Thanks to new DNA evidence a Kansas City man was released from prison three decades after a wrongful rape conviction, though the 70-year-old clerk instrumental in his release was fired for insubordination.
Sharon Snyder, who was fired about nine months prior to her retirement after 34 years as a court employee, was let go by a Jackson County Circuit judge in Missouri for offering legal advice to 49-year-old Robert Nelson, convicted in 1984 to 50 years incarceration for a Kansas City rape the year prior.
Nelson maintained his innocence in the case since that conviction, and in August of 2009 filed a motion with the court seeking DNA testing that had not been available at the time of his trial 25 years prior, reports the AP. That motion was denied, evidently due to Nelson’s lack of knowledge of the law to make a proper case.
Two years after that petition Nelson filed another motion seeking DNA testing, but was again denied. Following that second attempt, Snyder gave Nelson’s sister, Sea Dunnell, a copy of a successful motion filed for a different case which had also requested that DNA evidence be tested.
Nelson, who had no legal representation at the time, was able to use that motion as a guide for his own, which he filed successfully in February of 2012. In August a judge sustained the motion and assigned Nelson Laura O’Sullivan, legal director of the Midwest Innocence Project to be his legal representative.
Last month the Kansas City Police Department used DNA evidence to exclude Nelson as a suspect in the 1983 rape case, which resulted in his release on June 12.
Only five days after Nelson’s release Snyder was taken into a judge’s chambers and told that both the prosecutor and attorney “had a problem” with her intervention in the case. Although the documents that Snyder gave Nelson’s sister to file a successful motion with the court would have been available as public record, it was not conceivable that she would have ever been aware of its existence were it not for Snyder’s help.
“The document you chose was, in effect, your recommendation for a Motion for DNA testing that would likely be successful in this Division,” Judge Byrn wrote. “But it was clearly improper and a violation of Canon Seven … which warns against the risk of offering an opinion or suggested course of action.”
Snyder was fired from her job on June 27, told that she had violated court rules by providing assistance to Nelson, and speaking about details of the case to attorneys not involved in the matter.
According to the New York Times, this is not the first time that the Innocence Project has represented an individual who faced obstacles in obtaining exonerating DNA evidence in their case.
Joseph Buffey, who was wrongfully convinced to 70 years in prison for the 2001 rape of an 83-year-old woman, came to the attention of Innocence Project lawyers after he wrote them a letter several years ago.
In the Spring of 2011, a test on the victim’s rape kit showed that Buffey’s DNA was not present at the crime scene. However, once Buffey’s lawyers asked a judge to run those results through a West Virginia database of felons to find a match the prosecutor refused as the lab was not certified by the state.
A second request by Innocence Project to run the test through a certified lab was also refused by the prosecution, stating that “the state does not believe such testing will or can prove the defendant’s innocence after his guilty plea.” The judge ordered that test to go forward despite the objection of prosecutors, who said they suspected multiple men were involved in the rape case, though the victim had said only one individual was involved.
Buffey’s case is similar to Nelson’s in that the obstacles to obtain potentially exonerating DNA evidence are high. In addition to needing the requisite legal knowledge to file a proper motion with the court, a 2009 US Supreme Court ruling stated that a defendant willing to pay for a DNA test at his own expense was not entitled to do so. Chief Justice John G. Roberts said that such an allowance risked “unnecessarily overthrowing the established system of criminal justice.”
Only nine US states currently have laws granting defense lawyers access to a national DNA database, according to ThinkProgress. Meanwhile, in a June decision the Supreme Court ruled that officers be granted access to collect DNA information from suspects under arrest but not yet charged without probable cause.
August 1, 2013
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Deception | Court, Crime, DNA, Innocence Project, Kansas City Police Department, Law, USA |
Leave a comment
A ruling this week in a United States appeals court means officers of the law can legally and physically track down suspects based off of cell phone data without ever obtaining a warrant.
A 2-1 decision from the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit on Tuesday means law enforcement needn’t prove probable cause when asking a telecom company for location data that could be used to pinpoint suspected criminals.
The verdict overturns a ruling made in 2011 by a magistrate judge from Houston, Texas who said federal authorities weren’t able to compel telecoms for 60 days’ worth of cell phone records without a warrant.
Following that ruling from US District Judge Lynn Hughes, the federal government filed an appeal asking the Fifth Circuit to step-in. On Tuesday, justices there overturned Hughes’ decision and said cell phone companies and their customers had no Fourth Amendment protected right to refute the government’s request for information.
A cell subscriber, said the appeals court, “like a telephone user, understands that his cellphone must send a signal to a nearby cell tower in order to wirelessly connect his call.” That data, the court concluded, is thus “clearly a business record” and can be collected by investigators bypassing what would otherwise require a warrant.
“We understand the cell phone users may reasonably want their location information to remain private,” wrote the court. “But the recourse for these desires is in the market or the political process: in demanding that service providers do away with such records… or in lobbying elected representatives to enact statutory protections. The Fourth Amendment, safeguarded by the courts, protects only reasonable expectations of privacy.”
Had the court ruled otherwise, federal investigators could be told they must show a judge evidence of probable cause to obtain a warrant for location data. Instead, however, the appeals court agreed that only a substantially easier to acquire court order could be used to compel telecoms for that data.
Unlike a search warrant, a court order in such a case only requires authorities to argue there are reasonable grounds that the information is relevant to an investigation.
Privacy advocates attacked Tuesday’s ruling, including George Washington University law professor, who filed an amicus brief in the case opposing the side the appeals court took.
“The opinion is clear that the government can access cell site records without Fourth Amendment oversight,” Kerr told the New York Times this week.
“This decision is a big deal,” Catherine Crump of the American Civil Liberties Union added to the Times. “It’s a big deal and a big blow to Americans’ privacy rights.”
But while the appeals verdict impacts how federal investigations will be conducted for now, recent legislation adopted in two US states have taken the first steps towards installing local laws that limit the ability to collect location data. Both Montana and New Jersey approved legislation in June and July, respectively, saying a search warrant is required by state investigators in order to collect cell phone location data.
July 31, 2013
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | American Civil Liberties Union, Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution, Information Technology, Law, United States, United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, USA |
Leave a comment
Syria has agreed to let three sites undergo investigation by a team of UN chemical weapons experts to assess whether the accusations that the country employed the devices during the country’s two year civil war carried any weight.
“The Mission will travel to Syria as soon as possible to contemporaneously investigate three of the reported incidents, including Khan al-Asal,” U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s press office told Reuters in a statement.
Syria contends that rebels were responsible for some chemical weapons usage in the region while the rebels accuse the government of playing a role. Earlier this month, Russia submitted to the UN its analysis of samples taken in Aleppo, where chemical weapons had allegedly been used in March.
Russia’s findings indicated that it was rebels – not the Syrian army – behind the Khan al-Assal incident, in which more than 30 people died.
“We submitted a full set of documents [to the UN]. That’s over 80 pages, including photographs and precise geographic coordinates [of places where samples were taken], procedures and results,” Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov pointed out.
The United States cast doubt on the Russian analysis.
July 31, 2013
Posted by aletho |
War Crimes | Russia, Syria, UN, United States, USA |
Leave a comment
Archpriest Vsevolod Chaplin has praised Russian authorities for not caving in to pressure from abroad, saying granting asylum to US whistleblower Edward Snowden would help prevent the establishment of a ‘global electronic prison camp’.
“It is encouraging news that Russia is demonstrating its independence in this case as it has in many others, despite the pressure” said the head of the Holy Synod’s Department for Relations between the Church and Society.
Vsevolod Chaplin added that the Snowden saga has been broadly discussed both on the domestic and international level, with Russia’s position potentially bolstering its image as a country upholding “the true freedom of ideals.”
The Russian cleric further argued that Snowden’s revelations confirmed the existence of a pernicious problem discussed by Orthodox Christians for many years – “the prospective of a global electronic-totalitarian prison camp”.
“First they get people addicted to convenient means of communication with the authorities, businesses and among each other. In a while people become rigidly connected to these services and as a result the economic and political owners of these services get tremendous and terrifying power. They cannot help feeling the temptation to use this power to control the personality and such control might eventually be much stricter that all known totalitarian systems of the twentieth century,” Interfax news agency quoted Chaplin as saying.
The church official added that in his view true democracy remained an unreachable ideal.
“Any political system fixes the domination of a few over many. In the twentieth century the harshest forms of such political power used brute force, but now they are using soft power, through total data collecting and through soft persuasion of people, first through slogans but then through legal acts,” Chaplin explained. He noted that currently the soft power system was promoting such topics as declaring the western political system as the only viable option, making religion a marginal trend, and sidelining both criticism of market fundamentalism and leftist political platforms.
Chaplin urged Russian authorities to defend “real freedom, the freedom from the global ideological dictate and from the electronic prison camp.”
The cleric also offered a possible solution – the development of its own electronic communications system that would be independent from foreign-based mediums. “The nation has the brains for this and I hope we will also have a will,” Chaplin declared.
Russia is currently considering Edward Snowden’s request for temporary asylum and the former NSA contractor still remains in the transit zone of the Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport.
The Russian Justice Ministry on Tuesday sent a formal response to a letter from US Attorney General, who assured Moscow that Snowden would not face the prospect of death or torture if handed over to the United States.
The Russian ministry did not provide the details of its reply to the press.
July 31, 2013
Posted by aletho |
Full Spectrum Dominance | Edward Snowden, Human rights, Intelligence, National Security Agency, Russia, Snowden, United States, USA |
Leave a comment
By Colin Todhunter | July 30, 2013
On 15 August, India will celebrate Independence Day. There will be the usual celebratory flag waving and nationalist sentiments. The mainstream media will wallow in it, and key figures will indulge in the type of self congratulatory back-slapping that is common across the world when celebrating nationhood. But what will people be celebrating? The throwing off of British colonialism, the development of nationhood? Perhaps both of those things, but maybe neither, for what has ‘the nation’ and ‘independence’ come to mean in 2013?
Forget nations, flags or fly pasts. Freedom and self determination should be about ordinary people, ordinary people who farm and produce, who create genuine wealth, things of genuine worth.
Forget about sound bites referring to ‘the world’s biggest democracy’. Placing an X on a ballot paper every four years or so does not constitute democracy. If people are misinformed, misled and manipulated to think and act in a certain way, while backroom deals are carried out without their knowledge, they are but ignorant links in a chain (1,2).
Then there is no freedom, no self-determination. Someone else has appropriated the freedom and has enslaved. Someone else is determining the agenda.
Look no further to see this in action in that self-anointed bastion of ‘freedom and democracy’, the US.
Influence is bought and paid for by millionaire backers who fund politicians when running for office. And just in case that does not work to full effect, there is the infamous ‘revolving door’ that allows top corporate people to move in and out of the high echelons of government with ease in order to ensure the required policies are enacted. And don’t let the media get in the way of any of this. It won’t. Concentration of media ownership and the integration with armaments companies, banking interests and industry guarantees the public remain blissfully ignorant of issues, not least of how ‘democracy’ really works.
It all serves to ensure that the one percent maintain hegemony over the 99, maintain their unimaginable wealth and privileges and maintain the rest of the population in ignorance, in a state of powerlessness, in a state of poverty, relative poverty or vulnerability.
Yell moronically ‘USA!USA!’ when the authorities protect the people from imaginary or manufactured demons, or sign up and go to kill and die under the patriotic banner of ‘god and nation’. Mission accomplished, manipulation assured, control complete.
Class-based interests
And just who is doing the controlling? Never mind that a select number of companies predominate, dig further and you will find four institutions hold major stakes in most of these top companies and in doing so exert control over international finance and monetary policy via the IMF, World Trade Organisation, World Bank and Central European Bank (3). Control and wealth is highly concentrated in the hands of certain individuals or families.
In India too, a relative handful of families control much of the economy and society and are all too willing to fall in line with Western elite interests (4,5), whose hegemonic strategy lies in depressing wages, exploiting markets and maximising profit. Their interests do not lie with those of the 800 million who live on less than two dollars a day, the bulk of the people residing in the eight states that contain more poor people than 26 sub-Saharan African countries combined or the almost one in two children who are malnourished or their families; nor do their interests lie with the tens of millions across India who are having their lands stolen, their rights trampled on, their villages destroyed, their homelands occupied by paramilitary forces just because the rich require their land, their acquiescence, their mineral rich mountains, their agriculture.
The system cannot remedy this situation. It thrives on it. It produces it. But, of course, in an attempt to justify imperialism and plunder, the lie is forwarded that globalisation or neo-liberalism exists to lift the poor out of poverty, to liberate the masses from their burden.
The reality is that, in the name of ‘economic development’, what is currently happening in India constitutes the biggest land grab since Columbus and the biggest forced removal of peoples from their lands in history (6,7). Elite interests and supporters of their agenda in the media imply that the victims are unfortunate ‘collateral damage’ on the road to the promised land.
Sure, certain people have prospered in India in recent years. Sure, many now have lifestyles that their parents could only have imagined. But even under slavery, the lives of slaves improved over time. Moreover, notwithstanding the massive human ‘collateral damage’, there has been a terrible price to pay in terms of the damage caused in pursuit of an unsustainable model of development that destroys traditional agriculture, destroys the ecology and strips bare natural resources. This type of ‘development’ is warped and wholly unsustainable, whether within India or on a global level.
The poverty alleviation rate in India is more or less the same as it was back in 1991 when the US educated, World Bank/IMF trained Indian bureaucrat politicians began to assume power and shift the country towards the neo-liberalism required by their US backers (5).
India ‘s education system, healthcare system, infrastructure and welfare system has already been sacrificed via illegal ‘capital outflows’ into foreign bank accounts, which has accelerated since the opening up of the economy in ’91. A few have been enriched. At what cost to the rest?
In the West, it’s the same story. The secular theology of neo-liberalism has resulted in what many of us predicted. Tens of millions now bear the brunt of ‘austerity’, as companies rake in record profits and the extremely wealthy increase their wealth again by record amounts (8,9). Call it monopoly capitalism, a ‘new world order’ or some other name. The result is there for all to see: a rich and increasingly internationalised elite and the impoverishment of workers throughout the world.
On Independence Day, or during similar events in other places, we should urge people to think hard before bowing down to the flag, before swelling with pride and saying ‘god save the queen’, ‘the land of the brave’ or ‘mera pyara Bharat’.
Most nation states are run for the benefit of and to protect elite interests. And those interests have little respect for national boundaries or for the people they share the same land mass with. History shows that such interests have no hesitation in sacrificing (their own) national economies (10) or the lives of their compatriots en masse in barbaric wars (11) for ever greater power and ever more profit.
What do freedom, self-determination and patriotism actually amount to when the colonial oppressor is still present and has the compliance of India’s increasingly wealthy elite. Was this always to be India’s fabled ‘tryst’ with destiny?
Don’t be distracted by bogus notions of freedom, self-determination and patriotism.
The colonial oppressor is still there, and he has the compliance of India’s increasingly wealthy elite.
Notes
1) http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-eu-india-free-trade-agreement-corporate-driven-neocolonial-plunder/5338049
2) http://beejbachaoandolan.org/2007/09/
3) http://www.realnews24.com/the-large-families-that-rule-the-world/
4) http://www.worldcrunch.com/business-finance/rahul-gandhi-india-039-s-corporate-elite-and-the-enduring-power-of-family-dynasties/india-family-caste-business-gandhi/c2s11302/
5) http://www.globalresearch.ca/india-s-urban-slums-rising-social-inequalities-mass-poverty-and-homelessness/30756
6) http://www.countercurrents.org/sharma141109.htm
7) http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Globalization/War_Against_Nature_VFTS.html
8) http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/04/business/economy/corporate-profits-soar-as-worker-income-limps.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
9)http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jkhmGOxwbhM
10) http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-offshore-outsourcing-of-american-jobs-a-greater-threat-than-terrorism/18725
11) http://www.globalresearch.ca/endless-growth-based-on-consumerism-is-there-an-alternative-to-capitalism-and-oligarchy/5318000
Source
July 30, 2013
Posted by aletho |
Corruption, Economics, Supremacism, Social Darwinism, Timeless or most popular | British Empire, Economic inequality, India, International Monetary Fund, Poverty, Social Inequality, United States, USA, World Bank |
Leave a comment
The US is pressuring Russia to hand over NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden to face espionage charges. However, it routinely denies Russian requests to hand over suspected criminals living in America.
“Law agencies asked the US on many occasions to extradite wanted criminals through Interpol channels, but those requests were neither met nor even responded to,” spokesman for the Russian Interior Ministry Andrey Pilipchuk said on Monday.
He named Ilyas Akhmadov and Tamaz Nalbandov as examples of people living in the US, who Russia unsuccessfully tried to get for prosecution.
Akhmadov, a former officer in the Soviet Union’s Red Army, joined the militant movement in the Russian Republic of Chechnya in the early 1990s, fighting for some time along with the notorious terrorist Shamil Basayev. He is wanted in Russia over his connection to crimes committed by the insurgents.
He served as an official of the short-lived ‘government of Ichkeria’, an entity which wanted to form a sovereign Islamist state on Chechen territory. In 1999, Akhmadov was appointed ‘Foreign Minister of Ichkeria’, and toured Western countries to rally support for his cause.
After Moscow re-established control over Chechnya, he settled in the US in 2003 and sought political asylum there. He received it a year later, despite objections from the US Department of Homeland Security.
Nalbandov, an ethnic Ossetian, is suspected of abduction and extortion in Russia. In 2001, he was placed on domestic and international wanted lists.
In 2000, he moved to the US seeking political asylum and successfully obtained it. He was granted a residence permit in 2002.
Russia sought extradition of both men on several occasions in vain.
The criticism comes as the US pressures Russia to hand over Edward Snowden, a former NSA contractor, who exposed the agency’s secret surveillance programs and the role that other countries played in them.
Snowden is stranded at a Moscow airport after arriving there from Hong Kong last month. The US cancelled his passport as part of its effort to apprehend him and prosecute him on espionage charges. His limbo status means Snowden is unable to leave the airport’s transit zone in any direction.
The whistleblower is seeking political asylum in several countries, including Russia. Moscow tried to distance itself from Snowden’s case, although several Russian officials voiced their support for him and called on the government to help him.
Snowden won sympathies from activists worldwide, as many people see him as a hero, who sacrificed his career and possibly freedom to expose questionable secretive government policies. Russian human rights activists supporting the American said they regularly receive offers of money, jobs and even marriage to Snowden, the latter to facilitate his entrance to the country.
July 23, 2013
Posted by aletho |
Aletho News | Human rights, Ilyas Akhmadov, National Security Agency, Russia, Shamil Basayev, Snowden, United States, USA |
Leave a comment
The Travesty goes like this.
The grounds for Zimmerman’s acquittal were that he shot someone, and killed him. Pure and simple.
The grounds for Trayvon Martin’s having been killed is that he decided to defend himself against someone stalking him.
Does it make sense? No. Is it true? Yes.
There’s nothing to understand. That’s just the way it is. But if we do want to understand it, we have to look at the “role model.” Or rather, at The Role Model.
The Role Model is the US, the War Making Power.
The US walks (drives, flies, shoots and bombs its way) into another country under fabricated excuses, and considers anyone who tries to defend their country against this as an aggressor. Hence, Guantanamo is filled with prisoners, never charged with anything because the only thing they did was try to defend Afghanistan against a US invasion. Trayvon Martin is dead for the same reason – that is, Zimmerman invaded his space (acting like the US). With a role model like that, you can’t go wrong. Right?
To act in self-defense is to be the aggressor. Just ask Marissa Alexander. She has a restraining order against her estranged husband. He invades her house and threatens her. She goes out to the garage to get her gun, and comes back into the house to expel this unwanted invader from it. He approaches her, she fires a warning shot into the ceiling, the invader leaves, and she is sentenced to 20 years in prison for attempted murder. She couldn’t claim she was standing her ground because she is a black woman. The fact that this happened in her house meant that she was the aggressor. The judge said that she could not claim self-defense because she left the house and came back in, which made her the aggressor. Had she been acting in self-defense, he said, she would have fled. Her estranged husband, violating a restraining order with the same impunity that the US violates international law in invading countries and torturing prisoners, is the one who can claim to be the victim, standing his ground in her house, which is why she is accused of attempted murder.
Trayvon Martin is walking along, minding his own business, which is why he cannot claim his space of privacy as his ground. The ground belongs to the invader, the one who aggressed against the space of Trayvon Martin’s privacy, and stands on it. The one who defends his space becomes the aggressor.
Have I got that right? Whoever defends their space is a criminal, an aggressor (which is why Trayvon Martin is dead), while whoever invades that space and stands his ground can claim self-defense, and kill with impunity. Racially profiling a black teenager in a hoodie means he is a foreigner in his own space. We have prisons in Guantanamo for such people (unless we kill them first).
War is the role model. For the last 60 years, the US has waged wars of aggression, bombing other countries and landing troops they have trained to be killers on foreign soil – Korea, Vietnam, Panama, Iraq, Afghanistan – while referring to each invasion as “self-defense.”
Invasion is self-defense. Self-defense is aggression. Racialization is equality. Unless you are the racialized.
Zimmerman’s ground, the ground he claimed, didn’t belong to him. He was receiving stolen goods. You know how you steal land from people who do not see it as property? You turn it into property. You mark out a boundary, write that boundary down on a piece of paper called a deed, and sell it. You cannot steal land by picking it up and putting it in your pocket. You steal land by turning it into a commodity. It is a juridical trick, like acquitting a man of manslaughter after he has just slaughtered a man.
Oh, and one more thing to commodify the land, to steal it. You have to stand on it.
Standing your ground is a colonialist notion, since the ground is not “yours.” Not only is it not yours, it is a social space in which ownership cannot be claimed.
Disputes between individuals are personal things, not spatial. To make them spatial is to make them territorial. Any claim to the territory has no legitimacy other than that of force or criminality. Or in other words, colonialism. For Zimmerman to have stood “his” ground is already to be a criminal. Which is enough to get you exonerated of any crime in a colonialist society. Colonialism depends on it.
A beautiful thing happened at the demonstration in Oakland against The Zimmerman Travesty (two days after it happened). We, the colonized (yes, I make common cause under that name), met at the usual place, the plaza whose popular name commemorates the exercise of the police state that occurred at “Fruitvale Station.”
You know why this is a police state? Because you can’t stand your ground against the police. They are the invaders against whom all others are aggressors. The slightest gesture of dignity or self-respect will get you beaten to the ground, arrested for resisting arrest and assaulting an officer, and possibly killed. Guess who the police arrested at the demonstration I am speaking about. A photographer, plying his trade.
Anyway, there appeared at this demonstration a small band of the colonized on bicycles – bicycles tricked out with fancy wheels and decorations, and music playing. And just as the march was to start, they rode into the intersection, coordinated and circling around in it, stopping traffic in all directions. Taking back the land by not standing on it but moving. The motion, like dance, was powerful because it cannot be commodified. Only cars can stand their ground (i.e. colonize) on that land. Or cops – who arrived a few minutes later. These guys on bikes just rode circles around them, so that all the cops could do was take over the intersection, which meant taking over the task of stopping traffic in all directions.
It happened again and again, until it finally happened on the expressway. Bikes. And photographers. And we, the colonized, dancing behind them to their music.
Only the totally naïve would believe that Trayvon Martin attacked Zimmerman, instead of dancing around his stalking. There was a photo of Zimmerman with blood on his face, which surfaced three weeks after the event. Had the picture been made on the night of the murder, it would have been in every newspaper’s front page the next day. It took three weeks to produce it. It didn’t look like Photoshop, but you never can tell.
All that happened not because Trayvon Martin is black. No, we are no longer permitted to play that race card. There is a whole slew of Supreme Court decisions that legitimize profiling. Please see Michelle Alexander’s book, The New Jim Crow, for a partial list, complete with explanations in layperson’s language. Trayvon Martin wasn’t stalked and shot because he was black. He was stalked and shot because Zimmerman is white. It is the fact that Trayvon Martin could be stalked and shot by Zimmerman with impunity that makes him black. The DA and the AG assisted Zimmerman, in a cabal of jurisprudence, with the jury carrying the ball the rest of the way, because Zimmerman is white. It is that cabal that makes Trayvon Martin black. Pure and simple.
OMG, my deepest apologies. I’ve got this all wrong. Its not that the US invasions of other countries is the role model for Zimmerman. Not at all. It’s the Zimmermans of the country that are the role model for the US government.
~
Steve Martinot is a scholarly progressive activist in any cause for social justice and author of a number of books, including The Rules of Racialization and The Machinery of Whiteness. He can be reached at: martinot4@gmail.com.
July 22, 2013
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Militarism, Timeless or most popular | Aggression, Human rights, Stand-your-ground law, Trayvon Martin, United States, USA, Zimmerman |
Leave a comment
RT has conducted an interview with Annie Machon, a former intelligence officer with the UK’s MI5 who resigned in 1996 to blow the whistle. She is now a writer, public speaker and a Director of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition.
Germans are very protective of their privacy because of the historical experience during the Nazi era and with the Stasi following the war says Machon. However German intelligence agencies used the system which the US put in place to spy on the Germans.
RT: The revelations go even further against Chancellor Merkel’s initial angry response to Washington’s surveillance operations, how do you think you could explain these contradictions?
Annie Machon: The US has dealt Germany a marked deck of cards, to be quite honest, because what we’re looking at here is on one hand they are accessing Germany as a level III, a tier III partner in the internet spying game. They seem to be spying on them in the same way they are spying on China, or Iraq, or Saudi Arabia. On the other hand they are encouraging BND BfV, the German intelligence agencies to use the system which they’ve put in place to spy on the Germans. So it is giving with one hand and taking away with the other.
When Snowden’s initial information came out, it appeared that what we’re looking at was Germany was shocked, because they have a constitution that was supposed to protect the people’s privacy, they are supposed to protect people’s private communications and yet the NSA was spying on Germany. There were the initial sounds from the government and Angela Merkel and the people like that saying- we’re shocked, we’re shocked.
Yet the new revelations that are coming out in Der Spiegel, actually indicate that the German intelligence agency was very keen to get a piece of the action, to help the PRISM program, which is getting all the meta-data from social media and the Temper program which is mainlining into intelligence information coming out from all the optic cables. So it is sort of a lot of hypocrisy as well coming from the government.
RT: Now Edward Snowden’s revelations that Germany was spied on by the US did upset many, some even comparing the White House to East Germany’s former secret service-Stasi, what do you think those critics are saying now that it’s known that Berlin was cooperating with Washington?
AM: I think that they will be saying that there are even more likenesses to the old Stasi. Because we have a situation in Germany where because of their historical experience with the Gestapo in World War II and the Stasi in East Germany, they’ve put in a very strong cast iron constitution to protect the people from the invasion of their privacy, from being spied on. And this is what the Germans for decades have taken for granted. They have certain legal protections. And we have seen this time and again when other European-wide initiatives have tried to be imposed on Germany, where things like facial recognition data on Google or Facebook have been banned in Germany.
And yet the BND and the BfV, the two intelligence agencies in Germany have been doing this sort of spying, so I think the hypocrisy is quite astounding and will create a great deal of anger and questions rightly how much the German government knew what was going on.
RT: Snowden’s leaks claim that Germany has been watched much more closely than other EU countries. What kind of threat could Washington’s close ally pose to US interests or was it not a threat that they were looking for?
AM: I think it is just the ability to snoop. It might be well be a reaction to certain privacy laws in Germany. The Germans cannot conceivably pose a threat to the US, apart from through trade powers or something. In fact they have been bending over backwards to assist the US in Afghanistan. They provided more intelligence about Afghanistan than any other NATO state. And yet the US is doing this to Germany.
Most of the countries don’t seem that worried about the PRISM and the Temper programs which spy on everybody… At least in Germany there is sense of that because of historic reasons. People are worried about the surveillance state that is encroaching.
RT: Both countries claim surveillance is essential to providing security, why so much outcry if people have nothing to hide?
AM: Firstly there’s a right to privacy enshrined by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights after the WWII and that can only be infringed if you pose a direct threat to the state. And secondly they can change the goal post, what it means to be a threat to the state.
So for example at the moment, if you want to go out and protest about government issues, or nuclear issues, or peace issues and you want to wave a placard on the street, most people would think that is exercising your democratic right. In many European countries, many other countries too, this is now being deemed to be an extremist behavior, or violently extremist behavior or even terrorism.
So the laws of the land can change and you become a threat even though you think you’re just exercising your democratic rights. And we’ve seen this time and time again across most European countries. So I think people need to be aware, just because they don’t think they are doing anything wrong at the moment, that situation could change. It is a very slippery slope.
July 22, 2013
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Corruption, Deception, Timeless or most popular | Angela Merkel, Annie Machon, Germany, Information Technology, Intelligence, Internet, Security, Stasi, United States, USA |
Leave a comment
Twitter was abuzz yesterday when an unknown person published what were alleged to be a group of passwords for the email accounts of Congressional staffers. Multiple journalists, including reporters from the Daily Beast and Buzzfeed, commented on the list while linking to it.
While one would assume linking to the list is a First Amendment-protected activity—given the journalists had nothing to do with stealing the passwords—Barrett Brown is currently under indictment, in part, for remarkably similar behavior. And if he is convicted, it could have dire consequences for press freedom.
Brown, who has written for Vanity Fair and the Guardian among other publications, started a website called “Project PM” in 2009, which crowdsourced public information about security contractors who worked with government agencies like the NSA. Part of what Brown and other Project PM users investigated were leaked emails from security contractors like HB Gary and Stratfor.
Now, it’s important to note that, despite his fascination with Anonymous, Brown has never been accused of participating in any hacking. In fact, he lacks the expertise to even do so. Northwestern professor Peter Ludlow described what happened after Stratfor emails were leaked online by Anonymous: “When the contents of the Stratfor leak became available, Brown decided to put ProjectPM on it. A link to the Stratfor dump appeared in an Anonymous chat channel; Brown copied it and pasted it into the private chat channel for ProjectPM, bringing the dump to the attention of the editors.”
The link, it turned out, contained credit card numbers, among the wealth of information on the company itself. But by merely transferring the link from one chat room to another, Brown was indicted for trafficking in stolen authentication features (specifically the credit card verification values (“CVV”), or the three-digit number on the back of a credit card), access device (i.e., credit card) fraud and aggravated identity theft. (He is also indicted in two separate criminal cases with making online threats to an FBI agent and obstruction of justice, but those have no bearing on the charges being discussed here.)
The government’s prosecution theory isn’t limited to credit card numbers. The same theory could potentially be used against the Daily Beast or Buzzfeed journalists yesterday, or against any journalist that has linked to stolen material of a similar nature. That’s because the federal identity theft statute, 18 USC § 1028, is remarkably broad.
The statute criminalizes knowingly transferring an “authentication feature” known to be stolen or taken without lawful authority. “Authentication feature” means any “symbol,” “code” or “sequence of numbers or letters” used to authenticate a means of identification. And “means of identification” is defined as “any name or number that may be used alone or in conjunction with any other information, to identify a specific individual” including a “unique electronic identification number, address, or routing code.” The government has argued before—specifically in its prosecution of Andrew “Weev” Auernheimer—that this definition covers email addresses.
Under the government’s theory in Barrett Brown’s case, all journalists (and anyone else for that matter) tweeting out the link to the list of Congressional staffer email addresses and passwords were trafficking in authentication features and are guilty of a felony. While it turns out that many of the passwords in this case may not have been accurate, this lesson holds true anytime someone links to groups of stolen passwords posted online, which seems to happen fairly frequently.
And in this situation, under the Justice Department’s theory, those linking to the list violated the aggravated identity theft statute too because during that crime, they knowingly transferred “without lawful authority, a means of identification of another person”—the email addresses. These are serious charges; aggravated identity theft alone carries a mandatory two-year prison sentence that must run consecutively to any other sentence imposed.
It bears repeating: the government does not allege Brown participated in the hacking of Stratfor at all. Here, Brown didn’t even publish anything, he merely directed other people to where information was already published via a standard hyperlink. The right of journalists—or anyone for that matter—to link to already-public information, including sensitive information, is in serious jeopardy if Brown is convicted.
We’ll have more on the dangers of the Barrett Brown prosecution to both the press and public soon. In the meantime Brown’s case and the massive linking to the Congressional e-mail addresses and passwords that occurred yesterday emphasize why journalists should be worried when the right to link is threatened.
July 20, 2013
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | Barrett Brown, Federal Bureau of Investigation, United States, USA |
Leave a comment
A federal appeals court ruled Friday that New York Times journalist James Risen must testify in the trial of a former Central Intelligence Agency officer accused of leaking classified national defense information to the media.
A lower court ruled previously that Risen could protect the source responsible for sharing intelligence about a CIA operation discussed in his writing, but the US Court of Appeals from the Fourth Circuit reversed that decision Friday morning with a 2-1 vote.
“The reporter must appear and give testimony just as every other citizen must. We are not at liberty to conclude otherwise,” Chief Judge William Traxler Jr. wrote for the majority opinion.
The appeal panel’s decision came just days after United States Attorney General Eric Holder presented President Barack Obama with a proposal that would re-shape current law as it applies to journalists in order to more greatly ensure that reporters aren’t targeted during investigations unless other routes are exhausted first. That maneuver came on the heels of two highly public recent Justice Department scandals in which the White House was revealed to have subpoenaed the phones records for several Associated Press offices and also the email history of Fox News reporter James Rosen.
“Journalists should not be at legal risk for doing their jobs. Our focus must be on those who break the law,” Obama said during a May 23 address after those scandals first surfaced.
With Friday’s ruling, the appeals court weighed whether or not an established precedent would prevent Risen from being asked to disclose the source of his information, but Traxler said, “so long as the subpoena is issued in good faith and is based on a legitimate need of law enforcement, the government need not make any special showing to obtain evidence of criminal conduct from a reporter in a criminal proceeding.”
Next Risen will be expected to testify in the Espionage Act-case against Jeffrey Sterling, a former CIA official accused of disclosing details about a Clinton administration plan to put faulty nuclear weapon blueprints to Iran in an effort to slow down their race to acquiring a nuke. He previously said he’d refuse to speak of his source, however, which would now open up the possibility of being held in contempt of court.
Sterling is one of seven persons accused by President Barack Obama of spying under the Espionage Act, a World War One-era legislation that has previously been used only three times before this administration began targeting leakers.
Judge Roger Gregory, the only justice to vote in the minority, said compelling Risen to testify was a “sad” decision that posed a serious threat to investigative journalism, the Times reported.
“Under the majority’s articulation of the reporter’s privilege, or lack thereof, absent a showing of bad faith by the government, a reporter can always be compelled against her will to reveal her confidential sources in a criminal trial,” Gregory wrote. “The majority exalts the interests of the government while unduly trampling those of the press, and in doing so, severely impinges on the press and the free flow of information in our society.”
Judge Traxler disagreed, however, and along with Judge Roger Gregory wrote that even the US Constitution can’t keep Risen from being asked to take the witness stand.
“There is no First Amendment testimonial privilege, absolute or qualified, that protects a reporter from being compelled to testify by the prosecution or the defense in criminal proceedings about criminal conduct that the reporter personally witnessed or participated in, absent a showing of bad faith, harassment, or other such non-legitimate motive, even though the reporter promised confidentiality to his source,” Traxler wrote.
Gregg Leslie, the legal defense director for the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, told the Times he viewed the verdict as “disappointing,” and even suggested it was a step-backwards only so few days after Holder’s alleged effort to ensure the privacy of sources and reporters.
July 20, 2013
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | Central Intelligence Agency, CIA, James Risen, United States, USA |
Leave a comment
The FBI has reviewed thousands of criminal cases and suspects that 27 death penalty convictions may have been secured by using faulty and exaggerated testimonies that may have wrongfully linked defendants to crimes.
A joint review by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Justice Department was launched after the Washington Post last year reported that flawed forensic work by FBI hair examiners might have led to the convictions of innocent people. The article suggested that Justice Department officials knew of the flaws, but failed to acknowledge them.
Last July, federal officials announced that they would investigate old criminal cases to see if faulty testimonies influenced death penalty convictions. More than 21,700 FBI Laboratory files are being examined, and at least 120 convictions have already been identified as potentially suspicious. Of these, about 27 were death penalty convictions, the Post reports.
Investigators suspect that these convictions may have been influenced by FBI hair examiners who exaggerated the significance of their findings. These experts linked defendants to crimes based on “matches” from microscopic analysis of hair found at crime scenes. Many of these experts claimed that their hair analysis tests definitively confirmed the identity of the offender.
But such statements were often misleading: since the 1970s, FBI reports have usually stated that hair tests are not adequate proof to link a suspect to a crime, since these tests can be flawed.
In cases where solely a hair analysis led to a suspect’s conviction, US courts may have mistakenly locked up innocent people – or in some cases, sentenced them to death.
“One of the things good scientists do is question their assumptions,” David Christian Hassell, director of the FBI Laboratory, told the Post. “No matter what the field, what the discipline, those questions should be up for debate. That’s as true in forensics as anything else.”
The federal review of convictions has raised awareness about the problems that hair tests can pose when there is no other evidence to prove a suspect’s guilt. Texas executes more inmates than any other US state, and its Forensic Science Commission on Friday decided to scrutinize hair cases at all labs under its jurisdiction.
The review also led to a stay of execution in May. Willie Jerome Manning, a 44-year-old man convicted of murdering two college students in 1992, was scheduled to die by lethal injection in Mississippi. But the Justice Department discovered flaws in the forensic testimony that led to his conviction, which halted the execution pending further investigation.
It is unclear how many inmates are on death row or may have been executed already as a result of faulty hair tests, but the FBI says it will announce partial results of its examination later this summer. The review is currently prioritizing cases in which defendants can be punished by execution. Once that review is complete, the agency will examine cases in which defendants are currently imprisoned.
July 19, 2013
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Corruption, Deception, Timeless or most popular | Capital punishment, Criminal law, FBI, FBI scandal, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Forensic science, Science, Security, United States Department of Justice, USA |
Leave a comment
A former station chief with the CIA has been detained in Panama after being on the run from Italian police for more than a decade.
Robert Seldon Lady, 59, was reportedly brought into custody early Thursday after surfacing in the Central American country. An Italian court convicted him in 2009 in absentia of abducting an Egyptian terror suspect from the streets of Milan, and he was sentenced in early 2013 to nine years in prison. Only now, however, has he been caught, according to a statement made Thursday by the Italian justice ministry.
The case against Lady marked the first time ever that a CIA agent was accused of kidnapping and brought to trial. Twenty-two other Americans, mostly intelligence officers, were also convicted for their role in the “extraordinary rendition” of a Muslim cleric.
Lady was the station chief of the Central Intelligence Agency post in Milan during the time of the abduction. He is accused of abducting Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr and assisting in his years’ long detention which was reportedly accompanied with bouts of torture.
“I’m not guilty. I’m only responsible for carrying out orders that I received from my superiors,” Lady told Italy’s Il Giornale newspaper in 2009.
Previously, Lady told GQ magazine in a candid interview that, “When you work in intelligence, you do things in the country in which you work that are not legal.”
“It’s a life of illegality,” said Lady, “But state institutions in the whole world have professionals in my sector, and it’s up to us to do our duty.”
“I console myself by reminding myself that I was a soldier, that I was in a war against terrorism, that I couldn’t discuss orders given to me,” Lady said to Italian journalists.
Lady had served just shy of a quarter-century with the CIA at the time of the crime. He described his former employer to GQ years later as “the vanguard of democracy” and his role as “the greatest job I ever had.”
July 18, 2013
Posted by aletho |
Subjugation - Torture, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Central America, Central Intelligence Agency, CIA, Crime, Egypt, Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr, Latin America, Panama, Robert Seldon Lady, Terrorism, USA |
Leave a comment
Aletho News
Aletho News 