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Juche: Life inside the Orwellian Hermit Kingdom

by Mojambo ( 42 Comments › )
Filed under Cold War, JUCHE!, North Korea at January 21st, 2014 - 7:00 am

Life in North Korea makes life in Stalin’s U.S.S.R. seem like living in Switzerland. Socialism leads to Communism which leads to Stalinism which leads to genocide.

by Maureen Callahan

Life inside the surreal, cruel & sheltered North Korea

North Koreans clean up in front of one of the 34,000 statues of Kim Il Sung and his son Kim Jong Il, while grandson Kim Jong Un pals around with American D-list reality stars.

In so many ways, Dennis Rodman seems the diplomat North Korea deserves: defiant, unpredictable, irrational, unhinged.

Yet the comic aspects of his so-called “basketball diplomacy” — the drunken defense of dictator Kim Jong-un on CNN; serenading Kim with “Happy Birthday”; gifting him with several bottles of his own liquor, Bad Ass Vodka; allowing his “Dream Team” ofmotley ex-and wannabe NBA players to lose to the North Koreans — has turned the most brutal regime in the world into a punchline for late-night comics.

Lost among the jokes is the suffering of the average North Korean — the 24.7 million who live in abject poverty in the world’s most isolated nation.

North Korea’s human-rights record has been condemned by Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and the United Nations. Aside from saber-rattling, the government maintains little communication with the outside world.

The nation has so little electricity that, in the ultimate metaphor, nighttime satellite imagery shows North Korea gone dark, the only country in the world not illuminated. Travelers are only allowed to move within a circumscribed part of Pyongyang and are chaperoned and surveilled by government officials.

So: What do we really know about life inside the Hermit Kingdom?

Steven Seagal Behind the Curtains

In North Korea, a ballpoint pen is considered a luxury item. Men make it to their mid-20s without knowing that women menstruate, or what menstruation even is. The use of anesthesia for surgery is a fairly recent development. There is no sex education. You can marry for love, but only within your own social caste — determined by birth and generational loyalty to the regime.

In the fascinating feature called “Ask a North Korean” on the site NKNews.org, a series of four defectors have answered questions submitted by readers from all over the world. One asked what North Koreans do for fun.

“People do not have much in the way of individual pastimes under the totalitarian system in North Korea,” wrote Mina Yoon, a 20-something who defected in 2010. “The idea of ‘free time’ is not really common. Then, even if you do have free time, there aren’t many things to enjoy anyway.”

Mina’s family was lucky: they were one of the few families to have a TV, a gift to her father for his work performance. Children from all over would crowd into her living room, bribing her with what little food they had. And all they had to watch, like most North Koreans, was the lone state-run channel. Some daring souls would watch smuggled DVDs from the West, covering their windows with blankets — a transgression that, if discovered, still means hard time in a labor camp.

Not that long ago, it was a crime punishable by death.

“I will never forget the time when a group of friends and I gathered, covering the window with a thick duvet and fastening two or three locks to the door so we could watch Steven Seagal action movies,” defector Ji-Min Khan wrote.

[……..]
This is a radical notion for a country that punishes defectors with the threat of execution — and even if they escape, they must live with the fear that their families will be killed. The entire nation is a hive of East German-era paranoia, where anyone — from a neighbor to a family member — may be a spy or informant, ratting you out for an ill-advised criticism or complaint.

Jae Young Kim, another defector, wrote of a North Korean proverb: “The bird listens during the day and the mouse does at night.”

“You’re always being watched,” he writes. “From a young age, I learned to think of the potential consequences of everything I might say, before I said it. . . Criticism of the leaders is something that can lead to someone being sent from their city to the countryside; to a prison camp, or even worse.”

An Assigned Future, Rationed Food

Other infractions that have serious consequences: Girls cannot ride bicycles; it’s considered lascivious. Religion is a threat to the state and is banned; instead, children are raised to worship the late Kim Il-sung, who was made “president for life” four years after his death, in 1998, by his son and successor, the late Kim Jong-il. There are 34,000 statues of Kim Il-sung in North Korea, and all wedding ceremonies must take place in front of one.

All citizens must hang government-provided portraits of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il in their homes, and once a month, the police come by to inspect them. All, too, must wear uniforms, and their future careers are based on caste and dictated by the government.

When she was in kindergarten, Mina Yoon was told she would become a doctor. “The teachers made sure that when anyone asked me about my dreams, I would answer: ‘I will study hard and be a medical doctor when I grow up. My dream is to make North Korean people healthy and well, and bring joy to Gen. Kim Il-sung.’ ”

But that was just propaganda. Had she not gotten out, she would have worked in a factory.

Jobs often come without salaries. Those who do get a paycheck, earn, on average, between $1,000-2,000 a year. Food and clothing are rationed by the government.

[…….]

“The majority of North Koreans believe completely in the regime,” says Barbara Demick, a Seoul-based journalist and author of “Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea.”

“They are barely surviving,” she says. “Only the rich can afford to eat rice. They’re in a chronic state of food shortage.”

The average citizen eats twice a day — a manageable state of affairs for citizens who lived through the great famine of the ’90s, which reduced millions of people to eating tree bark and plucking undigested kernels of corn from animal excrement.

Starving in the Countryside

In September 2008, Demick became one of the few Westerners to travel beyond Pyongyang.

“I saw people who appeared to be homeless sleeping in the grass along the main street,” she writes. “Others squatted on their haunches, heads down, apparently having nothing else to do at 10 o’clock on a weekday morning. Walking barefoot along the sidewalk was a boy of about 9 years old wearing a mud-stained uniform that hung below his knees . . . older people sifted through grass on their hands and knees in search of edible weeds.”

One of Demick’s subjects, a young female doctor, was forced to strip apart the few clothes she owned to use as makeshift sanitary pads — no napkins or tampons were provided at medical school.

During the famine, this young doctor struggled to treat starving children as her own hospital went without heat and hot water. She eventually defected.

“She was only out for one hour when she saw that dogs eat better in China than doctors in North Korea,” Demick says. “Defectors very quickly realize their life is a lie. They’re modern-day Rip Van Winkles — they’ve woken up and been dropped into the modern world.”

Over the past several years, three North Koreans have been jailed for attempting to assassinate defectors who fled to South Korea. Since 2002, in the wake of the great famine of the 1990s, between 1,000-2,000 North Koreans a year flee — usually crossing the semi-porous border to China, then South Korea.

[……]
But life inside North Korea is so desperate, Peters says, that they’re willing to take the risk. “They think, ‘If I’m a bride, at least I’ll have enough to eat.’”

Wonder at the Outside World

Once beyond the confines of the Hermit Kingdom, North Koreans cannot believe what the outside world has to offer. Unfamiliar with modern plumbing, they don’t know how to flush toilets. Water that runs all day, every day, astonishes, as does the abundance of food.

And then comes the larger realization: These people have freedoms.

“I have sat with refugees in farmhouses on the Chinese border, and they’re watching South Korean TV, and they see cellphones and fashion and washing machines, and their jaws hang open,” says Demick.

[……..]

Meanwhile, what must North Koreans, the most homogenous society in the world, make of this nearly 7-foot tall pierced, tattooed, boa-wearing basketball player, probably the first black man and American they’ve seen in person?

“North Koreans would highlight the suffering of blacks in America, and say ‘Here is a disaffected black American who has suffered,’ ” Peters says. “There is a reason they want to put him in the state-run narrative, but the rank and file would be extremely puzzled.”

And Kim’s basketball diplomacy isn’t going to be enough to staunch the flight of young people, who increasingly suspect the world outside must be better than within.

“Kim Jong-un has made it clear that even though his father was brutal, he will be even worse,” Peters says. “And his father was a very cruel man.”

Read the rest – Life inside the surreal, cruel and sheltered North Korea

Tags: Dennis Rodman, Kim Il Sung, Kim Jong-Il, Kim Jong-Un, Maureen Callahan
Posted in Cold War, JUCHE!, North Korea | 42 Comments »

Samantha Laithwaite, The White Widow

by Mojambo ( 68 Comments › )
Filed under Al Qaeda, British Islamic Jihadists, Islamic Terrorism, Islamists, Kenya, UK at September 30th, 2013 - 12:00 pm

As we have commented upon before, converts to Islam are often more fanatical than those who were born into the cult. It is obvious that people such as Samantha Laithwaite are the ideal converts to Islam – dumb, needy, and easily manipulated (recall Katherine Russell, the widow of Tamerlan Tsarnaev). The the use of female terrorists by Muslims has been long established and the Chechens have in fact employed the “Black Widows” i.e. Muslim women whose husbands have been killed in war, women bent on revenge in many of their terror attacks in Russia.

by Maureen Callahan

She grew up middle-class in suburban Buckinghamshire, England, and was considered an average girl in every way. Her father, Allen, was a former British Army soldier-turned-lorry driver; her mother, Christine, a homemaker. She has one older brother, Allen, and friends recall that as early as junior high, Samantha Laithwaite was a pretty and popular girl. When her parents broke up in 1994, she took it hard but seemingly no harder than most of her friends whose parents had divorced. She wasn’t particularly ambitious or studious, but she was a good girl who was shy around boys, considered by classmates to be exceptionally warm and decent.

Today, she is known as the White Widow, wanted in connection with last week’s attack on the Westgate Mall in Kenya. But Laithwaite, 29, has been known to law enforcement since July 7, 2005, when her then-husband detonated a bomb in London’s subway system, killing himself and 26 civilians; back then, she was the weeping, 8-months-pregnant widow who became the subject of national sympathy.

So, how did this nice young girl grow up to become one of the world’s most wanted terrorists?

BROKEN HOMES, BROKEN LIVES

As wild as Laithwaite’s story seems — the white woman from the West who decides to become a radical Islamic jihadist — it is not without precedent. There is Rabiah Hutchison, the former Australian surfer girl tuned “grande dame of terror,” once married to a bin Laden confidante. “I would defend Islam with my life,” she told ABC News in 2008, “so that makes me a filthy, dirty, subhuman terrorist.”

There’s also “Mama Shabab,” a Canadian woman who runs a safe house for terrorists in Somalia; Colleen Rose, a. k. a. “Jihadi Jane,” the American woman facing a life sentence for aiding and abetting terrorists, and Muriel Degauque, a Belgian woman who committed the 2005 suicide bombing of a US convoy in Iraq (only she was killed).

They all have certain things in common, says Mia Bloom, professor of security studies at the University of Massachusetts and author of the book “Bombshell: Women and Terrorism”: broken homes, low self-esteem, lost souls in search of purpose.

A photo of Samantha Lewthwaite taken from her fake South African passport

“For someone who has no structure and is lost,” Bloom says, “Islam has more structures than other faiths.”

One of the best predictors, she says, “is involvement with a man who is in the organization. It acts as a vetting mechanism for the terrorist organization: This isn’t going to be a police informant.” If and when those first marriages fail — due to death, planned or otherwise — these women continue to marry within their terror networks, rising in esteem for their devotion to martyrs. In an otherwise rigidly patriarchal society, this is how women derive their power: raising money, acting as couriers, goading men into jihad by accusing them of being weaker than women.

By all accounts, Laithwaite fits the profile. She was 11 years old when her parents separated, and she began spending more and more time with her Muslim friends, who she felt had more-solid families. The only subject that really interested her was religion, and she began seriously studying Islam. She has been described as “empty in confidence.”

By 15, gone were the jeans and T-shirts and makeup. Instead, Laithwaite wore a salwar kameez, the baggy tunics and trousers worn in Afghanistan and Pakistan. She hadn’t yet abandoned the Western world — at 16, she attended her high-school prom. She wore jewels and a tiara and a face full of makeup.

[…….]

MEETING JAMAL

By the time she was 17, Laithwaite was a convert — not so unusual in her heavily Muslim area, where about seven girls a year convert to Islam.

“At first she just wore a headscarf,” but gradually she adopted full Islamic dress, the classmate said. Laithwaite then went on to study politics and religion at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, but she was more interested in getting married.

“Samantha just wanted the simple things in life — someone to support her and look after her,” the classmate says.

Around 2002, Laithwaite met Jermaine Lindsay, a Jamaican-born Islamic extremist who was one year her junior. Accounts of their first meeting differ: one has them bumping into each other at a “Stop the War” rally in London; another has them meeting in a chat room for Muslims; and yet another has them the product of an arranged marriage.

“She had seen a picture of him and been told a lot about him,” said her classmate. “But they only spoke for the first time in a phone call on the morning of the wedding.”

Laithwaite’s new husband, who preferred to go by Jamal, was himself a convert to Islam at age 14. His transformation was similar to Laithwaite’s: He swapped his jeans and sweatshirts for Muslim robes, grew a beard, withdrew from his non-Islamic friends and was interested mainly in kick-boxing, martial arts and his new religion.

[……..]

THE 7/7 ATTACKS

Laithwaite and Lindsay had their first child, a boy named Abdullah, in 2004. Not long after the baby was born, Lindsay spent a week and a half at two mosques in London, and in September 2004 the couple became close with another Muslim couple, Mohammad Siddique Khan and his wife, Hasina Patel.

In October Khan took off for Pakistan to undergo training at a terrorist camp; the goal was to send him back to London to carry out an attack. Around this time, Lindsay shaved off his beard and would disappear for days. When he was home, he played Islamic music and tapes of the Koran on a loop, the ceaseless noise disturbing his neighbors. Some reported the heavy stench of gasoline coming from the apartment Lindsay and Laithwaite shared.

[……..]

On July 7, 2005, Lindsay descended to the Picadilly Line on the London Underground at rush hour. He was one of four suicide bombers who killed 52 commuters and injured 700 on that day.

In the aftermath, Laithwaite, now eight months pregnant, expressed revulsion, horror and no foreknowledge of her husband’s terrorist activities.

“I had everything,” she told the press through tears. “But if this is true, now I have nothing.”

Then she demanded DNA evidence to prove her husband’s involvement.

She also issued a written statement: “I totally condemn and am horrified by the atrocities which occurred in London on Thursday, July 7. I am trying to come to terms with the recent events. My whole world has fallen apart, and my thoughts are with the families of the victims of this incomprehensible devastation.”

Authorities interrogated Laithwaite and even placed her in protective custody for a time. She sold her story to the UK Sun for more than $50,000, then later married a London-born Muslim extremist named Habib Saleh Ghani.

In 2009, Laithwaite had her third child and at an unknown point she and her family fled the UK. Authorities believe she had joined al Qaeda the year prior, and today is affiliated with Al-Shabab, the Somalia-based offshoot.

THE TERROR WIDOW

Samantha Laithwaite finally resurfaced in February 2011, entering Kenya with a fake passport identifying her as a South African named Natalie Faye Webb. She had several addresses in Johannesburg and ran up nearly $10,000 in bad loans from local banks.

In December of that year, she was arrested and questioned by authorities in connection with a plot to blow up hotels and restaurants in Mombasa; of the four people detained, including her roommate, Jermaine Grant, only Laithwaite was let go. Authorities believed her when she said she was just an unsuspecting tourist.

By the time police realized their mistake — Grant cracked and gave her up — Laithwaite was gone. In their former safe house, police found Laithwaite’s diaries, in which she wrote of her intention to bring up her children as martyrs. They also found ammunition for AK-47s, a destroyed laptop and bomb-making materials. Interpol issued then issued a Red Notice, or global arrest warrant, and Kenyan law enforcement charged her in absentia.

[…….]

While no one in the intelligence community doubts her importance, some are skeptical that she was physically present, much less operational.

Though these terrorist networks are beginning to recognize the strategic importance of women — al Qaeda has been soliciting applicants online for the past five years, with their younger cohort in Al-Shabab even more open to the role women can play — the intelligence community agrees that women would never be in a position to give orders. Al-Shabab has publicly said Laithwaite was not involved, and according to Katherine Zimmerman, senior analyst at the American Enterprise Institute’s Critical Threats project, “Al-Shabab hasn’t lied, except for inflating casualty counts.”

“Laithwaite’s more valuable alive,” says author and expert Mia Bloom. “Being an inspiration on the Internet and coordinating the attack — that I find more persuasive.”

As for the number of women — let alone white Western converts — involved in terrorist networks, no one really knows. There’s no centralized database, and women on the whole come under far less scrutiny at security checkpoints than men — precisely what makes them so valuable.

[…………]

Al-Shabab in particular has been agitating for the role of women to expand, and since the late ’90s, jihadi women have become more active in the region — Bloom says there’s been a 15 percent increase in Pakistan and a 25 percent spike in the PKK in Turkey.

“Al Qaeda is just starting to use women,” Bloom says. “But I think we are at the beginning of the wave.”

Read the rest – How an average English girl became the ‘White Widow’

Tags: Maureen Callahan, Samantha Lewthwaite
Posted in Al Qaeda, British Islamic Jihadists, Islamic Terrorism, Islamists, Kenya, UK | 68 Comments »

Why public opinion turned so sharply against unions

by Mojambo ( 192 Comments › )
Filed under Unions at September 6th, 2011 - 2:00 pm

Two things (amongst many) that we need to be thankful to Ronald Reagan for:

1. He rid us of Jimmy Carter

2. He broke the air traffic controllers union (PATCO) after their illegal strike in July 1981.

There was a time when we did need unions due to things such as worker abuse and sweat shops, however public sector unions now stand in opposition to real reform (see the Teachers Union) and are out to gouge the private sector taxpayer’s whose taxes actually fund them. As for private sector unions, they pretty well much are in the hip pockets of the Democratic Party.

by Maureen Callahan

This summer, something remarkable happened: 45,000 Verizon workers went on strike, and no one — save a few customers dealing with service interruptions — much cared.

The communications behemoth wanted more than 100 concessions on health care, pensions, sick days and outsourcing. Unions representing the workers said Verizon sought to void 50 years of collective-bargaining gains for middle-class workers, despite posting a 2.8% jump in revenue in the second quarter, up to $27.5 billion.

Thirteen days later, those on strike went back to work on good faith, the company guaranteeing nothing other than continued talks.

It’s an indictment of how anemic the labor movement in America has become, how irrelevant to the average worker that, even in this ever-contracting economy, the lower and middle classes couldn’t be agitated to care.

And why should they? Private-sector unions in the US are nearly extinct, having long ago abandoned an unwinnable fight against big business. Meanwhile, public-sector unions are thriving by comparison, even though public opinion has been on the decline since the rise of unions in the 1930s, when 72% of Americans had a favorable view of them.

By 2009, according to a Gallup poll, that number had declined to 48%.

How did this happen? How is it that the average American worker has come to view unionized labor — which, by definition, was meant to protect and progress each generation in ever-greater ways — with such contempt?

“At a certain historical moment, they had a real role to play, but they haven’t added to that,” says Jim Stergios, executive director of nonpartisan think tank the Pioneer Institute. “[They’re more concerned] that they meet their members’ needs at a time when the country is in a really rough spot.”

For New Yorkers especially, the prevailing attitude toward unions is akin to rent-stabilized apartments: great for the people who happened to luck into them, deeply unfair for those left to the vicissitudes of the free market.

And the unions, once self-branded as “the folks who brought you the weekend,” have only themselves to blame, long ago becoming the province of the few.

“There’s a big difference between a movement in the interest of the people, and an institution collecting dues and advancing the interests of its members,” says Barbara Ehrenreich, author of the modern-day classic “Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America.”

“I think,” she adds, “that unions continued to go on with business as usual, and didn’t realize that things had gotten a lot meaner.”

Today, for the average worker at a minimum-wage job, there’s no one to protect against getting fired for taking a sick day, or to force an employer to pay for a sick day, or to require a lunch break — let alone provide health care or pensions or vacations.

For any unprotected worker, unions have come to represent an increasingly polarized economy, the haves and the have-nots. The public sector is regarded with even more disdain — workers who are, in part, subsidized by taxpayers, yet seem to live in a hermetically sealed nation-state of their own.

Labor unions in America rose to power during the Great Depression, and in 1935 Congress passed the National Labor Relations Act, which ensured collective bargaining rights for workers. Yet when it came to the rights of public-sector workers to organize, even FDR warned against it, saying the notion of government workers striking against the government and, by extension, the taxpayers providing those salaries, was “unthinkable and intolerable.”

And so we have a schizophrenic relationship with unions, most recently illustrated by the private-sector strike against Verizon and the far uglier battle over public-sector rights to collective bargaining in Wisconsin.

That fight, spurred by Republican Gov. Scott Walker, has devolved into recall elections (largely unsuccessful), the banning of Republicans from the Labor Day Parade (since reversed) and the super-gluing of doors to a Catholic school ahead of the governor’s visit (mature). Not to mention the concessions wrung from fiscally starving governors, both Democrat and Republican, in New York, New Jersey and Massachusetts, and the battles over public-sector collective-bargaining rights in Ohio, Indiana, Michigan and Tennessee.

“This is extremely unusual from a historical standpoint,” says Terry Moe, professor of political science at Stanford University and author of “Special Interest: Teachers Unions and America’s Public Schools.” “This is a perfect storm. Even the unions’ allies are saying, ‘We have to do something.’ ”

A Harris poll released this week shows similar dissonance, its headline more suited to The Onion: “Most Americans Critical of Unions While Crediting Them for Improving Wages and Working Conditions.” While 65% of those polled said unions had done much to spike pay and improve on-the-job safety and fair practices, 71% said unions are more concerned with fighting change than fighting for it.

Ehrenreich, the journalist and activist who worked a series of minimum-wage jobs to expose the plight of the working poor, believes that private-sector unions have become as bloated and ineffectual as the big businesses they ostensibly keep in check.

“In DC, the AFL-CIO is near the White House,” she says. “That’s very expensive real estate, and I don’t think they should be there. I think they should be in storefronts around the country. I don’t think they should regard themselves as a bureaucracy — and I sense, in big labor, bureaucratic sclerosis — but as a movement.”

Unions, after all, not only brought the American worker the weekend: They’re responsible for child-labor laws, sick pay, benefits, fairness in the workplace — even the inalienable right to bathroom breaks, a federally instituted right as of April 1998.

But union membership in the private sector has been on the decline for nearly 30 years, with 2010’s ratio — 6.9% of private-sector workers unionized vs. 36.2% public — about the same as 1983’s.

New York has one of the highest rates of unionized workers in the country, at 11.9%, but the gap between public and private is in keeping with the national norm: 14% of private vs. 71% of public, a historic high.

“Things are very, very difficult in the private sector right now,” says the Pioneer Institute’s Stergios. “With the Verizon strike — who looked bad in that? The unions are really out of whack with this high unemployment rate. If workers don’t give something up, they seem irrational. They need a reality check. ”

Private-sector unions hit their apex in the 1950s, largely representing blue-collar workers, and almost no one saw their imminent decline.

“Everyone thought they’d just keep going up,” says Moe. But a confluence of factors contributed to their erosion: a globalized economy and the outsourcing of jobs; the migration of businesses to the Sun Belt, where labor costs are lower and there’s less public support for unions; and good old-fashioned union-busting.

[…..]

While organized labor in the private sector was steadily decomposing, it was flourishing in the public sector largely due to labor powerhouses such as the AFL-CIO and the UAW, long allied with the Democratic Party.

Those organizations succumbed to mission creep, seeking to expand their power base by promising money and votes in exchange for legislation that extended such rights to government workers: Cops, firefighters, sanitation workers and, of course, teachers, the largest and most powerful group in the organized public sector.

“Massachusetts is the best state in the nation educationally, and yet the Boston teachers contract is 225 pages in length,” Stergios says. “It states how many kids are allowed in a classroom, how many minutes before school officially starts can a teacher begin, how often is the principal allowed in the classroom — stuff that does not allow you to implement so-called best practices.”

Author Moe, too, thinks that the teachers unions have long been doing active harm, that the control they wield over nearly all of the system is unconscionable.

“Since 1980, when the teachers movement gets going, people have been saying, ‘Hey, we have to reform the schools.’ Why would they say that? Because, over the last quarter century, the teachers unions have been blocking reforms,” Moe says. “They want reforms to fail, to weaken accountability. They don’t like school choice, because it means they’ll all lose their jobs if kids leave.”

In the short term, he says, the outlook is grim, but in the long term, he sees the teachers unions busted not by government or by charter schools but technology.

[…….]

Read the rest – State of the unions

Tags: Maureen Callahan
Posted in Unions | 192 Comments »

The CSI effect and a travesty of justice in New York City

by Mojambo ( 47 Comments › )
Filed under Crime at May 30th, 2011 - 1:00 pm

For those of you (probably most of you) who are not familiar with the recently concluded trial for rape of two NYPD cops these are the facts. A young woman who was drunk (after celebrating her promotion in a Brooklyn bar with friends) was helped out of a taxi in Manhattan by two policemen; Kenneth Moreno 43, and Franklin Mata 29. They brought her to her apartment as she threw up from all the booze. They took her apartment keys and made four trips back to her apartment allegedly to “check up on her”. Moreno admitted that he placed a fake 911 call about a drunken bum in the building’s vestibule so he could have an excuse to return. When the woman sobered up she recalled her pants being pulled down and Moreno forcing himself on her. A few days later the woman confronted him about being raped (she said she was too drunk to resist and can remember hearing Velcro being removed – his bullet proof vest) and asked him if he was wearing a condom or not and if Mata had had sex with her too and he said he was wearing one and only he had sex with her. He also offered to be her boyfriend (he is a married father of two) and as a former alcoholic he could help her. Moreno claimed that he came back to counsel her and said that he even sang a Bon Jovi song to her (yeah right). She filed rape charges against him and his partner who was the look out. The jury of course was never told that his partner at first offered to testify against Moreno but was turned down. Anyway the idiot jury found them not guilty on all charges with the exception of police misconduct and they were terminated from the police force with loss of pensions. The article mentions that too many people get their ideas about crime from watching shows such as CSI (and Law & Order) and feel that if there is no DNA then there is no crime. In this case there was no DNA but the preponderance of circumstantial evidence as well as the bullshit story the two cops were telling pointed to the cops lying their asses off. Also the bad old days of blaming women for being sexually assaulted still has not left us. They still face a two year sentence on official misconduct charges.

by Maureen Callahan

Former officers Kenneth Moreno (left) and Franklin Mata after the trial.

Thursday’s acquittal of two New York cops in the rape of a young fashion executive has already gone down as one of the most shocking verdicts in the city’s history. Officers Kenneth Moreno, 43, and Franklin Mata, 29, admitted to helping the inebriated woman into her East Village apartment in response to a call for help. Surveillance videotape showed the officers leaving, then re-entering her apartment three additional times, with Moreno making a fake 911 call to cover up one of those returns. (Officer Mata, charged with serving as Moreno’s lookout and presumably familiar with criminal law, testified that he didn’t know “if making a fake 911 call is a crime.”)

Moreno, accused of rape, testified that the woman, in between violent episodes of vomiting, attempted to seduce him and that he’d rebuffed her — although he did serenade her with a Bon Jovi power-ballad. Finally, he said, all they’d done was cuddle in her bed, she in only a bra.

The bruising to the young woman’s cervix, the defense argued, was the result of her vigorous scrubbing in the shower, and this tack — revealing a staggering lack of familiarity with female anatomy — makes the not guilty verdict that much more incredible. Wouldn’t any competent jury question whether rough sex was the more likely explanation? Just how credible does a jury find a drunken young single woman in New York City? Did the lack of DNA evidence damn the prosecution — and if it did, should it have?

[…]

Of our five experts, all agreed that there were three major contributing factors to this outcome.

THE ‘CSI’ EFFECT

“That’s what we call this,” says Eugene O’Donnell, a former cop and prosecutor in New York and current professor of law and police studies at John Jay Criminal College. “CSI Seattle, CSI Anchorage

. . . there’s an insistence on the part of the jury that prosecutors have to have DNA evidence. They believe that it’s present and necessary — it’s neither.” O’Donnell believes that “the law needs to be changed,” that judges should be legally bound to inform juries that a lack of DNA evidence doesn’t equal innocence. “We need a remedy with jurors,” he says, “because I don’t think it’s getting through.”

“This is a trend, and it’s upsetting,” says Mary Griffitts, an attorney and jury consultant for such blue-chip companies as Johnson & Johnson.

“ ‘CSI’ has made things more difficult. There’s no law saying that ‘beyond a reasonable doubt’ means we show you DNA. It means ‘evidence that points to a moral certainty that is beyond dispute.’ ”

“ ‘CSI’ has not helped,” says Leslie Crocker Snyder, the legendary former New York prosecutor who, in 1974, founded the first sex crimes unit in the country; she also co-authored the rape shield law, which prohibits a victim’s sexual history from being used as evidence, that same year.

[…]

“My first rape case in 1970, two women were pulled off the street in Alphabet City, dragged into a filthy tenement stairwell, and raped,” she says. Crocker Snyder thought she’d cleared the exceptionally high legislative bar: Not only were the two women each other’s witnesses, but the perp had stolen each of their wallets. The jury acquitted, however, because the rapist’s semen was found only on the inside of each woman’s underwear. “Never mind that rapists are famous premature ejaculators,” she says. Twelve years later, the same man was eventually convicted on a separate set of sex crimes.

Compounding the issue: Many juries are easily swayed into believing that 50% of rape claims are fabricated (the actual percentage is 3-5%, on par with false theft claims). “This is an especial problem with rape cases,” O’Donnell says. “Who gets up in the morning and says, ‘I’ll read the paper, feed the cat, and oh, yeah, say I was raped?’ ”

THE FEMALE JUROR

The gender divide on this specific jury was seven men, five women, and our experts say this isn’t surprising — prosecutors are wary of female jurors in rape cases, because female jurors are the most judgmental when it comes to the alleged victim and her behavior. That this accuser was admittedly blackout drunk was always going to be played as a characterological flaw — because it works.

[…]

“The female foreperson had a smile,” says the source in the Manhattan DA’s office. “Traditionally, our harsher jurors tend to be women — they think, ‘I would never have been so drunk that I needed to call for help. I’d never have let those guys into my apartment.’ ”

[…]

Some female victims, he says, reject female doctors and investigators. He really has no idea why: “These things,” he says, “are so deep.”

“It’s a well-known fact that, in rape cases, you generally don’t want women on the jury,” says trial lawyer Lisa Bloom. “Women have said to me, ‘How could she have let herself get so drunk?’ Maybe it’s self-protective, the idea that this could never happen to you.”

REGRESSIVE ATTITUDES

The disappointed member of the DA’s office points to another case that wrapped up this week, in which she hopes women will take comfort: the conviction of a man in the rape of a 61-year-old woman in a nursing home. There were no witnesses to the rape; the woman hit the alarm button; she can’t speak, and gave her entire testimony by pointing at a chart of letters.

“That guy got seven years,” says the source.

But as Griffitts points out, that verdict, in many ways, illuminates the stubborn double-standard so common with sex crimes. “You always look at what the victim was doing,” she says, “which is why this case is different than an elderly lady laying in bed, doing nothing. ‘Blame the victim’ has not gone away. It’s just become a little more sophisticated.”

“The subtext is, ‘She deserved it,’ ” Bloom says. “That’s what’s so appalling.”

Along with sexual and societal mores, the legal system remains just as stagnant: The average sentence for a rape conviction is three years, maybe 11/2 with good behavior.

Moreno and Mata were found guilty of official misconduct and were fired by Commissioner Ray Kelly on Thursday. The victim, meanwhile, has a pending $57 million suit against the city, and the burden of proof is far less onerous than in a criminal trial. The reverberations of this case, however, are long-lasting, and all of our experts are concerned future victims will be far too demoralized to come forward.

[…]

“At least some will still come forward, knowing we’ll take their case seriously,” says the source with the DA. “People say that this can be such a setback. But we’d do this case again.”