Monthly Archives: November 2009

Victimless Crime File: Diane Schuler Was “Heavy Pot Smoker”

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Some of you may remember the story of Diane Schuler, the high and drunk woman who crashed her minivan full of children into another carload of people, killing herself and several other people including her daughter and three of her nieces. As I pointed out when first covering this awful story, studies have shown chronic marijuana users are more likely to be involved in car accidents than sober people and “acute” use raises the chances of being involved in an accident significantly. In this case, the stoned woman was driving the wrong way on a parkway when she caused the accident.

I mention this story (yet again) because I have frequently been told by potheads that they are excellent drivers, which is asinine and indicative of the selfishness of drug users who are always willing to endanger other people’s lives to party. Now Diane Schuler’s sister-in-law has confirmed what people have known all along, she was an immature party girl who thought getting high was more important than her responsibility to her children and other drivers on the road:

The sister-in-law of Taconic Parkway wrong-way driver Diane Schuler has told police Schuler smoked pot every day, according to a lawyer for victims of the crash.

The admission runs contrary to high-profile reports by Diane’s husband, Daniel Schuler, who has said his wife didn’t drink or use drugs.

Police have said Diane was high and drunk on July 26 when she drove her minivan the wrong way on the Taconic and crashed in Westchester County, killing herself, her 2-year-old daughter, her three nieces and three men from Yonkers.

The new evidence was revealed during a meeting on Friday with police and representatives from the district attorney’s office to go over evidence, including security footage of the children eating breakfast at a McDonald’s and Diane Schuler pumping gas, according to Irving Anolik, lawyer for the families of victims Michael and Guy Bastardi.

Anolik said Joan Schuler, sister of Daniel, “told them that she knew for a fact that the deceased, Diane Schuler, used marijuana daily because of the fact that she didn’t believe in doctors and that this was the best medicine in the world, as far as she was concerned.”

Anolik said he was “annoyed” and his clients were “outraged” at prior reports by Daniel Schuler and his attorney that Diane Schuler was clean of drugs and alcohol.

Yes, pot is “medicine” according to many pot smokers, but there’s nothing healthy about drinking and drugging as reports on Schuler’s behavior clearly indicate:

 Schuler stopped her red minivan loaded with kids on Route 17 at approximately 11:45 a.m. on July 26, the police report says.

“[The witnesses] noticed an adult female outside of the vehicle with brown hair, wearing blue, knee-length shorts, bent over with her hands on her knees, as if throwing up,” the report stated.

Afterward, the red van was seen “zigzagging in and out of traffic.”

Just north of the Ramapo rest stop, the witnesses “saw this same van pulled over” and the female “again with her hands on her knees.”

At 1:35 p.m. — driving the wrong way down the Taconic Parkway in Westchester — Schuler rammed her minivan into a Chevy Trailblazer.

Schuler, her daughter, Erin, 2, and her three nieces — Emma Hance, 8, Alyson Hance, 7, and Katie Hance, 5 — died in the crash. Killed in the Trailblazer were Michael Bastardi, 81, his son Guy Bastardi, 49, and Daniel Longo, 74.

An autopsy showed Schuler had a blood-alcohol level of 0.19. There also was evidence of a high level of THC in her blood, indicating she had smoked marijuana.

Mike Bastardi Jr., whose father, brother and family friend died in the crash, called the latest revelations “outrageous.”

“She threw up twice and kept drinking and smoking pot,” he alleged.

Yeah, that sounds pretty selfish. People in their latter 30s who still smoke pot even though they have children often are. Diane Schuler spent her life partying the way she did when she was a teenager and eight people payed the price for her inability to grow up and get sober with their lives.

But I’m sure legalizing pot would have prevented this right?

Obama-Led Feds Knew Fort Hood Killer Tried to Contact Al-Qaeda and Attended a Radical Mosque

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Yet D.H.S. head Janet Napolitano has claimed that Major Nidal Hasan is an “individual” whose actions are completely unrelated to Jihadism in an intellectual exercise so Orwellian that I frankly thought it was a joke when someone told me what she said.

With the release of this information it looks like that’s just one facet of covering the Obama administration’s asses. From ABC:

U.S. intelligence agencies were aware months ago that Army Major Nidal Hasan was attempting to make contact with people associated with al Qaeda, two American officials briefed on classified material in the case told ABC News.

It is not known whether the intelligence agencies informed the Army that one of its officers was seeking to connect with suspected al Qaeda figures, the officials said.

One senior lawmaker said the CIA had, so far, refused to brief the intelligence committees on what, if any, knowledge they had about Hasan’s efforts.

CIA director Leon Panetta and the Director of National Intelligence, Dennis Blair, have been asked by Congress “to preserve” all documents and intelligence files that relate to Hasan, according to the lawmaker.

On Sunday, Senator Joseph Lieberman (D-CT) called for an investigation into whether the Army missed signs as to whether Hasan was an Islamic extremist.

“If Hasan was showing signs, saying to people that he had become an Islamist extremist, the U.S. Army has to have a zero tolerance,” Lieberman told Fox News Sunday.

That’s why I voted for Lieberman when I was in Connecticut, because he’s tough on terror. And here he is totally right yet again. But contacting Al-Qaeda isn’t the only red flag that was raised by Hasan. Via Michelle Malkin comes this Telegraph piece showing Hasan’s ties to the 9/11 hijackers:

Hasan, the sole suspect in the massacre of 13 fellow US soldiers in Texas, attended the controversial Dar al-Hijrah mosque in Great Falls, Virginia, in 2001 at the same time as two of the September 11 terrorists, The Sunday Telegraph has learnt. His mother’s funeral was held there in May that year.

The preacher at the time was Anwar al-Awlaki, an American-born Yemeni scholar who was banned from addressing a meeting in London by video link in August because he is accused of supporting attacks on British troops and backing terrorist organisations.

Hasan’s eyes “lit up” when he mentioned his deep respect for al-Awlaki’s teachings, according to a fellow Muslim officer at the Fort Hood base in Texas, the scene of Thursday’s horrific shooting spree.

As investigators look at Hasan’s motives and mindset, his attendance at the mosque could be an important piece of the jigsaw. Al-Awlaki moved to Dar al-Hijrah as imam in January, 2001, from the west coast, and three months later the September 11 hijackers Nawaf al-Hamzi and Hani Hanjour began attending his services. A third hijacker attended his services in California.

Hasan was praying at Dar al-Hijrah at about the same time, and the FBI will now want to investigate whether he met the two terrorists.

Charles Allen, a former under-secretary for intelligence at the Department of Homeland Security, has described al-Awlaki, who now lives in Yemen, as an “al-Qaeda supporter, and former spiritual leader to three of the September 11 hijackers… who targets US Muslims with radical online lectures encouraging terrorist attacks from his new home in Yemen”.

But it get worse. His fellow soldiers and even his fellow Muslims were concerned about Hasan’s radicalism:

What does seem clear is that the army missed an increasing number of red flags that Hasan was a troubled and brooding individual within its ranks.

“I was shocked but not surprised by news of Thursday’s attack,” said Dr Val Finnell, a fellow student on a public health course in 2007-08 who heard Hasan equate the war on terrorism to a war on Islam. Another student had warned military officials that Hasan was a “ticking time bomb” after he reportedly gave a presentation defending suicide bombers.

Kamran Pasha, the author of Mother of the Believers, a new novel relating the story of Islam from the perspective of Aisha, Prophet Mohammed’s wife, was told of the al-Awlaki connection from a Muslim friend who is also an officer at Fort Hood. Using the name Richard, the recent convert to Islam described how he frequently prayed with Hasan at the town mosque after Hasan was deployed to Fort Hood in July. They last worshipped together at predawn prayers on the day of the massacre when Hasan “appeared relaxed and not in any way troubled or nervous”.

But Richard had previously argued with Hasan when he said that he felt the “war on terror” was really a war against Islam, expressed anti-Jewish sentiments and defended suicide bombings.

“I asked Richard whether he believed that Hasan was motivated by religious radicalism in his murderous actions,” Mr Pasha said.

“Richard, with great sadness, said that he believed this was true. He also believed that psychological factors from Hasan’s job as an army psychiatrist added to his pathos. The news that he would be deployed overseas, to a war that he rejected, may have pushed him over the edge.

“But Richard does not excuse Hasan. As a Muslim, he finds Hasan’s religious perspectives to be fundamentally misguided. And as a soldier, he finds Hasan’s actions cowardly and evil.”

But not every Muslim does clearly. A woman named Khadeeja Nuur, who claims to work for a “Islamic interest group” out of Washington DC put up a Facebook page asking Muslims to pray for Hasan’s recovery and asking for donations to several Islamic groups like CAIR,The Arab American Institute and The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committe.

Anwar Al-Awalki praised the massacre online. From his blog:

Nidal Hassan is a hero. He is a man of conscience who could not bear living the contradiction of being a Muslim and serving in an army that is fighting against his own people. This is a contradiction that many Muslims brush aside and just pretend that it doesn’t exist. Any decent Muslim cannot live, understanding properly his duties towards his Creator and his fellow Muslims, and yet serve as a US soldier. The US is leading the war against terrorism which in reality is a war against Islam. Its army is directly invading two Muslim countries and indirectly occupying the rest through its stooges.
Nidal opened fire on soldiers who were on their way to be deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan. How can there be any dispute about the virtue of what he has done? In fact the only way a Muslim could Islamically justify serving as a soldier in the US army is if his intention is to follow the footsteps of men like Nidal.
The heroic act of brother Nidal also shows the dilemma of the Muslim American community. Increasingly they are being cornered into taking stances that would either make them betray Islam or betray their nation. Many amongst them are choosing the former. The Muslim organizations in America came out in a pitiful chorus condemning Nidal’s operation.
The fact that fighting against the US army is an Islamic duty today cannot be disputed. No scholar with a grain of Islamic knowledge can defy the clear cut proofs that Muslims today have the right -rather the duty- to fight against American tyranny. Nidal has killed soldiers who were about to be deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan in order to kill Muslims. The American Muslims who condemned his actions have committed treason against the Muslim Ummah and have fallen into hypocrisy.
Allah(swt) says: Give tidings to the hypocrites that there is for them a painful punishment –

The implied threat to American Muslims who defend the Republic that provides for them so much freedom and protection from people like Hasan (or we used to, now Obama embraces Jihadism) cannot be ignored. There are forces in the Muslim community that must be countered and Americans must not shy away from that.

People knew this man was a Jihadist but sat on their hands because it is politically correct to do so. We know that there are certain Imams and organizations (like CAIR) that are fronts for Jihadism and we pretend they aren’t because it’s politically correct to do so. Political correctness kills and will kill again. It is a betrayal not just to those who end up victims of Jihadism, but the Muslims we throw to the wolves when we support Jihadists at the expense of reformers who understand they never had it so good as they do in the West.

People are dying and Obama’s D.H.S. is lying. It’s time for the truth to come out at last.

You Don’t Say: Report Says Phillip Garrido’s Parole Officers Dropped the Ball

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I’ll say. Since Garrido was holding Jaycee Dugard hostage in his backyard the entire time he was on parole, saying the parole officers “made some mistakes” is an understatement. How did his POs miss the little fact that their parolee was running a rape camp in his backyard?? Read this and weep:

(11-04) 20:26 PST Sacramento — State parole agents fell down on the job again and again during the 10 years they supervised sex offender Phillip Craig Garrido, failing to check out clues that could have led to alleged kidnap victim Jaycee Dugard and going long stretches without monitoring him at all, a state investigation found Wednesday.

From 1999 until he was finally arrested in August, Garrido, 58, was supposed to be subject to regular visits and other checks by the state Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. Parole authorities have always insisted they had no evidence Garrido ever violated the conditions placed on him by Nevada, where he was convicted of kidnapping and raping a woman in 1976.

However, an investigation led by state Inspector General David Shaw found that agents simply ignored several potential violations. And from the start, he said, they erroneously classified Garrido as a low-risk offender – meaning he was subject to less stringent supervision – then failed to take basic steps such as making regular visits and testing him for drugs.

Parole officers once went 13 months without visiting Garrido at his home outside Antioch, where he lived with his wife, Nancy, 54, the report found.

In the 60 visits that agents did make over the years, they never took note of electrical wires and phone lines running to the back of the property, the audit said. Those could have led them to a warren of tents and sheds where the couple allegedly imprisoned Dugard for 18 years.

Parole officials have said they were unaware the compound was there. But they never read a federal parole report from the early 1990s, around the time the couple allegedly kidnapped Dugard in South Lake Tahoe, indicating that Phillip Garrido had a soundproof recording studio beyond what appeared to be his back fence, the state audit found.

Corrections Secretary Matthew Cate insisted Wednesday that his agents had never received the federal report.

Read the rest, it gets worse.

h/t Crime Scene KC

Feds Look for Motive Behind Massacre of Troops Departing for Iraq by Fundamentalist Muslim Anti-War Activist

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Major Nadal Malik Hasan passed out Korans while dressed in traditional Muslim garb the morning of his cowardly attack on his fellow soldiers. He had been acting “strangely” for weeks according to reports.

From the Killeen Daily Herald:

In the morning, neighbors said Hasan handed Qurans and donated his furniture to anyone who would take it.

Neighbors described Hasan as a quiet man who began wearing “Arabic clothing” in recent weeks. Edward Windsor, a neighbor, never suspected Hasan was in the Army. Hasan’s rank surprised Windsor who would never have imagined an officer with a rank of major would have lived in an apartment that rents for $350 and houses soldiers ranked as private first class.

“For his rank structure, it’d be highly unlikely for him to live here,” Windsor said.

Maj. Hasan was known to make “outrageous” comments about American foreign policy including claiming that Muslims joining Al-Qaeda in Iraq were right to do so.  He had made public his hopes that President Obama would surrender in Iraq and Afghanistan and pull the troops out as quickly as we pulled out of Vietnam. From The Houston Chronicle:

The psychiatrist once said “Muslims should stand up and fight against the aggressor” and that the U.S. shouldn’t be fighting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in the first place, according to a Fox News interview with Col. Terry Lee, a former colleague.

[…]

Lee told Fox News Hasan “was hoping that President Obama would pull troops out. … When things weren’t going that way, he became more agitated, more frustrated with the conflicts over there … he made his views well known about how he felt about the U.S. involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

And when he talked about fighting “the aggressor,” his fellow soldiers “should stand up and help the armed forces in Iraq and in Afghanistan,” Lee said.

Rep. Michael McCaul, R-Austin, told reporters after a briefing on the shootings that Hasan was born in Virginia to parents who immigrated from Jordan.

The congressman said Hasan “took a lot of advanced training in shooting.”

That same article points out that Maj. Hasan wouldn’t allow himself to be photographed with women and was unsuccessful in finding a wife in his Mosque because even other Muslims couldn’t meet his religious expectations.

Via Atlas Shrugs here’s video of Hasan the morning of the massacre that was run on CNN. He was wearing traditional Islamic garb:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aOeXzamxSk8[/youtube]

As you can see in the video he was calm and collected the morning of the massacre, so all this psychobabble about Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder is just another deflection by a leftist media unwilling to unflinchingly look at the truth. You’ll also hear at around 2:56 that a week earlier he had told the owner of the store where the video was shot that he had a “religious conflict” with serving in Iraq.

It should be pointed out that high ranking doctors in the service are usually deployed in secure locations, so the theory that P.T.S.D. caused by his fear of the combat he never experienced caused his actions seems especially vapid.

He had been disciplined at one of his postings for proselytizing to patients and co-workers. From NPR:

A source tells NPR’s Joseph Shapiro that Hasan was put on probation early in his postgraduate work at the Uniformed Service University of the Health Sciences in Bethesda, Md. He was disciplined for proselytizing about his Muslim faith with patients and colleagues, according to the source, who worked with him at the time.

And most disturbingly of all Hasan had come to the attention of federal authorities at least six months ago for his postings on radical Muslim websites:

While an intern at Walter Reed, Hasan had some “difficulties” that required counseling and extra supervision, said Dr. Thomas Grieger, who was the training director at the time.

Grieger said privacy laws prevented him from going into details but noted that the problems had to do with Hasan’s interactions with patients. He recalled Hasan as a “mostly very quiet” person who never spoke ill of the military or his country.

“He swore an oath of loyalty to the military,” Grieger said. “I didn’t hear anything contrary to those oaths.”

But, more recently, federal agents grew suspicious.

At least six months ago, Hasan came to the attention of law enforcement officials because of Internet postings about suicide bombings and other threats, including posts that equated suicide bombers to soldiers who throw themselves on a grenade to save the lives of their comrades.

They had not determined for certain whether Hasan is the author of the posting, and a formal investigation had not been opened before the shooting, said law enforcement officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to discuss the case.

[…]

A second military official said Hasan’s family has Palestinian roots. There have been reports that he was harassed for his Muslim religion, but the official says there is no indication Hasan filed a complaint within the military about that.

Also troubling, although Hasan’s family claims to be Jordanian and he was American, Hasan listed his nationality on his Palestinian on a marriage match making form at his Mosque:

On a form filled out by those seeking spouses through a program at the mosque, Hasan listed his birthplace as Arlington, Va., but his nationality as Palestinian, Khan said.

“I don’t know why he listed Palestinian,” Khan said, “He was not born in Palestine.”

He wasn’t born in Palestine because there is no such place, and there never has been. The mythical Palestine is something of a cause celebre among both anti-war activists and Jihadists. The Washington Post says his parents were born on the West Bank.

And lastly it is reported that he yelled “Allah Akbar!” while committing his murders.

But his motive for killing soldiers about to be deployed to fight radical Jihadists remains unclear.

Or should we just say unspoken?

Ukraine Reporting Hemorrhagic Swine Flu

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Maybe I was missing something about H1N1 before, but I do not recall it being a disease in which people’s blood was filling up their lungs and pouring out of their orifices. The Ukraine has been pretty panicky over their bout with the swine flu, implementing some of the strictest quarantine measures we’ve seen. We might have to thank them if this report from Henry L. Niman’s Recombinomics site is accurate:

Work will initially begin in Lviv region, where reported numbers of cases showing severe manifestations of acute respiratory illness have been especially high. Two virologists on the team have started working at the National Influenza Centre and the laboratories of the Central Sanitary and Epidemiological Station in Kyiv to provide diagnostic support.

The above comments from the WHO update on Ukraine strike a more serious tone than yesterday’s quotes from WHO spokespersons playing down the alarming number of hospitalized and fatal cases, as well as media reports spinning political considerations, or politicians claiming only 15 confirmed H1N1 cases.  As the WHO update clearly states, the dominant influenza circulating worldwide is swine H1N1 and it is assumed that most cases in the Ukraine (see map) are swine H1N1.  Since the official government website lists 19,189 influenza cases (in addition to more than 235,000 ARI cases), the willingness of politicians to cite 15 confirmed cases, as well as media support in the distribution of the propaganda, is unfortunate.

The more severe manifestation of ARI cases are clearly hemorrhagic disease that fills lungs with blood and produces bleeding at all orifices, which are stark reminders of 1918 pandemic cases which were also linked to a swine H1N1.

Samples have arrived at Mill Hill in London, and sequence data should be available shortly.  Since current swine H1N1 produced lethal infections in previously healthy young adults, and produced hemorrhagic disease, changes in the viral genome may be absent or minor.  Therefore, release of the sequences to the entire scientific community would be useful.

Similarly, an update on the number of hemorrhagic cases would be useful.  Rumors have suggested that such the number of such cases is significantly higher than the six described in media reports.

Yikes. Four doctors have died from exposure already. I’m not worried about the swine flu myself, but if we start seeing this version here I’ll be in my bunker for the duration.

h/t Survival Blog