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Racist Suspect Watch


free your mind!

Cress Welsing: The Definition of Racism White Supremacy

Dr. Blynd: The Definition of Racism

Anon: What is Racism/White Supremacy?

Dr. Bobby Wright: The Psychopathic Racial Personality

The Cress Theory of Color-Confrontation and Racism (White Supremacy)

What is the First Step in Counter Racism?

Genocide: a system of white survival

The Creation of the Negro

The Mysteries of Melanin

'Racism is a behavioral system for survival'

Fear of annihilation drives white racism

Dr. Blynd: The Definition of Caucasian

Where are all the Black Jurors? 

The War Against Black Males: Black on Black Violence Caused by White Supremacy/Racism

Brazen Police Officers and the Forfeiture of Freedom

White Domination, Black Criminality

Fear of a Colored Planet Fuels Racism: Global White Population Shrinking, Less than 10%

Race is Not Real but Racism is

The True Size of Africa

What is a Nigger? 

MLK and Imaginary Freedom: Chains, Plantations, Segregation, No Longer Necessary ['Our Condition is Getting Worse']

Chomsky on "Reserving the Right to Bomb Niggers." 

A Goal of the Media is to Make White Dominance and Control Over Everything Seem Natural

"TV is reversing the evolution of the human brain." Propaganda: How You Are Being Mind Controlled And Don't Know It.

Spike Lee's Mike Tyson and Don King

"Zapsters" - Keeping what real? "Non-white People are Actors. The Most Unrealistic People on the Planet"

Black Power in a White Supremacy System

Neely Fuller Jr.: "If you don't understand racism/white supremacy, everything else that you think you understand will only confuse you"

The Image and the Christian Concept of God as a White Man

'In order for this system to work, We have to feel most free and independent when we are most enslaved, in fact we have to take our enslavement as the ultimate sign of freedom'

Why do White Americans need to criminalize significant segments of the African American population?

Who Told You that you were Black or Latino or Hispanic or Asian? White People Did

Malcolm X: "We Have a Common Enemy"

Links

Deeper than Atlantis

Entries from April 1, 2005 - April 30, 2005

Friday
Apr292005

Norman Kelley: Harold Cruse and the untimely demise of the American left.

With the passing on March 25 of Harold Cruse, one has to take note of the post­civil rights black intelligentsia and ask, "What has it developed in the last 40 years?" Interestingly, not much of anything except a great deal of attitude in the works of Cornel West, bell hooks and Michael Eric "Why I Love Black Women" Dyson.

Cruse, however, was a true public intellectual not a market intellectual, like the current crop of usual suspects. He wrote for popular periodicals and some left-of-center journals. His greatest claim to fame, in my view, was his seminal 1967 book,  The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual , the most searing indictment of the black intelligentsia.

 In short, Cruse argued, the black intelligentsia is incapable of having original ideas and perspectives as they pertain to the African-American situation in America. Believing in equal opportunity, Cruse also scorched and burned the Neo-African cultural movement and its questionable embrace of Afrocentrism and Kwanzaa, neither of which has led to anything noteworthy beyond greeting cards and various forms of Afro-kitsch.

 Cruse was an original thinker and non-academic who pissed off everyone in the 1960s (though after his book came out, Cruse was given a professorship at the University of Michigan, despite having no advanced degrees). He saw the Black Power movement as all slogan and no program, much like today's hip-hop politics: attitude but no ideas or programmatic approach.

Click to read more ...

Friday
Apr222005

Bush Off the Hook Again: Moussaoui Guilty Plea Means NO Trial for 9-11 Attacks  

April 24, 2005

9-11trial.jpg
  • NO Cross Examination of 9/11 Evidence. NO Adversarial Process to Uncover Facts.
Zacarias Moussaoui pleaded guilty yesterday to taking part in a broad al Qaeda conspiracy that resulted in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, saying Osama bin Laden personally instructed him to fly an airplane into the White House. In a hushed federal courtroom in Alexandria, the French citizen launched into the kind of heated monologue that has often marked his court appearances. He vehemently denied that he was planning to be one of the Sept. 11 hijackers and said his attack on the White House was to come later. The balding, bearded Moussaoui, 36 blasted his attorneys, calling one of them a "Judas," and said he expects "no leniency from the American" when his case comes to the sentencing phase. As he was being led from the courtroom by a team of security officers, he shouted in a thick accent, "Lord! God curse America!" The guilty plea, while marking the first conviction in a U.S. case stemming from the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon that killed nearly 3,000 people, did little to bring the nation closer to understanding the worst terrorist strike on American soil. A court document Moussaoui signed said only that he had participated in a general al Qaeda plot to fly airplanes into U.S. buildings and that bin Laden approved Moussaoui's planned attack on the White House. he complications that have prolonged the case of Moussaoui -- who is still the only person charged in the United States in connection with the Sept. 11 plot -- are far from over. U.S. District Judge Leonie M. Brinkema in Alexandria is likely to set a death penalty trial at which a jury would decide whether Moussaoui should be executed.  [more] and [more]
  • Bush has Lied about Everything else. Maybe Bush is Lying About 9/11 [more]
  • Bush Administration's total Number of Defendants Charged with Participating in 9/11: 1 Bush Administration's total Number of Defendants Convicted of Participating in 9/11: 0 [more]
Friday
Apr222005

Army Investigates Army: Clears Top Officers in Torture Cases 

An Army inspector general's report has cleared senior Army officers of wrongdoing in the abuse of military prisoners in Iraq and elsewhere, government officials familiar with the findings said yesterday. The only Army general officer recommended for punishment for the failures that led to abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison and other facilities in Iraq and Afghanistan is Brig. Gen. Janis L. Karpinski, who was in charge of U.S. prison facilities in Iraq as commander of the 800th Military Police Brigade in late 2003 and early 2004. Several sources said Karpinski is expected to receive an administrative reprimand for dereliction of duty. The investigation essentially found no culpability on the part of Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez and three of his senior deputies, ruling that allegations they failed to prevent or stop abuses were "unsubstantiated." The report has not been released. Of those 10 major inquiries, the inspector general's was designed to be the Army's final word on the responsibility of senior leadership in relation to the abuses. It was the only investigation designed to assign blame, if any, within the Army's senior leadership. Army officials said yesterday that they have identified 125 soldiers and officers who were either tried at courts-martial or issued administrative punishments for detainee abuses in Iraq and Afghanistan. So far, seven low-ranking soldiers have faced the most serious charges in the sexual humiliation and physical abuse cases arising out of Abu Ghraib; five have pleaded guilty or have been found guilty, and two have courts-martial scheduled for next month. [more] and [more]
Friday
Apr222005

Senator calls for Congressional Probe into US Torture - Republicans Against it

bushtorture.jpg
A senior US senator called for a congressional probe into the role played by US intelligence operatives in the prisoner abuse scandals in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Democratic Senator John Rockefeller said that while there have so far been at least 10 separate internal inquiries into prison abuse scandals involving US forces overseas, the probes have been limited in scope and have paid only cursory attention to intelligence matters. "There has been no review of the fundamental legal and operational issues that apply to the entire intelligence community," he said on the Senate floor, during debate on the nomination of career diplomat John Negroponte to become US director of national intelligence. "Congress should play the role of creating a set of consistent standards on how to treat foreign soldiers in US custody," he said. "Intelligence officers in the field are not provided with clear guidelines for effective and legal interrogation," said Rockefeller, the senior Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee. He continued: "I'm gravely concerned that this lack of clear and cohesive policies has led not only to numerous cases of prisoner abuse and death but also ineffective interrogations of prisoners in US custody." US military members have been accused -- and some lower-ranking service members court-marshaled -- for abusing and humiliating detainees overseas, including at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Rockefeller made his call for Senate support for a new investigation as an amendment to emergency legislation being debated in the US Senate this week on funding US military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. In response, the Republican chairman of the Intelligence Committee, Pat Roberts, strongly rejected the notion that the abuse scandals had not already been exhaustively probed. [more]


Friday
Apr222005

Senate Approves $81 Billion MORE for Bush's Wars - Total Cost Near $300 BILLION

  • Weapons Inspector Ends WMD Search in Iraq. Nothing [more]
The Senate unanimously approved yesterday an $81 billion bill to finance the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, provide relief to Asian tsunami victims and construct a massive embassy in Baghdad. The legislation now faces negotiations with the House that promise to be prickly. The core of the measure -- about $75 billion for military forces in Iraq and Afghanistan -- has generated no controversy. That sum will push war and reconstruction costs since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to more than $300 billion, according to the Congressional Research Service. The cost of the Iraq war alone is approaching $200 billion. But House and Senate negotiators will have to battle over several contentious side issues, such as extraneous provisions on immigration that reveal very different priorities. The Senate voted Tuesday night to expand the availability of employment visas for skilled workers, such as nurses and engineers, and to relax rules governing temporary visas for lower-skilled guest workers to allow about 35,000 more into the country this year. In contrast, the House last month took a get-tough approach to immigration on its version of the war spending bill, voting to deny driver's licenses to illegal immigrants, tighten rules for asylum seekers and bolster a fence along the California-Mexico border. [more]
Friday
Apr222005

Iraq: $300 BILLION DOLLARS

$300,000,000,000.00

We'd call it buyer's remorse, but "remorse" doesn't quite capture the stunning tragedy of the moment. Following Thursday's Senate approval of the latest war supplemental, American taxpayers will soon have paid three hundred billion dollars – that's $300,000,000,000.00 – to help finance the most disastrous foreign policy decision of our generation. You paid. Your co-workers paid. Elderly couples, struggling single parents, college kids, middle-class families – we all paid. Here's what you've got to show for it:

NO CREDIBLE "VICTORY STRATEGY": Defense Secretary Rumsfeld recently claimed that while the Bush administration has no exit strategy for Iraq, it does have a "victory strategy," the goal of which is "to help the Iraqi Forces develop the skills and the capacity to provide their own security." The sad truth: we don't have either. Though more than a year and a half has passed since Gen. John Abizaid first announced plans to build Iraq's security force, the Government Accountability Office reported last month that coalition leadership has still failed "to develop a system to assess the readiness of Iraqi military and police forces so they can identify weaknesses and provide them with effective support." What to make of President Bush's cheery declaration last week that Iraqi forces now outnumber their U.S. counterparts? It's simply not credible. The GAO states explicitly: "U.S. government agencies do not report reliable data on the extent to which Iraqi security forces are trained and equipped." Moreover, the high number of security forces frequently touted by senior White House officials "overstates the number actually serving," probably by "tens of thousands." As one training supervisor, Army Staff Sgt. Craig E. Patrick, admitted recently: "It's all about perception, to convince the American public that everything is going as planned and we're right on schedule to be out of here. I mean, they can [mislead] the American people, but they can't [mislead] us. These guys are not ready."

MULTIPLE NEW THREATS TO GLOBAL SECURITY: The CIA's National Intelligence Council believes that "Iraq has replaced Afghanistan as the training ground for the next generation of 'professionalized' terrorists," providing "terrorists with 'a training ground, a recruitment ground, the opportunity for enhancing technical skills.'"

HIGHEST LEVEL OF TERROR ATTACKS IN TWO DECADES: Every year since 1985 the State Department has published its annual report on international terrorism, described as "the definitive report on the incidence of terrorism around the world." In compiling the latest report, "the government's top terrorism center concluded that there were more terrorist attacks in 2004 than in any year since 1985." 

HISTORIC RECRUITMENT SHORTFALLS: The numbers tell the disturbing tale. The Army in February failed to fill its monthly quota of volunteers sent to boot camp for the first time in five years. The Marine Corps recently missed its monthly recruitment goal for the first time in ten years. The National Guard missed its annual recruitment goal for the first time in eleven years

UNPROTECTED TROOPS: Shockingly, a "third of the 35,000 Humvees and other trucks in Iraq" still "rely on sheet metal as a last-minute solution" to thwart insurgent attacks. And until yesterday, the war supplemental bill didn't include one red cent for armored Humvees and trucks. In an eleventh hour push, Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-MA) was able to crowbar roughly $200 million into the Iraq package for armor costs. Too bad the Army and Marine Corps say they need at least $750 million to finish the job.

NO SYSTEM FOR ACCOUNTABILITY: The Bush administration clearly knows how to spend our money. Keeping tabs on it is a whole other story. Though the watchdog group Transparency International recently declared that Iraq is becoming "the biggest corruption scandal in history," Sec. Rumsfeld is taking his sweet time figuring out how to keep our tax dollars from being swindled. GAO chief David Walker told the Senate two weeks ago the Pentagon still "doesn't have a system to be able to determine with any degree of reliability and specificity" how we spend war-related emergency funds. Moreover, Walker said, while there's no doubt that previously appropriated funds were spent, "trying to figure out what they were spent on is like pulling teeth."

  • More from the Center for American Progress [here]
Friday
Apr222005

Poll Finds that 72% of Non-Whites Believe Iraq "Not Worth it"

  • Overall Gallup Finds 53% Feel Iraq War Not Worth It
According to Gallup's Tuesday Briefing analysis, the amount of Americans who think iraq was "worth going to war over" has drastically diminished. In 3/03, 68% said the war was worth it, "and this sentiment climbed as high as 76% immediately following the fall of Baghdad." After Pres. Bush asked Congress for additional funding, support dropped to 50%. By 1/04, for the first time since the war broke out, less than a majority believed the war was worth it. After a slight rebound in the spring, the support dwindled again in 5/04 after the prisoner abuse scandal. Except for the final boost in 8/04, the support has remained below 50%. In the case of Iraq, there is a racial and generational divide. While white respondents are "ambivalent" -- 50% support and 48% oppose -- non-white respondents are more sure, with 72% saying the war is not worth it compared with 26% who say it was. Similiarly split are both the "oldest and youngest Americans." The majority of 18-29 year olds and Americans 65 and older think it was not worth going to war. Americans between the ages of 30-64 are more evenly split (release, 4/19). The Hotline April 19, 2005 Tuesday
Friday
Apr222005

11 killed as civilian helicopter is shot down in Iraq 

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  • Insurgent Violence Escalates in Iraq Over 100 Killed as Post-Election Calm Dissipates [more]
Insurgents in Iraq shot down a commercial helicopter chartered by the US defence department yesterday, killing all 11 people on board, including six American military contractors. A rocket-propelled grenade hit the Russian-built Mi-8 helicopter near the town of Tarmiya, 25 miles north of Baghdad, just before 2pm local time, according to US and Bulgarian military officials. Television pictures showed two charred bodies lying near the burning wreckage of what was believed to be the first civilian aircraft shot down in two years of resistance to US-led multinational forces. The Islamic Army in Iraq, a leading militant group, claimed responsibility in an internet statement. The three crew members were Bulgarian, six passengers worked for the US military contractor Blackwater and two were Filipino guards. A Canadian-based company, SkyLink Aviation Inc, had contracted the helicopter, which was owned by a Bulgarian company, Heli Air. It was heading for Tikrit. [more]
  •  Massacre at Iraq football stadium [more]
  •  Car bomb rocks mosque in Baghdad [more]
  •  Iraqi PM escapes convoy bombing [more]
  •  Fifty bodies found in Iraqi river [more]
Friday
Apr222005

Iraq militants show 'crash video'

An Iraqi insurgent group says it shot down a commercial helicopter that crashed near Baghdad on Thursday - and that it shot dead the only survivor. The Islamic Army posted a video on the internet purporting to show the wreckage, and the shooting. Eleven people died in the crash - six US security contractors, three Bulgarian crew and two Fijian guards. A statement said the survivor was shot in revenge for "the murder of Muslims in the mosques of Falluja". US and Bulgarian officials have confirmed the helicopter was lost about 20km (12 miles) north of the Iraqi capital on Thursday. The cameraman focuses on two bodies. One appears to be dead and is badly charred. The second person, wearing a blue flight suit, is alive but badly hurt. The cameraman orders him to stand up, but the survivor says he has a broken leg and asks for help. The militants appear to help him up, and tell him to run away. Then they shoot him at point blank range and he collapses. They continue to shoot the body, shouting "Allahu Akbar" (God is Great). A statement on the internet accompanying the video read: "The Islamic Army in Iraq claims responsibility for bringing down a... cargo aircraft and killing all those on board." It said the killing was revenge for the murder of Muslims in Falluja - an apparent reference to a video showing a US soldier shooting dead a wounded Iraqi in a mosque in November. [more]
  • SEE Footage from the scene of the crash [here]
Friday
Apr222005

You Call This Normal? Corporate Media Ignores US War Crimes, Massacre in Falluja

fallujah.jpg
  • "Things are almost back to normal here. We have teachers and books. Things are getting better." -- New York Times 3-26-05  "Vital Signs of a Ruined City Grow stronger in Falluja"
Cameras aren’t allowed in Falluja; neither are journalists. If they were then we would have first-hand proof of America’s greatest war crime in the last 30 years; the Dresden-like bombardment of an entire city of 250,000. Instead, we have to rely on eyewitness accounts that appear on the internet or the spurious reports that sporadically surface in the New York Times and Associated Press. For the most part, the Times and AP have shown themselves to be undependable; limiting their coverage to the details that support the overall goals of the occupation.  The truth about Falluja is far different than the bogus reports in the AP and Times. The fact that even now, a full 6 months after the siege, camera crews and journalists are banned from the city, tells us a great deal about the extent of America’s war crimes. Just two weeks ago, a photographer from Al Aribiyya news was arrested while leaving Falluja and his equipment and film were confiscated. To date, he is still being held without explanation and there is no indication when he will be released. This illustrates the fear among the military brass that the truth about Falluja will leech out and destroy whatever modest support still exists for the occupation. Journalists should realize that Falluja may turn out to be the administration’s Achilles heel; a My Lai-type atrocity that turns the public decisively against Bush’s war.[more]
Friday
Apr222005

Intelligence reports undercut US claims of Iraq-Qaeda link: top US senator

A top Democratic senator released formerly classified documents that he said undercut top US officials' pre-Iraq war claims of a link between Saddam Hussein's regime and the Al-Qaeda terror network. "These documents are additional compelling evidence that the Intelligence Community did not believe there was a cooperative relationship between Iraq and Al-Qaeda, despite public comments by the highest ranking officials in our government to the contrary," said Senator Carl Levin. The declassified documents undermine President George W. Bush's administration claims regarding Iraq's involvement in training Al-Qaeda operatives and the likelihood of a meeting between September 11, 2001, hijacker Mohammed Atta and an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague in April 2001, Levin said in a statement. In October 2002 Bush said: "We've learned that Iraq has trained al-Qaeda members in bomb-making and poisons and deadly gasses."

Click to read more ...

Friday
Apr222005

The shadow Iraqi government 

The ideal White House/Pentagon script for Iraq calls for a pro-American government, total control of at least 12% of the world's known oil reserves and 14 military bases to make it happen. Reality has been churning up other ideas. Whenever there is a so-called "transfer of power" in Mesopotamia, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, like clockwork, steps on a plane to Baghdad. On his latest trip designed to issue orders for the new, supposedly sovereign Iraqi government, Rumsfeld, in a splendid Freudian slip, let it be known on the record the US "does not have an exit strategy" in Iraq: only a "victory strategy". This is code for "we're not going anywhere". Reality had intervened two days before Rumsfeld arrived, when about 300,000 Shi'ite nationalists occupied the same Firdaws Square of "liberation day", April 9, 2003, but this time with no Saddam-toppling photo-op intent. Their messages were clear: out with the occupation; and Bush equals Saddam Hussein. By organizing this huge, Shi'ite mass protest - the largest popular demonstration in Iraq since 1958 - young cleric Muqtada al-Sadr was not just occupying a political vaccum: he was daring the new prime minister, Ibrahim Jaafari of the Da'wa Party - who appeals to the same Shi'ite constituency - to reveal his true colors. [more]

Highway to hell: Iraq the Super Ghetto
The occupation is worse than an economic tsunami: it managed to plunge Iraq - once a beacon of development in the Arab world - into Sub-Saharan poverty. There's less electricity each day than in 2003 or even 2004. Without electricity, the whole country is paralyzed: nothing - communications, industry, the healthcare system, the educational system - works properly. All water plants "reconstructed" by Bechtel and co are breaking down. With weekly, sometimes daily attacks on pipelines, oil production is pitiful, still inferior to Saddam-era, pre-war levels. Sixty percent of the total population survives on food stamps.

burgerking.jpg
Burger Thing Ready to Roll
There may be no funds for rebuilding American-bombed Iraqi infrastructure, but US$4.5 billion promptly found its way to Halliburton's subsidiary KBR for the construction and maintenance of the 14 "enduring camps" or permanent military bases. The most notorious of these may be Camp Victory North, a sprawling complex attached to Baghdad (former Saddam) International Airport. Camp Victory is a KBR-built, bungalow-with-air-con American city for 14,000, complete with Burger King and gym. When finished, it will be twice the size of giant Camp Bondsteel in Kosovo, the base attached to surveillance of oil pipelines in the Balkans.

American economist Jeremy Rifkin has calculated the number of years known world oil reserves would last at current rates of consumption and extraction. In the US it would be only 10 years. By contrast, in Iran it would be 53 years; in Saudi Arabia 55; in the United Arab Emirates 75; in Kuwait 116; and in Iraq no less than 526 years. That says it all about controlling oil reserves in the Middle East. [more]
  • What I Didn’t See in Iraq [more]
Friday
Apr222005

Before being Killed Aid worker uncovered America's secret tally of Iraqi civilian deaths

A week before she was killed by a suicide bomber, humanitarian worker Marla Ruzicka forced military commanders to admit they did keep records of Iraqi civilians killed by US forces.  Tommy Franks, the former head of US Central Command, famously said the US army "don't do body counts", despite a requirement to do so by the Geneva Conventions. But in an essay Ms Ruzicka wrote a week before her death on Saturday and published yesterday, the 28-year-old revealed that a Brigadier General told her it was "standard operating procedure" for US troops to file a report when they shoot a non-combatant. She obtained figures for the number of civilians killed in Baghdad between 28 February and 5 April, and discovered that 29 had been killed in firefights involving US forces and insurgents. This was four times the number of Iraqi police killed. "These statistics demonstrate that the US military can and does track civilian casualties," she wrote. "Troops on the ground keep these records because they recognise they have a responsibility to review each action taken and that it is in their interest to minimise mistakes, especially since winning the hearts and minds of Iraqis is a key component of their strategy." Sam Zia-Zarifi, deputy director of the Asia division of Human Rights Watch, the group for which Ms Ruzicka wrote the report, said her discovery "was very important because it allows the victims to start demanding compensation". He added: "At a policy level they have never admitted they keep these figures." [more] and [more]

Exactly how many Iraqi civilians have been killed in the last two years is unclear.

Iraq Body Count, a group that monitors casualty reports, says at least 17,384 have died. But the group bases its totals only on deaths reported by the media, and says it can therefore only "be a sample" of the total actually killed. Its website says: "It is likely that many if not most civilian casualties will go unreported by the media. That is the sad nature of war."
Ms Ruzicka, from California, was killed in Baghdad after her car was caught in the blast of a suicide bomber who attacked a convoy of security contractors on the road to the city's airport. She was in Iraq heading, Civic, the organisation she set up to record and document civilians killed or injured by the US military, and to seek compensation. She carried out a similar project in Afghanistan. A peer-reviewed report published last year in The Lancet and based on an extrapolation of data suggested that 100,000 civilians may have been killed during the invasion and its aftermath. One of the report's author, Dr Richard Garfield, professor of nursing at Columbia University, said: "Of course they keep records and of course they pretend they don't. Why is it important to keep the numbers of those killed? Well, why was it important to record the names of those people killed in the World Trade Centre? It would have been inconceivable not to. These people have lives of value. "Until people have names and are counted they don't exist in a policy sense." [more] and [more]
  • FOUL Images of The Bodies of Hostages That Were Pulled From the Tigris  [here]
  • Three U.S. Troops Killed in Iraqi City of Ramadi [more]
Friday
Apr222005

Fort Worth Police Officer Caught on Videotape Repeatedly Kicking Latino Man in the Head found GUILTY

A former Fort Worth police officer was found guilty Thursday of a civil-rights violation for repeatedly kicking a drug suspect during a 2000 arrest that was videotaped from a Police Department helicopter. A federal jury returned the verdict against Ruben Ruiz on a charge of deprivation of civil rights that resulted in bodily injury. Ruiz repeatedly kicked David Davis Jr. in the head while Davis was being arrested after a high-speed chase from Fort Worth to Arlington on Sept. 13, 2000. Ruiz resigned in March 2001. Sentencing is set for July 25, with Ruiz facing a maximum of 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine. Ruiz stared straight ahead without emotion as U.S. District Judge Terry Means announced the verdict by the jury of six women and six men in Fort Worth. The jury deliberated for about 2 1/2 hours. The courtroom was filled with Fort Worth police officers and relatives and friends of Ruiz. "The video was hard to get around," said Greg Westfall of Fort Worth, Ruiz's attorney. "You do all you can."According to prosecutors, Ruiz repeatedly kicked suspect David Davis Junior while he was lying face down on the ground and being held down by five other police officers. Prosecutors say Ruiz then stood on the suspect's head with the full force of his body. [more] and  [more]
Friday
Apr222005

Police trample on procedure at scene; Errors may affect strength of case in Jude beating

For at least an hour after Frank Jude Jr. was beaten, the off-duty Milwaukee police officers later charged in the crime and others were allowed to move freely in and out of the crime scene and talk to each other, according to witnesses and police sources. In contrast, three women who witnessed the beating were separated so they couldn't talk to each other and were not allowed to leave the crime scene. The on-duty supervisor in charge of the scene for that first hour on Oct. 24 - police Sgt. Corstan Court, who had only nine months in that job - failed to follow the basic police protocol to preserve a crime scene that is set by state Department of Justice guidelines. The scene changed once the department's internal investigators arrived at S. Ellen St. in Milwaukee's Bay View neighborhood, according to witnesses and police sources, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. The off-duty officers were separated and interviewed, the street where Jude was kicked and punched was closed, and evidence in a pool of Jude's blood was collected. But even then the scene was not handled as carefully as called for in police procedures from the state. In combing the scene for evidence, investigators missed Jude's diamond earring in the blood. The mother of a witness found it and gave it to a detective. Also, the president of the police union at the time, Bradley DeBraska, was allowed to enter the crime scene and advised officers not to speak to internal investigators or let them into an officer's home.

Click to read more ...