Nearly two months after WikiLeaks outraged the U.S. government by launching the release of a massive compendium of diplomatic documents, the secret-spilling website has published 2,628 U.S. State Department cables — just over 1 percent of its trove of 251,287 documents.
Here's a look at what the consequences of the cables' release has been so far, and what the future could hold for WikiLeaks.
IT'S LIFTED THE VEIL ON INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
WikiLeaks has given the world's public an unprecedented, behind-the-scenes look at U.S. diplomacy.
Among the most eye-catching revelations were reports that Arab countries had lobbied for an attack on Iran, China had made plans for the collapse of its North Korean ally, and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham
Clinton had ordered U.S. diplomats to gather the computer passwords, fingerprints and even DNA of their foreign counterparts.
Some of the most controversial cables dealt with a directive to harvest biometric information on a range of officials. U.S. diplomats have been forced repeatedly to deny spying on their counterparts — although none have specifically addressed the instructions to gather personal details, sensitive computer data, and even genetic material or iris scans.
Anthony Cordesman, an analyst for the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, cautioned that some cables were less explosive when taken in the context they were written. He noted that Arab belligerence toward Tehran has festered for years — and suggested the rhetoric was being ratcheted up at a time of high tensions over Iran's nuclear program.
As for the cables on scooping up fingerprints, frequent flyer numbers, and other personal information,
Cordesman said that "there isn't a diplomatic service in the world that doesn't serve its intelligence community."
IT'S SHOWN HOW LEADERS LIE
Over and over again, the cables captured world leaders lying — to each other, to their allies, and to their own citizens.
Diplomacy "comes across as a scheming, duplicitous profession — which it kind of is," said Carne Ross, a former British diplomat who resigned over the Iraq war.
Ross said the most outrageous example of double-dealing he had seen so far was the 2009 cable that caught Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh sharing a joke about how another senior official had covered up a series of U.S. attacks by lying to parliament.
But there are other examples. One of the cables has Morgan Tsvangirai, Zimbabwe's longtime opposition leader-turned-prime minister, telling Western diplomats that his calls for easing sanctions against Zimbabwe are for public consumption only. Another cable cites Israeli officials, who have often insisted their controversial blockade of the Gaza Strip is targeted only at their arch-foe Hamas, as freely acknowledging that the restrictions were in fact an effort to keep the Gazan economy teetering on the brink of collapse.
The cables are laced with cynicism. One quotes a former French prime minister as dismissing a fellow socialist politician as too honest for his own good. Meanwhile Qatar's prime minister, Sheikh Hamad Bin Jassim Bin Jabr Al-Thani, describes his country's apparently cordial relationship with neighboring Iran as one big charade.
"They lie to us, and we lie to them," Al-Thani is quoted as saying.
IT'S SHAKEN U.S. DIPLOMACY
Italy's Foreign Minister Franco Frattini drew considerable attention when he described the WikiLeaks release as the "September 11 of world diplomacy."
At the very least, the cables have angered some major world figures. Turkey's prime minister demanded that U.S. diplomats be punished for claiming that he had money stashed away in a collection of Swiss bank accounts; cables covering attempts to secure nuclear material in Pakistan drew outrage in a country where public hostility to the United States is already high; rivals such as Russia jumped on the cables to accuse the U.S. of arrogance and dishonesty.
Richard Dalton, the former British ambassador to Libya and now a fellow at London's Chatham House think tank, dismissed Frattini's prediction of a worldwide diplomatic meltdown, suggesting that things would eventually return to business as usual.
"It is — so far — a bump in the road," he said, although he noted longterm damage to U.S. diplomacy was still hard to gauge.
Even if the U.S. State Department rapidly recovers, individual officials still face serious damage to their careers. Officials have told The Associated Press that Ambassador Gene Cretz may lose his job as envoy to Tripoli over his descriptions of Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi's eccentricities.
Allied officials have been rattled by the releases as well: The German foreign minister's chief of staff took a leave of absence following the revelation that he was feeding information to Washington; Afghanistan's finance minister offered to resign after he was quoted as describing President Hamid Karzai as weak and paranoid; Britain's central banker also faced criticism after a cable caught him sharing his doubts about Prime Minister David Cameron's economic competency with the U.S. ambassador to London.
Singapore's Foreign Minister George Yeo may have been speaking for many across the world last month when he instructed officials to be less open when speaking with their American counterparts.
"The WikiLeaks disclosures have been disastrous for U.S. diplomacy," Yeo said.
(AP)
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Sunday, January 23, 2011
Winfrey promises to spill family secret Monday!
Oprah Winfrey has staged many a family reunion on her talk show. But on Monday's episode, she promises, the drama will be about her.
Winfrey told viewers Thursday that she will have a reunion of her own on "The Oprah Winfrey Show." She wouldn't say with whom — only that it involves something she's learned about recently and is known to only a few people close to her.
"I thought I'd seen it all. But this, my friends, is the miracle of all miracles," Winfrey says in a promotional spot for the show. The word "miracle" appears on screen, reinforcing her pronouncement.
"I was given some news that literally shook me to my core. This time, I'm the one being reunited," she said. "I was keeping a family secret for months, and on Monday you're going to hear it straight from me."
Her production company, Harpo, declined to provide further details Friday.
Given Winfrey's tangled family history, the possibilities for her reunion are many.
She was born to unmarried teenagers, Vernon Winfrey and Vernita Lee, and raised at various times by a grandmother, her mother, and her father and stepmother in Mississippi, Wisconsin and Tennessee, according to Winfrey and various biographies.
However, Kitty Kelley's unauthorized 2010 biography of Winfrey alleges that Vernon Winfrey isn't Oprah's biological father. Kelley also claims that she discovered the actual father's identity but was keeping it secret until Winfrey learns the truth herself.
As a teenager, Oprah Winfrey gave birth to a son who died shortly afterward. That chapter of her life was revealed after a family member sold the story to a tabloid in 1990, and Winfrey was said to have felt betrayed.
Using her Chicago-based show to disclose a new wrinkle in her personal history allows her to keep other media from getting hold of it first.
Winfrey has proved herself a master at milking family reunion drama, celebrity and otherwise, on her syndicated talk show that's in its 25th and final season. This month, she launched a cable channel, OWN.
She reunited more than 100 members of the Osmonds. She brought together both the screen family from "The Sound of Music" and descendants of the real-life members of the musical Von Trapp family portrayed in the film. After decades apart, singer Seal and his foster sister were reunited on Winfrey's show.
There was also the memorable reunion involving Clemantine and Claire Wamariya, sisters who escaped the Rwandan genocide and later immigrated to America without knowing if their parents had survived. They learned they had, but it wasn't until they were onstage with Winfrey that the sisters saw their mother and father again.
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Winfrey told viewers Thursday that she will have a reunion of her own on "The Oprah Winfrey Show." She wouldn't say with whom — only that it involves something she's learned about recently and is known to only a few people close to her.
"I thought I'd seen it all. But this, my friends, is the miracle of all miracles," Winfrey says in a promotional spot for the show. The word "miracle" appears on screen, reinforcing her pronouncement.
"I was given some news that literally shook me to my core. This time, I'm the one being reunited," she said. "I was keeping a family secret for months, and on Monday you're going to hear it straight from me."
Her production company, Harpo, declined to provide further details Friday.
Given Winfrey's tangled family history, the possibilities for her reunion are many.
She was born to unmarried teenagers, Vernon Winfrey and Vernita Lee, and raised at various times by a grandmother, her mother, and her father and stepmother in Mississippi, Wisconsin and Tennessee, according to Winfrey and various biographies.
However, Kitty Kelley's unauthorized 2010 biography of Winfrey alleges that Vernon Winfrey isn't Oprah's biological father. Kelley also claims that she discovered the actual father's identity but was keeping it secret until Winfrey learns the truth herself.
As a teenager, Oprah Winfrey gave birth to a son who died shortly afterward. That chapter of her life was revealed after a family member sold the story to a tabloid in 1990, and Winfrey was said to have felt betrayed.
Using her Chicago-based show to disclose a new wrinkle in her personal history allows her to keep other media from getting hold of it first.
Winfrey has proved herself a master at milking family reunion drama, celebrity and otherwise, on her syndicated talk show that's in its 25th and final season. This month, she launched a cable channel, OWN.
She reunited more than 100 members of the Osmonds. She brought together both the screen family from "The Sound of Music" and descendants of the real-life members of the musical Von Trapp family portrayed in the film. After decades apart, singer Seal and his foster sister were reunited on Winfrey's show.
There was also the memorable reunion involving Clemantine and Claire Wamariya, sisters who escaped the Rwandan genocide and later immigrated to America without knowing if their parents had survived. They learned they had, but it wasn't until they were onstage with Winfrey that the sisters saw their mother and father again.
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Women: Pa. abortions left us sterile, near death!
When Davida Johnson walked into Dr. Kermit Gosnell's clinic to get an abortion in 2001, she saw what she described as dazed women sitting in dirty, bloodstained recliners. As the abortion got under way, she had a change of heart — but claims she was forced by the doctor to continue.
"I said, 'I don't want to do this,' and he smacked me. They tied my hands and arms down and gave me more medication," Johnson told The Associated Press.
Johnson, then 21, had a 3-year-old daughter when she became pregnant again. She said she first went to Planned Parenthood in downtown Philadelphia but was frightened away by protesters.
"The picketers out there, they just scared me half to death," Johnson, now 30, recalled this week.
Someone sent her to Gosnell's West Philadelphia clinic, at the Women's Medical Society, saying anti-abortion protesters wouldn't be a problem there. She said she paid him $400 cash.
A few months after the abortion, she began to have gynecological problems. An examination revealed venereal disease. She blames Gosnell, 69, for the lifelong illness, which she declined to identify, and for the four miscarriages she has subsequently suffered.
Johnson learned last week that Philadelphia prosecutors believe Gosnell frequently delivered late-term babies alive at his clinic, then severed their spines with scissors, and often stored the fetal bodies — along with staff lunches — in refrigerators at the squalid facility. Tiny baby feet, prosecutors said, were discovered in specimen jars, lined up in a macabre collection.
"Did he do that to mine? Did he stab him in the neck?" Johnson asked at her North Philadelphia home. "Because I was out of it. I don't know what he did to my baby."
Gosnell was charged last week with killing seven babies born alive and with the 2009 death of a 41-year-old refugee after a botched abortion at the clinic, which prosecutors have called a drug mill by day and abortion mill by night. The medical practice alone netted him at least $1.8 million a year, much of it in cash, they say.
Prosecutors said uncounted hundreds more babies died there.
"(He) regularly and illegally delivered live, viable babies in the third trimester of pregnancy and then murdered these newborns by severing their spinal cords with scissors," said a report of the grand jury that investigated
Gosnell and his clinic for a year.
The grand jury said while it believes Gosnell killed most of the babies he aborted after 24 weeks, it could not recommend murder charges for all of the cases.
"In order to constitute murder, the act must involve a baby who was born alive," the grand jury said, adding that it was stymied by files that were falsified or removed and possibly destroyed.
"His entire practice showed nothing but a callous disdain for the lives of his patients," said the nearly 300-page grand jury report, released Wednesday.
The panel also had scathing criticism for Pennsylvania state health and medical regulators, saying they had numerous opportunities to shut Gosnell down over the years but ignored complaint after complaint about filthy conditions and illegal operations.
In all, prosecutors said, state officials failed to inspect the clinic despite repeated complaints from 1993 until January 2010, when a federal drug raid investigating heavy painkiller distribution at the clinic shut it down.
"His contempt for laws designed to protect patients' safety resulted in the death of Karnamaya Mongar," the refugee from Bhutan, the grand jury report said.
Unlicensed staff members gave Mongar far too much anesthesia for her 4-foot-11-inch, 110-pound body, hours before Gosnell arrived for his evening slate of abortions, the grand jury charged.
Gosnell, at his arraignment Thursday, said he did not understand why he was being charged with eight counts of murder.
"I understand the one count, because a patient died, but I didn't understand the seven counts," he told a magistrate.
The magistrate explained the other counts involved babies who prosecutors say were born alive, and she denied him bail.
Four other clinic employees are charged with murder for roles prosecutors say they had in the deaths of Mongar or the viable babies. Gosnell's wife was charged with performing illegal abortions and other crimes and is being held on $1 million bail.
Gosnell, in an interview with the Philadelphia Daily News after the clinic raid last year, described himself as someone who wanted to serve the poor and minorities in the neighborhood where he grew up and raised his six children, who include a doctor, a college professor and two children who are still at home.
Defense lawyer William J. Brennan, who represented Gosnell during the investigation, said Gosnell "feels he has provided a general care medical facility in a fairly impoverished area for four decades."
"That's his belief," Brennan said, "and he's entitled to it."
Gosnell told the magistrate he's looking to retain another lawyer, and Brennan confirmed he's not representing Gosnell anymore.
"I wish him well, but I am not taking this case," Brennan said. "The doctor and I have had our run."
In one 1999 case, prosecutors said, 20-year-old Marie Smith was sent home after a Gosnell abortion unaware that he had been unable to remove the entire fetus from her uterus. Days later, vomiting and with a swollen abdomen and severe infection, Smith was taken to a hospital, where she was rushed into surgery.
Her mother, Johnnie Mae Smith, said she was shocked at the "nasty and dirty, filthy" conditions in the clinic. When her daughter took ill days later, she called Gosnell.
"I said, 'What did you do to my daughter? ... My daughter's about to die,' Smith said. "He said, 'Take her to the hospital.'"
Gosnell turned up at the hospital with his checkbook, she said, aiming to settle immediately. Instead, she chased him away, vowing to sue. Later, her daughter got $3,000, after lawyer fees, from a $5,000 settlement.
Johnson never sued over the abortion or ensuing venereal disease, but 46 other parties have, including the family of 22-year-old Semika Shaw, who prosecutors said died of sepsis at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania in March 2002 two days after Gosnell perforated her uterus and cervix during an abortion.
Gosnell's insurer later settled the family's lawsuit over her death for $900,000 and referred a complaint and the settlement to state health officials who oversee the clinic and Gosnell's medical license. The insurer's complaint brought no action, prosecutors said, because a Board of Medicine attorney said "the risk was inherent with the procedure."
Gosnell typically worked from about 8 p.m. until after midnight, arriving only after his pregnant patients were dilated, sedated and ready for the abortion procedure.
During the day, his untrained or undertrained staff ran the clinic and practiced medicine there, authorities said. They ranged from two supposed "doctors" who had finished medical school but had no licenses to Ashley
Baldwin, the 15-year-old daughter of office manager Tina Baldwin, prosecutors said. The teenager came after school to administer anesthesia and assist with abortions, even past midnight, the grand jury charged.
"As Ashley's involvement in Gosnell's illegal practices became deeper — at one point she was working 50-hour weeks and well past midnight, while trying to complete high school — Tina did nothing to curtail her minor daughter's exploitation by Gosnell," prosecutors wrote in the report.
Tina Baldwin, 45, is charged with corruption of minors and helping to run a corrupt enterprise. Eight of her co-workers were charged with Gosnell.
Baldwin's husband, Michael Baldwin, told the AP this week that his wife got the Gosnell clinic job eight years ago after a business school she attended referred her there for an internship. She worked up front, taking cash from patients as they walked in.
Baldwin denied that his wife performed any medical tasks or witnessed anything untoward at Gosnell's clinic.
Ashley worked in recovery, making sure the patients had clothes and a ride home, he said.
"How's she going to give anesthesia? My daughter's scared of needles," he said of Ashley, who is now 20 and pregnant and still works in the medical field.
The younger woman, who prosecutors said was present the night Mongar died, was not charged.
Both women cooperated throughout the yearlong grand jury probe, and the family was therefore stunned — and angered — by Tina Baldwin's pre-dawn arrest on Wednesday, Michael Baldwin said.
Mongar had fled Bhutan and had survived nearly 20 years in refugee camps in Nepal, even after cholera took the life of a 4-year-old daughter. She and her family had made it to the United States just four months earlier to pursue "all that America has to offer," according to lawyer Bernard W. Smalley, who filed a medical malpractice lawsuit against Gosnell this week.
"She was the matriarch of their family, and now she's no longer there. Her children will all have to be raised without her," Smalley told the AP.
Mongar was referred to Gosnell's clinic in the city's impoverished Mantua section by a clinic in Virginia that did not do second-trimester abortions. Abortions are legal in Pennsylvania until 24 weeks; prosecutors said
Gosnell routinely performed illegal third-trimester abortions — when babies are viable and the procedure is far more dangerous.
Gosnell was certified in family practice but had never finished an obstetrics/gynecology residency. In the words of Joanne Pescatore, a lead prosecutor on the case, "He does not know how to do an abortion."
Gosnell perforated the uteruses, bowels and cervixes of countless patients, the grand jury report charged. He left fetal parts inside, ignored postoperative pain and bleeding and passed venereal diseases from one patient to the next through bloody and dirty instruments, the report said.
Besides his abortion practice, authorities said, he ranked third in the state for the number of prescriptions he wrote for OxyContin, the highly addictive narcotic painkiller. Authorities allege that he left blank prescriptions for such drugs at his office and allowed staff to make them out to the cash-paying patients who streamed in during the day, when he wasn't there.
Johnson's husband, Bobby, was one of Gosnell's pain patients. He said he went to Gosnell last year, paying $250 cash, to see the doctor about a debilitating pinched nerve. At the time, he said, he did not know his wife had gone to Gosnell years earlier, before they were married, for an abortion.
*This is a societal hot mess! All that were involved need to be locked up for life.*
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"I said, 'I don't want to do this,' and he smacked me. They tied my hands and arms down and gave me more medication," Johnson told The Associated Press.
Johnson, then 21, had a 3-year-old daughter when she became pregnant again. She said she first went to Planned Parenthood in downtown Philadelphia but was frightened away by protesters.
"The picketers out there, they just scared me half to death," Johnson, now 30, recalled this week.
Someone sent her to Gosnell's West Philadelphia clinic, at the Women's Medical Society, saying anti-abortion protesters wouldn't be a problem there. She said she paid him $400 cash.
A few months after the abortion, she began to have gynecological problems. An examination revealed venereal disease. She blames Gosnell, 69, for the lifelong illness, which she declined to identify, and for the four miscarriages she has subsequently suffered.
Johnson learned last week that Philadelphia prosecutors believe Gosnell frequently delivered late-term babies alive at his clinic, then severed their spines with scissors, and often stored the fetal bodies — along with staff lunches — in refrigerators at the squalid facility. Tiny baby feet, prosecutors said, were discovered in specimen jars, lined up in a macabre collection.
"Did he do that to mine? Did he stab him in the neck?" Johnson asked at her North Philadelphia home. "Because I was out of it. I don't know what he did to my baby."
Gosnell was charged last week with killing seven babies born alive and with the 2009 death of a 41-year-old refugee after a botched abortion at the clinic, which prosecutors have called a drug mill by day and abortion mill by night. The medical practice alone netted him at least $1.8 million a year, much of it in cash, they say.
Prosecutors said uncounted hundreds more babies died there.
"(He) regularly and illegally delivered live, viable babies in the third trimester of pregnancy and then murdered these newborns by severing their spinal cords with scissors," said a report of the grand jury that investigated
Gosnell and his clinic for a year.
The grand jury said while it believes Gosnell killed most of the babies he aborted after 24 weeks, it could not recommend murder charges for all of the cases.
"In order to constitute murder, the act must involve a baby who was born alive," the grand jury said, adding that it was stymied by files that were falsified or removed and possibly destroyed.
"His entire practice showed nothing but a callous disdain for the lives of his patients," said the nearly 300-page grand jury report, released Wednesday.
The panel also had scathing criticism for Pennsylvania state health and medical regulators, saying they had numerous opportunities to shut Gosnell down over the years but ignored complaint after complaint about filthy conditions and illegal operations.
In all, prosecutors said, state officials failed to inspect the clinic despite repeated complaints from 1993 until January 2010, when a federal drug raid investigating heavy painkiller distribution at the clinic shut it down.
"His contempt for laws designed to protect patients' safety resulted in the death of Karnamaya Mongar," the refugee from Bhutan, the grand jury report said.
Unlicensed staff members gave Mongar far too much anesthesia for her 4-foot-11-inch, 110-pound body, hours before Gosnell arrived for his evening slate of abortions, the grand jury charged.
Gosnell, at his arraignment Thursday, said he did not understand why he was being charged with eight counts of murder.
"I understand the one count, because a patient died, but I didn't understand the seven counts," he told a magistrate.
The magistrate explained the other counts involved babies who prosecutors say were born alive, and she denied him bail.
Four other clinic employees are charged with murder for roles prosecutors say they had in the deaths of Mongar or the viable babies. Gosnell's wife was charged with performing illegal abortions and other crimes and is being held on $1 million bail.
Gosnell, in an interview with the Philadelphia Daily News after the clinic raid last year, described himself as someone who wanted to serve the poor and minorities in the neighborhood where he grew up and raised his six children, who include a doctor, a college professor and two children who are still at home.
Defense lawyer William J. Brennan, who represented Gosnell during the investigation, said Gosnell "feels he has provided a general care medical facility in a fairly impoverished area for four decades."
"That's his belief," Brennan said, "and he's entitled to it."
Gosnell told the magistrate he's looking to retain another lawyer, and Brennan confirmed he's not representing Gosnell anymore.
"I wish him well, but I am not taking this case," Brennan said. "The doctor and I have had our run."
In one 1999 case, prosecutors said, 20-year-old Marie Smith was sent home after a Gosnell abortion unaware that he had been unable to remove the entire fetus from her uterus. Days later, vomiting and with a swollen abdomen and severe infection, Smith was taken to a hospital, where she was rushed into surgery.
Her mother, Johnnie Mae Smith, said she was shocked at the "nasty and dirty, filthy" conditions in the clinic. When her daughter took ill days later, she called Gosnell.
"I said, 'What did you do to my daughter? ... My daughter's about to die,' Smith said. "He said, 'Take her to the hospital.'"
Gosnell turned up at the hospital with his checkbook, she said, aiming to settle immediately. Instead, she chased him away, vowing to sue. Later, her daughter got $3,000, after lawyer fees, from a $5,000 settlement.
Johnson never sued over the abortion or ensuing venereal disease, but 46 other parties have, including the family of 22-year-old Semika Shaw, who prosecutors said died of sepsis at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania in March 2002 two days after Gosnell perforated her uterus and cervix during an abortion.
Gosnell's insurer later settled the family's lawsuit over her death for $900,000 and referred a complaint and the settlement to state health officials who oversee the clinic and Gosnell's medical license. The insurer's complaint brought no action, prosecutors said, because a Board of Medicine attorney said "the risk was inherent with the procedure."
Gosnell typically worked from about 8 p.m. until after midnight, arriving only after his pregnant patients were dilated, sedated and ready for the abortion procedure.
During the day, his untrained or undertrained staff ran the clinic and practiced medicine there, authorities said. They ranged from two supposed "doctors" who had finished medical school but had no licenses to Ashley
Baldwin, the 15-year-old daughter of office manager Tina Baldwin, prosecutors said. The teenager came after school to administer anesthesia and assist with abortions, even past midnight, the grand jury charged.
"As Ashley's involvement in Gosnell's illegal practices became deeper — at one point she was working 50-hour weeks and well past midnight, while trying to complete high school — Tina did nothing to curtail her minor daughter's exploitation by Gosnell," prosecutors wrote in the report.
Tina Baldwin, 45, is charged with corruption of minors and helping to run a corrupt enterprise. Eight of her co-workers were charged with Gosnell.
Baldwin's husband, Michael Baldwin, told the AP this week that his wife got the Gosnell clinic job eight years ago after a business school she attended referred her there for an internship. She worked up front, taking cash from patients as they walked in.
Baldwin denied that his wife performed any medical tasks or witnessed anything untoward at Gosnell's clinic.
Ashley worked in recovery, making sure the patients had clothes and a ride home, he said.
"How's she going to give anesthesia? My daughter's scared of needles," he said of Ashley, who is now 20 and pregnant and still works in the medical field.
The younger woman, who prosecutors said was present the night Mongar died, was not charged.
Both women cooperated throughout the yearlong grand jury probe, and the family was therefore stunned — and angered — by Tina Baldwin's pre-dawn arrest on Wednesday, Michael Baldwin said.
Mongar had fled Bhutan and had survived nearly 20 years in refugee camps in Nepal, even after cholera took the life of a 4-year-old daughter. She and her family had made it to the United States just four months earlier to pursue "all that America has to offer," according to lawyer Bernard W. Smalley, who filed a medical malpractice lawsuit against Gosnell this week.
"She was the matriarch of their family, and now she's no longer there. Her children will all have to be raised without her," Smalley told the AP.
Mongar was referred to Gosnell's clinic in the city's impoverished Mantua section by a clinic in Virginia that did not do second-trimester abortions. Abortions are legal in Pennsylvania until 24 weeks; prosecutors said
Gosnell routinely performed illegal third-trimester abortions — when babies are viable and the procedure is far more dangerous.
Gosnell was certified in family practice but had never finished an obstetrics/gynecology residency. In the words of Joanne Pescatore, a lead prosecutor on the case, "He does not know how to do an abortion."
Gosnell perforated the uteruses, bowels and cervixes of countless patients, the grand jury report charged. He left fetal parts inside, ignored postoperative pain and bleeding and passed venereal diseases from one patient to the next through bloody and dirty instruments, the report said.
Besides his abortion practice, authorities said, he ranked third in the state for the number of prescriptions he wrote for OxyContin, the highly addictive narcotic painkiller. Authorities allege that he left blank prescriptions for such drugs at his office and allowed staff to make them out to the cash-paying patients who streamed in during the day, when he wasn't there.
Johnson's husband, Bobby, was one of Gosnell's pain patients. He said he went to Gosnell last year, paying $250 cash, to see the doctor about a debilitating pinched nerve. At the time, he said, he did not know his wife had gone to Gosnell years earlier, before they were married, for an abortion.
*This is a societal hot mess! All that were involved need to be locked up for life.*
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AA Political Slugfest: NACCP PIMPING THE SCOTT SISTERS!
Listen to the African American Political Pundit and his guest commentary on how the the NAACP is pimping the newly released "Scott Sisters" from prison.
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Listen to internet radio with AAPolitical Slugfest on Blog Talk Radio
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