US official threatens employees with magic
Matthew says: "Reuters and the Washington Post reports that amongst other unusual and possibly illegal behavior, Ginger Cruz, a deputy to the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, has threatened to curse employees with magic."
Current and former SIGIR employees have told investigators that Bowen's deputy, Ginger Cruz, a self-described wiccan, threatened to put hexes on employees and made inappropriate sexual remarks.Link
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Burn the witch!!
Reminds me of when the Yippies and assorted Hippies attempted to levitate The Pentagon by use of magic (Oct 21, 1967) - in order to exorcise evil spirits.
Sometime Yippie leader Abbie Hoffman claimed they managed to lift the building 2 feet off the ground!
Magic is where you make it!
I don't see how this is any different than someone saying something along the lines of "God damn you"
Isn't using magic destructively bad for the practitioner? I hope Ms Cruz is prepared for the consequences of her actions.
The real news here may be that that a Wiccan managed to get such a position with the administration screening candidates for their political and religious views rather than competence. She must have cast a heck of a spell to get the job - fear her powers!
*sigh*
if MY hexes worked, these assholes would ALL be frogs by now...
Not the type of publicity the poor Pagan movement needs. Sigh.
@Father Brown: don't you mean "Magic is where you make it UP"?
You could've cited the next sentence, too.
"The Post said Cruz denied making comments of a "sexual nature" and noted that she was cleared of wrongdoing by an internal SIGIR investigation."
The answer is simple.
They should have stolen her magic leg!!
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No real Wiccan would threaten people with cursing. It would rebound on her threefold. She's just a fake, like a holier than thou Christian who preaches hate and not love. Sadly, no religion is exempt from having bad people join it and misrepresent its message.
She's not a very good wiccan if she's threatening people with curses. Central to the wiccan code is "do what thou wilt, but harm none" (very much like "treat others as you wish to be treated", which a lot of Christians seem to forget as well).
I like how they tacked on 'made inappropriate sexual remarks' haha
"Well, I will tolerate the hexings ma'am, but I do not appreciate being called 'hotpants' "
Isn't it wonderful how the Iraq spending windfall has attracted such a diverse and talented group of Americans. Colorful characters and scandals, sort of like one of the Gold Rush cities.
How is a "self-described" wiccan any different from a "self-described" christian, muslim, jew, or pastafarian? Aren't adherents of any faith self-described?
Personally, a boss making inappropriate sexual comments would be far more uncomfortable than one that continually threatens to curse me.
It's nice to know that Bush is an equal opportunity asshole employer.
She made the mistake of using the Wiccan brand of superstitious nonsense, instead of the state-mandated, all-American Christian variety.
rq Rcnstrctn, h|?
bvsly tht psd-wtch btch hs nt yt bn nfrmd tht vryn nvlvd wth "rq Rcnstrctn" , nd spclly th tp ppl, r LRDY crsd. S GTF T F RQ!
All religion is magic.
She turned me into a newt!
@ 21
That is a slur on magic!
Doesn't cursing someone also curse you twofold? Or am I thinking of Voodoo?
If not, that chick's gonna have like 1100 years worth of curse to work off.
Alessar She's just a fake
As opposed to the other kind of magical witch faerie?
"As it harm none, do as thou willt".
I thought that in Wicca, all your actions return to you three-fold.
Nevermind Wicca. Nevermind magic. Everything is magic until it is proven, then it becomes science. She was threatening to employ some of the 'occult' practices being exploited by the American gov't, big business, etc.
whoops.
I think that she's going to end up in Azkaban for that shit.
Alessar: hey, it's Jack O'Lantern from CoH!
@Alessar: You're absolutely right.
@Autarchi: ROTFLMAO!
I curse my co-workers every day but nothing so far...They are not hunched over in spasms of pain. Sigh, what am I doing wrong?
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Isn't usince the begitimacy somean that god exings a natural retre you make it!
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Krool, if we stick to the strict definitions, religion is not mysticism is not magic. . . Although they can all be considered as particular forms of insanity...
Then again, according to a definition of insanity, every human being is insane.
Some tnttvly dmbd-dwn definition:
Religion: looking up to God.
Mysticism: looking at your belly-button.
Magic: looking at your dick.
For those of you who believe that all Wiccans and pagans are devotees and love and light and frolic in meadows with pink unicorns and butterflies, I don't really want to be around when you come to the inevitable conclusion that, just like every other religious group, the pagan community is filled with normal, everyday people. That means that we can fight and argue each other, we can do petty spiteful things, and we are capable of a lot of mean-spirited acts. We're also capable of being kind, loving, high-minded and genuinely love humanity. In other words, we're human.
You can't have one happy community all grooving together. It will never happen, especially in a community where every single pagan is encouraged to find their own path. A lot of those paths will cross, but some go in opposite directions.
We're not perfect, and as a group, if you expect pagans to agree with each other and dance happily into the night, well, get over it, this is the real world, we have bad days just like everyone else. We can be xenophobic, prejudiced, and tyrannical, just like anyone else (that's why I tend to stay away from the community in this area.) You would not believe the amount of infighting and petty witch-wars that go on. Of course, there's a lot of group cohesion when the timing's right, at certain times of the year, or when there's a threat against the community or nature that unites us all.
The notion that all pagans are 'good' and all Christians are 'bad' and 'out to get us' is just as unreal as the notion that all Wiccans are sick and perverted, or Satan worshippers. Sadly, many pagans and Wiccans (myself included) believe that they've found a Utopian community of empowered believers when they first discover their path. That will wear out really quickly into disillusion and disenchantment when you spend time in the community. It's balance at its most basic, mixing the positive with the negative, not all fluffy 'Love and Light' goodness.
Towards those citing the Threefold Law:
Remember that Wicca is an individualist movement! Not all Wiccans believe in the Threefold Law, and in the witchcraft community at large, hexing is actually rather common. It's particularly common among the African Diasporic witchcraft practices, such as Santeria, Voodoo, Vodou, Hoodoo, Candomble and Yoruba. There are a fair number of non-Wiccan Pagan witches who practice some form of hexing or control magick, as well, despite its bad reputation.
-a former Hermetic Magician
Cases against Iraq IG, deputy, end without charges
LARA JAKES JORDAN
Associated Press
July 16, 2008
WASHINGTON (AP) — The government has cleared the top U.S. watchdog of Iraq reconstruction projects and his deputy of fraud and abuse allegations lodged by former employees, officials said Wednesday.
On July 3, federal prosecutors alerted the office of Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction Stuart Bowen that a grand jury declined to indict him or deputy Ginger Cruz.
Last week, on July 9, the President's Council on Integrity and Efficiency similarly cleared him and Cruz of any administrative charges stemming from the accusations. The executive branch council was created to investigate allegations of misconduct by inspectors general at federal agencies.
Both notices came in letters to Bowen's office, said SIGIR spokeswoman Kristine Belisle.
"I always had faith that we'd be cleared of the allegations," Cruz said in an interview Wednesday. "We knew there was no basis to them."
Cruz described the investigations dating back to 2006 as "very thorough." She said it combed through all of her e-mail, and multiple people were interviewed for it.
"To be completely cleared of anything criminal and anything administratively is a very welcome sense of closure for me personally, and the organization," Cruz said.
A complaint to the presidential council filed by anonymous former staff members in 2006 focused on a number of fraud and abuse allegations, as well as descriptions of possible workplace violations, including sexual harassment. It included charges that Bowen's office overstated the amount of savings that it generated in order to justify a budget request and that money was wasted on a book project.
A grand jury based in Richmond, Va., was investigating whether Bowen and Cruz inappropriately accessed employee e-mails and used taxpayer funds to pay their legal expenses associated with the 2006 administrative probe, federal officials confirmed in December.
Both Bowen and Cruz denied any wrongdoing throughout the investigations. In a memo released to the media, Bowen said the office paid $32,700 of Cruz's legal fees and none of his own. He said that SIGIR's general counsel determined that some of her fees could be paid by the agency since the administrative review "covered actions taken in her official capacity."
Bowen's office polices an uneven reconstruction effort in Iraq that has cost U.S. taxpayers more than $100 billion. His latest report, issued in April, found that millions of dollars of lucrative Iraq reconstruction contracts were never finished because of excessive delays, poor performance or other factors — including failed projects that are being falsely described by the U.S. government as complete.
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