Kent State: Questions burn after riots

4 fires, 53 arrests trigger big batch of court visits

Kristine Gill

27 Apr, 2009

READ another article about the College Fest riot.

WATCH video captured Saturday night and view photos taken during the riot.

WATCH video footage taken by readers.

More than 50 students have arraignments set for Wednesday and Thursday after this weekend's College Fest riots. But it still remains unclear what sparked the riots.

Only minor injuries to officers were reported by the Kent City Police and Fire departments, and there were no reports of major injuries to partygoers.

In a news release issued around 3 a.m. yesterday, Kent Police reported that about 53 people were arrested after multiple warnings for charges, including failure to disperse, a fourth-degree misdemeanor. Dispatchers said that number is climbing.

"We got arrested for failure to disperse, but we didn't hear the order. We were inside, and we went out on the porch to grab some things and they arrested us," senior psychology major Joey Smith said. "...They dragged me down the street without shoes on, with all the glass and the fire. They didn't even tell me what I was being arrested for."

What students saw

According to the press release from police, the riot started "when partying students and others began pelting police officers with bottles and rocks at the scene of an arrest."

Students corroborated that story yesterday.

"There were four or five cops, and they started arresting people on the sidewalk for open container. This girl's friend got arrested and she went up to see why, then she got pushed down," said Kirk Price, junior justice studies major. "People started throwing bottles after that, and the cops fired those rubber bullets right after."

Students said partygoers responded by starting a fire in the middle of East College Avenue.

"The fires didn't start first. I was running from the cops' shots before any fires started," said Lauren McCumber, junior integrated language arts major.

Max Nixon, junior airport management major, began taking video between 7 and 7:30 p.m., after what people are calling "the push," when he said an officer shoved a girl onto the pavement while she was apparently inquiring about the arrest of a friend. Nixon captured video as the girl, who was pushed, went back to talk to officers again. His video is posted on YouTube.

"The officer kind of rushes over to the female and arrests her (in the video). He pushes her around and swings her around," Nixon said. "In my opinion it was excessive force."

Nixon said beer bottle throwing that followed this scene was in direct response to "the push." He said officers retreated to the dead end of East College Avenue, where they regrouped and later advanced down the street to disperse students using paintball guns and tear gas.

"I was told they just blindly fired rubber bullets into the crowd to disperse the crowd," Nixon said.

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US declares swine flu outbreak a health emergency

WASHINGTON (AFP) — The United States declared a swine flu outbreak a public health emergency as officials confirmed 20 cases in five US states and warned that they expected more in the coming days.

President Barack Obama is monitoring the spreading virus and has reviewed US capabilities to counter the deadly flu outbreak, which has killed up to 81 people in Mexico, White House homeland security advisor John Brennan told reporters.

Obama has ordered a "very active, aggressive, and coordinated response," Brennan said.

Richard Besser, the acting head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), told a White House press conference that there were eight confirmed US cases in New York City, seven in California, two in Texas, two in Kansas and one in Ohio.

"As we look for cases of swine flu, we are seeing more cases of swine flu. We expect to see more cases of swine flu," said Besser.

"We're responding aggressively to try and learn more about this outbreak" and to implement measures to control its spread, he added.

"We've ramped up our surveillance around the country to try and understand better what is the scope, what is the magnitude of this outbreak."

Although there the government has not issued a warning against travel to Mexico, Besser said warnings could be increased "based on what the situation warrants."

Homeland Security Department Secretary Janet Napolitano said the US government would officially declare a public health emergency later on Sunday in response to the outbreak, adding that the declaration was "standard operating procedure."

The move allows government agencies to free up federal, state and local agencies and their resources in preventing the spread of the virus.

The declaration also allows officials to use medication and diagnostic tests and releases funds to purchase additional antiviral medication.

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AIPAC, NSA spying and the corruption of Congress

by Tom Burghardt

22 Apr, 2009

A major scandal involving a top Democrat, the Israeli lobby-shop AIPAC and charges that former U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales sought congressional help to suppress media reports of systematic, illegal warrantless surveillance of Americans by the National Security Agency (NSA) broke on Sunday.

Congressional Quarterly revealed that Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA) "was overheard on an NSA wiretap telling a suspected Israeli agent that she would lobby the Justice Department [to] reduce espionage-related charges against two officials of the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee, the most powerful pro-Israel organization in Washington."

The former ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, Harman is the co-sponsor of the shameful "Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act" (H.R.1955) and its mutant relative in the Senate (S.1959). In other words, Harman's "liberal" veneer is the perfect cover for currying favor with politically well-connected corporate grifters, major beneficiaries of the national security state's largesse.

[For complete article reference links, please source at Antifascist Calling...]

Harman was among the most vociferous defenders of the Bush regime's warrantless wiretapping program. As Salon's Glenn Greenwald reminds us, during an appearance on "Meet the Press" with Republicans Pat Roberts and Peter Hoekstra, Harman said that "the whistleblowers who exposed the lawbreaking and perhaps even the New York Times (but not Bush officials) should be criminally investigated, saying she 'deplored the leak,' that 'it is tragic that a lot of our capability is now across the pages of the newspapers,' and that the whistleblowers were 'despicable'."


Jeff Stein reported that the southern California Democrat, in an apparent quid pro quo, was recorded as saying she would "'waddle into'" the AIPAC case 'if you think it'll make a difference,' according to two former senior national security officials familiar with the NSA transcript."


In exchange for Harman's help, the sources said, the suspected Israeli agent pledged to help lobby Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., then-House minority leader, to appoint Harman chair of the Intelligence Committee after the 2006 elections, which the Democrats were heavily favored to win.


Seemingly wary of what she had just agreed to, according to an official who read the NSA transcript, Harman hung up after saying, "This conversation doesn't exist." (Jeff Stein, "Sources: Wiretap Recorded Rep. Harman Promising to Intervene for AIPAC," Congressional Quarterly, April 19, 2009)


AIPAC, the pro-Israel lobby shop with the power to make or break politicians who don't tow the line, have long been accused by critics of engaging in espionage in Washington on behalf of the settler-colonial state, America's stationary aircraft carrier in the Middle East.


Two AIPAC officials, Steve Rosen and Keith Weismann were indicted in 2005 for trafficking classified information on Iraq and Iran obtained from government officials. Lawrence Franklin, a policy analyst with a top secret classification, worked for Under Secretary for Defense Policy Douglas Feith and Under Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and was AIPAC's conduit.

According to FBI surveillance tapes, Franklin relayed top secret information to Rosen, then AIPAC's policy director and Weismann, a senior Iran analyst with the lobby group. The New York Times reported in 2004 that Franklin was one of two U.S. officials that held meetings with Paris-based Iranian dissidents, including Iran-Contra figure, the arms dealer Manucher Ghorbanifar.

The Pentagon-endorsed meetings were apparently brokered by the American Enterprise Institute's Michael Ledeen, another key Iran-Contra figure, identified by Italian journalists Carlo Bonini and Giuseppe D'Avanzano in their book Collusion, as a key facilitator of the bogus "yellow cake" dossier during the run-up to the 2003 American invasion and occupation of Iraq.

One purpose of the Paris meetings according to The Jerusalem Post was to "undermine a pending deal that the White House had been negotiating with the Iranian government," involving the exchange of top al-Qaeda operatives in Iranian custody in return for an American promise to halt its support of the anti-Iranian cult group, Mujahideen al-Khalq, whose fighters were based in Iraq.

Classified information obtained by Franklin was allegedly passed to Naor Gilon, the head of the political department at the Israeli Embassy in Washington. As with America's CIA, Israel's embassy political officers are often drawn from the ranks of their secret service, Mossad.

As the World Socialist Web Site points out, "No doubt AIPAC found Harman 'well-qualified' because she was prepared to promote the policies of the Israeli state, including the attempt to steer Washington toward a military confrontation with Iran, precisely the aim of the espionage of which Franklin, Rosen and Weissman are accused."

Franklin pled guilty and was sentenced in 2006 to 12 years and 7 months in prison. After multiple delays, the pair are scheduled to go on trial in June in Alexandria, Virginia.

But as The New York Times reported April 21, administration officials regard the case as a "problem child" and that "senior Justice Department officials" are conducting a "final review" that will determine whether the case goes forward or the charges against the alleged spies are dismissed.

Unlike the vast majority of Americans targeted by NSA's driftnet surveillance of their electronic communications, the Harman intercept was part of a lawful warrant obtained by the FBI during the course of its investigation of AIPAC officials.

The New York Times reported April 21, "that someone seeking help for the employees of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a prominent pro-Israel lobbying group, was recorded asking Ms. Harman, a longtime supporter of its efforts, to intervene with the Justice Department. She responded, the official recounted, by saying she would have more influence with a White House official she did not identify."

According to Congressional Quarterly, that official was none other than Bush crime family capo, Alberto Gonzales.

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Dozens of prisoners held by CIA still missing, fates unknown

by Dafna Linzer (ProPublica)
22 Apr, 2009

Last week, we pointed out that one of the newly released Bush-era memos inadvertently confirmed that the CIA held an al-Qaeda suspect [1] named Hassan Ghul in a secret prison and subjected him to what Bush administration lawyers called "enhanced interrogation techniques." The CIA has never acknowledged holding Ghul, and his whereabouts today are secret.

But Ghul is not the only such prisoner who remains missing. At least three dozen others who were held in the CIA's secret prisons overseas appear to be missing as well. Efforts by human rights organizations to track their whereabouts have been unsuccessful, and no foreign governments have acknowledged holding them. (See the full list. [2])

In September 2007, Michael V. Hayden, then director of the CIA, said [3] "fewer than 100 people had been detained at CIA's facilities." One memo [4] (PDF) released last week confirmed that the CIA had custody of at least 94 people as of May 2005 and "employed enhanced techniques to varying degrees in the interrogations of 28 of these ".”

Former President George W. Bush publicly acknowledged the CIA program in September 2006, and transferred 14 prisoners from the secret jails to Guantanamo. Many other prisoners, who had "little or no additional intelligence value," Bush said, "have been returned to their home countries for prosecution or detention by their governments."

Bush did not reveal their identities or whereabouts -- information that would have allowed the International Committee for the Red Cross [5] to find them -- or the terms under which the prisoners were handed over to foreign jailers. The U.S. government has never released information describing the threat that any of them posed.

Some of those prisoners have since been released by third countries holding them. But it is still unclear what has happened to dozens of others.

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U.S. government-sponsored mind control and Tulane

...The following year, in 1953, Project Artichoke grew into to a larger and more ambitious undertaking known as Project MKULTRA, the scope and nature of which remained hidden until the summer of 1977. In the wake of two congressional investigations and the reluctant disclosure of some 16,000 pages of records obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, CIA director Stansfield Turner disclosed the broad outlines of a twenty-five-year, multimillion-dollar program of research on germ warfare and on methods to alter or control human memory and behavior through the use of drugs, electricity, sensory deprivation, hypnosis, and other means. Involving 185 researchers at 88 non-governmental institutions, including 44 colleges and universities, the project's scope and duration seemed to justify the conclusion of former State Department officer John Marks that "the intelligence community ... changed the face of the scientific community during the 1950s and early 1960s." [116]

Certainly the Tulane experience lends support to Marks's conclusion that "[n]early every scientist on the frontiers of brain research found men from the secret agencies looking over his shoulders [and] impinging on the research." [117] Precisely when the government became interested in the Tulane schizophrenia studies remains unclear, but in March 1954 Heath was the principal speaker at a seminar conducted by the Army Chemical Corps at its Edgewood Arsenal medical laboratories. His subject was "Some Aspects of Electrical Stimulation and Recording in the Brain of Man." [118] Within a few months Tulane had signed an army "facility security clearance" for the Department of Psychiatry and Neurology. In 1955 Dr. Russell R. Monroe, a psychiatrist on Heath's research team, became the principal investigator for army contract DA-18-108-CML-5596, a project listed in university records under the title, "Clinical Studies of Neurological and Psychiatric Changes during the Administration of Certain Drugs." Classified army records were somewhat more specific, listing the contract's purpose as to "[s]tudy behavior during administration, LSD-25 & mescaline." [119] In retrospect the army's interest in Heath's work is not difficult to understand. At the time Heath gave his 1954 seminar presentation at Edgewood Arsenal, behavior control of a rather primitive kind had already been achieved through electrical stimulation of the brains of lower animals. At McGill University, James Olds and Peter C Milner had reported that rats with electrodes implanted in the brain's septal region would press levers at a rate of 2,000 times per hour to receive stimulation. [120] At the National Institutes of Health, Dr. John Lilly had attracted intense interest from the CIA and other agencies through his use of similar techniques on primates. After implanting multiple electrodes in the brains of monkeys, Lilly was able to identify the precise location of centers of pain, fear, anxiety, anger, and sexual arousal. In one experiment a monkey with access to a simple switch stimulated himself to produce virtually continuous orgasms, at a rate of one every three minutes for sixteen hours per day. Animal tests comprised an integral part of most academic research sponsored by military and CIA sources. In contrast, Project MKULTRA was primarily concerned with conducting drug, electrical, and other experiments involving human subjects. [121]...

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