Cassandra, who admits she was drinking that night even though she was underage, went to high school in the Houston area, where she was a proud member of the ROTC.

The night of the alleged assault, she was taken to the hospital and eventually given counsel and therapy, but the stress of it was all too much.

She says after a defense attorney with the Air Force harshly interrogated her without representation present, she backed off and decided not to testify.

‘It got very bad, I was getting calls late at night. She was in tears, and she was going back and forth on everything,’ Hernandez said.

But then the unthinkable happened.

Six months after the alleged assault, the Air Force charged Cassandra and the three men with indecent acts.

And it gave the men accused of the sexual assault immunity to testify against Cassandra, which they accepted.

Full Story: KVUE.

More info:

Air Force Times.

Houston Chronicle.

(via Lupa)

Frequency 23’s new podcast is up. This month:

This audio footage comes from a very special field agent, currently stationed somewhere in Texas. Our agent somehow managed to contact Bart Black, a contemporary of Alex Jones among others, for an interview regarding Bart’s own TV show based in Houston, “Frequency Clear”. “Frequency Clear” is a source for alternative news geared towards fighting the information war, guerilla media activism, and advocating for the First Amendment. Bart was gracious enough to accept our correspondent as a personal guest in his office and workspace, and the resulting interview touches upon the pending police state, the mother of all conspiracy theories, and life on the frontline of the information war.

Download at Frequency 23.

Way to go Officer Barbrady!

Local school officials in a suburb of Houston, Texas, are investigating how it was possible that a school police officer handed out calendars to students that featured explicit details on satanic and sexual rituals for every day of the month.

Link (via Wu).

Thompson proves he’s still the hardest writer out there:

This year’s first presidential debate was such a disaster for George Bush that his handlers had to be crazy to let him get in the ring with John Kerry again. Yet Karl Rove let it happen, and we can only wonder why. But there is no doubt that the president has lost his nerve, and his career in the White House is finished. NO MAS.

[...]

Every GOP administration since 1952 has let the Military-Industrial Complex loot the Treasury and plunge the nation into debt on the excuse of a wartime economic emergency. Richard Nixon comes quickly to mind, along with Ronald Reagan and his ridiculous “trickle-down” theory of U.S. economic policy. If the Rich get Richer, the theory goes, before long their pots will overflow and somehow “trickle down” to the poor, who would rather eat scraps off the Bush family plates than eat nothing at all. Republicans have never approved of democracy, and they never will. It goes back to preindustrial America, when only white male property owners could vote.

Things haven’t changed all that much where George W. Bush comes from. Houston is a cruel and crazy town on a filthy river in East Texas with no zoning laws and a culture of sex, money and violence. It’s a shabby sprawling metropolis ruled by brazen women, crooked cops and super-rich pansexual cowboys who live by the code of the West — which can mean just about anything you need it to mean, in a pinch.

[...]

The question this year is not whether President Bush is acting more and more like the head of a fascist government but if the American people want it that way. That is what this election is all about. We are down to nut-cutting time, and millions of people are angry. They want a Regime Change.

[...]

Of course I will vote for John Kerry. I have known him for thirty years as a good man with a brave heart — which is more than even the president’s friends will tell you about George W. Bush, who is also an old acquaintance from the white-knuckle days of yesteryear. He is hated all over the world, including large parts of Texas, and he is taking us all down with him.

An interesting thing about Meetup, a web site for organizing local interest groups, is that it ranks cities by number of people signed up for certain meets.

I’m sitting in front of a sound stage in the middle of a horse pasture watching robotic kids shift and rotate to electronic music. A computer thumps out crunchy, mechanical melodies over the funky beats oozing from turntables. Neon drawings float under the black light from the plywood dance floor. Off to the side of the stage, a guy sits cross-legged and meditates. I’ve been up since 6:30 in the morning, it’s 2:30 at night now, I’m freezing, and have no plans of going to bed. Fatigue has given way to fascination. I feel great.
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