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Newly appointed Odessa police chief vows to revise release of anti-Kiev activists

RT | May 05, 2014

Addressing a pro-Kiev rally, Odessa’s new head of police spoke against ‘separatism’ and vowed to revise the earlier release of pro-autonomy activists.

Ivan Katerinchuk was appointed following deadly clashes and a fire on Friday that killed dozens in the southeastern port city.

Local media reported that a few hundred people attended the rally near the Odessa interior ministry on Sunday. Some of them were heavily armed with wooden and metal bats, chains, shields, and helmets.

Katerinchuk addressed the crowd with “Glory to Ukraine!,” to which they answered with the traditional “Glory to heroes!,” RT’s Irina Galushko reported from Odessa.

“We don’t ban anybody from peacefully demonstrating and expressing their opinions. But we are against those who are promoting separatism and the splitting of Ukraine. I think that is where we are united,” a YouTube video shows Katerinchuk saying in Ukrainian. “But that does not mean that we should break the law,” he added.

When speaking about the 67 released anti-government activists, he said that all will be investigated and it will be determined if they broke any laws.

He called on the Right Sector to exercise restraint and select individuals who will represent the group in order to easily communicate with it about further actions from police.

The new police chief received his position on Sunday, following Friday’s disastrous events in Odessa. After being appointed, he announced that the priority of police would be to avoid additional clashes.

The police chief was born in western Ukraine. He has worked with the police since 1983 and resigned from the force in 2010 after holding various leadership roles.

His last position was as police chief in Ukraine’s Chernigovskaya region, located in the northwest of the country.

A YouTube video from the Sunday rally shows one of the pro-Kiev leaders shouting, “Odessa must be cleared of Colorado beetles (a derogatory term for pro-autonomy activists) before May 8.”

The same video footage showed that one of the attendees of the rally was the same radical that was shooting at the windows of Odessa’s burning House of Trade Unions.

On Friday, dozens of people died in flames in Odessa, when radicals set ablaze the local House of Trade Unions with anti-government protesters trapped inside. The city is now in mourning for those who died, many of whom suffocated from smoke or jumped out of windows.

Around 100 people rallied in central Odessa on Sunday after blocking the local Interior Ministry department in a protest against the detention of anti-government activists following the tragic events on May 2. The protesters have been trying to prevent police from sending the detained, which reportedly include dozens of survivors of the Trade Unions House fire, to the regional court building.

On Sunday, Ukraine’s acting Prime Minister Arseny Yatsenyuk blamed Russia for being behind the Odessa violence. “What happened in Odessa was part of a plan by the Russian Federation to destroy Ukraine and its statehood,” Yatsenyuk said. “Russia sent people here to create chaos.”

The accusations were not backed up by any evidence. In fact, US ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt said on Sunday that his country does not have evidence linking Russia to the tragic events in Odessa.

“We don’t have evidence of the Russian role in what – the tragedy that transpired on Friday. Prime Minister Yatsenyuk used some very strong words today, talking about the role that he believes Russia played,” Pyatt said in a telephone interview with CNN. “And this is something that we hope an impartial and systematic investigation will be able to get to the bottom of very quickly.”

However, the diplomat added that “we certainly believe that Russia is exercising influence across eastern Ukraine.”

May 5, 2014 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Subjugation - Torture | , , | Leave a comment

Agent Provocateur In Kent State Massacre, Obama Regime Refuses To Look At New Evidence

May 5, 2014 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular, Video | , | Leave a comment

NYPD Spent Years Spying On Muslims, Generated Exactly Zero Leads

By Mike Masnick | Techdirt | August 21, 2012

We just wrote about yet another (in a long line) of manufactured terrorist plots, in which the FBI creates its own terrorist plot to arrest anyone who can be coaxed into going along for the ride, even if they had no interest or ability to push the plot forward on their own. In that case, it was even more ridiculous, because they couldn’t even find anyone willing to go along with the plot — and the main “suspect” actually alerted the FBI to the informant who was trying to coax him into taking part in a plot (which didn’t stop him from being arrested, even if the case was eventually dropped).

Of course, the FBI is not alone in its incredibly ham-fisted anti-terrorism efforts in which the focus seems to be much more about someone’s religious leanings, rather than any actual interest in creating terror. The NY Police Department got plenty of attention for deciding to build their own local versions of the FBI and CIA to try to catch terrorists. That link describes the NYPD as a sort of new “elite” intelligence agency, hiring people out of other intelligence agencies and then placing agents around the globe to try to beat the FBI and CIA at their own game.

Back at home, apparently this included following on the FBI’s tactic of assuming that “brown skin = terrorist.” As such, they’ve spent the past few years spying on “Muslim neighborhoods” throughout New York (with help from the CIA), sending undercover agents and informants into Muslim groups and organizations:

The Demographics Unit is at the heart of a police spying program, built with help from the CIA, which assembled databases on where Muslims lived, shopped, worked and prayed. Police infiltrated Muslim student groups, put informants in mosques, monitored sermons and catalogued every Muslim in New York who adopted new, Americanized surnames.

Police hoped the Demographics Unit would serve as an early warning system for terrorism. And if police ever got a tip about, say, an Afghan terrorist in the city, they’d know where he was likely to rent a room, buy groceries and watch sports.

How useful has it been? Apparently not at all. Not a single lead has come out of the program. Not one.

I know this is a crazy thought, but perhaps violating the privacy of tons of people just because of the color of their skin or their religion, isn’t the best (or even “a”) way to stop terrorists.

May 2, 2014 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Islamophobia, Timeless or most popular | , , | Leave a comment

Shabak Torture Drives Israeli Palestinian Lawyer to Suicide

By Richard Silverstein | Tikun Olam | April 29, 2014

12915Amjad al-Safadi was an East Jerusalem defense attorney whose clients were Palestinian security prisoners. Two months ago, he himself was arrested by the Shabak and detained for 45 days. He was charged with aiding Palestinian militant groups and their detainees. During his detention he was tortured by Shabak interrogator goons. Among his claims were that electric shocks were used against him. He was released from prison and placed under house arrest (the same process used in the case of Majd Kayyal). Yesterday, five days after his release, he hung himself at his home and died.

News1, in that breathless credulous way Israeli media has of reporting Palestinian security “crimes,” claims (Hebrew) that four Palestinian lawyers were arrested (the charge sheet was filed on April 4th) after being recruited by a former prisoner to pass messages to arrestees from Islamic Jihad and Hamas housed in various prisons within Israel.

They were accused of “tens” of violations of various security statutes including “contact with a foreign agent,” “serving an unlawful association,” and “obtaining materials to facilitate in acts of terror.” The accused purportedly passed messages from the prisoners to the leadership of the militant groups with which they were affiliated. The attorneys were allegedly paid between $100-150 for each message delivered, with the funds coming from the militant groups in Gaza. The messages were designed to coordinate protests within the prisons against treatment of security detainees, including hunger strikes, attempts to establish “radio contact between Gaza and the prisons,” transfer of funds among the prisons and coordination between the organizations and their imprisoned leaders. The origin of these funds was allegedly an unnamed lawyer representing the organizations in Gaza.

For Israeli TV news coverage of the original arrests, see here.

Anyone who regularly reads this blog will know of my profound skepticism about virtually any criminal charge offered by the security services. While I haven’t been able to delve into the evidence offered, the charges in this case strike me as dubious, if not ludicrous. How some of the most highly surveilled prisoners in the Israeli prison system would’ve been able to create surreptitious radio communication between the prisons and Gaza, how they would have been able to transfer tens of thousands of dollars between prisoners and militant groups on the outside, how specifically the defendants aided in acts of terror–what materials they procured, and who they give them to? It all appears to be an elaborate fictional conspiracy.

These alleged activities began, according to the charge sheet in January 2012 and continued till their arrest.  How such a conspiracy involving so much money, equipment and co-conspirators could’ve extended for a period of two years in some of the most secure facilities in the State of Israel beggars belief.

There are always readers who point out the heinous charges against the victims as if they were proven. So let’s keep in mind that not only weren’t the charges proven, the victims hadn’t been tried, let alone convicted. There is a presumption of innocence in most democracies, though my right-wing readers often conveniently forget this when a Palestinian is involved.

Whether or not al-Safadi was guilty of any of the charges, the very notion of torturing a defense attorney in a so-called democracy is beyond repulsive.  What does it say about Israel that it’s torturers can make a well-educated professional man kill himself when released?  Don’t Israelis understand that when their representatives do such heinous things it reflects on the entire nation?  Or do they not care because they can create a wall between “us,” the Jews, and “them,” the Palestinians?  What they do to “them” is somehow insulated from “us?”

All this proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that Israeli ‘democracy’ is skin deep and reserved for the Jewish sector. Among Israeli Jews there is a prevalent notion that their country can be a democracy even with the Palestinian minority being denied democratic rights. The very notion is preposterous and indicates Israel is an ethnocracy rather than a democracy.

I have only been able to find one instance of an Israeli Palestinian prisoner committing suicide in an Israeli prison and none of prisoners killing themselves shortly after release from the torture chambers (there is of course the example of Ben Zygier, who committed suicide in his cell).  It’s always thrilling when Israel achieves yet another milestone in its march toward democracy and the rule of law!

I contacted the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel and asked what they knew about the case. Ishai Menuchin the director told me that they’d tried to locate Amjad within the prison system twice during his detention without success.  They heard he was at the Russian Compound (Jerusalem).  When they arrived to see him they discovered he’d been moved to Ramon, a different prison.  When they asked to meet with him there they were told he’d been released.

April 30, 2014 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Subjugation - Torture | , , , | Leave a comment

University of Regina set to endorse Israeli occupation?

By Andrew Loewen • Briarpatch Magazine • April 24, 2014

What would you do if the Canadian university you attended was planning to enter into a partnership with a university in another country whose persecution of your people meant you couldn’t speak out publicly – in Canada – for fear of reprisals against you and your family?

What if, further, the proposed partnership included course delivery for a degree in public safety management inside a country conducting a nearly 50-year-long occupation in contravention of international law? An occupation in which basic freedoms – of movement, speech, and self-determination – were denied your people, and in which security forces routinely imprisoned, shot, and killed civilians, including university students and children, with near total impunity.

Strange as it may sound, this is the reality facing Palestinian students at the University of Regina today. As part of a new MBA program in public safety management geared toward police service professionals, the Faculty of Business Administration is considering a partnership that would see students take optional courses at Israel’s Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

An open letter to administrators from University of Regina faculty highlights the kind of instruction on offer in the Policing and Homeland Security Studies program in the Faculty of Law at Hebrew University: “faculty expertise in this program includes ‘Policing terrorism, Political violence and protest policing, Minorities and law enforcement, Terrorism and crime, and Terror and society.’”

An article in the student newspaper The Carillon in late January alerted students to the proposed collaboration.

Speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of complications when returning to Palestine, a University of Regina alumnus and Regina resident says, “It’s a shame that the Board [of Governors] or the administration within the Faculty of Business kept it so low key. An educational institution is supposed to keep open channels of communication.”

According to the alumnus, “It says a lot about the nature of this co-operation [with Hebrew University] or even of the nature of this Faculty of Business. Maybe they know that this is bad publicity for them.”

Palestinians line up at an Israeli checkpoint near Bethlehem. Photo: Flickr/delayed gratification

The president and the dean

Following a 2012 trip to Israel as part of a delegation of Canadian academics, University President Vianne Timmons praised the work of Israeli academics in the fields of justice and police studies. “Israel is a leader in innovation,” she told the Canadian Jewish News.

President Timmons has declined interview requests regarding the potential MBA arrangement with Hebrew University, directing inquiries to the Dean of the Faculty of Business Administration, Andrew Gaudes.

When asked what Palestinian students on campus thought of the proposed partnership, Gaudes said in an interview, “I don’t know of any Palestinian students here on our campus.”

Asked if Palestinian students would be able to participate in courses delivered at Hebrew University, or if they could face unique travel restrictions, Gaudes said he had not looked into the matter: “There’s no point in me looking at something that’s not relevant to the program.”

But this rings hollow for Palestinian students. The Palestinian alumnus as well as a current Palestinian graduate student in the Faculty of Business Administration say that as Palestinians with dual (Palestinian-Canadian) citizenship they cannot enter Israel, nor can their Palestinian family and friends in the West Bank enter East Jerusalem, where Hebrew University is situated.

“They might approve [the visas] here, but that’s not what matters,” says the alumnus, stressing that it’s not Hebrew University but the Israeli military that has final say on travel and entry permits.

The current MBA student adds that millions of displaced Palestinians around the world are denied entry to their homeland. “So how is Dean Gaudes going to get them the visas to enter? It doesn’t make any sense,” she says.

Noting President Timmons’ remarks following her official visit to Israel in 2012, I asked the Dean which university administrators were behind the proposed partnership with Hebrew University. He said that the entire process was internal to the Faculty of Business. This account is not convincing for some.

The alumnus, who travels home to the West Bank annually, says, “The Faculty of Business does not make decisions for the university. [The President] knows exactly what’s going on.” He’s also skeptical of the Dean’s position that course content is the only consideration in such an arrangement.

“I’m taking courses in project management,” he says, “where they teach us that before entering into procurement agreements, it’s best practice to look at the firm’s history, to look at their policies, to look at their culture. You don’t just look at what you’re going to be getting from them, you look at everything in the background of that institution or corporation you’re going into a contract with. That’s important. If you’re skipping that step, you’re entering blindly.”

He points out that earlier this month, just days after my interview with the Dean, Israeli security forces stormed the campus of al-Quds Open University in the West Bank, firing at least 70 rounds of tear gas at students.

No ethics, no problem

When I sat down with the Dean in his office, I drew his attention to a recently published Amnesty International report called “Trigger-happy: Israel’s use of excessive force in the West Bank.” The report states, “Israel’s security forces have displayed a callous disregard for human life by killing scores of Palestinian civilians, including children, in the occupied West Bank over the past three years with near total impunity.”

I asked Gaudes how he reconciled this information with selecting an Israeli institution as an appropriate place for his students to learn public safety management and policing.

After an initial pause, Gaudes said he hoped that students from the program who “become mid to senior managers in the area of public safety” would be “more mindful of the impacts [of their decisions] at the ground level.” Referring to the Amnesty report, he said, “My hope is that if we’re educating managers [who] make decisions that can lead towards that possible outcome, they think twice.”

The irony of Gaudes’ remarks about mindfulness and the implications of decisions “at the ground level” is not lost on students. When reminded that undergraduates in the Faculty of Business must take courses in ethics and decision-making, Gaudes reiterated that his only consideration at this stage is the course content Hebrew University offers.

“It’s shocking that he would make that comment,” says the Palestinian alumnus.

“I’m worried about the content of what’s going to be delivered,” he says. “And not just the content. If it’s being conducted, where’s this research going to be put to test? Where’s it going to go? In decision-making in Canada or is it going to influence decision-making in Israel? That’s a big thing.”

It’s a chilling question for Palestinian students. “To me the content of what Hebrew University wants to do makes me think of a guinea pig experiment,” continues the University of Regina graduate. “From a Palestinian perspective, I look at myself right now as a guinea pig, because the policies that come out of Israeli universities inform the decision-making within the army. It serves the army that’s enforcing the occupation.”

Palestinian children stand in the rubble of a school in Gaza destroyed by Israeli shelling. Photo: Ashraf Amra/APA images

It is also of concern to Indigenous activists here in Canada, who are key targets of policing and surveillance operations. The website of the Office of the President at the University of Regina proudly incorporates Indigenization into the university’s mandate and vision. Yet, policies to impose Israeli curriculum on Palestinian students in East Jerusalem have resonances with Canada’s residential school system.

It’s part of an attempt “to slowly erase Palestinian identity,” says the former student. I asked the Dean how the partnership with Hebrew University would fit with the university’s commitment to Indigenization. He seemed confused by the question, before saying that he didn’t know.

The university’s reputation

The MBA student, meanwhile, is surprised by the Dean’s apparent lack of concern about the Faculty’s reputation and credibility. “I’ve been here a long time,” she says, “and all the instructors come into the class in the Faculty of Business Administration and say ‘we have to link all the courses together. What you learn in organizational behavior has to be linked to human resources, ethics has to be linked to statistics.’”

There is a sense of betrayal in her remarks: “Now if I’m sitting in the classroom and someone is standing in front of me lecturing from the Faculty of Business Administration about ethics? I would stand up and say that’s hypocrisy. You guys are teaching one thing and you’re doing something else. They will lose credibility with their students. It’s going to affect them really badly. I can’t believe they didn’t consider ethics in this way.”

Andrew Stevens, an assistant professor in the Faculty of Business Administration and a signatory of the open letter from faculty, has expressed similar concerns: “a partnership with Hebrew University, especially in the area of public safety and policing, could do damage to our reputation.”

Academic boycott

The MBA student says that had she known such a partnership might become reality, she never would have enrolled in the Faculty of Business at the University of Regina. She is likely not alone in this view, especially as the international campaign of boycott, divestment, and sanctions against Israel continues to build momentum on campuses worldwide.

Even in the U.S., where pro-Israel sentiment and propaganda is pervasive, the American Studies Association recently voted to endorse a boycott of Israeli academic institutions.

“The academic institutions and the [Israeli] army are interconnected and they influence one another. You cannot separate them,” says the MBA student, before underlining her central point: “The Faculty of Business Administration is actually supporting the occupation if it goes ahead with the partnership with Hebrew University.”

There has been no final decision on the proposed partnership, and it is not too late for administrators at the University of Regina to find more appropriate, more inclusive, and more respectable institutional partners abroad.

~

Join concerned students and faculty at the University of Regina t in calling for this partnership to be abandoned, please write to:

Dean Andrew Gaudes: Andrew DOT Gaudes AT uregina.ca
Associate Dean Ron Camp: Ronald DOT Camp AT uregina.ca
President Vianne Timmons: the DOT president AT uregina.ca

April 29, 2014 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation, Solidarity and Activism, Subjugation - Torture | , , | Leave a comment

Christian leaders tell youth to ‘tear up’ Israel army forms

Ma’an – 25/04/2014

JERUSALEM – Orthodox Archbishop Atallah Hanna and former Latin Patriarch Michel Sabbah on Friday urged Christian youth not to enlist in the Israeli military and to ignore Israeli “propaganda” encouraging them to do so.

The statement came after a meeting between the two religious figures on Friday, which followed reports on Tuesday that Israeli authorities would distribute military enlistment papers to Palestinian Christian youth who are citizens of Israel in order to encourage them to voluntarily sign up for military service.

The leaders called upon Christian youth who have received the enrollment papers to “tear them up and throw them away and not to engage with them in any way.”

The leaders also stressed the “firm national position of the Christians in refusing to join a military that exercises violence against the rights of the Palestinian people.”

The forms to be sent to Christian youth resemble the mandatory enlistment forms distributed to Jewish and Druze Israelis, and the army hopes that by sending these papers more youth will voluntarily sign up to enlist.

Although Christian Palestinian citizens of Israel are currently exempt from military service along with Muslims, a government decision made in February to re-classify Christians as a separate ethnicity distinct from “Arab” raised fears that mandatory enrollment would follow, as it did for Palestinians of the Druze religion in the 1950s.

About 10 percent of Palestinian citizens of Israel, also called “Arab-Israelis,” are Christians, while the majority of the remaining are Muslims and Druze.

Although the majority of Palestinians were expelled from their homes inside Israel during the 1948 conflict that led to the creation of the state of Israel, some managed to remain and their descendants today make up around 20 percent of Israel’s population.

April 25, 2014 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism | , , , | Leave a comment

6 Reasons Why Obama’s Clemency Program For Drug Offenders Doesn’t Change Mass Incarceration One Bit

By Bruce A. Dixon | Black Agenda Report | April 23, 2014

It’s all over the internet. The Obama administration is talking up the possibility of using presidential clemency powers to release some undetermined number, perhaps hundreds or even thousands of federal prisoners without wealth or political connections from their unjustly long drug sentences. But hold your hosannas, don’t get your hopes up. Though the precise numbers are unclear at this time, what’s unmistakably evident is that this is in no sense whatsoever the beginning of a rollback of America’s prison state. The releases, as the attorney general and government officials are describing them, will not represent any significant or permanent change to the nation’s universal policy of mass incarceration, mainly of poor black and brown youth. Here, in plain English are 6 reasons why.

  1. The Obama administration’s expected releases will use the president’s clemency powers. Presidential clemency amounts to forgiveness after the fact. Clemency does not change a single word or phrase in any of the galaxy of state and federal laws which have already sent literally millions to prison for absurdly long sentences for what authorities call “non-violent drug offenses,” and under which hundreds of thousands are currently serving those same sentences and hundreds of thousands more are awaiting trial and sentencing. Clemency leaves those laws in place, so that the places of those released will soon be filled again.
  2. Presidential clemency will set no legal precedents that current or future defendants in federal or state drug cases, their attorneys or sentencing judges can use to avoid the application of unjust existing laws, including harsh mandatory minimums and sentencing guidelines. Like the unjust statutes, the unjust legal precedents which have helped filled state and federal prisons to bursting will also remain intact.
  3. Presidential clemency will have no effect on the predatory conduct of police and prosecutors on the state or federal level. Police departments will remain free to conduct their “war on drugs” almost exclusively in poor and minority communities. Prosecutors will still be able to coerce defendants into accepting plea bargains, and threaten them with longer sentences if they go to trial. If only one in twenty defendants across the board and even fewer in federal court currently go to trial, what does that say about the ability or the willingness of our courts to even try determining guilt or innocence? Federal prosecutors have publicly thumbed their noses at Eric Holder’s feeble questioning of the war on drugs, stated their intention to continue filling the prisons and jails, and local prosecutors in the US are elected officials accustomed to running for office based on how many people they can lock up for how long.
  4. Presidential clemency can only be applied to federal prisoners, who are a mere 190,000, or 11% of the roughly 1.7 million currently serving time. (Another 600,000 are awaiting trial on all levels or serving misdemeanor time.)  If we’re talking about federal prisoners serving drug related sentences, the universe shrinks to only 100,000, or 5% of the nation’s 2.3 million prisoners.
  5. There are more former prisoners than current ones. For the rest of their lives, former prisoners and their families are viciously discriminated against in a host of ways, in the job and housing market, in education and public services and in access to health care, all legally. That won’t change. Even the few that get this clemency won’t be protected from that.
  6. The federal government will NOT even be screening all federal drug prisoners to determine who is eligible for clemency. Attorney General Holder has instead announced that criminal defense lawyers and organizations like the ACLU are being asked to bring to the government’s attention to cases they imagine are most deserving of clemency. Don’t they have, you know, a Department of Justice for that? Depending on private organizations and attorneys to come up with the cases for possible clemency turns the whole thing into an exercise in philanthropy, not the fundamental change in governmental policy that people need, want and demand. It means that prisoners serving unduly long sentences who don’t have vigilant private attorneys and advocacy organizations on their case will remain unjustly imprisoned, while those with outside friends have a chance at early release.

The bottom line is that an act of presidential clemency, while good news for the lucky hundreds or thousands of families involved, will leave no legal footprint and make no institutional impact upon the universal policy of mass incarceration. For this reason, it’s exactly NOT a first step that can lead to something more. It’s a dead end. At the rate the pipelines are pumping them in, their cells will be refilled in a month or two, no problem. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that this clemency initiative is nothing more than a lazy, cynical and nearly empty gesture it hopes will buy some black votes and good will in 2014 and beyond.

Is it better than nothing? Yes, of course. It’s just not that much better, and we definitely DO have a right to expect much, much better. There are millions locked up. A couple thousand may be released. But a million is a thousand thousands.  The dead end of presidential clemency for a handful on the federal level simply does not scale even to the beginning of changing the institutional policies of mass incarceration.  On that level it’s bogus.  It will free not one state prisoner a day earlier and initiates no processes or lasting precedents that ever will. It will help none of the hundreds of thousands of families of former prisoners and won’t affect any cases in the pipeline, which will refill the slots of those who receive clemency in weeks, and it doesn’t change what police or prosecutors and courts do either.  

This is not the result of some soaring vision of justice, and cannot lead to any lasting institutional change. It leaves the prison state completely intact, just giving the most hopeful and the most cynical something to talk about in the months leading up to another mid-term election, when the administration, and Democrats need the black vote.

It didn’t have to be this way. During the first two years of the Obama presidency, when his party had a lock on both houses of Congress, the president and congressional Democrats had a chance to write retroactive revocation of tens of thousands of sentences into its so-called Fair Sentencing Act. Despite this being a matter of desperate concern to the constituency that elected them, it was not a priority for the first black president or for the black political class at the time. Every year since, the Obama Department of Justice has had the chance to rewrite the way it distributes federal funding to state and local law enforcement agencies to discourage mass incarceration. Every year the president had the ability to close some of its notorious federal supermax prisons, or find ways to deny funding for such things on the state level. None of this happened. In fact, while a broad citizen movement in Illinois, the president’s home state finally closed a state supermax prison, Obama’s latest Bureau of Prisons budget has the feds buying another unused Illinois prison for conversion into a federal supermax, ADX Thomson, or Gitmo North. The federal prison budget has grown every year president Obama has held office.

Sophisticated apologists for the president will of course chide folks who find “better than nothing” insufficient for being naive and foolish. Are they?  Were the tens of millions who elected Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012 foolish for imagining that they have even the right to demand better?  What about the many, many thousands of activists who gave freely of their time and efforts year in and year out to make the careers of the black political class possible, the people who called house meetings, union and church meetings?  Were the folks who went door to door, who rallied and registered voters and more to elect black aldermen, sheriffs, county commissioners, mayors, legislators and finally a black president — the people who DID imagine and DID tell their children and their neighbors that this would make things better — were they all just unrealistic chumps?

I used to be one of them.  They didn’t say – we didn’t say — it was “better than nothing.”  We told each other, and often we actually believed electing black faces to high places was a necessary step toward making things better.  Were we naïve and foolish to imagine a better world is even possible?  Or is our black political class too cynical, too corrupt, too prosperous and too lazy to share the dreams of the ordinary people they supposedly represent?

April 24, 2014 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Progressive Hypocrite | , | Leave a comment

FBI adds to no-fly list Muslims who refuse to spy on their communities

Voice of Russia | April 23, 2014

A lawsuit, filed on behalf of four different men, blames the United States of violating their rights by keeping them on the no-fly list after they declined to spy on local Muslim communities, notably in New York, New Jersey and Nebraska. Some view the move as a punishment, though more likely this is a rigid coercive tool, plaintiffs argue.

“The no-fly list is supposed to be about ensuring aviation safety, but the FBI is using it to force innocent people to become informants,” said Ramzi Kassem, associate professor of law at the City University of New York, adding the practice looks more like an extortion.

The four plaintiffs have different stories to tell, however sharing one common feature: all the four point to US authorities over-policing the local Muslim society.

Awais Sajjad, for instance, a Muslim, lawfully naturalized US resident living in the New York area learnt he was on the no-fly list after he was turned back at the boarding zone at John F. Kennedy International Airport.

At the airport, FBI agents questioned Sajjad, a Muslim, before he was finally released. But later returned with an offer. In exchange for working for them, the FBI could provide him with US citizenship and compensation. To score a deal, the agents reminded Sajjad, it was up to the FBI to decide who was on the no-fly list.

“The more you help us, the more we can help you,” FBI agents said, according to the lawsuit filed Tuesday.

Another plaintiff, Naveed Shinwari, hasn’t seen his wife in more than two years, ever since they got married, he living permanently in the US, while his wife being an Afghan citizen. He strongly suspects it’s due to his refusal to become an informant for the FBI.

Returning back from the wedding, before he could even get home to Omaha, Nebraska, he was twice detained and questioned by FBI agents. These, he recollects, asked if he knew anything about national security threats. A third FBI visit followed when he got home, with the officer wanting to know about the “local Omaha community”, if he knew “anyone who’s a threat.”

Next time he was denied a boarding pass on a domestic US flight as he was to embark on a temporary job in Connecticut. Police told him he had been placed on the US no-fly list, although he had never in his life been accused of breaking any law.

Two more stories slightly varied from the previous ones, in that they contain a certain straight-forward directive, in line with the Muslims’ belief that law enforcement at times considers them a target, particularly thanks to mosque infiltrations and other surveillance practices.

Jameel Algibhah of the Bronx alleges that the FBI explicitly asked him to infiltrate a Queens mosque and pose as an extremist in online forums.

Their case follows at least one other, brought by the ACLU in Oregon, according to which the FBI attempted to leverage no-fly selectees into informants. Most sadly, the agency that’s behind the practice ever since no-fly lists emerged, is uniquely responsible for taking names off them. What all the four Muslims, who have never been convicted of a crime seek for, is to be cleared of the unjust punitive measures.

The FBI refused to comment Tuesday. But the process used to place individuals on the no-fly list has always been considered legal and well founded by officials, who said the practice relies on credible intelligence. Notably, MI5 in Britain openly thanked those Muslims who contributed to spying on others.

April 23, 2014 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Islamophobia | , | Leave a comment

Brazil passes ‘internet constitution’ ahead of global conference on web future

RT | April 23, 2014

Ahead of a two-day Net Mundial international conference in Sao Paulo on the future of the Internet, Brazil’s Senate has unanimously adopted a bill which guarantees online privacy of Brazilian users and enshrines equal access to the global network.

The bill known as the “Internet constitution” was first introduced in the wake of the NSA spying scandal and is now expected to be signed into law by President Dilma Rousseff – one of the primary targets of the US intelligence apparatus, as leaks by former NSA analyst Edward Snowden revealed.

Rousseff plans to present the law on Wednesday at a global Internet conference.

The bill promotes freedom of information, making service providers not liable for content published by their users, but instead forcing the companies to obey court orders to remove any offensive material.

The principle of neutrality, calling on providers to grant equal access to service without charging higher rates for greater bandwidth use is also promoted. The legislation also limits the gathering and use of metadata on Internet users in Brazil.

Approval of the Senate was assured after the government dropped a provision in the legislation requiring Internet companies such as Twitter and Facebook to store data on Brazilian users at home.

The final version bill states that companies collecting data on Brazilian accounts must obey Brazilian data protection laws even if the data is collected and stored on servers abroad.

The demand of the use of Brazilian data centers had been added to the legislation last year after Snowden’s leaks revealed the extent of NSA’s spying network and wiretapping of President Dilma Rousseff communications.

The NSA was also involved in spying on Brazil’s strategic business sector, particularly on state-run oil company Petrobras. In response to US spying, Rousseff canceled a state visit to Washington in October and called on the UN, together with Germany, to adopt a UN resolution guaranteeing internet freedoms.

The adoption of the bill was a top priority for the Brazilian leader as a two-day Net Mundial conference in Sao Paulo is scheduled to open in Brazil on Wednesday.

The aim of the global event on internet governance is to discuss cyber security amid the NSA spying scandal. Safeguarding privacy and freedom of expression on the Internet are among the topics to be discussed according to a draft agenda.

US officials will attend the meeting alongside representatives from dozens of other states.

“All of them should have equal participation in this multi-stakeholder process,” Virgilio Almeida, Brazil’s secretary for IT policy, who will chair the conference, told Reuters.

As part of the discussion, Russia and China have submitted a proposal jointly with Tajikistan and Uzbekistan asking for the UN to develop a code of conduct for the Internet.

“Most participants here want a multi-stakeholder model for the Internet,” Almeida told Reuters. “China wants a treaty at the United Nations, but only governments are represented there.”

The event is not expected to result in any binding policy decisions, but Almeida said it will facilitate a debate that will “sow the seeds” for future reforms of internet governance.

April 23, 2014 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , | Leave a comment

UK Filters And The Slippery Slope Of Mass Censorship

By Mike Masnick | Techdirt | April 23, 2014

We’ve covered the ridiculousness of the UK’s “voluntary” web filters. UK officials have been pushing such things for years and finally pushed them through by focusing on stopping “pornography” (for the children, of course). While it quickly came out that the filters were blocking tons of legitimate content (as filters always do), the UK government quickly moved to talk about ways to expand what the filters covered.

The pattern is not hard to recognize, because it happens over and over again. Government officials find some absolute horror — the kind of thing that no one will stand up for — to push for some form of censorship. Few fight back because no one wants to be seen as standing up for something absolutely horrific online, or be seen as being against “family values.” But, then, once the filters are in place, it becomes so easy both to ignore the fact that the filters don’t work (and censor lots of legitimate content) and to constantly expand and expand and expand them. And people will have much less of a leg to stand on, because they didn’t fight back at the beginning.

That appears to be happening at an astonishingly fast pace in the UK. Index On Censorship has a fantastic article, discussing how a UK government official has already admitted to plans to expand the filter to “unsavoury” content rather than just “illegal.”

James Brokenshire was giving an interview to the Financial Times last month about his role in the government’s online counter-extremism programme. Ministers are trying to figure out how to block content that’s illegal in the UK but hosted overseas. For a while the interview stayed on course. There was “more work to do” negotiating with internet service providers (ISPs), he said. And then, quite suddenly, he let the cat out the bag. The internet firms would have to deal with “material that may not be illegal but certainly is unsavoury”, he said.

And there it was. The sneaking suspicion of free thinkers was confirmed. The government was no longer restricting itself to censoring web content which was illegal. It was going to start censoring content which it simply didn’t like.

It goes on, in fairly great detail, to describe just how quickly the UK is sliding away down that slippery slope of censorship. It highlights how these filters were kicked off as an “anti-porn” effort, where the details were left intentionally vague.

But David Cameron positioned himself differently, by starting up an anti-porn crusade. It was an extremely effective manouvre. ISPs now suddenly faced the prospect of being made to look like apologists for the sexualisation of childhood.

Or at least, that’s how it was sold. By the time Cameron had done a couple of breakfast shows, the precise subject of discussion was becoming difficult to establish. Was this about child abuse content? Or rape porn? Or ‘normal’ porn? It was increasingly hard to tell.

And, of course, the fact that the filters go too far, is never seen as a serious problem.

The filters went well beyond what Cameron had been talking about. Suddenly, sexual health sites had been blocked, as had domestic violence support sites, gay and lesbian sites, eating disorder sites, alcohol and smoking sites, ‘web forums’ and, most baffling of all, ‘esoteric material’. Childline, Refuge, Stonewall and the Samaritans were blocked, as was the site of Claire Perry, the Tory MP who led the call for the opt-in filtering. The software was unable to distinguish between her description of what children should be protected from and the things themselves.

At the same time, the filtering software was failing to get at the sites it was supposed to be targeting. Under-blocking was at somewhere between 5% and 35%.

Children who were supposed to be protected from pornography were now being denied advice about sexual health. People trying to escape abuse were prevented from accessing websites which could offer support.

And something else curious was happening too: A reactionary view of human sexuality was taking over. Websites which dealt with breast feeding or fine art were being blocked. The male eye was winning: impressing the sense that the only function for the naked female body was sexual.

But, of course, no one in the UK government seems to care. In fact, they’re looking to expand the program. Because it was never about actually stopping porn. It was always about having a tool for mass censorship.

The list was supposed to be a collection of child abuse sites, which were automatically blocked via a system called Cleanfeed. But soon, criminally obscene material was added to it – a famously difficult benchmark to demonstrate in law. Then, in 2011, the Motion Picture Association started court proceedings to add a site indexing downloads of copyrighted material.

There are no safeguards to stop the list being extended to include other types of sites.

This is not an ideal system. For a start, it involves blocking material which has not been found illegal in a court of law. The Crown Prosecution Service is tasked with saying whether a site reaches the criminal threshold. This is like coming to a ruling before the start of a trial. The CPS is not an arbiter of whether something is illegal. It is an arbiter, and not always a very good one, of whether there is a realistic chance of conviction.

As the IWF admits on its website, it is looking for potentially criminal activity – content can only be confirmed to be criminal by a court of law. This is the hinterland of legality, the grey area where momentum and secrecy count for more than a judge’s ruling.

There may have been court supervision in putting in place the blocking process itself but it is not present for individual cases. Record companies are requesting sites be taken down and it is happening. The sites are only being notified afterwards, are only able to make representations afterwards. The traditional course of justice has been turned on its head.

And it just keeps going on and on. As the report notes, “the possibilities for mission creep are extensive.” You don’t say. They also note that technologically clueless politicians love this because they can claim they’re solving a hard problem when they’re really doing no such thing (and really are just creating other problems at the same time):

MPs like filtering software because it seems like a simple solution to a complex problem. It is simple. So simple it does not exist.

Of course, if you recognize that the continued expansion of such filters was likely the plan from the beginning, then everything is going according to plan. The fact that it doesn’t solve any problems the public are dealing with is meaningless. It solves a problem that the politicians are dealing with: how to be able to say they’ve “done something” to “protect the children” while at the same time building up the tools and powers of the government to stifle any speech they don’t like. To those folks, the system is working perfectly.

April 23, 2014 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , | Leave a comment

Lavrov: US should face responsibility for powers it installed in Kiev

RT | April 21, 2014

​The Russian Foreign Minister says the US should take responsibility for those whom they put in power instead issuing ultimatums to Moscow.

“Before giving us ultimatums, demanding that we fulfill demands within two or three days with the threat of sanctions, we would urgently call on our American partners to fully accept responsibility for those who they brought to power,” said Lavrov during a press conference with his colleague from Mozambique, Oldemiro Baloi.

All attempts to isolate Russia will lead to a dead end because Russia is “a big, independent power that knows what it wants,” he added

Meanwhile, the Russian FM also criticized statements from Western countries and Kiev’s authorities, which “invent possible and impossible arguments against Russia,” claiming that a large amount of Russian arms in the conflict zones proves Russian interference in Ukrainian affairs.

He called the statements absurd as Ukraine has traditionally used Russian-made arms.

“This statement is ludicrous. Everyone has Russian arms in Ukraine,” Lavrov said.

Meanwhile, he also said that TV outlets have reported that US arms were also found in Ukraine and illegal armed groups, not the Ukrainian army were in possession of these American arms.

Speaking about the crisis situation in eastern Ukraine and Kiev’s crackdown on the Donetsk region, Lavrov also said that Kiev authorities don’t want or maybe cannot control the extremists who continue to control the situation in the country.

“The authorities are doing nothing, not even lifting a finger, to address the causes behind this deep internal crisis in Ukraine,” he said.

Meanwhile, Lavrov also said that the Kiev coup-appointed government has violated the Geneva agreements of April 17, after the four-sided talks between the EU, the US, Russia and Ukraine.

“The Pravy Sektor (Right Sector) group has been “running the show” in the streets of central and western Ukraine and is trying to affect eastern regions,” he said, adding that buildings in Kiev seized by the protesters haven’t been freed and the streets haven’t been cleared.

“However, Kiev authorities say that “Maidan” is acting legally which is totally inadmissible,” he said.

Meanwhile, the attack by militants on the checkpoint in the eastern Ukrainian city of Slavyansk on Easter Sunday is a crime beneficial only for those who want to derail the Geneva agreements, said the Russian FM.

“The fact that extremists started to shoot at unarmed civilians is unacceptable,” he added.

Meanwhile, he also criticized the attitude of Kiev to foreign journalists in Ukraine as journalists in the country are being arrested and the authorities won’t let them into the regions for them to observe what is happening.

He also stressed that one of the Geneva agreement’s points is to amnesty political prisoners and participants in the protests.

“Instead of releasing the Donetsk governor, Pavel Gubarev, Kiev authorities continue to arrest activists in southeastern Ukraine,” said Lavrov.

According to Lavrov, the Kiev authorities are still spinning out the implementation of constitutional reform in the country.

“Why were they waiting for so long to speak about the necessity of constitutional reform? Why are they spinning out the process?” he asked at the conference.

Lavrov also stressed the necessity of restoring order in the crisis-torn country. By this he meant stopping extremism and religious intolerance, starting constitutional dialogue and disarming the illegally armed groups.

April 21, 2014 Posted by | Civil Liberties | , , | Leave a comment

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