Bad American

Iowa City Press Citizen picked up by Drudge

Iowa City Police received a 911 call about 6:31 a.m. directing them to 629 Barrington Road in the Windsor Ridge subdivision in east Iowa City. The call came from a cell phone and the caller immediately disconnected.

Police arrived at the scene and found the house unlocked. They entered the home, fearing for the family’s safety, and found the bodies of Sheryl Sueppel and her four children. Sueppel’s husband, Steven Sueppel, wasn’t there and the family’s tan Toyota Sienna minivan was missing. Police haven’t confirmed the cause of death, but did say that the incident was not a shooting.

Police launched a search for Steven Sueppel, a former vice president at Hills Bank, who was recently indicted for embezzling more than half a million dollars from the bank.

In the meantime, the University of Iowa, the Iowa City School District and all Hills Bank locations were placed on lockdown. The school district has since lifted its lockdown.

Meanwhile, Iowa City Police are on the scene of a single-vehicle fatality east of Iowa City in the median of Interstate 80 near the 250 mile marker. A Toyota minivan was westbound on the interstate between 6:30 and 7 a.m. when it crashed into the concrete support for an electronic road sign. The minivan burst into flame, and an Iowa State Trooper at the scene said there was one body found inside but that it was burned beyond immediate identification.

In a news release, police say the vehicle on I-80 is possibly the missing van, but as yet haven’t been able to confirm that.

As Keanu might say “whoa.”

FYI, in Eastern Iowa, Hills Bank is about as common as National City Banks are here in the Greater Cleveland area.

More background here from what appears to be a genuine heartland tragedy:

On Feb. 21, Sueppel appeared with his lawyer in Iowa Southern District Court in Davenport to plead not guilty to the charges.

Sueppel was charged with one count of embezzlement and six counts of money laundering. The court has alleged that during a seven-year period, Sueppel embezzled $599,040 from Hills Bank. He also allegedly laundered a total of $13,500 from Aug. 23, 2007 to Sept. 17, 2007, according to his indictment.

According to a search warrant signed by Johnson County Sheriff Det. Sgt. Doug Gwinn, Sueppel told bank officials he spent most of the $219,000 he took over a three-year period for cocaine purchases.

Needless to say, a small place like Iowa City is in complete shock.

Although police have yet to confirm it, they believe that Steven Sueppel, Sheryl’s husband and the four children’s father, is also dead after crashing the family’s minivan into a road sign on Interstate 80.

The extended Sueppel family is something of an Iowa City institution. Sister Agnes Giblin of St. Mary’s Catholic Church in Iowa City said the Sueppel’s were active church members.

“The family was always willing to help out whenever we asked them and they were very generous,” Giblin said today.

Giblin said the Sueppel’s were all at church for Easter Mass on Sunday. All four children were baptized there, the oldest child had taken First Communion there and the second was preparing to take First Communion in May.

Giblin went to the Sueppel house this morning and prayed outside of it before going to the home of Bill and Pat Sueppel, Steven Sueppel’s parents. She also visited the home of Sheryl Sueppels parents.

“They know we are here,” Giblin said. “We just tried to walk them through their grief.”

As a journalist who both covered these kind of wholesale family murders or researched them, I’m always struck by the mentality of the fathers in these cases who somehow feel that ending their own miserable lives isn’t quite enough - they have to take their entire families with them.

I am reminded of one of the most famous of these kinds of cases - the John List murders of 1971.

When I worked for the Peoria Journal-Star covering Bloomington-Normal, Illinois, the most famous of the fratricide cases (alleged fratricides) was the murder of the entire David Hendricks family. The funny thing about these cases is that tend never to go completely away if the alleged perp is still alive.

Apparently the Sueppel wife and kids were stabbed or hacked to death much like the Hendricks children who were slain by an ax.

Communities have to wrestle with these tragedies for many years and the imprint echoes through many layers of civic life. I can only imagine what will be going on the in the schools where the Sueppel children attended and the people who knew and worked with the parents. I am sure the media in Cedar Rapids will be covering this extensively as well.

Murders are always awful but these are among the worst for all involved, especially for the police and other first responders to the scene. I remember speaking with some of the people who arrived at the Hendricks house the morning of the slayings. McLean County Assistant States Attorney (later States Attorney) Charles Reynard said by the time he saw the bodies the children had taken on the appearance of wax figures from some ghastly Tussaud’s exhibition.

In any case, having lived in the area from 2003-07 and worked in the Eastern Iowa media, my thoughts and prayers are with the surviving family members.

Der Spiegel interviews Lawrence Wilkerson

OF COURSE you didn’t see this! Our ‘liberal’ US media protects you from the news people of other countries get every day about the USA. You might lose your religion patriotism. And we all know you MUST love your country unconditionally or you’re a bad American.

Anyway, Wilkerson was Colin Powell’s chief of staff in the weeks leading up to the illegal and immoral invasion of Iraq. You can read the whole interview (DO YOU DARE?!?! Has it been ‘vetted’ by CNN?) but the salient point is here:

SPIEGEL: Do you ever think that Powell was set up?

Wilkerson: Well I am increasingly convinced that, for a part of the Bush administration, the argument “weapons of mass destruction” was just a camouflage, just subterfuge for their real goals and reasons of the war.

SPIEGEL: What are they?

Wilkerson: I am convinced that the vast oil resources of Iraq weigh heavier for me now when I do the strategic analysis as reasons for the war than I thought back then.

SPIEGEL: Who do you mean specifically? George W. Bush?

Wilkerson: I am not sure. But I would be very interested to look at the documents chronicling Dick Cheney’s pre-war conversations with leading figures of the energy business and with oil magnates. Maybe one day historians will be able to get their hands on those documents and come to a judgment about that — if and when the classified documents become open to the public.

As I have repeatedly said and wrote ad nauseum, it is my steadfast belief that the so-called “energy conference” Cheney held with industry and defense representatives was first and foremost to find out the questions to the following questions: (1) how much oil is left and (2) how do we get our hands on it?

Period. It’s called Peak Oil. Google it.

What you’ve been experiencing for the last five years is the result of the answers Cheney got to those questions, the minutes of which remain above top secret.

While you’re inundated with the breast beating about the 4,000 troops of the empire who will never see their children again nor be seen by their children and families again for Bush’s war of oil, check this out:

OK, first of all, hat tip to Michael Shaw at HuffPo from whence this came.  Now look carefully at this photo of an intimidated (look at the eyes) Iraqi family posing with a US soldier. Look at what’s hanging in the upper right hand corner on their wall. Yep. Your eyes are not deceiving you, its a rug picturing the signing of the US Declaration of Independence.

This is from a photo essay on the MSNBC website “FirstPerson from the frontlines,” is dedicated to images from U.S. soldiers in Iraq. The picture was posted by “Anonymous,” and the description reads as follows:

Picture of me and some Iraqi kids home alone in Ta’meem Ramadi in 2006.
They had a wall rug with a picture of the signing of the United States
Declaration of Independence in their living room.
I asked them if their parents told them what it meant and they did not have a clue.
Their parents purchased the rug in a market. I also have a second picture of the entire wall rug.

We had to leave before I could explain what the picture meant.

Actually, if the soldier had taken the time to explain what the picture meant, he might have gotten in trouble for fomenting dissent. A HuffPo poster named RickO wrote it best:

Here’s an explanation of that picture: “Kids, you know what an insurgency is, right? Well, sometimes insugencies are called revolutions and other times they’re called extremism. It depends on your perspective. Either way, the point is to expel some occupying outsider or fight some perceived injustice so you can be free to make your own decisions and it almost always takes a blood bath to make the point. We had our own insurgency back in the day and even though we were a rag-tag bunch of farmers and merchants up against the world’s most powerful coalition of the willing, we kicked ass because we knew there was no military solution to a motivated insurency. All we had to do was hold out and hell, now the Brits are working for us.”

So today, just for a second, remember the captive people in Iraq - no longer held captive by Saddam Hussein but by the armies of George W. Bush and Gordon Brown. We’d leave and let them fight it out amongst themselves but as Bush famously once said “they’d get all the oil.” And that’s our goddamn oil, you betcha.

So sorry to destroy your country utterly and kill thousands of your citizens. Geopolitics are like that sometimes. Ask Kissinger. See, OUR way of life is non-negotiable. Yours isn’t.

I know, ‘might makes right’ wasn’t the message of our Declaration of Independence; in fact, it was exactly the opposite. But to Bush, Cheney and their minions, its probably just another “goddamn piece of paper.”

But once upon a time in America it meant something. But now such ideas are subversive and dissemination of them probably fall under the purview of the Patriot Act.

In case you want to read it, here it is. But you didn’t get it from me.