Is Clinton friend involved in passport breach?

This is no coincidence at all. Billary will go to any length to win.

Thomas

A State Department official in charge of the department during two of the three breaches into the passport files of Sen. Barack Obama has a direct tie to Bill and Hillary Clinton and department officials are investigating whether she furnished information to Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign.

Maura Harty was in charge of the Bureau Of Consular Affairs during the first two breaches of Obama's passport. Former President Bill Clinton appointed her to an ambassadorship during his Presidency.

Harty retired last month from the State Department. She joined the State Department in 2002 after serving as ambassador to Paraguay for two years of Bill Clinton's Presidential term. Sources within the State Department told Capitol Hill Blue this morning that revelations of the first two passport breaches surfaced only after Harty left her State Department job.

Man Innocently Kills Cop During Drug Raid

Imagine you’re home alone.

It’s 8 p.m. You work an early shift and need to be out the door before sunrise, so you’re already in bed. Your nerves are a bit frazzled, because earlier in the week someone broke into your home. Oddly, they didn’t take anything; they just rifled through your belongings.

But the violation weighs on your mind. At about the time you drift off, you’re awakened by fierce barking from your two large dogs. You hear someone crashing into your front door, as if he’s trying to separate it from its hinges. You grab the gun you keep for home defense and leave your room to investigate.

This past January that scenario played out at the Chesapeake, Virginia, home of 28-year-old Ryan Frederick, a slight man of little more than 100 pounds. According to interviews since the incident, Frederick says when he looked toward his front door, he saw an intruder trying to enter through one of the lower door panels. So Frederick fired his gun.

The intruders were from the Chesapeake Police Department. They had come to serve a drug warrant. Frederick’s bullet struck Detective Jarrod Shivers in the side, killing him. Frederick was arrested and has spent the last six weeks in a Chesapeake jail.

He has been charged with first degree murder. Paul Ebert, the special prosecutor assigned to the case, has indicated he may elevate the charge to capital murder, which would enable the state to seek the death penalty.

At the time of the raid, Ryan Frederick worked for a soft drink merchandiser. Current and former employers and co-workers speak highly of him. He also recently had gotten engaged, a welcome lift for a guy who’d had a run of tough luck.

He lost both parents early in life, and friends say the death of his mother hit particularly hard—Frederick discovered her in bed after she had overdosed on prescription medication. After the deaths of both parents, Frederick grew close to his grandmother, who then died two years ago.

Friends and neighbors describe Frederick as shy, self-effacing, non-confrontational, and hard-working. He had no prior criminal record. Frederick and his friends have conceded he smoked marijuana recreationally. But all—including his neighbors—insist there’s no evidence he was growing or distributing the drug.

According to the search warrant, the police raided Frederick’s home after a confidential informant told them he saw evidence of marijuana growing in a garage behind the home. The warrant says the informant saw several marijuana plants, plus lights, irrigation equipment and other gardening supplies.

After the raid, the police found the gardening supplies, but no plants. They also found a small amount of marijuana, but not much—only enough to charge Frederick with misdemeanor drug possession.

Frederick told a local television station that he was an avid gardener. A neighbor I spoke with backs him up, explaining that Frederick had an elaborate koi pond behind his home and raised a variety of tropical plants. He’d even given his neighbors gardening tips on occasion.

One of the plants Frederick told the local television station he raised was the Japanese maple, a plant that, when green, has leaves that look quite a bit like marijuana leaves.

So far, Chesapeake police have given no indication that they did any investigation to corroborate the tip from their informant. There’s no mention in the search warrant of an undercover drug buy from Frederick or of any extensive surveillance of Frederick’s home.

More disturbingly, the search warrant says the confidential informant was inside Frederick’s house three days before the raid—about the same time Frederick says someone broke into his home. Frederick’s supporters have told me that Frederick and his attorney now know the identity of the informant, and that it was the police informant who broke into Frederick’s home.

Chesapeake’s police department isn’t commenting. But if true, all of this raises some very troubling questions about the raid, and about Frederick’s continued incarceration.

Special prosecutor Paul Ebert said at a recent bond hearing for Frederick that Shivers, the detective who was killed, was in Frederick’s yard when he was shot, and that Frederick fired through his door, knowing he was firing at police.

Frederick’s attorney disputes this. Ebert also said Frederick should have known the intruders were police because there were a dozen or more officers at the scene. But some of Frederick’s neighbors dispute this, too. One neighbor told me she saw only two officers immediately after the raid; she said the others showed up only after Shivers went down.

What’s clear, though, is that Chesepeake police conducted a raid on a man with no prior criminal record. Even if their informant had been correct, Frederick was at worst suspected of growing marijuana plants in his garage. There was no indication he was a violent man—that it was necessary to take down his door after nightfall.

The raid in Chesapeake bears a striking resemblance to another that ended in a fatality. Last week, New Hanover County, N.C., agreed to pay $4.25 million to the parents of college student Peyton Strickland, who was killed when a deputy participating in a raid mistook the sound of a SWAT battering ram for a gunshot, and fired through the door as Strickland came to answer it.

In the case where a citizen mistakenly (and allegedly) shot through his door at a raiding police officer, the citizen is facing a murder charge; in the case where a raiding police officer mistakenly shot through a door and killed a citizen, there were no criminal charges.

Over the last quarter century, we’ve seen an astonishing rise in paramilitary police tactics by police departments across America. Peter Kraksa, professor of criminology at the University of Eastern Kentucky, ran a 20-year survey of SWAT team deployments and determined that they have increased 1,500 percent since the early 1980s—mostly to serve nonviolent drug warrants.

This is dangerous, senseless overkill. The margin of error is too thin, and the potential for tragedy too high to use these tactics unless they are in response to an already violent situation (think bank robberies, school shootings or hostage-takings). Breaking down doors to bust drug offenders creates violent situations; it doesn’t defuse them.

Shivers’ death is only the most recent example. And Ryan Frederick is merely the latest citizen to be put in the impossible position of being awakened from sleep, then having to determine in a matter of seconds if the men breaking into his home are police or criminal intruders.

You wonder how many people can honestly say they’d have handled it any differently than he did.

Different Standards for Black and White Preachers

Rudy Giuliani's priest has been accused in grand jury proceedings of molesting several children and covering up the molestation of others. Giuliani would not disavow him on the campaign trail and still works with him.

Mitt Romney was part of a church that did not view black Americans as equals and actively discriminated against them. He stayed with that church all the way into his early thirties, until they were finally forced to change their policies to come into compliance with civil rights legislation. Romney never disavowed his church back then or now. He said he was proud of the faith of his fathers.

Jerry Falwell said America had 9/11 coming because we tolerated gays, feminists and liberals. It was our fault. Our chickens had come home to roost, if you will. John McCain proudly received his support and even spoke at his university's commencement.

Reverend John Hagee has called the Catholic Church the "Great Whore." He has said that the Anti-Christ will rise out of the European Union (of course, the Anti-Christ will also be Jewish). He has said all Muslims are trained to kill and will be part of the devil's army when Armageddon comes (which he hopes is soon). John McCain continues to say he is proud of Reverend Hagee's endorsement.

Reverend Rod Parsley believes America was founded to destroy Islam. Since this is such an outlandish claim, I have to add for the record, that he is not kidding. Reverend Parsley says Islam is an "anti-Christ religion" brought down from a "demon spirit." Of course, we are in a war against all Muslims, including presumably Muslim-Americans. Buts since Parsley believes this is a Christian nation and that it should be run as a theocracy, he is not very concerned what Muslim-Americans think.

John McCain says Reverend Rod Parsley is his "spiritual guide."

What separates all of these outrageous preachers from Barack Obama's? You guessed it. They're white and Reverend Jeremiah Wright is not. If it's not racism that's causing the disparity in media treatment of these preachers, then what is it?

I'm willing to listen to other possible explanations. And I am inclined to believe that the people these preachers go after are more important than the race of the preacher. It's one thing to go after gays, liberals and Muslims -- that seems to be perfectly acceptable in America -- it's another to accuse white folks of not living up to their ideals.

I think there is another factor at play as well. The media is deathly afraid of calling out preachers of any stripe for insane propaganda from the pulpits for fear that they will be labeled as anti-Christian. But criticism of Rev. Wright falls into their comfort zone. It's easy to blame him for being anti-American because he criticizes American foreign and domestic policy.

If Rev. Wright had preached about discriminating against gay Americans or Muslims, there probably would not have been any outcry at all. That falls into the category of "respect their hateful opinions because they cloak themselves in the church."

But one thing is indisputable -- the enormous disparity in how the media has covered these white preachers as opposed to Rev. Wright. Have you ever even heard of Rod Parsley? As you can see from what I listed above, all of these white preachers have said and done the most outlandish and offensive things you can imagine -- and hardly a peep.

If the disparity in coverage isn't racist, then what is it?

The Truth About Fusion Centers Will Blow Your Mind

Sunday, 23 March 2008

Imagine that somewhere close to your local community there exists a secret computer center. Equipped with powerful mainframe computers and the database integrating powers of XML, this government-funded facility gathers data from thousands of sources including local, state and federal law enforcement, social welfare agencies, hospitals, banks, telephone companies, ISPs, computer search engines, private security companies, schools--essentially an endless list. With its massive computing power, this secret outpost is able to search and sift this data using vaguely defined criteria like "suspicious activity" in order to identify individuals for even closer scrutiny. Finally, this computer center dispenses the results of its analyses to local, state and federal law enforcement and to the military so that they can take action against the citizens tagged as threats.

Such a scenario is no longer the product of a paranoid, over-stimulated imagination. It is a reality called "fusion centers," forty of which have been established throughout the United States.

Initially part of the "Total Information Awareness" (TIA) program headed by Bush buddy and Iran-Contra convict Admiral John Poindexter, fusion centers suffered a setback when Congress de-funded TIA back in 2003 because of privacy and civil liberties concerns. But an idea that grabs so much government power at the expense of its citizens' privacy always has a phoenix-like ability to resurrect itself, and so the fusion center initiative has been reborn under the Department of Homeland Security's "Global Justice Information Sharing Initiative" and been provided with $380 million in funding for 40 installations throughout the country.

These fusion centers are usually located deep in the bowels of some state law enforcement agency (you can find your local one using this map). All forty coordinate and share data with each other, but no single agency, Congressional or otherwise, has oversight authority over them.

Civil liberties organizations like the ACLU and the Electronic Privacy Information Center see the fusion centers as a huge threat to privacy and even democracy. They thought they had been successful in stopping such a massive data gathering initiative when TIA was defunded, but today, there are forty fusion centers up and operating in the United States.

Why should you care if you aren't planning to crash some airlines into skyscrapers? Think for a moment about how fusion centers operate.

Say that you're planning to have a neighborhood get together. You head to the local supermarket and pick up a few of those big pork and beans cans and plenty of bottled water and soft drinks. Of course, you give the clerk your shopper card to save a few bucks. The record of your purchase heads to the supermarket's central database which they have patriotically agreed to share with the local fusion center. The out-of-the-ordinary purchase is flagged because the government is on the lookout for survivalist types who are stocking up for Doomsday and thus violating anti-hoading laws. Your bottled water purchase is cross-checked against other records, and the following turns up:

recent ammunition purchase made with a credit card (for a quail hunting outing, but they don't know that)
unusually large cash withdrawal of $3,000 (for buyng your neighbor's used car for your kid)
visits to "questionable" political web sites like the one where you're reading this (information courtesy of your ISP)
The fusion center computer is now in a frenzy because of the obvious threat you pose to national security. Thanks to the kind of speed that $380 million can purchase, it spits out your name and address just in time for the heavily armed SWAT team to show up at your barbecue.

Seriously, anyone who doesn't think that all this unsupervised information collecting poses no threat to democracy needs only to remember those government employees poking through Barack Obama's passport records to understand what fusion centers could mean for democracy.

The sad fact is that no one is going to shut these fusion centers down in the forseeable future. The best we can do is to cut their access to our information by practicing good personal privacy habits. Don't use that supermarket card or a credit card when you make purchases. Guard your privacy against ISPs and search engines by using an elite proxy or VPN. Encrypt your email.

If we can't stop the government from violating our privacy, we can at least make their job more difficult. Begin to resist today.

Anti-depressants can't cure sadness

Big Pharma caught in thier marketing schemes

I've been telling you for so long about the over-prescription of antidepressant medication that at times it's made me, well … depressed. But finally, a new study has been released that's put a smile on my face. Because nothing makes me smile like saying, "I told you so!"

According to research out of the University of Hull in the UK, antidepressant medications are only effective on those patients with severe cases of depression. Subjects in the study who suffered only from mild depression responded just as well to placebos as they did to various antidepressant medications such as Prozac.

I've been saying for years that depression is the most over-diagnosed (and, consequently, misdiagnosed) ailment in American society. Over the years, the line between true, clinical depression and, for want of a better term, "feeling down in the dumps," has been blurred to the point where it's almost vanished. The result is that doctors are handing out Prozac prescriptions to everyone with a mere case of the blues, and creating, to borrow from the title of a bestselling book, Prozac Nation. This new study merely backs up what I've long suspected: that most of these "depressed" patients don't really have anything clinically wrong with them.

The study's lead researcher, Irving Kirsch of the University of Hull, said that "although patients get better when they take antidepressants, they also get better when they take a placebo, and the difference in improvement is not very great." Kirsch added that "this means that depressed people can improve without chemical treatments."

This led the Kirsch and the other researchers to conclude that there's basically no reason to prescribe antidepressants to anyone but the most severely depressed patients. Which is, of course, the absolute correct conclusion to draw – and one that, quite frankly, I think could have and should have been drawn long ago by responsible people in the medical community. And I think it's a conclusion that could easily have been drawn without a protracted study.

I'm very happy that this study has drawn this conclusion, but like so many logical conclusions it must now swim upstream against Big Pharma's tireless efforts to push these antidepressants as cure-alls to the American populace. Just think of all the TV commercials you've seen advertising antidepressant drugs such as Paxil. When you realize that these drugs only benefit people with severe depression, doesn't it seem absurd to hawk them to one and all in prime time? If you're clinically depressed, are you really in the correct state of mind to even respond to a TV ad? Of course, this matters little to the pharmaceutical companies because they have a lot more money than any given supreme being, and will stop at nothing to create more buyers for their products – whether those buyers need their products or not.

But there's something even more depressing to consider.

What's more depressing is that the American Psychiatric Association (APA) has been complicit in the spread and needless prescribing of psychotropic drugs because their own diagnostic manual doesn't adequately differentiate clinical depression from normal feelings of profound sadness (except in the case of bereaved patients). Nowadays, "depression" is all but formally diagnosed at school nurses offices and university health centers using ridiculously simple checklists, which don't take life events into proper account (seriously – has anyone ever encountered a teenager or college kid who isn't "depressed" at some point?).

As a result, some studies have suggested that of the more than 30 million Americans that have been reported to suffer from depression at some point in their lives, as many as a quarter of this number may have been misdiagnosed and needlessly medicated. Which ads up to about 7.5 million more buyers for Big Pharma products.

And don't forget that antidepressant medications are often the pharmaceutical equivalent of "bringing out the big guns." And that means that many of these drugs can have serious side effects that can be difficult to wrestle with on their own. Prozac alone has side effects that include nausea, insomnia, anxiety, and anorexia. Not to mention sexual dysfunctions such as impotence. Imagine how those side effects could make you feel if you thought you were depressed BEFORE you started taking Prozac!

And it's not just because of Big Pharma and the APA. Because they've been taught to believe that these drugs will solve their problems, patients now expect to go to their doctors crying "depression" and walking out the door with a script for the "happy pills" of their choice. Unfortunately, the doctors seem to be all-to-willing to comply.

All of this means that although this study by Kirsch and his colleagues is spelling out a very important truth, this truth may go unheeded. At the very least, this study faces a long, upstream swim toward acceptance in today's prescription-happy culture. In spite of the fact that the study suggests that there should be a more tailored approach to the treatment of depression – and that each individual case must be treated as unique – this isn't likely to happen overnight.

Just remember that just because you're sad, it doesn't necessarily mean you're depressed. Depression has become its own strange badge of honor in today's society. There's nothing glamorous about it. People should be happy that they're merely sad, and the medical community should do a better job of teaching misguided patients to recognize themselves as such. "Clinically depressed" is a badge that no one should want to wear.

William Campbell Douglass II, M.D.