r3VOLution Media, Notes, Comments & Observations on: Freedom, Politics, Government, Fascism, Iran, & Privacy
The era of nuclear anxiety, the Red scare, and covert CIA plots forever changed the way we engage with the telephone. Voice on the Line is an animated, experimental social commentary that explores the ideas of the Cold War and ungrounded paranoia.
Check out more short films from the 2010 Sundance Film Festival now playing in the YouTube Screening Room.
Friends, I shall ask you to be as quiet as possible. I don’t know whether you fully understand that I have just been shot; but it takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose. But fortunately I had my manuscript, so you see I was going to make a long speech, and there is a bullet - there is where the bullet went through - and it probably saved me from it going into my heart. The bullet is in me now, so that I cannot make a very long speech, but I will try my best.
James O’Keefe, the conservative filmmaker who posed as a pimp in video stings at ACORN field offices, has been arrested by the FBI at Sen. Mary Landrieu’s (D-LA) office in downtown New Orleans, in connection to what appears to be an attempt to wiretap the offiice, NOLA.com reports:
FBI Special Agent Steven Rayes alleges that O’Keefe aided and abetted two others, Joseph Basel and Robert Flanagan, who dressed up as employees of a telephone company and attempted to interfere with the office’s telephone system.
A fourth person, Stan Dai, was accused of aiding and abetting Basel and Flanagan. All four were charged with entering fedral property under false pretenses with the intent of committing a felony.
O’Keefe gained notoriety for his secretly filmed ACORN videos, which caused a firestorm of media intrigue surrounding ACORN after O’Keefe posted them on the Andrew-Brietbart-owned blog Big Government last year.
UPDATE: Here is an affidavit signed by FBI Special Agent Steven Rayes. joseph basel et al.pdf
According to Rayes, O’Keefe and another man, Stan Dai, have admitted to federal agents that he helping plan, coordinate, and prepare for the attempted infiltration and wiretapping, and the two men who allegedly posed as telephone company workers have admitted to entering Landrieu’s office under false pretenses.
O’Keefe entered Landrieu’s office and told a staffer there that he was waiting for someone to arrive, according to the affidavit. Special Agent Rayes states that two men, Joseph Basel and Robert Flanagan, then entered the office wearing blue denim work pants, blue work shirts, flourescent vests, tool belts, and carrying hard hats, and claimed to be workers for a telephone company.
O’Keefe then recorded them with his cell phone (which the staffer noticed) as Basel asked to see the office phone, “manipulated” the handset, and tried to call it with his cell phone, Rayes states. Basel and Flanagan said they needed access to the phone system, at which point the staffer directed them to the GSA office in the building, according to the affidavit. They went there, were asked for credentials, and said they had left their credentials in their vehicle; neither of them actually work for a phone company, according to the affidavit.
UPDATE II: The Swamp’s Mark Silva reports that Flanagan, 24, is the son of the acting U.S. attorney in Shreveport, William Flanagan.
The challenge remains. On the other side are formidable forces: money, political power, the major media. On our side are the people of the world and a power greater than money or weapons: the truth.
Truth has a power of its own. Art has a power of its own. That age-old lesson – that everything we do matters – is the meaning of the people’s struggle here in the United States and everywhere. A poem can inspire a movement. A pamphlet can spark a revolution. Civil disobedience can arouse people and provoke us to think, when we organize with one another, when we get involved, when we stand up and speak out together, we can create a power no government can suppress. We live in a beautiful country. But people who have no respect for human life, freedom, or justice have taken it over. It is now up to all of us to take it back.
—
Howard Zinn, author and historian
The world lost an incredible person today.
Reblogged from caraobrien
Reblogged from thedailywhat
This expansive graph by Online Education tells you all you need to know about bottled water, as you scroll from top to bottom. Now excuse me while I try to hide my bottle of water. Won’t happen again, promise.
[Via Online Education]
Obama built a movement to get elected, but he hasn’t built a movement to govern.
— Sam Tanenhaus
Reblogged from soupsoup
Is it megalomania or just a political stunt? Senegal’s President Abdoulaye Wade may not even know the answer himself, but his offer to let quake-stricken Haitians resettle in his West African country certainly qualifies as the most flamboyant response to the tragedy in Haiti.
“The repeated calamities that befall Haiti prompt me to propose a radical solution: to take measures to create, somewhere in Africa, the conditions for Haitians to return,” the 83-year-old Senegalese president said on Saturday. “They did not choose to go to that island. It is our duty to recognise their right to come back to the land of their ancestors.”
Well, some of their ancestors, anyway. The slave populations of all the Caribbean islands were deliberately drawn from different parts of the west African coast, so that they would speak a variety of languages and find it harder to rebel. But the vocabulary of Haitian Creole suggests that there were many Wolof-speakers (the most widely used indigenous language in Senegal) among the slaves of Haiti.
Educated Haitians also speak French, of course, as do educated Senegalese, so it’s not as though Turkey or Sri Lanka were to offer a new home to Haitians. But it is nevertheless mighty peculiar: just where does Abdoulaye Wade propose to put them all?
He does sound serious about his offer, and he says that large numbers would be welcome. His spokesman, Mamadou Bemba Ndiaye, explained that “The president is offering voluntary repatriation to any Haitian that wants to return to their origin. If it’s just a few individuals, then we will likely offer them housing or small pieces of land. If they come en masse we are ready to give them a region.”
Now, it’s true that 90 percent of Haitians would leap at the chance to leave their country, the poorest in all the Americas, but the destination they have in mind is Miami or Montreal. Senegal is one of the best-run and most democratic countries of Africa (though both qualities have been badly damaged during the ten-year rule of Abdoulaye Wade), but it does not feature prominently on Haitian wish-lists.
It is also true that most Senegalese feel that their country is quite full enough without a large influx of Haitians. There are fourteen million people in Senegal, and the population is still growing fast. There are ten million people in Haiti, and its population is growing fast too. Moving a million Haitians to Senegal would relieve the intolerable pressure on Haiti’s badly degraded land for less than a decade – and it would cause chaos in Senegal.
“If they come en masse we are ready to give them a region,” said the president’s spokesman, adding that it would be in a fertile part of the country rather than in its parched deserts. But there is no fertile region of Senegal that is not already fully populated by people whose families have lived there for many generations. Where is the president planning to put them?
So yes, it is a stunt, not a real offer, and what gives the game away is the fact that Senegal is offering “voluntary repatriation” to Haitians, not assisted passage. They are welcome to come to Senegal if they can find the money for the airline tickets – but how many Haitians can do that?
Abdoulaye Wade is big on stunts and dramatic gestures. His last one, now nearing completion, is an enormous bronze statue overlooking the capital, Dakar, that is higher than the Statue of Liberty in New York harbour. It is called the African Renaissance Monument, but it is being built by North Koreans. It actually looks like one of those Socialist Realist groupings of statuary, all windswept hair and eyes fixed confidently on the future, that littered the old Soviet Union. Only bigger.
Maybe he should build one overlooking Port-au-Prince too. It would be about as much use to Haitians as his offer of new homes for them in Senegal. Abdoulaye Wade is showing more and more signs of the “Big Man” syndrome that has wrecked so many African countries that once had quite functional governments. From Sudan to Zimbabwe and from Sierra Leone to Somalia, we have watched them fall into tyranny and chaos. Senegal may be next.
And what of Haiti? As hard as you might look for signs of hope amid the ruins, you will not find any. The earthquake is a dramatic interlude of natural disaster in a long history of tragedy whose sources were mostly human. What has devastated Haiti is politics, much of it imposed from outside by foreign governments: the French in the 19th century, the United States in the 20th and 21st. No honest and competent Haitian government has ever survived more than a couple of years.
The denuded land, the runaway population growth, the unskilled and illiterate population, the universal corruption: all these are due to failures of policy, not to some fundamental flaw in the character of Haitian people. But by now there have been generations of despair and neglect, and it is getting harder and harder to see how Haitians might turn it all around. No wonder most of them want to leave. But most of them never will.
Reblogged from drinkthe-koolaid
Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills
The entire 38 episodes in order here
Shortly after three eight-year-old boys were found mutilated and murdered in West Memphis, Arkansas, local newspapers stated the killers had been caught. The police assured the public that the three teenagers in custody were definitely responsible for these horrible crimes. Evidence?
The same police officers coerced an error-filled “confession” from Jessie Misskelley Jr., who is mentally handicapped. They subjected him to hours of questioning without counsel or parental consent, audio-taping only two fragments totaling 46 minutes. Jessie recanted it that evening, but it was too late— Misskelley, Jason Baldwin and Damien Echols were all arrested on June 3, 1993, and convicted of murder in early 1994.
Although there was no physical evidence, murder weapon, motive, or connection to the victims, the prosecution pathetically resorted to presenting black hair and clothing, heavy metal t-shirts, and Stephen King novels as proof that the boys were sacrificed in a satanic cult ritual. Unfathomably, Echols was sentenced to death, Baldwin received life without parole, and Misskelley got life plus 40.
In the years since the convictions of Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin and Jessie Misskelley for a crime they did not commit, their cause has gained support from all over the world, and these men have become known as the West Memphis Three. The story of the injustice they have endured at the hands of the state of Arkansas has never lost momentum, and in recent months, the evidence in their favor has grown to the point where it’s nearly impossible to view this case as anything other than a miscarriage of justice.
Teenagers at the time of their arrest in 1993, these young men were considered suspects in the gruesome triple child homicide and arrested without any evidence tying them to the crime. The police and the state managed to convince the media and the juries that “devil worshippers” were responsible, and that Damien, Jason and Jessie somehow fit that description. It was publicly stated by law enforcement officials and the media that the murders had been a part of a satanic ritual; a human sacrifice in the wooded areas of West Memphis, Arkansas. It seems unlikely that this would be accepted as motive by a contemporary jury, but once the police had a young, mentally challenged boy in their custody, they managed to coerce him into providing what was seen as a “confession” despite huge logic holes, discrepancies and the fact that he later recanted and refused to testify against the other two men.
Now, 15 years later, these men are still fighting for their freedom, but there are a few major differences now. The “satanic cult sacrifice” motive is now seen as an embarrassment that the police and prosecution no longer embrace, and much more importantly, DNA and other forensic technologies have progressed to the point where items that were previously inadequate for testing are now providing the positive proof that Damien, Jason and Jessie have been waiting over a decade for.
The results of recent DNA testing have revealed that these three men couldn’t have been involved in the murders because not one cell of genetic material has been identified that matches them. The nature of this crime as put forth by the State of Arkansas makes it very unlikely that the perpetrator could have committed it without leaving even the smallest trace behind. DNA evidence was, however found that matches a pair of individuals who had been together on the day the children disappeared. One of these individuals is the stepfather of one of the victims.
In Fall of 2008, hearings took place in Jonesboro, Arkansas to show that Jason Baldwin and Jessie Misskelley did not receive adequate legal counsel during their trials. After several years of similar proceedings, Damien Echols finally completed his ineffective counsel hearings in 2000. These hearings revealed new information not known at the time of the original trials, as well as information that was not known to their trial attorneys. At these 2008 hearings, specifics of the original homicide investigation were examined in detail, providing further proof of the multitude of failures and errors made by West Memphis Police and other investigators at the time. It has also been shown that Damien, Jason and Jessie did not receive adequate counsel due to jury tainting, inexperienced public defenders, serious under funding, lack of access to state crime labs and resources among many other things.
Forensic psychologist Dr. Timothy Derning testified at this hearing that Jessie Misskelley was not competent to stand trial, and that he wasn’t questioned properly or legally by the police. His so-called confession contains many lapses in logic, discrepancies and outright fabrication, and yet it was used in truncated form as evidence, and resulted in the imprisonment of this man who should never have been questioned without a lawyer or parent present. In light of Dr. Dernings’s testimony it’s very clear that Jessie Misskelley was coerced into making his statements, and that the content of those statements is so disjointed and irrational, it should never have been considered valid.
Daniel Stidham, Jessie’s trial attorney, also testified at these hearings. Stidham stated that he had been grossly under funded and unprepared to defend his client. He admitted that for much of the time he spend as Jessie’s defense attorney he actually believed his client to be guilty due to the rumors and innuendo that was circulating at the time in conjunction with exaggerations and false information that had been released to the media. It wasn’t until Stidham was able to examine the case more closely that he came to realize that his client was not only mentally handicapped, but that he had been subjected to an irresponsible and unconscionable interrogation process at the hands of the West Memphis Police Department. Stidham’s budget was so prohibitively restricted that he was forced to use money from his own pocket to obtain expert witnesses, and his access to the state crime lab was almost non-existent.
Dr. Werner Spitz, perhaps the most well-known forensic pathologist and forensic scientist in the world, also provided illuminating testimony at this hearing. The pathologist who examined the victim’s bodies back in 1993 was not Board Certified, and according to Dr. Spitz was incapable of seeing evidence that would have been instantly obvious to a more experienced medical examiner. Spitz noted injuries on the bodies that could only have been caused by animal predation. These wounds had been previously attributed to a stabbing weapon.
As each new fact emerges, we see more and more proof that Jessie’s “confession” is nothing more than a case study in coercion and false confession. Experts on coercion and police procedure all agree that it simply isn’t worth anything as evidence.
As evidence of the innocence of Damien, Jason and Jessie increases, the hearsay and speculation against them continue to dwindle to nothing. Support for these three men continues to grow as more and more people are made aware of their situation. As they exhaust their state appeals, all three of these men are optimistic and encouraged by the advances in their case. They await the federal circuit courts and the chance to finally have an unbiased light shining on the facts. Damien, Jason and Jessie and their many supporters know that they will soon be free men, but they all want to make sure that the world doesn’t close its eyes and ears to this tragedy.
The current state of DNA technology in 2008 has improved greatly since the original investigations in 1993. Items that were previously considered untestable and insignificant at the time of their trials are now providing positive genetic matches.
• Recent DNA tests involving dozens of items related to the crime have failed to link any of the three defendants to the crime scene.
• A hair found at the site where the bodies were recovered has been shown to be a positive DNA match to another individual. The matching hair was found on a ligature used to bind one of the victims. This individual is the stepfather of one of the other victims.
• Another hair found at the site has been shown to be a positive DNA to a man who was with the stepfather on the day of the crimes.
• DNA recovered from the penis of one of the victims has been shown to NOT match Jessie Misskelley, Jason Baldwin or Damien Echols.
• Scientific analysis by some of nation’s leading forensics experts have shown that the original investigation was not conducted properly.
• Recent examinations have shown that wounds on the victims’ bodies were caused by animals at the crime scene after the victims were dead.
• These wounds were not caused by knives, as claimed by the prosecution, a claim that was a substantial factor in their case.
• In 1993, unqualified, untrained examiners that were not Board Certified reached erroneous conclusions based on misinformation.
• Witness testimony pertaining to knives and stabbing have been shown to be false.
• These new forensic findings undermine testimony by questionable “cult expert” Dale Griffis, who contended the murders had been a part of a satanic cult ritual human sacrifice. This absurd claim has again been proven false.
• The scientific evidence provided by qualified forensic experts has refuted everything used in court to convict these three innocent men.
For over 15 years, The West Memphis Three have been imprisoned for crimes they didn’t commit. Echols waits in solitary confinement at a Supermax facility for the lethal injection our tax dollars will pay for. But all three were condemned by their poverty, incompetent defense, Satanic panic and a rush to judgment by the media.
For more background info on the case go to www.wm3.org
Just Wednesday the Jonesboro Sun reported that Burnett overturned the death penalty against Robert Robbins for the gruesome 1997 murder of his former girlfriend, 19-year old Bethany White. In the initial trial, Robbins insisted upon defending himself, only allowing an attorney to sit in on the trial. The then-18-year-old Robbins asked for the death penalty, which he received the following year. At the time of the trial, Robbins was declared mentally competent to stand trial and was offered a plea bargain, which he turned down. He also waived his right to appeals.
Nevertheless, Robbins was granted a post-conviction relief because a juror didn’t correctly complete a death sentence form, and his mother petitioned against the death penalty on his behalf.
Robbins’ new attorneys also argued that Robbins should not have been sentenced to the death penalty because of his age and mental state at the time of the trial. They also argued that the 18-year-old shouldn’t have been allowed to waive his counsel. Even though Burnett struck down arguments submitted by the defense, he reduced Robbins’ death sentence to life in prison without parole.
If Burnett can find fault in a previous conviction that was based on indisputable evidence for no real reason, it’s a wonder that he can disregard mounting evidence that Jason Baldwin, Jessie Misskelley and Damien Echols deserve a new trial.
After all, the three defendants were 18 and 19 years old at the time of their conviction. All three received inadequate counsel, there’s still no physical evidence or motive tying the boys to the murder scene and forensic scientists have come forth to dispute claims that Christopher Byers, Steven Branch and Michael Moore were mutilated by humans. Still yet, Burnett finds no fault with his prior ruling, telling reporters that Misskelly’s allegedly coerced confession “ignored the forest for the trees.”
It’s interesting that Burnett is comfortable letting men who may be innocent rot in prison because they were convicted based on what many see as questionable evidence while overturning a death sentence based what looks like a paperwork error.
What would happen if Burnett would have ruled a mistrial for Misskelly and Baldwin?
Does he feel that it would be an admission of his own deficiencies as a judge? Or does this ruling prove that Burnett has a serious prejudice when it comes to the handling of this 15-year-old case that he’s admitted publicly to being “sick of”?
With a case like the West Memphis Three, which has garnered international attention for what supporters see as a gross mishandling of justice, Burnett’s run for the state Senate may be in jeopardy. After all, the life or death situations passing Burnett’s desk will reflect on the people of Arkansas, not just weird teenagers, if he’s elected.
The above photo of a Haitian man walking through a make-shift morgue in the aftermath of last week’s earthquake is being criticized by some as bordering sensationalism.
via NPR
