Amanda Knox

I'm not sure where those two towns or cities or villages are. I haven't looked at a map yet.

However, my first thought is that Raffaele was nowhere near that area, and the Italians just arrested him and then claimed that's where he was. We're talking Italy here after all.

However, I did not think a passport was required to travel in Europe. I am not sure why surrendering one's passport would make travel across European borders out of bounds.

Either way, the Kerchers are scum. I really wish Raffaele had hopped on a plane when he had a chance.

bump

wood chipper

And now the Kercher scumbags are whining to the media that they may never know what happened.

We all know what happened:

Kercher was whoring in exchange for drugs.

One of Kercher's customers introduced her to Guede.

Guede later broke in through the window, cut her throat, and raped her as the blood was spraying from her throat.

Then Guede took her phones so she could not summon aid, locked her in her room so she could not escape, and went out dancing at a nightclub while Kercher slowly drowned in her own blood on her bedroom floor.

He isn't arrested since it's no final court sentence.
He was just stopped to inform him about the ban to leave the country.

Passports/ID-cards are required in Europe like anywhere else.
You only must (!) not show them when crossing a border between Schengen-countries.

(Third World) Florence in Italy where the trial took place.


(First World) Michigan where Oralboy lives.

As been confirmed: the police brought him to the Udine police station, took his passport and put a stamp in his Italian identity papers showing that he cannot leave the country, as mandated by the appeals court in Florence.

Since the court didn't order Sollecito detained, he will be freed as soon as the paperwork is completed .... which already has happened.

For the benefit of anybody who may have missed this in the past.....


Saddam Hussein was provably involved in the anthrax attacks which followed 9-11. That means that George Bush had very few options unless you call letting somebody poison the US senate office building with anthrax and just skate an option, which is brain-dead. He could do what he did, which was try to take the high road, eliminate the Hussein regime, and try to construct a rational regime in Iraq both to prevent further attacks and to provide an example of rational government in the region, or he could do what I would have done, which would have been to level both Mecca and Medina, and ban the practice of I-slam not just in the US but throughout the world.

Most people would probably want to try what W. did first.

Oh, yeah, I know, most of you guys don't believe Hussein had anything to do with 9-11 or the anthrax attacks which followed...


The first case of anthrax after 9-11 (Bob Stevens) showed up about ten miles from where Mohammed Atta himself had been living, i.e. the short drive from Coral Springs to Boca Raton.

The last previous case of anthrax in a human in the United States prior to 9-11 had been about 30 years prior to that.

There are other coincidences. For instance, the wife of the editor of the sun (where Stevens worked) also had contact with the hijackers in that she rented them the place they stayed.

Atta and the hijackers flew planes out of an airport in the vicinity and asked about crop dusters on more than one occasion. Indeed, Atta sought a loan to try to buy and and modify a crop duster.

Atta and several of the hijackers in this group also sought medical aid just prior to 9/11 for skin lesions that the doctors who saw them now say looked like anthrax lesions.

http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2002-03-24/news/0203240066_1_dr-christos-tsonas-cutaneous-anthrax-hijackers

Basically, you either believe in the laws of probability or you don't. Anybody claiming that all these things were coincidences is either totally in denial or does not believe in modern mathematics and probability theory.

While the anthrax in question originally came from a US strain, it isn't too surprising that Iraq might have that strain since that strain was mailed to laboratories around the world years earlier. That is, it wsa mailed out for the purpose of allowing other nations to develop medicines to cure it, not to make weapons out of it...

Nonetheless, it was highly sophisticated, and went through envelope paper as if it weren't even there; many thought it to be not only beyond the capabilities of Hussein but of anybody else on the planet as well including us. Nonetheless, later information showed Husseins programs to be capable of such feats:


http://www.aim.org/publications/media_monitor/2004/01/01.html





Basically, the anthrax attack which followed 9/11 had Saddam Hussein's fingerprints all over it. It was particalized so finely it went right through envelop paper and yet was not weaponized (not hardened against antibiotics). It was basically a warning, saying as much as:




There is no way an American who had had anything to do with that would not be behind bars by now. In fact the one American they originally suspected told investigators that if he'd had anything to do with that stuff, he would either have anthrax or have the antibodies from the preventive medicine in his blood and offered to take a blood test on the spot. That of course was unanswerable.


The basic American notion of a presumption of innocence is not meaningful or useful in cases like that of Saddam Hussein. Even the Japanese had the decency to have their own markings on their aircraft at Pearl Harbor; Nobody had to guess who did it. Saddam Hussein, on the other hand, is like the kid in school who was always standing around snickering when things went bad, but who could never be shown to have had a hand in anything directly. At some point, guys would start to kick that guy's ass periodically on general principles. Likewise, in the case of Saddam Hussein, the reasonable assumption is that he's guilty unless he somehow or other manages to prove himself innocent and, obviously, that did not happen.


At the time, the US military was in such disarray from the eight years of the Clinton regime that there was nothing we could do about it. Even such basic items as machinegun barrels, which we should have warehouses full of, were simply not there. Nonetheless, nobody should think they would get away with such a thing and, apparently, Hussein and his baathists didn't.

Bob Woodward's book "Bush at War" documents some of this:



I mean, we didn't even have fricking machinegun barrels anymore. A friend of mine called up several barrelmakers about a barrel for a target rifle in the early spring of 02 and was told they were working 24/7 making machinegun barrels and didn't have time for any sort of civiliam firearm business.

A country with any sort of a military at all has to have warehouses full of that sort of thing and we had ******* none. We basically needed to go into Iraq the day after 9-11 and we were not able to due to the state Slick KKKlinton had left the military in, it took two years of building.


In the case of nuclear weaponry there appears to have been a three-way deal between Saddam Hussein, North Korea, and Libya in which raw materials from NK ended up in Libya to be transmogrified into missiles pointed at Europe and America by Saddam Hussein's technical people and with Iraqi financial backing (your oil-for-terrorism dollars at work), while Kofi Annan and his highly intelligent and efficient staff kept the west believing that their interests were being protected:



Muammar Khadaffi has since given the **** up and renounced the whole business.

The Czech government is sticking with its story of Mohammed Atta having met with one of Saddam Hussein's top spies prior to 9-11 and there are even pictures of the two together on the internet now:

http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/001/539dozfr.asp

Then again as I mentioned, there's the question of the anthrax attack which followed 9-11. Saddam Hussein's the only person on this planet who ever had that kind of weaponized anthraxs powder.

http://www.aim.org/publications/media_monitor/2004/01/01.html

Moreover it does not take hundreds of tons of anthrax powder to create havoc.

The sum total which was used was a few teaspoons full. In other words, a lifetime supply of that sort of thing for a guy like Saddam Hussein could easily amount to a hundred pounds worth, and I guarantee that I could hide that in a country the size of Iraq so that it would not be found.

The question of whether or not Hussein had 1000 tons of anthrax powder is simply the wrong question. The right questions are, did the guy have the motive, the technical resources, the financial wherewithal, the facilities, and the intel apparatus to play that sort of game, and the answers to all of those questions are obvious.

@izzythepoop,



Actually, I do have friends in England and I do visit them occasionally, but they live in one of the prettier and more pleasant parts of England. I generally stay out of the kinds of Yobshire slum areas which you and your Kercher brethren infest.

No he wasn't. He had no WMDs. Your insistence that he was involved, and may have had WMDs, is as likely as the Biblical flood actually having happened, prehistoric Peruvians flying around on Pterodactyls, and cities on Mars. All the product of a fevered imagination and an inability to face up to the truth.

Saddam Hussein's anthrax program was substantially more sophisticated than that of any other nation. Nonetheless you don't even need to go there to grasp the reality of the deal.

The ONLY four nations which ever had ANY kind of a weapon anthrax program are the US, Britain, Russia, and Iraq. Ask yourself what would happen to Muhammed Atta and his greasy pals were they to walk up to one or more agents of the CIA, M6, or КГБ and inquire about purchasing some anthrax....

I mean, GRANTED you need to be a bit brighter than IzzythePOOP to grasp this stuff, but that isn't asking for a whole hell of a lot...

They can't keep Albanians OUT of Italy, what makes you think they can keep one guy IN Italy if the guy really wants to leave??

I have no idea how you can get what I think.

The Albanians in Italy (Arbëreshë people) live there from the 15th century onwards.
After the breakdown of the communist regime in Albania, many Albanians emigrated to Italy - more than to other European countries. Italy tries to curb Albanian immigration since 1997, which is a sisyphean undertaking.

Since we don't have fences and walls at the European borders, you certainly can cross them with good chances of not being seen.

The snap judgement was made at the time of her arrest in 2007. The Perugia police focused on Amanda Knox because of her unconventional behavior. The prosecutor publicized a bizarre theory about a sex game. Italian media was totally dependent on the prosecutor's office for information. International media was dependent on Italian media. The sensationalistic prosecution theory fascinated the public. In early 2008, I also believed Knox and Sollecito were guilty. Later information came out about incompetent evidence collection. In the Perugia police's defense, I believe they were simply inexperienced in dealing with murder cases. Italian juries are not sequestered and were tainted by media stories. In addition, Italian juries are not required to make a unanimous verdict (only a simple majority is required).

There is much room for doubt. Knox and Sollecito are appealing the verdict. Under Italian law, they are treated as innocent until they have exhausted all appeals.

Me, I still don't know (naturally enough). I don't mean that in the philosophical sense people on a2k are kicking around lately, but just ordinary sense of sureness. I'm closer to it than I have been, and am interested in the account from the court of the basis of its decision, supposed to be within 90 days from the ruling.

Having just read the Guede skype item, it occurs to me it's conceiveable, though not to me at all likely, that it was "none of the above".

Your thread could have been an interesting discussion on European justice systems, osso. I feel sorry that so many outrageous comments have ruined the discussion.

Me too, for sure.

Walter has been invaluable for fleshing out what I had surmised - but not in such detail - about the difference in european systems and ours in the U.S.
I'll gladly say there is much untrustworthy about various italian court cases, but that is a bit of pot calling a kettle negative things.

For quite an eye opener on the ital justice scene, I highly recommend Tobias Jones' The Dark Heart of Italy. For a somewhat more positive take, I like the three books I've read by the italian former anti mafia prosecutor, Gianrico Carofiglio. Jones' book is the account of his experience as an investigative reporter (London Review of Books and The Independent on Sunday), based on his fairly lengthy time of living in Parma. I understand more than I did before about culture affecting justice and resolutions. Carofiglio's books are legal procedurals. The ones I read, in chronological order, are A Walk in the Dark, Involuntary Witness, and Reasonable Doubts.

It occurred to me that one out for the USA regarding extraditing Amanda is that, under our system, she was put in double jeopardy (which is prohibited in the USA).

Double jeopardy is commonly considered to be when the state makes a second run to get someone they did not get the first time. It does happen under American law that convictions are thrown out for cause, and we hold a new trial. SCOTUS obviously does not consider this to be double jeopardy.


http://news.sky.com/story/1204117/amanda-knox-will-be-extradited-by-us

A conviction may be thrown out for cause in the US but an exoneration cannot be. Amanda Knox had been found innocent by an appellate court in Italy and the state insisted on retrying her.

Once again the European Convention of Human Rights (seventh protocol) forbids double jeopardy; the seventh protocol is option but the wops had in fact signed it. What they're doing is illegal by their own standards.