This Can't Be Happening!

Breaking News!: Nine Jurors in McMillan Case Send Letter to Trial Judge Asking Him Not to Send Her to Jail!

In a surprise development, nine of the 12 jurors who on Monday voted unanimously to convict Cecily McMillan of felony assault of a police officer for elbowing him in the eye as he grabbed her to arrest her during a clearing of Zuccotti Park near Wall Street have written a letter to the trial judge, Ronald Zwiebel. In it they petition him not to sentence her to jail time.

The letter was first reported by the US edition of the British Guardian newspaper, which has done a far better job of reporting on this ugly case than any of the city’s three daily newspapers, which have devoted little time or space to it.

The Guardian had reported earlier on the day jurors were released from duty after rendering their verdict, that they had all rushed out to read about the case. Several said they were dismayed to learn about details that had been withheld from them by the trial judge at the request of the obsessed prosecutor — details such as the history of brutality by the officer who had grabbed McMillan from behind by the breast, causing her to throw up an elbow in defense, hitting his eye, or a brutal act by the same cop later after he had arrested her Also barred during the trial were details about the general violence used by the NYPD in clearing the group, of which Mcmillan was a part, from the Zuccotti Park public space, leaving jurors to think her incident was the only violence that took place that evening.

In its earlier report, the Guardian had quoted jurors as saying they were also shocked and upset to learn, after having voted to convict her, that she faced up to seven years in jail. They said they assumed she would be given some punishment like probation. Instead, they witnessed her being led out of the courtroom in shackels to be held on Rikers Island until her sentencing hearing several weeks later, with no bail set during the interim — a stark contrast from the way high-profile convicted business executives get treated while awaiting sentencing, or during their months of appeals.

It will be instructive to see how the judge responds — if at all — to the call by a large majority of the jurors in the case for no jail time for McMillan, as well as to see, if he does respond, how hard DA Vance and his prosecutor in the case object to any leniency in sentencing.

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Cecily McMillan and her lead attorney Martin Stolar in a photo taken during her trial

Two and a half years after the Occupy Wall Street movement took the country by storm, injecting topics like income inequality and class war into the realm of permissible national political discourse for the first time since the 1930s, the nation’s legal machinery of repression has come down like a proverbial ton of bricks on the movement just as nationally coordinated police repression crushed its physical manifestation in late 2011.

They haven’t killed him yet.

Paulo Malhaes, the confessed Brazilian torturer whose death I recently reported on this site may not have been murdered after all. At least that’s what police investigating the case have been loudly proclaiming for the past week.

The former Army officer who had been an active agent of repression during Brazil’s military dictatorship in the nineteen seventies was found dead in his home on April 25th. It was immediately and widely assumed that Malhaes had been assassinated by former comrades disturbed by his recent testimony before the Brazilian Truth Commission. But the police in Nova Iguacu, a commuter city on the periphery of Rio de Janeiro, are saying that Malhaes died of a heart attack while being restrained during a routine house robbery gone wrong.

Retired Colonel Paulo Malhaes testifying last month and his recent funeral
 

Based on what’s being reported in Brazil and via international wire services, however, the line of inquiry being pursued by the police is so rife with contradictory evidence and unanswered questions that the case is already showing all the earmarks of a cover up, if not a full blown conspiracy. At this point it’s still impossible to distinguish hearsay from fact, but the story goes something like this, beginning with a few scant details on the victim’s background:

While on active duty in an intelligence unit more than three decades ago, Paulo Malhaes was in command of what the Brazilian Army dubbed its House of Death located in a mountain town near Rio. It was where high profile militants involved in armed resistance were taken to be interrogated. Most never left alive, Malhaes has testified, and their bodies were partially dismembered, then dumped in a local river. “They paid a high price for playing cops and robbers with the Army,” Malhaes once gloated to reporters of the Brazilian daily, O Globo. During his testimony Malhaes said he did not repent his acts, and would do it all over again. The former colonel did refuse, however, to provide the names of those with whom he served, which may have not been enough to save him.

Malhaes had retired from the military sometime in the early eighties. He settled in the rural zone surrounding Nova Iguacu on a property next to a local police official, who, it has been revealed, also served under Malhaes in the House of Death. The police official raised horses. One article from O Globo claims that Malhaes “imposed his violent brand of law on the region” by riding the dirt roads of his neighborhood on horseback hunting for drug traffickers. When he saw them he would take out his gun and begin to shoot. It was also reported that Malhaes grew close to a local chief of organized crime involved in the numbers racket, and that he stayed in touch with some of the interrogators who had been his subordinates in the army’s torture unit.

  Listen to Dave Lindorff explain on Santa Barbara radio KCSB’s Radio Occupy program how the federal government, in collusion with state and local police, and possibly with private bank and oil company security firms, planned to use “suppressed sniper fire” to assassinate the leaders of Occupy Houston, and perhaps also the leaders of other Occupy Movement actions around the country.

Drawing on classified FBI and Homeland Security documents obtained by the Partnership for Civil Justice through the Freedom of Information Act, Lindorff tells Radio Occupy host Kathy Swift how the Homeland Security Department under the Obama administration coordinated the national crackdown that crushed the Occupy Movement, and how it nearly led to a campaign of assassination against this peaceful movement that in 2011 swept the nation. He also notes that the FBI, so quick to boast about the 40-plus alleged “terror” plots it has disrupted since 9-11, has never made a prosecution or arrest in this Houston terror plot to kill Occupy leaders, about which its Houston office wrote in a memo to FBI national headquarters.

To listen to part I of this two-part interview, got to Radio Occupy. To listen to Part II, click here

Portion of a page from the Craft International website showing sniper training programs for local police

This week’s “This Can’t Be Happening!” radio program on PRN radio features an interview with Dr. Phil Nel, a distinguished professor of English at Kansas State University, and an outspoken opponent of a current effort by the Kansas Board of Regents to impose a new “social media policy” on all the state’s public higher education institutions — a policy that would allow administrators to fire even tenured faculty for posting statements that “damage” the school or negatively impact “harmony” on campus.

Nel tells program host Dave Lindorff that this current campaign in Kansas is just one part of a nationwide attack on freedom of inquiry, thought and speech on the nation’s public colleges and universities, and more broadly on public education in general.

Prof. Phil Nel and other defenders of academic freedom are taking on the Kansas Board of Regents (to hear program, click here or on the photo above)

Disgraced former Kansas Attorney General Phill Kline, who while in office as AG and later as a county prosecutor conducted a draconian inquisition against abortion doctors and the state’s Planned Parenthood organization, may still be a visiting assistant professor of law at Jerry Falwell’s Liberty “University” in Lynchburg, Virginia, but he isn’t allowed to practice law anymore.

The US Supreme Court earlier this week, without comment, upheld the Kansas Supreme Court’s 2013 decision revoking Kline’s law license citing his abuses of power in pursuing abortionists — especially Dr. Kris Neuhaus, a referring physician who offered state-mandated second opinions for patients of abortion doctor George Tiller.

While the US Supreme Court didn’t comment in reaching its decision, the ruling by the Kansas Supreme Court, which the US high court ruling upholds, didn’t mince words, finding last October that Kline had misled or allowed subordinates to mislead others, including a Kansas City-area grand jury and local judges, so as to further his investigations. The justices wrote that they had found, in reviewing his behavior, “clear and convincing evidence” of professional misconduct. They ruled that during his time as the state’s top law-enforcement official and later as a county DA, Kline had violated 11 rules governing the professional conduct of attorneys.

While the Kansas Supreme Court didn’t go into specifics about cases in its ruling, the judges did consider Kline’s prosecutorial excesses as attorney general and county prosecutor, saying that his “fervid” pursuit of abortion providers in support of his anti-abortion “cause,” was an aggravating factor in their ruling.

In the view of many observers, Kline’s obsessive and “fervid” inquisition may have directly led to the murder Dr. George Tiller.
Dr. Kris Neuhaus: 'Karma's a bitch"
 

When a federal court trashed its “net neutrality” compromise policy in January, the Federal Communications Commission assured us that the Internet we knew and depended on was safe. Most activists didn’t believe federal officials and this past week the FCC demonstrated how realistic our cynicism was.

The Commission announced last week that among its proposals on the Internet, due for full discussion on May 15, was one which would give access providers the right to sign special deals with content producers for connections that are faster and cleaner than the connections most websites use. It’s precisely the nightmare that court decision threatened.

In the predictable outcry and immediate debate over the FCC’s announcement, however, two major issues seemed to be lost.

Wheeler and the Boss: Apparently the joke's on us!
 

To deliver this faster connection, the Internet giants will have to change the Net’s protocols, establishing a fast lane that completely destroys the technological basis of Internet neutrality. They will, effectively, be allowed to set up an alternate Internet.

At the same time, the announcements raise a question about the FCC’s role. To develop this proposal, it has obviously been talking to the very companies it is supposed to regulate and has written regulations based primarily on a concern about their ability to make lots of money.

Isn’t this the opposite of what federal regulation is supposed to do?

When the debate dust settles, it appears that not only may we lose the Internet as we know but we have no agency in government looking out for our interests.

            At approximately four o’clock this past Thursday afternoon, Paulo Malhaes, a retired officer who served in the ‘70s during the years of Brazil’s military dictatorship, was murdered at his small farm outside of Rio de Janeiro.

            Malhaes had become infamous in recent weeks, as I wrote in this space recently, for his lurid testimony before the Brazilian Truth Commission, where he described in graphic detail how the bodies of opponents of the repressive regime had been disappeared after being killed under torture.

            According to news reports, Malhaes, his wife and a house mate, in some reports described as a valet, had arrived at the farm around two p.m. and were confronted by three intruders already in their home.  The wife, Cristina Malhaes, and the house mate, later identified by police only as Rui, were restrained and led off into one room, while the former lieutenant colonel was taken to another.

            Cristina and Rui were later released unharmed as the assailants departed the scene by car.  Neither of the survivors reported having heard a sound to suggest the Malhaes had been worked over or “tortured.” But when police examined Malhaes’ body Friday morning they found marks on his face and neck, and have tentatively concluded that he died from asphyxiation.  The only items the murderers removed from the premises were a computer, a printer, and several weapons that had belonged to the victim.

            The announcement of Paulo Malhaes’ murder, reported in front pages all over Brazil, has sent shock waves through the country, including among surviving junta participants. The big question being debated is which side did him in.

Admitted Brazil junta torturer Lt. Col. Paulo Malhaes resting at the home (left) where he was slain after testifying before a national Truth Commission (right) investigating the 1970s tortures and disappearances that took place under the US-backed junta
 

 
I met Janet Burroway when I was a Vietnam veteran on the GI Bill at Florida State University and I signed up for a creative writing workshop she was just hired to teach. She was a worldly, published novelist seven years older than me. She had just left an oppressive husband, a Belgian, who was an important theater director in London where she’d been to parties with the likes of Samuel Beckett. I graduate in 1973, and in a turn of events that still amazes me, I asked her out and ended up living with her for a couple years. She had two beautiful boys, Tim, 9, and Toby, 6, who I grew to love.

The cover of Losing Tim; and Tim, Janet Burroway and Toby in England circa 1971

Cut to 2004. Even as a kid, Tim had a hard-headed moral code about what was right and wrong. As he grew into manhood, he became enamored of all things military; he loved guns. He had a career in the Army as a Ranger, where all his evaluations suggest a stellar soldier. He reached captain, but a promise to his wife and other reasons led him to resign his commission in the active Army. He worked in the Army reserves for a while in places like Bosnia. Contacts led him to civilian jobs in the military contractor world in Africa and Iraq, where he ended up running de-mining operations and training de-miners for RONCO Consulting Corporation.

By Spring 2004, he decided to resign from RONCO. He visited his mother in Tallahassee, then flew to Namibia, northwest of South Africa, to be with his wife Birgett, a white Namibian he’d met during an assignment in Africa where she worked for the UN. Birgett had an adolescent son from a previous relationship. They had a one-year old daughter.

The details are not absolutely clear. Tim was certainly disillusioned from his experiences in Iraq and was apparently sinking into depression. For reasons only he could know, one afternoon he put a nine-millimeter pistol to his head and, in front of Birgett, shot himself dead at age 39.

 
“The Face of Evil,” flashed the eye catching headline in Brazil’s major daily on a morning late this March, and the accompanying photo of Army lieutenant-colonel Paulo Malhaes, retired, could not have portrayed a more convincing ogre had it been photoshopped by central casting. Malhaes, a self-described torturer and murderer operated in the early 1970′s, the most repressive period in Brazil’s harsh era of prolonged military rule.

Retired Army Lieutenant Colonel Paulo Malhaes testifying to torture in the early 1970s

In depositions covering many hours, first recorded by the journalists of O Globo who got the scoop, and then before the Rio de Janeiro State — and the Brazilian Federal Truth Commission — Malhaes described in dispassionate but grisly detail how bodies of dissidents who died under torture were disposed of. “There was no DNA at the time; you’ll grant me that, right? So when one was tasked with dismantling a corpse, you had to ask which are the body-parts that will help identify who the person was. Teeth and the fingers alone. We pulled the teeth and cut off the fingers. The hands, no. And that’s how we made the bodies unidentifiable.” After which, the mutilated dead were dumped at sea, having first been eviscerated to prevent them from floating to the surface.

In marking the recently passed 50th anniversary of Brazil’s April 1, 1964 military coup that deposed popularly elected President Joao Goulart, Brazilians have been offered a kaleidoscope of opportunities to revisit and discuss that troubling past, and, for some, to overlay the impact of the dictatorship years on a society restored to democracy for over a generation, but in which the deepest structural problems remain unchanged. Many axes were being ground on these topics in the rich offering of articles and opinion pieces in the daily press as the coup’s anniversary day approached. Very few, of course, sought to defend the dictatorship, which, nonetheless, appears to have been the sole motivation behind Paulo Malhaes’ sudden impulse to seek repeat performances for his macabre confessions on the public stage, an agenda cruelly underscored by his brazen refusal to express remorse or reveal the names of his commanders.

In one bizarre aside, Malhaes confided a disassociated feeling of “solidarity” for the family of Rubens Paiva, a federal deputy allied with Goulart’s party whose murder and disappearance in 1971 Malhaes himself apparently had a hand in. It was “sad,” the colonel said, that Paiva’s family had to wait 38 years to learn the specifics of his fate, already made public from other sources. Malhaes quickly insisted that his comment not be interpreted as “sentimentality.” He hadn’t questioned his mission back then, and he still didn’t. “There was no other solution. They [my superiors] provided me with a solution,” written broadly enough for Malhaes to justify his butchery.

The lies, propaganda and rank hypocrisy emanating from Washington, and echoed by the US corporate media regarding events in Ukraine are stunning and would be laughable, but for the fact that they appear to be aimed at conditioning the US public for increasing confrontation with Russia – confrontation which could easily tip over the edge into direct military conflict, with consequences that are too dreadful to contemplate.

It would be beyond ironic if, a quarter of a century after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of nearly half a century of Cold War and Mutual Assured Destruction, during all of which time US and Russian soldiers never fought against each other, we now ended up with soldiers from our two countries actually doing battle with each other, instead of just fighting proxy wars.

For now, perhaps out of sheer unwillingness to accept that dreadful possibility, I’m choosing to look for the humor in this conflict.

When it comes to the US, the laughs are easy to find.

Start with Vice President Joe Biden, a guy who has always been hard to take seriously. I mean, we’re talking about a politician who in 1988 had to quit running for president when he was caught lifting his life story from British Labor Party leader Neil Kinnock.

Still, Biden outdid even himself on his current visit to Ukraine when he called on Russia to back off in its support of pro-Russian separatists in Eastern Ukraine saying that, “No nation should threaten its neighbors by amassing troops along the border.”

This from the man who is one heartbeat from the presidency of a nation that doesn’t just have an army and a navy and an airforce along its southern shore threatening its neighbor Cuba, but actually has its navy based on Cuban territory, which it refuses to leave, despite having long ago run out its lease. And the US doesn’t just threaten. It acts, most recently by attempting to fund a fake Cuban “Twitter” operation called ZunZuneo (Hummingbird Tweet) designed to enable and encourage anti-Cuban government activists to anonymously organize and create chaos.

The US State Dept. and the NY Times tried to claim the photo on the left showed a bearded ‘pro-Russian Ukranian’ who was the same as the bearded man at right, allegedly photographed in Russia where he’s supposed to be in Russian Special forces. Really — that’s the quality of the ‘proof’ that Russians are behind the uprising in eastern Ukraine