http://www.liveleak.com/browse?q=Quicksand-Like Sat, 25 May 2013 19:40:16 -0400 Liveleak http://edge.liveleak.com/80281E/u/u/ll2/logo.gif http://www.liveleak.com/browse?q=Quicksand-Like Wed, 15 May 2013 06:22:53 -0400 http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=f16_1368613017 omniradar US sinking down into the Syrian quicksand"...I think it is a mistake in Syria, even if we had intervened more significantly a year or six months ago. We overestimate our ability to determine outcomes." ...former Secretary of Defence, Robert Gates ... by Jim.W.Dean America sank down another foot this week into the Syrian quicksand. Israel is putting the next stage of the conflict's tactics on display, not only to the world but to the Syrian military with its last two strikes. As the rebel assault has ground to a halt, and the superior manpower of the Syrian army having shown it can conduct search and clear operations, the Free Syrian army is in a war of attrition it cannot win. It is much easier to recruit when you are winning and casualties not too bad than when the tide turns to stalemate and losing ground. The al-Nusra Front has been bleeding fighters away from the FSA. They are paying better and the AN brigades now have access to weapons the FSA does not. The al-Nusras had strategically focused on key infrastructure acquisition including some of the oil revenue prizes. Win or lose, Assad or no Assad, or even with a negotiated settlement, they aren't leaving. The West has been birthing another training ground in Syria for seasoned extremist Jihadis who will soon be looking for the next fight when Syria calms down. And it is just a matter of time before someone begins slipping them more powerful weaponry. But who will they using it on, next month, a year, or two years from now?Who is in whose crosshairs now? I fear that the West may now feel that the FSA could collapse if a stalemate continues and leave the al-Nusras the primary opposition force controlled by whom? Sure, the Saudis and Qatar warlords are supplying the payrolls and the weapons now, but new suppliers could always emerge, like Assad's stockpiles if there were a collapse. Libyan weapons and fighters are already in Syria with more said to be on the way. Is the CIA helping them hoping to kill two birds with one stone with two groups they want to get rid of fighting each other? And if Assad did fall and the FSA and al-Nusras began a civil war right away with the horrible civilian casualties that would be expected, who would carry that historical blood on their hands? So now we have 'enter stage left' the Israeli intervention. Why? Well, I think you all would agree that they don't view blood on their hands as much of a public relations problem. It never has been, so far. The story goes that the recent attacks were air launched 'stand off' weapons fired over Lebanon airspace at a safe distance from the Russian air defenses in Syria. I say they are Russia not only because of the origins of the missiles, but more importantly, they are manned by Russian air defense troops. None of the post attack analysis I have read so far has dared touch the red line no one will discuss, not even the Americans. What would the Soviets do if their forces who have remained neutral so far other than defending against air attacks, were themselves attacked? Already we see in the corporate press the last Israeli attack has paved the way for public discussion of an impending intervention to get the public use to hearing about it so it is less of a shock when it happens. Reuters was careful to refer to air defenses as Syrian, not Russian. The cover and deception for the latest Israeli strikes were the usual ghost missiles which can always be made to appear where needed to justify an attack. Hezbollah has plenty of missiles, and they are no threat to Israel whatsoever, unless Israel is planning to attack Lebanon. All military planners know this, just like they really know Iran is no offensive threat, but has to be painted as one to keep the American public paying for our forward deployment in that region. Everyone knows that Hezbollah has pulled together whatever it could for a deterrent. Regardless of what anyone might think about the political and ideological differences, once one party is attacked it has legal right to defend itself, as was done in the last Lebanon war. So the democratic West, which calls itself the free world, has besmirched that reputation by officially adopting the preemptive strike doctrine, a la NeoCon/Israeli Lobby madness. This has created a theater of the absurd where everyone knows that false flags will be staged to create the need for full scale response strikes. How is this done? Simple. You do attacks like Israel has just done which are a ploy of course to pull Iran into the quicksand party, too. And if Iran remains cool and does not take the bait (my bet) a false flag can be staged to blame you know who, with the motive being retaliation by the Iranians for the aforementioned pre-emptive attacks on the Syrians. The uniformed public would generally buy that scenario. But there is a problem. The public has had many years now to educate themselves about the rogue element operating behind the scenes in Western countries to trigger wars nowadays, and they take nothing on face value. When the weaker attack the stronger, everyone smells a setup. But keeping home country casualties low is critical to getting the public to accept aggressive military action with a smile. They already know when the bill comes due who is going to suffer the budget cutbacks, and it is not the defense contractors. If conventional Western military superiority is deceptively used in what is clearly wanton aggression, terrorism will be fueled by new generations, and the miniaturization of nuclear weapons will eventually find their way into their hands, where it will be payback time. The Israelis tested world reaction to their repeated invasions of Lebanese air space, and it was basically zero. The UN is beginning to understand that the more it condemns aggressions and is totally ignored, the weaker it looks and is held in contempt. The Lebanon incursions were just a warm-up to what they are doing now, and the world outrage has only gone up a slight notch as we get closer and closer to the big trap being sprung, which is giving the rebels heavy weapons and air cover to renew their offensive. A negotiated settlement has been totally rejected by the West, and a lot of innocent people will die for that poor judgment. The Israelis could never risk losing planes over Syria. Our Intel sources have confirmed that Israeli mobile 155mm howitzers forayed into Syria during the night to shell the Syrian army position with 70 to 80 rounds over a grid area. If you watch the YouTube video and turn the volume up you can hear and see them coming in as they sound like a train. The big explosion was an ammo dump or an Israeli bunker buster being tested out, sending a signal maybe to the underground Syria military high command that they can be struck. We heard soon after that depleted uranium had been used... bunker buster material and something not used against missiles in transport. The Russians have more advanced missiles, longer range, which can shoot down the Israeli planes over Lebanon. They can also strike Israeli airbases with their missile subs. Would the Russians do it if their air defense missile positions were attacked? I think so. How could they not respond? Such is the game of chicken that is being played here. If the NATO countries joined in a general air attack against Syria, would the Russians cut off their gas pipelines? And what would that do to the delicate financial position the EU is in now, being the house of cards that it is? And who would be blamed for the financial devastation that ensued, those defending themselves, or those who were clearly the aggressors? And if the respective publics then wanted their leaders heads on pikes, do the elites in their countries have ready plans to save themselves by triggering 'the big one' in terms of a huge terror attack in their own countries to blame on you know who? Would they really do that to save themselves? They have already done it... not to save themselves but purely out of greed, and they got away with it. If their survival were at stake they would kill their own people without hesitation. So the time folks to start raising holy hell about these bogus military threat scenarios is NOW. If we wait until afterward the damage will be done and most of our fellow citizens will probably be cowering in place. What they won't do now, they will not do later when they are poorer and weaker. The elites know that, and are betting on it. That is why they are playing with all of our lives like they are now. It's a supremacist thing with them. http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=f16_1368613017 omniradar US sinking down into the Syrian quicksand Syria Sun, 05 May 2013 12:37:13 -0400 http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=f1a_1367769279 apaulsey Oh yeah, its CINCO DE MAYO! I was just on my way to my shop and came up on a slow moving pickup -It took me a second to realize that there was a goat tied up in the back. I started filming as the goat was trying to break free. Then, they started to turn into the local fairgrounds entrance -It didn't take long for me to realize what day it was. Obama's thoughts on the holiday: "Cinco de mayo reminds us that America's diversity is America's strength. Today, as we celebrate the contributions and history of Mexican Americans and Hispanics in America, let us celebrate the larger story of America and our unique immigrant heritage." http://www.usatoday.com/story/theoval/2013/05/05/obama-cinco-do-mayo-statement/2136639/ Cinco de Mayo is once again upon us. Traditionally the province of Mexican heritage enthusiasts and drunk people, this year you can really own the holiday and impress your family and friends with these four fun facts. Don't worry, you'll be getting five facts worth of content on this list, but "Cinco Facts for Cinco de Mayo" is just trite. 1. Cinco de Mayo Means "Fifth Of May" Well, technically it means "Five of May," since "cinco" means "five" and "quinto" means "fifth," but it's close enough. This is why when someone asks you, "So, like, when is Cinco de Mayo?", it means she is either dumb or took French in grade school. If it's the former, she is probably the perfect audience for this joke you've been saving for just such an occasion, "What do you call four matadors in quicksand? CUATRO SINKO!" Although, let's be real, that's a joke that will kill with both high and low brow audiences, especially if both audience have already had a few margaritas. Those aware of Mexican heritage, whose ranks you are soon to join, might point out that matadors are typically Spanish and that Cinco de Mayo has nothing to do with Spain. This brings us to fact numero dos. 2. Cinco de Mayo Does Not Commemorate Mexican Independence You might be thrown off by the fact that "Cinco de Mayo" follows the naming conventions of "Fourth of July," and get tricked into thinking Cinco de Mayo celebrates Mexico's Independence Day. Don't worry, this is a classic rookie mistake. Mexico's independence day is actually celebrated on September 16. I've found a very effective way to compensate for such a faux pas is to simply throw a very extravagant Mexican Independence Day party in September. Here is how it works: your friends will be sitting around, probably discussing your many shortcomings and one of them will say, "Remember that time Cait thought Cinco de Mayo celebrated Mexico's independence from Spain? God, what a idiot." And then someone else will say, "No, she throws a huge Mexican Independence Day party in the fall every year. It must have been some one else," and just like that your reputation as a person with a reasonable knowledge of Mexican history is restored. 3. Cinco de Mayo Commemorates the Battle Of Puebla Cinco de Mayo actually celebrates the victory of Mexican forces against the French in the Battle of Puebla, on May 5, 1862. Some facts you should know about the Battle of Puebla - that's right, facts on facts on facts, told ya you'd get your five-facts-worth - include that the victory was of symbolic, rather then strategic significance. In fact, after the defeat at Puebla, the French still managed to occupy Mexico for six more years through the puppet government of Emperor Ferdinand Maximilian. Many described this move by Napoleon III as, "#Rude," but that didn't stop him. Nonetheless, Battle of Puebla became a rallying cry for resistance fighters, as it represented the victory of Mexican forces over the French against great odds. 4. Cinco de Mayo is More Widely Celebrated in the U.S. Than in Mexico Perhaps due to its dubious significance as an event or the existence of an actual independence day to celebrate instead, Cinco de Mayo is not widely celebrated in Mexico. It's believed that Cinco de Mayo was first celebrated by Americans of Mexican heritage during the American Civil War. It underwent a resurgence in popularity in the States during the 1960s, when Chicano activists championed the holiday as an example of indigenous people's rejection of the rule of invading Europeans. Today Cinco de Mayo can be likened to a Mexican St. Patrick's Day, in that a) in terms of a celebration of heritage, it matters a lot more to those who have left the country whose heritage it honors, and b) every one else just uses it as an excuse to drink excessive amounts of vaguely ethnically-themed alcohol. For those of you who would like to experience a more authentic Mexican holiday or just want an excuse to ring in the autumn season with a healthy dose of mescal, I will see you on September 16. http://www.policymic.com/articles/39807/cinco-de-mayo-2013-4-facts-about-the-holiday If you live near the Houston area and you cherish your life, please stay off of the roads. The drinking has already started -Shit's about to get real! http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=f1a_1367769279 apaulsey 5/5/13 - Why is there a goat tied-down in the back of that truck? cinco de mayo,goat,truck,drunk,driving,mexico,houston,texas Sun, 14 Apr 2013 21:27:38 -0400 http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=608_1365988698 GORTEVANS Deftones bassist Chi Cheng, who been in a partially conscious state since a 2008 car accident, died this weekend, his record label has confirmed. He was 42. Word of Cheng's passing was made public via fan/charitable site One Love for Chi , started by fan Gina Blackmore to help raise funds for Cheng's medical expenses. Cheng's family had come to use the site to communicate updates on the musician, and his mother posted Sunday that Cheng's "heart just suddenly stopped." "I know that you will always remember him as a giant of a man on stage with a heart for every one of you," wrote Jeanne Marie Cheng. "He left this world with me singing songs he liked in his ear." Cheng was the bassist on the first five albums for the Sacramento hard rock act, whose debut album, "Adrenaline," was released in 1995 after the band signed with the Warner Music Group. The Deftones had a commercial breakthrough on sophomore effort "Around the Fur," and 2000's "White Pony" and 2003's self-titled effort each reached the top 5 on the Billboard pop chart. Cheng was hospitalized in 2008 after a car accident. He was immediately said to be in a coma, and subsequent reports noted that Cheng was the passenger in a car that collided head-on with another vehicle in Santa Clara. Cheng, who was said to have not been wearing a seat belt at the time of the accident, was ejected from the car. The Deftones recently released their seventh album, "Koi No Yokan," via Warner Bros. Records and a spokeswoman for the label said the company was prepping a statement on Cheng's passing. Deftones vocalist Chino Moreno wrote on his official Facebook page, "Rest in peace Chi Cheng." Rage Against the Machine guitarist Tom Morello wrote on Twitter that Chengo was a "very sweet and talented guy," and pleaded with his followers to wear seat belts. Cheng's last album with the Deftones was the 2006 effort "Saturday Night Wrist," a work that took three years to complete due to personal struggles within the band. Cheng told The Times in 2006 that the band nearly broke up while recording the album. "It's a really onerous, painful process," he said of making the aggressively atmopsheric album, a merger of riffs, howls and dreamy, digital textures. "I wouldn't say it's a necessary evil, because I would like to not do it ever again, but it seems that kind of tension does make great music for us." Moreno has long spoken of the emotional devastation of Cheng's accident, while also noting that it brought the rest of the band closer together, putting a stop to the infighting that nearly tore the group apart. The Deftones regrouped shortly after Cheng's accident, scrapping an album that the band had nearly finished with the bassist. "One of our members was taken down," Moreno told The Times in 2010. "The little things that were getting in the way of us being friends and having fun seemed minuscule compared to what just happened to us. "We didn't sit around and talk so much about it. Everybody gravitated towards their instruments and started playing." Stepping into Cheng's role was Sergio Vega, formerly of the band Quicksand, who met the Deftones players during the first Warped Tour in 1995. Vega had filled in once before, in 1999, when Cheng was sidelined by a staph infection. Vega has appeared on 2010's "Diamond Eyes" and last year's "Koi No Yokan." The Deftones are scheduled to be on tour from late April through the early fall. Cheng had remained in a partially conscious state since the accident, although One Love for Chi had chronicled what was believed to be his slow but steady improvement. "He fought the good fight," his mother wrote on the site today. "You stood by him sending love daily. He knew that he was very loved and never alone." http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=608_1365988698 GORTEVANS Deftones bassist Chi Cheng dies Deftones, Chi Cheng, Dead, 42, RIP, Wed, 29 Feb 2012 22:17:23 -0500 http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=709_1330571545 aranger45 Nicole Graham was taking a ride along the Australian coastline just south of Melbourne when her horse stepped and sank into a pit full of "quicksand-like mud." There Graham stayed with the horse for three hours until it could be freed by rescuers. The Daily Mail reports that Graham was on a ride near Geelong with her daughter when 18-year-old horse named Astro got stuck. Graham then shouted a warning to her daughter, Paris, but even that was too late. The younger girl's horse sank partially in the muck. Graham is reported as saying the experience was "terrifying" and "heartbreaking": We went straight down and under. There was mud everywhere and every time I moved it sucked me back down. It wouldn't let us go." After ensuring her daughter and her horse were safe, she returned to Astro and prayed that rescuers would arrive before the tide engulfed the horse. She added: "I've been riding here for 20 years and never had a drama. I've never seen any signs and didn't realise it was so boggy. "When I saw the dust from the rescue trucks I was so relieved. I was starting to get overwhelmed." Fire lieutenant Roger Buckle, who was among a team of helpers, said: "It was like a quicksand." Fire crews worked with a local farmer, who provided a tractor, and a veterinary team. The firemen used hoses and a winch, but none of this equipment was successful. The Daily Mail reports that a helicopter was even on hand as a last resort. Aside from being dehydrated and exhausted, Stacey Sullivan, the horse's vet, said he was doing fine. http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=709_1330571545 aranger45 'Heartbreaking': Horse Stuck in '<span class="highlight">Quicksand-Like</span> Mud' Heartbreaking, Horse, Stuck, in, Quicksand-Like, Mud Sat, 29 Sep 2012 15:49:43 -0400 http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=dfe_1348947772 deathgod198255 Donald Henry GASKINS Jr. A.K.A.: "Pee Wee" - "Junior Parrott" Classification: Serial killer Characteristics: Rape Number of victims: 8 - 200 Date of murders: 1969 - 1975 Date of arrest: December 1975 Date of birth: March 13, 1933 Victims profile: Young men and women (hitchhikers)Method of murder: St abbing with knife Location: South Carolina, USA Status: Executed by electrocution in South Carolina on September 6, 1991 photo gallery Donald "Pee Wee" Gaskins: Donald "Pee Wee" Gaskins was the most prolific serial killer in South Carolina history. Once his brutality was unleashed, he knew no boundaries, torturing, killing, cannibalizing victims, both male and female. In his taped memoirs for the book, Final Truth by author Wilton Earl, Gaskins said, 'I have walked the same path as God, by taking lives and making others afraid, I became God's equal. Through killing others, I became my own master. Through my own power I come to my own redemption..' Donald Gaskins Childhood Years: Donald Gaskins was born on March 13, 1933 in Florence County, South Carolina. His mother, who was not married when she became pregnant with Donald, lived on and off with several men during his childhood. Many of the men treated the young boy with disdain, sometimes beating him for just being around. His mother did little to protect him from her lovers and the boy was left alone to raise himself. When his mother did marry, his stepfather beat him and his four half-siblings regularly. Junior Parrott: Gaskins was given the nicknames "Junior Parrott" and "Pee Wee" at a young age because of his small body frame. When he began attending school the violence he experienced at home followed him into the classrooms. He fought daily with the other boys and girls and was constantly punished by the teachers. At age eleven, he quit school, worked on cars at a local garage, and helped around the family farm. Emotionally Gaskins was battling an intense hatred toward people, women topping the list. The Trouble Trio: At the garage where Gaskins worked part-time, he met two boys, Danny and Marsh, both close to his age and out of school. The three teamed up and named themselves the "The Trouble Trio." The trio began burglarizing homes and picking up prostitutes in nearby cities. Locally they sometimes raped young boys, then threatened them so they would not tell the police. Early Criminal Behavior: The trio stopped their sexual rampage after being caught for gang-raping Marsh's younger sister. As punishment, their parents bound and beat the boys until they bled. After the beatings, Marsh and Danny left the area and Gaskins continued breaking into homes alone. In 1946, at the age of 13, a girl he knew interrupted him burglarizing a home. She attacked him with an ax, which he managed to get away from her, striking her in the head and arm with it before running away from the scene. Reform School Bound: The girl survived the attack and Gaskins was arrested, tried and found guilty of assault with a deadly weapon and intent to kill. He was sent to the South Carolina Industrial School for Boys until he turned 18 years old. It was during the court proceedings that Gaskins heard his real name spoken for the first time in his life. Reform School Education: Reform school was particularly rough on the small and young Gaskins. Almost immediately he was attacked and gang-raped by 20 of his new peers. He spent the rest of his time either accepting protection from the dorm "Boss-Boy" in exchange for sex or trying unsuccessfully to escape from the reformatory. He was repeatedly beaten for his escape attempts and sexually exploited among the gang favored by the "Boss-Boy." Escape and Marriage: Gaskins' desperate attempts to escape resulted in physical fights with guards, and he was sent off for observation at a state mental hospital. Doctors found him sane enough to return to the reform school and after a few nights, he escaped again and managed to get on with a traveling carnival. While there, he married a 13-year-old girl, and made the decision to turn himself in to the police and finish his sentence at the reform school. He was released in March 1951 on his 18th birthday. The Barnburner: After reform school, Gaskin got a job on a tobacco plantation but could not resist the temptation for more. He and a partner got involved with insurance fraud by collaborating with tobacco farmers to burn their barns for a fee. People around the area began talking about the barn fires and suspected Gaskins' involvement. Assault With a Deadly Weapon &amp; Attempted Murder: Gaskins' employer's daughter and friend confronted Gaskin about his reputation as the barnburner and he flipped. With a hammer in hand, he split the girl's skull. He was sent to prison after receiving a five-year sentence for assault with a deadly weapon and attempted murder. New Lessons - A Real Prison: Prison life was not much different from his time spent in reform school. Gaskins was immediately assigned to sexually service one of the prison gang leaders in exchange for protection. He realized the only way he would survive prison was to become known as a "Power Man." Power Men were those who had a reputation as being so brutal and dangerous that others stayed away. Graduating To Power Man: Gaskins' small size would prevent him from intimidating the others into respecting him. Only his actions could accomplish this task. He set his sights on one of the meanest inmates in the prison, Hazel Brazell. Gaskins managed to manipulate himself into relationship of trust with Brazell then ultimately cut his throat. He was found guilty of manslaughter, spent six months in solitary confinement, and was titled a Power Man among prisoners. He could now look forward to an easier time in prison. Escape and Marriage Part 2: In 1955, his wife filed for divorce. Gaskins flipped out and escaped from prison, stole a car and drove to Florida. He joined another carnival and in the interim married for a second time. The marriage ended after two weeks. Gaskins then became involved with a carnival woman, Bettie Gates, and the two drove to Cookeville, Tennessee to bail Gates' brother out of jail. Gaskins went to the jail with bail money and cigarettes in hand. When he returned to the hotel, Gates and his car were gone. Gates never returned but the police did and Gaskins discovered that he had been duped. Gates "brother" was actually her husband who had escaped from prison with the aid of a razor blade tucked inside a carton of cigarettes. The Little Hatchet Man: It did not take long for police to find out Gaskins was also an escaped convict and he was returned to prison. This time he received an additional nine months in jail for aiding an escape and for knifing a fellow prisoner. Later he was convicted of driving a stolen car across state lines and received three years in a federal prison in Atlanta, Georgia. While there, he got to know mafia boss, Frank Costello, who named him "the little hatchet man" and offered him future employment. Gaskins Is Released From Prison: Gaskins was released from prison in August 1961. He returned to Florence, SC and got a job working in the tobacco sheds but was unable to stay out of trouble. Soon he was back to burglarizing homes. This time he made more of an effort to avoid arrest by taking a job with a traveling minister. He worked as his driver and general assistant. This allowed him the opportunity to break into homes in different towns where the group preached, making his crimes harder to trace. Arrested for Statutory Rape: In 1962, Gaskin married a third time but this did not stop his criminal behavior. He was arrested for statutory rape of a twelve-year-old girl but managed to escape, this time traveling to North Carolina in a stolen Florence County car. There he met another 17-year-old and married for a fourth time. She ended up turning him into the police and Gaskin was convicted of statutory rape. He received six years at the Columbia penitentiary and was paroled in November 1968, vowing never to return. 'Them Aggravated and Bothersome Feelings,': All through Gaskins life he had what he described as, 'them aggravated and bothersome feelings,' that seemed to push him into criminal activity. He found little relief from the feelings until September 1969, when he picked up a female hitchhiker in North Carolina. Gaskins became angry with the young girl for laughing at him when he propositioned her for sex. He beat her until she was unconscious then raped, sodomized, and tortured her then sunk her weighted body into a swamp where she drowned. Rape, Torture, Murder: This act of brutality was what Gaskins later described as 'a vision' into the 'bothersome feelings' that haunted him throughout life. He finally discovered how to satisfy them and from that point on, it was the driving force in his life. He worked on mastering his skill of torture, often keeping his mutilated victims alive for days. He sometimes cannibalized their severed parts while they watched in horror or forced them to participate in the eating. Recreation Killing: Although Gaskins preferred female victims it did not stop him from doing the same to males he happened upon. By 1975, he had killed over 80 young boys and girls he found along the North Carolina highways and he now looked forward to his old "bothersome feelings" because it felt so good to him to relieve them through torture and murder. He considered his highway murders as weekend recreation and referred to killing personal acquaintances as "serious murders." Gaskins 'Serious Murders' Begin: Victims of his serious murders included his 15-year-old niece, Janice Kirby, and her friend, Patricia Alsobrook. In November 1970, he offered the two girls a ride home from a bar and instead drove them to an abandoned house. There he raped, beat, and drowned the girls in separate locations. His next serious murder was of Martha Dicks, a 20-year-old who was attracted to Gaskins and hung around him at his part-time job at a car repair shop. She was also the first African American that he killed. The Hearse: In 1973, Gaskins purchased an old hearse, telling people at his favorite bar that he needed the vehicle to haul all the people he killed to his private cemetery. At this time he was living in Prospect, South Carolina with his wife and child. Around town he had a reputation for being explosive, but not truly dangerous. People just thought he was mentally disturbed and most tried to avoid being around him. Some actually liked him and considered him a friend. A Double Murder - Mother and Child: One of those people was 23-year-old Doreen Dempsey. Doreen, an unwed mother of a two-year-old baby girl, and pregnant with a second child, decided to leave the area and accepted a ride to the bus station from her old friend Gaskins. Instead, Gaskins took her to a wooded area, raped and killed her, then raped and sodomized her baby. After killing the child he buried the two together. The rape of the child would later be described by Gaskins as the best sex of his life. Walter Neely: In 1975, Gaskins who was now 42 years old and a grandfather had been steadily killing for six years. His ability to get away with it was mainly because he never involved anyone else in his highway murders. This changed in 1975 after Gaskins murdered three people whose van had broken down on the highway. Gaskins needed help getting rid of the trio's van and enlisted the help of ex-con Walter Neely. Neely drove the van to Gaskins' garage and Gaskins repainted it so he could sell it. Hired to Kill: That same year Gaskins was paid $1,500 to kill Silas Yates, a wealthy farmer from Florence County. Suzanne Kipper, an angry ex-girlfriend, hired Gaskins to do the job. John Powell and John Owens handled all correspondence between Kipper and Gaskins in arranging the murder. Diane Neely who claimed to have car problems lured Yates out of his home on Feb. 12, 1975 Gaskins then kidnapped and murdered Yates as Powel and Owens watched, then the three buried his body. Blackmailing the Wrong Person: Not long afterwards, Diane Neely and her boyfriend, ex-con Avery Howard, attempted to blackmail Gaskins for $5,000 in hush money. They too were quickly disposed of by Gaskins after they agreed to meet him for the payoff. In the meantime, Gaskins was busy killing and torturing other people he knew, including a 13-year-old, Kim Ghelkins, who sexually rejected him. A Tour of Graves: Not knowing Gaskins' wrath, two locals, Johnny Knight and Dennis Bellamy robbed Gaskins repair shop and were eventually killed and buried along side the other locals Gaskin's killed. This time he once again called on Walter Neely's help to bury the pair. Gaskins obviously took Neely in as a trusted friend, a fact proven when he pointed out to Neely the graves of the other locals who he had murdered and buried there. Walter Neely Breaks: The investigation into the disappearance of Kim Ghelkins was turning up enough leads that pointed the finger at Gaskins. After a search of Gaskins apartment uncovered clothing worn by Ghelkins, Gaskins was indited for contributing to the delinquency of a minor. While awaiting trial in prison, Walter Neely broke down under police pressure and showed authorties Gaskins personal cemetary. Sentenced to Die: The bodies of Sellars, Judy, Howard, Diane Neely, Johnny Knight, Dennis Bellamy, Doreen Dempsey and her child were found in the graves. On April 27, 1976, Gaskins and Walter Neely were charged with eight counts of murder. Gaskins' attempts to appear as an innocent victim failed and on May 24, 1976, a jury found him guilty of murdering Dennis Bellamy, his sentence - death. He later confessed to the additional seven murders to avoid additional death sentences. A Bad Reputation: In November 1976, his sentence was commuted to life with seven consecutive life terms, after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled the death penalty unconstituional. In prison, he enjoyed the grandiose treatment he received from other inmates because of his infamous reputation. The death penalty was made legal again in South Carolina in 1978. This meant little to Gaskins until he was caught, tried and found guilty for the murder of prisoner, Rudolph Tyner, for money. Again, he received a death sentence. Peggy Cuttino: In an attempt to stay out of the electric chair, Gaskins began confessing to other murders, which if true, would make him the worst killer in the history of South Carolina. One crime he admitted to was that of 13-year-old Peggy Cuttino, daughter of a prominent family. Prosecutors had already prosecuted William Pierce for the crime and sentenced him to life in prison. Prosecutors claimed Gaskins' confession to the girl's murder was simply for publicity and his confession was rejected. The Final Months: During the last months of his life, Gaskins spent time working with author Wilton Earl on his book, Final Truth which was published in 1993. In the book, Gaskins spent a lot of his time talking about his murders and his feeling of something "bothersome" inside of him throughout his life. The closer his execution became the more philosophical he got while dictating his memoirs into a tape recorder. Execution Day: On the day of his execution, Gaskins slashed his wrists in an effort to postpone his execution. This time he would fail to trick death from his door and with stitched arms, he was placed into the electric chair and was pronounced dead by electrocution, at 1:05 a.m. on Sept. 6, 1991. Truth or Lies?: It will never be known for sure if Gaskins' memoirs in the book, Final Truth, were based on truth or if it was just his desire to be known as one of the most prolific serial killers in U.S. history. He claimed to have killed over 100 people although he never showed authorities where the bodies were located. Some say Gaskins was never beaten as a child, but was given tremendous love and attention when growing up. How many people he was actually responsible for killing is also an area of debate since proof of several of his confessed murders was never found. The one fact that cannot be disputed is that Gaskins was a psychopath from a very early age and had no regard for any human life but his own. From Charles Montaldo Donald "Pee Wee" Gaskins by Michael Newton Murder had lost its novelty for Donald Gaskins by the fall of 1980. A prolific killer, dubbed "the Redneck Charlie Manson" in some press accounts, he had claimed his first victim at age 19, in a jailhouse stabbing that got him sentenced to nine years for manslaughter. Now, in middle age, he was serving nine life terms in South Carolina's state prison -- one for each of nine victims police had recovered -- and that tally barely scratched the surface of his crimes. Gaskins was well acquainted with the means of violent death. It held no mysteries. But the crime he had in mind this time was different. Gaskins had never killed a victim on Death Row. Rudolph Tyner was already marked for death by the state, but he wasn't dying fast enough to please some people. Condemned for the holdup murders of Bill and Myrtle Moon at Murrells Inlet, in Georgetown County, Tyner expected to drag his case out for a decade or more with appeals before he kept his date with the electric chair. He might even beat the rap, since racial aspects of the case -- black gunman, white victims -- added weight to his appeals. South Carolina's death penalty statutes had been twice invalidated by Supreme Court rulings in the past eight years, proving that anything was possible. Tyner's worst problem on Death Row, so far, was feeding his insatiable narcotics addiction. Outside the prison walls, Tony Cimo schemed to accelerate Tyner's execution. Cimo was Myrtle Moon's son by a previous marriage, bent on avenging his mother's death. Through prison contacts, he negotiated for the hit, passed along from one convict to the next until he connected with Donald Gaskins. Finally, he had a contact who could guarantee results for a price. A maintenance trusty housed next-door to Death Row, Gaskins had free access to condemned inmates, mending broken pipes, toilets, light fixtures, anything at all. Unknown to Cimo, Gaskins also had a tape recorder, capturing their conversations for posterity -- a blackmail tool as good as money in the bank if he should ever manage to escape from custody. Gaskins decided poison was the way to go. Befriending Tyner on his visits to Death Row, Gaskins began to slip the holdup killer junk food, marijuana, pills and heroin. Tyner received the gifts, unquestioning, and begged for more. Cimo supplied a box of candy laced with poison "strong enough to kill a horse," but Tyner merely suffered stomach pains. Over the next 12 months, Gaskins repeated the experiment five times, spiking his target's food and drugs with ever-larger toxic doses, all in vain. Tyner lived on, oblivious to the "coincidence" between his gifts and stomach-churning trips to the infirmary. Six strikes and out. Gaskins gave up on poison and decided to construct a bomb. Cimo supplied the wiring, hardware and C-4 plastic explosive (smuggled past distracted guards in the hollowed-out heels of cowboy boots). Tyner agreed to let Gaskins connect a homemade intercom between their cells. Gaskins strung wire through prison heating ducts, constructed a "receiver" for his target from a plastic cup, and packed it with C-4. The two men synchronized their watches for a test run on the evening of Sept. 12, 1982. At the appointed hour, Tyner pressed the loaded plastic cup against his ear and spoke to Gaskins, on the far side of the wall between their cells. "The last thing he heard through that speaker-cup before it blew his head off," Gaskins later said, "was me laughing." But the last laugh belonged to his jailers. Press reports initially described Tyner's death as suicide, but there are no real secrets in prison. Snitches started talking, and Tony Cimo soon confessed his role in the plot. A grand jury was impaneled, indicting Gaskins and Cimo with two inmate accessories for murder and conspiracy. The state of South Carolina had failed to execute Donald Gaskins for his previous murders. Now, it was prepared to try again. Few observers would agree with Donald Gaskins's claim that he was "born special and fortunate" on March 13, 1933, in rural Florence County, South Carolina. An illegitimate child who never met his father, Gaskins was known for the first 13 years of his life as "Junior Parrott" (his mother's maiden name) or simply as "Pee Wee," a derisive reference to his size. Gaskins was alternately beaten and ignored by a series of brutal "step-daddies" until his mother finally married one of them in 1943, the union adding four half-siblings to the family. The new man of the house beat Gaskins and his other children "just for practice," as Pee Wee recalled, but the violence was a part of daily life, Gaskins steadfastly insisted that "I certainly weren't in no way what you could ever call abused." Still, something was obviously wrong with Junior Parrott. He was "pissed off" at girls from his earliest memory, unable to explain the rage coherently. By age 10, he suffered from the onset of a lifelong "bothersomeness," described as feeling like "a ball of molten lead rolling around in my guts and up my spine into my head." That feeling presaged outbursts of erratic violence, sometimes assuaged by forays into criminal activity. Gaskins was clever with his hands, a natural around machines and motors. He quit school at age eleven to work on cars at a local garage, teaming with two friends named Danny and Marsh in his spare time to form a marauding gang they dubbed "The Trouble Trio." Starting off with thefts of gasoline from service stations after closing time, they soon graduated to residential burglaries, counseled along the way by Danny's ex-convict father. Buying an old car with the proceeds from their robberies, they ranged farther afield, visiting prostitutes in Charleston and Columbia. Their sexual experiments also included younger boys, but the Trouble Trio made a critical mistake when they gang-raped Marsh's younger sister. Threats and promises of cash failed to secure her silence, and parental wrath descended on the boys in full force. Danny's father defended him with a shotgun, but Gaskins and Marsh were strung up by their wrists in a barn and whipped bloody by parents wielding a leather strap in relays. Pee Wee's cohorts fled the area as soon as Marsh could walk again, and Gaskins soloed for a while before he met another teenage thief, resuming weekend burglaries. One Saturday in 1946, he was prowling a house when one of the tenants -- a girl he knew -- surprised him. She was armed with a hatchet, slashing at Gaskins and chasing him outside, where he disarmed her and struck back, gashing her arms and splitting her scalp. The girl survived to identify Gaskins, whereupon he was jailed for assault with a deadly weapon and intent to kill. The judge found him guilty as charged and consigned him to the South Carolina Industrial School for Boys until his 18th birthday. Junior Parrott heard his true name for the first time in the courtroom, as sentence was pronounced. Crime School Gaskins would later say that he received his "real education" at the state reformatory near Florence, a few miles from where he grew up. His second night in custody, Gaskins was ambushed in the shower, beaten and gang-raped by a group of 20 boys. Afterward, he accepted "protection" from his dormitory's "Boss-Boy," who demanded daily sex and other services while sometimes loaning Gaskins out to friends. With no escape from torment inside the walls, Gaskins plotted his first escape. Thirteen months after his arrival, he fled the reform school with four other inmates. All were captured the next afternoon, but Gaskins leaped from the truck on his way back to Florence, this time running as far as the hideout he had once shared with his cronies of the Trouble Trio. A local lawman found him there and persuaded Gaskins to surrender. His reward: 30 lashes with a strap and 30 days' "hard labor isolation," digging ditches in the broiling daytime heat, with whippings every night for trivial infractions. After serving his penalty time, Gaskins went back to his dorm and the Boss-Boy who "owned" him. For his second escape, Gaskins chose a single accomplice and remained at large for six days before bloodhounds tracked him down. The punishment this time was 50 lashes and four months' hard labor. Returning to his dorm, Gaskins found "a new Boss-Boy who wasn't so easy to please." This one, Pee Wee recalled, "particularly liked to watch gang-rapes with me on the bottom." Gaskins made his third escape alone, fleeing south to an aunt's home in Williamsburg County. She convinced him to return after the warden promised leniency, but the promise was a lie. Back in Florence, Gaskins faced more isolation and a nightly regimen of 20 lashes. On the seventh day he punched a guard and was beaten unconscious, packed off to the state mental hospital in Columbia for five weeks. While there, Gaskins suffered a ruptured appendix, his life saved by emergency surgery. Deemed sane and fit for normal custody, Gaskins was shipped back to the reformatory in 1950. Light duty soon gave way to threats of whipping in reprisal for his prior conduct, fleeing to Sumter, where he joined a traveling carnival. He fell in love with a 13-year-old member of the crew and married her -- the first of his six wives -- on Jan. 22, 1951. After one night together, for his bride's sake, Gaskins surrendered to authorities and spent the last three months of his sentence in solitary confinement. Released on his 18th birthday, Gaskins tried four different jobs in his first six months of freedom, finally settling down to work on a tobacco plantation. Soon, he joined forces with a reformatory bunkmate to loot and burn tobacco barns, collaborating with landowners on insurance fraud. They torched six barns before Christmas 1956, but rumors spread quickly and Pee Wee's partner wisely fled the state. Gaskins stayed on, but he soon had cause to regret it. One day on the job, his employer's teenage daughter and a girlfriend cornered Gaskins in the barn, taunting him with rumors of his barn-burning forays. Gaskins snapped, lashed out with a hammer and cracked the girl's skull. Jailed for arson, assault with a deadly weapon and attempted murder, he beat the first charge at trial, then struck a bargain on the others. The prosecutor promised Gaskins 18 months' confinement in return for a guilty plea, but Pee Wee failed to get the deal in writing and Judge T.B. Greniker had other ideas. He pronounced a five-year sentence, then added another year for contempt when Gaskins cursed him. Pee Wee was on his way to the Big House. Power Man When Gaskins entered the South Carolina state prison in fall 1952, it struck him as "the dreariest looking place on earth." There were new faces and new rules to memorize, but the reality of prison life remained unchanged. In place of dorms and Boss-Boys, the state pen had cell blocks and "Power Men" who took what they wanted by force. Gaskins went in expecting another round of gang-rapes, but instead he was ignored until the afternoon when a hulking con approached him on the yard and told him, "You belong to Arthur." Over the next six months, while Gaskins was sharing his cell with a brutal rapist, he realized that the only way to save himself was to become a Power Man. To that end, knowing it meant murder, Gaskins started looking for the biggest, toughest victim he could find. He chose Hazel Brazell, a con so vicious that no one on either side of the bars dared call him by his despised first name. To ingratiate himself with Brazell, Gaskins used the same tactic he would employ with Rudolph Tyner, almost 30 years later. He brought gifts of food from the kitchen, becoming a fixture around Brazell's cellblock, accepted as part of the crowd. On his fifth visit, Gaskins found Brazell on the toilet, only one guard stationed outside his cell. Striking swiftly, he cut Brazell's throat with a stolen paring knife and warned the bodyguard to flee before guards arrived. "I surprised myself at how calm I was," Gaskins later wrote in his autobiography, Final Truth. "I didn't really feel nothing much at all." He admitted killing Brazell "in a fight" and bargained a murder charge down to manslaughter, two-thirds of the nine-year sentence concurrent with his pre-existing term. "I figured that was a damn fair deal," Gaskins said, "considering I wouldn't never again have to be afraid of anybody in The Pen no matter how long I was there." He spent six months in solitary and emerged a Power Man in his own right, the "Pee Wee" nickname now a label of respect. Gaskins cruised through his next two years of confinement, enjoying himself, but 1955 brought news that his wife had filed for divorce. Despondent, he hatched a plot to escape in a garbage drum, jumping from the truck along the highway to Florence. Stealing a car, he drove to Florida and rejoined the carnival at Lake Wales, meeting his next wife in the process. At 19, she was three years younger than Gaskins. Their marriage lasted all of two weeks, before he dropped her at her parents' house and hit the road. They were never divorced, but that small technicality would not stop Gaskins from logging four more marriages over the next two decades. His new love of the moment was Bettie Gates, a sideshow contortionist whose supple body proved irresistible. They left the show together, driving Pee Wee's stolen car to Cookeville, Tennessee, where Gates claimed her brother was jailed pending trial on some undisclosed charge. On arrival, Gates confessed that she was wanted in five states on counts ranging from forgery to armed assault. Gaskins agreed to deliver bail money and a carton of cigarettes, then returned to find Gates and his car missing from their motel. He was awaiting her return when police came to arrest him, breaking the news that Bettie's "brother" -- in fact, her husband -- had escaped from jail using a razor hidden with the smokes. Putnam County's sheriff initially accepted Gaskins's tale of being duped, but the recovery of his stolen car and false I.D. saw Pee Wee held on a fugitive warrant from South Carolina. Before his return to the Palmetto State, he pulled three months in Tennessee for aiding an escape, plus six more for slashing another inmate during a brawl. Back at South Carolina's state pen, he spent a "miserable" time in solitary before FBI agents arrived to charge him with a federal Dyer Act violation, for driving a stolen car across state lines. Conviction on that charge earned him three years at the federal lockup in Atlanta, Georgia. Gaskins later described that sentence as his "college education" in crime. His cellmates, whom he dubbed the "Three Wise Men," were bodyguards for imprisoned Mafia "prime minister" Frank Costello, serving time for income tax evasion and casino skimming. Pee Wee's reputation preceded him, and Costello dubbed him "the little hatchet man," reportedly offering Gaskins work as contract muscle if he ever felt an urge to settle down. The federal prison term was concurrent with Gaskins's remaining time in South Carolina, a favor from the court that left him eligible for parole in August 1961. Forgiving his escape, the state released him with a new suit, $20, and a bus ticket back to Florence. The Fugitive Whatever Gaskins may have learned from his prison "college education," it did not include a course on staying out of trouble. Reunited briefly with his mother and stepfather, he returned to work in the tobacco sheds, until an argument with his stepfather came to blows and Gaskins threatened the older man's life with a pitchfork. From there, he moved in with a cousin and resumed stripping cars, soon reverting to his old pattern of residential burglaries, looking for cheap sex in honky-tonk bars. Late in 1961 Gaskins had a near-miss brush with salvation. He went to work for circuit-riding preacher George Todd, driving the minister's van and serving as his general assistant, but the gospel had no impact on Pee Wee. Instead, he seized the opportunity to loot homes while they traveled, selling off whatever he could steal to willing buyers on the road. Along the way, in 1962, he met wife number three, a 17-year-old who caught his eye despite the fact that she was "old by my standards." Marriage, like religion, failed to civilize Gaskins. During his second year with Rev. Todd, he was jailed for statutory rape of a 12-year-old girl in Florence County. Taken to the courthouse for arraignment, Gaskins slipped out a window, stole a county car, and fled to Greensboro, North Carolina. There, he soon met and married wife number four -- another 17-year-old -- and abandoned her after three months. "It weren't that I stopped loving her," he later wrote. It were the edginess and bothersomeness stirring around inside me...I got so edgy and mad at the world, I just had to get away." As for his many wives, Pee Wee maintained, "I truly loved them all," Briefly reunited with his third wife in Georgia, Gaskins was en route to Florida when a highway patrolman tried to stop him for speeding. Fearing arrest as a fugitive, Gaskins drove his car into a swamp and escaped on foot, leaving not-so-ex-wife to the law. From there, he returned to North Carolina and wife number four, but she blew the whistle on him and he was extradited for trial. Jurors in Florence County rejected Pee Wee's argument that sex with pre-teen girls was justifiable. Convicted in 1964, he got six years for statutory rape and two more for his flight from custody. The state pen in Columbia had been renamed the Central Correctional Institute in Gaskins' absence, but nothing else had changed. He brought his reputation with him and did easy time as a Power Man, paroled in November 1968 on the condition that he stay out of Florence County for two years. Upon release, Pee Wee later said, "I was damned determined I never was going back to prison -- which didn't meant that I wasn't ever going to do anything illegal again. I just wasn't never planning on getting caught." That meant getting rid of witnesses, and Gaskins reckoned he was equal to the task. And in the process, he would have some fun. Coastal Kills Gaskins settled in Sumter, South Carolina, working construction and stripping hot cars on weekends, cruising bars for sex. He still suffered "them aggravated and bothersome feelings," now accompanied by headaches, stomach cramps, and pain in his groin. Increasingly, he raged and brooded over women who rejected him. He drove compulsively along the Carolina coast, later recalling, "It was like I was looking for something special on them coastal highways, only I didn't know what." In September 1969 he found out. The hitchhiker was young and blond, bound for Charleston, thumbing rides outside Myrtle Beach. Gaskins picked her up and propositioned her. When she laughed in his face, he beat her unconscious and drove to an old logging road. There, he raped and sodomized his victim, then tortured and mutilated her with a knife. She still clung to life when he weighted her body and sank her in a swamp to drown. Leaving the scene, Gaskin recalled, "I felt truly the best I ever remembered feeling in my whole life." Gaskins later called that first impulsive homicide "his miracle ... a beam of light, like a vision." From that day on, he made a habit of trolling the coastal highways on weekends, seeking victims and exploring future dump sites. By Christmas 1969 he had committed two more "coastal kills -- ones where I didn't know the victims or their names or nothing about them." It was recreational murder, refined over time until he could keep his victims alive and screaming for hours on end, sometimes for days. In 1970 Gaskins averaged one "coastal kill" every six weeks, experimenting with different torture methods, disappointed when his victims died prematurely. "I preferred for them to last as long as possible," he wrote. The next year, Pee Wee claimed 11 nameless victims, including his first kidnap-slaying of two girls at once. Ideas for tormenting his captives came to Gaskins as he browsed through hardware stores, eyeing the tools. "I never gave no thought to stopping," he admitted. "They was a clock-kind of thing. When it was time, I went and killed." His first male victims were acquired by accident, two long-haired boys whom Gaskins took for girls as he drove up behind them in March 1974. Gender would not save them, though. Gaskins drove them both to a hideout near Charleston, where he sodomized and tortured both, cooking and cannibalizing their severed genitals before he granted them the mercy of death. Gaskins lost track of the victims he murdered for sport between September 1969 and December 1975. They were hard to recall, he explained, "because they're mostly just a jumble of faces and bodies and memories of things I did to them." In terms of numbers, he said, "The closest figure I can come up with is 80 to 90." Sadistic murder was addictive for Pee Wee. "I finally reached the point where I wanted the bothersomeness to start," he wrote. "I looked forward to it every month, because it felt so good relieving myself of it." The only coastal victim he recalled by name was 16-year-old Anne Colberson, picked up near Myrtle Beach in 1971. Gaskins was not hunting at the time, but he refused to miss a golden opportunity. Over four days of rape and torture, he became "real fond of her." Finally, "because she had been so nice to me," Gaskins stunned her with a hammer and cut her throat before dropping Colberson into quicksand. The coastal kills were always recreation, though. However numerous the victims, however atrocious their suffering, they meant nothing to Gaskins. The focus of his life lay inland, where murder and business mixed. Serious Murders Before 1970, despite sporadic incidents of violence with family and friends, Gaskins maintained that he never gave "any real serious thought whatsoever" to killing a personal acquaintance. "The most important thing about 1970," he wrote from prison, "was that it was the year I started doing my 'serious murders'" -- defined as slayings of persons he knew, whose deaths required more planning to avoid detection. His first two "serious" victims were a 15-year-old niece, Janice Kirby, and her 17-year-old friend, Patricia Alsobrook. Gaskins had entertained thoughts of raping Kirby but saw no opportunity until one night in November 1970, when the girls were out drinking, in need of a ride home. Gaskins volunteered, taking them instead to an abandoned house where he ordered both to strip. The girls fought for their lives, clubbing Gaskins with a board before he drew a gun and overpowered them and beat them unconscious. After raping both, he drowned the girls and buried them in separate locations. Police grilled Pee Wee about the double disappearance, and while he admitted talking to the girls on the last night they were seen alive, he claimed they had left him and driven off in a car with several unknown boys. Lacking a corpse or other evidence, the trail went cold. A month later, Gaskins kidnapped, raped and murdered Peggy Cuttino, the 13-year-old daughter of a politically prominent family. This time, he left the body where it would be found. His alibi looked solid when police came calling, and they later focused on another suspect, William Pierce, already serving life in Georgia for a similar offense. Conviction of Cuttino's murder brought Pierce his second life sentence, a moot point since Georgia had no intention of releasing him. Years later, when Gaskins later confessed to the murder, embarrassed prosecutors rejected his statement, insisting Pee Wee claimed the murder "for publicity." Gaskins interrupted the murder spree to marry his pregnant girlfriend on Jan. 1, 1971, but it was only a momentary distraction. His next "serious" murder victim -- and the first African American he ever killed -- was 20-year-old Martha Dicks, a hanger-on around the garage where Gaskins worked part-time. For reasons best known to herself, Dicks seemed infatuated with Gaskins, boasting falsely to friends that they were lovers. Gaskins tolerated the jokes until Dicks claimed to be carrying his child. Inviting her to stay on one night, after work, he fed Dicks a fatal overdose of pills and liquor, discarding her corpse in a roadside ditch. Rumors of sex and racism aside, Gaskins insisted, "I didn't kill her for no reason besides her lying mouth." In late 1971, Gaskins moved to Charleston with his wife and child, committing his next two "serious murders" there in 1972. The victims were Eddie Brown, a 24-year-old gun runner, and his wife Bertie, described by Gaskins as "the best looking black girl I ever saw." Gaskins sold guns to Brown, including stolen military weapons, but he grew nervous when Brown informed him that federal agents were sniffing around Charleston, seeking illicit arms dealers. Fearing a setup, Gaskin shot the Browns and planted them behind the barn where he had buried Janice Kirby in 1970. Gaskins moved to Prospect, South Carolina, in July 1973, after his Charleston home burned down. (He blamed arsonists for the fire, but never identified the culprits.) Before year's end, he murdered three more victims, starting with 14-year-old runaway Jackie Freeman. Gaskins picked her up hitchhiking, in October, and held her captive for two days of rape, torture and cannibalism. "I always thought of Jackie as special," he recalled in his memoirs, "not really a serious murder, but likewise not just another coastal kill." The weekend after Freeman's slaying, Gaskins bought a used hearse and put a sign in the window: WE HAUL ANYTHING, LIVING OR DEAD. When asked about it over drinks, he explained that he wanted the vehicle "Because I kill so many people I need a hearse to haul them to my private cemetery." His first passengers were 23-year-old Doreen Dempsey and her two-year-old daughter Robin Michelle. Gaskins knew Dempsey from his carnie days. An unwed mother pregnant with her second child in December 1973, she planned on leaving town that month and accepted Pee Wee's offer of a drive to the local bus station. Instead, he drove into the woods and there demanded sex. Doreen agreed, then balked when Gaskins started to undress her child. Gaskins killed Doreen with a hammer, then raped and sodomized the child before strangling her to death and burying both victims together. Years later, he would recall his brutal assault on Robin Michelle as the best sex of his life. Pee Wee's "serious murders" continued in 1974, beginning with 36-year-old car thief Johnny Sellars. Sellars owed Gaskins $1,000 for auto parts, but he was slow to pay. Finally, tired of excuses, Gaskins lured Sellars to the woods and shot him with a rifle. Later the same night, hoping to forestall investigation of Sellars' disappearance, Gaskins called on Johnny's girlfriend, 22-year-old Jessie Ruth Judy, and stabbed her to death, hauling her corpse to the forest for burial beside her lover. Horace Jones, another car thief and con man, made the fatal mistake of trying to romance Pee Wee's current wife in 1974. "That pissed me off," Gaskins recalled in Final Truth. Not the attempt per se, "but the way he went about doing it. I mean if he had come straight to me like a man and asked to make a deal with me for my wife, I would probably have give her to him, for a night or a week, or to keep, if the offer was good enough." As it was, he shot Jones in the woods and stole $200 from the corpse before leaving Jones in a shallow grave. Searchers identify grave site. By December 1974 Gaskins was a grandfather, settled into a routine that suited him and satisfied his needs. That Christmas season, he recalled, was "the happiest and peacefullest I can remember." Pee Wee didn't know it yet, but he was running out of time. "The Killingest Year" Writing from prison, Gaskins called 1975 "my busiest year and my killingest year." His pace of random murders on the Carolina coast remained "about the same," although he started January with a threesome, including a man and two women. Gaskins described them as "hippie types" from Oregon, whose van had broken down near Georgetown. He offered a lift to the nearest garage, then detoured to a nearby swamp and handcuffed his captives at gunpoint. Before he drowned the trio, Gaskins said, "It was hard to say which one suffered most. I tried to make it equal." Gaskins made a critical mistake when he recruited ex-con Walter Neely to help him dispose of the van. Neely drove the vehicle to Pee Wee's garage, where Gaskin customized and repainted it for sale out of state. The drive made Neely an accessory after the fact, and Gaskin trusted his simple-minded helper to keep a secret. Before year's end, he would regret that choice. Pee Wee's first "serious murder" of the year involved a contract to kill Silas Yates, a wealthy Florence County farmer. He accepted $1,500 for the job, on behalf of 27-year-old Suzanne Kipper, furious at Yates for taking back a car, two horses, and other gifts he had given her while they were romantically involved. Two go-betweens on the contract, John Powell and John Owens, handled negotiations between Gaskins and Kipper. Gaskins recruited Diane Neely, friend Walter's ex-wife, to lure Yates from home on the night of Feb. 12, 1975, claiming her car had broken down near his house. Pee Wee waited in the darkness to abduct Yates at gunpoint and drive him to the woods, where Powell and Owens watched him knife Yates to death, then helped Gaskins bury the corpse. Kipper subsequently married Owens, while Pee Wee used his knowledge of the murder to blackmail her for sex on demand. The contract came back to haunt Gaskins when Diane Neely moved in with Avery Howard, a 35-year-old ex-convict whom Gaskins knew from state prison. She told Howard about the murder, and together they approached Gaskins with a demand for $5,000 hush-money. Gaskins agreed to meet them in the woods outside Prospect and bring the cash. The blackmailers arrived to find an open grave and Gaskins with a pistol in his hand. Two shots, a bit of spadework, and Pee Wee reckoned his problem was solved. The human juggernaut rolled on. Kim Ghelkins was the next to die, a 13-year-old friend of Gaskins who angered him by rejecting his sexual overtures. Pee Wee reacted in typical style by raping, torturing and strangling her, planting her body in the woods. Diane Neely's brother, 25-year-old Dennis Bellamy, teamed with 15-year-old half-brother Johnny Knight to loot Pee Wee's chop shop that summer, thus earning themselves a death sentence. Gaskins took Walter Neely along to help bury the pair in his "private cemetery," taking time to point out the surrounding graves of Johnny Sellars, Jessie Judy, Avery Howard and Walter's ex-wife. Again, for reasons never clear, he trusted Neely and allowed him to survive. By October 1975, Kim Ghelkins's parents knew enough of her movements to suspect Gaskins of murder. A Sumter deputy sheriff searched Pee Wee's home and found some of Kim's clothes in his closet, afterward securing statements that she was often seen in his company. The evidence would not support a murder charge, but Gaskins was indicted for contributing to the delinquency of a minor. He returned from Georgia on Nov. 14, 1975, to find police staked out around his house. Gaskins dodged them and made his way to the local bus station, planning a return to Georgia, but officers nabbed him before he could leave. Unable to post bond, Gaskins sat in jail for three weeks before the storm broke. Walter Neely had crumbled, telling all to police on advice from a neighborhood minister. He led authorities to Pee Wee's graveyard, where victims Bellamy and Knight were unearthed on Dec. 4. A day later, diggers found the bodies of Sellars, Judy, Howard and Diane Neely. On Dec. 10, Walter led them to the graves of Doreen Dempsey and her child. Gaskins struck a pose of injured innocence, but all in vain. Looking back on that chaotic month, he would recall, "the coroner had the bodies, Jesus had Walter, and the law had me." Giving Up the Dead Following a Florence County coroner's inquest on April 27, 1976, Gaskins and Walter Neely were each charged with eight counts of first-degree murder. Police also detained James Judy, husband of the murdered Jessie, on one count of murder and an accessory charge. Prosecutor T. Kenneth Summerford arranged for Gaskins to be tried alone in the Bellamy case, since bullets from the victim's body matched a pistol Gaskins had been carrying at his arrest in December 1975. At trial, convened on May 24, 1976, Gaskins feigned innocent, blaming Bellamy's murder on Walter Neely. Bellamy and Johnny Knight were both alive the last time he saw them, Gaskins testified, leaving his garage with Neely. For all he knew, Walter had stolen his pistol to murder the men, then replaced it without Pee Wee's knowledge. Jurors dismissed the fable and convicted him on May 28, whereupon Judge Dan McEachin sentenced Gaskins to die. That verdict frightened James Judy, wholly innocent of his wife's murder, into angling for a plea bargain. Police thought he had hired Gaskins to kill his wife and Johnny Sellars out of jealousy, and if a jury felt likewise he might be sent to the electric chair. Panicked, Judy pled guilty in return for a life sentence and went off to serve his time. Walter Neely was next, tried on eight counts of murder, his attorneys calling him a mentally retarded dupe who bowed to Pee Wee Gaskins's every whim. "In a way," Gaskins later wrote, "I reckon that was true, too. Walter surely weren't real bright, and he did pretty much anything I asked him, up until he got borned-again and forgot all about what loyalty and friendship meant." Convicted on all counts, Neely still evoked sufficient pathos to escape with a single life sentence. Pee Wee's attorney urged him to cut a deal with prosecutors to avoid another death sentence on his seven pending murder charges. Gaskins agreed, confessing to the crimes and adding details under influence of "truth serum," but he could have saved the effort. In November 1976 the U.S. Supreme Court invalidated South Carolina's death penalty statute and his capital sentence was commuted to life, with seven more consecutive life terms tacked on for good measure. The attendant publicity made Gaskins "downright famous" in prison, where even the guards dubbed him the "boss hog." Still unsatisfied, the law came after Gaskins next for Silas Yates's murder, indicting him with John Owens, John Powell, and Suzanne Kipper (now married to John). At trial, in April 1977, Gaskins claimed he was the decoy who lured Yates from home in 1975, while Powell and Owens did the killing, but all four defendants were sentenced to life. (Powell and Owens were paroled in the late 1980s, prompting Gaskins to remark that "some life sentences don't last as long as others." Kipper escaped in October 1990 and remained at large until February 1993, when she was recaptured in Michigan.) South Carolina passed a new death penalty statute in 1978 and prosecutor Ken Summerford filed new charges against Gaskins for Johnny Knight's murder, declaring his intent to put Pee Wee on Death Row. Gaskins may have been the only player in the game who didn't realize such retroactive prosecutions are forbidden. Bargaining for life imprisonment, he confessed still more murders, giving lawmen a hitchhiker's corpse in place of Janice Kirby's since he feared discovery of other victims buried near her grave site, yet unnamed. The last round of confessions made Gaskins South Carolina's most prolific serial killer to date. Between that reputation and his mechanical skills, it was easy to become a maintenance trusty. Easy to kill Rudolph Tyner in September 1982. Death Watch After prolonged investigation, a grand jury indicted Gaskins and Tony Cimo for Tyner's murder, along with inmate go-betweens Jack Martin and Charles Lee. Charges against Lee were dismissed after another convict, James Brown, claimed he took the explosive cup to Tyner's cell without knowledge of its purpose. (Brown was never charged.) Prosecutor James Anders tried Gaskins separately, calling Ken Summerford as a witness to display photos of Pee Wee's other victims, and Judge Dan Laney sentenced Gaskins to die. Tony Cimo, more sympathetic than Gaskins in court, received a 25-year prison sentence with parole eligibility after 30 months. He served the minimum and returned to Murrell's Inlet, where he died from a prescription drug overdose on June 10, 2001. Gaskins, meanwhile, spent the first three years of his new sentence not on Death Row, but in a rat-infested isolation unit. His attorneys appealed the confinement in 1985, but lawmen cited "reliable information" that Gaskins planned to have cronies kidnap the prosecutor's child and bargain for his release. Only after his petition for release from solitary was rejected did police "determine the report was an empty threat." A year later, freed from solitary after the isolation unit was condemned as unfit for human habitation, Gaskins found Death Row "a lot nicer" than his previous quarters. In 1990, Gaskins and the state's electric chair were moved again, this time to the Broad River Correctional Institute outside Columbia. Gaskins filled his last months with an art scam, tracing cartoon characters for sale to collectors of Death Row memorabilia, and dictating his memoirs on tape for author Wilton Earl (published as Final Truth in 1993). As death approached, Pee Wee waxed philosophical. "I truly don't mind dying," he wrote. "I've lived a damned full and good life." In fact, he decided, it was even better than that. "I have walked the same path as God," Gaskins raved. "By taking lives and making others afraid, I became God's equal. Through killing others, I became my own master. Through my own power I come to my own redemption.." He was even optimistic about his date with the chair, telling Earl's tape recorder, "When they put me to death, I'll die remembering the freedom and pleasure of my life. I'll die knowing that there are others coming along to take my place, and that most of them won't never get caught." There was no escape for Pee Wee, though. The U.S. Supreme Court rejected his final appeal in June 1991, clearing the way for Gaskins to be executed in September. Hours before his date with "Old Sparky," Gaskins slashed his arms from wrists to elbows with a razor blade he had swallowed days earlier, then regurgitated in a futile effort to postpone death. Prison medics stitched his wounds in time for Gaskins to meet his fate at 1:05 A.M. on Sept. 6, 1991. CrimeLibrary.com Donald Henry Gaskins, Jr. (March 13, 1933 - September 6, 1991) dubbed the "Meanest Man in America", was an American serial killer, possibly connected to over 200 murders. Born in Florence County, South Carolina, Pee Wee got an early start in crime, spending most of his youth in and out of reform school and later prison. Because of his pint-size, Pee Wee was forced to assume the role of "girlfriend" to older, more powerful inmates. He soon put an end to it by killing a highly regarded prisoner while the man was going to the bathroom, making him a jailhouse legend for the rest of his stay. In 1969, after being released from prison, Pee Wee got back to killing at an alarming rate. He made a distinction between his "coastal kills," -- people he found while driving around the roadways of the American South that he killed for pleasure -- and his "serious murders," -- people he knew that he killed for specific reasons. Aside from killing, Pee Wee had a thriving business fencing stolen cars. He operated his fencing business out of several properties around the Carolinas, where he murdered most of his victims. His other favorite hunting grounds were the coastal highways, where every six weeks, he went hunting to quell his feelings of "bother-someness." In the early '80s, Pee Wee was named the "Meanest Man in America" for killing another inmate while in Maximum Security. For his fearless homicidal stunt, Pee Wee was given the death penalty. He was executed on September 6, 1991. His total number of victims might well have been over two hundred, but law enforcement sources found it impossible to verify all of his claims. In the post-mortem auto-biography, "Final Truth," Pee Wee waxed poetic about how he had "a special mind" that gave him "permission to kill." Wikipedia.org Donald Henry "Pee Wee" Gaskins, Jr. (March 31, 1933 - September 6, 1991) was an American serial killer, possibly connected to over 100 murders. Early life Born in Manning, South Carolina, Gaskins spent most of his youth in and out of reform school, and later prison. Gaskins' small, slight build (5' 4" tall, hence his nickname) made him a target for physical and sexual abuse in prison. He eventually killed a highly regarded prisoner while the man was on the toilet, transforming him into a jailhouse legend for the rest of his stay. As a youth, he hit a woman in the head with a hatchet and left her for dead; she survived. Murders In 1969, after being released from prison, Gaskins continued killing. He made a distinction between people he found while driving around the roadways of the American South: people that he killed for pleasure, and familiar people that he killed for specific reasons. Gaskins also had a thriving business fencing stolen cars. He operated his fencing business out of several properties around The Carolinas, where he murdered most of his victims. His other favorite hunting grounds were the coastal highways, where every six weeks, he went hunting to quell his feelings of "bothersome-ness." He confessed of 100 murders, but law enforcement sources found it impossible to verify all of his claims. In his autobiography, Final Truth (published posthumously), Gaskins wrote that he had "a special mind" that gave him "permission to kill." Gaskins' first victims were his niece Janice Kirby and her friend Patricia Ann Alsobrook whom he beat to death in Sumter, South Carolina in 1970. When the police found a piece of Alsobrook's clothing in his rented trailer, Gaskins was asked why he killed her; he responded by saying, "...it was over an argument about their drug abuse". He was widely known for being a pedophile and rapist. On December 4, 1975, Gaskins led police to land he owned in Prospect, where police dug up numerous bodies of Gaskins' victims. Gaskins killed children and at least one baby. He crushed their necks, cut their throats, stabbed, poisoned, drowned them, beat them to death with his fists, and shot them execution style. Imprisonment Before 1976, Gaskins was on death row, but his sentences were commuted to life in prison when the South Carolina General Assembly's 1974 death sentence ruling was changed to meet the United States Supreme Court guidelines for the death penalty in other states. In the early 1980s, Gaskins was named the "Meanest Man in America" for killing another inmate while in maximum security, a crime for which he was sentenced to death. While in prison, Gaskins was hired by Tony Cimo to kill Rudolph Tyner. Tyner was on death row for killing Bill and Myrtie Moon, Cimo's parents, with a 12-gauge shotgun in the store they owned in the Burgess community. Gaskins first attempts at killing Tyner involved sprinkling poison on his food which only made him sick. Then Gaskins rigged a device similar to a portable radio and told Tyner this would allow them to talk between cells. When Tyner followed Gaskins instructions to hold it to his ear and plug it in, it exploded and killed Tyner. Gaskins later said, "The last thing he heard was me laughing." Gaskins was tried for the murder of Rudolph Tyner and sentenced to death. Death Gaskins was executed on September 6, 1991 at 1:10 a.m. He was the fourth person to die in the electric chair after the death penalty was reinstated in South Carolina in 1977. GASKINS, Donald Henry, jr. Few observers would agree with Donald Gaskins's claim that he was "born special and fortunate" in South Carolina on March 31, 1933. The runt of a litter born to an unwed mother named Parrott, Gaskins was known throughout his carly life as "Pee Wee" or "Junior Parrott," hearing his true name for the first time as a teenager, in court, when he was convicted of juvenile crimes and sentenced to a state reformatory. By that time, his mother had married one of Donald's numerous "step-daddies," a brutal disciplinarian who beat Donald and his half siblings "just for practice." Pee Wee was "plissed off" at girls from his earliest memory, unable to explain coherently the hatred he felt toward females. Dropping out of school, he joined two adolescent cohorts in a local crime wave that included numerous burglaries and at least one gang rape (of an accomplice's younger sister). The spree ended when a former classmate surprised Gaskins during a burglary and survived a hatchet blow to the head, identifying him for the police. Sentenced to reform school until his 18th birthday, Gaskins was first gang-raped in the lockup, then "protected" by an older hoy who used him sexually and passed him around to friends. Upon release in 1951, he found work on a tobacco plantation, soon deciding there was better money to be made from stealing the crop and torching barns to cover his thefts. Arrested for ARSON and attempted murder in 1952 (after striking a woman with a hammer), he won acquittal on the first charge and bargained the second down to assault and battery. His lawyer promised Gaskins 18 months in jail, but the judge handed down a five-year sentence, plus one more for contempt after Gaskins cursed him. In prison, Pee Wee was soon commandeered for sex by one of the cellblock "power men," until he cut the rapist's throat. Murder charges bargained down to manslaughter earned him another nine years, to be served concurrently with his previous sentence. Gaskins escaped in 1955 but was soon recaptured in Tennessee, now facing federal charges for driving a stolen car across state lines. His three-year sentence on that charge was set to run concurrently with his Carolina prison time, and Gaskins was paroled in August 1961, with 20 dollars and a bus ticket back to Florence. Charged with the statutory rape of a 12-yearold girl in 1962, Gaskins escaped through a courthouse window prior to trial and joined a traveling carnaval, but he was soon reca tured and sentenced to eight years in prison. He was paroled in November 1968 on the condition that he not return to Florence for at least two years. By that time, Gaskins was seething with rage, a blind hatred of society in general and females in particular which, he later sald, afflicted him with physical pains "Iike hot lead" in his stomach and groin. The only release carne through violence, and Gaskins committed the first of many random, recreational murders in September 1969, torturing and disemboweling a female hitchhiker he picked up along the Carolina coast, dumping her mutilated body in the ocean south of Georgetown, South Carolina. Henceforth, Gaskins would mentally divide his slayings into "coastal kills" (committed for sadistic pleasure, victimizing strangers of both sexes) and "serious murders" (involving victims who were personal acquaintances). On death row, decades later, he estimated that he had committed 10 "coastal kills" by October 1970, with his first "serious murders" occurring one month later. The November victims were his own niece, 15-year-old janice Kirby, and a girlfriend, 17-year-old Patricia Alsbrook, both of whom he raped and murdered at the Sumter mobile-home park where he lived. Gaskins buried them out in the country, revealing Alsbrook's grave in a 1976 bargain with prosecutors to save himself from the electric chair. (Two years later, in another death-row deal, Gaskins pretended to give up Kirby's remains, but he feared discovery of other corpses buried nearby, actually directing searchers to the grave of a victim planted near Columbia in 1973.) Once Gaskins got the hang of it, his homicidas proliferated at a dizzy pace. One murder, the December 1970 torture-slaying of 13-year-old Peggy Cuttino, was blamed on convict William Pierce, serving life for a similar slaying in Georgia; Gaskins admitted the crime in 1977, but embarrassed prosecutors have thus far refused to exonerase Pierce in that case. His "coastal kills" continued on a monthly basis, more or less, while victims of his "serlous murders" included criminal accomplices, personal enemies, and neighborhood acquaintances who aroused Gaskins sexually. One of the worst such cases, in 1973, involved the rape-slayings of 23-year-old Doreen Dempsey (eight months pregnant at the time) and her 20-month-old daughter Robin. (Gaskins later describes raping the infant as the best sexual experience of his life.) Through it all, Gaskins took comfort in the fact that he was "one of the few that truly understands what death and pain are all about. I have a special kind of mind that allows me to give myself permission to kill." Gaskins would later describe 1975 as his "killingest" year, climaxed with his arrest for trafficking in stolen cars. An accomplice in severa l of his "serious murders," Walter Neely, "got religion" that December and turned state's evidence, leading detectives to eight buried victims. Indicted on eight murder charges, Gaskins faced trial in May 1976 on only one count, for the 1975 slaying of Neely's ex-brother-in-law, Dennis Bellamy. Convicted on May 24 and sentenced to die, Gaskins was irate when Neely received a life sentence for the same murder one week later by claiming he had been "controlled" by Pee Wee against his will. With seven more indictments hanging over him, Gaskins began negotiating for his life, pointing police toward more graves in return for leniency. He need not have bothered, since the U.S. Supreme Court invalidated South Carolina's death penalty statute in November 1976, his sentence automatically commuted to life imprisonment. Amonth later, detectives were after Gaskins once again, this time for the murder of Silas Yates, a 45-year old Carolinian who allegedly offered Gaskins a murder contract in 1975. Pec Wee killed Yates instead, and Gaskins was tried on that charge (with three marginal accomplices) in April 1977, receiving his second life sentence. South Carolina's death penalty was reinstated by 1978, and Gaskins struck another bargain with prosecutors, agreeing to turn up more bodies and submit to a three-day grilling under sodium pentothal, in return for a signed-and-sealed promise of exemption from the chair. That spring found him sentenced to a total of nine life terms; no charges were filed in the cases of five other murders he confessed, since the existing sentences removed all hope of parole. That might have been the end for Pee Wee Gaskins, but he couldn't keep his nose clean, even in prison. In 1982 he accepted a contract to kill death-row inmate Randolph Tyner, wiring an explosiva charge to Tyner's radio and detonating it with fatal results on September 12. A relative of Tyner's original victim, who arranged the contract, was sentenced to 25 years in prison, but a sympathetic judge made him eligible for parole after 30 months. Gaskins, for his part, was sentenced to die, his final appeal rejected in june 1991. He was electrocutad three months later, on September 6. Before he died, Gaskins completed work on a gripping (if ungrammatical) autobiography, including an estimate of his final body count. Ignoring his first and last murders committed in prison, Gaskins tabulated 31 "serious murders" (including 14 victims found by police and 17 still buried in three South Carolina counties) and 80 or 90 "coastal kills," for a total in the neighborhood of 110 victims. Since Gaskins never learned the names of his "coastal" victims, remaining deliberately vague on the dates of their murders and locations where their bodies were dumped, the final tally is impossible to verify. By the same token, however, there is no clear reason to dispute his claim, and even if the "coastal" body count was overestimated by 100 percent, Gaskins still qualifies as one of America's most prolific serial killers of modern times. Michael Newton - An Encyclopedia of Modern Serial Killers - Hunting Humans 916 F.2d 941 Donald Henry GASKINS, Petitioner-Appellant, v. Kenneth D. McKELLAR, Warden, Central Correctional Institution; Attorney General of South Carolina, T. Travis Medlock, Respondents-Appellees. No. 89-4011. United States Court of Appeals, Fourth Circuit. Argued March 7, 1990. Decided Oct. 15, 1990. Rehearing and Rehearing In Banc Denied Nov. 16, 1990. Before ERVIN, Chief Judge, and PHILLIPS and CHAPMAN, Circuit Judges. PHILLIPS, Circuit Judge: Donald Henry Gaskins, a South Carolina prison inmate under sentence of death for capital murder, appeals the district court's denial of an evidentiary hearing and dismissal of his 28 U.S.C. Sec. 2254 petition for failure to show entitlement to federal collateral relief. We affirm. I * Gaskins' victim, fellow death row inmate Rudolph Tyner, had been sentenced to death for killing a Mr. and Mrs. Moon during a robbery. Tony Cimo, a stepson of the Moons, seeking to avenge the murders, contacted an acquaintance who put him in touch with Gaskins, who was serving ten life sentences, nine for murder and one for burglary. Telephone toll records produced at trial showed that thereafter Gaskins made a number of collect calls either to Cimo or to Cimo's acquaintance who had made the contact. Some of the recorded calls revealed that, after numerous failed attempts to poison Tyner, Gaskins resolved to kill Tyner by means of an explosive device. Ultimately, Gaskins succeeded. James Arthur Brown, a prisoner assigned to deliver meals to death-row inmates, testified that on the afternoon of the murder, Gaskins asked Brown to deliver a device to Tyner. Brown described the device as a radio-type speaker built into a plastic cup through which, Gaskins led Brown to believe, Tyner could communicate with Gaskins in the adjoining cell rather than having to yell through a common vent. The bottom of the cup had a female-electrical socket adapted for connection to an extension cord. Along with the cup's delivery Brown was to tell Tyner that " 'the wire was in the bottom vent in his cell.' " See State v. Gaskins, 284 S.C. 105, 326 S.E.2d 132, 136 (1985). Presumably, Tyner then found the wire in the common vent and plugged it into the cup-speaker. The cup exploded, blowing off part of Tyner's head and killing him. Brown testified that after the explosion he went to Gaskins' cell and saw Gaskins pulling a wire from the common vent in his own cell. Gaskins was convicted and sentenced to death by a jury, and his conviction and sentence were affirmed on direct appeal. See State v. Gaskins, 284 S.C. 105, 326 S.E.2d 132 (1985), cert. denied, 471 U.S. 1120, 105 S.Ct. 2368, 86 L.Ed.2d 266 (1985). Efforts to obtain state post-conviction relief were unavailing. See Gaskins v. State, No. 85-CP-40-3466, Letter Order (S.C. Jan. 7, 1987), cert. denied, 482 U.S. 909, 107 S.Ct. 2491, 96 L.Ed.2d 382 (1987). This Sec. 2254 petition, raising several claims, followed and was summarily dismissed by the district court. A number of issues and sub-issues are raised on appeal. Of these, one involves the denial of an evidentiary hearing respecting the admission in evidence at sentencing of an earlier confession to other murders, one involves a claimed denial of due process by virtue of trial judge bias, two involve alleged constitutional violations in jury selection, three involve trial court evidentiary rulings allegedly impacting on the trial's fundamental fairness, one involves prosecutorial misconduct, two involve guilt-phase jury instructions, and five involve alleged errors during the trial's sentencing phase. We address each of these in turn. II Gaskins contends that he was erroneously denied an evidentiary hearing to establish his claim that portions of a confession given by him in connection with an earlier, bargained plea of guilty to several unrelated murders were unconstitutionally admitted at the sentencing phase of his Tyner murder trial. The district court summarily dismissed this invalid-use-of-confession claim on the stated basis that " here is no reason, and no precedent, for arguing the confession's invalidity for the first time during the sentencing phase of a trial for a subsequent crime five years later ... in a collateral proceeding directed at those prior crimes." On this appeal, the parties have joined issue on this threshold question of the habeas court's power to entertain this claim. Because it is a difficult issue with broad and unclear implications,1 and because there is an alternative basis for upholding the summary dismissal, we decline to rest decision upon the district court's stated basis for dismissing the claim. To address the alternative basis, it is necessary first to identify the exact nature of Gaskins' constitutional claim. We take it to be that because the earlier confession was coerced, hence involuntarily given, hence unconstitutionally obtained, its use in evidence in the sentencing phase of the later Tyner trial violated Gaskins' eighth amendment right to a "reliab ... determination that death is the appropriate punishment." Johnson v. Mississippi, 486 U.S. 578, 584, 108 S.Ct. 1981, 1986, 100 L.Ed.2d 575 (1988) (death penalty predicated in part on prior conviction vacated because coerced confession violates eighth amendment) (quoting Gardner v. Florida, 430 U.S. 349, 363-64, 97 S.Ct. 1197, 1207-08, 51 L.Ed.2d 393 (1977)). The claim is rested on the undisputed fact that at Gaskins' sentencing hearing, a state solicitor was allowed, over Gaskins' timely objection, to read portions of the earlier confession in which Gaskins had admitted committing seven other murders. Though in personally arguing his case to the sentencing jury Gaskins specifically conceded that, "I'm guilty of some of , yes. I do not deny that," J.A. at 593, his contention apparently now is that he was coerced into confessing to more than he later conceded to the sentencing jury. From this, the argument runs that the sentencing jury's determination could be shown to be constitutionally unreliable if, as he claimed but was not allowed to establish by evidence, the jury thought him guilty of all the seven murders rather than the "some" lesser number that he specifically conceded. Given this possibility, Gaskins contends that the district court erred in failing to give him an evidentiary hearing to attempt to establish his claim of constitutional unreliability. This argument fails because of the claim's facial lack of merit. Where the allegations in a habeas petition are palpably incredible, the petition properly may be dismissed without affording any evidentiary hearing. See Blackledge v. Allison, 431 U.S. 63, 75-76, 97 S.Ct. 1621, 1629-30, 52 L.Ed.2d 136 (1977). Here the ultimate allegation, on which habeas relief depended, was that the sentencing jury's misperception of the exact number of unrelated murders that Gaskins had committed made its imposition of the death penalty constitutionally unreliable. Under the circumstances, the district court properly could have viewed this as an allegation incredible on its face, and on that basis summarily dismissed the claim. Even assuming the truth of the predicate allegation--that the earlier confession had admitted more murders than Gaskins actually had committed--it defies belief that a jury to which he had just renewed his confession to at least an indefinite "some" of the seven earlier confessed would have acted differently (more reliably) had it been aware of the exact mathematical disparity between those actually committed and those confessed. We might also affirm the summary dismissal of this claim on the alternative basis of a roughly parallel harmless error analysis. See Estelle v. Smith, 451 U.S. 454, 101 S.Ct. 1866, 68 L.Ed.2d 359 (1981) (harmless error analysis appropriate in review of capital sentencing proceeding). Here the record shows that the state sentencing jury found two aggravating factors: prior murder convictions and murder for hire. It also reveals that the jury had before it, in addition to the earlier confessed murders, still another prior conviction of murder by jury verdict. Both this latter conviction and the murder-for-hire finding stand unchallenged.2 As earlier indicated, the most favorable result that could be achieved by an evidentiary hearing to challenge the sentencing jury's finding of prior murders as an aggravator would be a demonstration that the jury erroneously believed that Gaskins had committed seven confessed murders, when he had only committed "some" number less than that. When it is recalled that the jury also had before it still another unchallenged murder conviction by jury trial, it is obvious that any error in denying an evidentiary hearing with such a limited potential was harmless beyond a reasonable doubt. See Chapman v. California, 386 U.S. 18, 24, 87 S.Ct. 824, 828, 17 L.Ed.2d 705 (1967). III We next consider the district court's dismissal of Gaskins' claim that the state trial judge's demonstrated bias and lack of impartiality made his state trial fundamentally unfair and therefore violated his constitutional right to due process. Fourteenth amendment due process requires, at a minimum, an impartial judge and jury. See Anderson v. Warden, Md. Penitentiary, 696 F.2d 296, 299 (4th Cir.1982). Gaskins makes a number of arguments supporting his contention that the state trial judge demonstrably was lacking in the requisite degree of impartiality to ensure due process. First, he points to twenty-two instances where the state trial judge allegedly improperly questioned witnesses. Second, he points to a newspaper article published after the guilt phase of Gaskins' trial, but before sentencing, in which the trial judge, in response to a reporter's question whether the judge thought Gaskins would receive the death penalty, replied, "what can you give a man who has got ten life sentences." We are persuaded upon a careful review of the record that the judge's conduct did not deny Gaskins a constitutionally fair trial. Of the twenty-two alleged instances where the trial judge questioned witnesses, Gaskins asserts the following as examples of the most "egregious" demonstrations of impermissible bias. These occurred during the questioning of state's witness James Brown and Gaskins' chief rebuttal witness to Brown's testimony, John Caison. It will be recalled that Brown was the inmate who, allegedly at Gaskins' behest, actually delivered the bomb to Tyner, and who testified to that effect at trial. The allegedly prejudicial conduct occurred when the state attempted to introduce through Brown certain incriminating letters that Gaskins had given Brown. After Brown testified that Gaskins had given him the letters, but before the letters were introduced, the trial judge conducted a hearing outside the hearing of the jury to determine the letters' admissibility. When the jury returned, the trial judge, even though Brown had already testified to the source of the letters, asked Brown to "reiterate where he got the documents from for the jury." J.A. at 214. During Brown's cross-examination, Gaskins attempted to establish that the letters were not incriminating. After sustaining an objection to a question concerning the intent of a phrase in the letter, the trial judge asked Brown directly what the letters meant to him. When Brown responded that they meant that Gaskins was trying to talk Brown into "taking the rap for it," the trial judge commented, " hat's right. That's what he thought." J.A. at 269. During the state's cross-examination of Gaskins' rebuttal witness, John Caison, Caison testified that Brown told Caison that Brown and others were plotting to get Tyner. When Caison testified that Brown did not reveal other members of the plot, the following colloquy occurred between the trial judge and Caison: THE COURT: You didn't ask CAISON: No, he said ... THE COURT: It's such a big event, weren't you curious? CAISON: What he told me, he said ... THE COURT: Tell the truth now. Did you ask him? CAISON: I asked him what it was about. THE COURT: Did he tell you? CAISON: No sir, he ... THE COURT: He wouldn't tell you? CAISON: He told me the less that I knew the better off I was. THE COURT: He delivered the explosives for somebody else? CAISON: I guess so. He didn't tell me that. THE COURT: He didn't tell you that. Tell the jury what he told you? J.A. at 336-37. Later, after Caison's redirect testimony concerning Brown's alleged involvement in an earlier attempt to poison Tyner, the trial judge again engaged in a colloquy with Caison: MR. SWERLING: Who told you not to go on Death Row ? CAISON: James Brown. * * * * * * THE COURT: Why did he tell you that?CAISON: He didn't want me to go on there to know about nothing. He wanted me to stay away from death row. THE COURT: All right. What did he have against Rudolph Tyner? Why did he want to kill him? CAISON: For the money. * * * * * * THE COURT: * * * * * * CAISON: I don't know. He didn't say. THE COURT: And you didn't ask? CAISON: He wouldn't have told me anyhow. * * * * * * THE COURT: Why didn't you ask him who paid him money? * * * * * * CAISON: Well, when somebody don't want to answer your question, you best leave them alone. J.A. 343-47. Gaskins argues that the trial judge's engagement with Brown and Caison reflected to the jury that Brown's theory, and not Caison's theory, was credible. This, argues Gaskins, rendered the trial fundamentally unfair, especially when coupled with the following accessory-before-the-fact jury instruction: ou must be convinced as I told you that the Defendant here aided, counseled, or otherwise procured James Brown to commit the murder of Rudolph Tyner and that the Defendant was not present either actually or constructively. J.A. 446. The instruction, argues Gaskins, simply incorporated the state's theory of the offense into the charge. Although these various instances of involvement by the trial judge might, in isolation, have damaged Gaskins' ability to discredit Brown's testimony, taken in the context of the entire trial, the trial judge's involvement did not render the trial fundamentally unfair. The record evidence of Gaskins' involvement in the plot to kill Tyner, even without Brown's testimony, was overwhelming. We therefore hold that any error in the trial court's involvement was harmless beyond a reasonable doubt. See Anderson, 696 F.2d at 299. Moreover, we fail to understand how the disputed jury instruction was in any way erroneous and we are directed to no case law to that effect. On the evidence of record, this was a proper instruction concerning what the jury had to find before it could convict Gaskins of murder or accessory before the fact to murder. Finally, respecting the trial judge's alleged statement to the newspaper, although we seriously question the propriety of such a statement if actually made, there is no evidence that the newspaper was read by any members of the sequestered jury or that by making the statement the trial judge allowed arbitrary factors to enter into the jury's deliberation. The judge himself did not of course decide the sentence to be imposed. We therefore affirm the district court's rejection of the claim of a denial of due process by virtue of the trial judge's lack of impartiality. IV We next consider related claims respecting the jury selection process. Of ten peremptory challenges available to Gaskins, three were exercised to exclude jurors Rhyne, Richardson, and Cecil. Gaskins argues that, for various reasons, the trial court erroneously refused to excuse these jurors for cause. Of the jurors who did sit, Gaskins argues that the trial court erroneously refused to excuse juror Doster for cause. Gaskins rightly makes no claim that requiring him to use peremptory challenges to exclude jurors Rhyne, Richardson, and Cecil violated his fourteenth amendment right to due process by arbitrarily depriving him of the full complement of peremptory challenges allowed by South Carolina law. See Ross v. Oklahoma, 487 U.S. 81, 108 S.Ct. 2273, 101 L.Ed.2d 80 (1988). The crux of Gaskins' claim in this regard is that he was denied his sixth amendment right to an impartial jury. "Any claim that the jury was not impartial ... must focus ... on the jurors who actually sat" and cannot be established simply by showing the loss of a peremptory challenge. Id. at 86, 108 S.Ct. at 2277. Accordingly, we examine Gaskins' claim in light of the jurors who actually sat. Of the jurors who actually sat, Gaskins only challenges the impartiality of juror Doster, whom Gaskins unsuccessfully challenged for cause but did not then challenge peremptorily. Doster admitted on voir dire that his "honest opinion is that was found guilty, convicted of those earlier murders, he should have been executed at that time." J.A. 110. Moreover, upon questioning by the trial court, Doster stated that, if Gaskins were found guilty of Tyner's murder, and that if it were shown that Gaskins had murdered before, Doster would be predisposed to impose a death penalty. Though he concedes that Doster was capable of impartially determining guilt or innocence, Gaskins contends that Doster should have been excused for cause because Doster's ability to consider a life sentence would be substantially impaired by his belief that Gaskins should have received the death penalty for the previous murders. While it may be true that Doster was predisposed in favor of the death penalty, we find no constitutional error in the trial court's refusal to exclude him. First, it is important to note that Gaskins elected not to use an available peremptory challenge to remove Doster. Though not dispositive, this is some indication that, at the time, the trial judge and Gaskins, both of whom had opportunity to observe Doster's demeanor, felt that Doster would act impartially. The controlling principle here is that "the most that can be demanded of a venireman ... is that he be willing to consider all of the penalties provided by state law, and that he not be irrevocably committed." Witherspoon v. Illinois, 391 U.S. 510, 522 n. 21, 88 S.Ct. 1770, 1777 n. 21, 20 L.Ed.2d 776 (1968) (emphasis in original). Our examination of Doster's voir dire testimony convinces us that the district judge did not err in concluding that he was not irrevocably committed. At numerous times during questioning, Doster stated that he could give a life sentence, even in the presence of aggravating circumstances. Doster stated that, though he could not with certainty say that the prior conviction would not affect his thoughts on sentencing, when it came time actually to impose the death sentence, he did not know how he would vote. Under the circumstances, we cannot say that Doster's views would "prevent or substantially impair the performance of his duties as a juror in accordance with his instructions and his oath." Adams v. Texas, 448 U.S. 38, 45, 100 S.Ct. 2521, 2526, 65 L.Ed.2d 581 (1980). Accordingly, we agree with the district court that the trial court's refusal to dismiss Doster for cause did not violate Gaskins' sixth amendment right to an impartial jury. V During the course of the trial, the trial court made three evidentiary rulings which, Gaskins argues, rendered his trial fundamentally unfair. The first involved Gaskins' cross-examination of James Brown; the second involved Gaskins' direct examination of John Caison; the third involved allowing a material witness to assert the fifth amendment. During cross-examination of Brown, Gaskins sought to discredit Brown with questions concerning Brown's attempts to blame on others the two prior murders of which he had been convicted. This evidence, argues Gaskins, constituted not only an attack on Brown's credibility, but would also have buttressed Gaskins' theory that Brown, not Gaskins, had conceived and executed Tyner's murder. The trial court excluded this evidence based upon the general South Carolina rule that only the fact of a conviction of a crime of moral turpitude is admissible. On appeal, the South Carolina Supreme Court held that, to the extent the trial court's ruling was erroneous, such error was harmless. See Gaskins, 326 S.E.2d at 139-40. We agree. Absent "circumstances impugning fundamental fairness or infringing specific constitutional protections," admissibility of evidence does not present a federal question. Grundler v. North Carolina, 283 F.2d 798, 802 (4th Cir.1960). Nevertheless, the defendant has a fundamental right to effective cross-examination on matters bearing on the witness' credibility. See Davis v. Alaska, 415 U.S. 308, 94 S.Ct. 1105, 39 L.Ed.2d 347 (1974). We agree with the district court that the trial judge's discretionary refusal to allow this particular line of cross-examination did not deny any federal constitutional right, if indeed it constituted an abuse of discretion under state law. Although Gaskins was not permitted to elicit from Brown the circumstances surrounding his other convictions, Gaskins availed himself of ample opportunities to discredit Brown's testimony. For example, during cross-examination, Brown revealed that, contrary to his trial testimony, he had initially told investigators that he and Gaskins had run together to Tyner's cell after the explosion. J.A. at 225. On further cross-examination, Brown admitted that he had revealed nothing to investigators about the speaker-cup bomb, and that when he finally did give his present version of the Tyner murder to the prosecutor, he did so from fear of being charged himself. J.A. at 232. In light of ample opportunities to impeach Brown's credibility, and in light of the overwhelming evidence of Gaskins' guilt, any abuse of the trial court's discretion on this score was harmless beyond a reasonable doubt. Similarly, any improper restriction on Gaskins' direct examination of John Caison was harmless beyond a reasonable doubt. On direct examination, James Brown stated that he had never admitted to Caison having attempted to poison Tyner. On direct examination of Caison, Gaskins attempted to elicit testimony to the effect that Brown had admitted attempting to poison Tyner and that, on the day of the explosion, Brown had told Caison to stay away from death row. The trial court excluded these statements as inadmissible hearsay. J.A. at 298-301. Even so, during cross-examination, Caison testified that "James Brown told me that they were plotting to get ," and that Brown told Caison "not to be on death row on Sunday." J.A. at 336-37. The information allegedly excluded was therefore ultimately adduced during cross-examination, rendering any error by the trial court in excluding it harmless beyond reasonable doubt. See Grundler, 283 F.2d at 802. Gaskins' final challenge to the state trial court's evidentiary rulings involves the court's refusal, after being informed that witness William Cole would assert his fifth amendment privilege against self-incrimination if forced to testify, to require Cole to take the stand and assert the privilege in open court. Out of the jury's hearing, the trial court determined that the crux of Cole's testimony would be that, after the explosion, Gaskins went, not to his cell as Brown had testified, but down to the site of the explosion. See Gaskins, 326 S.E.2d at 140. A criminal defendant's right to compel testimony is fundamental to sixth and fourteenth amendment due process rights. See United States v. Goodwin, 625 F.2d 693, 703-04 (5th Cir.1980). When a witness indicates that he will assert the fifth amendment privilege, the trial judge must make a proper and particularized inquiry into the legitimacy and scope of the witness' assertion of the privilege. See id. at 701. A witness may be totally excused only if the court finds that he could legitimately refuse to answer any and all relevant questions. See id. On this point we agree with the South Carolina Supreme Court that the trial court's refusal to require Cole to assert his fifth amendment privilege before the jury was in any event harmless error. First off, as the South Carolina Supreme Court concluded, Cole's testimony would have been merely cumulative. See Gaskins, 326 S.E.2d at 140. Moreover, the fact that Gaskins did not elect to offer Cole's expected testimony in the state post-conviction proceeding strongly suggests his own estimate of its slight probative value. Any error in refusing to require Cole to take the stand was harmless beyond a reasonable doubt. VI Gaskins' next claim involves alleged prosecutorial misconduct. During the state's closing argument at the guilt phase of Gaskins' trial, the solicitor stated that he wished to talk to the jury "about what is not in dispute in this case." J.A. at 367. The solicitor then proceeded to list fourteen so-called "undisputed" pieces of evidence, eight of which, Gaskins argues, only Gaskins could have disputed. Additionally, during the sentencing phase of Gaskins' trial, the prosecutor stated that "Mr. Gaskins has shown no remorse. No emotion. He has shown you nothing." J.A. at 577. Gaskins did not object to these statements at trial, but argued on both direct appeal and collateral review that these statements constituted violations of Doyle v. Ohio, 426 U.S. 610, 96 S.Ct. 2240, 49 L.Ed.2d 91 (1976) (improper comment on defendant's failure to testify). In assessing an alleged Doyle violation, the question is whether the disputed statement so infected the trial and sentencing with unfairness that the ultimate conviction and sentence constituted a denial of due process. See Darden v. Wainwright, 477 U.S. 168, 106 S.Ct. 2464, 91 L.Ed.2d 144 (1986). The eight "undisputed" pieces of evidence are: (1) tapes of Gaskins' conversations with Jack Martin (the intermediary through whom Cimo contacted Gaskins in prison); (2) identities of the voices on the Martin-Gaskins tapes; (3) the dates when the conversations occurred; (4) the exhibit showing when Cimo and Gaskins conversed; (5) Gaskins' voice on a statement given to an investigator; (6) two inculpatory letters written from Gaskins to Brown; (7) a letter written from Gaskins to Lee exculpating Lee; and (8) that electronic equipment, a soldering iron, speakers, and radios were found in Gaskins' cell. As the magistrate's recommendation, adopted by the district court, correctly notes, Gaskins presumably could have sought the testimony of voice and handwriting analysts to contradict items 1-7, and any number of inmates could have testified to the items Gaskins kept in his cell before Tyner's murder. We agree with the district court that, under these circumstances, the prosecutor's "laundry list" argument did not constitute a Doyle violation. Likewise, the state's argument during sentencing to the effect that Gaskins has shown no remorse must be viewed in context. The solicitor stated that: Mr. Gaskins has announced to the Court that he is going to make a speech to you as well. I want Mr. Gaskins when he comes up to tell you what in his character caused him to murder each of these people, what caused him to murder Dennis Bellamy? What caused him to shoot this 15 year old, Johnny Knight, in the back of the head? * * * * * * Mr. Gaskins has shown no remorse. No emotion. He has shown you nothing. * * * * * * Mr. is going to speak to you at this time ... and I ask you to listen to as you listened to me. J.A. 576-77. Under no reasonable view can the solicitor's statement be construed to constitute an improper comment on Gaskins' refusal to testify at the guilt phase of his trial. VII Gaskins asserts the following two errors in the trial court's guilt-phase jury instructions: (1) the trial court's charge regarding presumed malice constituted an impermissible burden-shifting instruction; and (2) the trial court's reasonable doubt instruction impermissibly lessened the state's burden of proof. As part of the jury charge, the trial court instructed the jury that "while malice is presumed from the use of a deadly weapon or from a dangerous instrument ... where circumstances relating and surrounding the incident are brought out, then the presumption vanishes and malice again must be proven to you beyond a reasonable doubt." J.A. at 442. On direct appeal, the South Carolina Supreme Court held that, although the instruction constituted impermissible burden-shifting, the constitutional error was harmless beyond a reasonable doubt. See Gaskins, 326 S.E.2d at 143. Both the magistrate and the district court agreed with the state supreme court. J.A. 1186; 1326-27. We also agree. Even where an instruction constitutes impermissible burden-shifting, any error in giving it may be found harmless if the reviewing court can say beyond reasonable doubt that the jury would have found it unnecessary to rely on the burden-shifting presumption in order to convict. See Rose v. Clark, 478 U.S. 570, 583, 106 S.Ct. 3101, 3109, 92 L.Ed.2d 460 (1986). Here, the jury necessarily found by its guilty verdict that Gaskins had murdered Tyner with a bomb Gaskins had built from electronic components in his cell and a piece of dynamite he received in the mail, so it is difficult to see how the jury could not have concluded, even without the presumption, that the killing was done "with malice." Aside from the raw circumstances of the killing, transcripts of conversations between Gaskins and Jack Martin (the intermediary who procured Tyner's murder) constitute further overwhelming evidence of malice.3 We therefore can say " 'beyond a reasonable doubt that the jury would have found it unnecessary to rely on the presumption.' " Id. Gaskins next asserts that the trial court's definition of reasonable doubt for the jury as "a doubt for which you can give a reason t is a substantial doubt," J.A. at 439, relieved the prosecution of proving every element of the crime beyond reasonable doubt as required by In re Winship, 397 U.S. 358, 364, 90 S.Ct. 1068, 1072, 25 L.Ed.2d 368 (1970). An instruction equating reasonable doubt with " 'a substantial doubt, a real doubt' ... although perhaps not in itself reversible error, often has been criticized as confusing." Taylor v. Kentucky, 436 U.S. 478, 488, 98 S.Ct. 1930, 1936, 56 L.Ed.2d 468 (1978). At some point, a reasonable doubt definition may be so incomprehensible or potentially prejudicial that it requires reversal. See United States v. Moss, 756 F.2d 329, 333 (4th Cir.1985). Nevertheless, the question in a collateral proceeding such as this is "whether the ailing instruction by itself so infected the entire trial that the resulting conviction violates due process, not merely whether 'the instruction is undesirable, erroneous or even universally condemned.' " Smith v. Bordenkircher, 718 F.2d 1273, 1276 (4th Cir.1983) (quoting Henderson v. Kibbe, 431 U.S. 145, 154, 97 S.Ct. 1730, 1736, 52 L.Ed.2d 203 (1977) (citations omitted)). Viewed in the context of the entire record of trial, the substantial-doubt portion of the instruction did not rise to the level of a due process violation. First, the trial court employed the instruction to set in contrast "some imaginary doubt or some slight doubt or some fanciful doubt that you might have." J.A. at 439. The trial judge's use of the term substantial doubt was, in context of the entire instruction, more accurate than when viewed in artificial isolation, and was not "likely to 'mislead the jury into finding no reasonable doubt when in fact there was some.' " Smith v. Bordenkircher, 718 F.2d at 1277. Moreover, the trial court flatly instructed the jury that "the proof offered by the state must exclude every other reasonable hypothesis except the guilt of the accused and must satisfy you beyond a reasonable doubt." J.A. at 444. This instruction further neutralized any negative effects of the substantial-doubt instruction. See Bordenkircher, 718 F.2d at 1277. We are not prepared to say that this instruction, even in combination with the substantial doubt instruction, "so infected the entire trial that the resulting conviction violates due process." Id. at 1276. VIII Gaskins argues that allowing evidence that a prior death sentence of Gaskins had been vacated could have led the jury to believe that any death penalty it imposed was advisory only, thereby diminishing the jurors' sense of responsibility for death-penalty imposition in violation of Caldwell v. Mississippi, 472 U.S. 320, 105 S.Ct. 2633, 86 L.Ed.2d 231 (1985) (eighth amendment violation to tell jury that Mississippi Supreme Court would review any death sentence).4 " t is constitutionally impermissible to rest a death sentence on a determination made by a sentencer who has been led to believe that the responsibility for determining the appropriateness of the defendant's death rests elsewhere." Caldwell, 472 U.S. at 328-29, 105 S.Ct. at 2639-40. Nevertheless, "if the challenged instructions accurately described the role of the jury under state law, there is no basis for a Caldwell claim. To establish a Caldwell violation, a defendant necessarily must show that the remarks to the jury improperly described the role assigned to the jury by local law." Dugger v. Adams, 489 U.S. 401, 109 S.Ct. 1211, 1215, 103 L.Ed.2d 435 (1989). The asserted Caldwell violation occurred when, during the penalty phase of the trial, the state introduced evidence of Gaskins' previously vacated murder conviction.5 And it is argued that this Caldwell violation was aggravated by the trial court's use over 40 times of words to the effect that "you will recommend that the court sentence the defendant to life imprisonment death." J.A. 610 (emphasis added). Even taken together, we conclude that this evidence and the judge's statement "had no effect on the sentencing decision." Caldwell, 472 U.S. at 341, 105 S.Ct. at 2646. First, Gaskins points to no references by the state or the trial judge concerning death-sentence review. We do not believe that evidence concerning a prior vacated death sentence "improperly described the role assigned to the jury by local law." Dugger, 109 S.Ct. at 1215. The most that a reasonable jury could have made of this evidence was that the statute under which the jury was to sentence Gaskins might conceivably be invalidated as unconstitutional at some future date. Nowhere was there any suggestion that such invalidation was imminent or even contemplated. Similarly, even taken together with the prior-death-sentence evidence, it is difficult to see how, in context, the trial judge's use of the word "recommend" could have had an effect on the sentencing decision. In an exhaustive analysis, the facts of which are not disputed here, the magistrate noted that during voir dire, the trial judge, the solicitor and Gaskins' attorney repeatedly told each juror that the jury could sentence to death or life imprisonment, that the jury had to make the decision, and that "the jury will be asked to decide his punishment, either life imprisonment or death by electrocution." Moreover, in each case Gaskins cites finding a Caldwell violation, the suggestion to the jury that its decision was merely advisory was explicit and obvious. Nowhere in this case did anyone even imply that the jury's recommendation was non-binding. Though, in retrospect, we believe a wiser course would have been for the trial judge to explicitly instruct the jury that the word "recommendation" meant "binding recommendation," under the circumstances, we are satisfied that the jury was properly aware of its sentencing responsibilities. Gaskins also contends that, even if there was no Caldwell violation, allowing testimony concerning the prior-vacated death sentence introduced arbitrary factors in the sentencing decision in violation of Booth v. Maryland, 482 U.S. 496, 107 S.Ct. 2529, 96 L.Ed.2d 440 (1987). Gaskins argues that this testimony implied that, regardless of whether Gaskins should be sentenced to death for Tyner's murder, the jury could properly reimpose the earlier death penalty which was, after all, only vacated because of a legal technicality. Although we agree that evidence of a prior-vacated death penalty is of limited, if any, relevance to the jury's decision whether to impose the death penalty, it is simply not a consideration so "constitutionally impermissible or totally irrelevant to the sentencing process," Zant v. Stephens, 462 U.S. 862, 885, 103 S.Ct. 2733, 2747, 77 L.Ed.2d 235 (1983), as to rise to the level of a violation of Booth. IX Gaskins' final assignments of error concern the trial judge's instructions to the sentencing jury to the following effect: (1) that the jury could not allow itself to be governed by sympathy; (2) that mitigating circumstances must be found beyond a reasonable doubt; (3) that the decision to impose a life sentence must be unanimous. At the sentencing hearing, the trial court instructed the jury not to allow itself to be governed by sympathy: You cannot allow yourselves to be governed by sympathy, by prejudice, or by passion or by public opinion. Both the state and the defendant have the right to expect that each of you will carefully and impartially consider all of the evidence in this case.... J.A. at 619. Gaskins argues that this instruction, coupled with the prosecutor's statements to the effect that Gaskins was asking for, but deserved, no mercy, constituted an eighth amendment violation because it effectively precluded the jury from considering relevant mitigating evidence offered by Gaskins, namely his individualized appeal for compassion, understanding and mercy. See, e.g., Caldwell, 472 U.S. at 330-31, 105 S.Ct. at 2640-41; Gregg v. Georgia, 428 U.S. 153, 199, 96 S.Ct. 2909, 2937, 49 L.Ed.2d 859 (1976). Our consideration of this issue is foreclosed by the Supreme Court's recent decision in Saffle v. Parks, --- U.S. ----, 110 S.Ct. 1257, 108 L.Ed.2d 415 (1990). Parks, considering the eighth amendment ramifications of a sympathy instruction in all material respects identical to the charge given in Gaskins' case,6 held that to uphold such a claim would be to adopt a "new rule" under Teague v. Lane, 489 U.S. 288, 109 S.Ct. 1060, 103 L.Ed.2d 334 (1989), that did not fall within Teague 's two exceptions. Accordingly, the proposed rule could not be announced or applied in a habeas case on collateral review. Parks, 110 S.Ct. at 1263-64. Parks dictates a similar rejection of Gaskins' claim here. Gaskins next asserts that the following charge, because it used the term "reasonable doubt" so close to the term "mitigating circumstance," impermissibly suggested to the sentencing jury that mitigating circumstances must be found beyond reasonable doubt in contravention of the eighth amendment: Before you can recommend the imposition of a life sentence, it is not necessary and I repeat, it is not necessary for you to find beyond a reasonable doubt the existence of any alleged statutory mitigating circumstances or any other mitigating circumstance. While it is necessary for you to find beyond a reasonable doubt the existence of at least one alleged statutory aggravating circumstance before you can recommend that the defendant be sentenced to death, it is not--it is not required that you find beyond a reasonable doubt the existence of at least one alleged statutory mitigating circumstance in order to recommend that the defendant be given a life sentence. As a matter of fact, you may recommend that the defendant receive a life sentence irrespective of whether you find the existence in the evidence of an alleged statutory mitigating circumstance or not; but where you consider an alleged statutory mitigating circumstance, it is proper for you to consider only a statutory mitigating circumstance that is supported by the evidence. J.A. 614-15 (emphasis added). We disagree. Gaskins' strained interpretation of the trial court's jury instruction is simply not supported by its language, and does not warrant finding an eighth amendment violation. Similarly, the trial court's statement to the effect that "you have to find at least one or more aggravating circumstances or else you will have to recommend a death sentence ," could not, in the context of the entire charge, have confused a reasonable juror. As the South Carolina Supreme Court stated, the trial court instructions made patently clear that: (1) a death penalty could not be imposed without aggravating circumstances; (2) if statutory or non-statutory mitigating circumstances were found, a life sentence would be appropriate; (3) the jury had, in any case, full discretion not to impose the death sentence, even though aggravating circumstances and no mitigating circumstances were found. See Gaskins, 326 S.E.2d at 146. Gaskins' final asserted error in the jury charge concerned the trial court's erroneous instruction to the effect that the decision to impose a life sentence must be unanimous. Gaskins contends that this incorrect instruction effectively communicated to the jury that if all members of the jury did not agree on Gaskins' sentence, then a mistrial would ensue. Thus, the erroneous instruction constituted an arbitrary factor into the sentencing, rendering the unanimous death sentence unreliable. See, e.g., Gardner v. Florida, 430 U.S. 349, 97 S.Ct. 1197, 51 L.Ed.2d 393 (1977). We disagree. Although the trial court inadvertently misstated South Carolina law, it is inconceivable that the disputed instruction could have caused the jurors unanimously to impose a death sentence out of fear of mistrial should they not be unanimous in their decision to impose life imprisonment. We are satisfied that this improper instruction, viewed in context of the entire jury charge, could have had no effect on the sentencing decision. See Caldwell, 472 U.S. at 341, 105 S.Ct. at 2646. X For the foregoing reasons, we affirm the district court's dismissal of Gaskins' habeas corpus petition. AFFIRMED. ***** 1 Cf. United States v. Jones, 907 F.2d 456, 460-69 (4th Cir.1990), and id. at 470-84 (dissenting opinion) (conflicting views on constitutional power of federal sentencing court to entertain collateral challenge to validity of prior state court conviction invoked for sentence enhancement purposes) 2 The parties do not raise and we therefore do not address the possible bearing on this point of Zant v. Stephens, 462 U.S. 862, 103 S.Ct. 2733, 77 L.Ed.2d 235 (1983) (where capital sentencing jurors have found two aggravators, invalidation of one on review does not require vacating death sentence), and Smith v. Procunier, 769 F.2d 170 (4th Cir.1985), aff'd on other grounds, 477 U.S. 527, 106 S.Ct. 2661, 91 L.Ed.2d 434 (1986) (constitutional invalidity of one finding of aggravating factor does not require vacating death penalty where another aggravator is unchallenged) 3 Some examples of conversations appear in the record: When he plugs that son of a bitch up, it'll blow him on into hell.... Dam if I can't fix him up. Get me enough to do that damn job and listen for the bang. That's enough to bust his heart. The next night after I get ... that son of a bitch'll be laid out. That's a hell of a hard ***** to get rid of. J.A. 1185. 4 Because this claim is closely related to Gaskins' claim that the trial judge's sentencing-phase instructions exacerbated the Caldwell violation, both will be dealt with in this section of the opinion 5 The sentence was vacated when the South Carolina Supreme Court declared South Carolina's death penalty statute unconstitutional 6 The challenged instruction in Parks stated that: You must avoid any influence of sympathy, sentiment, passion, prejudice, or other arbitrary factor when imposing sentence. You should discharge your duty as jurors impartially, conscientiously and faithfully under your oaths and return such verdict as the evidence warrants when measured by these Instructions. Parks v. Brown, 860 F.2d 1545, 1552 n. 8 (10th Cir.1988), reversed, --- U.S. ----, 110 S.Ct. 1257, 108 L.Ed.2d 415 (1990). 943 F.2d 49 Donald Henry Gaskins, Petitioner-appellant, v. Parker D. Evatt, Commissioner, South Carolina Department Of Corrections, T. Travis Medlock, Attorney General, Respondents-appellees United States Court of Appeals, Fourth Circuit. Submitted Sept. 5, 1991. Decided Sept. 5, 1991 Appeal from the United States District Court for the District of South Carolina, at Greenville. G. Ross Anderson, Jr., District Judge. (CA-91-2628-3-H) D.S.C. RELIEF DENIED. Before PHILLIPS and HAMILTON, Circuit Judges, and CHAPMAN, Senior Circuit Judge. PER CURIAM: With but a few hours remaining until the scheduled execution of petitioner Donald HenryGaskins, he has filed a voluminous petition for a writ of habeas corpus in which he attacks his conviction and sentence for capital murder rendered after a jury trial in the Richland County Court of General Sessions sitting in Columbia, South Carolina. Petitioner also seeks an evidentiary hearing on his petition for the great writ and a stay of his execution, which is set for 1:00 a.m. September 6, 1991. Gaskins was convicted of murdering one Rudolph Tyner, who, at the time of his death, was an inmate of the South Carolina Central Correctional Institution in Columbia, South Carolina. Tyner had previously been convicted of the capital murders of Mr. and Mrs. Warren Moon and sentenced to be executed. Gaskins was a fellow inmate of Tyner and was convicted of murdering Tyner for hire. At the time he murdered Tyner, Gaskins was serving nine life sentences for previous murders he had committed. The South Carolina Supreme Court affirmed the conviction and sentence on direct appeal. See State v. Gaskins, 326 S.E.2d 132 (1985), cert. denied, 471 U.S. 1120 (1985). Post-conviction relief was unsuccessful. See Gaskins v. State, No. 85-CP-40-3466, Letter Order (S.C. Jan. 7, 1987), cert. denied, 482 U.S. 909 (1987). His most recent petition for a writ of habeas corpus was denied by the South Carolina Supreme Court in the late afternoon of September 4, 1991. Gaskins has previously sought habeas corpus relief in our court but his petition was denied. See Gaskins v. McKellar, 916 F.2d 941 (1990), cert. denied, 111 S.Ct. 2277 (1991). The district court has denied his latest petition in an exhaustive opinion which has thoroughly discussed the three issues he has raised. At 6:00 p.m. he seeks a stay of execution pending full briefing and consideration of his appeal. In his new petition, Gaskins presents three grounds: (1) that the trial judge refused to admit into evidence, during the sentencing phase of his trial, the confession of Tyner to the murders of Mr. and Mrs. Moon and thereby denied him the right under Payne v. Tennessee, --- U.S. ----, 111 S.Ct. 1597 (1991) to present evidence about the character of his murder victim; (2) that evidence was admitted during the sentencing phase of his trial as to his racist views and affiliations as aggravating evidence to justify the imposition of the death penalty; and (3) that his sentence was based upon invalid prior convictions of murder. There is no merit to these claims. While we feel that petitioner reads Payne too broadly, even so, the evidence as to Tyner's character was fully presented to the sentencing jury, and a copy of Tyner's confession would have added nothing about his character of which the jury was not already aware. The jury had been made repeatedly aware that Tyner had murdered Mr. and Mrs. Moon in cold blood to prevent them from being witnesses to his armed robbery of them and their convenience store. Gaskins' jury was also aware that Tyner was awaiting execution for his crimes. The second ground, that it was error to admit evidence as to his racist views and affiliations, is now barred. This claim was presented in his first petition to the United States District Court filed August 11, 1987. The claim was denied by the district court, and the claim was abandoned by petitioner when he failed to appeal this issue to the U.S. Court of Appeals. The claim is also barred because it is successive, having been raised in his original petition of August 1987. See Rule 9(b), Rules Governing Section 2254 Cases in the United States District Courts. In his third ground petitioner seeks at this late hour to attack the validity of his prior murder convictions. This is clearly an abuse of the writ. Petitioner and his attorneys have known since his trial that his prior murder convictions, together with his murder of Tyner for hire, were used as aggravating circumstances under Section 16-320(C(a) Code of Laws of South Carolina, 1976 to support the jury's recommendation of a death sentence. Petitioner has made no showing that he did not have knowledge of the circumstances applicable to his prior murder convictions prior to his most recent petition, nor has he shown why this claim was not asserted at an earlier time. The issue of Gaskins' prior murder convictions was also covered in our prior decision, and the present claims add nothing new. The petition to stay execution does not present substantial grounds upon which relief might be granted. The issues have been previously considered and decided. The present petition for the writ is lacking in merit as we have explained above, therefore the motion to stay execution is denied. The mandate shall issue forthwith. RELIEF DENIED. http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=dfe_1348947772 deathgod198255 DONALD HENRY GASKINS JR SERIAL KILLER (first paragraph says it all ) FRIED serial killer, electrocuted ,stabbing ,women Mon, 20 Sep 2010 06:43:59 -0400 http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=ca9_1284979330 absu69 For decades, investigative journalists, researchers and analysts have noted the symbiotic relationships forged amongst international drug syndicates, neofascists and U.S. intelligence agencies, documenting the long and bloody history of U.S. complicity in the global drugs trade. While the United States has pumped billions of dollars into failed drug eradication schemes in target countries through ill-conceived programs such as Plan Colombia and the M'erida Initiative, in the bizarro world of the "War on Drugs," corporate interests and geopolitics always trump law enforcement efforts to fight organized crime, particularly when the criminals are partners in crimes perpetrated by the secret state. Since 2006, when Mexican President Felipe Calder'on turned the Army loose, allegedly to "dismantle" the drug cartels slowly transforming Mexico into a killing field some 28,000 people, primarily along Mexico's northern border with the U.S., have lost their lives. Countless others have been wounded, forced to flee or simply "disappeared." Writing in The Guardian, journalist Simon Jenkins tells us that "cocaine supplies routed through Mexico have made that country the drugs equivalent of a Gulf oil state." "Rather than try to stem its own voracious appetite for drugs," Jenkins writes, "rich America shifts guilt on to poor supplier countries. Never was the law of economics--demand always evokes supply--so traduced as in Washington's drugs policy. America spends $40bn a year on narcotics policy, imprisoning a staggering 1.5m of its citizens under it." Judging the results, one might even think the drug war solely exists as the principle means through which wealthy elites organize crime. Scenes from the Atrocity Exhibition o December 13, 2009: The Observer reported that "drugs money worth billions of dollars kept the financial system afloat at the height of the global crisis." Antonio Maria Costa, head of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, said he saw evidence that "the proceeds of organised crime were 'the only liquid investment capital' available to some banks on the brink of collapse last year. He said that a majority of the $352bn (lb216bn) of drugs profits was absorbed into the economic system as a result." The Observer informed us that this "will raise questions about crime's influence on the economic system at times of crisis." Costa told the British newspaper that "in many instances, the money from drugs was the only liquid investment capital. In the second half of 2008, liquidity was the banking system's main problem and hence liquid capital became an important factor." Although the UN's drug czar declined to identify the countries or banks that benefited from narcotics investments, he said that "inter-bank loans were funded by money that originated from the drugs trade and other illegal activities... There were signs that some banks were rescued that way." o February 26, 2010: Responding to charges by left-wing critics and academics, Mexican president Felipe Calder'on was forced to counter evidence that his government's "offensive" against narcotraffickers has left the "largest and most powerful of the cartels relatively unscathed," the Los Angeles Times disclosed. Critics accused the government of favoritism towards the Sinaloa cartel, claiming it "has been allowed to escape most of the government's firepower and carry on with its illegal business as usual." During a news conference, Calder'on said such charges were "absolutely false." The president said the suggestion was "painful," and went on to say: "I can assure you that this government has attacked without discrimination all criminal groups in Mexico ... without taking into consideration whether it's the cartel of so-and-so or what's-his-name. We've fought them all." Edgardo Buscaglia, an academic expert on organized crime challenged the president and said that arrest figures "skew heavily" toward the other cartels. "By his calculation," the Times reported, "of more than 53,000 people arrested in drug-trafficking cases in the three years since Calder'on took office, fewer than 1,000 worked for the Sinaloa organization." Commanded by Joaqu'in "El Chapo" Guzm'an, the Sinaloa cartel crime boss placed 937 on Forbes 2010 survey of the world's billionaires with an estimated net worth of $1 billion. A similar modus operandi is standard practice where foreign policy and corporate concerns of America's wealthiest clients overseas override efforts by law enforcement to choke-off the flow of narcotics. In Colombia, secret state agencies such as the CIA have long-favored drug organizations that have served as intelligence assets or death squads. Examples abound. Consider the "untouchable" status enjoyed by the Rodr'iguez Orejuela brothers' Cali cartel. During the 1980s, at the height of America's Central American interventions, cocaine shipped into the United States as part of the U.S. government's "guns-for-drugs" arrangement with Nicaraguan Contra rebels, was principally supplied by Cali traffickers. When Medell'in drug lord Pablo Escobar's group was brought down, the CIA, DEA and the Pentagon's Delta Force relied on operatives funded by the rival Cali faction and Los Pepes, a vigilante group founded by drug lord Carlos Casta~no and his brothers Fidel and Vicente. Los Pepes had operational links to the Colombian National Police, especially the Search Bloc (Bloque de B'usqueda) hunting Escobar, and acted on intelligence provided by the CIA/DEA/Delta Force to execute their missions. After Escobar's death, the Casta~no brothers launched the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC), a notorious right-wing death squad. The AUC in coordination with the Colombian Army, carried out multiple attacks and massacred thousands of leftists, trade union organizers and peasant activists. In 2001 under pressure from human rights groups, the U.S. State Department designated the AUC a "Foreign Terrorist Organization." This didn't however, prevent U.S. corporations such as Chiquita Brands International, Occidental Petroleum, Coca-Cola or the Drummond Company from allegedly hiring out AUC paramilitaries to murder trade union and peasant activists. In 2007, Chiquita pled guilty in federal district court and paid a $25 million fine under provisions of the Anti-Terrorism Act of 1991 for funding the AUC. Dole Food Company now faces similar charges. In 2002, the Justice Department unsealed an indictment against Carlos Casta~no and accused him of trafficking some 17 tons of cocaine into the United States. o March 9, 2010: The National Security Archive published a series of documents linking the U.S. secret state to Mexico's dirty warriors and drug cartel operatives under official protection by a CIA-allied intelligence agency. Following reporting by Peter Dale Scott that "both the FBI and CIA intervened in 1981 to block the indictment (on stolen car charges) of the drug-trafficking Mexican intelligence czar Miguel Nazar Haro, claiming that Nazar was 'an essential repeat essential contact for CIA station in Mexico City,' on matters of 'terrorism, intelligence, and counterintelligence'," the National Security Archive disclosed that Nazar Haro's corrupt Direcci'on Federal de Seguridad (DFS) was responsible for the disappearance, torture and murder of left-wing activists during the 1970s and '80s. The Archive revealed that "there is a deep connection between the former Mexican intelligence service and the country's drug mafias. As DFS agents took command of counterinsurgency raids in the 1970s, they often stumbled upon narcotics safe houses and quickly took on the job of protecting Mexico's drug cartels." Researchers Kate Doyle and Jesse Franzblau told us although "the DFS was disbanded in 1985 following revelations that it was behind the murder of DEA agent Enrique 'Kiki' Camarena, and Mexican journalist Manuel Buendia," of the 1,500 agents who suddenly found themselves unemployed, many "found their training in covert activities and brutal counterinsurgency operations easily adaptable to the needs of the criminal underworld." In 2006, the National Security Archive and investigative journalist Jefferson Morley disclosed that declassified U.S. documents "reveal CIA recruitment of agents within the upper echelons of the Mexican government between 1956 and 1969. The informants used in this secret program included President Gustavo D'iaz Ordaz and future President Luis Echeverr'ia." As we now know, when he served as Interior Secretary in the D'iaz government, Echeverr'ia oversaw the 1968 Tlatelolco massacre of student activists just days before the Summer Olympics were staged in Mexico City. "The documents," Morley wrote, "detail the relationships cultivated between senior CIA officers, such as chief of station Winston Scott, and Mexican government officials through a secret spy network code-named 'LITEMPO.' Operating out of the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City, Scott used the LITEMPO project to provide 'an unofficial channel for the exchange of selected sensitive political information which each government wanted the other to receive but not through public protocol exchanges'." These, and other disclosures reveal that "one of the most crime-ridden CIA assets we know of is the Mexican DFS, which the US helped to create," Peter Dale Scott wrote back in 2000. "From its foundation in the 1940s, the DFS, like other similar kryptocracies in Latin America, was deeply involved with international drug-traffickers. By the 1980s possession of a DFS card was recognized by DEA agents as a 'license to traffic;' DFS agents rode security for drug truck convoys, and used their police radios to check of signs of American police surveillance." Evidence suggests that similar protection and management of the global drug trade persists today. o March 16, 2010: Wachovia Bank, a subsidiary of banking giant Wells Fargo & Co., signed a Deferred Prosecution Agreement with the federal government. Wells admitted in court that its unit failed to monitor and report some $378.4 billion in suspected money laundering transactions by narcotics traffickers between 2004-2008, "a sum equal to one-third of Mexico's current gross domestic product," Bloomberg Markets magazine revealed. Cash laundered by drug mafias were used to purchase a fleet of planes that subsequently shipped some 22 tons of cocaine into the United States. Wells paid the government $160 million to resolve the case. American Express Bank and Western Union also agreed recently to huge settlements with the government for similar offenses. o May 19, 2010: Retired Mexican Army General Mario Arturo Acosta Chaparro was shot and wounded in Mexico City during an alleged robbery attempt. El Universal reports that police claimed that a thief wanted to "steal the general's watch" and shot him several times in the chest. In 2007, after a six-year imprisonment on charges of providing protection to late drug trafficking kingpin Amado Carrillo Fuentes, chief of the Ju'arez cartel and self-described "Lord of the Heavens," Acosta Chaparro was released from custody after his conviction was overturned on appeal. According to documents published by global whistleblowers WikiLeaks in 2009, the Swiss Bank Julius Baer's Cayman Islands unit, allegedly hid "several million dollars" of funds controlled by Acosta Chaparro and his wife, Silvia through a firm known as Symac Investments. WikiLeaks wondered whether Mexican authorities would "want to know whether the several millions of USD had anything to do with the allegations that Mr Chaparro, a former police chief from the Mexican state of Guerrero, stopped chasing his local drug dealers and joined them in business." According to reports cited by WikiLeaks, Acosta Chaparro was "already the subject of multiple allegations not only that he was a narcotrafficker but also that he had played a leading role in the dirty war of police and army against rural guerillas on his patch between 1975 and 1981. He was accused of organising the seizure, torture and murder of peasants who were suspected of helping the rebels and, with particular persistence of overseeing 'flights of death' in which well-tortured detainees were taken up in helicopters and pushed out over the ocean while still alive." Despite these serious charges, WikiLeaks informs us that "no action was taken at all Chaparro's funds might still be managed by the former representative of Julius Baer, Mexico Curtis Lowell Jun in Zurich." o June 7, 2010: Guerrero State Attorney General Albertico Guinto announced that 55 bodies were found deep in an abandoned silver mine outside Taxco, The Christian Science Monitor reported. In various states of decomposition, the victims showed signs of torture before being killed. "It was like a quicksand, but filled with bodies," Luis Rivera, the chief criminologist investigating the scene told The Washington Post. The recovery of the remains took nearly a week, "a task made more difficult" by the fact that some cadavers were mummified, others were dismembered by the fall and at least four of the victims had been decapitated. "There are headless bodies, but some of the heads don't match the bodies," Rivera said. Based on wound analysis of the corpses, investigators theorized that "many of the victims were alive when they were thrown down the mine shaft." o June 12, 2010: The Narco News Bulletin reports "a special operations task force under the command of the Pentagon is currently in place south of the border providing advice and training to the Mexican Army in gathering intelligence, infiltrating and, as needed, taking direct action against narco-trafficking organizations." A "former U.S. government official who has experience dealing with covert operations," told journalist Bill Conroy that "black operations have been going on forever. The recent media reports about those operations under the Obama administration make it sound like it's a big scoop, but it's nothing new for those who understand how things really work." Perhaps we should recall how "things" have worked in the recent past. Back in 2003, the Brownsville Herald reported that Los Zetas, formerly the enforcement arm of the Gulf cartel, "feature 31 ex-soldiers once part of an elite division of the Mexican army, the Special Air Mobile Force Group. At least one-third of this battalion's deserters was trained at the School of the Americas in Fort Benning, Ga., according to documents from the Mexican secretary of defense." According to the U.S. Defense Department, some 513 Mexican Special Forces soldiers received training at the School of the Americas, and about 120 "graduates" joined the Special Air Mobile Force. Luis Astorga, a drug trafficking expert at the National Autonomous University in Mexico City told the Herald: "There is a higher level of danger with the type of knowledge that these people have, their arms capacity, their knowledge of techniques and specialization in (drug) traffic operations. Traffickers traditionally don't have that; they pay other people for those services." Is history repeating itself under the M'erida Initiative? A former DEA official told Narco News in 2005 that "A lot of the Zetas came from former Mexican police offices or the military ... So they come from a diverse background. Some of them have prior training from the DEA, FBI and the U.S. military, as well as other agencies." o June 28, 2010: Rodolfo Torre Cantu, the leading candidate for governor in the state of Tamaulipas was gunned down in one of the highest profile assassinations since a presidential candidate was murdered under suspicious circumstances in 1994. Four others, including local lawmaker Enrique Blackmore, were also killed when their campaign van was sprayed with machine gun fire by unknown assailants. Cantu had vowed to crack down on drug gangs if elected. o July 15, 2010: A powerful car bomb explodes on a crowded street near a federal police headquarters in Ciudad Ju'arez, across the border from El Paso, Texas. Four are killed, including a police officer and doctor lured to the scene. o July 15, 2010: Investigative journalist Daniel Hopsicker revealed that the pilot "of the American-registered DC-9 (N900SA) from St. Petersburg, FL caught carrying 5.5 tons of cocaine in Mexico's Yucatan several years ago," Carmelo Vasquez Guerra, "had been released from prison less than two years after being arrested." Readers will recall that the DC-9 and another American-registered plane, a Gulfstream II business jet (N987SA) that spilled "4 tons of cocaine across a muddy field," Hopsicker reported, were used in CIA "rendition" (torture) flights and had been purchased by Mexican drug gangs with funds laundered through Wachovia Bank. "The shocking news was delivered via an international headline stating that a pilot named Carmelo Vasquez Guerra had been arrested in the West African nation of Guinea Bissau on a twin-engine Gulfstream II carrying... what else? 550 kilos--a half-ton--of cocaine." According to Hopsicker, the drug pilot was arrested--and released--from three countries "under mysterious and unexplained circumstances." Seeking answers to the pilot's series of seemingly miraculous escapes, Hopsicker drolly observed: "Maybe there is an innocent explanation for everything. Maybe drugs just show up, unbidden, like unwanted guests. And maybe Carmelo Vasquez Guerra didn't escape each time he got busted. Maybe he just 'released himself on his own recognizance'." o July 18, 2010: In the wake of the massacre of 17 people attending a birthday party in the northern city of Torreon, The Christian Science Monitor revealed that inmates from a prison in the nearby city of Gomez Palacio were the authors of the crime. "According to witnesses, the inmates were allowed to leave with authorization of the prison director ... to carry out instructions for revenge attacks using official vehicles and using guards' weapons for executions," said Ricardo Najera, a spokesman from the attorney general's office. After the atrocity, inmates drove back to their cells. o July 20, 2010: Following the Ju'arez car bomb blast that killed four, U.S. Ambassador to Mexico Arturo Sarukhan, downplayed it's significance and claimed, though disturbing, violence "has not yet reached the level of terrorism," The Washington Post reported. "Terrorism," the U.S. ambassador said, "refers to the acts by groups with political objectives that seek to control the government." But what if those with "political objectives" and limitless funds from the illicit trade already control the state's security apparatus? o July 25, 2010: Of the more than 28,000 people killed since December 2006 when President Felipe Calder'on "hurled the Mexican Army into the anti-cartel battle," nearly 6,300 (a quarter of the total) were murdered in Ciudad Ju'arez, The Nation reports. Under a three year deal, the United States has bankrolled the Army offensive with some $1.4 billion in funds under the M'erida Initiative. Journalists Charles Bowden and Molly Molloy wrote in response to Ambassador Sarukhan's statement: "We are supposed to believe in their evidence that 90 percent of the dead are criminals, but that they have no evidence at all of narco-terrorism?" Bowden and Molloy aver, "This, despite numerous incidents of grenades and other explosives being used in recent attacks in the states of Michoacan, Nuevo Le'on, Tamaulipas, Guerrero, Sonora and many other places in Mexico. And that 'armed commandos' dressed like soldiers and wielding high-powered machine guns are witnessed at the scenes of hundreds of massacres documented since 2008." According to expert Diego Valle, the steep rise in homicide rates correlate directly to increased military operations against some cartels. In his recent study, Statistical Analysis and Visualisation of the Drug War in Mexico, Valle writes that "military operations in Chihuahua, Nuevo Le'on, Veracruz and Durango have coincided with increases in homicides and attempts by the Sinaloa cartel to take over drug trafficking routes from rival cartels. After the army took control of Ciudad Ju'arez it became the most violent city in the world." o July 27, 2010: Building on alliances forged during the Cold War amongst right-wing political gangs and drug traffickers, cartel operations in Central America have soared, The Washington Post informs us. Since 2006, drug networks in Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras "are burrowing deeper into a region with the highest murder rates in the world." According to United Nations data, cocaine seizures in Central America "nearly quadrupled" between 2004 and 2007. "Over the past two years," the Post reports, "two national police chiefs and the former president have been arrested on charges related to drug trafficking or corruption. Two former interior ministers are fugitives." In Honduras, where a U.S.-sponsored coup toppled a democratically elected president in 2009, Mexican cartels have established "command-and-control" centers to coordinate cocaine shipments by sea and air to North America and Europe. In El Salvador, that country's leftist president has said that the violent street gang, Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13), have forged a working relationship with drug cartels that could eventually help the group mature into "an international syndicate." o August 22, 2010: Journalist Bill Conroy reports in The Narco News Bulletin that despite surging violence in Ciudad Ju'arez, the murder-plagued city "where some 10,000 small businesses have closed their doors since 2008 due, in large part, to a wave of burglaries, kidnappings, extortion and murders that has washed over the city during the past two and a half years," why is the violence not affecting the entire city? Conroy writes "there is often an exception to most rules, and in the case of Ju'arez, the rule of violence does not extend to its industrial zones, which are home to some 360 maquiladora factories that employ more than 190,000 people." According to a report obtained by Narco News from the El Paso Regional Economic Development Corporation, or REDCO, "there was only one homicide carried out in the maquila industrial zones" since 2008. "That's right," Conroy avers, "just one murder in this huge swath of Ju'arez that is dotted with maquila plants operated by huge corporations such as General Motors, Delphi, Motorola, Visteon, TECMA and Honeywell. Maquiladoras, also known as twin plants, are Mexico-based factories owned and/or operated by foreign companies that benefit from the cheap labor and favorable tax treatment." REDCO officials refused to comment to Narco News. However, Conroy writes, TECMA executive vice president Toby Spoon told ABC's El Paso affiliate KVIA that "If they got the maquila industry, or American companies or foreign companies, if they became targets of this, it would just take it to a whole different level, and nobody wants that." Isn't that an interesting statement! "So it would appear, based on that comment," Conroy writes, "that the narco-trafficking organizations, the Mexican government and the maquila factory owners have some sort of unspoken alliance of convenience that assures protection for the maquila factories and their professional employees." Indeed, Narco News discovered that "at last three security zones have been set up in Ju'arez that are guarded by Mexican soldiers who assure safe passage for Maquila executives commuting from El Paso to the Ju'arez factory sites. In addition, the maquila industrial zones themselves, according to media reports, are under the close watch of Mexican state police as well as private security guards employed by the maquilas." This is the same Army and federal police force that is seemingly "powerless" to halt the slaughter of Ju'arez citizens by ubiquitous, yet invisible, drug gangs which have transformed that city, and northern Mexico, into a free-fire zone. Curious indeed! o August 25, 2010: A wounded Ecuadorean migrant stumbled to a Mexican Marine checkpoint in the northern state of Tamaulipas and leads officials to a blood-splashed room. Inside, authorities discover the bodies of 58 men and 14 women, allegedly murdered by Los Zetas, or another cartel seeking to discredit their rivals. "Years ago," IPS reported, "Los Zetas found a gold mine: kidnapping undocumented migrants." The UN estimates that some half million undocumented migrants from Central and South America "cross Mexico from south to north every year in their attempt to reach the United States." And more than 10,000 were kidnapped between September 2009 and February 2010 according to Mexico's National Human Rights Commission. According to multiple press reports, the migrants were killed after they refused to serve as forced labor for Los Zetas. o August 26, 2010: A veteran officer with the U.S. Customs and Border Protection service (CBP), a satrapy within the sprawling Department of Homeland Security, Martha Alicia Garnica, 43, was sentenced to 20 years in prison for drug trafficking, human smuggling and bribery. "Three other defendants," the Center for Investigative Reporting disclosed, received prison sentences, ranging from two years to a little more than five years. A fourth defendant was murdered in February in Ju'arez." o August 27, 2010: "Federal prosecutors," The Nation revealed, "have used top leaders of Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13), known as the most violent gang in the US and Central America, as secret informants over a decade of murders, drug-trafficking and car-jackings across a dozen US states and several Central American countries." Former California state senator Tom Hayden told us that "the informants are identified as Nelson Comandari, described by law enforcement as 'the CEO of Mara Salvatrucha,' and his self described 'right hand man,' Jorge Pineda, nicknamed 'Dopey' because of his drug-dealing background." According to The Nation, Comandari's grandfather "was Col. Agustin Martinez Varela, a powerful right-wing Salvadoran who served as an interior minister during El Salvador's civil wars. Comandari's uncle, Franklin Varela, was a central informant in the Reagan administration's scandalous investigation into the activist Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador ." In his 1998 written testimony to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, retired DEA Special Agent Celerino Castillo III told Congress that "while our government shouted 'Just Say No !', entire Central and South American nations fell into what are now known as, 'Cocaine democracies'." Castillo testified: "On Jan. 18, 1985, Rodriguez allegedly met with money-launderer Ramon Milan-Rodriguez, who had moved $1.5 billion for the Medellin cartel. Milan testified before a Senate Investigation on the Contras' drug smuggling, that before this 1985 meeting, he had granted Felix Rodriguez's request and given $10 million from the cocaine for the Contras." Contra drug operations were coordinated by the CIA out of El Salvador's Ilopango airport and protected from prying eyes, and U.S. law enforcement investigators, by troops drawn from by Col. Varela's interior ministry. According to the National Security Archive's Oliver North File, "Mr. North's diary entries, from the reporter's notebooks he kept in those years, noted multiple reports of drug smuggling among the contras. A Washington Post investigation published on 22 October 1994 found no evidence he had relayed these reports to the DEA or other law enforcement authorities." o August 28, 2010: The bullet-ridden body of Roberto Suarez Vasquez, the lead investigator probing the murder of 72 Central- and South American migrants was found on a highway not far from where the massacre took place. o August 31, 2010: The entire 2,000 mile U.S.-Mexico border will be monitored by Predator drones. Part of a $600 million package passed by Congress earlier this year, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said the border was now "safer than ever." o August 31, 2010: Some 3,200 Mexican federal police, "nearly a tenth of the force," have been fired this year "under new rules designed to weed out crooked cops and modernize law enforcement," the Los Angeles Times reports. Amongst the 465 cops arrested in early August, federal authorities took four commanders into custody after 250 subordinates in violence-plagued Ciudad Ju'arez publicly accused them of corruption. o September 6, 2010: The Los Angeles Times reports that "drug traffickers who siphon off natural gas, gasoline and even crude, rob the Mexican treasury of hundreds of millions of dollars annually." The newspaper disclosed that "the cartels have taken sabotage to a new level: They've hobbled key operations in parts of the Burgos Basin, home to Mexico's biggest natural gas fields." Times' journalist Tracy Wilkinson writes that "the world's seventh-largest oil producer has become another casualty of the drug war." A series of kidnappings and murders in the gas-rich region has curtailed production. Pemex officials refused to comment and have sought to "repress information on the kidnappings." Despite a massive outcry by Mexico's citizens against moves by the Calder'on administration to privatize Pemex, which generates some $77 billion in annual revenue, Chevron's Latin American operations chief Ali Moshiri told the Houston Chronicle that the company wants to make Mexico "a big part of our portfolio." In this light, violence against Pemex workers and crippled production is nothing more than an odd coincidence, right? o September 8, 2010: Speaking at the elite Council on Foreign Relations in Washington, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton claimed that Mexico's drug cartels "increasingly resemble an insurgency with the power to challenge the government's control of wide swaths of its own soil," the Los Angeles Times reported. Comparing Mexico to Colombia, Clinton's comments reflect past U.S. claims that Colombia's well-entrenched drug mafias were part of a leftist "narcoguerrilla" strategy to topple the government. This is a mendacious comparison given rich evidence that for decades Colombia's leading mafia groups are allied with extreme right-wing forces in that country's political establishment. Declassified U.S. documents revealed that former President 'Alvaro Uribe, enjoyed close ties to drug-linked paramilitary organizations. A darling of the Pentagon and the American secret state, according to multiple press reports and documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by the National Security Archive, when Uribe was mayor of Medell'in, the epicenter of Pablo Escobar's narcoempire, the now-dead mafia boss's former lover Virginia Vallejo, told the Spanish paper El Pa'is: "Pablo used to say, that if it weren't for that blessed little boy , we would have to swim to Miami to get drugs to the gringos." According to Vallejo, when Uribe was the director of Colombia's Civil Aviation authority, he granted dozens of licenses for runways and hundreds of permits for planes and helicopters, on which the drug trade's infrastructure was built. The 1991 document by the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency noted that Uribe was a "close personal friend of Pablo Escobar" who was "dedicated to collaboration with the Medell'in cartel at high government levels." o September 9, 2010: 25 people, including women and teenagers ranging in age from 15 to 60, were murdered in Ciudad Ju'arez by Ju'arez cartel gunmen, the El Paso Times reports. The operation was allegedly mounted against their rivals in the Sinaloa drugs organization, apparently in retaliation for a kidnapping. The well-coordinated attacks took place in different parts of the city. Despite thousands of Mexican Army troops and federal police stationed in the city, the attacks took place with impunity. Since 2008, more than 6,400 Ju'arez citizens have been killed. While President Calder'on claims that 90 percent of victims are connected to drug organizations, evidence suggests that like the 72 migrant workers slaughtered in Tamaulipas in August, most of the victims had no ties to the murderous trade. o September 10, 2010: Seeking to calm a "diplomatic furor" over recent comments by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton that Mexico "resembled Colombia" during the heyday of cartel power, President Obama disputed Clinton's assertion, the Los Angeles Times reported. In what could generously be described as a replay of President Ronald Reagan's repeated denials that right-wing Nicaraguan Contra "rebels" were deeply mired in cocaine trafficking, Obama said that "Mexico is a great democracy, vibrant, with a growing economy," the president told the Spanish-language La Opinion newspaper. "And as a result, what is happening there can't be compared with what happened in Colombia 20 years ago." Human rights abuses are widespread. According to Amnesty International, political dissidents, environmentalists, trade union activists and indigenous human rights defenders are routinely disappeared, tortured or murdered with impunity. o September 12, 2010: An in-depth Washington Post profile of convicted U.S. Customs and Border Patrol officer Martha Garnica, sentenced in August for drug smuggling and human trafficking along the border, revealed that "the number of CBP corruption investigations opened by the inspector general climbed from 245 in 2006 to more than 770 this year." The Post reports that "corruption cases at its sister agency, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, rose from 66 to more than 220 over the same period." The vast majority of cases involve "illegal trafficking of drugs, guns, weapons and cash across the Southwest border." Although Garnica received a 20-year sentence for her crimes, not a single criminal indictment has been issued by the U.S. Justice Department for crimes committed by top corporate officers of Wells Fargo-owned Wachovia Bank, who admitted earlier this year to laundering hundreds of billions of dollars for Mexico's ultra-violent drug mafias. Aside from Bloomberg Markets magazine's comprehensive investigation, neither the Post, nor other U.S. "newspaper of record" reported on the bank's "deferred prosecution agreement" with the federal government. o September 15, 2010: Writing in The Nation, investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill revealed that the private security firm Blackwater "have provided intelligence, training and security services to US and foreign governments as well as several multinational corporations." According to Scahill, "former CIA paramilitary officer Enrique 'Ric' Prado, set up a global network of foreign operatives, offering their 'deniability' as a 'big plus' for potential Blackwater customers." While Blackwater's mercenary network was originally created to service CIA black ops, Prado wrote an email to a Total Intelligence executive (a Blackwater cut-out) with the subject line, "Possible Opportunity in DEA-Read and Delete," a pitch to the Drug Enforcement Administration. The Nation reports "that executive was an eighteen-year DEA veteran with extensive government connections." Prado explained that Blackwater "has developed 'a rapidly growing, worldwide network of folks that can do everything from surveillance to ground truth to disruption operations.' He added, 'These are all foreign nationals (except for a few cases where US persons are the conduit but no longer 'play' on the street), so deniability is built in and should be a big plus'." According to Scahill, the executive wrote back and suggested that "one of the best places to start may be the Special Operations Division, (SOD)." Scahill writes that "the SOD is a secretive joint command within the U.S. Justice Department, run by the DEA" and serves "as the command-and-control center for some of the most sensitive counternarcotics and law enforcement operations conducted by federal forces." As we have seen with other clandestine operations run amok in the drug war, "deniable" assets, especially when they are "foreign nationals" with no direct ties to the U.S. government, have a funny habit of lending their well-compensated "expertise" to drug traffickers. One is reminded of the case of Israeli mercenary Yair Klein, a former IDF lieutenant colonel. Klein's private security firm, Spearhead Ltd., produced training videos and tutored drug lord Carlos Casta~no's AUC in the fine art of murder. In 2001, Klein was convicted by a Colombian court for his firm's work with right-wing death squads and the enforcement arms of several drug trafficking organizations. According to Democracy Now!, Klein was "accused of training Mafia assassins" and "suspected of involvement in the explosion of a Colombian airliner in November 1989." Given Blackwater's sensitivity to human rights (just ask Baghdad residents!) one can be certain that the mercenary firm's interest in the drug war will assure Mexico's citizens that help is on the way! The Grim Road Ahead It should be clear: the "War on Drugs" like the "War on Terror" is a colossal, multibillion dollar fraud perpetrated on the American people. North Americans consume drugs and line the pockets of state-connected killers; Latin Americans do the dying. Low-level dealers and the poor who buy their illicit products are rewarded with wrecked lives, devastated communities and one-way tickets to prison. U.S. banking and financial elites reap whirlwind profits and are handed virtual get-out-of-jail-free cards by federal prosecutors and courts that levy fines regarded as little more than chump change by the banks. The CIA and their far-flung network of private contractors siphon-off illegal proceeds from the grim trade laundered through U.S. and European financial institutions. The U.S. secret state, seeking geopolitical advantage over their imperialist rivals deploy drug mafias and right-wing terrorists as plausibly deniable intelligence assets, just as they have for decades. Congressional banking and intelligence probes are killed. Black operations in areas of strategic interest to U.S. policy planners spread death and destruction, particularly where rich petrochemical and mineral reserves owned by other people are lusted after by American multinationals. Corporate media collaborate in this charade; pointing the finger at black and brown citizens, white elites on both sides of the border escape scrutiny. It is far easier to demonize black and brown youth as "predators" than to take a hard look in the mirror at a ruling class that are the real American drug lords. And still we wonder why Mexico is slowly transformed into a killing field. http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=ca9_1284979330 absu69 Partners in Crime: The U.S. Secret State and Mexico's &quot;War on Drugs&quot; war,on,drugs,mexico Tue, 23 Feb 2010 13:18:50 -0500 http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=6f1_1266948815 magpiemaniac Source: http://www.cnn.com/2010/OPINION/02/22/howard.too.much.law/ New York (CNN) -- The paralysis of Washington is becoming intolerable. Last week's headlines tell the story: o President Obama appointed a deficit-reduction commission to recommend the hard choices that our elected representatives won't make. o A popular Democratic senator, Evan Bayh of Indiana, announced he will not stand for re-election, citing "too much partisanship and not enough progress." o Washington can't even spend stimulus money -- The Government Accounting Office reported that barely 10 percent of a $5 billion program to weatherize almost 600,000 homes had been spent because of red tape. But what's the source of this paralysis? It's certainly true that there's excess partisanship, and special interests have too much influence. Both parties are guilty, with Democrats selling out to the trial lawyers to prevent any malpractice reform and Republicans engaging in scare tactics about "death panels." But I have a different take: The partisanship is mainly a symptom of a deeper powerlessness. Politicians posture and point fingers because they've learned it's impossible to take responsibility. Washington is immobilized by decades of accumulated law -- more than 100 million words of binding statutes and regulations. Like sediment in the harbor, these regulations and entitlements have piled up to the point where it's practically impossible to get anywhere. The stimulus money for weatherproofing homes, for example, couldn't be spent last year because a 1931 law, designed to keep union wages high, requires an army of federal bureaucrats to set wages in 3,000 different localities before anyone can start caulking those windows. No kidding -- that's what federal law requires. Let's take health care reform. The bills are a jumble of new programs, without any overarching principle that might cut down the horrible, inefficient bureaucracy that patients and doctors endure all day long. It's hardly surprising that Americans don't support the bills. Will piling 2,000 pages of new law on top of the massive bureaucracy fix American health care? But there's a reason Congress hasn't come up with a coherent proposal. Congress is shackled by laws of its own making -- by entitlements that politicians are scared to alter even if the result is to make health care more affordable for everyone. Politicians are bogged down in this vast legal quicksand, proposing more laws to deal with failures that are caused by the accumulation of too much law. Leadership requires freedom to take responsibility. Over the years the accretion of programs and entitlements has disconnected our leaders from this indispensable ingredient of all human accomplishment. No official, not even the president, has authority to make needed choices. Responsibility has been suffocated by law. The destruction of responsibility is a progressive disease, dragging the rest of society down with it. Ask any teacher or doctor. They're immersed in law all day long, preventing them from using their common sense to do what they believe is right. The only solution is to dredge the Potomac. Washington must start over, area by area, and simplify law so that officials have a chance of applying it sensibly to meet current needs. Individual responsibility should be the litmus test for all laws and programs. Who has responsibility to meet our public goals? Who has responsibility to hold them accountable? The only way to eliminate the massive waste in American health care -- estimated to be $700 billion to $1 trillion every year -- is to walk away from suffocating bureaucracy, and replace it with incentives for prudent health care decisions. Today, neither patients nor providers have any incentive to be responsible in their use of health care resources. Bureaucratic reimbursement formulas drive doctors and hospitals to make treatment decisions based on what bureaucratic guidelines will reimburse -- not care that's actually needed. The breakdown of judicial responsibility to keep lawsuits reasonable causes doctors to squander billions in defensive medicine. Universal distrust of justice has chilled the open interaction needed for safe hospitals. Thousands of tragic errors occur because doctors and nurses are reluctant to speak up when they suspect something is amiss -- "Are you sure that's the right dosage?" -- because they're not certain, and they don't want to be legally responsible. Rebuilding health care based on the principle of individual responsibility requires no genius. The basic changes are just common sense: (1) pay doctors based on overall results, not piecework reimbursement; (2) require patients who can afford it to pay a meaningful portion of their care; (3) reward patients for healthy lifestyles; (4) minimize defensive medicine by creating a reliable system of medical justice; and (5) replace the bureaucratic overhead and complexity with periodic audits to make sure people aren't cheating. Washington is broken. Everyone knows it. Responsibility is nonexistent. But Washington is unlikely to clean out its legal stables. Changing things is too scary. Political leaders and special interests would rather stay with the devil they know -- at least so long as they are secure in their jobs. Responsibility is simple. That's why it's so effective. Restoring responsibility, however, requires a kind of revolution -- an organized, coherent movement to replace existing bureaucracy with new goals and individual mandates to achieve them. Congress must be forced to clean out decades of accumulated bureaucracy and entitlements. We'll never get a government that balances the budget or makes health care affordable until our leaders can take responsibility to meet these challenges. http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=6f1_1266948815 magpiemaniac Too much law suffocating America lawyers, law, nanny, state, health, care, reform Tue, 13 Oct 2009 14:56:14 -0400 http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=38c_1255460047 BANBANBANG Barack Obama does seem to have much better instincts in foreign policy than George W. Bush. But lest that be seen as damning by faint praise, let's just say that Obama, like the Washington Redskins football team, is moving the ball down the field but needs to get it over the goal line more often. Obama has withdrawn U.S. forces from Iraqi cities and has pledged to end this Bush quagmire by the end of 2011. Because the United States has been reluctant to leave countries in which it has had a military presence - for example, Europe, Japan, and South Korea - whether the prospect of Iraqi relapse into violence will derail, or be used as an excuse to defer, the promised U.S. withdrawal remains to be seen. A more rapid U.S. withdrawal would be desirable so that there would be less time for a reversal, but at least Obama's original opposition to the Iraq War seems to be pointing him in the right direction. Similarly, on missile defense to be deployed in Europe, Obama has laudably gotten rid of an expensive, unproven system that was designed to meet a nonexistent threat and needlessly soured relations with Russia - still the only nation in the world that has the power to wipe the United States out of existence. Although the system was ostensibly directed against long-range Iranian missiles, which don't exist, the Russians were nervous that the 10 high-speed interceptors in Poland might grow in number and threaten their dwindling strategic nuclear arsenal. In place of the canceled system, Obama will deploy a more sensible missile defense that will eventually protect U.S. forces and Europe against Iranian short- and intermediate-range missiles, which they do possess. It's OK to build a missile defense to protect U.S. forces, but why does the U.S. continue to protect countries that are economic competitors and are rich enough to build up their own defenses? The answer: Although the U.S. constantly nags the stingy Europeans to "free ride" less and contribute more to the NATO alliance, the U.S. has made an implicit agreement to defend them, and pay much of the bill for doing so, in exchange for being the big dog in the alliance. With a yawning budget deficit that is dragging the U.S. economy, this is no longer a good trade. As in Iraq, Obama needs to be more radical; he should tell the Europeans to build their own missile defense. Another example of Obama not going far enough is in Afghanistan. Because he wanted to get out of Iraq and because Republicans always score points by calling the Democrats soft on national security, Obama evidently felt he had to be in favor of some war and thus reluctantly succumbed to pressure to augment U.S. forces in Afghanistan. If he had been smart, on his second day in office, he would have instead announced the rapid withdrawal of U.S. forces. Obama clearly understands what George W. Bush and Dick Cheney pooh-poohed - that public opinion in Islamic countries affects U.S. security - but again his policy does not go as far as the facts require. If Obama actually read Osama's writings, he would never have escalated the war in Afghanistan. Osama bin Laden and other terrorists attack the U.S. because of its meddling in and occupying of Islamic lands. The U.S. nation-building occupation in Afghanistan has led to a resurgent Taliban in that country and the strengthening of Islamism in Pakistan, which could threaten the nuclear-armed government there. To his credit, Obama is now resisting the very public call of his military for even more forces to be sent to Afghanistan. Although Obama is a Democrat and did not serve in the military, he is not sensitive on the draft issue like Bill Clinton was, which makes it easier for him to "just say no" to sinking even deeper into Afghan quicksand. After decades of public guilt over the poor treatment of returning Vietnam draftees, manifesting itself in excessive and un-American (as defined by the nation's anti-militaristic founders) adulation of the military, Obama and the Democratic leadership of Congress are at least pushing back a little. Let's hope they can sustain their resistance to the military onslaught here at home in order to end the armed escalation in Afghanistan and eventually reverse course there. Obama and the Democratic congressional leadership have little choice but to follow their instincts; in a democracy, further accelerating a war that is unpopular at home is political suicide. The good news is that an anti-al-Qaeda strategy employing a lighter footprint than occupation and nation-building - using law enforcement, intelligence, drones, cruise missiles, and an occasional Special Forces raid - has already had some success and would at least not poke the hornets' nest and create more anti-US terrorists. Obama has shown some good instincts in foreign policy, but he must resist political and institutional pressures against more radical changes to the dysfunctional status quo. -- Ivan Eland is Director of the Center on Peace & Liberty at The Independent Institute. Dr. Eland has spent 15 years working for Congress on national security issues, including stints as an investigator for the House Foreign Affairs Committee and Principal Defense Analyst at the Congressional Budget Office. His books include The Empire Has No Clothes: US Foreign Policy Exposed, and Putting "Defense" Back into US Defense Policy. ConsortiumNews http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=38c_1255460047 BANBANBANG Obama and the Afghan quagmire Middle East Mon, 30 Mar 2009 01:54:53 -0400 http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=02b_1238392178 baluchsaab Old article but worth reading. by Annie Nocenti The Khan of Kalat, Mir Suleiman Daud, is speeding. He's a fast driver, but so expert a wheelman there's no fear in the wide black Hummer. "Who drives American cars?" he says, mocking himself. "But when I saw this one, I knew it was my toy." Handsome and charismatic, Khan Suleiman enjoys hiding his eyes behind Gucci shades, and prefers a ball cap to a turban. Khan SuleimanAdd in the traditional long baggy shirts and baggy pants of the region, what sounds like Pakistani hip-hop blasting, the carload of his men packing pistols and Kalashnikovs that rides behind us, and it feels like quite the posse. But considering Khan Suleiman once took four AK47 bullets in the gut and chest in the tribal equivalent of a drive-by and lived, the bullet-resistant Hummer makes practical sense. Khan Suleiman's survival of that shooting was considered so miraculous that there is a university doctor who teaches a class in the incident. As for all the guns and ammunition, Baluchistan is one of the tribal provinces of Pakistan, and in tribal regions, one needs protection. Especially the Khan of Kalat, which literally means King of the Fort, the chief of chiefs. But it's not his own people he needs protection from. Khan of Kalat Suleiman's country is rich in resources that everyone wants to take and he doesn't have the power to stop them. "We sit on a mountain of gold," he says, "and the devil sits on us." His people, the Baluch Nation, are being indiscriminately bombed, arrested, and kidnapped, and he's powerless to stop it. Journalist Selig S. Harrison has called it a slow-motion genocide and Human Rights groups have called it an ethnic cleansing. "We have 700 miles of coast and oil and gas and gold," says Khan Suleiman. "We try to do something to have rights to it, we get spanked. We resist every ten years and get spanked every ten years." For the past few years, he has been in the middle of an unseen war that few beyond the regional press are reporting. But then something horrible happened and it radicalized his people. In August 2006 the chief of the Bugti tribe, 79-year-old Newab Akbar Bugti, was murdered by the Pakistan Army. "Bugti was buried with three locks on the coffin," says Khan Suleiman. "They thought his soul might come back and make trouble. So the army put locks on it. None of his tribe was around to see his body. Still they've got a guard on his body." The Baluch people were outraged by the murder, and Khan Suleiman had found his moment, the catalyst he needed. He called a national jirga, a meeting of the tribes, the first in 130 years. He wanted to find out if his sardars, his chiefs, the heads of tribes that have been, on and off, at war with each other for hundreds of years, could lay down personal disputes and unify for a common cause: an autonomous Baluchistan. Khan Suleiman's allies would be his former enemies. In the way of tribes, his enemies are also his friends. He put out his call. My first thought was: this man is a modern Sitting Bull. Which makes him a sitting duck. Which is why he travels in a Hummer and why his travel plans are never announced. What Khan Suleiman has just done is akin to Sitting Bull asking the Apache, the Cherokee, the Mohawks, all the major Native American warring tribes to smoke the peace pipe and unify against the migrating settlers that were stealing their land out from under them. Khan Suleiman's historic jirga was attended by 1,500, including 85 sardars and 300 tribal elders. The Baluch people have always protested the Punjabi-dominated military regime of Pakistan President General Pervez Musharraf that has been made rich off the Baluch province but gives so little back in terms of resources and tax revenues that the entire region still lacks the basic services that most consider human rights. The province is rich in natural gas yet only 6% of the Baluch have gas connections, less than half the children get an education, and only 2% of the population have clean water. The answer to Khan Suleiman's call for unification and resistance against this state of affairs was a resounding yes. "When you make a call you get an answer," says Khan Suleiman. "The answer means that Baluch is a nation. They have problems, but they have roots. I know them 700 years and they know me 700 years. I gave a call in the 21st century and 95% answered. Students and prime ministers agree. There are the rocket guys and the pen and paper guys, but we come together directly or indirectly." The jirga was so inspirational that the Pashtuns, the Sindhi and the Afghans have all decided to hold their own jirgas to unify their tribes. Even General Musharraf called a jirga of his own, "But nobody went," laughs Khan Suleiman. Baluchistan, which borders Afghanistan and Iran, is sparsely populated by people and overwhelmingly a land of rocks. Flatbed trucks pass carrying enormous marble hunks as big as cars. An old man sits by the side of the road, a mountain of rocks to his left, a pile of smaller rocks to his right, he in the middle with a hammer. A task for Sisyphus. But the more one looks at these majestic, dusty gray-brown mountains, the more one sees they are not at all dull, but coyly streaked in color. "Rubies, diamonds, lapis lazuli, gold, emeralds," says Khan Suleiman. "We have it all. Oil and natural gas and minerals." It is, of course, the enormous reserves of natural gas that have perked up the eyes and ears of those with a nose for such things. "All the 'guys' are around," says Khan Suleiman with amusement, meaning the big powers. He lists the US, Iran, India, China, Russia. We pass walls scrawled with graffiti, written in delicate Urdu script: "Azad Baluchistan, Baluchistan Zindebad"; Free Baluchistan, Long Live Baluchistan. We pull into a gas station, and the Khan is met by a group of men that somehow knew he'd be stopping here. They pay respect, ask him advice on property disputes. A day in the life of a Khan. One man asks Khan Suleiman if he thinks the Baluch people are unified. The Khan answers in Baluch, then translates for me. "I asked them, will they come out and protest on a certain day? Will they join the protest march this month? If they do, then that is my answer and that is their answer." Back out on the highway, my tinted window slides up automatically, and I look ahead to see an open black jeep coming the other way loaded with armed men staring at the Hummer. I wonder, has Khan Suleiman just closed my window to keep the dust out, or did he see that car coming and decide it best to not let them glance in and see the obviously foreign woman with the large video camera whose protective veil of her dupata (the headscarf worn by women in this mostly Muslim country), is constantly slipping off her head. As it is with many things a foreigner sees and hears when stepping fresh into a new culture, it's hard to know. Drive sixty miles out of Karachi, Pakistan, and into Baluchistan, and you drive 600 years back in time. As the roadside mosques lit up at night like discos fade, there are more goats and donkeys; fewer buildings, more huts. Women spend all day walking deserts for one bucket of water. Our convoy of SUVs often pass caravans of camels loaded with sticks of firewood, men riding mule carts loaded with hay. "The poor shepherd's barefoot son herds his sheep over mountains full of riches," says Suleiman. Or as Suleiman's uncle, Yahya Baloch, Prince of Kalat, said to me the day before, "The shepherd has his goats and makes his cheese and his butter. He sits in the mountains and is his own boss but belongs to a tribe. But every ordinary person has a small radio. And they may be listening to Air America, not the lies of Pakistan radio." Prince Yahya, like most of the older men we've met, has survived many wars in Baluchistan. He shows me the bullet holes in his home to prove it, from the times his brother, the previous Khan of Kalat, was attacked. He then shows off his astounding collection of antique guns; from muskets to guns hidden in canes like something out of James Bond. He speaks in moderate tones but it is easy to feel how much he loves his country. "Asia is the belt," he smiles, "Pakistan the buckle, but the pin is Baluch. The pin opens, your pants will fall." Meanwhile, General Musharraf has brought in Chinese engineers to develop a strategic port in Gwadar and build a road to the border, and gave a ten-year lease to China which has been over-mining the copper and gold in the Chaghi district. The Baluch resistance, angry at the lack of economic return to the Baluch for these developments, periodically responds by blowing up power lines, pipelines and other infrastructures. And there is widespread fear among locals that a major pipeline will be built that drains their main resource, natural gas, without any return. As one Baluchi Nationalist said to me, "The road is coming. The pipeline is coming. It's not here yet, but it's coming. The Americans are coming. One day they will just walk in. Under every mountain you'll see a G.I. Write it down in your heart. You'll see." Agha Aziz, one of Khan Suleiman's men. All photos by Annie Nocenti.Or, as the eternally unruffled Khan Suleiman puts it, with one of his sly smiles, "Where there is chaos, there is investment." While Islamabad fattens its coffers and others dream of wealth to come, the people of this resource-rich province are so impoverished and economically discriminated against that I've heard Baluchistan referred to as "the whore of everyone." Pakistan has long controlled the area by playing the feuding tribes off one another in order to keep the Baluch resistance from unifying, which is why Khan Suleiman's jirga is so important. Islamabad spins the actions of the freedom fighters into actions of "terrorists," and disclaims any official power of the Khan of Kalat. General Musharraf charges that the feudal system of sardar rule is the problem, but to the Baluch this has long been their way of life. Islamabad also uses the presence of the Taliban as a cover for military actions against the Baluch. A few nights back, we sat in Khan Suleiman's home in Quetta, the capital of Baluchistan. It is located on Syriab Street, street of chiefs, and we met in in a simple room with banks of low couches, over a spread of nuts, pomegranate seeds, overripe bananas and cardamom tea. "Have you seen any Taliban yet?" Khan Suleiman likes to tease. I had told him that there was nothing much in the mainstream press about Baluchistan other than claims that Quetta was now thick with Taliban. When we'd flown into Quetta the day before, as the pilot flew like a cowboy, taking dizzy dips over the red hills that surround Quetta, I looked down and saw what reminded me of an old Wild West American outpost. Sand rolls off the desert, rock dust off the mountains, giving the whole town a shimmering, ghostly air. At the airport, the first man to help with my bags said: "I am Baluch, not Taliban." The presence of Taliban in Quetta seems to be some kind of inside joke that's probably not that funny. It's not that the Taliban aren't here in Quetta, a town not far from the Afghanistan border, but they are not messing with Baluch business, I'm told. "They cross the border, and they are with us." But there is unquestionably an ominous feeling in Quetta. Leaving and entering our hotel, a mirror on wheels is rolled under the car chassis to look for bombs. The first day we go to the Russian bazaar, we are followed by Pakistan's Military Intelligence and photographed. As we shop for headscarves, the MI follows us and Khan Suleiman's men follow the MI. It feels more Graham Greene ironic than dangerous, yet the implication is there. Khan Suleiman's men confront the MI. "You do your job, we'll do ours," they are told. The day after we leave Quetta, three missiles hit the Parliament building. No one takes responsibility for it. Khan Suleiman's HummerWhile in Quetta, Khan Suleiman has arranged some interviews with several tribal chiefs. It is important to the Khan that we understand this is not "his" call, but the call of all Baluch, and he wants us to hear it confirmed from other chiefs. The first is Chief of Sarawan Nawab Mohammad Aslam Raisani. We drive into a walled and gated courtyard, where tribesmen mill about with Kalashnikovs slung over their shoulders as casually as women sling their purses. As I get out of the car, I hear the Mission Impossible theme song. It's Abdullah's cell phone. Abdullah is one of Suleiman's men assigned to this trip, and he's also got another cell phone that rings with the theme to The Godfather. Inside we meet Nawab Raisani, a distinguished chief with a raspy voice that I imagine is the result of an old war wound. He is gracious, gentle, and gestures towards a large plastic mat on the floor covered in food. He confirms his support for the Khan and that the tribes have "set aside our conflicts and disputes so that we can raise a collective voice." He stresses the importance of identity, "The Pakistan government wants to finish our national identity," he says. I ask if the tribes will be able to stay unified, and he answers that pressure is being put on the heads of tribes to do so. I ask if he would compromise on the question of autonomy for Baluchistan. "We will not go for any type of compromise," says Nawab Raisani. "We want total autonomy." There is a problem with autonomy for Baluchistan. As it was with the Native Americans, there are broken treaties involved. The current troubles in Baluchistan date back to the 1947 agreement between Britain and India that created Pakistan. Six million Baluch were forced to become part of the newly created country. But a 1948 treaty, in which the current Khan of Kalat (Khan Suleiman's grandfather) acceded to Pakistan, delineates that accession in only four areas: defense, foreign affairs, currency and communications. Resource and autonomy rights were not given up, but there is an ambiguity to the language of the treaty that has been exploited by Islamabad. There is also an older controversy around the 1893 "Durand Line" agreement between British India and Afghanistan, which divided the Pashtun and Baluch tribes into Afghanistan, sections of Iran, and what was to become, in 1947, Pakistan-slicing up a nomadic culture with arbitrary lines in the sand. The Baluch, a culture that dates back over a thousand years, ended up living under colonialist-style rule by Pakistan, a nation that at the time was one year old. Revered author and historian Agha Mir Naseer Khan Ahmadzai Baloch is the keeper of Baluch history. "We founded the Baluch Nation in 1410. We Baluch made a kingdom. And we told the superpower at the time that they should confirm our kingdom. We were told: 'You Baluch are sheep herders and on this condition I accept your kingdom. You should agree that annually you should give me ten thousand sheep.' And in this way," laughs Naseer Baloch, "our Baluch Kingdom came into existence. From this time right up to Khan Suleiman, 35 Khans have passed. The British conquered Baluchistan and annexed us to India. When they formed Pakistan in 1947, we were told, if you don't join Pakistan we will attack you." Khan Suleiman's next step will be to appeal to the World Court in Hague, the International Court of Justice (ICJ), claiming that Pakistan has violated the 1948 treaty as well as the 1973 Constitution that promised provincial autonomy. Violations include the plundering of resources, and the non-payment of royalties on fisheries, gas, minerals and overflights, and the building of cantonments. But the question is whether or not the ICJ can give fair hearing to Baluchistan, a tribal province without clear sovereign status, now that Pakistan has become a nation of international standing. Which is why it is imperative that such a move is backed in the press. The alternative, if an appeal to the ICJ fails, is likely to be armed struggle. Khan Suleiman is slyly hopeful of U.S. help. Without U.S. or other foreign support, Baluchistan does not have the wealth nor military might to sustain a long insurgency. It is a hope that is touching, fragile, and ornery all at once. "We'll see," he says with a sideways grin, "if the Americans are as moral as they say they are. The elephant has different kinds of teeth. The ones the elephant shows, and ones he eats with. They are not the same teeth." We drive from Quetta to Kalat, where the Khan has his palace and his mosque, and Khan Suleiman casually tells us we are to meet Sardar Ataullah Mengal next, in a town called Wadh. I expect an interview similar to the one we had with Nawab Raisani, but that's not the case. As soon as we are on the road to Wadh, the air is electric. The convoy of cars and guns is longer this time. There are tribals that have come out of the hills to see Khan Suleiman off. The closer we get to Wadh, the more men we see on the sides of the roads. They raise guns in salute, or join the convoy on motorbikes. Some carry the flag of Kalat. The convoy gets larger and larger, until, when we pull in for gas, there is a swarm of followers. Khan Suleiman gets out of the car and the reverence for the man from his people is stunning. Islamabad may think Khan Suleiman has no official power, but neither did many a charismatic leader throughout history. We arrive at Sardar Mengal's compound. A huge fluttering tent is set up, laid out with gorgeous Persian carpets, light streams in from above and the tent flutters, as if Allah is announcing his presence. As we enter, a sea of men turns and stands. As soon as Khan Suleiman and Sardar Mengal are seated, everyone else sits. They speak for a while, as Sardar Mengal confirms his support of the alliance of tribes. "We want to use the tribal way to unify," says Mengal, "then move on to democracy and the modern ways." Khan Suleiman has said that the example to think of is Britain, with its combination of Parliament-style democracy and monarchy. And as Khan Suleiman says about his role in this model, "I'd rather be Queen Elizabeth than Tony Blair." The gathering itself, with its open invitation to the people to attend, its transparent nature in that the people can listen to their chiefs talk and ask direct questions, does have the feeling of a Parliament-style meeting. Later, as we speak of current U.S. policy in Iraq and the Middle East, Ataullah Mengal asks me, with a certain belligerence, "Why are Americans so dumb?" As if to prove it, I have no satisfactory answer. The next day, we meet with Prince Musa and his son Noroz, a gentle young man ready to step up for his tribe. Prince Musa speaks of his love of flowers and weapons, his soft spot against the killing of animals. He dresses in camouflage clothes and dark sunglasses, and as he takes a whiff of the narcissus he grows, he reminds us of Robert Duvall in Apocalypse Now. He describes his support for Khan Suleiman. "We are a traditional people," says Prince Musa. "Tradition is that the elder son become Khan. We have a saying in Baluch: If one person sits on a horse it looks nice. Two people sitting on a horse it doesn't look nice. They will laugh at you. A horse is made for only one person." Prince Musa's tongue is for peace, but the sense one gets is that he is very ready to fight for it. No one we interviewed was shy about their readiness to go to war for their rights. And they believe their inferior weaponry and manpower are more than made up for by their superior guerrilla tactics and knowledge of their own land. "You Americans are worthless on the ground," I am told more than once. As Khan Suleiman puts it: "When you're eyeball to eyeball the first one that blinks is gone. So you have to be strong and not blink." Later he says, speaking both of Iraq and Afghanistan, "The U.S. gets in quicksand and turns the wheels and gets in deeper." The Baluch Liberation Front and the Baluch Liberation Army, along with the more official Baluch National Party are increasingly made up of not just moderate to extreme tribals or politicians, but intelligentsia, merchants, laborers, out-of-work engineers, lawyers, and the new Baluch middle class. The Baluch Student Organization actively stages demonstrations, roadblocks and rallies. Rumor has it the BLF and the BLA are paid in dollars, but others contend India or Russia finances the opposition. Wherever the backing comes from, because of the geographic position and potential resource wealth of Baluchistan, and this new bid for autonomy, many have an interest and a hand in keeping the region unstable. At the same time, it is US aid to Islamabad and US weaponry that is being used against the Baluch opposition. But perhaps that is politics in the desert, the sands ever-shifting. As this story goes to press, there is a 13-day protest march in progress, despite the house arrests of key players and other governmental attempts to stop it. It seems that, as I've been told, "All Baluch want independence. Even the birds want independence." It also seems that calls to resistance are most effective when written on the wind. http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=02b_1238392178 baluchsaab A Call to Resistance: The Khan of Kalat Gathers the Tribes Baluch Baluchistan Khan of Kalat Ahmedzai UK Tue, 07 Oct 2008 13:39:57 -0400 http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=869_1223401197 PiRaTeCoPy Years from today, when the current financial crisis is over, historians are likely to agree that it would have been far better if the Bush administration had declared a state of emergency earlier in the process so that the necessary steps could have taken to avoid a complete financial meltdown. The media could have been used to bring the American people up to date on market-related developments and educated in the bizarre language of structured finance. Knowledge is power; and power can prevent panic. Now we're in a terrible fix. People are scared and removing their money from the banks and money markets which is intensifying the freeze in the credit markets and driving stocks into the ground like a tent stake. Meanwhile, our leaders are "caught in the headlights", still believing they can "finesse" their way through the biggest economic cataclysm since the Great Depression. It's madness. If something is not done to increase the flow of credit immediately, the stock market will tumble, unemployment will spike, and many businesses will grind to a standstill. We could be just days away from a severe shock to the system. Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson's $700 billion bailout does not focus on the fundamental problems and is likely to fail. At best, it puts off the day of reckoning for a few weeks or months. Contingency plans should be put in place so the country does not have to undergo post-Katrina bedlam. Does Congress have any idea of the mess they've made by passing the Bailout bill? Do they even read the papers or are they so isolated in their Capital Hill bubble-world that they're entirely clueless? Did any Senator or congressman even notice, that while they were busy mortgaging off America's future, the stock market was plummeting to new lows? Between the time the ballots were cast on Paulson's bailout, and the announcement of the final tally (which was approved by a generous margin) the market went from a 310 point gain to a 157 point loss; a whopping 467 plunge in less than two hours. Thus spake the Market: "Paulson's bill is a fraud!" Listen up, Congress: This massive trillion dollar deleveraging process cannot be stopped. The system is purging credit excesses which are unsustainable. The levies you're building with this $700 billion bill may plug a few holes, but it won't stop the flood. Economist Ludwig von Mises put it like this: "There is no means of avoiding the final collapse of a boom brought on by credit expansion. The question is only whether the crisis should come sooner as a result of a voluntary abandonment of further credit expansion, or later as a final and total catastrophe of the currency system involved." The best course of action is to soften the blow as much as possible for underwater homeowners and let the market correct as it should. Otherwise the dollar will be torn to shreds. Look around; the six year Bush economic boom is vanishing before our eyes. Manufacturing is contracting, wages are stagnant, good paying jobs are headed overseas, unemployment is rising, and the middle class has shrunk every year since Bush took office. Is this the miracle of the "Washington consensus" and neoliberalism? The prosperity of the Bush era is as fake as the weapons of mass destruction; it's all smoke and mirrors. The Federal Reserve created the massive equity bubble in housing and finance through its low interest monetary policies. Cheap money is the rich man's method of social engineering; swift and lethal. The public be-damned. Now that the bubble is bursting, Congress needs to decide what it can do to soften the hard landing. Paulson's bill does not do that. In fact, even Paulson's supporters admit it's a flop. Here's what Martin Feldstein had to say in a Wall Street Journal editorial: "The recent financial recovery plan that Congress enacted will not rebuild lending and credit flows. That requires a program to stop a downward overshooting of house prices and the resulting mortgage defaults....The prospect of a downward spiral of house prices depresses the value of mortgage-backed securities and therefore the capital and liquidity of financial institutions. Experts say that an additional 10% to 15% decline in house prices is needed to get back to the prebubble level. That decline would double the number of homes with negative equity, raising the total to 40% of all homes with mortgages. The mortgages of five million homeowners would then exceed the value of their homes by 30% or more, which could prompt millions of defaults." (Martin Feldstein, "The Problem is still Falling house Prices", WS Journal) Feldstein doesn't give a hoot about the struggling homeowner who is worried-sick about losing his home in foreclosure. He just wants to make sure that the banks get their money back, and the only way they can do that is by putting a floor under housing prices so mortgage-backed securities (MBS) and all the other derivatives that are gunking-up the financial system begin to stabilize. Even though the article is little more than a paean to human greed; it does admit that Paulson's bailout falls short of its objectives. It won't work. Not only that, but it elevates G-Sax ex-chairman to Finance Czar, with almost unlimited powers to buy whatever toxic "structured" garbage he wants without any real oversight. Who will stop the Treasury Secretary if he decides to waste the taxpayers money on the full range of impaired assets including complex derivatives, collateralized debt obligations (CDOs), low-rated MBS, or even credit default swaps (CDS), which were sold in unregulated trading and which are oftentimes nothing more than side-bets made by speculators with no direct connection to the housing market? Is that what Congress approved? What if he decides to spend the whole $700 billion buying back mortgage-backed bonds from China and Europe, leaving US banks still underwater? (except for Goldman, of course) It's possible; especially if he thinks China will stop purchasing our debt if we don't back up our worthless bonds with cold hard cash. This bailout has DISASTER written all over it. Consider this from a September 29 report in the Washington Post: "Twenty of the nation's largest financial institutions owned a combined total of $2.3 trillion in mortgages as of June 30. They owned another $1.2 trillion of mortgage-backed securities. And they reported selling another $1.2 trillion in mortgage-related investments on which they retained hundreds of billions of dollars in potential liability, according to filings the firms made with regulatory agencies. The numbers do not include investments derived from mortgages in more complicated ways, such as collateralized debt obligations." (from Paul Craig Roberts, "Can a Bailout Succeed", counterpunch.org) So, how does Paulson expect to recapitalize the banks--which are loaded up with $2.4 trillion in mortgage-related investments--when congress's bill allocates a paltry $700 billion for the rescue plan? It's impossible. Just as it is impossible to keep prices artificially high with this kind of government buy-back program. These structured investments were vastly overpriced to begin with due to the fact that the market was hyperinflated with the Fed's low interest credit. As Doug Noland said, "This Credit onslaught fostered huge distortions to the level and pattern of spending throughout the entire economy. It is today impossible both to generate sufficient Credit and to main previous patterns of spending. Economic upheaval and adjustment are today unavoidable." (Doug Noland's Credit Bubble Bulletin) Yes, and "economic upheaval" leads to political upheaval and blood in the streets. Is that what Bush wants; a chance to deploy his North Com. troops within the United states to put down demonstrations of middle class people fighting for bread crumbs? In less than 8 years, the Financial Sector Debt tripled, mortgage debt doubled, and financial borrowing rose 75 percent. Why? Was it because the US was producing more goods that the world wanted? Was it because production rose sharply or demand doubled? No, it was because of asset-inflation; a chimera created by the illusionists at the Federal Reserve and the investment banks. That's the source of the massive credit expansion which is presently collapsing and pushing the world towards another Great Depression. As Henry Liu said in his article "Liquidity Boom and Looming Crisis" in the Asia Times: "Unlike real physical assets, virtual financial mirages that arise out of thin air can evaporate again into thin air without warning. As inflation picks up, the liquidity boom and asset inflation will draw to a close, leaving a hollowed economy devoid of substance. ...A global financial crisis is inevitable" The man who is most responsible for the current meltdown, Alan Greenspan, even admitted that he spotted the humongous equity bubble early on but refused to do anything about it. Here's a clip from an article by Maestro in the Wall Street Journal: "The value of equities traded on the world's major stock exchanges has risen to more than $50 trillion, double what it was in 2002. Sharply rising home prices erupted into major housing bubbles world-wide, Japan and Germany (for differing reasons) being the only principal exceptions." ("The Roots of the Mortgage Crisis", Alan Greenspan, Wall Street Journal) This admission proves Greenspan's culpability. If he knew that stock prices had doubled their value in just 3 years, then he also knew that equities had not risen due to increases in productivity or demand.(market forces) The only reasonable explanation for the asset inflation is the deeply-flawed monetary policies of the Fed. As his own mentor, Milton Friedman famously stated, "Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon". Any capable economist would have known that the explosion in housing and equities prices was a sign of uneven inflation. Now the bubble has popped and the tremors are likely to be felt through the global economy. No one in Congress has the foggiest idea of what is going on in the economy. They're all in La-la Land. The credit markets are paralyzed. The capital-starved banks are dramatically cutting back on lending and making it nearly impossible for consumers to borrow or businesses to even carry out daily operations like payroll. The commercial paper market has slowed to a crawl, forcing cash strapped companies to try and access existing credit lines or sell corporate bonds. Money market rates are soaring but wary depositors keep withdrawing their money putting more pressure on financial institutions. The whole system is wading through quicksand. The banking system is breaking apart before our eyes. The $700 billion "rescue package" will not relieved the situation at all. In fact, the various rates (like Libor, Libor-OIS spread, or the TED spread) which indicate the amount of stress in interbank lending have stayed at record highs signaling huge dislocations in the near future. Are we headed for an October stock market crash? This is from the Times Online: "US banks borrowed a record $367.8 billion (lb208 billion) a day from the Federal Reserve in the week ended October 1. Data from the US central bank shows how much financial institutions are relying on the Fed in its role as lender of last resort as short-term funding becomes almost impossible to find elsewhere. Banks' discount window borrowings averaged $367.80 billion per day in the week ended October 1, nearly double the previous record daily average of $187.75 billion last week." $368 billion a day, just to keep the banking system from collapsing. Did they forget to mention that on FOX News? And, yes; the Fed has started up the printing presses as everyone feared from the beginning. This tidbit appeared on the op-ed page of Saturday's Wall Street Journal: "Thursday, the Federal Reserve released the latest data on its balance sheet, which has ballooned by some $500 billion to $1.5 trillion in the past month. That may sound alarming, but it beats cutting interest rates across the board to prop up the banks. Those extra Fed assets and liabilities can be worked off as the crisis passes without the long-term inflationary impact of pushing interest rates still further into negative territory. By lending freely in a bank run until they stop running, the Fed can make banks pay for their desire for safety while contributing to financial stability." (Wall Street Journal) "$1.5 trillion"? But the Fed's balance sheet is only $900 billion. Where is the extra money coming from? Gutenberg, no doubt. Rep. Peter DeFazio made an impassioned plea on the floor of the House in a failed effort to stop Paulson's bailout. It's a good summary of the bill's shortcomings as well as an indictment of its author: Rep. Peter DeFazio: "This $700 billion bill is not aimed at the real economy in America. Not one penny of it will go to Main Street. It is aimed solely at the froth on Wall Street, the speculators on Wall Street, the non productive people on Wall Street the certifiably smart , masters of the universe, like Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson who created these weapons of financial destruction and now, lit the fuse by claiming there would be worldwide economic collapse if we didn't pass this bill to bail out Wall Street....I believe there are simpler answers. I just came from a meeting with William Isaacs who was head of the FDIC, they deal with banks. Mr. Paulson was a speculator on Wall Street; he deals with speculation. He doesn't understand regulative banking. (What is happening is) there is a tremendous amount of pressure being applied by some very powerful creditors such as the People's Republic of China who own a lot of this junk ($450 billion) and they want their money back or they're threatening us. That is not a good reason for going ahead with this faulty proposal. It does not deal with the underlying problems in housing. If we don't deal with the foreclosures and the deteriorating values, then, when the values drop another 5 or 10 percent, we're going to find there's another trillion dollars in junk securities out there and we will have already maxed out our credit and more people will have already lost their jobs. People are not spending because they are afraid they will lose their jobs. Their wages haven't increased. They are worried about the real economy, not the Wall Street economy. This bill will not solve the underlying problems. There is a cheaper, low cost alternative. The FDIC should declare an emergency. That would give them the power to assess the same guarantee to all bank depositors. (According to Isaacs) That would immediately free up all interbank lending. It would immediately bring a flood of foreign deposits into the US because we would be a safe haven for depositors. But Isaacs is a regulator; a regulator with experience who piloted this country out of the savings and loans crisis and saved us a bunch of money. He's not a big-time Wall Street speculator who came down here and got appointed by George Bush with three-quarters of a billion dollars in his pocket from money he had made creating these financial weapons of mass destruction. So, we are listening to the wrong guy here...Don't be stampeded!" (Watch the whole 5 minute video http://www.infowars.com/?p=5056) DeFazio is exactly right, especially about Paulson. As the New York Times article on Friday, "Agency's '04 Rule Let Banks Pile Up New Debt, and Risk", points out, Paulson, as chairman of Goldman Sachs, was one of the leaders of the five investment banks, who duped the SEC into loosening the rules on capital requirements which created the problems we are now facing. According to the Times: (The Big 5 investment banks) "wanted an exemption for their brokerage units from an old regulation that limited the amount of debt they could take on. The exemption would unshackle billions of dollars held in reserve as a cushion against losses on their investments. Those funds could then flow up to the parent company, enabling it to invest in the fast-growing but opaque world of mortgage-backed securities; credit derivatives, a form of insurance for bond holders; and other exotic instruments." This is the crux of the matter. Paulson polluted the system by bending the rules for the prudent leveraging of assets so he and his dodgy friends could maximize their profits. It's all about the bottom line. Paulson walked away with hundreds of millions of dollars in a scam that has now put the nation's economic future at risk. Last year the five Wall Street behemoths had "combined assets of more than $4 trillion". Now, everyone can see that it was all froth created through extreme leveraging that was intentionally ignored by S.E.C. boss Chris Cox. Now the banks are getting clobbered by short-sellers that are going from one financial institution to the next making them prove that they are sufficiently capitalized. They know its all a smokescreen, so they are saying, "Show me the money". One by one, the investment banks have fallen by the wayside. If the SEC was really operating in the public's interest, they'd being thumbing through G-Sax and Morgan Stanley's balance sheets right now making them prove that they're solvent. Instead, Cox has declared a moratorium on short selling while the investment banks have positioned themselves to get multi-million dollar taxpayer treats for their crappy assets. Where's the justice? As for Paulson's "No Banker Left Behind" boondoggle; it is not an effective way to recapitalize the banks and it doesn't fix the systemic problems in the credit markets. All it does is put the US at greater risk of losing its Triple A rating. If that happens it will be impossible to attract foreign capital which would be the equivalent of detonating a nuclear bomb in every city in the country. This is not the time to be putting more chips on the table like a riverboat gambler. It's time to show judgment and restraint, otherwise this whole thing will blow up. Emergency measures should be thoroughly examined so that liquidity is provided for the credit markets as fast as possible. The markets are already in meltdown-mode. "Real" economists--not the ideological hacks and loose cannons in the Bush administration--understand the fundamental problems and have generally agreed on a solution. It is a difficult issue, but one that anyone can grasp if they make the effort. Watch this 8 minute video with Nobel Prize winning economist, Joseph Stiglitz, http://www.cnbc.com/id/15840232?video=874100965&play=1 Stiglitz says: "There is a growing consensus among economists that any bail-out based on Paulson's plan won't work." If so, the huge increase in the national debt and the realization that even $700bn is not enough to rescue the US economy will erode confidence further and aggravate its weakness. Stiglitz's point is proven by the fact that the Dow Jones cratered after reports circulated that the House had passed the bailout. Paulson's fiasco has not calmed the markets at all; in fact, investors have begun to race for the exits. Confidence is draining from the system faster than the deposits in the dwindling money market accounts. Stiglitz adds: "This is not a good bill...It is based on "trickle down" economics which says that is you throw enough money at Wall Street and than some of it will go into ways that help the economy, but it is not really doing what needs to be done to recapitalize the banking system, stem the hemorrhaging of foreclosures, and deal with the growing unemployment..... We have seen these problems with banks before we know how to repair them. (Stiglitz worked with the World Bank during many similar crises) So why didn't they use these "tried and proven" methods? They (Paulson) decided that rather than a capital injection; they would try the almost impossible task of buying up all these bad assets, millions of mortgages and complex products, and hope that this will somehow solve the problem. It doesn't fix the big hole in the banks balance sheets, unless they vastly overpay for these products (Mortgage-backed securities)" This isn't rocket science. Many of the economists who disapproved of the bill have been through this drill before and they know what to do. The way to proceed is to have the US Treasury buy preferred shares in the banks that are not already technically insolvent. (The insolvent banks will have to be unwound by the FDIC) This will give the banks the capital they need to continue operations while protecting the taxpayer who gets an equity share with "upside potential" when the bank starts making profits again. This is how one goes about recapitalizing the banking system IF that is the real intention. Paulson's phony-baloney operation suggests he has something else up his sleeve; some ulterior motive like rewarding his friends on Wall Street with boatloads of taxpayer money or buying-back the toxic mortgages from foreign investors so they don't stop buying US debt. Here's how Bloomberg's Jonathan Weil sums it up: "If the government wants to save dying banks before they take others down with them, it should choose the clean and direct path: Inject capital into them. Take ownership stakes in return. And, where that's not feasible, seize them and sell their assets in an orderly way, just as the Resolution Trust Corp. did after the 1980s savings-and-loan crisis. Infusing capital directly, though, was too simple for Paulson. It lacked subterfuge. He decided the way to save the financial system from the evils of structured finance was through more structured finance. Instead of asking Congress to let Treasury recapitalize needy banks, he proposed buying some of their troubled assets at above-market prices. This would have let other banks create phony capital by writing up the values of similar assets on their own balance sheets, using Treasury's prices as their guide. Small Wonder. In short, Paulson's plan was one part robbery (with the banks doing the robbing) and one part accounting sleight of hand. No wonder House members rejected it.(at first) If Paulson or congressional leaders devise a Plan B, they should look to the example of Fortis, Belgium's biggest financial-services company. This week, the governments of Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg invested 11.2 billion euros ($16.3 billion) in Fortis. In exchange, they got ownership of almost half its banking business. That's how a government intervention is supposed to work. The company gets fresh capital, which has the added benefit of not being fake. The buyers get equity. Legacy shareholders get slammed with dilution. And if the company recovers, the government can sell shares to the public later, maybe even at a profit." (Jonathan Weil, Bloomberg News) Direct capital injections is the best way to recapitalize the banks and save the taxpayer money. Paulson's plan is just more flim-flam intended to reflate the value of sketchy assets. So far, investors and taxpayers are equally skeptical about the bill's prospects. Interbank lending remains clogged and the VIX, the "fear gauge", is still rising to record levels. Paulson hasn't fooled anyone. This bill does nothing to reduce foreclosures, reassure the markets, decrease unemployment, unfreeze the bond market, increase consumer spending, or put a floor under the stumbling dollar. All it does is hand out a few ripe plums to Paulson's buddies on Wall Street while (temporarily) soothing the frayed nerves of China's Finance Minister. That doesn't mean that China will be increasing its stash of US Treasuries or other US financial assets anytime soon. As the saying goes: "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, ..." Worst of all, Paulson's bailout bill wastes precious resources on a plan that is considerably wide of the mark. These problems have to be dealt with quickly to avert a larger catastrophe. Here's how Nouriel Roubini sees it: "It is now clear that the US financial system - and now even the system of financing of the corporate sector - is now in cardiac arrest and at a risk of a systemic financial meltdown. I don't use these words lightly...The Commercial paper market is shut down...Corporations have no access to long or short term credit markets. Brokers are increasingly not dealing with each other. The interbank market is seizing up...This cannot continue for more than a few days. It is the economic equivalent to cardiac arrest." (Nouriel Roubini's Global EconoMonitor) The levies have already broken, and the water is flooding into the city. The Federal Reserve will be forced to act. Expect an emergency rate cut of 50 basis points or more in the next 10 days coordinated with cuts in the other G-7 countries. Also, expect another bailout by the time Obama or McCain take office. As the French premier, Francois Fillon, warned on Saturday the world is "on the edge of the abyss". http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=869_1223401197 PiRaTeCoPy Financial Meltdown: We're on &quot;the Edge of the Abyss&quot; Sun, 31 Aug 2008 10:58:57 -0400 http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=4e9_1220194737 snade Zvi Bar'el - Haaretz August 31, 2008 The spark was in Georgia, which made an unwise decision that set off a chain reaction. The response by America and other NATO members was diplomatic but employed the language of war. Russia, Britain said, may take over Ukraine, Moldova and the Crimean peninsula; France proposed imposing sanctions; and nine NATO warships began exercises in the Black Sea, off Georgia's shores. Russia not only ignored the West's demands and warnings, it added threats of its own and warned of a conflagration in the Black Sea. On Wednesday, Russia poked Washington in the eye one more time and caused a stir in Israel. The charge d'affaires at the Russian embassy in Damascus announced that Moscow would beef up its naval forces in the Mediterranean and that warships would visit the Syrian port of Tartus more frequently. According to Russia's rationale, if the United States could dispatch the destroyer Cole off Lebanon's shores in March, Russia can send its warships to Syria's port. Because from now on, anything the United States can do, Russia can do, and maybe with even greater force and brutality. "Suddenly" it turns out that during a period of calm, when Russia was considered harmless, it accumulated enormous assets that today allow it to leverage its strategy. Europe, for example, which is now threatening Russia with sanctions, imports from Russia 30 percent of its oil and more than 40 percent of its natural gas, which keeps it warm during the winter. Russia is deeply invested in Iran, well beyond the construction of the Bushehr nuclear reactor - it holds long-term contracts in Iraq; Russia and China have extensively expanded trade relations, which reached $48 billion in 2007; and during his visit to Moscow last year, China's president said he expected trade between the two countries to reach $60 billion to $80 billion by 2010. With trade options like these, and many more investments in the Middle East, from Turkey to Algeria, Europe's dependence and an America stuck in the quicksand not in one place but two (Iraq and Afghanistan) - the Vladimir Putin-Dmitry Medvedev duo can walk around the neighborhood with brass knuckles and steely blue eyes, speaking in low voices. Especially after the ruckus they caused in Georgia. But this is not that same old Cold War. This is not about two ideologies fighting over space, but four superpowers - the United States, Europe, China and Russia - that are busy evaluating their economic forecasts for the coming decade and neutralizing mutual threats. It is not Abkhazia's national ambitions that interest Russia, just as Kosovo's ambitions are not the center of U.S. concerns. What is really important is where the next oil pipeline will pass, whether Iran will replace Russia as Europe's main energy supplier, whether Russia or the United States will lead in extracting petroleum in Iraq, and who will supply oil to China. If this were a matter of ideology, we would see Russia, a member of the international Quartet, working overtime to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, or at least encouraging dialogue between Israel and Damascus. If it were a matter of checking America's diplomatic strength in the region, Bashar Assad would have returned from his recent visit to Moscow with a pile of missiles, and not a cool promise for only defensive weapons, and only if he pays in cash. It may be possible to stop panicking from the Syrian-Russian ties, but it is best not to fall into diplomatic hibernation. Regional conflicts have always given powers reason to intervene, and Russia may renew its ambitions in this direction. Will Israel have the right response if Russia decides that the time has come to intervene in our little conflict? To become an active member of the Quartet? To recognize Palestinian independence as it recognized Abkhazia? Because if Russia becomes interested in the conflict, this may cause the United States to move, and this would be cause for panic. http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1016572.html http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=4e9_1220194737 snade If Russia shows interest in the conflict Thu, 06 Mar 2008 10:50:11 -0500 http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=b55_1204818611 allyssa Britain's blasphemy law no longer sacred After a teddy bear incident and much debate, the House of Lords votes to abolish it. By Kim Murphy Los Angeles Times Staff Writer March 05, 2008 LONDON -- A funny thing happened in November when Britain launched a righteous protest over Sudan's arrest of a British schoolteacher accused of insulting Islam by letting her students name a class teddy bear Muhammad. The Sudanese ambassador was summoned; Prime Minister Gordon Brown issued a protest. But it didn't take long for someone to point out that Downing Street was standing on diplomatic quicksand: Britain itself has a law making blasphemy a crime. Thus began a period of collective soul-searching on free speech and secularism, traditional values and the church that anoints Britain's queen. It culminated Wednesday in a 148-87 vote in the House of Lords to abolish the laws on blasphemy after a wrenching, two-hour debate. "It is crystal-clear that the offenses of blasphemy and blasphemous libel are unworkable in today's society," Kay Andrews said in introducing the government-backed amendment, adding that "as long as this law remains on the statute books, it hinders the UK's ability to challenge oppressive blasphemy laws in other jurisdictions." But in a debate that underscored Britain's continuing strong roots in the Church of England, there was substantial doubt about the wisdom of abandoning what for many is a symbol of the increasingly multicultural nation's reliance on Christian values as a foundation for law and society. "The essential question is: Should we abolish Christian beliefs and replace them with secular beliefs? As long as there has been a country called England, it has been a Christian country, publicly acknowledging the one true God," said Detta O'Cathain, a Conservative member of the House of Lords. "Noble lords may cry freedom, but I urge them to pause and consider that the freedom we have today was nurtured by Christian principles, and continues to be guided by them," she said. Most remaining blasphemy laws in Western democracies are either little used or, like Britain's, on their way out. This week, the Massachusetts Legislature began consideration of a bill to phase out that state's blasphemy proscription, along with other outdated "blue laws." Wednesday's vote in the upper house of Parliament was an amendment to a broad proposed law on criminal justice that must still go back to the House of Commons for approval before taking effect. Still, the vote was seen as a crucial hurdle in a process that is now all but assured. "The law on blasphemy will be abolished. And good riddance, is what we say," Terry Sanderson, president of the National Secular Society, said in an interview. "It's an unusable law, as it stands at the moment, and in the past it's been a very cruel law." In fact, Parliament has never passed a blasphemy law. It is a common- law crime established centuries ago and clarified by judges in the 19th century to protect the beliefs of the Church of England; citizens may fall afoul if they insult God, Christ, the Christian religion or the Bible in a way that is scurrilous, abusive or offensive, or in a manner that may breach the peace. Attacks on other religions are not covered, prompting many critics to brand the law as discriminatory. In practice, the law has seldom been used, and in 2006 a new law making it a crime to incite religious hatred was adopted as a more equitable alternative. The last time anyone was imprisoned for blasphemy was in 1922, when a man was convicted after comparing Jesus Christ to a circus clown. The last successful blasphemy prosecution occurred as a result of a private complaint in 1977 against a gay newspaper for publishing a poem that describes a Roman centurion's homosexual lovemaking with Christ's dead body, and legal analysts say it is doubtful any new prosecution could survive under European human rights laws. Just this week, a Christian activist organization, Christian Voice, lost its appeal under the blasphemy laws of a challenge to the musical " Jerry Springer: The Opera." "Far from being abolished, the laws against blasphemy should be strengthened to remove the loopholes the courts have created," Christian Voice's national director, Stephen Green, said in an interview. "This is all part of a move by the atheists to turn us into a secular state." The case of the teacher in Sudan, Gillian Gibbons, ended with a pardon and release after eight days in custody, negotiated in part by Muslim members of the British Parliament. Gibbons said in a statement that she had "great respect for the Muslim religion" and had intended no offense when she allowed her students to choose a name for the bear, but protesters in Sudan continued to call for punishing her. The Church of England has cautiously elected not to oppose abolishing the British law, though senior clerics have emphasized that any change in the law should not be seen as a move toward secularism. - -- Copyright 2008 Los Angeles Times http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=b55_1204818611 allyssa Britain's blasphemy law no longer sacred Legal, Secular, UK, Sudan, blasphemy law, teddy bear, mohammed