Jesse Osmun, Former Peace Corps Volunteer, Sentenced to 15 Years in Prison

Sorry for the downtime here, I've been working on a special project (about which more later). But as I promised last year, here's the latest news from the case of Jesse Osmun, the South Africa PCV who was arrested for sexually abusing children:

A judge sentenced a former Peace Corps volunteer to 15 years in prison for abusing girls under the age of 6 in South Africa while he was a volunteer there, federal officials said.

The sentencing was announced Thursday in a statement from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Jesse Osmun, 33, of Milford, Connecticut, joined the Peace Corps in 2010 and worked in a nongovernmental organization's AIDS center for children whose families had suffered or died from the disease, his attorney, Richard Meehan, Jr., told CNN Thursday. Osmun volunteered as a Web designer for the center and worked with older children in a "scout" program.

While there, Osmun engaged in sexual acts with four girls, all under the age of 6, officials said. One girl was abused twice a week over the course of approximately five months, authorities said.

Fuck.

Comments

Why Did Reality Winner Leak to the Intercept?

So Reality Winner, former NSA contractor, is in federal prison for leaking classified information — for five years and three months, the longest sentence of any whistleblower in history. She gave documents on how Russia had attempted to hack vendors of election machinery and software to The Intercept , which completely bungled basic security procedures (according to a recent New York Times piece from Ben Smith, the main fault lay with Matthew Cole and Richard Esposito ), leading to her capture within hours. Winner recently contracted COVID-19 in prison, and is reportedly suffering some lingering aftereffects. Glenn Greenwald has been furiously denying that he had anything at all to do with the Winner clusterfuck, and I recently got in an argument with him about it on Twitter. I read a New York story about Winner, which clearly implies that she was listening to the Intercepted podcast of March 22, 2017 , where Greenwald and Jeremy Scahill expressed skepticism about Russia actual...

Varanus albigularis albigularis

That is the Latin name for the white-throated monitor lizard , a large reptile native to southern Africa that can grow up to two meters long (see pictures of one at the Oakland Zoo here ). In Setswana, it's called a "gopane." I saw one of these in my village yesterday on the way back from my run. Some kids from school found it in the riverbed and tortured it to death, stabbing out its eyes, cutting off its tail, and gutting it which finally killed it. It seemed to be a female as there were a bunch of round white things I can only imagine were eggs amongst the guts. I only arrived after it was already dead, but they described what had happened with much hilarity and re-enactment. When I asked why they killed it, they said it was because it would eat their chickens and eggs, which is probably true, and because it sucks blood from people, which is completely ridiculous. It might bite a person, but not unless threatened. It seems roughly the same as killing wolves that...

Russiagate and the Left, Round II

Corey Robin has responded to my article arguing that the left should take the Trump-Russia story more seriously . I do appreciate that he considers me an ally, and I feel the same towards him. However I am not convinced. The points I want to make are somewhat disconnected, so I will just take them one at a time. What should be done? Robin complains that I don't give much attention to the question of how we should respond to Russian electoral espionage. As an initial matter, the question of whether a problem is an important one is logically distinct from what the response should be. There is a sizable vein of skepticism about Russiagate on the left, and the argument of the post was that skepticism was misplaced. Solutions can be worked out later. This point is rather similar to the centrist argument that you can't talk about Medicare for All unless you've got a fully costed-out bill detailing all the necessary taxes and regulation. However, I have advanced some pol...

Ryan Cooper

Search This Blog