German political prisoner Horst Mahler’s latest book slated for ‘harmful media’ list
By ADELHEID RITTER | Non-Aligned Media | June 11, 2015
Today, Thursday, June 11, 2015, at 11.30 AM, the council of the Federal Department for Media Harmful for Young Persons in Germany will be deciding whether Horst Mahler’s book Das Ende der Wanderschaft – Gedanken über Gilad Atzmon und die Judenheit (2013) (The End of the Wanderings – Reflections on Gilad Atzmon and Jewry) will be put on the harmful media index. Mahler wrote his book in his prison cell after reading Gilad Atzmon’s book The Wandering Who?A Study of Jewish Identity Politics (2011), sent to him by a friend.
Friedrich Bode, a retired Protestant minister and founding member of the Green Party, as well as Gerard Menuhin, son of the world famous violinist Yehudi Menuhin, will be there to defend the book.
Horst Mahler is Germany’s number one political prisoner. As a professional lawyer he encountered revisionist material when he was asked to defend a client over charges of “Holocaust Denial”. Although previously Mahler had identified himself on the radical left and had been a founding member of the Red Army Faction (RAF), he was shocked by the treatment of revisionist research in German courts with regard to Holocaust laws. Having been indoctrinated with guilt over the Holocaust, he found it deeply liberating to discover that Jews had been expelled from countries all over the world throughout the centuries, and that the expulsion of Jews from Germany was by no means a singular event.
Mahler maintains that Germany today is in effect a nation that is ruled by a foreign will. That foreign will is the will of the Jewish people, which manifests itself in Germany’s Holocaust laws and the numerous Holocaust memorials which literally pave the country. These, he believes, serve to reinforce German guilt. In Mahler’s analysis, such elements, along with the “re-education” programme implemented by the Allies (mainly through the mass media, educational institutions, politicians willing to execute this foreign will, and Jewish institutions), prevent the healthy self-expression of the German people. Such mechanisms need to be understood as part of a strategy of psychological warfare with the goal of effecting the “soul murder” of the German people. A people without a soul cannot survive physically. According to Mahler, this is a genocidal project that has its basis in the Jewish understanding of the German people as part of the nation of Amalek, the Biblical arch enemy whose “seed” must be destroyed.
Mahler frequently quotes Jewish philosopher and Rabbi Martin Buber to prove that the annihilation impulse exists in the Jewish people not only against the German people but also against every other nation, since Judaism embodies a stark “No to the lives of the peoples” (“ein Nein zum Leben der Völker” – meaning “no to the traditional ways of non-Jewish peoples”). According to Mahler, the German spirit and the Jewish spirit are antagonistic to each other, which is the root of the conflict. Whilst German philosophy is a deeply organic way of thinking that seeks to maintain sanctimonious harmony with nature, Jewish thinking and behaviour is the polar opposite, aiming at the destruction of naturally grown structures.
Mahler was sentenced to 12 years in prison for “incitement to the detriment of the Jews” and “Holocaust denial” in 2009. In his open letter to the Central Committee of Jews in Germany and the Jewish organisation “Sons of the Covenant” (B’nai B’rith), dated on August 2009, Mahler declares himself a personal prisoner of organised World Jewry (All-Juda).
Regarding incitement, it must be noted that Mahler nowhere calls for hostility against Jews, and explicitly says that hatred and physical harm against Jews must be prevented under any circumstances. His analysis of the current state of affairs is based on Hegelian philosophy, readings of Christian and Jewish Scripture, and a thorough understanding of the legal situation of present day Germany.
He has now served five years of his twelve-year term. At 79 years of age, German law should now permit him to leave prison early. However, authorities do not seem to be willing to act in accordance with the law in this case, and have asked Mahler to withdraw his proposal.
This is a very rough summary of Mahler’s positions. When writing in German, Mahler articulates his views in a well-informed, sophisticated and precise language.
Please feel free to send him an uplifting note:
Horst Mahler
JVA Brandenburg a.d. Havel
Anton-Saefkow Allee 22
14772 Brandenburg a. d. Havel
Egyptian journalists protest against arrests, for better labor laws
By Mostafa Mohie | Mada Masr | June 11, 2015
More than 200 members of the press gathered at the Journalists Syndicate in downtown Cairo on Wednesday, chanting for the “32 detained journalists and hundreds dismissed from their job” as they commemorated Egyptian Journalist Day.
The syndicate’s freedoms committee had sent a general invitation to protest on June 10 to denounce the recent wave of arrests, arbitrary dismissals and low wages faced by local journalists. Several websites for both privately and state-owned newspapers, including Ahram Gate, Bedaya, Al-Mal and Al-Fagr, published statements supporting the demonstration.
Leading up to the protest, the syndicate also filed 13 complaints with the prosecutor general demanding the immediate release of all journalists currently detained pending investigations, and detailing alleged acts of torture inflicted upon those journalists while in custody.
Among the protesters was Ibrahim Aref, editor-in-chief of the privately owned Al-Bayan newspaper. Aref and a colleague were recently prosecuted on charges of publishing false information regarding the assassination of six prosecutors, news which the newspaper had subsequently amended and apologized for.
Recounting his arrest to Mada Masr, Aref says that police personnel broke into his office and took him to the prosecutor’s headquarters in the Fifth Settlement district of New Cairo. He claims the building was under construction at the time and had no running water. The next day, he was taken to the High Court, where he was left in a defendant’s dock for nine hours without food or water before being released later that night on bail, he says.
“According to the law, everything that happened was illegal,” Aref argues. “Journalists cannot be detained for cases related to publishing. I went through the experience and got out of prison, but other colleagues are still detained, and their children are cheering with us today.”
Aya Allam, wife of detained journalist Hassan al-Qabanni, was also at Wednesday’s protest.
She spoke to Mada of her husband’s arrest, saying, “On January 22, police broke into my home and arrested my husband. He disappeared for three days, and we filed a report with the general prosecutor about the incident. It turned out he was being kept at the National Security headquarters in Sheikh Zayed.”
When Qabbani was finally called before the prosecutor, he bore injuries that suggested he was beaten, electrocuted and tortured, Allam says.
She claims that her husband never faced specific charges. Instead, during interrogations he was asked about his opinion of the January 25, 2011 revolution, the events of June 30, 2013, the Muslim Brotherhood and the Armed Forces. Later, his family learned that he was accused of spying for the Norwegian government, in the same case as Muslim Brotherhood leader Mohamed Ali Bishr, according to Allam.
Qabbani is currently being detained in dire conditions at the Aqrab prison, Allam alleges. She adds that he is restricted to his cell, isn’t allowed access to newspapers or books and only receives one meal per day.
Furthermore, his wife claims that though the prison management has been issuing visiting permits to the families of the detainees at the prison, when they arrive, they are not permitted to enter. Qabbani hasn’t received visitors since February, Allam says, accusing prison staff of tampering with the visitor records.
Reda Gamal’s husband, journalist Reda al-Darawy, has been detained for close to two years, she says.
“After July 3 [2013] and the ousting of the Muslim Brotherhood, my husband travelled to Amman to work at Yarmouk satellite channel, then to Lebanon to work at Al-Quds Channel. He came back on August 6 and was a guest speaker on Tamer Amin’s show. On his way out of Media Production City, he was arrested.”
Darawy has been accused of spying for Hamas and belonging to a banned group — the Muslim Brotherhood was declared an illegal organization at the end of 2013. He was later added as a defendant in the espionage case alongside former President Mohamed Morsi and other Brotherhood leaders, Gamal says.
Gamal adds that her husband was accused of illegally entering the Gaza Strip through the tunnels from Sinai, but refutes those charges.
“My husband visited the Strip twice for work, and the stamps on his passport prove it,” she argues.
His first visit was in July 2011, she says, when he conducted interviews with leaders of various political factions in Palestine for a piece that was published in the state-owned Akhbar al-Youm newspaper. Then under the Morsi administration, Darawy visited Gaza again to cover the truce agreement between Hamas and Israel, Gamal says.
Darawy has now been in custody for 22 months. A verdict is anticipated in his case on June 16.
Darawy’s case bears some similarities with that of journalist Mahmoud Abou Zeid, known as Shawkan, who is also currently in detention pending investigations. His brother, Mohamed Abou Zeid, says that Shawkan was covering the Rabea al-Adaweya sit-in after Morsi’s ouster in 2013, and had obtained permission to shoot photographs there from security forces in the area.
However, Shawkan was then arrested alongside a number of foreign journalists by men dressed in civilian clothing, Abou Zeid says. The foreign photojournalist were released, but Shawkan has remained in detention ever since.
Photographer Ahmed Gamal Zeyada, who was recently acquitted in a case related to violence at Al-Azhar University, says that his arrest was similar to Shawkan’s. Zeyada says he hadn’t met Shawkan prior to his arrest, but began exchanging letters with him following a march that was organized to draw attention to both of their arrests by their fellow photojournalists.
“After a while we became close friends, though we never met,” says Zeyada.
The arbitrary firing of journalists was also a core issue discussed by the protesters. Sahar Abdel Ghani, a journalist at the privately owned newspaper Al-Alam Al-Youm, says that she and 30 of her colleagues were fired due to budget cuts.
“We have been working for the newspaper for 13 years, and have put up with all the financial challenges throughout,” she says.
But despite the fact that she was fired under the pretext of budgetary constraints, Abdel Ghani claims that “the newspaper recently launched a new website and hired new reporters,” suggesting that the business wasn’t in such dire straits after all. She says she and her colleagues filed a wrongful termination complaint with the labor bureau, but nothing happened.
The Journalists Syndicate is currently in negotiations with the newspaper to either rehire the fired journalists or compensate them, she adds.
At the protest, around 150 journalists — most of them working for newspapers affiliated with political parties that have recently been shut down — declared they would go on strike.
Iman Ouf, a journalist for the privately owned Al-Mal newspaper and a member of the syndicate’s freedom committee that organized the demonstration, felt that Wednesday’s protest represented a good step toward solving the problem of journalists working in Egypt today.
“The number of participants wasn’t big, but it is a good start. Today is better than how things were before,” Ouf says.
Next, the syndicate plans to launch a campaign for a fair labor law, a unified contract for all journalists and an industry-wide a minimum wage, in addition to providing compensation for the families of the detained journalists, she continues.
The journalist adds that the regional and international support for the protest was a good indicator that journalists are capable of defending themselves. The protest received letters of support from the Arab Journalists Union and the International Union for Journalists, Ouf says, in addition to journalists syndicates in Jordan, Morocco, Tunisia, the European Union and the United States, and finally, from local political parties.
Obama administration attempts to tack 20 years onto man’s sentence for possession of books
PrivacySOS | June 9, 2015
The Obama administration is trying to tack 20 years onto a Florida man’s tax fraud sentence for the supposed crime of possessing books the government doesn’t like. The Intercept reports:
Now, to demonstrate that Robertson’s tax charges merit a terrorism enhancement, the government has cited a number of books owned by Robertson that allegedly extol extremist beliefs. Robertson, who is recognized as an Islamic scholar, owned a library which included roughly 10,000 e-books, a small number of which are alleged by the government to have contained passages deemed controversial.
The government hasn’t provided any evidence to demonstrate that Robertson endorsed, let alone acted upon, any of the passages cited in these books, the defense counters. “There is nothing contained in the prosecution’s memorandum which connects Mr. Robertson to any actual conspiracy to commit terrorism,” Robertson’s attorney, Daniel Broderson, said. “He is an Islamic scholar who owned thousands of books, and they are trying to pull select passages from a handful of books he owned to try and make the case that he’s an extremist.”
Robertson, who says he’s worked for the FBI and CIA as an asset in the past, alleges that the government is retaliating against him for “refusing to conduct an overseas operation requested by the CIA.”
“The government is trying to use my case to establish a legal precedent, where even if a person is not charged with actual terrorism offenses they can still try them as a ‘terrorist’ using the sentencing adjustment,” Robertson told The Intercept. “This is not just about prosecuting my case specifically, it’s about creating a precedent whereby the government can simply go through the books you own and use them to frighten people into believing that you’re a terrorist.”
Unfortunately, it wouldn’t be the first time. Read more about his case, and about the Muslim Exemption to the First Amendment.
Criminalizing Criticism: A Zionist Project
By Lawrence Davidson – To The Point Analyses – June 10, 2015
Part I – Some Historical Background
From the 1920s on into the 1990s, the Zionists controlled the storyline in the West on the Israel-Palestine conflict. This meant that their version of history was the only version as far as most of the people in the West were concerned. Consequentially, they had an uncontested media field to label the Palestinians and their supporters as “terrorists” – the charge of anti-Semitism was not yet widely used. Also, as a consequence of their monopoly, the Zionists did not bother to engage in public debate.
Then, over the last twenty years the Zionists slowly lost their monopoly. In part this was due to the fact that in 1993 the PLO recognized Israel’s right to exist and renounced terrorism, and in the following years many of the Arab states made or offered peace. However, the Israelis did not respond in kind. In particular they failed to respond in a fair and just way to U.S.-sponsored peace efforts. Why so?
The answer to why the Israelis did not, in good faith, take up multiple historic opportunities to make peace with the Palestinians lies in the very nature of the Zionist movement. From its beginning, and certainly from the establishment of the State of Israel, Zionism has been driven by dreams of colonial expansion and religious exclusiveness. Each of these goals is seen as part of Zionism’s God-given mission, and they still prevail. Professor David Schulman of Hebrew University, writing in the New York Review of Books (23 April 2015), describes the consequences of this situation, “the Israeli electorate is still dominated by hyper-nationalist, in some cases proto-fascist, figures. It is no way inclined to make peace. It has given a clear mandate for policies … that will further deepen Israel’s colonial venture.” As a consequence, Israel’s credibility with an increasing number of people in the West has eroded.
This erosion led to a relatively short period of time in the early 2000s when the Zionists attempted to counter the situation by engaging with their critics in public debate. However, the majority of time they lost. Israel’s barbarous behavior on the ground, combined with the fact that their historical version of events was shown to be full of holes, condemned them to an increasingly weak defensive position. This proved to be intolerable to the Zionists, so they withdrew from the debating field. And, as they did, they began to level charges of anti-Semitism against their critics, even those who are Jewish. These accusations of the worst sort of racism have been with us ever since – which is really ironic because much of what Israel is being criticized for is its own racist, apartheid nature.
This was an important change in tactics for Israel because it opened the way to misusing Western laws to Israel’s advantage. Just as the charge of terrorism has often been misused in a broad and sweeping manner (for instance, leveled against non-violent supporters of Palestinian charitable organizations), so the charge of anti-Semitism can potentially be used in an almost unlimited fashion by over-aggressive, pro-Zionist Western prosecutors against any critic of Israeli behavior.
Part II – The Boycott Movement
In the West, much of the organized criticism of Israel now comes from campaigns aimed at promoting Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) of the Zionist state. So robust has the BDS movement grown that Gilad Erdan, Israel’s newly appointed Minister of Public Security, Strategic Affairs, and Public Diplomacy, has described it as one of the most “urgent issues” facing Israel. Israel’s president, Reuven Rivlin, has described the developing academic boycott, just one part of BDS, as a “strategic threat of the first order.”
Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has taken it upon himself to set the tone of Israel’s counter-attack on BDS. He has declared that there is an “international campaign to blacken Israel’s name” and he alleges that it is not motivated by Israel’s policies toward the Palestinians but rather seeks to “delegitimize Israel … and deny our very right to live here.” In other words, he is claiming that present criticism of Israel is really an attack on its existence, and not on its behavior. For Netanyahu this has to be a form of anti-Semitism. As Hanan Ashrawi, a member of the PLO executive committee, describes Netanyahu’s argument, “If you criticize me you are anti-Semitic … . If you accept any kind of punitive measure or sanctions against Israel, you want to destroy Israel.” That is how the prime minister avoids confronting the facts.
As bad as this is, it gets even worse. Declaring the goal of BDS to be the elimination of Israel allows the Zionists to use their influence with Western legislators to make cooperation with the boycott subject to penalties. In the United States, AIPAC, the most powerful of the Zionist lobbies, is working on legislation similar to that used against Iran and also the Arab boycott of Israel in the 1970s. This legislation would penalize businesses, both at home and abroad, that favorably respond to calls for boycott. If this works we can expect the Zionists to go further and try to subvert the U.S. Constitution’s free speech provisions and then go after individuals as well as businesses. In this regard, efforts are also under way in Canada and France.
Part III – Money Magic
Finally, there is the assumption that money can destroy Israel’s critics. This is a special belief of Sheldon Adelson, the billionaire casino magnate and enthusiastic backer of Netanyahu. Adelson has taken aim at activity critical of Israel on U.S. college campuses. In the first week of June 2015, he and his supporters convened a “Campus Maccabees Summit,” the purpose of which was “to develop the conceptual framework for the anti-BDS action plan [on college campuses], assign roles and responsibilities to pro-Israel organizations, and create the appropriate command-and-control system to implement it.” Fifty activist Zionist organizations attended the conference, as did twenty donors, each of whom pledged one million dollars to the cause over the next two years.
Part IV – Conclusion
Prime Minister Netanyahu personifies the problem with Zionist thinking. He is wholly self-centered and seemingly incapable of recognizing, much less taking responsibility for, Israel’s racist behavior. Thus, with the Zionists having spent the last 100 years planning and then actually doing what was needed to deny as many non-Jews as possible the “very right to live in” Palestine, Netanyahu now accuses others of doing the same thing to him and his kin – and labels it a criminal act.
The truth is that most Western critics, including supporters of BDS, are not trying to kick the Jews out of Israel. They are trying to bring maximum pressure on the Israeli government to stop kicking non-Jews out, to stop territorial expansion in violation of international law, and to start acting like the democratic state it so questionably claims to be.
Speaking strictly for myself, I don’t believe any of these goals are possible unless Zionism is in fact kicked out of what is now Israel. That is, the ideology that drives Israeli racism and colonial expansion must be done away with, in the same way that apartheid was brought down in South Africa. That did not result in South Africa being destroyed or all white South Africans being deported. But it did result in a democracy being imported. The same scenario is necessary for Israel.
No doubt many Israelis and their supporters would equate this goal of extirpating Zionism with promoting another Holocaust. This is not so, but they are scared enough to label the effort of bringing a real democracy to Israel as anti-Semitic, and to try to get it declared illegal in the West.
Finally, besides the public outcry over anti-Semitism, the Zionists are working behind closed doors – the closed doors of American state and federal legislatures and university board rooms – where they do not have to face serious debate. This might prove the most dangerous of their maneuvers. For behind closed doors the Zionist monopoly resurfaces and truth is all the easier to suppress.
43 years in solitary: Federal court blocks release of last imprisoned Angola 3 inmate
RT | June 9, 2015
Screenshot from RT video
A federal court blocked the release of the last imprisoned member of the Angola 3, after a Louisiana judge ruled the state must release Albert Woodfox. The 68-year-old has spent 43 years in solitary, arguably the longest term of such confinement.
The ‘Angola 3’ ‒ Albert Woodfox, Robert King and Herman Wallace ‒ were inmates accused of murdering a guard at Louisiana State Penitentiary, also known as Angola Prison, during a prison riot in 1972. Though they maintained their innocence, the three men were convicted of murder and spent decades in solitary confinement. Woodfox and Wallace insisted that they were implicated solely for their involvement in a prison chapter of the Black Panthers.
On Tuesday, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals issued an emergency stay of Woodfox’s release, temporarily halting the ruling of US District Judge James Brady. The appeals court will hear arguments from Louisiana on whether or not to overturn Brady’s decision after he issued an unconditional writ of habeas corpus on Monday, citing five main reasons in his ruling to release Woodfox from prison.
“The five factors include: Mr. Woodfox’s age and poor health, his limited ability to present a defense at a third trial in light of the unavailability of witnesses, this Court’s lack of confidence in the State to provide a fair third trial, the prejudice done onto Mr. Woodfox by spending over forty-years in solitary confinement, and finally the very fact that Mr. Woodfox has already been tried twice and would otherwise face his third trial for a crime that occurred over forty years ago,” he wrote.
Woodfox suffers from Hepatitis C, diabetes, renal failure and a history hypertension, his lawyer told the (New Orleans) Times-Picayune.
“He a host of issues that elderly people commonly face, but his are in [the] context of [solitary confinement],” attonrey George Kendall said.
Woodfox has remained in solitary confinement for 43 years, which makes him the longest-serving solitary confinement prisoner in the US, Kendall told the Guardian in September.
Teenie Rogers, the widow of slain prison guard Brent Miller, has said she believes the two men were not involved in her husband’s death, and previously called for the release from prison, the Times-Picayune reported.
“If I were on that jury, I don’t think I would have convicted them,” she wrote in the Los Angeles Times in 2008.
King was exonerated and he was released in 2001, while Wallace’s was overturned in October 2013. Wallace died of liver cancer three days after he was released, even though a Louisiana grand jury re-indicted him on his death bed. He was never retried.
Woodfox was first convicted of second-degree murder in 1973, a verdict that was overturned in 1992 by a state court due to “systematic discrimination.” He was re-indicted by a different grand jury in 1993, then reconvicted in 1998.
Brady overturned Woodfox’s second guilty verdict in 2008, citing ineffective counsel. The state appealed, and the case wound its way up to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. That federal court reversed Brady’s ruling, saying that Woodfox couldn’t prove he would not have been convicted if he’d had a different defense team.
In 2012, Brady again overturned Woodfox’s conviction, and the state appealed to the Fifth Circuit, which then agreed with the case judge. In February, Louisiana state’s attorneys announced that a grand jury had indicted Woodfox for a third time in the Angola 3 case.
In his release order, Brady barred the state from conducting a third trial, ruling that further prosecution “would be unjust,” he wrote.
The state condemned the unconditional writ, having argued before Brady that releasing Woodfox is against the public interest and that the inmate “is a danger to the public and is a flight risk.”
“With today’s order, the Court would see fit to set free a twice-convicted murderer who is awaiting trial again for the brutal slaying of Corrections Officer Brent Miller,” Aaron Sadler, communications director for the Louisiana Department of Justice, told TheTimes-Picayune.
Woodfox’s attorneys, however, applauded the judge’s decision, saying that a third trial would have been unfair to their client.
“Now, because the State’s key witnesses are deceased, and Mr. Woodfox’s alibi witnesses are also deceased, there is no practical way for there to be a third trial which comports with the standards of a fair, American trial,” Kendall and Carine Williams said in a statement.
The state has long denied that Woodfox and Wallace were held in solitary confinement, but rather in a lockdown called “closed cell restricted,” which is designed to protect prisoners and guards.
“Contrary to popular lore, Woodfox and Wallace have never been held in solitary confinement while in the Louisiana penal system,” Louisiana Attorney General James Caldwell wrote in a 2013 statement. “They have always been able to communicate freely with other inmates and prison staff as frequently as they want. They have televisions on the tiers which they watch through their cell doors.”
King and watchdog groups define “closed cell restricted” lockdown as solitary, however. Since his 2001 release, King has advocated against the use of solitary confinement. He also fought for the freedom of his fellow Angola 3 defendants.
Amnesty International ‒ which has been part of a long-running, international campaign to free the Angola 3 ‒ praised the judge’s ruling as a “momentous step toward justice.”
“Woodfox has spent 43 years trapped in a legal process riddled with flaws,” Jasmine Heiss, a senior campaigner for Amnesty, said in a statement. “The only humane action that the Louisiana authorities can take now is to ensure his immediate release.”
The purpose state secrecy serves, from SEAL Team 6 down to Boston Police
PrivacySOS | June 7, 2015
The New York Times has published a long, detailed history of the Navy’s special operators in SEAL Team 6, also known as the Special Warfare Development Group, or by its insider name, DEVGRU. This paragraph caught my attention.
The unit’s advocates express no doubts about the value of such invisible warriors. “If you want these forces to do things that occasionally bend the rules of international law,” said James G. Stavridis, a retired admiral and former Supreme Allied Commander at NATO, referring to going into undeclared war zones, “you certainly don’t want that out in public.” Team 6, he added, “should continue to operate in the shadows.”
That perfectly sums up the mentality in the US National Security State, from the most elite Navy SEALs all the way down through the FBI, and increasingly, to our local police.
Just last week, the Boston Police Department and FBI killed a man in a confrontation in Roslindale, Massachusetts. The cops have said that Usaama Rahim was plotting to kill police officers, although they never prepared an arrest warrant for him. Instead of preparing to arrest him by obtaining a warrant and sending a tactical team to do it safely, a few plainclothes JTTF officers shot him dead after approaching him to have what they describe as a 7am chat in a CVS parking lot. The Feds say the FBI and BPD were following him 24 hours a day during the week preceding his killing. But asked how Rahim initially came to the attention of investigators, Boston police commissioner William Evans said he cannot say. That information, he says, is “classified.”
When we hear claims like this, it’s crucial to recall what purpose secrecy usually serves in the security context. The truth of the matter was spelled out in unusually frank terms by the former NATO commander quoted in the NYT story about special operators cited above. “If you want these forces to do things that occassionally bend the rules of…law, you certainly don’t want that out in the public.”
That’s an unacceptable approach to foreign war fighting. It borders on the authoritarian here at home. And we cannot lose sight of the connection between the two.
Assuming general tolerance for official secrecy regarding forever wars abroad won’t trickle down to the domestic policing space is a fool’s errand. We now see clearly what that trickle down means in Boston. Police and FBI killed a man, and now they’re saying National Security prevents them from talking about why. That should send a chill down your spine.
Instead of Training to Solve Crimes, Cops Team Up with the Military to Prep for War
By Gary Franchi | The Free Thought Project | June 9, 2015
NORTH VERNON, IN – While the media was focused on Bruce Jenner’s transformation into Caitlyn Jenner last week they missed the further transformation of the Indiana State Police into a militarized police Force.
Together with the Indiana National Guard they weren’t practicing solving crimes, they were practicing Fast Rope techniques from a Blackhawk helicopter.
The above video contains actual footage which the Free Thought Project secured from the department of Defense, of the exercises.
Unlike in the recent special forces exercise that just occurred in Michigan, using live ordinance at an abandoned public school, this exercise took place at the Muscatatuck Urban Training Center.
Discarding their traditional police uniforms they adorned military fatigues and we’re fully equipped to kill.
This clearly contradicts Obama’s declaration of last month to crack down on the militarization of local police.
Even while Obama claims a crackdown is occurring, the local police can still use military equipment because through a loophole that equipment doesn’t belong to them. It belongs to the military.
All around us we are witnessing a military buildup enslave a free people while the media fixates on issues of no consequence to liberty.
The only way around it is to bypass them altogether. Use the power in your hands right now to inform others. Without an informed and activated citizenry can we ever be free.
So join Next News in the New Media Coalition with the Free Thought Project and share this to your social networks.
If you’d like to see what military equipment your local department has acquired through the Fed’s 1033 program, you can do so at this link.
163 Egyptians ‘forcibly disappeared’ in past 2 months, claims report
By Mostafa Mohie | Mada Masr | June 8, 2015
At least 163 people have been forcibly disappeared and illegally detained by security forces in the past two months alone, according to a document published by the Freedom for the Brave campaign on its official Facebook page.
According to the group’s breakdown of these cases, 66 activists have gone missing in this time period, and their whereabouts are still unknown. Another 64 people were only located after they had been detained without charges or interrogation for more than 24 hours in an undisclosed location, in violation of the Constitution. Another 31 cases cited in the document have not yet been verified by the group.
At least two of the people included in the list were allegedly killed by security forces, including Ain Shams University student Ismail Atito and Sinai resident Sabry al-Ghoul.
The majority of these incidents occurred in Cairo, where 60 cases of forced disappearances have been reported, followed by Kafr al-Sheikh with 31, 16 in Giza and 13 in Daqahlia. Suez, Matrouh, the Red Sea, the New Valley and South Sinai were the only governorates that did not report any such cases in the past two months.
Freedom for the Brave said that the majority of the information compiled to create this database was gathered from the group’s own research on certain cases it has been directly following, as well as from documentation compiled by other rights organizations and complaints circulated on social media by the families of the disappeared. The campaign also published the tracking numbers of the official complaints that families have submitted to the prosecution.
“Activists have been forcibly disappeared since July 2013, but this number is now increasing at an unprecedented rate,” Freedom for the Brave member Tarek Mohamed told Mada Masr.
He believes that the current crackdown is a general “continuation of the regime’s policies against any movement associated with the January 25 revolution,” but also a specific reaction against the April 6 Youth Movement’s call for a general strike on June 11.
But the crackdown is baseless, Mohamed argued. The call to strike does not violate any law, as it is a “call for the people to stay home in protest against deteriorating economic conditions and ongoing arrests,” he claimed.
Several of the people who have been illegally detained and held in undisclosed locations were later charged with belonging to the April 6 Youth Movement, which the courts ruled an illegal organization last year, Mohamed pointed out. They also faced accusations of coordinating with the banned Muslim Brotherhood group and calling for the June 11 strike.
“Those accusations were leveled against activist Dalia Radwan, the only one released on bail, and a member of the Helwan University Student Union, Ahmed Khattab, who appeared in front of the prosecution bearing signs of torture,” Mohamed said. “Nagwa Ezz and Ahmed al-Zayyat faced similar charges”.
However, Mohamed added that the prosecution has since reversed its decision to release Radwan and remanded her into custody for 15 days pending investigations.
Mohamed also spoke of photojournalist Israa al-Taweel, Sohaib Mohamed and Amr Mohamed, who were illegally detained on June 1. Their families and lawyers have still not been able to obtain any information on their whereabouts.
“We fear that those who disappeared face the same fate of Atito,” Mohamed said, referring to the Ain Shams University student who disappeared on May 19 after he was allegedly summoned out of an exam room by a security officer and another unidentified man. He was found dead the following day. The Interior Ministry released a statement claiming the student was involved in the assassination of a police officer, and had been killed in an exchange of fire with police forces when he tried to evade arrest.
The ministry has denied all reports of forced disappearances. One source from the ministry told the privately owned newspaper Al-Shorouk that “we are in a state of law and we cannot detain citizens in the streets unlawfully. Whoever is arrested faces accusations according to judicial orders.”
Translated by Mai Shams El-Din
Meet RCEP, a Trade Agreement in Asia That’s Even Worse Than TPP or ACTA
By Jeremy Malcolm | EFF | June 4, 2015
It’s been a big few weeks for leaked trade agreements. Just when we thought we had seen all the leaked text of the Trade in Services Agreement (TISA), Wikileaks went ahead and published some more yesterday. And on the same day, a leaked draft of the intellectual property chapter of yet another trade agreement, the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) was leaked by Knowledge Ecology International (KEI).
If we described TISA as a treaty you’ve never heard of, RCEP has been even more obscure. RCEP can be compared with the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), except that rather than being driven by the United States, it is being driven by the ten-member Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN), with the addition of their trading partners from the broader Asia-Pacific region including most notably India and China, who are absent from the TPP pact.
We might then, expect that RCEP could be the “anti-TPP”; a vehicle for countries to push back against the neo-colonial ambitions of the United States, by proposing alternative, home-grown standards on the TPP’s thorniest issues such as copyright, patents, and investor protection. Some members of RCEP have indeed spoken out against the TPP because of its unbalanced promotion of strict copyright and patent laws, and some commentators have characterized RCEP and the TPP as competitors.
But based on yesterday’s leaks, the promise of RCEP pushing back against the TPP is being squandered. Instead, its IP chapter is turning out as a carbon copy. The text for the chapter that South Korea proposes, which KEI rightly and succinctly describes as “terrible”, calls for many of the same provisions and more, including:
- Copyright terms of life plus 70 years.
- Prohibiting temporary copies of works in electronic form (a thoroughly misguided and anti-innovation provision that has even been erased from the TPP).
- Confining copyright limitations and exceptions to those which comply with the three-step test, which ignores exceptions, such as the quotation right, that are exempted from that test under international law.
- Remuneration rights to performers for radio airplay, which goes beyond U.S. law.
- A prohibition on the Internet retransmission of broadcasts, mirroring proposals for a Broadcast Treaty that would inhibit the free use of public domain material.
- A prohibition on trafficking in devices used to circumvent DRM, even if the circumvention is for fair use purposes.
- Inflated awards for copyright or patent infringement, by calculating damages payable for the infringing works on the assumption that they were sold at full retail market value.
- Granting ex officio authority to customs authorities that allows them to seize goods suspected of being infringing at the border, without even the need for a complaint by the claimed rightsholder.
- Criminal penalties for “commercial scale” copyright and trademark infringement, even where the infringer has not sought or made any profit from the activity.
- Criminal penalties against those who record any part of an audiovisual work in a cinema, regardless of whether the clips recorded would amount to fair use, for example because they are to be used in criticism or review.
- Suspension of the Internet accounts of repeat infringers, and censorship of bulletin boards that are “considered to seriously damage the sound use of copyrighted works” (whatever that means).
- Authorizing a fast-track process for rightsholders to obtain personal information of alleged infringers from their ISP, without a judicial order.
This draft is much worse than a previous leaked Japanese proposal that was earlier published by KEI. It’s far worse than ACTA, and is even worse than the most recent leaked draft of the TPP. Far from setting up a positive alternative to the TPP, South Korea is channeling the USTR at its worst here—what on earth are they thinking? The answer may be that, having been pushed into accepting unfavorably strict copyright, patent, and trademark rules in the process of negotiating its 2012 free trade agreement with the United States, Korea considers that it would be at a disadvantage if other countries were not subject to the same restrictions.
There are other examples of this kind of vicious cycle; for example, when negotiating its FTA with the United States, Australia resisted increasing its copyright term to life plus 70 years (knowing that it would derive no benefit from doing so), before eventually capitulating. Now Australia (along with Chile and Singapore, both of which were also forced into increasing their copyright terms in similar circumstances), are amongst those pushing extended copyright terms to other countries in the TPP. (We know this from the first leaked text of the TPP IP chapter, which reveals them as proponents of a life plus 70 year term.)
Since RCEP is shaping up as even more extreme than the TPP, one might well ask with resignation whether concluding a trade agreement with balanced IP rules is actually impossible. Surprisingly, it isn’t. Consider the Trans-Pacific Strategic Economic Partnership [PDF] (TPSEP), yet another trade agreement in the so-called “noodle bowl” of bilateral and multilateral Asian FTAs. If the TPSEP sounds like a relative of the TPP, that’s because it is. In fact, it’s the predecessor of that broader agreement, that was concluded in 2006 between Chile, New Zealand, Brunei, and Singapore, and remains in force between those countries.
For those of us used to FTAs that ratchet up standards of copyright, patent and trademark protection, the TPSEP is somewhat remarkable. It explicitly acknowledges “the need to achieve a balance between the rights of right holders and the legitimate interests of users and the community with regard to protected subject matter,” but goes further than this to give some specific examples of user-friendly policies that countries should be permitted to adopt, including:
- Respecting the first sale doctrine, even for works sold across borders.
- Prohibiting companies from removing your fair use rights through small print in license agreements.
- Allowing users to bypass DRM for fair use purposes.
These are the kind of pro-user rules that could have differentiated RCEP from the TPP, if its members were bold enough to think outside the box. And since RCEP is still at an earlier stage of discussion, they still can: Korea’s proposed rules are an opening gambit, not an agreed text.
Unfortunately, the process of negotiation of the RCEP is just as closed as that of the TPP, which makes it the wrong place for IP rules altogether. But now that the text has been leaked and it has been revealed to be so atrocious, we can begin to build pressure for the negotiating countries to open up the process. If, heaven forbid, the TPP eventually passes—and perhaps even more so if it doesn’t—the Asia-Pacific region needs to ensure that its trade regime doesn’t lock in restrictive and punitive copyright, patent, and trademark rules.
Family Raided by SWAT and their Dog Shot, for Being Unable to Pay Utility Bill
By Matt Agorist | The Free Thought Project | June 5, 2015
St. Louis, MO — Nothing says Police State USA quite like a SWAT team raiding a family home and killing their dog because they are unable to pay their natural gas bill.
The woman whose dog was killed and home destroyed by SWAT officers is Angela Zorich, and her story about her police state experience will shock the conscience.
According to a federal lawsuit filed this month, Zorich was the victim of a massive military-style raid and subsequent puppycide. The raid was carried out because police said they needed “to check if her home had electricity and natural gas service.”
“This is an example of police overreaching and using excessive force to get a family out of their house,” said Kenneth Chackes to the Riverfront Times, the attorney who represents Zorich.
According to the lawsuit, on April 25, 2014, St. Louis County Police officers came to her house. Her son cussed at them. They inspected the home’s exterior and placed a “Problem Properties” sticker on the front window.
Days after being publicly shamed and labeled by the St. Louis Police Department as a “Problem,” on April 28, Zorich called them to follow up. She was told by police that she was being investigated for failing to have natural gas or electric service; two violations against city code.
Zorich admitted to the police that she did not have gas, but said that she did have electricity. Zorich asked for another inspection to prove that she had the utilities. The officer told her that was fine, but that the investigation would continue.
The next day, on April 29, 2014, the home of Angela Zorich was raided by multiple officers from the St. Louis County Police Tactical Response Unit.
The Riverfront Times outlines the details of the lawsuit:
Zorich was at home with several family members and her pit bull, Kiya, when a St. Louis County Police Tactical Response Unit burst through the door without knocking, according to her suit. The unit had at least five officers with M-4 rifles, supported by at least eight uniformed officers.
The officers entered so quickly, Zorich’s suit alleges, that Kiya didn’t even have time to bark. A tactical officer fired three shots into the dog, and the dog’s “bladder and bowels released and she fell to the floor.” The dog “was laying on the floor in her own waste and blood struggling to breathe. She had a gaping hole in her chest.”
Zorich claims the officers kept trying to talk to her about the natural gas, but she was focused on her dog, whom she’d raised as a puppy and who (she says) had “never shown aggression to any person.”
At one point in the raid, Zorich alleges, an officer pointed his firearm at her son’s head and said “One word, motherfucker, and I’ll put three in you.”
Zorich was subsequently taken into custody at the police station. When she was finally let go and allowed to return to her home, she found it to be completely trashed. Beds had been overturned, and items that were once on shelves had been thrown to the floor.
The citations issued to Zorich, which had allegedly justified the heavily militarized raid on her home, were for substandard siding, guard rail, screens, window glass and deck.
A dozen armed men dressed for war, were dispatched to a woman’s home, killed her dog, and kidnapped her because of some moldy wood and her inability to pay her gas bill.
In what world is this considered “justice”?
The apologists will say that Angela Zorich provoked police into this action against her. If she didn’t want to be raided, they will say, she should have just paid her gas bill. The thought of the raid being retaliatory in nature won’t enter their minds.
Named in the lawsuit is the county of St. Louis and two officers, Corey Zavorka and Robert M. Rinck. Her allegations include unlawful seizure and unlawful infliction of emotional distress (for the killing of the dog) and unlawful retaliation.
Hopefully, with her legal team, Zorich will get the actual justice she deserves.
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