Sharpton vows to ‘close this city’ after officer acquittals – My Man!!

NEW YORK (AP) — Hundreds of angry people marched through Harlem on Saturday after the Rev. Al Sharpton promised to “close this city down” to protest the acquittals of three police detectives in the 50-shot barrage that killed a groom on his wedding day and wounded two friends.

“We strategically know how to stop the city so people stand still and realize that you do not have the right to shoot down unarmed, innocent civilians,” Sharpton told an overflow crowd of several hundred people at his National Action Network office in the historically black Manhattan neighborhood. “This city is going to deal with the blood of Sean Bell.”

Sharpton was joined by the family of 23-year-old Sean Bell — a black man — and a friend of Bell who was wounded in the 2006 shooting outside a Queens strip club. Two of the three officers charged were also black.

The rally at Sharpton’s office was followed by a 20-block march down Malcolm X Boulevard and then across 125th Street, Harlem’s main business thoroughfare, where some bystanders yelled out “Kill the police!”

Fifty of the marchers carried white placards bearing big black numbers for each of the police bullets fired at Bell and his friends.

Sharpton urged people to return for a meeting this coming week “to plan the day that we will close this city down” with the kind of “massive civil disobedience” once led by Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

“They never accused Sean Bell of doing anything. Then why is he dead?” Sharpton asked, his voice roaring with anger. Authorities “have shown now that they will not hold police accountable. Well, guess what? If you won’t, we will!”

“Shut it down! Shut it down!” the crowd chanted, standing up and applauding wildly.

Sharpton didn’t say exactly how they would protest the acquittals of the officers who fired the 50 shots. He said Bell’s supporters could demonstrate all over the city, from Wall Street to the home of Justice Arthur Cooperman, who on Friday acquitted the three detectives after a nonjury trial.

Sitting behind Sharpton as he spoke were Bell’s parents, his sister and Nicole Paultre Bell, who took her fiance’s name after his death.

“The justice system let me down,” Paultre Bell told the crowd in a soft voice. “April 25, 2008: They killed Sean all over again. That’s what it felt like to us.”

It was her first public comment since she stormed out of a courtroom Friday after the NYPD detectives were cleared in Bell’s killing as he left his bachelor party.

One of Bell’s companions, Joseph Guzman, also spoke briefly on Saturday, saying: “We’ve got a long fight.”

Syria – Who, us? Nuclear weapons? Liar,liar… Pants on Fire!

WASHINGTON (AP) — Syria’s ambassador to the United States said Friday that the CIA fabricated pictures allegedly taken inside a secret Syrian nuclear reactor and predicted that in the coming weeks the U.S. story about the site would “implode from within.”

“The photos presented to me yesterday were ludicrous, laughable,” Ambassador Imad Moustapha told reporters at his Washington residence.

However, he refused to say what the building in the remote eastern desert of Syria was used for before Israeli jets bombed it in September 2007.

Senior U.S. intelligence officials said Thursday they believe it was a secret nuclear reactor meant to produce plutonium, which can be used to make high-yield nuclear weapons. They alleged that North Korea aided in the design, construction and outfitting of the building.

Syria bulldozed the building’s ruins a month after it was bombed and constructed a new, larger building in its place, leaving little or no evidence of what had been on the site.

Moustapha would not explain the purpose of the new building. But he said the lack of military checkpoints, air defenses or barbed wire fences around either building should show that it was not a sensitive facility.

So far, Syria has not allowed the International Atomic Energy Agency to inspect the area.

Syria’s ambassador to the United Nations, Bashar Ja’afari, pledged on Friday to cooperate with the IAEA and suggested that “the main target of the American CIA allegations against Syria is to justify the Israeli attack against the Syrian side.”

In a message to employees, CIA Director Michael Hayden praised the agency’s “outstanding” work, calling it “a case study in rigorous analytic tradecraft, skillful human and technical collection.”

But some outside nuclear experts were questioning some of the CIA’s analysis, though not disputing its conclusions.

David Albright, president of the nonprofit Institute for Science and International Security, analyzed commercial satellite imagery of the bombed facility last fall and surmised then it was a nuclear reactor. He questioned the intelligence agencies’ conclusion that the reactor was within months or weeks of completion.

“It’s not clear-cut it was ready to turn on,” Albright said.

He also took issue with the Bush administration’s assertion that the reactor was solely intended to support a nuclear weapons program. Officials said Thursday the reactor was ill-suited for electrical generation — it lacked distribution wires or substations — and did not bear the hallmarks of a research reactor. They concluded the plutonium was therefore meant for weapons but acknowledged they had no direct evidence of that.

Almost all reactors produce plutonium, even those dedicated to peaceful purposes, Albright said.

“Civilian uses are possible and cannot be dismissed out of hand,” he said. “I think the CIA and the White House have not shown that the only possibility for this reactor is that it was to make plutonium for nuclear weapons.”

“It very well could be true,” he said, “but it is far less than ironclad, absent other information.”

According to the CIA, the Syrian reactor was modeled on a small North Korean reactor built at Yongbyon. That facility produced a small amount of plutonium for nuclear weapons. Albright said that facility was also a research effort to determine if the North Koreans could scale up the model to produce electricity efficiently.

Siegfried Hecker, the co-director for Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation, said the evidence strongly suggests Syria’s intention was to produce plutonium. He agreed with the assessment that the plant was not well-suited for generating electricity.

“On the other hand, it was the best path to bomb-grade plutonium,” he said. “That was most likely the primary purpose of this facility.”

One piece of evidence that casts doubt on Syrian intentions to produce plutonium for weapons was the absence of a reprocessing facility, necessary to extract plutonium from spent nuclear fuel.

But Anthony Cordesman, a military expert with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said that may not have been a serious impediment. Syria could quickly build such a reprocessing capability, he said.

Cordesman also said the CIA undercut its case against Syria by not explaining how a plutonium-producing reactor would fit into Syria’s “long history” of suspicious activities that suggest it is trying to develop nuclear, chemical and biological weapons.

Bill Moyers on Jerimia Wright

By far and away the best documentary I have seen about this “infamous” man.

No surprise.

It’s Bill Moyers, after all.

Anyone interested can go to the site and watch it or read the whole transcript.

HIGHLY recommended!

Bill Moyers on Wright