US Pakistan Diplomat Accused of Murder CIA Agent

24/7 Cable news channels in the United States, massive well paid and financed media machines and not one of them could reveal the simple fact to the American people, their customers, that in fact the guy the Pakistani Police arrested for murder was trying to get off on diplomatic immunity, immunity provided for him by the U.S. Embassy because he was in fact a CIA operative out of the Embassy.

A CIA spy, a hail of bullets, three killed and a US-Pakistan diplomatic row

Did we learn this from CNN? MSNBC? Fox? CBS?ABC?NBC? Disney Channel? Nope we learn it from the Guardian, UK. So far to the left of the American media that they make liberal look; well, conservative.

In fact for the past two weeks of coverage the American media was under a WH imposed self censorship, not reporting on the known CIA connections of this accused murderer.

Pakistan Rejects US Diplomat's Self-Defense Claim

Pakistani police have rejected a detained U.S. diplomat's claim that he acted in self-defense when he shot dead two men last month in the eastern city of Lahore. Police are recommending the diplomat face murder charges.

Lahore Police Chief Aslam Tareen said Friday an investigation revealed Raymond Davis committed what the chief called "cold-blooded murder."

"The eyewitnesses [statements] and forensic reports showed that it has not been the self-defense case. So has tried to fire on them [and] 10 bullets were fired. Therefore, his self-defense plea was considered and that has been rejected by the investigators," Tareen said.

Washington's stance

Speaking to VOA on the latest developments in the case, U.S Embassy spokesperson Courtney Beale reiterated Washington's stance on the issue.

"We regret that this incident resulted in the loss of life. However, eyewitness accounts report [on the day of the incident] that the American acted in self-defense," Beale said. "There is no doubt that he has diplomatic immunity and we are working with the government of Pakistan to resolve this issue."

As American newspapers lifted a self-imposed gag on the CIA links of Raymond Davis, in place on the request of the US administration,

The New York Times reported on Monday that Davis “was part of a covert, CIA-led team of operatives conducting surveillance on militant groups deep inside the country, according to American government officials.”

This contradicts the US claim that Davis was a member of the ‘technical and administrative staff’ of its diplomatic mission in Pakistan.

Davis was arrested on January 27 after allegedly shooting dead two young motorcyclists at a crowded bus stop in Lahore. American officials say that the arrest came after a ‘botched robbery attempt’.

Now Raymond Davis the guy above identified as a CIA spy should not be confused with this 'private contractor'; which is a euphemism for 'mercenary', also arrested in Pakistan.

Pakistani Court Dismisses Bail Plea of US Man
A court in Pakistan Monday dismissed the bail application of an American national, who was arrested in northwest on Friday for illegal stay, court officials said.

Police sources said that Aaron Mark De Haven was working for a private security company.

Police said De Haven is from a security firm "Catalyst Services, " which provides security and accommodation to foreigners working on development projects in the region.

Catalyst Services

Your in-country solution for Middle East and South Asian Operations. You contact us and we do the rest.

Interesting that both these guys are working black ops in Pakistan. And have been outed by Pakistan's Secret Service. And yet in America neither the right wing or liberal media or mass media have covered this obvious coincidence. Not much for investigative journalism as a media standard in Amerika.

Who Killed Lynne Harper?

I see a Blogging Tory has picked up on the fact that Steven Truscott was not declared innocent. He was acquitted of a crime, which means he is 'not guilty'. Hello.

You cannot be declared innocent under Canadian law because well you are innocent, until proven guilty. Once proven guilty you can only be 'acquitted'. Is that so hard to understand?

You can however be declared 'innocent' by the court, however that cannot be done in an appeal case. It requires a new court case.

Though the court concluded that Truscott's conviction was a "miscarriage of justice," they fell short of declaring him factually innocent. Lockyer said without DNA evidence available to clear him once and for all, the declaration of complete innocence is impossible.

Of course the Blogging Tories are the same folks who considered Maher Arar a terrorist even after he was found to have been framed up by the RCMP and CSIS.

And like the Arar case they are all upset over the idea that a man wrongfully jailed may be entitled to compensation.

The judge mulling Steven Truscott’s right to compensation says the issue turns on the fact Truscott was not declared innocent.

In this case the bleeding heart Tory is sympathetic to the Harper family who believes in their heart of hearts that Truscott is guilty. Of course Lynne's father believes that, he has too. His world shattered the day his daughter died.

Like a lot of other folks he was stationed at the military base in the town.

At the time of Lynne's killing, the Harpers had only been living at RCAF Clinton, a base in southwestern Ontario, for about two years. Mr. Harper was a flight lieutenant. His wife, Shirley, stayed home to care for their three children, Lynne, 12, Barry, who was in Grade 10, and Jeffrey, who was only four years old when Lynne's body was found in Lawson's Bush.

And he would have known this guy who may have been the real killer.

A convicted pedophile stationed at the RCAF base at Clinton at the time of Lynne Harper's death. The OPP learned about him in 1997 after being contacted by a retired London, Ont., police detective, who felt the man was capable of murdering a child.

The man had pleaded guilty to sexual offences and possession of child pornography in the late 1980s. When police searched his house in connection with those offences, they found an eight-volume transcript of Truscott's hearing before the Supreme Court of Canada in 1966-67.

An airman who had been stationed at Clinton prior to 1959. He was stationed at Aylmer at the time of the murder, but had a home in Seaforth, close to the base, which he visited frequently.

He was identified by CBC's the fifth estate as Sgt. Alexander Kalichuk, who died in 1975.

MACINTYRE: In the 1950's Clinton was a military base … home and workplace for thousands of airmen …among them, at least one troubled individual whose medical files should have flagged him as a suspect.

Two years ago the fifth estate, assisted by the National Archives in Ottawa, retrieved a 900 page dossier on an acquaintance of the Harper family, once stationed at Clinton … a sexual predator with an unhealthy interest in young girls.
His name was Alexander Kalichuk.

Sgt. Kalichuk was a troubled man, a heavy drinker with a history of sexual offenses. He lived in this farmhouse with his wife and three children ... less than a 20 minute drive from the Clinton base. He worked as a supply technician there until 1957... He transferred to another base, in Aylmer, about a one hour drive away ... but made frequent trips back to Clinton ... where Lynn Harper's father was the senior supply officer.

Kalichuk's record of sex offenses went back at least a decade. In 1950 he had two convictions for indecent exposure in Trenton, where he was stationed.

About three weeks before Lynne Harper's murder he stalked three young girls on a country road outside St. Thomas. When two of them had gone home, he tried to lure the third into his car. Nancy Knowles … now Nancy Davidson …was 10 years old.

Today she remembers how the car followed at a distance until she was alone.

DAVIDSON: He asked me if I would come around and get in the car because he wanted me to pick out the prettiest present and I said, No. And then he pulled out - he had this brown paper bag and he pulled out this underwear.

MACINTYRE: Little kid's underwear.

DAVIDSON: Yeah, yeah.

MACINTYRE: And what did he want?

DAVIDSON: He wanted me to pick out the prettiest pair of underwear. He had a bottle between his legs. His eyes were bulgy and he had that glassy look and there were dark circles and I knew he was drinking and I just wanted to get away.

MACINTYRE: Kalichuk was caught and charged and appeared in Elgin County court a week later.

In spite of his prior convictions, the judge released him with a warning.
Three weeks after Lynne Harper's murder, Kalichuk entered a psychiatric hospital. According to records he was suffering from anxiety, depression and guilt.

Kalichuk was released but apparently far from cured. A heavily censored confidential military memo about "Sgt Kalichuk's aberrations" warned cryptically that when he was later posted at a base near Clinton, ongoing incidents were serious enough to get into the local paper.

In fact, police were warning about the activities of an unidentified molester who was preying on young girls from a car ... through all of which, Sgt. Kalichuk managed to avoid particular attention as a suspect ....in those incidents ... and, most significantly of all, in the murder of 12-year old Lynn Harper.

Kalichuk spent the rest of his life in and out of psychiatric hospitals and died in 1975 from alcoholism.

JULIAN SHER: Alexander Kalichuk is really just the worst example of a long list of potential suspects ignored that showed that the military and the police really were not interested in a serious investigation into who killed Lynn Harper.

The producer of the fifth estate documentary on Truscott two years ago continued to investigate the case independently … and has now written a book: Until You are Dead. Julian Sher.

SHER: In any rape case it would be normal for the police to investigate likely suspects in the area, people with a history of, of rape convictions, sexual deviants. In this case police didn't do that. Within 24 hours they focused on Steven. We uncovered names of people the police could have looked at. There was a man doing electrical repair work on the base who knew the Harper's who, according to one member of his family, said after Lynn Harper's murder, She had it coming to her. He had a rape conviction several years prior to the murder. He was never looked at. There was a lifeguard on the base and Lynn Harper was a very active swimmer who, according to members of his family, continued to engage in forms of sexual abuse and assault throughout the '60s and always was very nervous about the Harper case. He was never investigated by police. There were other men around the area who had known convictions and the police clearly didn't do their basic homework.

A new investigation into the case is needed since this was clearly a 'miscarriage of justice'. Now it is a case of actually finding Truscott innocent that would require a new police investigation.

Ontario Provincial Police Commissioner Julian Fantino is not ruling out a renewed search for Lynne Harper's real killer, but he admits his officers would face "major hurdles" in trying to solve the murder for which Steven Truscott was wrongly convicted in 1959.

But the likelihood of that happening is moot.

"The trail has gone cold," Sher said. "A lot of these people are dead. I think that unlike the cold cases on TV, this case is going to stay cold because there was never a serious investigation back in 1959."

The point remains that this was a case of a miscarriage of justice from the start,and the result could have meant the hanging of a 14 year old Steven Truscott.

In 1959, Truscott, then 14 years old, was sentenced to hang for the rape and murder of 12-year-old Lynne Harper. The case was a spectacle from the start, as Truscott became Canada's youngest death row inmate, spending 31/2 months in a "death cell" before his sentence was commuted to life in prison.

And it appears that part of the problem was an over zealous cop who decided not to investigate further since he had his boy. Unfortunately this is a common practice that has led to other innocents being railroaded for crimes they did not commit.

Pathologist's kin supports ruling

The pathologist's original conclusions allowed for a time of death much later than 7:45 p.m. -- perhaps even the next day,when Truscott was in school and therefore couldn't have committed the crime.

In October 2004, Julia Penistan told the Stratford Beacon-Herald she thought Truscott's conviction should be overturned and she believed her father faced pressure to support the police theory that Truscott was the murderer.

MACINTYRE: The lead investigator in the Harper murder case was a senior Ontario Provincial Police officer from Toronto … Inspector Harold Graham.
His quick disposition of the case and the conviction of Steven Truscott made Graham a legend among Ontario policemen and, before he retired, he'd become the OPP commissioner.

Graham died recently … adamantly rejecting our requests to discuss his biggest bust.

But at least one of his colleagues harboured serious misgivings. He was Corporal John Erskine …one of the three lead officers in the Harper murder investigation.

HARRIS: Well, he was a perfectionist in everything he did. Like it had to be done right or it wouldn't be done at all.

MACINTYRE: Dee Harris is Corporal Erskine's widow and she remembers how he became increasingly distressed by the case.

HARRIS: Oh not right at the start. It was later on in the investigation. He said at that time after he had looked at different fact that he said, I'm sure he's not guilty.

MACINTYRE: But the boss … Inspector Graham … had his mind made up, so the corporal kept his opinion to himself … His widow is still troubled by it.

HARRIS: All the police officers would come back to our house. I know Graham definitely felt he was guilty. He was convinced right at the start. The first day pretty well. You can't decide an investigation in the first day whether they're guilty or not guilty. You don't have enough facts to go on.

MACINTYRE: But after the first day of the Harper murder investigation Inspector Graham clearly believed he had his murderer … even though he originally thought the murder probably happened at 9 o'clock … when Truscott was home watching television.

MACINTYRE: That crucial detail quickly changed. As the police and prosecution prepared their case against their prime suspect in the fall of 1959.

Documents recently uncovered suggest that they suppressed crucial evidence supporting Truscott's claim of innocence.

There was a statement by a nine year-old girl, in clear and accurate detail, that Steven and Lynne crossed the bridge on his bike just as he and two other boys said he did. Neither the defense nor the jury ever saw that statement.

Mrs. Harper testified that is was unlikely that Lynn would ever hitch-hike. But according to three police reports, that's exactly what she and her husband first suspected when Lynn went missing. Neither defense nor jury ever saw those reports.

If there was one piece of evidence that sealed Steven Truscott's fate it was the report by the pathologist, Dr. Penistan, that she died shortly before eight o'clock in the evening of June ninth, 1959. But Dr. Penistan changed his mind about that seven years later … after what he called "an agonizing reappraisal".

He told Harold Graham … by then the assistant OPP commissioner … that Lynne Harper's death could have been at any time in a 48 hour period. Significantly, this was in May of 1966 … just as the Supreme Court of Canada was about to review the Truscott case … It might have been a bombshell … if the justices had known about it. But somebody struck Penistan's name from the list of prospective witnesses before the hearing started.

In the end Justice has been served. The Truscott case opened the debate on capital punishment in Canada, and for fifty years stood as the example of the horror of state murder of someone who could be innocent.

We've come a long way from the good old days when hanging anyone - let alone a teenager - was an acceptable form of justice. Each time we hear of a murder conviction overturned we give thanks that Canadian lawmakers rejected the state's role as executioner. Each time a conviction is overturned we become more determined that our prison system is one that protects the public, but also treats its inmates with some dignity.

Amen.

Ironically it was a Conservative government which commuted Truscott's death sentence.

The Conservative government under then prime minister John Diefenbaker commutes Truscott's sentence to life in prison.

Our New Conservative government would not be so forgiving given their rhetorical fixation on Law and Order and punishing Young Offenders as Adults. After all Harper ain't no Dief the Chief.


SEE:

Say No To Capital Punishment

Why I Oppose Capital Punishment

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Say No To Capital Punishment

Two little words this morning prove why Capital Punishment, murder by the state , is never justified.

Steven Truscott.

For fifty years he awaited justice, while the justice system failed him and Lynne Harper the victim of a brutal rape murder. This morning the Ontario Court of Appeal acquitted him.

Acquittal, but not innocence, likely for Truscott

Sentenced to death in 1959 for the murder of a 12-year-old, there is no avenue for the Canadian legal system to declare him innocent

The real sexual predator who brutally raped and murdered Lyn escaped justice, while Truscott suffered from a justice system that saw him as their best bet for conviction and would not be deterred by facts to the contrary.

Fifty years, the life of a man, to appeal an injustice, resulted finally in justice being served. Truscott is an excellent case for why capital punishment is never justified, it is an irreversible judgment.

No other crime in Canada has divided public opinion as much as the tragic story of the June 9, 1959, murder of 12-year-old Lynne Harper, for which Truscott, then 14, was ultimately convicted. He was the youngest person ever sentenced to death in Canada (his death sentence was later commuted to life imprisonment). Still protesting his innocence, he began serving his sentence. His appeal to the Ontario Court of Appeal was dismissed. Leave to appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada was denied.

Public opinion ran passionately in favour of his guilt. Pierre Berton had written a sympathetic verse in this very paper a week after the trial and later said he had never known a more violent response to any column he had ever written.

He was called "a sob sister for a monster" and callers expressed the hope that his own daughter would soon be raped. Yet, seven years later, the tide of opinion shifted spectacularly.

The public came to believe that Steven's trial suffered from serious deficiencies, questionable expert testimony and unfairness to the accused. The case was discussed everywhere, including the House of Commons. All because of Isabel LeBourdais, who had published The Trial of Steven Truscott in March 1966. The book was a passionate, emotional defence of Steven Truscott and a scathing denunciation of his trial. She was named woman of the year by The Canadian Press.

Isabel LeBourdais, whose book raised questions about the Truscott investigation, talks with Steven Truscott in 1968 outside Collins Bay Penitentiary.

The doubts raised by the book and the language in which these doubts were framed struck a nerve deep in the Canadian consciousness. As a result of the book, the minister of justice, for the first time in Canadian history, directed a reference to the Supreme Court of Canada as to the propriety of the conviction. It is also the first time in which that court heard live testimony.

The Supreme Court affirmed the conviction on May 4, 1967, but doubts remained. Justice Emmett Hall, one of the most eminent judges of the court, wrote a powerful, passionate and stinging dissent and would have directed a new trial. He sharply criticized the conduct of the Crown. An already inflamed public, he said, was further inflamed by the Crown's improper suggestions and the trial judge's improper charge to the jury. Many Canadians believed that of the nine judges on the Supreme Court, only Justice Hall got it right.

Because of the Truscott Case capital punishment in Canada was reconsidered and eventually removed from the criminal code.

Canada banned the death penalty because of fears about wrongful convictions, concerns about the state taking the lives of individuals, and uncertainty about the death penalty's role as a deterrent for crime.

The case of Steven Truscott, who was just 14 years old when convicted of a murder that many continue to believe he did not commit, was a significant impetus (although certainly not the only one) toward the abolishment of capital punishment.

The return to having Capital Punishment in the criminal code is a platform from the old Reform Party that is the base of the Harper Conservatives. And it came up in the Conservative Leadership race.

Tony Clement declared that he believes that capital punishment should be an option for extreme cases. "My personal view is that in the case of serial killers and murderers of police officers, for instance, that it would be appropriate in those circumstances". -- Tony Clement

This decision should bury that forever. But if it doesn't then my reply to the Law and Order right wingers who endlessly lobby for state murder, will forever remain two little words; Steven Truscott.

The first private bill calling for abolition of the death penalty was introduced in 1914. In 1954, rape was removed from capital offenses. In 1956, a parliamentary committee recommended exempting juvenile offenders from the death penalty, providing expert counsel at all stages of the proceedings and the institution of mandatory appeals in capital cases.

Between 1954 and 1963, a private member's bill was introduced in each parliamentary session calling for abolition of the death penalty. The first major debate on the issue took place in the House of Commons in 1966. Following a lengthy and emotional debate, the government introduced and passed Bill C-168, which limited capital murder to the killing of on-duty police officers and prison guards.

Contrary to predictions by death penalty supporters, the homicide rate in Canada did not increase after abolition in 1976. In fact, the Canadian murder rate declined slightly the following year (from 2.8 per 100,000 to 2.7). Over the next 20 years the homicide rate fluctuated (between 2.2 and 2.8 per 100,000), but the general trend was clearly downwards. It reached a 30-year low in 1995 (1.98) -- the fourth consecutive year-to-year decrease and a full one-third lower than in the year before abolition. In 1998, the homicide rate dipped below 1.9 per 100,000, the lowest rate since the 1960s.

The overall conviction rate for first-degree murder doubled in the decade following abolition (from under 10% to approximately 20%), suggesting that Canadian juries are more willing to convict for murder now that they are not compelled to make life-and-death decisions.

All of Canada's national political parties formally oppose the reintroduction of the death penalty, with the exception of the Reform Party which supports a binding national referendum on the issue.

The debate over capital punishment was renewed once again in 1984. There was a free vote in the House of Commons on the topic in 1987. Supporters of capital punishment narrowly lost the vote, 148 to 127. The Bill to reintroduce capital punishment came from Conservative backbencher Gordon Taylor. Taylor initially introduced the Bill to reinstate capital punishment for Clifford Olson in 1986 but the Speaker of the House refused the Bill, as a law cannot be passed relating to a specific person. Taylor therefore changed the Bill to cover all those convicted of first degree murder and mass murders. In the end though, the Bill was not successful.

The debate concerning capital punishment is far from over, and it is an issue that is not likely to end in the near future. For now though, the debate seems to be dormant. Yet at a time when Canadians are demanding that criminals be held accountable for their actions and that justice be put back into the justice system, it is not likely that the call for the reinstatement of capital punishment will ever go away. Poll after poll shows that Canadians support the use of capital punishment in certain circumstances, but the political will is simply not there. The recent acts of terrorism in the United States might spur a renewed call for capital punishment, even if only for terrorist murders.

In 1976, capital punishment was removed from Canada's Criminal Code. After years of debate, Parliament decided that capital punishment was not an appropriate penalty. The reasons for this decision were due to the possibility of wrongful convictions, concerns about the state taking the lives of individuals, and uncertainty as to the effectiveness of the death penalty as a deterrent.

• In 1961, legislation was passed which reclassified murder into capital and non-capital offences. Capital murder referred to planned or deliberate murder, murder that occurred during the course of other violent crimes, or the murder of a police officer or prison guard. At this time, only capital murder was punishable by death.
• On December 10, 1962, Arthur Lucas and Robert Turpin were the last people to be executed in Canada.
• In 1967, a bill was passed that placed a moratorium on the use of the death penalty, except in cases involving the murder of a police officer or corrections officer.
• On July 14, 1976, with the exception of certain offences under the National Defence Act, the death penalty was abolished in Canada. The bill, C-84, passed by a narrow margin on a free vote.
• In 1987, a free vote regarding the reinstatement of the death penalty was held in the House of Commons. The result of the vote was in favour of maintaining the abolition of the death penalty, 148 to127.
• In 1998, Parliament removed the death penalty with the passing of An Act to Amend the National Defence Act and to make consequential amendments to other Acts, S.C. 1998 c. 35.
• In Canada, the abolition of the death penalty is considered to be a principle of fundamental justice. Canada has played a key role in denouncing the use of capital punishment at the international level.
• The Supreme Court of Canada has held that prior to extraditing an individual for a capital crime, Canada must seek assurances, save in exceptional circumstances from the requesting state that the death penalty will not be applied.

SEE:

Saddam and the CIA

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Torture Porn

I see that the MSM have spent this weekend focusing on what they call Torture Porn which I wrote about in Gore Kulture. Cliff from Rusty Idols and I then proceeded to have a running discussion on the phenomena in the comments.

From horror film to torture porn

Torture porn films - horror or hype?

Is there any escape from tired, old torture-porn?

Hollywood, movie fans shy away from "torture porn"

Held captive to torture-porn zeitgeist

Torture porn for popcorn eaters not up to snuff

Filmgoers may be fed up with sadistic gore

See

Gothic Capitalism Redux

Jack the Ripper

Emotional Plague


Serial Murder

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Canadian Shooters Use Long Guns

Revisiting A Canadian Tragedy

As America grieves the victims of the Virginia Tech massacre, we take you back to 1975, when a shooting spree at a school in Brampton, Ontario, shocked the country. We bring you eyewitness accounts, and we'll find out what we've learned.

CBC Sun Day report ran this amazing piece of forgotten history. I left the following comment on their web site;

"I too did not know about the Brampton tragedy and I thank you for using this opportunity to present this in light of the Virgina Tech massacre. I note that the comment made by Carole MacNeil was that the first such shooting in a school occurred here in Edmonton in 1959. "

The situation between these high school shootings and the later Taber, Dawson and Virginia Tech massacres show we do not have enough psychological counseling prior to such incidents, rather we provide it after the fact.

The other point to remember is that so far all the shootings in Canada including Edmonton, Brampton, the Lapine shooting in Montreal, the Taber shootings, and Dawson College, unlike the situation in the U.S., were all done using long guns, rifles.

The same long guns that the Harpocrites don't want registered. Because after all law abiding duck hunters and farmers use them too.

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shootings, Montreal, DawsonCollege, CGEP, gunregistry, gun-contol, murder, crime, Canada, Quebec, Harper, Conservatives, Government, Toews, Gill, Dawson, College, CGEP, Montreal, Massacre, shooting, crime, Columbine,Toews, farmers,duckhunters,Kimveer Gill, Cho Seung-Hui, Dawson College, Virginia Tech, College shootings, Montreal, Massacre, shooting, crime, Columbine, video, videogaming, movies, firstpersonsooters, Reich, emotional plague

You Talkin' To Me

The emotional plague continues to reveal itself in America where Gore Kulture meets everyday life.

"You talkin' to me?" Alone in his apartment, Travis postures and practices his moves in front of the mirror.


A picture from Kimveer Gill's Blog The Dawson College killer.

Could "Ismail Ax" Be A Part Of This Picture (NBC)

For two days the world has been searching for the meaning of the phrase "Ismail Ax."
Those two words, written in red ink on one arm of Cho, the 23-year-old Virginia Tech student behind the campus shooting spree which killed 32 students, set off a massive Internet hunt by the public Tuesday for clues to what might have motivated the nation's worst mass killings.

And today a theory has emerged proposing an answer which shows the killer's sick sense of humour - that it is a web language term used to signify a query.

Cho was a keen internet user who dubbed himself "?" in email and web conversations.

A web-savvy source told The Daily Telegraph Online today Ismail is a term used in text tagging - a way to tag words for searchability online.

"He was already known for signing his name as a question mark," the suorce said. "And the meaning of this tag represents question. The name Ismail itself represent question."

One of the photographs in the Virginia Tech killer's "multimedia manifesto" may have been inspired by a bloody South Korean movie.

"Oldboy," from the respected director Chan-woo Park, is about a man unjustly imprisoned for 15 years. After escaping, he goes on a rampage against his captor. In one scene, he dispatches more than a dozen henchmen with the aid of a hammer.

In the package of materials that Cho Seung-Hui sent to NBC News, one photo shows the killer brandishing a hammer in a pose similar to one from the film.

"Oldboy," the second film in Park's "Vengeance Trilogy," won the Gran Prix prize at the 2004 Cannes Film Festival.

The connection was spotted by Professor Paul Harris of Virginia Tech, who alerted authorities, according to London's Evening Standard. The similarities have prompted speculation, especially in online forums, that Cho's entire massacre may have been inspired by "Oldboy.

Dr. James Gilligan, who has spent many years studying violence as a prison psychiatrist in Massachusetts, and as a professor at Harvard and now at N.Y.U., believes that some debilitating combination of misogyny and homophobia is a “central component” in much, if not most, of the worst forms of violence in this country.

“What I’ve concluded from decades of working with murderers and rapists and every kind of violent criminal,” he said, “is that an underlying factor that is virtually always present to one degree or another is a feeling that one has to prove one’s manhood, and that the way to do that, to gain the respect that has been lost, is to commit a violent act.”

"We see that the compass of the emotional plague coincides approximately with the broad compass of social abuse, which has always been and still is combatted by every social freedom movement. With some qualifications, it can be said that the sphere of the emotional plague coincides with that of "political reaction" and perhaps even with the principle of politics in
general. This would hold true, however, only if the basic principle of all politics, namely thirst for power and special prerogatives, were carried over into those spheres of life which we do not think of as political in the
usual sense of the word."

"Those who are truly alive are kindly and unsuspecting in their human relationships and consequently endangered under present conditions. They assume that others think and act generously, kindly, and helpfully, in accordance with the laws of life. This natural attitude, fundamental to healthy children as well as to primitive man, inevitably represents a great danger in the struggle for a rational way of life as long as the emotional plague subsists, because the plague-ridden impute their own manner of thinking and acting to their fellow men. A kindly man believes that all men are kindly, while one infected with the plague believes that all men lie and cheat and are hungry for power."

The Emotional Plague /Listen Little Man by Wilhelm Reich
"

See:

Nazi Gay Killer Wanted to be a Cop

The Real Crime In Canada

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Gore Kulture

No not Al Gore.

Gore as in Grand Guignol as in a specific sub genre of horror movies; slasher films, blood and guts movies like Saw, Hostile, etc.

The Peculiar Charms of the Grand Guignol

by Gideon Lester

"At one performance, six people passed out when an actress, whose eyeball was just gouged out, re-entered the stage, revealing a gooey, blood-encrusted hole in her skull. Backstage, the actors themselves calculated their success according to the evening's faintings. During one play that ended with a realistic blood transfusion, a record was set: fifteen playgoers had lost consciousness. Between sketches, the cobble-stoned alley outside the theatre was frequented by hyperventilating couples and vomiting individuals."

-- Mel Gordon, The Grand Guignol:
theatre of fear and terror.

We can go back to Shakespeare to find the first real case of Grand Guignol in theatre;

Titus Andronicus is a play with "14 killings, 9 of them on stage, 6 severed members, 1 rape (or 2 or 3, depending on how you count), 1 live burial, 1 case of insanity and 1 of cannibalism--an average of 5.2 atrocities per act, or one for every 97 lines."

We seem to have moved from a rash of horror films to gore films in four short years. The gore phenomena is specific to the current mass culture we are experiencing.

We have seen an increase in horror films, just as we did during the depression and again during the Viet Nam war, horror films reflect the need for social catharsis during times of cultural stress.

The Gore film on the other hand was an underground phenomena, much like Grand Guignol. It first appeared not in film but in the fifties as crime and horror comics.

It existed since the early sixties, as a b-film phenomena in particular the films of Herschell Gordon Lewis, but became popular in the eighties with the works of Stuart Gordon and Sam Raimi. It expanded in the nineties with the work of Clive Barker, in particular the Hellraiser series, now coming to the small screen as a computer game.

But these were horror movies, there was gore, but there was also humour, atmosphere, the gore was incidental, there to frighten you as much as the thing that jumps out of the dark.

But today the movies are Gore for gore's sake. In that they hearken back to Herschell Gordon Lewis work and Romero's Night of the Living Dead. But unlike them they are major studio releases, a popular film phenomena on the big screen and the producers of the goriest of the gore films; Saw I, II and III are Canadian.

It is reflective of the current social crisis of sociopathology that is in the headlines. Man kills and BBQs girlfriend

Take for instance the Picton murder case and its Edmonton counter part the serial killing of prostitutes, or this recent Edmonton case that was in the news for weeks;

Michael Briscoe, acquitted in the rape and murder of Nina Courtepatte, is haunted by his failure to intervene and try to save her when she was brutally attacked 2 years ago

Edmonton, with its record-high murder rate, is quickly losing its reputation as a safe city.

But it's not just the creeping crime wave that's spooking people. It's the grim reality that we are now known for one of the most odious killings in the country.

Malls are supposed to be places where young people hang out, shop and flirt - not where a strikingly pretty 13-year-old girl is chosen at random to be raped and slaughtered for kicks.

I fear we are raising a society of sociopaths - kids who are so adrift, amoral and inured to violence that they have become completely indifferent to evil. They are drawn to it, it seems, out of twisted curiosity and sheer boredom.

How else to explain how a group of young people could lure Nina Courtepatte from West Edmonton Mall on the pretext of inviting her to a party, only to rape her and beat her to death on a golf course?

Brutality, savagery, gore, and cannibalism all underlie Grand Guignol and the Gore film today, as it does the headlines in your daily paper.

AN ALCOHOLIC who strangled his friend and then told police he did it so he could be sent to prison to exact revenge on a cannibal killer who murdered his girlfriend, was yesterday jailed for life. Alan Taylor said he never got over the murder of Julie Paterson, who was beheaded and partially eaten by psychopath David Harker in 1998.

New Delhi, Mar 22: The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) on Thursday gave a clean chit to Mohinder Singh Pandher, co-accused in the gruesome Nithari serial killings in the outskirts of Delhi. CBI blamed his servant for the macabre killings and also confirmed cannibalism in him. It said Pandher's servant Surinder Koli was a psychopath and blamed him for the killings

A religious cult leader who raped, murdered and ate at least three women in Papua New Guinea has been captured by a group of villagers.

Steven Tari, 35, who called himself the "black Jesus" was beaten by locals from the village of Matepi before being handed over to police.

The failed bible student had gathered around six thousand followers as he travelled through mountain villages promising disciples gifts from heaven if they joined his congregation.

But communities discovered he was indulging in cannibalism, sacrificing young women, drinking their blood and eating their flesh.

The Gore phenomena begins with Slaughter of the Lambs, and its overwhelming popularity. It is about the brutality of a serial killer who skins his victims, and the anti-hero is a cannibal; Dr. Hannibal Lecter. It coincides disturbingly with pig farmer Robert Pictons brutal murder and dismemberment of women in Vancouver, and its implication of cannibalism.

The disturbing fact is that our fascination with the Picton case is the same as our fascination with Dr. Lecter. Cannibalism being the final taboo leading to the mass media phenomena of Hannibal the Cannibal.

I'm not alone in my fascination with cannibalism — why else would there be five Hannibal Lecter movies? Soylent Green is made of people; the living dead will eat your brains at any time of dawn, day, or night; and the biggest blockbuster of 2006, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest, featured droves of flesh-hungry islanders.

In fact cannibalism is American as Apple Pie. Even before the infamous Donner party case, the founders of America engaged in cannibalism and capitalism.

Jamestown aims for historic reign over Plymouth

JAMESTOWN, Va. -- The first permanent English settlement in North America has more personality than many other historic attractions.
Capt. John Smith, the pint-sized adventurer, left a breathless narrative of his exploits.
Commerce took root here, and so did tobacco and slavery.
Then there was the cannibalism.
Still, as the country prepares to commemorate Jamestown's 400th anniversary in May, many see this swampy outpost on the James River only as a coming attraction to the Pilgrims' arrival at Plymouth Rock about 13 years later.
New Englanders, for example, point to the Thanksgiving feast, the Pilgrims' pure pursuit of religious freedom and the Mayflower.
Jamestown, on the other hand, "is the creation story from hell," Karen Ordahl Kupperman writes in her new book, "The Jamestown Project." Conflict, disease, horrific killings and starvation are all part of the back story of Jamestown, founded in 1607 as a business venture.
But if not for Jamestown, scholars say, there may not have been a Plymouth, and we all might be speaking Spanish. The Spanish, intent on spreading Roman Catholicism, were turned away twice from the nearby Chesapeake Bay during the early years of the Protestant Jamestown settlement.
"There's no question that Jamestown throws down the gauntlet to the Spanish," said James Horn, who wrote "A Land as God Made It: Jamestown and the Birth of America."
Now, during an 18-month commemoration, Jamestown finally could outshine Plymouth and fully embrace what historian and writer Nathaniel Philbrick calls its proper claim as "the rightful birthing ground of America."
"Not only was the [Jamestown] settlement found more than a decade before, but the colony that developed from those beginnings was, in many ways, more quintessentially American since it was all about making money," said Mr. Philbrick, the author of "Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War."

Another gore phenomena in media is the popularity of the Zombie. Zombie parties are occurring across North America. In Edmonton there is a Zombie club of folks who dress up in gory zombie costumes and wander the streets groaning and moaning.

At the University of Alabama they are offering a course on Zombies.

Do you hope that when you die, your corpse will return to life and shamble around, wreaking havoc? Have you ever wanted to taste human flesh? Or do you just want to be able to live your life without that crippling fear of someone eating your brains?

Those who said yes to any of those questions will find a kindred spirit in Sean Hoade, a UA instructor currently teaching creative writing, literature and English. In May, during the interim, he will be teaching EN 311-001, titled, Zombies! The Living Dead in Literature, Film and Culture.

Hoade said zombies are the perfect choice because they are the ultimate metaphor for human life.

"Anything that you look at," Hoade said, "the way we know people by sight but don't really know our neighbors ... race relations and class warfare - all of that is reflected in zombies. And that's why they've become so incredibly popular. [There are] zombie movies, zombie books, zombie graphic novels, so I think that it's only right for the English department to offer a class looking at all things zombie."

Hoade said the class will also discuss what zombies being reanimated corpses indicates about people's fears.

"Death is so sanitized now that [even] being around a dead body that isn't reanimated is incredibly spooky. So we're going to look at how the fear of the zombie is actually a fear not just of death, because we're all afraid of death, but a fear, actually, of the dead also."

The class won't strictly focus on the intellectual aspects of zombies. Students will also be able to participate in a variety of zombie-related activities.

"We're going to engage in mock cannibalism," Hoade said. "We're going to [have] human-flavored tofu. It's based on what people who had to resort to cannibalism, like the Donner party and that plane crash and things like that, what they said human flesh tastes like.

"I ordered putrescine, which is the chemical that dead things give off," he said. Putrescine, which is a chemical compound used by the body for cellular division, is responsible for the smell of rotting flesh.

"We're probably going to do a zombie walk, which is we're all going to get made up as zombies and walk around campus and terrorize it. I'll have to see if that's allowed. We're also going to eat Jell-O brains. [The purpose of the activities are] just to try to get into the zombie mindset ... We might go over to the graveyard and lie down on the graves."

Zombie mindset? Zombies have no brains, no minds, thats why they eat brains, they lack intelligence. Just like the folks at PETA.

The folks in charge of PETA love all of God's creatures—with a few notable exceptions. Asked by BlackBook whether the animal-rights group opposes human cannibalism, Dan Mathews, the group's outrage-provoking vice president, quips, "No, as long as the person being eaten is Anna Wintour." It's far from the first time PETA has gone after the Vogue editor in chief, whom it accuses of doing more than anyone else to keep the wearing of animal pelts in style.

The aristocracy has a history of fascination with death and haute coutoure, they go together like art and suicide.

WHEN Victoria Beckham heard that the flamboyant fashion guru, design muse and socialite Isabella Blow had attempted to kill herself in 2005 by throwing herself off a bridge in London, she remarked, "What genius!"

After school, Blow lived in a squat in London and took cleaning jobs. Then she went off to New York, where Brian Ferry, an old friend - introduced her to Vogue editor Anna Wintour. Blow hung out with artists Jean-Michel Basquiat, Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol, who wanted to know her when he saw she was wearing one pink and one purple shoe.

But for all the name-dropping, there have been two main role models in Blow's life. The first is the Duchess of Windsor, of whom a stylised portrait hangs in her hallway. "Wallis was ugly, like me, but she made the best of herself. I wish I'd lured a king." The other is Blow's aforementioned flesh-eating grandmother, Vera Delves Broughton, a photographer, explorer and big-game fisher. Until recently she held the record for catching the biggest fish in European waters (a tuna, which took 16 hours to reel in).

As for the cannibalism, Blow explains, "She was once in Papua New Guinea. She had some dinner and said, 'God, that was delicious. What was it?' It turned out to be a poor local tribesman who had been grilled up. In her Who's Who hobbies, my grandmother listed 'Once a cannibal'. Ha, ha! I'm so like her. Very wild!"

Christianity itself is based upon the disturbing concepts of cannibalism of its God and the idea of the Living Dead; the resurrection.

Or was Pope Benedict biding his time? Last week he published an Apostolic Exhortation on the Eucharist, Sacramentum Caritatis — The Sacrament of Love. In part it is a summary of the conclusions of the Synod of Catholic Bishops held in Rome in October 2005 — the start of the liturgical Year of the Eucharist promulgated by his predecessor, Pope John Paul II — and as such carries the authority of the whole Church. But it is also a theological tour de force showing the clarity and cogency that are particular to the writings of Joseph Ratzinger.

Sacramentum Caritatis opens with a lucid exposition of the Catholic belief on the Eucharist. The priest’s words of consecration during the Mass turn bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ — a transformation Pope Benedict describes as ‘a sort of “nuclear fission” which penetrates to the heart of all being, a change meant to set off a process which transforms reality, a process leading ultimately to the transfiguration of the entire world’.

This belief, with its connotations of cannibalism and human sacrifice, has always been hard to take. Even in Christ’s lifetime, many of his disciples, according to Saint John, regarded the idea as ‘intolerable ...and stopped going with him’. It was a defining bone of contention between Catholics at the time of the Reformation. Luther downgraded the change from transubstantiation (the bread and wine become the flesh and blood of Christ) to consubstantiation (bread and wine remain bread and wine but co-exist with the flesh and blood of Christ), and Calvin disbelieved it altogether.

The recent rash of zombie and gore films reflect a culture inundated with death. Senseless death, be it wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon and through out the middle east, vast unimaginable death from starvation, mass rape and murder in Dafur, or disasters such as Tsunamis , hurricanes and earthquakes that slaughter thousands and decimate cities.

Our fears of death and the unknown are now amplified by our fear of pain. Gore movies are about pain. Blood and guts, yes but the Saw phenomena is about pain, torture and self inflicted pain.

It is Abu Gharib and Gitmo brought to the large screen. We know not what torture Arar Mehar went through, or those held in CIA black prisons. But when we watch Saw we get a gleaming, an inkling of what it feels like to be held incommunicado and tortured. For no good reason. What does the torturer want? Like those held in sensory deprivation in Gitmo, we do not know.

The horror film since its origins in the silent era was fear of the other, the monster. Today with the advent of the Gore film, the monster is us. We suffer the emotional plague of isolation and alienation in a capitalist culture out of our control and dashing headlong into oblivion.

See

Gothic Capitalism Redux

Jack the Ripper

Emotional Plague

Rape

Serial Murder

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horror,, gore,, horror films,, Zombie,,crime, women, Canada, Supreme Court of Canada, crime

Homolka's Child

The announcement , or rumours, that S&M kink freak and serial killer Karla Homolka had given birth, reminded me of this....

The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

W.B. Yeats The Second Coming



And thinking of her victims, this....
I HAVE NO MOUTH, AND I MUST SCREAM


See

Karla Homolka

Serial Killer


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Karla Homolka, serial killer, rape, murder, crime, Canada, baby, Paul Bernardo, Yeats