see link for full story
http://www.wate.com/story/22684896/fami ... or-answers" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
Family of New Market man killed by FBI asks for answers
Posted: Jun 25, 2013 4:48 PM EST
The family of a Jefferson County man killed in an FBI raid is asking for answers.
Nearly four months after the shooting, they say no one has told them why this happened.
In March, FBI agents came to 41-year-old Scott Edward Evans' New Market home on Stapleton Road to serve a search warrant.
Federal prosecutors claimed Evans sent and received emails containing child porn as part of an international child porn ring.
The bureau said when agents tried to arrest him he was shot and killed.
Gary Grizzle, Evans' father-in-law, lived next to Evans for more than twenty years and wants to know why an FBI agent killed him.
"We just want to hear something back about it," said Grizzle. "What's going on and what brought all this on?"
Grizzle said since the day of the shooting, no one from the FBI has been back to the house. He said they did not clean up the scene and left his daughter's home a wreck.
He says the child porn accusations against their son-in-law are shocking and he has doubts if they are even true.
Grizzle says the family only had one old computer and said his son-in-law did not even know how to set up an email account.
He says the only photos Evans had on his cell phone were of his three daughters.
"We would like to know why?" said Grizzle. "What proof they had and what caused all this."
Grizzle says Evans' death has been hard for his daughter and the couple's three daughters, ages 8, 15, and 21.
FBI WATCH Making Cruelty visible
-
msfreeh
- Level 34 Illuminated
- Posts: 7718
Re: FBI WATCH Making Cruelty visible
6 stories
see link for full story
http://www.tnp.no/norway/panorama/3808- ... ils-to-fbi" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
26.06.2013 - Oslo
Norwegian IT Company Forced to Hand Over Emails to FBI
The monthly magazine Journalisten wrote that the incident happened in 2010 and 2011. Lysglimt was general manager of e-mail service Runbox, and in March 2013, he was forced to deliver the traffic and e-mails from the servers of the company to the FBI in the United States.
According to Lysglimt, he was first contacted by NCIS in August 2010, where he was asked to assist the American police. But he demanded a court decision. After NCIS got it from the Oslo District Court, he had to give the demanded information.
- I find the whole affair as uncomfortable, not to mention that I can not talk about it with anyone. As I still choose to tell, it’s not because I’m so brave. But when you see what others, like Snowden, is willing, I think it’s a small sacrifice to reveal what happened, says Lysglimt to the magazine.
Hans Jørgen Lysglimt is now also on the parliamentary list of Pirate Party in Oslo for the upcoming elections.
see link for full story
http://whowhatwhy.com/2013/06/27/fbi-do ... necessary/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
FBI Document—“[DELETED]” Plots to Kill Occupy Leaders “If Deemed Necessary”
By Dave Lindorff on Jun 27, 2013
dissenting-vote-suddenly-dies-down-sniper-election-from-the-demotivational-poster-1273925293Would you be shocked to learn that the FBI apparently knew that some organization, perhaps even a law enforcement agency or private security outfit, had contingency plans to assassinate peaceful protestors in a major American city — and did nothing to intervene?
Would you be surprised to learn that this intelligence comes not from a shadowy whistle-blower but from the FBI itself – specifically, from a document obtained from Houston FBI office last December, as part of a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request filed by the Washington, DC-based Partnership for Civil Justice Fund?
To repeat: this comes from the FBI itself. The question, then, is: What did the FBI do about it?
The Plot
Remember the Occupy Movement? The peaceful crowds that camped out in the center of a number of cities in the fall of 2011, calling for some recognition by local, state and federal authorities that our democratic system was out of whack, controlled by corporate interests, and in need of immediate repair?
That movement swept the US beginning in mid-September 2011. When, in early October, the movement came to Houston, Texas, law enforcement officials and the city’s banking and oil industry executives freaked out perhaps even more so than they did in some other cities. The push-back took the form of violent assaults by police on Occupy activists, federal and local surveillance of people seen as organizers, infiltration by police provocateurs—and, as crazy as it sounds, some kind of plot to assassinate the “leaders” of this non-violent and leaderless movement.
But don’t take our word for it. Here’s what the document obtained from the Houston FBI, said:
An identified [DELETED] as of October planned to engage in sniper attacks against protestors (sic) in Houston, Texas if deemed necessary. An identified [DELETED] had received intelligence that indicated the protesters in New York and Seattle planned similar protests in Houston, Dallas, San Antonio and Austin, Texas. [DELETED] planned to gather intelligence against the leaders of the protest groups and obtain photographs, then formulate a plan to kill the leadership via suppressed sniper rifles. (Note: protests continued throughout the weekend with approximately 6000 persons in NYC. ‘Occupy Wall Street’ protests have spread to about half of all states in the US, over a dozen European and Asian cities, including protests in Cleveland (10/6-8/11) at Willard Park which was initially attended by hundreds of protesters.)
Occupiers Astounded—But Not Entirely
Paul Kennedy, the National Lawyers Guild attorney in Houston who represented a number of Occupy Houston activists arrested during the protests, had not heard of the sniper plot, but said, “I find it hard to believe that such information would have been known to the FBI and that we would not have been told about it.” He then added darkly, “If it had been some right-wing group plotting such an action, something would have been done. But if it is something law enforcement was planning, then nothing would have been done. It might seem hard to believe that a law enforcement agency would do such a thing, but I wouldn’t put it past them.”
He adds, “The use of the phrase ‘if deemed necessary,’ sounds like it was some kind of official organization that was doing the planning.” In other words, the “identified [DELETED” mentioned in the Houston FBI document may have been some other agency with jurisdiction in the area, which was calculatedly making plans to kill Occupy activists.
Kennedy knows first-hand the extent to which combined federal-state-local law enforcement forces in Houston were focused on disrupting and breaking up the Occupy action in that city. He represented seven people who were charged with felonies for a protest that attempted to block the operation of Houston’s port facility. That case fell apart when in the course of discovery, the prosecution disclosed that the Occupiers had been infiltrated by three undercover officers from the Austin Police department, who came up with the idea of using a device called a “sleeping dragon” -- actually chains inside of PVC pipe -- which are devilishly hard to cut through, for chaining protesters together blocking port access. The police provocateurs, Kennedy says, actually purchased the materials and constructed the “criminal instruments” themselves, supplying them to the protesters. As a result of this discovery, the judge tossed out the felony charges.
FBI Response
WhoWhatWhy contacted FBI headquarters in Washington, and asked about this document—which, despite its stunning revelation, and despite PCFJ press releases, was notwithstanding a few online mentions, was generally ignored by mainstream and “alternative” press alike.
The agency confirmed that it is genuine and that it originated in the Houston FBI office. (The plot is also referenced in a second document obtained in PCJF’s FOIA response, in this case from the FBI’s Gainesville, Fla., office, which cites the Houston FBI as the source.) That second document actually suggests that the assassination plot, which never was activated, might still be operative should Occupy decisively re-emerge in the area. It states:
On 13 October 20111, writer sent via email an excerpt from the daily [DELETED] regarding FBI Houston’s [DELETED] to all IAs, SSRAs and SSA [DELETED] This [DELETED] identified the exploitation of the Occupy Movement by [LENGTHY DELETION] interested in developing a long-term plan to kill local Occupy leaders via sniper fire.
Asked why solid information about an assassination plot against American citizens exercising their Constitutional right to free speech and assembly never led to exposure of the plotters’ identity or an arrest—as happened with so many other terrorist schemes the agency has publicized—Paul Bresson, head of the FBI media office, offered a typically elliptical response:
The FOIA documents that you reference are redacted in several places pursuant to FOIA and privacy laws that govern the release of such information so therefore I am unable to help fill in the blanks that you are seeking. Exemptions are cited in each place where a redaction is made. As far as the question about the murder plot, I am unable to comment further, but rest assured if the FBI was aware of credible and specific information involving a murder plot, law enforcement would have responded with appropriate action.
Note that the privacy being “protected” in this instance (by a government that we now know has so little respect for our privacy) was of someone or some organization that was actively contemplating violating other people’s Constitutional rights— by murdering them. That should leave us less than confident about Bresson’s assertion that law enforcement would have responded appropriately to a “credible” threat.
Houston Cops Not Warned?
The Houston FBI office stonewalled our requests for information about the sniper-rifle assassination plot and why nobody was ever arrested for planning to kill demonstrators. Meanwhile, the Houston Police, who had the job of controlling the demonstrations, and of maintaining order and public safety, displayed remarkably little interest in the plot: “We haven’t heard about it,” said Keith Smith, a public affairs officer for the department, who told us he inquired about the matter with senior department officials.
Asked whether he was concerned that, if what he was saying was correct, it meant the FBI had not warned local police about a possible terrorist act being planned in his city, he said, “No. You’d have to ask the Houston FBI about that.”
Craft International Again
Sniper action by law enforcement officials in Texas would not be anything new. Last October, a border patrol officer with the Texas Department of Public Safety, riding in a helicopter, used a sniper rifle to fire at a fast-moving pickup truck carrying nine illegal immigrants into the state from Mexico, killing two and wounding a third, and causing the vehicle to crash and overturn. It turns out that Border Patrol agents, like a number of Texas law enforcement organizations, had been receiving special sniper training from a Dallas-based mercenary-for-hire organization called Craft International LLC. It seems likely that Houston Police have also received such training, possibly from Craft, which has a contract for such law-enforcement training funded by the US Department of Homeland Security.
Efforts to obtain comment from Craft International have been unsuccessful, but the company’s website features photos of Craft instructors training law enforcement officers in sniper rifle use (the company was founded in 2009 by Chris Kyle, a celebrated Army sniper who last year was slain by a combat veteran he had accompanied to a shooting range). A number of men wearing Craft-issued clothing and gear, and bearing the company’s distinctive skull logo, were spotted around the finish line of the April Boston Marathon, both before and after the bombing. Some were wearing large black backpacks with markings resembling what was seen on an exploded backpack image released by the FBI.(For more on the backpacks that allegedly contained the bombs, see this piece we did in May.)
An Activist Responds
Remington Alessi, an Occupy Houston activist who played a prominent role during the Occupy events, was one of the seven defendants whose felony charge was dropped because of police entrapment. He says of the sniper plot information, which first came to light last December as one of hundreds of pages of FBI files obtained by PCJF, “We have speculated heavily about it. The ‘if deemed necessary’ phrase seems to indicate it was an organization. It could have been the police or a private security group.”
Alessi, who hails from a law-enforcement family and who ran last year for sheriff of Houston’s Harris County on the Texas Green Party ticket, garnering 22,000 votes, agrees with attorney Kennedy that the plotters were not from some right-wing organization. “If it had been that, the FBI would have acted on it,” he agrees. “I believe the sniper attack was one strategy being discussed for dealing with the occupation.” He adds:
I assume I would have been one of the targets, because I led a few of the protest actions, and I hosted an Occupy show on KPFT. I wish I could say I’m surprised that this was seriously discussed, but remember, this is the same federal government that murdered (Black Panther Party leader) Fred Hampton. We have a government that traditionally murders people who are threats. I guess being a target is sort of an honor.
There, Alessi is referring to evidence made public in the Church Committee hearings of the 1970s which revealed that the FBI was orchestrating local police attacks (in Chicago, San Francisco and New York) on Panther leaders. (For more on that, see this, starting at p. 185, esp. pp. 220-223; also see this .)
Alessi suspects that the assassination plot cited in the FBI memo was
probably developed in the Houston Fusion Center (where federal, state and local intelligence people work hand-in-glove). During our trial we learned that they were all over our stuff, tracking Twitter feeds etc. It seems to me that based on the access they were getting they were using what we now know as the NSA’s PRISM program.
He notes, correctly, that in documents obtained from the FBI and Homeland Security by the PCJF’s FOIA search, the Occupy Movement is classed as a “terrorist” activity.
Ironically, while the Occupy Movement was actually peaceful, the FBI, at best, was simply standing aside while some organization plotted to assassinate the movement’s prominent activists.
The FBI’s stonewalling response to inquiries about this story, and the agency’s evident failure to take any action regarding a known deadly threat to Occupy protesters in Houston, will likely make protesters at future demonstrations look differently at the sniper-rifle equipped law-enforcement personnel often seen on rooftops during such events. What are they there for? Who are the threats they are looking for and potentially targeting? Who are they protecting? And are they using “suppressed” sniper rifles? Would this indicate they have no plans to take responsibility for any shots silently fired? Or that they plan to frame someone else?
WhoWhatWhy plans to continue doing this kind of groundbreaking original reporting. You can count on it. But can we count on you? We cannot do our work without your support.
Please click here to donate; it’s tax deductible. And it packs a punch.
GRAPHIC: http://cdn.motinetwork.net/demotivation ... 925293.jpg" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
FBI Documents (click on each to enlarge)
see link for full story
http://www.wate.com/story/22684896/fami ... or-answers" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
Family of New Market man killed by FBI asks for answers
Posted: Jun 25, 2013 4:48 PM EST
The family of a Jefferson County man killed in an FBI raid is asking for answers.
Nearly four months after the shooting, they say no one has told them why this happened.
In March, FBI agents came to 41-year-old Scott Edward Evans' New Market home on Stapleton Road to serve a search warrant.
Federal prosecutors claimed Evans sent and received emails containing child porn as part of an international child porn ring.
The bureau said when agents tried to arrest him he was shot and killed.
Gary Grizzle, Evans' father-in-law, lived next to Evans for more than twenty years and wants to know why an FBI agent killed him.
"We just want to hear something back about it," said Grizzle. "What's going on and what brought all this on?"
Grizzle said since the day of the shooting, no one from the FBI has been back to the house. He said they did not clean up the scene and left his daughter's home a wreck.
He says the child porn accusations against their son-in-law are shocking and he has doubts if they are even true.
Grizzle says the family only had one old computer and said his son-in-law did not even know how to set up an email account.
He says the only photos Evans had on his cell phone were of his three daughters.
"We would like to know why?" said Grizzle. "What proof they had and what caused all this."
Grizzle says Evans' death has been hard for his daughter and the couple's three daughters, ages 8, 15, and 21.
see link for full story
http://grist.org/news/fbi-chases-anti-g ... gressions/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
FBI chases anti-GMO activists while ignoring Monsanto’s transgressions
By John Upton
FBI agent with gunHot on the trail of the bad guys — depending on your definition of “bad.”
Some experimental GMO crops were torn out of a field in Oregon this month. That means it’s time for the federal government to freak the @#$%! out and do its best to clamp down again on eco-activism.
The sugar beet plants, which were genetically engineered by Syngenta to survive applications of the herbicide Roundup, were uprooted in the middle of the night from a couple of fields, presumably by anti-GMO activists. The destruction of the experimental crops occurred in the same state where a strain of Monsanto’s illegal herbicide-resistant wheat recently showed up in a farmer’s field, threatening America’s multibillion-dollar wheat export market.
Guess which crime the FBI is desperate to crack?
That’s right: The sugar beet one. The agency announced that it “considers this crime to be economic sabotage and a violation of federal law involving damage to commercial agricultural enterprises.” According to the FBI, a $10,000 reward is being offered for clues by Oregonians for Food and Shelter, a corporate forestry and agriculture group that lobbies for pro-GMO and pro-pesticide legislation.
The Oregonian reports that 1,000 genetically engineered sugar beet plants were uprooted from land leased by Syngenta on June 8:
Three nights later, the destruction continued on another property, where another 5,500 plants were ruined.
“It doesn’t look like a vehicle was used. It looks like people entered the field and destroyed the plants by hand,” said Paul Minehart, head of corporate communications in North America for Syngenta, a global agriculture corporation based in Basel, Switzerland.
Estimates for the damage were not specified but the financial losses are significant, according to FBI spokeswoman Beth Anne Steele.
Meanwhile, Monsanto is continuing to push its claim that its genetically engineered wheat turned up on an Oregon farm because of an act of sabotage. That claim is drawing skepticism from the expert whose tests first confirmed that the rogue wheat was developed by Monsanto. From a report in The Guardian:
While Monsanto’s chief technology officer suggested eco-activists were to blame, [Oregon State University weed sciences professor Carol] Mallory-Smith said deliberate contamination was the least likely scenario:
“The sabotage conspiracy theory is even harder for me to explain or think as logical because it would mean that someone had that seed and was holding that seed for 10 or 12 years and happened to put it on the right field to have it found, and identified. I don’t think that makes a lot of sense.”
We may learn more about the cause of the GMO wheat contamination after the U.S. Department of Agriculture completes an investigation.
http://www.pakistantoday.com.pk/2013/06 ... programme/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
FBI’s subversive programme
Author: By Dr Agha Saeed
June 26, 2013 on 4:19 AM
COINTELPRO: A secret system for liquidating dissent
When a former vice president of the United States begins to sound like major critics of the US imperial system, such as Ramsey Clark and Noam Chomsky, then you know that the situation is really bleak.
A few days ago, former Vice President Al Gore had told The Guardian that “the NSA spying revealed by whistleblower Edward Snowden is unlawful because it violates the Constitution”.
What is far more injurious to human rights of religious, ethnic and ideological minorities is Federal Bureau of investigation’s (FBI) Counter Intelligence Programme popularly known as the COINTELPRO.
Although initiated by the FBI after the Russian Revolution as a secret system based on the deployment of illegal means and immoral methods to contain undesirable social movements, yet the fully integrated covert operation, under the label of COINTELPRO, officially didn’t begin till 1956 with the stated aim to “increase factionalism, cause disruption and win defections” inside the Communist Party USA.
In retrospect, it was built around ten sets of mutually-reinforcing covert activities against a historically particular ideological, ethnic, or religious group – chronologically, the communists, socialists, labour, African Americans, American Indians, Latino Americans, Arab Americans, environmentalists, peace groups, and now Muslim Americans – to liquidate any credible challenge to the US empire and to establish the tyranny of the majority over the targeted minority.
The above-mentioned ten sets of covert activities are: 1) Enlist the support of the “mainstream” media, academia and the intelligentsia for producing and popularising justifications for isolating, harassing, intimidating, and marginalising the targeted group, 2) Disrupt its internal unity, 3) Replace its authentic leadership with handpicked individuals, 4) Undermine its legitimate major institutions and organisations, 5) Deny it all means of respect, acceptance, and growth by stigmatising its values, beliefs and identity, 6) prevent access to mainstream media as well as social, political, educational, and government institutions, 7) Bleed it economically, 8) Delegitimise its very existence by organising systematic disinformation and misinformation campaigns to create inerasable negative images of the targeted group, 9) Infiltrate, intimidate, harass, entrap, bribe, blackmail, cheat, deceive and lie to subvert and “neutralise” the targeted group, and 10) Consequently, and most importantly, control its agenda of affinities and actions.
Amazingly, all of these ten sets of illegal activities are stacked in FBI’s two ‘Top-Secret’ internal memos penned in late 1960s.
The first memo, dated August 25, 1967, and authored by the FBI’s iron-fisted chief J Edgar Hoover, reveals a whole host of abusive activities as well as documents Hoover’s total disregard for any adverse impact on the “rights of Americans”.
1) “The purpose of this new counterintelligence endeavour is to expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralise the activities of black nationalist hate-type organisations and groupings, their leadership, spokesmen, membership, and supporters, and to counter their propensity for violence and civil disorder.”
2) “The activities of all such groups of intelligence interest to the Bureau must be followed on a continuous basis so we will be in a position to promptly take advantage of all opportunities for counterintelligence and inspire action in instances where circumstances warrant. The pernicious background of such groups, their duplicity, and devious maneuvers must be exposed to public scrutiny where such publicity will have a neutralizing effect.”
3) “No opportunity should be missed to exploit through counterintelligence techniques the organisational and personal conflicts of the leaderships of the groups and where possible an effort should be made to capitalise upon existing conflicts between competing black nationalist organisations.”
4) “When an opportunity is apparent to disrupt or neutralise black nationalist, hate-type organisations through the cooperation of established local news media contacts or through such contact with sources available… to insure the targeted group is disrupted, ridiculed, or discredited through the publicity and not merely publicized...”
5) “You are also cautioned that the nature of this new endeavour is such that under no circumstances should the existence of the programme be made known outside the bureau.”
The second memo, dated March 4, 1968, also authored and labelled by J Edgar Hoover as “Racial Intelligence” was issued “just one month before the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.”
6. “Prevent the coalition of militant black nationalist groups. In unity there is strength; a truism that is no less valid for all its triteness. An effective coalition of black nationalist groups might be… the beginning of a true black revolution.”
7. “Prevent the rise of a “messiah” who could unify, and electrify, the militant black nationalist movement. Malcolm X might have been such a “messiah”; he is the martyr of the movement today. Martin Luther King, Stokely Carmichael and Elijah Muhammed all aspire to this position…. King could be a very real contender for this position should he abandon his supposed “obedience” to “white, liberal doctrines” (nonviolence) and embrace black nationalism.”
8. [It] “should also be a goal of the Counterintelligence Programme to pinpoint potential troublemakers and neutralise them before they exercise their potential for violence.”
9. “Prevent militant black nationalist groups and leaders from gaining respectability by discrediting them to three separate segments of the community…”
10. “A final goal should be to prevent the long-range growth of militant black organisations, especially among youth.”
In his book, Assault on the Left: The FBI and the Sixties Antiwar Movement, James K Davis points out: “These efforts devastated what was left of CPUSA. By 1971, the figure was down to about 3,000 members, a considerable number of those being undercover FBI informants.”
see link for full story
http://www.tnp.no/norway/panorama/3808- ... ils-to-fbi" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
26.06.2013 - Oslo
Norwegian IT Company Forced to Hand Over Emails to FBI
The monthly magazine Journalisten wrote that the incident happened in 2010 and 2011. Lysglimt was general manager of e-mail service Runbox, and in March 2013, he was forced to deliver the traffic and e-mails from the servers of the company to the FBI in the United States.
According to Lysglimt, he was first contacted by NCIS in August 2010, where he was asked to assist the American police. But he demanded a court decision. After NCIS got it from the Oslo District Court, he had to give the demanded information.
- I find the whole affair as uncomfortable, not to mention that I can not talk about it with anyone. As I still choose to tell, it’s not because I’m so brave. But when you see what others, like Snowden, is willing, I think it’s a small sacrifice to reveal what happened, says Lysglimt to the magazine.
Hans Jørgen Lysglimt is now also on the parliamentary list of Pirate Party in Oslo for the upcoming elections.
see link for full story
http://whowhatwhy.com/2013/06/27/fbi-do ... necessary/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
FBI Document—“[DELETED]” Plots to Kill Occupy Leaders “If Deemed Necessary”
By Dave Lindorff on Jun 27, 2013
dissenting-vote-suddenly-dies-down-sniper-election-from-the-demotivational-poster-1273925293Would you be shocked to learn that the FBI apparently knew that some organization, perhaps even a law enforcement agency or private security outfit, had contingency plans to assassinate peaceful protestors in a major American city — and did nothing to intervene?
Would you be surprised to learn that this intelligence comes not from a shadowy whistle-blower but from the FBI itself – specifically, from a document obtained from Houston FBI office last December, as part of a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request filed by the Washington, DC-based Partnership for Civil Justice Fund?
To repeat: this comes from the FBI itself. The question, then, is: What did the FBI do about it?
The Plot
Remember the Occupy Movement? The peaceful crowds that camped out in the center of a number of cities in the fall of 2011, calling for some recognition by local, state and federal authorities that our democratic system was out of whack, controlled by corporate interests, and in need of immediate repair?
That movement swept the US beginning in mid-September 2011. When, in early October, the movement came to Houston, Texas, law enforcement officials and the city’s banking and oil industry executives freaked out perhaps even more so than they did in some other cities. The push-back took the form of violent assaults by police on Occupy activists, federal and local surveillance of people seen as organizers, infiltration by police provocateurs—and, as crazy as it sounds, some kind of plot to assassinate the “leaders” of this non-violent and leaderless movement.
But don’t take our word for it. Here’s what the document obtained from the Houston FBI, said:
An identified [DELETED] as of October planned to engage in sniper attacks against protestors (sic) in Houston, Texas if deemed necessary. An identified [DELETED] had received intelligence that indicated the protesters in New York and Seattle planned similar protests in Houston, Dallas, San Antonio and Austin, Texas. [DELETED] planned to gather intelligence against the leaders of the protest groups and obtain photographs, then formulate a plan to kill the leadership via suppressed sniper rifles. (Note: protests continued throughout the weekend with approximately 6000 persons in NYC. ‘Occupy Wall Street’ protests have spread to about half of all states in the US, over a dozen European and Asian cities, including protests in Cleveland (10/6-8/11) at Willard Park which was initially attended by hundreds of protesters.)
Occupiers Astounded—But Not Entirely
Paul Kennedy, the National Lawyers Guild attorney in Houston who represented a number of Occupy Houston activists arrested during the protests, had not heard of the sniper plot, but said, “I find it hard to believe that such information would have been known to the FBI and that we would not have been told about it.” He then added darkly, “If it had been some right-wing group plotting such an action, something would have been done. But if it is something law enforcement was planning, then nothing would have been done. It might seem hard to believe that a law enforcement agency would do such a thing, but I wouldn’t put it past them.”
He adds, “The use of the phrase ‘if deemed necessary,’ sounds like it was some kind of official organization that was doing the planning.” In other words, the “identified [DELETED” mentioned in the Houston FBI document may have been some other agency with jurisdiction in the area, which was calculatedly making plans to kill Occupy activists.
Kennedy knows first-hand the extent to which combined federal-state-local law enforcement forces in Houston were focused on disrupting and breaking up the Occupy action in that city. He represented seven people who were charged with felonies for a protest that attempted to block the operation of Houston’s port facility. That case fell apart when in the course of discovery, the prosecution disclosed that the Occupiers had been infiltrated by three undercover officers from the Austin Police department, who came up with the idea of using a device called a “sleeping dragon” -- actually chains inside of PVC pipe -- which are devilishly hard to cut through, for chaining protesters together blocking port access. The police provocateurs, Kennedy says, actually purchased the materials and constructed the “criminal instruments” themselves, supplying them to the protesters. As a result of this discovery, the judge tossed out the felony charges.
FBI Response
WhoWhatWhy contacted FBI headquarters in Washington, and asked about this document—which, despite its stunning revelation, and despite PCFJ press releases, was notwithstanding a few online mentions, was generally ignored by mainstream and “alternative” press alike.
The agency confirmed that it is genuine and that it originated in the Houston FBI office. (The plot is also referenced in a second document obtained in PCJF’s FOIA response, in this case from the FBI’s Gainesville, Fla., office, which cites the Houston FBI as the source.) That second document actually suggests that the assassination plot, which never was activated, might still be operative should Occupy decisively re-emerge in the area. It states:
On 13 October 20111, writer sent via email an excerpt from the daily [DELETED] regarding FBI Houston’s [DELETED] to all IAs, SSRAs and SSA [DELETED] This [DELETED] identified the exploitation of the Occupy Movement by [LENGTHY DELETION] interested in developing a long-term plan to kill local Occupy leaders via sniper fire.
Asked why solid information about an assassination plot against American citizens exercising their Constitutional right to free speech and assembly never led to exposure of the plotters’ identity or an arrest—as happened with so many other terrorist schemes the agency has publicized—Paul Bresson, head of the FBI media office, offered a typically elliptical response:
The FOIA documents that you reference are redacted in several places pursuant to FOIA and privacy laws that govern the release of such information so therefore I am unable to help fill in the blanks that you are seeking. Exemptions are cited in each place where a redaction is made. As far as the question about the murder plot, I am unable to comment further, but rest assured if the FBI was aware of credible and specific information involving a murder plot, law enforcement would have responded with appropriate action.
Note that the privacy being “protected” in this instance (by a government that we now know has so little respect for our privacy) was of someone or some organization that was actively contemplating violating other people’s Constitutional rights— by murdering them. That should leave us less than confident about Bresson’s assertion that law enforcement would have responded appropriately to a “credible” threat.
Houston Cops Not Warned?
The Houston FBI office stonewalled our requests for information about the sniper-rifle assassination plot and why nobody was ever arrested for planning to kill demonstrators. Meanwhile, the Houston Police, who had the job of controlling the demonstrations, and of maintaining order and public safety, displayed remarkably little interest in the plot: “We haven’t heard about it,” said Keith Smith, a public affairs officer for the department, who told us he inquired about the matter with senior department officials.
Asked whether he was concerned that, if what he was saying was correct, it meant the FBI had not warned local police about a possible terrorist act being planned in his city, he said, “No. You’d have to ask the Houston FBI about that.”
Craft International Again
Sniper action by law enforcement officials in Texas would not be anything new. Last October, a border patrol officer with the Texas Department of Public Safety, riding in a helicopter, used a sniper rifle to fire at a fast-moving pickup truck carrying nine illegal immigrants into the state from Mexico, killing two and wounding a third, and causing the vehicle to crash and overturn. It turns out that Border Patrol agents, like a number of Texas law enforcement organizations, had been receiving special sniper training from a Dallas-based mercenary-for-hire organization called Craft International LLC. It seems likely that Houston Police have also received such training, possibly from Craft, which has a contract for such law-enforcement training funded by the US Department of Homeland Security.
Efforts to obtain comment from Craft International have been unsuccessful, but the company’s website features photos of Craft instructors training law enforcement officers in sniper rifle use (the company was founded in 2009 by Chris Kyle, a celebrated Army sniper who last year was slain by a combat veteran he had accompanied to a shooting range). A number of men wearing Craft-issued clothing and gear, and bearing the company’s distinctive skull logo, were spotted around the finish line of the April Boston Marathon, both before and after the bombing. Some were wearing large black backpacks with markings resembling what was seen on an exploded backpack image released by the FBI.(For more on the backpacks that allegedly contained the bombs, see this piece we did in May.)
An Activist Responds
Remington Alessi, an Occupy Houston activist who played a prominent role during the Occupy events, was one of the seven defendants whose felony charge was dropped because of police entrapment. He says of the sniper plot information, which first came to light last December as one of hundreds of pages of FBI files obtained by PCJF, “We have speculated heavily about it. The ‘if deemed necessary’ phrase seems to indicate it was an organization. It could have been the police or a private security group.”
Alessi, who hails from a law-enforcement family and who ran last year for sheriff of Houston’s Harris County on the Texas Green Party ticket, garnering 22,000 votes, agrees with attorney Kennedy that the plotters were not from some right-wing organization. “If it had been that, the FBI would have acted on it,” he agrees. “I believe the sniper attack was one strategy being discussed for dealing with the occupation.” He adds:
I assume I would have been one of the targets, because I led a few of the protest actions, and I hosted an Occupy show on KPFT. I wish I could say I’m surprised that this was seriously discussed, but remember, this is the same federal government that murdered (Black Panther Party leader) Fred Hampton. We have a government that traditionally murders people who are threats. I guess being a target is sort of an honor.
There, Alessi is referring to evidence made public in the Church Committee hearings of the 1970s which revealed that the FBI was orchestrating local police attacks (in Chicago, San Francisco and New York) on Panther leaders. (For more on that, see this, starting at p. 185, esp. pp. 220-223; also see this .)
Alessi suspects that the assassination plot cited in the FBI memo was
probably developed in the Houston Fusion Center (where federal, state and local intelligence people work hand-in-glove). During our trial we learned that they were all over our stuff, tracking Twitter feeds etc. It seems to me that based on the access they were getting they were using what we now know as the NSA’s PRISM program.
He notes, correctly, that in documents obtained from the FBI and Homeland Security by the PCJF’s FOIA search, the Occupy Movement is classed as a “terrorist” activity.
Ironically, while the Occupy Movement was actually peaceful, the FBI, at best, was simply standing aside while some organization plotted to assassinate the movement’s prominent activists.
The FBI’s stonewalling response to inquiries about this story, and the agency’s evident failure to take any action regarding a known deadly threat to Occupy protesters in Houston, will likely make protesters at future demonstrations look differently at the sniper-rifle equipped law-enforcement personnel often seen on rooftops during such events. What are they there for? Who are the threats they are looking for and potentially targeting? Who are they protecting? And are they using “suppressed” sniper rifles? Would this indicate they have no plans to take responsibility for any shots silently fired? Or that they plan to frame someone else?
WhoWhatWhy plans to continue doing this kind of groundbreaking original reporting. You can count on it. But can we count on you? We cannot do our work without your support.
Please click here to donate; it’s tax deductible. And it packs a punch.
GRAPHIC: http://cdn.motinetwork.net/demotivation ... 925293.jpg" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
FBI Documents (click on each to enlarge)
see link for full story
http://www.wate.com/story/22684896/fami ... or-answers" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
Family of New Market man killed by FBI asks for answers
Posted: Jun 25, 2013 4:48 PM EST
The family of a Jefferson County man killed in an FBI raid is asking for answers.
Nearly four months after the shooting, they say no one has told them why this happened.
In March, FBI agents came to 41-year-old Scott Edward Evans' New Market home on Stapleton Road to serve a search warrant.
Federal prosecutors claimed Evans sent and received emails containing child porn as part of an international child porn ring.
The bureau said when agents tried to arrest him he was shot and killed.
Gary Grizzle, Evans' father-in-law, lived next to Evans for more than twenty years and wants to know why an FBI agent killed him.
"We just want to hear something back about it," said Grizzle. "What's going on and what brought all this on?"
Grizzle said since the day of the shooting, no one from the FBI has been back to the house. He said they did not clean up the scene and left his daughter's home a wreck.
He says the child porn accusations against their son-in-law are shocking and he has doubts if they are even true.
Grizzle says the family only had one old computer and said his son-in-law did not even know how to set up an email account.
He says the only photos Evans had on his cell phone were of his three daughters.
"We would like to know why?" said Grizzle. "What proof they had and what caused all this."
Grizzle says Evans' death has been hard for his daughter and the couple's three daughters, ages 8, 15, and 21.
see link for full story
http://grist.org/news/fbi-chases-anti-g ... gressions/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
FBI chases anti-GMO activists while ignoring Monsanto’s transgressions
By John Upton
FBI agent with gunHot on the trail of the bad guys — depending on your definition of “bad.”
Some experimental GMO crops were torn out of a field in Oregon this month. That means it’s time for the federal government to freak the @#$%! out and do its best to clamp down again on eco-activism.
The sugar beet plants, which were genetically engineered by Syngenta to survive applications of the herbicide Roundup, were uprooted in the middle of the night from a couple of fields, presumably by anti-GMO activists. The destruction of the experimental crops occurred in the same state where a strain of Monsanto’s illegal herbicide-resistant wheat recently showed up in a farmer’s field, threatening America’s multibillion-dollar wheat export market.
Guess which crime the FBI is desperate to crack?
That’s right: The sugar beet one. The agency announced that it “considers this crime to be economic sabotage and a violation of federal law involving damage to commercial agricultural enterprises.” According to the FBI, a $10,000 reward is being offered for clues by Oregonians for Food and Shelter, a corporate forestry and agriculture group that lobbies for pro-GMO and pro-pesticide legislation.
The Oregonian reports that 1,000 genetically engineered sugar beet plants were uprooted from land leased by Syngenta on June 8:
Three nights later, the destruction continued on another property, where another 5,500 plants were ruined.
“It doesn’t look like a vehicle was used. It looks like people entered the field and destroyed the plants by hand,” said Paul Minehart, head of corporate communications in North America for Syngenta, a global agriculture corporation based in Basel, Switzerland.
Estimates for the damage were not specified but the financial losses are significant, according to FBI spokeswoman Beth Anne Steele.
Meanwhile, Monsanto is continuing to push its claim that its genetically engineered wheat turned up on an Oregon farm because of an act of sabotage. That claim is drawing skepticism from the expert whose tests first confirmed that the rogue wheat was developed by Monsanto. From a report in The Guardian:
While Monsanto’s chief technology officer suggested eco-activists were to blame, [Oregon State University weed sciences professor Carol] Mallory-Smith said deliberate contamination was the least likely scenario:
“The sabotage conspiracy theory is even harder for me to explain or think as logical because it would mean that someone had that seed and was holding that seed for 10 or 12 years and happened to put it on the right field to have it found, and identified. I don’t think that makes a lot of sense.”
We may learn more about the cause of the GMO wheat contamination after the U.S. Department of Agriculture completes an investigation.
http://www.pakistantoday.com.pk/2013/06 ... programme/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
FBI’s subversive programme
Author: By Dr Agha Saeed
June 26, 2013 on 4:19 AM
COINTELPRO: A secret system for liquidating dissent
When a former vice president of the United States begins to sound like major critics of the US imperial system, such as Ramsey Clark and Noam Chomsky, then you know that the situation is really bleak.
A few days ago, former Vice President Al Gore had told The Guardian that “the NSA spying revealed by whistleblower Edward Snowden is unlawful because it violates the Constitution”.
What is far more injurious to human rights of religious, ethnic and ideological minorities is Federal Bureau of investigation’s (FBI) Counter Intelligence Programme popularly known as the COINTELPRO.
Although initiated by the FBI after the Russian Revolution as a secret system based on the deployment of illegal means and immoral methods to contain undesirable social movements, yet the fully integrated covert operation, under the label of COINTELPRO, officially didn’t begin till 1956 with the stated aim to “increase factionalism, cause disruption and win defections” inside the Communist Party USA.
In retrospect, it was built around ten sets of mutually-reinforcing covert activities against a historically particular ideological, ethnic, or religious group – chronologically, the communists, socialists, labour, African Americans, American Indians, Latino Americans, Arab Americans, environmentalists, peace groups, and now Muslim Americans – to liquidate any credible challenge to the US empire and to establish the tyranny of the majority over the targeted minority.
The above-mentioned ten sets of covert activities are: 1) Enlist the support of the “mainstream” media, academia and the intelligentsia for producing and popularising justifications for isolating, harassing, intimidating, and marginalising the targeted group, 2) Disrupt its internal unity, 3) Replace its authentic leadership with handpicked individuals, 4) Undermine its legitimate major institutions and organisations, 5) Deny it all means of respect, acceptance, and growth by stigmatising its values, beliefs and identity, 6) prevent access to mainstream media as well as social, political, educational, and government institutions, 7) Bleed it economically, 8) Delegitimise its very existence by organising systematic disinformation and misinformation campaigns to create inerasable negative images of the targeted group, 9) Infiltrate, intimidate, harass, entrap, bribe, blackmail, cheat, deceive and lie to subvert and “neutralise” the targeted group, and 10) Consequently, and most importantly, control its agenda of affinities and actions.
Amazingly, all of these ten sets of illegal activities are stacked in FBI’s two ‘Top-Secret’ internal memos penned in late 1960s.
The first memo, dated August 25, 1967, and authored by the FBI’s iron-fisted chief J Edgar Hoover, reveals a whole host of abusive activities as well as documents Hoover’s total disregard for any adverse impact on the “rights of Americans”.
1) “The purpose of this new counterintelligence endeavour is to expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralise the activities of black nationalist hate-type organisations and groupings, their leadership, spokesmen, membership, and supporters, and to counter their propensity for violence and civil disorder.”
2) “The activities of all such groups of intelligence interest to the Bureau must be followed on a continuous basis so we will be in a position to promptly take advantage of all opportunities for counterintelligence and inspire action in instances where circumstances warrant. The pernicious background of such groups, their duplicity, and devious maneuvers must be exposed to public scrutiny where such publicity will have a neutralizing effect.”
3) “No opportunity should be missed to exploit through counterintelligence techniques the organisational and personal conflicts of the leaderships of the groups and where possible an effort should be made to capitalise upon existing conflicts between competing black nationalist organisations.”
4) “When an opportunity is apparent to disrupt or neutralise black nationalist, hate-type organisations through the cooperation of established local news media contacts or through such contact with sources available… to insure the targeted group is disrupted, ridiculed, or discredited through the publicity and not merely publicized...”
5) “You are also cautioned that the nature of this new endeavour is such that under no circumstances should the existence of the programme be made known outside the bureau.”
The second memo, dated March 4, 1968, also authored and labelled by J Edgar Hoover as “Racial Intelligence” was issued “just one month before the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.”
6. “Prevent the coalition of militant black nationalist groups. In unity there is strength; a truism that is no less valid for all its triteness. An effective coalition of black nationalist groups might be… the beginning of a true black revolution.”
7. “Prevent the rise of a “messiah” who could unify, and electrify, the militant black nationalist movement. Malcolm X might have been such a “messiah”; he is the martyr of the movement today. Martin Luther King, Stokely Carmichael and Elijah Muhammed all aspire to this position…. King could be a very real contender for this position should he abandon his supposed “obedience” to “white, liberal doctrines” (nonviolence) and embrace black nationalism.”
8. [It] “should also be a goal of the Counterintelligence Programme to pinpoint potential troublemakers and neutralise them before they exercise their potential for violence.”
9. “Prevent militant black nationalist groups and leaders from gaining respectability by discrediting them to three separate segments of the community…”
10. “A final goal should be to prevent the long-range growth of militant black organisations, especially among youth.”
In his book, Assault on the Left: The FBI and the Sixties Antiwar Movement, James K Davis points out: “These efforts devastated what was left of CPUSA. By 1971, the figure was down to about 3,000 members, a considerable number of those being undercover FBI informants.”
-
msfreeh
- Level 34 Illuminated
- Posts: 7718
Re: FBI WATCH Making Cruelty visible
I have known Angela Clemente for at least 5 years. We raised a few bucks
in Maine to help her survive in New Jersey while FBI agents were trying to kill her.
We talk by phone periodically as she tries to hold on long enough to get a kidney transplant.
She is the primary guardian for her 41 year old autistic brother as well as her special needs child.
Angela was the principal investigator that uncovered evidence New York FBI agent Lyndley DeVecchio
collaborated with the New York Mafia in several murders. I could go on about Angela but right now
she can use your help. If, like me, you believe that blogging isn't behavior, and only behavior is the truth,
let us see how you respond. This is a article about her in today's New York Times.
see link for full story
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/30/nyreg ... wanted=all" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
The Mob and Angela Clemente
June 29, 2013
At the end of February, a 300-page report, tersely titled, “New York Systemic Corruption,” was received for review by the Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General in Washington. In three bound volumes, it detailed a series of oft-made, and explosive, allegations: that in the 1990s, while trying to stem the Colombo family war, federal prosecutors and agents for the Federal Bureau of Investigation in New York knowingly allowed two moles in the mob to kill while they were on the government’s payroll.
Ms. Clemente's main focus has been the F.B.I.’s entanglements with the mob. She has looked at ties between R. Lindley DeVecchio, who ran the F.B.I.’s Colombo family squad, and Gregory Scarpa Sr., a Colombo family captain, who was secretly serving as the agent’s mole.
But the dossier had not been sent to Washington by one of the defense attorneys or professional private detectives who have, for two decades now, been working on the legal cases related to the war, an internecine struggle from 1991 to 1993 that resulted in a dozen deaths and more than 80 convictions. It was sent from an unlikely, and mostly unknown, source: a 5-foot-4, single mother from New Jersey named Angela Clemente.
For nearly 15 years, Ms. Clemente, 48 and a self-professed “forensic analyst,” has waged an independent and improbable campaign to prove that the government turned a blind eye to as many as 39 murders committed in New York by turncoat gangsters it paid to work as informants.
Through interviews in the underworld and by prying loose documents from classified archives, her unusual citizen-sleuthing has taken her deep into the local version of the James (Whitey) Bulger case, which is now being tried in Boston. Not only into the annals of the New York mob, but also, in a strange, octopus-like fashion, into corollary inquiries into Islamic terrorism, the Kennedy assassination, even the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City.
“You have a real knack for investigation,” Representative Dana Rohrabacher, a former chairman of the House oversight committee, wrote to Ms. Clemente in 2007 after she helped lead the authorities to a stash of explosives in a Kansas house owned by Terry Nichols, one of the Oklahoma City bombers. “Your ability to get valuable information from sources unavailable to many of us in government is truly an asset to those seeking the truth.”
A onetime medical technician who in her 30s studied to become a paralegal, Ms. Clemente is not your typical gumshoe. For one thing, she tends not to work for criminal defendants or their lawyers, opting instead to send her findings to public officials, like Mr. Rohrabacher, hoping to prompt Congressional hearings or legislative change. For another, when she isn’t in Washington or visiting federal prisons, she lives in Tuckerton, N.J., north of Atlantic City, and cares for her autistic brother Miles, 47, and 15-year-old son Santo, who has a rare autoimmune disease.
It was more or less by chance that Ms. Clemente found her mission in 1999, when she was working from home, in Toms River, N.J., helping prison inmates file transfer requests or obtain better medical care.
A member of the Gambino crime family discreetly sought her out, she said, and suggested she investigate the gangland murder of John Minerva, a Colombo soldier shot at the height of his family’s civil war while sitting in a Champagne-colored Cadillac outside a coffee shop in North Massapequa, N.Y. The mobster told her that one of the defendants convicted in Mr. Minerva’s death, Anthony Russo, had been wrongly accused.
“When I got the Russo case, I didn’t really know about the mob,” Ms. Clemente said recently. “I just started talking to everyone involved, the Mafia guys, the victims’ families, even some of the judges. I was just trying to learn what I could and see if something had actually gone wrong.”
She also didn’t know that Mr. Russo’s conviction, in Brooklyn in 1994, was linked to one of the most extraordinary — and litigated — tales in New York Mafia history, the epic saga of a convoluted and allegedly compromised partnership between a lawman and a hit man: R. Lindley DeVecchio, a streetwise agent who ran the F.B.I.’s Colombo family squad, and Gregory Scarpa Sr., a Colombo family captain, who was secretly serving as the agent’s mole.
Before Ms. Clemente arrived on the scene, New York’s finest lawyers had been chasing hints for years that Mr. DeVecchio was corrupt and had allowed Mr. Scarpa to kill his rivals during the Colombo family war and pin some murders on men who were not involved. The lawyers’ efforts were more than a simple search for truth; if Mr. DeVecchio was in fact tainted, then a cadre of Colombo gangsters that he had helped imprison might go free.
Using the Russo case as an entry point, Ms. Clemente began to examine the tangled bond between Mr. DeVecchio and Mr. Scarpa, an expert assassin known as the Grim Reaper.
Overwhelmed by its complexities, she soon sought help from an unusual source: a Yale-trained scholar and former Michigan state official named Stephen Dresch. This odd couple — Ms. Clemente was heavyset at the time and nervous; Dr. Dresch wore bathrobes and a Unabomber beard — spent six years going through the case file and re-interviewing witnesses.
Finally, in 2005, they sent their findings to Representative William D. Delahunt, a Massachusetts Democrat who was then holding hearings on corruption in the Boston office of the F.B.I.
In an interview last month, Mr. Delahunt, now retired from Congress, said that he referred their work to Charles J. Hynes, the Brooklyn district attorney, and in 2006 — just before Dr. Dresch died — Mr. Hynes’s office indicted Mr. DeVecchio on charges of helping Mr. Scarpa commit four murders while he was an F.B.I. informant.
It was the first time that the long-pursued agent was forced to appear in court as a defendant. (Mr. Scarpa died in 1994.) At a news conference announcing the charges, Michael F. Vecchione, Mr. Hynes’s chief investigator, publicly thanked Ms. Clemente. “See that woman over there,” he said. “She opened the Pandora’s box.”
One year later, Mr. DeVecchio’s trial collapsed in spectacular fashion, when a prosecution witness was shown to be a liar — not that it stopped Ms. Clemente. By 2008, she had sued the F.B.I. through the Freedom of Information Act and received more than 1,000 pages of previously classified material concerning Mr. Scarpa. (The same material was used by Peter Lance, the author of the true-crime book, “Deal with the Devil,” scheduled to be published Tuesday.)
By 2010, Ms. Clemente had identified a second mob informant who worked with Mr. DeVecchio: Frank Sparaco, a Colombo family killer. Just this March, he came forward in a jailhouse affidavit supporting her initial claim: that Anthony Russo was not involved in John Minerva’s death.
The appellate courts have so far been unwilling to listen to Mr. Sparaco, but Alan Futerfas, Mr. Russo’s lawyer, credits Ms. Clemente’s work. “Angela has always been a fighter and a firebrand,” Mr. Futerfas said. “She’s managed to discover information that’s important to these issues.”
Three weeks ago, her investigation took another startling turn. Ms. Clemente’s lawyer, Jim Lesar, said that the government, again responding to her Freedom of Information Act request, had agreed in principle to give her a trove of 50,000 pages of previously unseen documents. Who knows what they might reveal?
Given her status as an outsider in Brooklyn’s legal circles, questions have always swirled around Angela Clemente. Where does she come from? How does she support herself? And most of all, Why does she do what she does?
Ms. Clemente said she was born in Muskegon, Mich., the child of a brilliant, jobless father and a mother who worked in restaurants and bars. Her family was itinerant, passing in her early years through Delaware, Florida, Vermont and New Jersey. “We would move to one place, get kicked out, and then move to another,” she said. “That’s the way we lived — it was a mess.”
Ms. Clemente was 11 when her parents divorced. Her mother remarried — “A biker, he was crazy” — and Ms. Clemente claims that her stepfather sexually abused her through her teens. At age 18, she fled her family’s home in Daytona Beach, Fla., and moved out on her own, finding work as a hospital technician.
In 1986, when she was 22, Ms. Clemente gave birth to a daughter she had with a man who had a job installing air-conditioning units. When the girl turned 4, the man was charged with sexually assaulting her. Within a year, the charges were dismissed. Ms. Clemente claims that the local prosecutor’s office mishandled the case.
“After that,” she said, “I was furious. I decided I was going to hold every law enforcement officer in the country to the highest standards of behavior. I know it’s crazy. But I just made the decision that people in power should have to follow rules.”
“Angela is a person who has every right to be bitter with the world,” said David Schoen, a defense lawyer who has been involved for years in cases connected to the Colombo family war. “But there’s a spark in her that won’t let her rest. She sees injustice and will not give up.”
In the wake of the case’s dismissal, Ms. Clemente and her daughter — now in her 20s and living on her own in New Jersey — moved to Colorado, where Ms. Clemente studied to become a physician assistant. They wandered north to Seattle and then south to Los Angeles. Returning to Seattle, in 1998, Ms. Clemente got pregnant again, after an encounter with a stranger, and Santo, her son, was born with a rare disease that afflicts him with blisters if he stays too long in the sun.
Unable to find a day care center that would care for her ailing child, Ms. Clemente said she quit her medical studies and, after taking online courses, began doing paralegal work out of her home in Seattle and, eventually, New Jersey. “I integrated my legal and medical experience and started taking cases,” she explained. “From speaking with attorneys, I managed to find inmates who needed help.”
Among them was Mr. Russo, a Colombo family captain whose conviction in the Minerva murder launched Ms. Clemente on the twisting path toward Mr. DeVecchio.
On June 16, 2006, three months after Mr. DeVecchio was indicted, Ms. Clemente said she found an anonymous note on her car, summoning her to Brooklyn, from someone claiming they had information about the Minerva case. She went to the Caesar’s Bay Bazaar off the Belt Parkway and, hours later, a passer-by found her sprawled unconscious in the parking lot. Mr. Vecchione, the same investigator who had thanked her months before, told reporters at the time that Ms. Clemente had choke marks on her neck, cuts and bruises, and a large welt on her stomach.
in Maine to help her survive in New Jersey while FBI agents were trying to kill her.
We talk by phone periodically as she tries to hold on long enough to get a kidney transplant.
She is the primary guardian for her 41 year old autistic brother as well as her special needs child.
Angela was the principal investigator that uncovered evidence New York FBI agent Lyndley DeVecchio
collaborated with the New York Mafia in several murders. I could go on about Angela but right now
she can use your help. If, like me, you believe that blogging isn't behavior, and only behavior is the truth,
let us see how you respond. This is a article about her in today's New York Times.
see link for full story
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/30/nyreg ... wanted=all" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
The Mob and Angela Clemente
June 29, 2013
At the end of February, a 300-page report, tersely titled, “New York Systemic Corruption,” was received for review by the Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General in Washington. In three bound volumes, it detailed a series of oft-made, and explosive, allegations: that in the 1990s, while trying to stem the Colombo family war, federal prosecutors and agents for the Federal Bureau of Investigation in New York knowingly allowed two moles in the mob to kill while they were on the government’s payroll.
Ms. Clemente's main focus has been the F.B.I.’s entanglements with the mob. She has looked at ties between R. Lindley DeVecchio, who ran the F.B.I.’s Colombo family squad, and Gregory Scarpa Sr., a Colombo family captain, who was secretly serving as the agent’s mole.
But the dossier had not been sent to Washington by one of the defense attorneys or professional private detectives who have, for two decades now, been working on the legal cases related to the war, an internecine struggle from 1991 to 1993 that resulted in a dozen deaths and more than 80 convictions. It was sent from an unlikely, and mostly unknown, source: a 5-foot-4, single mother from New Jersey named Angela Clemente.
For nearly 15 years, Ms. Clemente, 48 and a self-professed “forensic analyst,” has waged an independent and improbable campaign to prove that the government turned a blind eye to as many as 39 murders committed in New York by turncoat gangsters it paid to work as informants.
Through interviews in the underworld and by prying loose documents from classified archives, her unusual citizen-sleuthing has taken her deep into the local version of the James (Whitey) Bulger case, which is now being tried in Boston. Not only into the annals of the New York mob, but also, in a strange, octopus-like fashion, into corollary inquiries into Islamic terrorism, the Kennedy assassination, even the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City.
“You have a real knack for investigation,” Representative Dana Rohrabacher, a former chairman of the House oversight committee, wrote to Ms. Clemente in 2007 after she helped lead the authorities to a stash of explosives in a Kansas house owned by Terry Nichols, one of the Oklahoma City bombers. “Your ability to get valuable information from sources unavailable to many of us in government is truly an asset to those seeking the truth.”
A onetime medical technician who in her 30s studied to become a paralegal, Ms. Clemente is not your typical gumshoe. For one thing, she tends not to work for criminal defendants or their lawyers, opting instead to send her findings to public officials, like Mr. Rohrabacher, hoping to prompt Congressional hearings or legislative change. For another, when she isn’t in Washington or visiting federal prisons, she lives in Tuckerton, N.J., north of Atlantic City, and cares for her autistic brother Miles, 47, and 15-year-old son Santo, who has a rare autoimmune disease.
It was more or less by chance that Ms. Clemente found her mission in 1999, when she was working from home, in Toms River, N.J., helping prison inmates file transfer requests or obtain better medical care.
A member of the Gambino crime family discreetly sought her out, she said, and suggested she investigate the gangland murder of John Minerva, a Colombo soldier shot at the height of his family’s civil war while sitting in a Champagne-colored Cadillac outside a coffee shop in North Massapequa, N.Y. The mobster told her that one of the defendants convicted in Mr. Minerva’s death, Anthony Russo, had been wrongly accused.
“When I got the Russo case, I didn’t really know about the mob,” Ms. Clemente said recently. “I just started talking to everyone involved, the Mafia guys, the victims’ families, even some of the judges. I was just trying to learn what I could and see if something had actually gone wrong.”
She also didn’t know that Mr. Russo’s conviction, in Brooklyn in 1994, was linked to one of the most extraordinary — and litigated — tales in New York Mafia history, the epic saga of a convoluted and allegedly compromised partnership between a lawman and a hit man: R. Lindley DeVecchio, a streetwise agent who ran the F.B.I.’s Colombo family squad, and Gregory Scarpa Sr., a Colombo family captain, who was secretly serving as the agent’s mole.
Before Ms. Clemente arrived on the scene, New York’s finest lawyers had been chasing hints for years that Mr. DeVecchio was corrupt and had allowed Mr. Scarpa to kill his rivals during the Colombo family war and pin some murders on men who were not involved. The lawyers’ efforts were more than a simple search for truth; if Mr. DeVecchio was in fact tainted, then a cadre of Colombo gangsters that he had helped imprison might go free.
Using the Russo case as an entry point, Ms. Clemente began to examine the tangled bond between Mr. DeVecchio and Mr. Scarpa, an expert assassin known as the Grim Reaper.
Overwhelmed by its complexities, she soon sought help from an unusual source: a Yale-trained scholar and former Michigan state official named Stephen Dresch. This odd couple — Ms. Clemente was heavyset at the time and nervous; Dr. Dresch wore bathrobes and a Unabomber beard — spent six years going through the case file and re-interviewing witnesses.
Finally, in 2005, they sent their findings to Representative William D. Delahunt, a Massachusetts Democrat who was then holding hearings on corruption in the Boston office of the F.B.I.
In an interview last month, Mr. Delahunt, now retired from Congress, said that he referred their work to Charles J. Hynes, the Brooklyn district attorney, and in 2006 — just before Dr. Dresch died — Mr. Hynes’s office indicted Mr. DeVecchio on charges of helping Mr. Scarpa commit four murders while he was an F.B.I. informant.
It was the first time that the long-pursued agent was forced to appear in court as a defendant. (Mr. Scarpa died in 1994.) At a news conference announcing the charges, Michael F. Vecchione, Mr. Hynes’s chief investigator, publicly thanked Ms. Clemente. “See that woman over there,” he said. “She opened the Pandora’s box.”
One year later, Mr. DeVecchio’s trial collapsed in spectacular fashion, when a prosecution witness was shown to be a liar — not that it stopped Ms. Clemente. By 2008, she had sued the F.B.I. through the Freedom of Information Act and received more than 1,000 pages of previously classified material concerning Mr. Scarpa. (The same material was used by Peter Lance, the author of the true-crime book, “Deal with the Devil,” scheduled to be published Tuesday.)
By 2010, Ms. Clemente had identified a second mob informant who worked with Mr. DeVecchio: Frank Sparaco, a Colombo family killer. Just this March, he came forward in a jailhouse affidavit supporting her initial claim: that Anthony Russo was not involved in John Minerva’s death.
The appellate courts have so far been unwilling to listen to Mr. Sparaco, but Alan Futerfas, Mr. Russo’s lawyer, credits Ms. Clemente’s work. “Angela has always been a fighter and a firebrand,” Mr. Futerfas said. “She’s managed to discover information that’s important to these issues.”
Three weeks ago, her investigation took another startling turn. Ms. Clemente’s lawyer, Jim Lesar, said that the government, again responding to her Freedom of Information Act request, had agreed in principle to give her a trove of 50,000 pages of previously unseen documents. Who knows what they might reveal?
Given her status as an outsider in Brooklyn’s legal circles, questions have always swirled around Angela Clemente. Where does she come from? How does she support herself? And most of all, Why does she do what she does?
Ms. Clemente said she was born in Muskegon, Mich., the child of a brilliant, jobless father and a mother who worked in restaurants and bars. Her family was itinerant, passing in her early years through Delaware, Florida, Vermont and New Jersey. “We would move to one place, get kicked out, and then move to another,” she said. “That’s the way we lived — it was a mess.”
Ms. Clemente was 11 when her parents divorced. Her mother remarried — “A biker, he was crazy” — and Ms. Clemente claims that her stepfather sexually abused her through her teens. At age 18, she fled her family’s home in Daytona Beach, Fla., and moved out on her own, finding work as a hospital technician.
In 1986, when she was 22, Ms. Clemente gave birth to a daughter she had with a man who had a job installing air-conditioning units. When the girl turned 4, the man was charged with sexually assaulting her. Within a year, the charges were dismissed. Ms. Clemente claims that the local prosecutor’s office mishandled the case.
“After that,” she said, “I was furious. I decided I was going to hold every law enforcement officer in the country to the highest standards of behavior. I know it’s crazy. But I just made the decision that people in power should have to follow rules.”
“Angela is a person who has every right to be bitter with the world,” said David Schoen, a defense lawyer who has been involved for years in cases connected to the Colombo family war. “But there’s a spark in her that won’t let her rest. She sees injustice and will not give up.”
In the wake of the case’s dismissal, Ms. Clemente and her daughter — now in her 20s and living on her own in New Jersey — moved to Colorado, where Ms. Clemente studied to become a physician assistant. They wandered north to Seattle and then south to Los Angeles. Returning to Seattle, in 1998, Ms. Clemente got pregnant again, after an encounter with a stranger, and Santo, her son, was born with a rare disease that afflicts him with blisters if he stays too long in the sun.
Unable to find a day care center that would care for her ailing child, Ms. Clemente said she quit her medical studies and, after taking online courses, began doing paralegal work out of her home in Seattle and, eventually, New Jersey. “I integrated my legal and medical experience and started taking cases,” she explained. “From speaking with attorneys, I managed to find inmates who needed help.”
Among them was Mr. Russo, a Colombo family captain whose conviction in the Minerva murder launched Ms. Clemente on the twisting path toward Mr. DeVecchio.
On June 16, 2006, three months after Mr. DeVecchio was indicted, Ms. Clemente said she found an anonymous note on her car, summoning her to Brooklyn, from someone claiming they had information about the Minerva case. She went to the Caesar’s Bay Bazaar off the Belt Parkway and, hours later, a passer-by found her sprawled unconscious in the parking lot. Mr. Vecchione, the same investigator who had thanked her months before, told reporters at the time that Ms. Clemente had choke marks on her neck, cuts and bruises, and a large welt on her stomach.
-
msfreeh
- Level 34 Illuminated
- Posts: 7718
Re: FBI WATCH Making Cruelty visible
FBI went in and changed the link to the previous story about Angela Clemente
Here is the correct link I tested it . I tried the link in the previous story and it would not work.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/30/nyreg ... d=all&_r=0" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
Here is the correct link I tested it . I tried the link in the previous story and it would not work.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/30/nyreg ... d=all&_r=0" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
-
msfreeh
- Level 34 Illuminated
- Posts: 7718
Re: FBI WATCH Making Cruelty visible
see link for full story
http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/fbi- ... dGmYm1yziE" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
FBI Agent Apologizes to Slain Man's Family
BOSTON July 1, 2013
A former FBI agent who admitted revealing the identity of an informant who was then allegedly killed by James "Whitey" Bulger has given a dramatic public apology to the family of a second man who was killed along with the informant.
http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/fbi- ... dGmYm1yziE" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
FBI Agent Apologizes to Slain Man's Family
BOSTON July 1, 2013
A former FBI agent who admitted revealing the identity of an informant who was then allegedly killed by James "Whitey" Bulger has given a dramatic public apology to the family of a second man who was killed along with the informant.
-
msfreeh
- Level 34 Illuminated
- Posts: 7718
Re: FBI WATCH Making Cruelty visible
Amazing how American voters and taxpayers continue to allow Congress to fund the FBI after a 1999 Memphis Jury declared
it was FBI agents who had assassinated Martin Luther King. You do know what to do, eh?
Boo! did I scare you?
Here is another victim of a FBI assassination.
see link for full story
http://www.buffalonews.com/apps/pbcs.dl ... 09669/1003" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
New suit seeks to know fate of civil rights activist who vanished in 1973
July 4, 2013
No one doubts Ray Robinson is dead.
After all, it’s been 40 years since the black activist from Selma, Ala., a disciple of Martin Luther King Jr. and Jesse Jackson, went missing.
He was last seen at Wounded Knee, S.D., where he had gone in April of 1973 to preach the importance of nonviolence and stand with American Indians in their fight against the federal government.
Robinson never made it home and, by all accounts, was murdered.
Even now, decades later, his widow and children, eager to have him brought home, wonder where he’s buried.
A new lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in Buffalo seeks to answer that question.
“This may sound silly after all these years, but we just want to bury him,” said Tamara Kamara, one of his daughters who lives in Michigan. “We just want to know he’s gone and have a place to take my children and grandchildren and say this is where he’s buried.”
Robinson’s disappearance is, in many people’s eyes, one of America’s great unsolved murders.
It’s been the topic of books and newspaper stories and, four decades after he went missing, it’s now a national story with a Buffalo angle because of the two local lawyers who filed the family’s suit here.
“The family and the American people have a right to know what happened to Ray Robinson,” said Michael Kuzma, a Buffalo lawyer representing the family. “They have a right to know who murdered him and where he’s buried so they can bring him back home.”
Kuzma’s Freedom of Information suit in Buffalo federal court seeks information from the FBI and others on what happened to Robinson and, perhaps even more important, what happened to his body.
“We’ve come to the understanding that he’s dead and that he died inside Wounded Knee,” Kamara said. “The worst part is not knowing where he’s buried.”
At Wounded Knee
Robinson’s standing as a civil rights activist was well-established long before he traveled to South Dakota. He marched with King in Washington, D.C., in 1963 and was one of the demonstrators in 1968 who set up Resurrection City, an encampment on the Washington Mall designed to focus attention on America’s poor.
And yet, it wasn’t until his disappearance at Wounded Knee, a historic and some might say inspiring moment for Native Americans, that the world learned of his legacy.
The 71-day siege in 1973 was well under way when Robinson backpacked into the Pine Ridge reservation, where Wounded Knee was located. He told friends and family that he wanted to build a bridge between the black civil rights struggle and the American Indian movement.
What happened next is unclear and the subject of an often-ugly debate between Robinson’s family and members of the American Indian Movement, or AIM.
“He was there,” Steve Hendricks, author of “The Unquiet Grave,” a book on the FBI and the American Indian movement, said of Robinson. “In all probability, and I say this with 99 percent certainty, he was murdered at Wounded Knee by activists in AIM.”
By some accounts, Robinson’s message of nonviolence didn’t sit well with AIM’s leaders or members of the Oglala Lakota tribe that had seized control of the small town with the bloody history.
Until then, Wounded Knee was best known for the 1890 massacre of Lakota Indians, nearly half of them women and children, by a U.S. cavalry unit.
What started as an internal protest against the Oglala Lakota’s leadership, viewed by many as corrupt, quickly turned into an armed occupation directed at a federal government many thought had thumbed its nose at treaties between the two sides.
The often bloody stand-off resulted in the death of two Indians, the wounding of a federal agent and the rumored murder of others, including Robinson.
“This is a guy who was there on the side of justice,” said Daire Brian Irwin, a Buffalo lawyer representing the Robinson family. “This guy’s a hero, and only a few people know his story.”
Ongoing investigation
Technically, the investigation into Robinson’s disappearance remains open.
An FBI official in Minneapolis confirmed as much but said he could not comment on the work its office was doing in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.
“We have an ongoing case on Ray Robinson,” said Gregory Boosalis, a division counsel for the FBI.
While Irwin and Kuzma seek answers to the question “What happened to Ray Robinson?” there are FBI documents, now public, that suggest he was indeed there.
The documents are based on FBI interviews with witnesses who claim they were at Wounded Knee and saw or heard about two black people who were on the reservation.
Robinson’s widow, Cheryl Buswell-Robinson, has said the two were probably her husband and a black woman from Alabama who, unlike her husband, made it home after the occupation.
There also are a handful of accounts, none of them verified, as to what happened to Robinson.
In a 1974 letter to a friend, Buswell-Robinson wrote that she had heard her husband was shot for entering Pine Ridge without reporting to AIM leader Dennis Banks.
In still another account, AIM member Richard Two Elk told the Associated Press in 2004 that he saw someone shoot Robinson in the knees but didn’t see him die. He said Robinson had refused to pick up a gun.
Allegations of apathy
AIM’s leaders have repeatedly denied any role in Robinson’s death, and Banks, in an interview with the AP last year, said he doesn’t remember meeting Robinson or hearing anything about him until well after the siege had ended.
“Over the years,” Banks said at the time, “the Robinson name has popped up, and I’m not sure even who would have that information or where it was.”
Hendricks is convinced Robinson is buried at Wounded Knee and that he was most likely shot by AIM activists. He also thinks it’s possible AIM suspected Robinson was an FBI informant. “I come up with no other scenario,” he said. “We know there were FBI informants at Wounded Knee. That’s clear.”
Hendricks, the author, doesn’t believe Robinson was an informant, and Kamara said her mother has fought long and hard to refute those rumors. “That went against his core,” she said.
Attorneys Kuzma and Irwin agree, but they believe the FBI played a role in Robinson’s disappearance.
They wonder why the agency has failed, after 40 years, to come up with a single suspect while at the same time successfully investigating the killing of AIM activist Anna Mae Aquash at Pine Ridge two years later. Two people are currently serving life sentences for her murder.
“They’re not going after it,” added Hendricks. “They’re not even remotely interested, not even interviewing the most obvious witnesses.”
‘No anger’
The suit filed by Kuzma and Irwin seeks information about the FBI’s investigation into Robinson’s disappearance and includes a letter from the agency indicating some of their records have been destroyed.
Why would the FBI destroy documents while an investigation is ongoing?
“It’s possible the referenced letter is talking about other cases that referenced Ray Robinson,” said Boosalis, the FBI official in Minneapolis. “To my knowledge, no documents in our case have been destroyed.”
While others speculate about who may have killed Robinson, his family is reluctant to point fingers at either the FBI or AIM.
They do believe, however, that both sides know where he’s buried.
“I’m hoping that AIM people can look in their hearts and realize this was a good man. This is a brother,” Buswell-Robinson told the AP in 2012. “This is a man that was willing to give his life for justice, for what’s right.”
Kamara says the same message applies to the FBI.
it was FBI agents who had assassinated Martin Luther King. You do know what to do, eh?
Boo! did I scare you?
Here is another victim of a FBI assassination.
see link for full story
http://www.buffalonews.com/apps/pbcs.dl ... 09669/1003" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
New suit seeks to know fate of civil rights activist who vanished in 1973
July 4, 2013
No one doubts Ray Robinson is dead.
After all, it’s been 40 years since the black activist from Selma, Ala., a disciple of Martin Luther King Jr. and Jesse Jackson, went missing.
He was last seen at Wounded Knee, S.D., where he had gone in April of 1973 to preach the importance of nonviolence and stand with American Indians in their fight against the federal government.
Robinson never made it home and, by all accounts, was murdered.
Even now, decades later, his widow and children, eager to have him brought home, wonder where he’s buried.
A new lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in Buffalo seeks to answer that question.
“This may sound silly after all these years, but we just want to bury him,” said Tamara Kamara, one of his daughters who lives in Michigan. “We just want to know he’s gone and have a place to take my children and grandchildren and say this is where he’s buried.”
Robinson’s disappearance is, in many people’s eyes, one of America’s great unsolved murders.
It’s been the topic of books and newspaper stories and, four decades after he went missing, it’s now a national story with a Buffalo angle because of the two local lawyers who filed the family’s suit here.
“The family and the American people have a right to know what happened to Ray Robinson,” said Michael Kuzma, a Buffalo lawyer representing the family. “They have a right to know who murdered him and where he’s buried so they can bring him back home.”
Kuzma’s Freedom of Information suit in Buffalo federal court seeks information from the FBI and others on what happened to Robinson and, perhaps even more important, what happened to his body.
“We’ve come to the understanding that he’s dead and that he died inside Wounded Knee,” Kamara said. “The worst part is not knowing where he’s buried.”
At Wounded Knee
Robinson’s standing as a civil rights activist was well-established long before he traveled to South Dakota. He marched with King in Washington, D.C., in 1963 and was one of the demonstrators in 1968 who set up Resurrection City, an encampment on the Washington Mall designed to focus attention on America’s poor.
And yet, it wasn’t until his disappearance at Wounded Knee, a historic and some might say inspiring moment for Native Americans, that the world learned of his legacy.
The 71-day siege in 1973 was well under way when Robinson backpacked into the Pine Ridge reservation, where Wounded Knee was located. He told friends and family that he wanted to build a bridge between the black civil rights struggle and the American Indian movement.
What happened next is unclear and the subject of an often-ugly debate between Robinson’s family and members of the American Indian Movement, or AIM.
“He was there,” Steve Hendricks, author of “The Unquiet Grave,” a book on the FBI and the American Indian movement, said of Robinson. “In all probability, and I say this with 99 percent certainty, he was murdered at Wounded Knee by activists in AIM.”
By some accounts, Robinson’s message of nonviolence didn’t sit well with AIM’s leaders or members of the Oglala Lakota tribe that had seized control of the small town with the bloody history.
Until then, Wounded Knee was best known for the 1890 massacre of Lakota Indians, nearly half of them women and children, by a U.S. cavalry unit.
What started as an internal protest against the Oglala Lakota’s leadership, viewed by many as corrupt, quickly turned into an armed occupation directed at a federal government many thought had thumbed its nose at treaties between the two sides.
The often bloody stand-off resulted in the death of two Indians, the wounding of a federal agent and the rumored murder of others, including Robinson.
“This is a guy who was there on the side of justice,” said Daire Brian Irwin, a Buffalo lawyer representing the Robinson family. “This guy’s a hero, and only a few people know his story.”
Ongoing investigation
Technically, the investigation into Robinson’s disappearance remains open.
An FBI official in Minneapolis confirmed as much but said he could not comment on the work its office was doing in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.
“We have an ongoing case on Ray Robinson,” said Gregory Boosalis, a division counsel for the FBI.
While Irwin and Kuzma seek answers to the question “What happened to Ray Robinson?” there are FBI documents, now public, that suggest he was indeed there.
The documents are based on FBI interviews with witnesses who claim they were at Wounded Knee and saw or heard about two black people who were on the reservation.
Robinson’s widow, Cheryl Buswell-Robinson, has said the two were probably her husband and a black woman from Alabama who, unlike her husband, made it home after the occupation.
There also are a handful of accounts, none of them verified, as to what happened to Robinson.
In a 1974 letter to a friend, Buswell-Robinson wrote that she had heard her husband was shot for entering Pine Ridge without reporting to AIM leader Dennis Banks.
In still another account, AIM member Richard Two Elk told the Associated Press in 2004 that he saw someone shoot Robinson in the knees but didn’t see him die. He said Robinson had refused to pick up a gun.
Allegations of apathy
AIM’s leaders have repeatedly denied any role in Robinson’s death, and Banks, in an interview with the AP last year, said he doesn’t remember meeting Robinson or hearing anything about him until well after the siege had ended.
“Over the years,” Banks said at the time, “the Robinson name has popped up, and I’m not sure even who would have that information or where it was.”
Hendricks is convinced Robinson is buried at Wounded Knee and that he was most likely shot by AIM activists. He also thinks it’s possible AIM suspected Robinson was an FBI informant. “I come up with no other scenario,” he said. “We know there were FBI informants at Wounded Knee. That’s clear.”
Hendricks, the author, doesn’t believe Robinson was an informant, and Kamara said her mother has fought long and hard to refute those rumors. “That went against his core,” she said.
Attorneys Kuzma and Irwin agree, but they believe the FBI played a role in Robinson’s disappearance.
They wonder why the agency has failed, after 40 years, to come up with a single suspect while at the same time successfully investigating the killing of AIM activist Anna Mae Aquash at Pine Ridge two years later. Two people are currently serving life sentences for her murder.
“They’re not going after it,” added Hendricks. “They’re not even remotely interested, not even interviewing the most obvious witnesses.”
‘No anger’
The suit filed by Kuzma and Irwin seeks information about the FBI’s investigation into Robinson’s disappearance and includes a letter from the agency indicating some of their records have been destroyed.
Why would the FBI destroy documents while an investigation is ongoing?
“It’s possible the referenced letter is talking about other cases that referenced Ray Robinson,” said Boosalis, the FBI official in Minneapolis. “To my knowledge, no documents in our case have been destroyed.”
While others speculate about who may have killed Robinson, his family is reluctant to point fingers at either the FBI or AIM.
They do believe, however, that both sides know where he’s buried.
“I’m hoping that AIM people can look in their hearts and realize this was a good man. This is a brother,” Buswell-Robinson told the AP in 2012. “This is a man that was willing to give his life for justice, for what’s right.”
Kamara says the same message applies to the FBI.
-
msfreeh
- Level 34 Illuminated
- Posts: 7718
Re: FBI WATCH Making Cruelty visible
see link for full story
http://www.usnews.com/news/blogs/washin ... tic-drones" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
Washington Whispers
FBI Hasn't Responded to Sen. Rand Paul's Request for 'Prompt' Answers on Domestic Drones
July 5, 2013
FBI Director Robert Mueller testifies before the Senate Judiciary Committee during a hearing on Capitol Hill, June 19, 2013.
FBI Director Robert Mueller testifies before the Senate Judiciary Committee during a hearing on Capitol Hill, June 19, 2013.
More than two weeks have passed since Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., requested "prompt" answers to questions about the FBI's use of drones within the United States, but he is still waiting for a response.
It's unclear why the FBI did not immediately provide answers to Paul's 11 questions, but the delay could conceivably morph into an unwelcome spectacle for the Obama administration.
Paul inquired about the domestic use of drones in a June 20 letter to FBI Director Robert Mueller, after the director told the Senate Intelligence Committee his agency was using the unmanned devices without clear guidelines.
Paul asked Mueller to explain how long the FBI has been using drones, how many drones the FBI has, whether or not FBI drones would ever be armed, why they are used, what policies guide their use and what has been done with the information they collect.
[ENJOY: Editorial Cartoons About Drone Policy]
Moira Bagley, Paul's communications director, told U.S. News Friday that the FBI has not provided answers to the questions. She declined to speculate if Paul would filibuster the confirmation hearing of James Comey to replace Mueller as FBI director in response to the delay.
Comey, a Republican, was nominated by President Barack Obama in June and is widely expected to be easily confirmed.
In June Bagley said it was "too early to tell" if Paul would filibuster Comey's nomination. Now, Bagley says, she would need to confer with other Paul staffers to learn what steps might be taken to wring out answers.
In March Paul stood on the Senate floor for 13 hours to filibuster the nomination of John Brennan to lead the CIA after Attorney General Eric Holder failed to definitively rule out using drones to kill people within the U.S.
http://www.usnews.com/news/blogs/washin ... tic-drones" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
Washington Whispers
FBI Hasn't Responded to Sen. Rand Paul's Request for 'Prompt' Answers on Domestic Drones
July 5, 2013
FBI Director Robert Mueller testifies before the Senate Judiciary Committee during a hearing on Capitol Hill, June 19, 2013.
FBI Director Robert Mueller testifies before the Senate Judiciary Committee during a hearing on Capitol Hill, June 19, 2013.
More than two weeks have passed since Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., requested "prompt" answers to questions about the FBI's use of drones within the United States, but he is still waiting for a response.
It's unclear why the FBI did not immediately provide answers to Paul's 11 questions, but the delay could conceivably morph into an unwelcome spectacle for the Obama administration.
Paul inquired about the domestic use of drones in a June 20 letter to FBI Director Robert Mueller, after the director told the Senate Intelligence Committee his agency was using the unmanned devices without clear guidelines.
Paul asked Mueller to explain how long the FBI has been using drones, how many drones the FBI has, whether or not FBI drones would ever be armed, why they are used, what policies guide their use and what has been done with the information they collect.
[ENJOY: Editorial Cartoons About Drone Policy]
Moira Bagley, Paul's communications director, told U.S. News Friday that the FBI has not provided answers to the questions. She declined to speculate if Paul would filibuster the confirmation hearing of James Comey to replace Mueller as FBI director in response to the delay.
Comey, a Republican, was nominated by President Barack Obama in June and is widely expected to be easily confirmed.
In June Bagley said it was "too early to tell" if Paul would filibuster Comey's nomination. Now, Bagley says, she would need to confer with other Paul staffers to learn what steps might be taken to wring out answers.
In March Paul stood on the Senate floor for 13 hours to filibuster the nomination of John Brennan to lead the CIA after Attorney General Eric Holder failed to definitively rule out using drones to kill people within the U.S.
-
msfreeh
- Level 34 Illuminated
- Posts: 7718
Re: FBI WATCH Making Cruelty visible
Who are the experts to call when you need to get a minimum sentence in a pedophilia case?
couple of reads caution the two largest groups of FBI agents by religious category are Mormons
and Catholics. Why ? Because the FBI agents who are Mormon and Catholic do not question authority, eh?
also see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fCVlI-_4GZQ" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
see link for full story
http://www.sacbee.com/2013/07/06/554803 ... -plea.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
Sacramento priest accepts plea deal in molestation case
Jul. 6, 2013
Grudgingly, one of the nation's leading critics of the Catholic Church's handling of sexual abuse by priests credited the Sacramento Diocese with doing some things right in the prosecution of the Rev. Uriel Ojeda.
The 33-year-old priest pleaded no contest Friday to a single count of molesting a 13-year-old girl and admitted to engaging in "substantial sexual conduct" with her, which will likely bring him eight years in state prison.
David Clohessy, the St. Louis-based director of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, said Sacramento church officials did "the bare minimum" to make sure a case was filed against Ojeda after the victim's father first made accusations against the cleric two years ago.
"Tragically, because for decades bishops refused to do even that, then by comparison, it makes Sacramento church officials look better," Clohessy said. "On the one hand, I think it's important to acknowledge progress where progress really happens. But by the same token, it's hard to define doing the bare minimum in child sex cases as real progress."
Clohessy said Bishop Jaime Soto also should have cracked down on the dozens of Ojeda supporters who packed courtrooms and danced and chanted outside the jail after the priest's Nov. 30, 2011, arrest. He said the church should have done more to publicize Ojeda's misdeed and to shake the trees in the parishes where the reverend worked to find other potential victims.
Diocesan spokesman Kevin Eckery said church officials did go to Holy Rosary Parish in Woodland and Our Lady of Mercy in Redding and read announcements to inform congregants about the charges.
The bishop also "made it very clear" at the time of the arrest "that his concerns were for the victim" and he barred Ojeda's backers from organizing fundraisers on church property, Eckery said.
A couple of dozen Ojeda supporters were on hand Friday in Sacramento Superior Court, and some of them wept after the priest replied "no contest" when he was asked how he pled to a single count of molesting a 13-year-old girl. They also heard him say, "I admit," when Judge Eugene L. Balonon asked him if he engaged in "substantial sexual conduct" with the girl.
Afterward, one of them clutched Eckery in a sarcastic embrace and repeatedly told him, "Congratulations." Another, Sylvia Chavez, told reporters the case "was all based on a plan that was formulated by the diocese and the bishop, and everything was false."
During the proceeding, Ojeda's discomfort was most apparent when he officially entered his plea after Deputy District Attorney Allison Dunham read the facts of the charge against him.
Dunham told the court that sometime between June 29, 2007, and June 30, 2009, in Sacramento County, when Ojeda was posted at the parish in Woodland, he "entered the victim's bedroom at night when everyone in the household was asleep."
"She woke up and the defendant was lying next to her in bed," the prosecutor said.
Dunham said Ojeda then reached underneath the girl's pajamas and touched her in a manner that "constitutes substantial sexual conduct with a child under the age of 14 years, to wit, 13 years," for his own sexual purposes.
In exchange for the plea, the DA's Office dropped six other felony counts involving the same victim that could have brought Ojeda 20 years in prison.
Balonon scheduled sentencing for Aug. 2.
"This is a fair resolution of the case based upon the facts and circumstances," Dunham said in a statement. "The victim and her family can move forward with their lives and be proud that they had the courage to report the abuse to the Sacramento Diocese and law enforcement."
Ojeda's attorney, Jesse Ortiz, called the case tough for Ojeda, his supporters, the victim and her family – "everybody."
Ortiz said Ojeda's decision to accept the plea bargain was equally difficult.
"We always felt that we would be successful at trial, but going through the risks and understanding that the ultimate decision is in the hands of jurors, and we don't even know who they are at this point, it was just something he wasn't prepared to do," Ortiz said.
Friday's plea came two days after Balonon ruled against Ojeda' effort to exclude statements he allegedly made admitting the molestation. The judge said Ojeda's conversation about the allegations with church officials was not covered by a clergy-penitent's privilege.
Ojeda had discussed the matter with the Rev. Timothy Nondorf, an aide to Soto, and to Joseph Sheehan, a former FBI agent who was working as a private investigator on contract with the law firm that represents the Catholic Diocese of Sacramento.
Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/2013/07/06/554803 ... rylink=cpy" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
see link for full story
CNN exclusive: FBI misconduct reveals sex, lies and videotape
By Scott Zamost and Kyra Phillips, CNN Special Investigations Unit
January 27, 2011
Washington (CNN) -- An FBI employee shared confidential information with his girlfriend, who was a news reporter, then later threatened to release a sex tape the two had made.
A supervisor watched pornographic videos in his office during work hours while "satisfying himself."
And an employee in a "leadership position" misused a government database to check on two friends who were exotic dancers and allowed them into an FBI office after hours.
These are among confidential summaries of FBI disciplinary reports obtained by CNN, which describe misconduct by agency supervisors, agents and other employees over the last three years
http://www.cnn.com/2011/US/01/27/siu.fb ... index.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
Read the FBI documents obtained by CNN
-- An employee had "a sexual relationship with a source" over seven months. The punishment was a 40-day suspension.
-- The supervisor who viewed "pornographic movies in the office while sexually satisfying himself" during work hours received a 35-day suspension.
-- The employee in a "leadership position" who misused a "government database to conduct name checks on two friends who were foreign nationals employed as exotic dancers" and "brought the two friends into FBI space after-hours without proper authorization" received a 23-day suspension. The same employee had been previously suspended for misusing a government database.
-- An employee who was drunk "exploited his FBI employment at a strip club," falsely claiming he was "conducting an official investigation." His punishment was a 30-day suspension.
-- And an employee conducted "unauthorized searches on FBI databases" for "information on public celebrities the employee thought were 'hot'" received a 30-day suspension.
see link for full story
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldne ... alers.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
February 22, 2013
FBI agents caught sexting and dating drug dealers
Dating drug dealers, harassing ex-boyfriends with naked pictures, and pointing guns at pet dogs: these were just a few of the offences committed recently by serving FBI agents, according to internal documents.
The US provided officers from the Egyptian secret police with training at the FBI, despite allegations that they routinely tortured detainees and suppressed political opposition.
Disciplinary files from the Bureau's Office of Professional Responsibility record an extraordinary range of transgressions that reveal the chaotic personal lives of some of America's top law enforcers.
One male agent was sacked after police were called to his mistress's house following reports of domestic incident. When officers arrived they found the agent "drunk and uncooperative" and eventually had to physically subdue him and wrestle away his loaded gun.
A woman e-mailed a "nude photograph of herself to her ex-boyfriend's wife" and then continued to harass the couple despite two warnings from senior officials. The Bureau concluded she was suffering from depression related to the break-up and allowed her to return to work after 10 days.
see link for full story
http://www.wgrz.com/news/article/192104 ... ent-Busted" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
Buffalo FBI Agent Busted
Dec 10, 2012
BUFFALO, NY - A Special Agent working in the Buffalo office of the FBI is due in Eden Town Court later this month, after being arrested by New York State Police last Friday night, charged with exposing himself to a fellow motorist on the New York State Thruway.
State Police Lt. David Denz confirmed for WGRZ-TV that John A. Yervelli Jr., 48, of Lakeview, was charged with Public Lewdness, a class B misdemeanor, punishable by up to 90 days in jail.
According to Denz, a truck driver from central New York was traveling in the right lane while east bound on the Thruway near mile marker 442, between Exits 57 and 57A, when he noticed a grey minivan pull alongside him in the passing lane.
The trucker told police that when he looked down, he noticed the driver of the other vehicle (who had turned his dome light on) was not wearing pants.
"At that point the complainant stated that the driver of the minivan was exposing himself and making lewd gestures," Denz told 2 On Your Side.
Denz says the trucker called police, who then intercepted the minivan at the Hamburg toll plaza, where the trucker also went to identify Yervelli. Denz said it appeared Yervelli was wearing pants when he was pulled over.
"He denied exposing himself," Denz told Channel 2, but added that "inconsistencies" in the account given by Agent Yervelli lead State Police to file charges.
A source says Yervelli insisted to the trooper who pulled him over that he was attempting to relieve himself into a bottle while he was driving. However, the location where he said that occurred was within a few miles (or minutes) of the exit he was headed to, and even closer to a Thruway rest stop.
"I don't want to give you too many specifics as far as what he stated, but he made statements that would lead you to believe that the truck driver's story was credible," Denz said.
Child Porn Probe Leads To FBI Headquarters
Target claims inquiry is just a “misunderstanding”
http://www.thesmokinggun.com/documents/ ... adquarters" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
JANUARY 5 2011--The government’s pursuit of suspects trafficking in child pornography recently led federal agents to a familiar address--the FBI’s Washington, D.C. headquarters, where a bureau official is the subject of an ongoing criminal probe, The Smoking Gun has learned.
The investigation by the Department of Justice’s inspector general is focusing on FBI employee Joseph Bonsuk’s receipt of nearly 80 illicit images that were e-mailed to him by an Illinois sex offender whose rap sheet includes felony convictions for bank robbery and solicitation of a minor.
Prosecutors move to dismiss charges against former Scout leader
January 3, 2007
NEW HAVEN, Conn. --Federal prosecutors have moved to dismiss charges against a retired FBI agent who was indicted on child sex charges dating back more than a decade when he was a Boy Scout leader, in response to the death of his accuser.
William Hutton, 63, of Killingworth, was arrested in February on charges he enticed a member of his Scout troop to Maine for the purpose of sexual activity in 1994 and 1995.
http://www.ctpost.com/news/article/Form ... -86217.php" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
Former Scout leader, FBI agent indicted on child sex charges
News-Times, The (Danbury, CT)
Saturday, February 4, 2006
NEW HAVEN (AP) - A retired FBI agent was indicted Friday on federal child sex charges dating back more than a decade when he was a Boy Scout leader.
William Hutton, 63, of Killingworth, was arrested Friday. The federal grand jury indictment accuses Hutton of enticing a member of his Scout troop to Maine for the purpose of sexual activity in 1994 and 1995.
"It's obviously devastating. He was an FBI agent in this district and was reputed in this district," defense attorney Hugh Keefe said.
"The people who worked with him in the U.S. attorney's office and FBI respected him."
Keefe said the investigation has been going on for years. He would not discuss the details of the case or how the allegations surfaced.
Investigators asked anyone who knows anything about the case to call the FBI. U.S. Attorney Kevin O'Connor said that's standard practice whenever there might be more victims.
"In any case that's a concern," O'Connor said. "Whether that's the situation here I can't say."
If convicted on all four charges, Hutton faces up to 30 years in prison and up to $250,000 in fines.
Hutton was released on a $200,00 bond. He may not own any firearms or have any unsupervised contact with children. He was also ordered to stay away from playgrounds, schools, arcades or anywhere children congregate.
http://www.headwatersproductions.com/pr ... icle5.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
Edward Rodgers was in charge of investigating cases of Child Abuse at the FBI
THE DENVER POST - Voice of the Rocky Mountain Empire
May 17, 1990
Sisters win sex lawsuit vs. dad $2.3 million given for years of abuse
By Howard Prankratz
Denver Post Legal Affairs Writer
Two daughters of former state and federal law enforcement official Edward Rodgers were awarded $2.319,400 yesterday, after a Denver judge and jury found that the women suffered years of abuse at the hands of their father.
The award to Sharon Simone, 45, and Susan Hammond, 44, followed testimony of Rodgers’ four daughters in person or through depositions, describing repeated physical abuse and sexual assaults by their father from 1944 through 1965.
Rodgers, 72, who became a child abuse expert after retiring from the FBI and joining the colorado Springs DA’s office, failed to appear for the trial. But in a deposition taken in March, Rodgers denied ever hitting or sexually abusing his children.
http://www.fox10tv.com/dpp/news/FormerL ... ntArrested" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
Local attorney arrested
On child indecency accusations
Updated: Wednesday, 22 Apr 2009, 1:33 PM CDT
Published : Monday, 20 Apr 2009,
MOBILE, Ala. - Mobile Police arrested 52-year-old Phillip Kent Baxley on child indecency charges. Baxley is a local attorney in Mobile, but he's also a former coach and acting president for the Mobile Soccer Club.
"I'm surprised to hear it," said Mobile Soccer Club Director, Mohammed Elzare. "He's a former FBI agent and attorney. So we're definitely saddened to hear this."
Baxley was arrested at his Dauphin Street office on a fugitive felony warrant out of Harris County, Texas.
Texas police officers say Baxley was involved in an incident with a nine-year-old girl in 2004.
Investigators say it happened at a family member's house in a Houston suburb, but the girl waited some time before saying anything.
"When the victim, the nine-year-old made the outcry she was interviewed in another county and all of the information was forwarded to us and the investigation went from there," said Lt. Wade Conner with the Deer Park, Texas Police Department.
Mobile Soccer Club Board Members say they were blind-sided by the news on Monday. For now, the board likely plans to distance itself from Baxley.
"Stopping ties until this situation is resolved and hopefully it comes out to a good outcome," said Elzare.
But Texas investigators are confident the charges will stick, despite Baxley's background. "If they're a pedophile then we deal with them all the same," said Wade. "It doesn't matter what they do for a living."
Baxley is locked up in the Mobile County Jail. That's where he'll stay until he's extradited to Texas.
FBI Agent Pleads Guilty to Child Abuse
http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/was ... hief_x.htm" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
Tuesday February 17, 2004 11:46 PM
By JOHN SOLOMON
Associated Press Writer
https://antipolygraph.org/cgi-bin/forum ... 1077052156" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
WASHINGTON (AP) - The former chief internal watchdog at the FBI has pleaded guilty to sexually assaulting a 6-year-old girl and has admitted he had a history of molesting other children before he joined the bureau for what became a two-decade career.
John H. Conditt Jr., 53, who retired in 2001, was sentenced last week to 12 years in prison in Tarrant County court in Fort Worth, Texas, after he admitted he molested the daughter of two FBI agents after he retired. He acknowledged molesting at least two other girls before he began his law enforcement career, his lawyer said.
Monday August 8, 2005 Longtime FBI agent sentenced to prison on child porn count
also see http://www.policeone.com/news/113935-Lo ... hild-Porn/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
BOISE, Idaho- A longtime FBI agent who helped arrest infamous outlaw Claude Dallas has been sentenced to a year in prison for possessing child pornography.
William Buie, 64, was sentenced Monday after pleading guilty in March. Buie told authorities that he learned to access child pornography Web sites while attending a seminar on preventing child exploitation in 2000 or 2001.
February 22, 2007
http://fredericksburg.com/News/FLS/2007 ... 007/262383" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
Ex-FBI man gets 7 years for child sex
Former FBI analyst sentenced in child sex case
A 17-year veteran of the FBI will serve seven years in prison for having sexual relations with a young girl in Spotsylvania County, a judge ruled yesterday.
Anthony John Lesko, 44, entered an Alford plea yesterday in Spotsylvania Circuit Court to nine counts of felony indecent liberties upon a child.
Lesko, who later moved to Jacksonville, Fla., worked as an intelligence analyst at the FBI for 17 years, according to his attorney, James A. Carter II. He is a major in the U.S. Army Reserves and has received numerous military awards.
An Alford plea means Lesko doesn't admit guilt but believes there is enough evidence for a conviction. Under the terms of the plea, he was sentenced to seven years in prison with another 15 years suspended.
Lesko engaged in a sex act with a girl, 9 and 10 at the time, at least nine times in 2003-2004, according to evidence put forth by Spotsylvania Commonwealth's Attorney William Neely.
The girl told a member of the Spotsylvania Department of Social Services about the activity in February 2004, according to the evidence. Lesko at first denied the allegations, but later spoke with a U.S. Navy counselor about them.
Lesko told the counselor that he was the victim of the sexual assault; he said the girl initiated the contact, according to the plea. Lesko entered the plea partly to spare the girl the pain of a trial, his attorney said.
on for 12 months after pleading guilty to possession of child pornography.
William Buie, 64, of Boise, most recently worked as an investigator for the Idaho attorney general's office.
FBI Agent Accused Of Masturbating In Public
http://www.pennlive.com/midstate/index. ... _pris.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
May 25, 2007
FBI Agent Accused Of Masturbating In Public
Posted by, Marissa Pasquet KOLD News 13 News Editor
FBI Special Agent Ryan Seese, 34, is facing sex offense charges after a cleaning woman said she found him masturbating in a women's lavatory on campus, according to a University of Arizona police spokesman.
FBI Workers Suspected of Secretly Taping Teens in Dressing Room
April 20, 2009
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,517222,00.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
Two FBI workers are accused of using surveillance equipment to spy on teenage girls as they undressed and tried on prom gowns at a charity event at a West Virginia mall.
The FBI employees have been charged with conspiracy and committing criminal invasion of privacy. They were working in an FBI satellite control room at the mall when they positioned a camera on temporary changing rooms and zoomed in for at least 90 minutes on girls dressing for the Cinderella Project fashion show, Marion County Prosecutor Pat Wilson said Monday.
see link for full story
http://fox59.com/2013/04/10/former-fbi- ... y-charges/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
April 9, 2013
Former FBI agent files petition to enter guilty plea for child pornography charges
A local former Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agent arrested on child pornography charges filed a petition to enter a guilty plea.
Donald Sachtleben was arrested in May 2012, following an investigation into the distribution of child pornography. Authorities said they were able to trace online activity back to Sachtleben’s Carmel home.
According to court documents, Sachtleben hid behind the email ‘[email protected]’ and openly traded child porn. In one email he attached nine images of child pornography and child erotica and wrote:
“Saw your profile… Hope you like these and can send me some of (y)ours. I have even better ones if you like.”
Police obtained a search warrant on May 3. During an initial forensic examination of Sachtleben’s laptop computer, approximately 30 images and video files containing child pornography were reportedly discovered.
Former top FBI agent charged with child porn distribution
By Bill Mears, CNN
May 15, 2012
http://www.cnn.com/2012/05/15/justice/e ... index.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
(CNN) -- A former supervisory FBI agent has been arrested and jailed on child pornography charges.
Donald Sachtleben was taken into custody and charged Monday after a nationwide undercover investigation of illegal child porn images traded over the Internet.
A federal complaint alleges 30 graphic images and video were found on Sachtleben's laptop computer late last week when FBI agents searched his home, about 23 miles north of Indianapolis.
Sachtleben is currently an Oklahoma State University visiting professor, according to his online resume. He is director of training at the school's Center for Improvised Explosives, but all references to his work have now been removed from the university's website. There was no indication from the school as to whether it had suspended him. Calls to the university and his Indianapolis attorneys were not immediately returned.
He had been an FBI special agent from 1983 to 2008, serving as a bomb technician. He worked on the Oklahoma City bombing and Unabomber investigations, according to his university biography.
A separate LinkedIn profile filled out by Sachtleben says he is an "accomplished investigator with more than 25 years of experience in FBI major case management, counter terrorism investigations, bombing prevention, post blast investigations and public speaking."
FBI agent arrested on child sexual assault charge
Associated Press - January 15, 2008 6:14 PM ET
http://www.denverpost.com/news/ci_7978377" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
PUEBLO, Colo. (AP) - An FBI agent is under arrest in Pueblo for investigation of sexual assault on a child by someone in a position of trust.
Authorities say 53-year-old David Allan Johnson is being held in the Pueblo County jail today on a $100,000 bail.
Former Great Falls FBI agent sentenced on child sex charges
Jan 23, 2008
A man from Great Falls who's accused of sexually assaulting five underage girls will be spending the next 10 years behind bars.
Stanley Perkins, 64, changed his plea to guilty after police began investigating him for child molestation in August 2006.
The former educator, who also served two years as an FBI agent, was sentenced on one count of felony sexual assault.
see link for full story
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/crime- ... ormer.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
Jail for former FBI worker from Va.
Washington Post Editors
A 65-year-old former FBI employee from Prince William County was sentenced to nearly four years in prison Friday for possessing child pornography.
Samuel I. Kaplan, of Gainesville, who pleaded guilty June 2 in U.S. District Court in Alexandria, was sentenced to 46 months behind bars.
Kaplan was an information technology program manager at an FBI facility in Chantilly when authorities discovered that he had used the FBI's computer network to "facilitate sexually explict communications," the Justice Department said.
Investigators said they later found 10 to 20 images on Kaplan's home computer showing juveniles involved in sex acts.
http://franklincoverup.com/index.php?op ... &Itemid=26" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
Ex-FBI agent gets 2 1/2 years for assault on marshal
A federal judge today sentenced retired FBI special agent Gary L. John
to 2 ½ years in prison for assaulting a U.S. marshal trying to place him
under arrest.
John, formerly of 110 Post Rd., Westerly, had been on the lam for two
months, when U.S. marshals working with Rhode Island Sheriffs
Department, tracked him to Stratford, Conn., in December 2005. He was
wanted in Rhode Island at the time for allegedly violating orders
barring him from contacting his ex-wife and for failing to appear in
court.
see link for full story
http://articles.baltimoresun.com/1993-0 ... -fbi-agent" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
FBI agent convicted of daughters' abuse
July 11, 1993|By Traci A. Johnson | Traci A. Johnson,Staff Writer
An FBI agent who lives in Carroll County has been convicted of sexually abusing his daughters over a 14-year period.
The agent, as part of an agreement with prosecutors, pleaded guilty Friday before Circuit Judge Francis M. Arnold to two counts of second-degree sexual offense and two counts of child abuse.
The agent's name is being withheld to protect the privacy of the victims.
In exchange for the agent's plea, the state dropped 18 other counts against him, ordered a presentence investigation and agreed to let him remain free on $125,000 bond pending sentencing Sept. 10.
The agent was suspended from the FBI's Baltimore field office when he was arrested in December.
The original indictment also charged the man with fondling his oldest daughter's friend several years ago when the girl had slept over at the agent's home.
An investigation began after one of the man's daughters told a county child-abuse investigator of at least five incidents of molestation from 1980 to 1987, court documents said.
The victims said their father performed sexual acts ranging from fondling to intercourse beginning when each was preschool age. The abuse lasted until the girls were in their early teens, said Assistant State's Attorney Kathi Hill in a statement of facts presented in court.
In February, defense attorney John E. Harris Sr. tried unsuccessfully to have the case moved out of Carroll on the grounds that pretrial publicity had damaged the defendant's chance for a fair trial.
Ms. Hill said the state will recommend a sentence of 35 years in state prison, with 15 years suspended.
Although Ms. Hill said she once argued that the agent should be incarcerated until his trial, she said Friday she was not worried about whether he will return for his sentencing.
"Even if he'd take a walk, when he eventually comes back he wouldn't have to be tried again. He'd just be sentenced," Ms. Hill said. "There's not so much fear on our part, because we don't have to prove the case again."
The state will ask the court, as part of the agent's sentence, to impose five years of supervised probation and order him to have no contact with females under 18 and to undergo psychological therapy.
Judge Arnold also accepted a plea agreement Friday in which a Mount Airy hairdresser admitted sexually abusing a teen-age boy he befriended in 1990.
David Curtis Flynn of Grimes Court in Mount Airy was immediately sentenced to four years in prison for a second-degree sexual offense.
From January 1991 to November 1992, Flynn had a sexual relationship with the boy, whose family knew and trusted the man, according to a statement of facts that Ms. Hill read in court.
The victim told authorities that Flynn talked to him before the incidents, saying he had been abused as a child, Ms. Hill said.
"I am deeply sorry . . . in my soul," Flynn said. "None of my attentions were meant as wrongdoing. I showed [the victim] the kind of love and affection I was brought up with. I'm deeply sorry for upsetting his childhood."
Judge Arnold sentenced Flynn to 10 years in state prison, then suspended six years of the term.
The judge also ordered five years of supervised probation for the defendant after the prison term and ordered him to participate in all recommended treatment programs.
Mystery Over FBI Agent's Firing
Government shrouds details of why top child porn prober got canned
http://www.thesmokinggun.com/documents/ ... nts-firing" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
Mystery Over FBI Agent's Firing
AUGUST 20--The lead FBI investigator on several of the government's highest profile child porn prosecutions has recently been fired in connection with her work on those cases, though details of why the agent was terminated have been sealed by a federal judge.
The canning of Monique Winkis, 40, was just disclosed by federal prosecutors to a Tennessee defense lawyer who represents Timothy Richards, who was convicted in a case in which Winkis was the lead FBI agent. In an August 8 U.S. District Court filing, defense lawyer Kimberly Hodde stated that prosecutors had informed her that Winkis was canned due to her 'conduct in the investigation of cases related to Defendant Richards' prosecution.'
Specific details of Winkis's firing are contained in a court filing made by Department of Justice officials, a submission that was ordered sealed last week by Judge Aleta Trauger. In her court filing, Hodde argues that Richards, pictured at left, is entitled to details about the Winkis firing since the ex-prober was the FBI case agent assigned to his prosecution.
The Winkis firing was apparently first disclosed by government lawyers during a late-June status conference, at which Trauger set dates for court pleadings 're: FBI Wincus,' according to a court filing. Winkis did not respond to a detailed message left with her mother, and the federal prosecutor handling the Richards case did not return a message left at her office. An FBI spokesperson declined comment, noting that the agency is prohibited from discussing personnel matters.
According to court records, Winkis worked for the FBI for about 13 years, most recently from the bureau's Washington, D.C. headquarters where she was a supervisor in the Innocent Images Unit. In that capacity, Winkis developed cases based on information provided by Justin Berry, who began operating an X-rated Webcam business while still a teenager. Berry's cooperation was, in large part, arranged in late-2005 by Kurt Eichenwald, then a New York Times reporter investigating online child porn businesses.
According to a December 2005 Eichenwald story, the Times 'persuaded Justin to abandon his business and, to protect other children at risk, assisted him in contacting the Justice Department.' That Times report also quoted Winkis commenting on the breadth of potential targets identified as a result of Berry's cooperation and how 'hundreds of other kids that we are not aware of yet' could be saved from sexual abuse and exploitation.
EX-FBI AGENT JOHN LANDS IN JAIL - AGAIN
By Ryan McBride - The Sun Staff
WAKEFIELD - A former FBI agent from Westerly has returned to prison
after a series of recent arrests for violating a court order to stay
away from his ex-wife.
John served 15 months at the ACI for a criminal conviction of violating a
restraining order in March 2002. His suspended sentence and probation
from the conviction end in 2012.
According to court records, state police arrested John in February 2002
on a disorderly conduct charge for exposing himself in public.
Calif. FBI agent accused of paying for prostitutes
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/huff-wire ... fbi-agent/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
GREG RISLING | September 24, 2012
LOS ANGELES — An undercover FBI agent has been accused in court documents of spending U.S. taxpayer dollars on prostitutes in the Philippines for himself and others during an international weapons trafficking probe last year.
Deputy Federal Public Defender John Littrell filed a motion last week asking a judge to toss an indictment against his client, Sergio Santiago Syjuco, for "outrageous government misconduct." Syjuco, 25, and two other Philippine nationals have been charged with conspiracy and face up to 20 years in prison.
The agent, who wasn't identified in court documents, paid up to $2,400 each time he went to brothels with Syjuco and others to reward them for their work to secure weapons to ship to the U.S. without a license, court documents show.
"I have never seen anything like this during my career as a criminal defense lawyer," Littrell told The Associated Press on Monday. "I hope that the Department of Justice takes these allegations seriously, does a complete investigation, and ensures that whoever authorized this outrageous misconduct is held accountable."
FBI spokeswoman Laura Eimiller declined comment Monday, but federal prosecutors acknowledged in court documents that the agent sought nearly $15,000 in reimbursements for "entertainment" and other expenses related to the investigation. The prosecutors said they don't have any receipts from the clubs, but two of them listed in the filing, "Air Force One" and "Area 51," are suspected brothels.
No charges have been filed against the agent.
Syjuco, Cesar Ubaldo and Arjyl Revereza, a Philippines customs official, were charged earlier this year with violating arms import laws by selling a grenade launcher, a mortar launcher and other weapons to the undercover agent who said he was interested in buying high-powered weapons that could be used by drug cartels in the U.S. and Mexico.
The case was part of a federal investigation of Asian organized crime groups involved in the illicit trafficking of firearms.
The weapons were eventually loaded onto a ship that arrived at the Port of Long Beach in June 2011 and the items were seized by authorities.
Littrell argues that the agent – and none of the three defendants – arranged importing the weapons to the U.S. He also questioned why the weapons were first shipped from the Philippines to China, where it wasn't known whether officials there checked the container, before arriving in the U.S.
Littrell and an investigator recently visited the Philippines and interviewed several people who claim the agent, using an alias "Richard Han," paid for himself and others to have sex with prostitutes. Alex Escosio, who worked at Area 51, told defense attorneys that Han "always paid for everything, including alcohol, private rooms, food and girls for the entire group of people he brought in," court documents show.
"Although the government represents that these expenditures were for `entertainment and cocktail (tips included),' it is impossible that the agent could not have known that they money went toward prostitutes," Littrell wrote in court documents.
Area 51 was raided in May by Philippine authorities where 60 victims of sex trafficking were rescued, some of whom were underage girls, Littrell said. At least seven people were arrested.
see link for full story
http://www.wjla.com/articles/2012/12/ke ... 82698.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
Keith Dietterle, FBI analyst, accused of distributing child pornography
By Jennifer Donelan
December 3, 2012 - 05:37 pm
An FBI analyst has been accused of distributing child pornography in a disturbing case that's left his neighbors wanting answers.
A task force made up of FBI agents and D.C. police officers busted Keith Dietterle. The 28-year-old will appear for a preliminary hearing Tuesday.
Dietterle is accused of sending child pornography to another man he met in a chat room frequented by individuals who have a sexual interest children. But the person Dietterle was allegedly speaking with was a D.C. police detective.
According to court documents, agents say Dietterle thought he was communicating with a man who claimed to be sexually abusing a 3-year-old nephew and 12-year-old daughter. The detective wrote he and Dietterle discussed a possible meeting with the "children" for sex. Over a two week period, Dietterle sent three images via Yahoo instant messenger depicting child pornography, court documents state.
Dietterle is accused of later sending multiple links, including a 13-minute video, images and six separate videos of underage children all being sexually abused.
couple of reads caution the two largest groups of FBI agents by religious category are Mormons
and Catholics. Why ? Because the FBI agents who are Mormon and Catholic do not question authority, eh?
also see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fCVlI-_4GZQ" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
see link for full story
http://www.sacbee.com/2013/07/06/554803 ... -plea.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
Sacramento priest accepts plea deal in molestation case
Jul. 6, 2013
Grudgingly, one of the nation's leading critics of the Catholic Church's handling of sexual abuse by priests credited the Sacramento Diocese with doing some things right in the prosecution of the Rev. Uriel Ojeda.
The 33-year-old priest pleaded no contest Friday to a single count of molesting a 13-year-old girl and admitted to engaging in "substantial sexual conduct" with her, which will likely bring him eight years in state prison.
David Clohessy, the St. Louis-based director of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, said Sacramento church officials did "the bare minimum" to make sure a case was filed against Ojeda after the victim's father first made accusations against the cleric two years ago.
"Tragically, because for decades bishops refused to do even that, then by comparison, it makes Sacramento church officials look better," Clohessy said. "On the one hand, I think it's important to acknowledge progress where progress really happens. But by the same token, it's hard to define doing the bare minimum in child sex cases as real progress."
Clohessy said Bishop Jaime Soto also should have cracked down on the dozens of Ojeda supporters who packed courtrooms and danced and chanted outside the jail after the priest's Nov. 30, 2011, arrest. He said the church should have done more to publicize Ojeda's misdeed and to shake the trees in the parishes where the reverend worked to find other potential victims.
Diocesan spokesman Kevin Eckery said church officials did go to Holy Rosary Parish in Woodland and Our Lady of Mercy in Redding and read announcements to inform congregants about the charges.
The bishop also "made it very clear" at the time of the arrest "that his concerns were for the victim" and he barred Ojeda's backers from organizing fundraisers on church property, Eckery said.
A couple of dozen Ojeda supporters were on hand Friday in Sacramento Superior Court, and some of them wept after the priest replied "no contest" when he was asked how he pled to a single count of molesting a 13-year-old girl. They also heard him say, "I admit," when Judge Eugene L. Balonon asked him if he engaged in "substantial sexual conduct" with the girl.
Afterward, one of them clutched Eckery in a sarcastic embrace and repeatedly told him, "Congratulations." Another, Sylvia Chavez, told reporters the case "was all based on a plan that was formulated by the diocese and the bishop, and everything was false."
During the proceeding, Ojeda's discomfort was most apparent when he officially entered his plea after Deputy District Attorney Allison Dunham read the facts of the charge against him.
Dunham told the court that sometime between June 29, 2007, and June 30, 2009, in Sacramento County, when Ojeda was posted at the parish in Woodland, he "entered the victim's bedroom at night when everyone in the household was asleep."
"She woke up and the defendant was lying next to her in bed," the prosecutor said.
Dunham said Ojeda then reached underneath the girl's pajamas and touched her in a manner that "constitutes substantial sexual conduct with a child under the age of 14 years, to wit, 13 years," for his own sexual purposes.
In exchange for the plea, the DA's Office dropped six other felony counts involving the same victim that could have brought Ojeda 20 years in prison.
Balonon scheduled sentencing for Aug. 2.
"This is a fair resolution of the case based upon the facts and circumstances," Dunham said in a statement. "The victim and her family can move forward with their lives and be proud that they had the courage to report the abuse to the Sacramento Diocese and law enforcement."
Ojeda's attorney, Jesse Ortiz, called the case tough for Ojeda, his supporters, the victim and her family – "everybody."
Ortiz said Ojeda's decision to accept the plea bargain was equally difficult.
"We always felt that we would be successful at trial, but going through the risks and understanding that the ultimate decision is in the hands of jurors, and we don't even know who they are at this point, it was just something he wasn't prepared to do," Ortiz said.
Friday's plea came two days after Balonon ruled against Ojeda' effort to exclude statements he allegedly made admitting the molestation. The judge said Ojeda's conversation about the allegations with church officials was not covered by a clergy-penitent's privilege.
Ojeda had discussed the matter with the Rev. Timothy Nondorf, an aide to Soto, and to Joseph Sheehan, a former FBI agent who was working as a private investigator on contract with the law firm that represents the Catholic Diocese of Sacramento.
Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/2013/07/06/554803 ... rylink=cpy" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
see link for full story
CNN exclusive: FBI misconduct reveals sex, lies and videotape
By Scott Zamost and Kyra Phillips, CNN Special Investigations Unit
January 27, 2011
Washington (CNN) -- An FBI employee shared confidential information with his girlfriend, who was a news reporter, then later threatened to release a sex tape the two had made.
A supervisor watched pornographic videos in his office during work hours while "satisfying himself."
And an employee in a "leadership position" misused a government database to check on two friends who were exotic dancers and allowed them into an FBI office after hours.
These are among confidential summaries of FBI disciplinary reports obtained by CNN, which describe misconduct by agency supervisors, agents and other employees over the last three years
http://www.cnn.com/2011/US/01/27/siu.fb ... index.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
Read the FBI documents obtained by CNN
-- An employee had "a sexual relationship with a source" over seven months. The punishment was a 40-day suspension.
-- The supervisor who viewed "pornographic movies in the office while sexually satisfying himself" during work hours received a 35-day suspension.
-- The employee in a "leadership position" who misused a "government database to conduct name checks on two friends who were foreign nationals employed as exotic dancers" and "brought the two friends into FBI space after-hours without proper authorization" received a 23-day suspension. The same employee had been previously suspended for misusing a government database.
-- An employee who was drunk "exploited his FBI employment at a strip club," falsely claiming he was "conducting an official investigation." His punishment was a 30-day suspension.
-- And an employee conducted "unauthorized searches on FBI databases" for "information on public celebrities the employee thought were 'hot'" received a 30-day suspension.
see link for full story
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldne ... alers.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
February 22, 2013
FBI agents caught sexting and dating drug dealers
Dating drug dealers, harassing ex-boyfriends with naked pictures, and pointing guns at pet dogs: these were just a few of the offences committed recently by serving FBI agents, according to internal documents.
The US provided officers from the Egyptian secret police with training at the FBI, despite allegations that they routinely tortured detainees and suppressed political opposition.
Disciplinary files from the Bureau's Office of Professional Responsibility record an extraordinary range of transgressions that reveal the chaotic personal lives of some of America's top law enforcers.
One male agent was sacked after police were called to his mistress's house following reports of domestic incident. When officers arrived they found the agent "drunk and uncooperative" and eventually had to physically subdue him and wrestle away his loaded gun.
A woman e-mailed a "nude photograph of herself to her ex-boyfriend's wife" and then continued to harass the couple despite two warnings from senior officials. The Bureau concluded she was suffering from depression related to the break-up and allowed her to return to work after 10 days.
see link for full story
http://www.wgrz.com/news/article/192104 ... ent-Busted" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
Buffalo FBI Agent Busted
Dec 10, 2012
BUFFALO, NY - A Special Agent working in the Buffalo office of the FBI is due in Eden Town Court later this month, after being arrested by New York State Police last Friday night, charged with exposing himself to a fellow motorist on the New York State Thruway.
State Police Lt. David Denz confirmed for WGRZ-TV that John A. Yervelli Jr., 48, of Lakeview, was charged with Public Lewdness, a class B misdemeanor, punishable by up to 90 days in jail.
According to Denz, a truck driver from central New York was traveling in the right lane while east bound on the Thruway near mile marker 442, between Exits 57 and 57A, when he noticed a grey minivan pull alongside him in the passing lane.
The trucker told police that when he looked down, he noticed the driver of the other vehicle (who had turned his dome light on) was not wearing pants.
"At that point the complainant stated that the driver of the minivan was exposing himself and making lewd gestures," Denz told 2 On Your Side.
Denz says the trucker called police, who then intercepted the minivan at the Hamburg toll plaza, where the trucker also went to identify Yervelli. Denz said it appeared Yervelli was wearing pants when he was pulled over.
"He denied exposing himself," Denz told Channel 2, but added that "inconsistencies" in the account given by Agent Yervelli lead State Police to file charges.
A source says Yervelli insisted to the trooper who pulled him over that he was attempting to relieve himself into a bottle while he was driving. However, the location where he said that occurred was within a few miles (or minutes) of the exit he was headed to, and even closer to a Thruway rest stop.
"I don't want to give you too many specifics as far as what he stated, but he made statements that would lead you to believe that the truck driver's story was credible," Denz said.
Child Porn Probe Leads To FBI Headquarters
Target claims inquiry is just a “misunderstanding”
http://www.thesmokinggun.com/documents/ ... adquarters" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
JANUARY 5 2011--The government’s pursuit of suspects trafficking in child pornography recently led federal agents to a familiar address--the FBI’s Washington, D.C. headquarters, where a bureau official is the subject of an ongoing criminal probe, The Smoking Gun has learned.
The investigation by the Department of Justice’s inspector general is focusing on FBI employee Joseph Bonsuk’s receipt of nearly 80 illicit images that were e-mailed to him by an Illinois sex offender whose rap sheet includes felony convictions for bank robbery and solicitation of a minor.
Prosecutors move to dismiss charges against former Scout leader
January 3, 2007
NEW HAVEN, Conn. --Federal prosecutors have moved to dismiss charges against a retired FBI agent who was indicted on child sex charges dating back more than a decade when he was a Boy Scout leader, in response to the death of his accuser.
William Hutton, 63, of Killingworth, was arrested in February on charges he enticed a member of his Scout troop to Maine for the purpose of sexual activity in 1994 and 1995.
http://www.ctpost.com/news/article/Form ... -86217.php" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
Former Scout leader, FBI agent indicted on child sex charges
News-Times, The (Danbury, CT)
Saturday, February 4, 2006
NEW HAVEN (AP) - A retired FBI agent was indicted Friday on federal child sex charges dating back more than a decade when he was a Boy Scout leader.
William Hutton, 63, of Killingworth, was arrested Friday. The federal grand jury indictment accuses Hutton of enticing a member of his Scout troop to Maine for the purpose of sexual activity in 1994 and 1995.
"It's obviously devastating. He was an FBI agent in this district and was reputed in this district," defense attorney Hugh Keefe said.
"The people who worked with him in the U.S. attorney's office and FBI respected him."
Keefe said the investigation has been going on for years. He would not discuss the details of the case or how the allegations surfaced.
Investigators asked anyone who knows anything about the case to call the FBI. U.S. Attorney Kevin O'Connor said that's standard practice whenever there might be more victims.
"In any case that's a concern," O'Connor said. "Whether that's the situation here I can't say."
If convicted on all four charges, Hutton faces up to 30 years in prison and up to $250,000 in fines.
Hutton was released on a $200,00 bond. He may not own any firearms or have any unsupervised contact with children. He was also ordered to stay away from playgrounds, schools, arcades or anywhere children congregate.
http://www.headwatersproductions.com/pr ... icle5.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
Edward Rodgers was in charge of investigating cases of Child Abuse at the FBI
THE DENVER POST - Voice of the Rocky Mountain Empire
May 17, 1990
Sisters win sex lawsuit vs. dad $2.3 million given for years of abuse
By Howard Prankratz
Denver Post Legal Affairs Writer
Two daughters of former state and federal law enforcement official Edward Rodgers were awarded $2.319,400 yesterday, after a Denver judge and jury found that the women suffered years of abuse at the hands of their father.
The award to Sharon Simone, 45, and Susan Hammond, 44, followed testimony of Rodgers’ four daughters in person or through depositions, describing repeated physical abuse and sexual assaults by their father from 1944 through 1965.
Rodgers, 72, who became a child abuse expert after retiring from the FBI and joining the colorado Springs DA’s office, failed to appear for the trial. But in a deposition taken in March, Rodgers denied ever hitting or sexually abusing his children.
http://www.fox10tv.com/dpp/news/FormerL ... ntArrested" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
Local attorney arrested
On child indecency accusations
Updated: Wednesday, 22 Apr 2009, 1:33 PM CDT
Published : Monday, 20 Apr 2009,
MOBILE, Ala. - Mobile Police arrested 52-year-old Phillip Kent Baxley on child indecency charges. Baxley is a local attorney in Mobile, but he's also a former coach and acting president for the Mobile Soccer Club.
"I'm surprised to hear it," said Mobile Soccer Club Director, Mohammed Elzare. "He's a former FBI agent and attorney. So we're definitely saddened to hear this."
Baxley was arrested at his Dauphin Street office on a fugitive felony warrant out of Harris County, Texas.
Texas police officers say Baxley was involved in an incident with a nine-year-old girl in 2004.
Investigators say it happened at a family member's house in a Houston suburb, but the girl waited some time before saying anything.
"When the victim, the nine-year-old made the outcry she was interviewed in another county and all of the information was forwarded to us and the investigation went from there," said Lt. Wade Conner with the Deer Park, Texas Police Department.
Mobile Soccer Club Board Members say they were blind-sided by the news on Monday. For now, the board likely plans to distance itself from Baxley.
"Stopping ties until this situation is resolved and hopefully it comes out to a good outcome," said Elzare.
But Texas investigators are confident the charges will stick, despite Baxley's background. "If they're a pedophile then we deal with them all the same," said Wade. "It doesn't matter what they do for a living."
Baxley is locked up in the Mobile County Jail. That's where he'll stay until he's extradited to Texas.
FBI Agent Pleads Guilty to Child Abuse
http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/was ... hief_x.htm" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
Tuesday February 17, 2004 11:46 PM
By JOHN SOLOMON
Associated Press Writer
https://antipolygraph.org/cgi-bin/forum ... 1077052156" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
WASHINGTON (AP) - The former chief internal watchdog at the FBI has pleaded guilty to sexually assaulting a 6-year-old girl and has admitted he had a history of molesting other children before he joined the bureau for what became a two-decade career.
John H. Conditt Jr., 53, who retired in 2001, was sentenced last week to 12 years in prison in Tarrant County court in Fort Worth, Texas, after he admitted he molested the daughter of two FBI agents after he retired. He acknowledged molesting at least two other girls before he began his law enforcement career, his lawyer said.
Monday August 8, 2005 Longtime FBI agent sentenced to prison on child porn count
also see http://www.policeone.com/news/113935-Lo ... hild-Porn/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
BOISE, Idaho- A longtime FBI agent who helped arrest infamous outlaw Claude Dallas has been sentenced to a year in prison for possessing child pornography.
William Buie, 64, was sentenced Monday after pleading guilty in March. Buie told authorities that he learned to access child pornography Web sites while attending a seminar on preventing child exploitation in 2000 or 2001.
February 22, 2007
http://fredericksburg.com/News/FLS/2007 ... 007/262383" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
Ex-FBI man gets 7 years for child sex
Former FBI analyst sentenced in child sex case
A 17-year veteran of the FBI will serve seven years in prison for having sexual relations with a young girl in Spotsylvania County, a judge ruled yesterday.
Anthony John Lesko, 44, entered an Alford plea yesterday in Spotsylvania Circuit Court to nine counts of felony indecent liberties upon a child.
Lesko, who later moved to Jacksonville, Fla., worked as an intelligence analyst at the FBI for 17 years, according to his attorney, James A. Carter II. He is a major in the U.S. Army Reserves and has received numerous military awards.
An Alford plea means Lesko doesn't admit guilt but believes there is enough evidence for a conviction. Under the terms of the plea, he was sentenced to seven years in prison with another 15 years suspended.
Lesko engaged in a sex act with a girl, 9 and 10 at the time, at least nine times in 2003-2004, according to evidence put forth by Spotsylvania Commonwealth's Attorney William Neely.
The girl told a member of the Spotsylvania Department of Social Services about the activity in February 2004, according to the evidence. Lesko at first denied the allegations, but later spoke with a U.S. Navy counselor about them.
Lesko told the counselor that he was the victim of the sexual assault; he said the girl initiated the contact, according to the plea. Lesko entered the plea partly to spare the girl the pain of a trial, his attorney said.
on for 12 months after pleading guilty to possession of child pornography.
William Buie, 64, of Boise, most recently worked as an investigator for the Idaho attorney general's office.
FBI Agent Accused Of Masturbating In Public
http://www.pennlive.com/midstate/index. ... _pris.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
May 25, 2007
FBI Agent Accused Of Masturbating In Public
Posted by, Marissa Pasquet KOLD News 13 News Editor
FBI Special Agent Ryan Seese, 34, is facing sex offense charges after a cleaning woman said she found him masturbating in a women's lavatory on campus, according to a University of Arizona police spokesman.
FBI Workers Suspected of Secretly Taping Teens in Dressing Room
April 20, 2009
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,517222,00.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
Two FBI workers are accused of using surveillance equipment to spy on teenage girls as they undressed and tried on prom gowns at a charity event at a West Virginia mall.
The FBI employees have been charged with conspiracy and committing criminal invasion of privacy. They were working in an FBI satellite control room at the mall when they positioned a camera on temporary changing rooms and zoomed in for at least 90 minutes on girls dressing for the Cinderella Project fashion show, Marion County Prosecutor Pat Wilson said Monday.
see link for full story
http://fox59.com/2013/04/10/former-fbi- ... y-charges/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
April 9, 2013
Former FBI agent files petition to enter guilty plea for child pornography charges
A local former Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agent arrested on child pornography charges filed a petition to enter a guilty plea.
Donald Sachtleben was arrested in May 2012, following an investigation into the distribution of child pornography. Authorities said they were able to trace online activity back to Sachtleben’s Carmel home.
According to court documents, Sachtleben hid behind the email ‘[email protected]’ and openly traded child porn. In one email he attached nine images of child pornography and child erotica and wrote:
“Saw your profile… Hope you like these and can send me some of (y)ours. I have even better ones if you like.”
Police obtained a search warrant on May 3. During an initial forensic examination of Sachtleben’s laptop computer, approximately 30 images and video files containing child pornography were reportedly discovered.
Former top FBI agent charged with child porn distribution
By Bill Mears, CNN
May 15, 2012
http://www.cnn.com/2012/05/15/justice/e ... index.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
(CNN) -- A former supervisory FBI agent has been arrested and jailed on child pornography charges.
Donald Sachtleben was taken into custody and charged Monday after a nationwide undercover investigation of illegal child porn images traded over the Internet.
A federal complaint alleges 30 graphic images and video were found on Sachtleben's laptop computer late last week when FBI agents searched his home, about 23 miles north of Indianapolis.
Sachtleben is currently an Oklahoma State University visiting professor, according to his online resume. He is director of training at the school's Center for Improvised Explosives, but all references to his work have now been removed from the university's website. There was no indication from the school as to whether it had suspended him. Calls to the university and his Indianapolis attorneys were not immediately returned.
He had been an FBI special agent from 1983 to 2008, serving as a bomb technician. He worked on the Oklahoma City bombing and Unabomber investigations, according to his university biography.
A separate LinkedIn profile filled out by Sachtleben says he is an "accomplished investigator with more than 25 years of experience in FBI major case management, counter terrorism investigations, bombing prevention, post blast investigations and public speaking."
FBI agent arrested on child sexual assault charge
Associated Press - January 15, 2008 6:14 PM ET
http://www.denverpost.com/news/ci_7978377" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
PUEBLO, Colo. (AP) - An FBI agent is under arrest in Pueblo for investigation of sexual assault on a child by someone in a position of trust.
Authorities say 53-year-old David Allan Johnson is being held in the Pueblo County jail today on a $100,000 bail.
Former Great Falls FBI agent sentenced on child sex charges
Jan 23, 2008
A man from Great Falls who's accused of sexually assaulting five underage girls will be spending the next 10 years behind bars.
Stanley Perkins, 64, changed his plea to guilty after police began investigating him for child molestation in August 2006.
The former educator, who also served two years as an FBI agent, was sentenced on one count of felony sexual assault.
see link for full story
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/crime- ... ormer.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
Jail for former FBI worker from Va.
Washington Post Editors
A 65-year-old former FBI employee from Prince William County was sentenced to nearly four years in prison Friday for possessing child pornography.
Samuel I. Kaplan, of Gainesville, who pleaded guilty June 2 in U.S. District Court in Alexandria, was sentenced to 46 months behind bars.
Kaplan was an information technology program manager at an FBI facility in Chantilly when authorities discovered that he had used the FBI's computer network to "facilitate sexually explict communications," the Justice Department said.
Investigators said they later found 10 to 20 images on Kaplan's home computer showing juveniles involved in sex acts.
http://franklincoverup.com/index.php?op ... &Itemid=26" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
Ex-FBI agent gets 2 1/2 years for assault on marshal
A federal judge today sentenced retired FBI special agent Gary L. John
to 2 ½ years in prison for assaulting a U.S. marshal trying to place him
under arrest.
John, formerly of 110 Post Rd., Westerly, had been on the lam for two
months, when U.S. marshals working with Rhode Island Sheriffs
Department, tracked him to Stratford, Conn., in December 2005. He was
wanted in Rhode Island at the time for allegedly violating orders
barring him from contacting his ex-wife and for failing to appear in
court.
see link for full story
http://articles.baltimoresun.com/1993-0 ... -fbi-agent" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
FBI agent convicted of daughters' abuse
July 11, 1993|By Traci A. Johnson | Traci A. Johnson,Staff Writer
An FBI agent who lives in Carroll County has been convicted of sexually abusing his daughters over a 14-year period.
The agent, as part of an agreement with prosecutors, pleaded guilty Friday before Circuit Judge Francis M. Arnold to two counts of second-degree sexual offense and two counts of child abuse.
The agent's name is being withheld to protect the privacy of the victims.
In exchange for the agent's plea, the state dropped 18 other counts against him, ordered a presentence investigation and agreed to let him remain free on $125,000 bond pending sentencing Sept. 10.
The agent was suspended from the FBI's Baltimore field office when he was arrested in December.
The original indictment also charged the man with fondling his oldest daughter's friend several years ago when the girl had slept over at the agent's home.
An investigation began after one of the man's daughters told a county child-abuse investigator of at least five incidents of molestation from 1980 to 1987, court documents said.
The victims said their father performed sexual acts ranging from fondling to intercourse beginning when each was preschool age. The abuse lasted until the girls were in their early teens, said Assistant State's Attorney Kathi Hill in a statement of facts presented in court.
In February, defense attorney John E. Harris Sr. tried unsuccessfully to have the case moved out of Carroll on the grounds that pretrial publicity had damaged the defendant's chance for a fair trial.
Ms. Hill said the state will recommend a sentence of 35 years in state prison, with 15 years suspended.
Although Ms. Hill said she once argued that the agent should be incarcerated until his trial, she said Friday she was not worried about whether he will return for his sentencing.
"Even if he'd take a walk, when he eventually comes back he wouldn't have to be tried again. He'd just be sentenced," Ms. Hill said. "There's not so much fear on our part, because we don't have to prove the case again."
The state will ask the court, as part of the agent's sentence, to impose five years of supervised probation and order him to have no contact with females under 18 and to undergo psychological therapy.
Judge Arnold also accepted a plea agreement Friday in which a Mount Airy hairdresser admitted sexually abusing a teen-age boy he befriended in 1990.
David Curtis Flynn of Grimes Court in Mount Airy was immediately sentenced to four years in prison for a second-degree sexual offense.
From January 1991 to November 1992, Flynn had a sexual relationship with the boy, whose family knew and trusted the man, according to a statement of facts that Ms. Hill read in court.
The victim told authorities that Flynn talked to him before the incidents, saying he had been abused as a child, Ms. Hill said.
"I am deeply sorry . . . in my soul," Flynn said. "None of my attentions were meant as wrongdoing. I showed [the victim] the kind of love and affection I was brought up with. I'm deeply sorry for upsetting his childhood."
Judge Arnold sentenced Flynn to 10 years in state prison, then suspended six years of the term.
The judge also ordered five years of supervised probation for the defendant after the prison term and ordered him to participate in all recommended treatment programs.
Mystery Over FBI Agent's Firing
Government shrouds details of why top child porn prober got canned
http://www.thesmokinggun.com/documents/ ... nts-firing" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
Mystery Over FBI Agent's Firing
AUGUST 20--The lead FBI investigator on several of the government's highest profile child porn prosecutions has recently been fired in connection with her work on those cases, though details of why the agent was terminated have been sealed by a federal judge.
The canning of Monique Winkis, 40, was just disclosed by federal prosecutors to a Tennessee defense lawyer who represents Timothy Richards, who was convicted in a case in which Winkis was the lead FBI agent. In an August 8 U.S. District Court filing, defense lawyer Kimberly Hodde stated that prosecutors had informed her that Winkis was canned due to her 'conduct in the investigation of cases related to Defendant Richards' prosecution.'
Specific details of Winkis's firing are contained in a court filing made by Department of Justice officials, a submission that was ordered sealed last week by Judge Aleta Trauger. In her court filing, Hodde argues that Richards, pictured at left, is entitled to details about the Winkis firing since the ex-prober was the FBI case agent assigned to his prosecution.
The Winkis firing was apparently first disclosed by government lawyers during a late-June status conference, at which Trauger set dates for court pleadings 're: FBI Wincus,' according to a court filing. Winkis did not respond to a detailed message left with her mother, and the federal prosecutor handling the Richards case did not return a message left at her office. An FBI spokesperson declined comment, noting that the agency is prohibited from discussing personnel matters.
According to court records, Winkis worked for the FBI for about 13 years, most recently from the bureau's Washington, D.C. headquarters where she was a supervisor in the Innocent Images Unit. In that capacity, Winkis developed cases based on information provided by Justin Berry, who began operating an X-rated Webcam business while still a teenager. Berry's cooperation was, in large part, arranged in late-2005 by Kurt Eichenwald, then a New York Times reporter investigating online child porn businesses.
According to a December 2005 Eichenwald story, the Times 'persuaded Justin to abandon his business and, to protect other children at risk, assisted him in contacting the Justice Department.' That Times report also quoted Winkis commenting on the breadth of potential targets identified as a result of Berry's cooperation and how 'hundreds of other kids that we are not aware of yet' could be saved from sexual abuse and exploitation.
EX-FBI AGENT JOHN LANDS IN JAIL - AGAIN
By Ryan McBride - The Sun Staff
WAKEFIELD - A former FBI agent from Westerly has returned to prison
after a series of recent arrests for violating a court order to stay
away from his ex-wife.
John served 15 months at the ACI for a criminal conviction of violating a
restraining order in March 2002. His suspended sentence and probation
from the conviction end in 2012.
According to court records, state police arrested John in February 2002
on a disorderly conduct charge for exposing himself in public.
Calif. FBI agent accused of paying for prostitutes
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/huff-wire ... fbi-agent/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
GREG RISLING | September 24, 2012
LOS ANGELES — An undercover FBI agent has been accused in court documents of spending U.S. taxpayer dollars on prostitutes in the Philippines for himself and others during an international weapons trafficking probe last year.
Deputy Federal Public Defender John Littrell filed a motion last week asking a judge to toss an indictment against his client, Sergio Santiago Syjuco, for "outrageous government misconduct." Syjuco, 25, and two other Philippine nationals have been charged with conspiracy and face up to 20 years in prison.
The agent, who wasn't identified in court documents, paid up to $2,400 each time he went to brothels with Syjuco and others to reward them for their work to secure weapons to ship to the U.S. without a license, court documents show.
"I have never seen anything like this during my career as a criminal defense lawyer," Littrell told The Associated Press on Monday. "I hope that the Department of Justice takes these allegations seriously, does a complete investigation, and ensures that whoever authorized this outrageous misconduct is held accountable."
FBI spokeswoman Laura Eimiller declined comment Monday, but federal prosecutors acknowledged in court documents that the agent sought nearly $15,000 in reimbursements for "entertainment" and other expenses related to the investigation. The prosecutors said they don't have any receipts from the clubs, but two of them listed in the filing, "Air Force One" and "Area 51," are suspected brothels.
No charges have been filed against the agent.
Syjuco, Cesar Ubaldo and Arjyl Revereza, a Philippines customs official, were charged earlier this year with violating arms import laws by selling a grenade launcher, a mortar launcher and other weapons to the undercover agent who said he was interested in buying high-powered weapons that could be used by drug cartels in the U.S. and Mexico.
The case was part of a federal investigation of Asian organized crime groups involved in the illicit trafficking of firearms.
The weapons were eventually loaded onto a ship that arrived at the Port of Long Beach in June 2011 and the items were seized by authorities.
Littrell argues that the agent – and none of the three defendants – arranged importing the weapons to the U.S. He also questioned why the weapons were first shipped from the Philippines to China, where it wasn't known whether officials there checked the container, before arriving in the U.S.
Littrell and an investigator recently visited the Philippines and interviewed several people who claim the agent, using an alias "Richard Han," paid for himself and others to have sex with prostitutes. Alex Escosio, who worked at Area 51, told defense attorneys that Han "always paid for everything, including alcohol, private rooms, food and girls for the entire group of people he brought in," court documents show.
"Although the government represents that these expenditures were for `entertainment and cocktail (tips included),' it is impossible that the agent could not have known that they money went toward prostitutes," Littrell wrote in court documents.
Area 51 was raided in May by Philippine authorities where 60 victims of sex trafficking were rescued, some of whom were underage girls, Littrell said. At least seven people were arrested.
see link for full story
http://www.wjla.com/articles/2012/12/ke ... 82698.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
Keith Dietterle, FBI analyst, accused of distributing child pornography
By Jennifer Donelan
December 3, 2012 - 05:37 pm
An FBI analyst has been accused of distributing child pornography in a disturbing case that's left his neighbors wanting answers.
A task force made up of FBI agents and D.C. police officers busted Keith Dietterle. The 28-year-old will appear for a preliminary hearing Tuesday.
Dietterle is accused of sending child pornography to another man he met in a chat room frequented by individuals who have a sexual interest children. But the person Dietterle was allegedly speaking with was a D.C. police detective.
According to court documents, agents say Dietterle thought he was communicating with a man who claimed to be sexually abusing a 3-year-old nephew and 12-year-old daughter. The detective wrote he and Dietterle discussed a possible meeting with the "children" for sex. Over a two week period, Dietterle sent three images via Yahoo instant messenger depicting child pornography, court documents state.
Dietterle is accused of later sending multiple links, including a 13-minute video, images and six separate videos of underage children all being sexually abused.
-
msfreeh
- Level 34 Illuminated
- Posts: 7718
Re: FBI WATCH Making Cruelty visible
I am just a messenger from down here in the whisper stream
but did you catch the New York Times piece a couple of days ago about
New York City FBI agent Lyndley DeVecchio collaborating with the
Mafia in New York City in the murders of over 100 people?
see http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/30/nyreg ... d=all&_r=0" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
Time to look at the larger picture of how FBI agents collaborated with organized crime in most major cities. It was systemic. We now have strong evidence for FBI agents agents working with Memphis Mafia soldier Liberto to assassinate Martin Luther King .
see http://www.nydailynews.com/news/world/p ... e-1.349264" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
There is also evidence the Mafia helped in the assassination of President Kennedy. see http://archive.lewrockwell.com/orig12/d ... 1.1.1.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
but did you catch the New York Times piece a couple of days ago about
New York City FBI agent Lyndley DeVecchio collaborating with the
Mafia in New York City in the murders of over 100 people?
see http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/30/nyreg ... d=all&_r=0" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
Time to look at the larger picture of how FBI agents collaborated with organized crime in most major cities. It was systemic. We now have strong evidence for FBI agents agents working with Memphis Mafia soldier Liberto to assassinate Martin Luther King .
see http://www.nydailynews.com/news/world/p ... e-1.349264" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
There is also evidence the Mafia helped in the assassination of President Kennedy. see http://archive.lewrockwell.com/orig12/d ... 1.1.1.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
-
msfreeh
- Level 34 Illuminated
- Posts: 7718
Re: FBI WATCH Making Cruelty visible
see link for full story
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175722/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
Tomgram: Matthew Harwood, Counterterrorism in the Twilight Zone
July 9, 2013.
They went without saying a word. In the dead of night, the last U.S. troops slipped out of Iraq and across the Kuwaiti border. There was no victory parade. No departure ceremony. They never said goodbye. They didn’t even cancel scheduled meetings with their Iraqi counterparts. They just up and left, weeks before their departure deadline in December 2010.
The Americans took home their weapons and vehicles, of course. They took much of their heavy equipment and electronics gear, too. They also took something far more intimate, something you might assume belonged to the Iraqi people, something you probably never knew existed: “a massive database packed with retinal scans, thumb prints, and other biometric data identifying millions of Iraqis,” as Spencer Ackerman put it when he wrote about those digital records in 2011.
In the years after the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, the U.S. military collected biometric data on around three million Iraqis. It’s done the same for millions of Afghans. And it’s keeping this information in perpetuity. Back in 2011, a spokesman for the Tampa, Florida-based U.S. Central Command told Ackerman, “We have this information, and rather than cull through it all and say 'bad guy, good guy, bad guy, good guy,' it’s better to just keep it.” Just why may be unclear, but the capture and retention of this data fit a pattern: the U.S. drive to expand its national security state into a global security initiative.
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175722/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
Tomgram: Matthew Harwood, Counterterrorism in the Twilight Zone
July 9, 2013.
They went without saying a word. In the dead of night, the last U.S. troops slipped out of Iraq and across the Kuwaiti border. There was no victory parade. No departure ceremony. They never said goodbye. They didn’t even cancel scheduled meetings with their Iraqi counterparts. They just up and left, weeks before their departure deadline in December 2010.
The Americans took home their weapons and vehicles, of course. They took much of their heavy equipment and electronics gear, too. They also took something far more intimate, something you might assume belonged to the Iraqi people, something you probably never knew existed: “a massive database packed with retinal scans, thumb prints, and other biometric data identifying millions of Iraqis,” as Spencer Ackerman put it when he wrote about those digital records in 2011.
In the years after the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, the U.S. military collected biometric data on around three million Iraqis. It’s done the same for millions of Afghans. And it’s keeping this information in perpetuity. Back in 2011, a spokesman for the Tampa, Florida-based U.S. Central Command told Ackerman, “We have this information, and rather than cull through it all and say 'bad guy, good guy, bad guy, good guy,' it’s better to just keep it.” Just why may be unclear, but the capture and retention of this data fit a pattern: the U.S. drive to expand its national security state into a global security initiative.
-
msfreeh
- Level 34 Illuminated
- Posts: 7718
Re: FBI WATCH Making Cruelty visible
3 stories
http://www.hstoday.us/briefings/corresp ... 5aa21.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
see link for full story
Voice Recognition Capabilities at the FBI
By: Hirotaka Nakasone
07/11/2013 ( 1:04pm)
Hirotaka Nakasone, Senior Scientist, FBI Voice Recognition Program, examines the use and effectiveness of current speaker authentication technologies at the FBI. In this IDGA exclusive, Nakasone also highlights the various challenges that are unique to voice recognition, and discusses what plans are in place for capturing voice recordings in line with the FBI’s Next Generation Identification (NGI project).
IDGA: Examine the use and effectiveness of current speaker authentication technologies at the FBI
The FBI’s use of the speaker recognition technology dates back to the early 1960’s. A team of FBI special agents and technical support personnel began to develop a protocol to perform voice comparison examinations by using the sound spectrograph. But this spectrographic technique had always been used only as investigative guidance only -- never had been introduced in the court of law due to the inconclusive nature of the technology.
Concerned about the controversial nature of the technique and inconsistent admissibility status of the technique in criminal proceedings, in 1976 FBI commissioned the National Research Council's (NRC), National Academy of Sciences (NAS) to review and assess the status of the spectrographic speaker recognition. The results of the NAS’s study were published in 1979 paper, On the Theory and Practice of Voice Identification. Subsequent to this NAS report, FBI determined to continue its original policy on the spectrographic voice identification, that is, to use it only as investigative guidance. This practice prevailed for the next three decades.
In the late 1990’s, the FBI began the development of the automated speaker recognition technology by the leading research groups sponsored by the FBI and other US government agencies. This effort was accelerated by the sponsorship of the Biometric Center of Excellence (BCOE) in 2007. Currently, the FBI offers forensic speaker recognition analysis services by using the automated speaker recognition technology for its field offices within the US and abroad. Here are some high lights about the FBI’s current speaker recognition technology:
Conducted within an FBI’s forensic unit within Digital Evidence Laboratory that is accredited by the American Society of Crime Laboratory Directors – Laboratory Accreditation Board (ASCLD/LAB);
Conducted by fully trained examiners with technical and engineering background;
Conducted by using multiple sets of advanced state-of-the-art speaker recognition algorithms;
Conducted under standard operating procedures;
Conducted only for investigative and intelligence purposes – not for courtroom purposes; and
The primary speaker recognition system is capable of conducting channel-independent and language-independent recognition under a certain set of forensic conditions with known reasonably acceptable levels of accuracy.
What biometric challenges are unique to voice recognition?
I want to address three challenges unique to voice recognition. Please note that these challenges were also recognized by the 2011 NSTC Biometric Challenge–Update as well.
Challenge #1 is dynamic nature of human speech production that changes constantly as a function of time, therefore it requires a long sampling period ranging from tens of seconds to a few minutes to create a statistical meaningful speaker model. Voice is more time intensive in contrast to other biometric modalities like fingerprint, iris, face, DNA, SMT, etc.
Challenge #2 is the fragility of human speech that is susceptible to different recording environment and equipment used for capture.
Challenge #3 is the susceptibility of human speech that is affected by different state of emotions or different speaking styles. Those researchers in the speaker recognition community are well aware of these challenges, and have resolved some of them.
In contrast to these challenges, voice recognition has its undeniable strength as well. Automatic speaker recognition is a highly scientific forensic process, using solid mathematical and statistical foundations. In that sense I do not foresee any serious issue in fusing voice with other modalities to create a multi-modal biometrics database. The FBI’s BCOE at the Criminal Justice and Information Service Division has sponsored such projects to collect multimodal biometric data including face, iris, face, fingerprint and voice.
What plans are in place for capturing voice recordings in line with the FBI’s Next Generation Identification (NGI project)? What are the short and long term aims?
The US government Inter-agency collaboration began to consider an implementation of a voice data collection for voice biometric application about three years ago in March of 2009 by establishing the Symposium for Investigatory Voice Biometrics (SIVB). The SIVB activity over the past three years was culminated in drafting of the ANSI/NIST ITL Type-11 Voice Record that is meant to enable the interoperability of voice records among laboratories, field offices, and government agencies for investigative and intelligence purposes.
see link for full story
http://clayton-richmondheights.patch.co ... ns-academy" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
UMSL Staffer Graduates from FBI Citizens Academy
July 11, 2013
In her line of work at the University of Missouri–St. Louis, Kendra Perry-Ward comes into contact with FBI agents. Recently, the tables were turned, and she had the opportunity to actually put herself in the shoes of a special agent.
In May, she graduated from the FBI Citizens Academy in St. Louis, according to a press release from UMSL.
“It was exciting to find out first hand how the FBI works,” said Perry-Ward, director of government and business relations for the Center for Nanoscience at UMSL and a resident of Richmond Heights. “We have done a lot of work with the FBI over the years because of the type of research we do here.”
During her time at UMSL, Perry-Ward has has partnered with the bureau on various presentations and seminars. In particular, she coordinates an FBI-led conference at UMSL, which educates faculty on conducting business overseas, research technology protection and cyber safety.
During the nine-session course taught by FBI agents, Perry-Ward learned varied information—from how the bureau tracks down spies and terrorists to how special agents balance enforce the laws and ensure the constitutional rights of an individual.
The citizens academy is designed for business, religious and civic leaders who are nominated by an FBI employee or a previous academy graduate. A limited number of participants are then selected from the pool of nominees. The program is offered nationwide.
French legal complaint targets NSA, FBI, tech firms over Prism
11 Jul, 2013
French legal complaint targets NSA, FBI, tech firms over Prism French legal complaint targets NSA, FBI, tech firms over Prism
PARIS: Two French human rights groups filed a legal complaint on Thursday that targets the U.S. National Security Agency, the FBI and seven technology companies they say may have helped the United States to snoop on French citizens' emails and phone calls.
The complaint, which denounces U.S. spying methods revealed by former intelligence contractor Edward Snowden, is filed against "persons unknown" but names Microsoft, Yahoo , Google, Paltalk, Facebook, AOL and Apple as "potential accomplices" of the NSA and FBI.
see link for full story
http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/201 ... encryption" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
Report: Microsoft Helped NSA, FBI Get Around Encryption
July 11, 2013 3:55 PM
The latest in series of reports on secret U.S. electronic surveillance efforts claims to detail the extent of Microsoft's cooperation with the National Security Agency, with the tech giant reportedly allowing agents to circumvent its own encryption system to spy on email and chats, as well as its cloud-based storage service.
Information in the newspaper's report on Thursday is sourced to Edward Snowden, the NSA leaker who has not been seen in public for weeks and whose whereabouts are the subject of continued rumor and speculation, as .
According to The Guardian, Microsoft helped the NSA and FBI get around its encryption so that the agency could access Outlook.com, including Hotmail, as part of the Prism program aimed at gathering data on Internet communications. Skype, which Microsoft bought two years ago, reportedly worked with intelligence agencies to collect audio and video from the chat service. The newspaper also said that Microsoft eased access to its cloud-based SkyDrive service.
http://www.hstoday.us/briefings/corresp ... 5aa21.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
see link for full story
Voice Recognition Capabilities at the FBI
By: Hirotaka Nakasone
07/11/2013 ( 1:04pm)
Hirotaka Nakasone, Senior Scientist, FBI Voice Recognition Program, examines the use and effectiveness of current speaker authentication technologies at the FBI. In this IDGA exclusive, Nakasone also highlights the various challenges that are unique to voice recognition, and discusses what plans are in place for capturing voice recordings in line with the FBI’s Next Generation Identification (NGI project).
IDGA: Examine the use and effectiveness of current speaker authentication technologies at the FBI
The FBI’s use of the speaker recognition technology dates back to the early 1960’s. A team of FBI special agents and technical support personnel began to develop a protocol to perform voice comparison examinations by using the sound spectrograph. But this spectrographic technique had always been used only as investigative guidance only -- never had been introduced in the court of law due to the inconclusive nature of the technology.
Concerned about the controversial nature of the technique and inconsistent admissibility status of the technique in criminal proceedings, in 1976 FBI commissioned the National Research Council's (NRC), National Academy of Sciences (NAS) to review and assess the status of the spectrographic speaker recognition. The results of the NAS’s study were published in 1979 paper, On the Theory and Practice of Voice Identification. Subsequent to this NAS report, FBI determined to continue its original policy on the spectrographic voice identification, that is, to use it only as investigative guidance. This practice prevailed for the next three decades.
In the late 1990’s, the FBI began the development of the automated speaker recognition technology by the leading research groups sponsored by the FBI and other US government agencies. This effort was accelerated by the sponsorship of the Biometric Center of Excellence (BCOE) in 2007. Currently, the FBI offers forensic speaker recognition analysis services by using the automated speaker recognition technology for its field offices within the US and abroad. Here are some high lights about the FBI’s current speaker recognition technology:
Conducted within an FBI’s forensic unit within Digital Evidence Laboratory that is accredited by the American Society of Crime Laboratory Directors – Laboratory Accreditation Board (ASCLD/LAB);
Conducted by fully trained examiners with technical and engineering background;
Conducted by using multiple sets of advanced state-of-the-art speaker recognition algorithms;
Conducted under standard operating procedures;
Conducted only for investigative and intelligence purposes – not for courtroom purposes; and
The primary speaker recognition system is capable of conducting channel-independent and language-independent recognition under a certain set of forensic conditions with known reasonably acceptable levels of accuracy.
What biometric challenges are unique to voice recognition?
I want to address three challenges unique to voice recognition. Please note that these challenges were also recognized by the 2011 NSTC Biometric Challenge–Update as well.
Challenge #1 is dynamic nature of human speech production that changes constantly as a function of time, therefore it requires a long sampling period ranging from tens of seconds to a few minutes to create a statistical meaningful speaker model. Voice is more time intensive in contrast to other biometric modalities like fingerprint, iris, face, DNA, SMT, etc.
Challenge #2 is the fragility of human speech that is susceptible to different recording environment and equipment used for capture.
Challenge #3 is the susceptibility of human speech that is affected by different state of emotions or different speaking styles. Those researchers in the speaker recognition community are well aware of these challenges, and have resolved some of them.
In contrast to these challenges, voice recognition has its undeniable strength as well. Automatic speaker recognition is a highly scientific forensic process, using solid mathematical and statistical foundations. In that sense I do not foresee any serious issue in fusing voice with other modalities to create a multi-modal biometrics database. The FBI’s BCOE at the Criminal Justice and Information Service Division has sponsored such projects to collect multimodal biometric data including face, iris, face, fingerprint and voice.
What plans are in place for capturing voice recordings in line with the FBI’s Next Generation Identification (NGI project)? What are the short and long term aims?
The US government Inter-agency collaboration began to consider an implementation of a voice data collection for voice biometric application about three years ago in March of 2009 by establishing the Symposium for Investigatory Voice Biometrics (SIVB). The SIVB activity over the past three years was culminated in drafting of the ANSI/NIST ITL Type-11 Voice Record that is meant to enable the interoperability of voice records among laboratories, field offices, and government agencies for investigative and intelligence purposes.
see link for full story
http://clayton-richmondheights.patch.co ... ns-academy" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
UMSL Staffer Graduates from FBI Citizens Academy
July 11, 2013
In her line of work at the University of Missouri–St. Louis, Kendra Perry-Ward comes into contact with FBI agents. Recently, the tables were turned, and she had the opportunity to actually put herself in the shoes of a special agent.
In May, she graduated from the FBI Citizens Academy in St. Louis, according to a press release from UMSL.
“It was exciting to find out first hand how the FBI works,” said Perry-Ward, director of government and business relations for the Center for Nanoscience at UMSL and a resident of Richmond Heights. “We have done a lot of work with the FBI over the years because of the type of research we do here.”
During her time at UMSL, Perry-Ward has has partnered with the bureau on various presentations and seminars. In particular, she coordinates an FBI-led conference at UMSL, which educates faculty on conducting business overseas, research technology protection and cyber safety.
During the nine-session course taught by FBI agents, Perry-Ward learned varied information—from how the bureau tracks down spies and terrorists to how special agents balance enforce the laws and ensure the constitutional rights of an individual.
The citizens academy is designed for business, religious and civic leaders who are nominated by an FBI employee or a previous academy graduate. A limited number of participants are then selected from the pool of nominees. The program is offered nationwide.
French legal complaint targets NSA, FBI, tech firms over Prism
11 Jul, 2013
French legal complaint targets NSA, FBI, tech firms over Prism French legal complaint targets NSA, FBI, tech firms over Prism
PARIS: Two French human rights groups filed a legal complaint on Thursday that targets the U.S. National Security Agency, the FBI and seven technology companies they say may have helped the United States to snoop on French citizens' emails and phone calls.
The complaint, which denounces U.S. spying methods revealed by former intelligence contractor Edward Snowden, is filed against "persons unknown" but names Microsoft, Yahoo , Google, Paltalk, Facebook, AOL and Apple as "potential accomplices" of the NSA and FBI.
see link for full story
http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/201 ... encryption" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
Report: Microsoft Helped NSA, FBI Get Around Encryption
July 11, 2013 3:55 PM
The latest in series of reports on secret U.S. electronic surveillance efforts claims to detail the extent of Microsoft's cooperation with the National Security Agency, with the tech giant reportedly allowing agents to circumvent its own encryption system to spy on email and chats, as well as its cloud-based storage service.
Information in the newspaper's report on Thursday is sourced to Edward Snowden, the NSA leaker who has not been seen in public for weeks and whose whereabouts are the subject of continued rumor and speculation, as .
According to The Guardian, Microsoft helped the NSA and FBI get around its encryption so that the agency could access Outlook.com, including Hotmail, as part of the Prism program aimed at gathering data on Internet communications. Skype, which Microsoft bought two years ago, reportedly worked with intelligence agencies to collect audio and video from the chat service. The newspaper also said that Microsoft eased access to its cloud-based SkyDrive service.
-
msfreeh
- Level 34 Illuminated
- Posts: 7718
Re: FBI WATCH Making Cruelty visible
see link for full story
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/1 ... 01251.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
Gerald Montanari, Former FBI Agent, Says Bulger Victim Predicted His Own Death
07/15/13
A man who was allegedly killed by James "Whitey" Bulger predicted he would be killed if Bulger learned he'd been cooperating with authorities, a former FBI agent testified Monday.
Retired agent Gerald Montanari told jurors in Bulger's racketeering case that Edward "Brian" Halloran became an FBI informant in 1982 and agreed to testify against Bulger and members of his gang in the 1981 slaying of Tulsa, Okla., businessman Roger Wheeler, as well as other killings.
Halloran was facing a state murder charge and hoped his cooperation would help him in that case – and secure protection for himself and his family.
Halloran told the former agent Bulger or his partner, Stephen "The Rifleman" Flemmi, would probably kill him if they found out he was cooperating, Montanari said.
"He said that if Bulger or Flemmi had any indication that he was cooperating with the FBI that they would go to any extreme, even if it meant killing innocent bystanders, including his family," Montanari said.
Bulger is charged with opening fire on a car Halloran was in a few months after he turned informant. Halloran and Michael Donahue, an acquaintance who had offered him a ride home, were killed.
Bulger, 83, has pleaded not guilty to participating in 19 killings during the 1970s and `80s while he allegedly led the Winter Hill Gang. He has also denied prosecutors' assertions that he was a longtime FBI informant who ratted on the rival New England Mafia and other criminals.
Montanari said Halloran was a "mid-level strong-arm type" who acted as an enforcer for the gang. He said Halloran reached out to the FBI at the end of 1981 about Wheeler's death.
The FBI made arrangements for Halloran and his family to live in a rented house on Cape Cod to protect him, Montanari said. He said the FBI believed if Halloran abided by the guidelines given to him, including that he not go to Boston, "we felt this would be sufficient security for him."
Montanari said he and another agent met with Halloran dozens of times over a period of two to three months, and he told them about various crimes he said were committed by Bulger, Flemmi, hit man John Martorano and others. Halloran had agreed to wear a recording device to capture conversations he had with a Bulger associate who played a role in the Wheeler killing, Montanari said.
Prosecutors say Bugler learned of Halloran's cooperation through former FBI agent John Connolly, who was Bulger's handler while he was an FBI informant. Halloran was gunned down in May 1982, near a restaurant in South Boston.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/1 ... 01251.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
Gerald Montanari, Former FBI Agent, Says Bulger Victim Predicted His Own Death
07/15/13
A man who was allegedly killed by James "Whitey" Bulger predicted he would be killed if Bulger learned he'd been cooperating with authorities, a former FBI agent testified Monday.
Retired agent Gerald Montanari told jurors in Bulger's racketeering case that Edward "Brian" Halloran became an FBI informant in 1982 and agreed to testify against Bulger and members of his gang in the 1981 slaying of Tulsa, Okla., businessman Roger Wheeler, as well as other killings.
Halloran was facing a state murder charge and hoped his cooperation would help him in that case – and secure protection for himself and his family.
Halloran told the former agent Bulger or his partner, Stephen "The Rifleman" Flemmi, would probably kill him if they found out he was cooperating, Montanari said.
"He said that if Bulger or Flemmi had any indication that he was cooperating with the FBI that they would go to any extreme, even if it meant killing innocent bystanders, including his family," Montanari said.
Bulger is charged with opening fire on a car Halloran was in a few months after he turned informant. Halloran and Michael Donahue, an acquaintance who had offered him a ride home, were killed.
Bulger, 83, has pleaded not guilty to participating in 19 killings during the 1970s and `80s while he allegedly led the Winter Hill Gang. He has also denied prosecutors' assertions that he was a longtime FBI informant who ratted on the rival New England Mafia and other criminals.
Montanari said Halloran was a "mid-level strong-arm type" who acted as an enforcer for the gang. He said Halloran reached out to the FBI at the end of 1981 about Wheeler's death.
The FBI made arrangements for Halloran and his family to live in a rented house on Cape Cod to protect him, Montanari said. He said the FBI believed if Halloran abided by the guidelines given to him, including that he not go to Boston, "we felt this would be sufficient security for him."
Montanari said he and another agent met with Halloran dozens of times over a period of two to three months, and he told them about various crimes he said were committed by Bulger, Flemmi, hit man John Martorano and others. Halloran had agreed to wear a recording device to capture conversations he had with a Bulger associate who played a role in the Wheeler killing, Montanari said.
Prosecutors say Bugler learned of Halloran's cooperation through former FBI agent John Connolly, who was Bulger's handler while he was an FBI informant. Halloran was gunned down in May 1982, near a restaurant in South Boston.
-
msfreeh
- Level 34 Illuminated
- Posts: 7718
Re: FBI WATCH Making Cruelty visible
2 READS
see link for full story
July 16 2013
China, Hong Kong and Russia foil US attempt to silence NSA whistleblower
Now that Edward Snowden is safely away out of the clutches of the US police state, at least for now, let’s take a moment to contemplate how this one brave man’s principled confrontation with the Orwellian US government has damaged our national security state.
Firstly, there are the four computers loaded with National Security Agency secrets, which have already exposed the details of how our government is monitoring our entire national communications grid, prying into the details of the telephonic and internet activity of every American citizen. We’ve only begun to learn about the ugly totalitarian activities of our government, and now that Snowden is safe from arrest, we will no doubt learn much more.
Second, the US has been humiliated by both China and Russia, which have demonstrated dramatically that they cannot be intimidated by the world’s dominant superpower, which stands revealed as less super and less powerful than it has been claiming. China, according to local experts on Hong Kong/China relations like Chinese University of Hong Kong professor Willie Lam, intervened in the legal process to tell Hong Kong authorities not to honor the US government’s arrest warrant on espionage and theft of official secrets charges, and to allow him to leave the territory. Russia, meanwhile, whose President Vladimir Putin had already volunteered to grant Snowden amnesty, provided the world’s most celebrated whistleblower a seat on an Aeroflot flight from Hong Kong to Moscow, where he just landed safely today.
The US was left to bluster impotently that Hong Kong’s unwillingness to arrest and hold Snowden in response to the US indictment and extradition request was a sign that the Hong Kong Special Administration Region, which is supposed, under Chinese Law, to have autonomy from Beijing, and to be able to follow its own laws, including an extradition treaty with the US which was signed a year before the territory was handed over from British to Chinese control in 1996, was actually not so autonomous. As an unidentified “senior official” of the Obama administration was reported saying to the Washington Post, “”If Hong Kong doesn’t act soon, it will complicate our bilateral relations and raise questions about Hong Kong’s commitment to the rule of law.”
That line must be evoking gales of laughter around the world, and could also be a laugh line for local comics here in the US, where the rule of law died years ago with the illegal invasion of Iraq, the illegal secret rendition, detainment and torture of hundreds of suspects in the Bush/Obama “War” on Terror, the continued operation of the internationally illegal Guantanamo Bay detention and torture center, the three-year detainment without trial and torture of Army whistleblower Bradley Manning, the extra-legal killing of Americans by drone-launched missile attacks, and the NSA spying on all Americans, begun as early as 2007. Meanwhile, the high-minded sounding US talk about respecting the “rule of law” has also been exposed as a fraud by the latest execution slaying of Ibragim Todashev, shot six times, including an execution shot to the back of the head, by an FBI agent at the end of a three-hour middle-of-the-night interrogation in Todashev’s Orlando, Florida apartment. Todashev, an acquaintance of slain Boston Marathon bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev, had been being interrogated by three FBI agents, along with several Massachusetts State Troopers, when all but one agent inexplicably left the room, leaving him alone with one agent. The agent claims Todashev attacked him, initially claiming that all manner of weapons were involved, but later admitted the suspect was unarmed. Nonetheless, the agent emptied his revolver into the man. It subsequently came out that in 150 cases of FBI agents shooting a suspect since 1993 (including 70 fatalities), investigations by the FBI had concluded that “all were justified.” (Even the LAPD and the NYPD don’t make that kind of an absurd claim.) Snowden’s revelations also exposed the US as a hypocrite in accusing China of criminally hacking into US corporate and government computers. It turns out that the US itself is the biggest official hacker, with a massive campaign, run out of the NSA, of hacking into Chinese, Hong Kong, Iranian and other countries’ computer systems, and of actually engaging in a kind of undeclared computer warfare against rival states against which this country is not, officially, at war.
- See more at: http://www.pakistantoday.com.pk/2013/07 ... cptZE.dpuf" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
see link for full story
http://www.courthousenews.com/2013/07/16/59406.htm" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
July 16, 2013
Manning Charges 'Hammer' Whistle-Blowers, Lawyer Says
- Charging WikiLeaks source Bradley Manning with "aiding the enemy" is a "very slippery slope" that threatens to put the "hammer down on any whistle-blower," his defense attorney told a military judge on Monday.
The former intelligence specialist faces 22 charges connected with the disclosure of more than 700,000 military and diplomatic files, including battlefield reports from Iraq and Afghanistan, U.S. embassy cables, and footage of airstrikes that killed civilians.
Manning said he hoped the publication of this information would spark widespread debate, reforms and reportage about the way the U.S. conducts warfare and diplomacy.
Although the "aiding the enemy" charge against him is a possible capital offense, prosecutors are seeking a life sentence in this case rather than the death penalty. The charge has ignited controversy for having journalistic sources risk their lives by approaching journalists with information they believe to be in the public interest.
News outlets from the New York Times and the New Republic condemned the charge as dangerous overkill, and Amnesty International recently called upon the U.S. military to withdraw it.
Manning's attorney David Coombs noted Monday that the statute is typically used to punish cases when "the accused goes to somebody that he believes or she believes to be an enemy."
This includes the case of former National Guardsman Ryan Anderson whose efforts to help al-Qaida were intercepted by undercover agents; former FBI agent Robert Hanssen who secretly spied for the USSR and Russia; and Antonio Guerrero, a member of the so-called Cuban Five arrested in Miami for espionage. All three are serving life sentences.
Capt. Angel Overgaard, one of the prosecutors, hearkened back to the Civil War case of Pvt. Henry Vanderwater who leaked a roster of Union soldiers to an Alexandria, Va., newspaper.
The military judge, Col. Denise Lind, asked whether Vanderwater was trying to help the Confederacy, in that instance.
Overgaard replied that she did not know. Vanderwater served three months of hard labor and a dishonorable discharge for his leak to the press.
Prosecutors accuse Manning of aiding al-Qaida and al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula through his leaks. They do not contend that he intended to do this, only that he allegedly knew that disclosure could have had this effect and ignored that threat.
Coombs countered that Manning actually wanted "to spark reform, spark debate, to get a discussion on what we're doing and why we're doing certain things."
Responding to this with one of the most serious charges in U.S. jurisprudence is a "very slippery slope," Coombs said.
"Basically, [it's] putting a hammer down on any whistle-blower, on anybody who wants to put information out," he added. "In order to avoid that, there should be an intent requirement."
Overgaard said that it "would be nice if we had a videotaped confession" of Manning stating that he knew his leaks could have aided the enemy. Instead, she said that the government provided a "mountain of circumstantial evidence" that Manning's training alerted him to the risks of disclosure.
Coombs countered that the government already has its sought-after confessions in the form of online chats with Adrian Lamo, a former hacker who turned Manning into law enforcement, and a WikiLeaks contact thought to be its chief, Julian Assange.
These conversations centered on informing the public, not helping terrorists, Coombs said.
Judge Lind indicated that she would rule Thursday on whether she would exonerate Manning on this charge, as well as a more minor charge of "exceeding authorized access" to his computer.
Afterward, prosecutors can call three witnesses for a rebuttal case, but they cannot use an unnamed witness they tried to shoehorn in Monday, Lind said.
The government witnesses will attempt to undermine testimony defending WikiLeaks as a legitimate news outlet and casting Manning as driven by the public good.
One witness will purportedly testify that Manning told him, "I would be shocked if you were not telling your kids about me 10 to 15 years from now."
Prosecutors hope to use the remark to depict Manning as driven by "notoriety."
Maj. Thomas Hurley, who is one of Manning's military defenders, slammed the rebuttal witnesses as an "ambush."
Prosecutors have known for several months that Manning planned to call Yochai Benkler, a Harvard professor whose study "A Free Irresponsible Press: WikiLeaks and the battle for the soul of the networked fourth estate" contains his well-known thoughts on the whistle-blowing website.
Hurley particularly bristled at an attempt to refute Benkler's testimony with the unidentified witness.
see link for full story
July 16 2013
China, Hong Kong and Russia foil US attempt to silence NSA whistleblower
Now that Edward Snowden is safely away out of the clutches of the US police state, at least for now, let’s take a moment to contemplate how this one brave man’s principled confrontation with the Orwellian US government has damaged our national security state.
Firstly, there are the four computers loaded with National Security Agency secrets, which have already exposed the details of how our government is monitoring our entire national communications grid, prying into the details of the telephonic and internet activity of every American citizen. We’ve only begun to learn about the ugly totalitarian activities of our government, and now that Snowden is safe from arrest, we will no doubt learn much more.
Second, the US has been humiliated by both China and Russia, which have demonstrated dramatically that they cannot be intimidated by the world’s dominant superpower, which stands revealed as less super and less powerful than it has been claiming. China, according to local experts on Hong Kong/China relations like Chinese University of Hong Kong professor Willie Lam, intervened in the legal process to tell Hong Kong authorities not to honor the US government’s arrest warrant on espionage and theft of official secrets charges, and to allow him to leave the territory. Russia, meanwhile, whose President Vladimir Putin had already volunteered to grant Snowden amnesty, provided the world’s most celebrated whistleblower a seat on an Aeroflot flight from Hong Kong to Moscow, where he just landed safely today.
The US was left to bluster impotently that Hong Kong’s unwillingness to arrest and hold Snowden in response to the US indictment and extradition request was a sign that the Hong Kong Special Administration Region, which is supposed, under Chinese Law, to have autonomy from Beijing, and to be able to follow its own laws, including an extradition treaty with the US which was signed a year before the territory was handed over from British to Chinese control in 1996, was actually not so autonomous. As an unidentified “senior official” of the Obama administration was reported saying to the Washington Post, “”If Hong Kong doesn’t act soon, it will complicate our bilateral relations and raise questions about Hong Kong’s commitment to the rule of law.”
That line must be evoking gales of laughter around the world, and could also be a laugh line for local comics here in the US, where the rule of law died years ago with the illegal invasion of Iraq, the illegal secret rendition, detainment and torture of hundreds of suspects in the Bush/Obama “War” on Terror, the continued operation of the internationally illegal Guantanamo Bay detention and torture center, the three-year detainment without trial and torture of Army whistleblower Bradley Manning, the extra-legal killing of Americans by drone-launched missile attacks, and the NSA spying on all Americans, begun as early as 2007. Meanwhile, the high-minded sounding US talk about respecting the “rule of law” has also been exposed as a fraud by the latest execution slaying of Ibragim Todashev, shot six times, including an execution shot to the back of the head, by an FBI agent at the end of a three-hour middle-of-the-night interrogation in Todashev’s Orlando, Florida apartment. Todashev, an acquaintance of slain Boston Marathon bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev, had been being interrogated by three FBI agents, along with several Massachusetts State Troopers, when all but one agent inexplicably left the room, leaving him alone with one agent. The agent claims Todashev attacked him, initially claiming that all manner of weapons were involved, but later admitted the suspect was unarmed. Nonetheless, the agent emptied his revolver into the man. It subsequently came out that in 150 cases of FBI agents shooting a suspect since 1993 (including 70 fatalities), investigations by the FBI had concluded that “all were justified.” (Even the LAPD and the NYPD don’t make that kind of an absurd claim.) Snowden’s revelations also exposed the US as a hypocrite in accusing China of criminally hacking into US corporate and government computers. It turns out that the US itself is the biggest official hacker, with a massive campaign, run out of the NSA, of hacking into Chinese, Hong Kong, Iranian and other countries’ computer systems, and of actually engaging in a kind of undeclared computer warfare against rival states against which this country is not, officially, at war.
- See more at: http://www.pakistantoday.com.pk/2013/07 ... cptZE.dpuf" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
see link for full story
http://www.courthousenews.com/2013/07/16/59406.htm" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
July 16, 2013
Manning Charges 'Hammer' Whistle-Blowers, Lawyer Says
- Charging WikiLeaks source Bradley Manning with "aiding the enemy" is a "very slippery slope" that threatens to put the "hammer down on any whistle-blower," his defense attorney told a military judge on Monday.
The former intelligence specialist faces 22 charges connected with the disclosure of more than 700,000 military and diplomatic files, including battlefield reports from Iraq and Afghanistan, U.S. embassy cables, and footage of airstrikes that killed civilians.
Manning said he hoped the publication of this information would spark widespread debate, reforms and reportage about the way the U.S. conducts warfare and diplomacy.
Although the "aiding the enemy" charge against him is a possible capital offense, prosecutors are seeking a life sentence in this case rather than the death penalty. The charge has ignited controversy for having journalistic sources risk their lives by approaching journalists with information they believe to be in the public interest.
News outlets from the New York Times and the New Republic condemned the charge as dangerous overkill, and Amnesty International recently called upon the U.S. military to withdraw it.
Manning's attorney David Coombs noted Monday that the statute is typically used to punish cases when "the accused goes to somebody that he believes or she believes to be an enemy."
This includes the case of former National Guardsman Ryan Anderson whose efforts to help al-Qaida were intercepted by undercover agents; former FBI agent Robert Hanssen who secretly spied for the USSR and Russia; and Antonio Guerrero, a member of the so-called Cuban Five arrested in Miami for espionage. All three are serving life sentences.
Capt. Angel Overgaard, one of the prosecutors, hearkened back to the Civil War case of Pvt. Henry Vanderwater who leaked a roster of Union soldiers to an Alexandria, Va., newspaper.
The military judge, Col. Denise Lind, asked whether Vanderwater was trying to help the Confederacy, in that instance.
Overgaard replied that she did not know. Vanderwater served three months of hard labor and a dishonorable discharge for his leak to the press.
Prosecutors accuse Manning of aiding al-Qaida and al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula through his leaks. They do not contend that he intended to do this, only that he allegedly knew that disclosure could have had this effect and ignored that threat.
Coombs countered that Manning actually wanted "to spark reform, spark debate, to get a discussion on what we're doing and why we're doing certain things."
Responding to this with one of the most serious charges in U.S. jurisprudence is a "very slippery slope," Coombs said.
"Basically, [it's] putting a hammer down on any whistle-blower, on anybody who wants to put information out," he added. "In order to avoid that, there should be an intent requirement."
Overgaard said that it "would be nice if we had a videotaped confession" of Manning stating that he knew his leaks could have aided the enemy. Instead, she said that the government provided a "mountain of circumstantial evidence" that Manning's training alerted him to the risks of disclosure.
Coombs countered that the government already has its sought-after confessions in the form of online chats with Adrian Lamo, a former hacker who turned Manning into law enforcement, and a WikiLeaks contact thought to be its chief, Julian Assange.
These conversations centered on informing the public, not helping terrorists, Coombs said.
Judge Lind indicated that she would rule Thursday on whether she would exonerate Manning on this charge, as well as a more minor charge of "exceeding authorized access" to his computer.
Afterward, prosecutors can call three witnesses for a rebuttal case, but they cannot use an unnamed witness they tried to shoehorn in Monday, Lind said.
The government witnesses will attempt to undermine testimony defending WikiLeaks as a legitimate news outlet and casting Manning as driven by the public good.
One witness will purportedly testify that Manning told him, "I would be shocked if you were not telling your kids about me 10 to 15 years from now."
Prosecutors hope to use the remark to depict Manning as driven by "notoriety."
Maj. Thomas Hurley, who is one of Manning's military defenders, slammed the rebuttal witnesses as an "ambush."
Prosecutors have known for several months that Manning planned to call Yochai Benkler, a Harvard professor whose study "A Free Irresponsible Press: WikiLeaks and the battle for the soul of the networked fourth estate" contains his well-known thoughts on the whistle-blowing website.
Hurley particularly bristled at an attempt to refute Benkler's testimony with the unidentified witness.
-
msfreeh
- Level 34 Illuminated
- Posts: 7718
Re: FBI WATCH Making Cruelty visible
Any smart criminal justice consumer worth their salt would ask:
Did FBI agents follow the Bill of Rights when they assassinated President Kennedy
and Martin Luther King?
Did FBI agents follow the Bill of Rights when they created the 1993 1st World Trade Center
bombing, Oklahoma City bombing and 911?
see link for full story
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/ ... lance.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
Posted on July 16, 2013
Rand Paul: I Want To Know If FBI Is Following The Bill Of Rights When Using Drones For Surveillance
Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) said he would put a hold on the nomination of James Comey as FBI director to get more information on how the federal government is using drones.
"I'm trying to get a real truth. Is the FBI using the Bill of Rights? Are they seeking a warrant from a judge before they spy on us?" Sen. Paul said on FOX News this afternoon.
Did FBI agents follow the Bill of Rights when they assassinated President Kennedy
and Martin Luther King?
Did FBI agents follow the Bill of Rights when they created the 1993 1st World Trade Center
bombing, Oklahoma City bombing and 911?
see link for full story
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/ ... lance.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
Posted on July 16, 2013
Rand Paul: I Want To Know If FBI Is Following The Bill Of Rights When Using Drones For Surveillance
Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) said he would put a hold on the nomination of James Comey as FBI director to get more information on how the federal government is using drones.
"I'm trying to get a real truth. Is the FBI using the Bill of Rights? Are they seeking a warrant from a judge before they spy on us?" Sen. Paul said on FOX News this afternoon.
-
msfreeh
- Level 34 Illuminated
- Posts: 7718
Re: FBI WATCH Making Cruelty visible
see link for full story
http://www.utsandiego.com/uniontrib/200 ... m4lee.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
FBI to pay man $190,000 to settle wrong-arrest case
May 4, 2006
A San Diego man wrongly arrested by an FBI agent in May 2000 will get $190,000 from the federal agency in a federal court settlement.
Julian Christopher Lee was arrested based on a warrant that an FBI agent knew to be false, Lee's lawyer, Douglas Gilliland said Monday.
The settlement approved Friday by federal Magistrate Judge Ruben B. Brooks follows a 2004 federal appeals court ruling that allowed Lee to continue the suit he filed against FBI agent Jake Gregory, Gilliland said.
“They knowingly had the wrong person put in jail for not cooperating with the agent,” Gilliland said. He said the case “should be able to guide future FBI agents with what they can and can't do.”
“Clearly, if somebody doesn't want to participate with your investigation, you can't have that person arrested so you could interrogate them further,” Gilliland said.
The U.S. Attorney's Office, which represented Gregory and the FBI, declined comment.
In a separate suit, Lee won an $81,000 judgment in June 2002 against the San Diego Sheriff's Department, the agency which locked him up for five days.
The government had previously argued that Lee was arrested by mistake instead of his brother, Robert, a fugitive wanted on robbery and assault charges.
Gilliland said Lee's brother had assumed Lee's identity, using his Social Security number and driver's license.
When Lee refused to cooperate with Gregory, the agent called Dade County, Florida and asked for a copy of an outstanding arrest warrant to be faxed to him, Gilliland said.
The warrant named a “Christopher Lee” but contained Julian's date of birth and Social Security number, Gilliland said. He said it also described a man who was 90 pounds lighter and two inches shorter than Julian Lee.
Based on the warrant, Julian Lee was arrested and spent four days in jail, Gilliland said.
http://www.utsandiego.com/uniontrib/200 ... m4lee.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
FBI to pay man $190,000 to settle wrong-arrest case
May 4, 2006
A San Diego man wrongly arrested by an FBI agent in May 2000 will get $190,000 from the federal agency in a federal court settlement.
Julian Christopher Lee was arrested based on a warrant that an FBI agent knew to be false, Lee's lawyer, Douglas Gilliland said Monday.
The settlement approved Friday by federal Magistrate Judge Ruben B. Brooks follows a 2004 federal appeals court ruling that allowed Lee to continue the suit he filed against FBI agent Jake Gregory, Gilliland said.
“They knowingly had the wrong person put in jail for not cooperating with the agent,” Gilliland said. He said the case “should be able to guide future FBI agents with what they can and can't do.”
“Clearly, if somebody doesn't want to participate with your investigation, you can't have that person arrested so you could interrogate them further,” Gilliland said.
The U.S. Attorney's Office, which represented Gregory and the FBI, declined comment.
In a separate suit, Lee won an $81,000 judgment in June 2002 against the San Diego Sheriff's Department, the agency which locked him up for five days.
The government had previously argued that Lee was arrested by mistake instead of his brother, Robert, a fugitive wanted on robbery and assault charges.
Gilliland said Lee's brother had assumed Lee's identity, using his Social Security number and driver's license.
When Lee refused to cooperate with Gregory, the agent called Dade County, Florida and asked for a copy of an outstanding arrest warrant to be faxed to him, Gilliland said.
The warrant named a “Christopher Lee” but contained Julian's date of birth and Social Security number, Gilliland said. He said it also described a man who was 90 pounds lighter and two inches shorter than Julian Lee.
Based on the warrant, Julian Lee was arrested and spent four days in jail, Gilliland said.
-
msfreeh
- Level 34 Illuminated
- Posts: 7718
Re: FBI WATCH Making Cruelty visible
see link for full story
http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/07/24/ ... epression/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
July 24, 2013
National Security State, Advent of Fascism
Obama’s Fanaticism Over Secrecy, Surveillance and Repression
by NORMAN POLLACK
If the US were not engaged in actions and policies that are illegal, immoral, aggressive, war-provoking, and therefore, it is fair to say, evil, the issue of leaks would never arise, there being no rhyme or reason for them and the increasingly widening effects of government’s stringent, escalating, and still counting, countermeasures, for suffocating a public consciousness of wrongdoing through a campaign of massive surveillance in order to prevent further revelations and ensure continued societal blindness to, and even the endorsement of, interventions, assassinations, cyberwarfare, indefinite detentions, a global system of military bases poised for purposes of internal espionage leading to regime change, the enforcement of a favorable climate for trade, investment, and the extraction of resources, and much else which can be subsumed under the heading of national self-interest (always taken for granted and non-negotiable), all in violation, or skirting the edges, of international law, itself largely crafted to serve American needs, and implemented largely through active support of world financial institutions, trading blocs, military organizations, of essentially kept nations seemingly anxious to do our bidding. With a framework like that, no wonder the desire to keep the lid on. Secrecy is not a nervous twitch, nor an excess of zeal in the promotion of a misconstrued American Innocence (saving the world for democracy, humanitarian interventionism, or similar self-advantaged formulas), but a central enabling mechanism in the use of power, primarily military-oriented, for ends capitalistic and nationalist encompassed in a single system defining the US’s Exceptionalist drive for unilateral dominance of the global structure. Ideology alone doesn’t do the job (it never did!), nor do exports magically traverse the sea lanes, greeted at foreign ports with hosannas; capitalism is a fractionated international order, inclined to trade rivalries and the forcible settlement of differences. War determines outcomes, and in turn requires the regimentation of thought on the home front. Obama’s fanaticism about secrecy is therefore perfectly reasonable and rational, if one happens to subscribe to ruling-groups’ ends (along with an added dash of sadism, which he applies by diverting resources from a sound social safety net to satisfy the military appetite) of a government-assisted unrestrained capitalism, government itself, of course, simultaneously invisible in its subventionary function while whipped in place unmercifully when performing any sort of welfare or ameliorative function.
Secrecy is the ideal camouflage for surrounding, covering, and protecting the class-state, its system of power, its elites’ hidden agenda, and the political-cultural mechanisms which engineer consent to the national purpose as defined from above, not so much to hide ordinary hanky-panky–favoritism to contractors, political contributors, etc.– but war crimes real time, which seldom result in the internal democratization of the offending power, and instead contribute to wealth-and-power differentiation among the populace, which bears the brunt of such policies, whether drafted to fight in wars to enforce US capitalist objectives or placed in vulnerable positions domestically so as not to be in position to press for systemic reforms (essentially moderate, as measured by democratic theory and practice) such as the demand for collective bargaining rights, freedom of expression, and the curbing of the maldistribution of wealth. For capitalism, especially in America, where political and economic democracy are disconnected so that pro forma electoral freedom coexists with corporate monopolization and the concentration of wealth, the ballot box somehow becomes an exhaustive remedy for ruling groups’ hegemonic purposes abroad and the instilling of institutional-cultural docility at home. These goals are mutually dependent; one cannot be fulfilled without the other. Which suggests that a pattern of convergence is in process of formation, secrecy providing the bridge, or better, connecting rod, between foreign intervention and domestic surveillance, now becoming conflated into a singular mode of repression intended to bring into question, amenable to prosecution, whatever is considered to be politically-economically-militarily unacceptable, whether this means questioning either domestic or foreign policy and activity, with each sharing the other’s identity, and no doubt soon, degree of penalization.
In this light, a radical, whose social protest extends beyond the aforementioned moderate demands of the reformer (themselves stopping short of systemic overhaul, but nonetheless worth contesting in the absence of their achievement), is in the cross-hairs of a government unused to substantive criticism in either the domestic- or foreign-policy realms, hence under Obama the acceleration of countermeasures to stifle—again, the import of surveillance, even as a dark shadow making individuals think twice about holding, still less communicating, suspicious thoughts—a potentially awakened political consciousness, “awakened” given the Snowden and Manning Revelations on a unified US government pressing the total integration of military, capitalistic, and geostrategic assumptions, and behind that, the integration as well of structure, ideology, and policy making, to the end of maximizing State power both in its own right and the better to promote and service the political economy of capitalism, nay, an advanced mode of capitalism facing the strains of a changing, now multipolar, context of international politics. Gaps in the integrative process leave room, i.e., mental space, for popular resistance through the perception of the forced joining of parts, integration as per se repression, whereby everything must be brought into conformity with an homogenous composition of forces focused on promoting expansionist-aggressive systemic tendencies (particularly the mature stage of capitalism warns of senility, and therefore, the resort to extreme measures even to remain in place) while also promoting silence and/or complicity at home. In this way, intervention (and with it, targeted assassination, regime change, global political and economic influence, counterrevolution as a generalized posture) neatly dovetails with surveillance (and the further splintering of traditional civil liberties, presumably mandated by a counterterrorism policy), so that when we return to the radical, be it on either front, the lines between foreign and domestic “criminal” activity is starting to blur—the further conflation, facing the individual directly, so that our hypothetical whistleblower of the future in whichever realm is left open to the charge of treasonous conduct, as indeed is being contemplated or already decided with respect to Snowden and Manning.
The preceding overview, especially the overall convergence of structure, ideology, and policy, transcending narrow fields of operation, or boundaries of scope and practice (e.g., the CIA, contrary to its charter, is as much an operational as intelligence force, and perhaps as much involved in domestic as in foreign theaters of activity), speaks to Obama’s elaboration, inheriting much of, thence adding still more to, the work of his predecessors dating from the immediate aftermath of the Second World War through his own presidency, of a Secretive, National-Security, Militarized State, whose monolithic façade is beginning to seriously break down, thanks in equal parts to overextension unsupported by sufficient political-economic (but not military) resources, a globalization process, ostensibly American-led yet actually witnessing the dispersion of power, with China and Russia independent centers, and peripheral nations, like Brazil, shaping into no-longer dependent industrializing countries, and finally, in a by no means exhaustive listing, the revelations themselves, in which, to Obama, Snowden is the Anti-Christ, and Manning, the Mephistophelian figure, upsetting expectations of an hypostatized democratic leadership phony in fact from the start. Thus, with cracks showing in Leviathan’s armor, matters are tensing up; Obama is getting antsy. The heavy-handed, until now still secretive, program of surveillance, which I initially took to be a means for scaring Americans into regimented, compliant mode, actually also is unwitting admission on the part of Obama, the National-Security State, and Authority in general of an unremitting fear at the top as well, both that the tightly coiled structure of power is becoming unstuck, and that as layer upon layer of obfuscation is cleared away it will be seen that our political and military high-and-mighty trusted leaders, i.e., themselves, are merely run-of-the-mill war criminals. Certainly, armed drones for targeted assassination, as one example, must have crossed their minds, if not troubled their sleep, that international-law violations stood on the horizon. Nor did waterboarding comport well with democratic leadership, nor mass surveillance and data mining, nor indefinite detention, nor a 1000-and-1 daily favors to American business, banking, and industry, which makes the infliction of suffering on others worthwhile.
Turning, then, to the highlights of surveillance, just as occurring over the last few days (for anyone who questions the importance of Snowden, this heightened government activity, generously termed damage control, should put the issue to rest, for his revelations had and will continue to have an implosive force showing a central core naked of moral scruple, the vacuum to be filled with capitalist-military strivings for undisputed global power), I must quickly note that, first, counterterrorism has been the screen for the preliminaries of internal regimentation for some time (an implicit domestic antiradicalism gained through creating a climate of superpatriotism—present already, though less organized—and obedience to regulations designed to stimulate respect for emergency powers and the whole concept of prevailing danger, and second, Obama is not a Johnny-come-lately to the use of repression, with purported threats from outside serving as a rationale, for we see from the earliest days of his administration the smooth transition from Bush II, with no inner qualms publicly manifested, that appeared to many—myself also fooled—as mere political inertia, when in reality it represented a purposeful, vital continuity which, in short order, blossomed into a full-scale qualitative escalation, so that by 2011 at the latest he had in place the secrecy-element, the determined prosecution of whistleblowers (under Bush there were no successful convictions, or even cases reaching that stage), a National-Security Team second-to-none in its interventionist, war-making, brook-no-opposition, at home or abroad, proclivities, in sum, a newly-articulated design and framework in which the intervention-surveillance duopoly was ready to spring forward in writing a new chapter in American capitalist-military expansion.
Ah, the Aspen Security Forum, an annual event: we think of Tea Party nutcakes running around decrying big government, when it is the “respectables,” in such meetings as this, who represent the thinking and planning of Pentagon officials and interested citizens (aka, defense contractors, war-inspired think-tank fellows, consultants and lobbyists of every stripe anxious to push their ideological agendas and/or their military hardware and products), who are the aspirant, more sophisticated, better connected, and thus more dangerous power-wielders, adjuncts of, and sometimes, as now, members in good standing of, a practically-speaking ruling class of capitalist-military-(and slightly to the side) economic elites, whose names, such as General Keith B. Alexander, head of NSA, and Ashton B. Carter, from Harvard professor to deputy secretary of defense, need to be fleshed out and made familiar. An unfailing barometer for determining the national-defense/national-security atmosphere, the Forum, last Thursday (July 18), bore witness to the Snowden Phenomenon, forcing a scrambling around to maintain the machinery of war—here, the magnification of cyberwar in the nation’s arsenal—and the continued institutionalization of government secrecy, both signifying a further convergence of unitary purpose. Sanger and Schmitt write in the New York Times on the 18th that NSA “has imposed new rules designed to sharply restrict the sharing and downloading of top-secret material from its computer networks” following Snowden, as related by “two of the Pentagon’s most senior officials” at the Forum that day. Discussing the “two-man rule,” applied to the handling of nuclear weapons (“two computer systems administrators [working] simultaneously when they are inside systems that contain highly classified material”), Alexander said that in future “the most sensitive data” will be put “in a highly encrypted form” and made limited in accessibility, to prevent its being moved “throughout the nation’s intelligence agencies and the Defense Department.”
So far, pretty obvious. Alexander defended massive surveillance, his “You need a haystack to find a needle” statement perhaps vying with George Tenet’s “slam dunk” one for contemporary imbecilic honors, but he redeems himself by revealing for the first time that Obama, soon after taking office, was informed of Bush’s NSA-surveillance operations—specifically “the number of errors the agency made,” which the General termed, according to the reporters, “the inadvertent collection of information about American citizens.” Inadvertent? Here the account becomes intensely interesting. Even Sanger and Schmitt want to get Obama off the hook. Alexander continues: “When the president first came on board, we had a huge set of mistakes that we were working through in 2009. He [Obama] said essentially, ‘I can see the value of these [italics, mine], but how do we ensure that we get these within compliance and that everything is exactly right?’” At first, one—and the reporters—think a critical view of the Bush surveillance programs is being expressed. Yet, Obama’s concern is not termination but legitimation, and here he called for an NSA self-policing of its actions, a “directorate of compliance,” and subsequently, ensuring the favorable approval of the FISA Court. He did the same with the armed drone for targeted assassination: cover the government’s (and his own) rear via in-house legal justifications, including secret White House Counsel memos and secret FISA Court decisions. Inadvertence = legalized criminal activity, whether massive surveillance or killing women and children as “collateral damage.”
The Forum breaks further new ground, Alexander and Carter revealing the formalization of cyberwarfare as “a new mission” using “a class of weapons that the Obama administration has rarely discussed in public,” with 4,000 military personnel deployed to the Pentagon to start operations. Secrecy, thou art wondrous! Obama “accelerated” Bush’s “Olympic Games” program, and then, as the purpose of our whole discussion, instigated (more politely, inaugurated), as here, programs of his own, more elaborate and devastating. From targeted assassination to cyberwarfare, perhaps a new signature weapon to which he is committed, with Carter excitedly saying, as proof of its importance (never mind accusations leveled against China in this realm, our Exceptionalism is our badge of honor): “I wanted to start this fast. Fundamentally, we’re spending everything we can think about spending intelligently for, notwithstanding our budget hassles, because this is an area we are protecting even as our military capabilities will be cut.” Cyberteams are planned, under Alexander’s command, a revealing of details of “one of the military’s most closely held projects.” The focus on teams, “in addition to the N.S.A. work force,” enables planning to start from scratch, with the possibility of modeling them after Special Ops units. In all of this, Obama is not a passive onlooker. Make it legit, but make it work: cyberwarfare, another feather in his cap.
On July 19, Charlie Savage reported in The Times that the US Court of Appeals, Fourth Circuit (Richmond, Va.), by a 2-1 vote, ruled that James Risen of the paper “must testify in the criminal trial” of a former CIA agent “charged with providing him with classified information.” The majority opinion held that the First Amendment did not protect a reporter receiving “unauthorized leaks” from divulging his source—a clear test of freedom of the press, and, to the dissenting judge (Savage’s paraphrase) “a serious threat to investigative journalism.” The judge stated, “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.” Apparently, the Supreme Court, 40 years before, had delineated a precedent applicable only to grand jury investigations, leaving the issue of trials up in the air; still, the Obama administration (here DOJ) immediately stated, “We agree with the decision,” as well they might, for Justice has prosecuted more than twice the number of leak cases under Obama than under previous president’s combined. AG Holder, given the criticism over “subpoenaing Associated Press reporters’ phone records and portraying a Fox News reporter as a criminal conspirator [a serious charge] in order to obtain a warrant for his e-mails,” in response “announced new guidelines for leak investigations,” which hardly alters my characterization: Obama’s fanaticism about leaks. Risen’s case was first tried in a lower court, the decision held in his favor on the ground that he was protected “by a limited ‘reporter’s privilege’” under the First, the Obama administration then appealing, arguing “that such a reporter’s privilege did not exist,” and now, on July 19th, the Appeals Court reversed the decision of the lower court and Risen is compelled to testify or go to jail. The Obama people play hard ball; Risen “has vowed to go to prison,” rather than comply.
The flurry of activity of July18-19 is not happenstance, but a direct response to Snowden, his revelations, and the frustration on Obama’s part that he remains out there, seeking asylum world opinion on his side and in effect thumbing his nose at the Leviathan. Towering America meets it match; a government that is afraid of its own transparency, is not a democratic government. Slowly the wheels are turning against the US, not just because of the outrage over surveillance, but a proper understanding if not in America then globally that surveillance is not cops-and-robbers child’s play but the linchpin of a repressive social order capable of striking out viciously against all who oppose it. Why else surveillance? The momentum continues, so long as Snowden remains free and capable of releasing further documents, fittingly, the fascistic state-secrets doctrine, USG’s favorite defense against judicial and/or public oversight, and launching pad for the Obama-Holder-DOJ prosecutions using the Espionage Act against whistleblowers, now being turned inside out and upside down. Stripped of the state-secrets doctrine, i.e., of no avail when the information becomes revealed, America looks quite totalitarian in its pursuit of national policy (and pretty shabby in its need for conformity at home, deference, abroad). Hegemony loses its luster, as do militarism and capitalism, when it is realized by others that US fine pronouncements are the cover for dominance: over the global structure, markets, capital flows, and, the human underside, cheap, docile labor abroad (and increasingly, at home), all predicated on a compliant American public, consumerism their bread-and-circuses to ensure absolute devotion to the System of Enterprise, as meanwhile, the defense budget and the culture of militarization expand. Yes, why else surveillance?
Then, on July 20th, another article in the New York Times, by Sharon LaFraniere, providing context for the Obamaean (i.e., the whole administration, in military lockstep about self-protection, whether national-security advisers, CIA, Pentagon, FDA, Interior, all having something to hide) fanaticism about secrecy—and the president’s own frenetic urge to strike out at leakers, masking a profound insecurity about being found out as a potential/actual war criminal, platitudinous leader, and simple careerist. The title of the article, “Math Behind Leak Crackdown: 153 Cases, 4 Years, 0 Indictments,” superbly captures the reality, for it refers to the record of the Bush administration, not Obama’s, who would strain every muscle to rectify the situation. Once again, in the Bush-Obama relationship, we see, first, overlap and continuity, second, the latter’s intensification of policy and program, and third, the progression from intensification to a qualitative leap: Obama on surveillance and prosecutions leaves Bush in swaddling clothes. Here’s another name to remember in the White House cast of characters: Dennis C. Blair, Obama’s national intelligence director until 2010, who, examining the Bush record (as in the article’s title) “was dismayed by what he found.” He said it “was pretty shocking to all of us,” which led to “a series of phone calls and meetings” with AG Holder to work out “a more aggressive strategy to punish anyone” leaking national-security secrets. Blair put the matter well: “My background is in the Navy, and it is good to hang an admiral once in a while as an example to the others. We were hoping to get somebody and make people realize that there are consequences to this and it needed to stop.”
This was precisely the mindset that, subsequent to his comment, would lead to the prosecution (along with solitary confinement) of Manning, and represent administration thinking and policy in the attempt to capture Snowden. But, ironically, it is not “an admiral once in a while,” but retired General James E. Cartwright, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (until mid-summer 2011) who is being investigated for leaking classified information. More on this momentarily, but we see right away the self-devouring nature of surveillance, the passion for secrecy, the fear of leaks—the net is cast ever wider, now a top-ranking general. The reporter, picking up on Blair’s remark about consequences, gives us a convenient summary, including the preceding day’s Appeals Court decision: “The Obama administration has done its best to define those consequences, with an aggressive focus on leaks and leakers that has led to more than twice as many prosecutions as there were in all previous administrations combined. It also led to a significant legal victory on Friday when a federal appeals court accepted the Justice Department’s argument that the First Amendment does not protect reporters from having to reveal the sources suspected of leaking information to them.” (Italics, mine) So much for Obama’s respect for the First Amendment and for freedom of the press.
Whether, as the reporter, citing “present and former government officials,” claims the focus on leaks at the highest levels of the administration “was driven by pressure from the intelligence agencies and members of Congress,” or the reverse, Obama’s desire to prove himself in spirit one of the former and to placate conservatives and war hawks of both parties of the latter, the fact remains that he has drawn very close to the CIA (and CIA-JSOC paramilitary operations) and the Democratic head of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Dianne Feinstein, has carried water for him in demanding the zealous prosecution of leakers, chastising in closed hearings, as early as 2009, Holder, Blair, and FBI Director Mueller, for not doing enough. To critics of the Manning-Snowden revelations (Snowden incidentally acknowledged Manning as a source of inspiration), things were getting out of hand; secrecy must be preserved in the national interest and at all costs. To critics of the critics, perhaps, with the Cartwright case, things are getting out of hand the other way (a distinctly minority view, both in government and the nation as a whole, sold on national security as the holy of holies). In his case, it was revelation of Obama’s new love—cyberwarfare, the attack on Iran’s nuclear program, that brought him to Coventry courtesy the DOJ. (The case against Risen of The Times also had to do with his revealing information about Iran, “a covert operation to deceive” its nuclear scientists.) Cartwright, though, by definition, “represents an escalation of effort,” in the reporter’s words, compared with previous prosecutions of officials, never above mid-level in ranking, and in the words of a member of the Federation of American Scientists, “The Cartwright case stands alone. It is a sign that the administration is not backing off its anti-leak crusade. It is still going full-tilt.”
Putting all of this together, Ms. LaFraniere also discusses administration procedural matters, such as DOJ imposition of “a tight deadline to decide whether to open criminal inquiries into leaks, shortening to just three weeks a review process that had often dragged on for months,” one finds overwhelming support for the idea that Obama’s actions have had a chilling effect on public scrutiny of all areas of government, a tightening both of rhetoric and practice, in which surveillance, prosecution, condemnation of divulging documents pointing to illegality and worse, indicate to me the advent of fascism in America. The term “fascism” should not be bandied about. I think it fits structurally (the high degree of concentration in the economic sector , along with the more significant marker, the interpenetration government and business), militarily (not only aggressive conduct of foreign policy, but the militarization of capitalism), culturally (a profound disregard for the valuing of equality, whether in race relations or in deference shown business, political, and military leaders as part of an hierarchical ordering of economic and social relations), and now, more overt signposts, as seen above, when a government resorts to massive surveillance, to hide its dirty linen. A fitting close to these thoughts can be found in the excellent article by Carlos Borrero in today’s (July 23) CounterPunch, when he writes: “Systematic surveillance can only be understood as an essential part of state repression, the purpose of which is to intimidate those that question the status quo by promoting a culture of fear. One can never be separated from the other.” His reference is to US repression of anticolonist forces in Puerto Rico, yet the statement is equally valid for America (that which has been inflicted on the exploited comes back with equal force to the exploiter, fearful his pathological quest for dominance will someday prove his undoing). If further indictment of Obama and the liberalization of militaristic capitalism to make it palatable to the American people is required, I cite the drone campaign for targeted assassination, a scenario for permanent war—the advent (arrival on the scene) of fascism, dressed in the fashion of humanitarian interventionism and domestic silence concerning the atrocities practiced at home, on the poor and the dissidents of every stripe and persuasion.
Norman Pollack is the author of “The Populist Response to Industrial America” (Harvard) and “The Just Polity” (Illinois), Guggenheim Fellow, and professor of history emeritus, Michigan State University. His new book, Eichmann on the Potomac, will be published by CounterPunch/AK Press in the fall of 2013.
http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/07/24/ ... epression/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
July 24, 2013
National Security State, Advent of Fascism
Obama’s Fanaticism Over Secrecy, Surveillance and Repression
by NORMAN POLLACK
If the US were not engaged in actions and policies that are illegal, immoral, aggressive, war-provoking, and therefore, it is fair to say, evil, the issue of leaks would never arise, there being no rhyme or reason for them and the increasingly widening effects of government’s stringent, escalating, and still counting, countermeasures, for suffocating a public consciousness of wrongdoing through a campaign of massive surveillance in order to prevent further revelations and ensure continued societal blindness to, and even the endorsement of, interventions, assassinations, cyberwarfare, indefinite detentions, a global system of military bases poised for purposes of internal espionage leading to regime change, the enforcement of a favorable climate for trade, investment, and the extraction of resources, and much else which can be subsumed under the heading of national self-interest (always taken for granted and non-negotiable), all in violation, or skirting the edges, of international law, itself largely crafted to serve American needs, and implemented largely through active support of world financial institutions, trading blocs, military organizations, of essentially kept nations seemingly anxious to do our bidding. With a framework like that, no wonder the desire to keep the lid on. Secrecy is not a nervous twitch, nor an excess of zeal in the promotion of a misconstrued American Innocence (saving the world for democracy, humanitarian interventionism, or similar self-advantaged formulas), but a central enabling mechanism in the use of power, primarily military-oriented, for ends capitalistic and nationalist encompassed in a single system defining the US’s Exceptionalist drive for unilateral dominance of the global structure. Ideology alone doesn’t do the job (it never did!), nor do exports magically traverse the sea lanes, greeted at foreign ports with hosannas; capitalism is a fractionated international order, inclined to trade rivalries and the forcible settlement of differences. War determines outcomes, and in turn requires the regimentation of thought on the home front. Obama’s fanaticism about secrecy is therefore perfectly reasonable and rational, if one happens to subscribe to ruling-groups’ ends (along with an added dash of sadism, which he applies by diverting resources from a sound social safety net to satisfy the military appetite) of a government-assisted unrestrained capitalism, government itself, of course, simultaneously invisible in its subventionary function while whipped in place unmercifully when performing any sort of welfare or ameliorative function.
Secrecy is the ideal camouflage for surrounding, covering, and protecting the class-state, its system of power, its elites’ hidden agenda, and the political-cultural mechanisms which engineer consent to the national purpose as defined from above, not so much to hide ordinary hanky-panky–favoritism to contractors, political contributors, etc.– but war crimes real time, which seldom result in the internal democratization of the offending power, and instead contribute to wealth-and-power differentiation among the populace, which bears the brunt of such policies, whether drafted to fight in wars to enforce US capitalist objectives or placed in vulnerable positions domestically so as not to be in position to press for systemic reforms (essentially moderate, as measured by democratic theory and practice) such as the demand for collective bargaining rights, freedom of expression, and the curbing of the maldistribution of wealth. For capitalism, especially in America, where political and economic democracy are disconnected so that pro forma electoral freedom coexists with corporate monopolization and the concentration of wealth, the ballot box somehow becomes an exhaustive remedy for ruling groups’ hegemonic purposes abroad and the instilling of institutional-cultural docility at home. These goals are mutually dependent; one cannot be fulfilled without the other. Which suggests that a pattern of convergence is in process of formation, secrecy providing the bridge, or better, connecting rod, between foreign intervention and domestic surveillance, now becoming conflated into a singular mode of repression intended to bring into question, amenable to prosecution, whatever is considered to be politically-economically-militarily unacceptable, whether this means questioning either domestic or foreign policy and activity, with each sharing the other’s identity, and no doubt soon, degree of penalization.
In this light, a radical, whose social protest extends beyond the aforementioned moderate demands of the reformer (themselves stopping short of systemic overhaul, but nonetheless worth contesting in the absence of their achievement), is in the cross-hairs of a government unused to substantive criticism in either the domestic- or foreign-policy realms, hence under Obama the acceleration of countermeasures to stifle—again, the import of surveillance, even as a dark shadow making individuals think twice about holding, still less communicating, suspicious thoughts—a potentially awakened political consciousness, “awakened” given the Snowden and Manning Revelations on a unified US government pressing the total integration of military, capitalistic, and geostrategic assumptions, and behind that, the integration as well of structure, ideology, and policy making, to the end of maximizing State power both in its own right and the better to promote and service the political economy of capitalism, nay, an advanced mode of capitalism facing the strains of a changing, now multipolar, context of international politics. Gaps in the integrative process leave room, i.e., mental space, for popular resistance through the perception of the forced joining of parts, integration as per se repression, whereby everything must be brought into conformity with an homogenous composition of forces focused on promoting expansionist-aggressive systemic tendencies (particularly the mature stage of capitalism warns of senility, and therefore, the resort to extreme measures even to remain in place) while also promoting silence and/or complicity at home. In this way, intervention (and with it, targeted assassination, regime change, global political and economic influence, counterrevolution as a generalized posture) neatly dovetails with surveillance (and the further splintering of traditional civil liberties, presumably mandated by a counterterrorism policy), so that when we return to the radical, be it on either front, the lines between foreign and domestic “criminal” activity is starting to blur—the further conflation, facing the individual directly, so that our hypothetical whistleblower of the future in whichever realm is left open to the charge of treasonous conduct, as indeed is being contemplated or already decided with respect to Snowden and Manning.
The preceding overview, especially the overall convergence of structure, ideology, and policy, transcending narrow fields of operation, or boundaries of scope and practice (e.g., the CIA, contrary to its charter, is as much an operational as intelligence force, and perhaps as much involved in domestic as in foreign theaters of activity), speaks to Obama’s elaboration, inheriting much of, thence adding still more to, the work of his predecessors dating from the immediate aftermath of the Second World War through his own presidency, of a Secretive, National-Security, Militarized State, whose monolithic façade is beginning to seriously break down, thanks in equal parts to overextension unsupported by sufficient political-economic (but not military) resources, a globalization process, ostensibly American-led yet actually witnessing the dispersion of power, with China and Russia independent centers, and peripheral nations, like Brazil, shaping into no-longer dependent industrializing countries, and finally, in a by no means exhaustive listing, the revelations themselves, in which, to Obama, Snowden is the Anti-Christ, and Manning, the Mephistophelian figure, upsetting expectations of an hypostatized democratic leadership phony in fact from the start. Thus, with cracks showing in Leviathan’s armor, matters are tensing up; Obama is getting antsy. The heavy-handed, until now still secretive, program of surveillance, which I initially took to be a means for scaring Americans into regimented, compliant mode, actually also is unwitting admission on the part of Obama, the National-Security State, and Authority in general of an unremitting fear at the top as well, both that the tightly coiled structure of power is becoming unstuck, and that as layer upon layer of obfuscation is cleared away it will be seen that our political and military high-and-mighty trusted leaders, i.e., themselves, are merely run-of-the-mill war criminals. Certainly, armed drones for targeted assassination, as one example, must have crossed their minds, if not troubled their sleep, that international-law violations stood on the horizon. Nor did waterboarding comport well with democratic leadership, nor mass surveillance and data mining, nor indefinite detention, nor a 1000-and-1 daily favors to American business, banking, and industry, which makes the infliction of suffering on others worthwhile.
Turning, then, to the highlights of surveillance, just as occurring over the last few days (for anyone who questions the importance of Snowden, this heightened government activity, generously termed damage control, should put the issue to rest, for his revelations had and will continue to have an implosive force showing a central core naked of moral scruple, the vacuum to be filled with capitalist-military strivings for undisputed global power), I must quickly note that, first, counterterrorism has been the screen for the preliminaries of internal regimentation for some time (an implicit domestic antiradicalism gained through creating a climate of superpatriotism—present already, though less organized—and obedience to regulations designed to stimulate respect for emergency powers and the whole concept of prevailing danger, and second, Obama is not a Johnny-come-lately to the use of repression, with purported threats from outside serving as a rationale, for we see from the earliest days of his administration the smooth transition from Bush II, with no inner qualms publicly manifested, that appeared to many—myself also fooled—as mere political inertia, when in reality it represented a purposeful, vital continuity which, in short order, blossomed into a full-scale qualitative escalation, so that by 2011 at the latest he had in place the secrecy-element, the determined prosecution of whistleblowers (under Bush there were no successful convictions, or even cases reaching that stage), a National-Security Team second-to-none in its interventionist, war-making, brook-no-opposition, at home or abroad, proclivities, in sum, a newly-articulated design and framework in which the intervention-surveillance duopoly was ready to spring forward in writing a new chapter in American capitalist-military expansion.
Ah, the Aspen Security Forum, an annual event: we think of Tea Party nutcakes running around decrying big government, when it is the “respectables,” in such meetings as this, who represent the thinking and planning of Pentagon officials and interested citizens (aka, defense contractors, war-inspired think-tank fellows, consultants and lobbyists of every stripe anxious to push their ideological agendas and/or their military hardware and products), who are the aspirant, more sophisticated, better connected, and thus more dangerous power-wielders, adjuncts of, and sometimes, as now, members in good standing of, a practically-speaking ruling class of capitalist-military-(and slightly to the side) economic elites, whose names, such as General Keith B. Alexander, head of NSA, and Ashton B. Carter, from Harvard professor to deputy secretary of defense, need to be fleshed out and made familiar. An unfailing barometer for determining the national-defense/national-security atmosphere, the Forum, last Thursday (July 18), bore witness to the Snowden Phenomenon, forcing a scrambling around to maintain the machinery of war—here, the magnification of cyberwar in the nation’s arsenal—and the continued institutionalization of government secrecy, both signifying a further convergence of unitary purpose. Sanger and Schmitt write in the New York Times on the 18th that NSA “has imposed new rules designed to sharply restrict the sharing and downloading of top-secret material from its computer networks” following Snowden, as related by “two of the Pentagon’s most senior officials” at the Forum that day. Discussing the “two-man rule,” applied to the handling of nuclear weapons (“two computer systems administrators [working] simultaneously when they are inside systems that contain highly classified material”), Alexander said that in future “the most sensitive data” will be put “in a highly encrypted form” and made limited in accessibility, to prevent its being moved “throughout the nation’s intelligence agencies and the Defense Department.”
So far, pretty obvious. Alexander defended massive surveillance, his “You need a haystack to find a needle” statement perhaps vying with George Tenet’s “slam dunk” one for contemporary imbecilic honors, but he redeems himself by revealing for the first time that Obama, soon after taking office, was informed of Bush’s NSA-surveillance operations—specifically “the number of errors the agency made,” which the General termed, according to the reporters, “the inadvertent collection of information about American citizens.” Inadvertent? Here the account becomes intensely interesting. Even Sanger and Schmitt want to get Obama off the hook. Alexander continues: “When the president first came on board, we had a huge set of mistakes that we were working through in 2009. He [Obama] said essentially, ‘I can see the value of these [italics, mine], but how do we ensure that we get these within compliance and that everything is exactly right?’” At first, one—and the reporters—think a critical view of the Bush surveillance programs is being expressed. Yet, Obama’s concern is not termination but legitimation, and here he called for an NSA self-policing of its actions, a “directorate of compliance,” and subsequently, ensuring the favorable approval of the FISA Court. He did the same with the armed drone for targeted assassination: cover the government’s (and his own) rear via in-house legal justifications, including secret White House Counsel memos and secret FISA Court decisions. Inadvertence = legalized criminal activity, whether massive surveillance or killing women and children as “collateral damage.”
The Forum breaks further new ground, Alexander and Carter revealing the formalization of cyberwarfare as “a new mission” using “a class of weapons that the Obama administration has rarely discussed in public,” with 4,000 military personnel deployed to the Pentagon to start operations. Secrecy, thou art wondrous! Obama “accelerated” Bush’s “Olympic Games” program, and then, as the purpose of our whole discussion, instigated (more politely, inaugurated), as here, programs of his own, more elaborate and devastating. From targeted assassination to cyberwarfare, perhaps a new signature weapon to which he is committed, with Carter excitedly saying, as proof of its importance (never mind accusations leveled against China in this realm, our Exceptionalism is our badge of honor): “I wanted to start this fast. Fundamentally, we’re spending everything we can think about spending intelligently for, notwithstanding our budget hassles, because this is an area we are protecting even as our military capabilities will be cut.” Cyberteams are planned, under Alexander’s command, a revealing of details of “one of the military’s most closely held projects.” The focus on teams, “in addition to the N.S.A. work force,” enables planning to start from scratch, with the possibility of modeling them after Special Ops units. In all of this, Obama is not a passive onlooker. Make it legit, but make it work: cyberwarfare, another feather in his cap.
On July 19, Charlie Savage reported in The Times that the US Court of Appeals, Fourth Circuit (Richmond, Va.), by a 2-1 vote, ruled that James Risen of the paper “must testify in the criminal trial” of a former CIA agent “charged with providing him with classified information.” The majority opinion held that the First Amendment did not protect a reporter receiving “unauthorized leaks” from divulging his source—a clear test of freedom of the press, and, to the dissenting judge (Savage’s paraphrase) “a serious threat to investigative journalism.” The judge stated, “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.” Apparently, the Supreme Court, 40 years before, had delineated a precedent applicable only to grand jury investigations, leaving the issue of trials up in the air; still, the Obama administration (here DOJ) immediately stated, “We agree with the decision,” as well they might, for Justice has prosecuted more than twice the number of leak cases under Obama than under previous president’s combined. AG Holder, given the criticism over “subpoenaing Associated Press reporters’ phone records and portraying a Fox News reporter as a criminal conspirator [a serious charge] in order to obtain a warrant for his e-mails,” in response “announced new guidelines for leak investigations,” which hardly alters my characterization: Obama’s fanaticism about leaks. Risen’s case was first tried in a lower court, the decision held in his favor on the ground that he was protected “by a limited ‘reporter’s privilege’” under the First, the Obama administration then appealing, arguing “that such a reporter’s privilege did not exist,” and now, on July 19th, the Appeals Court reversed the decision of the lower court and Risen is compelled to testify or go to jail. The Obama people play hard ball; Risen “has vowed to go to prison,” rather than comply.
The flurry of activity of July18-19 is not happenstance, but a direct response to Snowden, his revelations, and the frustration on Obama’s part that he remains out there, seeking asylum world opinion on his side and in effect thumbing his nose at the Leviathan. Towering America meets it match; a government that is afraid of its own transparency, is not a democratic government. Slowly the wheels are turning against the US, not just because of the outrage over surveillance, but a proper understanding if not in America then globally that surveillance is not cops-and-robbers child’s play but the linchpin of a repressive social order capable of striking out viciously against all who oppose it. Why else surveillance? The momentum continues, so long as Snowden remains free and capable of releasing further documents, fittingly, the fascistic state-secrets doctrine, USG’s favorite defense against judicial and/or public oversight, and launching pad for the Obama-Holder-DOJ prosecutions using the Espionage Act against whistleblowers, now being turned inside out and upside down. Stripped of the state-secrets doctrine, i.e., of no avail when the information becomes revealed, America looks quite totalitarian in its pursuit of national policy (and pretty shabby in its need for conformity at home, deference, abroad). Hegemony loses its luster, as do militarism and capitalism, when it is realized by others that US fine pronouncements are the cover for dominance: over the global structure, markets, capital flows, and, the human underside, cheap, docile labor abroad (and increasingly, at home), all predicated on a compliant American public, consumerism their bread-and-circuses to ensure absolute devotion to the System of Enterprise, as meanwhile, the defense budget and the culture of militarization expand. Yes, why else surveillance?
Then, on July 20th, another article in the New York Times, by Sharon LaFraniere, providing context for the Obamaean (i.e., the whole administration, in military lockstep about self-protection, whether national-security advisers, CIA, Pentagon, FDA, Interior, all having something to hide) fanaticism about secrecy—and the president’s own frenetic urge to strike out at leakers, masking a profound insecurity about being found out as a potential/actual war criminal, platitudinous leader, and simple careerist. The title of the article, “Math Behind Leak Crackdown: 153 Cases, 4 Years, 0 Indictments,” superbly captures the reality, for it refers to the record of the Bush administration, not Obama’s, who would strain every muscle to rectify the situation. Once again, in the Bush-Obama relationship, we see, first, overlap and continuity, second, the latter’s intensification of policy and program, and third, the progression from intensification to a qualitative leap: Obama on surveillance and prosecutions leaves Bush in swaddling clothes. Here’s another name to remember in the White House cast of characters: Dennis C. Blair, Obama’s national intelligence director until 2010, who, examining the Bush record (as in the article’s title) “was dismayed by what he found.” He said it “was pretty shocking to all of us,” which led to “a series of phone calls and meetings” with AG Holder to work out “a more aggressive strategy to punish anyone” leaking national-security secrets. Blair put the matter well: “My background is in the Navy, and it is good to hang an admiral once in a while as an example to the others. We were hoping to get somebody and make people realize that there are consequences to this and it needed to stop.”
This was precisely the mindset that, subsequent to his comment, would lead to the prosecution (along with solitary confinement) of Manning, and represent administration thinking and policy in the attempt to capture Snowden. But, ironically, it is not “an admiral once in a while,” but retired General James E. Cartwright, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (until mid-summer 2011) who is being investigated for leaking classified information. More on this momentarily, but we see right away the self-devouring nature of surveillance, the passion for secrecy, the fear of leaks—the net is cast ever wider, now a top-ranking general. The reporter, picking up on Blair’s remark about consequences, gives us a convenient summary, including the preceding day’s Appeals Court decision: “The Obama administration has done its best to define those consequences, with an aggressive focus on leaks and leakers that has led to more than twice as many prosecutions as there were in all previous administrations combined. It also led to a significant legal victory on Friday when a federal appeals court accepted the Justice Department’s argument that the First Amendment does not protect reporters from having to reveal the sources suspected of leaking information to them.” (Italics, mine) So much for Obama’s respect for the First Amendment and for freedom of the press.
Whether, as the reporter, citing “present and former government officials,” claims the focus on leaks at the highest levels of the administration “was driven by pressure from the intelligence agencies and members of Congress,” or the reverse, Obama’s desire to prove himself in spirit one of the former and to placate conservatives and war hawks of both parties of the latter, the fact remains that he has drawn very close to the CIA (and CIA-JSOC paramilitary operations) and the Democratic head of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Dianne Feinstein, has carried water for him in demanding the zealous prosecution of leakers, chastising in closed hearings, as early as 2009, Holder, Blair, and FBI Director Mueller, for not doing enough. To critics of the Manning-Snowden revelations (Snowden incidentally acknowledged Manning as a source of inspiration), things were getting out of hand; secrecy must be preserved in the national interest and at all costs. To critics of the critics, perhaps, with the Cartwright case, things are getting out of hand the other way (a distinctly minority view, both in government and the nation as a whole, sold on national security as the holy of holies). In his case, it was revelation of Obama’s new love—cyberwarfare, the attack on Iran’s nuclear program, that brought him to Coventry courtesy the DOJ. (The case against Risen of The Times also had to do with his revealing information about Iran, “a covert operation to deceive” its nuclear scientists.) Cartwright, though, by definition, “represents an escalation of effort,” in the reporter’s words, compared with previous prosecutions of officials, never above mid-level in ranking, and in the words of a member of the Federation of American Scientists, “The Cartwright case stands alone. It is a sign that the administration is not backing off its anti-leak crusade. It is still going full-tilt.”
Putting all of this together, Ms. LaFraniere also discusses administration procedural matters, such as DOJ imposition of “a tight deadline to decide whether to open criminal inquiries into leaks, shortening to just three weeks a review process that had often dragged on for months,” one finds overwhelming support for the idea that Obama’s actions have had a chilling effect on public scrutiny of all areas of government, a tightening both of rhetoric and practice, in which surveillance, prosecution, condemnation of divulging documents pointing to illegality and worse, indicate to me the advent of fascism in America. The term “fascism” should not be bandied about. I think it fits structurally (the high degree of concentration in the economic sector , along with the more significant marker, the interpenetration government and business), militarily (not only aggressive conduct of foreign policy, but the militarization of capitalism), culturally (a profound disregard for the valuing of equality, whether in race relations or in deference shown business, political, and military leaders as part of an hierarchical ordering of economic and social relations), and now, more overt signposts, as seen above, when a government resorts to massive surveillance, to hide its dirty linen. A fitting close to these thoughts can be found in the excellent article by Carlos Borrero in today’s (July 23) CounterPunch, when he writes: “Systematic surveillance can only be understood as an essential part of state repression, the purpose of which is to intimidate those that question the status quo by promoting a culture of fear. One can never be separated from the other.” His reference is to US repression of anticolonist forces in Puerto Rico, yet the statement is equally valid for America (that which has been inflicted on the exploited comes back with equal force to the exploiter, fearful his pathological quest for dominance will someday prove his undoing). If further indictment of Obama and the liberalization of militaristic capitalism to make it palatable to the American people is required, I cite the drone campaign for targeted assassination, a scenario for permanent war—the advent (arrival on the scene) of fascism, dressed in the fashion of humanitarian interventionism and domestic silence concerning the atrocities practiced at home, on the poor and the dissidents of every stripe and persuasion.
Norman Pollack is the author of “The Populist Response to Industrial America” (Harvard) and “The Just Polity” (Illinois), Guggenheim Fellow, and professor of history emeritus, Michigan State University. His new book, Eichmann on the Potomac, will be published by CounterPunch/AK Press in the fall of 2013.
-
msfreeh
- Level 34 Illuminated
- Posts: 7718
Re: FBI WATCH Making Cruelty visible
see link for full story
http://www.opednews.com/articles/The-JF ... 6-349.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
General News 7/26/2013
The JFK Case: The Twelve Who Built the Oswald Legend (Part 10: Nightmare in Mexico City)
When it comes to working the Oswald legend, there's no one quite like Ann Goodpasture, the station case officer at the CIA's Mexico City station in 1963. Although she received the highest rating as outstanding in her fitness report, she made several supposed mistakes that would humiliate a rookie. Let me offer a brief hypothesis of how Goodpasture used the Oswald file in a clever maneuver designed to see who had impersonated Oswald in a telephone call in Mexico City two months before the JFK assassination.
Goodpasture had good reason to believe that there might have been enemy spy in her immediate circles. I believe that Goodpasture used a photo of a KGB operative to create a pretense that the Mexico City station believed that that this KGB Mystery Man might be Lee Oswald. Her objective was to kick off an operation designed to figure out who was trying to penetrate the CIA's wiretap operations in Mexico City. Oswald had twelve prominent legend makers who used him in various ways as an intelligence asset during the last years of his life. Goodpasture was legend maker #11 - she used Oswald's biography for her own purposes. What she wound up doing was causing even more confusion over who Oswald really was. She may have had an idea, however, who was trying to penetrate the CIA's wiretap operations.
I will stick my neck out and say that I believe that someone impersonated Oswald in a phone call precisely to convince the Mexico City and CIA HQ to conduct a molehunt to find the impersonator.
I'll take this hypothesis further and say that the paper trail created by the molehunters was an effective way to blackmail the CIA and the FBI from conducting an effective investigation of the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
To me, the best way to analyze the JFK assassination is to focus on the cover-up. If you understand Goodpasture, you understand why the cover-up had to happen.
A little background on Goodpasture, Oswald, and Sylvia Duran
During the sixties, Ann Goodpasture was the chief aide to Mexico City station chief Win Scott. Starting in August 1963, she picked up new tapes and simultaneously delivered new ones to a new agent in Mexico City, a Soviet analyst named Bill Bright. Bright was with the counter-espionage unit that reviewed Oswald when his file was used in a molehunt during May 1960. (See Part 3 of this series.) Bright's role is intriguing, still being studied, and will be addressed later on in this article.
She would review the summary of the transcripts from the LIENVOY wiretap operation on the Communist embassies at about 8 am every morning after the taps were picked up and transcribed. She would process the take between 8-9 am, and have any items of unusual significance on Scott's desk by nine . [ii] Transcripts on the Cuban and Soviet wiretaps arrived every day. [iii]
Goodpasture also played a key role in the more old-fashioned - but more secure, as we shall see - LIFEAT wiretap operation. During 1963, LIFEAT tapped individual locations rather than relying on the centralized telephone exchange like LIENVOY. She would also disseminate the take from the three cameras trained on the Soviet embassy compound. [iv] No one at the station knew the wiretaps and hidden cameras as well as Goodpasture.
When an American calling himself Lee Oswald appeared in Mexico City on Friday, September 27, he bounced between the Soviet and Cuban consulates in an effort to get himself an instant visa to visit these countries. I'm going to put on ice for the moment whether this man was actually Lee Oswald - what I'm concerned about is the phone calls he made to the consulates, not the personal visits to the consulates.
In June 1963, Oswald applied and received a new passport. His wife Marina was pregnant. She wanted to return to the Soviet Union and spend time with her family while the baby was an infant. Oswald wanted to go with her.
However, the Oswalds had been unable to get the Soviets to issue them a visa for almost a year. Their previous negotiations had all been with the Soviet consulate in Washington, DC. Now Lee was trying his hand in Mexico City. It's hard to believe that he would have gone to the USSR without her. Their second child was due in a few weeks. Lee was a devoted father.
The smart way to get a Cuban visa was to make prior arrangements with the American Communist party or the Cuban Communist party prior to arrival in Mexico City. Oswald had done none of those things, even though he had written a number of letters to various American Communist officials.
Oswald's effort in shuttle diplomacy between the Soviet and Cuban consulates did him no good. All sides pretty much agree that he visited the Cuban consulate three times and the Soviet consulate once on Friday the 27th. He told the Cubans he got the visa OK from the Soviets, and told the Soviets that he already had a Cuban visa. Cuban consulate secretary Sylvia Duran talked to the Soviets, and both sides determined that Oswald was lying.
By the end of the day, Oswald had struck out at both consulates. Oswald made one final pitch to the Soviets at about 10 am on Saturday the 28th, which also ended in failure. [v] The conversations between the Soviet and Cuban consulates about what to do with this unprepared man were all picked up on tape. Mexico City chief Win Scott wanted to know if this man could be identified.
Oswald was identified, and quickly. Shortly after Oswald left the Soviet consulate on Saturday the 28th, a call came in from the Cuban consulate to the Soviet consulate. Goodpasture reported that "Oswald came to the attention of the listening post operators from a tap on the Soviet line".
http://www.opednews.com/articles/The-JF ... 6-349.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
General News 7/26/2013
The JFK Case: The Twelve Who Built the Oswald Legend (Part 10: Nightmare in Mexico City)
When it comes to working the Oswald legend, there's no one quite like Ann Goodpasture, the station case officer at the CIA's Mexico City station in 1963. Although she received the highest rating as outstanding in her fitness report, she made several supposed mistakes that would humiliate a rookie. Let me offer a brief hypothesis of how Goodpasture used the Oswald file in a clever maneuver designed to see who had impersonated Oswald in a telephone call in Mexico City two months before the JFK assassination.
Goodpasture had good reason to believe that there might have been enemy spy in her immediate circles. I believe that Goodpasture used a photo of a KGB operative to create a pretense that the Mexico City station believed that that this KGB Mystery Man might be Lee Oswald. Her objective was to kick off an operation designed to figure out who was trying to penetrate the CIA's wiretap operations in Mexico City. Oswald had twelve prominent legend makers who used him in various ways as an intelligence asset during the last years of his life. Goodpasture was legend maker #11 - she used Oswald's biography for her own purposes. What she wound up doing was causing even more confusion over who Oswald really was. She may have had an idea, however, who was trying to penetrate the CIA's wiretap operations.
I will stick my neck out and say that I believe that someone impersonated Oswald in a phone call precisely to convince the Mexico City and CIA HQ to conduct a molehunt to find the impersonator.
I'll take this hypothesis further and say that the paper trail created by the molehunters was an effective way to blackmail the CIA and the FBI from conducting an effective investigation of the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
To me, the best way to analyze the JFK assassination is to focus on the cover-up. If you understand Goodpasture, you understand why the cover-up had to happen.
A little background on Goodpasture, Oswald, and Sylvia Duran
During the sixties, Ann Goodpasture was the chief aide to Mexico City station chief Win Scott. Starting in August 1963, she picked up new tapes and simultaneously delivered new ones to a new agent in Mexico City, a Soviet analyst named Bill Bright. Bright was with the counter-espionage unit that reviewed Oswald when his file was used in a molehunt during May 1960. (See Part 3 of this series.) Bright's role is intriguing, still being studied, and will be addressed later on in this article.
She would review the summary of the transcripts from the LIENVOY wiretap operation on the Communist embassies at about 8 am every morning after the taps were picked up and transcribed. She would process the take between 8-9 am, and have any items of unusual significance on Scott's desk by nine . [ii] Transcripts on the Cuban and Soviet wiretaps arrived every day. [iii]
Goodpasture also played a key role in the more old-fashioned - but more secure, as we shall see - LIFEAT wiretap operation. During 1963, LIFEAT tapped individual locations rather than relying on the centralized telephone exchange like LIENVOY. She would also disseminate the take from the three cameras trained on the Soviet embassy compound. [iv] No one at the station knew the wiretaps and hidden cameras as well as Goodpasture.
When an American calling himself Lee Oswald appeared in Mexico City on Friday, September 27, he bounced between the Soviet and Cuban consulates in an effort to get himself an instant visa to visit these countries. I'm going to put on ice for the moment whether this man was actually Lee Oswald - what I'm concerned about is the phone calls he made to the consulates, not the personal visits to the consulates.
In June 1963, Oswald applied and received a new passport. His wife Marina was pregnant. She wanted to return to the Soviet Union and spend time with her family while the baby was an infant. Oswald wanted to go with her.
However, the Oswalds had been unable to get the Soviets to issue them a visa for almost a year. Their previous negotiations had all been with the Soviet consulate in Washington, DC. Now Lee was trying his hand in Mexico City. It's hard to believe that he would have gone to the USSR without her. Their second child was due in a few weeks. Lee was a devoted father.
The smart way to get a Cuban visa was to make prior arrangements with the American Communist party or the Cuban Communist party prior to arrival in Mexico City. Oswald had done none of those things, even though he had written a number of letters to various American Communist officials.
Oswald's effort in shuttle diplomacy between the Soviet and Cuban consulates did him no good. All sides pretty much agree that he visited the Cuban consulate three times and the Soviet consulate once on Friday the 27th. He told the Cubans he got the visa OK from the Soviets, and told the Soviets that he already had a Cuban visa. Cuban consulate secretary Sylvia Duran talked to the Soviets, and both sides determined that Oswald was lying.
By the end of the day, Oswald had struck out at both consulates. Oswald made one final pitch to the Soviets at about 10 am on Saturday the 28th, which also ended in failure. [v] The conversations between the Soviet and Cuban consulates about what to do with this unprepared man were all picked up on tape. Mexico City chief Win Scott wanted to know if this man could be identified.
Oswald was identified, and quickly. Shortly after Oswald left the Soviet consulate on Saturday the 28th, a call came in from the Cuban consulate to the Soviet consulate. Goodpasture reported that "Oswald came to the attention of the listening post operators from a tap on the Soviet line".
-
msfreeh
- Level 34 Illuminated
- Posts: 7718
Re: FBI WATCH Making Cruelty visible
see link for full story
http://www.windsorstar.com/entertainmen ... story.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
Did an FBI agent fire the shot that killed JFK? Killing of Kennedy to be re-examined in cable docudrama
Jul 29, 2013
BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. - Weeks before the 50th anniversary of President John F. Kennedy's assassination this fall, ReelzChannel will take another look at the killing in a docudrama that suggests a Secret Service agent fired one of the bullets that felled Kennedy.
"JFK: The Smoking Gun" is based on the work of retired Australian police Detective Colin McLaren, who spent four years combing through evidence from Kennedy's death on Nov. 22, 1963.
The two-hour docudrama airs Nov. 3 in the U.S., Canada and Australia. It suggests that agent George Hickey fired one of the bullets that hit Kennedy. Hickey, who is now dead, was riding in the car behind Kennedy's limo that day.
http://www.windsorstar.com/entertainmen ... story.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
Did an FBI agent fire the shot that killed JFK? Killing of Kennedy to be re-examined in cable docudrama
Jul 29, 2013
BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. - Weeks before the 50th anniversary of President John F. Kennedy's assassination this fall, ReelzChannel will take another look at the killing in a docudrama that suggests a Secret Service agent fired one of the bullets that felled Kennedy.
"JFK: The Smoking Gun" is based on the work of retired Australian police Detective Colin McLaren, who spent four years combing through evidence from Kennedy's death on Nov. 22, 1963.
The two-hour docudrama airs Nov. 3 in the U.S., Canada and Australia. It suggests that agent George Hickey fired one of the bullets that hit Kennedy. Hickey, who is now dead, was riding in the car behind Kennedy's limo that day.
-
msfreeh
- Level 34 Illuminated
- Posts: 7718
Re: FBI WATCH Making Cruelty visible
SEE LINK FOR FULL STORY
http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/ ... story.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
Growing use of FBI screens raises concerns about accuracy, racial bias
July 29 2013
Employers are increasingly turning to the FBI’s criminal databases to screen job applicants, sparking concerns about the accuracy of the agency’s information and the potential for racial discrimination.
Many of the FBI’s records list only arrests and not the outcomes of those cases, such as convictions. Consumer groups say that missing information often results in job applicants who are wrongfully rejected. A lawsuit filed against the Commerce Department by minorities alleges that the use of incomplete databases means that African Americans and Hispanics are denied work in disproportionate numbers.
The FBI’s background checks “might be considered the gold standard, but these records are a mess,” said Madeline Neighly, staff lawyer at the National Employment Law Project.
NELP is slated to release a report Tuesday showing that the FBI processed nearly 17 million employment background checks last year — six times more than it did a decade ago. The advocacy group estimates that as many as 600,000 of those reports contain incomplete or inaccurate information.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/ ... story.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
Growing use of FBI screens raises concerns about accuracy, racial bias
July 29 2013
Employers are increasingly turning to the FBI’s criminal databases to screen job applicants, sparking concerns about the accuracy of the agency’s information and the potential for racial discrimination.
Many of the FBI’s records list only arrests and not the outcomes of those cases, such as convictions. Consumer groups say that missing information often results in job applicants who are wrongfully rejected. A lawsuit filed against the Commerce Department by minorities alleges that the use of incomplete databases means that African Americans and Hispanics are denied work in disproportionate numbers.
The FBI’s background checks “might be considered the gold standard, but these records are a mess,” said Madeline Neighly, staff lawyer at the National Employment Law Project.
NELP is slated to release a report Tuesday showing that the FBI processed nearly 17 million employment background checks last year — six times more than it did a decade ago. The advocacy group estimates that as many as 600,000 of those reports contain incomplete or inaccurate information.
-
msfreeh
- Level 34 Illuminated
- Posts: 7718
Re: FBI WATCH Making Cruelty visible
see link for full story
http://www.patriotledger.com/blogs/mobi ... with-slime" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
Reorting from the Whitey Bulger Trial
August 2, 2013
Not something you'd forget
FBI Agent Todd Richards started off the day by talking of a meeting he had with Kevin Hayes.
The issue boiled down to whether when Mick Murray called Hayes and said to him that "Kevin Weeks wanted to meet him right away," or did he say as Hayes testified, "Kevin Weeks and Whitey wanted to meet him right away."
Don't you think that was an important issue? Does anyone remember why Kevin Hayes was going to the meeting or what happened at the meeting?
The next witness to testify was retired FBI Agent Matthew Cronin. He came in dressed in a suit, dress shirt and tie, as I'd expect an FBI agent would dress when in court. (Same as Richards,)
Cronin was in the C-7 unit that did thefts and stolen property investigations. He'd come from ten years in New York City which is the biggest office in the country. He said as soon as he got here things felt different. In New York everyone minded their own business while in Boston it seemed everyone was minding everyone else's business. He felt uncomfortable with the atmosphere.
His first eye-opening came when he went out to meet with the state and local police which was part of what his job entailed. He found there was a strong sentiment among them that there was a leak in the office and they identified the leak as John Connolly. He said it caused a great uneasiness in the office and he had to operate close to the vest because of the distrust. He said he would not put things in writing because he didn't know what would happen to them.
He talked to his partner Jim Crawford about it and to his supervisor. When asked why when nothing was done he didn't go higher he pointed out that you had to follow the chain of command. He said it just wasn't wise to go outside of it if you were concerned with keeping your job.
This all goes into the ideas I've been writing about for a while as I said in my book Don't Embarrass The Family that the FBI has a lot of good agents but its structure makes them ineffective. It's almost like the leadership doesn't want to know there are any problems so everyone who sees something wrong has to walk around with her mouth shut for to do otherwise will result in some sort of punishment. We see that in the almost three-month investigation of the homicide of a man by an FBI agent in a room in front of other law enforcement officers, an investigation that should have taken three days at the most.
The FBI operates in a world of fright. Everyone is frightened to step out of line. It's quite a tragedy and something that is not good for our country. I see Congressman Keating is looking for answers from the FBI as to what happened at the time of the Marathon Terrorist Attack; he should talk to his fellow Massachusetts Congressman Lynch who has been waiting for two years for an investigation to finish up which is supposed to tell him into why Mark Rossetti a capo in the Mafia was a top echelon informant for the FBI. If our Congressman are afraid of the FBI, and the agents are afraid of the FBI, who is it that wields all this power to bring about this horrid state of affairs.
Cronin gave a slight indication of how things work when he and his partner went to see Jeremiah O'Sullivan about a leak problem. He said the conversation went from him feeling pleasant to angry. Why did he get angry? O'Sullivan threw him out of his office. Makes you feel good about all this stuff going on.
Then he tells how he was the affiant in a wiretap for Heller's Cafe, a successful federal wiretap done on Mike London who had a little gambling going on at his place but his main business was to wash money, he was mentioned as the guy who'd cash checks for the bookies. One witness said how he would have his clients make out the checks to "Ted Williams" or "Yogi Berra" and London would cash them.
Cronin went on to say that he had a three-phase investigation: Heller's, Vinny Ferrara; and Whitey Bulger. He said he did Heller's and after that Morris removed him from the case. The thread of protection of Whitey and distrust of Connolly ran throughout the early part of his testimony.
Later he got into the times, six times he said, when he met Olga Davis, the mother of Deborah Davis.She told them her daughter was missing and expressed her concern that Flemmi had murdered her and also told them she believed Flemmi had murdered her husband. It seemed Cronin and Crawford made an effort to look into the disappearance but did not do any work with respect to Flemmi. Cronin said Flemmi was organized crime and that was the job of another squad.
Of interest Cronin never reduced anything Olga told him to writing. He felt that her safety was at risk and didn't want anyone to know she was talking with him. He wouldn't go so far as to say he thought if it was in writing it'd be leaked out to Flemmi, but it seemed clear that was his fear.
He talked about how he tried to have Olga confront Flemmi on a recorded phone line but she seemed reluctant. He mentioned that there was or had been a wiretap on the Davis home in Randolph around that time. That might have been a wiretap I had done on that house although I did not think the FBI was involved in it.
The pre-morning recess ended with prosecutor Kelly asking Cronin the following question: "If someone does a lousy job investigating a case that doesn't give someone the right to murder someone, does it?"
That question shows the level this case has descended to.
http://www.patriotledger.com/blogs/mobi ... with-slime" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
Reorting from the Whitey Bulger Trial
August 2, 2013
Not something you'd forget
FBI Agent Todd Richards started off the day by talking of a meeting he had with Kevin Hayes.
The issue boiled down to whether when Mick Murray called Hayes and said to him that "Kevin Weeks wanted to meet him right away," or did he say as Hayes testified, "Kevin Weeks and Whitey wanted to meet him right away."
Don't you think that was an important issue? Does anyone remember why Kevin Hayes was going to the meeting or what happened at the meeting?
The next witness to testify was retired FBI Agent Matthew Cronin. He came in dressed in a suit, dress shirt and tie, as I'd expect an FBI agent would dress when in court. (Same as Richards,)
Cronin was in the C-7 unit that did thefts and stolen property investigations. He'd come from ten years in New York City which is the biggest office in the country. He said as soon as he got here things felt different. In New York everyone minded their own business while in Boston it seemed everyone was minding everyone else's business. He felt uncomfortable with the atmosphere.
His first eye-opening came when he went out to meet with the state and local police which was part of what his job entailed. He found there was a strong sentiment among them that there was a leak in the office and they identified the leak as John Connolly. He said it caused a great uneasiness in the office and he had to operate close to the vest because of the distrust. He said he would not put things in writing because he didn't know what would happen to them.
He talked to his partner Jim Crawford about it and to his supervisor. When asked why when nothing was done he didn't go higher he pointed out that you had to follow the chain of command. He said it just wasn't wise to go outside of it if you were concerned with keeping your job.
This all goes into the ideas I've been writing about for a while as I said in my book Don't Embarrass The Family that the FBI has a lot of good agents but its structure makes them ineffective. It's almost like the leadership doesn't want to know there are any problems so everyone who sees something wrong has to walk around with her mouth shut for to do otherwise will result in some sort of punishment. We see that in the almost three-month investigation of the homicide of a man by an FBI agent in a room in front of other law enforcement officers, an investigation that should have taken three days at the most.
The FBI operates in a world of fright. Everyone is frightened to step out of line. It's quite a tragedy and something that is not good for our country. I see Congressman Keating is looking for answers from the FBI as to what happened at the time of the Marathon Terrorist Attack; he should talk to his fellow Massachusetts Congressman Lynch who has been waiting for two years for an investigation to finish up which is supposed to tell him into why Mark Rossetti a capo in the Mafia was a top echelon informant for the FBI. If our Congressman are afraid of the FBI, and the agents are afraid of the FBI, who is it that wields all this power to bring about this horrid state of affairs.
Cronin gave a slight indication of how things work when he and his partner went to see Jeremiah O'Sullivan about a leak problem. He said the conversation went from him feeling pleasant to angry. Why did he get angry? O'Sullivan threw him out of his office. Makes you feel good about all this stuff going on.
Then he tells how he was the affiant in a wiretap for Heller's Cafe, a successful federal wiretap done on Mike London who had a little gambling going on at his place but his main business was to wash money, he was mentioned as the guy who'd cash checks for the bookies. One witness said how he would have his clients make out the checks to "Ted Williams" or "Yogi Berra" and London would cash them.
Cronin went on to say that he had a three-phase investigation: Heller's, Vinny Ferrara; and Whitey Bulger. He said he did Heller's and after that Morris removed him from the case. The thread of protection of Whitey and distrust of Connolly ran throughout the early part of his testimony.
Later he got into the times, six times he said, when he met Olga Davis, the mother of Deborah Davis.She told them her daughter was missing and expressed her concern that Flemmi had murdered her and also told them she believed Flemmi had murdered her husband. It seemed Cronin and Crawford made an effort to look into the disappearance but did not do any work with respect to Flemmi. Cronin said Flemmi was organized crime and that was the job of another squad.
Of interest Cronin never reduced anything Olga told him to writing. He felt that her safety was at risk and didn't want anyone to know she was talking with him. He wouldn't go so far as to say he thought if it was in writing it'd be leaked out to Flemmi, but it seemed clear that was his fear.
He talked about how he tried to have Olga confront Flemmi on a recorded phone line but she seemed reluctant. He mentioned that there was or had been a wiretap on the Davis home in Randolph around that time. That might have been a wiretap I had done on that house although I did not think the FBI was involved in it.
The pre-morning recess ended with prosecutor Kelly asking Cronin the following question: "If someone does a lousy job investigating a case that doesn't give someone the right to murder someone, does it?"
That question shows the level this case has descended to.
-
msfreeh
- Level 34 Illuminated
- Posts: 7718
Re: FBI WATCH Making Cruelty visible
see link for full story
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/03/nyreg ... .html?_r=0" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
F.B.I. Agent Is Charged In Plot to Sell Documents
August 2, 2013
The former agent, Robert Lustyik, was with the Federal Bureau of Investigation in late 2011 when he began plotting with a friend, Johannes Thaler, according to a criminal complaint unsealed on Friday in Federal District Court in White Plains, N.Y.
“I will work my magic .... We r sooooooo close,” Agent Lustyik wrote in an exchange of text messages with Mr. Thaler, the complaint said.
“I know,” Mr. Thaler replied. “It’s all right here in front of us. Pretty soon we’ll be having lunch in our oceanfront restaurant.”
The Bangladeshi who had sought the materials, Rizve Ahmed, paid a total of $1,000 to Mr. Lustyik and Mr. Thaler for two F.B.I. documents concerning Mr. Ahmed’s political rival, the complaint said. One was a suspicious activity report; the other was a memo about the man that mentioned $300 million, the complaint said without elaboration. The men planned to seek tens of thousands of dollars in additional bribes for other confidential information, the complaint said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/03/nyreg ... .html?_r=0" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
F.B.I. Agent Is Charged In Plot to Sell Documents
August 2, 2013
The former agent, Robert Lustyik, was with the Federal Bureau of Investigation in late 2011 when he began plotting with a friend, Johannes Thaler, according to a criminal complaint unsealed on Friday in Federal District Court in White Plains, N.Y.
“I will work my magic .... We r sooooooo close,” Agent Lustyik wrote in an exchange of text messages with Mr. Thaler, the complaint said.
“I know,” Mr. Thaler replied. “It’s all right here in front of us. Pretty soon we’ll be having lunch in our oceanfront restaurant.”
The Bangladeshi who had sought the materials, Rizve Ahmed, paid a total of $1,000 to Mr. Lustyik and Mr. Thaler for two F.B.I. documents concerning Mr. Ahmed’s political rival, the complaint said. One was a suspicious activity report; the other was a memo about the man that mentioned $300 million, the complaint said without elaboration. The men planned to seek tens of thousands of dollars in additional bribes for other confidential information, the complaint said.
-
msfreeh
- Level 34 Illuminated
- Posts: 7718
Re: FBI WATCH Making Cruelty visible
TWO STORIES
see link for full story
http://antiwar.com/blog/2013/08/05/is-t ... anization/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
Is the FBI a Criminal Organization?
John Glaser, August 05, 2013
Last week, in a piece I wrote for The Huffington Post on the hypocrisy in the Bradley Manning trial, I argued that “The law is for the powerful to defy with impunity, and for the weak to be punished with.” As evidence, I mentioned several high crimes committed by the Bush and Obama administration, crimes for which they will never be prosecuted.
And then in yesterday’s USA Today I saw this remarkable article reporting that government documents show that the FBI committed 5,658 crimes in 2011 alone. That amounts to 15 crimes a day, on average, that FBI agents explicitly authorized. And far from being part of a rogue, covert program kept hidden from a judge, this is standard operating procedure on which the Department of Justice provides oversight.
The FBI gave its informants permission to break the law at least 5,658 times in a single year, according to newly disclosed documents that show just how often the nation’s top law enforcement agency enlists criminals to help it battle crime.
The U.S. Justice Department ordered the FBI to begin tracking crimes by its informants more than a decade ago, after the agency admitted that its agents had allowed Boston mobster James “Whitey” Bulger to operate a brutal crime ring in exchange for information about the Mafia. The FBI submits that tally to top Justice Department officials each year, but has never before made it public.
Agents authorized 15 crimes a day, on average, including everything from buying and selling illegal drugs to bribing government officials and plotting robberies. FBI officials have said in the past that permitting their informants — who are often criminals themselves — to break the law is an indispensable, if sometimes distasteful, part of investigating criminal organizations.
Let that last sentence sink in for a moment. The government must break the law in order to catch and punish lawbreakers. Does that not offend even the most superficial understanding of the rule of law this country was supposedly founded upon?
According to the USA Today report, this number of 5,658 crimes in one year barely scratches the surface:
USA TODAY obtained a copy of the FBI’s 2011 report under the Freedom of Information Act. The report does not spell out what types of crimes its agents authorized, or how serious they were. It also did not include any information about crimes the bureau’s sources were known to have committed without the government’s permission.
Crimes authorized by the FBI almost certainly make up a tiny fraction of the total number of offenses committed by informants for local, state and federal agencies each year. The FBI was responsible for only about 10% of the criminal cases prosecuted in federal court in 2011, and federal prosecutions are, in turn, vastly outnumbered by criminal cases filed by state and local authorities, who often rely on their own networks of sources.
“The million-dollar question is: How much crime is the government tolerating from its informants?” said Alexandra Natapoff, a professor at Loyola Law School Los Angeles who has studied such issues. “I’m sure that if we really knew that number, we would all be shocked.”
If you read Trevor Aaronson’s meticulously reported book The Terror Factory: Inside the FBI’s Manufactured War on Terrorism, you’ll get a glimpse into how the thuggery at the FBI works in the war on terror. Aaronson thoroughly documents all those “terror plots” that the FBI has “foiled.” By and large, the FBI uses untrustworthy delinquents as informants in order to entrap unsuspecting halfwits that never would have been able to carry out a terror attack without FBI encouragement and facilitation.
Far be it from me to prejudge, but Antiwar.com has been requesting FBI documents on this website through the Freedom of Information Act since 2011, to no avail. Thankfully, the ACLU is suing on our behalf. Requesting surveillance of this website and its founders, as the FBI did, and suspecting we may be an agent of a foreign power – all for exercising our First Amendment rights- seems like it fits perfectly within the Bureau’s modus operandi.
see link for full story
http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/08/ ... _ever.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
August 05, 2013
The Best Mob Story Ever
By Jack Cashill
The best mob story ever told does not involve Al Capone or Bugsy Segal or John Gotti. It involves a mobster few American have ever heard of, Greg Scarpa by name, and his not quite as lethal son, Greg Scarpa Jr., "Junior" going forward.
One reason few people ever heard of Scarpa is that until his arrest in September 1992, he worked as a "Top Echelon Confidential Informant" under the protection of the FBI for the most of the thirty years prior. During that time, Scarpa murdered at least fifty people. Understandably, this is not a story not that the FBI wants told, but author Peter Lance has told it anyhow in his stunningly comprehensive new book, Deal With The Devil.
I have taken a particular interest in this story over the years because of the light it shines, improbably enough, on the destruction of TWA Flight 800 off the coast of Long Island in 1996, a subject about which I co-authored the 2003 book First Strike. More on this angle later.
The FBI protected Scarpa, a capo in the Colombo family, because he provided intelligence on New York's five notorious La Cosa Nostra (LCN) families. Some of the intelligence was accurate. All of it was self-serving. As needed, Scarpa provided other services as well. In 1964, the FBI, under enormous pressure to solve the "MissBurn" case, sent Scarpa to the small Mississippi town of Philadelphia. His job was to interrogate one of the locals who knew what happened to three civil rights workers who had gone missing. The fellow would not talk to the FBI. Armed with a straight razor, Scarpa proved much more persuasive. FBI agents soon found the bodies, as the man told Scarpa they would, buried under an earthen dam. Although this part of the saga did not make the movie, Mississippi Burning, Lance makes a compelling case for its legitimacy. Nor was this the only time the FBI sent Scarpa to Mississippi.
In return for his services, the FBI kept Scarpa out of prison. At the heart of Lance's book is the contention that the FBI, in the person of agent Lin DeVecchio, did much more, none of it justifiable. Lance argues that DeVecchio lost his moral balance and, at the very least, provided Scarpa with the kind of FBI intelligence that allowed Scarpa to target his enemies.
What has intrigued me most is the activity of New York City's FBI office in the summer of 1996, the year TWA 800 was destroyed. In April of that year, the office's assistant director, Jim Kallstrom, sent a memo to the head of the FBI, Louis Freeh, warning that the continued internal FBI investigation of DeVecchio would "have a serious negative impact on the government's prosecution of various LCN figures."
In July 1996, the case was still dragging on when Freeh assigned Kallstrom to head up the TWA Flight 800 investigation. For the first five weeks Kallstrom did a credible job before buckling under White House pressure on or about August 22. I have always wondered what combination of carrots and sticks the White House used to misdirect the investigation away from the obvious missile strike to a fully contrived mechanical failure.
Without making the connection directly, Lance suggests a possible carrot. In early September 1996, the Justice Department abruptly closed its thirty-one month long investigation and informed DeVecchio that a prosecution was "not warranted." By mid-September 1996, Kallstrom had ended all talk of a bomb or missile and pushed through the administration's "mechanical failure" narrative. Kallstrom would remain DeVecchio's most prominent champion even during his criminal trial on the same charges.
As an FBI informant, Junior picked up where Scarpa senior left off. Awaiting trial in 1996 in New York's Metropolitan Correctional Center (MCC) on racketeering charges, Junior turned down a 17-year plea offer in the hope that he could finesse information out of a few of his fellow prisoners and trade it for a reduced sentence.
Incredibly, those prisoners included Ramzi Yousef, Abdul Hakim Murad, and Wali Khan Amin Shah Shah, all awaiting trial on what is known as the Bojinka plot, and Eyad Ismail, who was awaiting trial for the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center along with Yousef. In January 1995, Yousef's Manila apartment had caught fire just weeks before he and his co-conspirators were to unleash Bojinka, the plot to blow up a dozen American airliners over the Pacific. He was apprehended a month later.
On March 7, 1996, Junior initiated a meeting with assistant U.S. Attorneys Valerie Caproni and Patrick Fitzgerald and his own attorney, Larry Silverman, to formalize the arrangement. For more than a year, Junior worked these guys for intelligence and passed it along to the FBI. The investigators who first unearthed the FBI documentation, the late Stephen Dresch and Angela Clemente, have rightly called Scarpa's information "the single most significant Al-Qaeda intelligence in U.S. History, prior to 9-11."
"Yousef wants to blow things up but he does not say why," Junior would tell his handlers. Yousef was fully capable of such mischief. In 1994, he had planted a bomb on a Philippine Airlines 747 as something of a test and killed the Japanese national who was sitting above it.
In May 1996, Junior reported that "during the trial [Yousef et al.] had a plan to blow a plane up to show they are serious." As July 17 approached, according to Junior, Yousef was warning friends not to fly on TWA or American Airlines on the morning of July 18. On the night of July 17, after the explosion, Yousef kept pressing to use Junior's cell phone, which he allegedly did not know was part of an FBI sting. Yousef called 9-11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed that night, saying, "What had to be done has been done, TWA 800" (last two words unintelligible).
A week after the blast, Junior reported, "Murad feels that they may get a mistrial from the publicity surrounding the TWA explosion." By this time, Yousef had already appealed for one and been turned down. It is altogether possible, indeed likely, that Yousef had nothing to do with the destruction of TWA Flight 800. An opportunist to the core, he was willing to take credit nonetheless. Given his track record, however, the authorities had to have taken him seriously.
On July 24, the FBI reported, "Scarpa advised that Yousef has been avoiding any conversation pertaining to the explosion." Within days of the TWA 800 crash, the same U.S. attorney who was managing the Scarpa sting, Valerie Caproni, illegally took the crash investigation away from the National Transportation Safety Board and gave it to the FBI.
For the next five weeks, the FBI led the media to believe a bomb had destroyed TWA Flight 800. This culminated in the August 23 New York Times headline, "Prime Evidence Found That Device Exploded in Cabin of Flight 800." Given the intelligence Caproni had gotten from Scarpa, she would have had to suspect that Yousef's people were responsible for the presumed bombing.
And yet there is no evidence in the available FBI documents to suggest that any pressure was brought to bear on either Yousef or Junior to cough up information. There are several possible reasons why. The most obvious is that from day one the White House knew that a missile, not a bomb, had taken down the airplane. The leaking of "bomb" evidence was a conscious misdirection.
The less obvious reason is that Caproni and the FBI had come to see Junior as a liability. If they publicly gave him credit for his intelligence work, it would be hard to deny his corroboration of the charge that his father had a lethally corrupt relationship with DeVecchio.
Some seventy-five trials of New York-area mob figures hinged on DeVecchio's integrity. If that were impeached, there would be chaos in the courts. This is the story that Lance tells. Junior received no credit for his intelligence work. At the end of the day, the authorities called it a "hoax and scam," despite the fact that in February 1997 Junior passed along Yousef's comment that Islamic terrorists "will like hijacking airplanes so much that they will become addicted to them."
see link for full story
http://antiwar.com/blog/2013/08/05/is-t ... anization/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
Is the FBI a Criminal Organization?
John Glaser, August 05, 2013
Last week, in a piece I wrote for The Huffington Post on the hypocrisy in the Bradley Manning trial, I argued that “The law is for the powerful to defy with impunity, and for the weak to be punished with.” As evidence, I mentioned several high crimes committed by the Bush and Obama administration, crimes for which they will never be prosecuted.
And then in yesterday’s USA Today I saw this remarkable article reporting that government documents show that the FBI committed 5,658 crimes in 2011 alone. That amounts to 15 crimes a day, on average, that FBI agents explicitly authorized. And far from being part of a rogue, covert program kept hidden from a judge, this is standard operating procedure on which the Department of Justice provides oversight.
The FBI gave its informants permission to break the law at least 5,658 times in a single year, according to newly disclosed documents that show just how often the nation’s top law enforcement agency enlists criminals to help it battle crime.
The U.S. Justice Department ordered the FBI to begin tracking crimes by its informants more than a decade ago, after the agency admitted that its agents had allowed Boston mobster James “Whitey” Bulger to operate a brutal crime ring in exchange for information about the Mafia. The FBI submits that tally to top Justice Department officials each year, but has never before made it public.
Agents authorized 15 crimes a day, on average, including everything from buying and selling illegal drugs to bribing government officials and plotting robberies. FBI officials have said in the past that permitting their informants — who are often criminals themselves — to break the law is an indispensable, if sometimes distasteful, part of investigating criminal organizations.
Let that last sentence sink in for a moment. The government must break the law in order to catch and punish lawbreakers. Does that not offend even the most superficial understanding of the rule of law this country was supposedly founded upon?
According to the USA Today report, this number of 5,658 crimes in one year barely scratches the surface:
USA TODAY obtained a copy of the FBI’s 2011 report under the Freedom of Information Act. The report does not spell out what types of crimes its agents authorized, or how serious they were. It also did not include any information about crimes the bureau’s sources were known to have committed without the government’s permission.
Crimes authorized by the FBI almost certainly make up a tiny fraction of the total number of offenses committed by informants for local, state and federal agencies each year. The FBI was responsible for only about 10% of the criminal cases prosecuted in federal court in 2011, and federal prosecutions are, in turn, vastly outnumbered by criminal cases filed by state and local authorities, who often rely on their own networks of sources.
“The million-dollar question is: How much crime is the government tolerating from its informants?” said Alexandra Natapoff, a professor at Loyola Law School Los Angeles who has studied such issues. “I’m sure that if we really knew that number, we would all be shocked.”
If you read Trevor Aaronson’s meticulously reported book The Terror Factory: Inside the FBI’s Manufactured War on Terrorism, you’ll get a glimpse into how the thuggery at the FBI works in the war on terror. Aaronson thoroughly documents all those “terror plots” that the FBI has “foiled.” By and large, the FBI uses untrustworthy delinquents as informants in order to entrap unsuspecting halfwits that never would have been able to carry out a terror attack without FBI encouragement and facilitation.
Far be it from me to prejudge, but Antiwar.com has been requesting FBI documents on this website through the Freedom of Information Act since 2011, to no avail. Thankfully, the ACLU is suing on our behalf. Requesting surveillance of this website and its founders, as the FBI did, and suspecting we may be an agent of a foreign power – all for exercising our First Amendment rights- seems like it fits perfectly within the Bureau’s modus operandi.
see link for full story
http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/08/ ... _ever.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
August 05, 2013
The Best Mob Story Ever
By Jack Cashill
The best mob story ever told does not involve Al Capone or Bugsy Segal or John Gotti. It involves a mobster few American have ever heard of, Greg Scarpa by name, and his not quite as lethal son, Greg Scarpa Jr., "Junior" going forward.
One reason few people ever heard of Scarpa is that until his arrest in September 1992, he worked as a "Top Echelon Confidential Informant" under the protection of the FBI for the most of the thirty years prior. During that time, Scarpa murdered at least fifty people. Understandably, this is not a story not that the FBI wants told, but author Peter Lance has told it anyhow in his stunningly comprehensive new book, Deal With The Devil.
I have taken a particular interest in this story over the years because of the light it shines, improbably enough, on the destruction of TWA Flight 800 off the coast of Long Island in 1996, a subject about which I co-authored the 2003 book First Strike. More on this angle later.
The FBI protected Scarpa, a capo in the Colombo family, because he provided intelligence on New York's five notorious La Cosa Nostra (LCN) families. Some of the intelligence was accurate. All of it was self-serving. As needed, Scarpa provided other services as well. In 1964, the FBI, under enormous pressure to solve the "MissBurn" case, sent Scarpa to the small Mississippi town of Philadelphia. His job was to interrogate one of the locals who knew what happened to three civil rights workers who had gone missing. The fellow would not talk to the FBI. Armed with a straight razor, Scarpa proved much more persuasive. FBI agents soon found the bodies, as the man told Scarpa they would, buried under an earthen dam. Although this part of the saga did not make the movie, Mississippi Burning, Lance makes a compelling case for its legitimacy. Nor was this the only time the FBI sent Scarpa to Mississippi.
In return for his services, the FBI kept Scarpa out of prison. At the heart of Lance's book is the contention that the FBI, in the person of agent Lin DeVecchio, did much more, none of it justifiable. Lance argues that DeVecchio lost his moral balance and, at the very least, provided Scarpa with the kind of FBI intelligence that allowed Scarpa to target his enemies.
What has intrigued me most is the activity of New York City's FBI office in the summer of 1996, the year TWA 800 was destroyed. In April of that year, the office's assistant director, Jim Kallstrom, sent a memo to the head of the FBI, Louis Freeh, warning that the continued internal FBI investigation of DeVecchio would "have a serious negative impact on the government's prosecution of various LCN figures."
In July 1996, the case was still dragging on when Freeh assigned Kallstrom to head up the TWA Flight 800 investigation. For the first five weeks Kallstrom did a credible job before buckling under White House pressure on or about August 22. I have always wondered what combination of carrots and sticks the White House used to misdirect the investigation away from the obvious missile strike to a fully contrived mechanical failure.
Without making the connection directly, Lance suggests a possible carrot. In early September 1996, the Justice Department abruptly closed its thirty-one month long investigation and informed DeVecchio that a prosecution was "not warranted." By mid-September 1996, Kallstrom had ended all talk of a bomb or missile and pushed through the administration's "mechanical failure" narrative. Kallstrom would remain DeVecchio's most prominent champion even during his criminal trial on the same charges.
As an FBI informant, Junior picked up where Scarpa senior left off. Awaiting trial in 1996 in New York's Metropolitan Correctional Center (MCC) on racketeering charges, Junior turned down a 17-year plea offer in the hope that he could finesse information out of a few of his fellow prisoners and trade it for a reduced sentence.
Incredibly, those prisoners included Ramzi Yousef, Abdul Hakim Murad, and Wali Khan Amin Shah Shah, all awaiting trial on what is known as the Bojinka plot, and Eyad Ismail, who was awaiting trial for the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center along with Yousef. In January 1995, Yousef's Manila apartment had caught fire just weeks before he and his co-conspirators were to unleash Bojinka, the plot to blow up a dozen American airliners over the Pacific. He was apprehended a month later.
On March 7, 1996, Junior initiated a meeting with assistant U.S. Attorneys Valerie Caproni and Patrick Fitzgerald and his own attorney, Larry Silverman, to formalize the arrangement. For more than a year, Junior worked these guys for intelligence and passed it along to the FBI. The investigators who first unearthed the FBI documentation, the late Stephen Dresch and Angela Clemente, have rightly called Scarpa's information "the single most significant Al-Qaeda intelligence in U.S. History, prior to 9-11."
"Yousef wants to blow things up but he does not say why," Junior would tell his handlers. Yousef was fully capable of such mischief. In 1994, he had planted a bomb on a Philippine Airlines 747 as something of a test and killed the Japanese national who was sitting above it.
In May 1996, Junior reported that "during the trial [Yousef et al.] had a plan to blow a plane up to show they are serious." As July 17 approached, according to Junior, Yousef was warning friends not to fly on TWA or American Airlines on the morning of July 18. On the night of July 17, after the explosion, Yousef kept pressing to use Junior's cell phone, which he allegedly did not know was part of an FBI sting. Yousef called 9-11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed that night, saying, "What had to be done has been done, TWA 800" (last two words unintelligible).
A week after the blast, Junior reported, "Murad feels that they may get a mistrial from the publicity surrounding the TWA explosion." By this time, Yousef had already appealed for one and been turned down. It is altogether possible, indeed likely, that Yousef had nothing to do with the destruction of TWA Flight 800. An opportunist to the core, he was willing to take credit nonetheless. Given his track record, however, the authorities had to have taken him seriously.
On July 24, the FBI reported, "Scarpa advised that Yousef has been avoiding any conversation pertaining to the explosion." Within days of the TWA 800 crash, the same U.S. attorney who was managing the Scarpa sting, Valerie Caproni, illegally took the crash investigation away from the National Transportation Safety Board and gave it to the FBI.
For the next five weeks, the FBI led the media to believe a bomb had destroyed TWA Flight 800. This culminated in the August 23 New York Times headline, "Prime Evidence Found That Device Exploded in Cabin of Flight 800." Given the intelligence Caproni had gotten from Scarpa, she would have had to suspect that Yousef's people were responsible for the presumed bombing.
And yet there is no evidence in the available FBI documents to suggest that any pressure was brought to bear on either Yousef or Junior to cough up information. There are several possible reasons why. The most obvious is that from day one the White House knew that a missile, not a bomb, had taken down the airplane. The leaking of "bomb" evidence was a conscious misdirection.
The less obvious reason is that Caproni and the FBI had come to see Junior as a liability. If they publicly gave him credit for his intelligence work, it would be hard to deny his corroboration of the charge that his father had a lethally corrupt relationship with DeVecchio.
Some seventy-five trials of New York-area mob figures hinged on DeVecchio's integrity. If that were impeached, there would be chaos in the courts. This is the story that Lance tells. Junior received no credit for his intelligence work. At the end of the day, the authorities called it a "hoax and scam," despite the fact that in February 1997 Junior passed along Yousef's comment that Islamic terrorists "will like hijacking airplanes so much that they will become addicted to them."
-
msfreeh
- Level 34 Illuminated
- Posts: 7718
Re: FBI WATCH Making Cruelty visible
see link for full story
http://www.zdnet.com/a-def-con-postscri ... 000019180/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
A DEF CON postscript: Said the FBI agent to the taxi driver
Summary: While attending America's high-profile hacking and security conferences, Black Hat and DEF CON, a Vegas taxi driver tells Violet Blue his FBI fares want to blind hackers to "teach them a lesson."
Violet Blue
August 9, 2013
Suit and tie corporate security conference Black Hat blends into the t-shirts and tactical pants hackers of DEF CON with a lot of overlap. It's common for hackers to attend both Las Vegas conferences, though at Black Hat USA, they're called security researchers.
The conferences now occur back-to-back; Black Hat ends and DEF CON begins the next day. This year DEF CON was twice the size of Black Hat; an estimated 15,000 attendees to Black Hat's 7,000.
021
It was my first time attending Black Hat, but not my first DEF CON. Black Hat is at the opulent, yet strangely cheesy, Ceasers Palace and heavily moneyed, with nary a visible tattoo in sight. DEF CON is at the seen-better-Vegas-times Rio and is a kaleidoscope of piercings and dyed hair.
Two days into DEF CON, there had been no noise in response to the pre-conference announcement that Feds were not welcome this year. In opposition, Black Hat had rolled out the red carpet for NSA Director General Alexander, and it was widely accepted as a matter of logic that there were undercover agents everywhere.
http://www.zdnet.com/a-def-con-postscri ... 000019180/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
A DEF CON postscript: Said the FBI agent to the taxi driver
Summary: While attending America's high-profile hacking and security conferences, Black Hat and DEF CON, a Vegas taxi driver tells Violet Blue his FBI fares want to blind hackers to "teach them a lesson."
Violet Blue
August 9, 2013
Suit and tie corporate security conference Black Hat blends into the t-shirts and tactical pants hackers of DEF CON with a lot of overlap. It's common for hackers to attend both Las Vegas conferences, though at Black Hat USA, they're called security researchers.
The conferences now occur back-to-back; Black Hat ends and DEF CON begins the next day. This year DEF CON was twice the size of Black Hat; an estimated 15,000 attendees to Black Hat's 7,000.
021
It was my first time attending Black Hat, but not my first DEF CON. Black Hat is at the opulent, yet strangely cheesy, Ceasers Palace and heavily moneyed, with nary a visible tattoo in sight. DEF CON is at the seen-better-Vegas-times Rio and is a kaleidoscope of piercings and dyed hair.
Two days into DEF CON, there had been no noise in response to the pre-conference announcement that Feds were not welcome this year. In opposition, Black Hat had rolled out the red carpet for NSA Director General Alexander, and it was widely accepted as a matter of logic that there were undercover agents everywhere.
-
msfreeh
- Level 34 Illuminated
- Posts: 7718
Re: FBI WATCH Making Cruelty visible
caution this site has no way to contact them
http://thefbifiles.com/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
http://thefbifiles.com/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
-
msfreeh
- Level 34 Illuminated
- Posts: 7718
Re: FBI WATCH Making Cruelty visible
SEE LINK FOR FULL STORY
http://jfkcountercoup.blogspot.com/2013 ... topsy.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
JFKcountercoup
Monday, August 12, 2013
Case for a New Autopsy
A CASE FOR A NEW AUTOPSY
By William Kelly
The victim was murdered, gunned down on the street in broad daylight in front of hundreds of witnesses.
The cause of death - a bullet to the head, was determined by an autopsy. But after that fact was clearly established, there is complete legal confusion - as the body was improperly removed from the state where the murder occurred before there was a proper forensic autopsy, as required by law. Rather than a proper forensic autopsy – which creates certified evidence that can be used in a court of law, a less thorough regular autopsy was performed, the purpose of which was to determine the cause of death - gunshot to the head.
But there were three different autopsy reports prepared, the doctors who conducted the autopsy did not talk about the wounds with the emergency room doctors who treated them, and there were two brain exams, one of a brain that was not that of the victim.
The photos, x-rays and reports of the autopsy could not be introduced as evidence in a court of law because the technicians who took the photos and x-rays could not identify them as the ones they created, so the provenance - the chain of evidence from the scene of the crime to the grave, is broken and lost, much like our history.
If the victim was an unknown bum found dead in a street gutter and his death was considered suspicious, his remains would be routinely exhumed and given a proper forensic autopsy - one that would produce photos, x-rays and reports that could be introduced as evidence in a court of law.
But justice has been thwarted in this case because the victim was the President of the United States named John F. Kennedy, and political forces have intervened to prevent a proper legal resolution of the case and keep the truth from being known.
The details of the original, botched autopsy are well known. When the doctors in the emergency room at Parkland Hospital in Dallas viewed the wounds within minutes after they were inflicted, they only examined the throat and head wounds. The throat wound they assumed, because of its small size, to be one of entrance, and it was enlarged to insert breathing tubes.
The head wound, as all the Parkland doctors agreed, was a large, grapefruit sized whole in the back of the head, indicating an exit wound, and a flap of bone and flesh on the side of the head above the ear exposed the brain. The large, gaping hole in the back of the President’s head was also confirmed by Secret Service agent Clint Hill, who twice viewed it and confirmed its existence.
Because the President was lying on his back on the hospital gurney,and the nature of the head wounds precluded his survival, the Parkland doctors didn’t turn him over and didn't know there was also an entrance wound in the back, about six inches below the neck.
They did however, find a nearly pristine bullet on a gurney that may have been used by to wheel the President or Texas Governor John Connally into the emergency room.
The autopsy doctors, when they discovered the entrance wound in the back, found that the bullet only penetrated a few inches, less than a finger, and the bullet probably fell out and was the one discovered on the gurney at Parkland. A four star military general ordered the doctors not to track the full extent of the back wound.
The next day the autopsy doctors were surprised to learn that the Parkland emergency doctors had enlarged an already existing throat wound – which they believed to be an entrance wound, so it was realized that, even though their conclusion as to the cause of death - gunshot to the head, was correct, the rest of their report was invalid as more information became available from witnesses at Parkland.
Eventually the official report on the assassination concluded that the back wound was not a superficial, two inch deep wound, but did in fact transit the victim and exited his throat, and then inflicted all of the wounds on Governor Connally in the jump seat in front of the President, creating the “Single Bullet Theory,” which is required if all of the wounds were by one gunman shooting from behind.
When the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) investigated the murder in the late 1970s and the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) in the 1990s questioned the doctors, photographers and x-ray technicians, they testified that could not recognize their work, sometimes explaining that the photos in evidence could not have been the ones they took because they were of a different type of film and not from the angles of the photos they took.
In retrospect, everyone with any knowledge of the Bethesda Naval Hospital autopsy agrees that it was a medical and legal abortion, and all of the autopsy reports, exams, x-rays and photos have lost their chain of possession and the provenance necessary for them to be introduced into evidence in a court of law.
Because the cause of death was a “gunshot to the head,” and therefore a murder, this case certainly meets the “suspicious death” threshold necessary for the law to require a new, proper forensic autopsy, one that would answer all outstanding questions and recreate the lost provenance of the chain of evidence in the case.
But since the victim is not an ordinary American citizen, but the President of the United States, the laws, rules and standards are considered different - and rather than give the President the best and most thorough autopsy he deserves, observance of the law is relegated to the feelings of the Kennedy family.
In a press release for the NOVA TV science program Cold Case JFK it is noted that, “Renowned JFK assassination expert and professor John McAdamas weighs in on the findings of the Warren Commission , the deficiencies of the medical and autopsy evidence, and the lack of understanding on the part of the Kennedy camp on the need for a forensic autopsy at the time..”
Indeed, a forensic autopsy is what is needed, and it is one that can and should be done today, in honor of the president on the fiftieth anniversary of his murder.
Society gives the family primary control over the body of the deceased, yet in many cases a coroner, district attorney or grand jury has the power to order the exhumation of a body for a forensic autopsy, especially in the case of a suspicious death or homicide.
In an academic presentation on the subject of a new autopsy at a 2003 Conference, the topic should have been presented in an objective, unbiased fashion, but instead, an emotional appeal was made to respect the Kennedy family, to honor the revered dead and let them rest in peace.
Well, the revered dead are turning over in their graves and will never rest in peace, and neither will we, until the total truth is determined, including the answers to the many questions concerning the medical evidence and botched autopsy of the President.
The first objection to a proper forensic autopsy is the feelings of the Kennedy family, and like the decision of the Connally family at the death of John Connally, not to permit an autopsy, it has always been assumed that the Kennedy family would also oppose a new, proper forensic autopsy.
John Connally and his wife were sitting just in front of President Kennedy and he was wounded in the same barrage of bullets. They never believed the “single bullet theory,” and it has been suggested that there is more lead in Connally's wrist than is missing from the so-called “magic bullet.”
When Connally died the Justice Department requested the bullet fragments be removed, but the request was denied by the Connally family.
When the Department of Justice agreed to request of John T. Orr, Jr. one of the most respected federal attorneys, to subject bullet fragments CE567 to further tests, they also noted in a memo for the record that: “...It is our view that the Department (of Justice) has retained investigative jurisdiction over the assassination, though such investigation is restricted to activities which are not based upon the expectation of an eventual federal prosecution. Thus, the examination of evidence in federal possession is seemingly appropriate, (while) obtaining evidence by grand jury subpoena would like be inappropriate. This position was adopted by the Division and endorsed b the Office of the Deputy Attorney General when we declined to seek a court order for exhumation of former Governor Connally’s body following allegations that bullet fragments remaining in his body from the incident would reveal, by weight or composition, the existence of additional bullets.” [For more on CE567 see: http://jfkcountercoup2.blogspot.com/201 ... found.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;]
Though no one has actually asked them, like the Connallys, it has always been assumed that the Kennedys will deny such a request as well.
That may have been the case with the previous generation who witnessed the public exhumation and butchering of the body of Lee Harvey Oswald, which was done to positively establish his identity.
But today a proper forensic autopsy can be conducted with dignity, it can answer many of the outstanding questions, legally reestablish the provenance of the medical evidence in the case and reconnect the truth to history.
Bill Kelly
William E. Kelly, Jr. was born in 1951, the son of a Camden, New Jersey, policeman. He majored in history at the University of Dayton, Ohio, School of Education, where he did his thesis on the Bay of Pigs. After graduation he taught history and became a freelance journalist and author of regional history books "300 Years at the Point" and "Birth of the Birdie," a history of golf. He is writing a follow up book on golf, "Flight of the Eagle - The Growth of Golf in America," and a history of rock & roll at the Jersey Shore. Kelly formed the Committee for an Open Archives (COA) with his college associate John Judge, lobbying extensively for the JFK Assassination Records Act, which was passed in 1992. With others, he was an original founder of the Coaliton on Political Assassinations (COPA). With Judge, he also assisted the 9/11 Citizen's Watch, which monitored the work of the 9/11 Commission. Kelly is currently attempting to petition federal prosecutors to convein a special federal grand jury to review the evidence and get Congress to Oversee the JFK Act.
http://jfkcountercoup.blogspot.com/2013 ... topsy.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
JFKcountercoup
Monday, August 12, 2013
Case for a New Autopsy
A CASE FOR A NEW AUTOPSY
By William Kelly
The victim was murdered, gunned down on the street in broad daylight in front of hundreds of witnesses.
The cause of death - a bullet to the head, was determined by an autopsy. But after that fact was clearly established, there is complete legal confusion - as the body was improperly removed from the state where the murder occurred before there was a proper forensic autopsy, as required by law. Rather than a proper forensic autopsy – which creates certified evidence that can be used in a court of law, a less thorough regular autopsy was performed, the purpose of which was to determine the cause of death - gunshot to the head.
But there were three different autopsy reports prepared, the doctors who conducted the autopsy did not talk about the wounds with the emergency room doctors who treated them, and there were two brain exams, one of a brain that was not that of the victim.
The photos, x-rays and reports of the autopsy could not be introduced as evidence in a court of law because the technicians who took the photos and x-rays could not identify them as the ones they created, so the provenance - the chain of evidence from the scene of the crime to the grave, is broken and lost, much like our history.
If the victim was an unknown bum found dead in a street gutter and his death was considered suspicious, his remains would be routinely exhumed and given a proper forensic autopsy - one that would produce photos, x-rays and reports that could be introduced as evidence in a court of law.
But justice has been thwarted in this case because the victim was the President of the United States named John F. Kennedy, and political forces have intervened to prevent a proper legal resolution of the case and keep the truth from being known.
The details of the original, botched autopsy are well known. When the doctors in the emergency room at Parkland Hospital in Dallas viewed the wounds within minutes after they were inflicted, they only examined the throat and head wounds. The throat wound they assumed, because of its small size, to be one of entrance, and it was enlarged to insert breathing tubes.
The head wound, as all the Parkland doctors agreed, was a large, grapefruit sized whole in the back of the head, indicating an exit wound, and a flap of bone and flesh on the side of the head above the ear exposed the brain. The large, gaping hole in the back of the President’s head was also confirmed by Secret Service agent Clint Hill, who twice viewed it and confirmed its existence.
Because the President was lying on his back on the hospital gurney,and the nature of the head wounds precluded his survival, the Parkland doctors didn’t turn him over and didn't know there was also an entrance wound in the back, about six inches below the neck.
They did however, find a nearly pristine bullet on a gurney that may have been used by to wheel the President or Texas Governor John Connally into the emergency room.
The autopsy doctors, when they discovered the entrance wound in the back, found that the bullet only penetrated a few inches, less than a finger, and the bullet probably fell out and was the one discovered on the gurney at Parkland. A four star military general ordered the doctors not to track the full extent of the back wound.
The next day the autopsy doctors were surprised to learn that the Parkland emergency doctors had enlarged an already existing throat wound – which they believed to be an entrance wound, so it was realized that, even though their conclusion as to the cause of death - gunshot to the head, was correct, the rest of their report was invalid as more information became available from witnesses at Parkland.
Eventually the official report on the assassination concluded that the back wound was not a superficial, two inch deep wound, but did in fact transit the victim and exited his throat, and then inflicted all of the wounds on Governor Connally in the jump seat in front of the President, creating the “Single Bullet Theory,” which is required if all of the wounds were by one gunman shooting from behind.
When the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) investigated the murder in the late 1970s and the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) in the 1990s questioned the doctors, photographers and x-ray technicians, they testified that could not recognize their work, sometimes explaining that the photos in evidence could not have been the ones they took because they were of a different type of film and not from the angles of the photos they took.
In retrospect, everyone with any knowledge of the Bethesda Naval Hospital autopsy agrees that it was a medical and legal abortion, and all of the autopsy reports, exams, x-rays and photos have lost their chain of possession and the provenance necessary for them to be introduced into evidence in a court of law.
Because the cause of death was a “gunshot to the head,” and therefore a murder, this case certainly meets the “suspicious death” threshold necessary for the law to require a new, proper forensic autopsy, one that would answer all outstanding questions and recreate the lost provenance of the chain of evidence in the case.
But since the victim is not an ordinary American citizen, but the President of the United States, the laws, rules and standards are considered different - and rather than give the President the best and most thorough autopsy he deserves, observance of the law is relegated to the feelings of the Kennedy family.
In a press release for the NOVA TV science program Cold Case JFK it is noted that, “Renowned JFK assassination expert and professor John McAdamas weighs in on the findings of the Warren Commission , the deficiencies of the medical and autopsy evidence, and the lack of understanding on the part of the Kennedy camp on the need for a forensic autopsy at the time..”
Indeed, a forensic autopsy is what is needed, and it is one that can and should be done today, in honor of the president on the fiftieth anniversary of his murder.
Society gives the family primary control over the body of the deceased, yet in many cases a coroner, district attorney or grand jury has the power to order the exhumation of a body for a forensic autopsy, especially in the case of a suspicious death or homicide.
In an academic presentation on the subject of a new autopsy at a 2003 Conference, the topic should have been presented in an objective, unbiased fashion, but instead, an emotional appeal was made to respect the Kennedy family, to honor the revered dead and let them rest in peace.
Well, the revered dead are turning over in their graves and will never rest in peace, and neither will we, until the total truth is determined, including the answers to the many questions concerning the medical evidence and botched autopsy of the President.
The first objection to a proper forensic autopsy is the feelings of the Kennedy family, and like the decision of the Connally family at the death of John Connally, not to permit an autopsy, it has always been assumed that the Kennedy family would also oppose a new, proper forensic autopsy.
John Connally and his wife were sitting just in front of President Kennedy and he was wounded in the same barrage of bullets. They never believed the “single bullet theory,” and it has been suggested that there is more lead in Connally's wrist than is missing from the so-called “magic bullet.”
When Connally died the Justice Department requested the bullet fragments be removed, but the request was denied by the Connally family.
When the Department of Justice agreed to request of John T. Orr, Jr. one of the most respected federal attorneys, to subject bullet fragments CE567 to further tests, they also noted in a memo for the record that: “...It is our view that the Department (of Justice) has retained investigative jurisdiction over the assassination, though such investigation is restricted to activities which are not based upon the expectation of an eventual federal prosecution. Thus, the examination of evidence in federal possession is seemingly appropriate, (while) obtaining evidence by grand jury subpoena would like be inappropriate. This position was adopted by the Division and endorsed b the Office of the Deputy Attorney General when we declined to seek a court order for exhumation of former Governor Connally’s body following allegations that bullet fragments remaining in his body from the incident would reveal, by weight or composition, the existence of additional bullets.” [For more on CE567 see: http://jfkcountercoup2.blogspot.com/201 ... found.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;]
Though no one has actually asked them, like the Connallys, it has always been assumed that the Kennedys will deny such a request as well.
That may have been the case with the previous generation who witnessed the public exhumation and butchering of the body of Lee Harvey Oswald, which was done to positively establish his identity.
But today a proper forensic autopsy can be conducted with dignity, it can answer many of the outstanding questions, legally reestablish the provenance of the medical evidence in the case and reconnect the truth to history.
Bill Kelly
William E. Kelly, Jr. was born in 1951, the son of a Camden, New Jersey, policeman. He majored in history at the University of Dayton, Ohio, School of Education, where he did his thesis on the Bay of Pigs. After graduation he taught history and became a freelance journalist and author of regional history books "300 Years at the Point" and "Birth of the Birdie," a history of golf. He is writing a follow up book on golf, "Flight of the Eagle - The Growth of Golf in America," and a history of rock & roll at the Jersey Shore. Kelly formed the Committee for an Open Archives (COA) with his college associate John Judge, lobbying extensively for the JFK Assassination Records Act, which was passed in 1992. With others, he was an original founder of the Coaliton on Political Assassinations (COPA). With Judge, he also assisted the 9/11 Citizen's Watch, which monitored the work of the 9/11 Commission. Kelly is currently attempting to petition federal prosecutors to convein a special federal grand jury to review the evidence and get Congress to Oversee the JFK Act.
