Aletho News

ΑΛΗΘΩΣ

Ukrainian parliament passes law allowing army deserters to be shot

RT | February 5, 2015

Ukraine’s parliament has passed a law which authorizes commanding officers to use physical force against army defectors. It comes as the latest military draft has seen a lack of enthusiasm on the part of potential soldiers.

Ukraine’s parliament voted on Thursday with 260 MPs in favor – only 226 votes were needed to pass the law. The new article 22(1) added to the charter regulating service in the armed forces of Ukraine states that commanders “have the right to personally use physical force, special means, and weapons when in combat” against soldiers who commit “criminal acts.”

Under criminal acts the law lists “disobedience, resistance or threat to use force against the commander, voluntary abandonment of military positions and certain locations of military units in areas of combat missions.”

An explanatory note to the document says that currently there are mass violations of military discipline, in particular, desertion from units and drinking alcohol, as well failure to execute commanders’ orders.

In late January, a new Ukrainian military draft for 2015 came into effect. This one is the fourth wave of mobilization since Kiev launched a military operation against militias in eastern Ukraine in April 2014.

It was expected to see 100,000 people joining the army in three stages throughout the year. However, the country’s Defense Ministry said on January 31 that nearly 7,500 Ukrainians are already facing criminal charges for evading military service.

The Ukrainian president’s adviser, Yury Biryukov, cited statistics, showing that desertion surprisingly was primarily a problem in western Ukraine, traditionally seen as a hotbed of anti-Russian sentiment.

The Ukrainian president went as far as signing a decree on additional measures to ensure a successful draft in 2015. A major provision is temporary restriction on leaving the country for men eligible for military service.

“The Verkhovna Rada [Ukraine parliament] has authorized the shooting of army deserters. By doing so they are risking shooting the whole army: people don’t want to participate in a bloody venture,” said the head of Russia’s Lower House of Parliament Committee for relations with the CIS bloc, Leonid Slutsky, on his Twitter.

Kiev began a military assault on eastern Ukraine’s Donetsk and Lugansk regions in April 2014, after they refused to recognize the country’s new, coup-imposed authorities. Following a period of calm and hopes that the Minsk negotiations conducted in September 2014 were bearing fruit, Kiev launched a new assault on the militia-held areas on January 18. Since then, eastern Ukraine has suffered constant shelling. Among the latest incidents, a hospital in Donetsk was hit on Wednesday. Local authorities said more than 15 people were feared dead in the attack. According to UN estimates, over 5,000 people have died since the conflict started.

READ MORE:

Potential conscripts evade draft, flee country amid escalation in E. Ukraine

New military draft starts in Ukraine amid intensified assault on militia-held territories

February 6, 2015 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Militarism | , , , , | Leave a comment

230 Egyptian Activists, Including Ahmed Douma, Get Life Sentences

Douma_0

Leading Egyptian opposition campaigner Ahmed Douma
Al-Akhbar | February 4, 2015

An Egyptian court sentenced prominent activist Ahmed Douma along with 229 other anti-Mubarak activists to life in prison on Wednesday after the court held hearings for 269 people connected to “the cabinet headquarters events” of December 2011, judicial sources said.

Douma and 268 others were accused of staging “riots” outside central Cairo’s cabinet headquarters and assaulting policemen during a sit-in back in December 2011 against a decision by Egypt’s then-ruling military council to appoint as prime minister Kamal al-Ganzouri, who had served in this position under ousted autocrat Hosni Mubarak.

In addition to “rioting,” the activists were accused of possessing white arms like knives, attacking police officers and armed forces, burning the al-Majmaa al-Alami and attacking other government buildings including the cabinet headquarters.

Thirty-nine other defendants, all minors, were sentenced to 10 years in prison. All 269 defendants were found guilty of taking part in clashes with security forces near Cairo’s Tahrir Square in December 2011, the sources said.

In April, Douma along with two other prominent activists, were sentenced to three years in prison and ordered to pay a 10,000 Egyptian pound (around $1,300) fine. The fine was raised on Wednesday to 17 million Egyptian pounds (around $2 million).

In December an Egyptian court dismissed charges against Mubarak for ordering security forces to kill protesters during the 2011 uprising.

That verdict, and others handed down to Mubarak-era figures, has led some to conclude that the old regime that existed before the uprising has been reestablished under a different name.

Wednesday’s ruling, which can be appealed, is the harshest court order delivered so far against non-Islamist activists, amid a government crackdown on dissent overseen by President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi.

Authorities banned the Muslim Brotherhood following Mursi’s ouster and launched a heavy crackdown on its members, leaving at least 1,400 dead and 15,000 jailed, including hundreds sentenced to death for allegedly taking part in deadly riots in August 2013.

Egypt was brought in November in front of the UN’s top human rights body for a litany of rights abuses, including its crackdown, mass arrests and unfair trials targeting Mursi supporters, journalists and activists, described as “unprecedented in recent history.”

Besides the heavy crackdown on Muslim Brotherhood supporters, many of the leading secular activists behind the 2011 uprising have also found themselves on the wrong side of the new political leadership, getting locked up for taking part in peaceful demonstrations following the recent ban on unlicensed protests.

Critics accuse Sisi of taking Egypt back to authoritarian rule. Sisi says he is committed to democracy in Egypt, a strategic US ally with influence across the Arab world.

(Reuters, AFP, Al-Akhbar)

February 4, 2015 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , | Leave a comment

Cops Are Scanning Social Media to Assign You a “Threat Rating”

By Matt Agorist | The Free Thought Project | December 16, 2014

Police State, USA — Imagine the following scenario: You are on your way home from work, driving down the road, when you notice police lights in your rear view mirror. You are being pulled over.

As you sit there, on the shoulder, adrenaline rushing, simultaneously angry and nervous, the police officer, in his patrol car behind you, is sizing you up based on an algorithm that determines your “threat rating.”

Online activity, purchases, and “comments that could be construed as offensive,” all contribute to your threat score.

The officer enters your license plate into a mobile application on his laptop. In a matter of seconds, this application crawls over billions of records in commercial and public databases, including all available social media engagement, recent purchases and “any comments that could be construed as offensive.” The application then determines if your “threat rating” is green, yellow, or red.

Imagine that you are one of our informed and frequent readers and understand the importance of police accountability and are unafraid to voice your completely peaceful, yet strong opinion about police misconduct. Imagine that you left a comment on facebook this morning about a particular officer’s misconduct; imagine that it is this particular officer who just pulled you over.

Your rating just came back red.

Up until this point, you have never committed a crime, you have never been violent, you have never even so much as run a stop sign. However, this police officer now knows that you made a comment about him punching the (insert handcuffed and helpless victim example here) on facebook, and he literally sees red (your threat rating).

What happens next? Does a routine traffic stop for driving 10 miles over the speed limit morph into a situation in which you now have a Smith and Wesson M&P 9mm pistol with Streamlight TLR-2s laser site being aimed just above your left ear?

Do you receive multiple erroneous citations because this officer now has access to your personal life? Do you get cited where the officer would have otherwise let someone else go?

Or, maybe you are a cop or a judge, or the mayor, but this application confuses you with someone else and marks you as “red,” then what? What if you are driving someone else’s car?

The reality is, that any number of unimaginable things can and would happen next. And now, thanks to a particularly ominous product, by a company named Intrado, and the Orwellian nature of police in this country, those unimaginable situations are now a reality.

Intrado is one of many corporations thriving here in the US, from the creation and growth of the police industrial complex. The hypothetical “application” mentioned in the above scenario is a real product of Intrado, called Beware. Police departments nationwide have been purchasing and using this application since 2012.

Intrado is one of many companies who cater to the police state, giving police these ostensibly helpful tools which actually erode civil rights and leave a huge opening for corruption and abuse.

Private companies are currently, and have been acquiring large portions of your tax dollars from federal grants. These funds are in return being used to build and implement actual “Pre-crime” technologies.

No, not the psychic-based sci-fi pre-crime like in Minority Report, but actuary based mathematical and statistical assessments designed with the explicit goal to reduce future instances of criminality. This means that instead of sentencing people for crime already committed, sentences based on these risk assessments are instead sentencing people for crimes that they, or people like them, might commit.

In a society that claims justice to be blind, how does judging someone on what they might do fit in to the idea of freedom? The answer to that question is simple, it doesn’t.

Even if these “threat ratings” showed a statistical correlation to actually lower some instances of crime, which we have not seen, it’s not the right way to go about policing a people. Reason Magazine’s Peter Suderman sums this logic up quite eloquently:

By a roughly similar logic, we could lock up everyone—or even just everyone with the right risk profile, regardless of what crimes they have or have not already committed—from a high crime neighborhood, and call it a success when crime goes down.

The notion that this “surveillance grid” approach by police and their higher-ups, is for the safety of the people, is a total farce. It does little to nothing to protect society from a rogue criminal. What it does do, however, is protect the government by deeming large groups of people enemies of the state; regardless of whether or not the individuals in these arbitrary groups are peaceful or have committed a crime.

The bright side of this Orwellian nightmare of a total police state that locks us up for crimes we didn’t commit, is that it’s preventable. All we have to do is show this information to those who have yet to see the encroaching blue leviathan that is Orwell’s proverbial “boot stamping on a human face — forever.”

In fact we’ve already seen well informed communities stop their police departments from obtaining such equipment. The city council of Bellingham, Washington, recently rejected a proposed purchase of the Beware “threat rating” system.

Despsite the Bellingham police department receiving a $25,000 federal grant to cover most of the $36,000 annual cost of Beware, the citizens still said “nay.” At a mandatory hearing about the purchase from Intrado, Bellingham citizens discovered how Beware worked and opposed the purchase. … Full article

February 4, 2015 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Corruption, Full Spectrum Dominance | , | Leave a comment

Five Important Questions About DEA’s Vehicle Surveillance Program

By Rachel Levinson-Waldman | Just Security | January 30, 2015

With each week, we seem to learn about a new government location tracking program. This time, it’s the expanded use of license plate readers. According to the Wall Street Journal, relying on interviews with officials and documents obtained by the ACLU through a FOIA request, the Drug Enforcement Administration has been collecting hundreds of millions of records about cars traveling on U.S. roads. The uses for the data sound compelling: combating drug and weapons trafficking and finding suspects in serious crimes. But as usual, the devil is in the details, and plenty of important questions remain about those details.

First, who approved the program, and under what circumstances? We don’t know. The DEA is an arm of the Department of Justice, so presumably the Attorney General’s office has been involved, but details aren’t yet available. Also unknown is whether there has been any judicial oversight.

Second, are there any limitations on how the data can be used? This is also unknown. The emails obtained by the ACLU indicate that the main purpose of the program was to assist in seizures of cars, money, and other assets, often from people not charged with any crime, a program that has come under withering criticism. But the history of data collection programs is that information collected for one purpose quickly becomes attractive for other purposes. And the more information available (even for proper purposes), the more is available for misuse as well. Indeed, license plate information has been abused in the past, with peaceful protestors’ data shared with the FBI.

Third, how long can it be kept? The article reports that the DEA holds the data for three months, a significant drop from its previous two-year retention period. Much of this data is coming from readers set up by state and local law enforcement, though, and the retention periods for those jurisdictions are an inconsistent patchwork, with deletion times ranging from immediate (Ohio state patrol) to 90 days (Boston) to two years (Los Angeles County) to five years (New York City) to never (New York State Police). This is especially alarming given that a vanishingly small percentage of the millions of license plates scanned are actually connected to any crime or wrongdoing. At the same time, data collected by DEA reportedly goes back to state and local jurisdictions as well, setting up an endless loop of information with inadequate oversight. 

Fourth, where else does the data go? Some of it is sent to fusion centers, which are state- or regional-based hubs that centralize information for sharing among the federal government, states, and private partners. Originally established in the wake of 9/11, fusion centers have largely abandoned their focus on terrorism for want of credible threats; they have instead transformed into an “all threats” model. In the process, they have been roundly criticized for wasting money, contributing little to counterterrorism efforts, and endangering both civil liberties and Privacy Act protections. Maryland and Vermont are known to feed their plate data to fusion centers, and the numbers are likely higher, given fusion centers’ voracity for data.

Finally, which other federal agencies are using license plate readers? We know that the Department of Homeland Security is using them as part of their border enforcement. As of early 2009, nearly 100% of cars crossing the border were scanned with a license plate reader. And both DEA and DHS license plate readers can be coupled with cameras that provide pictures of the occupants of vehicles being scanned.

Of course, the DEA database is only the latest in a string of disclosures that, taken together, reveal a web of powerful surveillance capabilities. Late last year, the Wall Street Journal revealed that the U.S. Marshals Service is using a secretive technology that sweeps up information about thousands of innocent Americans’ cell phones in the process of searching for suspects. As with the license plate reader scheme, little is known about the specifics of this program.

And just last week, USA Today revealed that at least 50 law enforcement agencies, including the FBI and the U.S. Marshals Service, have obtained radar devices that allow them to detect any human movements inside a house, even motion as minimal as breathing, from more than 50 feet away. In at least one case, the device was used without a warrant to case a home for the presence of a suspected parolee.

Senators Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) have already expressed concern about this technology, and it’s hard to see how its use without a warrant passes constitutional muster. As the Tenth Circuit observed in a recently published case weighing the use of the radar technology, the Supreme Court has already disapproved of the use of a thermal imaging device to capture details of life within a home. Perhaps even more salient, the Court earlier established that tracking technology (known as a beeper) cannot be used without a warrant to confirm a person’s presence inside a private home, if obtaining that information would otherwise require entry into the home. It’s a little mystifying that using a high-powered radar for the same purpose would be kosher.

Taken together, these stories suggest a zone of privacy that is narrowing so much as to be almost imperceptible. Separate from the question of how these technologies are actually being used, the breadth of surveillance capabilities they provide are staggering. You can be tracked on the streets; in your home; on your phone; and almost anywhere else. We seem to forever be caught in a kind of vicious cycle: it’s too early to criticize or critique technologies when they’ve just been introduced and there’s no record of misuse, but once they’ve been in place for even a year or two, they take on an air of inevitability. … Full article

Rachel Levinson-Waldman serves as Counsel to the Brennan Center’s Liberty and National Security Program, which seeks to advance effective national security policies that respect constitutional values and the rule of law.

February 2, 2015 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , , | Leave a comment

Group Promoting Peace and Love Labeled As Terrorists, Surveilled by DHS and Police

By John Vibes | The Free Thought Project | February 1, 2015

Missoula, Montana – According to the Missoula Police Department, peace and love are extremist views, and promoting these ideas could be a possible sign of terrorist activity.

The police department received a Department of Homeland Security grant of $254,930 last week, to assist them in fighting the terrorist threat. That threat was apparently posed by “the Rainbow Family,” a large hippy gathering that promotes peace and love.

In the application documents where the agency requested the grant, the Rainbow Family was listed as an “extremist organization” that requires constant surveillance.

Police Chief Scott Hoffman said that the department needed a “mobile command unit” to deal with the Rainbow Family threat.

“It’s a mobile command unit. It’s just like a motor home with communications and computers and radios and things like that. I don’t know what the hazards of the Rainbow people are,” Hoffman said.

After the story went public, representatives from the police department have played damage control with the media, claiming that the operation is only to help with cleaning up and keeping the area safe.

When reporters with the Missoulian called the police department for a comment, they were told by Missoula Police Lt. Scott Brodie that the mobile command unit would be primarily for the clean up effort.

“When they have their gatherings, they historically have created a mess that needs to be cleaned up. The command center could just coordinate and speed things up, get it done faster. It’s a coordination tool is what it is,” Brodie said.

It becomes apparent how ridiculous the accusations of “extremism” are when doing some research into what the Rainbow Family stands for. They are a decentralized, loose-knit group of people who want to promote ideas of peace, freedom, equality, and love.

The group takes their name from the ancient Native American proverb that says “When the earth is ravaged and the animals are dying, a new tribe of people shall come unto the earth from many colors, classes, creeds, and who by their actions and deeds shall make the earth green again. They will be known as the warriors of the rainbow.”

Back in 2013, the U.S. Forest Service spent over $500,000 in efforts to police the event and only made two arrests. Otherwise, there were no issues or problems at the event.

February 1, 2015 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , | Leave a comment

Eight-year-old summoned to French police station for “glorifying terrorism”, two hour interrogation

By Sylvain Mouillard – Libération – 28/1/2015

A school director has filed a complaint against the father of a fourth grader. He is also supposed to have inflicted “bullying” onto the schoolboy, according to the family lawyer.

January 8th, 2015, the day after the killing at Charlie Hebdo.  In a primary school in Nice, fourth grade pupils discuss the tragedy with their schoolteacher. “Are you Charlie?”, he asks them. Ahmed, aged 8, says no. Why not? “Because they caricatured the Prophet. I am with the terrorists.”  The teacher alerts the school headmaster, who decides to summon the boy, and then his parents, who reason with their offspring. But he does not stop there. On January 21st, the head of the school, which is located in the south of the city, lodged a complaint at the police station for “glorification of terrorism”, according to the lawyer for the family of the child, Mr Sefen Guez Guez.

Contacted Wednesday evening by Libération, the Minister of Education confirmed that a complaint had been filed against the father of the child, who is supposed to have made an “intrusion” into the school premises.  And that “an alert had been sent to child protection services.”

“From there, the judicial machine is launched,” Mr Guez Guez, the lawyer defending Ahmed, explains to Libération.

Summoned on Wednesday afternoon to the police station in Nice, as part of an unofficial hearing, the child remained there for almost two hours.

What next?

The lawyer related the events in a series of tweets, under the moniker “IbnSalah” .

[Tweet] S. Ibn Salah Question from OPJ [police officer in the French Criminal Investigation Department]: “What does the word terrorism mean to you ? – I don’t know.” Ahmed. 8-year-old.

[Tweet] S. Ibn Salah “Did you really say that the journalists deserved to die? – It’s not true, I never said that.”

“Placing a child of 8 years in an unofficial hearing, is telling of the current state of hysteria around this notion of glorifying terrorism. In these kind of cases, pedagogy is necessary”, considers Mr Guez Guez, furious. “We do not think of leaving it there, the headmaster’s attitude is unacceptable.”  He accuses him of inflicting “bullying” onto Ahmed by “putting him in the corner” and “depriving him of recreation.”

According to the lawyer, the child also recounted having endured this remark while he was playing in the sandbox: “Stop digging, you will not find a submachine gun to kill us all with.”  Ahmed, a diabetic, had even once been deprived of taking his insulin, according to the lawyer. Contacted by Libération, the prosecutor of Nice confirmed the existence of this unofficial hearing, but did not have any further comment to make.

“In the current context, the school principal decided to report what happened to the police”, Commissioner Marcel Authier explained to the AFP [French Press Agency], noting that it is was absolutely not  a judicial complaint. “The child and his father were summoned to try to understand how a boy of 8 years could be able to make such radical statements”, said the director for the department of public safety. “Obviously, the child does not understand what he said. We do not know where he found his declarations sentiment from”, he said. The primary school, closed, could not be reached on Wednesday evening.

~

Translated by Jenny Bright, Tlaxcala


“Glorifying terrorism”: French Minister of Education Najat Vallaud-Belkacem supports the measures taken by Nice Elementary school

Politicians react after the summoning of Ahmed, 8-years-old, to the police station for having affirmed his support for the perpetrators of the “Charlie Hebdo” attack.

LIBERATION with AFP – January 29, 2015

Najat Vallaud-Belkacem supports the administration of the Nice Elementary School where studies Ahmed, 8, summoned to the police station yesterday for “glorifying terrorism” . The staff “responded appropriately”, the Minister of Education said this Thursday. “I say it strongly, not only has this team done well to behave as such, but its monitoring work, educational as well as social, is a useful endeavour and I thank them for it”, the Minister has insisted from the Presidential Palace where she had met with teachers, educators and associations.

Najat Vallaud-Belkacem also affirmed that “when the father [of the schoolboy] came into the school facility, he had […] a brutal attitude, he even repeatedly entered without authorisation into the school building while threatening school staff.  So it is for this precise reason and for that reason only that the school director filed a complaint against the father and not against the child.”

A statement which the child’s lawyer, Me Sefen Guez Guez, again challenged on his Twitter account.

[Tweet] S. Ibn Salah @najatvb Nonsense. I signed a police report that testifies to the contrary. Go ahead slandering and defaming, but the truth will always emerge.  State lie.

On the right-wing scene as well, some were keen to show their full support for the school headmaster who made the complaint against the child, as for instance Christian Estrosi, UMP mayor of Nice, where the incident occurred, and Eric Ciotti (UMP).

[Tweet] Christian Estrosi Full support for the school headmaster who courageously denounced the facts. I await justice and firmness in front of parental responsibility.

[Tweet] Eric Ciotti I wonder about the collective hysteria merely because of the unofficial hearing of a child and of his parents after alarming declarations had been uttered.

[Tweet] Eric Ciotti Child heard at Nice, the police and teachers have perfectly reacted given the context, I fully support them.

More cautious, Chantal Jouanno (UDI) has wondered, in a message on Twitter, why “no one [has been] putting their trust in the principal and the police.”

[Tweet] Chantal Jouanno Child heard at Nice with his father. No one trusts the school headmaster and the police?

The communist deputy of the mayor of Paris, Ian Brossat, has not reacted on the substance of the case but to the declarations of some right-wing members.

[Tweet] Ian Brossat Those who rejoice at an 8-year-old being summoned by justice howl when their dear Sarkozy is in custody. #Go figure it out.

As for the National Islamophobia Observatory (OIC), he was indignant: “The National Observatory against Islamophobia is indignant about the treatment inflicted on Ahmed, a child of 8 years, summoned to a police station in Nice”, writes in a statement this authority attached to the French Council of the Muslim Faith (CFCM), the representative body of Islam in France. “The fight against radicalisation should not lead to mass hysteria but must be inscribed within the Republican legal framework”, said the Observatory, which calls on the Minister of Education, Najat Vallaud-Belkacem, “to ensure that such excesses do not happen again and to give priority to dialogue in similar cases.”

On Twitter, where the hashtag #Ahmed8 was used nearly 4000 times Thursday morning, users have already taken up the case, with irony , dismay , annoyance , humour , or to express their agreement with the decision of the school headmaster.

~

Source: http://www.liberation.fr/societe/2015/01/29/enfant-convoque-au-commissariat-pour-apologie-du-terrorisme-la-droite-applaudit_1191086

Translated by Jenny Bright for Tlaxcala

February 1, 2015 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Islamophobia | , , , , , | Leave a comment

Canada introduces new anti-terrorism laws

Press TV – January 31, 2015

Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper has introduced new anti-terror laws, which significantly expands the powers of the country’s spy agencies.

The proposed legislation announced on Friday would allow anyone suspected of being involved in a terror plot to be taken into custody for up to a week without any charges.

The law would make it a felony for any person to call for a terrorist attack, even without making any specific threat.

In addition, the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service (CSIS), would receive additional powers to track and arrest suspects, including preventing Canadian citizens from traveling abroad for terror purposes by cancelling their plane or other travel reservations.

Furthermore, authorities will have the right to remove terror-related material posted on any Canadian website.

Harper said the new law is required as militants have declared war on Canada and it would be wrong to ignore their threats.

The proposed law still has to be approved by the country’s parliament. However, the legislation is likely to be adopted as Harper’s Conservative administration holds the majority of seats in the assembly.

The legislation has drawn criticism from a number of figures including, opposition leader Tom Mulcair, who expressed concern about oversight and abuses.

Kent Roach, a law professor at the University of Toronto, also voiced concern over the proposed law, saying it has a “potential” of suppressing expression.

Harper’s proposal comes in the wake two so-called terrorism-related attacks in the capital of Ottawa and in the city of Quebec last October.

On October 22, 2014, an armed assailant, identified as Michael Zehaf-Bibeau, killed a soldier at the country’s national war memorial in the capital and then stormed the parliament before being shot dead by police.

In another incident just two days earlier, a radicalized Quebec man, identified as Martin Couture-Rouleau, was shot dead by police after he ran down two soldiers, killing one of them, with his vehicle near a military compound.

Related:

Canada monitors all internet downloads  January 28, 2015

Canada police allowed to search phones  December 12, 2014

January 31, 2015 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , | Leave a comment

Commissioner Bratton Equates NYC Protests With Paris Terror Attack

By Sue Udry | Dissent News Wire | January 29, 2015

NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton announced today the formation of a new, elite unit that will be specially trained and equipped to deal with dangerous situations like the hostage situation in Australia, lone wolf attacks and… protests.

According to CBS News New York, Bratten really truly did conflate terrorism and protests.

 “It is designed for dealing with events like our recent protests, or incidents like Mumbai or what just happened in Paris,” the commissioner said.

In order to address these situations, all equally perilous apparently, Bratton told a news conference that the 350 member Strategic Response Group will “be equipped and trained in ways that our normal patrol officers are not. They’ll be equipped with all the extra heavy protective gear, with the long rifles and machine guns — unfortunately sometimes necessary in these instances.” In addition, the officers will have smartphones and tablets so they can be kept up to date on what is being said over social media.

Those smart phones and tablets may prove to be more dangerous to communities than the new weapons. Josmar Trujillo provides this analysis at CityLimits.org :

It’s hard to imagine a more Orwellian future for high-poverty, high-crime communities than one in which technology intensifies the criminal justice spotlight on their neighborhoods. Funneling more cops and surveillance into certain neighborhoods all but assures that you’ll find more crime there—especially the low-level type via Broken Windows. Indeed, if by being predictive police are looking to be prophetic, then it may be a self-fulfilling prophecy. Communities of color are most familiar with a cycle in which cops aggressively look for crime, arrest and document crime, then set out to aggressively look for more crime in a city with less and less crime. Technology, though, adds in a new element wherein it normalizes aggressive, racialized policing through a veneer of color-blind efficiency. As people become data plots and probability scores, law enforcement officials and politicians alike can point and say technology is void of the racist, profiling bias of humans.

In case smart phones and machine guns aren’t enough, Bratton wants more surveillance.  CBS reports that

Bratton is also calling on the Metropolitan Transportation Authority to outfit all new subway cars with cameras that would be monitored on the train by an officer in the conductor’s booth, as well as at an off-site location.

Bratton pitched the unit as a way to keep from pulling beat cops away from their neighborhoods. The police unions are in support of the new unit, but the Gothamist reports that support is not unanimous. Priscilla Gonzalez, Organizing Director of Communities United for Police Reform, gave this statement.

Initial reports of Commissioner Bratton’s plans suggest the opposite of progress. His demands for less oversight of the NYPD and a more militarized police force that would use counter-terrorism tactics against protestors are deeply misguided and frankly offensive. We need an NYPD that is more accountable to New Yorkers and that stops criminalizing our communities, especially when people are taking to the streets to voice legitimate concerns about discriminatory and abusive policing. Despite growing evidence that discriminatory broken windows is a failed and harmful policing strategy, Commissioner Bratton stubbornly continues to defend and expand it.

Tell Bratton: Protest is NOT Terrorism!

Tell Commissioner Bratton that you are outraged he is equating protests with terror attacks, and wants to treat them with equal force. The streets of NYC don’t need more heavily-armed police on the loose.

Phone

311 or 212-NEW-YORK (639-9675) outside NYC

Webform

Send Online Message

Commissioner Bratton

NYPD Switchboard: 1-646-610-5000

Tweet:

@NYPD

January 30, 2015 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Subjugation - Torture | | Leave a comment

Professor Salaita Sues University of Illinois For Free Speech Rights

By Deirdre Fulton | Common Dreams | January 29, 2015

Professor Steven Salaita, a Palestinian-American professor of Indigenous studies whose offer of a tenured position at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign was rescinded last year because of his tweets criticizing the Israeli government’s bombing of Gaza, has filed a civil rights suit against the school and its top officials and donors, saying that his termination violated his First Amendment right to free speech and other constitutional rights, as well as basic principles of academic freedom.

“Like any American citizen, I have the right to express my opinion on pressing human rights concerns, including Israeli government actions, without fear of censorship or punishment,” Salaita said in a statement. “The University’s actions have cost me the pinnacle of academic achievement—a tenured professorship, with the opportunity to write and think freely. What makes this worse is that in my case the University abandoned fundamental principles of academic freedom and shared governance, crucial to fostering critical thought, that should be at the core of the university mission.”

Salaita, who is being represented by the Center for Constitutional Rights along with the Chicago civil rights law firm of Loevy & Loevy, filed the lawsuit Thursday in a U.S. federal court in Chicago.

The complaint (pdf) alleges that university officials, including the chancellor and university trustees, violated Salaita’s constitutional rights to free speech and due process of law, and breached an employment contract with him. According to CCR, the suit is also against university donors who, based on emails made public, unlawfully threatened future donations to the university if it did not fire Salaita on account of his political views.

As Common Dreams reported in September, Salaita had been awarded the tenured position in fall 2013 and was scheduled to begin on August 16, 2014—just two weeks after Chancellor Phyllis Wise rescinded the offer. University documents released in response to a public-records request revealed that Wise had been pressured by numerous pro-Israel students, parents, alumni, and big-money donors to abort his appointment. These demands followed critical comments by Salaita regarding Israel’s most recent attack on Gaza, during which thousands of Palestinians, including hundreds of children, were killed.

The university’s action, which Wise explained was taken because Salaita’s speech lacked “civility,” spurred protests from within the university as well as the academic community at-large. Sixteen academic departments of the university have voted no confidence in the university administration, and prominent academic organizations, including the American Association of University Professors, the Modern Language Association, and the Society of American Law Teachers have publicly condemned the university’s actions.

“The use of ‘civility’ as cover for violating Professor Salaita’s rights must be challenged, as it threatens the very notion of a University as a place for free inquiry and open debate,” said Maria LaHood, a senior attorney with the Center for Constitutional Rights. “There is neither a ‘civility’ exception nor a ‘Palestine’ exception to the First Amendment.”

According to CCR, the lawsuit seeks Salaita’s reinstatement and monetary relief that includes compensation for the economic hardship and reputational damage he suffered as a result of the university’s actions.

“Only donor pressure, or sheer pride, can explain the administration’s stubborn refusal to revisit a decision that has done so much harm to Dr. Salaita and to constitutional and other principles that academics hold dear,” said Anand Swaminathan of Loevy & Loevy. “The administration has something to hide, and through this lawsuit we intend to expose it.”

January 30, 2015 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Full Spectrum Dominance, War Crimes | , , , , , | Leave a comment

US Company’s Rice Plantation Pushes out Nigerian Communities

teleSUR | January 29, 2015

After years of working with the government to develop a sustainable community agriculture system, over 40,000 Nigerians will now have to fend for themselves after their land was given away to U.S. food company Dominion Farms, international human rights groups told teleSUR Thursday.

“The land in question is taken from the farmers,” Raymond Nyayiti Enoch from the Center for Environmental Education and Development (CEED) Nigeria told teleSUR via email.

“Added still, they will have no alternative fertile land of food production because the Federal Government Agency, the Upper Benue River Basin Development Authority (UBRBDA) have spent years developing the land and working with the farmers to boost food production in the way and manner beneficial to the farmers and their community,” he said.

A report was released Wednesday detailing a land grab case in the Gassol community in Nigeria’s northeastern Tabara State, where Dominion Farms has taken over a large swath of fertile community land in order to develop a 300-square-kilometer rice plantation.

The move comes as a shock to the communities, who were kept in the dark about the development decision and who had previously been working with the government to develop small-scale, community agriculture that they could depend on for food.

For years, the federal government has been trying to increase international investment in Nigeria’s agriculture sector in order to increase local food production and become a food exporter in order to increase GDP.

However, according to Enoch, potential economic benefits for the country come at a high price. The secretive way in which the government carried out the transaction with Dominion Farms could cause internal conflict, not only between the federal government and the tens of thousand of Nigerians affected by the sudden loss of land, but also with the government-led UBRBDA who the federal bodies involved excluded from the deal.

“It poses a potential conflict that would mar the production process even before its started,” said Enoch, who added that this will make it hard to attract further international investment.

Ange David, member of GRAIN, an international rights group that supports small farmers, said the government is taking the wrong tactic if its trying to improve its economy.

“Nigeria has a target to resolve the problem of employment, so how [will it] resolve it by this kind of ‘investment’ who will put more than 40,000 persons on the street or push [them] to leave their village and to join the urban zone like Abuja or Lagos,” David told teleSUR in an email, referring to two of the most populous cities in Nigeria that experience high poverty rates.

“As we know, the major occupation of the people of Taraba is agriculture,” said David. “So how can we imagine that this land grab can help that communities who will lose the land for ever.”

According to Enoch, this is the first major land grab in Nigeria, with several others “looming” across the country, including in the same state of Tabara.

Nigeria is one of the many countries around the world being affected by U.S. multinational companies and their land grabbing strategies.

In Sierra Leone, a western African nation embattled by Ebola, the people have joined forces to combat another virus, that of “multinational companies,” which have recently taken advantage of the poverty stricken communities to buy up their lands at negligible prices. This only benefits the corporations, leaving the population without the possibility of cultivating their own land.

Also see: Paraguay: Big Business Want to “Eliminate Farmers and Indigenous Communities” Says Activist

And: ​Israel, Land-Grabs and the ‘Wild West’

January 30, 2015 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Economics | , , , | Leave a comment

Minister: State saboteurs don’t deserve Egyptian nationality

Mada Masr | January 28, 2015

Endowments Minister Mokhtar Gomaa is reiterating his demand to strip citizens of their Egyptian nationality if they are found to promote acts of violence against national security.

Gomaa made these comments on Tuesday to the “Hunna al-Asema” program on the privately owned CBC channel, and again to the “Ala Masou’ouleyati” show on the privately-owned Sada al-Balad channel.

Terror groups are instigating and promoting violence against Egypt’s security forces from abroad, while funneling funds for terrorist operations across the country, Gomaa insisted while speaking to pro-regime television presenter Ahmed Moussa on Tuesday on his “Ala Masou’ouleyati” program.

The Muslim Brotherhood is at the forefront of these terror groups, Gomaa claimed.

The Cabinet officially classified the Brotherhood as a terrorist organization on December 25, 2013.

“We are calling for, and continue to call for, the stripping of citizenship from such criminals. This is an honor that they do not deserve,” Gomaa said. “Such individuals are traitors and agents, and they do not deserve the honor of belonging to this country.”

Gomaa’s comments may be buttressed by constitutional Article 86, which stipulates: “Maintaining national security is a duty, and citizens’ commitment to it is a national responsibility, guaranteed by the law. Defense of the nation and the homeland are an honor and sacred duty.”

However, Gomaa’s comments also directly contravene the rights of citizenship enshrined in the 2014 Constitution.

Article 6 stipulates that “citizenship is a right to anyone born to an Egyptian father or an Egyptian mother. Citizens have the right to legal recognition and official documentation that proves their personal information, as regulated by the law.”

Furthermore, Article 62 holds that “no citizen may be deported from or prevented from returning to the country.”

Moussa described this year’s commemorations of the January 25 revolution anniversary as an attempt to destabilize the country. Moussa referred to participants in these protest rallies as “members of the terrorist Brotherhood society,” along with “the terrorists of the April 6 Youth Movement” and “the saboteurs of the Revolutionary Socialists Movement.”

“I have no problem with the killing of two, three or four hundred terrorists,” Moussa commented during his January 25 broadcast.

While speaking on the “Hunna al-Asema” show on Tuesday, Gomaa insisted that “the Ministry of Endowments stands beside all the state’s institutions in combating terrorism and in confronting terrorist elements.”

Gomaa added that any individual ministry employee who is found to be involved in promoting or instigating violence against the state would immediately be dismissed from his or her post.

January 29, 2015 Posted by | Civil Liberties | , | Leave a comment

Seattle faces $500k suit for pepper-spraying school teacher

RT | January 29, 2015

​A Seattle, Washington high school history teacher who was pepper-sprayed by police moments after speaking at a Martin Luther King Jr. Day rally is suing the city for $500,000.

Attorneys for Jesse Hagopian filed the claim against Seattle on Wednesday, nine days after the incident unfolded during, ironically, an anti-police brutality protest held in tandem with similar rallies across the United States on the holiday named for the slain civil rights leader.

Hagopian, a history teacher at Garfield High School who is known throughout the region for his activism, had just finished speaking during the January 19 event and was on the phone with his mother when a female police officer began discharging her pepper spray, striking multiple people.

An eyewitness was filming only a few feet away from where that officer and others had formed a barricade along a city intersection as law enforcement tried to control the crowd. A separate video filmed from above suggests that an officer had been knocked off their bicycle down the street, prompting the police to try and clear the area.

The ground-level footage appears to show Hagopian on the phone, walking towards the sidewalk, when he is blasted across the face with a stream of pepper spray.

“Ah, f**k. They just sprayed,”a voice on the video is heard saying as the officer barks to the crowd while attempting to clear the intersection.

Hagopian later got online and explained what happened in his own words:

“I was marching for Martin Luther King day today – amazing march! At one point after the big main march, group of bike cops set up a line to keep us from marching. Some people walked through the line, but I didn’t. When my phone rang, I turned away from the cops and began walking away to answer the phone. A cop then ran up in my face and pepper sprayed me right in the face.”

The close-up video recording of the incident has since been acquired by James Bible, the former president of the Seattle chapter of the NAACP, who in turn posted it to YouTube on Wednesday in concert with the announcement concerning the court filing. Bible is also serving as Hagopian’s attorney.

According to the Seattle Times, the suit alleges that Hagopian “instantly felt a burning sensation in his eyes and had some difficulty breathing.” The teacher later posted a photograph online showing him trying to tame the effects of the spray by dousing his face with milk.

“The main thing I’m upset about is that [I was on] the sidewalk when I was pepper sprayed so there’s really no reason at all they can use to justify what they did,” Hagopian told The Skanner News. … Full article

January 29, 2015 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Solidarity and Activism, Subjugation - Torture, Video | , , , , , | Leave a comment

« Previous Entries     Next Entries »