Paul E. Ester's Flogger

The officer gives families details on compensation to survivors: a death gratuity of $12,000; reimbursement of up to $6,900 for burial expenses; the soldier’s unpaid pay and allowances; a monthly check for the surviving spouse until remarriage and surviving children until they reach a certain age; and Social Security benefits…. Rest of Article

WASHINGTON, Nov. 23 (UPI) — Former Sen. Max Cleland, a Democrat, has been nominated by President Bush to serve on the board of the Export-Import Bank.

As a result he will have to leave the commission investigating the Sept. 11 terror attacks.

The statutes governing the panel, formally known as The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, bar anyone who holds a federal job like being on the Ex-Im Board.

Cleland has been one of the more outspoken members of the commission, accusing the administration of delaying access to vital documents in an effort to run out the clock on its investigation. The panel, which started work at the beginning of the year, must submit its report by a congressionally mandated deadline of May 27, 2004…. Rest of Article

The National Academy of Sciences has concluded that a technique the FBI has used for decades to match bullets to crimes is flawed, a position that could hand defense lawyers a new avenue of attack against the world’s most famous crime lab.

The academy’s study, to be released early next month, makes about a half-dozen recommendations for changing the way the FBI matches bullets by their lead content and strongly urges bureau experts to more precisely describe the significance of their findings in court.

The findings, which are in final draft form, were described to The Associated Press by several people involved in the study. They would speak only on condition of anonymity.


The study’s publication next month could open the door to hundreds, even thousands of appeals, and give defense lawyers in future cases new ammunition for undermining expert testimony…. Rest of Article

SANTIAGO, Chile Ñ The bodies of 400 to 500 Chileans who “disappeared” under ex-dictator Augusto Pinochet’s bloody rule were dumped into the ocean strapped to pieces of railroad track to make them sink, according to new court testimonies published yesterday in La Nacion newspaper.

According to the paper, 12 retired helicopter mechanics, breaking decades of silence, recounted macabre details of the operation to Judge Juan Guzman, who is investigating charges of human-rights abuses under Pinochet’s 1973-1990 rule.

La Nacion’s report was based on leaks of confidential testimonies provided to Guzman and his team of detectives.

The mechanics, who all admitted to participating in some of the body-dumping flights over the Pacific Ocean between 1974 and 1978, said the operation was planned and carried out by the Army Aviation Command in conjunction with Pinochet’s secret police.

“There were at least 40 trips. In each one, they loaded eight to 15 bundles (corpses) aboard the Puma helicopters,” the paper said.

“Some of them did not have the shape of a body but were smaller, just the remains,” it paraphrased from the testimonies.

La Nacion reported that the men tied a piece of railroad track to the corpses with wire, stuck them in a canvas bag and unloaded them over water. The body of one victim, a communist activist named Marta Ugarte, washed up onto a Chilean beach in 1976, providing the first clue about the operation. The identities of the other bodies are not known…. Rest of Article

Rebecca Suell wants answers, and not the ones the U.S. Army is giving her.

ÊÊÊ Why does the Army keep calling the last letter her husband sent to her, the one he mailed from Iraq on June 15, a suicide note? Can taking a bottle of Tylenol really kill you? And how did he get his hands on a bottle of Tylenol in the middle of the desert anyway?

ÊÊÊ The questions may differ, but experts say the desperate search for answers — and the denial — are usually the same.

ÊÊÊ Since April, the military says, at least 17 Americans — 15 Army soldiers and two Marines — have taken their own lives in Iraq. The true number is almost certainly higher. At least two dozen non-combat deaths, some of them possible suicides, are under investigation according to an AP review of Army casualty reports.

ÊÊÊ No one in the military is saying for the record that the suicide rate among forces in Iraq is alarming. But Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the top American military commander in Iraq, was concerned enough, according to the Army Surgeon General’s office, to have ordered a 12-person mental health assessment team to Iraq to see what more can be done to prevent suicides and to help troops better cope with anxiety and depression.
… Rest of Article

PUB groups across the country reported record takings for England’s historic 20-17 win over Australia in the Rugby World Cup Final on Saturday.

Industry estimates put the number of pints downed by rugby fans at 37m when 10,000 pubs opened early across the UK for the match being screened live from Sydney…. Rest of Article

BAGRAM, Afghanistan (Reuters) – A senior U.S. general said on Friday that al Qaeda mastermind Osama bin Laden had “taken himself out of the picture” and that his capture was not essential to winning the “war on terror.”

General Peter Pace, vice chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, said at U.S. military headquarters just north of Kabul that the 11,500-strong U.S.-led force hunting al Qaeda and Taliban militants was not focusing on individuals.

”He (bin Laden) has taken himself out of the picture,” Pace told reporters after visiting U.S. troops serving in Afghanistan.

”It is not an individual that is as important as is the ongoing campaign of the coalition against terrorists,” he said.

America’s new ambassador to Kabul Zalmay Khalilzad said earlier this week that the U.S. military would “redouble” its efforts to find bin Laden and other al Qaeda and Taliban leaders.

While appearing to contradict this, Pace, added: “That is not to say that we would not be glad to capture Osama bin Laden today or tomorrow.”

He said U.S.-led forces were winning their war against “terrorists” in Afghanistan, despite nearly 400 people being killed in just over three months in the bloodiest period since the Taliban’s ouster two years ago.

”The fact that the enemy is not pooling up in waves that can be attacked in large numbers to me means that in fact the coalition is being effective,” Pace said.

… Rest of Article

You mean they are not pooling in groups of 19?

WASHINGTON – While probing organized crime in New England since the 1960s, the FBI used killers as informants, shielded them from prosecution and knowingly sent innocent people to jail, House investigators said Thursday in concluding a two-year inquiry.

The bureau’s conduct “must be considered one of the greatest failures in the history of federal law enforcement,” according to the final report from the House Government Reform Committee.

“Federal law enforcement personnel tolerated and probably encouraged false testimony in a state death penalty case just to protect their criminal informants,” said Rep. Dan Burton, who started the investigation when he was committee chairman.

“False testimony sent four innocent men to jail. They were made scapegoats in order to shield criminals,” said Burton, R-Ind.


The FBI came under criticism for trying to stonewall investigators. Lawmakers complained that the bureau delayed giving them access to audio recordings and logs of conversations involving New England crime boss Raymond Patriarca that provided vital information on the 1965 murder of Edward “Teddy” Deegan.

“The Justice Department made it very difficult for this committee to conduct timely and effective oversight,” the report said. “The FBI must improve management of its informant programs to ensure that agents are not corrupted. The committee will examine the current FBI’s management, security, and discipline to prevent similar events in the future.”… Rest of Article

IZHEVSK, Russia — The first snow of the season was pelting his country cottage — too cold and wet for hunting — so the dapper little general had retreated to the warmth of his kitchen. There was a wheel of Camembert on the table, some dark bread and sliced pears, and a bottle of Armenian brandy. He swirled some of the brandy in a snifter and tried to explain about all the blood and tears of the past half-century.

“A lot of people ask me how I sleep, because of all the people who’ve been killed with my guns,” said Mikhail Kalashnikov, 84, designer of the renowned AK47 assault rifle.

His light, inexpensive, virtually indestructible guns — “they’re like my children,” he said recently — long have been the weapons of choice for armies from Vietnam to China and from Angola to Cuba. They’ve also been used by terrorists, freedom fighters, guerrillas and gangsters.

The Kalashnikov has been the primary weapon — often for both sides — in most of the 40-odd wars of the past decade. Military historians say there are 100 million AKs in the world today.

“But it’s not the designer’s fault or the weapon’s fault when terrible things happen; it’s the politicians’,” said Kalashnikov, a former major general. “It’s because the politicians are unable to reach peaceful agreements. I must say I sleep quite soundly.”… Rest of Article

Wal-Mart is not just the world’s largest retailer. It’s the world’s largest company–bigger than ExxonMobil, General Motors, and General Electric. The scale can be hard to absorb. Wal-Mart sold $244.5 billion worth of goods last year. It sells in three months what

number-two retailer Home Depot sells in a year. And in its own category of general merchandise and groceries, Wal-Mart no longer has any real rivals. It does more business than Target, Sears, Kmart, J.C. Penney, Safeway, and Kroger combined. “Clearly,” says Edward Fox, head of Southern Methodist University’s J.C. Penney Center for Retailing Excellence, “Wal-Mart is more powerful than any retailer has ever been.” It is, in fact, so big and so furtively powerful as to have become an entirely different order of corporate being.

Wal-Mart wields its power for just one purpose: to bring the lowest possible prices to its customers. At Wal-Mart, that goal is never reached. The retailer has a clear policy for suppliers: On basic products that don’t change, the price Wal-Mart will pay, and will charge shoppers, must drop year after year. But what almost no one outside the world of Wal-Mart and its 21,000 suppliers knows is the high cost of those low prices. Wal-Mart has the power to squeeze profit-killing concessions from vendors. To survive in the face of its pricing demands, makers of everything from bras to bicycles to blue jeans have had to lay off employees and close U.S. plants in favor of outsourcing products from overseas.

Of course, U.S. companies have been moving jobs offshore for decades, long before Wal-Mart was a retailing power. But there is no question that the chain is helping accelerate the loss of American jobs to low-wage countries such as China. Wal-Mart, which in the late 1980s and early 1990s trumpeted its claim to “Buy American,” has doubled its imports from China in the past five years alone, buying some $12 billion in merchandise in 2002. That’s nearly 10% of all Chinese exports to the United States…. Rest of Article