State of Fear
Taylor
Published: Tuesday 8 January 2013
The FBI documents obtained by the PCJF show that government security services began to monitor the activities of Occupy activists before the Zuccotti Park encampment was established.

 

Shannon McLeish of Florida is a 45-year-old married mother of two young children. She is a homeowner, a taxpayer and a safe driver. She votes in every election. She attends a Unitarian Universalist church on Sundays. She is also, like nearly all who have a relationship with the Occupy movement in the United States, being monitored by the federal government. She knows this because when she read FBI documents obtained by the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund(PCJF) through the Freedom of Information Act, she was startled to see a redaction that could only be referring to her. McLeish’s story is the story of hundreds of thousands of people—perhaps more—whose lives are being invaded by the state. It is the story of a security and surveillance apparatus—overseen by the executive branch under Barack Obama—that has empowered the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security to silence the voices and obstruct the activity of citizens who question corporate power.

Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, executive director of the PCJF, said in a written statement about the released files: “This production [of information], which we believe is just the tip of the iceberg, is a window into the nationwide scope of the FBI’s surveillance, monitoring, and reporting on peaceful protesters organizing with the Occupy movement. These documents show that the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security are treating protests against the corporate and banking structure of America as potential criminal and terrorist activity. These documents also show these federal agencies functioning as a de facto intelligence arm of Wall ...

The Idol Smasher
Elizabeth
Published: Monday 31 December 2012
Reed believes something has to be done soon to fight against the rapid reconfiguration of the United States into a corporate, feudal state. But he is not sure the Occupy movement is the answer.

Ishmael Reed has spent the last five decades smashing idols—idols of race, idols of capitalism, celebrity idols and the idols of national virtue and greatness. His essays, novels, poems, plays, songs and cartoons routinely shatter the delusions and myths of a nation stubbornly unwilling to confront its past or understand its present. He rips open a history that saw white Europeans exterminate one race and enslave another to create the nation’s prosperity, a past that includes the violent plundering of nations around the globe—Cuba, the Philippines, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan among them—to show us who we have become. He names the corrosive disease of empire. He excoriates what Alexis de Tocqueville called our “perpetual practice of self-applause.” He battles back against the sophisticated forms of propaganda—especially from Hollywood—that perpetuate patriotic fantasies and pander to the dark streams of paranoia, racism and fear that run like electric currents through white society.

Reed’s righteous fury is a heartening antidote to the squeamishness of liberals and the lunacy of the right wing. He says the editors of The New York Times and most other major media outlets “sound like they get their instructions from Julius Streicher [the Nazi propagandist] when it comes to blacks.” He calls the HBO series “The Wire” “a Neo-Nazi portrait of black people” and dismisses the movie “Precious” as a film that “makes D.W. Griffith look like a ...

Native American Activist Leonard Peltier’s Jailhouse Plea for Long-Denied Clemency
Taylor
Published: Thursday 13 December 2012
On Friday, actors, musicians and activists are uniting to renew calls for clemency for one of America’s most well-known and longest incarcerated prisoners: Leonard Peltier

During the holidays, the atmosphere of goodwill and mercy traditionally extends all the way to the nation’s highest leaders, with presidents typically pardoning more prisoners than any other time in the year. On Friday, actors, musicians and activists are uniting to renew calls for clemency for one of America’s most well-known and longest incarcerated prisoners: Leonard Peltier. The Native American activist and former member of the American Indian Movement was convicted of abetting the killing of two FBI agents during a shootout on South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in 1975. Peltier has long maintained his innocence; Amnesty International considers him a political prisoner who was not granted a fair trial. We air a never-before-broadcast video of Peltier from an interview by German journalist Claus Beegert.

Facebook Helps Fight Crime
Taylor
Published: Thursday 13 December 2012
The Unsilenced Voice of a ‘Long-Distance Revolutionary’
Amanda Rae
Published: Tuesday 11 December 2012
Abu-Jamal, who was a young activist in the Black Panthers and later one of the most important radical journalists in Philadelphia, a city that a few decades earlier produced I.F. Stone, has long been the bête noire of the state.

I am sitting in the visiting area of the SCI Mahanoy prison in Frackville, Pa., on a rainy, cold Friday morning with Mumia Abu-Jamal, America’s most famous political prisoner and one of its few authentic revolutionaries. He is hunched forward on the gray plastic table, his dreadlocks cascading down the sides of his face, in a room that looks like a high school cafeteria. He is talking intently about the nature of empire, which he is currently reading voraciously about, and effective forms of resistance to tyranny throughout history. Small children, visiting their fathers or brothers, race around the floor, wail or clamber on the plastic chairs. Abu-Jamal, like the other prisoners in the room, is wearing a brown jumpsuit bearing the letters DOC—for Department of Corrections.

Abu-Jamal was transferred in January to the general prison population after nearly 30 years in solitary confinement on death row and was permitted physical contact with his wife, children and other visitors for the first time in three decades. He had been sentenced to death in 1982 for the Dec. 9, 1981, killing of Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner. His sentence was recently amended to life without parole. The misconduct of the judge, flagrant irregularities in his trial and tainted evidence have been criticized by numerous human rights organizations, including Amnesty International.

Abu-Jamal, who was a young activist in the Black Panthers and later one of the most important radical journalists in Philadelphia, a city that a few decades earlier produced I.F. Stone, has long been the bête noire of the state. The FBI opened a file on him ...

Did Petraeus Betray Us? And are We Better Off Without Him?
Satra Kit
Published: Friday 16 November 2012
“At that moment, apparently, all that was known was that there were harassing, anonymous emails to Kelley, referencing the Director of the CIA, whom she knew, and referencing information about the CIA director that was supposedly confidential.”

 

The David Petraeus clown car extravaganza that’s entertaining the country these days serves the useful purpose of distracting people from taking a hard look at the nature of the national security state we’ve become.  Comically hoist by his own petard, former General Petraeus is arguably just another of our war criminals who will never be held to account. 

 

Some say the FBI never should have been looking at his email in the first place.  Glenn Greenwald articulated this argument clearly as clearly as anyone on DemocracyNOW, where he complained that: 

 

…the FBI, based on really no evidence of any actual crime, engaged in this massive surveillance effort of, first, obtaining all kinds of intimate and private information about two women, one of whom complained, one of whom was the target of the complaint, Paula Broadwell and Jill Kelley; learned the locations and email accounts of Paula Broadwell, who was the subject of this fairly innocuous complaint; read through all of her emails; learned the identity of her anonymous lover, David Petraeus; likely read—certainly read through all of her emails, probably read through his; and then, in the process, as well, learned about an affair between the complainant, Jill Kelley—or not an affair, but inappropriate ...

GOP Rep Accuses FBI of Blackmailing Petraeus to Testify That Anti-Islam Video Sparked Libya Attack
Taylor
Published: Thursday 15 November 2012
The truth will soon be known, as Petraeus will now in fact be testifying under oath before the House Intelligence Committee’s closed-door hearings on Friday.

Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) thinks that the FBI may have been gathering information on former CIA Director David Petraeus to blackmail him so that he would testify favorably to the Obama administration’s position on the attack on Benghazi in September. “Hypothetically, of course,” as Gohmert put it.

 

Appearing on WMAL radio this morning, the outspoken Texas Congressman, known for his Tea Party-leanings, made clear that he wasn’t actually accusing the Obama White House of directing the FBI to investigate Petraeus for political reasons relating to his upcoming Benghazi testimony. Nor was he actually saying that the FBI was engaging in activities reminiscent of original FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover to “blackmail” other government officials.

Instead, as Gohmert repeatedly made clear, he was only hypothetically spinning a story 

Top U.S. Commander Involved in David Petraeus Scandal
Taylor
Published: Tuesday 13 November 2012
The David Petraeus Scandal, Explained
Taylor
Published: Tuesday 13 November 2012
FBI Data Mining Strikes Concerns
Satra Kit
Published: Sunday 28 October 2012
Will the Apocalypse Arrive Online?
Satra Kit
Published: Monday 22 October 2012
It may sound like a scene from a zombie apocalypse movie or the first episode of NBC’s popular new show “Revolution,” but it could be your life -- a nationwide cyber-version of Ground Zero.

First the financial system collapses and it's impossible to access one’s money. Then the power and water systems stop functioning.  Within days, society has begun to break down.  In the cities, mothers and fathers roam the streets, foraging for food. The country finds itself fractured and fragmented -- hardly recognizable.

It may sound like a scene from a zombie apocalypse movie or the first episode of NBC’s popular new show “Revolution,” but it could be your life -- a nationwide cyber-version of Ground Zero.

Think of it as 9/11/2015.  It’s Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta's vision of the future -- and if he’s right (or maybe even if he isn’t), you better wonder what the future holds for erstwhile American civil liberties, privacy, and constitutional protections.

Last week, Panetta addressed the Business Executives for National Security, an organization devoted to creating a robust public-private partnership in matters of national security. Standing inside the Intrepid, New York’s retired aircraft-carrier-cum-military-museum, he offered a hair-raising warning about an imminent and devastating cyber strike at the sinews of American life and wellbeing.

Yes, he did use that old alarm bell of a “cyber Pearl Harbor,” but for anyone interested in American civil liberties and rights, his truly chilling image was far more immediate.  “A cyber attack perpetrated by nation states or violent extremist groups,” he predicted, “could be as destructive as the terrorist attack of 9/11.”

Panetta is not the first Obama official to warn that the nation could be facing a cyber catastrophe, but he is the highest-ranking to resort to 9/11 imagery in doing so. Going out on a limb that previous ...

Shooting to Kill Immigrants on the Mexican Border: WTF? A Border Agent Fired First at Suspected Immigrant Smugglers?
Taylor
Published: Tuesday 9 October 2012
Unasked is the question: Why would a border agent investigating possible illegal border crossing take the first shot at someone he suspected of trying to sneak into the country?

 

Sometimes it takes a small tragedy to call attention to expose a much bigger one.

The small tragedy happened when Nicholas Ivie, a US Border Patrol agent, was shot dead on a dark night in rough terrain along the border with Mexico in Arizona, a state that has been obsessing about illegal border crossers coming into the US from Mexico seeking jobs.

The story, as reported by FBI and Cochise County Sheriff’s Office investigators, as well as the border patrol union’s president, is that Ivie was with one set of border patrol agents responding to a motion sensor that had been triggered -- perhaps by a person or an animal -- and ended up getting shot by a second border patrol team that had also been dispatched to investigate, but that had approached the location from another direction.

What reportedly happened is that Ivie opened fire on the other team, and when they returned fire, thinking they were under attack by armed smugglers, Ivie was killed. The incident is being called a case of “friendly fire,” a term that is used by the military for cases where US troops kill one of their own by accident in a firefight.

But the incident is more than just an accident. It highlights the sorry state that the ...

Senate Report Says National Intelligence Fusion Centers Have Been Useless
Taylor
Published: Thursday 4 October 2012
Cash spent to watch televisions and report on suspicious bass fishing in Mexico.

 

An alarming report published by the Department of Homeland Security in March 2010 called attention to the theft of dozens of pounds of dangerous explosives from an airport storage bunker in Washington state.

Like many such warnings, it drew on information gathered by one of the department’s “fusion centers” created to exchange data among state, local and federal officials, all at a cost to the federal government of hundreds of millions of dollars.

There was just one problem with that report, and many others like it: the theft had occurred seven months earlier, and it had been highlighted within five days in a press release by the Justice Department’s Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, which was seeking citizen assistance in tracking down the culprits.

The DHS report’s tardiness and its duplication of work by others has been a commonplace failing of work performed by fusion centers nationwide, according to a new investigation of the DHS-funded centers by the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.

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IMPACT: Cabinet Officials Signal Crackdown on Medicare Billing Abuse
Taylor
Published: Tuesday 25 September 2012
Sebelius, Holder pledge scrutiny of electronic records in wake of Center series.

Top federal officials are stepping up scrutiny  for doctors and hospitals that may be cheating Medicare by using electronic health records to improperly bill the health plan for more complex and costly services than they deliver.

U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius and Attorney General Eric Holder notified five medical groups of their intention to ramp up investigative oversight, including possible criminal prosecutions, by letter on Monday.

The government action follows The Center for Public Integrity’s “Cracking the Codes”  series,  published last week. The year-long investigation found that thousands of medical professionals have steadily billed higher rates for treating seniors on Medicare over the last decade — adding $11 billion or more to their fees.

The Center’s probe uncovered a broad range of costly billing errors and abuses that have plagued Medicare for years—from confusion over how to pick proper payment codes to outright overcharges. The findings indicated that Medicare billing problems are worsening as doctors and hospitals switch to electronic health records.

 “There are troubling indications that some providers are using this technology to game the system, possibly to obtain payments to which they are not entitled,” the letter states, adding: “There are also reports that some hospitals may be using electronic health records to facilitate ‘upcoding’ of the intensity of care or severity of patients’ condition as a means to profit with no commensurate improvements in the quality of care.”

The letter said that “false documentation of care is ...

Troy Davis One Year Later: Execution Fuels National Movement to Abolish Death Penalty
Amanda Rae
Published: Saturday 22 September 2012
“As Texas executed its eighth prisoner of the year Thursday, Californians are set to vote this November on abolishing capital punishment.”

We speak with three people who joined us for our special live broadcast on the night Troy Davis was executed in Jackson, Georgia, including his sister, Kimberly Davis. "This is a tough time both for me and my family, but as my brother said, he always wanted us to continue the fight and to keep the faith, and that’s what we’ve been doing," Kimberly Davis says. As Texas executed its eighth prisoner of the year Thursday, Californians are set to vote this November on abolishing capital punishment. We discuss the legacy of Troy Davis and how his case has fueled the anti-death penalty movement with NAACP President Benjamin Jealous and Laura Moye of Amnesty International USA. "We know that Troy Davis was not the first person who had not killed anybody to be put to death in this country, and he won’t be the last," Jealous says. Moye also gives us an update on the case of Missouri death row prisoner Reggie Clemons, whom many are comparing to Troy Davis.

Transcript:

AMY 

Fox Conspiracy Theory: Obama Admin. is Engaged in “Cover-Up” of Libya Consulate Attacks
Amanda Rae
Published: Friday 21 September 2012
“Fox hosts accuse Obama Administration of ‘widespread cover-up’ to protect terrorists and ‘murderers.’”

Fox News hosts accused President Obama and his administration of perpetuating a "cover-up" of the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi. But the Obama administration is conducting an investigation into the attack, the State Department is setting up an independent panel to investigate it, and the director of the National Counterterrorism Center has testified about the attacks to a congressional committee.

Fox Hosts Accuse Obama Admin. Of "Widespread Cover-Up" To Protect Terrorists And "Murderers"

Hannity: "We Are Witnessing A Widespread Cover-Up Based On Flat-Out Lies." Hannity began his September 20 Fox News show by airing a montage of White House officials speaking about the attacks on the U.S. embassy and consulate. He then said:

HANNITY: All right now, how this event can evolve from an impromptu riot about a YouTube video to a premeditated terrorist attack in the span of a week -- well, that can be explained one of three ways. Number one, this administration is stupid, simple as that. Number two, this administration is on the receiving end of some of the worst intelligence in American history. Or number three, we are witnessing a widespread cover-up based on flat-out lies, all aimed to protect a president who happens to be running for re-election. I'm going with number three, and in a moment, I'm going to show you the evidence to back it up. [Fox News,Hannity, 9/20/12]

Hannity Accuses Obama Admin. Of Lying To Protect "The Perpetrators Of Terror, The Murderers Of Americans," And Possibly Al Qaeda. Later during his show, while discussing the attacks with Fox ...

Ten Huge Issues Being Ignored in the Presidential Campaign
Satra Kit
Published: Wednesday 19 September 2012
“While the candidates themselves occasionally talk about these issues, there’s a number of critical concerns that get no attention, including some of the worst problems (in terms of the harm they cause to people’s lives) in the United States and the world.”

The media focus on political minutiae in the presidential campaign can often crowd out the substantive issues that the winner will have to deal with once taking office. And while the candidates themselves occasionally talk about these issues, there’s a number of critical concerns that get no attention, including some of the worst problems (in terms of the harm they cause to people’s lives) in the United States and the world. To address this lamentable state of affairs, ThinkProgress has compiled a list of eight of the most significant problems being severely underserved by the campaign and American political discourse more broadly. In no particular order:

MASS INCARCERATION AND THE DRUG WAR

Writing in the New Yorker, Adam Gopnik termed “mass incarceration on a scale almost unexampled in human history…perhaps the fundamental fact [of American society], as slavery was the fundamental fact of 1850.” Indeed, as Gopnik notes, there are more black men are in prison today than were enslaved then and more total people in prison than there were in Stalin’s gulags at their largest. The result of this wave of imprisonment was structural inequality so severe that it was called “the new Jim Crow” by a famous book of the same title, as the strict limitations placed on convicted felons have rendered millions black Americans second-class citizens. One of the principal causes of the rise of mass incarceration is the War on Drugs, which has failed abysmally at limiting the use of dangerous drugs but ...

How Not to Protest the RNC
Satra Kit
Published: Saturday 1 September 2012
“There’s little drama to a scripted protest against a scripted convention.”

 

The Huffington Post recently tried its best to give a positive frame for protesters of the Republican National Convention, calling them “a diverse coalition of senior citizens, religious leaders, community organizers, and activists in faded Occupy T-shirts.” All 200 of them.

It was a nice spin, but for most people the RNC protests will sail by without even a yawn. There’s little drama to a scripted protest against a scripted convention. Protests against the DNC will likely be just as uninteresting.

Contrast that to news coming out from Togo. There, a group of women are calling for a nationwide sex strike. Yes — for a week, women will keep their legs closed to men in order to force the resignation of President Gnassingbé.

The marches at the RNC pale in comparison to the Togo activists’ planned actions (or, more precisely, their lack of actions). While the contexts are completely different, their difference sheds some light into the choices discerning activists need to make on where we spend our time.

Laughing or gasping

Cultural activists, like the Yes Men, keep challenging us to think more creatively. At a training I led for their Yes Labs program, Yes Men co-founder Andy Bichlbaum told me, “If an action doesn’t make you laugh or gasp, we have to throw it out.”

The RNC protesters took a shot at it by melting huge chunks of ice written as “the middle-class.” But it doesn’t make me laugh or gasp. If inspiring is a goal, ho-hum actions should be stricken from our toolbox.

Too often, however, activists are stuck repeating the tactics they know. They then begrudge the media, or their comrades, or potential allies, for not getting it. At a direct action workshop I co-led with George Lakey in South Korea, we heard young movement activists ...

NYPD Admits Muslim Spy Program Generated No Leads or Terrorism Probes -- Only Controversy
Satra Kit
Published: Monday 27 August 2012
“In the years following the Sept. 11 attacks, the NYPD secretly infiltrated Muslim student groups, sent informants into mosques, eavesdropped on conversations and created databases showing where Muslims lived, worked and prayed.”

After years of spying on Muslim neighborhoods, infiltrating groups and eavesdropping on conversations across the northeastern United States, the New York City Police Department has admitted its secret Demographics Unit failed to yield a single terrorism investigation or even a single lead. In the years following the Sept. 11 attacks, the NYPD secretly infiltrated Muslim student groups, sent informants into mosques, eavesdropped on conversations and created databases showing where Muslims lived, worked and prayed. We’re joined by Adam Goldman, who co-wrote the Pulitzer Prize-winning Associated Press series that revealed the spy program and, most recently, its failure.

 

Transcript

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: The New York City Police Department has admitted its secret Demographics Unit that spied on Muslims in an elaborate CIA-backed effort over a more than six-year period failed to yield a single terrorism investigation or even a single lead. In the years following the September 11th attacks, the New York ...

Building Bridges Between Principles and Practice
Satra Kit
Published: Sunday 26 August 2012
“It seems that in order to properly understand, study, and develop nonviolent revolution, one must analyze the world from a truly anti-imperialist, internationalist, holistic and Global South perspective.”

Amidst occupations and uprisings, mass mobilizations and stirring campaigns this year, the question of how to best connect our ideals with more pragmatic considerations has been a constant refrain. Discussions about tactics and their philosophical underpinnings have gotten particularly heated. Often these debates have been based as much on rhetoric and theory as on a careful reading of actual history.

Recent articles on this site by Stephanie Van Hook and Cynthia Boaz have addressed these concerns in poignant ways. And while I feel indebted to these, I have grown less interested in the debate between so-called principled nonviolence and strategic nonviolent action, which I fear may at times be doing more to maintain false dichotomies than to build movements which make these ultimately simplistic terms as insignificant as they nearly always have been in times of tumult and rebellion.

Decades prior to pitching my own tent somewhere along the continuum of definitions of violence and nonviolence, I was primarily an activist. New York City then was fraught with every small, sectarian group let, with leaders of every major and minor leftist tendency divided by every FBI Counter Intelligence Program trick in the book. It seemed only logical to try to get people with essentially similar ideas to at least occasionally work together. Of course, nonviolent activists or pacifists made up only a small (but influential) percentage of those seeking peace with justice. In that context, I felt pushed to be less of an “absolute” pacifist (or absolute anything) and more of a revolutionary, less of an ideologue and more of a pragmatist.

One of the first lessons I learned was to take a long view of ...

Defining a Mass Shooting
Amanda Rae
Published: Saturday 25 August 2012
Death Takes a Policy: How a Lawyer Exploited the Fine Print and Found Himself Facing Federal Charges
Satra Kit
Published: Saturday 25 August 2012
“Caramadre portrays himself as a modern-day Robin Hood.”

 

Joseph Caramadre has spent a lifetime scouring the fine print. He's hardwired to seek the angle, an overlooked clause in a contract that allows him to transform a company's carelessness into a personal windfall. He calls these insights his "creations," and he numbers them. There have been about 19 in his lifetime, he says. For example, there was number four, which involved an office superstore coupon he parlayed into enough nearly free office furniture to fill a three-car garage. Number three consisted of a sure-fire but short-lived system for winning money at the local dog track. But the one that landed him on the evening news as a suspect in a criminal conspiracy was number 18, which promised investors a unique arrangement: You can keep your winnings and have someone else cover your losses.

Caramadre portrays himself as a modern-day Robin Hood. He's an Italian kid from Providence, R.I., who grew up modestly, became a certified public accountant and then put himself through night school to get a law degree. He has given millions to charities and the Catholic Church. As he tells his life story, his native ability helps him outsmart a phalanx of high-priced lawyers, actuaries and corporate suits. Number 18 came to fruition, he says, when a sizable segment of the life insurance industry ignored centuries of experience and commonsense in a heated competition for market share.

Federal prosecutors in Rhode Island and insurance companies paint a very different picture of Caramadre: They say he's an unscrupulous con artist who engaged in identity theft, conspiracy and two different kinds of fraud. Prosecutors contend he deceived the terminally ill to make millions for himself and his clients. For them, Caramadre's can't-miss investment strategy was an illusion ...

Bill Koch Antoinette?
Satra Kit
Published: Saturday 25 August 2012
“It’s an unpopulated, faux Western town that might boggle the mind of anyone who ever had a playhouse.”

 

What do Marie Antoinette and one Bill Koch have in common? If you'd asked me that a few days ago, I'd have answered "Not much." That is, until yesterday, when I about Bill Koch's private Western town.

There's a new town in Colorado. It has about 50 buildings, including a saloon, a church, a jail, a firehouse, a livery and a train station. Soon, it will have a mansion on a hill so the town's founder can look down on his creation.

But don't expect to move here — or even to visit.

This town is billionaire Bill Koch's fascination with the Old West rendered in bricks and mortar. It sits on a 420-acre meadow on his Bear Ranch below the Raggeds Wilderness Area in Gunnison County.It's an unpopulated, faux ...

How the FBI Fought the 1960s Student Movement & Aided Reagan’s Rise to Power
Satra Kit
Published: Friday 24 August 2012
“The large portion of it really deals, as the title says, with the FBI’s attempts to—through surveillance and repression of student radicals and university professors.”

 

Investigative journalist Seth Rosenfeld's new book, "Subversives: The FBI's War on Student Radicals, and Reagan's Rise to Power," is based on more than 300,000 pages of records Rosenfeld received over three decades through five Freedom of Information lawsuits against the FBI. The book tracks how then-FBI director J. Edgar Hoover ordered his agents to investigate and then disrupt the Free Speech Movement that began in 1964 on the Berkeley campus of the University of California. The protests prevailed and helped spawn a nationwide student movement. Rosenfeld outlines in great detail how FBI records show agents used "dirty tricks to stifle dissent on the campus." In the book's more than 700 pages, he uses the documents to explore the interweaving stories of four main characters: the FBI's J. Edgar Hoover; actor and politician Ronald Reagan, who was running for governor of California at the time; Clark Kerr, then the University of California president and a target of scorn from both Reagan, Hoover and student activists; and legendary Free Speech Movement leader and orator, Mario Savio.

Transcript

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: We want to continue our conversation with Seth Rosenfeld, longtime investigative reporter and author of Subversives: The FBI’s War on Student Radicals, and Reagan’s Rise to Power. Seth, we’ve had a long discussion on Richard Aoki, but he really is a small portion of your book. The large portion of it really deals, as the title says, with the FBI’s attempts to—through surveillance and repression of student radicals and university professors. You go into—in depth about the efforts of the agency against Mario Savio and the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley, and even against the president of the University of California system at the time, Clark Kerr. Could you talk a little bit about that?

Does Paul Ryan Know What’s in His Budget?
Satra Kit
Published: Monday 20 August 2012
“His budget implies that after three decades the federal government will have no money to spend on health research, education, highways, airports, and other infrastructure, the Food and Drug Administration and most other activities that we associate with the federal government.”

 

If the news media had to work for a living, this is what they would all be asking right now. The reason is simple. The projections the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) made for Representative Ryan's budget imply that he literally wants to shut down the federal government.

His budget implies that after three decades the federal government will have no money to spend on health research, education, highways, airports, and other infrastructure, the Food and Drug Administration and most other activities that we associate with the federal government. His budget has money for Social Security, Medicare and other health programs and the Defense Department. That's it.

This is not a vicious anti-Ryan attack coming from hyper-partisan Democrats. This is what the analysis of his budget by the non-partisan CBO shows. It's right there in the fifth row of Table 2.
The table shows that in 2040, Representative Ryan would allot an amount equal to 4.75 percent of GDP to all these other areas of government including defense spending. By 2050, Ryan's allocation for these areas, including defense, falls to 3.75 percent of GDP.

The defense budget is currently a bit over 4.0 percent of GDP. Ryan has indicated that he would like to maintain or even increase this level of spending. The arithmetic is then straightforward. In 2040, Ryan would leave less than 0.75 percent of GDP for areas of spending that currently require more than five times this amount. In 2050, all these areas of spending would literally have to be zeroed out as defense spending will take up every cent and more that Ryan has left in his budget.

It is important to understand that CBO tried to accurately present the implications of the budget that Representative Ryan gave them. CBO works for Congress. These are career civil servants. They cannot be easily fired, but if CBO's staff deliberately misrepresented a ...

Men Explain Things to Me
Satra Kit
Published: Monday 20 August 2012
Here, let me just say that my life is well-sprinkled with lovely men, with a long succession of editors who have, since I was young, listened and encouraged and published me, with my infinitely generous younger brother, with splendid friends of whom it could be said “gladly would he learn and gladly teach.”

 

I still don't know why Sallie and I bothered to go to that party in the forest slope above Aspen. The people were all older than us and dull in a distinguished way, old enough that we, at forty-ish, passed as the occasion's young ladies. The house was great -- if you like Ralph Lauren-style chalets -- a rugged luxury cabin at 9,000 feet complete with elk antlers, lots of kilims, and a wood-burning stove. We were preparing to leave, when our host said, "No, stay a little longer so I can talk to you." He was an imposing man who'd made a lot of money.

He kept us waiting while the other guests drifted out into the summer night, and then sat us down at his authentically grainy wood table and said to me, "So? I hear you've written a couple of books."

I replied, "Several, actually."

He said, in the way you encourage your friend's seven-year-old to describe flute practice, "And what are they about?"

They were actually about quite a few different things, the six or seven out by then, but I began to speak only of the most recent on that summer day in 2003, River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West, my book on the annihilation of time and space and the industrialization of everyday life.

He cut me off soon after I mentioned Muybridge. "And have you heard about the very important Muybridge book that came out this year?"

So caught up was I in my assigned role as ingénue that I was perfectly willing to entertain the possibility that another book on the same subject had come out simultaneously and I'd somehow missed it. He was already telling me about the very important book -- with that smug look I know so well in a man holding forth, eyes fixed on the fuzzy far horizon of his own authority.

Here, let me just say that ...

Drone on the Range
Satra Kit
Published: Monday 13 August 2012
It's the arrival and proliferation of "unmanned vehicle systems," soon to be buzzing around the airspace of your own town.

 

Get ready, America. Here comes "the next latest and greatest thing in aviation." Wow, what could it be? Maybe the airlines are going to drop all of their ridiculous rip-off fees. That'd be great!

No, no, not that kind of aviation. You probably won't find this breakthrough so great. It's the arrival and proliferation of "unmanned vehicle systems," soon to be buzzing around the airspace of your own town.

Yes, drones, right here at home. Those very same pilotless, remote-controlled, undetectable planes that the CIA has been secretly using to spy on and bomb people in Pakistan and elsewhere are headed to our local police departments, FBI offices, and...well, who knows who else will have these toys?

All we know is that Congress — under pressure from Boeing, Northrop Grumman, and other big drone peddlers — directed the Federal Aviation Agency earlier this year to open up civilian air space to thousands of them by 2015. And, in their wisdom, our loosey-goosey lawmakers provided no regulation of who can have drones, how many, or for what purposes.

So prepare to be pestered and monitored, for police agencies and corporate interests are said to be abuzz about getting their own. The first ones are expected to be used for high-altitude surveillance, which is worrisome enough. But consider this: A Texas sheriff's office that has already bought a "ShadowHawk" drone says it might outfit the little buzzer to fire tear gas and rubber bullets.

No worries, though. The drone industry's lobbying group has drafted a two-page code of conduct urging purchasers to "respect the privacy of individuals."

How nice. Only, it's a voluntary code — and totally unenforceable.

Three Cheers for Mitt’s Yankee Tax Shrewdness
Satra Kit
Published: Sunday 12 August 2012
Is Mitt doing more than honoring our national legacy of shrewd thrift, plus fierce resistance to centralized authority? 

Full disclosure: rest assured nothing in this tax defense of the grievously-assaulted GOP entrant reflects my father’s 40 year CPA career. I did however, inherit, his honest tax credo: declare all income (certainly with paper trails), only deduct what's defensible by logic or statute, and hire the best tax wizards you can afford. Ask Mitt Romney, who’s mastered the art of spending a few hundred thousand dollars on good advice to save multimillions – perhaps all above board, as far as we know. Sure. I put aside whether fewer, highly-suspicious tax technicalities, even millions buried offshore, wouldn’t have better served Mitt’s thin presidential resume. No one's perfect and wealth outlasts losing.    

  

Nevertheless, let us not throw the not quite born candidate out with the tax water, as Harry Reid’s outlandish, obvious charade attempts. Is Mitt doing more than honoring our national legacy of shrewd thrift, plus fierce resistance to centralized authority?  That belief system arrived with our Pilgrim Parents, then cemented by that most frugal spendthrift-Founding Father, Ben Franklin. He codified that unquenchable Yankee credo: a hard-earned coin saved (that is, from gov’mint takeover) is twice as good as any money earned (especially if taxable).  

  

Tax Avoidance: Double Winner 

 

First, the owner freely spends it all, doubtlessly founding an array of job-creating enterprises. Second, that infamous carryover from prehistoric times, the government, can’t give it away fast enough to the wastrels, equal to tossing dollars down the toilet. If any of us committed that literal federal crime (destroying money), we’d not only have wet, grimy, sullied greenbacks in inaccessible piping, but a huge plumbing bill and screaming ...

Attorney General to US: Nothing to See on Wall Street, Folks, Just Move Along
Satra Kit
Published: Saturday 11 August 2012
“Holder was on the defensive yesterday, a sign that the mounting criticism of his inaction is getting his attention.”

 

Yesterday the Justice Department announced that once again it's not going to pursue evidence of Wall Street crimes which has been sent its way. It has already failed to act on information sent to it by sources whose investigators are apparently more dogged than its own, including several other government agencies and the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission. Now the bipartisan committee which was led by Senators Carl Levin and Tom Coburn can be added to the list of sources whose leads weren't pursued by Attorney General Eric Holder and his staff.

Holder was on the defensive yesterday, a sign that the mounting criticism of his inaction is getting his attention. He was also scornful of that criticism, saying that it's belied by "a troublesome little thing called facts."

There's something troublesome here, all right, but it isn't the facts.

A Justice Department press release announced that there will be no prosecutions based on the Levin/Coburn report:

“After a careful review of the information provided in the report and more than a year of thorough investigation, the Department of Justice ... the FBI and the Special Inspector General for the Troubled Asset Relief Program (and other agencies) have determined that, based on the law and evidence as they exist at this time, there is not a viable basis to bring a criminal prosecution with respect to Goldman Sachs or its employees in regard to the allegations set forth in the report."

The press release goes on to say that "the department and its investigative partners conducted an exhaustive review of the report and its exhibits, independently gathered and scrutinized a large volume of other documents, and tenaciously pursued potential evidentiary leads, including conducting numerous witness interviews."

The DoJ also boasts that "Since FY 2011, the Department of Justice’s ...

On Gun Laws, It’s Bipartisan Consensus Not Gridlock That’s the Problem
Taylor
Published: Thursday 9 August 2012
“It’s the consensus, not the gridlock, that’s the problem.”

Another mass murder, another shooting spree, leaving bodies bullet-riddled by a legally obtained weapon. This time, it was Oak Creek, Wis., at a Sikh temple, as people gathered for their weekly worship. President Barack Obama said Monday, “I think all of us recognize that these kinds of terrible, tragic events are happening with too much regularity for us not to do some soul-searching.” Amidst the carnage, platitudes. With an average of 32 people killed by guns in this country every day—the equivalent of five Wisconsin massacres per day—both major parties refuse to deal with gun control. It’s the consensus, not the gridlock, that’s the problem.

The president’s press secretary, Jay Carney, said, “We need to take common-sense measures that protect Second Amendment rights and make it harder for those who should not have weapons under existing law from obtaining weapons.” It’s important to note where Jay Carney made that point, reiterating the phrase “common sense” five times in relation to the President’s intransigence against strengthening gun laws, and invoking “Second Amendment” a stunning eight times. He spoke from the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room in the White House, named after one of Mr. Carney’s predecessors, shot in the head by John Hinckley during the attempted assassination of President Ronald Reagan in 1981. Brady survived and co-founded with his wife the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence. After each of these massacres, the Brady Campaign has called for strengthened gun control.

This latest mass ...

Where’s the Outrage: Nobody Seems to Care as America Becomes a Police State
Satra Kit
Published: Wednesday 1 August 2012
“America has been so degraded as a free society that such intrusive violations of our privacy by a police agency or a librarian are now accepted by most people as normal and to be expected.”

Back in 1976, I co-founded, with some Los Angeles colleagues, a feisty little alternative weekly called the L.A. Vanguard. About two months after we launched it, I got tipped off about a program by the local phone companies, Pacific Telephone and GTE, in which they had so-called “Security Departments,” composed of banks of operators, whose sole job was to provide unlisted phone numbers to inquiring government agencies, all without a warrant. As I delved into this story I learned more: these special operators (led in each case by retired FBI officials) were also providing credit information on phone customers on request, and the agencies who had instant access to all this data ranged from local police to the public library.

When we broke the story, it exploded on the Los Angeles media scene. There was a banner headline across the whole top of the Los Angeles Times front page screaming “Unlisted Numbers Given Out.” We at the L.A. Vanguard, to promote our little paper and being guerrilla journalists, announced that we were holding a protest and press conference on the sidewalk in front of the main entrance of the Pacific Telephone building in L.A., at which we’d be handing out copies of our newspaper. We were mobbed by reporters and camera crews from every media organization in the city. It was huge. Pacific Tel’s PR people realized they had to respond and invited everyone inside for an impromptu news conference at which they tried to quell the furor, but they only made it worse by having to admit the scale of the program.

Now I understand that Los Angeles, which is home to more celebrities per square foot than any other place in the world, has a thing about privacy, but this story even went national. It was simply shocking at the time to learn that the phone company would provide police and other government agencies -- even the over-due books department of the library! -- ...

Police Shootings Echo Nationwide
Satra Kit
Published: Monday 30 July 2012
“We know a lot less about Anaheim and the killing of Manuel Angel Diaz, shot in the back and in the head by that city’s police just a few short hours after the awful Aurora murders.”

 

 

Welcome to the abattoir -- a nation where a man can walk into a store and buy an assault rifle, a shotgun, a couple of Glocks; where in the comfort of his darkened living room, windows blocked from the sunlight, he can rig a series of bombs unperturbed and buy thousands of rounds of ammo on the Internet; where a movie theater can turn into a killing floor at the midnight hour.

We know about all of this. We know because the weekend of July 20th became all-Aurora-all-the-time, a round-the-clock engorgement of TV news reports, replete with massacre theme music, an endless loop of victims, their loved ones, eyewitness accounts, cell-phone video, police briefings, informal memorials, and “healing,” all washed down with a presidential visit and hour upon hour of anchor and “expert” speculation. We know this because within a few days a Google search for “Aurora movie shootings” produced over 200 million hits referencing the massacre that left 70-plus casualties, including 12 fatalities.

We know a lot less about Anaheim and the killing of Manuel Angel Diaz, shot in the back and in the head by that city’s police just a few short hours after the awful Aurora murders.

But to the people living near La Palma Avenue and North Anna Drive, the shooting of Manuel Diaz was all too familiar: it was the sixth, seventh, or eighth police shooting in Anaheim, California, since the beginning of 2012. (No one seems quite sure of the exact count, though the Orange County District Attorney’s office claims six shootings, five fatalities.)

Diaz, 25, and as far as police are concerned, a “documented gang member,” was unarmed. He was apparently running when he ...

Denver Shooting Rampage Leaves 12 Dead, 50 Wounded in Latest of Unparalleled U.S. Gun Attacks
Amanda Rae
Published: Saturday 21 July 2012
“This was one of the worst mass shootings in the United States since the killings of 32 people at Virginia Tech five years ago.”

At least 12 people have been killed and more than 50 wounded in a mass shooting at a movie theater outside of Denver. A number of the wounded are in critical condition. It was one of the worst mass shootings in the United States since the killings of 32 people at Virginia Tech five years ago. The shootings have called to mind the killings at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, only 25 miles away from the theater, where 12 students and a teacher were killed in a mass shooting spree by two students in 1999. We go to Denver to speak with Mary Kershner, a registered nurse, gun control advocate and founding member of Nurses Advocating Gun Safety. She has lost three members of her family to gun violence.

Transcript:

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: We begin today’s show in Colorado. At least 14 people have been killed and more than 50 wounded in a massive shooting at a movie theater outside of Denver. A gunman wearing a gas mask and bulletproof vest set off what appeared to be a smoke bomb before opening fire at random. Police say the suspect is in custody and that he’s believed to have acted alone.

The attack came at a screening of the new Batman film in the Denver suburb of Aurora. Ten people reportedly died at the scene, and four later succumbed to their injuries in the hospital. A ...

If Bankers Took Steroids or Made Knockoff Handbags, They’d Clean Up Wall Street Tomorrow
Satra Kit
Published: Friday 13 July 2012
Our largest (and, lest we forget, taxpayer-rescued) banks have already paid tens of billions of dollars to settle civil and criminal charges - and now there’s LIBOR.

If only. If only Brian Moynihan designed fashionable shoes, Jamie Dimon pitched a mean slider, and Lloyd Blankfein had written the song "Boyfriend" for Justin Bieber. Then they'd prosecute bank fraud.

The Justice Department used as many people to investigate one baseball player as it's doing to pursuing Wall Street housing fraud. It has coordinated fifteen Federal agencies to seize counterfeit goods worth $178 million, yet all but ignored a bankers' crime wave which cost the global economy trillions.

Our largest (and, lest we forget, taxpayer-rescued) banks have already paid tens of billions of dollars to settle civil and criminal charges - and now there's LIBOR. Yet there have been no arrests for a well-documented litany of charges which includes bribery, perjury, forgery, investor fraud, consumer fraud, and money-laundering for Mexican drug cartels.

Let's do the numbers. Number of seizures to recover counterfeit goods worth $178 million: 24,792. Number of arrests for crimes worth tens of billions in settlements and trillions in losses: Zero.

Low and Inside

Earlier today I took part in a press call with the Campaign for a Fair Settlement in which its Campaign Director, Brian Kettenring, noted that the Department of Justice assigned 93 agents to investigate ballplayer Roger Clemens and "about 100 to investigate misconduct responsible for millions of underwater homeowners and $800 bllion in underwater equity."

They weren't investigating Clemens for his pitching technique (although I think there's more to be learned about his split-finger fastball), but for something even less consequential: his alleged steroid use. Kettenring's right to contrast the government's Clemens probe with its response to the well-documented Wall Street crimes which triggered a worldwide financial crisis.

U.S. Citizen Sues After Erroneously Being Held as an Undocumented Immigrant
Amanda Rae
Published: Thursday 12 July 2012
“James Makowski’s lawsuit ‘argues that the FBI and Department of Homeland Security violated the Privacy Act of 1974’ because the government agencies share fingerprints from people who are suspected of immigration violations.”

 

A U.S. citizen is suing the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security after the fingerprint-sharing program Secure Communities incorrectly identified him as an undocumented immigrant. When Chicago resident James Makowski pleaded guilty in December 2010 to a felony charge and sentenced to four months at a drug treatment facility, the controversial program flagged Makowski as an undocumented immigrant, and he spent two months in a maximum-security prison before immigration officials stopped his erroneous deportation order.

Makowski’s lawsuit — the first legal challenge to Secure Communities — “argues that the FBI and Department of Homeland Security violated the Privacy Act of 1974” because the government agencies share fingerprints from people who are suspected of immigration violations:

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How Many Millions of Cellphones Are Police Watching?
Taylor
Published: Thursday 12 July 2012
“Both police and cell service providers had long resisted releasing details on the scope of cellphone surveillance. But the new disclosures from cellphone companies still leave a slew of unanswered questions.”

 

In response to a congressional inquiry, mobile phone companies on Monday finally disclosed just how many times they’ve handed over users’ cellphone data to the FBI and other law enforcement agencies. By the New York Times’ count, cellphone companies responded to 1.3 million demands for subscribers’ information last year from law enforcement. Many of the records, such as location data, don’t require search warrants or much court oversight.

Both police and cell service providers had long resisted releasing details on the scope of cellphone surveillance. But the new disclosures from cellphone companies still leave a slew of unanswered questions. Here’s what we have yet to learn.

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Fox’s Brazen Star: Karl Rove Rebukes Obama on Executive Privilege Claim
Taylor
Published: Thursday 28 June 2012
“For someone whose qualifications as a constitutional authority are nil, Rove's comments displayed an impressive degree of contempt for his listeners that is not seen every day, not even on Fox.”

Forever incapable of embarrassment, let alone sober reflection, Karl Rove is very well suited to his current roles as Fox News commentator and Crossroads Super PAC smear sponsor. But he achieved a moment of near-perfection last Thursday when, appearing on a Fox morning news broadcast, he spoke up about President Obama's invocation of executive privilege against a House committee subpoena of Justice Department documents.

“It's one thing to exert executive privilege over the actions of the president, and his aides, and the White House,” he said. “It's another thing to exercise executive privilege with regard to a Cabinet official, seemingly in a matter that — according to the president up until now — had no connections with, no contact with, no communications with the White House ... .”

Rove went on to complain that the president's privilege claim over the “Operation Fast and Furious” documents demanded by Rep. Darrell Issa's oversight committee “is a very long reach. I mean basically, if the president is allowed to take the privilege that goes to the Executive Office of the President and extend it to a Cabinet department, then he can extend it to any branch of the government for any matter, even if there was no presidential or White House involvement. And I'm not certain that that's what the Founders thought about when they talked about executive privilege.”

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Romney and the Rise of the Superpredator Corporate Class
Satra Kit
Published: Monday 25 June 2012
“Society and government are supposed to discourage people from from acting on their worst impulses, and when it comes to the corporate class they - and we - have failed.”

 

Remember the "superpredators"? They were the supposedly super-violent youngsters of dark complexion that conservatives kept screaming about in the 1990s. We were told they were about to unleash an unprecedented wave of vicious crime any day now.

Those superpredators don't exist, and never did. But the myth of the "superpredator" offers us a new (and, admittedly, partially ironic) lens through which to view today's corporate executives, a class of people which is apparently remorseless about the harm it causes in the pursuit of self-enrichment.

Let's be clear: No group of human beings is uniquely predisposed toward evil. But society and government are supposed to discourage people from from acting on their worst impulses, and when it comes to the corporate class they - and we - have failed.

Now the rise of the Corporate Superpredator Class could culminate in the election of one of its own to the highest office in the land.


Fear of Children

The myth of the juvenile "superpredator" was promoted by conservatives in the 1990s and 2000s. As Fairness and Accuracy in Media reported in 1998, politicized professors and mainstream commentators were terrifying the public with stories about the "remorseless brutality" we can expect to see from the "teenaged time bomb" that TIME Magazine's scare piece described as follows: "They are just four, five and six years old now, but already they are making criminologists nervous."

But those superpredator children never existed. In fact, juvenile crime rates have declined "significantly" since the early 1990s, according to FBI statistics. But the fear engendered by ...

Fed Survey Shows Middle Class Took a Big Hit
Taylor
Published: Thursday 14 June 2012
“Between the 2007 survey and the 2010 survey, the typical family had lost 38.8 percent of their wealth.”

The Federal Reserve Board’s newly released triennial Survey of Consumer Finance (SCF) confirmed what most of us already knew: The middle class has taken a really big hit. It showed that between the 2007 survey and the 2010 survey, the typical family had lost 38.8 percent of their wealth. In fact, the wealth of the typical family was down 27.1 percent from where it had been a decade ago in 2001. This is in spite of the fact that the economy was more than 15 percent larger than in 2010 than it had been 2001.

It wasn’t just wealth that had dropped; the survey showed that income had fallen as well. Median family income in 2010 was down by 7.7 percent from its 2007 level and 6.3 percent from its level a decade ago.

There is not much surprising about these numbers. The SCF is picking up the impact of the collapse of the housing bubble. For the vast majority of middle-class families, their home is by far their largest financial asset. For decades they were encouraged to believe that it was a safest way to save for the retirement or other purposes. 

This clearly was not true when house prices became inflated by a bubble. In the years when the bubble reached levels that were clearly unsustainable, from 2002-2007, housing was just about the worst possible place to keep wealth.

Unfortunately, tens of millions of Americans ...

Two US Attorneys Appointed by Holder to Lead Leak Probe
Satra Kit
Published: Saturday 9 June 2012
Ahead of Trial, Bradley Manning Seeks Withheld Gov’t Evidence and Dismissal of 10 Charges
Satra Kit
Published: Friday 8 June 2012
“Manning’s attorneys are seeking the dismissal of 10 of the counts against Manning as well as the release of hundreds of thousands of documents relating to the alleged leak.”

For just the third time since he was arrested over two years ago, alleged Army whistleblower Bradley Manning was seen by the public this week at a pre-trial hearing in a military court at Fort Meade, Maryland. The 24-year-old Private is accused of leaking hundreds of thousands of documents to the whistleblowing website WikiLeaks including secret files on the Iraq and Afghan wars. Manning's attorneys are seeking the dismissal of 10 of the counts against Manning as well as the release of hundreds of thousands of documents relating to the alleged leak. We speak with Kevin Gosztola, a civil liberties blogger at Firedoglake.com who has been attending Manning's pre-trial hearing.

Transcript

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: For just the third time since he was arrested over two years ago, alleged Army whistleblower Bradley Manning was seen by the public this week. His three-day pretrial hearing wraps up today before a military court at Fort Meade in Maryland. Manning faces 22 charges, including the capital offense of aiding the enemy, as well as violating the Espionage Act, computer fraud and theft of records. The 24-year-old private is accused of leaking hundreds of thousands of documents to the whistleblowing website WikiLeaks, including secret files on the Iraq and Afghan wars.

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Police, Suspensions in Schools Need Reform, New Report Urges
Satra Kit
Published: Friday 25 May 2012
“The Los Angele school district has already adopted what’s called “positive behavioral support” as an alternative to out-of-school suspension.”

 

When it comes to student discipline, suspending kids and a heavy police presence in schools are policies that are doing more harm than good, according to a new report on three especially troubled California districts.

The report released Thursday by University of California scholars and Human Impact Partners is an exhaustive profile of students in South Los Angeles, Oakland and the agribusiness hub of Salinas in Central California.  All these communities have high levels of family poverty, high rates of student suspension and high dropout rates. Oakland-based Human Impact Partners reviews data and conducts on-the-ground interviews to assess the effects that public policies have on equity and health in communities.

The report was funded by the California Endowment. The Center for Public Integrity also receives some support from the Endowment.

The Los Angele school district has already adopted what’s called “positive behavioral support” as an alternative to out-of-school suspension. But researchers found that some L.A. schools are still failing to use the method. As a result, students are still being suspended and losing hundreds of days of school time. The report delves into the high rate of suspensions for “willful defiance,” and the serious discipline challenges the schools face.

The researchers also touch on Los Angeles’ school police, the largest school police force in the nation. They recommend that district police officers, sheriff’s deputies and city police “dedicate a meaningful amount of their professional development over the next three years” to learning about positive behavioral support as “an alternative intervention.” 

The Center for Public Integrity recently obtained and ...

White House & Dems Back Banks Over Protests: Newly Discovered Homeland Security Files Show Feds Central to Occupy Crackdown
Amanda Rae
Published: Tuesday 15 May 2012
“A new trove of heavily redacted documents provided by the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) exposes the massive hypocrisy of the Obama administration and the Democratic Party, which this election year have tried to co-opt and claim as their own the anti-fat-cat theme of the ‘We are the 99%’-chanting Occupiers.”

A new trove of heavily redacted documents provided by the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request filed by the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund (PCJF) on behalf of filmmaker Michael Moore and the National Lawyers Guild makes it increasingly evident that there was and is a nationally coordinated campaign to disrupt and crush the Occupy Movement.

The new documents, which PCJF National Director Mara Verheyden-Hilliard insists “are likely only a subset of responsive materials,” in the possession of federal law enforcement agencies, only “scratch the surface of a mass intelligence network including Fusion Centers, saturated with 'anti-terrorism' funding, that mobilizes thousands of local and federal officers and agents to investigate and monitor the social justice movement.”

Nonetheless, blacked-out and limited though they are, she says they offer clues to the extent of the government’s concern about and focus on the wave of occupations that spread across the country beginning with last September’s Occupy Wall Street action in New York City.

The latest documents reveal “intense involvement” by the DHS’s so-called National Operations Center (NOC). In its own literature, the DHS describes the NOC as “the primary national-level hub for domestic situational ...

Conveying the Heritage of Liberty
Amanda Rae
Published: Thursday 3 May 2012
The National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) tramples on the Bill of Rights, the first ten amendments to the Constitution, which are the very amendments that were demanded by some of the Founding Fathers before they would accept the Constitution.

Last Fall conservative Senate members slipped into a budget bill, the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), several sections that threaten to destroy the very freedoms we have been fighting for. With the idea that the United States itself is part of the battlefield of terrorism, the NDAA makes is possible for a president to direct the military to police our nation and to arrest and hold suspects in indefinite detention!



The NDAA passed the Congress and the President quietly signed it into law on New Year’s eve 2011. The dangerous sections were opposed by the Department of Justice and the military as confusing to the antiterrorism efforts of the FBI’s Terrorism Task Force and the Department of Homeland Security, while giving the military an assignment for which it is not trained and does not want.

 

The  NDAA tramples on the ...

CISPA Critics: Cybersecurity Act Will Increase Domestic Surveillance, Violate Privacy Rights
Satra Kit
Published: Sunday 29 April 2012
The bill has faced widespread opposition from online privacy advocates and even the Obama administration, which has threatened a veto.

As it heads toward a House vote, critics say the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) would allow private internet companies like Google, Facebook and Microsoft to hand over troves of confidential customer records and communications to the National Security Agency, FBI and Department of Homeland Security, effectively legalizing a secret domestic surveillance program already run by the NSA. Backers say the measure is needed to help private firms crackdown on foreign entities — including the Chinese and Russian governments — committing online economic espionage. The bill has faced widespread opposition from online privacy advocates and even the Obama administration, which has threatened a veto. We speak with Michelle Richardson, legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union.

Transcript:

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: A legislative battle has erupted on Capitol Hill over a controversial House bill that critics say would allow private internet companies to hand over troves of confidential customer records and communications to the National Security Agency and other agencies. In a letter on Monday, 18 Democratic House members warned that unless specific limitations were put in place, the bill, quote, "would, for the first time, grant non-civilian federal agencies, such as the National Security Agency, unfettered access to information about Americans’ internet activities and allow those agencies to use that information for virtually any purpose." The bill is titled the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, or simply CISPA.

Backers of the legislation say it is needed to help private companies crack down on foreign entities—including the Chinese and Russian governments—committing online economic espionage that is stealing trade secrets from U.S. ...

Rendell and Ridge: From “Militant” Labelers to Terrorist Enablers
Amanda Rae
Published: Thursday 26 April 2012
While citizens concerned about the impacts from fracking and reckless gas industry practices are being labeled “eco-terrorists” and “an insurgengy,” those responsible, directly or indirectly for having them labeled as such, are shilling on behalf of a State Department-designated terrorist organization.

A new chapter has been added to the shale gas industry's eco-terrorism, counterinsurgency and psychological operations saga.

In March, NBC News investigative reporter Michael Isikoff revealed that many prominent U.S. public officials are on the payroll of the People's Mujahedin of Iran (MEK), a group labeled by the U.S. State Department as a terrorist organization. These U.S. officials are lobbying hard to remove the MEK from the list.

Under U.S. Supreme Court precedent, after the recent Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project decision — a controversial decision itself — it is a federal crime to provide "material ...

More Controversy Over FBI Informant
Satra Kit
Published: Sunday 22 April 2012
Defense’s arguments in terrorism cases often turn to entrapment, but such claims rarely hold up in court based upon the fact that, ultimately, defendants are “caught in the act.”

In another instance of potential entrapment by the FBI and its controversial informants, Khalifa Ali al-Akili, a Pittsburgh resident, was nearly arrested on terrorism charges based upon interactions he had with FBI informant Shahed Houssain and a second individual to whom Houssain had introduced Akili.  At the extremist and adamant language of these men, Akili had the notion that he was being setup.

As it turned out, he was right.

Houssain, as described by the Washington Post’s Peter Finn, is “one of the FBI’s most prolific and controversial informants for terrorism cases.”  Houssain has been the subject of numerous profiles over the years, including this timeline from Mother Jones and this account from the New York Times, that further detail Houssain’s background and contentious role as an FBI informant for terrorist cases.

In this recent example—of Akili’s ultimate arrest on gun charges—documents used during the case have brought to light more details of the FBI’s methods for investigating terrorist plots and their utilization of informants like Houssain.

Defense’s arguments in terrorism cases often turn to entrapment, but such claims rarely hold up in court based upon the fact that, ultimately, defendants are “caught in the act.”   US District Judge Colleen McMahon, at the sentencing of a separate terrorism case involving four men from Newburgh, New York, illustrated this distressing ...

“The NSA Is Lying”: U.S. Government has Copies of Most of Your Emails Says NSA Whistleblower
Amanda Rae
Published: Saturday 21 April 2012
National Security Agency whistleblower William Binney estimates the NSA has assembled 20 trillion "transactions" — phone calls, emails and other forms of data — from Americans.

National Security Agency whistleblower William Binney reveals he believes domestic surveillance has become more expansive under President Obama than President George W. Bush. He estimates the NSA has assembled 20 trillion "transactions" — phone calls, emails and other forms of data — from Americans. This likely includes copies of almost all of the emails sent and received from most people living in the United States. Binney talks about Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act and challenges NSA Director Keith Alexander’s assertion that the  READ FULL POST 6 COMMENTS

Thirteen Ways Government Tracks Us
Amanda Rae
Published: Tuesday 10 April 2012
The advanced technology of the war on terrorism, combined with deferential courts and legislators, have endangered both the right to privacy and the right of people to be free from government snooping and tracking.

Privacy is eroding fast as technology offers government increasing ways to track and spy on citizens.  The Washington Post reported there are 3,984 federal, state and local organizations working on domestic counterterrorism.  Most collect information on people in the US.  Here are thirteen examples of how some of the biggest government agencies and programs track people.

 

One.  The National Security Agency (NSA) collects hundreds of millions of emails, texts and phone calls every day and has the ability to collect and sift through billions more.  WIRED just reported NSA is building an immense new data center which will intercept, analyze and store even more electronic communications from satellites and cables across the nation and the world.  Though NSA is not supposed to focus on US citizens, it does.

 

Two.  The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) National Security Branch Analysis Center (NSAC) has more than 1.5 billion government and private sector records about US citizens collected from commercial databases, government information, and criminal probes.

 

Three.  The American Civil Liberties Union and the New York Times recently reported that cellphones of private individuals in the US are being tracked without warrants by state and local law enforcement all across the country.  With more than 300 million cellphones in the US connected to more than 200,000 cell phone towers, cellphone tracking software can pinpoint the location of a phone and document the places the cellphone user visits over the course of a day, week, month or longer. 

 

Four.  More than 62 million people in the US have their fingerprints on file with the FBI, state and local governments.  This system, called the Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System (IAFIS), shares information with 43 states and 5 federal agencies.   This system ...

Training Terrorists in Nevada: Seymour Hersh on U.S. Aid to Iranian Group
Amanda Rae
Published: Tuesday 10 April 2012
Journalist Seymour Hersh has revealed that the Bush administration secretly trained an Iranian opposition group and that the Obama administration knew about the training.

Journalist Seymour Hersh has revealed that the Bush administration secretly trained an Iranian opposition group on the State Department’s list of foreign terrorists. Hersh reports the U.S. Joint Special Operations Command trained operatives from Mujahideen-e-Khalq, or MEK, at a secret site in Nevada beginning in 2005. According to Hersh, MEK members were trained in intercepting communications, cryptography, weaponry and small unit tactics at the Nevada site up until President Obama took office. TheMEK has been listed as a foreign terrorist groups since 1997 and is linked to a number of attacks, spanning from the murders of six U.S. citizens in the 1970s to the recent wave of assassinations targeting Iranian nuclear scientists. Hersh also discusses the role of Israeli intelligence and notes the Obama administration knew about the training, "because they have access to what was going on in the previous administration in this area, in terms of the  READ FULL POST 7 COMMENTS

John Nichols on Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Commitment to Labor Rights as Human Rights
Amanda Rae
Published: Thursday 5 April 2012
Martin Luther King, Jr. argued that labor rights were human rights and civil rights, a message that resonated in Wisconsin during last year’s protests against Republican Gov. Scott Walker’s effort to eliminate almost all collective bargaining rights for most public workers, as well as slash their pay and benefits.

On the 44th anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., we look at his history of activism in Wisconsin, a state that has been central to the history of labor organizing, and beyond. Near the end of his life, King was helping to organize members of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), which was founded in Wisconsin in 1932. King argued that labor rights were human rights and civil rights, a message that resonated in Wisconsin during last year’s protests against Republican Gov. Scott Walker’s effort to eliminate almost all collective bargaining rights for most public workers, as well as slash their pay and benefits. "This is not just a battle about economics. It’s not just a battle about wages, benefits and pensions,” says John Nichols, political correspondent for The Nation. "It’s also a battle about that right to organize, that right of individuals who, in and of themselves, may not have immense power but, when they come together, have the potential to challenge the most powerful political and economic figures in the country. Dr. King preached that as a gospel."

Transcript:

AMY GOODMAN: READ FULL POST DISCUSS

Department of Energy Knew of Solyndra Risks, Former FBI Agent Finds
Amir Gholi
Published: Friday 30 March 2012
“Solyndra filed for bankruptcy Sept.6, 2011. Two days later, it faced a raid by agents from the FBI and the Energy Department inspector general.”

The Department of Energy was fully aware of the risks in backing Solyndra Inc., a start-up company that pocketed a half-billion dollar DOE loan but never turned a penny in profit before shutting its doors, concludes a former FBI agent hired to examine the company’s books.

The expert’s report, filed this week in Solyndra’s voluminous bankruptcy case in California, could embolden critics who say the government ignored financial red flags in supporting the solar panel maker with President Obama’s maiden green energy loan in 2009.

The $535 million loan, which bankrolled a vast new manufacturing plant in Fremont, Calif., was part of a broad government mission to kick-start the clean energy movement: Solyndra’s unique solar panels would cover commercial rooftops across the country, aiding the environment and boosting the economy.

Yet the company collapsed under a sea of debt and a business plan that, amid dramatic shifts in the global solar market, caused it to sell far fewer panels at far higher costs than envisioned. From 2009-11, it cost Solyndra $3.92 more per watt to make its panels than to sell them, the bankruptcy report shows.

Solyndra filed for bankruptcy Sept.6, 2011. Two days later, it faced a raid by agents from the FBI and the Energy Department inspector general. With those clouds looming, the company’s board hired R. Todd Neilson — the former federal agent and veteran trustee in bankruptcy cases — as chief restructuring officer.

Solyndra’s board wanted a CRO to not only manage its bankruptcy case, but to explore whether the company committed misdeeds on its road to collapse. “In light of the Federal criminal investigation and ongoing Congressional investigation … the Subcommittee agreed that the CRO would act in an independent capacity in determining if any improprieties had occurred with respect to the Debtors’ finances,” Neilson’s ...

Repress U, Class of 2012
Satra Kit
Published: Friday 23 March 2012
“Since 9/11, the homeland security state has come to campus just as it has come to America’s towns and cities, its places of work and its houses of worship, its public space, and its cyberspace.”

Campus spies. Pepper spray. SWAT teams. Twitter trackers. Biometrics. Student security consultants. Professors of homeland security studies. Welcome to Repress U, class of 2012.

Since 9/11, the homeland security state has come to campus just as it has come to America’s towns and cities, its places of work and its houses of worship, its public space, and its cyberspace.  But the age of (in)security had announced its arrival on campus with considerably less fanfare than elsewhere -- until, that is, the “less lethal” weapons were unleashed in the fall of 2011.

Today, from the City University of New York to the University of California, students increasingly find themselves on the frontlines, not of a war on terror, but of a war on “radicalism” and “extremism.”  Just about everyone from college administrators and educators to law enforcement personnel and corporate executives seems to have enlisted in this war effort.  Increasingly, American students are in their sights.

In 2008, I laid out seven steps the Bush administration had taken to create a homeland security campus.  Four years and a president later, Repress U has come a long way.  In the Obama years, it has taken seven more steps to make the university safe for plutocracy.  Here is a step-by-step guide to how they did it.

1. Target Occupy

Had there been no UC ...

Paul Ryan’s Plan for American Decline
Amanda Rae
Published: Thursday 22 March 2012
“The Ryan budget shows debilitating cuts to nearly every department of government today, from law enforcement and border patrols to scientific research, food safety, environmental protection, federal highways, national parks, weather monitoring, education and all the other essential functions of a great country.”

If the foreign adversaries and competitors of the United States imagined a future that would fulfill their most ambitious objectives, it might begin with a government crippled by the House Republican leadership's "Ryan budget" released on Tuesday. Followed to its absurd conclusion, this document would lead America toward a withered state, approaching the point where Marxian dreams and Randian ...

FBI in The Process of Creating a System for Monitoring all Conversations on Social Networking Sites
Satra Kit
Published: Sunday 11 March 2012
“The bureau has placed a request from tech firms to develop a program that would enable agents to sift through waves of “publicly available” information, ostensibly to look for keywords related to terrorism, criminal activity and other threats to national security.”

If you're a regular reader of Natural news, you're already well aware of the fact that government, the courts, and private industry have all essentially disregarded the intent and meaning of the U.S. Constitution's Fourth Amendment privacy protections in the age of information technology. It seems that you give up your right to be "secure" in your "persons, houses, papers, and effects" if you dare to use a social media network or virtually any other information exchange system.


The latest onslaught comes from the FBI, which is only the most recent federal agency seeking to monitor all of your conversations on sites like Facebook and Twitter.

The bureau has placed a request from tech firms to develop a program that would enable agents to sift through waves of "publicly available" information, ostensibly to look for keywords related to terrorism, criminal activity and other threats to national security.


'Early warning' system?


The goal, according to the bureau's request, is to develop a sort of early warning system that provides real-time intelligence to improve "the FBI's overall situational awareness." The proposed program must "have the ability to rapidly assemble critical open source information and intelligence that will allow SIOC to quickly vet, identify, and geo-locate breaking events, incidents, and emerging threats."

The FBI joins DARPA - the secretive Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency- and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in searching for a program that can "monitor" ...

Civil Rights Organizations Call on FBI to End Facilitation of ICE’s “Secure Communities” Deportation Program
Satra Kit
Published: Friday 9 March 2012
“Groups demand FBI address concerns from governors and other high level state and local officials that program undermines public safety.”

Today, the Bill of Rights Defense Committee and more than 80 other civil and immigrant rights organizations sent a letter to the FBI demanding that it end its facilitation of ICE’s Secure Communities deportation program (S-Comm).

The groups charge that S-Comm threatens public safety, encourages racial profiling and undermines community policing by turning local police departments into gateways to deportation. Under S-Comm, the FBI takes all fingerprints submitted by local police for criminal background checks and automatically forwards the prints to federal immigration officials, regardless of whether individual has been convicted of a crime or of the severity of the charge. 

Last summer, the governors of New York, Illinois, and Massachusetts requested that S-Comm be delayed or deactivated in their states. The FBI, as the agency that manages the federal criminal fingerprint database, has the ability to grant the governors’ request, but thus far has not provided an official response. 

Today’s letter calls upon the FBI’s Criminal Justice Information Services Advisory ...

WikiLeaks: Emails Leak Exposes Inner Workings of Private Intel Firm Stratfor, a “Shadow CIA”
Amanda Rae
Published: Wednesday 29 February 2012
“WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said the files implicate some of the world’s largest firms in corporate espionage.”

The whistleblowing website WikiLeaks has begun publishing what it says are 5.5 million emails obtained from the servers of Stratfor, a private U.S.-based intelligence-gathering firm known to some as a "shadow CIA" for corporations and government agencies. The emails were reportedly obtained by the hackers group, Anonymous. WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said the files implicate some of the world’s largest firms in corporate espionage. Firms with ties to Stratfor include Coca-Cola, Goldman Sachs, Dow Chemical, and sectors of the U.S. government, including the Department of Homeland Security, the Marine Corps and the Defense Intelligence Agency. Coke asked Stratfor to keep tabs on the protest plans of the group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. "We’ve only seen the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the stories based on the material. They will come out in the next coming days and weeks," said Kristinn Hrafnsson, a WikiLeaks spokesperson who has been a key member of the project to release the Stratfor emails. "What we were doing yesterday was introducing the project, the nature of Stratfor and how they operate and their ties."

Transcript:

AMY 

Ron Paul Wants to Abolish the CIA; His Largest Donor Builds Toys for It
Anna Gilliam
Published: Friday 24 February 2012
“Can Paul really oppose such ‘fascism’ while his campaign is bankrolled by one of the chief protagonists and beneficiaries of the very system Ron Paul claims to oppose?”

If there’s one thing that distinguishes Ron Paul from the rest of the GOP field, it’s his principled stand against American empire and his ardent defense of individual liberties. Paul’s opposition to wars, bloated defense budgets and government espionage of US citizens has made him a hero among some young conservatives. His seemingly rock-solid principles and radicalism has even drawn some on the left; unlike even left-wing Democrats, Paul has said he wants to abolish both the CIA and the FBI to protect individual “liberty.”

So it should come as a shock and disappointment to his followers that Ron Paul’s single largest donor—his Sheldon Adelson, as it were—founded a controversial defense contractor, Palantir Technologies, that profits from government espionage work for the CIA, FBI and other agencies, and which last year was caught organizing an illegal spy ring targeting American political opponents of the US Chamber of Commerce, including journalists, progressive activists and union leaders. (Palantir takes its name from the mystic stones used by characters in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings to spy one another.)

According to recently filed FEC disclosure documents, Ron Paul’s Super PAC has received nearly all of its money from a single source, billionaire Peter Thiel. So far, Thiel has contributed $2.6 million to Ron Paul’s Super PAC, Endorse Liberty, providing 76 percent of the Super PAC’s total intake. 

Thiel, a self-described libertarian and opponent of ...

Occupy Draws Strength From the Powerless
Anna Gilliam
Published: Tuesday 14 February 2012
“Those who do not carve out spaces separate from the state and its systems of power, those who cannot find room to become autonomous, or who do not “live in truth,” inevitably become compromised.”

There is a recipe for breaking popular movements. I watched it play out over five years in the war in El Salvador. I now see these familiar patterns in the assault against the Occupy movement. It goes like this. Physically eradicate the insurgents’ logistical base of operations to disrupt communication and organization. Dry up financial and material support. Create rival organizations—the group Stand for Oakland seems to be one of these attempts—to discredit and purge the rebel leadership. Infiltrate the movement to foster internal divisions and rivalries, a tactic carried out consciously, or perhaps unconsciously, by an anonymous West Coast group known as OLAASM—Occupy Los Angeles Anti Social Media. Provoke the movement—or front groups acting in the name of the movement—to carry out actions such as vandalism and physical confrontations with the police that alienate the wider populace from the insurgency. Invent atrocities and repugnant acts supposedly carried out by the movement and plant these stories in the media. Finally, offer up a political alternative. In the war in El Salvador it was Jose Napoleon Duarte. For the Occupy movement it is someone like Van Jones. And use this “reformist” to co-opt the language of the movement and promise to promote the movement’s core aims through the electoral process. 

Counterinsurgency campaigns, although they involve arms and weapons, are primarily about, in the old cliché, hearts and minds. And the tactics employed by our intelligence operatives abroad are not dissimilar to those employed by our intelligence operatives at home. These operatives are, in fact, often the same people. The state has expended ...

The Ethics of Internet Piracy
Anna Gilliam
Published: Friday 10 February 2012
“We need to find a way to maximize the truly amazing potential of the Internet, while properly rewarding creators.”

Last year, I told a colleague that I would include Internet ethics in a course that I was teaching. She suggested that I read a recently published anthology on computer ethics – and attached the entire volume to the email.

Should I have refused to read a pirated book? Was I receiving stolen goods, as advocates of stricter laws against Internet piracy claim?

If I steal someone’s book the old-fashioned way, I have the book, and the original owner no longer does. I am better off, but she is worse off. When people use pirated books, the publisher and the author often are worse off – they lose earnings from selling the book.

"Follow Project Syndicate on Facebook or Twitter. For more from Peter Singer, click here."

But, if my colleague had not sent me the book, I would have borrowed the copy in my university’s library. I saved myself the time needed to do that, and it seems that no one was worse off. (Curiously, given the book’s subject matter, it is not for sale in digital form). In fact, others benefited from my choice as well: the book remained on the library shelf, available to other users.

On the other hand, if the book had not been on the shelf and those other users had asked library staff to recall or reserve it, the library might have noted the demand for the book and ordered a second copy. But there is only a small probability that my use of the book would have persuaded the library to buy another copy. And, in any case, we are now a long way from the standard cases of stealing.

I asked the 300 students in my ethics class which of them had not downloaded something from the Internet, knowing or suspecting that they were violating copyright. ...

Obama to Meet Iraq’s Maliki on Monday
Amanda Rae
Published: Sunday 11 December 2011
“The White House has said Obama and Maliki have ‘agreed that it was in the best interests of both the United States and Iraq to draw down U.S. forces by the end of 2011 and embark on a new phase in our relationship: a long-term strategic partnership across a range of sectors.’”

The White House this week plans to showcase the close of the war in Iraq, looking to highlight what it says is a 2008 campaign promise made good — and likely previewing a 2012 campaign theme.

President Barack Obama will meet Monday at the White House with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to talk about Iraq's future, and Obama and his wife, Michelle, will head to Fort Bragg, N.C., on Wednesday to speak with returning veterans.

"As we definitively end America's war in Iraq this month, the president wanted to speak directly to the troops at Fort Bragg and to members of the armed forces and their families everywhere," White House spokesman Jay Carney said Friday. He added that Obama would address "the enormous sacrifices and achievements of the brave Americans who served in the Iraq war, and he will speak about the extraordinary milestone of bringing the war in Iraq to an end."

Obama and Maliki will discuss the removal of the troops and what the administration says are "efforts to start a new chapter in the comprehensive strategic partnership between the United States and Iraq."

Analysts note that though the war is winding down, the United States will continue to have a presence in the country, which is still wracked by violence. Vice President Joe Biden made a surprise stop in Iraq last month to talk with Maliki about U.S.-Iraqi cooperation on a variety of fronts, including law enforcement, defense and security.

The White House says Obama _who ran for office in 2008 promising to wind down the war in Iraq — also will tout the war's close during interviews Tuesday with local television anchors from across the country.

He mentioned the close of the war in one of four local television interviews he did Thursday, suggesting to WISH-TV in Indianapolis, Ind., that he could be back in the battleground state to announce new initiatives for returning ...

Ex-Rep. Doolittle, Caught up in Abramoff Scandal, Now a Lobbyist
Amanda Rae
Published: Saturday 10 December 2011
“Doolittle was one of several lawmakers caught up the turbulent wake of Jack Abramoff, the Republican uber-lobbyist who was released recently after serving three and a half years in prison on mail fraud and conspiracy charges.”

Meet John Doolittle, working stiff.

Sacramento, Calif.,-area residents once called him Republican state senator, then congressman. Federal prosecutors once called him, ominously, Representative 5. Now, starting over at the age of 61, he unashamedly calls himself a lobbyist.

"It's funny," Doolittle said. "That's such a negative term, but if people ask, that's what I say I am."

He laughed. He laughs easily, which is saying something, given all that's transpired.

"I know," said his former colleague Rep. Dan Burton, R-Ind., "that he and his wife went through a great deal."

Doolittle was one of several lawmakers caught up the turbulent wake of Jack Abramoff, the Republican uber-lobbyist who was released recently after serving three and a half years in prison on mail fraud and conspiracy charges. More than a dozen other individuals were convicted or pleaded guilty to assorted charges, though no charges were ever brought against Doolittle or his wife, Julie, who did event planning for Abramoff's firm.

John and Doolittle estimate that they shelled out more than $400,000 for attorneys' fees during a long-running corruption investigation that left them poorer but in the clear. Doctors' bills have tallied hundreds of thousands of dollars more, covering the exotic medical travails of Julie Doolittle.

They suffered the essentially involuntary end of John Doolittle's 28-year career in elective office. They saw his former legislative director sob as he was sentenced to four years in federal prison. They have, whatever one might say about Doolittle's politics, endured.

"It was painful to leave" Congress, Doolittle acknowledged, but "I'm going forward. Honestly, I don't look back."

Doolittle represented portions of the Sacramento area in the state Senate from 1981 through 1990. From 1991 through his 2008 retirement, he ...

Why No Financial Crisis Prosecutions? Ex-Justice Official Says It’s Just too Hard
Anna Gilliam
Published: Thursday 8 December 2011
The Justice Department has decided that holding top Wall Street executives criminally accountable is too difficult a task.

It’s an issue we and others have noted again and again: Years after the financial crisis, there have still been no prosecutions of top executives at the major players in the financial crisis.

Why’s that? Well, according to a now-departed Justice Department official who used to be in charge of investigating such matters, the Justice Department has decided that holding top Wall Street executives criminally accountable is too difficult a task.

David Cardona, who recently left the FBI for a job at the Securities and Exchange Commission, told the Wall Street Journal that bringing financial wrongdoing to account is “better left to regulators,” who can bring civil cases. Civil cases, of course, can produce penalties from the banks -- as well as promises to be on better behavior -- but don’t put any executives behind bars. Here’s the Journal:

While at the FBI, Mr. Cardona oversaw dozens of criminal probes of large financial firms. The FBI's probes haven't led to any successful prosecutions of high-profile executives in relation to the financial crisis, despite demands from some lawmakers and angry Americans. In contrast, the SEC has filed crisis-related civil-fraud cases against 81 firms and individuals, and it has ...

ACLU Alleges That FBI is Illegally Gathering Information on Muslims During Community Outreach
Moderator
Published: Friday 2 December 2011
It’s disconcerting that the FBI is engaging in illegal spying, and it is also troubling that the FBI is betraying the trust of the very American Muslims who have chosen to cooperate with the federal government in its goal of identifying and preventing domestic radicalization.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), using information gathered from internal Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) documents, is alleging that the FBI is illegally gathering information on Muslims’ political and religious affiliations during outreach meetings.

Particularly since the September 11 terrorist attacks, the FBI has been conducting outreach with American Muslims and Arab Americans, working with them to increase cooperation between communities and federal authorities. Yet the documents obtained by the ACLU show that the FBI has been using this outreach to spy on Muslim communities that are ...

Government Settles Case Brought by First Anthrax Victim for $2.5 Million
Moderator
Published: Wednesday 30 November 2011
At issue was whether a leading U.S. Army bio-weapons laboratory in Frederick, Md., was negligent in failing to adequately secure its anthrax stocks, possibly enabling a mentally troubled researcher at the lab to carry out the attacks.

While denying negligence by one of its premier bio-weapons labs, the government has agreed to pay $2.5 million to settle a wrongful death suit filed by survivors of the first fatality victim of the deadly 2001 anthrax mail attacks, court papers revealed Tuesday.

The money will go to the widow and children of Robert Stevens, a Florida-based photo editor for the National Enquirer and other tabloids who was the first of five people to die after inhaling the tiny spores.

The settlement ended a secrecy-shrouded, eight-year court fight shortly before U.S. District Judge Daniel Hurley of West Palm Beach, Fla., was due to either grant a Justice Department motion to dismiss the suit or to send the case forward to trial. By settling, the government protected from public scrutiny a sizable cache of documents about its secretive biological weapons program.

At issue was whether a leading U.S. Army bio-weapons laboratory in Frederick, Md., was negligent in failing to adequately secure its anthrax stocks, possibly enabling a mentally troubled researcher at the lab to carry out the attacks.

Bruce Ivins,  READ FULL POST 6 COMMENTS

National Lawyers Guild Files FOIA Requests Seeking Evidence of Federal Role in Occupy Crackdown
Moderator
Published: Monday 21 November 2011
“The Guild and other observers strongly suspect that the 72 so-called Fusion Centers created buy the Homeland Security Department around the country, and the many Joint Terror Task Forces operated by the FBI in conjunction with local police in many cities, are serving as coordination points for the increasingly systematic attacks on the Occupy Movement.”

With Congress no longer performing its sworn role of defending the US Constitution, the National Lawyers Guild Mass Defense Committee and the Partnership for Civil Justice today filed requests under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) asking the Department of Justice, the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI, the CIA and the National Parks Service to release "all their information on the planning of the coordinated law enforcement crackdown on Occupy protest encampments in multiple cities over the course of recent days and weeks."

According to a statement by the NLG, each of the FOIA requests states, "This request specifically encompasses disclosure of any documents or information pertaining to federal coordination of, or advice or consultation regarding, the police response to the Occupy movement, protests or encampments."

National Lawyers Guild leaders, including Executive Director Heidi Beghosian and NLG Mass Defense Committee co-chair and PCJ Executive Director Mara Veheyden-Hilliard both told TCBH! earlier this week that the rapid-fire assaults on occupation encampments in cities from Oakland to New York and Portland, Seattle and Atlanta, all within days of each other, the similar approach taken by police, which included overwhelming force in night-time attacks, mass arrests, use of such weaponry as pepper spray, sound cannons, tear gas, clubs and in some cases "non-lethal" projectiles like bean bags and rubber bullets, the removal and even arrest of reporters and camera-persons, and the justifications offered by municipal officials, who all cited "health" and "safety" concerns, all pointed to central direction and guidance.

As we reported, Oakland Mayor Jean Quan admitted publicly in an interview on a San Francisco radio program earlier this week that prior to her first order to police to clear Oscar Grant Plaza of ...

40,000 Rally, More than 100,000 Sign Petitions, to Say: “Recall Walker”
Moderator
Published: Monday 21 November 2011
“The grassroots energy across the state, the size of the crowd at Saturday’s rally, the number of signatures already collected: all of these confirm the historic scope and reach of the recall drive.”

As tens of thousands of Wisconsinites rallied in Madison for a mass signing of petitions to recall anti-labor Governor Scott Walker Saturday, it was announced that the drive had collected 105,000 signatures in its first four days.

By the end of the weekend, that number will go substantially higher, say organizers of Saturday’s rally, which marshalls estimated drew 40,000. (Early in the day, as the crowd was building, Capitol Police confirmed that roughly 30,000 were present and the numbers grew as units of firefighters, teachers and state, county and municipal employees poured into the Capitol Square from the edges of Madison’s downtown.)

When the rally was done, activists with United Wisconsin, the group that is coordinating the recall drive, displayed tall piles of newly signed petitions. “After they’ve counted all the new petitions that have been gathered in Madison and across the state,” said former Wisconsin Attorney General Peg Lautenschlager, “they’ll be well on their way to 200,000.”

The ...

National Lawyers Guild Files FOIA Requests Seeking Evidence of Federal Role in Occupy Crackdown
Moderator
Published: Sunday 20 November 2011
“The National Lawyers Guild Mass Defense Committee and the Partnership for Civil Justice today filed requests under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).”

With Congress no longer performing its sworn role of defending the US Constitution, the National Lawyers Guild Mass Defense Committee and the Partnership for Civil Justice today filed requests under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) asking the Department of Justice, the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI, the CIA and the National Parks Service to release "all their information on the planning of the coordinated law enforcement crackdown on Occupy protest encampments in multiple cities over the course of recent days and weeks."

According to a statement by the NLG, each of the FOIA requests states, "This request specifically encompasses disclosure of any documents or information pertaining to federal coordination of, or advice or consultation regarding, the police response to the Occupy movement, protests or encampments."

National Lawyers Guild leaders, including Executive Director Heidi Beghosian and NLG Mass Defense Committee co-chair and PCJ Executive Director Mara Veheyden-Hilliard both told TCBH! earlier this week that the rapid-fire assaults on occupation encampments in cities from Oakland to New York and Portland, Seattle and Atlanta, all within days of each other, the similar approach taken by police, which included overwhelming force in night-time attacks, mass arrests, use of such weaponry as pepper spray, sound cannons, tear gas, clubs and in some cases "non-lethal" projectiles like bean bags and rubber bullets, the removal and even arrest of reporters and camera-persons, and ...

GOP Candidates Advocate Torture
Moderator
Published: Sunday 20 November 2011
“The United States has long considered waterboarding to be torture.”

At last week’s debate, Republican presidential candidates Herman Cain and Michelle Bachman defended waterboarding. Cain said, “I don't see it as torture. I see it as an enhanced interrogation technique,” which is what the Bush administration used to call its policy of torture and abuse. Bachman declared, “If I were president, I would be willing to use waterboarding. I think it was very effective. It gained information for our country.” And after the debate, Mitt Romney’s aides told CNN that he does not think waterboarding is torture.
 

President Obama correctly retorted, “Waterboarding is torture.” He added, “Anybody who has actually read about and understands the practice of waterboarding would say that is torture - and that’s not something we do, period.”
 

The United States has long considered waterboarding to be torture. Several federal court opinions refer to waterboarding as torture. Our government prosecuted, convicted and hung Japanese military leaders following World War II for waterboarding. The U.S. War Crimes Act defines torture as a war crime.
 

George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and John Yoo have all admitted participating in decisions to waterboard detainees, knowing that interrogators would carry out their orders. Under the doctrine of command responsibility, commanders all the way up the chain of command to the commander-in-chief can be prosecuted for war crimes if they knew or should have known their subordinates would commit them and the commanders did nothing to stop or prevent it. Therefore, Bush, Cheney, and Yoo have admitted to the commission of war crimes.
 

But by refusing to investigate them for their admitted torture, the Obama administration has given the Bush officials a free pass.
 

Moreover, Bachman was wrong when she claimed torture is effective. Former high level FBI interrogators, ...

Man Charged With Attempted Assassination in White House Shooting
Moderator
Published: Friday 18 November 2011
A witness stated that a man stopped his car and began shooting through the passenger-side window in the direction of the White House.

An Idaho man has been charged with attempting to assassinate President Obama in connection with a shooting incident at the White House on Friday night.

A criminal complaint filed in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania states that Oscar Ramiro Ortega-Hernandez, 21, "knowingly did attempt to kill the President of the United States." The charge carries a maximum sentence of life in prison.

Ortega-Hernandez was arrested in Indiana, Pa., on Wednesday, five days after a shooting incident near the National Mall.

The U.S. Secret Service, ATF, FBI, U.S. Park Police and the Washington Metropolitan Police Department had been working together to locate Ortega-Hernandez after law enforcement Friday responded to the sound of gunfire on Constitution Avenue, approximately 700 yards south of the White House.

A witness stated that a man stopped his car and began shooting through the passenger-side window in the direction of the White House.

On Tuesday, personnel discovered two rounds of ammunition on the White House grounds, at least one of which damaged historic exterior glass in a window above the Truman Balcony on the South Portico.

READ FULL POST 7 COMMENTS

Energy Dept. Offered to Put Private Investors Ahead of Taxpayers if Solyndra Went Bankrupt
Taylor
Published: Thursday 17 November 2011
“Solyndra did shut its doors this year, and now those investors, including a bundler to President Obama, stand first in line in bankruptcy proceedings.”

As solar panel maker Solyndra sunk deeper into debt last year, a top Department of Energy official pulled the company’s chief investor aside with a last-ditch pitch: If investors raised $75 million to help Solyndra stay afloat, they would be first to collect if the fledgling firm went bankrupt.

Solyndra did shut its doors this year, and now those investors, including a bundler to President Obama, stand first in line in bankruptcy proceedings. The Energy Department, which supported Solyndra with a $535 million loan guarantee even as auditors, analysts and government bureaucrats raised bright red flags about the company’s prospects, placed U.S. taxpayers second in line.

The roots of that arrangement are spelled out in a Dec. 7, 2010 email from Steve Mitchell, the managing director of Argonaut Private Equity, Solyndra’s top financial investor, and addressed to “George.” Argonaut’s founder is George Kaiser, an Oklahoma oil billionaire who bundled campaign contributions for Obama’s 2008 election.

With Solyndra buried in a cash flow crisis late last year, the company and its chief investors met with Energy Department officials in a search for solutions. Solyndra and its investors wanted more money from DOE, which had already bankrolled it with the low interest half billion dollar loan issued by the Federal Financing Bank.

READ FULL POST 6 COMMENTS

With Security Spotty, Many Had Access to Anthrax
Moderator
Published: Tuesday 25 October 2011
“The existing security procedures were so lax they would have allowed any researcher, aide or temporary worker to walk out of the Army bio weapons lab with a few drops of anthrax.”

The Army laboratory identified by prosecutors as the source of the anthrax that killed five people in the fall of 2001 was rife with such security gaps that the deadly spores could have easily been smuggled out of the facility, outside investigators found.

The existing security procedures -- described in two long-secret reports -- were so lax they would have allowed any researcher, aide or temporary worker to walk out of the Army bio-weapons lab at Fort Detrick, Md., with a few drops of anthrax -- starter germs that could grow the trillions of spores used to fill anthrax-laced letters sent to Congress and the media.

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FBI Responds to BORDC’s Calls for Accountability, Conceding our Concerns
Moderator
Published: Friday 14 October 2011
While claiming to defend the Bureau’s integrity and professionalism, the letter ultimately conceded the underlying issues BORDC raised.

On October 3, BORDC received a letter from the FBI responding to concerns we have repeatedly raised about the FBI’s ongoing abuses of constitutional rights. While claiming to defend the Bureau’s integrity and professionalism, the letter ultimately conceded the underlying issues BORDC raised.

This summer, BORDC led a diverse coalition of more than 40 organizations concerned about constitutionally offensive FBI practices, inviting congressional resistance to the White House’s (ultimately successful) proposal to extend the FBI director’s term—for the first time since J. Edgar Hoover’s infamous and corrupt reign of intimidation and coercion. At the time, we wrote that:

Under Director Mueller’s leadership, the FBI has frequently violated the rights of diverse law-abiding Americans, abused its investigative powers, failed to abide by its own guidelines, arbitrarily revised those guidelines to permit longstanding abuses even in the face of congressional concerns, and avoided public accountability by cloaking its actions in secrecy—all while actively (and demonstrably) misleading federal courts, Congress and the American people.

Our letter, whose assertions were supported by a wide range of third-party reports and analysis, connected numerous issues that have previously prompted occasional but inadequate scrutiny of FBI operations.

In response, the director of the FBI’s Office of Intergovernmental and Public Liaison claimed that existing policies “contain numerous measures designed to ensure their authorities are used properly and within the confines of the Constitution.” Specifically, the Bureau claims that ...

Was FBI’s Science Good Enough to ID Anthrax Killer?
Moderator
Published: Tuesday 11 October 2011
Paul Keim, an anthrax expert at Northern Arizona University who assisted in the FBI investigation, said he had qualms about whether the bureau's groundbreaking laboratory method would have survived a rigorous legal review.

In March 2007, federal agents convened an elite group of outside experts to evaluate the science that had traced the anthrax in the letters to a single flask at an Army lab in Maryland.

Laboratory work had built the heart of the case prosecutors had against Bruce Ivins, an Army researcher who controlled the flask. Investigators had invented a new form of genetic fingerprinting for the case, testing anthrax collected from U.S. and foreign labs for mutations detected in the attack powder.

Out of more than 1,000 samples, only eight had tested positive for four mutations found in the deadly germs sent to Congress and the news media.

Even so, the outside scientists, known as the Red Team, urged the FBI to do more basic research into how and when the mutations arose to make sure the tests were “sound” and the results unchallengeable.

Jenifer Smith, a senior manager at the FBI’s laboratory, shared the team’s concerns. Smith recalled that she was worried the FBI didn’t have a full understanding of the mutations and might see a trial judge throw out the key evidence.

“The admissibility hearing would have been very difficult,” Smith recalled in an interview. “They had some good science but they also had some holes that would have been very difficult to fill.”

The Man Behind Pakistan Spy Agency’s Plot to Influence Washington
Moderator
Published: Tuesday 4 October 2011
Fai’s tale of rags to riches to arrest this summer is a lesson in how easy it is to win influence in Washington.

The night should have been a coup for Syed Ghulam Nabi Fai. Once a poor villager from halfway around the world, Fai had become the go-to man in Washington, D.C., for his cause, Kashmir, the Himalayan region long caught in a tug of war between Pakistan and India.

And there he was on March 4, 2010, hosting a fundraiser for Rep. Dan Burton, the Indiana Republican who had been the chief supporter in Congress of Fai's Kashmiri American Council for 20 years. In some ways, the event inside Fai's home in Fairfax, Va., symbolized everything that Fai had become, featuring speeches in the living room and kebabs and curries in the basement.

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FBI Seeks to Expand Definition of Rape
Moderator
Published: Friday 30 September 2011
“Revising the definition of rape would result in a higher and more accurate number of rapes that are reported nationwide each year,” Baltimore Police Commissioner Frederick H. Bealefeld III said.

The FBI is moving to change the federal definition of rape for the first time in 80 years, which authorities and women's advocacy groups hope will lead to improved tracking of the crime and an attitude shift among investigators.

Critics have maintained that the current definition is archaic, too narrow, and leaves crimes uncounted in police statistics, resulting in fewer resources for victims and law enforcement.

A subcommittee of the Criminal Justice Information Service of the FBI plans to take up the task at an Oct. 18 meeting in Baltimore. Its recommendations will go to an advisory board and then to FBI Director Robert Mueller for approval.

Greg Scarbro, the FBI's unit chief for the Uniform Crime Report, said the agency has been discussing revisions since last year.

"From the highest levels of the FBI, there's an understanding that this needs to change. We just need to make sure it happens in the right way," he said.

Since 1927, rape has been defined as forcible male penile penetration of a female - which excludes cases involving oral and anal penetration, where the victims were drugged or under the influence of alcohol, and male victims.

"In order for the public to combat violence in our communities, we need to know where it exists and what it looks like," said Carol Tracy, director of the Women's Law Project, which helped spur reform in Philadelphia a decade ago and has taken a leading role in the push to update the FBI's definition.

The New York Times first reported on Thursday the potential for change after police chiefs, sex-crimes investigators, federal officials and advocates convened in Washington to discuss the limitations of the federal definition and the wider issue of local police departments not adequately investigating rapes.

 

Among those who spoke at that meeting was Baltimore Police Commissioner Frederick H. Bealefeld III, who said he ...

Muslim Denied Spot with Florida County’s Republican Party
Moderator
Published: Tuesday 27 September 2011
Members of Broward’s Republican Party said Hamze was making a mockery of their rules and was trying to become a member as a publicity stunt.

Islam and tea party activism clashed at a raucous meeting Monday night when a group of Broward County Republicans blocked a Muslim activist as a member of the party's executive committee.

Republicans, who changed their rules to publicly vet Nezar Hamze and then vote on his application by secret ballot, said they didn't oppose him because he was a Muslim - but because he is associated with the Center for American-Islamic Relations, whose Washington-area affiliate was an unindicted co-conspirator in a federal terrorism indictment.

Hamze, CAIR's South Florida director, said his local group had nothing to do with the suspect activities in Washington. He said CAIR advocates for civil rights for Muslims, who have been unfairly targeted ever since 9/11.

"I'm aligned with Republican values. And I want to serve the party," Hamze said, who earlier told a reporter that any effort to block him was the result of anti-Islamic "bigotry."

At times, when he addressed the packed room at the Sheraton Suites in Fort Lauderdale, a few members shouted out among the crowd of about 300.

"Terrorist!" said one man.

"Let him speak!" said another.

Members of Broward's Republican Party said Hamze was making a mockery of their rules and was trying to become a member as a publicity stunt.

"I don't have a positive impression of Mr. Hamze. I don't think he will be an asset to our party," said Scott Spages, who is involved in programs concerning radical Islam at his church, Calvary Chapel Fort Lauderdale.

In the end, the Broward Republican Executive Committee voted 11-158 to block him from committee membership. He can still attend meetings, but as a general member of the public.

"Wow," he said afterward. "If I had realized it would be like that, I wish they had just sent me a letter saying I was denied."

One Broward Republican ...

With The Death Penalty, ‘Probably’ Isn’t Good Enough
Moderator
Published: Saturday 24 September 2011
The conviction was based almost entirely on eyewitness testimony, and in the two decades since that trial, seven of nine witnesses have at least partially recanted.

The death penalty is a barbaric anachronism, a crude instrument not of justice but of revenge. Most countries banished it long ago. This country should banish it now.

The state of Georgia was wrong to execute convicted murderer Troy Anthony Davis as protesters and journalists kept a ghoulish vigil Wednesday night — just as the state of Texas was wrong, hours earlier, to execute racist killer Lawrence Russell Brewer.

That’s hard for me to write, because if anyone deserved a syringe full of lethal poison it was Brewer. He was an avowed white supremacist who had been convicted, along with two accomplices, of the 1998 hate-crime murder of a black man, James Byrd Jr. They offered Byrd a ride, beat him up and then killed him by chaining his ankles to the back of their pickup and dragging him for more than two miles. When police found Byrd’s body, it was dismembered and decapitated.

“I have no regrets,” Brewer said in an interview with Beaumont, Tex., television station KFDM this year. “I’d do it all over again, to tell you the truth.”

Sweet guy, huh? Still, I ...

Solyndra Executives Will Take the Fifth Before Congress
Elizabeth
Published: Wednesday 21 September 2011
In a statement, a Solyndra spokesperson said Harrison and Stover would be “unable to provide substantive answers to the Subcommittee's questions.”

Two top executives from the embattled company Solyndra will appear before Congress later this week, but their lawyers announced today that they will invoke their Fifth Amendment rights and decline to answer questions, ABC News reports.

"This is not a decision arrived at lightly, but it is a decision dictated by current circumstances," wrote Walter F. Brown Jr., the lawyer for Solyndra CEO Brian Harrison in a letter to Congress.

Among those circumstances, the lawyer said, is a broadening investigation by the FBI and the U.S. Department of Justice into the Obama administration's decision to loan $535 million to the California solar power company, and the abrupt financial ruin of the firm, which shut its doors late last month.

"It would be irresponsible for anyone in his position not to [take the Fifth]," wrote Jan Nielsen Little, the lawyer for Solyndra's chief financial officer, W.G. Stover, Jr., in a separate letter.

In a statement, a Solyndra spokesperson said Harrison and Stover would be "unable to provide substantive answers to the Subcommittee's questions," and said that "present circumstances require both gentlemen to exercise their Fifth Amendment rights."

The statement added that Solyndra is unaware of any wrongdoing by company officials related to the loan guarantee "or otherwise," and is cooperating with federal investigators. "The company believes that the record will establish that Solyndra carefully followed the rules of the competitive application process, starting in December 2006 under the Bush administration and continuing under the Obama administration."

Members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which has been conducting its own investigation into the loan, expressed outrage that the executives -- after promising to freely answer questions -- would now ...

FBI Raid's Target Was Point Person for Scott Walker's Anti-Labor Program
Elizabeth
Published: Wednesday 21 September 2011
Even if we are to believe that Walker is not interested in what’s happening with an investigation into potential wrongdoing by his former aides and his campaign, he can’t really distance himself from Archer.

When Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker took a phone call that he thought was from billionaire campaign donor David Koch, he described the secret meeting of his cabinet at which he outlined the “budget repair bill” that stripped collective bargaining protections from public employees and teachers, replaced civil servants with political cronies and made it possible to sell off public utilities in no-bid deals with out-of-state corporations.

Walker was talking himself up as a new Ronald Reagan, in hopes of impressing one of the primary funders of conservative projects in the United States. But his comments revealed the previously unknown details regarding the political machinations behind a piece of legislation so controversial that it would provoke mass demonstrations, court battles and legislative recall elections.

“This is an exciting time,” the governor told “Koch“ in late February. “This is, you know, I told my cabinet, I had a dinner the Sunday, excuse me, Monday right after the 6th, came home from the Super Bowl where the Packer’s won, that Monday night, I had all my cabinet over to the residence for dinner. Talked about what we were going to do, how we were going to do it, we had already kind of doped plans up, but it was kind of a last hurrah, before we dropped the bomb and I stood up and I pulled out a, a picture of Ronald Reagan and I said you know this may seem a little melodramatic but 30 years ago Ronald Reagan whose 100th birthday we just celebrated the day before um had one of the most defining moments of his political career, not just his presidency, when he fired the air traffic controllers and uh I said to me that moment was more important than just for labor relations and or even the federal ...

The Killing of Troy Davis
Moderator
Published: Wednesday 21 September 2011
Former FBI director William Sessions: “It is for cases like this that executive clemency exists.”

The killing of Troy Davis would mark a devastating end to a case that inspired a global mobilization against the death penalty. Davis, 42, has faced execution four times in the past four years for a 1989 murder in Savannah, despite serious doubts about his guilt. His conviction hinged on nine witnesses—no physical evidence linked him to the crime—seven of whom later recanted their testimony. Some described being coerced by police. Others point to a different man—the eighth witness, who first implicated Davis—as the real killer. “If I knew then what I know now,” juror Brenda Forrest said in 2009, “Troy Davis would not be on death row.”

Forrest was one of several people who met with members of the pardons board on September 19 to plead for Davis’s life. Others included Davis’s nephew De’Juan, who grew up visiting his uncle on death row and whose mother, Davis’s sister Martina Correia, has been his most tireless defender, while also battling breast cancer. Davis’s more high-profile supporters range from the pope to former FBI director William Sessions, who wrote recently, “It is for cases like this that executive clemency exists.”

But Davis is a black man convicted of killing a white police officer—and in Southern and Northern states alike, this fact alone will trump all others. “Race is everything in this case,” Georgia Congressman John Lewis declared in September 2008, on a day when Davis came within two hours of lethal injection.

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Brown-Skinned Lady Sits Next To Two Indian Men On Plane, Gets Strip-Searched And Detained For ‘Suspicious Activity’
Moderator
Published: Thursday 15 September 2011
After interrogating and strip-searching the three passengers, the FBI determined hours later that “there was no real threat,” excusing the wildly disproportionate response by stating, “The public would rather us err on the side of caution than not.”

On the same day the country gathered together to recognize the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) launched two F-16 jets to tail a Frontier Airlines flight from Denver after the crew reported “suspicious activity on board.” That “activity”? The existence of three dark-skinned passengers. Two Indian men and one self-described “half-Arab, half-Jewish housewife” from Ohio — all unknown to each other — made the mistake of boarding a plane on Sept. 11, 2011.

After the crew reported that two people had spent “an extraordinarily long time” in the bathroom, the jets escorted the plane to its destination in Detroit, Michigan. Then, according to reports and the “half-Arab, half-Jewish housewife” Shoshana Hebshi, a SWAT team of about 10 police boarded the plane with machine guns and three dogs, approached Hebshi and the men’s aisle, handcuffed them, and escorted them off the plane:

Before I knew it,  READ FULL POST 10 COMMENTS
Time to Leave 9/11 Behind
Moderator
Published: Sunday 11 September 2011
We learned lessons from the attacks, but so many of them were wrong.

After we honor the 10th anniversary of the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, we need to leave the day behind. As a nation we have looked back for too long. We learned lessons from the attacks, but so many of them were wrong. The last decade was a detour that left our nation weaker, more divided and less certain of itself.

Reflections on the meaning of the horror and the years that followed are inevitably inflected by our own political or philosophical leanings. It’s a critique that no doubt applies to my thoughts as well. We see what we choose to see and use the event as we want to use it.

This does nothing to honor those who died and those who sacrificed to prevent even more suffering. In the future, the anniversary will best be reserved as a simple day of remembrance in which all of us humbly offer our respect for the anguish and the heroism of those individuals and their families.

But if we continue to place 9/11 at the center of our national consciousness, we will keep making the same mistakes. Our nation’s future depended on far more than the outcome of a vaguely defined “war on terrorism,” and it still does. Al-Qaeda is a dangerous enemy. But our country and the world were never threatened by the caliphate of its mad fantasies.

We asked for great sacrifice over the past ...

10 Years After 9/11, Suspected al Qaida Figure Still Eludes FBI
Elizabeth
Published: Sunday 11 September 2011
U.S. officials warned that Shukrijumah, 36, is especially dangerous to the nation because of the time he spent in America

Adnan el Shukrijumah left his family's Miramar, Fla., home in 2001 and traveled to Trinidad on business, presumably to buy sunglasses and children's clothes for resale in south Florida flea markets.

Ten years later, Shukrijumah is an elusive, globe-trotting fugitive — sometimes called "the Elvis of al Qaida" — wanted by the FBI as one of the terrorist group's alleged leading operatives and the subject of lingering questions about his possible association with 9/11 hijackers before the attacks.

He's also under indictment on charges of directing an alleged suicide-bomb plot in 2009 against the New York subway system. The reward for his capture: $5 million.

"We are still looking for him," said FBI special agent Michael Leverock, who's based in south Florida.

U.S. officials warned that Shukrijumah, 36, is especially dangerous to the nation because of the time he spent in America. The mystery surrounding his whereabouts — and whether he played a direct role in 9/11 — remains among the key unanswered questions a decade after the attacks.

"They are us. They know us intimately," said Michael Scheuer, a former top analyst in the CIA unit created after 9/11 to track down al Qaida founder Osama bin Laden, whom U.S. forces killed May 2 in a raid on his Pakistan hideout.

Shukrijumah is now a leading member and perhaps the head of al Qaida's foreign operations subcommittee, a post that makes decisions on plans and recruitments, said Rohan Gunaratna, a terrorism expert and author of the book "Inside Al Qaeda: Global Network of Terror."

"He has moved up in the ranks because he's very clever and because he knows the main target, the United States," Gunaratna said.

Shukrijumah was born on Aug. 4, 1975, in Saudi Arabia. As the son of two foreigners, he wasn't eligible for Saudi citizenship but obtained citizenship of Guyana, ...

America’s FBI Goes Rogue – An Analysis
Lawrence Davidson
Published: Thursday 1 September 2011

Part I - Entrapment as Government Policy

Here is an important question: What single organization is responsible for more terror plots in the USA than any other? Possible answers: Al Qaida. That would no doubt be the popular answer but it would be wrong. The KKK. Way past their prime, so that is not it. The Jewish Defense League. Good guess, but still not it. So what is the correct answer? It is the Federal Bureau of Investigation, AKA the FBI. Don’t believe me? Well, just read Trevor Aaronson’s expose entitled "The Informants" published in the September/October 2011 issue of Mother Jones.

Aaronson looked at over 500 terrorism related cases taken up by the FBI and found that over half of them involved the Bureau’s stable of 15,000 informants. Many of these are ex-felons and con men who are often paid well if their efforts result in an arrest and conviction. So what, you might say. Using informants to obtain information about criminal activity is an old and legitimate tactic. Yes, however, that approach to information gathering is not exactly how the FBI uses all of its informants. Indeed, the Bureau has a program, misnamed "prevention" which encourages its agents to get creative in the use of informants. How creative? Well, if they can’t find any terrorist activity going on, they have their informants instigate some. Where are they doing this? Mainly in our country’s Muslim communities.

According to the Mother Jones story the FBI has concluded that Al-Qaeda as an organization is no longer a major threat to the US. The threat now comes from the "lone wolf," the person who is angry at or frustrated by their life situation and open to the influence of terrorist rhetoric. Allegedly, the American Muslim community is full of these "lone wolves" just sitting out there fuming, ...

FBI Brags About Chasing Down Mortgage Fraudsters But Big Banks Are Left Untouched
Moderator
Published: Tuesday 16 August 2011
The FBI investigated fraud cases that resulted in convictions of low-level Ameriquest workers, but didn’t press cases higher up the corporate chain.

In a new report , the Federal Bureau of Investigation pats itself on the back for using “sophisticated investigative techniques” to target mortgage fraudsters. The FBI’s 2010 “Year in Review” mortgage fraud report says the agency has used wiretaps, undercover operatives and “tactical analysis coupled with advanced statistical correlations and computer technologies.”

Not everyone is impressed.

Consumer advocates say the FBI is missing the big picture, focusing its investigative muscle on small-time crooks and turning a blind eye to misconduct by big banks.

While millions of homeowners have been put at risk by dishonest tactics used by the mortgage industry, these advocates say, the FBI has targeted low-level lender employees and street-level fraudsters.

Richard Eskow, a senior fellow with the Campaign for America’s Future, a progressive think tank, calls the new report the latest example of the “pseudo-investigatory approach” of the FBI, the Justice Department and the Obama administration in the aftermath of the mortgage meltdown.

“The only thing worse than doing nothing is to do what they've done―try to hoodwink the public into thinking they're doing something,” Eskow told iWatch News.

The Obama administration, Eskow claims, has taken the view that the nation’s largest banks are too important to the economy to be threatened by criminal investigations and indictments. “Too Big to Fail,” he says, also means “Too Big to Jail.”

A telephone call to the White House press office Monday afternoon wasn’t immediately returned.

The FBI did not immediately respond to a request for comment from iWatch, but said in its report that it has “continued to dedicate significant resources” to the threat of mortgage fraud.

“The FBI continues to enhance liaison partnerships within the mortgage ...

U.S. Navy Vet Sues Donald Rumsfeld
Moderator
Published: Friday 12 August 2011
U.S. Navy vet sues Donald Rumsfeld for torture in Iraq and court allows case to move forward

On Monday, a federal appeals court refused to dismiss a lawsuit filed by two U.S. citizens against former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and unnamed others for developing, authorizing and using harsh interrogation techniques against detainees in Iraq. Donald Vance and Nathan Ertel were working for a private U.S. government contractor, Shield Group Security, in 2006 when they witnessed the sale of U.S. government weapons to Iraqi rebel groups for money and alcohol. After they became FBI informants and collaborated with an investigation into their employer, the company revoked their credentials for entering Iraq’s so-called Green Zone, effectively barring them from the safest part of the country. Shortly afterward, they were arrested and detained by U.S. troops, moved to the U.S.-run prison at Camp Cropper, and subjected to extreme sleep deprivation, interrogated for hours at a time, kept in a very cold cell, and denied food and water for long periods. They were eventually released and never charged with a crime. For more on his story, we speak with Donald Vance, a U.S. Navy veteran, and with Andrea Prasow, the senior counsel in the Terrorism and Counterterrorism Program at Human Rights Watch.

Transcript:

AMY GOODMAN: For years, human rights groups have attempted to file a lawsuit against former Bush administration officials for their role in crafting policies that led to torture in Iraq. Well, on Monday, in a move that has shocked some in the legal community, a federal appeals court refused to dismiss a lawsuit against former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and unnamed others for developing, authorizing and using harsh interrogation techniques against prisoners in Iraq.

The details of the case may surprise you. The lawsuit was filed not ...

Judge Allows Feds to Revise Filing in Anthrax Case
Moderator
Published: Monday 1 August 2011
"Robert Stevens was the first person in U.S. history known to have died from an anthrax attack."

Justice Department lawyers, defending a wrongful death lawsuit filed by the family of the first victim of the 2001 anthrax letter attacks, won a judge's approval Friday to withdraw a court filing that seemed to undermine the FBI’s assertion that an Army researcher was the killer.

U.S. District Judge David Hurley of West Palm Beach, Fla., accepted a government attorney’s declaration that the FBI and federal prosecutors didn’t alert the government defense team to 10 errors in a statement of facts until after it had been filed in court on July 15.

 

The  initial filing asserted flatly that the U.S. bioweapons facility that employed researcher Bruce Ivins, whom the FBI accused of manufacturing the anthrax, did not have “specialized equipment” needed to produce the deadly powder in the secure biocontainment lab where Ivins had a workspace.

 

The  revised filing said that Ivins had access to a refrigerator-sized machine known as a lyophilizer, which can be used to dry solutions such as anthrax, at the facility in a less secure lab. In addition, it said that Ivins also had a smaller “speed-vac” that could be used for drying substances in his containment lab.

 

Ivins committed suicide on July 29, 2008, not long after federal prosecutors advised his attorney that they were on the verge of seeking his indictment on five capital murder counts.

 

Early last year, the Justice Department closed its eight-year, $100 million investigation into the case and officially declared that the career anthrax researcher had mailed the letters shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The letters were addressed to three media outlets and Democratic U.S. ...

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