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Deh report on the tivoli incursion wey deh public defenda finally release...?
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i'm sure Muta will be all over it comes Wednesday -
No but this is what de Gleanah had to sayOriginally posted by Wahalla View Post
AN INTERIM report into what Public Defender Earl Witter describes as a "siege" of Tivoli Gardens during a state of emergency in May 2010 has called for a thorough commission of enquiry into activities of the security forces and gunmen.
The report, tabled in Parliament yesterday after missing several deadlines, highlighted that provisional claims for 688 persons who have submitted 1,295 documented complaints are quantified at a little more than $110.8 million.
Witter also wants both Police Commissioner Owen Ellington and then chief of defence staff, now retired, Rear Admiral Hardley Lewin, as well as other senior personnel, to testify about their oversight operations before a judicial enquiry.
The public defender is also recommending that former prime minister and chairman of the defence board, Bruce Golding, and his then National Security Minister Dwight Nelson to testify at the constituted commission of enquiry.
PERSONAL INJURY NOT FACTORED
In relation to the proposed claims, Witter said they would not take into account personal injury and detention.
"This sum does not take account of claims which may yet be made for monetary compensation regarding the alleged extrajudicial killings. A caring, volunteer cadre of attorneys-at-law in private practice will presently begin the assessment," the report stated.
According to the report, in the assessment process, all claims will be disaggregated in order to take account of payouts made by the Government to complainants and other persons, amounting to $92.1 million, according to official figures. This sum was reportedly distributed by the Ministry of Labour and Social Security, at the instance of the Social Development Commission, as part of a programme of urgent "social intervention" instituted within weeks of the incursion.
The report drew on several hundred handwritten statements of complainants and witnesses, who gave accounts of what happened to them, their relatives, friends and neighbours, at the hands of the security forces. It also reviewed statements furnished by state security personnel to the Bureau of Special Investigations and from what Witter called "authoritative sources".
"This interim report should, therefore, dispel any doubt of the need for an independent public enquiry into matters of the gravest concern as well as immense public importance," Witter declared in his 257-page report.
DEATH TOLL COULD RISE
Witter's interim report is also intimating that the official death toll could be increased to 81 instead of the 76 previously reported.
Of the 76 persons (including three members of the security forces) killed during the so-called incursion, Witter said he was investigating complaints that 44 were instances of extrajudicial killings.
"In addition, investigations have turned up five cases of missing persons, four of them extant, the corpse of one of them now having been positively identified by DNA analysis. Those four may yet be presumed dead, according to law. Four male corpses remaining unidentified may be theirs. If not, the known civilian body count attributable to relevant activities would rise to 80 and the overall death toll to 81," the report outlined.
The public defender painted a graphic picture of what he saw of the alleged victims of the incursion when he visited Madden's Funeral Home on North Street in Kingston.
"At our insistence, we were admitted to the morgue and viewed three large mounds of tagged corpses, most in varying stages of decomposition, many nude or scantily clad, piled up on the bare concrete floor: a macabre, surreal spectre of mass slaughter. At first, the two insensate and impatient morgue attendants on duty could give no accurate tally of these dead," Witter recounted.
Turning to former Tivoli Gardens strongman Christopher 'Dudus' Coke, who gained renown as a benefactor of the poor, Witter said Coke was both feared and revered as the undisputed don.
"Adults and children alike came to depend upon his largesse. According to his supporters and admirers, it was he who kept a territory relatively crime-free, almost displacing the Jamaica Constabulary Force, whose members were scorned or deeply distrusted by the citizenry; that it was he who kept children in school and off the streets at night, enforcing his own peculiar brand of discipline."
The categories of complaints are:
i. Allegations of extrajudicial killings
ii. Missing/disappearance of persons
iii. Personal injury, battery and assault
iv. Detention
v. Malicious damage to real property
vi. Loss/malicious destruction of personal property, and
vii. Looting (larceny)
http://jamaica-gleaner.com/gleaner/2...ead/lead1.htmlComment
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got ot page 88....Comment
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wahalla seereeuss tred tood badd yuh neva put a betta titleComment
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Earlier this spring, The New Yorker received a batch of video footage from the Drug Enforcement Administration that shows the beginning of one such operation carried out in Kingston, Jamaica, on May 24, 2010, when Jamaican security forces stormed the barricaded neighborhood of Tivoli Gardens. The target was not a terrorist but Christopher (Dudus) Coke, the powerful drug lord and “don,” loved and feared in Tivoli Gardens, who has since pled guilty to racketeering. As I reported in “A Massacre in Jamaica,” in 2011, at least seventy-three civilians, including one U.S. citizen, were killed in the process. Many firsthand accounts suggest that the killings were carried out by the Jamaican security forces long after the neighborhood was under their control. The operation was assisted by a surveillance plane from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, which was flying above the neighborhood and relaying information to the Jamaican authorities.
Today, we are releasing footage taken by that plane. The video runs from roughly nine-thirty in the morning, Jamaica time, until three in the afternoon, ending just before the crucial hours when, witnesses say, most of the killings occurred. The video was turned over in response to a federal lawsuit that I filed with the help of The New Yorker and a clinic of Yale Law School students. The assistant U.S. attorney representing the D.E.A. has said that this is all the video it has that is responsive to the lawsuit. It remains unclear whether the U.S. government has additional video from later in the operation.
These six hours of footage raise more questions than they answer. We see people running but not what they are running from. We know that the Jamaican Army fired mortars, but we do not see the mortars being fired or falling. There are momentary flashes that could be gunfire or rays of sunlight reflected by windows. Beside a tree is a cluster of red pixels that might or might not be a dead body. We see barricades and small fires but also small children, and laundry hung out to dry in the sun.
A few things are conclusive: this operation was carried out by the Jamaican military in a residential neighborhood under the eyes of the U.S. government. There is very little in the videos to support the Jamaican Army’s claim that “the resistance we faced in entering Tivoli Gardens was fierce,” as reported by the Times in the days after the attack. Other documents suggest that the highest levels of the Jamaican government did not feel they could trust their own Army. In an e-mail to colleagues written on the afternoon of May 25, 2010, the day after the attack, Isiah Parnell, the head of the U.S. mission to Jamaica at the time, wrote: “FM [apparently the Jamaican foreign minister] said that they’d heard that non-combatants were being summarily shot and women raped. He said that they could not trust reporting by the JDF [Jamaican Army] that those illegal activities were not taking place and asked if we had any info on the matter. Based on our contact with the military and JCF [Jamaican police] I responded that we had not heard that concern nor did we see that with our military asset.”
When reached by phone, Dr. Kenneth Baugh, who was Jamaica’s foreign minister at that time, disputed this account of the meeting. “I know categorically that I did not receive reports of rapes or murders,” he said. Baugh could not immediately recall whether he had met with Parnell on May 25, 2010. “At no time did I express a lack of trust in the J.D.F.,” he said. “I feel that the J.D.F. can always be trusted. They managed the process to the best of their abilities.” Attempts to reach Parnell and spokespeople from the U.S. State Department late Tuesday night were unsuccessful.
The question of whether anyone will have to answer for the killings depends on Jamaica’s Parliament, and on Earl Witter, the Jamaican official charged with carrying out an initial investigation. Almost three years after the raid, Witter’s three-hundred-and-ninety-six-page report was delivered to Jamaica’s Parliament on Tuesday and could be released to the public as early as Wednesday afternoon.
Visit The New Yorker’s new video page.
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Originally posted by blugiant View Post
A few things are conclusive: this operation was carried out by the Jamaican military in a residential neighborhood under the eyes of the U.S. government. There is very little in the videos to support the Jamaican Army’s claim that “the resistance we faced in entering Tivoli Gardens was fierce,” as reported by the Times in the days after the attack.
https://www.newyorker.com/online/blo...n-jamaica.html[/QUOTE]Comment
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Sorry... understatement... this needs to be read....Originally posted by blugiant View Post- Have u read it.....????
So far I have read they did not question the claims by the PM... Nor did they put the context that journalist made that prior to the intrusion there were gun carrying males who were posturing
- Again it is the footballers testiment that threw me back to Greenbay...one was in the Reggaeboyz squad... shades of Ghutto Thompson and his brother.. one got released because Seaga called...
- The disrespect and incompetence on the bodies...
- But they have Seaga Boulevard and a McKenzie avenue... talk bout politician ego....
- the rastayard raid...that is 50 year old biznis..
- leaving people to sit in their excrement....
- I actually think as I read this that every police constable should be handed this in training and told how this should be gone through step by step as to how this was wrong...
- This is exactly how the police dealt with me thirty years ago..no improvement... no change
- A constable was rude to the Public Defender and a Sargent refused to give his name....
- Sorry but every time I read about a Kanadian police man or a yanki police man.. given a choice I would rather deal with them than beign poor and deal with Jamaican policeman....The guns in face, the aggression and the need to humiliate.. the threat to shoot you....http://jamaica-gleaner.com/pages/int...t/#/103/zoomed
Last edited by Wahalla; 05-07-2013, 04:00 AM.Comment
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I finished reading yesterday...
- It asked alot of questions rather than answered them which was what I thought it was
- The incompetence at Maypen cementry was farcical
- With all the gun crime in Jamaica they had only one functioning comparison microscope
- they had sloppy scientific/ forensic/ protocols...Bodies were allowed to rot! Shows hpw little and poor the investigation process is
- the managment of the security forces is atrocious
- the discipline of the security forces is farse. A constable was and agressive to the Public defender while he was guarding a site. demonstrates that the wrong training and wrong functionality of the constabulary.. it is still a force not a service...
- The security forces shot up the house in Red Hills was a farce....but it brought the policing of the sink communities to the middle class
- The solution he proposed teaching Garvey in schools and love....
- They drew historical analogs which were wrong....This was not morant bay rebellion or 38 riots.. This was not Bloody Sunday in Northern Ireland...This was green bay.. tivoli 97, Tivoli 2001.
- There is no clarity of the intelligence sources on which the operation was
- After reading this and given the Manett enjuiry I under stand why golding resigned.. It was the right thing to do...
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and this timely story:
Dudus was talking to US before Tivoli raid
Former don’s lawyers were trying to arrange surrender
BY PAUL HENRY Co-ordinator — Crime/Court Desk [email protected]
Wednesday, May 08, 2013
ATTORNEYS for former Tivoli Gardens don Christopher 'Dudus' Coke had been negotiating his surrender to the US Embassy in Kingston before the deadly 2010 Tivoli Gardens operation to flush him out, a highly placed source confirmed to the Jamaica Observer last night.
"The negotiation was taking place some three months before the incursion," said the source, who requested anonymity.
The source confirmed information in an unclassified US Department of State e-mail about the issue circulated by US journalist Mattathias Schwartz yesterday.
The e-mail communication was between a Cameron Holland and Isiah Parnell, the then chargé d'affairs at the US Embassy in Kingston, on Wednesday, May 26, 2010. The e-mail, sent at 7:00 pm with the subject line "Christopher 'Dudus' Coke", was also copied to other persons.
The communication came two days after Coke fled Tivoli Gardens after police and soldiers entered the community on May 24 to arrest him but faced fierce resistance from gunmen determined to prevent his arrest. The security forces eventually took control of the community and returned the capital city to normalcy on May 26, but the hunt for Coke was on in earnest.
"As you are probably aware, today Coke's counsel spoke with the DOJ [Department of Justice] prosecutor on the case and proposed Coke's surrender directly to US authorities," said Holland's e-mail to Parnell. "This would mean that Jamaica would not/not arrest Coke, and no extradition proceedings would commence. Instead, his surrender would be entirely outside the framework of the treaty."
Parnell responded 14 minutes later to the e-mail: "Cameron, thanks for your continuing help on this difficult matter. I'll touch base with the attorney later tonight to see how his talks with his client are progressing."
What appeared to be significant portions of both e-mails were blocked out.
Last night, members of Coke's legal team were unavailable for comment. But our source revealed knowledge of talks between them and the US authorities before the Tivoli operation.
At the time he was on the run, Coke, a strong supporter of the then ruling Jamaica Labour Party, had been wanted in the US on drug and gunrunning charges.
During that time, it was rumoured that Coke wanted to surrender to the US authorities, instead of local police, for fear of being killed in jail like his father Lester Lloyd Coke (also known as Jim Brown) in the early 1990s while awaiting extradition to the US.
Coke was held in late June 2010 on the Mandela Highway in St Catherine in a car being driven by Rev Al Miller. Miller had said that he was taking Coke to the US Embassy in Liguanea where he was to surrender himself.
Miller has since been charged with harbouring a fugitive. Last month, the clergyman appeared in the Corporate Area Resident Magistrate's Court where his attorney made an application for disclosure of certain records relating to meetings and conversations with Police Commissioner Owen Ellington, and his deputies, regarding the matter.
His legal team also wants the release of the 119 recording relating to Coke's capture. Resident Magistrate Lorna Shelly-Williams is to make a ruling on the application later this month.
Coke, who waived his right to an extradition hearing and was flown to the US on June 24, 2010, is serving a 23-year sentence in a federal prison after pleading guilty to racketeering.
Read more: http://www.jamaicaobserver.com/news/...#ixzz2ShiCj1OaWhen its hot in the jungle of peace I go swimming in the ocean of love.....Comment
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