http://www.oaoa.com/…

A police investigation on a fake marijuana grow house may lead to the Odessa American’s website, Odessa Police Lt. Jesse Duarte and Chief Tim Burton suggested.

Duarte said OPD wants to identify posters responding to two previous stories on the raid to see if they can figure out who wrote an anonymous letter alleging a Lotteman Drive house had marijuana growing in it. He said he “couldn’t rule out” the possibility that Kopbusters wrote the letter.

“They’re denying that they wrote the letter, but we have earlier blogs that show that,” Duarte said.

Duarte was one of the investigators involved in the Dec. 4 raid at 232 Lotteman Drive. Duarte and other officers suspected it was a grow house, but when they entered the home they instead found Christmas trees under grow lights and a poster telling them they were being filmed by Kopbusters for a reality TV show.

Kopbusters, according to CEO Barry Cooper, is a new reality TV show that has not yet been available for broadcast but has set out do what they call reverse stings on corrupt narcotics investigators.

Duarte was also involved in the arrest of Yolanda Madden, who Kopbusters claim was framed by police and a police informant who they say planted meth on her. She was convicted of possessing methamphetamine with intent to distribute within 1,000 feet of a park and is serving time in a Bryan federal prison camp.

Duarte said the OPD’s interest in cyber-sleuthing comes from a since-edited post at Kopbusters’ site, nevergetbusted.com, that Duarte said claimed Kopbusters wrote the letter.

Duarte contacted the Odessa American Tuesday to ask how to get the identities of posters on the OA site at oaoa.com.

“We’re following an investigation, and I needed to know some particulars about how your site was set up,” Duarte said.

He didn’t specify any particular screen names he wanted to look up, but he mentioned Kopbusters CEO Barry Cooper and “everyone that is responding” to the two stories.

Neither Duarte, Burton or anyone at the OPD issued a search warrant in connection with the OA website. Burton said however that the site’s posters could be involved in their investigation.

“It (the interest and possible investigation into the OA website) was initiated based upon the events that took place at 232 Lotteman,” Burton said.

Odessa American Editor Laura Dennis said the OA will not release confidential records that indicate e-mail addresses or other information from posters who have registered on the paper’s website to the OPD or anyone else.

“We tell website users that their information is confidential and that it will not be sold or given out. We will stand by that,” Dennis said.

Attorney John Bussian is a First Amendment specialist and is a Freedom Communications attorney. Freedom is the parent company of the Odessa American. Bussian said Tuesday that Freedom recently successfully resisted a subpoena in Fort Walton Beach, Fla., by law enforcement asking the paper to reveal confidential data given to the paper by users who had registered on the paper’s website.

“We have just resisted efforts by law enforcement officers to make the press reveal confidential data provided to us by those posting comments on our websites,” Bussian said. “This is not obstructing justice it is simply asking law enforcement to make the press witnesses of last resort and to demonstrate the things required by the First Amendment before forcing us to reveal these posters,” Bussian said.

Bussian said information given to the OA on the website is confidential.

Yolanda Madden’s father, Raymond Madden, who was in Austin Tuesday, said in a phone interview that he expected the police to want to look into the newspaper’s website. He didn’t seem to be bothered by the prospects.

“They would love to get me,” Madden said. “I mean these guys are desperate.”

Madden hired Kopbusters to help him prove that the OPD framed his daughter. Both Raymond Madden and Kopbusters CEO Cooper claim the OPD raid on the suspected grow house in Odessa proves that the OPD plays fast and loose with the rules because they relied on an anonymous letter to help secure a search warrant.

OPD officials, however, disagree and say that the warrant was legally obtained.

Note the poll on the right.

Here is the story they are referring to.

Barry Cooper called into Free Talk Live Tuesday the 30th, 2008. I’ll post the audio if Ian Bernard posts it tomorrow. Barry has said that the F-bombs in the linked article were fabricated. He apparently told off the reporter after the interview due to him being misrepresented. The reporter reportedly works with the cops.

http://rawstory.com/…

An anonymous tipster appeared to be harrying cops.

It sounded like the plot of the latest TV pseudo-thriller: a rogue cop, a woman scorned, a helpless father, a drug grower, a small town pastor and police that play fast and loose with the constitution, all colliding after an anonymous letter tipped off police to an alleged marijuana farm in a Texas town.

Barry Cooper, a 39-year-old former drug cop turned filmmaker, said that short, poorly written and unattributed letter was the key that tied together motley crew of characters in his latest documentary. A preview of that documentary, a reality show Cooper has dubbed “KopBusters,” is available exclusively from RAW STORY at the bottom of this page.

“I’m leaving Odessa because my boyfriend is out of control,” an anonymous female allegedly wrote to the Odessa police on Dec. 3. “I can’t talk to the police because I have traffic warrants.”

The mysterious tipster claimed 80 marijuana plants were nearing harvest at a small house in the west Texas town, and that officers only had a few days to nab the culprit.

“He does not know I’m telling and thinks I don’t know about him cheating on me,” she continued. “He has been growing pot for a long time and never get caught and he is getting sloppy.”

Based on the tip, police conducted surveillance on the house and determined several of the general statements about the property to be factual.

Within 12 hours, Judge Bill McCoy of the 258th District Court had signed a search warrant based upon the letter and the police department’s periphery follow-up, and the raid was on.

Little did the officers know, inside the house, the flora bathed beneath bright, heat-emitting grow lights wasn’t marijuana but, instead, miniature Christmas trees.

As officers invaded with guns drawn, it quickly became apparent they’d been had. A handwritten poster proclaimed they had just become part of Cooper’s new reality show, ‘KopBusters.’

And bust the cops, he did. According to the Odessa American, Terry Pierce, who also works as an associate police chaplain, denies giving the officers any letter.

However, on Monday the American reported that the local police made a mistake filling out the affidavit. Instead of the police chaplain, First United Pentacostal Church pastor Terry Pugh delivered the letter. Odessa City Manager Richard Morton insisted it was a simple mistake: the letter was allegedly given to officers with “Pastor Terry” written on an open envelope.

“Someone played on my sentiments,” Pugh told the American. “Had I known that, I would have never been involved in it. I thought I was helping the police catch bad guys.”

“It wasn’t just this erroneous affidavit, but also the judge granted a bad warrant based solely on an anonymous tip,” said Cooper. “The Supreme Court has said an anonymous tip is not enough. Maybe we should make a new show called ‘JudgeBusters.’”

Cooper originally planned his first sting for an undisclosed location in Washington state. But after being contacted by Odessa resident Raymond Madden, whose daughter Yolanda was arrested in 2005 for possessing methamphetamine, ‘KopBusters’ shifted course.

“The police got the wrong person,” claims Yolanda’s father on the ‘KopBusters’ trailer. “They thought she was someone else. Once they made the bust, they had to go through with it. You can’t say, ‘Oh, excuse me, we planted drugs.’”

A man who answered the telephone at the Odessa police department declined comment.

The sting was designed, Cooper said, to embarrass the cops that arrested Yolonda, and to put a public face on police neglect of the Fourth Amendment.

Of course, it likely crossed Cooper’s mind that several of his former partners are cops in Odessa. Or that his former narcotics task force was once based there. But the way he describes it, revenge is not atop his list. To Cooper, ‘KopBusters’ is almost a humanitarian mission.

“Free Yolanda!” he yells in the footage. “Ya’ll planted drugs on Yolanda, and we’re gonna get her released and get the crooked cops busted. If you’re a good cop, great. But you’re not. You raided my house, and nothing’s going on.”

The American quoted Cooper saying he believes the police “[got] together to make up this f—ing letter.” Thermal imaging cameras, he claimed to RAW STORY, were used to seek out heat from the grow lamps inside his rented house: an investigatory technique the Supreme Court has declared unconstitutional, but is still frequently used, especially in aerial observation.

“What I’m telling people is that anyone could have sent that letter,” he said. “Anyone who gets pissed off at someone else could have dropped a letter in the offering basket at church, or sent an anonymous tip to police. That’s the point of the court’s logic: to prevent people from triggering false raids.”

RAW STORY pressed him on the letter’s origin, but Cooper stuck to his story.

“No, really, that’s all I’m saying about the letter,” he insisted. “Anybody could have written it. It doesn’t matter who it came from. An anonymous tip is not enough to raid a home.”

And while Cooper may be the most obvious suspected source of the letter, there’s no evidence thus far to tie him to it; a good thing for him, because a false crime report is itself a crime.

Naturally, the Odessa police department is looking into pressing charges. Likewise, Cooper said he plans to file a $10 million federal lawsuit. Both remain to be seen.

Another sting, he boasted, is coming very soon. “I could do it as quickly as 30 days.”

‘KopBusters: Vol. 1′ is set for release in July.

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Still pertinent:

http://www.theatlantic.com/…

Youth unemployment is high throughout the European Union, but it is particularly high in Greece, hovering between 25 and 30 percent. With few job prospects, rampant poverty in the face of nouveau riche prosperity, a public university system in shambles, a bloated government sector in desperate need of an overhaul, and a weak, defensive conservative government with only a one-seat majority in parliament, it is a ripe period for protests, which have had as their aim the fall of Prime Minister Costas Karamanlis.

And it appears that the riots continue:

Hundreds of rioters battled police in central Athens today (Dec. 20, 2008), fire-bombing a credit reporting agency and attacking the city’s Christmas tree two weeks after the police shooting of a teenager set off Greece’s worst unrest in decades.

Today’s violence followed a memorial gathering at 9 p.m. (1900 GMT) where 15-year-old Alexandros Grigoropoulos died Dec. 6, in the Athens neighborhood of Exarchia.

The rioters, using the National Technical University of Athens as a base, launched attacks against police, throwing rocks and petrol bombs and erecting roadblocks.

Security forces are prevented by law from entering the university grounds unless the school administration gives the go-ahead, but so far no permission has been given.

At around 4 p.m. today, about 150 youth attacked the Christmas tree at Syntagma Square in central Athens, hanging trash bags from its branches before clashing with riot police. The square was cleared within two hours. At least three news photographers were injured by police batons. The tree survived the attack.

The original Christmas tree was burned to the ground Dec. 8, during the worst night of rioting.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/…

The National Health Service is providing dying cancer patients with drugs that are five times less effective than those available privately and is refusing to treat them if they try to buy medicines themselves.

One drug for kidney cancer, routinely available through public health systems in most European countries but not to British patients, can reduce the size of tumours in 31% of patients, compared with just 6% of those prescribed the standard NHS drug.

The growing row over “co-payments” has prompted the government to reconsider the ban. Alan Johnson, the health secretary, has promised a “fundamental rethink” of the policy.

Research presented at the American Society of Clinical Oncology found that kidney patients taking the new drug Sutent lived six months longer than those prescribed alpha interferon, the NHS treatment.

The failure of the NHS to make more effective drugs available to cancer patients has been condemned as “unethical” by leading doctors.

A woman with bowel cancer is fighting for the right to pay for a drug that could extend her life long enough for her to spend Christmas with her grandchildren.

Sheila Norrington, 59, a former NHS medical secretary from Maidstone, Kent, has been told by doctors that if she buys the drug Erbitux, which the health service will not pay for, she will lose her state-funded cancer care. Erbitux is the only drug capable of treating her advanced bowel cancer.

Norrington’s husband, Goff, 61, a former sales manager, said: “We have been told that if we pay for it ourselves we will be thrown off the NHS completely and we will need to pay for everything privately. We are devastated. This is not going to cure my wife, but if it keeps her alive a little bit longer, then we would pay for it.”

The couple say that although they could pay for a few cycles of the drug, which costs about £3,000 a month, they could not pay for all Norrington’s care, including scans, blood tests and consultations.

Goff Norrington added: “We have two young granddaughters and this could make the difference between sitting round the table with them at Christmas or not. We think it is deplorable that patients can get this drug almost anywhere in Europe but we cannot get it in the UK.”

A spokesman for Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells NHS Trust said: “We are governed by Department of Health policy on this issue.”

A poll for The Sunday Times shows strong support for allowing co-payment in the National Health Service, with 89% saying that people who buy additional cancer drugs should continue to get free NHS treatment.

Only 5% think allowing co-payment would create a two-tier NHS. Until now this has been the position taken by Alan Johnson, the health secretary.

Ministers had feared that allowing co-payment would upset less well-off patients, but the YouGov poll of nearly 1,800 people shows strong backing across the social spectrum and supporters of all three main parties.

Lee over at MooreWatch.com I think said it all: “This, of course, begs the question.  If compassionate free government healthcare can’t provide, y’know, actual healthcare to patients, and they are forced to paying massive amounts of money to buy their own treatments, maybe the solution to the problem is less free government healthcare and more private sector solutions.”

When will these people realize that the government can not negate scarcity? The only thing that can bring more and better healthcare to the masses is an increase in their wealth and the only way to do that is capital accumulation through free market capitalism.