Day: July 25, 2009

Human Trafficking In America


The FBI was so busy carrying out the phony war on terror, WOT, the ignored the pleas of one person who tried to tell them about a man who was trafficking in humans…a modern 21st century slave trader.  I’m astonished really.  How could this be?  I found it ironic that next to the story of Levy Rosenbaum in the New York Daily News was a poll for its readers which asked, Do you think people should be allowed to sell their kidneys, as if Rosenbaum was merely paying people for their kidneys.  In fact, he was extorting them:

Rosenbaum “a thug” who would pull out a pistol he was apparently licensed to carry and tell the sellers, “You’re here. A deal is a deal. Now, you’ll give us a kidney or you’ll never go home.’ “

Here’s the piece from the Daily News.

The Brooklyn man arrested Thursday for dealing in black-market kidneys was identified to the FBI seven years ago as a major figure in a global human organ ring.

Levy-Izhak Rosenbaum‘s name, address and even phone number were passed to an FBI agent in a meeting at the Roosevelt Hotel in Manhattan by a prominent anthropologist who has been studying and documenting organ trafficking for more than a decade.

Nancy Scheper-Hughes of the University of California, Berkeley, was and is very clear as to Rosenbaum’s role in the ring.

“He is the main U.S. broker for an international trafficking network,” she said.

Her sources include a man who started working with Rosenbaum imagining he was helping people in desperate need. The man then began to see the donors, or to be more accurate, sellers, who were flown in from impoverished countries such as Moldova.

“He said it was awful. These people would be brought in and they didn’t even know what they were supposed to be doing and they would want to go home and they would cry,” Scheper-Hughes said.

The man called Rosenbaum “a thug” who would pull out a pistol he was apparently licensed to carry and tell the sellers, “You’re here. A deal is a deal. Now, you’ll give us a kidney or you’ll never go home.’ ”

Scheper-Hughes felt she had to stop Rosenbaum. She met with the FBI.

“I always thought of it as my Dick Tracy moment,” she said Thursday.

She waited and waited for something to be done. The FBI may have been following the lead of the State Department, which dismissed organ trafficking as “urban legend.”

“It would be impossible to conceal a clandestine organ trafficking ring,” a 2004 State Department report stated.

Scheper-Hughes had better luck in Brazil and in South Africa, where law enforcement corroborated her findings and acted decisively.

But the ring kept operating elsewhere. Scheper-Hughes visited villages in Moldova where, “20% of the men were siphoned off to be kidney sellers in this same scheme.”

Back in Brooklyn, Rosenbaum stayed busy. He was contacted by an FBI informant who introduced Rosenbaum to an undercover agent who supposedly wanted to buy a kidney for her uncle.

“I’m doing this a long time,” Rosenbaum was recorded saying.

The undercover asked how many organs he had sold.

“Quite a lot,” he answered.

On Wednesday, the FBI called Scheper-Hughes, who is putting her findings into the upcoming, “A World Cut in Two, The Global Traffic in Humans for Organs.”

“Why are you calling me now?” she asked.

Thursday, seven years after her Dick Tracy moment with the FBI at the Roosevelt Hotel, Rosenbaum was finally arrested.

For the last eight years we have been led to believe the greatest threat to us as a society has been Islam and Muslims, and of course now, Barack Obama, and during that same time people have been robbing the national treasury, Bernie Maddof, and human resources, Rosenbaum and no one lifted a finger until all the money was gone and scores of bodies were piled up and all this was done while we were diverted with the bogey man ruse. Are you not convinced the war on terror is a fraud?

Obama’s re-calibrated apology was a mistake


President Obama did not need to clear the air, or the record regarding his remarks that the Cambridge, Massachusetts police department acted stupidly, because they did.  I know it was a political move doing so, he didn’t want to upset his base that may think police are above the law, but frankly the arresting officer, James Crowley blew it and he was wrong.  I don’t think anything more needs to be said about that; should professor Henry Gates decide to take civil action against the city of Cambridge or not, I’m not weighing in on that for the moment.  It appears to me the city realized Crowley’s mistake and dropped the charges, disorderly conduct is a catch all for when the police don’t really have anything else to charge you with, as they should have.

President Obama has shown himself to be a politician and that’s unfortunate; we in America have too many of those.  What we need is a leader who takes a position regardless of public opinion, for the public good; who has enough foresight to know the outcome will be beneficial for all even when no one else thinks so.  What we don’t need, is someone who gives in to every whim and cross wind that plows across the American body politic  with an eye on the next election cycle.  Police brutality has always been pandemic in American society and the only way to treat this disease is to attack it at its roots; those people in authority who enable it, pardon it, condone it and practice it need to be held accountable to the fullest extent of the law.  Obama didn’t even do that; he merely said the practitioners of the brutality with respect to Gates acted “stupidly” and for that choice of words all the angst about his election is now being rehashed in corporate media, the home of profit over substance, agenda over truth.

Quite frankly what happened in professor Gates’ home will never really be known, but the outcome of those unknown actions is he was charged with disorderly conduct.  That didn’t happen.  But Gates was arrested because he wasn’t deferential enough with Crowley who reached a point where he could no longer walk away from a citizen who demanded more than he, Crowley, was willing to give.  Cops know this charge is aimed at quieting down someone who doesn’t go along willingly with the police program, but in the case of Gates who didn’t go along while in his own house, the charge could not stick.  I was struck by how other police officers had become judge and jury for Gates in deciding that he should have been charged, one officer saying Gates had become “openly hostile for what, I think, was no good reason.”  This , however, is the sanitized definition of disorderly conduct removed from the atmosphere of the Gates case:

The term disorderly conduct is used in statutes to identify various acts against the public peace. It has been held to include the use of obscene language in public, the blocking of public ways, and the making of threats. A statute must identify acts that constitute disorderly conduct with sufficient clarity in order to avoid being held unconstitutional because of vagueness.

I hope you understood that last sentence; the statute as it is is so vague municipalities have to be so specific about it that Cambridge’s definition couldn’t cut it enough to keep Gates tied up. If you want to say that it was dismissed because of politics then I’ll venture to say the arrest was made because of race. As I mentioned in the previous post about the Gates arrest, that when Crowley knew he was face to face with the occupant of the residence should have done an about face and left. That’s what I think as a private citizen should have been Crowley’s concession to the altercation; for those who say that wasn’t necessary or mandatory, I would say equally as forcefully that Gates’ deferential attitude to Crowley was not necessary nor called for in order to avoid a stupid result.

Let me take it a step further………and what if after Gates had identified himself as the legal resident he asked Crowley to leave, exit, get out of his house and Crowley refused. What would Gates’ rights have been then? The 2nd amendment in me says, when confronted with an intruder from whom you fear for your personal safety, and who is armed, you have a right to deadly force. What then would have been the outcome had Gates exercised this right to self defense? Thankfully, we don’t have to go there and despite all the scenarios one could picture that could have happened, the best one is the one that did happen. It’s been reported Obama has offered to have the two main participants to the White House for a friendly get together. That would be nice, I’m sure, but his re-calibration wasn’t necessary.