CDC: Gun homicide victims 10 times more likely to be shot by a black person than a white person

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CDC: Gun homicide victims 10 times more likely to be shot by a black person than a white person

by J. D. Heyes             
  March 26 2013
(NaturalNews) A new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has broken down by race the number of gun deaths in America, and - according to this government agency's own figures - the divide is especially pronounced between whites and blacks.

According to data culled from all 50 states, whites are much more likely to use a firearm to commit suicide, while blacks are much more likely to die at the hand of someone else wielding a gun.

"A white person is five times as likely to commit suicide with a gun as to be shot with a gun; for each African American who uses a gun to commit suicide, five are killed by other people with guns," the Washington Post reported, citing the CDC report.

Where blacks and whites live also makes a difference, the government report notes. For instance, gun deaths in urban centers are much more likely to be homicides, while suicide gun deaths is much more prominent in rural areas.

There is also a divide in terms of which ethnic group is more supportive of gun control. From the Post:

A Washington Post-ABC News poll this month found that about three-quarters of blacks support stronger controls, compared with about half of whites. The poll also found that two-thirds of city dwellers support stronger gun controls, while only about a third of rural residents back them.

The CDC data indicated that suicide and homicide rates among Asians and Hispanics were not as pronounced as the sharp differences seen between whites and blacks.

Missing the point?

While there is some discussion in the Post article about gun deaths by homicide, the story focuses primarily on guns used in cases of suicide. The paper's underlying themes seem clear: More guns equals more suicides, and, if we just had fewer guns we'd have fewer suicides.

What is not examined in the Post article is as glaring as what is. For one, you could argue that gun control laws appear aimed primarily at whites, since whites, by far, own more guns as a percentage of the population (an argument that would, no doubt, be advanced by some black leaders if the opposite were true). For another, absent from the Post story is the fact that most African-American casualties of gun violence are killed by members of their own ethnic group - a fact that is also substantiated by government statistics.

A special report by the U.S. Justice Department's Bureau of Justice Statistics in 2007 laid bare several facts regarding gun homicides in the black community - trends that continue unabated:

-- "Blacks were victims of an estimated 805,000 nonfatal violent crimes and of about 8,000 homicides in 2005. While blacks accounted for 13 percent of the U.S. population in 2005, they were victims in 15 percent of all nonfatal violent crimes and nearly half of all homicides," the report said.

-- Young, black males were many times more likely to be killed with a gun than black females.

-- "Blacks living in urban areas were more likely than those in suburban or rural areas to be victims of violence," said the report.

-- And finally, "In 2005 most homicides involving one victim and one offender were intraracial. About 93 percent of black homicide victims and 85 percent of white victims in single victim and single offender homicides were murdered by someone of their race," the BJS report said. "About four-fifths of black victims of nonfatal violence perceived the offenders to be black."

Gun violence is not racism

"The vast majority of people being murdered are African American in the City of Cincinnati," said Hamilton County Prosecutor, Joe Deters, who is white, in an interview with local ABC affiliate WCPO, in March 2011. "The vast majority. Well outside the 40 percent of the population it should be."

He continued: "In 2009, the City of Cincinnati did not have a single white victim of a homicide. (That) tells me that we have a subset in the underclass of Cincinnati which is committing a lot of violent crime and they tend to be black. And the reality is, you almost always commit murder within your racial classifications. So when we've got a young black man up in the coroner's office, it's almost always a result of another young black man shooting him."

The Reverend Damon Lynch III, who is black, says the main reason for so much black-on-black crime is the destruction of the traditional family within the African-American community.

"In 1920, 90 percent of black families had a father in the house. In 1960, 80 percent of black families had a father in the house. In 2011, it's only 30 percent. Three out of 10," he said.

The point is, per the government's own statistics, indeed there is a wide disparity regarding gun violence in white and black communities. But seriously, what is the more important discussion to have regarding gun violence - suicide rates or intraracial homicide rates particular to a certain demographic and ethnic group? Which debate would better serve the nation?

Downplaying one side of the gun issue while over-emphasizing another side because of a particular socioeconomic and political point of view does not advance the debate or help solve the inherent problems involved. All it does is misinform and inflame passions.

Sources:

http://www.washingtonpost.com

http://www.wcpo.com

http://bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/bvvc.pdf

Health insurance rates to double as Obamacare fully kicks in

naturalnews.com

Originally published March 26 2013

Health insurance rates to double as Obamacare fully kicks in

by J. D. Heyes

(NaturalNews) Writing on the blog of the Department of Health and Human Services on the third anniversary of the passage of the Affordable Care Act, more popularly known as Obamacare, HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius had this to say about the impact of the law on insurance rates:

As a former state insurance commissioner, I know that for too long, too many hard-working Americans paid the price for policies that handed free rein to health insurance companies. For more than a decade before the Affordable Care Act, premiums rose rapidly, straining the budgets of American families and businesses. And insurers often raised premiums without any explanation. ... The Affordable Care Act is working to bring affordability and fairness to the marketplace by barring insurers from dropping your coverage when you get sick or placing a lifetime dollar limit on coverage.

Sebelius goes on to imply that provisions within the law (requiring more "transparency" from insurance companies, for instance) will eventually help lower rates (though she never says so directly). In other words, she's dodging the issue of rising premiums, and with good reason: Premiums under Obamacare are likely to double for most Americans, according to health insurers who are being forced to comply with Obamacare's stringent coverage requirements.

Wait - weren't premiums supposed to go down?

"Health insurers are privately warning brokers that premiums for many individuals and small businesses could increase sharply next year because of the health-care overhaul law, with the nation's biggest firm projecting that rates could more than double for some consumers buying their own plans," The Wall Street Journal reported March 22.

Insurers made those projections in sessions with agents and brokers; they provide some of the most damning evidence so far of just how much Obamacare will force companies to raise rates when major provisions of the law kick in next year - just as scores of industry experts and economists warned would happen.

Such predictions don't jibe with the rosy - and misleading - rhetoric from Sebelius and her boss, President Obama, the latter of whom said in 2010:

"You'll be able to buy in, or a small business will be able to buy into (government insurance pools). And that will lower rates, it's estimated, by up to 14 to 20 percent over what you're currently getting. That's money out of pocket. ... Your employer, it's estimated, would see premiums fall by as much as 3,000 percent, which means they could give you a raise."
Both the president and his team don't understand free-market economics, or they do and they have been intentionally misleading. Either way, the figures the insurance companies are projecting are the polar opposite of what Americans were promised by Obamacare advocates regarding the future cost of policies (and really, prices for such services have never really gone down).

"There's no question premiums are still going to keep going up," Larry Levitt of the Kaiser Family Foundation, a research clearinghouse on the health care system, told CBS News shortly before Obamacare became law. "There are pieces of reform that will hopefully keep them from going up as fast. But it would be miraculous if premiums actually went down relative to where they are today."

Yet another Obamacare lie

The one ace in the hold the government retains; however, is regulatory power over the insurance companies in terms of price increases. Under Obamacare, insurers have to request rate hikes and they must be approved by government bureaucrats, the vast majority of whom have a) never run a business; b) never had to meet a payroll; and c) have never had to cover employees' health insurance and other benefits.

So in this sense, the government very well could keep rates artificially lower than they normally would be, but while requiring insurers to cover more people for less, they won't be in business long.

And that could well be the administration's goal.

"Carriers will be filing proposed price increases with regulators over the next few months," WSJ reported. Time will tell how that goes, but the word is out: What Americans were told about lower premiums under Obamacare, like most of what they were told about the law, was a lie.
Sources:

http://online.wsj.com

http://www.healthcare.gov

http://www.cbsnews.com/2100-250_162-6306991.html

Why America Needs War

By Dr. Jacques R. Pauwels

Global Research, March 26, 2013

Indy Media Belgium 30 April 2003

Region: USA

Theme: Global Economy, US NATO War Agenda

This incisive article was written on April 30, 2003, by historian and political scientist Jacques Pauwels. 
Wars are a terrible waste of lives and resources, and for that reason most people are in principle opposed to wars. The American President, on the other hand, seems to love war. Why? Many commentators have sought the answer in psychological factors. Some opined that George W. Bush considered it his duty to finish the job started, but for some obscure reason not completed, by his father at the time of the Gulf War; others believe that Bush Junior expected a short and triumphant war which would guarantee him a second term in the White House.
I believe that we must look elsewhere for an explanation for the attitude of the American President.
The fact that Bush is keen on war has little or nothing to do with his psyche, but a great deal with the American economic system. This system – America’s brand of capitalism – functions first and foremost to make extremely rich Americans like the Bush “money dynasty” even richer. Without warm or cold wars, however, this system can no longer produce the expected result in the form of the ever-higher profits the moneyed and powerful of America consider as their birthright.
The great strength of American capitalism is also its great weakness, namely, its extremely high productivity. In the historical development of the international economic system that we call capitalism, a number of factors have produced enormous increases in productivity, for example, the mechanization of the production process that got under way in England as early as the 18th century. In the early 20th century, then, American industrialists made a crucial contribution in the form of the automatization of work by means of new techniques such as the assembly line. The latter was an innovation introduced by Henry Ford, and those techniques have therefore become collectively known as “Fordism.” The productivity of the great American enterprises rose spectacularly.
For example, already in the 1920s, countless vehicles rolled off the assembly lines of the automobile factories of Michigan every single day. But who was supposed to buy all those cars? Most Americans at the time did not have sufficiently robust pocket books for such a purchase. Other industrial products similarly flooded the market, and the result was the emergence of a chronic disharmony between the ever-increasing economic supply and the lagging demand. Thus arose the economic crisis generally known as the Great Depression. It was essentially a crisis of overproduction. Warehouses were bursting with unsold commodities, factories laid off workers, unemployment exploded, and so the purchasing power of the American people shrunk even more, making the crisis even worse.
It cannot be denied that in America the Great Depression only ended during, and because of, the Second World War. (Even the greatest admirers of President Roosevelt admit that his much-publicized New Deal policies brought little or no relief.) Economic demand rose spectacularly when the war which had started in Europe, and in which the USA itself was not an active participant before 1942, allowed American industry to produce unlimited amounts of war equipment. Between 1940 and 1945, the American state would spend no less than 185 billion dollar on such equipment, and the military expenditures’ share of the GNP thus rose between 1939 and 1945 from an insignificant 1,5 per cent to approximately 40 per cent. In addition, American industry also supplied gargantuan amounts of equipment to the British and even the Soviets via Lend-Lease. (In Germany, meanwhile, the subsidiaries of American corporations such as Ford, GM, and ITT produced all sorts of planes and tanks and other martial toys for the Nazi’s, also after Pearl Harbor, but that is a different story.) The key problem of the Great Depression – the disequilibrium between supply and demand – was thus resolved because the state “primed the pump” of economic demand by means of huge orders of a military nature.
As far as ordinary Americans were concerned, Washington’s military spending orgy brought not only virtually full employment but also much higher wages than ever before; it was during the Second World War that the widespread misery associated with the Great Depression came to an end and that a majority of the American people achieved an unprecedented degree of prosperity. However, the greatest beneficiaries by far of the wartime economic boom were the country’s businesspeople and corporations, who realized extraordinary profits. Between 1942 and 1945, writes the historian Stuart D. Brandes, the net profits of America’s 2,000 biggest firms were more than 40 per cent higher than during the period 1936-1939. Such a “profit boom” was possible, he explains, because the state ordered billions of dollars of military equipment, failed to institute price controls, and taxed profits little if at all. This largesse benefited the American business world in general, but in particular that relatively restricted elite of big corporations known as “big business” or “corporate America.” During the war, a total of less than 60 firms obtained 75 per cent of all lucrative military and other state orders. The big corporations – Ford, IBM, etc. – revealed themselves to be the “war hogs,” writes Brandes, that gormandized at the plentiful trough of the state’s military expenditures. IBM, for example, increased its annual sales between 1940 and 1945 from 46 to 140 million dollar thanks to war-related orders, and its profits skyrocketed accordingly.
America’s big corporations exploited their Fordist expertise to the fullest in order to boost production, but even that was not sufficient to meet the wartime needs of the American state. Much more equipment was needed, and in order to produce it, America needed new factories and even more efficient technology. These new assets were duly stamped out of the ground, and on account of this the total value of all productive facilities of the nation increased between 1939 and 1945 from 40 to 66 billion dollar. However, it was not the private sector that undertook all these new investments; on account of its disagreeable experiences with overproduction during the thirties, America’s businesspeople found this task too risky. So the state did the job by investing 17 billion dollar in more than 2,000 defense-related projects. In return for a nominal fee, privately owned corporations were permitted to rent these brand-new factories in order to produce…and to make money by selling the output back to the state. Moreover, when the war was over and Washington decided to divest itself of these investments, the nation’s big corporations purchased them for half, and in many cases only one third, of the real value.
How did America finance the war, how did Washington pay the lofty bills presented by GM, ITT, and the other corporate suppliers of war equipment? The answer is: partly by means of taxation – about 45 per cent -, but much more through loans – approximately 55 per cent. On account of this, the public debt increased dramatically, namely, from 3 billion dollar in 1939 to no less than 45 billion dollar in 1945. In theory, this debt should have been reduced, or wiped out altogether, by levying taxes on the huge profits pocketed during the war by America’s big corporations, but the reality was different. As already noted, the American state failed to meaningfully tax corporate America’s windfall profits, allowed the public debt to mushroom, and paid its bills, and the interest on its loans, with its general revenues, that is, by means of the income generated by direct and indirect taxes. Particularly on account of the regressive Revenue Act introduced in October 1942, these taxes were paid increasingly by workers and other low-income Americans, rather than by the super-rich and the corporations of which the latter were the owners, major shareholders, and/or top managers. “The burden of financing the war,” observes the American historian Sean Dennis Cashman, “[was] sloughed firmly upon the shoulders of the poorer members of society.”
However, the American public, preoccupied by the war and blinded by the bright sun of full employment and high wages, failed to notice this. Affluent Americans, on the other hand, were keenly aware of the wonderful way in which the war generated money for themselves and for their corporations. Incidentally, it was also from the rich businesspeople, bankers, insurers and other big investors that Washington borrowed the money needed to finance the war; corporate America thus also profited from the war by pocketing the lion’s share of the interests generated by the purchase of the famous war bonds. In theory, at least, the rich and powerful of America are the great champions of so-called free enterprise, and they oppose any form of state intervention in the economy. During the war, however, they never raised any objections to the way in which the American state managed and financed the economy, because without this large-scale dirigist violation of the rules of free enterprise, their collective wealth could never have proliferated as it did during those years.
During the Second World War, the wealthy owners and top managers of the big corporations learned a very important lesson: during a war there is money to be made, lots of money. In other words, the arduous task of maximizing profits – the key activity within the capitalist American economy – can be absolved much more efficiently through war than through peace; however, the benevolent cooperation of the state is required. Ever since the Second World War, the rich and powerful of America have remained keenly conscious of this. So is their man in the White House today [2003, i.e. George W. Bush], the scion of a “money dynasty” who was parachuted into the White House in order to promote the interests of his wealthy family members, friends, and associates in corporate America, the interests of money, privilege, and power.
In the spring of 1945 it was obvious that the war, fountainhead of fabulous profits, would soon be over. What would happen then? Among the economists, many Cassandras conjured up scenarios that loomed extremely unpleasant for America’s political and industrial leaders. During the war, Washington’s purchases of military equipment, and nothing else, had restored the economic demand and thus made possible not only full employment but also unprecedented profits. With the return of peace, the ghost of disharmony between supply and demand threatened to return to haunt America again, and the resulting crisis might well be even more acute than the Great Depression of the “dirty thirties,” because during the war years the productive capacity of the nation had increased considerably, as we have seen. Workers would have to be laid off precisely at the moment when millions of war veterans would come home looking for a civilian job, and the resulting unemployment and decline in purchasing power would aggravate the demand deficit. Seen from the perspective of America’s rich and powerful, the coming unemployment was not a problem; what did matter was that the golden age of gargantuan profits would come to an end. Such a catastrophe had to be prevented, but how?
Military state expenditures were the source of high profits. In order to keep the profits gushing forth generously, new enemies and new war threats were urgently needed now that Germany and Japan were defeated. How fortunate that the Soviet Union existed, a country which during the war had been a particularly useful partner who had pulled the chestnuts out of the fire for the Allies in Stalingrad and elsewhere, but also a partner whose communist ideas and practices allowed it to be easily transformed into the new bogeyman of the United States. Most American historians now admit that in 1945 the Soviet Union, a country that had suffered enormously during the war, did not constitute a threat at all to the economically and militarily far superior USA, and that Washington itself did not perceive the Soviets as a threat. These historians also acknowledge that Moscow was very keen to work closely together with Washington in the postwar era.
Indeed, Moscow had nothing to gain, and everything to lose, from a conflict with superpower America, which was brimming with confidence thanks to its monopoly of the atom bomb. However, America – corporate America, the America of the super-rich – urgently needed a new enemy in order to justify the titanic expenditures for “defense” which were needed to keep the wheels of the nation’s economy spinning at full speed also after the end of the war, thus keeping profit margins at the required – or rather, desired – high levels, or even to increase them. It is for this reason that the Cold War was unleashed in 1945, not by the Soviets but by the American “military-industrial” complex, as President Eisenhower would call that elite of wealthy individuals and corporations that knew how to profit from the “warfare economy.”
In this respect, the Cold War exceeded their fondest expectations. More and more martial equipment had to be cranked out, because the allies within the so-called “free world”, which actually included plenty of nasty dictatorships, had to be armed to the teeth with US equipment. In addition, America’s own armed forces never ceased demanding bigger, better, and more sophisticated tanks, planes, rockets, and, yes, chemical and bacteriological weapons and other weapons of mass destruction. For these goods, the Pentagon was always ready to pay huge sums without asking difficult questions. As had been the case during the Second World War, it was again primarily the large corporations who were allowed to fill the orders. The Cold War generated unprecedented profits, and they flowed into the coffers of those extremely wealthy individuals who happened to be the owners, top managers, and/or major shareholders of these corporations. (Does it come as a surprise that in the United States newly retired Pentagon generals are routinely offered jobs as consultants by large corporations involved in military production, and that businessmen linked with those corporations are regularly appointed as high-ranking officials of the Department of Defense, as advisors of the President, etc.?)
During the Cold War too, the American state financed its skyrocketing military expenditures by means of loans, and this caused the public debt to rise to dizzying heights. In 1945 the public debt stood at “only” 258 billion dollar, but in 1990 – when the Cold War ground to an end – it amounted to no less than 3.2 trillion dollar! This was a stupendous increase, also when one takes the inflation rate into account, and it caused the American state to become the world’s greatest debtor. (Incidentally, in July 2002 the American public debt had reached 6.1 trillion dollar.) Washington could and should have covered the cost of the Cold War by taxing the huge profits achieved by the corporations involved in the armament orgy, but there was never any question of such a thing. In 1945, when the Second World War come to an end and the Cold War picked up the slack, corporations still paid 50 per cent of all taxes, but during the course of the Cold War this share shrunk consistently, and today it only amounts to approximately 1 per cent.
This was possible because the nation’s big corporations largely determine what the government in Washington may or may not do, also in the field of fiscal policy. In addition, lowering the tax burden of corporations was made easier because after the Second World War these corporations transformed themselves into multinationals, “at home everywhere and nowhere,” as an American author has written in connection with ITT, and therefore find it easy to avoid paying meaningful taxes anywhere. Stateside, where they pocket the biggest profits, 37 per cent of all American multinationals – and more than 70 per cent of all foreign multinationals – paid not a single dollar of taxes in 1991, while the remaining multinationals remitted less than 1 per cent of their profits in taxes.
The sky-high costs of the Cold War were thus not borne by those who profited from it and who, incidentally, also continued to pocket the lion’s share of the dividends paid on government bonds, but by the American workers and the American middle class. These low- and middle-income Americans did not receive a penny from the profits yielded so profusely by the Cold War, but they did receive their share of the enormous public debt for which that conflict was largely responsible. It is they, therefore, who were really saddled with the costs of the Cold War, and it is they who continue to pay with their taxes for a disproportionate share of the burden of the public debt.
In other words, while the profits generated by the Cold War were privatized to the advantage of an extremely wealthy elite, its costs were ruthlessly socialized to the great detriment of all other Americans. During the Cold War, the American economy degenerated into a gigantic swindle, into a perverse redistribution of the nation’s wealth to the advantage of the rich and to the disadvantage not only of the poor and of the working class but also of the middle class, whose members tend to subscribe to the myth that the American capitalist system serves their interests. Indeed, while the wealthy and powerful of America accumulated ever-greater riches, the prosperity achieved by many other Americans during the Second World War was gradually eroded, and the general standard of living declined slowly but steadily.
During the Second World War America had witnessed a modest redistribution of the collective wealth of the nation to the advantage of the less privileged members of society. During the Cold War, however, the rich Americans became richer while the non-wealthy – and certainly not only the poor – became poorer. In 1989, the year the Cold War petered out, more than 13 per cent of all Americans – approximately 31 million individuals – were poor according to the official criteria of poverty, which definitely understate the problem. Conversely, today 1 per cent of all Americans own no less than 34 per cent of the nation’s aggregate wealth. In no major “Western” country is the wealth distributed more unevenly.
The minuscule percentage of super-rich Americans found this development extremely satisfactory. They loved the idea of accumulating more and more wealth, of aggrandizing their already huge assets, at the expense of the less privileged. They wanted to keep things that way or, if at all possible, make this sublime scheme even more efficient. However, all good things must come to an end, and in 1989/90 the bountiful Cold War elapsed. That presented a serious problem. Ordinary Americans, who knew that they had borne the costs of this war, expected a “peace dividend.”
They thought that the money the state had spent on military expenditures might now be used to produce benefits for themselves, for example in the form of a national health insurance and other social benefits which Americans in contrast to most Europeans have never enjoyed. In 1992, Bill Clinton would actually win the presidential election by dangling out the prospect of a national health plan, which of course never materialized. A “peace dividend” was of no interest whatsoever to the nation’s wealthy elite, because the provision of social services by the state does not yield profits for entrepreneurs and corporations, and certainly not the lofty kind of profits generated by military state expenditures. Something had to be done, and had to be done fast, to prevent the threatening implosion of the state’s military spending.
America, or rather, corporate America, was orphaned of its useful Soviet enemy, and urgently needed to conjure up new enemies and new threats in order to justify a high level of military spending. It is in this context that in 1990 Saddam Hussein appeared on the scene like a kind of deus ex machina. This tin-pot dictator had previously been perceived and treated by the Americans as a good friend, and he had been armed to the teeth so that he could wage a nasty war against Iran; it was the USA – and allies such as Germany – who originally supplied him with all sorts of weapons. However, Washington was desperately in need of a new enemy, and suddenly fingered him as a terribly dangerous “new Hitler,” against whom war needed to be waged urgently, even though it was clear that a negotiated settlement of the issue of Iraq’s occupation of Kuwait was not out of the question.
George Bush Senior was the casting agent who discovered this useful new nemesis of America, and who unleashed the Gulf War, during which Baghdad was showered with bombs and Saddam’s hapless recruits were slaughtered in the desert. The road to the Iraqi capital lay wide-open, but the Marines’ triumphant entry into Baghdad was suddenly scrapped. Saddam Hussein was left in power so that the threat he was supposed to form might be invoked again in order to justify keeping America in arms. After all, the sudden collapse of the Soviet Union had shown how inconvenient it can be when one loses a useful foe.
And so Mars could remain the patron saint of the American economy or, more accurately, the godfather of the corporate Mafia that manipulates this war-driven economy and reaps its huge profits without bearing its costs. The despised project of a peace dividend could be unceremoniously buried, and military expenditures could remain the dynamo of the economy and the wellspring of sufficiently high profits. Those expenditures increased relentlessly during the 1990s. In 1996, for example, they amounted to no less than 265 billion dollars, but when one adds the unofficial and/or indirect military expenditures, such as the interests paid on loans used to finance past wars, the 1996 total came to approximately 494 billion dollar, amounting to an outlay of 1.3 billion dollar per day! However, with only a considerably chastened Saddam as bogeyman, Washington found it expedient also to look elsewhere for new enemies and threats. Somalia temporarily looked promising, but in due course another “new Hitler” was identified in the Balkan Peninsula in the person of the Serbian leader, Milosevic. During much of the nineties, then, conflicts in the former Yugoslavia provided the required pretexts for military interventions, large-scale bombing operations, and the purchase of more and newer weapons.
The “warfare economy” could thus continue to run on all cylinders also after the Gulf War. However, in view of occasional public pressure such as the demand for a peace dividend, it is not easy to keep this system going. (The media present no problem, as newspapers, magazines, TV stations, etc. are either owned by big corporations or rely on them for advertising revenue.) As mentioned earlier, the state has to cooperate, so in Washington one needs men and women one can count upon, preferably individuals from the very own corporate ranks, individuals totally committed to use the instrument of military expenditures in order to provide the high profits that are needed to make the very rich of America even richer. In this respect, Bill Clinton had fallen short of expectations, and corporate America could never forgive his original sin, namely, that he had managed to have himself elected by promising the American people a “peace dividend” in the form of a system of health insurance.
On account of this, in 2000 it was arranged that not the Clinton-clone Al Gore moved into the White House but a team of militarist hardliners, virtually without exception representatives of wealthy, corporate America, such as Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Rice, and of course George W. Bush himself, son of the man who had shown with his Gulf War how it could be done; the Pentagon, too, was directly represented in the Bush Cabinet in the person of the allegedly peace-loving Powell, in reality yet another angel of death. Rambo moved into the White House, and it did not take long for the results to show.
After Bush Junior had been catapulted into the presidency, it looked for some time as if he was going to proclaim China as the new nemesis of America. However, a conflict with that giant loomed somewhat risky; furthermore, all too many big corporations make good money by trading with the People’s Republic. Another threat, preferably less dangerous and more credible, was required to keep the military expenditures at a sufficiently high level. For this purpose, Bush and Rumsfeld and company could have wished for nothing more convenient than the events of September 11, 2001; it is extremely likely that they were aware of the preparations for these monstrous attacks, but that they did nothing to prevent them because they knew that they would be able to benefit from them. In any event, they did take full advantage of this opportunity in order to militarize America more than ever before, to shower bombs on people who had nothing to do with 9/11, to wage war to their hearts’ content, and thus for corporations that do business with the Pentagon to ring up unprecedented sales. Bush declared war not on a country but on terrorism, an abstract concept against which one cannot really wage war and against which a definitive victory can never be achieved. However, in practice the slogan “war against terrorism” meant that Washington now reserves the right to wage war worldwide and permanently against whomever the White House defines as a terrorist.
And so the problem of the end of the Cold War was definitively resolved, as there was henceforth a justification for ever-increasing military expenditures. The statistics speak for themselves. The 1996 total of 265 billion dollar in military expenditures had already been astronomical, but thanks to Bush Junior the Pentagon was allowed to spend 350 billion in 2002, and for 2003 the President has promised approximately 390 billion; however, it is now virtually certain that the cape of 400 billion dollar will be rounded this year. (In order to finance this military spending orgy, money has to be saved elsewhere, for example by cancelling free lunches for poor children; every little bit helps.) No wonder that George W. struts around beaming with happiness and pride, for he – essentially a spoiled rich kid of very limited talent and intellect – has surpassed the boldest expectations not only of his wealthy family and friends but of corporate America as a whole, to which he owes his job.
9/11 provided Bush with carte blanche to wage war wherever and against whomever he chose, and as this essay has purported to make clear, it does not matter all that much who happens to be fingered as enemy du jour. Last year, Bush showered bombs on Afghanistan, presumably because the leaders of that country sheltered Bin Laden, but recently the latter went out of fashion and it was once again Saddam Hussein who allegedly threatened America. We cannot deal here in detail with the specific reasons why Bush’s America absolutely wanted war with the Iraq of Saddam Hussein and not with, say, North Korea. A major reason for fighting this particular war was that Iraq’s large reserves of oil are lusted after by the US oil trusts with whom the Bushes themselves – and Bushites such as Cheney and Rice, after whom an oil tanker happens to be named – are so intimately linked. The war in Iraq is also useful as a lesson to other Third World countries who fail to dance to Washington’s tune, and as an instrument for emasculating domestic opposition and ramming the extreme right-wing program of an unelected president down the throats of Americans themselves.
The America of wealth and privilege is hooked on war, without regular and ever-stronger doses of war it can no longer function properly, that is, yield the desired profits. Right now, this addiction, this craving is being satisfied by means of a conflict against Iraq, which also happens to be dear to the hearts of the oil barons. However, does anybody believe that the warmongering will stop once Saddam’ scalp will join the Taliban turbans in the trophy display case of George W. Bush? The President has already pointed his finger at those whose turn will soon come, namely, the “axis of evil” countries: Iran, Syria, Lybia, Somalia, North Korea, and of course that old thorn in the side of America, Cuba. Welcome to the 21st century, welcome to George W. Bush’s brave new era of permanent war!
Jacques R. Pauwels is historian and political scientist, author of ‘The Myth of the Good War: America in the Second World War’ (James Lorimer, Toronto, 2002). His book is published in different languages: in English, Dutch, German, Spanish, Italian and French. Together with personalities like Ramsey Clark, Michael Parenti, William Blum, Robert Weil, Michel Collon, Peter Franssen and many others… he signed “The International Appeal against US-War”.

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From the International Press on Saturday, March 22, 2003:

The cost to the United States of the war in Iraq and its aftermath could easily exceed $100 billion…Peace-keeping in Iraq and rebuilding the country’s infrastructure could add much more…The Bush administration has stayed tightlipped about the cost of the war and reconstruction…Both the White House and the Pentagon refused to offer any definite figures.
(The International Herald Tribune, 22/03/03)
It is estimated that the war against Iraq will cost approximately 100 billion dollar. In contrast to the Gulf War of 1991, whose cost of 80 million was shared by the Allies, the United States is expected to pay the entire cost of the present war…For the American private sector, i.e. the big corporations, the coming reconstruction of Iraq’s infrastructure will represent a business of 900 million dollar; the first contracts were awarded yesterday (March 21) by the American government to two corporations. (Guido Leboni, “Un coste de 100.000 millones de dolares,” El Mundo, Madrid, 22/03/03)

Half-Ownership Claim of Facebook Is a ‘Fabrication,’ Magistrate Says

• By David Kravets
• 03.26.13

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/03/ceglia-fabricated-evidence/

Paul Ceglia

Declaring the case fraudulent, a magistrate judge on Tuesday urged a federal court to dismiss claims by a New York man whose lawsuit asserts he owns half of the social-networking service Facebook.
The plaintiff in the suit was arrested last year and has been charged with a multi-billion-dollar scheme to defraud the social-networking site and its chief executive and founder Mark Zuckerberg.
Paul Ceglia, of Wellsville, New York, remains free on bond. He filed his federal civil lawsuit in 2010, citing documents and a contract between him and Zuckerberg that promised him 50 percent of the social networking site.
His lawsuit prompted the federal fraud charges, and a federal magistrate decided Tuesday that enough was enough, and found that the contract at the center of the dispute “is a recently created fabrication.” (.pdf)
Those were the words of Magistrate Leslie G. Foschio of New York. Complex cases are often referred to magistrates, who make recommendations to a lawsuit’s presiding judge, in this case U.S. District Judge Richard Arcara.
There is no timeline for Arcara to rule, but Ceglia has two weeks to respond to Foschio’s recommendation.
Facebook used harsh words to describe Foschio’s decision.
“Today’s federal court decision confirms what we have said from day one: This lawsuit is an inexcusable fraud based on forged documents,” said Colin Stretch, Facebook’s deputy general counsel.
Ceglia, a wood pellet salesman, is accused in New York federal criminal court of one count of mail fraud and one count of wire fraud (.pdf). Each count carries a maximum 20-year term.
Indeed, Facebook has made clear from the beginning that it believed the contract and e-mails that Ceglia produced as evidence were fake — and the company even hired private investigators to dig up dirt on Ceglia’s checkered past.
Zuckerberg maintained that an authentic “Work for Hire” contract between the two did exist, but it involved another project altogether. Ceglia hired Zuckerberg to work on Ceglia’s StreetFax company nearly a decade ago, Zuckerberg claimed. Ceglia, however, alleged the contract also discussed fronting Zuckerberg $2,000 in exchange for half of Facebook when Zuckerberg was a Harvard University computer science student.
Ceglia did not immediately respond for comment.

How Forensics Claims Facebook Ownership Contract Is ‘Forged’

• By David Kravets
• 03.27.12
• http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/facebook-ownership-forensics/

An allegedly forged e-mail between Zuckerberg and Ceglia. The "-400" in the dateline denotes Eastern Daylight Time (or summer time), but e-mail was purportedly sent in February, which is Eastern Standard Time, or -0500.

Hoping to blast away a lawsuit with digital science, Facebook asked a federal judge Monday to dismiss a long-running case brought by New York resident Paul Ceglia who claims he owns half of the social networking site.
Ever since Ceglia filed suit in 2010, Facebook has made it clear it believes the contract and e-mails that Ceglia has produced as evidence are fakes — and it even hired private investigators to dig up dirt on Ceglia‘s none-too-sparkly past.
As we reported Monday, Facebook told a federal judge that its forensic examiners proved that a 9-year-old contract between Ceglia and Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg was “forged.” The analysis also claims that 27 e-mails between Zuckerberg and Ceglia — some of which mention Facebook — were “fabricated” by Ceglia.
Zuckerberg has said all along that the authentic “Work for Hire” contract involved another project. Ceglia hired Zuckerberg to work on Ceglia’s StreetFax company nearly a decade ago, Zuckerberg claims. Ceglia, however, alleges the contract also included fronting Zuckerberg $2,000 in exchange for half of Facebook when Zuckerberg was a Harvard University computer science student.
The voluminous filings on Monday included e-mails subpoenaed from Zuckerberg’s Harvard e-mail account and a 102-page digital forensics report on evidence found in Ceglia’s computers and e-mail accounts.
We dug into the report by Stroz Freidberg, (.pdf) a New York forensics company, to see how Facebook’s forensic team is arguing that Ceglia is trying to scam Facebook. The analysis was based on Ceglia having turned over hard drives, laptops, desktops and other gear as part of a court order:
Here is a brief sampling of the reports allegations, which have not been proven yet in a court of law.

• Facebook said it had discovered the original “Work for Hire” contract on Ceglia’s computer and one e-mailed in 2004 to a Ceglia lawyer — neither of them mention Facebook, despite allegations from Ceglia that the contract includes Facebook. Ceglia has since claimed these were planted post-facto on his computer and his lawyer’s by Facebook.
• Two TIFF images were discovered by examining Ceglia’s sent mail, which was found by investigators opening a file named “Sent Items.dbx.” on Outlook Express. The examiners found what they say was the original 2003 contract, which does not reference Facebook. The contract was also e-mailed to a Ceglia attorney at the firm Sidney Austin in 2004. The firm produced the e-mail pursuant to a subpoena, which had the same image of the contract attached. An examination of the e-mail metadata shows the e-mail was sent to the attorney on March 3, 2004, six years before the lawsuit was filed.
• Twenty-seven e-mails allegedly between Ceglia and Zuckerberg, some of which reference a Facebook deal, were not discovered on Ceglia’s hard drives. Ceglia said he cut-and-pasted the e-mails into Microsoft Word documents, the text of which a metadata analysis concluded was backdated.”This metadata anomaly constitutes evidence of backdating because a file that was last modified in October 2003 could not contain authentic emails from July 2004,” the forensic report said. What’s more, the e-mail on the Word files contain fudged date lines for the time the e-mail was “purportedly sent.”
  

  At the end of each ‘Date’ line, the time zone that the email was purportedly sent in is indicated with an offset of the format ‘+HHMM’ or ‘-HHMM.’ HHMM indicates hours and minutes from Coordinated Universal Time (‘UTC’); the + or – indicates whether the time zone is before or after Coordinated Universal Time. For example, Eastern Daylight Time is represented as ‘-0400′ and Eastern Standard Time is represented as ‘-0500.’ Standard time was in effect in the United States from late October 2003 to early April 2004.
  Thus, one would expect that authentic e-mails sent during that time period from a location in the Eastern Time Zone would contain the ‘-0500′ stamp, in the absence of an inaccurate system clock. However, all but one of the 27 purported e-mails contain the ‘-0400′ time zone stamp for Eastern Daylight Time, including all of the purported e-mails supposedly sent between Oct. 26, 2003 and Apr. 4, 2004.

• The original, signed “Work for Hire” contract, which was attached to the lawsuit, was not discovered on Ceglia’s computers or the hard drives and USB storage devices Ceglia turned over. The investigators said they found “seven unsigned versions” of the contract “that are very similar but not identical to the Work for Hire Document. All seven of those electronic documents contain metadata anomalies indicative of backdating and document manipulation.” The metadata shows they were backdated to 2003 when Zuckerberg, as a Harvard University student, agreed to perform the contracted work for Ceglia. But the copies of the contract were created in 2011. And they all had “significant” formatting differences. The margin space varies, from 0.32 inches, to 0.03 inches to 0.13 inches.
• Ceglia reinstalled Windows at least twice, including in late December 2010 — months after he’d filed suit against Facebook. While there are many good reasons to reinstall Windows, there are some not-so-legit ones as well. Facebook’s forensic team imaged Ceglia’s hard drive in March 2011, which showed an install date of late December 2010.
  

  The reinstallation of an operating system is a destructive action that may have the effect of overwriting existing data on a hard drive. In Stroz Friedberg’s experience with electronic forgery cases, the reinstallation of an operating system can be done in an effort to destroy or conceal data.
  Stroz Friedberg determined that the Windows operating system on the Seagate Hard Drive and the Forensic Image Created by Plaintiff’s Expert of that drive was reinstalled on at least two occasions.

A hearing on the motion to dismiss is set for Apr. 4 in New York federal court. Ceglia’s attorney, Dean Boland, denies the claims made by Facebook’s experts.

Congress Backs Borderless Internet Sales Tax (And So Does Amazon)

• By Marcus Wohlsen
• 03.26.13       http://www.wired.com/business/2013/03/congress-backs-internet-sales-tax/

Democratic U.S. Sen. Al Franken, who represents Best Buy’s home state of Minnesota, supports a borderless internet sales tax. So do Republicans. So does Amazon.
Photo: Aaron Landry via photopin

The fairy tale of Washington bipartisanship became a reality, if however briefly, as Democrats and Republicans in the U.S. Senate united behind what’s typically the thorniest subject in politics: taxes.
In a non-binding resolution passed last week, 75 senators from both sides of the aisle agreed that states should be able to force any internet retailer who makes more than $1 million in sales annually to collect sales taxes for them, regardless of whether the retailer physically does business in the state.
The amendment to a budget bill merely takes the temperature of the Senate on the issue of a so-called internet sales tax. Another vote would still have to happen to send the idea on its way to becoming actual law. But any tax sponsored by a Wyoming Republican, in this case Mike Enzi, that Al Franken also supports seems destined for safe passage through the Senate.
“Today’s vote proves that an overwhelming majority of Senators support this bipartisan legislation to level the playing field for brick-and-mortar retailers,” said Illinois Democrat Dick Durbin, another big backer.
For politicians, that’s a sound bite that’s easy to get behind. Brick-and-mortar businesses both small and large — from Barnes & Noble and Best Buy to Target and Walmart — back the bill. So do nearly 70 national trade groups, both liberal and conservative.
Guess who else supports the bill? The one company whose business would seem to be more deeply affected than any other if such a bill were to become law — and the one company at which this legislation would appear to be directly aimed: Amazon.
Other retailers have long complained that Amazon’s dazzling rise stems in no small part from the exemption it’s long enjoyed from collecting sales tax in states where it lacks a physical presence. Amazon already possesses the distinct advantage over competitors such as Best Buy that comes from not having the overhead of physical retail spaces to maintain. Its lower costs have allowed Amazon to race to the bottom on price.
Until recently, even if Best Buy charged the same $500 for a model of digital camera, a buyer in California would effectively have paid nearly $50 less on Amazon, since Amazon didn’t have to collect the sales tax. (Of course, buyers are still legally obligated to pay that sales tax to the state when they file their taxes, but hardly any do.)
Amazon ultimately struck a deal with California that put off until last year a state measure requiring the company to start collecting sales tax. At the time, Amazon said it hoped uniform federal regulations for online sales tax collection would make the state law unnecessary. In exchange, Amazon promised to build warehouses in California and create thousands of jobs.
The federal law didn’t materialize, but the warehouses have. And it’s these million-square-foot embodiments of Amazon’s retail might that should give traditional brick-and-mortar sellers pause when considering why the company would support a resolution that would seem to strip the e-tailer of its price advantage.
Once Amazon no longer enjoys the price advantage of not collecting sales tax, the company has no incentive to keep its physical operations outside a state’s borders. This is what happened in California: While Amazon was able to pitch its warehouses as a boon to the state’s economy, the company also gained massive outposts on the fringes of the state’s two largest population centers — the San Francisco Bay Area and greater Los Angeles. Now brick-and-mortar retailers in those regions must compete with more than Amazon the online retailer; they have to compete with Amazon’s own bricks and mortar.
Not that shoppers will travel physically to Amazon’s newly nearby warehouses. But they won’t have to. By moving closer to large concentrations of its customers, Amazon increases its efficiency in shipping, which lowers its costs and keeps prices down. The company can redistribute its inventory to keep more of what SoCal customers want in SoCal and more of what NorCal customers want in NorCal. Once federal government requires online retailers to start collecting sales tax in all 50 states, Amazon will have no incentive to stay out of any of them.
Amazon bulls and bears debate whether customers in states such as California and Texas that now require the company to collect sales tax are buying less. But in both states, Amazon’s new physical infrastructure is still under construction. Brick-and-mortar stores in those states have yet to feel the effects of a fully operational Amazon just a few miles away.
Already Amazon has shown no hesitation in extending that physical footprint straight into cities with its lockers. It could turn out that forcing Amazon to collect sales tax nationwide could be the worst thing to happen to brick-and-mortar retail. Competing with Amazon was tough enough when it was just a company in Seattle with a big warehouse in Kentucky. What happens when one of the world’s biggest stores, online or off, suddenly moves right into your backyard?

Tim Berners-Lee Takes the Stand to Keep the Web Free

• By Joe Mullin
• 02.08.12      http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/02/tim-berners-lee-patent/

World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee addresses the media during the International World Wide Web conference in Hyderabad, India, Thursday, March 31, 2011. Photo: Mahesh Kumar A/AP

The inventor of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee, testified in a courtroom Tuesday for the first time in his life. The web pioneer flew down from Boston, near where he teaches at MIT, to an eastern Texas federal court to speak to a jury of two men and six women about the early days of the web.
His trip is part of an effort by a group of internet companies and retailers trying to defeat two patents — patents that a patent-licensing company called Eolas and the University of California are saying entitle them to royalty payments from just about anyone running a website with “interactive” features, like rotating pictures or streaming video.
(For background on the case and patents, see our story “Patent Troll Claims Ownership of Interactive Web — And Might Win“)
The defendants, including Google, Amazon, and Yahoo, are hoping that Berners-Lee’s testimony—combined with that of other web pioneers like Netscape co-founder Eric Bina, Viola browser inventor Pei-Yuan Wei, and Dave Raggett (who invented the HTML “embed” tag) — will convince the jury that the inventions of Eolas and its founder, Michael Doyle, aren’t worth much. The stakes couldn’t be higher — if Berners-Lee and the defendants don’t succeed, Eolas and Doyle could insist on a payout from almost every modern website.
Berners-Lee, a slight 56-year-old man, spoke quickly and quietly; at one point, Judge Leonard Davis asked him to speak up. “We have a language situation with your accent that makes it doubly
difficult,” he told the scientist. Berners-Lee shifted position and looked about the room as he spoke, and seemed uncomfortable at times.
Jennifer Doan, a Texarkana lawyer representing Yahoo and Amazon, led the questioning.
“Mr. Berners-Lee, why are you here?” asked Doan.
“I am here because I want to help get some clarity over what was obvious, and what was the feeling of computing [in the early 1990s]…. The tools I had in my knapsack, so to speak,” he said.
After describing how Berners-Lee worked at CERN in Switzerland back in the 1980s, Doan moved on to the web. When Berners-Lee invented the web, did he apply for a patent on it, Doan asked.
“No,” said Berners-Lee.
“Why not?” asked Doan.
“The internet was already around. I was taking hypertext, and it was around a long time too. I was taking stuff we knew how to do…. All I was doing was putting together bits that had been around for years in a particular combination to meet the needs that I have.”
Doan: “And who owns the web?”
Berners-Lee: “We do.”
Doan: “The web we all own, is it ‘interactive’?”
“It is pretty interactive, yeah,” said Berners-Lee, smiling.
Then Doan moved on to the heart of Berners-Lee’s testimony: to establish the importance of the Viola browser, created by Pei Wei, who was at that time a computer science student at UC Berkeley. The Viola browser is a key piece of “prior art” that the defendant companies hope will invalidate the UC/Eolas patent.
Berners-Lee described Viola as “an important part of the development of the web.”
The jury was shown an e-mail from Pei Wei to Berners-Lee dated December 1991 — almost two years before Doyle’s invention — which read in part: “One thing I’d like to do soon, if I have time, is to teach the parser about Viola object descriptions and basically embed Viola objects (GUIs and programmability) into HTML files.”
Later Tuesday, Wei would testify that he had demonstrated interactive elements working in the Viola browser to Sun Microsystems in May 1993 — several months before Doyle claims to have come up with his invention.
Finally, Doan turned to Berners-Lee’s book, in which he described Wei as “a very inventive student at UC Berkeley.” Berners-Lee described how the web community at that time wasn’t focused on patents or even money — Wei simply put his invention online for free.
“It was ahead of its time,” said Berners-Lee. “The things Pei was doing would later be done in Java.” Java was heavily used in the late 1990s to add interactivity to web pages, later to be supplanted by Flash, Javascript and now HTML5.
His own act, creating the World Wide Web, was more a matter of personalities and persuasion than it was a matter of hammering out code, he explained.
“[My book] is the story of those times — inventing it, and not so much inventing but the social process of trying to get everyone to use the same standards. The reason the Web took off is not because it was a magic idea, but because I persuaded everyone to use HTML and HTTP.”
In cross-examination, lead Eolas attorney Mike McKool grilled Berners-Lee about his views on software patents.
“There’s been a debate, in Europe, about whether to allow the patenting of software,” McKool began.
“There have been debates, in general, for many years [about software patents],” replied Berners-Lee.
“They don’t allow patenting of software over there, do they?”
The scientist on the witness seemed to start an answer, then reconsidered, saying only: “I’m not a patent attorney.”
“You do understand that under United States law — in this country — our country can and does grant patents on software?” asked McKool.
“Yes.”
Then McKool brought up a 2004 article in the International Herald-Tribune, in which Berners-Lee was quoted being critical of software patents.
“[Don't you want] complete abolition of software patents?” asked McKool.
On the stand, Berners-Lee hesitated to condemn software patents in general, but made clear he was concerned about the Eolas patents.
“I clearly — I had concerns about the software patent system in the U.S., and this particular patent is key in raising those concerns,” said Berners-Lee, looking increasingly worn down.
McKool pulled up a slide from a talk Berners-Lee gave in 2004, when he accepted an award in Finland. The bullet points noted that in the U.S., software patents created “fear, uncertainty and doubt” and an “incentive for obfuscation.” The bar for what constitutes a novel invention is “set ridiculously low” by the U.S. Patent Office, the slide stated.
“What you say,” said McKool, raising his voice and slowing down as he reached the most nationalistic part of his cross-exam, “is that Europe should stay clear of the mess the U.S.A. is in.”
Berners-Lee quietly concurred. Those looked like his slides; his points.
It’s hard to tell what kind of impact Berners-Lee had on the case. His celebrity status in the tech world is probably unknown to the jurors, and he was tough to follow at times. At best, he might lend some gravitas to the defendants’ plan: rolling out a series of web pioneers associated with early technologies—like the MOSAIC and Viola browsers — to show that Doyle and his company weren’t first.
After his testimony, several lawyers from the audience approached the “father of the web,” hoping to meet him and shake his hand. I also approached, handing him a card and telling him I was a journalist here to cover the trial.
“There are a lot of people who want to understand what this trial is about, and why it’s here,” I said. “People want to know why it’s so important that you came to Tyler.”
“Oh…. I can’t, I just can’t,” said Berners-Lee, still looking shaken.
He saw that my card was from the journalism school at UC Berkeley, where I have a reporting fellowship.
“University of California,” he said. “So, do you teach journalism?” He seemed more interested in the idea that I might be a professor than anything else.
“Not really,” I said. “I’m just a reporter. There’s one class I help out with; that’s it.”
“That’s important, journalism,” he said, seeming distracted but also heartfelt. “Keep up the good work. It’s about getting the truth out to the world, I suppose.”
But he wouldn’t be able to help me with that. Not today, in this room in Tyler, in a room full of dark-suited lawyers. More than 20 years after the quiet English scientist had set the web in motion, he seemed to sense that in Texas, his invention was confronting something new and threatening.

Darpa’s Next Drone Could Be a Datalink Between Planes and Ships

• By Spencer Ackerman
• 03.26.13            http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2013/03/darpa-tern-datalink/

The artists’ concept behind TERN, a drone Darpa wants to launch from the deck of a small warship.
Image: Darpa

The Pentagon’s far-out research scientists aren’t just trying to build a drone that can operate off the deck of a small warship. They’re starting to describe their new-mark flying robot as a device that bridges the communication systems between ships and aircraft. And if they can pull it off, Darpa will be giving the U.S. military a capability it badly needs for one of its major initiatives.
Last month, Darpa announced a program to design something called the TERN, for Tactically Exploitative Reconnaissance Node, a surveillance and strike drone that can fly up to 900 miles from the deck of a destroyer or Littoral Combat Ship. Darpa wants it to be “substantially beyond current state-of-the-art aviation capabilities from smaller ships,” according to the full, formal solicitation for the drone that the agency released Tuesday.
And how. The solicitation seems to emphasize the “Node” aspect of TERN. Among the intriguing requirements that Darpa “encouraged” its potential research teams to explore is the ability for the drone to “exploit cooperation between aircraft and ship to achieve enhanced performance. Such cooperation could potentially take the form of data exchange, external energy addition, or manipulation of the recovery environment.”
That doesn’t sound like too much, but the implications are significant, and they go way beyond drone warfare.

Most significantly, the Navy and the Air Force are working on a master concept for future partnered operations called AirSea Battle. AirSea Battle is inchoate and confusing. Its Pentagon architects have yet to articulate how specifically long-range bombers and stealth jets are supposed to work alongside carrier strike groups, submarines or close-to-shore fighters like the Littoral Combat Ship.
But even if they figure all that out, the leaders of the Navy and Air Force have conceded that they’ll still face another “foundational” challenge, as the former Air Force chief of staff put it in May. Navy ships and Air Force planes don’t have a common communications architecture. “Our links need to be similar,” Adm. Jonathan Greenert told a panel discussion on AirSea Battle back then, “or at least minimally compatible.” If you can’t talk to each other, you can’t fight together.
It’s unclear how the Navy and the Air Force will come to speak the same language. The TERN program points to a potential solution: Design the data links on a long-endurance drone at sea to be bilingual. It surely won’t be easy to build a software layer that can communicate with both Air Force planes and Navy ships. But it’s probably easier, and cheaper, than retrofitting the communications systems on planes, subs and ships for maximum compatibility or demanding that defense companies build future flying and sailing platforms with that goal in mind.
There are all sorts of reasons why Darpa might not go this way with TERN. It might ultimately value the “novel design approaches” the researchers want over making it a true communications node. And the drone is definitely designed with the Navy primarily in mind, with seemingly little buy-in from the Air Force, if any. But should the TERN designers explore the full implications of exchanging data between ships and aircraft, Darpa’s next robot might unlock a whole deeper set of solutions for the Navy and Air Force.

The Killing of Justin Bieber

Hatched in prison by a convicted murderer with a case of Bieber Fever gone bad, it was a grotesquely twisted plan: Kidnap the then-18-year-old pop star while he played Madison Square Garden, execute and castrate him. If not for one wrong turn, it might have been the most infamous celebrity crime of the century. Inside the plot to assassinate—and desecrate—the world's greatest teen idol.

By Kevin Gray,

Illustrations by Mat Maitland

April 2013 Issue

The kid was under Dana Martin's skin. A convicted murderer serving a life sentence, Martin lay face-down on a prison-issue bed, wincing. Behind him, on a white plastic patio chair, hunched a tattoo artist serving five months for assault.

Grabbing Martin's right ankle, he pressed the buzzing needle of a prison-made inking gun into a pimply white right calf. The gun was improvised using the tiny electric motor of a Radio Shack cassette player, with a piece of guitar string and a pen for a needle—its black ink harvested from the smoke of burning baby oil. The tattooist was finishing up an illicit 15-hour project that had spanned two weeks, putting the final touches on a seraphic face: a young boy with a bowl cut, a hoodie, pouty lips, and a lover's gaze. The kid's name, inked in big, bubbly street lettering, ran up the shin—JUSTIN BIEBER—and beneath that, the date: FEBRUARY 11, 2011. It was a big day for fans of the teen pop idol—Bieber's breakthrough 3-D concert biopic, which Martin had obsessively tracked for weeks on shows like Entertainment Tonight, was arriving in theaters. Martin admired the ink work on the film title, which he adopted as a "Fuck you all" motto: NEVER SAY NEVER.
Now, two years later, as the 45-year-old prisoner stands shackled in a cinder-block room at the Southern New Mexico Correctional Facility, outside Las Cruces, in late January—his legs in ankle chains, bony wrists clamped to belly chains at his waist—a wry scowl takes over his face. It's as if his strange journey, from adoration to attempted assassination, is causing him pain or humor. Or both.
On November 20 of last year, New Mexico State Police charged him and two others with multiple counts of first-degree conspiracy to commit murder, accusing them of attempting one of the most bizarre and twisted plots ever hatched in a prison. According to the police affidavit, the plan involved kidnapping Bieber in New York City during a sold-out two-concert stand at Madison Square Garden, executing him, and then cutting off his testicles as trophies of their handiwork. Martin has admitted that he masterminded the plot, which also targeted Bieber's bodyguard and two Vermont residents, and brazenly claims he's still trying to kill the pop idol. His codefendants, Mark Staake and Tanner Ruane—an uncle-and-nephew team from Albuquerque—maintain their innocence. For very different reasons, all three defendants eagerly await their trial, for which there is no date yet. Staake and Ruane say they want to put the record straight—that Martin had set them up—while Martin, whose life sentence makes any further punishment academic, is approaching his day in court as one more chance to bask in the spotlight.
Their alleged plot made headlines around the globe, not least because of the manner in which it unraveled. Staake and Ruane missed a turn and ended up at a border crossing, where Staake was apprehended on an outstanding warrant. Bieber's team has remained silent on the alleged plot, except to release a statement assuring his adoring public that "We take every precaution to protect and ensure the safety of Justin and his fans."
The New Mexico prison must now do the same for the Man Who Would Kill Bieber. Martin is on 23-hour-a-day lockdown for his own protection. To the outside world he is a self-styled John Hinckley Jr. or Mark David Chapman for our TMZ-infused times, a fan whose celebrity obsession led him to try to kill for fame. But in the Lord of the Flies food chain of prisons, he is simply a target. Just as engineering the murder of the world's biggest pop star would bring him longed-for notoriety, shivving Martin would bestow valuable cred on a fellow inmate.
I meet Martin in the gymnasium-size visiting room of the 1,300-prisoner facility, which squats in the Chihuahuan Desert, amid dry streambeds and creosote bushes.
"I shaved it for you," says Martin, by way of a greeting. "The tattoo? I always tell people you need to have a shaved Bieber. Believe me, you do not want a hairy Bieber."
Throughout our three-hour interview, Martin displays a flinty sense of humor and a prison-scholar vocabulary peppered with nonwords like "disconvoluted." He speaks in a monologue of associative thought—variously arrogant, insecure, defensive, colorful, witty, and seemingly sociopathic. "I never really had empathy in my life," he tells me. He bemoans his status as a prison pariah. Convicted of first-degree murder for killing a young girl in 2000, he occupies the lowest caste among inmates. He says he's been beaten and sexually assaulted as retribution for his offense. "For killing a 15-year-old female," he complains. "Which seems to be a very unpopular crime."
In his six-by-eight-foot cell, Martin finds solace in watching reports on himself and his plot on E! but is miffed by the coverage—starting with his goateed mug shot. "They keep running this photo of when I had my Apolo Ohno beard, because it looks the creepiest." He bristles at the misrepresentation of his criminal past. "They say I raped the girl I murdered. That never happened." And he is frustrated that no one truly understands why he decided that Justin Bieber must die. "It isn't just so people will know who I am. It's because he changed, and that made me angry."
• • • Justin Bieber's voice first came to Martin over a prison radio in the winter of 2010. As the Canadian phenom exploded across the pop cosmos—his bouncy hit single "Baby" had soared up the charts—Martin, like millions of preteen girls, caught Bieber Fever. "He's an attractive kid, everybody knows that," says Martin, annoyed at having to explain his crush. "Justin Bieber is warm and fuzzy. He's talented. I liked his music." Martin downloaded every song he could manage and eventually amassed 52 on his Department of Corrections–issued mp3 player. Although he had favorite tracks (he finds "Overboard" to be "sad and down-to-earth"), he quickly became more fixated on the musician than on the music. Martin remembers watching Bieber on the Today show emoting to Matt Lauer about how much he cared about his fans: "He just seemed to purr."
A true Belieber, he watched intently as Bieber became ubiquitous, appearing on The View, guest-starring on CSI, flipping off the paparazzi, becoming Ellen DeGeneres' new favorite person ever, and hosting Saturday Night Live. After the 3-D film Justin Bieber: Never Say Never opened, a year later, Forbes ranked the pop star No. 2 on its list of the highest-paid celebrities under 30. Martin loved it. Alone in his cell, he sketched his idol in a bow tie and pink shirt and vest, adding the drawing to his collection of male nudes. (Martin claims his attraction to Bieber is more than sexual, and he turns testy when I raise the subject: "What are you trying to get me to say, that I love Justin Bieber and think he's gorgeous? He's a good-looking kid. Would I go to bed with him? Yeah. He's legal, so probably.") Psychiatrists say celebrity stalkers like Martin may acquire romantic and erotic fixations in order to compensate for their own deficiencies. "Intimacy-seeking stalkers develop fantasy relationships as a way to raise themselves up socially, to feel pleasure, and to escape what is usually a blighted life," says James Knoll IV, the director of forensic psychiatry at the State University of New York's Upstate Medical University.

NOW I'M A BELIEBER: Dana Martin (left, in Southern New Mexico Correctional Facility) was the teen idol's biggest fan before becoming the alleged mastermind of a plot to murder and castrate the pop star and two others. Martin allegedly recruited a prison associate, Mark Staake, top right, and his nephew, Tanner Ruane, bottom right, to carry out the hits.
When Bieber performed songs from his 2011 Christmas album, Under the Mistletoe, outside the Today studios, drawing one of the largest crowds in the show's history, Martin longed to partake of what the devotees at Rockefeller Center enjoyed: the freedom to worship at the altar of the Biebs. "Anybody on the streets, all these girls that are his fans, can look at Bieber anytime they want to on their cell phones, they can read anything they want, they can tweet him, they know where he's going to be, they can go see him—just buy tickets and walk in. I can't do that," Martin says.
One day, Martin recalls, he saw Bieber tell a TV host that he rarely received fan mail because his fans only tweet and e-mail him. So Martin started mailing handwritten letters, dozens of them, to Bieber at the Ellen show ("He claims she's a personal friend," Martin explains) and at his label, Island Def Jam. Martin asked for autographed photos, appealing to Bieber's professed Christianity to please respond to him. He realized that whoever opened his letters would see a prison return address and probably trash them. But he was hopeful that Bieber, who cares about his fans, might come through. If he could just have a personal letter, Martin reasoned, then "I'm no longer a nobody. There's a certain validation that somebody like me would get if Justin Bieber was my friend."
Martin kept up his one-way correspondence as Bieber continued his march toward world domination. By the middle of 2012, Martin could hardly turn on the TV without seeing his young idol. Bieber was trying to pivot from teen pop to a more mature dance-pop and R&B. But Martin, increasingly resentful about the lack of response, apparently detected something else changing in his idol.
At 18, Bieber would speed around Los Angeles in a $230,000 white Ferrari 458 Italia. When his manager, Scooter Braun, presented him with a Fisker Karma sports car on TV, he exuded bashful humility. "I'm looking at his manager on Ellen, and he's telling Justin, 'You know how I always say it is important to stay humble,'" Martin says, chafing at his wrist chains as he tries to gesticulate. "And I'm like, 'Really?' He can fool a bunch of 9-year-old girls, but the adult audience that he wants now is not fooled by this."
Martin resented the new, more adult and urban image Bieber cultivated. He cringed at Bieber's awkward Vanilla Ice–like embrace of hip-hop slang: Wassup, man, how you doing? "He's a phony now," he says.
Martin's letters turned angry. He says he wrote DeGeneres in May 2012. "I said, 'I want a reply from him or I'm going to do something nasty to him.'" As evidence he was not to be trifled with, Martin included his rap sheet. Hearing nothing back from DeGeneres or Bieber, he began plotting. "That's when I decided to kidnap and kill him," he says.
• • • Dana Martin's history of narcissism and vengeance began in his hometown of Barre, Vermont, a picturesque burg deep in the state's granite belt. On October 25, 2000, he lured a teen named DeAndra Florucci to his parents' home. He tied her to his bed with sneaker laces, had sex with her, strangled her with his father's paisley tie, then dumped her nude body into a ravine. Martin confessed to the killing six days later. At his 2001 sentencing, prosecutors said Martin had killed Florucci in a fit of jealousy—for dating a man he was in love with. The man had abandoned Martin at a Lake George, New York, motel room, 120 miles away, the night before the killing. Martin was convicted in June 2001 of first-degree murder. Since receiving his sentence of 35 years to life with no chance of parole, he has been moved among prisons in Vermont, Florida, Minnesota, and New Mexico, often for his own protection.
In spring of 2012, shortly after he was transferred to Las Cruces, Martin met Mark Staake, who was serving four years for stealing a car and for aggravated burglary with a deadly weapon. A slender 41-year-old native of Albuquerque, Staake has a rap sheet littered with convictions—for armed burglary, grand theft auto, drunk driving, and cocaine possession.
Martin showed Staake his Bieber tattoo. Staake tells me he thought it was "a little strange, but I don't judge nobody. He can be gay or whatever—that's his business." As two of a handful of white prisoners amid the gang-ridden prison's largely Hispanic population, Staake and Martin bonded. When a new prisoner enters the cell block, it is standard practice for other prisoners to look through the legal file he arrives with. In Martin's file, Staake found federal convictions for transporting explosives and threatening a federal judge, and he was impressed. Staake knew Martin was in for life but says Martin must have removed his murder case from his file when he showed it to Staake. Martin did, however, claim responsibility for a string of 25 grisly unsolved killings. "From there the guy just started telling me his life story like I was a priest," Staake says. "He laid it all out and he didn't stop. I found it fascinating, as sick as a lot of it was. He's a very interesting dude, highly intelligent, and the stuff that came out of his mouth was like stuff you'd see on TV. I found myself looking forward to meeting up in the yard and hearing more stories." When the two were in the hole at the same time for disciplinary trouble, Staake says, Martin would pass him coded notes through the slots of their adjacent cells. And when they were moved to separate units, Martin wrote him letters through inter-prison mail. One included "a cartoon drawing of a beaver dressed like a rapper with chains and a hat that said JB on it," Staake says. Another note contained "coded language about kidnapping someone for $170,000." (Staake says he told Martin he wouldn't abduct anyone.)
To Martin, the friendship was less the point than getting Staake in his thrall. "I'm a great manipulator because I don't ever forget anything," Martin says. "It's a lifetime of observing people, their facial expressions, their body languages." Martin felt that Staake—who was due to be paroled in the fall—could be persuaded to carry out a hit. He set about convincing Staake that despite being in prison, Martin had access to fine cars, a sprawling mansion, wads of cash, and contacts in a powerful Chinese gang. "I spent a huge amount of time lying to Mark," he says. Staake, and later Ruane, "were pawns in this game, and they didn't really matter to me. I have a history of not having friends."

BIEBER, INK: Martin's devotional tattoo from 2011, shaved for this interview.
Martin infused his lies with plausible evidence. He kept a photo album full of his fake holdings and showed Staake a snapshot of a 1983 Ferrari 308, worth $143,000, claiming it was his father's. He encouraged Staake to look it up on Carfax, using a VIN cribbed from a classified ad. Martin told Staake his family owned the historic Lottery Hill Farm in Woodstock, Vermont—a $2.7 million estate once owned by Michael J. Fox. Martin says he convinced Staake that he sold heroin for a Chinese organized-crime syndicate in New York City and that he had connections that would protect Staake.
By mid-June, with Staake due to be paroled in October, Martin's plot had thickened. He wanted to settle some old scores as well and says he directed Staake to kill two former Vermont friends: One was Maurice Simoneau, the man who had been dating Florucci and who had left Martin in the Lake George motel room. "He was obsessed with me, and I didn't want anything to do with it," says Simoneau, who was in love with Florucci and believes Martin killed her to get rid of her as a rival and to hurt him. "He was off the wall, very short-tempered—a nut job." The other intended victim, whom police call PL, knew Martin when he was a teen in the mid-1990s. Martin targeted PL simply for refusing to give him information on a mutual acquaintance. Martin says he instructed Staake to strangle both men with paisley ties—the method he used on Florucci—and convinced Staake that the Chinese gang had approved the hit on Simoneau.
As a rationale, Martin says he told Staake that Simoneau, a convicted heroin dealer, once stole $430,000 worth of the Chinese gang's heroin from him (a claim Simoneau denies) and that carrying out the hit would put Staake in good standing with the gang. To prove it, Martin gave Staake a phony letter that read "BY ORDER: Hip Sing Assoc., 16 Pell Street, NY, NY 11013" and contained personal information about Simoneau. Martin promised Staake that in exchange for these killings and that of Bieber, the gangsters would pay him $50,000. In addition, he offered Staake his father's Ferrari and Lottery Hill Farm as a hideout.
Martin developed a code for them to discuss the crimes over the phone while Staake was on the road. They would call the targets pit bulls. The killings would be referred to as "putting down the dogs." It was corny but simple to remember and indicative of Martin's contempt for his intended victims.
By this point, Bieber had released the album Believe, which only fueled Martin's desire for blood. It included the biting song "Maria," a thinly veiled swipe at Mariah Yeater, the fan who had falsely claimed that Bieber had fathered her child, with the lyrics Now she's in the magazines, on TV, making a scene. Oh she's crazy, crazy in love. And she's all over the news, saying everything but the truth. If Martin could kill Bieber, he too would become an indelible part of pop-culture history. "Fame I don't really care about," he says. "Wanting to be remembered for posterity, that is what is important to me."
Martin was moving quickly down a twisted and bloody trail blazed by the likes of Mark David Chapman, the troubled fan who shot and killed John Lennon in New York City in 1980; Yolanda Saldívar, the founder of the Selena fan club, who shot and killed the Tejano singer at a Days Inn in Corpus Christi, Texas, in 1995; John Hinckley Jr., whose obsession with Jodie Foster led him to shoot President Ronald Reagan in 1981 to get her attention; and Valerie Solanas, who got her 15 minutes by shooting Andy Warhol in 1968 after he refused to produce a play she wrote, Up Your Ass.
A key psychiatric term in the field of celebrity-stalking studies is "entitled reciprocity," in which an inflamed narcissism convinces the stalker that he or she deserves the star's attention. "If the stalker thinks he's being rejected, he can feel humiliated and develop anger and hatred toward this star he loves," says J. Reid Meloy, a Southern California–based forensic psychologist who advises Hollywood celebrities' security teams on stalker strategies and edited the book Stalking, Threatening and Attacking Public Figures. "They think, 'I have spent hundreds of hours writing and communicating and sending e-mails and presents to this celebrity; this celebrity figure owes me time, they owe me attention—how dare they ignore me.' Narcissism is the aggressive underbelly of this idealized fantasy," says Meloy, who worked with the Los Angeles County D.A.'s Office to evaluate threats posed to Madonna and Gwyneth Paltrow. The quintessential example of the phenomenon is Robert Bardo, who killed Rebecca Schaeffer, the 21-year-old star of the CBS sitcom My Sister Sam, on her L.A. doorstep in 1989 after stalking her for three years. Before the murder, he had written to his sister: "I have an obsession with the unattainable. I have to eliminate what I cannot attain."
Although Martin's Bieber fixation was known to Staake, its depths may not have been. When Staake was released on parole in October, he went directly to Albuquerque and recruited his 23-year-old nephew, Tanner Ruane, a six-foot, 260-pound bar bouncer, as a wingman. Ruane confirms that Staake asked him to go to Vermont but, from his cell in New Mexico's Doña Ana County jail, claims he knew nothing of a murder plot—saying his uncle told him they were going to Vermont only to get Martin's father's Ferrari and sell it. "He said he had met a rich guy in prison," Ruane says. "He says, 'He gave me a Ferrari, let's go up and get it.' And I'm like, 'Yeah, right. Dude gave you a Ferrari.' He says, 'Look at these pictures.' I'm like, 'That don't mean nothing.' He says, 'Dude, the title is at Grandma's house, go ahead and call her.' So I called Grandma, and he wasn't lying." It's not clear whether Ruane's grandmother (Staake's mother) really did tell him this.
Regardless of the mission, Staake, fresh out of prison and broke, couldn't afford to make the trip. So Ruane sold off his 9mm pistol, his Xbox, and his Sony Bravia flat-screen TV—all for $1,000—and Staake borrowed a 1983 BMW to make their 3,300-mile drive to Vermont.
Martin says he directed Staake and Ruane to kill his hometown nemeses first, then head to New York to carry out Operation Bieber. The singer's tour schedule would bring him to Madison Square Garden for a pair of concerts on November 28 and 29. Martin, knowing Bieber's public location is frequently tweeted about, whether it's shopping at a Best Buy or caffeinating at Starbucks, was confident the singer would be an easy target. "I needed Staake to pull a Jack Ruby," Martin says, "which is basically to just run up to Justin Bieber and shoot his bodyguard, shoot Justin Bieber if necessary, because this whole thing is fluid." Preferably, however, with the bodyguard down, Martin hoped that Staake and Ruane could abduct Bieber in a car and later kill him "and cut off his testicles."

Before he left New Mexico, Staake says, Martin asked him to have a friend draw a picture of Bieber strapped to a chair, wrapped in barbed wire, with a bullet hole in his head. Staake says Martin had told him, "If I was free, here's what I'd want to do—put Bieber in a cage, rape him repeatedly, and put it on YouTube."
By the time Staake and Ruane reached Barre, Vermont, on November 18, the BMW was thick with fast-food wrappers, discarded Marlboro 27 boxes, and a man-stench that would not abate. That evening, they drove up to the address they had for the first victim, Maurice Simoneau, a small apartment building. According to Simoneau, when his father met the pair on the porch, they told him they were from out of state and that a friend had told them Simoneau "would show them around town." Simoneau's father told Staake and Ruane that his son wasn't home. They soon had other troubles. They learned that Staake's 80-year-old stepfather, a grandfather figure to Ruane, had died of cancer in New Mexico. Exhausted from the drive and emotionally drained, they were a sobbing mess when Martin called a short while later. "Tanner was yelling on the phone—he was going crazy," Martin says. "They were both crying. I'm trying to keep them together."
"We were both pretty tore up, pretty worn out," Ruane says. Martin says he instructed them to give up for the night and head 80 miles north to Derby, Vermont, about four miles from the Canadian border, where PL lives. Running low on cash, Ruane says, he and Staake decided to sleep in the car.
After a night in subfreezing temperatures, Ruane woke around 6 a.m., sore, tired, and cold to the bone. He started driving, put the heater on, and pulled onto I-91, heading north. "I was frozen, trying to light my cigarette and defog the window and drive all at the same time," he says. "That's when I missed the exit."
The duo drove straight up to what looked like a toll booth. It was in fact the U.S.-Canada border crossing. When they realized their mistake, Ruane made a U-turn, but it was too late: They were stopped by border agents, who ran a background check and found a warrant for Staake's arrest—he had violated his probation by leaving New Mexico. The border agents handed Staake over to the Vermont State Police and let Ruane go. He was frozen with fear. "I sat there for four hours—I was scared, dude," Ruane says. "I'm 23 years old, never been on this side of the U.S. before without one of my guardians. I had half a tank of gas, maybe 20 dollars, and I was 3,000 miles from home."
He recalled the first thing his uncle had told him on the trip: "Don't make Dana mad."
When Martin called Ruane's cell a short while later and learned of their run-in at the border, he was furious. According to the police, Ruane told Martin over a tapped prison phone line that he didn't want to "move it forward" without his uncle because it was his "deal." Martin agreed, according to the police, realizing this 23-year-old with no criminal experience couldn't do the job alone. "It's gonna end here," Martin told him. Ruane was upset, or pretending to be, telling Martin, "Fuck! Dude, this pisses me off so bad, brother." He told Martin that he and his uncle had the heart to do the job and, authorities say, asked Martin to keep the gig open for them. Still smarting, however, Martin said of his intended victims that they "don't know how fucking lucky they got."
• • • It might have ended there. But Martin couldn't accept the failure of his plan. Even if he didn't kill Justin Bieber, he figured he could still gain global notoriety for his effort—just as Mariah Yeater is infamous for trying to ensnare the singer in a sex scandal, just as Hinckley is infamous for trying to kill Reagan. He decided to explain the plan to authorities and set up Ruane. "I knew my calls were being recorded," Martin says. "Once I know the plan is dead, now I need to tell prison officials about it. I'm talking to one of the witnesses on the telephone, who isn't too bright, and I can get him to start talking about it and I did, because I wanted people to know that Dana Martin is doing this. I knew that by telling, I was going to be guilty of conspiracy. I don't care. But people now know that we were going after Justin Bieber."
Martin asked to speak to his prison caseworker, Sergeant Edgar Pinon, and told him the details of the plot. Pinon notified the New Mexico State Police, and Martin agreed to cooperate—he would talk Ruane through the plot as the authorities listened in. The next morning, Ruane called Martin. With officers from the Corrections Department's Security Threat Intelligence Unit instructing him, Martin told Ruane to pull into the nearest service area, the Pilot truck stop in Rotterdam, New York, and wait for some of Martin's Vermont friends to bring him money to get home. While Ruane idled in the parking lot, Martin talked him through the plot for the benefit of the eavesdropping cops. Ruane was chatty, telling Martin that he and his uncle had bought gardening clippers, "for, like . . . trimming roses," allegedly to perform the castrations. He said the clippers were his idea. He said his uncle was going to "handle the whole putting down of the dogs, and I was going to go snip-snip." He again told Martin how bad he felt that he could not finish the job. When I ask Ruane about the taped calls, he says, "I was just saying what my uncle told me to say." Beyond that, he says, he doesn't remember the specifics of the calls.

In one telling audio snippet released to the media in late February, Ruane appears to be unaware of any plans beyond Vermont. In the recording, Martin says, "Did he go over the Bieber thing with you?" Ruane answers in a laconic, countrified voice, "Nuh-uh, no. Like, the way I work, dude, is I like to know as little as possible." But Ruane goes on to talk about the alleged castration weapons. "We went and we bought some of the, you know, hedge clippers? . . . You're gonna give me five large for each one I get." Martin then instructs Ruane on exactly how he wants the Vermont targets strangled with the paisley tie: "Tie it really, really tight. Tie it in the front once, really tight, put it in a knot that cuts off the oxygen, then you tie it in the back again, really tight, and that just seals the deal."
When I ask Ruane if Martin set him up, he says simply, "I couldn't tell you if he did. You're telling me." Staake is more emphatic. He maintains that he and his nephew traveled to Vermont to pick up the Ferrari and some drugs from Martin's Chinese-gangster connection. "I knew he was an evil person," Staake says of his prison associate. "But it was just one of those things. It was an opportunity for me to come up on some money and get on my feet when I got out of prison. I didn't go up there for any other reason." He thinks Martin fabricated the hit plot "because he started to worry about me getting ready to rip him off."
At 2:30 P.M., a team of New York state troopers swarmed the truck stop and arrested Ruane. Inside the BMW, police found Fiskars gardening clippers, photos and addresses of both Vermont targets, the Hip Sing gang letter, and a hand-drawn map of Lottery Hill Farm.
Martin claims he still has assassins—his Chinese-gangster pals—looking to kill Bieber. "It's still on," he says. It seems less likely—but not impossible—that hit men could reach Bieber now. While the singer typically had one visible bodyguard before the plot, he is now generally seen escorted by two or three. "There may be any number of people who appear to be fans but are actually planted among the fans," says Meloy, the stalker expert. "They'll be looking for nonverbal stuff that telegraphs a problem—someone with a sullen look or a very flat expression, just staring at the celebrity."
Even now, Martin says he's willing to rescind his fatwa against Bieber if the singer or even Braun, Bieber's manager, would agree to meet him. "I've written to the district attorney saying that I'll plead guilty, I'll even testify against my two partners—I just want to have a sit-down with Justin Bieber," he says. "And they just won't do it. To them that's just bizarre."
Prosecutors have refused to comment on the case. But on January 3, a grand jury in Las Cruces indicted all three men on two counts each of first-degree conspiracy to commit murder and solicitation to commit murder—for the planned Vermont hits, but not for Bieber. The district attorney's office says it considers the investigation still open.
Despite telling me that he has hit men looking to kill Bieber, or maybe because of it, Martin wonders aloud if Bieber will immortalize him in song. "That's not likely, is it?" he says. "Because this isn't going away. Do you really think that I would stop? Honestly? I tell people I'm not going to stop. And I'm not gonna stop. So if you're Justin Bieber, wouldn't you want to, like, do something to make this go away? . . . Until something bad actually happens to him, they are going to treat it as 'Oh, Martin's just crazy, he doesn't have nobody.' I was kinda hoping that, with what I did, it would show them."
• • •

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