a weaponized version of islam has created worldwide conflict. it is currently destroying swedish cities. it is destroying syria. it has destroyed afghanistan. it has destroyed libya.
the evil fucks in governments – i’m an anarchist, ALL people in government are evil fucks – HAVE to take in refugees from nations they have destroyed by supporting resource extraction and the internal warfare needed to carry it out. just like the u.s. MUST take in their former translators from iraq and afghanistan and their families. otherwise, they would be tracked down and killed by people unfriendly to the u.s.
if the ‘white” (there, i said it) nations of europe and northernmost america did NOT take these people in and instead left them behind to fend for themselves, you wouldn’t see too many people lining up to help whitey.
and – wouldn’t you know it – where do these refugees land upon their arrival in their new country? most of them are dumped into neighborhoods that have traditionally been filled almost exclusively by poor white folk – many of them immigrants as well.
sounds like a perfect recipe to stir racial hostility – just look at how neo-nazi parties have suddenly become active in the government of greece.
sweden is burning with undirected rage that lashes out at the first available target. racist cops go after african and islamic immigrants. the streets erupt in flames. the political parties re-align. and the government will either come up with a solution that makes matters worse for all swedes, or it will do nothing until the situation becomes so dire that martial law is declared, and the government wins forever, because only terrorists and criminals would be opposed to the government.
who the hell knows? maybe the king will dismiss the government and demand all swedes declare their fealty to him or get the hell out.
and i gotta admit that – despite the headline and opening rantings, i am seeing little evidence of these riots being religiously motivated, other than attacks on schools. under sharia law, boys should be educated apart from girls, and girls are discouraged from getting “too much” education.
see the rawa website for more about women living under sharia authoritarians.
the rodney king quote goes here. not that i’m trying to quote him, it’s just a sentiment that continually echoes in my heart and head, all my 50+ years.
The Swedish capital, Stockholm, has been hit by a fifth night of civil disturbances that started following a fatal police shooting. Albeit quieter than on previous nights, firefighters continued to battle sporadic arson attacks on cars early on Friday. – from Russia Today
Disturbances blamed on failed effort to integrate foreigners
In one suburb, more than 80 per cent of the 12,000 or so inhabitants are from an immigrant background, and most are from Turkey, the Middle East and Somalia, the BBC reported.
Community activists have accused the police of using racist language. Police have tried to calm the situation by speaking with community leaders.
two years ago: Swedes Begin to Question Liberal Migration Tenets
February 26, 2011
For a time, Sweden seemed immune to the kind of anti-immigrant sentiment blossoming elsewhere on the European continent. Its generous welfare and asylum policies have allowed hundreds of thousands of refugees to settle here, many in recent years from Muslim countries. Nearly a quarter of Sweden’s population is now foreign born or has a foreign-born parent.
But increasingly, Swedes are questioning these policies. Last fall, the far-right party — campaigning largely on an anti-immigration theme — won 6 percent of the vote and, for the first time, enough support to be seated in the Swedish Parliament.
Six months later, many Swedes are still in shock. The country — proud of its reputation for tolerance — can no longer say it stands apart from the growing anti-immigrant sentiment that has changed European parliaments elsewhere, leading to the banning of burqas in France and minarets in Switzerland.
In Malmo, a rapidly gentrifying port city in Sweden’s south, support for the far-right Sweden Democrats was particularly strong, about 10 percent of the vote. It is a place where tensions over immigration are on full display.
It is home to almost 20,000 immigrants, overwhelmingly Muslim, almost half of them jobless.
“It’s become crazy around here. You can’t go out in the evening,” said Maria, who like other locals, did not want her surname revealed. “I’ve got nothing against foreigners. I’ve been married to a Bulgarian for 40 years. But these people don’t share our values. If you don’t like the colour of our flag, I say, I’ll help you pack your bags.”
Swedish police seek reinforcements after youths set ablaze cars and attack property and schools in poorer suburbs of capital
MR. SMARTY-PANTS AWARD – FOR pointing out that the rioting is going on in the suburbs, and not in stockholm proper. 12 points!
Stockholm’s not burning
Integration Minister Erik Ullenhag is another unimpressed voice when it comes to the international attention on Stockholm.
“I’ve seen in the international media that this is a riot between young people in some parts of Stockholm and the society, but this is not true,” he told me on Thursday.
“It’s a small proportion. The majority of young people in Tensta, Husby, Rinkeby, they go to schools and they want to have opportunities in Sweden, and it’s important to tell that story.”
He added that the unrest is unfortunately overshadowing all the good things that happen in these areas.
WHAT IS THIS ALL ABOUT? IT LOOKS LIKE THE FEDS ARE DOING A MOP-UP, COVERING THE TRACKS OF A DRUG-RUNNING OPERATION. WHOSE TRACKS ARE THEY COVERING, AND WHY?
Widow of Dead Bombing Suspect’s Family also founded Skull and Bones
CONFIRMED: Katherine Russell (alleged bomber’s wife) is granddaughter of Richard Warren Russell, Skull and Bones member and entrepreneur in the energy industry.
Russell’s obituary lists Warren King Russell II as son – and that’s Katherine’s emergency room doctor father.
That means wife had family spook connections as well as husband Tamerlan (Uncle Rusla). And both had fast, dramatic and uncharacteristic conversions to a perverted form of Islam favored by the gangster family that runs Saudi Arabia and works hand in hand with our spooks.
What does a massive coincidence like this mean?
Yale University’s elite Skull and Bones Society was co-founded by none other than William Huntington Russell (1809 – 1885) along with his classmate at the time, Alphonso Taft. The secret society’s alumni organization, which owns the society’s real property and oversees the organization, is called the Russell Trust Association.
young man in florida killed during questioning by federal agents, at his apartment.
The shooting occurred in an apartment complex near the Universal Studios theme park, where the FBI and members of other law enforcement agencies including the Massachusetts State Police were interviewing the man about the marathon bombing.
“A violent confrontation was initiated by the individual,” the FBI said. A special agent, it said, “acting on the imminent threat posed by the individual, responded with deadly force. The individual was killed and the special agent was transported to the hospital with non-life-threatening injuries.”
NBC News reported on Wednesday that 27-year-old Ibragim Todashev had confessed to his involvement in an unsolved 2011 triple homicide in a Boston suburb that investigators believe was drug related.
Authorities were also stepping up their investigation into possible connections between Tsarnaev, who died in a shootout with police, and an unsolved 2011 triple homicide in a Boston suburb that investigators believe was drug related.
Law enforcement officials have also interviewed another person of Chechen origin, ex-rebel Musa Khadzhimuratov, at his home in New Hampshire, the New York Times reported last week. Khadzhimuratov, who had served as a bodyguard to a top Chechen separatist leader during the region’s civil war with Russia more than a decade ago, also had contact with Tsarnaev.
THIS IS WHERE THE BROTHERS TSARNAEV ARE ALLEGED TO FIT INTO THIS
Watertown Man the Focus of Federal Drug Bust that Nets 9
May 9, 2011
Nine men face charges stemming from drug investigation of drugs coming from Canada to Massachusetts.
The investigation beganin Febrary 2010 in Vermont when federal authorities were looking into a drug trafficking organization based in Canada that used warehouses in Massachusetts and Rhode Island, the affidavit said. The investigation led authorities to a warehouse at 33 Flagship Drive in North Andover.
Surveillance led authorities to Madarati. On March 23, 2010, a rented U-Haul truck left the warehouse and stopped at 185 Warren St. in Watertown, Madarati’s home, Lavoie wrote.
On June 14, 2010, Federal agents set up surveillance of the Dunkin Donuts at 49 Mt. Auburn St. in Watertown. They allegedly spotted a man give two duffle bags to Madarati in the parking lot.
Watertown Police stopped Madarati’s car at Summer and Waverley streets. When ICE agents looked in the bag, they found $70,040 in cash, which they believe to be drug proceeds, according to the affidavit.
In August 2010, ICE and Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) agents received permission to monitor and record Madarati’s cell phone calls.
“These wiretaps have revealed that Madarati is involved in the distribution of marijuana, oxycodone, cocaine, and Ecstasy in and around the area of Watertown, Massachusetts,” Lavoie wrote in the affidavit.
Federal agents learned that Madarati worked with Soukiasian, Sarkissian and Johnson to distribute “wholesale quantities of marijuana that Madarati received from an organization based in Quebec,” Lavoie wrote.
Soukiasian and Idanjian’s cell phones were also tapped by the agents.
The conversations and communications were in English, Arabic and Armenian, and federal authorities had to bring in contractors to translate.
On Oct. 27, agents seized $1.77 million in cash after observing Madarati and Soukiasian deliver two pieces of luggage to two unnamed men who had entered the U.S. from Canada earlier that day. The bags were exchanged at the Marriott Hotel in Newton and agents made the stop as the two unnamed men tried to enter Hanscom Airport.
“There went to the second floor and saw a very graphic crime scene. There were three dead bodies in the apartment,” said Gerry Leone, Middlesex County District Attorney.
Leone would not say how the victims died. He only said that the crime was not random.
“We have no evidence of a break in the apartment and we have other…that the assailants were known to each other,” said Leone. “We know there are at least two people who are not in that apartment now who were there earlier.”
Law enforcement agencies are also looking for clues linking Tsarnaev to a September 12, 2011(the bodies were discovered on the afternoon of the 12th – gaian), triple murder in Waltham, Massachusetts, where three men including a close friend of Tsarnaev were found stabbed in the neck in an apartment.
News reports said that marijuana was strewn over their bodies.
i apologize for the sloppy way i produced this post. i forgot vital information, but only remembered to add it in pieces. i hope the current version stands up better than the original.
Names disappearing from police reports: Liability concerns are prompting police departments around the state to redact names and other information from many reports.
Privacy law stems from Hollywood murder
The driver privacy act was originally passed in response to the 1989 murder of actress Rebecca Schaeffer, who was shot by an obsessed fan who obtained her home address through California Department of Motor Vehicles records. The federal law prohibits the release of DMV data with certain exceptions, including use by attorneys, insurance companies and police in conducting their official duties.
Police work that has traditionally been conducted in public view is increasingly being shielded, as insurance companies and municipal attorneys throughout Wisconsin push departments to withhold names from reports due to liability concerns.
A long-ignored federal privacy law is driving the redactions, interpreted by some municipal leaders to overrule a state public records law that says the full reports should be released.
With a growing number of departments redacting crash reports — and, in some cases, all incident reports — drivers injured in crashes may have no right to the identity of the other motorist, and communities can be kept in the dark about who police are arresting.
At least 30 municipalities now redact personal information from reports — citing the Palatine ruling and the 1994 federal Driver Privacy Protection Act it interpreted, according to media reports and agency websites. Officials in most of those municipalities say names are among the personal information barred from release.“The danger and the damage and the cost of violating the federal law is substantially more than violating the public records law,” Thompson said. “If you release a record that you’re not supposed to release, you’ve now violated somebody’s civil rights, and you’re now in federal court where you have no cap for damages.”
— Senne v. Village of Palatine —
The Illinois case was filed in August 2010 by Jason Senne, who alleged Palatine violated the driver privacy act by leaving a parking ticket with his name, date of birth and other personal information in public view on his windshield. He is the lead plaintiff in a class-action suit seeking $80 million — $2,500 for each parking ticket issued in the preceding four years.The case was dismissed in district court, but the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago overturned the dismissal in August and ordered that the case proceed. In the meantime, Palatine has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to review the case and consider dismissing it, but the high court has not yet responded.
Among the departments making changes, many are redacting names from only crash reports, but some are withholding names from all reports. Police typically run all people they contact through the DMV database to confirm identifying information, and some attorneys interpret the Palatine ruling to mean data that touches the DMV database — even if it doesn’t originate there — is barred from release.
But the state DOT, which oversees the State Patrol, has not changed its policy and still releases unredacted reports, said spokeswoman Peg Schmitt. Since all local reports are sent to the DOT — typically within 10 days — reports that are redacted in cities like Green Bay, Sheboygan or Wausau can be obtained in full from the DOT.
Schmitt said the DOT believes it is in compliance with the law and won’t reconsider its policy until the Palatine case works its way through the legal system.
The Milwaukee Police Department has yet another twist on the policy, releasing fully unredacted reports to those involved in a crash, according to Sgt. Mark Stanmeyer. People not involved in the crash can get a report with names, but all other personal information is redacted.
Dennis Olson, an agent with American Family Insurance, discovered Menomonee Falls police have no exception for the parties involved. He said police refused to release an unredacted report to a client of his who was involved in a crash in mid-April, and the insurance company had to obtain it on her behalf.
Redaction policies inconsistent
For now, municipal attorneys and insurance companies are left to figure out the driver privacy act on their own, leading to highly inconsistent policies.
“There is no clear answer to give anybody,” said Dennis Tweedale, CEO of the League of Wisconsin Municipalities Mutual Insurance Co., which covers 370 cities and villages. “That’s why it’s such a mess. It’s all over the place.”
Pay-per-View Legal Documents
Among the departments making changes, many are redacting names from only crash reports, but some are withholding names from all reports. Police typically run all people they contact through the DMV database to confirm identifying information, and some attorneys interpret the Palatine ruling to mean data that touches the DMV database — even if it doesn’t originate there — is barred from release.
But the state DOT, which oversees the State Patrol, has not changed its policy and still releases unredacted reports, said spokeswoman Peg Schmitt. Since all local reports are sent to the DOT — typically within 10 days — reports that are redacted in cities like Green Bay, Sheboygan or Wausau can be obtained in full from the DOT.
Schmitt said the DOT believes it is in compliance with the law and won’t reconsider its policy until the Palatine case works its way through the legal system.
The Milwaukee Police Department has yet another twist on the policy, releasing fully unredacted reports to those involved in a crash, according to Sgt. Mark Stanmeyer. People not involved in the crash can get a report with names, but all other personal information is redacted.
Dennis Olson, an agent with American Family Insurance, discovered Menomonee Falls police have no exception for the parties involved. He said police refused to release an unredacted report to a client of his who was involved in a crash in mid-April, and the insurance company had to obtain it on her behalf.
A Black Agenda Radio commentary by executive editor Glen Ford
These days, a radical label can get you killed. In National Security Speech, “it is clear that to ‘radicalize’ means very much the same as to ‘weaponize’; the radicalized person has been transformed into a weapon.” Under such assumptions, the secret police feel justified in using lethal force on purely political pretexts.
“The line between political beliefs and illegal action is eradicated, so that the ‘radicalized’ person or group is inherently deserving of liquidation.”
Like all advanced police states, the U.S. national security regime has begun speaking its own, degenerate language. It is a mode of speech that simultaneously defines the “enemy” and justifies his or her destruction. The soulless, bureaucratic roots of National Security Speech belie the ruthless intent, which is to make the utter destruction of the targeted group or individual appear to be the natural order of things.
“Self-radicalization” is one of the terms coined by national security speakers. To people like President Obama, a guy who adds targets to his Kill List every Tuesday, “self-radicalization” represents a grave threat to the American state. “One of the dangers that we now face,” said Obama, in the wake of the Boston Marathon bombing, “are self-radicalized individuals who are already in the United States,” because it is difficult to prevent them from carrying out “plots.”
In this context, it is clear that to “radicalize” means very much the same as to “weaponize”; the radicalized person has been transformed into a weapon. A radical is no longer simply an individual “who advocates thorough or complete political or social reform,” but someone who by their very thought processes represents a clear and present danger to the United States. The line between political beliefs and illegal action is eradicated, so that the “radicalized” person or group is inherently deserving of liquidation. The operative word is “radical.”
Obama is not talking about “Manchurian Candidates” who have been programmed against their will and without their knowledge to carry out acts dictated by others. He’s talking about people who quite consciously object to U.S. policies, who might do something about it at some time in the future, or influence others’ opinions about the United States. Obama’s problem with the people he calls “self-radicalized” is that they cannot be easily entrapped or shown to be guilty by association with others who think as they do – and if they do act, their actions do not necessarily implicate others. For the fascist-minded, this must be quite frustrating.
“Assata remains radical”
Assata Shakur was radicalized at least 45 years ago. An all-white jury convicted her of killing a New Jersey policeman. She escaped from prison, and has been under the protection of the Cuban government for the last 29 years, a political exile. The cop has been dead since 1973, Shakur’s political party has long been defunct, and she is a grandmother far from home. But the FBI felt compelled to double the one million dollar reward for Shakur, and to elevate her to number one domestic terrorist. Why? Because Shakur continues to “maintain and promote her…ideology” and “provides anti-U.S. government speeches espousing the Black Liberation Army message.” That is, she remains radical, and therefore, a weapon, even at the age of 65, isolated from her 40 million fellow African Americans, few of whom know her name. But the FBI pretends to fear that her “ideology” might go viral at any time.
They don’t believe that, of course. The political police are simply determined to make radicalism – of the “self” or group inspired variety – synonymous with criminality, much in the way that “Black” is now inextricably linked with crime in the public mind. According to that formula, a Black woman radical makes the perfect poster for a political witch hunt. For Black Agenda Radio, I’m Glen Ford. On the web, go to BlackAgendaReport.com.
With the second member of the military’s campaign to stem sexual misconduct falling under investigation — for alleged sexual misconduct — critics were quick to lambast Pentagon brass for “gross negligence” and for maintaining an internal system of investigation and discipline that appears to be in desperate need of being ripped down and rebuilt with fresh independence and transparency.
An Army sergeant who was part of the Fort Hood, Texas, sexual-assault response office is under investigation for forcing a female soldier into prostitution.
NPR’s Larry Abramson is reporting on the story for our Newscast unit:
“The Army refused to release the name of the sergeant first class, who was part of the response team at Fort Hood, Texas, dealing with sexual assault cases. The man faces accusations of pandering, abusive sexual contact, assault and maltreatment of subordinates. The sergeant was suspended from all duties, and has not been charged. Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel ordered the Army to investigate.”
In a statement, Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., said the Senate Armed Services Committee, which he chairs, is considering ways to counter the problem of sexual abuse in the military.
Investigators in Fort Hood, Texas, are looking into allegations that an Army sergeant sexually assaulted three female soldiers and forced one into prostitution. This is only the latest in a string of military sexual assault scandals that has lawmakers demanding answers.
Nancy Parrish, president of the victims advocacy group Protect Our Defenders, agreed that “the Pentagon is responsible for failing to effectively govern its personnel,” following news that a Fort Hood Army sergeant first class allegedly forced at least one subordinate soldier into prostitution and sexually assaulted two others.
Last week’s story of the US Air Force’s Chief Sexual Assault Prevention and Response officer being arrested for sexual assault may have been embarrassing, but it seems to have been the tip of the iceberg.
The soldier was identified as Sgt. First Class Gregory McQueen, and in the face of allegations ranging from sexual abuse to pimping and misuse of power, he has been suspending from his duties, though officials maintain he has yet to actually be charged with crimes related to this.
Officials familiar with the situation say Sgt. McQueen got his start when he persuaded a private under his command to sell sexual favors to other soldiers. The ring grew but he was finally caught after he approached another private as a potential recruit and sexually assaulted her when she refused to be a prostitute. She reported the attack to military officials.
msnbc’s melissa harris-perry has something to say about this, but i can’t embed the video, so here’s the link. there’s a video from two days ago on this topic below.
Head Of Sexual-Harassment Program at Fort Campbell, Ky., has been arrested in a domestic dispute and has been relieved of his post.
“Lt. Col. Darin Haas turned himself in to police late Wednesday on charges of violating an order of protection and stalking. A spokesman for the post on the Tennessee-Kentucky line say Haas was immediately removed as manager of a program meant to prevent sexual harassment and assault and encourage equal opportunity.” – from AP report
Haas and his former wife have orders of protection against each other, but she said he repeatedly contacted her Wednesday night despite the order.
Inside the military’s culture of sex abuse, denial and cover-up
The first thing Petty Officer 2nd Class Rebecca Blumer realized upon waking was that she was freezing cold and naked. The second thing was that her body ached all over. Blumer groggily scanned the unfamiliar room for clues. She saw a concrete floor splotched with vomit, a metal door and a window onto a hallway, where a woman in an orange jumpsuit was sweeping.
“Where am I?” Blumer called hoarsely.
“Richmond County jail,” the inmate told her.
Blumer shivered. “I need to see a doctor,” she whispered.
The woman nodded. “You’ve been screaming that all night.”
Blumer sat back in shock. She was a normally cheerful 23-year-old Navy intelligence analyst stationed at Fort Gordon, a vast Army base of 15,000 military employees in Augusta, Georgia. Blumer, whose job was to sift through top-secret data, was part of a thousand-member naval unit. The night before, February 12th, 2010, she and some friends had gone to a bar not far from base for a couple of beers. Three Army guys – one with light hair, the other two dark-haired – had sent Blumer a shot of Jägermeister, a drink she didn’t care much for but had downed anyway. The light-haired man had rounded the bar to talk to her. The last thing Blumer remembered was being overwhelmed by a dizzy, sluggish feeling, her limbs and head too heavy to lift, the noises in the bar rising up and caving in on her. Only later would Blumer find out the rest: that at 1:40 a.m., police had noticed her driving with her headlights off. That she’d barely been able to stand upright during her field sobriety test, but when placed under arrest she’d gone berserk, trying to break free of the police car and screaming incoherently. In jail, she’d yelled for a doctor and fought with the cops so wildly that she’d been hosed down in an effort to quiet her. Now, crouching in her cell with a swollen jaw; bruises smudging her wrists, ankles and neck; her abdomen sore inside; and her lower back and buttocks afire with what felt like rug burn, it dawned on Blumer. She’d been roofied and raped.
Melissa Harris-Perry asks, have we reached the turning point? Congresswoman Jackie Speier, Executive Director of Servicewoman’s Action Network Anu Bhagwati and Rolling Stone editor Sabrina Erdely discuss the dramatic rise in sexual assault and rape in the military reported in a new Pentagon report.
Pentagon Unilaterally Grants Itself Authority Over ‘Civil Disturbances’
The manhunt for the Boston Marathon bombing suspects offered the nation a window into the stunning military-style capabilities of our local law enforcement agencies. For the past 30 years, police departments throughout the United States have benefitted from the government’s largesse in the form of military weaponry and training, incentives offered in the ongoing “War on Drugs.” For the average citizen watching events such as the intense pursuit of the Tsarnaev brothers on television, it would be difficult to discern between fully outfitted police SWAT teams and the military.
The lines blurred even further Monday as a new dynamic was introduced to the militarization of domestic law enforcement. By making a few subtle changes to a regulation in the U.S. Code titled “Defense Support of Civilian Law Enforcement Agencies” the military has quietly granted itself the ability to police the streets without obtaining prior local or state consent, upending a precedent that has been in place for more than two centuries.
here's an excerpt from the document, see link below:
Emergency authority. A Federal military commander's authority, in
extraordinary emergency circumstances where prior authorization by the
President is impossible and duly constituted local authorities are
unable to control the situation, to engage temporarily in activities
that are necessary to quell large-scale, unexpected civil disturbances
because:
(1) Such activities are necessary to prevent significant loss of
life or wanton destruction of property and are necessary to restore
governmental function and public order; or
(2) Duly constituted Federal, State, or local authorities are
unable or decline to provide adequate protection for Federal property
or Federal governmental functions.
Explosives or munitions emergency. A situation involving the
suspected or detected presence of unexploded ordnance (UXO), damaged or
deteriorated explosives or munitions, an improvised explosive device
(IED), other potentially explosive material or device, or other
potentially harmful military chemical munitions or device, that creates
an actual or potential imminent threat to human health, including
safety, or the environment, including property, as determined by an
explosives or munitions emergency response specialist. Such situations
may require immediate and expeditious action by an explosives or
munitions emergency response specialist to control, mitigate, or
eliminate the threat.
Law enforcement agency. Any of a number of agencies (outside the
Department of Defense) chartered and empowered to enforce U.S. laws in
the following jurisdictions: the United States, a State (or political
subdivision) of the United States, a territory (or political
subdivision) of the United States, a federally recognized Native
American tribe or Alaskan Native Village, or within the borders of a
host nation.
The most objectionable aspect of the regulatory change is the inclusion of vague language that permits military intervention in the event of “civil disturbances.” According to the rule:
Federal military commanders have the authority, in extraordinary emergency circumstances where prior authorization by the President is impossible and duly constituted local authorities are unable to control the situation, to engage temporarily in activities that are necessary to quell large-scale, unexpected civil disturbances.
Bruce Afran, a civil liberties attorney and constitutional law professor at Rutgers University, calls the rule, “a wanton power grab by the military,” and says, “It’s quite shocking actually because it violates the long-standing presumption that the military is under civilian control.”
One of the more disturbing aspects of the new procedures that govern military command on the ground in the event of a civil disturbance relates to authority. Not only does it fail to define what circumstances would be so severe that the president’s authorization is “impossible,” it grants full presidential authority to “Federal military commanders.” According to the defense official, a commander is defined as follows: “Somebody who’s in the position of command, has the title commander. And most of the time they are centrally selected by a board, they’ve gone through additional schooling to exercise command authority.”
As it is written, this “commander” has the same power to authorize military force as the president in the event the president is somehow unable to access a telephone. (The rule doesn’t address the statutory chain of authority that already exists in the event a sitting president is unavailable.) In doing so, this commander must exercise judgment in determining what constitutes, “wanton destruction of property,” “adequate protection for Federal property,” “domestic violence,” or “conspiracy that hinders the execution of State or Federal law,” as these are the circumstances that might be considered an “emergency.”
another tidbit from the pentagon:
Special Operations and Low-Intensity Conflict (ASD(SO/LIC)), the proper
use of electronic counter-measures (ECM) by or in support of DoD
explosive ordnance disposal (EOD) personnel when supporting civil
authorities is addressed in interagency agreements and contingency
plans.
(c) The USD(I) shall:
(1) Establish DoD processes and procedures to provide support to
civilian law enforcement officials with Defense Intelligence Component
resources in accordance with appropriate statutory authorities and DoD
and Intelligence Community policy.
(2) Facilitate consultation on DoD policy regarding intelligence
support of law enforcement officials, with appropriate Federal
departments and agencies; State, local, and tribal agencies; and the
DoD Components.
“These phrases don’t have any legal meaning,” says Afran. “It’s no different than the emergency powers clause in the Weimar constitution [of the German Reich]. It’s a grant of emergency power to the military to rule over parts of the country at their own discretion.”
Afran also expresses apprehension over the government’s authority “to engage temporarily in activities necessary to quell large-scale disturbances.”
“Governments never like to give up power when they get it,” says Afran. “They still think after twelve years they can get intelligence out of people in Guantanamo. Temporary is in the eye of the beholder. That’s why in statutes we have definitions. All of these statutes have one thing in common and that is that they have no definitions. How long is temporary? There’s none here. The definitions are absurdly broad.”
The stated purpose of the updated rule is “support in Accordance With the Posse Comitatus Act,” but in reality it undermines the Insurrection Act and PCA in significant and alarming ways. The most substantial change is the notion of “civil disturbance” as one of the few “domestic emergencies” that would allow for the deployment of military assets on American soil.
To wit, the relatively few instances that federal troops have been deployed for domestic support have produced a wide range of results. Situations have included responding to natural disasters and protecting demonstrators during the Civil Rights era to, disastrously, the Kent State student massacre and the 1973 occupation of Wounded Knee.
Senior Obama officials tell the US Senate: the ‘war’, in limitless form, will continue for ‘at least’ another decade – or two
It is hard to resist the conclusion that this war has no purpose other than its own eternal perpetuation. This war is not a means to any end but rather is the end in itself. Not only is it the end itself, but it is also its own fuel: it is precisely this endless war – justified in the name of stopping the threat of terrorism – that is the single greatest cause of that threat.
On Thursday, the Senate Armed Services Committee held a hearing on whether the statutory basis for this “war” – the 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF) – should be revised (meaning: expanded). This is how Wired’s Spencer Ackerman (soon to be the Guardian US’s national security editor) described the most significant exchange:
“Asked at a Senate hearing today how long the war on terrorism will last, Michael Sheehan, the assistant secretary of defense for special operations and low-intensity conflict, answered, ‘At least 10 to 20 years.’ . . . A spokeswoman, Army Col. Anne Edgecomb, clarified that Sheehan meant the conflict is likely to last 10 to 20 more years from today – atop the 12 years that the conflict has already lasted. Welcome to America’s Thirty Years War.”
That the Obama administration is now repeatedly declaring that the “war on terror” will last at least another decade (or two) is vastly more significant than all three of this week’s big media controversies (Benghazi, IRS, and AP/DOJ) combined. The military historian Andrew Bacevich has spent years warning that US policy planners have adopted an explicit doctrine of “endless war”. Obama officials, despite repeatedly boasting that they have delivered permanently crippling blows to al-Qaida, are now, as clearly as the English language permits, openly declaring this to be so.
America which is known as the freest country in the world has incarcerated more of it’s citizens than the rest of the world combined. 7.1 million Americans are either in prison, on probation or under correctional supervision. The numbers continue to climb each year as more prisons are built nationwide. News journalist Fareed Zakaria from CNN goes in depth to show viewers how much the American government as well as private corporations spend building prisons apposed to schools.
He goes on to say that our elected officials have been bought out by lobbyist. They want the politicians to pave the way for more prisons by passing more laws of enslavement to insure a steady flow of inmates to occupy the cells. America has entered into a hell like period where people are worth more in prison than free and working as all jobs are being shipped to China. America is being
de-industrialized and destroyed by design in the name of clean energy and saving the planet.
Government staged terror attacks are giving them the excuse to spy on Americans and destroy the Constitution which protects our freedom. An open air prison is being built around the population in the name of safety and security and the majority of people believe the government wants to protect them from terror which is government sponsored to create an atmosphere of fear.
It appears that things will have to get much worse before people realize the U.S. government has been high-jacked by International Bankers that now control our military and send them into ever expanding wars. They seek to destroy America by passing laws that will turn this country into a tyrannical police state where every human activity is monitored, taxed and eventually outlawed for any excuse they can think up.
the judge rules that, by plugging into to the internet, you voluntarily give up any expectation of privacy. they have all your data anyway…
Privacy, schmivacy
Court re-iterates that, by and large, we have no expectation of digital privacy.
Among other reasons for denial, Judge David Campbell said that Rigmaiden had no “reasonable expectation of privacy” when using a mobile Internet hotspot (“aircard”) from Verizon. And ultimately, that’s how law enforcement agents tracked him down and arrested him.
Virtually everything about Defendant’s actions related to the apartment was fraudulent. Defendant rented the apartment using the name of a deceased individual, provided a forged California driver’s license to support the false identity, used the driver’s license number from another person in support of the forged license, and provided a forged tax return to support his purported ability to pay rent. Defendant used the laptop he had procured through fraud in the apartment, and connected to the Internet with the aircard purchased with a false identity while using the account with Verizon that he maintained using a false identity. Even the electricity that lighted the apartment and powered the computer and aircard was purchased in a false name. What is more, while living in the apartment under false pretenses, Defendant had $70,000 in cash, a false passport, and a copy of his laptop computer in a storage unit (also rented under false pretenses) ready for a quick escape.
One who so thoroughly immerses himself in layers of false identities should not later be heard to argue that society must recognize as legitimate his expectation of privacy in the location and implements of his fraud. The Court concludes that Defendant’s presence in apartment 1122 was akin to the “burglar plying his trade in a summer cabin during the off season.”
Campbell, in his 52-page decision, also cited the 1976 case, United States v. Miller. That decision later helped influence the third-party doctrine:
The reasoning of Miller applies to the historical records obtained by the United States. They are not the customer’s private papers. Once a customer makes a call, communicates over the Internet, leases an apartment, or uses the services of an alarm company, he has no control over the business record made by the business of that transaction. Instead, the record created is a business record of the provider. The choice to create and store the record is made by the provider, and the provider controls the format, content, and duration of the records it chooses to create and retain. . . . Moreover, these records pertain to transactions to which the companies were a participant. The assignment of a particular cell tower to process a call is made by the cell phone company to facilitate the functioning of its network; the ISP uses the IP address to route Internet communications it transmits; the rental company maintains a rental file for each occupant; and an alarm service independently maintains records of the equipment it installs and maintains. Thus, under Miller, the business records obtained by the government are not protected by the Fourth Amendment.
The judge concluded:
Contrary to Defendant’s arguments, federal courts consistently rely on Smith and Miller to hold that defendants have no reasonable expectation of privacy in historical cell-site data because the defendants voluntarily convey their location information to the cell phone company when they initiate a call and transmit their signal to a nearby cell tower, and because the companies maintain that information in the ordinary course of business.
Court Ruling Gives FBI Too Much Leeway on Surveillance Technology
In today’s decision denying the motion to suppress, the judge held that information about how the stingray operates – such as the fact that it scoops up third party data – was merely a “detail of execution which need not be specified.” We respectfully but strongly disagree.
If the government has probable cause to believe a suspect lives at a particular address and wants a search warrant, it obviously needs to tell the court if the address is a 100-unit apartment building and that the government intends to search all 100 units until it finds the suspect. Omitting such information would never be considered a “detail of execution.” Law enforcement should be held to the same standard when they conduct electronic surveillance.
The judge dismissed the significance of the stingray’s impact on third parties because the government deleted and did not review the third-party data after it located Mr. Rigmaiden. But the Fourth Amendment does not include a “no harm, no foul” rule. The violation arises from the fact that the government searched people who are not suspected of any wrongdoing. This is a violation even if the government doesn’t later use the information against those third parties. – from the aclu northern california website
THIS IS WIRED.com’s COVERAGE:
A legal fight over the government’s use of a secret surveillance tool has provided new insight into how the controversial tool works and the extent to which Verizon Wireless aided federal agents in using it to track a suspect.
Court documents in a case involving accused identity thief Daniel David Rigmaiden describe how the wireless provider reached out remotely to reprogram an air card the suspect was using in order to make it communicate with the government’s surveillance tool so that he could be located. - Secrets of FBI Smartphone Surveillance Tool Revealed in Court Fight
Over the course of a three-hour hearing in the U.S. District Court in Arizona, Rigmaiden, 31, asserted that the warrant the government obtained only authorized Verizon Wireless to provide agents with data about the air card but did not authorize agents to use the invasive stingray device. He also asserted that Verizon Wireless “reprogrammed” his air card to make it interact with the FBI’s stingray, something that he says was outside the bounds of the judge’s order.
Rigmaiden and civil liberties groups who have filed amicus briefs in the case also maintain that the government failed its duty to disclose to the judge who issued the warrant that the device they planned to use not only collected data from the target of an investigation but from anyone else in the vicinity who was using an air card or other wireless communication device. - Government Fights for Use of Spy Tool That Spoofs Cell Towers
In order to use the stingray with Rigmaiden’s air card, the defendant asserts in court documents that Verizon reprogrammed his air card so that when an incoming voice call arrived, the card would disconnect from any legitimate cell tower to which it was already connected, and send real-time cell-site location data to Verizon, which forwarded the data to the FBI. This allowed the FBI to position its stingray in the neighborhood where Rigmaiden resided. The stingray then “broadcast a very strong signal” to force the air card into connecting to it, instead of reconnecting to a legitimate cell tower, so that agents could then triangulate signals coming from the air card and zoom-in on Rigmaiden’s location.
To make sure the air card connected to the FBI’s simulator, Rigmaiden says that Verizon altered his air card’s Preferred Roaming List so that it would accept the FBI’s stingray as a legitimate cell site and not a rogue site, and also changed a data table on the air card designating the priority of cell sites so that the FBI’s fake site was at the top of the list. – Judge Allows Evidence Gathered From FBI’s Spoofed Cell Tower
deaths due to gun violence and injuries caused by gunshots have been declining in the u.s., according to data released by the department of justice.
in their may 2013 special report, firearm violence, 1993-2011, Michael Planty, Ph.D., and Jennifer L. Truman, Ph.D. present statistics which show that gun violence in 2011 was almost 40% of what it had been in 1993. excerpts below:
In 2011, a total of 478,400 fatal and nonfatal violent crimes were committed with a firearm. Homicides made up about 2% of all firearm-related crimes. There were 11,101 firearm homicides in 2011, down by 39% from a high of 18,253 in 1993. The majority of the decline in firearm-related homicides occurred between 1993 and 1998. Since 1999, the number of firearm homicides increased from 10,828 to 12,791 in 2006 before declining to 11,101 in 2011.
Nonfatal firearm-related violent victimizations against persons age 12 or older declined 70%, from 1.5 million in 1993 to 456,500 in 2004. The number then
fluctuated between about 400,000 to 600,000 through 2011.
The primary source of information on firearm-related homicides was obtained from mortality data based on death certificates in the National Vital Statistics System of the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS), Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) Web-based Injury Statistics Query and Reporting System (WISQARS). These mortality data include causes of death reported by attending physicians, medical examiners, and coroners, and demographic information about decedents reported by funeral directors who obtain that information from family members and other informants. The NCHS collects, compiles, verifies, and prepares these data for release to the public.
The estimates of nonfatal violent victimization are based on data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ (BJS) National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), which collects information on nonfatal crimes against persons age 12 or older reported and not reported to the police from a nationally representative sample of U.S. households.
Homicide rates are presented per 100,000 persons and the nonfatal victimization rates are presented per 1,000 persons age 12 or older. Additional information on firearm violence in this report comes from the School-Associated Violent Deaths Surveillance Study (SAVD), the FBI’s Supplemental Homicide Reports (SHR), the Survey of Inmates in State Correctional Facilities (SISCF), and the Survey of Inmates in Federal Correctional Facilities (SIFCF). Each source provides different information about victims and incident characteristics. Estimates are shown for different years based on data availability and measures of reliability.
Nearly 90% of firearm crimes were committed with a handgun
From 1993 to 2011, about 60% to 70% of homicides were committed with a firearm. Over the same period, between 6% and 9% of all nonfatal violent victimizations were committed with a firearm, with about 20% to 30% of robberies and 22% to 32% of aggravated assaults involving a firearm.
Handguns accounted for the majority of both homicide and nonfatal firearm violence. A handgun was used in about 83% of all firearm homicides in 1994, compared to 73% in 2011. Other types of firearms, such as shotguns and rifles, accounted for the remainder of firearm homicides.
For nonfatal firearm violence, about 9 in 10 were committed with a handgun, and this remained stable from 1994 to 2011.
Dick Durbin’s ‘nobody-could-have-known’ defense for Authorization to Use Military Force
Various senators are reportedly considering changes to the 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF) in light of how far beyond its scope US military action is now routinely deployed. That may seem like a welcome development, but as Marcy Wheeler notes, the officials involved and the “experts” on whom they’re relying strongly suggest that any changes would entail expanding and broadening this authorization, not narrowing or rescinding it. One of the Senators who is pushing for changes is Democrat Dick Durbin, who said this:
“None of us, not one who voted for it, could have envisioned we were voting for the longest war in American history or that we were about to give future presidents the authority to fight terrorism as far flung as Yemen and Somalia. I don’t think any of us envisioned that possibility.”
Immediately after the 9/11 attack, Democratic Rep. Barbara Lee of California knew exactly that which Durbin now says nobody “could have envisioned”. She not only knew it, but she stood up on the floor of the Congress a mere three days after the 9/11 attack in order to cast the lone vote against the AUMF, citing precisely these dangers:
“[W]e must be careful not to embark on an open-ended war with neither an exit strategy nor a focused target. We cannot repeat past mistakes.
“In 1964, Congress gave President Lyndon Johnson the power to ‘take all necessary measures’ to repel attacks and prevent further aggression. In so doing, this House abandoned its own constitutional responsibilities and launched our country into years of undeclared war in Vietnam.
“At this time, Senator Wayne Morse, one of the two lonely votes against the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, declared, ‘I believe that history will record that we have made a grave mistake in subverting and circumventing the Constitution of the United States. I believe that with the next century, future generations will look with dismay and great disappointment upon a Congress which is now about to make such a historic mistake.’
“Senator Morse was correct, and I fear we make the same mistake today.”
Rep. Lee’s obviously emotional and courageous warnings on the floor of the House, delivered on September 14, 2001 in opposition to the AUMF
as many doctors continue to push addictive drugs onto their patients for the profits of pharmaceutical companies, doctors with any sense of ethics continue to convince Americans to get off their fat, lazy asses and take care of themselves, rather than expecting pills to make everything better.
meanwhile, politicians use this epidemic to push for more surveillance on doctors and patients…but give pharmaceutical companies a free pass.
Prescription drug-related deaths continue to rise in U.S.
Despite efforts by law enforcement and public health officials to curb prescription drug abuse, drug-related deaths in the United States have continued to rise, the latest data show.
Figures from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reveal that drug fatalities increased 3% in 2010, the most recent year for which complete data are available. Preliminary data for 2011 indicate the trend has continued.
The figures reflect all drug deaths, but the increase was propelled largely by prescription painkillers such as OxyContin and Vicodin, according to just-released analyses by CDC researchers.
The numbers were a disappointment for public health officials, who had expressed hope that educational and enforcement programs would stem the rise in fatal overdoses.
“While most things are getting better in the health world, this isn’t,” CDC director Tom Frieden said in an interview. “It’s a big problem, and it’s getting worse.”
Drugs overtook traffic accidents as a cause of death in the country in 2009, and the gap has continued to widen.
Overdose deaths involving prescription painkillers rose to 16,651 in 2010, the CDC researchers found. That was 43% of all fatal overdoses.
The numbers come amid mounting pressure to reduce the use of prescription painkillers. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is considering a proposal to limit daily doses of painkillers and restrict their use to 90 days or less for non-cancer patients. The proposal also would make such drugs available to non-cancer patients only if they suffer from severe pain.
“The data supporting long-term use of opiates for pain, other than cancer pain, is scant to nonexistent,” Frieden said. “These are dangerous drugs. They’re not proven to have long-term benefit for non-cancer pain, and they’re being used to the detriment to hundreds of thousands of people in this country.”
Among the most promising tools to combat the problem, Frieden said, are computerized drug monitoring programs that track prescriptions for painkillers and other commonly abused narcotics from doctor to pharmacy to patient. Frieden said such programs should be used to monitor doctors’ prescribing as well as patients’ use.
“You’ve got to look at the data to see where the problems are,” he said. “You don’t want to be flying blind.”
In California, officials do not use the state’s prescription drug monitoring program, known as CURES, to proactively seek out problem patients or physicians. The state’s medical board initiates investigations of doctors only after receiving a complaint. Legislation awaiting action in Sacramento would increase funding for CURES and provide more investigators to police excessive prescribing, among other measures. – from the l.a. times
How Many are Dying From Prescription Drugs?
Nearly 20 percent of Americans have used prescription drugs for nonmedicinal reasons, three-quarters of whom may be abusing them. Legal prescription drug abuse is a silent epidemic, and is part of the reason why the modern American medical system has become the leading cause of death and injury in the United States. Authored in two parts by Gary Null, PhD, Carolyn Dean, MD ND, Martin Feldman, MD, Debora Rasio, MD, and Dorothy Smith, PhD, the comprehensive Death by Medicine article described in excruciating detail how everything from medical errors to adverse drug reactions to unnecessary procedures caused more harm than good.
In a June 2010 report in the Journal of General Internal Medicine, study authors said that in looking over records that spanned from 1976 to 2006 (the most recent year available) they found that, of 62 million death certificates, almost a quarter-million deaths were coded as having occurred in a hospital setting due to medication errors.
An estimated 450,000 preventable medication-related adverse events occur in the U.S. every year.
The costs of adverse drug reactions to society are more than $136 billion annually — greater than the total cost of cardiovascular or diabetic care.
Adverse drug reactions cause injuries or death in 1 of 5 hospital patients.
The reason there are so many adverse drug events in the U.S. is because so many drugs are used and prescribed – and many patients receive multiple prescriptions at varying strengths, some of which may counteract each other or cause more severe reactions when combined.
There are numerous repercussions to a society that eats, breathes and sleeps prescription medications, not the least of which is its impact on children. Between 2001 and 2008, there was a 36 percent increase in hospital admissions, and a 28 percent increase in emergency room visits, among children 5 and younger who had accidentally ingested medication. ER visits for ingestion of prescription opioid painkillers, such as Oxycodone, increased 101 percent!
And in 2009, there were nearly 4.6 million drug-related visits to U.S. emergency rooms nationwide, with more than half due to adverse reactions to prescription medications – most of which were being taken exactly as prescribed. When you add in the growing numbers of people who are using these drugs recreationally or due to addiction, you begin to see the magnitude of the problem that the pharmaceutical industry is propagating.
Unfortunately, this problem is now seriously impacting the next generation. When you were a teenager you may have snuck a beer or two at a party … nowadays teens will mix a variety of prescription pills together in a bowl and take a mouthful of them like candy! The kids think this is a safe way to get high, since they see their parents taking the same medications all the time, but it often turns out to be a literal prescription for disaster that can even be deadly. - from dr. mercola, The New Epidemic Sweeping Across America (and it’s Not a Disease)
The U.S. federal government spends nearly $4 billion on its drug war, the bulk of which is spent fighting cocaine. Nearly 1 million people are arrested each year for marijuana.
rush limbaugh’s famous bust for prescription drug addiction and prescription fraud helped glamorize prescription pill abuse and trivialized the problems because he got away with it.
Both drugs kill only a fraction of its users compared to the killer available at most pharmacies: Prescription painkillers. Since 2003, more overdoses have involved opioid analgesics than heroin and cocaine combined. Scientists have yet to confirm a single overdose of marijuana.
It’s tough to argue. Prescription painkillers are an epidemic. Popular Science recently published a fascinating graphic analyzing overdose deaths since 1999. The findings are alarming. Overdoses have doubled between 1999 and 2010, and half are from opioid pharmaceuticals such as Vicodin, OxyContin and Percocet.
In 2010, 38,239 died of overdoses of heroin, cocaine, alcohol, LSD, opium, mescaline, prescription pills and other drugs. Half of those, 16,651, were from opiates that are completely legal with a prescription, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Ex-President Clinton’s foundation vows to cut the number of OD deaths over next five years
Last April in East Harlem a retired police officer shot dead an armed gunman who held up a pharmacy looking for Oxycontin and Percocet. The suspect’s accomplice surrendered.
“The NYPD has seen firsthand the destructive power of addiction to Oxycontin,” Kelly said. “One of our own police officers who became addicted to the pills after incurring an injury on the job began robbing drug stores at gunpoint. He, like many others we’ve seen, demanded Oxy by name, but left the cash in an open register untouched.
“If that doesn’t illustrate the power of addiction, nothing does.”
Between 2004 and 2010 the rate of emergency room visits related to painkillers nearly tripled in the city, Kelly said.
In response, the NYPD and the Drug Enforcement Administration has formed a new unit that allows police access to a national database that tracks how controlled substances are distributed.
Police also started “Operation Safety Cap.” The department now has a database of nearly 6,000 area licensed pharmacists, Kelly said.
Officers are visting their businesses to make security recommendations — and many of them have agreed to let police place “bait bottles” on pharmacy shelves.
as always, the rich can get away with drug abuse, while the poor go to prison
Rush Limbaugh and prosecutors in the long-running prescription fraud case against him have reached a deal calling for the only charge against the conservative commentator to be dropped without a guilty plea if he continues treatment, his attorney said Friday.
Limbaugh turned himself in to authorities on a warrant filed Friday charging him with fraud to conceal information to obtain prescriptions, said Teri Barbera, a spokeswoman for the Palm Beach County Jail. He and his attorney Roy Black left about an hour later, after Limbaugh was photographed and fingerprinted and he posted $3,000 bail, Barbera said.
Prosecutors’ three-year investigation of Limbaugh began after he publicly acknowledged being addicted to pain medication and entered a rehabilitation program. They accused Limbaugh of “doctor shopping,” or illegally deceiving multiple doctors to receive overlapping prescriptions, after learning that he received about 2,000 painkillers, prescribed by four doctors in six months, at a pharmacy near his Palm Beach mansion.\
Limbaugh, who pleaded not guilty Friday, has steadfastly denied doctor shopping. Black said the charge will be dismissed in 18 months if Limbaugh complies with court guidelines. – from cbs news, Rush Limbaugh Arrested On Drug Charges
if people treated themselves with respect and developed healthy habits, they would not feel much need for prescription pills to make them feel better.
Where do we even start with this mess? How did America get to this point – where we are in danger of being over-run by the allies of a rogue intelligence agency that we are powerless against? How did the USA go from being the champion of the free world to being the greatest threat to the peace and security of its own citizens, and instant death from remote-control-in-the-skies for everyone else on earth?
It’s tempting to start out with the assassination of John F. Kennedy, but the story starts with the creation of the CIA and the National Security State, founded in 1947 by President Harry Truman to address the fact that, with the war against fascism over, it was time for the US government to rid itself of communists and other socialists who had poured into President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal administration. The fear being that communists loyal to Russia’s revolutionary leader and communist party chairman Joseph Stalin would help him gradually transform the US into a communist state.
Government and business leaders wanted to ensure that there were “trusted people” in charge of things here, behind the scenes. These unaccountable, largely unknown people would be free to pursue their own agenda, without interference from government oversight and regulation. They set up fake businesses and NGOs. They hired CIA operatives to help facilitate business overseas and converted media mouthpieces to their cause.
They justified this by making sure the world knew of the dangers of “creeping socialism.” For years, the world was able to watch the Congress of the United States, along with their partners in business, destroy people’s lives by accusing them of being communists. Sometimes the accusations were merely petty acts of malice against people who had rejected the committee chairman’s homosexual advances – this happening in an era much more judgemental and less accepting of ANY expression of sexuality, much less one which many people could not comprehend.
Despite the fact that several courageous individuals succeeded in exposing the gross abuse of power of the anti-communists (even today, one of the more vocal anti-communists’ name is used to describe persecution for political gain – “McCarthyism.”), several of them retained power, and even increased this power in the decades afterwards – both Richard Nixon (HUAC) and Ronald Reagan (anti-communist president of the Screen Actors Guild) eventually took over the White House (in possession of the CIA since the intelligence/industry coup that had JFK assassinated), largely on the political clout earned in the 1940′s and 50′s anti-communist witch-hunts.
The longterm consequences of the 1963 coup has been a nation in a state of perpetual warfare. At first, the war was against the Communist Menace, anywhere on the globe (Greece, Iran, Guatemala, Korea, Vietnam, Grenada, the list goes on…). After the Soviet Union collapsed – as it was always intended to – the old Cold Warriors needed a new boogeyman to seek out and destroy anywhere an oil field or other valuable natural resources were in danger of being stolen from American corporations by foreigners.
However, in the 1970s a glitch in the system developed. The American people had become unwilling to finance and die for wars abroad, being fought for very unclear purposes. Two strategies were developed to compensate for this. First, blue-blood businessmen helped the CIA set up their own drug-running operations. This would give them international contacts, with people who would do just about anything for money. It would also give the CIA a ways of building a “black budget” of money from drug-running operations, with the good people of the United States and their elected representatives none the wiser.
Also, this allowed industries to develop their own private military and intelligence businesses. Both to set up their own smuggling networks, and to deal with those pesky foreigners who kept trying to utilize their nation’s natural resources for the benefit of the local population. How dare they!
This privatization and outsourcing of warfare for the benefit of multinational corporations picked up steam under the guidance of President James Earl Carter, who came up with the brilliant idea of recruiting and arming the most intolerant and violent people to be found on Earth and sending them to fight against the Soviet army in Afghanistan, rather than risk an outright war if the US were involved in some kind of official capacity. These mujahadeen eventually became the current crop of Afghan warlords and Opium barons. We are allegedly at war with this group, forever. We are currently arming this group. Not the exact same people, of course – but the ideology (or “theology” if you want to legitimize their insane version of Islam) remains the same. They exist to cause violence and chaos in countries not under the direct control of one of “their” Imans. There are no nations that fit this description, and the Holy Terror Army (a name i just made up and will now use to refer to any fundamentalist religion that resorts to extreme violence to impose it’s version of “god’s” law on nonbelievers) is spreading nightmarish violence around the world.
Prior to this current age of holy terror, acting President Ronald Reagan expanded the proxy wars to Angola, Guatemala, Honduras, Colombia, Cambodia, and Grenada. His successor invaded Panama and Kuwait. And dirty old man Bill Clinton gave al Qaeda it’s biggest test, installing the CIA’s Holy Terror Army into the former Yugoslavia.
After that, the CIA/al Qaeda alliance was ready for the big time, and despite having trained, funded, and armed the Holy Terror Army, President Slick Willy justified military actions abroad by claiming they were targeting the workings of Holy Terror mastermind Osama bin Laden. This was the reason given for striking a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan being built to provide cheap prescription drugs to a continent being decimated by AIDS. Millions of Africans have died over the years due to this, and not just of AIDS - they’ve died of numerous maladies that could have been treated with pharmaceuticals, but the patent-holders demand prices that few people in Africa can afford.
Which brings us to 9/11/2001, the invasion of a country for fun and profit, and the start of a second perpetual war, the first one being the war on drugs, which the U.S. intentionally escalates by selling arms to drug cartels.
So, the CIA has assassinated an American President, set up an international drug-running operation which employs the most insanely violent people imaginable, and conducts wars with proxy armies which it cannot control, only finance. And the Government continues to use the war on drugs as a pretext to wage war on its own citizens, despite a proven will by the American public to legalize Ganja. But, this isn’t enough.
The war on terror has to be continually justified, despite a proven inability to militarily defeat a state of mind. Otherwise, it could lose its precious funding. Money is hard to come by, with the Government printing it as fast as it can in order to give it to European Banking cartels. There’s nothing left for the rest of us. I guess we are supposed to take solace in the roles left to us – fodder for their highly profitable, never-ending wars – and learn to love Big Brother.
Here in the spring of 2013, it looks as if the cycle has run its course, and the extreme violence of the late 20th century is finally coming back to its spawning grounds in North America. In the past two years, there have been numerous instances of mass shootings that were so obviously orchestrated by someone other than the “fall guy,” who usually ends up dead, that the Government is losing credibility. Washington has lost the Hearts and Minds campaign in the homeland, to the bloggers.
In addition to being nothing more than future collateral damage to our government, Americans are also guinea pigs in Monsanto’s GMO playground. They have been given immunity from prosecution for the damage their poisons are causing.
Our government is unaccountable to us. It is out of control, and the people in the positions of political power can only find solutions to the problems the banks, corporations, Holy War Terrorists, and drug cartel violence create by spreading more of the same.
If the US government continues to escalate the war of attrition it is waging against Americans, there may come a day when we welcome intervention by some foreign power. In the meanwhile, some countries may not wait for an invitation to intervene here. Just as they are saying about Syria, and like they said about Bosnia, the world cannot sit idly by and watch a violent regime continue to slaughter its own people.
It seems like our nation is doomed, and if we don’t want to go down with it, we had damn well better starting envisioning our lives in the ruins of the former United States, and living our lives to accommodate the changing world around us – one that an out-of-control CIA completely fucked over. I doubt the people of Yugoslavia had much of an idea how things would go after Tito died. Their society imploded. NATO intervened. Everything fell apart. Fortunes were lost in the destruction. New fortunes were made in the reconstruction – mostly for foreign corporations. And I don’t see things turning out much differently for us.
rob los ricos
The National Security State
The apparatus of the National Security State, largely established in the National Security Act of 1947, laid the foundations for the extension of American hegemony around the globe. In short, the Act laid the foundations for the apparatus of the American Empire. The National Security Act created the National Security Council (NSC) and position of National Security Adviser, as well as the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JSC) as the Pentagon high command of military leaders, and of course, the CIA.
The first major foreign operation carried out by the National Security State, or rather, the “secret government,” was the overthrowing of a democratically elected government in Iran. In 1952, the British were concerned at the efforts of Iran’s new Prime Minister Mohommad Mossadeq, in nationalizing Iran’s oil industry, taking the monopoly away from British Petroleum. So the British intelligence, the SIS, proposed to the Americans a joint operation, and the CIA obliged.
On January 17, 1961, President Dwight D. Eisenhower gave his farewell address to the nation in which he warned America and indeed the world about the growing influence of the National Security State in what he referred to as the “military-industrial complex”:
“Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations.
This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence – economic, political, even spiritual – is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.”
Eisenhower was speaking from the point of view of having first-hand knowledge of this “influence” in the corridors of power, himself as President being unable to challenge it, and unable to do so simply in the first decade of the American Empire. He was warning against the influence of the interconnected relationship and organized power of the military, government, and industry, in that the growing influence of this “complex” was so vast that it threatened to take over the government and subvert democracy itself. It was the functions of this complex that saw profit created through war and empire, and thus, there was a constant drive and impetus towards pursuing empire and resorting to war. If you build a massive military structure, you are going to use it; if it is profitable to go to war, you will go to war.
Prescott Bush, the father of GHW Bush, later wrote Clover Dulles, the widow of Allen Dulles, in 1969, about his meeting with Allen Dulles after JFK had canned him in fall, 1961. “He [Allen] tried to make a pleasant evening of it, but I was rather sick of heart, and angry too, for it was the Kennedys that brought about the fiasco [Bay of Pigs]. And here they were making Allen to be the goat, which he wasn’t and did not deserve. I have never forgiven them.”
Note the last sentence of Prescott Bush. His son George Herbert Walker Bush says he can’t remember where he was on the day of the JFK assassination, despite his being a US Senate candidate staying in the Dallas, TX Sheraton the night of 11/21/63 and being in Dallas on 11/22/63. GHW Bush helped plan the Bay of Pigs invasion and I think he was involved in the JFK assassination. – from The LBJ-CIA Assassination of JFK
During the Cuban Missile Crisis, it wasn’t the Joint Chiefs alone who were trying to push for war, the “CIA also played a dangerous game during the crisis,” as Kennedy had ordered the CIA to halt all raids against Cuba during the crisis, “to make sure that no flying sparks from the agency’s secret operations set off a nuclear conflagration.” However, Bill Harvey, the CIA agent in charge of “Operation Mongoose,” the CIA plan which employed the Mafia to attempt to kill Castro, in brazen defiance of Kennedy’s orders, mobilized “every single team and asset that we could scrape together” and then dropped them into Cuba, “in anticipation of the U.S. invasion that the CIA hoped was soon to follow.”`
Robert Kennedy became the conduit through which the back-channel negotiations took place with the Soviets that ultimately ended the crisis without catastrophe. Nikita Khrushchev recounted the situation in his memoirs, in which he explained that Robert Kennedy “stressed how fragile his brother’s rule was becoming as the crisis dragged on,” which struck Khrushchev as “especially urgent.” Robert Kennedy warned the Soviets that, “If the situation continues much longer, the president is not sure that the military will not overthrow him and seize power. The American army could get out of control.” Khrushchev even later wrote that, “for some time we had felt there was a danger that the president would lose control of his military,” and that, “now he was admitting this to us himself.” Thus:
“Moscow’s fear that Kennedy might be toppled in a coup, Khrushchev suggested in his memoirs, led the Soviets to reach a settlement of the missile crisis with the president. “We could sense from the tone of the message that tension in the United States was indeed reaching a critical point.”
Thirteen days after the crisis began, the Soviets announced that they would remove the missiles from Cuba, with the US agreeing to remove missiles from US bases in Turkey and “pledging not to invade Cuba,” which Kennedy and future presidents would honour. At the announcement of the end to the crisis, General LeMay roared at Kennedy, “It’s the greatest defeat in our history,” and that, “We should invade today!” A defense analyst at the Pentagon, Daniel Ellsberg, who was consulting with Air Force generals and colonels on nuclear strategy at the end of the crisis, remarked that after the settlement was reached, “there was virtually a coup atmosphere in Pentagon circles,” explaining, “not that I had the fear there was about to be a coup – I just thought it was a mood of hatred and rage. The atmosphere was poisonous, poisonous.” - from lew rockwell, The National Security State and the Assassination of JFK
Zbigniew Brzezinski:
How Jimmy Carter and I Started the Mujahideen
Q: The former director of the CIA, Robert Gates, stated in his memoirs ["From the Shadows"], that American intelligence services began to aid the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan 6 months before the Soviet intervention. In this period you were the national security adviser to President Carter. You therefore played a role in this affair. Is that correct?
Brzezinski: Yes. According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the Mujahadeen began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan, 24 Dec 1979. But the reality, secretly guarded until now, is completely otherwise: Indeed, it was July 3, 1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention.
Q: Despite this risk, you were an advocate of this covert action. But perhaps you yourself desired this Soviet entry into war and looked to provoke it?
Brzezinski: It isn’t quite that. We didn’t push the Russians to intervene, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would.
Q: When the Soviets justified their intervention by asserting that they intended to fight against a secret involvement of the United States in Afghanistan, people didn’t believe them. However, there was a basis of truth. You don’t regret anything today?
Brzezinski: Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter: We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war. Indeed, for almost 10 years, Moscow had to carry on a war unsupportable by the government, a conflict that brought about the demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire.
Q: And neither do you regret having supported the Islamic [integrisme], having given arms and advice to future terrorists?
Brzezinski: What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?
The above has been translated from the French by Bill Blum author of the indispensible, “Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II” and “Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower” Portions of the books can be read at: <http://members.aol.com/superogue/homepage.htm>
Mujahideen trained and funded by the US are among its deadliest foes
American officials estimate that, from 1985 to 1992, 12,500 foreigners were trained in bomb-making, sabotage and urban guerrilla warfare in Afghan camps the CIA helped to set up.
Since the fall of the Soviet puppet government in 1992, another 2,500 are believed to have passed through the camps. They are now run by an assortment of Islamic extremists, including Osama bin Laden, the world’s most wanted terrorist.- from the gaurdian, Frankenstein the CIA created
CONTROLLING THE ILLEGAL DRUG TRADE
The more one studies the dark history of the US national security state, the more transparent the CIA – Wall Street connections become. The links to the international drug trade are less obvious, but have existed from the beginning, that is, from the days of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the forerunner of the CIA. Time and again, the same pattern has played out: US military interventions in Southeast Asia, Central America and, since 2001, Afghanistan and Iraq, have been accompanied by a sharp increase in narco-trafficking, with all of the attendant evils. These include the plague of drug addiction, drug-related crime, the devastation of the family and as I hope to show, the corrupting of democratic institutions at home and abroad.
The morally bankrupt policies that are responsible for all of the above have had another deleterious effect: They have crippled our nation’s capacity to play a positive role on the world stage. It is no wonder that foreigners no longer view the United States with admiration and respect, but increasingly with fear and loathing. But US elites are oblivious to such concerns. They do not care, and are quite candid about what they view as the CIA’s pragmatic “need” to associate with unsavory individuals and criminals in the interest of furthering US foreign policy goals. Their realpolitik can be read between the lines of the policy papers. Take, for instance, the 1996 intelligence report, already noted, prepared by Maurice “Hank” Greenberg for the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), and for which Greenberg was nominated to replace John Deutch as director of the CIA. In the paper Greenberg affirms that “the capability to undertake [covert operations]….constitutes an important national security tool.” Later, in the section titled “Intelligence and Law Enforcement” he insists that foreign policy ought to take precedence over law enforcement when it comes to overseas operations. The bulk of U.S. intelligence efforts overseas is devoted to traditional national security concerns; as a result, law enforcement must ordinarily be a secondary concern. FBI and Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) agents operating abroad should not be allowed to act independently of either the ambassador or the CIA lest pursuit of evidence or individuals for prosecution cause major foreign policy problems or complicate ongoing intelligence and diplomatic activities.
This means, over and above diplomacy, that when criminals are judged to be intelligence assets, they are granted protection from prosecution (emphasis added) for narco-trafficking, money laundering, extortion, rape, even terrorism and murder. In 1982, the CIA and the US Department of Justice actually worked out a secret agreement to this effect. The deal exempted the CIA from having to report drug trafficking by CIA assets, which, notice, made a mockery of then presidential wife Nancy Reagan’s much ballyhooed “just say no” anti-drug campaign. At the time, most Americans trusted Ronald Reagan and believed that his administration was serious about the so-called war on drugs. But hindsight shows that the Reagan White House badly abused the public’s good faith.
The template for Iraq today is not Vietnam, with which it has often been compared, but El Salvador, where a right-wing government backed by the United States fought a leftist insurgency in a 12-year war beginning in 1980. The cost was high — more than 70,000 people were killed, most of them civilians, in a country with a population of just six million. Most of the killing and torturing was done by the army and the right-wing death squads affiliated with it. According to an Amnesty International report in 2001, violations committed by the army and associated groups included ‘‘extrajudicial executions, other unlawful killings, ‘disappearances’ and torture. . . . Whole villages were targeted by the armed forces and their inhabitants massacred.’’ As part of President Reagan’s policy of supporting anti-Communist forces, hundreds of millions of dollars in United States aid was funneled to the Salvadoran Army, and a team of Special Forces advisers, led for several years by Jim Steele, trained front-line battalions that were accused of significant human rights abuses. The United States lost more than 700 soldiers in the war.
The foreign policy advocated by Maurice Greenberg, above, is in large part responsible for the drug-related violence on the streets of our cities, and for the epidemic of narcotic addiction among our children, who have been sacrificed to the false god of national security. But the social carnage is not limited to the United States. Drug addiction in Muslim Iraq was almost unknown prior to the US invasion in 2003; but has since become a major problem. A similar recent explosion of heroin use has occurred in Iran, which, notice, is right next door to Afghanistan, where the poppies are grown with the blessing of the CIA. Such foreign policies are evil, a scourge upon the planet, yet, are intimately associated with US empire building. Quite simply, the US power elite has followed in the footsteps of the British and French who, in their day, also exploited the immensely profitable opium and heroin trade. The writer Chalmers Johnson has termed this descent into darkness the sorrow of empire.
The CIA’s secret collusion with the Department of Justice gave the CIA veto over law enforcement, effectively blunting the capacity of US drug enforcement agencies to interdict the flow of illegal drugs into the US. The timing was no accident. The deal coincided with the start of the CIA’s Contra war in Central America. This explains why, the next year, the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), under pressure from the Pentagon, closed its office in Tegucigalpa, Honduras. The flow of drugs through Honduras had not diminished; in fact, just the opposite. For years, the country had been a transfer point for illegal drug smuggling into the US, a reality that Contra leaders readily exploited to finance their war against the Nicaraguan Sandinistas; and they did so with the full knowledge and approval of the CIA. For many years after, Langley’s veto blocked legitimate efforts by US law enforcement to curb the drug trade.
I must emphasize that, meanwhile, the American people were kept in the dark about the policy and its effects, at every point in the chain: from the formulation of the policy to its implementation to the phony packaging of the policy for mass consumption. In fact, we only know about it, today, thanks to a courageous journalist named Gary Webb, who published a groundbreaking series of articles in 1996 in the San Jose Mercury News, exposing Contra links and CIA complicity in the crack cocaine epidemic that ravaged the black communities of Los Angeles in the 1980s. The series, appropriately titled “Dark Alliance”, was one of the first big stories to be carried on the Internet; and later, Webb expanded it into an important book by the same name, in which he lays out the voluminous evidence in stark detail. But it was Webb’s series of articles in 1996 that initially focused media attention on the drug issue; and which compelled CIA director John Deutch to announce an internal investigation. Meanwhile, the agency simultaneously launched a disinformation campaign to discredit Webb, whom it viewed as a serious threat.
The campaign against Gary Webb has been called “one of the most venomous and factually inane assaults on a professional journalist’s competence in living memory.” The fawning mainstream press, always eager to do the CIA’s bidding, appeared to take pleasure in savaging the messenger, even while tacitly conceding that his facts were basically correct. One of the low points occurred on live TV, on November 15, 1996, when NBC’s Andrea Mitchell, wife of Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan, referred to Webb’s exhaustively documented expose as “a conspiracy theory,” the kiss of death for any serious journalist. At this same time, as we know, Greenspan was busily engineering the deregulation of Wall Street, setting the stage for the 2008 financial meltdown of the global economy. – from foreign policy journal, Black 9/11: A Walk on the Dark Side Part 3: AIG and the Linkage to the Drug Trade
when assets go bad
Phillip (alternately, “Philip”) Marshall, 54, a career airline pilot who claimed to have once served as a contract pilot for the CIA and DEA during the Iran-Contra affair, shot and killed his two teenage children, and the family dog, then killed himself.
Michael Ruppert. Mike is a former LAPD (Los Angeles Police Department) narcotics officer who in the late 1970′s, trained in narcotics by the U.S. Justice Department. The CIA tried to recruit Mike to traffic drugs with them. When Mike tried to expose the corruption that he saw (the moral thing to do), he was fired without cause. As Governor Jesse Ventura says, “Don’t just go along to get along.”
Mike Ruppert has spent the last 25 years fighting the system, trying to expose the lies and tyranny of the CIA (and many other offices of our government). This is no conspiracy theory, Mike Ruppert has presented over 6,000 documents indicting the U.S. government’s involvement in decades of heroin and cocaine drug-trafficking into the cities and towns of the United States. You can subscribe to Mike’s newsletter at www.copvcia.com or go to www.fromthewilderness.com
Sleeping With the Devil: How U.S. and Saudi Backing of Al Qaeda Led to 9/11
Front row, from left: Major Gen. Hamid Gul, director general of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI), Director of Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Willian Webster; Deputy Director for Operations Clair George; an ISI colonel; and senior CIA official, Milt Bearden at a Mujahideen training camp in North-West Frontier Province of Pakistan in 1987. (source RAWA)
The CIA, concerned about the factionalism of Afghanistan … found that Arab zealots who flocked to aid the Afghans were easier to “read” than the rivalry-ridden natives. While the Arab volunteers might well prove troublesome later, the agency reasoned, they at least were one-dimensionally anti-Soviet for now. So bin Laden, along with a small group of Islamic militants from Egypt, Pakistan, Lebanon, Syria and Palestinian refugee camps all over the Middle East, became the “reliable” partners of the CIA in its war against Moscow.
To this day, those involved in the decision to give the Afghan rebels access to a fortune in covert funding and top-level combat weaponry continue to defend that move in the context of the Cold War. Sen. Orrin Hatch, a senior Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee making those decisions, told my colleague Robert Windrem that he would make the same call again today even knowing what bin Laden would do subsequently. “It was worth it,” he said.
“Those were very important, pivotal matters that played an important role in the downfall of the Soviet Union,” he said.
The United States spent millions of dollars to supply Afghan schoolchildren with textbooks filled with violent images and militant Islamic teachings ….
The primers, which were filled with talk of jihad and featured drawings of guns, bullets, soldiers and mines, have served since then as the Afghan school system’s core curriculum. Even the Taliban used the American-produced books ….
John Adams once called the vice presidency, “the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived.” FDR’s VP, John Nance Garner, said the job wasn’t “worth a pitcher of warm piss.”
It’s quotes like these that make Dick Cheney—who pretty much ran his own separate government from the VP’s office—all the more impressive, not to mention terrifying. For not only was Cheney out of control, he was out of control in a job that had no controls attached to it. No one had ever thought them necessary before.
Give the man credit for creativity. Cheney found even more ways to overturn the Constitution, undermine the separation of powers, and possibly make the U.S. government an accessory to murder many times over.
The New York Times broke half the story in Sunday’s paper as Scott Shane explained that “the Central Intelligence Agency withheld information about a secret counterterrorism program from Congress for eight years on direct orders from former Vice President Dick Cheney.” Congress finally found out eight years after Cheney gave the order, when CIA Director Leon E. Panetta informed the House and Senate intelligence committees upon learning of the program himself.
According to current law, when a U.S. intelligence agency is involved in a covert action, at least eight members of Congress—the Republican and Democratic leaders of both houses of Congress and of their intelligence committees—must be informed in order for the program to be legal.
CIA defenders insist compliance with the law is actually a gray area because “this program never went fully operational” as one official put it. And Panetta terminated the program as soon as he learned of it. But given the history of both Cheney and many in the CIA’s contempt for both Congress and the Constitution, it’s entirely possible that we still don’t know the full story. - from the daily beast
there are some flaws to this video, but it’s a treasury of good information.
In Iraq and Afghanistan, the use of contractors reached a level unprecedented in U.S. military operations. As of March 31, 2010, the United States deployed 175,000 troops and 207,000 contractors in the war zones. Contractors represented 50 percent of the Department of Defense (DOD) workforce in Iraq and 59 percent in Afghanistan.
This increase is the logical outcome of a series of decisions going back decades. Force structure reductions ranging from the post-Vietnam decisions that moved most Army logistics support elements to the Army Reserve and Guard4 to the post–Cold War reduction that cut the Army from 18 to 10 divisions with corresponding cuts in support forces greatly reduced the Services’ ability to support long-term operations. Next, a series of decisions in the 1990s led to the employment of contractors in the Balkans for tasks from traditional camp-building to the new concept of “force development” that saw MPRI training the Croatian army. Finally, the decision to invade Iraq with minimum forces left the United States with too few troops in-theater to deal with the disorder that resulted from the removal of Saddam. Thus, it is understandable that the immediate, unanticipated need for large numbers of logistics and security personnel, the shortage of such troops on Active duty, and the precedent for using contractors in the Balkans caused the Pentagon to turn to contractors to fill the immediate operational needs. However, the subsequent failure to conduct a careful analysis of the wisdom of using contractors is less understandable. The executive branch has conducted numerous investigations into fraud, waste, and corruption in the contracting process. Congress has held hearings and established the Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan. Yet the U.S. Government has not systematically explored the essential question: Does using contractors in a conflict zone make strategic sense?
By the end of 2009, contractors reported almost 1,800 dead and 40,000 wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan. As the fighting in Afghanistan gets worse, contractors are now suffering more deaths than U.S. forces: “In the first two quarters of 2010 alone, contractor deaths represented more than half—53 percent—of all fatalities. This point bears emphasis: since January 2010, more contractors have died in Iraq and Afghanistan than U.S. military soldiers.” For practical purposes, these casualties were “off the books” in that they had no real impact on the political discussions about the war. As Peter Singer noted:
there was no outcry whenever contractors were called up and deployed, or even killed. If the gradual death toll among American troops threatened to slowly wear down public support, contractor casualties were not counted in official death tolls and had no impact on these ratings. . . . These figures mean that the private military industry has suffered more losses in Iraq than the rest of the coalition of allied nations combined. The losses are also far more than any single U.S. Army division has experienced.
Contractor casualties are not reported via the Pentagon, but only through the U.S. Department of Labor. Labor’s Web site notes that these are not comprehensive statistics but only represent those injuries and deaths that resulted in insurance claims. Thus, it is difficult if not impossible to determine how many additional casualties were suffered by other nations’ contractors in either Iraq or Afghanistan.
In reality, it is virtually impossible to determine the actual effectiveness of any contractors—armed or unarmed—until they begin to operate in theater (and only then if a member of the U.S. Government can observe the contractors as they operate).
Compounding the problems created by lack of quality control, the government does not control the contractor’s daily contact with abuse, intimidation, and even killing of local civilians such as the DynCorp employee who ran a child sex ring in the Balkans or the September 2007 Blackwater shootings in Nisour Square, Baghdad.
This lack of quality and tactical control greatly increases the impact of the third major problem: the United States is held responsible for everything the contractors do or fail to do. Despite the fact the United States has no effective quality or operational control over the contractors, the local population rightly holds it responsible for all contractor failures.
In addition to undercutting government legitimacy, the use of contractors may actually undercut local government power. In Afghanistan, security and reconstruction contracts have resulted in significant shifts in relative power between competing Afghan qawmsas well as allegations of corruption. Dexter Filkins, writing in the New York Times, notes that the power structure in Orugzan Province, Afghanistan, has changed completely due to the U.S. Government’s selecting Matiullah Khan to provide security for convoys from Kandahar to Tirin Kot:
With his NATO millions, and the American backing, Mr. Matiullah has grown into the strongest political and economic force in the region. He estimates that his salaries support 15,000 people in this impoverished prov ince. . . . This has irritated some local leaders, who say that the line between Mr. Matiullah’s business interest and the government has disappeared. . . . Both General [Nick] Carter [commander of ISAF South] and Hanif Atmar, the Afghan interior minister, said they hoped to disband Mr. Matiullah’s militia soon—or at least to bring it under formal government control. . . . General Carter said that while he had no direct proof in Mr. Matiullah’s case, he harbored more general worries that the legions of unregulated Afghan security companies had a financial interest in prolonging chaos.
Thus, an unacknowledged but serious strategic impact of using contractors is to directly undercut both the legitimacy and the authority of the host nation government. - this article was originally published as Institute for National Strategic Studies Strategic Forum 260 (NDU Press, November 2010)
Earlier this week, Bloomberg reported that QinetiQ, a high tech defense contractor specializing in secret satellites drones and software used by U.S. special forces, was the victim of a sustained cybersecurity breach for several years starting in 2007.
According to Bloomberg, documents released in the Anonymous Stratfor hack reveal QinetiQ was compromised as part of a cyber-espionage attack originating in China — and notes the breach was part of a much broader campaign targetting U.S. contractors:
“QinetiQ’s espionage expertise didn’t keep Chinese cyber- spies from outwitting the company. In a three-year operation, hackers linked to China’s military infiltrated QinetiQ’s computers and compromised most if not all of the company’s research. At one point, they logged into the company’s network by taking advantage of a security flaw identified months earlier and never fixed [...]
QinetiQ was only one target in a broader cyberpillage. Beginning at least as early as 2007, Chinese computer spies raided the databanks of almost every major U.S. defense contractor and made off with some of the country’s most closely guarded technological secrets, according to two former Pentagon officials who asked not to be named because damage assessments of the incidents remain classified.“
U.S. intelligence reports ranked cyber threats as the top danger facing the country for the first time in April, but tensions have been running high about the government’s ability to protect digital assets and intelligence for years. A 2011 Department of Justice report noted that only 64 percent of FBI agents assigned to national security-related cyber investigations had the appropriate skills and expertise to handle those types of cases.
Government cybersecurity contracting exploded during the Bush Administration, with many roles traditionally filled by government employees or resources outsourced to external companies over whom the government has less oversight. The Obama Administration has made efforts to curb that trend, but that expansion, combined with a lack of cybersecurity expertise in the military and federal agencies, resulted in many cybersecurity defense operations being outsourced or completed under the heavy supervision of outside contractors. – from think progress, The U.S. Outsources Cybersecurity & Defense To Contractors That Keep Getting Hacked
The Syrian government has called on the United Nations to classify a leading rebel group as a terrorist organisation after its leader pledged allegiance to the head of Al Qaeda.
Abu Mohammed al-Jawlani heads the radical Nusra Front rebel group.
In a message posted online on Wednesday he pledged allegiance to the head of Al Qaeda, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and supported calls for an Islamic state to be created in Syria.
It is now beyond reasonable doubt that President John F. Kennedy was assassinated by his own National Security State in what was a violent coup d’état that is, an overthrowing of the legitimate elected government of the United States by force through the use of the clandestine black-ops services of the CIA, elements of the Secret Service, the US military, the FBI and organized crime.
Unless and until the United States publicly discloses to the citizenry that its duly elected government was overthrown in 1963 and that since then the replacement/imposter government has been at least technically/legally speaking illegitimate[12] it will likely be impossible to reverse the increasingly rapid disintegration of America. The reality is that since the murder of President John F. Kennedy, there has been an extra-constitutional imposter “government” in place which prior to that time existed only in the shadows. It has been given many different names including the “war party” the MIMIC (media, intelligence, military, industrial complex) the secret government, the shadow government etc. That entity or “Regime” as a result of the JFK assassination appears to have profoundly altered the trajectory of the United States by placing the country on a constant war footing and building and sustaining an enormous foreign military base presence throughout the world which serves to project American power and enlarge the “empire.” – from jericho rendezvous, After the JFK Assassination–a True Coup d’état: Is the Current US Government Legitimate?
A handful of polls conducted in the days after the Boston Marathon bombings show that US citizens are responding much differently than in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks that killed roughly 3,000 people. Not only are Americans more opposed now to giving up personal freedoms for the sake of security than they were after 9/11, but other statistics show that distrust against the federal government continues to climb.
Just one day after the April 15 Boston Marathon bombing, pollsters with Fox News asked a sample of Americans, “Would you be willing to give up some of your personal freedom in order to reduce thethreat of terrorism?” Forty-three percent of the respondents said they would, while 45 percent said no. Comparatively, 71 percent of Americans asked a similar question in October 2001 said they’d be willing to give up personal freedoms, while only 20 percent opposed at the time.
A separate poll conducted by the Washington Post just three days after the Boston Marathon bombing reveals that nearly half of those surveyed say that the government will go too far in trying to prevent future acts of terrorism. The Post asked a random national sample of 588 adults, “Which worries you more: that the government (will not go far enough to investigate terrorism because of concerns about constitutional rights), or that it (will go too far in compromising constitutional rights in order to investigate terrorism)?” Days after the Boston bombing, 41 percent of respondents said the government will not go far enough, compared to 48 percent saying they’ll go too far. When similar questions were asked in 2006 and 2010, 44 percent and 27 percent said the government will go too far, respectively, signaling that for the first time in years Americans are overly concerned about a misuse of power on the part of Washington.
That isn’t to say that the Boston attack is necessarily inspiring Americans to question authority, though. Two months before Tsarnaev brothers allegedly detonated a pair of explosives near the finish line of the Boston Marathon, 53 percent of Americans polled by the Pew Research Center said the federal government is threatening their personal rights and freedoms. In November 2011, that statistic was only 30 percent. - from russia today, Americans troubled more by governmental abuse than terrorism
Police and private security personel monitor security cameras at the Lower Manhattan Security Initiative on April 23, 2013 in New York City. (AFP Photo / John Moore)Police and private security personel monitor security cameras at the Lower Manhattan Security Initiative on April 23, 2013 in New York City. (AFP Photo / John Moore)Police and private security personel monitor security cameras at the Lower Manhattan Security Initiative on April 23, 2013 in New York City. (AFP Photo / John Moore)Police and private security personel monitor security cameras at the Lower Manhattan Security Initiative on April 23, 2013 in New York City. (AFP Photo / John Moore)
The Syrian government has called on the United Nations to classify a leading rebel group as a terrorist organisation after its leader pledged allegiance to the head of Al Qaeda.
The call came as the opposition accused forces loyal to president Bashar al-Assad of “savage” killings in the country’s south.
Abu Mohammed al-Jawlani heads the radical Nusra Front rebel group.
In a message posted online on Wednesday he pledged allegiance to the head of Al Qaeda, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and supported calls for an Islamic state to be created in Syria.
The Syrian regime is demanding the UN “fulfil its role and preserve global security” by classing Nursa Front as an Al Qaeda linked entity.
One of the two men killed this morning even had a “tangential” connection to Tamerlan Tsarnaev, one of the two suspects in the Boston attack. Russian authorities raided the home of Shakhrudin Askhabov, killing him and one other person after they reportedly opened fire on the police. The Federal Security Service (FSB) even released video of the raid, including images of the dead bodies and some of their weapons.
Moscow has been battling Islamic militants, nationalist rebels, and organized crime in Dagestan off and on ever since the Soviet Union broke up. It’s been a long and brutal conflict that Russia has often tried to tie to the larger global fight against Islamic terrorism. Despite facing a number of terrorist attacks on their own soil, Russia’s questionable tactics and heavy-handed retaliations have not earned them a lot of sympathy from the global community
But during public comments on the Boston bombings last week, President Vladimir Putin made it clear that he hopes Americans might start to see things his way, now that source of both countries’ terror problems have had the same root. At the very least, it seems it have may temporarily given him cover for a crackdown that Moscow wanted to carried out anyway. - from the atlantic wire
Testimony on Russian-American Relations on the Question of Chechnya
Before the U.S. Congress
Russian actions in Chechnya were primarily criticized in the Western media, and in Western political circles, as they were seen through the prism of human rights violations and the excessive use of force. There was a potent attempt to separate the American fight against Islamist terrorism from the Russian fight against Chechen terrorism that took place within Russia’s borders.
“no one’s talking pre-emptive strike…for now…”
In addition, Russian efforts to get extradition orders for some Chechen terrorist leaders that moved to the UK, such as Akhmed Zakayev, self-proclaimed Prime Minister of the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria (Chechen separatists call Chechnya “Ichkeria”), or to the U.S., such as Ilyas Akhmadov, Foreign Minister of the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria, who, by the way, was granted asylum in Boston, received neither understanding nor support by the American and British sides. As if that were not enough, sadly, many Western countries preferred to call the terrorists and cut-throats “freedom fighters” oppressed by the Russian authorities.
This last point was articulated by President Putin in his annual direct line with the public on April 25th. He was translated by the Russian media as having said, “I was always appalled when our Western partners and the Western media called the terrorists, who did bloody crimes in our country, ‘insurgents’, and almost never ‘terrorists.’ They [the terrorists] were receiving help, informational, financial and political support. Sometimes directly and sometimes indirectly. And we were saying that we must do the job and not be content with declarations proclaiming terrorism a common threat. Those two have proved our position all too well”
The attacks by the Tsarnaev brothers in Boston, as well as the 9/11 attacks, have provoked feelings of solidarity with the American people and especially with the citizens of Boston among the Russian people and Kremlin leadership. Just as he did in 2001, President Putin expressed his readiness to cooperate with the U.S. government to uncover all the details that led to the tragedy in Boston and, as far as I know, the secret services of both countries are now actively working together on this.
It is crucial to point out that the Russian side and Russian secret services tracked the contacts of the Tsarnaevs and turned to the American authorities so that they could investigate them. Unfortunately, the evident remaining distrust between the two countries and the doubts of the American side that Russia is indeed combating Chechen terrorism in the Caucasus must have caused the authorities to not take the warning seriously enough. – from the Institute for Democracy and Cooperation
Boston terror suspects uncle was married to CIA officer’s daughter and even shared a home with the agent
An uncle of the Boston bombers was previously married to a CIA officer’s daughter for three years, it emerged today.
Ruslan Tsarni even lived with his father-in-law agent Graham Fuller in his Maryland home for a year.
Mr Fuller was forced to explain the relationship today as news of the family link emerged online.
He told Al-Monitor that his daughter, Samantha, was married to Ruslan, whose surname was then Tsarnaev, for three to four years in the 1990s.
this graph shows “drills” planned in the dallas/ft. worth area for later this year.
The couple divorced in 1999 more than ten years after he left the agency in 1987.
‘Samantha was married to Ruslan Tsarnaev (Tsarni) for 3-4 years, and they lived in Bishkek for one year where Samantha was working for Price Waterhouse on privatization projects,’ Mr Fuller said.
‘I, of course, retired from CIA in 1987 and had moved on to working as a senior political scientist for RAND.’
He said his son-in-law showed no interest in the agency or politics but spoke generally about his family in Chechnya.
He said any attempts to portray the relationship as a link between the security agency and the two terrorists was ‘absurd’.
‘Like all Chechens, Ruslan was very concerned about his native land, but I saw no particular involvement in politics,’ Fuller told Al-Monitor.
‘I doubt he even had much to say of intelligence value other than talking about his own family’s sad tale of deportation from Chechnya by Stalin to Central Asia. Every Chechen family has such stories.’ - from the daily mail.
Putin Suggests West Uses Al Qaeda to Bring Down Assad
Russian president Vladimir Putin in an interview that aired on Thursday suggested that Western powers are using terrorists to destabilize the Ba’athist regime in Syria. “This is a dangerous and very short sighted policy,” he said.
The Russian leader, who started his third term as president in May, told Russia’s RT television, “Today, some want to use militants from Al Qaeda or some other organizations with equally radical views to achieve their goals in Syria.” He compared the situation to the United States backing mujahideen rebels during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in the 1980s and warned that propping up Islamic extremists in Syria will similarly backfire. – from the atlantic sentinel
The EU Al-Qaeda Oil Consortium
The decision of the European Union to lift the embargo on Syrian government’s energy exports by importing oil from the ‘armed opposition’ is another flagrant violation of international law. It violates the UN General Assembly declaration of 1962 on Permanent Sovereignty over Natural Resources and is yet another violation of the 1981 UN declaration on the Inadmissibility of Intervention and Interference in the Internal Affairs of States. But it is much more than a technical violation of the law. It marks the decent of civilization into barbarism.
London and Paris, have more than Washington, been at the forefront of aggression against Syria. In spite of the fact that it has now been confirmed by most media sources that the Syrian ‘opposition’ is Al-Qaeda, London and Paris persist in their insane drive to arm the terrorists, using the spurious argument that if they don’t arm the ‘moderates’ the ‘extremists’ will take over the country. However, in the words of the New York Times, ‘nowhere in rebel-controlled Syria is there a secular fighting force to speak of’. The fact that the Syrian ‘rebels’ are in fact Al- Qaeda has even been admitted by the war-mongering French daily Le Monde.
So, Paris and London are pushing for further arming of Al-Qaeda and the legalization of oil trading with the jihadi terrorists. In plain language this means that the loose, terrorist network known to the world as Al-Qaeda will soon become one of the EU’s partners in the oil business. A new absurd chapter in the Era of Terror is about to be enacted. - from global research, Stealing Syria’s Oil: The EU Al-Qaeda Oil Consortium
Western media hails EU oil deal as potential game changer, despite admitting Al Qaeda holds oil fields.
It was recently reported that the European Union would be lifting its oil embargo on Syria, in an effort to help fund what it calls “rebels” operating there. In the Associated Press article, “EU lifts Syria oil embargo to bolster rebels,” it states:
The European Union on Monday lifted its oil embargo on Syria to provide more economic support to the forces fighting to oust President Bashar Assad’s regime.
The decision will allow for crude exports from rebel-held territory, the import of oil and gas production technology, and investments in the Syrian oil industry, the EU said in a statement.
On paper, the E.U.’s idea seemed straightforward. Without an embargo, European companies can now legally begin importing barrels of oil directly from rebel groups, which have seized several oil fields in recent months, mostly around the eastern area of Deir Ezzor. That would provide the opposition with its first reliable source of income since the revolt erupted in Feb. 2011, and in theory hasten the downfall of Bashar Assad’s regime, by giving rebels the means to run skeletal local governments and consolidate their control. As part of the decision, the E.U. ministers also agreed to export technical equipment, insure the rebels’ shipments of oil and invest in the rebel oil businesses. Before the war, Syria earned about $3.6 billion a year exporting oil and gas to Europe, with its biggest customers in Germany and Italy, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
Syria’s main oilfields are in the eastern provinces of Deir al-Zour and Hassakeh, which both border Iraq.
Just as in Libya, the West is wasting no time in despoiling Syria’s resources, with the pillaging beginning long before the war even reaches a definitive conclusion. But in addition to the overt looting of Syria’s resources, there is an added complication.TIME also reports:
Still, analysts warn that the plan is deeply flawed—and in fact, that the E.U.’s decision could intensify the violence in Syria, by setting up a deadly competition for control of a resource that has languished amid two years of grinding civil war.
And indeed, this “deadly competition” has already been taking place, as Al Qaeda’s al-Nusra front in Syria has been overrunning civilian populations, government positions, and local militias alike across Syria’s oil-rich region. In fact, TIME’s itself admits that:
Complicating the issue is the fact that several of the rebel-held oil fields are believed to be under the control of Jabhat al-Nusra, which has declared its allegiance to al-Qaeda.
TIME concedes that “several” oil fields are held by Al Qaeda; however, other reports across the Western media indicate most, if not all “rebel-held oil fields” are under Al Qaeda’s control.
In the New York Times article, “Islamist Rebels Create Dilemma on Syria Policy,” not only is it admitted that, “nowhere in rebel-controlled Syria is there a secular fighting force to speak of,” but it specifically mentions the oil fields the EU seeks to plunder:
Elsewhere, they [al-Nusra] have seized government oil fields, put employees back to work and now profit from the crude they produce.
Additionally:
In the oil-rich provinces of Deir al-Zour and Hasaka, Nusra fighters have seized government oil fields, putting some under the control of tribal militias and running others themselves.
Islamist rebels are clashing with tribesmen in eastern Syria as struggles over the region’s oil facilities break out in the power vacuum left by civil war, activists said on Saturday.
One dispute over a stolen oil truck in the town of Masrib in the province of Deir al-Zor, which borders Iraq, set off a battle between tribesmen and fighters from the Nusra Front, an al-Qaeda linked rebel group, which left 37 killed, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
The fighting, which started in late March and lasted 10 days, was part of a new pattern of conflict between tribal groups and the Nusra Front, said a report from the Observatory, a British-based group which opposes Syria’s government and draws information from a network of activists in the country.
The Reuters article had forewarned:
The incentive for disputes over lucrative resources may be increased by plans by the European Union to lift an embargo on Syrian oil, which would make it easier to sell.
The EU said this week it wants to allow Syria’s opposition to sell crude in an effort to tilt the balance of power towards the rebels, who are outgunned by Assad’s fighter planes and long range missiles.
In other words, the EU’s announcement while lining the pockets of big-oil, is sowing increased chaos, violence, and death across oil-rich regions of Syria, compounding an already catastrophic humanitarian disaster of the West’s own creation. It is also clear that Al Qaeda’s al-Nusra front is the opposition the EU plans to buy the oil from, as there are no other “opposition” groups across the country to speak of according even to the New York Times, and more specifically, none besides al-Nusra holding significant ground in Syria’s oil fields.
Son-in-law: Former CIA agent Graham Fuller, left, explained his relationship to the two Boston terror suspects’ uncle today. Ruslan Tsarni, right, was married for three years to his daughter, Samantha. photo: daily mail
FILE – This is an undated file photo provided by the New Jersey State Police showing Assata Shakur – the former Joanne Chesimard – who was put on a U.S. government terrorist watch list on May 2, 2005. Shakur, 57, was convicted in 1973 of killing New Jersey State Trooper Werner Foerster as he lay on the ground. She escaped from prison in 1979 and fled to Cuba. The FBI is scheduled to make an announcement Thursday, May 2, 2013 regarding Joanne Chesimard, who killed a New Jersey state trooper on this date 40 years ago. (AP Photo/New Jersey State Police, File)
one of the great sheroes of the uprising against the fascist pig nixon white house has made the fbi’s most wanted list, 33 years after being forced to live in exile.
if we had more activists like her, the government wouldn’t be able to get away with their bullshit austerity scams and terror plots.
EXPECT an update on this story tonight, as assata is one of the strongest revolutionaries on the planet. not for her actions as much as her heart. she’s wonderful.
Today, Joanne Chesimard — better known as Assata Shakur — became the first woman to make the FBI’s list of most wanted terrorists. In 1977, an all-white jury convicted Chesinard of killing a New Jersey state trooper, and she was given a life sentence. A former member of the Black Liberation Army, she escaped from prison in 1979 with the help of fellow activists, including her brother Mutulu Shakur, the rapper Tupac’s stepfather. Chesimard inspired Common’s “Song for Assata,” which in turn inspired conservatives to protest Common’s visit to the White House.
Chesimard’s supporters believe that she, like other former members of the Black Panthers Party, was the victim of FBI misconduct through Cointelpro. In the early seventies, she was linked to a string of bank robberies and police killings that prompted a multistate manhunt. Those charges were later dismissed, acquitted, or mistried, but she was wanted for questioning when she, Sundiata Acoli, and Zayd Malik Shakur were pulled over on the New Jersey turnpike for a broken tail light — a confrontation that ended in the shootout that left Trooper Werner Foerster and Zayd Malik Shakur dead.
Chesimard fled to Cuba, where she received political asylum due to racial persecution and — despite periodic political maneuvering to have her extradited — lived openly, giving interviews and publishing her autobiography. She went back underground in 2005, when she was reclassified as a domestic terrorist and the reward for her capture rose to $1 million. Today, the fortieth anniversary of the killing, the F.B.I. and the state of New Jersey doubled it, contributing another $1 million dollars.
The terrorist attacks on Boston — like the shootings in Newtown and Aurora — are a reminder of the glaring gender imbalance among mass killers. (As if the logical conclusions of women attaining equality would be their equal participation in murder, as opposed to, say, less oppression in general.) But in this particular instance of bad glass-ceiling-breaking, Chesimard seems like something of a token appointment. – from new york magazine
it’s hard for me to imagine that a man would kill himself when he has an 11 years-old daughter. first of all, who will take care of her when he is gone? second, he would want to protect her if he felt there was some sort of danger lurking about. third, he would want to be her champion and fight for her. can’t do that stuff when you’re dead. doesn’t add up.
for anyone not following this, there are a number of detainees at guantanamo bay who are eligible for release – about half the population. but, there is nowhere to send them, as their home nations don’t particularly want them back, and they will likely be killed upon their return, even the innocent ones. their presence back home might compromise snitching and human trafficking networks.
as you can imagine, the ones eligible for release would like to leave. in protest, many of the prisoners have gone on a hunger strike. dozens of the prisoners are refusing food and demanding release. the u.s.’s response has been to force-feed the strikers, and this is causing international concern, as it is seen as torture.
who didn’t see this coming when bush II started this mess?
An attorney who represented prisoners detained at Guantanamo Bay was found dead last week.
Andy P. Hart, 38, a federal public defender in Toledo, Ohio, apparently died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Hart left behind a suicide note and a thumb drive, believed to contain his case files. It is unknown where Hart died, what the suicide note said or whether an autopsy was performed.
Hart’s death comes amid escalating chaos that has engulfed Guantanamo over the past three months—from a mass hunger strike to military commissions and renewed pressure on the White House to shut down the prison facility. Hart was one of three-dozen Guantanamo attorneys who signed a letter in March urging Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel to take immediate action and bring about an end to the hunger strike.
Because Hart was a federal employee working on sensitive legal issues the FBI was contacted about his death. It is unknown if the agency has been investigating the circumstances surrounding his death.
Neither the FBI nor local law enforcement officials in Toledo, Ohio returned calls for comment. A phone number listed for Hart was disconnected Wednesday. – from truthout, Guantanamo Attorney Found Dead
Military Admits 100 Prisoners on Hunger Strike at Guantánamo
The U.S. military has acknowledged for the first time the number of prisoners on hunger strike at Guantánamo has topped 100. About a fifth of the hunger strikers are now being force fed, a practice widely viewed as a form of torture. David Remes, a lawyer for the prisoners, says even more people are taking part than the military admits.
David Remes: “The military at first denied that there was a hunger strike. The only hunger strikers it acknowledged was the hunger strikers — were the hunger strikers who had been striking before February. Our clients told us that nearly 130 of them were hunger-striking. And it’s interesting, because gradually, week by week and day by day, the Gitmo authorities have been acknowledging higher and higher numbers, to the point where now they are acknowledging that 100 men are on hunger strike — we said about 130 — and 20 are being force-fed.”
One of the reasons the United States prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, is in the midst of a major hunger strike, with at least 100 detainees taking part, is that most of the prisoners there are already cleared for release. By the Obama administration’s own accounting, some 86 of the 166 detainees at Guantanamo are eligible for release or transfer to other countries’ custody. But because the administration hasn’t been willing or able to find places to send them, no detainee has been released in more than a year, when two ethnic Uighurs from China were sent to El Salvador.
Through statements released by their lawyers and communications from the detainees themselves, The Huffington Post was able to identify the names of 12 cleared detainees, of the 56 publicly identified, who have reportedly taken part in the hunger strike. Their stories are below. Many more cleared prisoners not identified here have likely joined the hunger strike.
Adel Bin Ahmed Bin Ibrahim Hkiml
Adel Bin Ahmed Bin Ibrahim Hkiml has been at Guantanamo for 11 years. Born in Tunisia, the 48-year-old lived in Italy for eight years, working as a chef in Bologna before traveling to Pakistan to marry. After he was turned over to U.S. forces by bounty hunters in December 2001, he was allegedly tortured. While in solitary confinement at Guantanamo in March, he tried to kill himself, his lawyers have said.
“He’s been cleared for years too, just like me,” Shaker Aamer, a legal U.K. resident who is imprisoned at Guantanamo, wrote of Hkiml. “He tried to kill himself on 19 March. He was in Camp Five Echo, which is the worst of the worst places here in Hell, just the place you’d put someone you said was no danger, who should be sent home to his family. He didn’t die, fortunately, and they took him to hospital, patched him up for nine days, and then brought him right back to Camp Five Echo. That’s what they call treatment for people who are so depressed they’re suicidal.”- there’s much more to see, from the huffington post, Guantanamo Detainees Cleared For Release Take Part In Hunger Strike
Twenty-one inmates are being force-fed through nasal tubes.
Protestors call for the closure of the Guantánamo Bay prison camp. Photograph: Larry Downing/Reuters A former chief prosecutor for the controversial American prison camp at Guantánamo Bay has called for the prison to be closed, launching an online petition that has gathered some 60,000 signatures in less than 24 hours. Col Morris Davis served for two years as the chief prosecutor for terrorism trials at Guantánamo. He decided to campaign for the closure of the camp in the wake of a hunger strike that now involves more than 100 prisoners, including some 21 who are being force fed to keep them from starving to death. click on image to see the article, from the guardian, u.k.
Force-feeding hunger strikers is a breach of international law, the UN’s human rights office said Wednesday, as US authorities tried to stem a protest by inmates at the controversial Guantanamo Bay jail.
“If it’s perceived as torture or inhuman treatment — and it’s the case, it’s painful — then it is prohibited by international law,” Rupert Coville, spokesman for the UN high commissioner for human rights, told AFP.
Out of 166 inmates held at the prison at the remote US naval base in southeastern Cuba, 100 are on hunger strike, according to the latest tally from military officers. And of those, 21 detainees are being fed through nasal tubes. – from france24, UN calls force-feeding ‘torture’ amid Guantanamo hunger strike
US Military Calls in ‘Force-Feeding Teams’ as Guantanamo Hunger Strike Continues
The US military has confirmed that at least 40 “medical personnel” have arrived at the Guantanamo Bay detention facility in order to expand a force-feeding operation designed to counter an ongoing hunger strike by more than 100 prisoners protesting their indefinite detention and ill treatment.
But because the procedure of “force-feeding” is widely held as a form of torture, critics of the practice may well view the medical teams as nothing more than ‘torture reinforcements’ as the number of those approved for the painful process continues to grow and their conditions deteriorate.
Military authorities repeatedly claim that force-feedings are somehow necessary, but experts are unequivocal when they declare that the procedure is torture.
The United Nations Human Rights Commission considers the practice of force-feeding—in which detainees are strapped to a restraining chair, have tubes pushed up their nostrils and liquids pumped down their throats—a clear form of torture. In addition, the World Medical Association prohibits its physicians from participating in force-feeding and the American Medical Association has just sent a letter to the Pentagon calling the practice an affront to accepted medical ethics.
One detainee, speaking recently through his lawyer David Remes, described the process by saying it felt a “razor blade [going] down through your nose and into your throat.”
In an interview with the Guardian, Remes discussed the treatment of those at Guantanamo as he pushed back against the US military’s claims that it is safeguarding the prisoners by torturing them. “It’s like the way you would treat an animal,” he said. – see more, including video, from common dreams, ‘Torture Reinforcements’ Not ‘Medical Personnel’ Arrive to Combat Gitmo Hunger Strike
A teenage girl is expelled and is now under arrest and facing felony charges for a science project gone wrong. Kiera Wilmot’s future is in serious jeopardy for mixing household chemicals in a bottle, producing a small “pop” sound, and now she’s being charged with having a bomb or explosive device. Why are law enforcement and officials coming down on her this hard? Cenk Uygur and Ana Kasparian break it down.
Kiera Wilmot, 16, charged with felony possession of a weapon as part of ‘zero-tolerance policy’ after project exploded
To Florida teenager Kiera Wilmot, it was a simple experiment in preparation for her school’s science fair, mixing common household chemicals in a small plastic bottle to see how they would react.
Witnesses say the bottle popped “like a firecracker”, harmlessly blowing off the lid and creating a small amount of smoke.
But to staff at Bartow High School, police officers and an assistant state attorney with a zero-tolerance attitude, her actions were much more serious.
The unsupervised experiment on school grounds ended with Wilmot, 16, led away to a juvenile detention facility in handcuffs, expelled and charged as an adult with felony possession of a weapon and making or discharging a destructive device, with a possible penalty of up to 20 years in jail.
The episode has pitted campaigners for a common-sense approach to school discipline against an unrepentant school district that insists it is just following rules, warning parents to advise their children that there will always be “consequences to actions”.
“This is totally insane,” Dr Kathleen Nolan, a lecturer in teacher preparation at Princeton University and author of Police in the Hallways: Discipline in an Urban High School told the Guardian.
“This young woman faces expulsion, felony charges and a criminal record because of what appears to be misguided curiosity. These zero tolerance laws have put into place a mindlessness where individuals no longer think through these kind of situations and use their discretion.”
photo from davey d’s hip hop corner, click on image to see the original post.
According to Wilmot’s arrest report, the school’s assistant principal Dan Durham said he was walking around the campus before classes began and heard “an explosion”. He said he saw Wilmot near the area and she told him she was conducting an experiment for the science fair.
He called police when the girl’s science teacher told him that it was not part of any class work.
In the report, officer Gregory Rhoden of the Bartow police department said Wilmot brought a plastic water bottle from home, in which she mixed some toilet bowl cleaner and aluminum foil.
“Wilmot advised she did not know what would happen when she mixed the ingredients. She thought it would just cause some smoke,” Rhoden said.
“Wilmot advised in no way was she trying to hurt anyone or cause a disruption at school.”
Ron Pritchard, the school’s principal, confirmed that nobody was hurt and no school property was damaged. He told reporters that Wilmot was “a good kid” and a model student.
“She made a bad choice. Honestly, I don’t think she meant to ever hurt anyone. She wanted to see what would happen and was shocked by what it did. She has never been in trouble before. Ever,” he said.
That cut little ice with Polk County’s assistant state attorney Tammy Glotfelty, who advised Rhoden to charge the girl with the two felony offences. Her office told the Guardian on Thursday: “The case is under investigation. We have no comment at this time.”
The Polk County school board, meanwhile, issued a statement announcing it was disappointed by Wilmot’s “bad choice”.
“The incident was a serious breach of conduct. In order to maintain a safe and orderly learning environment, we simply must uphold our code of conduct rules. We urge our parents to join us in conveying the message that there are consequences to actions. We will not compromise the safety and security of our students and staff,” the statement said.
Wilmot, whose family has made no comment, now faces the likelihood of having to complete her high school studies at home. Her supporters have launched an online petition at change.org calling for the “unjust” charges to be dropped, which had attracted more than 18,000 signatures by lunchtime Thursday.
“Given that this case is so high profile, the hope is that somebody will intervene and get something going in the right direction,” Dr Nolan said.
“Unfortunately there are so many young people like her whose lives have been turned in a different direction because of an overreaction. I’ve heard so many teacher and administrators lament, ‘There’s nothing I can do.’”
Investigators said it was gruesome.
Today’s story features a much worse incident in the Army, with reports that the Sexual Harassment/Assault Response and Prevention (SHARP) 
it grants full presidential authority to “Federal military commanders.” According to the defense official, a commander is defined as follows: “Somebody who’s in the position of command, has the title commander. And most of the time they are centrally selected by a board, they’ve gone through additional schooling to exercise command authority.”
He goes on to say that our elected officials have been bought out by lobbyist. They want the politicians to pave the way for more prisons by passing more laws of enslavement to insure a steady flow of inmates to occupy the cells. America has entered into a hell like period where people are worth more in prison than free and working as all jobs are being shipped to China. America is being
Nonfatal firearm-related violent victimizations against persons age 12 or older declined 70%, from 1.5 million in 1993 to 456,500 in 2004. The number then
From 1993 to 2011, about 60% to 70% of homicides were committed with a firearm. Over the same period, between 6% and 9% of all nonfatal violent victimizations were committed with a firearm, with about 20% to 30% of robberies and 22% to 32% of aggravated assaults involving a firearm.
For nonfatal firearm violence, about 9 in 10 were committed with a handgun, and this remained stable from 1994 to 2011.
![Prescott Bush, the father of GHW Bush, later wrote Clover Dulles, the widow of Allen Dulles, in 1969, about his meeting with Allen Dulles after JFK had canned him in fall, 1961. "He [Allen] tried to make a pleasant evening of it, but I was rather sick of heart, and angry too, for it was the Kennedys that brought about the fiasco [Bay of Pigs]. And here they were making Allen to be the goat, which he wasn't and did not deserve. I have never forgiven them." Note the last sentence of Prescott Bush. His son George Herbert Walker Bush says he can't remember where he was on the day of the JFK assassination, despite his being a US Senate candidate staying in the Dallas, TX Sheraton the night of 11/21/63 and being in Dallas on 11/22/63. GHW Bush helped plan the Bay of Pigs invasion and I think he was involved in the JFK assassination.](http://roblosricos.files.wordpress.com/2013/05/bushjfkbookdepo2.jpg?w=593&h=619)
This lack of quality and tactical control greatly increases the impact of the third major problem: the United States is held responsible for everything the contractors do or fail to do. Despite the fact the United States has no effective quality or operational control over the contractors, the local population rightly holds it responsible for all contractor failures.
Adel Bin Ahmed Bin Ibrahim Hkiml
