congrats to tony pierce

can't imagine a better person re:present:ing buzznet now and in the future ....

oranger

Calif. Inmates to Get Orange Undies
- By The Associated Press

(09-27) 13:53 PDT Ventura, Calif. (AP) --

The Sheriff's Department came up with a bright idea to stop male inmates from leaving the jailhouse with county-issued underwear: socks, skivvies and shirts are now dyed orange. Some $50,000 is spent each year for inmate underwear.

"We just keep losing horrendous amounts of that property," said Kathy Kemp, chief deputy of the Sheriff's Department's detention services division. The division's tight budget led to the orange undies plan.

"We think we'll be able to reduce the amount of clothes that inmates take with them," Cmdr. Brent Morris said.

About 1,400 male inmates will get orange undergarments.

Inmates who change from their jail jumpsuits to their street clothes will stand out in bright orange and they'll have to hand over their drawers before they leave, the department said.

The estimated 200 female inmates will keep using white underwear. There hasn't been a significant amount of underwear lost from the women's side, officials said.

URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/news/archive/2005/09/27/national/a135357D04.DTL

disgusted

War Pornography
Gore-for-porn swap by US soldiers in Iraq makes Abu Ghraib look like kid stuff.
By Chris Thompson / East Bay Express

NowThatsFuckedUp.com

Who / What:
NowThatsFuckedUp.com
Photo Gallery:
The War Pornographers

If you want to see the true face of war, go to the amateur porn Web site NowThatsFuckedUp.com. For almost a year, American soldiers stationed in Iraq and Afghanistan have been taking photographs of dead bodies, many of them horribly mutilated or blown to pieces, and sending them to Web site administrator Chris Wilson. In return for letting him post these images, Wilson gives the soldiers free access to his site. American soldiers have been using the pictures of disfigured Iraqi corpses as currency to buy pornography.

At Wilson's Web site, you can see an Arab man's face sliced off and placed in a bowl filled with blood. Another man's head, his face crusted with dried blood and powder burns, lies on a bed of gravel. A man in a leather coat who apparently tried to run a military checkpoint lies slumped in the driver's seat of a car, his head obliterated by gunfire, the flaps of skin from his neck blooming open like rose petals. Six men in beige fatigues, identified as US Marines, laugh and smile for the camera while pointing at a burned, charcoal-black corpse lying at their feet.

The captions that accompany these images, which were apparently written by the soldiers who posted them, laugh and gloat over the bodies. The soldier who posted a picture of a corpse lying in a pool of his own brains and entrails wrote, "What every Iraqi should look like." The photograph of a corpse whose jaw has apparently rotted away, leaving a gaping set of upper teeth, bears the caption: "bad day for this dude." One soldier posted three photographs of corpses lying in the street and titled his collection, "die haji die." The soldiers take pride, even joy, in displaying the dead.

This is a moral catastrophe. The Bush administration claims such sympathy for American war dead that officials have banned the media from photographing flag-draped coffins being carried off cargo planes. Government officials and American media officials have repeatedly denounced the al-Jazeera network for airing grisly footage of Iraqi war casualties and American prisoners of war. The legal fight over whether to release the remaining photographs of atrocities at Abu Ghraib has dragged on for months, with no less a figure than Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Richard Meyers arguing that the release of such images will inflame the Muslim world and drive untold numbers to join al-Qaeda. But none of these can compare to the prospect of American troops casually bartering pictures of suffering and death for porn.

"Two years ago, if somebody had said our soldiers would do these things to detainees and take pictures of it, I would have said that's a lie," sighed the recently retired General Michael Marchand – who as Assistant Judge Advocate General for the Army was responsible for reforming military training policy to make sure nothing like Abu Ghraib ever happens again. "What soldiers do, I'm not sure I can guess anymore."

But for Chris Wilson, it's all in a day's work. "It's an unedited look at the war from their point of view," he says of the soldiers who contribute the images. "There's always going to be a slant from the news media. ... And this is a photo that comes straight from their camera to the site. To me, it's just a more real look at what's going on."

Wilson, a 27-year-old Web entrepreneur living in Florida, created the Web site a year ago, asked fans to contribute pictures of their wives and girlfriends, and posted footage and photographs bearing titles such as "wife working cock" and "ass fucking my wife on the stairs." The site was a big hit with soldiers stationed overseas; about a third of his customers, or more than fifty thousand people, work in the military. Wilson says he started getting e-mail from soldiers thanking him for keeping up their morale and "bringing a little piece of the States to them." But other soldiers complained that they had problems buying memberships to his service. "They wanted to join the site, the amateur wife and girlfriend site," he says. "But they couldn't, because the addresses associated with their credit cards were Quackistan or something, they were in such a high-risk country, that the credit card companies wouldn't approve the purchase."

That's when Wilson hit upon the idea of offering free memberships to soldiers. All they had to do was send a picture of life in Iraq or Afghanistan, and they'd get all the free porn they wanted. All sorts of images began appearing over the transom, but he dedicated a special site to view the most "gory" pictures. Asked what he feels upon viewing a new crop, Wilson says: "Personally, I don't look at it one way or another. It's newsworthy, and people can form their own opinions."

Wilson's Web site has made the news before – but not for posting pictures of murdered human beings. Last October, the New York Post reported that the Pentagon was investigating Wilson for posting naked pictures of female soldiers in Iraq. After a few months, the Post reported that the Pentagon had blocked soldiers in Iraq from accessing the Web site, which had posted five more pictures of nude female soldiers, some of whom had posed with machine guns and grenades. After the Post's stories, Wilson says, he was bombarded with requests for interviews from newspapers and radio stations. Even after he started posting photographs of corpses late last year, media inquiries focused exclusively on his nudie pics. It wasn't until reporters from the European press contacted him last week that anyone took notice of Wilson's snuff-for-porn arrangement with American troops.

"The soldiers thing, I think the Italians picked it up first," Wilson says. "I've done interviews with the Italians, the French, Amsterdam. ... They were very critical, saying the US wouldn't pick it up, because it's such a sore spot. ... It raises too many ethical questions. ... I started to laugh, because it's true."

According to Army spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Chris Conway, Pentagon policy may be ambivalent when it comes to soldiers posting pictures of mutilated war victims. "There are policies in place that, on the one hand, safeguard sensitive and classified information, and on the other hand protects the First Amendment rights of servicemembers," he says, adding that field commanders may issue additional directives. "In plain English, if you're on the job working for the Department of Defense, you shouldn't be freelancing. You should be doing your duty."

If American soldiers are always considered representatives of their government while in the field, international law clearly prohibits publishing and ridiculing images of war dead. The First Protocol of the Geneva Conventions states that "the remains of persons who have died for reasons related to occupation or in detention resulting from occupation or hostilities ... shall be respected, and the gravesites of all such persons shall be respected, maintained, and marked." The first Geneva Convention also requires that military personnel "shall further ensure that the dead are honorably interred, if possible according to the rites off the religion to which they belonged."

Nothing about this appalling trade could begin to be called "honorable." This latest scandal doesn't just demean the bodies of the dead – it demeans us all, in ways we won't begin to understand for years. One of the pictures on Wilson's site depicts a woman whose right leg has been torn off by a land mine, and a medical worker is holding the mangled stump up to the camera. The woman's vagina is visible under the hem of her skirt. The caption for this picture reads: "Nice puss – bad foot."

able danger

Pentagon Nixes 9/11 Hearing Testimony
- By KIMBERLY HEFLING, Associated Press Writer

(09-21) 09:06 PDT WASHINGTON (AP) --

The Department of Defense forbade a military intelligence officer to testify Wednesday about a secret military unit that the officer says identified four Sept. 11 hijackers as terrorists more than a year before the attacks, according to the man's attorney.

In testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee, attorney Mark Zaid, who represents Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer, said the Pentagon also refused to permit testimony there by a defense contractor that he also represents.

The Judiciary Committee was hearing testimony about the work of a classified unit code named "Able Danger."

Zaid, appearing on behalf of Shaffer and contractor John Smith that Able Danger, using data mining techniques, identified four of the terrorists who struck on Sept. 11, 2001 — including mastermind Mohamed Atta.

"At least one chart, and possibly more, featured a photograph of Mohamed Atta," Zaid said.

Maj. Paul Swiergosz, a Defense Department spokesman, said Wednesday that open testimony would not be appropriate.

"We have expressed our security concerns and believe it is simply not possible to discuss Able Danger in any great detail in any public forum," he said.

Swiergosz said no individuals were singled out not to testify.

"There's nothing more to say than that," Swiergosz said. "It's not possible to discuss the Able Danger program because there are security concerns."

Another Pentagon spokesman, Bryan Whitman, said later that the Defense Department would be represented at the hearing by William Dugan, the acting assistant to the secretary for intelligence oversight. Whitman also said the Pentagon believes it has provided sufficient information on Able Danger to the committees with primary oversight responsibility for the Department of Defense: the Armed Services and Intelligence committees.

On three occasions, Able Danger personnel attempted to provide the FBI with information, but Department of Defense attorneys stopped them because of legal concerns about military-run investigations on U.S. soil, Zaid said in his prepared remarks, encouraging the panel to locate a legal memorandum that he said Defense Department attorneys used to justify stopping the meetings.

Zaid also charged that records associated with the unit were destroyed during 2000 and March 2001, and copies were destroyed in spring 2004.

Rep. Curt Weldon. R-Pa., who was the first to come forward to assert that Able Danger had identified Atta and three others as being members of an al-Qaida cell, was also scheduled to testify.

If Weldon is correct, the intelligence would change the timeline for when government officials first became aware of Atta's links to the terrorist network al-Qaida.

Former members of the Sept. 11 commission have dismissed the "Able Danger" assertions.

Pentagon officials had acknowledged earlier this month that they had found three people who recall an intelligence chart identifying Atta as a terrorist prior to the Sept. 11 attacks.

In addition to Shaffer, another military officer, Navy Capt. Scott Phillpott, has come forward to support Weldon's claims. He was not on Wednesday's witness list.

URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/n/a/2005/09/21/national/w054427D06.DTL

indecency laws are indecent

Israeli Couple Fined for Kissing in India

(09-21) 09:12 PDT NEW DELHI, India (AP) --

India may be the land of the Kamasutra, the ancient treatise on sex, but public displays of affection remain strictly taboo in the country's hinterlands, as an Israeli couple found out.

They were fined 500 Indian rupees ($11) each for embracing and kissing after getting married in a traditional Hindu ceremony in the northwestern Indian town Pushkar, the Asian Age newspaper reported Wednesday.

The Israeli Embassy in New Delhi confirmed the incident and identified the couple as Alon Orpaz and Tehila Salev, who decided to get married while visiting India. The embassy did not provide additional details.

The Asian Age said priests at Pushkar's Brahma temple were so incensed when the couple smooched as hymns were still being chanted that they filed a police complaint.

A court in Pushkar then charged them with indecency and ordered them to pay the fine or face 10 days in prison, the newspaper reported. The couple decided to pay, it said.

"We will not tolerate any cultural pollution of this sort," the newspaper quoted a priest, Ladoo Ram Sharma, as saying.

Asian Age reported that the priests planned to ask the government to require tourists to be appropriately dressed when visiting the holy town and its temples.

Pushkar, located on the banks of Pushkar Lake, is a popular Hindu pilgrimage spot that's also frequented by foreign tourists, who come for the town's annual cattle fair and camel races.

URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/news/archive/2005/09/21/international/i061841D52.DTL

naked and purring on the hood of a new car

Singer Waits Files Suit Against GM Unit

- By MATT MOORE, Associated Press Writer
Thursday, September 15, 2005

(09-15) 10:23 PDT FRANKFURT, Germany (AP) --

Singer-songwriter Tom Waits said Thursday he has filed a lawsuit against a unit of automaker General Motors Corp. and a German advertising agency for allegedly using a soundalike in a series of European ads.

The 55-year-old singer, whose distinct, gravelly voice has won him two Grammy awards, filed the civil suit this week with a state court in Frankfurt, listing Adam Opel AG and the advertising firm McCann Erickson as the defendants.

Andreas Schumacher, Waits' German lawyer, said the singer was approached numerous times about doing the ads last year, but declined, citing a policy of not doing commercials. He said the firm then hired a soundalike and the ads aired earlier this year in Sweden, Finland, Denmark and Norway.

"We have sent copies of the lawsuit to McCann Erickson and Opel," Schumacher said.

Waits is seeking damages and any profits derived from the ads for violating his personality rights, Schumacher said.

"Apparently the highest compliment our culture grants artists nowadays is to be in an ad — ideally naked and purring on the hood of a new car. I have adamantly and repeatedly refused this dubious honor," Waits said in a statement. "While the court can't make me active in radio, I am asking it to make me radioactive to advertisers."

Ralf Specht, the manager of McCann Erickson in Frankfurt, said the agency spoke with Waits in May and had changed the music in the ad campaign. He said the company had not gotten a copy of the lawsuit yet. An Opel spokesman said he couldn't comment because the company had not received a copy of the lawsuit, either.

bush wants katrina probe

"duuuuuude ... just hold up a mirror and stare at it!!!!!!!!!!"

it'll save us all a great deal of time and money.

an open letter to the president

Angry 'Times-Picayune' Wants Firing of FEMA Chief
Here is the text via Editor & Publisher

We heard you loud and clear Friday when you visited our devastated city and the Gulf Coast and said, "What is not working, we’re going to make it right."

Please forgive us if we wait to see proof of your promise before believing you. But we have good reason for our skepticism.

Bienville built New Orleans where he built it for one main reason: It’s accessible. The city between the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain was easy to reach in 1718.

How much easier it is to access in 2005 now that there are interstates and bridges, airports and helipads, cruise ships, barges, buses and diesel-powered trucks.

Despite the city’s multiple points of entry, our nation’s bureaucrats spent days after last week’s hurricane wringing their hands, lamenting the fact that they could neither rescue the city’s stranded victims nor bring them food, water and medical supplies.

Meanwhile there were journalists, including some who work for The Times-Picayune, going in and out of the city via the Crescent City Connection. On Thursday morning, that crew saw a caravan of 13 Wal-Mart tractor trailers headed into town to bring food, water and supplies to a dying city.

Television reporters were doing live reports from downtown New Orleans streets. Harry Connick Jr. brought in some aid Thursday, and his efforts were the focus of a "Today" show story Friday morning.

Yet, the people trained to protect our nation, the people whose job it is to quickly bring in aid were absent. Those who should have been deploying troops were singing a sad song about how our city was impossible to reach.

We’re angry, Mr. President, and we’ll be angry long after our beloved city and surrounding parishes have been pumped dry. Our people deserved rescuing. Many who could have been were not. That’s to the government’s shame.

Mayor Ray Nagin did the right thing Sunday when he allowed those with no other alternative to seek shelter from the storm inside the Louisiana Superdome. We still don’t know what the death toll is, but one thing is certain: Had the Superdome not been opened, the city’s death toll would have been higher. The toll may even have been exponentially higher.

It was clear to us by late morning Monday that many people inside the Superdome would not be returning home. It should have been clear to our government, Mr. President. So why weren’t they evacuated out of the city immediately? We learned seven years ago, when Hurricane Georges threatened, that the Dome isn’t suitable as a long-term shelter. So what did state and national officials think would happen to tens of thousands of people trapped inside with no air conditioning, overflowing toilets and dwindling amounts of food, water and other essentials?

State Rep. Karen Carter was right Friday when she said the city didn’t have but two urgent needs: "Buses! And gas!" Every official at the Federal Emergency Management Agency should be fired, Director Michael Brown especially.

In a nationally televised interview Thursday night, he said his agency hadn’t known until that day that thousands of storm victims were stranded at the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center. He gave another nationally televised interview the next morning and said, "We’ve provided food to the people at the Convention Center so that they’ve gotten at least one, if not two meals, every single day."

Lies don’t get more bald-faced than that, Mr. President.

Yet, when you met with Mr. Brown Friday morning, you told him, "You’re doing a heck of a job."

That’s unbelievable.

There were thousands of people at the Convention Center because the riverfront is high ground. The fact that so many people had reached there on foot is proof that rescue vehicles could have gotten there, too.

We, who are from New Orleans, are no less American than those who live on the Great Plains or along the Atlantic Seaboard. We’re no less important than those from the Pacific Northwest or Appalachia. Our people deserved to be rescued.

No expense should have been spared. No excuses should have been voiced. Especially not one as preposterous as the claim that New Orleans couldn’t be reached.

Mr. President, we sincerely hope you fulfill your promise to make our beloved communities work right once again.

When you do, we will be the first to applaud.

mean meanwhile

On Overpass, Thousands Wait All Day for 5 Buses

Anna Badkhen, Chronicle Staff Writer
Saturday, September 3, 2005

Metairie, La. -- It looked like a refugee camp in some desperately poor country on the other side of the world.

Under a blistering sun on the western outskirts of the American city of New Orleans, about 5,000 people have been stranded for days in a soggy, garbage-strewn wasteland surrounded by metal barriers, sharing 12 portable toilets and one garbage can.

They were deposited here, at the intersection of Interstate 10 and Causeway Boulevard, in 95-degree heat after rescuers plucked them from rooftops and bridges in their flooded city -- women with infants, men in wheelchairs, families who had to swim for hours, children who had spent days without food or water.

The lucky ones slept on military cots, the others on sodden cardboard boxes amid a putrid pulp of discarded socks, empty water bottles, rotting raw meat and beans in tomato sauce spilled from military meal packages. Each time a U.S. helicopter landed to deliver new refugees, it would churn up dust and garbage, sending plastic bags afloat in the air above. The only protection from the blistering sun were fallen tree branches, a piece of someone's wooden fence or an American flag.

Why didn't they get out of New Orleans, as they were told, before Hurricane Katrina hit? Because, many of them said, they didn't have the money or the means. Most of them were black.

As they waited to be taken somewhere, anywhere, they felt deceived and discarded by the rest of the country.

"It's because we're not important enough," said Tanya Miller, 37, who along with her family had spent days floating on an air mattress and a powerless boat before being picked up.

Around the perimeter of Miller's temporary new home stood several dozen police officers, mostly white, holding their rifles at the ready.

"We just don't want anybody to get out of hand in this heat," said Louisiana state trooper Chance Thomas, who stood on the bridge pointing the muzzle of his M-16 at the crowd below. "I'm just doing crowd control."

But Steven Mullcur, 36, a construction worker, said that when he and his wife wanted to visit his father, who lives not far from the camp, to use his shower, "two cops pulled up and said that if we didn't go back they'd put a bullet in me or worse."

"The statement that ticked me off the most was, 'You should've left before -- now stay here,' " Mullcur said.

One police officer, who declined to be identified, confirmed that the residents were not allowed to leave their garbage-strewn wasteland except on helicopters, which took only the severely ill, or on buses, which were not there.

"They're treating us like criminals here," said Miller's son, Danard, 13. "They're not letting us leave."

Cynthia Walton, 47, a diabetic with high blood pressure, wondered whether race played a role in their fate.

"We've been very patient and polite," said Walton, who has walked on crutches since her spinal surgeries four years ago. "I'm not doing anything wrong. Is it because we're black?"

But there was a more pressing concern.

"Have you heard about buses?" one man called out.

The last bus came shortly after midnight the night before. Although hundreds of empty buses were lined up along the interstate between New Orleans and Baton Rouge, they were not picking up these people from the overpass because they had no place to take them, authorities said. All the shelters in the state were full, they said.

To help him cool off, Angel Sky, 17, gave her 2-week-old son, Thomas, water from a bottle as she held him on her lap. He wore nothing except diapers. An Apache helicopter roared overhead. Thomas grimaced and cried. Sky patted him gently on his bare back. He was, Sky said, "not good. Too hot."

"I need wipes and Pampers, but they don't have it," she said softly.

Food at the camp consisted of MREs -- military Meals Ready to Eat -- and whatever else state officials and humanitarian groups bring: water without ice, frozen sandwiches.

"They give us hot water and cold hot dogs!" said Tommy McElveen, 25, who arrived here Wednesday night. "We were on Airline Bridge for four days," he said, referring to a viaduct from which boaters rescued many fleeing the flood.

"Should have stayed there."

"Lady! Can you get the water?" a child called, pointing at an unopened water bottle under a broken cardboard box on the other side of the police- manned barrier. The bottle was covered in what appeared to be refried red beans, but the child took it, opened it, poured a little water out and then drank thirstily.

Police officer Ricky Thibodeaux surveyed the scene from a patch of highway where Marine and Navy helicopters landed to drop off new refugees and pick up those who needed to be taken to a triage center.

"What a terrible situation we have," Thibodeaux said. "It's like a horror movie. It's like a war zone."

Under the bridge, an old man with bloodied soles lay on a green stretcher. Another man covered the eyes of his wife and toddler son as a helicopter lifted off. A man in a wheelchair marked "same day surgery" stared, glassy- eyed, into the sky. An elderly man stood nearby, then collapsed on the concrete. His body was rigid, and his skin felt clammy and cool. Soldiers put him on a stretcher and rushed him to a helicopter.

Shortly before 3 p.m., five buses arrived. The crowd surged toward them, leaving behind the stench of rotting food, sweat and urine. Few would be able to get on.

"This is not nearly enough," said Jacob Dickinson, a police officer, shaking his head.

As the crowd pushed forward, a man yelled out: "Excuse me! I been here three days!" He had a toddler in his arms, bags on his shoulders.

Dickinson responded, warily: "More buses will come." He didn't entirely believe it himself, he said quietly to a reporter. He shrugged. "If it was up to me, I'd have y'all outta here."

"We can deploy troops to Afghanistan and Iraq, we can help with the tsunami, but it takes six days to get people out of New Orleans!" said Vince MacAfee, 38, a waiter who arrived earlier in the day along with about 300 people from a Salvation Army shelter in the city.

He looked at the thousands of people pushing each other toward the five buses built to hold up to 50 people each, fathers and mothers with babies in their arms trying desperately to secure a way out.

"Because we were getting here so late, because the government is handling it so slow, people will die tonight."

E-mail Anna Badkhen at abadkhen@sfchronicle.com.

waiting for a leader

and waiting and waiting and waiting and waiting ...

NY TIMES EDITORIAL

George W. Bush gave one of the worst speeches of his life yesterday, especially given the level of national distress and the need for words of consolation and wisdom. In what seems to be a ritual in this administration, the president appeared a day later than he was needed. He then read an address of a quality more appropriate for an Arbor Day celebration: a long laundry list of pounds of ice, generators and blankets delivered to the stricken Gulf Coast. He advised the public that anybody who wanted to help should send cash, grinned, and promised that everything would work out in the end.

We will, of course, endure, and the city of New Orleans must come back. But looking at the pictures on television yesterday of a place abandoned to the forces of flood, fire and looting, it was hard not to wonder exactly how that is going to come to pass. Right now, hundreds of thousands of American refugees need our national concern and care. Thousands of people still need to be rescued from imminent peril. Public health threats must be controlled in New Orleans and throughout southern Mississippi. Drivers must be given confidence that gasoline will be available, and profiteering must be brought under control at a moment when television has been showing long lines at some pumps and spot prices approaching $4 a gallon have been reported.

Sacrifices may be necessary to make sure that all these things happen in an orderly, efficient way. But this administration has never been one to counsel sacrifice. And nothing about the president's demeanor yesterday - which seemed casual to the point of carelessness - suggested that he understood the depth of the current crisis.

While our attention must now be on the Gulf Coast's most immediate needs, the nation will soon ask why New Orleans's levees remained so inadequate. Publications from the local newspaper to National Geographic have fulminated about the bad state of flood protection in this beloved city, which is below sea level. Why were developers permitted to destroy wetlands and barrier islands that could have held back the hurricane's surge? Why was Congress, before it wandered off to vacation, engaged in slashing the budget for correcting some of the gaping holes in the area's flood protection?

It would be some comfort to think that, as Mr. Bush cheerily announced, America "will be a stronger place" for enduring this crisis. Complacency will no longer suffice, especially if experts are right in warning that global warming may increase the intensity of future hurricanes. But since this administration won't acknowledge that global warming exists, the chances of leadership seem minimal.