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French Child Interrogated by Police for ‘Apology for Terrorism’

teleSUR | January 29, 2015

French police interrogated an eight year old child because he said that “[he was] not Charlie” in class, in the southern city of Nice on Wednesday.

The professor had begun a discussion with his students the day following the attack on the Charlie Hebdo satirical magazine that left 12 dead – 10 journalists and two police. The child justified his refusal to identify with Charlie as “they [the journalists] caricatured the prophet. I am with the terrorists.” The school director, alerted by the teacher, decided to file a complaint for the French crime of “apology of terrorism” -similar to inciting terrorism- last week, against his father, confirmed the education ministry.

One week later, the child was interrogated for two hours in the police station of Nice, informed his lawyer, Sefen Guez Guez.

To the question “What does the word terrorism mean to you?” the child replied, “I do not know,” the lawyer tweeted. “Did you say that the journalists deserved to die?” “Wrong, I have never said that,” he said.

Guez denounced the “current state of collective hysteria that surrounds this notion of apology of terrorism.”

“In this kind of case, pedagogy is what we need,” he asserted, saying he intended to sue the director, which he accused of having abusively punished the boy. The boy claimed he was deprived of playtime, had to stand in the corner, and was even told the following while playing in the sand pit, “Stop digging, you will not find any Tommy gun to shoot us all.” As a diabetic, he was also deprived of his insulin shots, claimed his lawyer.

During the two weeks that have followed the Charlie Hebdo attack, over 70 people have been put on trial for “apology of terrorism,” sometimes just for shouting “Allahu Akbar” to municipal police. In Corsica 30 people were found guilty, including people with mental issues.

Stand-up comedian Dieudonne will be heard in a Parisian court on February 4 for having posted on Facebook “I am Charlie Coulibaly,” a combining the slogan “I am Charlie” and the name of the attacker of a Kosher supermarket, a few days after the Charlie Hebdo tragedy.

January 29, 2015 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Islamophobia | , | Leave a comment

Handcuffs, Leg Shackles and Tasers: The New Face of Punishment in the Public Schools

By John W. Whitehead | The Rutherford Institute | January 26, 2015

“In many parts of the country, teachers are viewed as beyond reproach, much like doctors, police officers, or clergy … and, therefore, are rarely challenged about their classroom conduct. In some cases, this means that actions that would be considered criminal if committed by a parent remain unchallenged by law enforcement if they occur in a school setting.”—Senator Tom Harkin, “Dangerous Use of Seclusion and Restraints in Schools Remains Widespread and Difficult to Remedy: A Review of Ten Cases”

Roughly 1500 kids are tied up or locked down every day by school officials in the United States.

At least 500 students are locked up in some form of solitary confinement every day, whether it be a padded room, a closet or a duffel bag. In many cases, parents are rarely notified when such methods are used.

On any given day when school is in session, kids who “act up” in class are pinned facedown on the floor, locked in dark closets, tied up with straps, bungee cords and duct tape, handcuffed, leg shackled, tasered or otherwise restrained, immobilized or placed in solitary confinement in order to bring them under “control.”

In almost every case, these undeniably harsh methods are used to punish kids for simply failing to follow directions or throwing tantrums. Very rarely do the kids pose any credible danger to themselves or others.

Unbelievably, these tactics are all legal, at least when employed by school officials or school resource officers (a.k.a. police officers) in the nation’s public schools.

For example, in what may be the youngest example of a child being restrained in this way, in October 2014, a 4-year-old Virginia preschooler was handcuffed, leg shackled and transported to the sheriff’s office after reportedly throwing blocks and climbing on top of the furniture. School officials claim the restraints were necessary to protect the adults from injury.

In New York, “school safety agents” tied a 5-year-old ADHD student to a chair with Velcro straps as a punishment for throwing a tantrum in class. Police officers claim the straps were necessary because the boy had tried to bite one of the adults.

A 6-year-old kindergarten student in a Georgia public school was handcuffed, transported to the police station, and charged with simple battery of a schoolteacher and criminal damage to property for throwing a temper tantrum at school.

A second-grader in Arizona who suffers from ADHD was duct-taped to her chair after getting up to sharpen her pencil too often.

Kentucky school officials placed a 9-year-old autistic student in a duffel bag as a punishment acting up in class. Turns out, it wasn’t the first time the boy had been placed inside the “therapy bag.”

An 11-year-old special needs student had his hands cuffed behind his back and was driven home in a police car after refusing to come inside after recess and acting in an out of control manner by “passively” resisting police officers.

Unfortunately, these are far from isolated incidents.

According to a ProPublica investigative report, such harsh punishments are part of a widespread phenomenon plaguing school districts across the country.

Indeed, as investigative reporter Heather Vogell points out, this is a local story everywhere. It’s happening in my town. It’s happening in your town. It’s happening in every school district in America.

In 2012 alone, there were more than 267,000 attempts by school officials to restrain or lock up students using straps, bungee cords, and duct tape. The numbers are likely far greater when one accounts for the schools that underreport their use of such tactics.

Vogell found that “most [incidents] of restraints and seclusions happen to kids with disabilities—and are more likely to happen to kids with autism or emotional/behavioral problems.” Often due to their age, their emotional distress, or their disabilities, these young people are unable to tell their parents about the abusive treatment being meted out to them by school officials.

At least 500 students are placed in “Scream Rooms” every day (there were 104,000 reported uses of scream rooms in a given year). For those unfamiliar with the term, a “scream room” is an isolated, unmonitored, locked room—sometimes padded, often as small as four-feet-by-four-feet—which school officials use to place students in seclusion.

These scream rooms are a far cry from the tested and approved “time out,” which involves monitoring the child in a non-locked setting in order to calm him down. As psychiatrist Keith Albow points out, “Scream rooms are nothing but solitary confinement, and by extension, that makes every school that uses them a prison. They turn principals into wardens and make every student an inmate.”

Schools acting like prisons. School officials acting like wardens. Students treated like inmates and punished like hardened criminals.

This is the end product of all those so-called school “safety” policies, which run the gamut from zero tolerance policies that punish all infractions harshly to surveillance cameras, metal detectors, random searches, drug-sniffing dogs, school-wide lockdowns, active-shooter drills and militarized police officers.

Paradoxically, instead of making the schools safer, school officials have succeeded in creating an environment in which children are so traumatized that they suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, nightmares, anxiety, mistrust of adults in authority, as well as feelings of anger, depression, humiliation, despair and delusion.

Even in the face of parental outrage, lawsuits, legislative reforms, investigative reports and endless cases showing that these tactics are not working and “should never be used for punishment or discipline,” full-grown adults—police officers and teachers alike—insist that the reason they continue to handcuff, lock up and restrain little kids is because they fear for their safety and the safety of others.

“Fear for one’s safety” has become such a hackneyed and threadbare excuse for behavior that is inexcusable. Dig a little deeper and you’ll find that explanation covers a multitude of sins, whether it’s poorly trained police officers who shoot first and ask questions later, or school officials who are ill-equipped to deal with children who act like children, meaning they don’t always listen, they sometimes throw tantrums, and they have a hard time sitting still.

That’s not to say all schools are bad. In fact, there are a small but growing number of schools that are proactively switching to a policy of Positive Behavior Interventions and Supports (PBIS), which relies on the use of “engaging instruction, combined with acknowledgement or feedback of positive student behavior,” in order to reduce the need for unnecessary discipline and promote a climate of greater productivity, safety, and learning.  One school in Pennsylvania for children with significant behavior challenges found that they were able to “reduce the use of physical restraint from approximately 1,000 incidents per year in 1998 to only three incidents total in 2012” after switching to a PBIS-oriented program. If exposed to this positive reinforcement early enough in school, by the time a student makes it to the third grade, little to no intervention is required.

Unfortunately, these schools are still in the minority in an age that values efficiency, expediency and conformity, where it’s often faster and easier to “lock down” a kid who won’t sit still, won’t follow orders, and won’t comply.

Certainly, this is a mindset we see all too often in the American police state.

So what’s the answer, not only for the here-and-now—the children growing up in these quasi-prisons—but for the future of this country? How do you convince a child who has been routinely handcuffed, shackled, tied down, locked up, and immobilized by government officials—all before he reaches the age of adulthood—that he has any rights at all, let alone the right to challenge wrongdoing, resist oppression and defend himself against injustice?

Most of all, as I point out in my book A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, how do you persuade a fellow American that the government works for him when for most of his young life, he has been incarcerated in an institution that teaches young people to be obedient and compliant citizens who don’t talk back, don’t question and don’t challenge authority?

Peter Gray, a professor of psychology at Boston College, believes that school is a prison that is damaging our kids, and it’s hard to disagree, especially with the numbers of police officers being assigned to schools on the rise. What this means, notes Mother Jones, is greater police “involvement in routine discipline matters that principals and parents used to address without involvement from law enforcement officers.”

Students, in turn, are not only finding themselves subjected to police tactics such as handcuffs, leg shackles, tasers and excessive force for “acting up” but are also being ticketed, fined and sent to court for behavior perceived as defiant, disruptive or disorderly such as spraying perfume and writing on a desk.

Clearly, the pathology that characterizes the American police state has passed down to the schools. Now in addition to the government and its agents viewing the citizenry as suspects to be probed, poked, pinched, tasered, searched, seized, stripped and generally manhandled, all with the general blessing of the court, our children in the public schools are also fair game.

What can be done?

Without a doubt, change is needed, but that will mean taking on the teachers’ unions, the school unions, the educators’ associations, and the police unions, not to mention the politicians dependent on their votes and all of the corporations that profit mightily from an industrial school complex.

As we’ve seen with other issues, any significant reforms will have to start locally and trickle upwards. For a start, parents need to be vocal, visible and organized and demand that school officials 1) adopt a policy of positive reinforcement in dealing with behavior issues; 2) minimize the presence in the schools of police officers and cease involving them in student discipline; and 3) insist that all behavioral issues be addressed first and foremost with a child’s parents, before any other disciplinary tactics are attempted.

“Children are the messages we send to a time we will not see,” Professor Neil Postman once wrote. If we do not rein in the police state’s influence in the schools, the future to which we are sending our children will be characterized by a brutal, totalitarian regime.

January 28, 2015 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Subjugation - Torture, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

FOIA Documents Reveal Massive DEA Program to Record American’s Whereabouts With License Plate Readers

By Bennett Stein & Jay Stanley | ACLU | January 26, 2015

The Drug Enforcement Administration has initiated a massive national license plate reader program with major civil liberties concerns but disclosed very few details, according to new DEA documents obtained by the ACLU through the Freedom of Information Act.

The DEA is currently operating a National License Plate Recognition initiative that connects DEA license plate readers with those of other law enforcement agencies around the country. A Washington Post headline proclaimed in February 2014 that the Department of Homeland Security had cancelled its “national license-plate tracking plan,” but all that was ended was one Immigrations and Customs Enforcement solicitation for proposals. In fact, a government-run national license plate tracking program already exists, housed within the DEA. (That’s in addition to the corporate license plate tracking database run by Vigilant Solutions, holding billions of records about our movements.) Since its inception in 2008, the DEA has provided limited information to the public on the program’s goals, capabilities and policies. Information has trickled out over the years, in testimony here or there. But far too little is still known about this program.

In 2012, the ACLU filed public records requests in 38 states and Washington, D.C. seeking information about the use of automatic license plate readers. Our July 2013 report, You Are Being Tracked, summarized our findings with regard to state and local law enforcement agencies, finding that the technology was being rapidly adopted, all too often with little attention paid to the privacy risks of this powerful technology. But in addition to filing public records requests with state agencies, the ACLU also filed FOIA requests with federal agencies, including the DEA.

The new DEA records that we received are heavily redacted and incomplete, but they provide the most complete documentation of the DEA’s database to date. For example, the DEA has previously testified that its license plate reader program began at the southwest border crossings, and that the agency planned to gradually increase its reach; we now know more about to where it has grown. The DEA had previously suggested that “other sources” would be able to feed data into the database; we now know about some of the types of agencies collaborating with the DEA.

The documents uncovered by our FOIA request provide additional details, but their usefulness is limited by the DEA’s decision to provide only documents that are undated or years old. If the DEA’s collection of location information is as extensive as the agency has suggested in its limited comments to legislatures, the public deserves a more complete and comprehensive explanation than the smattering of records we have obtained can provide.

These records do, however, offer documentation that this program is a major DEA initiative that has the potential to track our movements around the country. With its jurisdiction and its finances, the federal government is uniquely positioned to create a centralized repository of all drivers’ movements across the country — and the DEA seems to be moving toward doing just that. If license plate readers continue to proliferate without restriction and the DEA holds license plate reader data for extended periods of time, the agency will soon possess a detailed and invasive depiction of our lives (particularly if combined with other data about individuals collected by the government, such as the DEA’s recently revealed bulk phone records program, or cell phone information gleaned from U.S. Marshals Service’s cell site simulator-equipped aircraft ). Data-mining the information, an unproven law enforcement technique that the DEA has begun to use here, only exacerbates these concerns, potentially tagging people as criminals without due process.

Some major findings from the documents

The National License Plate Recognition Initiative includes a massive database containing data from both DEA-owned automatic license plate readers and other readers. Among the findings from the FOIA documents:

  • At the time of an undated slideshow, the DEA had deployed at least 100 license plate readers across the United States (eight states are identified: California, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Florida, Georgia, and New Jersey). A 2010 document also explains that the DEA had by then set up 41 plate reader monitoring stations throughout Texas, New Mexico, and California.
  • The DEA is also inviting federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies around the country to contribute location information to the database. For example, the documents show that local and regional law enforcement systems in Southern California’s San Diego and Imperial Counties and New Jersey all provide data to the DEA. The program was “officially opened” to these partners in May 2009. Other agencies are surely partnering with the DEA to share information, but these agreements are still secret, leaving the public unable to know who has their location information and how it is being used.
  • Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) is one of the federal agencies that has shared information with the DEA. An undated Memorandum of Understanding explains that the agencies will, “at regular intervals,” provide each other license plate reader data. It also authorizes the two agencies to further share each other’s data with other federal, state, and local law enforcement and prosecutors as well as to “intelligence, operations, and fusion centers.” This is a lot of location points. CBP collects “nearly 100 percent of land border traffic,” which amounts to over 793.5 million license plates between May 2009 and May 2013, according to CBP’s response to our FOIA request.
  • Additionally, any federal, state, or local law enforcement agent vetted by the DEA’s El Paso Intelligence Center can conduct queries of the database, located in Merrifield, Va.
  • The same undated slideshow suggests that there were over 343 million records in the database at the date of the slide’s publication (due to redactions, it is impossible to confirm that date from this document).
  • The unredacted parts of the documents and news reports suggest that the DEA recently changed its retention policy to six months for non-hit data. While this is an improvement from previous statements of DEA retention policy, it is still far too long. The government should not collect or retain information revealing the movements of millions of people accused of no crime. But even that long retention period is only meaningful if it comes with strict rules limiting data use, sharing, and access. Like its retention policy, the DEA should make these policies public.
  • The DEA says that the National License Plate Recognition Initiative targets roadways that the agency believes are commonly used for contraband transport. But it’s not clear what this means or what it is based on. Every highway in the United States must be regularly used for contraband transport. Is the DEA using this undefined mandate to target people of color? Without more information from the DEA, we have no idea.
  • One DEA document references steps needed to ensure the program meets its goals, “of which asset forfeiture is primary.” Asset forfeiture has been in the news a lot lately, criticized as a widely abused law enforcement tactic that doesn’t advance public safety but simply enriches police and federal agencies.
  • The program also apparently data mines license plate reader data “to identify travel patterns.” The extent of this data mining is unknown. Is the DEA running all of our license plate reads through a program to predict our likelihood of committing a crime? Are we all suspects if we drive on a certain road? What else does the DEA think it knows about us just from the collection and analysis of our locations via license plate reader data?

More answers are needed

The DEA’s license plate reader programs raise serious civil liberties concerns, and the agency should be open about what it is doing so that those activities can be subject to public debate. Among other questions, the agency should answer these:

  • How many license plate readers does DEA currently own and operate? In which states? And, how much did it spend on these license plate readers?
  • Which policies govern the use of the license plate readers? Which policies govern the use of the license plate reader database? Has the agency done a Privacy Impact Assessment on these programs?
  • How many license plate reader hits have resulted in arrest and prosecution of a serious crime? How many license plate reader hits have not correlated to an alert upon further investigation (a “mis-hit”)?
  • From which local, state, and tribal law enforcement agencies does the DEA receive license plate reader data?
  • Which additional agencies does the DEA partner with? How many people have been approved to conduct queries of the DEA database?
  • Has the DEA used or attempted to use Vigilant Solution’s National Vehicle Location Service or a similar privately-run license plate reader database? Does DEA combine information from its own database with records in Vigilant’s, creating a mega-database in a public-private surveillance partnership?

As is the case with most police and federal law enforcement spy technologies, license plate tracking programs have flown under the radar of courts and legislators for far too long, silently collecting records about ordinary Americans in the cover of secrecy. When programs are secret, we have no way of challenging them or ensuring they conform with our values and the law. Before accountability comes transparency. Over the coming weeks, we will continue to release records documenting the federal government’s significant investment in automatic license plate readers and its unregulated and largely unseen location tracking programs.

January 27, 2015 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Corruption, Deception | , , , , , | Leave a comment

North Sinai curfew extended by 3 months

Sinai Al Arish police sta copie

North Sinai police station – Photo by Virginie Nguyen
By Omar Ryad | Mada Masr | January 25, 2015

The government has extended a curfew in North Sinai by three months, citing ongoing security concerns in the region.

The curfew was initially put in place for three months on October 25, after attacks on military checkpoints that killed more than 30 security personnel.

It was set to expire Sunday, but the Cabinet elected to extend it for an additional three months, Cabinet Spokesperson Hossam al-Qawish said during a telephone interview with private satellite channel CBC extra.

Qawish said that the ongoing unrest in the region convinced the government that the curfew and other security operations need to continue.

The curfew is now set to expire April 25.

It was originally imposed from 5 pm to 7 am each day, with anyone outside during curfew at risk of being shot or arrested. It has cut short working hours and transformed North Sinai’s cities into ghost towns.

In December, the hours were reduced in some parts of North Sinai to run from 7 pm to 6 am, after a meeting between President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi and tribal elders in Sinai.

However, area residents told a Mada Masr correspondent in Arish that the curfew still remains a significant hardship.

Forcing businesses to close early has pushed the city into a general state of recession and increased robbery and thuggery, area residents say.

Instead of keeping crime down, residents say the checkpoints that implement the curfew “only protect themselves,” in addition to increasing the numbers of random arrests.

Crimes against property are not the biggest problem, says Arish resident Abu Abdallah al-Tarabeen. “We can handle all of this if it is for the general wellbeing, but what we cannot stand are the large numbers of dead bodies, reaching around 50 bodies, left out for over two years in the isolated northern areas in Rafah and Sheikh Zuwayed,” he said, referring to a mass grave site in Arish.

A report released Saturday by the Ambulance Authority said that eleven bodies were buried around the grave site Tarabeen refers to, making it difficult for the authorities to process remains for burial or autopsies. According to Tarabeen, the 50 bodies were all killed by live ammunition in previous clashes.

Further inflaming tensions, on January 22 a family was shot minutes after the curfew was imposed at 7 pm.

Over the past months, soldiers have generally allowed a 30-minute grace period for employees, children and families to make their way home from the local market, but on that day, soldiers manning the checkpoint declared the grace period was no longer in effect and opened fire on civilians in the street.

One man was reportedly shot at while on the way home from buying wedding dresses for his three daughters. His wife and other relatives were also hit, and had to be transferred to intensive care.

The military has also evacuated and demolished homes in Rafah as part of a planned buffer zone along Egypt’s border with the Gaza Strip.

January 25, 2015 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Subjugation - Torture | , | Leave a comment

UK Police officer who kicked mother tending to sick child cleared

RT | January 23, 2015

A police officer accused of repeatedly kicking and hitting a mother looking after a sick child in hospital has been cleared of actual bodily harm (ABH).

The woman was left with over 40 injuries after Warren Luke, a Metropolitan police officer, kicked and hit her after hospital staff told him she was refusing to leave.

Luke was cleared on Thursday of any crime at Wood Green Crown Court.

The mother, who remains unnamed for legal reasons, was looking after her daughter when the incident occurred in 2013. Hospital staff asked the woman to leave, the court heard. When she refused, four police officers were called.

A video played to the jury showed the mother explaining the incident.

“‘You’ve got to leave, you’ve got to leave,’” she reported Luke as saying.

“I kept playing with my daughter and then I saw him moving towards me. He was kicking me and kicking me. He had one hand on my head. When I fell on the bed he grabbed my hair and banged my head. I was screaming. I couldn’t defend myself. My ex-husband ran in and shouted, ‘why are you kicking my wife?’”

Luke, however, protested that the mother’s behavior had been “escalating” and he believed the child was in danger.

Rather than use a baton or gas, he told the court that he decided to strike the mother on her bicep, and then use what he referred to as a “distraction strike” to her face, using his boot.

He claimed his actions were in accordance with his training.

“I did kick out at the left side of her face as trained to do. My footwear was a boot but it’s light,” he said.

“I can’t say exactly where and how her injuries were sustained, I can only say what I did,” he replied, when asked how she sustained so many injuries.

The women was reported to have needed plastic surgery after the incident, and is said to have taken a year off work to recover.

He denied using full force on the woman, saying: “I wouldn’t say that I used full force, but I do remember hitting harder because it had no effect.

“I used police tactics with good reason that were absolutely necessary. I didn’t go too far. Whenever a police officer uses force you need to be accountable for it,” he added.

Witnesses described with horror the clash between the two, and said they were “appalled.”

Two police officers, who were called to attend to the woman, also gave evidence. One, Laura Riley, was seen crying as she gave evidence for the prosecution. Her colleague Mary Clark said it was “just horrific.”

A spokesperson for the Metropolitan Police said Luke would undergo a misconduct review following the incident.

January 23, 2015 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Subjugation - Torture | , , | Leave a comment

Exonerating the CIA

When the Establishment Investigates Itself

By BINOY KAMPMARK | CounterPunch | January 21, 2015

Exonerating spooks for improper conduct is a regular feature of the establishment. After all, you don’t convict your own, turning your nose at activities pursued under the grand, catch-all term of national security. From the start, the CIA review, established to investigate its own activities into spying on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, was always predictably constituted, with predictable outcomes.

The “accountability board” was chaired by former Sen. Evan Bayh (D-Indiana), along with former Obama White House attorney Bob Bauer and, as anticipated, three senior CIA officers. The originating source of its convening was yet another predictable feature: the CIA itself. (The board was convened in August 2014 by CIA Director John Brennan.)

Its task: to investigate alleged misconduct of five CIA employees who improperly accessed computer data belonging to the SSCI under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and the Wiretap Act, and make recommendations that “future instances of the miscommunication and confusion that led to this controversy” do not occur again.

The background to the review proved acrimonious. The SSCI had an issue over the CIA prying into its material on the agency’s rendition and torture program. The CIA, in turn, felt that the senators and their staff had obtained unauthorised access to agency documents and improperly dealt with classified material. The Department of Justice, sensing trouble, evaded the issue.

Last March, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) suggested that the CIA search may have violated a range of legal provisions, citing the Fourth Amendment, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, and Executive Order 12333 prohibiting the agency from conducting domestic searches or surveillance.

The CIA, according to Feinstein, had become a power onto its own, effectively subverting the constitution. From the start, it hired “a team of outside contractors – who otherwise would not have had access to these sensitive documents – to read, multiple times, each of the 6.2 million pages of documents produced, before providing them to a fully-cleared committee staff conducting the committee’s oversight work.” Naturally, it “proved to be a slow and very expensive process” (Truthdig, Mar 12, 2014).

Wednesday’s redacted report by the review board, termed the “Final Report of the Rendition, Detention and Interrogation Network Agency Accountability Board”, concluded in rather bland fashion that the entire affair had been a misunderstanding. That blandness also involved a good deal of hair splitting, riddled by legal dissembling. “The Board determined that while an informal understanding existed that SSCI work product should be protected, no common understanding existed about the roles and responsibilities in the case of a suspected security incident.”

It found that the “core” of that misguided understanding centred on “the establishment of SSCI shared drives that would be walled-off but also accessible to CIA IT staff for the purpose of IT network administration.” While “SSCI work product was often cited as protected… these were not clearly defined or agreed to by both parties.”

Evidently, areas of cognition vary in relationships between the intelligence community and the community that oversees it – understanding differs on whether it is informal, which can lead to breaches of trust, or “common”, in which case, it is assumed to be firmer. Truth be told, the CIA did not particularly like senatorial staff digging in a rather dirty intelligence backyard.

Accordingly, the board found that “none of the five individuals under review by the board was responsible for this mistake, and two of them – the most senior – had expressly counselled that care be taken to avoid accessing [SSCI] work product.”

Read between the lines, and you can only deduce that the senators and staff had to assume that they would be spied upon. (The names of who authorised such conduct have been redacted.) In the pecking order of the Republic, political figures investigating a body for alleged criminal conduct were the ones to be monitored. This attitude is outlined in so far as the CIA had “obligations under the National Security Act”, with a pressing legal duty to search the computers “for the presence of Agency documents to which SSCI staff should not have access.”

Various recommendations were made regarding the use of shared computer networks having classified material, though the agency retains the prerogative to define how those boundaries are to be charted. Expect more misunderstandings in due course. A specific omission from the review is the failure to explain the disappearance of material off the system, including the now famed Internal Panetta Review.

A standout feature that somehow undermines the constitutionally motivated anger of SSCI committee members lies in its inconsistent attitude to surveillance. Bulk gathering of data on US citizens, and non-citizens, has its uses, but keeping an eye on Congress, a body which has also taken its eye off constitutional erosions, doesn’t. The question is one of degree: who are the greater rogues?

The exoneration of CIA employees may well sting, but it has its own institutionalised justifications. Even the president agrees. According to Barack Obama’s spokesman, Jay Carney, the president expressed “great confidence in John Brennan and confidence in our intelligence community and in our professionals at the CIA” (Truthdig, Mar 12, 2014). The establishment simply got off the hook, again.

Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com

 

January 21, 2015 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance, Progressive Hypocrite | , , | Leave a comment

The FBI’s Dubious Record on Prosecuting Terror Plots

Fake plots get busted, real ones get a pass

By Dave Lindorff | ThisCantBeHappening! | January 19, 2015

If you’re planning to commit an act of terror in the US and want to be left alone by the FBI, make sure your target is something, or someone, that the US government doesn’t like or care about.

Consider these two terrorist plots.

Just last week, on Jan. 14, the FBI announced that it had arrested Christopher Lee Cornell, a guy in Ohio the bureau alleges had plans to attack Congress with pipe bombs and guns. Apparently acting alone, Cornell is alleged by the FBI to have “researched how to make pipe bombs” (there’s no indication that he actually made or tested any actual bombs), and to have purchased a pair of M-15 semi-automatic rifles and ammunition. How Cornell, who is described as a self-styled “jihadist,” but one with no real connection with foreign Islamic militants, planned to get past the metal detectors and tight security at the Capitol Building in Washington, was not explained, and probably was not known to Cornell himself. It also appears that the FBI was watching Cornell all along, and no doubt encouraging him too, as it was working with a snitch — a man facing prosecution who was in communication with Cornell and may well have been a provocateur, given the Bureau’s prior history of luring vulnerable people into planning terror acts which it then busts.

Compare this case with one we reported on earlier here, which was in the works in the fall of 2011. I’m referring to a terrorism plot in Houston, TX, which the FBI never did report publicly, but which was instead disclosed only thanks to some documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act in 2012 by the Washington, DC-based public interest law firm Partnership for Civil Justice, and which involved an apparently well-developed plan to assassinate leaders of the Houston Occupy Movement. Those documents — internal memos sent out by FBI offices in Houston and Gainesville, FL — refer to “one identified [deleted]” that “planned to engage in sniper attacks against protesters in Houston, Texas if deemed necessary.”

The initial memo, sent to FBI headquarters in Washington from the Houston FBI office, went on to say that the “identified” plotters “had received intelligence that indicated the protesters in New York and Seattle planned similar protests in Houston, Dallas, San Antonio and Austin, Texas,” and that they “planned to gather intelligence against the leaders of the protest group and obtain photographs, then formulate a plan to kill the leadership by suppressed sniper rifles.”

A second memo, sent out by the Gainesville, FL FBI office, says that the Houston assassination plot, while not executed, was actually just put on hold. As that memo states: “writer sent via email an excerpt from the daily [DELETED] regarding FBI Houston’s [DELETED] to all IAs, SSRAs and SSA [DELETED] This [DELETED] identified the exploitation of the Occupy Movement by [LENGTHY DELETION] interested in developing a long-term plan to kill local Occupy leaders via sniper fire.”

That’s a lot of rich detail about an evidently serious plot that never resulted in any arrests.

Yet as we reported in an article which just won a 2015 Project Censored Award, the FBI never pursued this plot and never arrested anyone. Indeed when Paul Bresson, the senior public affairs officer for the Bureau in Washington, was asked by this reporter for an explanation for this bizarre lack of interest in a known plot to murder innocent protesters, and for the identity of the terrorist plotters, he evasively replied, “The FOIA documents that you reference are redacted in several places pursuant to FOIA and privacy laws that govern the release of such information so therefore I am unable to help fill in the blanks that you are seeking. Exemptions are cited in each place where a redaction is made. As far as the question about the murder plot, I am unable to comment further, but rest assured if the FBI was aware of credible and specific information involving a murder plot, law enforcement would have responded with appropriate action.”

Actually, the response of the US Homeland Security Department to journalists who looked into the federal government’s involvement in the violent suppression of the 2011 Occupy movement shouldn’t make anyone feel like “resting assured” about anything. In 2014, we learned that our publication, in fact, had been the subject back on Nov. 18, 2011, of an alert sent out by Homeland Security’s Washington Office of Threat Assessment to all Fusion Centers around the country, saying ThisCantBeHappening! had published an article exposing the Homeland Security’s central role in orchestrating the wave of local police violence against Occupy encampments across the country.

The conclusion, hard to avoid, is that the FBI and Justice Department are playing a double game when it comes to terrorism. On one hand they have been aggressively pursuing a campaign of entrapment and outright incitement, actively promoting and assisting in the development of bogus terror plots by naive or mentally unbalanced individuals, so that they can later “bust” those plots, thereby justifying their expansive police-state tactics while keeping the public in a constant state of fear. On the other hand, they are either turning a blind eye towards genuine plots aimed against activists and radical protests, such as the one “identified” in Houston in the fall of 2011, or worse, are maybe actively involved in the development of those plots, which they then do not prosecute or prevent from happening.

This is something we need to keep in mind as we watch the trial of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the only surviving suspect or witness in the Boston Marathon bombing — an actual terrorism act that has many rational people wondering how much the government knew in advance, or wondering if they were just patsies who were set up to look that way.

 

January 20, 2015 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception | , , | Leave a comment

Delaware man: Police probing Biden shooting ‘beat the daylights out of me’

RT | January 20, 2015

A Delaware man said that local police violently accosted him before he was arrested, as law enforcement officials investigated reports of multiple gunshots near the home of Vice President Joe Biden in Greenville, Delaware.

B7wOFAfCQAAYwj9There has been an ongoing investigation into the shooting incident near Biden’s home, but the man, Rock Peters, was arrested roughly 30 minutes after the gunshots were reported. Peters said he was left with a swollen nose, rib injuries, multiple face abrasions and a black eye after New Castle County police beat him.

The incident occurred on Saturday night when Peters had been driving a car near the entrance to Joe Biden’s estate, as officers were closing traffic after reports of the gunfire incident. An officer advised Peters to turn around, but Peters told him it was the only way he knew.

The police officer began to walk away but returned after he thought he heard Peters say something, at which point Peters sped away.

Shortly afterwards, Peters was pulled over by another police officer who radioed for assistance. The police officer signaled for Peters to step out of the vehicle and, as he did, Peters put his right hand in his right jacket pocket, according to police.

At this time the officer placed his left hand on Peters’ arm and forced him to the ground. With another officer, the two cops struggled with Peters, and one of the officers struck him on his shoulder, neck and head with is knee.

“They beat the daylights out of me,” Peters told The News Journal, adding that he did nothing wrong during his interaction with police. He also denied being connected in any way to the shooting incident, and was not charged in connection with the gunfire.

Police didn’t find a weapon on him, but Peters does face reckless endangerment and resisting arrest charges after fleeing from one officer and scuffling with two others, according to a police affidavit.

“That’s a lie,” Peters told the News Journal. “This is what they did to me,” he said, showing the newspaper’s reporter the bloody, stained clothes from when he says a New Castle police officer punched him in the face.

Regarding the shooting, the Secret Service and New Castle County police had no update on Monday, but they have continued to search for a suspect and witnesses. Joe Biden and his wife, Dr. Jill Biden, were in the state over the weekend but not at home at the time of the shooting incident.

January 20, 2015 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Subjugation - Torture | , | Leave a comment

Guatemalan Court Sentences Ex-Police Chief for Murdering 37

teleSUR | January 19, 2015

A Guatemalan court found Pedro Garcia Arredondo guilty of murder, attempted murder, and crimes against humanity Monday for the massacre of 37 people at the Spanish embassy in Guatemala 35 years ago, EFE reports.

Garcia Arredondo, 69, is responsible for burning the victims of the massacre to death on Jan. 31, 1980, found the court after four months of hearings.

The tribunal outcome confirmed the long-held suspicions in the country that the fire was the result of a “clandestine police operation” and that the participants “prevented the Red Cross, emergency services, and journalists from entering” the building.

The former police chief was still trying to declare his innocence, but Judge Sara Yoc Yoc ruled that he gave the orders to burn down the embassy. According to her ruling, Garcia Arredondo “used the media to confirm the deaths of those inside the embassy.”

The security forces of Guatemala’s military regime at the time attacked the Spanish embassy after rural workers and students occupied it in protest to the dictatorship.

Among the 37 burned to death was Spanish Consul Jaime Ruiz del Arbol Soler and Vicente Menchu and Francisco Tum, the father and cousin, respectively, of 1992 Nobel Prize Winner Rigoberta Menchu. Menchu gave the first testimony against Garcia Arredondo in the case.

Just two people survived the fire, including the Spanish ambassador. The other, Guatemalan farmer Gregorio Yuja, subsequently disappeared and his body was found with evidence of torture three days after the fire in the rectory of the State University of San Carlos of Guatemala. Yuja has since become a symbol of the left-wing student movement.

Garcia Arredondo was first arrested in 2011 over the forced disappearance of a university student, also in 1980. He is three years into a 70 year sentence for that crime.

January 20, 2015 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Subjugation - Torture | , , | Leave a comment

A 1961 Massacre of Algerians in Paris When the Media Failed the Test

By James J. Napoli – Washington Report on Middle East Affairs – March 1997

A colleague of mine in Cairo told me a story a few years ago about a massacre in the streets of Paris.

He was a news service reporter at the time of the violence in the French capital —Oct. 17, 1961—and saw tens of bodies of dead Algerians piled like cordwood in the center of the city in the wake of what would now be called a police riot.

But his superiors at the news agency stopped him from telling the full story then, and most of the world paid little attention to the thin news coverage that the massacre did receive. Even now, the events of that time are not widely known and many people, like myself, had never heard of them at all.

This year is an apt time to recall what happened, and not only because this is the 35th anniversary year of Algerian independence. The continuing civil war in Algeria and the growing violence and racism in France, as well as the appalling slaughters taking place elsewhere in the world, give it a disturbing currency.

Here’s what happened:

Unarmed Algerian Muslims demonstrating in central Paris against a discriminatory curfew were beaten, shot, garotted and even drowned by police and special troops. Thousands were rounded up and taken to detention centers around the city and the prefecture of police, where there were more beatings and killings.

How many died? No one seems to know for sure, even now. Probably around 200.

It seems astonishing today, from this perspective, that such a thing could happen in the middle of a major Western capital closely covered by the international media. This was not Kabul, Beijing, Hebron or some Bosnian backwater, after all, but the City of Light—Paris.

But the Fifth Republic under President Charles de Gaulle was in trouble in October 1961. De Gaulle, who was primarily interested in establishing France’s pre-eminent position in Western Europe and the world, found himself presiding over domestic chaos. France was constantly disrupted by strikes and protests by farmers and workers, as well as by terrorism from opposing organizations: the Front de Libération Nationalè (FLN), representing the Algerian nationalist independence movement, and the Organisation Armée Secrete (OAS), a group of disaffected soldiers, politicians and others committed to keeping Algeria French. The OAS rightly perceived that de Gaulle was bound to free France from the burden of its last major colonial holding, so he could get on with the business of making France the economic and political power of his lofty ambition.

Eyewitness reports recounted stranglings by police.

But the vicious war in Algeria, marked by bloody atrocities committed on all sides, had been grinding on for nearly seven years. Terrorist attacks in Paris and other French cities had claimed dozens of lives of police, provoking what Interior Minister Roger Frey called la juste colère—the just anger—of the police. They vented that anger on the evening of Oct. 17. About 30,000 Muslims—from among some 200,000 Algerians, ostensibly French citizens, living in and around Paris—descended upon the boulevards of central Paris from three different directions. The demonstration of men, women and children was called by the FLN to protest an 8:30 p.m. curfew imposed only on Muslims.

The demonstrators were met by about 7,000 police and members of special Republican Security companies, armed with heavy truncheons or guns. They let loose on the demonstrators in, among other places, Saint Germain-des-Prés, the Opéra, the Place de la Concorde, the Champs Elysée, around the Place de l’ètoile and, on the edges of the city, at the Rond Point de la Defense beyond Nèuilly.

My news agency friend counted at least 30 corpses of demonstrators in several piles outside his office near the city center, into which he had pulled some Algerians to get them away from rampaging police. Another correspondent reported seeing police backing unarmed Algerians into corners on side streets and clubbing them at will. Later eyewitness reports recounted stranglings by police and the drowning of Algerians in the Seine, from which bodies would be recovered downstream for weeks to come.

Thousands of Algerians were rounded up and brought to detention centers, where the violence against them continued. “Drowning by Bullets,” a British TV documentary aired about four years ago, alleges that scores of Algerians were murdered in full view of police brass in the courtyard of the central police headquarters. The prefect of police was Maurice Papon, who recently was still denying charges that he was responsible for deporting French Jews to Auschwitz during World War II while he was part of the Vichy government.

The Official Version

The full horror of this inglorious 1961 episode in French history was largely covered up at the time. Though harrowing personal accounts did eventually percolate to the surface in the French press, the newspapers—enfeebled by years of government censorship and control—for the most part stuck with official figures that only two and, later, five people had died in the demonstration. Government-owned French TV showed Algerians being shipped out of France after the demonstration, but showed none of the police violence.

Journalists had been warned away from coverage of the demonstration and were not allowed near the detention centers.

With few exceptions, the British and American press stuck to the official story, including suggestions that the Algerians had opened fire first. Even the newsman who saw the piles of Algerian corpses was not allowed to report the story; his bosses ordered that the bureau reports stick to the official figures.

Both French and foreign journalists in Paris seemed tacitly to agree that nothing should be done to further destabilize the French government or endanger de Gaulle, who was widely seen as the last, best hope for navigating France out of its troubles.

The story quickly died, drowned out by fresher alarums and excursions in Europe and elsewhere. And, of course, in the next year, Algeria would have its independence.

Jacques Vergès, the controversial French lawyer who represented the FLN during the war in Algeria, told me in an interview last summer that the police violence and government and press cover-up in 1961 were not surprising. The political circumstances were right for it, and the news media usually do what they’re told.

Just look at how easy it was to round up and intern American citizens of Japanese descent after Pearl Harbor, he observed.

If he’s right, then the problem for politicians is to make sure that the conditions for injustice and atrocity do not conjoin, that there is no probability created for massacres like the one in Paris in October 1961. And if the politicians fail, then the problem for journalists and others is how to resist becoming their accomplices.

January 19, 2015 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Full Spectrum Dominance, Subjugation - Torture, Timeless or most popular | , , | Leave a comment

Theresa May Performs The Pre Traumatic Stress

By Gilad Atzmon | January 19, 2015

In The Wandering Who I wrote, “within the condition of the Pre-Traumatic Stress Disorder, the stress is the outcome of a phantasmic event, an imaginary episode set in the future; an event that has never taken place. Unlike the PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) in which stress comes as the direct reaction to an event that (may) have taken place in the past, within the state of Pre-TSD, the stress is the clearly the outcome of an imaginary potential event… If it is taken to extremes, even an agenda of total war against the rest of the world is not an unthinkable reaction…”

The Daily Mail Reports today:

‘Without its Jews, Britain would not be Britain,’ warns Theresa May over fears of an exodus in wake of anti-Semitic attacks.

  • Home Secretary never thought she would see the day Jews wanted to flee
  • She vows to redouble efforts to wipe out anti-Semitism in the UK
  • Eric Pickles says Jewish community is part of what makes Britain tick
  • Board of Deputies hails demonstration of the government’s solidarity
  • Scotland Yard have promised extra police patrols in Jewish areas
  • It comes after gun attack on a Paris kosher supermarket killed four

Needless to mention, that Theresa May’s comments are based on a fear of a future (imaginary) attack on British Jews.

Wouldn’t it be better if, for instance, our mother Theresa were advising British Jews to disassociate themselves from the Jewish State and its militancy? Such an act could save British Jews a lot of trouble.   Theresa May could also suggest to her Tory MP friends to drift away from the Conservative Friends Of Israel club (CFI). At the moment 80% of our Conservative MPs are friends of Tel Aviv, it is not clear how many of them are friendly with Glasgow or Liverpool.

January 19, 2015 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism | , | Leave a comment

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