MORE Horror from Tracy, California

First, there was this:

Not Guilty Plea Entered In Cantu Murder Case
A northern California woman accused of raping, drugging and murdering her 8-year-old neighbor pleaded not guilty at a hearing Friday.

Melissa Huckaby, 28, is accused of murdering Sandra Cantu, her daughter's playmate, who disappeared on March 27 and whose body was found stuffed in a suitcase in an irrigation pond on April 6.

San Joaquin County Court Judge Linda Lofthus scheduled a preliminary hearing for the case for Sept. 24.

Huckaby, a former Sunday school teacher, is also charged with child endangerment and furnishing a harmful substance. Prosecutors and police say she drugged another 7-year-old girl and a man months before Cantu was murdered. Both survived.

LINK

And now this:

Tortured teen testimony released
A 16-year-old allegedly tortured for a year inside a Tracy home told a grand jury that he escaped because his captors talked about killing him and dumping his body in the Delta.

Afraid for his life, the boy — called Kyle in court papers — fled the Tennis Lane home on Dec. 1 by unlocking himself from the fireplace to which he was chained and using a trampoline to hop over the backyard wall.

After he heard his alleged captors talking on speakerphone about how they planned to cut off his fingers with a meat cleaver, Kyle said he knew then that he had to find a way out.

Husband and wife Michael Schumacher and Kelly Lau were arrested in December along with next-door neighbor Anthony Waiters and a woman named Carén Ramirez who called herself Kyle’s mom. Police said they starved, drugged and beat the boy for as many as 18 months after he fled a Sacramento group home in spring 2007.

The four could spend life in prison if found guilty of the several charges of torture, kidnapping, false imprisonment, assault with caustic chemicals and other forms of abuse.

Kyle told the grand jury that the abuse escalated from slapping and punching to slicing flesh and drawing blood for offenses as minor as forgetting to feed the dog or for taking food to slake his hunger.

Waiters once sliced Kyle’s arm with a steak knife, Kyle said. Ramirez held his arm down and Kyle screamed, the boy alleged. Kyle said that afterwards, the pair poured bleach on his cuts and doctored them with salt and butter before wrapping his arm in a paper towel.

Other times, Ramirez, Lau and Waiters would stick an aluminum baseball bat into the fireplace and brand Kyle’s back, the teen said.

The boy said Schumacher would sometimes punch him in the face until he passed out. Kyle also said he was chained to the fireplace, where he was forced to sleep most nights.

Lau used a belt once to choke him until he lost consciousness, Kyle said. She allegedly strapped a belt around his neck and buckled it. He dropped to the fireplace hearth and his arm fell on the grate while the fire blazed, he said.

“When I first woke up, I didn’t know what happened or anything,” he said. “So then I immediately noticed my arm was, like, discolored and everything, and I was, like, really freaking out, and at first I didn’t feel anything.”

To treat the burn, Kyle said Ramirez would just pour bleach on it. His wounds scabbed over and became infected.

Kyle was allegedly abused nearly every day until he bled, and that’s the only reason he ever got new clothes, he said.

YOU CAN READ MORE ABOUT THIS TEEN'S HORROR STORY HERE

Is there something in the water there in Tracy, California? These are true horror stories and according to some odd sounding people who left comments, other people knew it was going on or should have known and they did nothing about it.

What is going on in Tracy?

Mancow Denies His Waterboarding Was a Hoax

George Bush got memos from Rumsfeld that used Scripture to push Iraq war

Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld sent President George Bush top secret wartime memos with cover sheets that mixed Scripture and battle photos to cast the Iraq invasion as a holy Christian crusade.

Rumsfeld, not a man who wore religion on his sleeve, appeared to be trying to manipulate - or curry favor with - the Bible-quoting Bush, according to an explosive story in GQ.

Some Pentagon analysts worried that if the memo covers leaked, they would inflame the Islamic world, undercut Washington's Arab allies and bolster those who claimed America was out to Christianize the Muslim world.

MORE...

A rather disgusting and scary perversion of a religion, don't you think? If you put a kaffiyeh on Rummy's head, you might think you were dealing with sha'aria-mad Al Qaeda.

Well, we now know that Bush had plans for an Iraq invasion before the 2000 election. We know the whole torture mess was not about preventing imminent terrorist attacks against Americans but was, instead, all about forcing prisoners to utter the magic words that there was a connection between Osama and Saddam. We know the ironclad proof of Saddam's WMD factories as represented by the "top-secret CIA photos" held up at the U.N. by Colin Powell were mere purchased images from a commercial satellite company that provides "taken from space" photos to anyone who wants to buy them. We know the White House and Cheney targetted Valerie Plame and Joseph Wilson for exposing a crack in their strategy. We know the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo was orchestrated from the White House - from conception to planning to execution of the torture program.

So, this little tidbit about Rummy's abuse of religion is just another piece of the horror puzzle this country and other countries have been made to endure for the sake of one President's insanity.

Ick.