This Article Says It All

Adam Geller from the Detroit Free Press hits the nail on the head with this article.



Just as before, law enforcement proved overeager and bumbling. Just as before, a hyperactive media went into overdrive, eager to pronounce guilt. And just as before, a nation of voyeurs proved only too ready to play pundit.

It's been almost a decade since the murder of JonBenet Ramsey, but it's taken less than two weeks of fevered -- and apparently pointless -- speculation to show how little things have changed.

That seemed clear Monday when prosecutors in Boulder, Colo., abruptly dropped their case against John Karr, saying DNA tests failed to put the 41-year-old itinerant teacher at the crime scene, despite his insistence that he had strangled the 6-year-old beauty queen at her home on Dec. 26, 1996.

"Because no evidence has developed, other than his own repeated admissions ... the people would not be able to establish that Mr. Karr committed this crime despite his repeated insistence that he did," District Attorney Mary Lacy said in court papers.

The admission by prosecutors that they had the wrong man might have seemed shocking if this had been any other case. But in the context of the Ramsey case -- an investigation beset from its earliest stages by gross misjudgments by investigators -- it struck many observers as not only expected, but also grimly fitting.

"If there's a single mistake they haven't made, I'm not sure what it is, said Philip Jenkins, a professor of history at Pennsylvania State University who has written on child molestation and serial murder. "It fits, but it makes the existing record worse."

Media jumped the gun -- again

The decision to drop the charges against Karr was made all the more fitting because Karr's arrest earlier this month came as the nation appeared almost to have forgotten the case.

Any hope of that ended Aug. 16, when police in Thailand arrested Karr and brought him before reporters, where he professed his guilt, saying he'd been with JonBenet at the time of her death.

When pressed, he would not, or could not, describe exactly what had happened. But there was enough about his persona -- a creepy narrative that included Karr's flight from child pornography charges in California -- to whip the news media and the public into a frenzy.


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Live Cheap, Die Cheap..... Warning... Human error may cause death

Forty-nine people were killed today when a Comair passenger plane crashed just after takeoff in Lexington, Ky. One person survived the crash and was hospitalized. No immediate reason was given for the crash, but witnesses said in television interviews that they saw smoke and fire.

There were 47 passengers and three crew members on Comair flight 5191, which was traveling from Lexington to Atlanta, the airline’s president, Don Bornhorst, said.

The University of Kentucky hospital reported that the one survivor was in critical condition, according to The Associated Press. The Fayette County coroner’s office confirmed the 49 deaths.

Comair is a subsidiary of Delta Air Lines, based in Cincinnati. Mr. Bornhorst said at a televised news conference that the jet, operated by his airline as a Delta Connection commuter flight, crashed shortly after 6 a.m. about half a mile from the end of the runway in a wooded area.

“We can not speculate on the cause of this accident,” he said.

Asked whether the plane could have taken off from the wrong runway, which was a shorter one, officials at a news conference declined to comment and said there was an investigation taking place.

Truce Strained as Israelis Raid Lebanon Site

BOUDAI, Lebanon, Aug. 19 — Helicopter-borne Israeli commandos landed near the Hezbollah stronghold of Baalbek and engaged in a lengthy firefight in what the Lebanese prime minister, Fouad Siniora, called a “flagrant violation” of the cease-fire brokered by the United Nations.

British police officers guarded a house raided earlier in London’s Walthamstow District.

Plan Was to Sneak Liquid Explosives on Planes

LONDON, Aug. 10 — The British authorities said Thursday that they had thwarted an advanced terrorist plot to blow up airplanes flying from Britain to the United States using liquid explosives that would have escaped airport security.

The officials said they had arrested 24 men, all British-born Muslims, who planned to carry the liquids in drink bottles and combine them into explosive cocktails to commit mass murder aboard as many as 10 flights high over the Atlantic.

Intelligence officials said they believed that some plotters were probably still at large, requiring increased airport security.

Airports, which faced chaotic delays and cancellations, instantly changed rules on what passengers could carry on board. In the United States, liquids, gels and creams were banned from carry-on luggage. In Britain, all carry-on items were barred except objects like wallets and eyeglasses without their cases.

Officials said the plot — of which few concrete details were made known — bore the hallmarks of Al Qaeda and involved links to plotters in Pakistan.

Late Thursday, the authorities in Pakistan said an unspecified number of arrests had been made there, too.

An American counterterrorism official, who spoke in return for anonymity because of the sensitivity of the case, said several of the plotters had traveled to Pakistan in the last few weeks and might have met there with at least one person affiliated with Al Qaeda. The official said it was after that person’s arrest by Pakistani authorities that the British, fearing that word of the detainment would send the plotters into hiding, decided to move in.

This is the latest in a series of conspiracies apparently rooted in the disaffection of young, British-born Muslims, many of Pakistani descent, who cast themselves as part of a jihadist struggle against Britain, which they see as an outrider of the United States in Iraq, Afghanistan and now Lebanon.

It also mimicked a failed plot in the Philippines in 1995 financed by Osama bin Laden to blow up airplanes over the Pacific. That ended when the chemicals exploded at an apartment in Manila.

On Thursday, Britain raised its terror threat assessment by one notch to its highest level, “critical,” meaning an attack was imminent.

The American official said the plotters were planning a “dry run” of the operation in the next few days when they planned to test whether they could board flights simultaneously. If this had worked, a full-scale attack would have been carried out within days, the official said.

Risks Escalate as Israel Fights a Ground War

JERUSALEM, Aug. 4 — After resisting a major ground offensive for three weeks, Israel now has an estimated 10,000 troops in southern Lebanon trying to build a buffer zone free of Hezbollah, and the risks are already evident. Seven Israeli soldiers have been killed in two days of brutal battles on territory the guerrillas know far better than the Israelis.

The plan of the country’s military chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Dan Halutz, an air force man, to destroy Hezbollah from the air has proved wanting, and now, nervously, Israel is sending the country’s young men into the forbidding hills of southern Lebanon, where its forces battled Hezbollah for 18 years before pulling out in May 2000.

“We certainly hope that some international resolution will come before another 18 years passes,” Brig. Gen. Ido Nehushtan said.

In the past few days the troops have crossed the border by the thousands — with seven brigades, including reserve units, totaling around 10,000 troops — now in Lebanon, according to army radio and other Israeli news reports.

“In the first days, we concentrated very much on the air campaign,” said General Nehushtan, who declined to comment on the reported figures on ground troops in Lebanon. “Now we want to clear Hezbollah from all areas near the border. Our plan is to push north on a much larger scale.”

A Gaza home destroyed by Israel Monday. The Israeli Army called the homeowner to warn him about the attack, and his family was evacuated.

Up to 10,000 Israeli Troops Push Into Lebanon

MISGAV AM, Israel, Aug. 1 — Up to 10,000 Israeli troops pushed into Lebanon on a wider front today after the Israeli cabinet decided to widen its offensive, aiming to push Hezbollah back from the border before a cease-fire is declared and a multinational force is deployed there.

Israeli troops backed by air support, tanks and armored bulldozers entered Lebanon at four different places along the border, moving up to four and a half miles inside Lebanon to engage Hezbollah fighters and destroy their outposts and infrastructure.

Red-and-white tourist buses full of soldiers who had waited for more than two weeks for orders moved into Lebanon today through corridors cleared by bulldozers, tanks and engineering units.

There were house-to-house battles with hundreds of Hezbollah fighters in Lebanese towns and villages close to the border, but the fighting has been intermittent and closely contained, partly to keep down Israeli casualties.