EIGHT YEARS AGO TODAY

Sep 15 1996

Serial killer Ottis Toole dies in prison from cirrhosis of the liver. In their heyday, he and Henry Lee Lucas had traveled the country, killing perhaps as many as 600 victims.

Toole was born on March 5, 1947. His alcoholic father soon took off for parts unknown, leaving Toole in the care of a religious fanatic mother and a sister who dressed him in girls clothes "to play." His confusion was exacerbated by his grandmother, an alleged Satanist, who branded Ottis "the Devil's child," and sometimes took him on graveyard runs that yielded human body parts for use in "magic" charms.

Toole ran away from home repeatedly. He suffered from seizures and derived satisfaction from torching vacant houses in his neighborhood. Questioned later about his choice of targets, he replied, "I just hated to see them standing there."

By his own admission, Toole committed his first murder at age 14. The victim, a traveling salesman, picked him up outside town and drove him into the woods for sex. Afterward, Toole "got nervous" and ran the man down with his own car.

Henry Lee Lucas

Toole met killer Henry Lee Lucas at a Jacksonville soup kitchen, taking him home for a night of drinking, conversation, and sex. The men had much in common, sharing memories of murders, looking forward to a time when they might hunt together.

Convicted of second-degree arson, he freely confessed to setting an estimated 40 fires over two decades. His statements "cleared" 25 murders in 11 states and he admitted participating with Lucas in another 108 homicides.

On October 21, 1983, Toole confessed to the murder of Adam Walsh, son of America's Most Wanted host John Walsh, startling assistant police chief Leroy Hessler with the details that were "grisly beyond belief." As Hessler told the media, "There are certain details that only he could know. He did it. He's got me convinced."

A practicing cannibal, Toole dropped hints about his interest in Satanism, but stopped short of naming alleged fellow cult members.

http://www.carpenoctem.tv/killers/toole.html

A Ukrainian man, not named for legal reasons, had demanded a watermelon at the shop in the Siberian town of Hanty Mansisk.

But when the shop assistant refused to hand over a fruit for free, he flew into a rage, jumped over the counter and bit off his ear.

Police who caught the blood stained attacker minutes later have charged him with grievious bodily harm and theft, saying: "We couldn't find the ear, we think he ate it."

Sports mad son killed

September 12, 2004

A mother angry at her son for playing too much sport beat him to death with his own tennis racquet, Cambodian police said today.

She then tried unsuccessfully to take her own life.

Just One Question...

Russian military officials have issued a warning after a man made a garden fence out of 28 unexploded bomb shells.

They warning locals near an army training site in Morozovo, in the Novosibirsk region, to stop using unexploded shells as building material.

In the past shells have turned up used in building houses, items of furniture and in one case as part of an outdoor toilet.

Bush team 'knew of abuse' at Guantánamo

Oliver Burkeman in Washington
Monday September 13, 2004
The Guardian

Evidence of prisoner abuse and possible war crimes at Guantánamo Bay reached the highest levels of the Bush administration as early as autumn 2002, but Donald Rumsfeld, the defence secretary, chose to do nothing about it, according to a new investigation.

The investigation, by the veteran journalist Seymour Hersh, quotes one former marine at the camp recalling sessions in which guards would "fuck with [detainees] as much as we could" by inflicting pain on them.

The Bush administration repeatedly assured critics that inmates were granted recreation periods, but one Pentagon adviser told Hersh how, for some prisoners, they consisted of being left in straitjackets in intense sunlight with hoods over their heads.

Hersh provides details of how President George Bush signed off on the establishment of a secret unit that was given advance approval to kill or capture and interrogate "high-value" suspects - considered by many to be in defiance of international law - an officially "unacknowledged" programme that was eventually transferred wholesale from Guantánamo to the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

A CIA analyst visited Guantánamo in summer 2002 and returned "convinced that we were committing war crimes" and that "more than half the people there didn't belong there. He found people lying in their own faeces," a CIA source told Hersh.

The analyst submitted a report to General John Gordon, an aide to Condoleezza Rice, Mr Bush's national security adviser.

Ms Rice saw the document by autumn of the same year, and called a high-level meeting at which she asked Mr Rumsfeld, to deal with the problem.

But after he vowed to act, "the Pentagon went into a full-court stall", a former White House official is quoted as saying.

A senior intelligence official told Hersh: "I was told [by FBI agents] that the military guards were slapping prisoners, stripping them, pouring cold water over them and making them stand until they got hypothermia."

The secret "special access programme" facilitating much of the mistreatment of prisoners, widely held to have contravened the Geneva convention, was established following a direct order from the president.

Hersh reports that a secret document signed by Mr Bush in February 2002 stated: "I determine that none of the provisions of Geneva apply to our conflict with al-Qaida in Afghanistan or elsewhere throughout the world."

Hersh's book reports that an army officer communicated concerns over abuses at Abu Ghraib both to General John Abizaid, the US central command (Centcom) chief at the time.

The officer told Hersh: "I said there are systematic abuses going on in the prisons. Abizaid didn't say a thing. He looked at me - beyond me, as if to say, 'Move on. I don't want to touch this.'"

The administration is being accused of concealing up to 100 "ghost detainees" from the Red Cross, which must be granted access to prisoners of war and other detainees under the Geneva convention.

Mr Rumsfeld told reporters on Friday he had approved the use of harsh interrogation measures, but that they had only been meant for Guantánamo.

 Brigadier-General Janis Karpinski, who was responsible for military jails in Iraq, meets with Donald Rumsfeld. 

Stink over bad service and lousy tip lands diner under arrest

By The Associated Press
(9/13/04 - LAKE GEORGE, NY) — Humberto A. Taveras, 41, faces a misdemeanor charge of theft of services after he and his fellow diners argued with Soprano's Italian and American Grill managers over the legality of requiring an 18 percent tip for large parties.

Taveras and eight others had pizza at the restaurant in this resort village Sunday night. He said they weren't completely satisfied with the food and left a tip of under 10 percent. Taveras said they also were not told of a mandatory 18 percent gratuity for parties of six or more and did not see notice of it on their menus.

LUSAKA (Reuters) - Zambian police have arrested a man who exhumed, cooked and ate part of his grandson's corpse.

33 YEARS AGO TODAY

Sep 13 1971

New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller orders an attack to retake Attica prison. In all, 29 prisoners die and 85 are wounded; and 10 hostages are killed.

After a prison guard mistakenly thought they had been fighting, two inmates were taken from their cells for punishment. A rumor spread through the cellblock that both had been beaten.

The next morning, angry inmates rioted. They seized control of an exercise yard and took guards as hostages. Thus began the worst prison insurrection in U.S. history, indeed the bloodiest single clash between Americans since street riots in New York City a century earlier.

Altogether, 43 people died at Attica, nearly all -- inmates and hostages alike -- when state troopers stormed the prison Sept. 13 and fired indiscriminately through a thick haze of tear gas. It was, a state investigating commission would later conclude, an assault both ill-conceived and poorly executed, leading to needless loss of life. One disenchanted state prosecutor ended up calling it "a turkey shoot."

Officials at first said inmates had killed the hostages, slitting their throats and castrating them. None of that was true, as autopsies showed.

Troopers and Attica guards resorted to brutal reprisals. They forced inmates to strip and crawl over broken glass. One man had a screwdriver repeatedly shoved into his rectum. Another, forced to lie naked for hours with a football propped under his chin, was warned that if he let the ball drop, he would be killed or castrated.

-http://www.nytimes.com/learning/students/pop/010900attica-review.html 

"They beat, whipped, clubbed - on top of the tear gas men who were there - including men on stretchers, men lying down. If a guy raised his head a little bit that was an invitation to get a club over the head. If you moved your finger, you got a finger whack"

"We have reason to think that some men were seen alive by inmates, even after the uprising, who were subsequently reported dead."-Herman Schwartz