Tag: Prisoners

US Version Of ‘Devil’s Island’

We have a new ‘detention’ center about to open in Florida it is being called ‘Alligator Alcatraz’…..

President Donald Trump will visit a new immigration detention center in the Florida Everglades on Tuesday for what’s expected to be the site’s official opening, showcasing what critics are condemning as an inhumane makeshift prison camp and what supporters are embracing as a national model for aggressively ramping up detention and deportation efforts.

Florida officials have raced to erect the compound of heavy-duty tents, trailers and temporary buildings in a matter of days, as part of the state’s muscular efforts to help carry out Trump’s immigration crackdown.

Dubbed “Alligator Alcatraz” by state officials, the facility is located at an isolated airfield about 45 miles (72 kilometers) west of downtown Miami and is surrounded by swamps filled with mosquitoes, pythons and alligators.

To Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis and other state officials, locating the facility in the rugged and remote Florida Everglades is meant as a deterrent, and naming it after the notorious federal prison, an island fortress known for its brutal conditions, is meant to send a message. It’s another sign of how the Trump administration and its allies are relying on scare tactics to try to persuade people in the country illegally to leave voluntarily.

It is sounding like the US version of France’s Devil’s Island…..a prison in the middle of a jungle surrounded by disease and dangerous wildlife.

Donny’s press secretary summed it up like this….

“The facility is in the heart of the Everglades and will be informally known as ‘Alligator Alcatraz.’ There is only one road leading in, and there is the only way out is a one-way flight,” Leavitt told reporters on Monday.

“It is isolated and surrounded by dangerous wildlife in unforgiving terrain, the facility will have up to 5,000 beds to house, process and deport criminal illegal aliens. This is an efficient and low-cost way to help carry out the largest mass deportation campaign in American history,” she added.

Leavitt was later asked whether the “dangerous wildlife” is a “design feature” of the facility.

“When you have illegal murderers and rapists and heinous criminals in a detention facility surrounded by alligators, yes, I do think that’s a deterrent for them to try to escape,” she said.

The problem that load of manure is not everyone sent there will a murderer or a rapist….some will be family members that have been ripped away from their loved ones.

  • The compound at Dade-Collier Training and Transition Airport in the Everglades, around 50 miles west of Miami, consists of tents, trailers and temporary buildings, the AP reports. “You don’t always have land so beautiful and so secure,” Trump said. “You have a lot of bodyguards and a lot of cops that are in the form of alligators. You don’t have to pay them so much.” He joked about teaching detainees to run in a zigzag manner to improve their chances by “about 1%” if they escape and have to run away from an alligator.
  • Critics of the project include Bacardi Jackson, executive director of the ACLU of Florida, the Miami Herald reports. In a statement Tuesday, Jackson said the branding of the facility “reflects an intent to portray people fleeing hardship and trying to build a better life for themselves and their families as threats, which is both unnecessary and abusive.”
  • The area is home to endangered species. Elise Pautler Bennett, an attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity, described it as the “most sensitive” place in the state, the BBC reports. “Any other project that would have been proposed in the Everglades would have gone through an intense environmental approval process,” she said. “I’m convinced this one didn’t get that because it’s a political stunt.”

To me this is cruel and usual punishment and I find it sad that many Americans support this cruelty.

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

Three For One

That is the deal made with Russia….we get 3 prisoners they get one…..sounds like a one sided deal but consider there was actually about 20+ prisoners involved with this trade…..

The deal that resulted in the biggest and most complex prisoner swap since the end of the Cold War took more than a year of secret negotiations, reports Reuters. The most well-known names involved are Americans Evan Gershkovich and Paul Whelan, but 22 other prisoners also were in the mix, and at least six nations were involved in the swap. Coverage:

  • 3 US citizens: Russia released 16 people from custody, while US-led Western nations freed eight prisoners. A total of three American citizens were released: Gershkovich, 32, a reporter for the Wall Street Journal who was held more than a year; Whelan, 54, a former US Marine held since 2018; and Alsu Kurmasheva, 47, a Russian-American editor for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty who was arrested last year, per the New York Times. All three were expected to arrive at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland later Thursday.
  • Linchpin: The big name freed on the Russian side is Vadim Krasikov, described by the Wall Street Journal as the “linchpin” to the entire deal. Krasikov, seen as a Russian assassin, had been serving a life sentence in Germany after murdering a former Chechen rebel there in 2019.
  • Pulitzer winner, others: Others freed include Vladimir Kara-Murza, a Pulitzer-Prize winning columnist and prominent critic of Vladimir Putin. He is a contributor to the Washington Post, which has a running list of bios of all those released.
  • Biden: “Their brutal ordeal is over, and they’re free,” President Biden said in remarks Thursday afternoon. He called the deal to secure the prisoners’ freedom a “feat of diplomacy,” adding: “Multiple countries helped get this done. … I personally thank them all again.” The Journal reports that Biden made a pivotal call to the prime minister of Slovenia on July 21, only about an hour before he informed the nation he would not seek reelection. Slovenia released two Russian prisoners key to the swap.
  • In Ankara: The actual exchange took place in Ankara, Turkey, where planes with prisoners from the US, Germany, Poland, Slovenia, Norway, and Russia converged, per the Times.
  • Two big names: Gershkovich, a Wall Street Journal reporter, had been detained more than a year, and Whelan, a former US Marine, had been held since 2018. Both were convicted of espionage charges that the US says are bogus.
  • Prison movement: Reuters reports that Whelan and Russian-British dissident Vladimir Kara-Murza had disappeared from view in recent days, and at least seven Russian dissidents had been moved from their prisons. The outlet says the swap involved prisoners held by Russia and Belarus on one side, and prisoners held by the US and Germany, and perhaps other nations, on the other. The AP estimates about two dozen people were involved.
  • Russia’s side: The New York Times reports that among the pro-Putin prisoners freed is Vadim Krasikov, a convicted assassin. Journalist Christo Grozev, who the Daily Beast reports was involved in negotiations, calls the deal “bittersweet” because it shows that as long as Putin “hoards ‘swap capital’ he will always be able to get his killers, hackers, and spies back.”
  • Dissidents: The Washington Post lists Russian dissidents Kara-Murza, Ilya Yashin, Lilia Chanysheva, Ksenia Fadeeva, Oleg Orlov, and artist Alexandra Skochilenko as among those who’d been moved from their prisons.

Will this make it into some movie in the future…..we seem to glorify these sort of things….

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

 

Closing Thought–18Jan24

This is a horrifying report out of the state of Alabama…..

The bodies of two men who died while incarcerated in Alabama’s prison system were missing their hearts or other organs when returned to their families, a federal lawsuit alleges. The family of Brandon Clay Dotson, who died in a state prison in November, filed a federal lawsuit last month against the Alabama Department of Corrections and others, saying his body was decomposing and his heart was missing when his remains were returned to his family, the AP reports. In a court filing in the case last week, the daughter of Charles Edward Singleton, another deceased inmate, said her father’s body was missing all of his internal organs when it was returned in 2021.

Lauren Faraino, an attorney representing Dotson’s family, said Wednesday that the experience of multiple families shows this is “absolutely part of a pattern.” Dotson, 43, was found dead on Nov. 16 at Ventress Correctional Facility. His family, suspecting foul play was involved in his death, hired a pathologist to do a second autopsy and discovered his heart was missing, according to the lawsuit. His family filed a lawsuit seeking to find out why his heart was removed and to have it returned to them.

“Defendants’ outrageous and inexcusable mishandling of the deceased’s body amounts to a reprehensible violation of human dignity and common decency,” the lawsuit states, adding that “their appalling misconduct is nothing short of grave robbery and mutilation.” Dotson’s family, while seeking information about what happened to his heart, discovered that other families had similar experiences, Faraino said. The situation involving Singleton’s body is mentioned in court documents filed by Dotson’s family last week. In the documents, the inmate’s daughter Charlene Drake writes that a funeral home told her that her father’s body was brought to it “with no internal organs” after his death while incarcerated in 2021.

Is the state harvesting human organs for profit?  Or is it that some ghoul in the prison system is getting rich desecrating bodies for profit?

This is just sick and more attention should be paid by everyone.

Any thoughts?

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

Jail, The Killing Fields

The election is over and time to return to looking and posting on society and the problems that need attention.

We have been bombarded with the tragic deaths of people that are being taken into custody by the people……the protests are justified….the violence, in my opinion, is justified by the protesters for those sent to “control” protests are showing NO mercy to the people or their rights.

However there is a part of this story that goes virtually under reported…..deaths will accused are in jail awaiting trial……nearly 5000 deaths in a decade of accused dying in jail for various reasons….

7,571 inmate deaths Reuters documented in an unprecedented examination of mortality in more than 500 U.S. jails from 2008 to 2019. Death rates have soared in those lockups, rising 35% over the decade ending last year. Casualties like Hill are typical: held on minor charges and dying without ever getting their day in court. At least two-thirds of the dead inmates identified by Reuters, 4,998 people, were never convicted of the charges on which they were being held.

Unlike state and federal prisons, which hold people convicted of serious crimes, jails are locally run lockups meant to detain people awaiting arraignment or trial, or those serving short sentences. The toll of jail inmates who die without a case resolution subverts a fundamental tenet of the U.S. criminal justice system: innocent until proven guilty.

…

The Reuters analysis revealed a confluence of factors that can turn short jail stays into death sentences. Many jails are not subject to any enforceable standards for their operation or the healthcare they provide. They typically get little if any oversight. And bail requirements trap poorer inmates in pre-trial detention for long periods. Meanwhile, inmate populations have grown sicker, more damaged by mental illness and plagued by addictions.

https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-jails-deaths/

This is unacceptable….but do I need quote the Constitution? 

Damn silly question!

Of course I do!

The U.S. Constitution grants inmates core rights, but those provisions are hard to enforce. The Fourteenth Amendment guarantees fair treatment to pre-trial detainees, but “fair” is open to interpretation by judges and juries. The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel punishment forbids “deliberate indifference to serious medical needs of prisoners,” but proving deliberate negligence is difficult. The Sixth Amendment assures speedy trials, but does not define speedy.

Don’t trust me…then I suggest you look it the fuck up!

Here is one proposal…..

End pretrial detention for most defendants

Problem: Many people who face criminal charges are unnecessarily detained before trial. Often the sole criteria for release is access to money for bail. This puts pressure on defendants to accept plea bargains, even when they are innocent, since even a few days in jail can destabilize their lives: they can lose their apartment, job, and even custody of children. Pretrial detention also leads to jail overcrowding, which means more dangerous conditions for people in jail, and also drives sheriffs’ demands for more and bigger jails — wasting taxpayer dollars on more unnecessary incarceration.

Solutions: States are addressing this problem with a variety of approaches, including bail reforms that end or severely restrict the use of money bail, establishing the presumption of pretrial release for all cases with conditions only when necessary, and offering pretrial services such as postcard or phone reminders to appear in court, transportation and childcare assistance for court appearances, and referrals to drug treatment, mental health services, and other needed social services.

Any thoughts?

Learn Stuff!

I Read I Write You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

Terrorists: Will They Go Or Will They Stay?

The evacuation of Kurds and US troops from Northern Syria left “many many” (a Trumpian term) ISIS prisoners in limbo…will they stay of will they go?

SecState has demanded that countries take their terrorist back,,,,,,

European and other members of the international coalition fighting the Islamic State group must take back and prosecute their nationals detained in Iraq and Syria to help keep IS from regaining territory, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Thursday. Pompeo told foreign ministers and senior officials from some 30 coalition members that it’s imperative that they hold thousands of detained foreign fighters accountable for atrocities committed while the Islamic State held swaths of territory in the two countries. Many of the detained foreign fighters are from Europe, the AP reports, but countries have been reluctant to take them back and officials acknowledged there are still differences of opinion among coalition partners about how best to deal with them.

The meeting came amid concerns about the US commitment to the fight against IS remnants. Those concerns have increased as President Trump has pressed to withdraw American troops from Syria. It was also the first meeting at such a senior level since IS was driven from the last of its major strongholds in March and the first since the group’s leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, killed himself during a US raid last month. Pompeo said bringing the foreign fighters to justice in their home countries is critical to preventing IS from resurrecting its caliphate and exporting its ideology. “That work begins with carrying out justice against those who deserve it,” he said. Recent court rulings in Europe have required the governments to repatriate their nationals, per the Washington Post. The governments “are fighting a losing battle,” one lawyer involved in the cases said.

I found a wrinkle in Pompeo’s demands/ultimatum…….it begins in Alabama……

A woman who moved from Alabama to Syria, pledged allegiance to ISIS, and burned her American passport will not be getting a new one. A federal judge ruled Thursday that 25-year-old Hoda Muthana, who is currently in a refugee camp in Syria with her 2-year-old son, is not an American citizen, the Wall Street Journal reports. Judge Reggie Walton of the US District Court for the District of Columbia ruled in the support of the State Department’s decision that Muthana should never have been granted US citizenship, despite having been born in New Jersey, because her father was in the US as a Yemeni diplomat when she was born. Her passport was revoked by the Obama administration in 2016.

Muthana, who grew up in Alabama, was detained by Kurdish forces in Syria earlier this year. She says she was “brainwashed” by ISIS members she encountered online, reports the AFP. After she moved to Syria, she married three different foreign fighters, all of whom were killed in combat, and urged the group’s supporters worldwide to carry out terrorist acts against non-Muslims. Her lawyers say they plan to look at further options. Muthana says she regrets “every single thing” and is willing to face prosecution if she is allowed to return to the US with her son. “Anyone that believes in God believes that everyone deserves a second chance, no matter how harmful their sins were,” she told NBC in a recent interview.

Will the US let her return to her country of origin?  Will they disobey a edit issued by SecState Pompeo?

Just a thought?

More information on these people……https://www.crisisgroup.org/middle-east-north-africa/eastern-mediterranean/syria/208-women-and-children-first-repatriating-westerners-affiliated-isis

I Read, I Wrote, You Know

“Lego Ergo Scribo”

American Citizen In Detention

Closing Thought–04Mar19

Our president is always going on and on about the “hostages” he has helped release from countries like North Korea…..and yet an American citizen is being held in Saudi Arabia and he is silent and prefers to deal with it with inaction……


A US citizen has been detained and tortured in Saudi Arabia and may be on his last leg, sources tell the New York Times. Walid Fitaihi was apparently held against his will in November 2017 at the Ritz Carlton in Riyadh, where guards blindfolded, stripped, slapped, and bound him, then shocked him with electricity for about an hour. A friend says the Harvard-trained doctor was whipped so badly he couldn’t sleep on his wounded back for days. “It is believed that Dr. Fitaihi has been and is tortured at least psychologically during his imprisonment,” his attorney Howard Cooper wrote the State Department in January, per CNN. Cooper described his client as “physically deteriorated” and “emotionally broken.” Now American friends of Fitaihi, 54, are pressing Washington to address his case and criticizing President Trump’s inaction.


And Fitaihi isn’t alone: The dual American-Saudi citizen is one of hundreds of eminent Saudis detained, and at times apparently tortured, in a 2017 crackdown led by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Fitaihi’s friend says he was likely tortured for information about Adel Fakeih, a relative by marriage and an ex-senior aide to the crown prince. Al Jazeera notes that Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, himself a murder victim of Saudi agents, tweeted about Fitaihi in 2018: “What has happened to us?” he wrote in Arabic. “How can someone like Dr. Walid Fitaihi be arrested and what are the justifications for it?” Meanwhile, Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner met with the crown prince this week, but it seems Fitaihi’s imprisonment wasn’t discussed. Trump says he has successfully extricated 20 US citizens held abroad.

Once again we can see how this president puts personal gain over the lives of his fellow countrymen……

Another American Captured

Another American has made the news…but this one is not an accused spy…..this is one is a terrorist…..this one is allied with ISIS (you remember them right?)……

Warren Christopher Clark, American, 34, has made news….he will get his few fleeting moments in the spotlight….

This person has been captured with other ISIS fighters in Syria…..

At least one American—a former substitute teacher from Texas—has been captured with ISIS in Syria, say Kurdish forces. The Kurds say they captured a second American as well, but the citizenship of that man is much iffier, reports the New York Times. In a news release, the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces say they caught Warren Christopher Clark, 34, with ISIS fighters in northeast Syria. Clark graduated from the University of Houston and worked as a substitute teacher of English as a Second Language in Fort Bend before taking similar jobs in Saudi Arabia and Turkey, reports the Houston Chronicle. Clark has been in the news before, when investigators at George Washington University turned up a resume and cover letter he once sent to ISIS looking for a job.

“Dear Director, I am looking to get a position teaching English to students in the Islamic State,” Clark wrote in the letter, which was found inside an Iraqi house. “I believe that a successful teacher can understand a student’s strengths and weaknesses and is able to use that understanding to help students build on their understanding of the English language.” NBC News reported last year that Clark had converted to Islam around 2004 and become radicalized online. The Kurdish military group says it also captured an American named Zaid Abed al-Hamid, but it wasn’t clear whether Hamid was actually a US citizen. The US military has not confirmed the capture of either man yet, reports Stars and Stripes. If confirmed, they would be the fifth and sixth Americans captured on the battlefield in Iraq and Syria, per the Times.

Will the CIA do its “thing” to wrangle intel out of this guy?

This dude is so screwed!  As he should be!  Can you say which way to the nearest “black site”?

Closing Thought–13Dec18

On this day in 1945 the Hyena of Auschwitz was executed…..one Irma…….

https://www.historyandheadlines.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/December-13-1945-The-Hyena-of-Auschwitz-aka-The-Beautiful-Beast-is-Executed.jpg

On December 13, 1945, Irma Ida Ilse Grese, age 22, was executed in accordance with her sentence of death for the crime of committing War Crimes  (Crimes Against Humanity) for her service as a concentration camp guard at Ravensbruck and Auschwitz Nazi death camps during World War II.

The apparently attractive young lady thus became the youngest female executed by British authorities during the 20th Century.

Irma was born in 1923 to a dairy working family in Germany, but her mother committed suicide by drinking acid in 1936, after finding out her husband was having an affair. Irma’s father remarried and probably joined the Nazi Party. A somewhat troubled girl, Irma quit school at age 14 and was deeply involved (obsessed) with a Nazi program for girls called the League of German Girls. She attempted to become an apprentice nurse, but could only find work at an SS sanatorium. Irma also found work as a dairy helper, but took the opportunity of getting a job as a concentration camp guard at Ravensbruck in 1942. Apparently enthusiastic about her job, she quickly rose to the second highest rank a female guard could hold and transferred to Auschwitz in 1943 where she was involved in selecting which inmates would go to the gas chambers.

Camp inmates learned to hate and fear Irma, who dressed as stylishly as possible and took great pains to prepare her makeup and feminine appearance. Irma was known to deviate from picking the sickest inmates for death, and instead choosing any female that retained a semblance of her beauty. Irma was accused at trial of taking sadistic pleasure in the beatings and general savaging of prisoners, including torture and attacking prisoners with guard dogs. Witnesses testified that Irma often wore heavy boots and carried a whip and pistol, randomly shooting prisoners as she saw fit.

Irma was subjected to a 53 day trial conducted under British jurisdiction, and was one of only 3 female concentration camp guards executed, despite many others being accused of similar crimes.  At her trial Irma claimed she was sent to camp duty against her will.  Along with the 3 females sentenced to death, 8 male guards from Auschwitz were also sentenced to death and executed.  Of all these, only Irma remained defiant of her captors.  Her last word before being hanged was “schnell!” meaning “hurry up.”

Another sordid side story to Irma Grese is that she apparently was quite popular with the SS officers and guards (males), and had relations with some of them, reputedly even Dr. Josef Mengele, the notorious sadistic camp doctor.  Irma reportedly forced an inmate doctor to abort Irma’s baby by one of these Nazis, and Irma planned on a career as a movie actress after the war.  In a bizarre twist on her wish to be in movies, Irma was the inspiration for the title character Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS, a 1975 Canadian film.

(Warning:  This trailer can be disturbing on many levels…..)

https://youtu.be/f1K49rYSx4k

Your history lesson is done and I am off to see the doctors…have a day and see you tomorrow……chuq

Peace Out!

The POW Experience

AS a wonk on history and foreign policy especially on conflicts around the world….my granddaughter came to me and ask if there were any WW2 POWs in the US….if not where were they held.

She had watched the Hitler Channel with her father and saw all the German troops that had surrendered at Tunisia in 1943….her brain wanted to know where all these people were held since the war was still raging around Europe and other locations.

I told her that many were sent to the US and that there were even some held here in Mississippi…..okay she wanted to know where….so I did what I always do…I dropped some history on her….

Just about 60 miles up Highway 49 is Camp Shelby, today it is a training site for the Reserves and the Seabees but during WW2 it was a POW camp…..it held prisoners from the Africa Corps…….

World War II was truly a world war. All of the major countries and a large number of small nations were drawn into the fight. Even countries that tried to remain neutral found themselves in the conflict either by conquest or by being in the path of the campaigns of the major powers. For example, in 1940, more than a year before the United States entered the war, the major powers — Britain, Italy, and Germany — fought important battles in Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya in North Africa.

Not until November 1942, almost a year after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, did American forces enter the fight in North Africa. U.S. forces made amphibious landings at the North African cities of Casablanca, Oran, and Algiers. German and Italian forces in Libya were then caught in a vise — Americans advanced from the west along the North African coast to Tunisia while British troops advanced from the east out of Egypt. The Germans and Italians had to defend on two fronts — the British front on the east and the American front on the west. (See the maps on the left.)

http://www.mshistorynow.mdah.ms.gov/articles/233/german-prisoners-of-war-in-mississippi-1943-1946

After we talked about this situation I got to thinking…where else in the US were German POWs held?

So I went into full research mode and came up with a simple answer….

Internment camps themselves were a new concept for the U.S. government. Sure, there had been forcible relocations of Native Americans for centuries prior to World War II, but none of those horrific crimes involved strategically removing American citizens and their families from one area of the country to another until a war ended (when the removed citizens would then – in theory – be allowed to return home). The Roosevelt administration eventually created three types of camps for prisoners: temporary camps, internment camps, and detention centers. The detention centers, run by the Department of Justice, housed the most suspicious prisoners, and it is the detention centers that deserve the most focus. So, without further ado, here are the ten harshest WWII prison camps in the U.S.:

https://www.realclearhistory.com/articles/2018/07/20/ten_world_war_ii_prison_camps_in_america.html

The old professor hopes that this answered any question that my reader has about this subject……

I love it when my granddaughter visits!

What Goes Around, Comes Around

The most recent terrorists attacks have brought up all the rhetoric again….and we have even returned to the debate about torture……since the loudest proponent of this is the GOP front runner, Trump…..the rhetoric is even louder than normal….

It seems that thanx to the election rhetoric most Americans think the torturing of another human being is acceptable…….

Donald Trump made some waves in early March when he made pro-torture statements at a GOP debate (he walked that back somewhat the next day). But he likely wouldn’t have offended a good number of Americans, according to a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll. Per the poll of nearly 2,000 US adults (18 and over) between March 22 and March 28, almost two-thirds of respondents are OK with the US using torture methods to get info from terror suspects, Reuters reports. About one-quarter of those asked agreed torture is “often” justified “against suspected terrorists to obtain information about terrorism,” with another 38% saying it was “sometimes” justified; just 15% said it should never be employed.

And 64% of US citizens feel like a terror attack within the next six months is “very likely” or “somewhat likely,” the Hill notes. There’s a disparity, too, between political parties, with 82% of Republicans noting torturous methods are “often” or “sometimes” justified, while only 53% of Democrats feel this way. Trump himself may be exacerbating Americans’ fears due to recent attacks overseas (e.g., France, Belgium) and at home (San Bernardino); he’s said that techniques like waterboarding should be on the table, despite outcry from human rights groups, and that he’ll “bring back a hell of a lot worse” methods if he assumes the White House. “The public right now is coping with a host of negative emotions,” says a Vanderbilt University professor. “Fear, anger, general anxiety: [Trump] gives a certain credibility to these feelings.”

I am opposed to torture…..PERIOD!

But for the sake of this post I have one more thing yo say…….”Try it then we can talk”!

Torture is like war….those that are the strongest defenders are the ones that have tasted neither.

My opinion is that if you have not experienced a thing then there is NO way one can make a rational conclusion.

But this poll was taken after the latest attack in Brussels……so emotional responses kicked in.

A recent study by the U of Maryland found that the chances of an attack here in the US is low……

“In global terms, this is a relatively low level of activity,” according to the study, first reported by The Washington Times .

“North America is the least-likely region to be involved in a terrorist attack, though this is not the general impression among many of its residents,” says Steve Killelea with the Institute for Economics and Peace, which published the study using statistics and analysis from the University of Maryland’s National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism .

Source: Study: U.S. at ‘Low’ Risk of Terror Attack – US News

This is a significant study but as usual the media did not report on this because it would not feed the fear that they want to perpetrate….without information Americans have kneejerk responses…..and kneejerk responses lead to disastrous decisions.