ACORN Nut Sues The Whistleblowers

Adrian MacNair — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 19:30:35 +0000

Katherine Conway-Russell, ACORN Director in Philadelphia [Capture from Giles/O'Keefe video]

Imagine if two police officers went undercover in order to infiltrate a ruthless Hispanic gang responsible for smuggling child sex slaves into the country. Now imagine that these police officers not only got evidence of conspiracy to commit said smuggling of child sex slavery, but they got it on tape for the world to see. In a major crime bust, the police swoop in and drag the entire gang into lockup as the media lauds the crackdown of the sex slave ring. The police are commended and awarded with merit and toasted by law enforcement.

Now imagine that these child sex slave trafficking lowlifes, after lengthy consultations with their blood-sucking predatory lawyers, descend on these honorable officers and sue them for defamation of character and the dissemination of illegally obtained recordings in a manner calculated to harm and injure. Sound impossible? Unrealistic? A bad episode of Law and Order?

Not so. That is almost exactly what is happening to Hannah Giles and James O’Keefe III, the two independent filmmakers who were behind the incredible whistleblowing series of videos that exposed ACORN for the corrupt and fraudulent entity it is. The videos were so devastating that Congress moved on the “Defund ACORN Act”, and the California Chapter officially split from their scandal-plagued national brothers.

But the filmmakers are now facing a lawsuit in federal court in Philadelphia by an ACORN employee featured in one of the films. In the film in question, Giles poses as a prostitute seeking to traffic in underage prostitutes from El Salvador, while O’Keefe acts as her pimp, who is running for Congress and wishes to launder the profits from the prostitution into his campaign for election.

The plaintiff, Katherine Conway-Russell, who appears in the first video in the Philadelphia office, claims that Giles and O’Keefe,

“purportedly sought information regarding housing and mortgage opportunities in Philadelphia, but were in reality imposters who deliberately and surreptitiously created video and audio recordings in an attempt to discredit plaintiff Conway-Russell and ACORN Housing Corporation,” and that they subsequently “disseminated the illegally obtained recordings in a manner calculated to harm and injure” Katherine Conway-Russell.

“Discredit” the plaintiff? Anybody who watches the videos by the pair know that ACORN and their agents managed to do that entirely themselves. Any reasonable person confronted by a prostitute and a pimp asking for information on the correct way to launder child sex slave money into the United States would have, at the very least, told them that they could not aid and abet criminal activity. But far from doing so, the videos revealed that there is a systemic and, indeed, an ideological will in ACORN, to defy and manipulate those laws which prohibit such activities.

The plaintiff also alleges that the actions of the pair was illegal, based on a Pennsylvania statute which makes it a third degree felony to record any conversation with a person who is not aware and consenting to the recording. Ms.Conway-Russell will use the “Wiretapping and Electronic Surveillance Control Act” to claim damages for the violation, including punitive damages and the costs of the related litigation.

If it sounds unjust, it’s because it is. The idea that this publicly-funded criminal enterprise that poses as an organization that advocates for low-income families, would try to use the evidence that revealed said enterprise as being one that advocates instead for the trafficking of child sex slaves, in order to sue the people who exposed them, isn’t just morally reprehensible, but the most disgusting manipulation of laws that were never intended to shield criminals.

This is the second such ridiculous lawsuit, with the first being one filed in September 2009 by ACORN itself against the filmmakers and Andrew Breitbart. His website BigGovernment.com has been an important portal in exposing ACORN’s widespread fraud and abuse.

Where Are The Stories On What Pakistanis Actually Think About Drone Attacks?

Adrian MacNair — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 19:00:06 +0000

The New York Times ran a short piece yesterday via Reuters news service which indicated that U.S. drone attacks in Afpak [Afghanistan and the Pakistani border] are “undermining efforts to deal with militancy.” A drone aircraft was reported to have killed 3 militants in a car traveling in Pakistan’s North Waziristan region. It also mentions that on Thursday another drone attack successfully killed two other militants in the same region.

What is frustrating for many people following the situation in Afpak, is that despite the success of using unmanned aerial drones to locate and eradicate militants, the mainstream media tends to give off the impression that the tactic is a controversial one because of alleged civilian deaths. The end of the Times article states that the U.S. killed 415 people with drones in 2009, many of whom were foreign militants, but that Pakistan is concerned the civilian casualties could inflame public anger and bolster support for the militants and terrorism. Really? Let’s analyze that, shall we?

Do you think that it inflamed public anger against the U.S. and bolstered support for terrorism after militants murdered 75 innocent people in Lakki Marwat yesterday? How many hearts and minds did the militants win when they killed 44 Shiites at a procession in the southern city of Karachi on December 28? Or the suicide bombing that killed 33 in Punjab’s Dera Ghazi Khan on December 15? The 48 killed in a market in Lahore and the 10 in Peshawar on December 7? The 35 killed in a mosque in Rawalpindi on December 4?

We haven’t even gone back a month yet, and the death toll for “major” bombings is 245. How many of those were Muslims killed by their fellow Muslims?

And what do the people living in Afghanistan and Pakistan actually think about NATO and U.S. forces and drone strikes on militants? You wouldn’t know it from reading any mainstream media in North America, but the people are quite happy about our presence. Do you think the mainstream media would be responsible enough to report this Pakistani piece:

…They see the US drone attacks as their liberators from the clutches of the terrorists into which, they say, their state has wilfully thrown them. The purpose of today’s column is, one, to challenge the Pakistani and US media reports about the civilian casualties in the drone attacks and, two, to express the view of the people of Waziristan, who are equally terrified by the Taliban and the intelligence agencies of Pakistan. I personally met these people in the Pakhtunkhwa province, where they live as internally displaced persons (IDPs), and in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA).

I would challenge both the US and Pakistani media to provide verifiable evidence of civilian ‘casualties’ because of drone attacks on Waziristan, i.e. names of the people killed, names of their villages, dates and locations of the strikes and, above all, the methodology of the information that they collected. If they can’t meet the challenge, I would request them to stop throwing around fabricated figures of ‘civilian casualties’ that confuse people around the world and provide propaganda material to the pro-Taliban and al Qaeda forces in the politics and media of Pakistan.

Let us not forget that the Taliban, aided by the mainstream media, lie. They lie all the time. The Taliban’s “Year in Review” for 2009 claims to have killed 5,587 foreign troops in Afghanistan. The actual casualties for western troops has been 521 over the past year, leaving the Taliban with a lie ratio of 10.7:1.

Perhaps our media could spend more time investigating what civilians in Afghanistan and Pakistan actually think about drones, rather than copy editing the talking points from the Pakistani government and Taliban propaganda.

FrontPage Magazine » Adrian MacNair

ACORN Nut Sues The Whistleblowers

Where Are The Stories On What Pakistanis Actually Think About Drone Attacks?