Whoever dumped the body of a prominent national defense consultant into a garbage bin in a bustling college town risked being detected, either by witnesses or surveillance cameras, with some of the containers in well-lit parking lots, near restaurants and stores.
Police don't know which of the 10 bins collected on New Year's Eve in Newark contained the body of 66-year-old John P. Wheeler III, who was last seen alive the afternoon before some 15 miles away in downtown Wilmington. Where he might have been killed and what he was doing on the days leading up to his death also remain elusive, said Newark police spokesman Lt. Mark Farrall.
"We still don't know the location of the crime scene," Farrall said Tuesday.
Much is known about Wheeler's 40-year consulting career.
A 1966 West Point graduate and Army officer at the Pentagon during the Vietnam War, he later served the administrations of the last three Republican presidents. During Ronald Reagan's time in the White House, Wheeler headed the Vietnam Veterans Leadership Program and helped get the Vietnam War Memorial wall built in Washington. Under George W. Bush, he helped develop an Air Force program to combat cyber attacks on U.S. weapons systems.
~ more... ~
Thursday, January 6, 2011
Cameras plentiful where Del. man's body dumped
The Pentagon's New Map - Thomas Barnett lecture
WW2 mass graves found at Austrian hospital
UPI reports:
Mass graves recently found at an Austrian psychiatric hospital may hold the remains of Nazi euthanasia victims, officials said Tuesday.
At a news conference, officials from Hall Hospital said a commission will study the remains, try to identify them and to find out how they died, The Guardian reported. The graves were discovered during new construction, which has been stopped.
The excavation is to begin in March when the ground will no longer be frozen.
About 220 people were buried at the hospital between 1942 and 1945, Oliver Seifert, a historian, said. He said Hall was not known to have been a center for the killing of those considered unfit, although patients from the hospital were sent elsewhere for extermination.
Seifert said a careful study of the hospital graves could determine whether euthanasia became so ingrained in the Nazi medical system that it was carried out on some scale in many hospitals.
"We know that murder was actively carried out at other psychiatric institutions, by overdosing patients, neglect or undernourishment," Seifert said.
Military needs response plan to genocide
Chris Taylor and Anthony Zinni write for CNN:
In the past 75 years, the world has been witness to genocide in Cambodia, Rwanda, Srebrenica, Darfur and the Holocaust.
In a few weeks, the next mass atrocity could happen in East Africa.
As retired Adm. Dennis Blair, former U.S. director of National Intelligence, testified in 2010: "A number of countries in Africa and Asia are at significant risk for a new outbreak of mass killing. Among these countries, a new mass killing or genocide is most likely to occur in southern Sudan."
In one week, the mostly Christian people of South Sudan will cast a historic vote to secede or not from the Muslim North. While the United States rightly pursues diplomatic solutions to what most believe will be a vote to secede, prudence demands military preparations for violence -- to include mass killings that could be carried out simultaneously by varied groups.
Should South Sudan vote to secede, North-on-South violence is probable. A secession vote could also create a scramble for power and retribution by marginalized tribes in the South, while posturing by outside provocateurs and regional states could also lead to unintended violence.
Joseph Kony's Lord's Resistance Army could exploit violence in Sudan to cover its own killing of civilians, as could al-Shabaab in Somalia. All could result in mass killings, and all could require military responses.
But so could a withdrawal from Iraq, unrest in Central Asia, or cartel violence in Mexico -- and the United States is unprepared to respond to genocide or mass atrocities in any of these cases. Failing to respond to barbaric events of human slaughter is more than just a matter of political will or legal authority -- it is a result of the manifest lack of critical thinking about how military forces could respond when prevention fails.
The Obama administration has said many of the right things. The 2010 National Security Strategy proclaims the United States will "in certain instances ... use military means to prevent and respond to genocide and mass atrocities." The Pentagon's 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review says the military will "prepare to defeat adversaries and succeed in a wide range of contingencies," to include "preventing human suffering due to mass atrocities." Even so, the United States has done little in the way of concrete planning should mass violence against civilians break out.
~ more... ~
The Rove/Assange Story Hits the International Press in Sweden
The story of Karl Rove's likely connection to the arrest ofWikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has been picked up by a major news site in Sweden. We are pleased to say that our work here at Legal Schnauzer played a part in an important story going global.
Nyheter24 ("News 24"), a Stockholm-based online tabloid that is targeted at the 15-39 age group, broke the story in Sweden. The newspaper cites reporting by Andrew Kreig at Huffington Post (and the Justice Integrity Project), plus our work at Legal Schnauzer. Here is the Nyheter24 headline:
Karl Rove hjälper Reinfeldt att hantera Julian Assange: Enligt källor till Huffington Post har George W Bushs högra hand, Karl Rove, hjälpt den svenska regeringen att hantera fallet Julian Assange.
What does that mean? Well, we've been working on our Swedish--by pushing the translation button on our Google toolbar--and we will get to that in a moment.
But first, we must say that it's pretty cool for our humble blog to have reached a global audience. We have international visitors to the blog on a regular basis, and they have picked up considerably since we've been writing about the Rove/Assange story. But to our knowledge, this is the first time our work has been picked up by a major news outlet in a foreign country.
Even though we can't read Swedish, we pretty quickly discerned thatNyheter24 reporter Aaron Israelson had cited our work:Nu anklagas Karl Rove för att ligga bakom den svenska regeringens kampanj för att få Wikileaks grundare och chefredaktör, Julian Assange, utlämnad hit. I syfte att därefter utlämna honom till USA - där ett spionåtal hotar Assange.
Den amerikanske journalisten Roger Shuler, som bloggar på välbesökta och ansedda Legal Schnauzer,skriver att en säker källa uppger att Rove hjälper regeringen Reinfeldt med fallet Assange.
What does that mean? With the click of a button, here is the translation I came up with--and I swear I didn't have anything to do with the writing of this story:Now accused Karl Rove of being behind the Swedish government's campaign to get Wikileaks founder and editor, Julian Assange , extradited here. In order to then hand him over to the U.S.--where a spy prosecutions threaten Assange.
The American journalist Roger Shuler, who blogs on the popular and prestigious Legal Schnauzer, writes that a reliable source says that Rove will help the government Reinfeldt case Assange.
Popular and prestigious? Man, you gotta love those Swedish journalists. Mrs. Schnauzer and I got quite a hoot out of that translation. Even we would not describe the blog in such glowing terms. But given that we both have been cheated out of our jobs here in Alabama, largely because of the progressive tone of this blog, it's nice to see that our work is appreciated across the Atlantic.
~ more... ~
The Village Where the Neo-Nazis Rule
Hitler salutes in the street and firing practice in the forest: Neo-Nazis have taken over an entire village in Germany, and authorities appear to have given up efforts to combat the problem. The place has come to symbolize the far right's growing influence in parts of the former communist east.
Horst and Birgit Lohmeyer have been working on their life's dream for six years, renovating a house in the woods near Jamel, a tiny village near Wismar in the far northeastern German state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania. Birgit Lohmeyer writes crime novels, her husband is a musician, and both try to pretend everything is normal here in Jamel.
It wasn't easy to find their new home. The Lohmeyers spent months driving out to the countryside every weekend, heading east from where they lived in Hamburg, but most of the houses they saw were too expensive. Then they came across the inexpensive red brick farmhouse in Jamel. Slightly run-down, but not far from the Baltic Sea, the house sits surrounded by lime and maple trees, near a lake.
The Lohmeyers knew that a notorious neo-Nazi lived nearby -- Sven Krüger, a demolition contractor and high-level member of the far-right National Democratic Party (NPD). What the Lohmeyers didn't know was that other neighbors felt terrorized by Krüger. He and his associates were in the process of buying up the entire village.
Jamel is an example of the far-right problem that has plagued Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania for years. The rural region, once part of communist East Germany, has a poor reputation in this regard -- the NPD, which glorifies the Third Reich, has been in the state parliament since 2006 and neo-Nazi crimes are part of daily life. In recent months, a series of attacks against politicians from all the democratic parties has shaken the state. Sometimes hardly a week goes by without an attack on another electoral district office, with paint bombs, right-wing graffiti and broken windows.
Norbert Nieszery, leader of the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD) in the state parliament, calls it an "early form of terror." Nieszery's own office windows have been smashed twice. State Interior Minister Lorenz Caffier of the center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) says he has registered a "new level" of right-wing extremist violence. He believes the NPD is trying to raise its profile through aggressive behavior ahead of the state parliament election in September. One local mayor requested police protection after receiving repeated right-wing threats. The Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, Germany's domestic intelligence agency, has warned that the NPD is becoming increasingly influential in local municipalities and that the neo-Nazis are trying to entrench themselves in daily life.
~ more... ~
Deadly experiments: Israel's murderous testing ground for 'less-lethal' weapons
On New Year's Eve 2010, whilst much of the world was celebrating, over 1,000 people demonstrated in the Palestinian village of Bil'in against Israel's encroachment on the village's land. Israeli tear gas and rubber bullets rained down on the protesters and Jawaher Abu Rahma, who had joined the march to the apartheid wall and retreated to the sidelines after the first volleys of gas, choked to death as the allegedly non-lethal gas enveloped the village.
A report from Bil'in residents said that Israeli soldiers fired tear gas "from the moment protesters entered their sight." [1] "It is obvious that, for the army, the mere presence of unarmed demonstrators is reason enough to use chemical weapons against them," it added.
Bil'in, a symbol of popular resistance
Since 2005, the village of Bil'in has been resisting Israel's apartheid wall and settlements encroaching on the village's land. In February 2010, the community's steadfast resistance finally won an announcement by the Israeli military that the wall's route around the village would be altered. [2]
The village has become a symbol of a new popular resistance to the Israeli occupation and has attracted international solidarity from all over the world. Bil'in's fight has become a foundation of the joint struggle by Israeli and Palestinian activists against the occupation and has spurred the birth of the 'popular committees' movement against the illegal wall and settlements. Statements from Bil'in have often provided a compass for the global movement for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) against Israeli apartheid.
Bil'in's successes, however, have come at a price, which is baldly illustrated in the story of the Abu Rahma family. In 2008, Ashraf Abu Rahma was badly injured after he was shot at close range while detained by an Israeli soldier. [3] In April 2009, his brother, Bassem, was shot in the chest by a tear gas canister at close range and died from his wounds. [4] Abdallah and Adeeb Abu Rahma have both served hundreds of days in prison for their involvement in the popular struggle. [5] Despite all this, their sister, Jawaher, kept returning to the demonstrations week after week for four years, until she collapsed from tear gas inhalation on 31 December, 2010, and died in a Ramallah hospital, aged 36.
In a blog published a day after her death, Bil'in residents reasserted that action for change is necessary and that the BDS strategy is "a means for activists to unite under one manifesto." Celebrating their past victories in spite of the tragedy, they added: "Corporations are divesting from Israel, trade unions are passing motions to boycott settlement goods, universities are refusing to collaborate with their Israeli counterparts." [6]
Israeli activists have responded to a call-out by the Bil'in residents by blocking a main street in Tel Aviv and holding a procession to the US ambassador's house to 'return' tear gas canisters fired at demonstrators in Bil'in. [7] 12 protesters were arrested for charges including 'conspiring to possess weapons', despite the fact that all they were carrying was the spent canisters.
Calls have also been made to target the manufacturers of the tear gas used by the Israeli forces against Palestinian civilians, [8] in particular Combined Systems Incorporated (CSI) and Defense Technology, which is owned by BAE Systems.
~ more... ~
image from http://www.spitting-image.net
