Man charged in massacre of 251 villagers

[Jeanfromfillmore]

Man charged in massacre of 251 villagers
The Press-Enterprise
Spanish authorities have charged a former Moreno Valley karate instructor with genocide and war crimes in the 1982 massacre of 251 men, women and children in Guatemala.
Spanish National Court Judge Santiago Pedraz issued an arrest warrant Monday seeking the extradition of Jorge Orantes Sosa Jr., 52, to Madrid. Sosa is charged with genocide, torture, terrorism and extrajudicial killing in a village while part of an elite government special forces unit during the Guatemalan civil war.
Sosa had operated the World Union Budo Sosa-Kai in Moreno Valley for the past decade, before fleeing from U.S. authorities to Canada last year. He was arrested on U.S. indictment for immigration fraud in January while staying with family in Canada.
Department of Justice officials in Washington D.C. would not comment whether U.S. officials would seek to try Sosa first in federal court in Riverside or when he may face extradition proceedings to Madrid. He remains in a Canadian jail.
The martial arts studio is listed as the same address as Sosa's home off Frederick Street in Moreno Valley. A phone number in Moreno Valley was disconnected and a message left for an attorney in Calgary went unreturned.
Sosa lived in Canada, where he worked under his father as a karate instructor. He later moved to Moreno Valley, where he applied for and was granted dual U.S.-Canadian citizenship in 2008.
U.S. officials first began investigating Sosa when he applied for U.S. citizenship in San Bernardino and swore under oath he had no criminal history or belonged to a criminal organization. While investigating his citizenship application, Sosa was tied to allegations related to the Guatemalan massacre.
Sosa was among eight defendants charged in the massacre. Two other men were also charged in the U.S. for immigration fraud, but not related to the massacre itself.
Prosecutors with the Center for Justice and Accountability requested the arrest warrant and extradition on behalf of the Guatemalan victims. Nobel Laureate Rigoberta Menchu Tum, whose family was ordered killed by the Guatemalan government in 1982, along with other human rights advocates filed the first lawsuit in 1999, leading to charges against former head of state General Efrain Rios Montt and senior Guatemalan officials.
"The victims in the Guatemalan Genocide case have been working tirelessly for years to find and make sure that Sosa Orantes and many like him are prosecuted for the brutal crimes they committed," said Pamela Merchant, executive director for the CJA , a San Francisco-based human rights authority.
"Charging Sosa Orantes with genocide and securing his prosecution for the Dos Erres massacre is the beginning of the justice the victims want and deserve," Merchant said.
Sosa's ancestors are Guatemalan. Beyond that, it's unclear how he became part of that Central American nation's military.
Federal investigators found Sosa to be the leader of the Kaibiles in La Polvora, El Peten, Guatemala. Sosa led a team of 40 soldiers to the small village of Dos Erres, near Las Cruces, where the soldiers raped women and children, then systematically killed the villagers, according to the indictment.
During a mission Dec. 7, 1982 to avenge a guerrilla attack on a military convoy, the Guatemalan Military High Command ordered Sosa and his troops to surround the village to prevent the villagers from escaping. Each of the homes was searched for weapons and the women and children were separated from the men, according to court records.
Villagers were bludgeoned with sledge hammers and thrown into wells along with babies. Soldiers fired shotguns and threw fragmentation grenades down the wells. Women and girls were raped before they were killed, the indictment states.
The massacre occurred during the height of the country's civil war, which lasted between 1960 and 1996. According to a United Nations commission, the Guatemalan military slaughtered more than 200,000 indigenous Mayans.
Under the arrest warrant issued Monday, Sosa could face trial on the war crimes and receive up to 30 years in Spanish prison once extradited to Madrid.
The case is being tried in Spain, where that country's Constitutional Court ruled in 2005 that Spain would observe "universal jurisdiction" for crimes under the Geneva Convention, such as genocide, according to the CJA.
http://www.pe.com/localnews/stories/...250568581.html

[Jeanfromfillmore]

The Hypocrisy of the Left


Libelous Left Shows True Colors during Wisconsin Protests

Threats. Violence. Racism. Extremist rhetoric. Liberal activists are doing exactly what the Left and the media falsely accused the tea partiers of doing.

In the April issue of Townhall Magazine, Mary Katharine Ham takes on the hypocrisy of the American Left that loves to falsely accuse conservatives of violent rhetoric but then engages in it frequently. They are the two-faced liberals who make up the modern progressive movement, and they have brought about what Ham calls "The Swift Death of the New Tone."


Andrew Breitbart combats the mainstream media and it's libelous antics in his new book, Righteous Nation, He explains that the Tea Party had successfully defended the attacks by the media and the Democratic Party and would become the machine that radically altered the American political landscape. "What had started exclusively as an anti-intrusive, limited government, political movement had naturally evolved into something more all-encompassing and cultural. With Tea Partiers stealing from the left-wing playbook, conservatives had begun to learn the value of showing up, being vocal, and acting local, NOT threatening, violent, or racist."


Here's an excerpt of her April column, "The Swift Death of the New Tone":

A child's handwritten sign that reads "We hate Scott Wacre" is seen taped to a wall in the rotunda during protests against budget cuts proposed by Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, R, at the state Capitol in Madison. The "new tone" the Left has been demanding from conservatives was nowhere to be seen during the union protests. (Reuters/ Darren Hauck)

Remember the days, in August of 2009, when conservatives merely raising their voices at health care town halls portended the sure destruction of the Republic? There were large numbers of conservatives gathering peacefully (and, yes, sometimes angrily) to express their discontent with Obama's health care law. The media decided these protests were threatening and dangerous on their face.

The mere gathering together of conservatives critical of the president caused Chris Matthews to sputter and Rachel Maddow to whine about the closed-minded, racist and surely violent crowds that would be the undoing of the Union. The only problem was there wasn't much violence to speak of.

During the most heated month of the health care uprising, when more than 500 town halls took place over one month across the country, there were exactly 10 instances of documented violence. Most of them were confined to the ripping of signs and minor tussles (though there were a handful of punches thrown), and seven of 10 incidents were perpetrated by ObamaCare supporters on protesters, according to photos, police reports and witnesses.


Nonetheless, the media kept up its "Climate of Hate" narrative through 2010, tsk-tsking over the tone of protest posters, often erroneously blaming tea partiers for Lyndon Larouche activists' Hitler signs and generally making a giant, scary deal out of the least errant word from any right-leaning protester in any place at any time.

There was evidence in 2009 that the stringent requirements for polite protest were not going to apply to everyone. Concurrent with the health care protests that made the media to tremble with their ferocity, the international community held the G20 gathering in Pittsburgh. There, a collection of liberal and anarchist protesters did approximately $50,000 of damage to local businesses, and 190 of them were arrested for blocking traffic and rolling trash bins and throwing rocks at police.

The CBS headline for that story? "Police fire gas on G20 protesters."

By 2011, the "violent right-wingers" narrative took its most irresponsible turn yet and blamed Sarah Palin's political speech for the shooting of Democratic Rep. Gabrielle Giffords in Tucson, Ariz. Giffords is recovering, praise God, after being shot in the head by a mentally ill man who had been fixated on her since at least 2007. To this day, there is no evidence that he was motivated by anyone’s political rhetoric, martial words or imagery. The 28-page federal indictment of Jared Lee Loughner does not mention Palin's now-infamous crosshairs map as a cause of the incident because it wasn't.


Nonetheless, the country was called by all of national media to a time of soul-searching about our "tone." There should be a new tone, they said, and President Barack Obama echoed that in his Tucson speech saying our rhetoric should "honor" those who had been killed while engaging in our democratic process in that Safeway parking lot.

Several right-leaning pundits joined the call to civility, giving credence to the idea that rhetoric and Loughner's crime were somehow connected -- among them David Frum, Joe Scarborough and Jeb Bush.

But the new tone didn't last long. After all, it could last only until it was necessary for liberals to protest again, at which point all the rules imposed on conservative activists would be swiftly jettisoned in favor of celebrating the "passion" of those who carry Hitler signs for "justice."