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Courthouse gunman enters insanity plea

ATLANTA, Georgia (CNN) — Accused of killing three people in a shooting rampage at an Atlanta, Georgia, courthouse and a fourth after his escape, Brian Nichols on Thursday pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity as jury selection began in his trial.

Nichols, 36, is charged with 54 counts, including murder, kidnapping, robbery and escape. Prosecutors have said they will seek the death penalty.

Prosecutors have said that Nichols confessed to his shootings shortly after his arrest. The defense does not dispute that he was the gunman, and instead is focusing on his mental state and ability to form the intent to kill. In court papers, the defense claims Nichols suffers from a disorder that overmastered his will to refrain from criminal acts.

Nichols is accused of overpowering a Fulton County sheriff’s deputy, Cynthia Hall, on March 11, 2005, as he was being led into a courtroom where he was facing a second trial on rape charges.

He then allegedly took Hall’s gun from a lockbox and fatally shot three people at the courthouse — Fulton County Superior Court Judge Rowland Barnes, court reporter Julie Ann Brandau and Fulton County Sheriff’s Sgt. Hoyt Teasley, who attempted to apprehend him outside the building. Watch opening of Nichols’ trial

Nichols is also charged with killing David Wilhelm, a federal customs agent, hours later at Wilhelm’s home in the Buckhead section of Atlanta.

Nichols was arrested 26 hours after his escape in suburban Gwinnett County, where he had held a woman hostage in her apartment. It was the largest manhunt in Georgia history,

Eighteen people — 12 jurors and six alternates — will be chosen as jurors. Attorneys in the case plan to question about 21 prospective jurors daily after the prospects watch a 38-minute video. Because of publicity the case received, a jury pool of hundreds has been assembled, meaning jury selection is likely to last for weeks.

Nichols’ trial has been plagued by delays. In October, Judge Hilton Fuller abruptly halted jury selection on what would have been its third day, accepting a defense motion to stop the trial until questions of funding for Nichols’ lawyers were resolved.

In January, Fuller removed himself from the case after a New Yorker magazine article written by Jeffrey Toobin, who is also a CNN legal analyst, quoted him as saying the only defense open to Nichols was insanity, because everyone in the world knows he did it.

found here.

Iraq, Turkey sign border security pact

BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) — Turkey and Iraq signed an agreement Thursday that tightens and streamlines their working relationship in a range of areas, including the volatile issue of border security and the promise of a fruitful trade relationship.

The signing comes as Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan begins a two-day visit to Iraq, which Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki called historic.

The two signed a joint political declaration on the establishment of a high-level strategic cooperation council between the governments that will help forge a long-term strategic partnership and then spoke to reporters.

As much as history and mutual interests bring us together, challenges also bring us together as well, al-Maliki said.

Erdogan said, Iraq’s future is our future.

There is a mutual determination to form a security area in order to eliminate the terrorist threats between the two countries and an economic work area and an energy passage in order to provide better services for the two countries, he added.

The council is to meet once a year under the co-chairmanship of the prime ministers, three times a year at the ministerial level and once every three months by senior-level officials.

found here.

Politician, punch line, president, and the land he left us

(CNN) — Rick Perlstein could have called his book Paranoia.

If Perlstein’s history of the 1960s and early ’70s in America has a throughline, it’s mistrust. Parents don’t trust their children. Enlisted men don’t trust their officers. Blacks don’t trust whites, Southerners don’t trust Northerners, the Silent Majority doesn’t trust the Intellectual Establishment, and — soon enough — nobody trusts the government.

And in the midst of it all was Richard Nixon: Red-baiter, former vice president, failed gubernatorial nominee, punch line, political strategist and president, a master at playing both sides to maintain his hold on power. In doing so, he provided a roadmap for his successors.

Hence Perlstein’s actual title: Nixonland (Scribner).

I’m fascinated with how Americans fight with each other, says Perlstein, 39, who was born the year Nixon took office. And the ’60s is the best, the most — besides the Civil War, I can’t think of a more dramatic canvas. And Nixon fits in as the guy who exploited these tensions to create a new kind of politics that we’re still living with now. Slideshow: What made the ’60s the ’60s

Perlstein’s book has earned rave reviews. In The Atlantic magazine, conservative writer Ross Douthat praised the author for the rare gift of being able to weave social, political, and cultural history into a single seamless narrative. Newsweek’s Evan Thomas called it the best book written about the 1960s in more than a quarter-century.

Perlstein says he’s long had an obsession with the ’60s — which, in Nixonland, start with the Democratic landslide of 1964 and end with the Nixon landslide of 1972. The author, now a senior fellow at the left-leaning Campaign for America’s Future in Chicago, considers the book a sequel to his earlier work, a biography of Barry Goldwater and the rise of the conservative movement.

But Nixonland is as much a cultural history as a political chronicle; indeed, in the ’60s the two were tightly enmeshed. The decade saw the full flower of youth culture, which was intertwined with Vietnam War protests, increasing drug use and distinctive music.

It also saw the rise of what Nixon, in a major 1969 speech, termed the Silent Majority — older, more conservative Americans buffeted on all sides by change, taking refuge in the familiar.

Both groups had their pop culture heroes and touchstones, Perlstein observes.

The generational divide went so deep as to form a fundamental argument about what was moral and what was immoral, Perlstein says. This was how people lived in the world — through popular culture and through politics. The two feed off each other.

Though the era is now remembered through the rosy lenses of the baby boomers, their parents — the heart of the Silent Majority — didn’t look upon the culture so fondly. Many disdained the era’s pop music, the most obvious expression of youth.

Moreover, some of the highest-rated TV specials of 1969 and 1970 were Bob Hope programs, Perlstein writes, and when a movie such as 1970’s Joe came out — about a hardhat who loathes the hippies — many in the audience came to cheer for the hardhat.

Movies may have been the most revealing mirror of society. The rise of the youth culture coincided with the death of the studio system. Some of what emerged were films willing to show the grit and ugliness of the cities (the cities being a common euphemism for civic decline). Midnight Cowboy and The French Connection, the Academy Awards’ best pictures of 1969 and 1971 respectively, show a weary, cold New York crumbling under its residents’ feet.

Television tiptoed more gingerly into the new age, Perlstein says. With just three networks catering to the entire country, everything had to have this lowest-common-denominator mass appeal, he says. You could watch TV in 1966 and it’s really not any different from what it looked like in 1956.

When you did get interesting shows, it was often an accident — a midseason replacement, he adds. ‘The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour’ was supposed to be a typical variety show. [CBS] never would have signed it up had they known that they were going to start talking about how much they hated the Vietnam War and started putting on Pete Seeger and making jokes about Richard Nixon. It was an accident.

An underlying theme of Nixonland is how the various cultural and political movements eventually borrow from each other, with varying results.

The mass gatherings of youth — be-in, sit-in — became Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-in, a colorful comedy show hosted by two nightclub comics, with a writing staff that included an old Nixon hand, Paul Keyes.

The nightly arguments between parents and children became the sitcom All in the Family, a show whose central figure — the bigoted construction worker Archie Bunker — became a cultural hero.

And then there was Nixon, a controlling man who, in trying to stay at least one move ahead of everyone else, ends up consumed by his own power. The result is Watergate, which is just being uncovered as Nixonland ends.

Could it have been different? Countless commentators have tried to replay history from the hinge year of 1968, wondering if a surviving Robert Kennedy could have beaten Nixon and salved an angry culture.

Perlstein, whose next book will chronicle the ’70s, will have none of it.

I don’t like that magic thinking. I’m very suspicious of it, he says. Martyrs seem to get 100 extra bonus points in the annals of history, and that’s a bias. By the same token, nostalgia systematically cheats the past.

found here.

Betancourt to Larry King: FARC captivity ‘was hell’

(CNN) — Ingrid Betancourt says death was her everyday companion during the six years she was a hostage of a leftist rebel group in Colombia.

I really couldn’t even imagine that I was taking the road for seven years, she told CNN’s Larry King Live. For me, I thought perhaps it could last for three months at the most. I couldn’t imagine what was going to come.

Betancourt, who has French and Colombian citizenship, was campaigning for the Colombian presidency when the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia abducted her in 2002.

She was rescued July 2 in an elaborately planned ruse that hoodwinked FARC captors into giving up Betancourt and 14 other hostages including three American contractors. She spoke to King Tuesday from Paris, France.

In a way, I thought that [the rebels] knew what my struggle was, she said. I thought they were wanting perhaps something like the things I was fighting for. I was fighting for social justice. I was fighting against corruption. Watch Betancourt say her captivity was ‘hell’

During the interview, Betancourt talked very slowly and appeared weary. She explained that it had been a long and arduous week.

Her kidnapping was swift and it was hard for her at first to comprehend going from a free person to a prisoner, she said.

You are a free woman and then you become a prisoner and you receive all kinds of orders. Sit here, stand there. That’s it, she said. You just, you don’t have the possibility of even moving to take your bag without asking for permission.

Betancourt’s campaign for Colombia’s presidency was built on her promise to curb drug trafficking and FARC’s methods of kidnapping innocent people. She met with FARC leaders, imploring them, No more kidnapping.

I thought that perhaps we had that common ground. I was mistaken. I didn’t understand that they think completely different.

If you don’t work with them, if you’re not one of the members of that club, you are an enemy, she added. I didn’t know I was their enemy, but I was.

Betancourt said she knew her captors had orders to kill her if a rescue operation was launched.

I lived for nearly seven years with the awareness that death was my everyday companion, she said.

Medical care was nonexistent, she said, and even day-to-day activities were difficult. I was the only woman in a camp with other men, she said. Everything for me was difficult. Bathing, changing myself, I was always late for everything.

The rebels’ response to her lateness: They scream. That was every day life.

She said after being freed she immediately noticed one thing about her life was drastically different — she was no longer constantly scratching herself, bombarded by bugs and insects.

You know, it was hell. It was hell for the body, it was hell for the soul, it was hell for the mind…everything was so horrible, she said. We had all kinds of pains.

In a week, the difference of going from this life to that life…

Betancourt answered nearly all questions, but she would not discuss Emmanuel, the child born in captivity to her running mate, Clara Rojas — who was captured along with her — or whether she was sexually abused.

I think that many things that happened in the jungle we have to leave in the jungle, she said.

Rojas was released earlier this year. Rebels took Emmanuel from his mother about a year after his birth in 2004, delivering him to a farmer who posed as an uncle and had the boy placed in foster care in Bogota, where he remained until being reunited with his mother after her release.

Betancourt also would not detail the punishment she endured after a failed escape attempt.

Oh, that was horrible, she said before telling King that she was not ready for that.

I don’t want to fill myself with those memories, she said.

But the worst thing that happened to her, she said, was realizing that mankind, that human beings can be so horrible to other human beings.

Despite her nightmare, Betancourt said she harbors no hatred for FARC rebels. It’s like a kind of position I took many years ago that when I was released I wouldn’t take out of the jungle any kind of bitterness or any kind of eagerness to seek for revenge, anything of that, she said. And now that I’m out, I feel that I am like in another land. It seems so far and people seem so alien to me.

I don’t want to forget but I want to forgive.

Betancourt’s release was greeted with an outpouring of joy in France, with politicians and media praising the woman who had become a cause celebre in the country where she grew up.

She was given a clean bill of health last week despite reports that she had suffered chronic liver problems for years while in captivity. She walked on her own from a plane the day of her rescue and she remained standing for more than an hour as she recounted her rescue and answered questions from reporters.

On the day of her rescue, Betancourt said, the hostages were awakened at 4 a.m. and told they had to be ready to move. An international commission, they were told, was coming by helicopter, and they were to be moved to another place in that helicopter.

But when it arrived, one of the men aboard the helicopter appeared to know the rebel commanders, and the hostages lost hope.

There was this camera and they were filming us and I was thinking, they just want to tape us so that the world sees that we are alive … and this is going to go on and on and on for four more years, five, six more years, she said.

In truth, the Colombian military had tricked the rebels into believing the transfer was ordered by a FARC commander. And once the hostages were taken aboard the helicopter and it took off, the soldiers overcame the rebel commander who boarded with them, Betancourt said.

I saw the commander of the FARC, he was on the floor, he was neutralized and I heard the voice of the leader saying ‘This is Colombian Army, you are free,’ she said.

I couldn’t talk. I screamed. It was like a yell from, it was a scream that went from the bottom of my stomach, she said. And then I hugged everyone I could hug. I would have hugged anyone at that second. I hugged the one that was beside me, front — I would kiss everybody. It was crazy. It was very intense. We were crying.

Now that she is in France and has been reunited with her children and her mother, Betancourt said she is still concerned with the fate of other hostages held in the FARC-controlled jungles.

We could be over there, we could be the ones left in the jungle, she said. We had this incredible luck to be here, so for me it’s very, very important, very important to ask all the people that can help us to fight for the release of the ones who are still in the jungle.

found here.

Betancourt to Larry King: FARC captivity ‘was hell’

(CNN) — Ingrid Betancourt says death was her everyday companion during the six years she was a hostage of a leftist rebel group in Colombia.

I really couldn’t even imagine that I was taking the road for seven years, she told CNN’s Larry King Live. For me, I thought perhaps it could last for three months at the most. I couldn’t imagine what was going to come.

Betancourt, who has French and Colombian citizenship, was campaigning for the Colombian presidency when the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia abducted her in 2002.

She was rescued July 2 in an elaborately planned ruse that hoodwinked FARC captors into giving up Betancourt and 14 other hostages including three American contractors. She spoke to King Tuesday from Paris, France.

In a way, I thought that [the rebels] knew what my struggle was, she said. I thought they were wanting perhaps something like the things I was fighting for. I was fighting for social justice. I was fighting against corruption. Watch Betancourt say her captivity was ‘hell’

During the interview, Betancourt talked very slowly and appeared weary. She explained that it had been a long and arduous week.

Her kidnapping was swift and it was hard for her at first to comprehend going from a free person to a prisoner, she said.

You are a free woman and then you become a prisoner and you receive all kinds of orders. Sit here, stand there. That’s it, she said. You just, you don’t have the possibility of even moving to take your bag without asking for permission.

Betancourt’s campaign for Colombia’s presidency was built on her promise to curb drug trafficking and FARC’s methods of kidnapping innocent people. She met with FARC leaders, imploring them, No more kidnapping.

I thought that perhaps we had that common ground. I was mistaken. I didn’t understand that they think completely different.

If you don’t work with them, if you’re not one of the members of that club, you are an enemy, she added. I didn’t know I was their enemy, but I was.

Betancourt said she knew her captors had orders to kill her if a rescue operation was launched.

I lived for nearly seven years with the awareness that death was my everyday companion, she said.

Medical care was nonexistent, she said, and even day-to-day activities were difficult. I was the only woman in a camp with other men, she said. Everything for me was difficult. Bathing, changing myself, I was always late for everything.

The rebels’ response to her lateness: They scream. That was every day life.

She said after being freed she immediately noticed one thing about her life was drastically different — she was no longer constantly scratching herself, bombarded by bugs and insects.

You know, it was hell. It was hell for the body, it was hell for the soul, it was hell for the mind…everything was so horrible, she said. We had all kinds of pains.

In a week, the difference of going from this life to that life…

Betancourt answered nearly all questions, but she would not discuss Emmanuel, the child born in captivity to her running mate, Clara Rojas — who was captured along with her — or whether she was sexually abused.

I think that many things that happened in the jungle we have to leave in the jungle, she said.

Rojas was released earlier this year. Rebels took Emmanuel from his mother about a year after his birth in 2004, delivering him to a farmer who posed as an uncle and had the boy placed in foster care in Bogota, where he remained until being reunited with his mother after her release.

Betancourt also would not detail the punishment she endured after a failed escape attempt.

Oh, that was horrible, she said before telling King that she was not ready for that.

I don’t want to fill myself with those memories, she said.

But the worst thing that happened to her, she said, was realizing that mankind, that human beings can be so horrible to other human beings.

Despite her nightmare, Betancourt said she harbors no hatred for FARC rebels. It’s like a kind of position I took many years ago that when I was released I wouldn’t take out of the jungle any kind of bitterness or any kind of eagerness to seek for revenge, anything of that, she said. And now that I’m out, I feel that I am like in another land. It seems so far and people seem so alien to me.

I don’t want to forget but I want to forgive.

Betancourt’s release was greeted with an outpouring of joy in France, with politicians and media praising the woman who had become a cause celebre in the country where she grew up.

She was given a clean bill of health last week despite reports that she had suffered chronic liver problems for years while in captivity. She walked on her own from a plane the day of her rescue and she remained standing for more than an hour as she recounted her rescue and answered questions from reporters.

On the day of her rescue, Betancourt said, the hostages were awakened at 4 a.m. and told they had to be ready to move. An international commission, they were told, was coming by helicopter, and they were to be moved to another place in that helicopter.

But when it arrived, one of the men aboard the helicopter appeared to know the rebel commanders, and the hostages lost hope.

There was this camera and they were filming us and I was thinking, they just want to tape us so that the world sees that we are alive … and this is going to go on and on and on for four more years, five, six more years, she said.

In truth, the Colombian military had tricked the rebels into believing the transfer was ordered by a FARC commander. And once the hostages were taken aboard the helicopter and it took off, the soldiers overcame the rebel commander who boarded with them, Betancourt said.

I saw the commander of the FARC, he was on the floor, he was neutralized and I heard the voice of the leader saying ‘This is Colombian Army, you are free,’ she said.

I couldn’t talk. I screamed. It was like a yell from, it was a scream that went from the bottom of my stomach, she said. And then I hugged everyone I could hug. I would have hugged anyone at that second. I hugged the one that was beside me, front — I would kiss everybody. It was crazy. It was very intense. We were crying.

Now that she is in France and has been reunited with her children and her mother, Betancourt said she is still concerned with the fate of other hostages held in the FARC-controlled jungles.

We could be over there, we could be the ones left in the jungle, she said. We had this incredible luck to be here, so for me it’s very, very important, very important to ask all the people that can help us to fight for the release of the ones who are still in the jungle.

found here.