by the outsider,” said attorney T.J. Grimaldi.

On Tuesday, attorney T.J. Grimaldi, representing the family of Westcott, informed the city that family would be filing a lawsuit, after finding numerous “glaring inconsistencies” in police statements in the aftermath of the killing.

 

“We have developed and seen what we view to be significant inconsistencies with the way that the police department portrayed this case from the get-go all the way to its conclusion,” he said. “We have put the city and the police department on notice that we are going to be filing a lawsuit,” Grimaldi said.

Westcott became the target of an intense drug trafficking investigation after a confidential informant led investigators to believe that Westcott was a dealer, as opposed to the casual cannabis smoker he was in reality. The informant has since gone public and admitted that he was lying to police in the case.

According to the Tampa Bay Times report:

A 50-year-old felon and drug addict, Ronnie “Bodie” Coogle, was the principal Tampa Police Department informer against at least five suspects this year. He conducted nine undercover operations. In their probable-cause affidavits, his handlers called him reliable. Even Tampa’s police chief praised his “track record.”

Coogle said they were all wrong. He said he repeatedly lied about suspects, stole drugs he bought on the public’s dime and conspired to falsify drug deals.

“He wasn’t a drug dealer. He sold a few grams of pot to smoke pot and stay high,” Coogle said of Westcott. “If you could even label Jason a drug dealer, he was the lowest level drug dealer.”

Peter Zwolinski, Westcott’s landlord, told the Times that when a Tampa police officer told him on the night of the raid that Westcott and Reyes were drug dealers, he “basically laughed in his face.”

 

“A drug dealer is paying his rent on time, and he doesn’t have me bothering him for money every week,” Zwolinski said. “You ever see a drug dealer whose phone was disconnected for a week at least every other month? I don’t.”

After seeing a news report about Westcott’s death, Coogle decided to come clean about his complicity in the situation and expose the lies that the police were attempting to forward in the case.

 

“They’re making statements that are lies, that are absolute untruths, that are based on shady facts,” Coogle said of Tampa police. “Everything they’re saying is based on the informant. And I was the informant.”

Coogle said he decided to step forward and reveal his identity, risking retribution from drug dealers, because of his remorse over Westcott’s death. “I’ve got morals, and I feel compassion for this guy’s family and for his boyfriend,” he said. “It didn’t have to happen this way.”

Westcott’s live-in boyfriend, Israel Reyes, 22, elaborated telling the Tampa Bay Times that he and Westcott were marijuana smokers, who sometimes sold to acquaintances, not drug dealers. He said they never kept more than 12 grams — a misdemeanor possession amount — in the house.

“We would just sell a blunt here and there to our friends or whatever. It was no crazy thing. There weren’t people coming in and out of our house every day,” Reyes said. “It wasn’t paying any bills. We were still broke . . . going to work every day.”

 

Nonetheless, on May 27, 2014, a Tampa Police SWAT team raided Westcott and Reyes’s home, killing Jason Westcott. Officers claim they announced the warrant and proceeded to clear the house, when they encountered an armed Westcott pointing his gun at police. Officers proceeded to fatally shoot him.

“I knew what they were saying from the moment it happened was a lie,” explained Patti Silliman, Westcott’s mother.

The stench of a police cover-up is strong in this case.

 

Initially, police claimed that a neighbor’s complaints led to the raid. After further investigation revealed that information to be false, police then attempted to say that the information was from an undercover officer. Finally, after being pressed by a relentless investigation into the facts, police revealed they used a confidential informant.

The fact that a young man with his whole life to live was killed by police, over a $2 dollars worth of a plant, is a direct statement on the absurdity of the “War on Drugs.” The practice of trusting the word of individuals who have a vested interest in alleviating their own criminal charges is a practice that is contrary to the highest ideals of justice.

turrible

[plommer]

Deemer ghosted as american pharoah because he secretly has a fetish for horses

Nyquist will not win the triple C

[CarolinaKid]

http://www.ufosightingsdaily.com/

[Mofome]

Avenger is a woman

[RaiseThese]

Just saw this thread, lol.

[joeybagadonuts]

On 10/7/2015 at 1:21 PM, Chickadee said:

Crystal Meth User Eats Own Neighbor Believing He Was ‘A Broccoli’

 

 

Springfield, MO | A 26-year old resident of Springfield has been gruesomely murdered in what local authorities call “the most terrifying act of cannibalism” the area has ever been involved in.

 

Billy James Suthern, a 44-year old crystal meth user who possibly suffers from a serious mental disorder believe experts, murdered Jamal Huntington, his 26-year old neighbor, before proceeding to butcher the man and to eat his flesh believing he was “a piece of broccoli” report local authorities.

“This is clearly an act of racism despite the psychological issues the murderer obviously suffered” accuses Anthony J. West, spokesman for the Afro-American Justice Foundation.

 

Anthony J. West, spokesman for the Afro-American Justice Foundation, believes the event attests to the “the state of racial tensions in modern America”

 

Although police officer John Valentino responded to the call within a manner of minutes, there was nothing law enforcement agents could do to save the man’s life.

“I can barely talk about this, what I saw was so horrid” he told local reporters. “I am sick to my stomach, this is such a barbarous act. The memory of this man eating the victim’s brains out as if it where Jell-o will stick with me until I die” commented the officer that is now on leave for psychological trauma.

A giant piece of Broccoli

 

Sheriff deputy Alan Wattsons first reported that the murderer “seemed confused” and “distraught” he wrote in the official police report. “The man believed he was eating a giant piece of broccoli and was obviously under the influence of drugs” he explained. “When he was notified that he was arrested for murdering his neighbor, he started crying, realizing the tragic ‘incident’ which had occurred” he told journalists.

 

The state of Missouri has seen an escalation of crystal meth labs since 2002, giving it the unpopular claim of being America’s crystal meth capital. A recent statewide survey revealed one adult in three has used crystal meth in his lifetime or knows someone who consumes the drug, a dramatic situation that calls for “immediate action” has warned the Drug Enforcement Agency’s (DEA) newly appointed Director of operations, Chuck Rosenberg.

Damn raise , can’t believe you did this