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Friday, 22 May 2015

LAPD cop who kicked Alesia Thomas to death is now on trial

© NBC screenshot

    
The LAPD cop who kicked Alesia Thomas to death was recorded on dashcam saying: "I'm going to punt you in your p*ssy."

Those words of Officer Mary O'Callaghan were said as Thomas was handcuffed and her legs restrained.

The video clearly shows Thomas getting punched in the throat, as well as kicked in the groin over and over by Officer O'Callaghan, in the video that surfaced nearly three years ago.

Watch the full report in the video below...

In the video we can clearly see Officer O'Callaghan punching Thomas' throat.

Thomas is seen tied with a nylon restraint, saying "I can't" over and over.

The video showed O'Callaghan raise her boot and strike Thomas, whose body shook in response. A few minutes later, Thomas' eyes closed and her head fell backward, the video showed. The recording then cut off.

She died at the hospital that evening. The video of her being assaulted was just released for the first time in court and can be seen below.


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Dragnet surveillance is about power and social control, not public safety

Attorney General Loretta Lynch says that USA Patriot Act dragnet spy powers must be extended or else the terrorists will get us.

Lynch said Friday the country would be “less safe” if Congress fails to renew surveillance programs included in the Patriot Act.

Lynch joined other top Obama administration officials, who are urging the Senate to pass the USA Freedom Act, which would reform the National Security Agency’s (NSA) bulk phone records collection program while renewing other key parts of the post-Sept. 11 law.

“Our biggest fear is that we will lose important eyes on people who have made it clear that their mission is to harm American people here and abroad,” Lynch told CBS News in her first interview since becoming attorney general.
 

If NSA’s phone metadata program expires completely, Lynch said the U.S. government would lose “important tools” to identify terror threats.

"I think that we run the risk of essentially being less safe," Lynch added. "I think that we lose the ability to intercept these communications, which have proven very important in cases that we have built in the past. And I am very concerned that the American people will be unprotected if this law expires."

Lynch didn't marshal any evidence to support her claims about the connection between dragnet spying and public safety. That's because there isn't one. Even the Department of Justice has acknowledged as much, writing in an Inspector General report that FBI agents interviewed couldn't identify "any major case developments" tied to Section 215 of the Patriot Act, the provision the FBI claims enables dragnet spying.

Surveillance boosters have never been able to point to a circumstance—even one example—that proves dragnet surveillance is vital in stopping terrorism. Some insiders in the security state have observed that the bigger the haystack, the more difficult it is to successfully use intelligence information to identify and track threatening people. More information is not better. Better information is better, they say.

Loretta Lynch says she fears that if the Patriot Act isn't reauthorized, "we will lose important eyes on people who have made it clear that their mission is to harm American people here and abroad." That's total nonsense. Anyone who "makes it clear" that they want to kill Americans is someone a judge would authorize targeted surveillance against. The government should leave the rest of us out of it.

Just about every recent terrorist attack on US and European soil has been committed by someone known to law enforcement. That's true for the Garland, Texas shooter and for Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who blew up the Boston Marathon in April 2013. The government doesn't need to spy on you and me in order to track people it already suspects of being up to no good.

You might be wondering: If dragnet spying doesn't stop terrorism, and most terrorists are known to law enforcement, why do the FBI and the new Attorney General insist on renewing the Patriot Act's worst provisions? It's an important question, with a depressing answer.

The reason Lynch's claims about dragnet spying don't add up is because they are based on a perversion of the true purpose served by society wide surveillance. While the Patriot Act doesn't stop terrorism, it's quite good at enabling social and political control, and finding people who are vulnerable and may be easily coerced into becoming FBI informants.

If surveillance boosters were honest about why they want these powers, you might hear them talking less about terrorism and more about power. Add your voice: take action now to tell congress to reject dragnet surveillance.

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Sherrif's department who flash-bombed baby blames infant for being in the room to avoid paying medical bills

    
Nearly a year has passed since a Habersham County SWAT team stormed into the Phonesavanh residence, and very nearly killed their 19 month old child. The no-knock raid was prompted by an anonymous tip which suggested there were drugs in the house. As the officers forced their way into the home, they lobbed a flash grenade which wound up landing in the crib where baby "bou-bou" was sleeping. As it erupted, the infant suffered severe burns and had to be taken to the hospital, and placed in a medically induced coma.

To any sane person, the sheriff's department would be responsible for the damage inflicted on this child. Not only were there no drugs in the house, but the suspect they were looking for was found elsewhere. And despite their claims that they had the house under surveillance for two days prior to the raid, somehow they had no idea that there were children who lived there.

Still, the family had to fight the county tooth and nail to have their $1 million in medical bills reimbursed. Last month they settled with the county, and received $964,000, half of which will be given to them now, and the rest will be given to baby after he turns 18. While it's great to hear that the family is getting something out of this, it's shocking to see how defiant the sheriff's department was, right to the very end. They never once admitted culpability for their gross negligence, and in a bizarre twist, their defense statement in court basically blamed the infant for his own injuries.

William Norman Grigg from the Pro Libertate blog read through the lengthy document, and sifted through the legalese for our benefit. It's almost unbelievable how far the sheriff's department was willing to go to avoid paying the family whose child they burned alive.

The act of sleeping in a room about to be breached by a SWAT team constituted "criminal" conduct on the part of the infant. At the very least, the infant was fully liable for the nearly fatal injuries inflicted on him when Habersham County Sheriff's Deputy Charles Long blindly heaved a flash-bang grenade - a "destructive device," as described by the ATF, that when detonated burns at 2,000-3,500 degrees Fahrenheit - into the crib.

Merely by being in that room, Bou-Bou had assumed the risk of coming under attack by a SWAT team. By impeding the trajectory of that grenade, rather than fleeing from his crib, Bou-Bou failed to "avoid the consequences" of that attack.

In any case, Bou-Bou, along with his parents and his siblings, are fully and exclusively to blame for the injuries that nearly killed the child and left the family with more than one million dollars in medical bills. The SWAT team that invaded the home in Cornelia, Georgia on the basis of a bogus anonymous tip that a $50 drug transaction had occurred there is legally blameless.

This is the defense presented by Haberham County Sheriff Joey Terrell and his comrades in their reply to a federal lawsuit filed last February on behalf of Bou-Bou Phonesavanh and his family.

Can you believe that? It gets much worse from here. When photographic evidence of the baby's horrific injuries were shown in court, the defendants denied that the photograph "accurately depicts the injuries allegedly sustained." The statement goes on to the blame the parents and the baby because the damages caused to the child were "directly and proximately caused by the contributory and comparative negligence of the plaintiffs and their failure to exercise ordinary care."

And as a last-ditch effort to avoid paying the bill, the sheriff's department invoked the principle of "laches," which in the legal world, is a kind of use it or lose it statement. It basically means that you don't have the right to sue, if you waited a long period of time in the hopes that future circumstances would favor your case. It doesn't apply in this case at all because the family almost immediately filed a notice with the court after the incident.

The origins and usage of that obscure and archaic legal term do offer some insight about the way Bou-Bou's would-be murderers see themselves, and their victim.

"Laches" is a term embodying the ancient legal maxim that "Equity favors the vigilant, and not those who have slumbered on their rights." Defendants who appeal to this oft-cited and little-applied concept are accusing plaintiffs of subjecting them to a form of "legal ambush."

What Sheriff Joey and his cornpone chekists are claiming, in effect, is that while he was sleeping, Baby Bou-Bou ambushed .

How low can one police department go?

Meteors makes sonic booms over New Zealand

© Screen Capture

    
A picture of two near earth meteors taken near Omanawa this week is being offered as an explanation for mysterious bangs heard in the sky over the lower Kaimai area.

Omanawa resident and EOL CEO Terry Coles heard what sounded like two large explosions last Saturday night. He wondered at the time if they were sonic booms from a meteor.

His suspicions were confirmed on Tuesday when he set up a camera on the balcony to take continuous exposures for a timelapse video he's working on about the night sky over the Kaimais.

"I left the camera running as I needed several thousand consecutive images and went inside where it was warm," says Terry.

"Just after 11pm I heard three more explosions in quick succession, louder this time as if they were close by."

Suspecting he had missed something special he sifted through hundreds of images from Tuesday night and found something in just one frame.

"Two beautiful meteors one behind the other with an amazing green tail. The timestamp on the image coincided with when I had heard the booms."

"A stroke of luck that I had the camera pointing at the right bit of sky, even if it was only a wide angle lens so not a close up view unfortunately."

The colour is caused by the super-heating of magnesium atoms.

"They glow when they get hot and come into contact with oxygen atoms. A bit like auroras do," says Terry.

It could be rock or metal. The tail could be dust fragments off the head of the meteor or smoke. He's got images of that as well. He made a little slow-mo time lapse of the next 22 frames which show a smoke trail twisting and twirling in the wind.

"It makes it look quite close," says Terry. "I wouldn't imagine the camera would have picked up the smoke trail if they were too far away. It's night, pitch black, and smoke doesn't glow.

"The lens was only a wide angle lens so they were a lot closer than they look in the photo. But without actually standing out there and seeing them it would be pretty hard to tell what size they were, and how far away they were."

The camera was pointing south.

Reputable internet sites say a meteor has to be larger than a football to produce a sonic boom, says Terry.

The larger the object the louder the boom. Larger objects make two distinct booms - two ahead, and one behind that is usually not heard from the ground. He heard three distinct booms in rapid succession.

"If you zoom in on the photo you can see the head of the meteor is split in two, that's probably when the sonic boom happened," says Terry. "There's a lot of theory on the internet about sonic booms and when it happens. It probably happened quite a while before, but took a while to get to us.

"It could have happened when it was quite elevated. It's hard to know really without actually seeing it, just looking at a photo."

The camera was facing south with an elevation of 45-50 degrees above the horizon. Each image is a ten second exposure.

"It's hard to know in that ten seconds when it was passing the frame. It could have been the last second or it could have been half, at five seconds which would have made the tail look longer than it was."

It may have struck earth south of Omanawa on the Kaimai range, or even in the Waikato

"Someone might find themselves a million dollar space rock if they look hard enough."

Mother consents to circumcision of 4-year-old son after being jailed for week

Image

© WPBF
Heather Hironimus

    
A Florida mother consented on Friday to allowing her 4-year-old son to be circumcised, ending a legal battle with the child's father, according to media reports.

Heather Hironimus, 31, was jailed for a week after hiding out with the child for months after a protracted court fight to block the circumcision, the Sun Sentinel newspaper reported.

Crying in a state courtroom in Palm Beach County, Florida, she consented to the procedure shortly after a judge ordered her to remain jailed until signing off on it, the newspaper reported.

She still faces a charge of interference with child custody, according to the .

A lawyer for the child's father, Dennis Nubus, said a date for the circumcision had not been scheduled, the reported. The procedure may take place out of state, as Nubus has received death threats from anti-circumcision activists, the reported.

Circumcision is a medical procedure in which skin covering the tip of the penis is removed. While the procedure is part of some religious customs, religion did not motivate the parental dispute, according to the .

Courts have upheld a 2012 parenting agreement signed by Hironimus, 31, that allowed for the circumcision, the and reported.

An attorney for Hironimus could not immediately be reached for comment.

The US government told me Bin Laden read my book but what is it not telling us?

Image

© AP

    
I already knew that Osama bin Laden read my book before the headlines this week - but I'm still angry that he gave only four-and-a-half stars on his Amazon review. Obviously, something in the book pissed him off, because he never friended me on Facebook.

It was actually quite embarrassing to learn that Bin Laden was reading my tome - and a few by my homie Noam Chomsky. It's embarrassing because it's clear that Bin Laden was more well-read than our president of the time (though, in George W Bush's defence, there's much to be learned from My Pet Goat).

I do hope Osama made it to page 229. I talk about a guy who worked at my office, Clinton Davis. Before I left to write for the and , my office was in Tower 2 of the World Trade Center. Davis, a cop, was safe at ground level, but he ran upstairs to save others - and disappeared, forever. Did Bin Laden get a little laugh out of that one? At least he got to know his victim's name.

And what did Bin Laden think of my investigation of the 9/11 attack? While working at , a few weeks after the towers fell, a little birdie dropped off a 30-page memo marked "SECRET," "eyes only" and "1-99I WF", which is code for "national security document". The document suggested that FBI agents were blocked from investigating the Bin Laden family well before 11 September 2001. Calls to the Defense Intelligence Agency, CIA and FBI insiders authenticated this bombshell of a devastating intelligence failure.

No, the evidence did not show that President Bush knew about the 9/11 attack in advance. But here was something still quite damning: we learned that the Bush family connection to the Bin Laden family business might have been a shield against government probes. Did Bin Laden, reading that, make a note to himself to thank the Bushes for their unintended protection? I assumed the FBI would deny the authenticity of the document. Instead of denying that the Bin Laden investigation had been spiked, the FBI spokesman told these chilling words: "There are a lot of things the intelligence community knows and other people ought not to know."

Ought not to know? What else ought we not to know? What else is government hiding from us - and when will it kill us?

The US government has charged Edward Snowden with "willful communication of classified communications and intelligence information to an unauthorised person". CIA agent Jeffrey A Sterling has just received a three-year sentence for passing information to a reporter. This suggests that, today, releasing the FBI document would land me or my informants in the slammer.

Why? Is there really a fear that terrorists will read our information? Well, in my case at least, I know Bin Laden probably did in fact read secret national security documents - in my book. Did he learn some great state secret that would allow him to escape? Obviously not. Did Bin Laden learn the secret that our leaders are incompetent and craven and that our intelligence agencies are poisoned by commercial and political interests? I suspect he knew that already.

Finding that Bin Laden read my book, with its several chapters revealing state secrets, confirms for me that the new official war on whistleblowers and reporters is not about keeping information out of the hands of terrorists, but making sure that "the public ought not to know" where the fools at the helm are leading us.

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