UK: Police Rescue Sex Slave Children

By Cahal Milmo, Chief Reporter
www.independent.co.uk/
2 September 2009

Five children being kept as sex slaves by paedophiles who broadcast daily abuse of their victims over the internet have been rescued by police from homes in Scotland and England and placed in care.

The boys and girls, aged from seven to 13, were freed in a series of raids last month as part of an investigation by a specialist Scottish unit set up to oversee inquiries into serious sexual crimes.

The operation was launched when evidence of the internet abuse was obtained following the arrest of a man in central Scotland for alleged sex offences. Three of the children were found at undisclosed locations in Scotland and two more were later discovered in England as a result of the initial raids.

The investigation was supported by Scotland's National Sex Crimes Unit, a team of senior prosecutors who under the Scottish legal system are able to direct and offer advice on ongoing police operations.

Derek Ogg QC, the barrister who heads the unit, said: "This was one of our most harrowing and disturbing cases but it clearly demonstrated the value of, and real need for, the unit. It was a fantastic result for good, old-fashioned police and detective work."

Police declined to reveal further details of the investigation but said legal proceedings were now active against several individuals.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/police-rescue-sex-slave-children-1780270.html

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Operation Zapata, United Fruit, CIA, GHW Bush, Rockefeller, Dulles, etc.:

" ... The CIA was using companies like Zapata to stage and supply secret missions attacking Fidel Castro’s Cuban government in advance of the Bay of Pigs invasion. The CIA’s codename for that invasion was “Operation Zapata.” In 1981, all Securities and Exchange Commission filings for Zapata Off-Shore between 1960 and 1966 were destroyed. In other words, the year Bush became vice president, important records detailing his years at his drilling company disappeared. In 1969, Zapata bought the UNITED FRUIT Company of Boston, another company with strong CIA connections ... "
http://www.famoustexans.com/georgebush.htm

"... The CIA made Guatemala safe, not for democracy, but for the Rockefeller-owned United Fruit Company. CIA director, Allen Dulles (President of the CFR), owned UFC stock. ... "
http://aconstantineblacklist.blogspot.com/2007/12/vietnam-war-power-elite-playbook.html

"Feds Look the Other Way While United Fruit Company Peddles Death and Corruption in Latin America - ... Today of course, the infamous United Fruit of yore (whose machinations in Guatemala led to a CIA coup that set off decades of mass-murdering chaos) is known by the more perky name of Chiquita, and conjures up cheery pictures of childhood banana-munching around the family table. But while corporations may change their spots (or their peels) and their personnel over the years, the nature of the beast remains much the same, because its raison d'etre remains the same: maximizing profit. And United Fruit/Chiquita has traditionally been willing to push the banana boat way out when it comes to ensuring that its exploitation of cheap labor remains undisturbed. ... "
http://alexconstantine.blogspot.com/2007/08/chertoff-chiquita-and-right-wing-death.html

- AC

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The Crucifixion of Dan Mitrione: CIA Torturer of Innocents was Tortured to Death by the Tupamaros in Retaliation

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JFKmitrione.htm

Daniel Mitrione was born in Italy on 4th August, 1920. The family emigrated to the United States and in 1945 Mitrione became a police officer in Richmond, Indiana.

Mitrione joined the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in 1959. The following year he was assigned to the State Department's International Cooperation Administration. He was then sent to South America to teach "advanced counterinsurgency techniques." His speciality was in teaching the police how to torture political prisoners without killing them.

According to A.J. Langguth of the New York Times, Mitrione was working for the CIA via the International Development's Office of Public Safety (OPS). We know he was in several foreign countries but between 1960 and 1967 he spent a lot of time in Brazil and was involved in trying to undermine the left-wing president João Goulart, who had taken power after President Juscelino Kubitschek resigned from office in 1961.

João Goulart was a wealthy landowner who was opposed to communism. However, he was in favour of the redistribution of wealth in Brazil. As minister of labour he had increased the minimum wage by 100%. Colonel Vernon Walters, the US military attaché in Brazil, described Goulart as “basically a good man with a guilty conscience for being rich.”

The CIA began to make plans for overthrowing Goulart. A psychological warfare program approved by Henry Kissinger, at the request of telecom giant ITT during his chair of the 40 Committee, sent U.S. PSYOPS disinformation teams to spread fabricated rumors concerning Goulart. John McCloy was asked to set up a channel of communication between the CIA and Jack W. Burford, one of the senior executives of the Hanna Mining Company. In February, 1964, McCloy went to Brazil to hold secret negotiations with Goulart. However, Goulart rejected the deal offered by Hanna Mining.

The following month Lyndon B. Johnson gave the go-ahead for the overthrow of João Goulart (Operation Brother Sam). Colonel Vernon Walters arranged for General Castello Branco to lead the coup. A US naval-carrier task force was ordered to station itself off the Brazilian coast. As it happens, the Brazilian generals did not need the help of the task force. Goulart’s forces were unwilling to defend the democratically elected government and he was forced to go into exile. This action ended democracy in Brazil for more than twenty years. According to David Kaiser (American Tragedy) this event marks the change in the foreign policy developed by John F. Kennedy. Once again, Johnson showed that his policy was to support non-democratic but anti-communist, military dictatorships, and that he had fully abandoned Kennedy’s neutralization policy.

Mitrione remained in Brazil to help the new government deal with the supporters of João Goulart. According to Franco Solinas, Mitrione was also in the Dominican Republic after the 1965 US intervention.

In 1967 Mitrione returned to the United States to share his experiences and expertise on "counterguerilla warfare" at the Agency for International Development (AID), in Washington. In 1969, Mitrione moved to Uruguay, again under the AID, to oversee the Office of Public Safety. At this time the Uruguayan government was led by the very unpopular Colorado Party. Richard Nixon and the CIA feared a possible victory during the elections of the Frente Amplio, a left-wing coalition, on the model of the victory of the Unidad Popular government in Chile, led by Salvador Allende.

The OPS had been helping the local police since 1965, providing them with weapons and training. It is claimed that torture had already been practiced since the 1960s, but Dan Mitrione was reportedly the man who made it routine. He is quoted as having said: "The precise pain, in the precise place, in the precise amount, for the desired effect." It has been alleged that he used homeless people for training purposes, who were allegedly executed once they had served their purpose.

On July 31, 1970, the Tupamaros kidnapped Daniel Mitrione and an Agency for International Development associate, Claude L. Fly. Although they released Fry they proceeded to interrogate Mitrione about his past and the intervention of the U.S. government in Latin American affairs. They also demanded the release of 150 political prisoners. The Uruguayan government, with U.S. backing, refused, and Mitrione was later found dead in a car. He had been shot twice in the head but there was no evidence that he had been tortured.

The Secretary of State William P. Rogers and President Nixon's son-in-law David Eisenhower attended Mitrione's funeral. The Uruguayan ambassador, Hector Luisi, promised that the people responsible for Mitrione's death would "reap the wrath of civilized people everywhere".

A few days after the funeral, a senior Uruguayan police officer, Alejandro Otero, told the Jornal do Brasil that Mitrione had been employed to teach the police to use "violent techniques of torture and repression". The US government issued a statement calling this charge "absolutely false" and insisted he was a genuine member of the Agency for International Development.

In 1978 Manuel Hevia Cosculluela, a CIA agent who had worked with Mitrione in Montevideo, published a book about his experiences (Eight Years with the CIA). According to Cosculluela, Mitrione had tortured four beggars to death with electric shocks at a 1970 seminar to demonstrate his techniques for Uruguayan police trainees. Cosculluela reported that Mitrione worked under William Cantrell, a CIA agent. Mitrione told Cosculluela: "Before all else, you must be efficient. You must cause only the damage that is strictly necessary, not a bit more. We must control our tempers in any case. You have to act with the efficiency and cleanness of a surgeon and with the perfection of an artist. This is a war to the death. Those people are my enemy. This is a hard job, and someone has to do it. It's necessary. Since it's my turn, I'm going to do it to perfection.If I were a boxer, I would try to be the world champion. But I'm not. But though I'm not, in this profession, my profession, I'm the best."

James Abourezk, who represented South Dakota in the U.S. Senate, discovered that the Office of Public Safety had been training Latin America police to torture left-wing activists for many years. Abourezk made this information public and in 1974, Congress banned the provision by the U.S. of training or assistance to foreign police and the OPS was closed down.

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Central American Fears

By Stabroek staff
http://www.stabroeknews.com/2009/editorial/08/07/central-american-fears/
August 7, 2009

The coup d’état in Honduras, the original banana republic, thanks to the almost feudal predominance of the notorious United Fruit Company in the first half of the twentieth century, has given rise to fears among some Central America watchers that the age of the banana republics – characterized by combinations of brutal and venal dictators, electoral fraud, bloody coups, endemic corruption and all sorts of guerrilla movements – might once again be upon us. This is obviously a worst case scenario.

Nevertheless, the longer the stand-off in Honduras lasts, the greater the fears that the Central American region will be prone to further destabilization and a return to the internecine violence of the civil wars of the 1980s, which saw some half a million people killed and several millions displaced in El Salvador, Guatemala and Nicaragua.

In Nicaragua, last November, there were serious irregularities in municipal elections leading to several days of political street violence. Now, President Daniel Ortega, the former Sandinista guerrilla leader who fought against the dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza and who, ironically, rules in the style of an old-time caudillo, is seeking constitutional changes to allow him to run again for president when his current and final term comes to an end in 2011.

In Guatemala, in May, a murdered lawyer accused centre-left President Alvaro Colom and his inner circle of his own assassination in a posthumously released videotape. Mr Colom says that the video is part of a conspiracy by his political foes, in league with narco-traffickers, to destabilize his administration, already seen as weak in the midst of widespread corruption and rising rates of poverty and violent crime.

Indeed, Mr Colom has made powerful enemies on the right, as he has given access to military archives to lawyers seeking to build a case for genocide against the former dictator, General Efraín Ríos Montt. Mr Colom’s government has made it a priority to bring to justice former army and police officers accused of ordering massacres during the 36-year civil war that killed close to a quarter of a million people, many of them of Mayan descent. However, there is evidence that demilitarized personnel have joined the narco-gangs, making a weak state like Guatemala increasingly vulnerable to the intimidatory and predatory tactics of the drug cartels, as violence and narco-dollars combine to undermine institutions and whole societies.

In El Salvador, which has a leftist government for the first time in its history, the new president, Mauricio Funes of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMNL) party founded by Marxist guerrillas from the civil war, is walking a thin line between the moderate, pragmatic centre-left approach he favours and the more radical positions of revolutionary colleagues, who want to align themselves with Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez and the ALBA grouping. El Salvador, like the rest of the region, is particularly vulnerable to the world economic crisis, especially as there has been a dramatic reduction in remittances from the vast numbers of Salvadorans in the USA. And El Salvador is also the most violent country in Central America, with one of the world’s highest murder rates. It is not a recipe for stability.

Some analysts believe that fragile states, already succumbing to the influx of narco-dollars and organized crime, are also threatened by Venezuela’s petro-dollars, which in re-ordering political alignments, are at the same time creating a new form of dependency and eroding national unity.

In Honduras, Mr Chávez’s influence has polarized the country to such an extent that the clumsy attempt by Manuel Zelaya, the deposed president, to seek a referendum on the possibility of extending his term in office, was widely seen as a ploy to impose a Chávez-style government on Honduras. But Mr Chávez cannot be blamed for all of Honduras’s woes.

Honduras is a conservative society, with a strong agrarian tradition. Even the left is somewhat conservative by Latin American standards. Indeed, Mr Zelaya is from the landowning class and members of his own party have turned against him and backed the coup authorised by the Congress. Mr Zelaya’s major mistake would appear to have been to ignore the elite’s resistance to constitutional reform, populism and “twenty-first century socialism.”

Conflict is usually driven by fear – fear of change, fear of the unknown, fear of catastrophe – but conflict has a nasty way of bringing about the very result it seeks to avoid. By seeking to prevent Mr Zelaya from following Mr Chávez’s example, the Honduran political establishment has brought greater uncertainty and a real danger of civil conflict upon the country.

What is being played out in Honduras is part of the wider, highly charged ideological debate in the Americas, as to the best political and economic models to follow. Undoubtedly, there is much to be said for attempts to effect greater equity and social justice in traditionally lopsided societies. However, it is far from clear that the confrontational model of populist authoritarianism being championed by Mr Chávez, including expropriation of private property and businesses, closure of media houses, political intimidation and thuggery, and subversion of the judiciary, is the way forward, much less for countries with high rates of crime and poverty, and rising personal and institutional insecurity. But then neither should countries like Honduras be simply left to function as the personal fiefdoms of oligarchic landowners or wannabe caudillos, whether from the right or the left.

Meanwhile, the longer it takes for the Honduras crisis to be peacefully resolved, the greater the risk of conflict and the fear of conflagration in the Central American tinderbox.

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Jaycee Lee Dugard and "Sharon Marshall"

By Allen Glines
Examiner
August 31, 2009

Floyd and "Davis," circa mid-70s

Between 1973 and 1975, Franklin Delano Floyd abducted a young girl he called
"Suzanne Davis." He claims he took as her parent when she was abandoned and raised her in a number of different states under several aliases. To this day, his story hasn't been verified, and her true age and identity remain a mystery. It is believed that she was born in 1969.

In 1979, Floyd enrolled "Davis" in an Oklahoma City, Oklahoma school. She graduated from high school in Forest Park, Georgia in 1986. When she moved to Arizona later in the year, she transformed from "Suzanne Davis" into "Sharon Marshall." (She also used the alias "Tonya Hughes")

Investigators discovered child pornography in a truck Floyd used. "Davis" is portrayed from age 4 until her pre-teen years in about 40 of the photographs engaging in sexually explicit conduct. These photographs exposed Floyd's desire to memorialize the considerable amount of time he had been sexually abusing "Davis."

In 1988, "Davis" gave birth to a son named Michael Anthony Hughes, which Floyd claimed was his biological son. A year later, Floyd married his captive in New Orleans, Louisiana. Two years later, they were wanted in connection with a homicide in Houston, Texas. Before legal proceedings could begin, "Davis" was killed in a suspicious hit-and-run accident.

Davis as an adult

Floyd has never provided details of her history. He's currently on death row for the murder of another woman.

While Dugard was given her happy ending, "Davis" passed away without anyone knowing her real name, where she came from, and who loved her the most. I hope her true identity is found out before too much time has passed.

http://www.examiner.com/x-16211-Salt-Lake-City-TV-Examiner~y2009m8d31-Jaycee-Lee-Dugard-and-Sharon-Marshall

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Your Cyborg Eye Will Talk to You

by Dana Oshiro
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/your_cyborg_eye_will_talk_to_you.php
August 31, 2009
(Tip o' the wired VR augmented reality cap to Virginia McCullough for the lead.)

Just as many of us are getting used to augmented reality applications for cellphones and digital cameras, Babak Amir Parviz and his University of Washington students are taking it one step further. The group is working on a human machine interface where LEDs are embedded into contact lenses in order to display information to the wearer. You heard right, in a few years your cyborg eye will talk to you. In an article with the IEEE Spectrum, Parviz relays the challenges of custom-building semi-transparent circuitry into a polymer lens roughly 1.2 millimeters in diameter.

Says Parviz, "We're starting with a simple product, a contact lens with a single light source, and we aim to work up to more sophisticated lenses that can superimpose computer-generated high-resolution color graphics on a user's real field of vision."

For now, Parviz mentions that single pixel visual cues for gamers and the hearing impaired are already quite possible with the lens prototypes. The group has also experimented with non-invasive biomonitoring including checking glucose levels for diabetics.

Some of the obvious challenges of building an augmented reality contact lens include:
1. The Need for Custom Parts: Regular circuitry and LEDs are incompatible with regular contact lenses. Every piece of this project must be fabricated from scratch.

2. Physical Constraints: The group must attempt to fit transistors, radio chips, antennas, diffusion resistors, LEDs and photodetectors onto a miniscule polymer disc. Additionally, the team is required to control lens position and light intensity relative to the pupil. And finally, because the lens is so close to the corneal surface, the group must project images away from the cornea using either micro-lenses or lasers.

3. User Safety: In addition to protecting the eye against chemicals, heat and toxins, the lens components must be semi-transparent in order for the wearer to view their surroundings.

"We already see a future in which the humble contact lens becomes a real platform, like the iPhone is today, with lots of developers contributing their ideas and inventions. As far as we're concerned, the possibilities extend as far as the eye can see." And you thought the iPhone SDK was a tough nut to crack.

For Parviz's complete seven page article, check out the IEEE Spectrum's Biomedical page.

Posted in Augmented Reality, NYT and tagged with contact lens, crowd-sourcing, eye

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Arrest Made in U.S. Theft Ring that Hit Bernankes

By Jane Sutton
Sep 1, 2009

MIAMI (Reuters) - A woman described by a federal agent as a heroin addict with a stash of wigs was arrested in Miami on charges of being part of an identity theft ring that targeted the wife of Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke.

Shonya Michelle Young of Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, was arrested Monday night at a hotel near Miami International Airport on a warrant charging her with conspiracy to commit bank fraud, U.S. Marshals spokesman Barry Golden said Tuesday.

Young is charged in Virginia with being part of a theft ring that stole millions of dollars from the bank accounts of hundreds of people nationwide. Among them was Anna Bernanke, the wife of the Fed chief, whose purse containing checks from the couple's account was stolen from a Washington coffee shop. ...

It was unclear how much money was stolen from the Bernankes. Court documents, which identified victims only by their initials, said another defendant had fraudulently drawn $900 from the personal account of "BB." ...

CONTINUED: http://www.reuters.com/article/domesticNews/idUSTRE58052L20090901

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