Let's see what the taxpayer funded in our neighborhood boys and girls

Discuss political news items / current events.
Post Reply
msfreeh
Level 34 Illuminated
Posts: 7683

Re: Let's see what the taxpayer funded in our neighborhood

Post by msfreeh »

Adultery, a Love Child and Claims of a Police Conspiracy Heat Up Princeton

Wednesday, September 23, 2015 |



http://www.dallasobserver.com/news/adul ... on-7617220" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Princeton sits in an ocean of cookie-cutter suburbs about 40 miles northeast of Dallas, at the edge of a gold coast of development washing away horse country. To the west is McKinney; to the east, Farmersville. In between, there's Princeton, where they love God, country and family and the divorce rate is well below the national average.

But sometimes, just one bad marriage is bad enough. In Princeton, that's the case with Dr. Glen David Hurlston and his ex-wife Suzanne Besse, the lead characters in a soap operatic story of alleged sexual obsession, violence, secret affairs and out-of-wedlock children. Toss in the accusation of murder solicitation, secret recordings, drug addiction and alleged police abuse, and Princeton, population 6,800, begins to look like General Hospital's Port Charles.

The center of the drama is the house on Sage Drive that Hurlston bought for his wife, Suzanne Besse, in July 2010, so she could be closer to her two older children from a previous marriage. Two years later, on New Year's night, it's where Princeton police handcuffed Hurlston and hauled him to jail, accused of beating his wife.

He says he doesn't remember beating Besse. He only remembers his daughter's eyes as officers led him away in handcuffs. "I saw little tears in her eyes," he says. "It was just like, 'I'm sorry ... I don't know what to say.' But I wanted to say, 'Hey, it's OK. Don't worry about it. The police aren't bad people,'" he recalls. "I didn't know they were bad people."

Hurlston would soon learn his wife was having an affair with Princeton's former police chief, Jeff Barnett, now the chief in Kyle, a town south of Austin. Besse had given birth to Barnett's son, whom Besse passed off as Hurlston's, Hurlston says.

The affair, Hurlston believes, is what led to his arrest and what he claims was continuing harassment by Princeton police. In a lawsuit pending in federal court in Sherman, Hurlston contends Besse and Barnett schemed to take the doctor's money, and he accuses Barnett, the cities of Princeton and Kyle, and Princeton police Lieutenant Robert Michnick of violating his civil rights. Hurlston claims Princeton police officers did not have probable cause to arrest him on a family violence charg

msfreeh
Level 34 Illuminated
Posts: 7683

Re: Let's see what the taxpayer funded in our neighborhood

Post by msfreeh »

The FBI’s Homemade Mobster

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/ ... e-mobster/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

msfreeh
Level 34 Illuminated
Posts: 7683

Re: Let's see what the taxpayer funded in our neighborhood

Post by msfreeh »

DA's office investigating allegations of prosecutorial misconduct
September 25, 2015 Updated: September 25, 2015 9:02pm

http://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/ho ... 530813.php" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

A Houston defense lawyer is asking that murder charges against his client be dismissed because of prosecutorial misconduct.

Attorney Paul Morgan said Friday that charges against 49-year-old Vernon Brooks stemming from a 2012 shooting should be dropped because information that benefits his client was withheld by prosecutor Sarah Mickelson.

Morgan said the prosecutor broke the law and violated his client's constitutional rights by withholding information about paying three witnesses a total of $5,000 after they testified in a related case in February.

"Who knows what else has been withheld?" Morgan said. "We have a serious problem when prosecutors are hiding evidence."

Jeff McShan, a spokesman with the Harris County District Attorney's Office, said the office is investigating the allegations and plans to file a written response in the case.

Attempts to reach Mickelson on Friday were unsuccessful.

The accusation, which is spelled out in court records filed Thursday and Friday, is the latest in a string of allegations of prosecutorial misconduct at the district attorneys office. In two recent cases, a capital murder conviction was tossed out and murder case awaits a possible retrial.

In this case, Brooks and another man, Joseph Bailey, were charged with murder in the death of Sergio Saldana on Sept. 25, 2012.

Three former confederates of both men testified against Bailey in February, their time on the witness stand helping Harris County prosecutors secure a conviction. A day later, according to court records, the FBI paid them $5,000.

In general, exculpatory information in a criminal case is known as "Brady material" because of Brady vs. Maryland, the Supreme Court case that ruled evidence that helps a defendant must be released.

Before trial, Mickelson acknowledged that she intended to put several informants on the stand a

msfreeh
Level 34 Illuminated
Posts: 7683

Re: Let's see what the taxpayer funded in our neighborhood

Post by msfreeh »

http://www.theatlantic.com/national/arc ... me/407908/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;


U.S.
What the FBI Can't Tell Us About Crime

The bureau released its national crime statistics for 2014 on Monday, but there are important caveats.


The FBI says violent crime fell again across the nation last year, continuing a two-decade-long downward trend.

The 2014 edition of the Uniform Crime Report released Monday said violent crime dropped nationwide by 0.2 percent. New England saw the sharpest declines, with double-digit falls in New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont. Outside of the Northeast, the numbers varied greatly: Illinois saw an 8.3 percent decline, for example, while Florida saw reports of violent crime increase by almost 17 percent.

The UCR is the most well-known measure of crime in the United States, but it’s not flawless. FBI Director James Comey, who told reporters in April that it was “ridiculous that I can’t tell you how many people were shot by the police last week, last month, last year,” announced a new initiative Monday to collect more data on police shootings in the wake of high-profile incidents over the past year. But activists warned that police departments would still submit data on a voluntary basis instead of through a desired mandatory system.

As I noted in May, much statistical information about the U.S. criminal-justice system simply isn’t collected. The number of people kept in solitary confinement in the U.S., for example, is unknown. (A recent estimate suggested that it might be as many as 80,000 and 100,000 people.) Basic data on prison conditions is rarely gathered; even federal statistics about prison rape are generally unreliable. Statistics from prosecutors’ offices on plea bargains, sentencing rates, or racial disparities, for example, are virtually nonexistent.

Without reliable data on crime and justice, anecdotal evidence dominates the conversation. There may be no better example than the so-called “Ferguson effect,” first proposed by the Manhattan Institute’s Heather MacDonald in May. She suggested a rise in urban violence in recent months could be attributed to the Black Lives Matter movement and police-reform advocates.

“The most plausible explanation of the current surge in lawlessness is the intense agitation against American police departments over the past nine months,” she wrote in the Wall Street Journal.

Many others have disputed MacDonald’s analysis. Using data from the first half of 2015 from the 60 most populous U.S. cities, FiveThirtyEight’s Carl Bialik wrote that despite an overall increase in homicides, the picture was far murkier than what MacDonald portrayed.

msfreeh
Level 34 Illuminated
Posts: 7683

Re: Let's see what the taxpayer funded in our neighborhood

Post by msfreeh »

2 Stories

20 years ago we brought Sigmund Diamond to speak at Bates College


23 years later no change


1.

Books of The Times; When Academics Doubled as Intelligence Agents
By HERBERT MITGANG
Published: July 29, 1992


http://www.nytimes.com/1992/07/29/books ... gents.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;


Compromised Campus The Collaboration of Universities With the Intelligence Community, 1945-1955 By Sigmund Diamond 371 pages. Oxford University Press. $27.95.

It should not come as a surprise to readers of recent books and magazine articles about the reign of J. Edgar Hoover during the cold war that the tentacles of the Federal Bureau of Investigation extended into the nation's universities. Thanks to the Freedom of Information Act, in recent years historians, biographers and journalists have been able to obtain Government dossiers -- heavily censored and often with pages withheld -- on individuals and organizations ranging from America's Nobel laureates in literature to members of Congress and the Supreme Court.

In "Compromised Campus," Sigmund Diamond, Giddings Professor of Sociology and Emeritus Professor of History, Columbia University, adds fuel to the bonfire of the liberties. Citing F.B.I. files and his own observations, he reveals that for at least 10 years after World War II, Hoover's special agents in charge enlisted administrators and professors and planted them as subagents in place. Professor Diamond maintains that such college officials and faculty members were more than willing to report to the F.B.I. about colleagues they suspected of being disloyal Americans. He finds that some did so for patriotic reasons, others to advance their careers on campus or later in Washington.

Professor Diamond's theme builds on information already existing in the study of McCarthyism and Hoovermania, which are linked because the Senator and the Director worked together closely. Among the most revealing books in the field is Ellen Schrecker's "No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities." The leading expert on domestic surveillance without judicial fiat, Prof. Athan Theoharis of Marquette University, obtained thousands of F.B.I. documents and interpreted them in such valuable books as "Spying on Americans" and "From the Secret Files of J. Edgar Hoover." Presidents and Presidential aspirants, Federal employees, newspapers, networks, film studios, guilds, unions and civil rights leaders all were shown to have F.B.I. files, usually without their knowledge or an opportunity to challenge faceless accusers.

As Professor Theoharis and other authors have demonstrated, sometimes spying was done upon an organization's members by its own officials. In the best-known case, Ronald Reagan, while president of the Screen Actors Guild in 1947, served as an informer, assigned the code name Agent T-10, for the Los Angeles office of the F.B.I. Similarly, Professor Diamond cites examples of university officials who collaborated with the agencies he classifies together as the intelligence community: the F.B.I., the Central Intelligence Agency and the State Department.

In "Compromised Campus," the author devotes special attention to individuals he considers collaborators with the F.B.I. during the early 1950's, based on files he unearthed under the Freedom of Information Act. They include, from Harvard, McGeorge Bundy, dean of the faculty of arts and sciences; Henry A. Kissinger, a teaching fellow who was executive director of an international seminar, and William Yandell Elliott, a professor of government described as Mr. Kissinger's mentor.

At Yale, the author singles out William F. Buckley Jr., onetime editor of the Yale Daily News, calling him "the F.B.I. informer as Yale intellectual," and Harry B. Fisher, the F.B.I.'s liaison on campus, "an undercover employee of Yale University for 25 years, whose last 15 years of service were devoted mainly to political surveillance."

Professor Diamond, who received his Ph.D. in American history at Harvard, seems to be paying off an old score against Mr. Bundy, presenting some accounts that have been previously argued in the pages of The New York Review of Books. The author writes that he was dismissed from an administrative job, which included teaching duties, because Dean Bundy wanted him to disclose the political beliefs of former colleagues and "cooperate by giving the names to the authorities." He responded that he was willing to talk about himself but would decline to discuss others.

The author devotes two chapters to the Russian Research Center at Harvard, which was the special province of the Boston F.B.I. office. "The Russian Research Center was the locus of fruitful collaboration between the intelligence agencies and Harvard, fruitful but not entirely free of tension," he writes. Citing internal reports between Boston and Washington that he managed to obtain by diligent digging, Professor Diamond adds, "The F.B.I. had its version of the history of the Russian Research Center, and its documents make clear how it intruded in the affairs of the center." In one case, Professor Diamond writes, "a slip by the F.B.I. censor" indicates that Isaiah Berlin, the distinguished British diplomat, author and philosopher, was kept under surveillance by Charles Baroch, a "confidential informant" who was a graduate student at the center.

Professor Diamond says that the F.B.I. watched faculty members who were considered politically suspect. In 1969, the bureau's campus informant (whose name was deleted from the records) reported that two humanities professors at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology had been denied reappointments after their dossiers were provided to school officials. The "chilling" evidence of cooperation between the F.B.I. and M





2.



http://theconversation.com/the-growing- ... emia-47184" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

The growing link between intelligence communities and academia
September 30, 2015 5.09am EDT
Author

Scott Firsing

Research Fellow, International Relations, Monash University

Disclosure statement

Scott Firsing does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond the academic appointment above.
Partners

Monash University

Monash University provides funding as a founding partner of The Conversation AU.
Republish this article

We believe in the free flow of information. We use a Creative Commons Attribution NoDerivatives licence, so you can republish our articles for free, online or in print.
Republish
The Tribute in Light is seen on the 14th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center. 9/11 was the beginning of major changes in the intelligence community. Reuters/Andrew Kelly



The idea of university professors or students working with the FBI or CIA probably makes you raise your eyebrows.

But then perhaps you’re picturing someone like the fictional Henry McCord in Madam Secretary . He’s a Georgetown theology professor who was asked to plant a bug for the National Security Agency (NSA) at the home of a scholar believed to be connected to a terrorist.

Such covert operations do happen. But mostly, professors will be called to deliver a guest lecture to agents or a university will be contracted to help with research. This is true for organizations in the United States like the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and the NSA, and for their counterparts elsewhere in the world.

Such interactions make even academics wary. A tenured professor in the United States tends to be a liberal who is suspicious of the intelligence community’s (IC) methods and activities overseas.

But the tactics used by America’s current and potential future enemies are constantly changing. This volatility and diversity of threats means that the IC needs higher education’s help.
Intelligence post-9/11

The events of September 11 2001 were a catalyst for change in the intelligence profession. In the 14 years since, the number of institutions associated with the field has grown so “large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work,” according to a two-year investigation published by the Washington Post in 2010.

The IC has transformed and greatly expanded to address the shortfalls that became evident after 9/11. One of its moves was to expand the CIA’s Sherman Kent’s School of Intelligence Analysis which opened in May 2000 and became part of the new CIA University founded in 2002. Mainstream academia also started to develop specialized degrees in intelligence, homeland security and national defence.

Those outside the IC may question why we need structures and organizations like the CIA, FBI and others.

National Security Agency (NSA) headquarters, Fort Meade, Maryland. NSA website

In his 2014 book Scientific Methods of Inquiry for Intelligence Analysis, academic Professor Hank Prunckun explains that intelligence is important because it allows control to be exercised in a given situation – and control equals power.

Prunckun calls intelligence “an exact science based on sound qualitative and quantitative research methods.”

His book forms part of the Security and Professional Intelligence Education Series, another resource developed for the emerging IC after September 11. This is a range of books focusing on intelligence, foreign policy, national security and business intelligence.

Some universities have already recognized the role and value of intelligence. There are a number of new bachelors and master’s degrees, particularly in the United States, which focus on the areas of intelligence and national security.
Graduating into intelligence agencies

The goal of these new university degrees is to help create the next generation of professionals for the IC. One of the pluses of this arrangement is that universities have four years to develop skills like critical thinking and report writing. Intelligence organizations have only a limited amount of time to teach these abilities.

Here are five skills or characteristics that students who want to work in intelligence communities can develop at university.

A global focus: students need to start understanding how the world works. Many universities offer basic global politics courses, but regional focus minors, say in African geopolitics or the working of South East Asia, are helpful too. Students considering a career in intelligence should also try to study overseas to broaden their horizons.

An inquisitive nature: thinking critically is arguably the most important skill one can develop in universities. Universities need to train problem-solvers who understand analytic methodologies and strategic concepts – and who can apply that knowledge. My conversations with staff from organizations like the NSA show they want young, creative thinkers who can think out of the box to identify gaps or problems. They don’t want “yes” men and women.

Technological savvy: a minor in technology is recommended in this era of internet saturation and “big data.”

A sense of immediacy: when I say current affairs, I mean seriously current. Universities must be quick to adapt to changing concepts and threats – like offering courses in cybersecurity or the IS.

Communication skills: intelligence agents must be able to communicate effectively in writing, in a boardroom or in an elevator when they have just seconds with a director or policymaker.

Multilingualism is a huge bonus, too.

Research is another area where academia can contribute to the IC. It can be used to fill in gaps. There is also a major role for

msfreeh
Level 34 Illuminated
Posts: 7683

Re: Let's see what the taxpayer funded in our neighborhood

Post by msfreeh »

http://jfklancer.com/Dallas2015/speakers.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;


welcome you to the 20th annual JFK Lancer November in Dallas Conference held November 20-22 at the Adolphus Hotel in Dallas, Texas.

For the past 21 years, JFK Lancer has gathered the world's leading JFK researchers, teachers, authors, and eye-witnesses to share their knowledge on the events surrounding John F. Kennedy's presidency and assassination. We believe in the importance of combining historical evidence and cutting-edge research to shed light on the mysteries of the turbulent 1960s.

Whether you are a student of JFK history or simply curious, we invite you to join us on November 20, 2015 at the Adophus Hotel when we will gather once more in Dallas to share knowledge and challenge the status quo.


(left) Bill Newman: Dealey Plaza eye-witness, (middle) Sherry Fiester- Forensic expert, (right) Alan Dale- Researcher and Broadcaster
JFK
Conference Schedule

Friday, November 20, 2015
4:00pm Registration Opens
5:00pm - 10:00pm Speakers

Saturday, November 21, 2015
8:00am - 10:00pm Speakers and Special Events

Sunday, November 22, 2015
8:00am Guided Walking Tour of Dealey Plaza
12:00pm Informal Gathering at the Knoll

Our goal is to help make your conference experience as positive as possible. We are still working on the final schedule

msfreeh
Level 34 Illuminated
Posts: 7683

Re: Let's see what the taxpayer funded in our neighborhood

Post by msfreeh »

Couple of stories about FBI agents and 5th Graders


1.

http://whosarat.websitetoolbox.com/post ... ?&trail=25" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

2.


http://m.arkansasonline.com/news/2015/o ... to-career/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Fifth-graders' tour opens eyes to career opportunities at FBI
Arkansas Online- October 3 2015


But after a Friday visit to the FBI's Little Rock field office, the 10-year-old realizes her interest in code breaking might provide a good career

3.



http://www.cleveland.com/nation/index.s ... pying.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;





MORGANTOWN, W.Va. -- 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.

More national news: Cleveland.com/nation
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.

Gary Sutton Jr., 40, of New Milton and Charles Hommema of Buckhannon have been charged with the misdemeanors and face fines and up to a year in jail on each charge if convicted. Sutton has been rele

msfreeh
Level 34 Illuminated
Posts: 7683

Re: Let's see what the taxpayer funded in our neighborhood

Post by msfreeh »

see link for full story


http://www.courthousenews.com/2015/10/0 ... ounsel.htm" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;


Courthouse News Service
Monday, October 05, 2015Last Update: 8:07 AM PT

The Right to Competent, not Perfect, Counsel


WASHINGTON The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday obliterated relief for a Maryland police officer who shot his young mistress in the head at point-blank range.
When James Kulbicki killed Gina Marie Neuslein in 1993, the pair were ensnarled in a paternity suit and faced a court appearance in the coming days on unpaid child support.
Kulbicki was married to another woman and he was 14 years older than Neuslein. They had been seeing each other on and off for about two years, and Kulbicki admitted at his murder trial to being the father of Neuslein's 18-month-old child.
The former police officer made headway in his bid for postconviction relief when he complained that his defense attorneys were ineffective for failing to question the legitimacy of certain forensic evidence.
At Kulbicki's trial in 1995, an FBI agent testified about Comparative Bullet Lead Analysis, or CBLA, telling the court that the composition of elements in the molten lead of a bullet fragment found in Kulbicki's truck matched the composition of lead in a bullet fragment removed from Neuslein's brain.
One could "expect" such similarity if "examining two pieces of the same bullet," Special Agent Ernest Peele testified. He said the bullet taken from Kulbicki's gun was not an "exact" match to the bullet fragments, but that the bullets probably came from the same package.
CBLA fell out of favor, however, in the years after Kulbicki's conviction. Kulbicki seized on this when the Court of Appeals of Maryland declared CBLA evidence inadmissible for the first time in 2006, finding that it was not generally accepted by the scientific community.
The Maryland Court of Appeals vacated Kulbicki's conviction in 2013 on that basis alone.
The U.S. Supreme Court summarily reversed Monday, finding no support for the "conclusion that Kulbicki's defense attorneys were constitutionally required to predict the demise of CBLA."
"At the time of Kulbicki's trial in 1995, the validity of CBLA was widely accepted, and courts regularly admitted CBLA evidence until 2003," the unsigned decision states.
The justices saw no deficient performance by Kulbicki's defense team in "dedicating their time and focus to elements of the defense that did not involve poking methodological holes in a then-uncontroversial mode of ballistics analysis."
Though Kulbicki complained about his attorneys' failure to find the 1991 report Peele had co-authored - a document that "presaged the flaws in CBLA evidence" - the justices on Monday saw "no reason to believe that a diligent search would even have discovered the supposedly crucial report."
"Given the uncontroversial nature of CBLA at the time of Kulbicki's trial, the effect of the judgment below is to demand that lawyers go 'looking for a needle in a haystack,' even when they have 'reason to doubt

msfreeh
Level 34 Illuminated
Posts: 7683

Re: Let's see what the taxpayer funded in our neighborhood

Post by msfreeh »

couple of stories


1.

‘Neutralizing’ John Lennon: One Man Against The ‘Monster’




http://www.westernjournalism.com/neutra ... e-monster/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;


The musical genius was a high-profile example of the lengths to which the U.S. government will go to persecute those who dare to challenge its authority.


October 6, 2015 at 2:33pm

“You gotta remember, establishment, it’s just a name for evil. The monster doesn’t care whether it kills all the students or whether there’s a revolution. It’s not thinking logically, it’s out of control.”—John Lennon (1969)

John Lennon, born 75 years ago on October 9, 1940, was a musical genius and pop cultural icon.



He was also a vocal peace protester and anti-war activist and a high-profile example of the lengths to which the U.S. government will go to persecute those who dare to challenge its authority.

Long before Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden were being castigated for blowing the whistle on the government’s war crimes and the National Security Agency’s abuse of its surveillance powers, it was Lennon who was being singled out for daring to speak truth to power about the government’s warmongering, his phone calls monitored and data files collected on his activities and associations.

For a little while, at least, Lennon became enemy number one in the eyes of the U.S. government.

Advertisement

Years after Lennon’s assassination, it would be revealed that the FBI had collected 281 pages of files on him, including song lyrics, a letter from J. Edgar Hoover directing the agency to spy on the musician, and various written orders calling on government agents to set the stage to set Lennon up for a drug bust. As reporter Jonathan Curiel observes, “The FBI’s files on Lennon … read like the writings of a paranoid goody-two-shoes.”

As the New York Times notes, “Critics of today’s domestic surveillance object largely on privacy grounds. They have focused far less on how easily government surveillance can become an instrument for the people in power to try to hold on to power. ‘The U.S. vs. John Lennon’ … is the story not only of one man being harassed, but of a democracy being undermined.”

Indeed, as I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, all of the many complaints we have about government today—surveillance, militarism, corruption, harassment, SWAT team raids, political persecution, spying, overcriminalization, etc.—were present in Lennon’s day and formed the basis of his call for social justice, peace and a populist revolution.

For all of these reasons, the U.S. government was obsessed with Lennon, who had learned early on that rock music could serve a political end by proclaiming a radical message. More importantly, Lennon saw that his music could mobilize the public and help to bring about change. Lennon believed in the power of the people. Unfortunately, as Lennon recognized: “The trouble with government as it is, is that it doesn’t represent the people. It controls them.”

However, as Martin Lewis writing for Time notes: “John Lennon was not God. But he earned the love and admiration of his generation by creating a huge body of work that inspired and led. The appreciation for him deepened because he then instinctively decided to use his celebrity as a bully pulpit for causes greater than his own enrichment or self-aggrandizement.”

For instance, in December 1971 at a concert in Ann Arbor, Mich., Lennon took to the stage and in his usual confrontational style belted out “John Sinclair,” a song he had written about a man sentenced to 10 years in prison for possessing two marijuana cigarettes. Within days of Lennon’s call for action, the Michigan Supreme Court ordered Sinclair released.

What Lennon did not know at the time was that government officials had been keeping strict tabs on the ex-Beatle they referred to as “Mr. Lennon.” FBI agents were in the audience at the Ann Arbor concert, “taking notes on everything from the attendance (15,000) to the artistic merits of his new song.”

The U.S. government was spying on Lennon.

By March 1971, when his “Power to the People” single was released, it was clear where Lennon stood. Having moved to New York City that same year, Lennon was ready to participate in political



2.


When Black Writers Were Public Enemy No. 1 - POLITICO Magazine
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/ ... ers-117512" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
Apr 30, 2015 - In the mind of the young FBI, however, McKay's 1922 was most notable as a year ... Non-black writing could be targeted, of course; Joyce and Eliot were both ... writing persisted from World War II through the militant Black Arts ...
Modernism on File: Writers, Artists, and the FBI, 1920-1950
https://books.google.com/books?isbn=0230610390" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
Claire A. Culleton, ‎Karen Leick - 2008 - ‎Art
Writers, Artists, and the FBI, 1920-1950 Claire A. Culleton, Karen Leick ... Richard Wright, who realized he was the target of an FBI investigation, subsequently ...
How Bad Was FBI Spying on African American Writers? An Interview
historynewsnetwork.org/article/160253
Sep 11, 2015 - I looked for all of these authors' FBI files and added some names of my own to ... the first major African American writer targeted for surveillance. .... St. Louis was a significant Midwest site of the Black Arts Movement and it was ...
Little 'Red Scares': Anti-Communism and Political Repression in ...
https://books.google.com/books?isbn=1409410919" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
Professor Robert Justin Goldstein - 2014 - ‎History
Yet biddle's failure to at least inquire how the Fbi had acquired the information, ... also informed another Fbi target: radical German émigré artists and writers who ...
[PDF]MODERNISM ON FILE: WRITERS, ARTISTS, AND THE FBI, 1920 ...
http://www.palgraveconnect.com/pc/doifi ... 0230610392" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
Modernism on file : writers, artists, and the FBI, 1920–1950 / edited by. Claire A. ..... Palmer's home targeted, he encouraged Hoover and the bureau to open and.
Fbi Files Reveal Folly Of `War Against Writers` - tribunedigital ...
articles.chicagotribune.com/.../8803040113_1_fbi-and-director-authors-file
Mar 27, 1988 - Fbi Files Reveal Folly Of `War Against Writers` ... that the bureau had not been spying on writers and artists. ... Dashiell Hammett`s radical allegiances made him an understandable FBI target, but at one point the bureau lost ...
The Einstein File: J. Edgar Hoover's Secret War Against the ...
https://books.google.com/books?isbn=0312316097" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
Fred Jerome - 2003 - ‎History
the extreme measures the FBI took to collect information on Einstein, his friends ... the FBI and other agencies targeted and harassed German refugee writers such as ... Einstein was in touch with many of these artists, shared their hatred for ...
Joyce and the G-Men: J. Edgar Hoover's Manipulation of Modernism
https://books.google.com/books?isbn=0312235534" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
Claire A. Culleton - 2004 - ‎Literary Criticism
with Beav's dad, a retired FBI agent, and he helped me to understand the ... FBI and its special watchdog division that targeted twentieth-century writers, artists, ...
The FBI: A Comprehensive Reference Guide
https://books.google.com/books?isbn=089774991X" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
Athan G. Theoharis - 1999 - ‎Law
At home, this meant that the FBI needed to be given ... in the private sector — notably, artists, writers, college and university professors, and news ... of 1917, the American communist movement became a principal target of FBI investigations.

msfreeh
Level 34 Illuminated
Posts: 7683

Re: Let's see what the taxpayer funded in our neighborhood

Post by msfreeh »

a good criminal justice consumer warrior
knows how to read between the lines



couple stories


1


http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/2 ... hUwR88pAXA" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;.


Dell Selected by Department of Justice for One of the Largest VDI Deployments in the U.S. Government

New $28M project is based on Dell XC Series appliances for a leading, scalable hyper-converged infrastructure solution
This solution will deliver improved management and scalability for the U.S. DoJ and offer a secure solution to access corporate data and applications on any device

October 07, 2015 10:00 AM Eastern Daylight Time

ROUND ROCK, Texas--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Dell announced today it was awarded a contract for a Department of Justice unclassified virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) deployment. The $28 million partnership includes new Dell XC Series of Web-scale Converged Appliances, powered by Nutanix software, as well as Dell Networking and Dell AppAssure data protection software. Supporting up to 55,000 named users, specifically within the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the deal includes more than 600 Dell XC Series appliances and represents one of the largest VDI deployments the U.S. government has undertaken.

The foundation of this solution is the Dell XC Series appliances, hyper-converged systems that combine compute, storage and virtualization resources in one solution built on preconfigured, industry-leading Dell PowerEdge 13th generation servers. These appliances are integrated with industry-leading software from Nutanix, the hyper-converged market leader according to IDC.

The FBI will be able to take advantage of a truly comprehensive IT solution that offers simple deployment and management and also scales-out incrementally, one node at a time, and seamlessly as demands increase. Moreover, these appliances excel in supporting desktop virtualization, while also providing lower total cost of ownership and faster time to value when compared to a traditional VDI solution approach. With this addition, the FBI will be able to better empower its field agents and administrators, as well as dramatically expand its operations across its global footprint. Furthermore, the FBI will be able to leverage Dell’s world-class global support–all while working with one technology partner to satisfy these multiple needs.

This new Dell solution will allow the FBI to create a flexible and easy-to-manage virtual desktop infrastructure that can easily scale as needed. The XC Series deployment will scale to more than 600 nodes and support VMware Horizon 6 desktop virtualization software. The addition of these hyper-converged appliances offers FBI users the opportunity to reduce the number of elements managed in the IT environment, increase overall savings and decrease time

2.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... ities.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;


Sex Files: FBI agents guilty of sleeping with sources, watching porn at work and searching files for addresses of 'hot' celebrities



It is supposed to be the nation’s elite police force, working to the highest standards of all.

But hundreds of FBI agents each year are in fact having to be disciplined for serious breaches of misconduct, secret files have revealed.

In the past three years more than 1,000 FBI employees have been found guilty of inappropriate behaviour, including one agent who had a sexual relationship with a source.
FBI

Inappropriate: FBI agents bow their heads during a moment of silence in Tucson on January 10 - but FBI files show many should be hanging their heads in shame

Another agent used FBI databases to get personal details about celebrities he thought were ‘hot’.

And one male member of staff shared confidential information with his news reporter girlfriend, and then threatened to release a sex tape the two had made unless she kept it quiet.

The litany of misconduct was detailed in confidential summaries of disciplinary rulings obtained by CNN.

The disclosure threatens to undermine the FBI’s reputation for, as its own motto points out, ‘Fidelity, Bravery, Integrity’.
FBI

'Fidelity, Bravery, Integrity': Many agents are only managing one out of three from the bureau motto

The bureau could also face harsh criticism over its refusal to fire any of those caught out, even though the offences were of a grave nature.

Among the toughest punishments was for the agent who had the seven-month sexual relationship with a source. He was suspended for 40 days.

Another employee drunkenly ‘exploited his FBI employment’ at a strip club by falsely claiming he was conducting an official investigation. He was suspended for 30 days.

In another case a supervisor who viewed pornography in his office during work hours, while 'sexually satisfying himself' (so the file states) got a 35-day suspension.

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 was ordered to stay away from work for 23 days.

President of the FBI Agents’ Association Konrad Motyka said such behaviour was ‘never acceptable’.

He added: ‘Demonstrable incorrect conduct or criminal conduct is not acceptable and never should be’.


No-tolerance policy: Assistant Director Candice Will defended the bureau's policy of disciplining rather than firing

FBI Assistant Director Candice Will defended the decision not to fire any of the employees caught out behaving inappropriately.

She said that 500 cases of misconduct were referred to her in the bureau's Office of Professional Responsibility each year.

Of those around 70 per cent - or 350 - were disciplined, including 30 who were fired.

The FBI employs 34,300 people, including 13,700 agents.

Assistant Director Will said: ‘We do have a no-tolerance policy. We don't tolerate our employees engaging in misconduct.

‘We expect them to behave pursuant to the standards of conduct imposed on all FBI employees. It doesn't mean that we fire everybody.

'You know, our employees are human, as we all are. We all make mistakes. So, our discipline is intended to reflect that.

msfreeh
Level 34 Illuminated
Posts: 7683

Re: Let's see what the taxpayer funded in our neighborhood

Post by msfreeh »

couple of stories



1.

http://www.wired.com/2015/10/cops-dont- ... k-iphones/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;


Cops Don't Need a Crypto Backdoor to Get Into Your iPhone
WIRED-
“In spite of the big words the FBI has used over the last year, the situation isn't quite as dire as they make it out to be,” says Chris Soghoian, principal technologist ...



2.
http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2015/10/12/fbi ... us-crimes/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;


FBI No Longer Checks Its Records for 'Nonserious' Crimes
Wall Street Journal (blog)
Federal regulations require the FBI to exclude from its rap-sheet
database “nonserious” arrests and convictions of juveniles and adults,
such as ...


3.

Chelsea Manning is suing the FBI


http://www.businessinsider.com/ap-manni ... se-2015-10" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;


— Imprisoned national-security leaker Chelsea Manning is suing the
Federal Bureau of Investigation over access to files compiled during
the agency's inquiry into her release of classified documents to the
WikiLeaks website.

Lawyers representing the Army private formerly known as Bradley
Manning filed the lawsuit last week in the U.S. district court in
Washington. The FBI denied Manning's 2014 request to release the
records under the Freedom of Information Act, claiming they may be
relevant to a pending or prospective law-enforcement proceeding

msfreeh
Level 34 Illuminated
Posts: 7683

Re: Let's see what the taxpayer funded in our neighborhood

Post by msfreeh »

4 stories


1.

see link for important bar graph

http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015 ... ric-garner" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Eric Garner and Tamir Rice among those missing from FBI record of
police killings

Only 224 of 18,000 law enforcement agencies reported fatal
shootings in 2014
Previously unpublished FBI data sheds new light on flawed
voluntary system

New York Michael Brown Eric Garner
Emerald Garner, daughter of Eric Garner, right, cries while standing
next to Esaw Garner, Eric Garner’s wife, center, and Lesley McSpadden,
mother of Michael Brown, in April. Photograph:

Thursday 15 October 2015 08.42 EDT
Last modified on Thursday 15 October 2015 09.08 EDT


Killings by police that unleashed a new protest movement around the US
in 2014, including those of Eric Garner, Tamir Rice and John Crawford,
are missing from the federal government’s official record of homicides
by officers because most departments refuse to submit data.
Analysis The tracking of police violence in the US may have reached a
turning point
The past week has seen a series of comments regarding the state of
documenting US police killings – and some clarity on how the
government plans to do so
Read more

Only 224 of 18,000 law enforcement agencies around the US reported a
fatal shooting by their officers to the FBI last year, according to
previously unpublished data obtained by the Guardian, which sheds new
light on flaws in official systems for counting the use of deadly
force by police.

The Counted, an investigation by the Guardian to report all deaths
caused by police in 2015, had already logged deadly shootings by
officers from 224 different law enforcement agencies by 10 April this
year. Crowd-sourced counts in 2014 recorded deaths at a similar higher
rate.

Stephen Fischer, a spokesman for the FBI, said exclusions were
inevitable because the program remained voluntary. “We have no way of
knowing how many incidents may have been omitted,” Fischer said in an
email.

Amid mounting pressure on public authorities to overhaul the recording
of deadly incidents involving law enforcement, an extensive review of
all data on “justifiable homicides” by police collected by the FBI
from police departments between 2004 and 2014 found:

No police departments from the state of Florida reported any
homicides by officers, meaning deaths caused by police in the
country’s third-most populous state were not logged by the FBI. The
New York police department, by far the country’s biggest, submitted
data for just one year during the past decade.

The FBI records only basic personal details of each person killed
and not information such as whether they were armed with a weapon – a
critical factor in ongoing debates over the use of force by police
around the country.

A chaotic approach was applied to recording other high-profile
deaths over recent years. Some were logged, some filed to a separate
category with general homicides without noting the subjects were
killed by police, and others were ignored.

An increase in the number of homicides by police publicly reported
by the FBI over the past five years was effectively matched by a rise
in the number of individual departments reporting any homicides,
casting doubt over purported trends in the data.

Details of other controversial deaths that prompted protests were
entered incorrectly in the FBI database, damaging government efforts
to monitor demographic information about people killed by police.

The analysis of raw FBI data was carried out as the US Department of
Justice announced it was trialling a new open-source system for
counting homicides by law enforcement. The system’s methodology
closely resembles those of The Counted and a Washington Post record of
fatal police shootings.


2.

DOJ/FBI agents protect members of Congress who commit crimes.

Congress protects DOJ/ FBI agents who commit crimes.

Always funded by your tax dime.


couple of coverups in progress....
Was Hastert a pedophile......


Google Lyndon Johnson assassinated Kennedy
YouTube


if link fails

http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=aDrUdq5dZIY" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;


also see


http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/ex- ... se-n445111" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;



BREAKING
News
Oct 15 2015, 10:15 am ET
Ex-House Speaker Dennis Hastert Strikes Deal in Hush-Money Case





Former House Speaker Dennis Hastert has struck a plea deal to resolve
charges he lied to the FBI about bank withdrawals — money allegedly
used to keep sexual misconduct accusations under wraps, lawyers
announced in court on Thursday.

The politician, who was not in the Chicago courtroom, will appear on
Oct. 28 to enter a plea.

Hastert, who led the House for eight years before retiring in 2007,
was indicted in June on charges he structured bank transactions to
avoid triggering red flags and then lied about those cash withdrawals
to the FBI.

Court papers say he was taking out the money because he agreed to pay
a mystery man identified only as "Individual A" some $3.5 million in
hush money to conceal "prior misconduct."

Federal law enforcement sources have said "Individual A" was a student
at Yorkville High School in Illinois while Hastert was a teacher and
coach there in the '60s and '70s, and that the misconduct was sexual
in nature.
Dennis Hastert poses with wrestlers in a yearbook photo. NBC News

After Hastert was indicted, a Montana woman, Jolene Burdge, came
forward with claims that Hastert had molested her brother, Steve
Reinbolt, a Yorkville grad who died in 1995 of AIDS complications.

A friend of Reinboldt's told NBC News on condition of anonymity that
Reinboldt — who is not Individual A — also told him years ago that he
had sexual contact with Hastert.

"I was hanging out at Steve's house in December 1974, I seem to recall
we went for a drive and he told me that he was gay. He also said that
his first sexual encounter was with Denny Hastert," the friend said.


3.


two stories about assassination


1.

Lyndon Johnson led a ‘coup d'etat’ against JFK: Scholar

http://www.presstv.ir/Detail/2015/10/13 ... assination" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Tue Oct 13, 2015 3:59PM
PressTv User

Former US President Lyndon B. Johnson (left), along with high level
CIA officials, “engineered the murder of Kennedy as a coup d'etat,”
Dr. Kevin Barrett told Press TV on Tuesday.

Former US President Lyndon B. Johnson, with the CIA’s assistance, was
involved in a “coup d'etat” to assassinate former President John F.
Kennedy, an American scholar in Wisconsin says.

Johnson, along with high level CIA officials, “engineered the murder
of Kennedy as a coup d'etat,” said Dr. Kevin Barrett, a founding
member of the Muslim-Jewish-Christian Alliance.

“This has been established by alternative historians because you can’t
publish this in the mainstream [media], you can’t say this in the
academic journals,” Barrett told Press TV on Tuesday.

Johnson served as vice president of the United States during the
presidency of Kennedy from 1961 to 1963.

He was sworn in as president in Dallas, Texas on November 22, 1963,
just 2 hours after JFK was assassinated in Dallas. This was
interpreted by some that Johnson was too eager to assume power.

“We know that we had a coup d'etat on November 22, 1963, orchestrated
by Vice President Johnson and top level CIA people, with the possible
help of organized crime elements linked to the Israeli Mossad,”
Barrett said.

Israel also had a motive to kill Kennedy because the president was
opposed to the regime's nuclear weapons program which he believed
could instigate a nuclear arms-race in the Middle East, Barrett
argued.

Kennedy encountered tensions with former Israeli Prime Minister David
Ben-Gurion who wanted to develop nuclear weapons.

The President's Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy,
known unofficially as the Warren Commission, was established by
Johnson in November 1963 to investigate the assassination of Kennedy.

The commission's final report, released

2.

Maldives police chief says no one beyond reach in boat blast probe

http://www.haveeru.com.mv/news/63103" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Oct 15, 2015 - 04:36

Police Commissioner Hussain Waheed meets top police officers on
Thursday. PHOTO/POLICE

Police Commissioner Hussain Waheed meets top police officers on
Thursday. PHOTO/POLICE

Maldives police chief Hussain Waheed on Thursday insisted that he
would not hesitate to arrest anyone in connection to the explosion
aboard the presidential speedboat late last month.

Speaking during a sit-down with police officers on Saturday, Hussain
Waheed said the case has been given top priority.

He said the police has given special precedence to bring everyone
connected to the blast to justice. The chief asked all police
officers' support in the endeavour.

The investigation team has been given the green light to use every
available resource at its disposal, he added. Police would also enable
the team to conduct and independent investigation, he said.

The police chief further stressed that no one must be allowed to
disrupt the peace and stability of the country to hinder the
investigation.

He urged all police officers to be vigilant to ensure the safety and
security of the nation at this crucial juncture.

President Abdulla Yameen Abdul Gayoom and First Lady Fathimath Ibrahim
were travelling to Male from the Ibrahim Nasir International Airport,
located on the nearby island of Hulhule which is a five-minute ferry
ride from the capital city, on September 28 when the explosion took
place. They had returned home that morning after concluding their
visit to Saudi Arabia to perform the annual hajj pilgrimage.

The president was unhurt, but the first lady suffered a spinal
fracture while presidential secretary Fathimath Mohamed Solih and
bodyguard Abdu Nasir received minor injuries including burns.

The first lady still remains in hospital.

The blast is being investigated by an enquiry commission set up by the
president.

Apart from releasing video footage of the incident, the commission has
not revealed much detail. But it had been confirmed that two army
officers with links to the armoury had been taken into custody, and
are now in remand for 15 days.

Haveeru has found that the speedboat had been secured by the MNDF for
about two hours after the explosion. Sources say that the two army
officers had gone on-board without authorisation and are accused of
trying to destroy evidence.

The government, meanwhile, has said the explosion could be a targeted
attack on the president -- an assertion backed by a team of experts
from Sri Lanka assisting the investigation.

Forensic experts from Saudi Arabia, FBI, India and Australia are also
assisting the probe.

The claims of a possible assassination attempt have also prompted
President Yameen to take extra measures to bolster security.

In a major security shakeup, the president sacked his defence minister
this week. He has also replaced the police intelligence chief, the
armoury chief and the head of personal security in the past week.

The MNDF's SPG has also been split into two, with a new division
created and put in charge of presidential security alone.

In a rare sight, soldiers armed with assault rifles can no



4.
https://www.revealnews.org/article/the- ... veillance/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

The Secret History of American Surveillance

Topics: Criminal Justice / Cybersecurity / National Security / Surveillance and Privacy

By Ariane Wu / October 15, 2015

Produced by Ariane Wu | Credits

From cellphone spying to facial scanning technology to massive data farms, it’s no secret that the U.S. government is gathering loads of personal information on its citizens.

But few remember the origins of our modern surveillance state. Some argue that it was forged over 115 years ago, half a world away in the Philippine Islands.

The story begins in the mid-1870s, when a technological renaissance catapulted America into its first information revolution. Thomas Edison’s quadruplex telegraph and Philo Remington’s typewriter allowed data to be recorded accurately and transmitted quickly. Inventions such as the electrical tabulating machine and the Dewey Decimal System could count, catalog and retrieve huge amounts of information efficiently. Photography was becoming widely accessible, thanks to George Eastman’s roll film, and biometric criminal identification systems such as fingerprinting were adopted from Europe. Our ability to manage, store and transmit data grew by leaps and bounds.

Inventions

When the U.S. occupied the Philippines in 1898, these inventions became the building blocks for a full-scale surveillance state that was used to suppress Filipino resistance.

According to historian Alfred McCoy, who has written extensively on this topic, Capt. Ralph Van Deman – dubbed “the father of U.S. military intelligence” – masterminded a security apparatus that compiled “phenomenally detailed information on thousands of Filipino leaders, including their physical appearance, personal finances, landed property, political loyalties, and kinship networks.” The system ended up indexing 70 percent of Manila’s entire population.

This total information control coupled with laws such as the Sedition Act, which severely punished anyone who engaged in “subversive” political activity, allowed the governor-general of the islands, Future US President William Howard Taft, to manipulate and blackmail anyone at will.

Faces

Years later, the colonial policing used in the Philippines was refined and adapted to be used domestically in the U.S. The first example, McCoy notes, was shortly after America entered World War I.

Sedition-Law

At the time, rapidly growing labor strikes and radical groups were fueling a public hysteria of immigrants and leftists. This was the first Red Scare. The 1917 Espionage Act and 1918 Sedition Act punished political “subversion.” Postmaster General Alfred S. Burleson banned virtually the entire anti-war and socialist press. Van Deman’s military intelligence division collaborated with groups such as the American Protective League to collect more than a million pages of surveillance reports on German Americans in 14 months. By 1920, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer and a young J. Edgar Hoover had arrested more than 10,000 people in mass raids around the country. Scandal erupted when the public learned that most of the arrested were not foreign immigrants, but U.S. citizens. In the end, public outrage forced Uncle Sam to curb domestic surveillance, and the State Department’s cryptography unit was abolished.

Raids-Continue

Many have pointed out the cyclical nature of American domestic surveillance. First, a real or imagined crisis such as communism or terrorism gets perceived as a threat to national security. To combat these dangers, U.S. leaders develop new surveillance technologies, clandestinely using it on innocent civilians. Often, the government’s first targets and scapegoats are society’s most marginalized groups. FBI Director Hoover’s COINTELPRO, for instance, infiltrated the Black Panthers, American Indian Movement and anti-Vietnam War organizations by using illegal wiretapping, mail opening and undercover informants. When these invasive spy operations are exposed, as they were after the Palmer Raids and Watergate scandal, laws are passed to prevent future trampling of citizens’ rights.

Files

The scapegoats and government agencies doing the spying may change over time, but in the U.S., the pattern of domestic surveillance has generally been the same. That is, until recently.

Mass surveillance today is far less expensive and labor intensive than it used to be. The rate at which technology is growing also has completely outstripped current laws that regulate use of such technologies. It’s problematic because so much of this surveillance is opaque. Take

msfreeh
Level 34 Illuminated
Posts: 7683

Re: Let's see what the taxpayer funded in our neighborhood

Post by msfreeh »

http://weldbham.com/blog/2015/10/16/sec ... am-column/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;


October 16, 2015
Secrets of social justice
Courtney Haden
Courtney Haden

Courtney is a Weld columnist.
A noted activist was telling it all in Tuscaloosa last week.
Photo by Courtney Haden.

Photo by Courtney Haden.

There was a homecoming of a different sort at the University of Alabama last week, one that had nothing to do with football. The occasion was the 2015 Rose Gladney Lecture for Justice and Social Change, during which the keynote speaker, Dr. Candace Waid, disclosed “Some Secrets of Tuscaloosa in the Spring of ’70.”

If you have spent any time at the University, then you already know that Tuscaloosa is continually suffused with secrets, wafting about town like fevers in a swamp. 1970 was no unusual year in that regard, except that the FBI took a special interest in some of those secrets.

America was almost five years into its miserable adventure in Vietnam when Candy Waid enrolled at the University, and the same anti-war spirit that had arisen on campuses elsewhere in the country since 1967 was finally making its way to Alabama. Pockets of nonconformity were not unusual there, especially where two or more art students were gathered together, but the fall of 1969 was the first time a significant countercultural presence could be detected on campus. There were frat boys sporting sideburns and sorority girls wearing bellbottoms, but more significantly, dissent was becoming part of the campus discourse.

In ten Hoor Hall last week, one of the secrets Dr. Waid revealed was a subversive Homecoming art project. Living in the women’s honors dorm, Byrd Hall, she and fellow members of what they called the Byrd Hall Liberation Front devised a new slant on the traditional dorm door decoration contest. On the unused third floor, they gave the doors a coffin motif with blood-red paint-spattered tombstones, the dates on which were pertinent to the timeline of the Vietnam War. A large banner proclaimed the theme: “Tell Me Before I Die Who Won the Homecoming Game at ‘Bama.” Far from affronting, the art won the category for Best Door Decoration.

By spring 1970, anger replaced sly nuance. The Nixon Administration had escalated the war into Cambodia and National Guardsmen had killed four students at Kent State University in Ohio. There were demonstrations and counter-demonstrations at the Capstone, but on May 6, the Tuscaloosa Women’s Movement organized a memorial service to attempt to bring people together. That service turned into a demonstration in front of the President’s Mansion and then into a student takeover of the Student Union building.

In the Supe Store that night, protesters helped themselves to ice cream as they debated tactics among themselves. As an elected member of the Student-Faculty Coalition Direction Committee, Waid was in a tight spot. At that time, university rules effect

msfreeh
Level 34 Illuminated
Posts: 7683

Re: Let's see what the taxpayer funded in our neighborhood

Post by msfreeh »

http://www.triplicate.com/News/Local-Ne ... with-theft" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;


Officer in raid video charged with theft
October 20, 2015 05:09 pm

Pelican Bay State Prison Correctional Officer Matthew Yates, 34, is facing misdemeanor theft charges, accused of taking $100 from a suspect arrested last March in a drug sting.

Yates was part of a group of correctional officers assisting Del Norte Sheriff’s deputies in executing a search warrant March 9 at the home of James Banuelos. A surveillance videotape appeared to show Yates and other prison guards stealing cash from Banuelos, sparking a lengthy investigation by the FBI.

msfreeh
Level 34 Illuminated
Posts: 7683

Re: Let's see what the taxpayer funded in our neighborhood

Post by msfreeh »

Federal officials giving depositions in Jill Kelley privacy suit
Jill Kelley’s name was leaked to the media as the target of what the Kelleys consider harassing and threatening emails. Photo provided by Jill Kelley
Jill Kelley’s name was leaked to the media as the target of what the Kelleys consider harassing and threatening emails. Photo provided by Jill Kelley
David Petraeus resigned as CIA director after his affair with biographer Paula Broadwell came to light.
Published: October 22, 2015 | Updated: October 22, 2015 at 10:07 PM

http://www.tbo.com/list/military-news/f ... -20151022/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;


Last month, at Justice Department headquarters in Washington, FBI agent Adam Malone underwent hours of questioning in a case so contentious his deposition was halted in a disagreement among the attorneys present.

The case arises from the e-mail investigation that revealed the affair behind the resignation of CIA Director David Petraeus. The plaintiffs are Jill Kelley, a former honorary consul who became known to the world as the Bayshore Boulevard socialite and friend of top military leaders, along with her husband Scott, a surgical oncologist.

The allegations are that someone in the government violated the couple’s privacy rights when Jill Kelley’s name was leaked to the media as the target of what the Kelleys consider harassing and threatening emails. The Kelleys want to know who did it — and, in a key requirement for a privacy complaint, whether it was done on purpose and why.

Already, the case file includes depositions from a former defense secretary and three FBI agents along

msfreeh
Level 34 Illuminated
Posts: 7683

Re: Let's see what the taxpayer funded in our neighborhood

Post by msfreeh »

see links at bootom of page for other story that a Memphis jury in 1999 concluded police had assassinated Martin Luther King


Lawyer aims to right a long-ago wrong
Originally published October 25, 2015 at 5:27 pm

Lawyer works to restore lost history and find justice for an American martyr.

Jim Emison’s voice gets tight and his eyes teary when he talks about Elbert Williams. “This man died because he wanted to be a real American, because he wanted to vote, and I want America to know him. He’s a real hero.” Emison is on a quest to make sure that happens, bringing to light some lost American history.

He was in Seattle this month for the first time since he mustered out of the Navy here in 1971. He came to speak at an event for blackpast.org, the history website created by recently retired University of Washington professor Quintard Taylor, who grew up in Haywood County, Tenn., where Elbert Williams was killed in 1940.

Emison and his family lived in neighboring Crockett County. His law practice included Haywood County, but he didn’t know about Williams. Emison’s grandfather was a judge, his uncle and father were lawyers, and they would have known the history but never spoke about it.

Emison learned only after he retired in 2011 and started working on an article about local history. There was a mention of an incident that led him to start digging. He’s working on a book about Williams’ death.

see link for full story
http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-new ... ago-wrong/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Haywood was a cotton county, which meant lots of enslaved people. When slavery ended, black people, who were the majority of the population, joined the party of Lincoln, voted and, along with a small number of whites who favored Reconstruction, ran the county. It was a brief moment of democracy. As everywhere, Reconstruction was short-lived. The North let white Democrats reassert themselves, intimidate the black population and reclaim dominance.

The last time a black resident registered to vote was in 1907, Emison said. Most black folks were working as sharecroppers, living on the same plantations, in the same shacks, doing the same work as their enslaved parents and grandparents.

But in 1939, 52 people who had had enough of being denied a basic right formed a local chapter of the NAACP to register black residents to vote. The leading white residents harassed the first president, had him arrested on phony charges and beaten, then burned his house down. He fled the night of the fire.

Ongoing terrorism caused about 22 black families to flee before Williams took the lead in the NAACP. Then a group of men, led by two police officers, came to his house and dragged him to jail in his pajamas. Three days later, his mutilated body was pulled from the Hatchie River, and it would be more than two decades before black citizens tried to vote again.

The coroner



2.



Who really murdered Martin Luther King? | Green Left Weekly
http://www.greenleft.org.au/node/29655" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
An hour later, Martin Luther King, ... (MPD) lieutenant Earl Clark. ... on the executive of which there was an FBI informer. Witnesses saw a man (Earl Clark) ...
Martin Luther King Assassination Conspiracy Exposed in ...
http://www.ratical.org/ratville/JFK/Uns ... onExp.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
Complete Transcript of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Assassination ... the murder of Martin Luther King Jr. speaks eloquently ... MPD Lieutentant Earl Clark ...
How the Government Killed Martin Luther King, Jr. | Veterans ...
http://www.veteranstoday.com/2013/04/04/mlk-hit" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
... Earl Clark, an MPD lieutenant and ... She recalled him confiding to her that he “had Martin Luther King ... Memphis PD and the FBI also suppressed the ...
Who Killed Martin Luther King? | Dissident Voice
dissidentvoice.org/2008/04/who-killed-martin
Apr 04, 2008 · ... a conspiracy that included J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI, ... MPD Lieutenant Earl Clark, ... the guy who killed martin luther king should be exicuted.
MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR - WebRing: Collaborate with like ...
webspace.webring.com/people/hj/jacksonday/king.htm
In the three weeks before the killing of Martin Luther King, Jr., FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover holds a series of ... MPD Lieutenant Earl Clark gives a smoking rifle ...

msfreeh
Level 34 Illuminated
Posts: 7683

Re: Let's see what the taxpayer funded in our neighborhood

Post by msfreeh »

William Pawelec's widow reveals national security secrets ...
projectavalon.net › ... › Project Avalon ›


https://battleofearth.wordpress.com/201 ... y-secrets/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Jul 28, 2011 - 18 posts - ‎11 authors
William (Bill) Pawelec had a long career working on top secret security projects around the world. In 2000, he shared some of those secrets in a ...
William Pawelec Interview - YouTube
Video for William pawelec▶ 1:00:16


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yytSNQ2ogD4" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
Dec 14, 2010 - Uploaded by csetiweb
Mr. William Pawelec was a U.S. Air Force computer operations and programming specialist ...

msfreeh
Level 34 Illuminated
Posts: 7683

Re: Let's see what the taxpayer funded in our neighborhood

Post by msfreeh »

couple of reads



1.

http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryla ... story.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;



Army employee pleads guilty to stealing more than 90 computers from Aberdeen Proving Ground
Most of the stolen computers were resold through pawnbrokers

Brian Lee Long, 48, of Rising Sun, is facing 10 years in prison after he pleaded guilty Wednesday to theft of government property from Aberdeen Proving Ground, federal law enforcement officials announced.

According to Long's plea agreement, from April 8, 2001 through Jan. 21, 2015, Long was employed at the Kirk U.S. Army Health Clinic at Aberdeen Proving Ground, initially as a paramedic, then as a supply technician at the Logistics Division. Long admitted that from Oct. 1, 2014 through Dec. 31, 2014, he stole 73 laptop computers, 19 desktop computers and three monitors from the Logistics Division warehouse.

The guilty plea was announced by Rod J. Rosenstein, the United States Attorney for the District of Maryland; Kevin Perkins, Special Agent in Charge of the FBI; and Ed Collins, Special Agent of the U.S. Army Criminal Investigation Command.

Long sold at least 19 of the stolen laptop computers and four of the stolen desktop computers to pawnshops f


2.

CNN.com - FBI missing computers, weapons - July 18, 2001
http://www.cnn.com/2001/US/07/17/FBI.computers/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
Jul 18, 2001 - An internal FBI review has turned up hundreds of stolen or missing firearms, including submachine guns, and laptop computers, including at ...


3.



FBI sniper rifle stolen from hotel parking lot days before Obama's ...
fox13now.com/.../fbi-sniper-rifle-stolen-from-hotel-parking-lot-days-befor...
Apr 25, 2015 - "(The agent) stated his FBI issued sniper rifle was missing which was in a hard rifle ... number has been entered into the National Crime Information Computer.

msfreeh
Level 34 Illuminated
Posts: 7683

Re: Let's see what the taxpayer funded in our neighborhood

Post by msfreeh »

Mormons and the FBI – A Bleg - Patheos
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/peculiarpe ... bi-a-bleg/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
Apr 30, 2014 - The Associated Press reported in the early 1980s that “The CIA does some of its most successful recruiting in predominantly LDS Utah.
Mormon FBI agent played part in largest espionage case in ...
http://www.deseretnews.com/.../Mormon-F ... est-espion.." onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;.
Nov 5, 2014 - James Ellsworth was an FBI handler for a double agent during World War II. ... An LDS FBI agent who served his mission in Germany became handler to the first double agent in FBI history. ... In early February 1940, Mormon FBI agent James Ellsworth left his home in Huntington Park ...
Mormon Quotes on Geovernment Agencies and the LDS Church
mormonthink.com/QUOTES/gov.htm
CIA has a surprising number of Mormon Church members in its employ, and the ... “There are dozens, perhaps hundreds of special agents of the FBI currently on ...
Mormon Mafia” Cited in FBI Discrimination Case - Christian ...
http://www.equip.org/article/mormon-maf ... tion-case/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
Three hundred-eleven Hispanic FBI agents won a class action suit against the agency on September 30. A central argument in the suit was that their careers ...
Hi I'm Bernard, | philosophy, Soldier, war, FBI, CIA, NSA, Mormon.
https://www.mormon.org/me/83k7" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
I retired from the FBI in 2006. I served 34 years in Air Force Intelligence, the NSA, FBI and CIA. I'm a Mormon.
New ABC series features Mormon character wearing nothing but ...
http://www.sltrib.com" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false; › News
Jun 23, 2015 - "Are you Elder Eric? No way," says Caleb, rather stupidly stunned to think that — gasp! — a Mormon could be in the FBI. "Hey, do they know?
11 Surprising Things You Didn't Know About Mormons - Business ...
http://www.businessinsider.com/11-surpr ... -about-mor.." onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;.
Jun 24, 2011 - Mormons have become firmly embedded in the national consciousness this summer with the emergence of not one but two Mormon ...
LDSLiving - The Mormon FBI Agent Who Took Down 'Baby Face ...
http://www.ldsliving.com/The-Mormon-FBI ... .-/s/78619" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
Apr 16, 2015 - The Mormon FBI Agent Who Took Down 'Baby Face Nelson'. byAdapted from Kathryn Jenkins Gordon in <em>Colorful Characters in Mormon ...
It's true, the FBI and cia recruit/recruited heavily from the morg-rm's ...
exmormon.org/phorum/read.php?2,575624,577457
Jul 24, 2012 - 38 posts - ‎24 authors
There's a short reference in a mystery by Greg Iles about "one of the most elite groups in the [FBI] known as the Mormon Mafia." I won't include ...
Inside The Mormon Church | How Did the Mormon Church Become ...
http://www.truthbeknown.com/mormonism.htm" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
Says Brussell, "It is of no small moment that the LDS has infiltrated the CIA and the FBI, and that the special interests of the church have been handled by those ...

msfreeh
Level 34 Illuminated
Posts: 7683

Re: Let's see what the taxpayer funded in our neighborhood

Post by msfreeh »

Report: 1,000 police have lost their badges for sexual misconduct. Reality: The problem's much bigger than that.


http://www.vox.com/2015/11/1/9654946/po ... xual-fired" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;


November 1, 2015, 3:30 p.m.

The Associated Press has published a huge investigation into sexual misconduct by police officers, revealing that from 2008 to 2014, 1,000 officers across the country were stripped of their badges (and with them, their certification to work as police in the state) for sex-related misconduct. More than half of the officers — 550 — lost their certification due to sexual assault; another 440 were decertified for other sexual misconduct, which ranged from possessing child pornography or sexting with underage civilians to having (consensual) sex on the job.

What's more alarming is that there's no way that the AP investigation uncovered all — or even most — of the sexual misconduct that police officers engaged in over that period. There are a lot of steps between an officer engaging in misconduct and the officer losing his state certification. Every step presents an opportunity for fellow officers, the police department, prosecutors, or the certification board itself to protect an officer before he's forced to turn in his badge.

Sexual assault is always underreported — and that's especially true when the perpetrator is a police officer

A thousand officers getting fired might sound like a lot, but, of course, it's a pretty small fraction of the number of law enforcement officers in America. Look at it this way: If only 550 officers actually committed sexual assault between 2008 and 2014, the annual sexual assault crime rate among all police would be something like 20 per 100,000 — far lower than the rate for the general population. (According to the FBI, the crime rate for rape alone was 36.6 per 100,000 in 2014.)

But the AP isn't reporting that 1,000 officers committed sexual misconduct between 2008 and 2014 — only that 1,000 of them lost their badges over it. So there are two different questions: How often do police officers engage in misconduct? and When a police officer engages in misconduct, how often does he lose his badge over it?

When misconduct by police officers makes it into the news, it's often related to sex. The AP cites a study of news articles about police misconduct by a professor at Bowling Green State University; it found that sex-related cases were the third most common reason for officers to get arrested "behind violence and profit-motivated crimes." A separate analysis of news articles conducted by David Packman for the National Police Misconduct Reporting Project in 2009 and 2010 found that sex-related misconduct was the second most likely reason for a police officer to make it into the news — after excessive force.

That's extremely surprising. Because sexual assault is generally less likely to come to the attention of police than other crimes.
victims don't report crime to police

Police can only investigate and count crimes that they know about. With the exception of homicide, where there's literally a dead body to be explained away, cops will almost never find out a crime was committed if no one reports it to them. This can skew crime data in plenty of ways, as I've explained, but — as you can see in the chart above — it's a particularly big problem with sexual assault, whose victims are far less likely to go to the police than victims of other types of crimes.


And the reasons that sexual assault is underreported to begin with get compounded when the assailant is a police officer. If a victim doesn't believe that there's any point in reporting her assault because no one will believe her word against her assailant's, or because there's no evidence, or because she's worried her assailant will retaliate — that's probably all the more likely when the person she'd be reporting the assault to is the coworker of the person who committed the assault.
Police departments have opportunities to protect officers from getting in legal trouble over misconduct

Reporting misconduct is only the beginning. It takes a lot more than that to get a police officer stripped of his badge.

A quarter of the nation's police officers are employed in states that don't have any way to decertify a police officer, including California, New York, and New Jersey. But even when states have decertification boards, they rarely have enough power to go after police officers who are being protected by prosecutors or by their departments.

According to the AP's breakdown of state policies for decertifying police officers, only one state — Utah — requires police departments to tell the state certification board every time a complaint is made against a police officer. In the vast majority of states, an officer is only put at risk of losing his certification after he's already been held accountable for the misconduct by someone else.

In many states, law enforcement agencies are only obligated to report misconduct to the state board after an officer is arrested, or in some cases convicted, for a crime. In many states, the agency has to report any ti

msfreeh
Level 34 Illuminated
Posts: 7683

Re: Let's see what the taxpayer funded in our neighborhood

Post by msfreeh »

http://www.phillyvoice.com/new-nsa-dome ... o-use-us-/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;



A National Security Agency (NSA) data gathering facility is seen in Bluffdale, about 25 miles south of Salt Lake City, Utah, on May 18, 2015.

November 05, 2015
New NSA domestic spy program too clumsy to use: U.S. senator
Politics NSA Washington D.C. United States Reuters Surveillance Spying

WASHINGTON - A new, more limited system for monitoring Americans' phone calls for signs of terrorist intent is so slow and cumbersome that the U.S. National Security Agency will likely never use it, a senior Senate Republican said.

Richard Burr, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, opposed the new system when it was mandated earlier this year. He said this week he was not concerned by how the NSA will transition to it because it will probably not be used.

The NSA, which spies on electronic communications worldwide, is weeks away from ending its former indiscriminate vacuuming of information about Americans' phone calls, or metadata, and replacing it with a more targeted system.

Burr made his comments as lawmakers and Obama administration officials continue to disagree about the new approach to call monitoring, set to take effect on Nov. 29 under a law that overhauled domestic surveillance practices. It will replace a system exposed publicly more than two years ago by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden and denounced by civil liberties advocates as overly intrusive.

The new system cannot be relied upon for national security purposes, Burr said in an interview on Tuesday.

"I'm not concerned with the rollout (of the new system) because I'm resigned to the fact that metadata will never be used again," added Burr, a Republican security hawk.

He said he would have preferred to let the NSA continue its data grabs unfettered, adding that discontinuing the metadata program represents "a loss in the arsenal we have to identify terrorists."

Asked about Burr's comments, White House National Security Council spokesman Ned Price replied that the USA Freedom Act, enacted in June, "struck a reasonable compromise which allows us to continue to protect the country while implementing various reforms."

A presidential review panel appointed by President Barack Obama found that while the now-abandoned metadata collection program may have assisted in terrorism-related investigations, it did not lead to a single clear counterterrorism breakthrough that could be directly attributed to the program.

The NSA declined to comment on Burr's remarks.

Under the new procedures, the government – NSA and law enforcement agencies – will only be able to obtain, with court authorization, telephone calling data of particular individuals or groups of individuals available through routine billing records maintained by telecommunications companies. The companies themselves will not be required to maintain such data in any particular format or for any specific period of time.

Under the previous law, the NSA itself collected and stored large volumes of telephone calling data from U.S. telecommunications companies and NSA spies were allowed to query it extensively, including charting an individual suspect's network of phone contacts, without a court warrant.

SLOWER TO 'CONNECT THE DOTS'

Some officials have raised concern about the effectiveness of the new system, although there is little indication that the NSA plans to forgo its use entirely.

NSA Director Mike Rogers told Burr's committee in late September that his agency would lose some operational capabilities without bulk collection. Additionally, Rogers said he could issue emergency orders to query phone data less than 24 hours after being alerted of potential terrorist activity. Such orders will now have to come from the U.S. attorney general, Rogers said, so it could take longer to "connect the dots" in an investigation.

Others in the intelligence community disagreed.

FBI Director James Comey told a congressional panel last month that the new surveillance program was likely to produce more useful intelligence for counterterrorism operations.

Jasper Graham, a former NSA technical director and now chief technology officer at cyber security company Darktrace, said it was extremely unlikely that spies would no longer rely on phone metadata under the new program.

"All of it is useful information ... even if it is tremendously burdensome and cumbersome," Graham said. But a slower process could raise challenges, he added, beca

msfreeh
Level 34 Illuminated
Posts: 7683

Re: Let's see what the taxpayer funded in our neighborhood

Post by msfreeh »

http://www.mintpressnews.com/two-austin ... ng/211075/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;


Subscribe
Two Austin Men Beaten By Police For Jaywalking


| November 7, 2015


Austin-jaywalker

Two men had just crossed the street when they were rushed by several Austin police officers who shoved them against a wall, punching and kneeing them while telling them to stop resisting.

When asked what crime had the men committed, one of the cops looked up and said, “crossed against the light.”

Yes, that heinous crime of jaywalking, which is taken very serious in Austin as we learned last year when the city made international news after police beat up a jogger for jaywalking.

Last Thursday police in Austin, Texas, began a “pedestrian enforcement” activity near the campus of the University of Texas, where they stopped and warned or ticketed jaywalkers.

When law enforcement officers attempted to issue a jaywalking citation to a jogger, Amanda Jo Stephen, she refused to stop. Some witnesses say she didn’t hear the officers, as she was wearing earphones. Police contend that the officers were clearly visible to her.

One way or the other, according to reports, police chased her down and detained her, at which point she became unco-operative and refused to give her name. Several officers then placed her under arrest, and she was carried, screaming into a police car and taken to jail, where she was booked for jaywalking and “failure to identify”.

Austin Police Chief Art Acevedo quickly came to the defense of the arresting officers, saying they may have been rough with the female college student, but at least they didn’t rape her.

This person absolutely took something that was as simple as ‘Austin Police – Stop!’ and decided to do everything you see on that video,” Austin Police Chief Art Acevedo said at a press conference Friday, according to Austin NPR station 90.5 KUT.

“And quite frankly she wasn’t charged with resisting. She’s lucky I wasn’t the arresting officer, because I wouldn’t have been as generous. … In other cities there’s cops who are actually committing sexual assaults on duty, so I thank God that this is what passes for a controversy in Austin, Texas,” Acevedo said.

So yes, while beating up citizens up for jaywalking might seem a bit extreme, especially since jaywalking citations are supposedly meant for safety reasons, we should be grateful that they didn’t drag the young men into a back alley and sodomize them.

Instead, they dragged one of them into the street and handcuffed him.

But who knows what they would have done had the cameras not been there.

msfreeh
Level 34 Illuminated
Posts: 7683

Re: Let's see what the taxpayer funded in our neighborhood

Post by msfreeh »

http://motherboard.vice.com/read/a-list ... anda-movie" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;


Motherboard
Newsletter
A List of the Dumb Swag the FBI Made to Promote Its Dumb Propaganda Movie
November 12, 2015 // 09:00 AM EST

Earlier this year, a friend brought me a mysterious FBI-branded mousepad she had gotten from a conference in Washington, DC. It has a massive pawn chess piece on it, with the words “Don’t Be a Pawn” and “Game of Pawns” plastered across the middle of it.

I immediately Googled Game of Pawns, and found that it’s a very bad, pretty expensive anti-spying drama the FBI commissioned to persuade impressionable youths to not sell secrets to foreign governments.

The film, which is heavy-handed and unwatchable except as a piece of ironic entertainment for those who love to cringe, is based on Glenn Duffie Shriver, an American who studied abroad in Shanghai, was asked to provide the Chinese government with classified information, and was ultimately arrested. The film, a fictionalized version of his story, uses blatant shots of Washington DC's Chinatown to serve as "downtown Shanghai" and suffers from awful dialogue, bad timing, weird stereotypes, etc.

How much money had the agency spent on these damn mousepads? And was it only mousepads? How else had the agency promoted this piece of art?

The movie was created specifically so study abroad offices and university professors could warn their students that selling secrets to foreign governments is an illegal endeavor. From the film's original press release:

"The movie has played a significant role in our outreach efforts to educate American academia on how foreign intelligence services target and attempt to recruit American students studying abroad,” Frank Montoya, the National Counterintelligence Executive, said. “Productions such as the movie Game of Pawns are essential and very practical tools for sensitizing the public and private sectors to our nation’s growing counterintelligence mission.”

I immediately wondered why the FBI was creating totally crazy, mostly fictional propaganda movies that tell people not to be spies, and wondered how much money the agency (and FBI Academy TV Studios, which is a thing) had wasted on this endeavor. Motherboard contributor Shawn Musgrave had previously learned that this cinematic masterpiece cost the agency at least $650,000 (the invoice docs he obtained are opaque and hard to parse). It's been viewed on YouTube 117,403 times, which has been its primary distribution method. Not exactly a blockbuster considering its budget.

But what about the mousepad? How much money had the agency spent on these damn mousepads? Had there been internal discussion about what taglines to put on it? Various designs to choose from? Who put these together? Do people even use mice anymore?

msfreeh
Level 34 Illuminated
Posts: 7683

Re: Let's see what the taxpayer funded in our neighborhood

Post by msfreeh »

a smart criminal justice consumer would have read
ALaw Unto Itself by David Burnham.

Written 20 years ago it exposes FBI agents using the IRS
to target political activists.




1.

News
Nov 17 2015, 12:33 pm ET
Secret Service Accessed Rep. Chaffetz's Personal Info 60 Times

by Tony Capra



http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/sec ... es-n464941" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Homeland Security Inspector General John Roth testified at a joint House-Senate hearing Tuesday that Secret Service employees improperly accessed a restricted database 60 times looking for information on House Oversight and Government Reform Chairman Jason Chaffetz.

The access began minutes before Secret Service Director Clancy began testifying at a hearing chaired by Chaffetz on March 24th and continued through April 2nd of this year.

"Knowledge of Chairman Chaffetz's application was widespread and was fueled and confirmed by improper access


2.

MISUSE OF THE I.R.S.: THE ABUSE OF POWER
By David Burnham; David Burnham is a former New York Times reporter. This article is adapted from his book ''The I.R.S.: A Law Unto Itself,'' to be published next January
by David Burnham.
Published: September 3, 1989

http://www.nytimes.com/1989/09/03/magaz ... wanted=all" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

PETER K. BROS - CHIEF OF THE RULINGS section No. 2, exempt organization technical branch of the Internal Revenue Service, in Washington - was responding to an application for tax-exempt status. Some months earlier, the Minnesota Association for the Improvement of Science Education had applied for such status, including in its statement of purpose the desire to encourage the continued ''teaching of evolution in the public schools as the only recognized scientific theory of the origin of life on earth.''

In his Oct. 23, 1981, letter, Bros seemed personally affronted by the request. ''When you advocate that 'evolution' should be taught in the schools, state specifically what you mean by 'evolution' or what 'theory of evolution' should be taught,'' Bros wrote. ''What gives you the standing or the prerogative to deem certain version [ s ] of the origin of life on earth as pseudo-scientific? Why are you opposed to permitting the granting of equal time in school curricula to the teaching of the theory of creationism?''

Sister Lucy Knoll, a science teacher in the Roman Catholic school system of Minneapolis who was also the association's secretary, understood the power of the I.R.S. and its individual bureaucrats. Within two weeks, she dispatched a low-keyed, six-page response to Bros's questions.

''The pseudo-scientific versions of the origin of life on earth,'' she in-formed the tax man, ''are those that are derived from other than scientific data. Pseudo-scientific versions are put forward by numerous groups in our society, especially by religious fundamentalists whose views of what the Bible teaches are contrary to those of modern science.''

Sister Knoll's formal response to Bros was dispassionate. But the complaint she wrote to Roscoe L. Egger Jr., I.R.S. Commissioner during most of the Reagan Administration, had a different tone. ''The letter from Mr. Bros is partisan in the extreme and expresses his hostility toward the scientific view of the origin of life on earth,'' she informed Egger. ''The questions he asks are those one might expect from a totalitarian regime.''

Sister Knoll demanded the association's request for tax exemption be assigned to another official. She and the association's board members also shot off angry letters to their Congressmen, who contacted the I.R.S. A few months later, the association was granted tax-exempt status.

In the grand tradition of great bureaucracies, the I.R.S. blandly insisted that it had all been a misunderstanding. Bros's original response, the agency said, was merely intended to make sure that the association was presenting a ''full and fair exposition of the facts'' of the case.

Although Sister Knoll and her colleagues won, in many cases the personal views of I.R.S. officials have determined how the tax agency interpreted tax laws. The result: The I.R.S., which regularly intrudes on the lives of more Americans than any other Federal agency, has arguably become the single most powerful instrument of social control in the United States, deciding on a wide range of matters that are far removed from the collection of taxes.

The power of the I.R.S. is based on a number of factors: O Size. With 123,000 employees, the I.R.S. is the largest Federal law-enforcement agency. It is generally acknowledged as the greatest tax-collection system in the world, bringing to the United States Treasury an annual $1 trillion from 200 million taxpayers. O Information. It is a truism that the institution with the most information usually has the most power, and the I.R.S. has a computerized national data base unmatched by any other Federal agency. Today, with the help of high-speed computers, information presented by taxpayers on their income tax returns is compared with the billions of bits of data given the I.R.S. by the nation's employers, banks, corporations, universities, car dealers, state tax agencies, real-estate agents and other assorted record keepers. To collect the information it deems necessary, the I.R.S. has the power to order - without a warrant - banks, employers and other institutions to provide data about a taxpayer. (All other Federal, state and local police forces are required to obtain a warrant to get such information.) O Legal authority. One unique I.R.S. weapon is its independent authority to impose civil penalties. If a taxpayer feels the penalty is not justified, he can challenge it, but because of the special nature of civil tax law, the legal burden of proving his innocence almost always rests with him. This contrasts with criminal cases, in which the burden of proving the suspect's guilt rests with the government. The I.R.S. can grant or refuse tax-exempt status to various kinds of educational and charitable organizations, which means the agency's decisions can affect a broad range of social activities, including the practice of religion, the role of private schools, the availability of birth-control counseling, and the right of various groups to present their sometimes unpopular views.

Furthermore, the I.R.S. is empowered to make a ''jeopardy assessment'' - that is, without prior approval of a judge, to seize the assets of any taxpayer who, it believes, might be contemplating flight. In fact, a Federal law makes it extremely difficult for Federal judges to enjoin the agency from making such a seizure. O Complexity and ambiguity of tax laws. The Revenue Code of the United States, the law that is passed by Congress, is printed on some 2,200 pages. The I.R.S. regulations interpreting the law require an additional 7,600 pages.

Last year, Money magazine asked 50 tax preparers to complete the tax return of a hypothetical couple with three children who earned a combined salary of $100,000. The make-believe family's investments included stocks, mutual funds and corporate and municipal bonds, as well as a second home that was occasionally rented out.

The 50 tax pros came up with 50 different tax bills. When the magazine conducted the same survey with 50 other tax preparers this year, the confusion was even greater.

The confusion extends to I.R.S. agents as well. A 1987 study - conducted by the I.R.S. and the General Accounting Office, an investigative arm of Congress - of nearly 1,000 I.R.S. employees assigned to answer taxpayer questions, found that more than one-third of the answers were incorrect or incomplete.

The result is a Kafkaesque world in which neither the enforcers nor the citizens understand the law. This gives I.R.S. agents a free hand to pick and choose their targets. O Nothing must stop the collection of taxes. Federal cash payments - to the nation's highway builders, welfare and Social Security recipients, defense contractors, and public and private institutions that provide an assortment of services vital to the well-being of American citizens - are the lifeblood of Congressional politics. To guarantee their re-election, incumbent members of Congress must deliver the goods to their constituents, but Congress cannot give away money unless the Treasury is continually replenished.

This political imperative of not messing with the I.R.S. comes close to being a law of nature almost as unbending as the force of gravity. The I.R.S. is, therefore, rarely examined by Congress, which has the major responsibility of insuring that the agency is working fairly and effectively.

Throughout the history of the tax agency (which began as a continuing organization during the Civil War), very few commissioners - who are appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate - remained in office long enough to understand and lead the agency. This prevented the tax agency from becoming the personal kingdom of one man, but it also meant that only a few commissioners gained sufficient knowledge of the agency to be fairly held accountable for either its successes or(Continued on Page 50) its failures. The rapid turnover at the top has guaranteed that the agency is run by a small cadre of senior civil servants who have spent their entire careers slowly inching up the promotion ladder. Not surprisingly, most of them are cautious men who have adopted the I.R.S.'s generally conservative view of the world.

Largely left to their own devices, I.R.S. agents have, on many occasions, abused their authority for private or political ends. This summer, a House subcommittee disclosed that some high officials at the Internal Revenue Service had, from the early 1980's through last year, engaged in questionable and unethical practices. Furthermore, said the House panel, the tax agency's anticorruption unit had lost a great deal of its effectiveness.

Abusive and arbitrary acts by I.R.S. agents are nothing new, and charges of corruption among agents in such cities as Los Angeles, Cleveland, New York and Chicago have been regularly investigated. But more serious, perhaps, than such corruption (given the agency's size, most employees appear to be doing an honorable job) is the misuse of the agency when it comes to political or ideological issues. The history of the I.R.S. is riddled with repeated instances of agents acting out of self-interest or pursuing their own ideological agenda, as well as examples of Presidents, White House staff and Cabinet officials pressuring the tax agency to take political actions.

O CCASIONALLY, THE actions that the I.R.S. fails to take have as much significance as those it takes. In 1981, an umbrella group of organizations favoring abortion rights filed a Federal suit against the Roman Catholic Church, the I.R.S. and the agency's boss, the Treasury Secretary. The suit accused the church of using tax-exempt contributions for improper political purposes. It also charged that the I.R.S. and the Treasury Secretary had ''consistently overlooked these violations and failed and refused to perform their statutory duty to enforce the [ Tax ] Code and the Constitution.''

As one instance of what it viewed as a violation of the church's tax-exempt status, the abortion-rights group cited ''A Pastoral Plan for Pro-Life Activities'' that the United States Catholic Conference and the National Conference of Catholic Bishops had adopted in 1975. One section of this plan called for the creation of Congressional pro-life action groups that would ''work for qualified candidates who will vote for a constitutional amendment and other pro-life issues.''

By failing to withdraw the church's tax-exempt status because of these activities, the pro-choice group contended, the I.R.S. in effect provided the church with a substantial illegal subsidy for its political campaigns.

The I.R.S. has yet to take any public action against the Catholic Church, and the suit is still pending in Federal court. For the entire eight years of the Reagan Administration, say its critics, the inaction of the I.R.S. strengthened the hand of the Administration's strongest political ally on the abortion issue.

Over the years, the actions the I.R.S. has taken against ''unpopular'' groups and movements have assumed various forms. The agency has brought tax-evasion charges, taken away or denied tax-exempt status, or resorted to the annual audit. Often, the targeted organizations will exhaust themselves mentally and financially defending against these actions.

For many years, civil rights activities were a major agency concern. In 1954, the liberal Mississippi publisher Hodding Carter took the then-daring step for a Southern newspaper of endorsing the Supreme Court's school-desegregation decision. Almost immediately, Carter's newspaper, The Delta Democrat-Times, became the subject of a long series of annual I.R.S. audits. Like many who are selected for intense I.R.S. attention, the Carter family has never been able to uncover documents that would support their belief that the audits were politically motivated.

The Carters were not the only I.R.S. targets as the South moved into this difficult period of social change. In the late 1950's, the I.R.S. began auditing Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Years later, several of his lawyers and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference were audited as well. After the auditors raised questions about some deductions he was unable to document, King settled, paying the I.R.S. $500 in back taxes. He settled as well with the state of Alabama, which had also brought civil tax charges against him.

Then Alabama had second thoughts. King became the first person ever prosecuted by the state on criminal tax charges. The civil rights leader and his lawyers were forced to expend a great deal of time and money on

msfreeh
Level 34 Illuminated
Posts: 7683

Re: Let's see what the taxpayer funded in our neighborhood

Post by msfreeh »

Manufacturing Terror
An FBI Informant Seduced Eric McDavid Into a Bomb Plot. Then the Government Lied About It.

https://theintercept.com/2015/11/19/an- ... -about-it/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;


Photo: McDavid: Indy Bay; Anna: Earth First Journal
Trevor Aaronson, Katie Galloway



Nov. 19 2015, 1:04 p.m.

IT WAS A SWELTERING DAY in the summer of 2004, and Eric McDavid, then 26 years old, was in Des Moines, Iowa, for an annual gathering of self-described anarchists.

McDavid had come from his parents’ home outside Sacramento, train-hopping the 1,700-mile journey and scavenging for food where he could, including in dumpsters. An idealistic young man with a shaved head and a thick red beard, McDavid had been drawn to activism following the 9/11 terrorist attacks, when his parents gave him a copy of Michael Moore’s book Dude, Where’s My Country? McDavid began to attend protests in the San Francisco area, eventually gravitating toward anti-government views.

In Iowa, McDavid was staying with other activists in a farm house with a large porch. They were attending CrimethInc, which was described, in the gathering’s literature, as an event for anarchists “in pursuit of a freer and more joyous world.” Activists would come and go from the house, talking and smoking cigarettes or pot on the porch.

“Hey, anybody want to go for a ride?” someone shouted. “I’ve got to pick up somebody out on [Interstate] 80 at a truck stop.”

McDavid, in an interview with The Intercept, recalled hopping into the car with another activist. A few minutes later, McDavid spotted her, short and petite, no more than 120 pounds, with pink hair and a camouflage miniskirt. She said her name was Anna. He was quiet on the ride back, impressed and slightly intimidated by the story she told of hitchhiking from Florida with truckers.

McDavid recalled that Anna sidled up to him on the porch.

“So when are we going to bed?” she asked.

McDavid looked at his friend, whose eyebrows shot up in surprise.

“As soon as I get done with this cigarette?” he responded.

McDavid went upstairs and unfurled his sleep sack, offering to share it with Anna. She demurred, which confused McDavid, but she was flirtatious for the rest of the CrimethInc gathering and McDavid became enamored. She told him that she was 24 years old and had spent time in Iraq in the National Guard, which turned her against the government.

“If you’re asking if it made me angry and wanna, you know, destroy it,” she’d say later to one of McDavid’s friends, “then the answer would be yes.”

None of it was true. Anna wasn’t an activist. That wasn’t even her real name, which at the time was Zoe Elizabeth Voss. She was a paid FBI informant.



ericanna_still-1-5

Watch Eric & “Anna,” a film about an FBI informant and the environmental activist she helped entrap.

Anna would go on to lead McDavid and two other activists in their 20s in a loose plot to bomb targets in Northern California. Maybe in the name of the Earth Liberation Front. Or maybe not. Fitting for the muddied plot, their motivation was as unclear as their targets. Anna, at the direction of the FBI, made the entire plot possible — providing the transportation, money, and a cabin in the woods that the FBI had wired up with hidden cameras. Anna even provided the recipe for homemade explosives, drawn up by FBI bomb experts. Members of the group suggested, in conversations with her, that they regarded her as their leader.

At trial, McDavid’s lawyer, Mark Reichel, argued that the FBI had used Anna to lure McDavid into a terrorism conspiracy through the promise of a sexual relationship once the mission was complete. “That’s inducement,” Reichel told the federal jury. “That’s entrapment.” The jurors weren’t persuaded, however. In 2007, McDavid was convicted of conspiring to use fire or explosives to damage corporate and government property, and he was sentenced to nearly 20 years in prison, one of the longest sentences given to an alleged eco-terrorist in the United States. At the time of his conviction, the FBI had built a network of more than 15,000 informants like Anna and the government had classified eco-terrorism as the No. 1 domestic terrorism threat — even though so-called eco-terrorism crimes in the United States were rare and never fatal.

Seven years after his conviction, the government’s deceit was finally revealed. Last November, federal prosecutors admitted they had potentially violated rules of evidence by withholding approximately 2,500 pages of documents from McDavid. Among the belatedly disclosed documents were love letters between Anna and McDavid and evidence that Anna’s handler, Special Agent Ricardo Torres, had quashed the FBI’s request to put Anna through a polygraph test, commonly used by the FBI to ensure informants aren’t lying to agents as they collect evidence. The new documents also revealed which of the letters and emails the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit had reviewed before offering instructions on how to manipulate McDavid and guide him toward a terrorist conspiracy.

FILE - In this Thursday, Jan. 8, 2015 file photo, Eric McDavid, 37, walks out of the Federal Courthouse in Sacramento, Calif., with his attorneys Ben Rosenfeld and Mark R. Vermeulen, right, after being released from prison after serving nearly nine years in federal custody for what FBI agents alleged was as an eco-terrorist plot in the name of the Earth Liberation Front. McDavid was ordered released when a judge ruled that at his trial the government had never turned over to his defense attorney thousands of pages of documents they were entitled to see. (AP Photo/Sacramento Bee, Jose Luis Villegas, File) MAGS OUT; LOCAL TELEVISION OUT (KCRA3, KXTV10, KOVR13, KUVS19, KMAZ31, KTXL40); MANDATORY CREDIT

Eric McDavid, 37, walks out of the federal courthouse with his attorneys, Jan. 8, 2015, Sacramento, Calif.

Photo: Jose Luis Villegas/Sacramento Bee/AP
McDavid was released earlier this year as part of an unusual settlement: He agreed to plead guilty to a lesser charge of general conspiracy in exchange for his immediate release. Yet when his lawyers demanded to know why the government had withheld evidence that had been specifically requested before trial, the government made a veiled threat to throw McDavid back into prison for violating the terms of his plea agreement.

“The United States is currently reviewing its potential remedies for McDavid’s breach and whether to pursue those remedies,” federal prosecutors warned in their formal response.

The extent to which the crime was manufactured by the government can be fully measured now, thanks to the release of the hidden documents that became public earlier this year and hours of undercover recordings that were obtained exclusively by The Intercept and Field of Vision, which are releasing a documentary about the case, Eric & “Anna,” directed by one of the authors of this story, Katie Galloway, along with Kelly Duane de la Vega.

“To me, there are big American themes here,” said Ben Rosenfeld, a lawyer who was among those representing McDavid after his conviction. “Man entrapped by FBI and their informant — and railroaded by prosecutors who withhold and distort evidence at trial — is released after serving nine years of an outrageous 20-year sentence. He then dares to ask for an explanation, and the U.S. attorney’s office threatens him with re-prosecution just for asking. The court then runs cover for all of them and refuses even to probe who was responsible. That’s the opposite of accountability.”



IN THE FALL of 2003, Anna was 17 years old and a sophomore at a South Florida community college. Eager to impress her professor, she proposed an extra credit assignment: infiltrating protests at the upcoming Free Trade Agreement of the Americas summit in Miami.

“I wanted to figure out what they were doing and why they were interested in doing what they were doing,” Anna said at McDavid’s trial. “So I went to Goodwill, and I got some ratty clothes, because I knew the protestors were more into a grunge lifestyle than your average Old Navy or Gap lifestyle.”

She wasn’t a natural spy. Protest organizers suspected a plant and shut her out of their meetings. The next day, she showed up again, this time in a mask, and managed to attend a meeting where organizers discussed their plans.

After Anna presented the report to her class, a classmate who was a state law enforcement agent asked if he could share the paper with his bosses. Anna agreed. She soon received a call from the Miami Police Department, the lead agency during the protest.

“We have some questions about what you did, what you saw,” Anna recalled them saying. “Would you mind coming in this afternoon?”

When Anna arrived, she was greeted by two police officers and an FBI agent who asked if she’d be willing to monitor protestors at the upcoming G8 forum in Sea Island, Georgia, as well as the 2004 Democratic and Republican national conventions. She’d be undercover, they made clear. She signed up immediately.

For the FBI, Anna was a great find — an informant young enough to look the part of the environmental and animal-rights activists she would be infiltrating. As in Muslim communities after 9/11, the FBI created undercover stings that provided the means and opportunity for left-wing activists to cross the line into violent action. While far fewer in number than the stings against Muslims, the stings on left-wing activists have been just as egregious. For example, an FBI informant led five members of the Occupy movement — at least one of whom had been treated for mental health issues — in a plot to bomb a bridge in Ohio. The FBI came up with the plot and financed it. An undercover informant provided the purported bomb.

The government’s interest in McDavid appears to have begun in February 2005, when the FBI arrested a man named Ryan Lewis for his role in planting five incendiary devices in Auburn, California, near Sacramento. Lewis, who pleaded guilty and was sentenced to six years in prison, was a friend of McDavid’s. After Lewis’ arrest, FBI agents went to McDavid’s parents’ house — but McDavid, something of a drifter at the time, wasn’t there.

Anna provided the FBI with a way to gather information about him. Anna and McDavid exchanged emails after meeting at CrimethInc in Iowa. In one email Anna sent — which was among the newly released documents — Anna explicitly suggests the promise of a relationship. “I think you and I could be great,” she wrote on June 27, 2005, weeks before the next CrimethInc in Indiana. “But we have a LOTS of little kinks to work out … I hope in Indiana we can spend more quality time together, and really chat about life and our things.”

In his reply, McDavid didn’t miss the “our things” cue:

hey cheeka, so far as us B’n great, that i think is an understatement … along w/the ‘LOTS of little kinks 2 wk out’ … but if u aint learning, u aint live’n … & I do think we could learn a lot from eachother … ido think that indiana will B a good space 2 start some of that but i’d like 2 look N2 do’n some independently from the scene N the future 2, i think that it’d throw a different light on the subject wich could B helpful … but that’s 4 a future discussion : ) … now so far as plans, u know I don’t have those things anymore, only ideas …

In another email leading up to their Indiana meeting, McDavid made his feelings clear: “Totally miss you. You’re never far from my thoughts or heart. Guess I’ve been fighting that last part a bit. Okay, a lot.” He signed it, “Much love, me.”

eric-mcdavid-handwritten-note

Eric McDavid’s handwritten note to “Anna,” the FBI informant.

Photo: FBI
By then, Anna was working with Special Agent Torres, who was based in the FBI’s Philadelphia office. In October 2005, a collection of McDavid’s electronic and handwritten messages were provided to the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit in Quantico, Virginia, for “behavioral insight into Eric McDavid,” according to an FBI memo. The unit’s analysis and the fact that Anna received such specific guidance — key pieces of evidence that the defense had been seeking before the trial — were made public only in January of this year. At trial, Anna testified that the Behavioral Analysis Unit had offered advice, but it was not disclosed that FBI psychologists had actually reviewed McDavid’s messages.

“They said if he makes another advance at you, what you need to say to him to calm him, to mollify him,” Anna testified. She was instructed not to “shoot him down outright.” Instead, she was advised to tell him, “We need to put the mission first. There’s time for romance later.”

Anna and McDavid saw each other again in 2005 at the next CrimethInc. Anna told her FBI handler, and later said on the witness stand, that McDavid expressed his interest in violence then. “He said that he had gotten a bomb recipe for C4 from an individual in West Virginia. And his plan was to make little C4 bombs,” Anna testified.

But this alleged conversation was not recorded. Anna was the only source. McDavid has denied he said it.

Could Anna be trusted?

Among the documents released years after McDavid’s conviction were FBI reports that requested a polygraph examination for Anna, to make sure she was telling the truth. It’s unclear why the FBI scuttled Anna’s polygraph. The bureau declined to comment for this story. Anna also told her handler that McDavid had two co-conspirators in his supposed bomb plot. Anna claimed that Lauren Weiner, a Philadelphia art student who was 20 years old and went by the nickname Ren, told her that McDavid invited her and Zach Jenson, a 20-year-old sometime travel companion of McDavid’s who went by the nickname Ollie, to join the plot.

Yet the plot, or whatever it really was, was going nowhere by the time Anna told the FBI about it. McDavid had returned to the West Coast and dropped out of contact with her. The FBI decided to jumpstart the plot. “We formulated a plan to get me out to the West Coast under the guise of a sick aunt that I was visiting,” Anna recounted at trial.



USING FBI MONEY, Anna bought a plane ticket for Weiner to fly to Sacramento in the fall of 2005. They met up with Jenson and drove to McDavid’s parents’ house outside Sacramento. It was November 18, 2005. As they arrived, McDavid told them: “Just so everybody’s on the same page, you’re walking into a house of a known anarchist.” He was joking about his friendship with Ryan Lewis and how FBI agents had come to his parents’ house after Lewis’ arrest. They hung around McDavid’s house, smoking marijuana, talking and eating dinner, before finally moving into the backyard to sit around a fire pit, where they discussed the alleged plot. Anna led the conversation, pressuring the group to come up with a concrete plan.

“We could practice shooting, we could do reconnaissance, we could even test something tomorrow and Sunday,” Anna said.

“Hm-hm,” McDavid mumbled, not committing to any ideas.

If McDavid had told Anna that he was planning a C4 bomb attack, as she reported to the FBI, his conversation at the fire pit suggested that his dedication had been momentary at best.

“What do we need to do over winter? What do we need to improve? What do we need to train more on?” Anna badgered.

They spoke vaguely about targets. McDavid talked about pouring sugar into the underground tanks at gas stations. They wondered aloud if dropping a lit cigarette into those tanks would cause

Post Reply