FBI Director Comey elected Trump,FBI Director Mueller will keep Trump President

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msfreeh
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FBI Director Comey elected Trump,FBI Director Mueller will keep Trump President

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Material dealing with FBI Director nominee James Tomey should be posted here.
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/OTUS/dem ... agErZxyziE" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

see link for full story


Obama's GOP FBI Pick a Folk Hero for Democrats
PHOTO: Deputy Attorney General James Comey gestures during a news conference in Washington, Jan. 14, 2004.
Deputy Attorney General James Comey gestures during a news conference in Washington, Jan. 14, 2004. (Evan Vucci/AP)


May 30, 2013

James Comey, the man President Obama is likely to nominate as the new director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, may be a Republican, but he's near and dear to the hearts of many liberals in Washington.

The former Bush administration official became something of a folk hero for some of the most riveting congressional testimony in history.

"As far as I'm concerned, when the Justice Department lost Jim Comey, it lost a towering figure," said Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., during that congressional hearing in 2007. And when he said that, Schumer wasn't referring to Comey's 6'8 frame.

In that testimony, Comey recounted how he, a deputy attorney general under John Ashcroft, rushed to his boss's hospital bedside to urge him not to sign an authorization for a classified domestic wiretapping program.

At the time, Senate Democrats were investigating the Justice Department's activities, including the firing of Justice Department attorneys, and in the process of that investigation this now historic incident from 2004 was unearthed in cinematic detail.

Here's how it happened:

With Ashcroft in the intensive care unit in 2004, Comey was acting attorney general and he refused to sign the order re-authorizing the surveillance program which was set to expire within a few days. Then-White House counsel Alberto Gonzales, who later became attorney general, and White House Chief of Staff Andy Card went to Ashcroft's sick bed at George Washington Hospital in an apparent attempt to override Comey's decision.

In his 2007 congressional testimony, years after leaving the Justice Department for the private sector, Comey said that he believed Gonzales and Card were attempting to do "an end-run around the acting attorney general."

"And so I raced to the hospital room, entered. And Mrs. Ashcroft was standing by the hospital bed, Mr. Ashcroft was lying down in the bed, the room was darkened. And I immediately began speaking to him, trying to orient him as to time and place, and try to see if he could focus on what was happening, and it wasn't clear to me that he could. He seemed pretty bad off," Comey told Congress.

"I was very upset. I was angry. I thought I just witnessed an effort to take advantage of a very sick man, who did not have the powers of the attorney general because they had been transferred to me," he added.

You can watch the rest here.

That testimony became the lynchpin of the Democratic argument that Gonzales had engaged in "poor judgment and questionable actions," according to Sen. Diane Feinstein, D-Calif. And it precipitated a no-confidence vote against Gonzales in the Senate.

"Comey obviously won a lot of points on the liberal side for the hospital episode," said Michael Tomasky a liberal columnist and editor in chief of Democracy magazine.

But not everyone is ready to give Comey a pass for his involvement in Bush adminsitration counterterrorism policies. The American Civil Liberties Union said that though he deserves "credit" for "courageously" halting the reauthorization of a secret survaillance program, the Senate should still closely scrutinize his nomination.

"As the second-highest ranked Justice Department official under John Ashcroft, Comey approved some of the worst abuses committed by the Bush administration," said Anthony D. Romero, executive director of the ACLU. "Specifically, the publicly available evidence indicates Comey signed off on enhanced interrogation techniques that constitute torture, including waterboarding. He also oversaw the indefinite detention without charge or trial of an American citizen picked up in the United States and then held for years in a military brig."

And as a Republican who donated more than $7,500 to Republican Nominee Mitt Romney's presidential campaign in 2011 and 2012, and $2,300 to Arizona Senator John McCain's presidential bid in 2008, Senate Republicans may be hard pressed to put up a big fight against Comey's nomination.
Last edited by msfreeh on December 31st, 2017, 1:42 pm, edited 3 times in total.

msfreeh
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Re: Obama choses James Tomey, a man who tortures to head the

Post by msfreeh »

comment off the internet




The Wall Street Journal Blog censored this comment...."So, 'Mr. Comey burnished his reputation with high-profile prosecutions of white-collar crimes, including the case involving entrepreneur homemaker Martha Stewart.' This is propaganda from the WSJ. Comey's self-serving 'testimony put Comey in the spotligh' because of the fawning WSJ. Ms. Stewart was not 'in jail for trading on insider information.' She had no "insider information" and no evidence existed she did anything wrong with her small, personal, legal stock sale. Comey framed her with trumped-up charges, including a big-time bogus charge with a 10-year prison term and a $2 million fine that was thrown out in court as completely baseless and bizarre.

As a Bush goon, Comey's prosecutorial malfeasance unleashed on Martha Stewart makes him unfit for the FBI. In charge of the FBI, 'Comey the Terrible' is a threat to the constitutional rights of all Americans. United States Code Section 1001 will be his weapon of terror in trampling the American constitution."

Obama is obviously rehabilitating the Bush Administration and giving America eight more years of Bush. The Obama Administration is morally bankrupt and imploding with scandals. Obama's presidential campaign of "change" was election fraud.

msfreeh
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Re: Obama choses James Tomey, a man who tortures to head the

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see link for full story

http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/201 ... nforcement" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;


FBI Pick Is A Republican With Deep Roots In Law Enforcement


May 30, 2013 7:00 AM
President Obama is expected to nominate James Comey, seen in 2004, to be the next director of the FBI.


From 'Morning Edition': NPR's Carrie Johnson talks about James Comey

"Name any high office in federal law enforcement ... odds are Jim Comey's had it over the years."

That's some of what NPR's Carrie Johnson had to say about the man who she has been told, by two sources with knowledge of the decision, will be President Obama's choice to be the next director of the FBI.

Carrie . Then on Morning Edition, she added more details about the 52-year-old former deputy attorney general. For instance:

— In 2004, when Comey was the No. 2 official at Justice during the George W. Bush administration, he rushed to a Washington-area hospital to be by then-Attorney General John Ashcroft's bedside. Comey helped thwart White House counsel Alberto Gonzales' attempt to pressure Ashcroft into reauthorizing a controversial wiretapping program.

As Carrie and , Comey later testified before Congress that, "I was angry. I thought I had just witnessed an effort to take advantage of a very sick man who did not have the powers of the attorney general." At one point, he threatened to resign.

— It was Comey who expanded the mandate of a special prosecutor appointed to investigate the 2003 leak of CIA operative Valerie Plame's identity. That probe led to the , Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, for lying to investigators.

— Comey's career also includes stints as the top prosecutor in New York City. While in that post, he prosecuted home styles guru and TV personality . Before that, while working as a prosecutor in Virginia, Comey worked to take guns off the streets of Richmond.


— "By choosing Mr. Comey, a Republican, Mr. Obama made a strong statement about bipartisanship at a time when he faces renewed criticism from Republicans in Congress and has had difficulty winning confirmation of some important nominees. At the same time, Mr. Comey's role in one of the most dramatic episodes of the Bush administration — in which he refused to acquiesce to White House aides and reauthorize a program for eavesdropping without warrants when he was serving as acting attorney general — should make him an acceptable choice to Democrats." ()

— "The expected nomination would bestow an exceedingly important and sensitive post on a registered Republican who twice served as an appointee of President George W. Bush: first as U.S. attorney in Manhattan and second as deputy attorney general. However, Comey is widely viewed as an apolitical prosecutor and is best known for rebuffing pressure from Bush's White House to approve the reauthorization of a terrorist surveillance-related program in 2004. ()

— "The expected nomination of Comey, a Republican, was seen in some quarters as a bipartisan move by a president besieged by Republicans in Congress. But Chuck Hagel's prior service as a Republican senator from Nebraska did not spare him from a bruising nomination battle for secretary of defense." ()

As for issues that might raise questions about a Comey nomination, Iowa Republican Sen. Charles Grassley said Wednesday that "if he's nominated, he would have to answer questions about his recent work in the hedge fund industry. ... The administration's efforts to criminally prosecute Wall Street for its part in the economic downturn have been abysmal, and his agency would have to help build the case against some of his colleagues." , "Comey was general counsel to Connecticut-based hedge fund Bridgewater Associates from 2010 until earlier this year and now lectures at Columbia Law School."

msfreeh
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Re: Obama choses James Tomey, a man who tortures to head the

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see link for full story

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree ... i-bush-nsa" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;



Obama's new FBI chief approved Bush's NSA warrantless wiretapping scheme

James Comey becomes just the latest symbol of the Obama legacy: normalizing what was very recently viewed as radical

Thursday 30 May 2013 08.57 EDT




One of the biggest scandals of the Bush administration (which is really saying something) began on December 16, 2005. That was when the New York Times' James Risen and Eric Lichtblau were finally allowed to reveal what they had learned more than a year earlier: namely, that President Bush, in 2002, had ordered the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on the electronic communications of US citizens without first obtaining warrants from the FISA court as required by 30-year-old criminal law. For the next three years, they reported, the NSA "monitored the international telephone calls and international e-mail messages of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people inside the United States without warrants." The two NYT reporters won the Pulitzer Prize for that story.

To say that progressives and liberals bellowed sustained outrage over that revelation is to understate the case. That NSA program was revealed less than two months after I first began writing about political issues, and I spent the next full year overwhelmingly focused on that story, and also wrote my first book on it. In progressive circles, the NSA warrantless eavesdropping program was the pure symbol of Bush/Cheney radicalism and lawlessness: they secretly decided that they were empowered to break the law, to commit what US statutes classified as felonies, based on extremist theories of executive power that held that the President, as Commander-in-Chief, was entitled under Article II of the Constitution to eavesdrop however he wanted in the name of national security, even if it meant doing exactly that which the law forbade.

The FISA law provided that anyone who eavesdrops without the required warrants - exactly what Bush officials did - is committing a felony "punishable by a fine of not more than $10,000 or imprisonment for not more than five years, or both" - for each offense. Moreover, all three federal judges who actually ruled on the merits of the Bush NSA warrantless eavesdropping program concluded that it violated the law.

So why, then, was there no accountability for this systematic illegal spying? That happened for two reasons. First, both the Bush DOJ and then the Obama DOJ successfully convinced obsequious federal courts that the eavesdropping program was so secretive that national security would be harmed if courts were to adjudicate its legality - in other words, top government officials should be placed above and beyond the rule of law because doing so is necessary to Keep Us Safe™. Second, the Bush DOJ's most senior lawyers - Attorney General John Ashcroft, Deputy Attorney General James Comey and OLC chief Jack Goldsmith - approved a legal memorandum in 2004 endorsing radical executive power theories and warped statutory interpretations, concluding that the Bush NSA warrantless eavesdropping program was legal, thus making it more difficult to prosecute the Bush officials who ordered it (even if the Obama DOJ were inclined to prosecute, which they were not).

It was announced yesterday that this very same James Comey - who as Bush's Deputy Attorney General authorized the once-very-controversial, patently illegal Bush NSA eavesdropping program - is President Obama's choice to be the new Director of the FBI.

How are Obama's most devoted media loyalists reacting to the news that he is about to put in charge of the FBI the Bush lawyer who authorized the illegal NSA warrantless eavesdropping program based on warped right-wing legal theories? Exactly as you would expect. Here's one of them - who wrote post after post after post in 2006 and 2007 vehemently denouncing the NSA program which Comey authorized and the theories on which it was based - hailing Comey as "not only non partisan in [his] job but consistently put constitutional equities at center [of his] thinking".

It is true that Comey was at the center of a dramatic Bush-era political controversy that earned him praise from many Bush critics, including me. Comey was one of the Bush DOJ lawyers who, along with Ashcroft, Goldsmith, and FBI Director Robert Mueller, had threatened to resign if Bush did not modify the NSA program in order to make it legal in Comey's eyes, and he then went to the hospital where Ashcroft was quite ill to prevent then-White House counsel Alberto Gonzales and then-White House chief of staff Andy Card from bullying the infirm and barely cogent Attorney General into signing off on the legality of the NSA program.

In other words, there was something the NSA was doing for years - that we still don't know - even more extreme than the illegal NSA program revealed by the NYT in 2005. It was Comey, along with Ashcroft, Mueller, and Goldsmith, who threatened to resign if it did not stop, and they deserve credit for that. But the reason they didn't end up resigning was because Bush officials "modified" that NSA program into something those lawyers could and did endorse: the still-illegal, still-radical NSA eavesdropping program that spied on the communications of Americans without warrants and in violation of the law. And this was accomplished by inventing a new legal theory to accompany the old one: that Congress, when it enacted the 2001 AUMF, silently and "implicitly" authorized Bush to eavesdrop in exactly the ways the law expressly forbade.

Thus, it was Comey who gave his legal approval to enable that NSA eavesdropping program to spy on Americans without warrants: the same program that produced so much outrage and scandal when revealed by the NYT. How can any progressive who spent the Bush years vehemently denouncing that domestic spying program as the symbol of Bush radicalism and lawlessness now cheer when the lawyer who approved it is about to be put in charge of the FBI?

Then there's Comey's mixed and quite murky role in authorizing Bush's torture program. Internal DOJ emails released to the New York Times in 2009 show Comey expressing serious reservations, and even objections, to the willingness of Albert Gonzales to legally authorize any interrogation techniques the White House wanted, and he warned those officials that their involvement would be condemned by history. But even as he did so, Comey, as the New York Times explained, eventually, albeit reluctantly, gave his legal approval to those techniques:

"Previously undisclosed Justice Department e-mail messages, interviews and newly declassified documents show that some of the lawyers, including James B. Comey, the deputy attorney general who argued repeatedly that the United States would regret using harsh methods, went along with a 2005 legal opinion asserting that the techniques used by the Central Intelligence Agency were lawful.

"That opinion, giving the green light for the CIA to use all 13 methods in interrogating terrorism suspects, including waterboarding and up to 180 hours of sleep deprivation, 'was ready to go out and I concurred,' Mr. Comey wrote to a colleague in an April 27, 2005, e-mail message obtained by The New York Times."

As I wrote at the time, the NYT article significantly overstated Comey's role in approving these torture programs. But it is true that he ultimately acquiesced to their legalization.

There's no question that James Comey was far from among the worst people at the Bush DOJ. He's not John Yoo or David Addington, some of whose theories he rejected. He engaged in some rare, commendable conduct, including objecting to the more extreme version of the NSA program to the point of threatening resignation, and voicing serious reservations about the wisdom of some of the more extreme torture techniques. I understand the respect people have for some of what he did, and even share it.

But whatever else was true, he was the lawyer who legally approved that warrantless NSA program that the New York Times revealed that caused so much scandal. And he was part of the process that legalized the torture techniques used by the Bush administration. How can that possibly not disqualify him from running the FBI in the eyes of progressives who claimed to find all of that so atrocious and such an assault on all that is dear and good in the world?

But this is exactly where the Obama administration has taken us. Comey will run the FBI alongside Obama's chief of the CIA, John Brennan, who spent the Bush years advocating multiple torture techniques and rendition. The Agent of Change reaches deep into the bowels of the Bush National Security State and empowers them to run two of the most powerful agencies. Then again, the Bush NSA program is hardly controversial in the Age of Obama: it was Obama who first voted to immunize the telecoms from all legal liability for their illegal participation in that program, then the Obama DOJ succeeded in having all lawsuits over that program dismissed on secrecy and immunity grounds, and then Obama himself succeeded in first enacting and then renewing the law that legalized most aspects of that Bush NSA eavesdropping program.

What was once deemed radical is now normal. Bush officials who formally authorized programs once depicted by progressives as radical and criminal are now heralded by those same progressives as Champions of the Constitution. The politician elected on a pledge of Change and Restoration of Our Values now routinely empowers exactly those Washington officials who championed the policies against which he railed. It's one thing to watch Obama shield and protect all Bush officials who enabled this illegal warrantless domestic surveillance scheme. It's quite another to watch him put in charge of the FBI the very official whose signature deemed it to be legal.

James Comey is far from the worst choice to lead the FBI. I doubt it will change much of anything one way or the other, and there are undoubtedly worse people within the senior ranks of the Democratic Party who would be the likely alternatives. But it's still a potent symbol of how little has changed in the right direction and how much it has changed in the wrong direction. If you had told progressives in 2008 that the Bush lawyer who approved the NSA program would be named by Obama as the FBI Director, they would scoff in disbelief. Now they'll cheer. That is what has changed.
Holder's off-the-record meeting with media outlets

Following up on yesterday's column about Eric Holder's attempts to meet with media outlets over the leak investigations controversy and his demand that the meeting be off-the-record: several organizations have commendably refused to attend under those conditions, including the New York Times, Associated Press, the Huffington Post and (even) CNN. Unsurprisingly, both Politico and the Washington Post will eagerly submit to that condition and attend the meeting, even though they'll be barred from telling their readers what was discussed. Here is the unbelievable response of the official spokesman of the Democratic National Committee, Brad Woodhouse, upon learning that several leading media outlets will not attend under that condition:
woodhouse



Another of the most controversial acts of the Bush administration was the due-process-free imprisonment of US citizen Jose Padilla, who was arrested in 2002 on US soil, then put in a military brig, without charges, for 3 1/2 years. During that time, he was denied a lawyer, held incommunicado, and tortured. That was the incident that, more than any other, really motivated me to begin writing about politics: back then, it actually shocked me that the US government would claim the power to imprison US citizens on US soil without charges of any kind. As Charles Davis recalls, it was James Comey who took a leading role in the Bush administration in defending that lawless imprisonment, arguing in 2004:


"Had we tried to make a case against Jose Padilla through our criminal justice system, something that I, as the United States attorney in New York, could not do at that time without jeopardizing intelligence sources, he would very likely have followed his lawyer's advice and said nothing, which would have been his constitutional right.

"He would likely have ended up a free man, with our only hope being to try to follow him 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and hope -- pray, really -- that we didn't lose him. . . .

"Two years ago, the president of the United States faced a very difficult choice. After a careful process, he decided to declare Jose Padilla for what he was: an enemy combatant, a member of a terrorist army bent on waging war against innocent civilians. And the president's decision was to hold him to protect the American people and to find out what he knows.

"We now know much of what Jose Padilla knows, and what we have learned confirms that the president of the United States made the right call, and that that call saved lives."

Indeed, when the Bush administration declared Padilla to be an "enemy combatant" and thus removed him from the civilian court system and imprisoned him without charges, Comey was the US Attorney in New York, where Padilla's case was contested. He then became a leading advocate for Bush's denial of the most basic due process to this US citizen. That is who Obama-loyal progressives today are hailing. And that is who is about to lead the FBI, thanks to President Obama.
UPDATE II

On Monday, when I wrote about Obama's terrorism speech, I noted the gushing editorial from the New York Times that was published very shortly after the speech was over, and suggested that its length and detailed discussion of the speech meant that the editors had been given an advanced preview by the White House. The paper's editorial page editor, Andy Rosenthal, did acknowledge yesterday that at least part of the praise for Obama's speech was unwarranted. Furthermore, Charlie Savage did preview the speech in the NYT the day before it was delivered. But the NYT editorial page editors insist to me that they did not themselves receive any advanced review, but rather wrote the editorial based on the speech as it was delivered. I take them at their word that this is true.
UPDATE III

The ACLU today issued a statement on Comey's nomination which, among other things, pointed out that "as the second-highest ranked Justice Department official under John Ashcroft, Comey approved some of the worst abuses committed by the Bush administration." In other words, he's the ideal choice for President Obama to run the FBI. Anyway, as the president taught us long ago, it's really unproductive - and more than a little crass - to Look Backward when it comes to our most powerful political officials. It's just not a nice thing to do. What's a little illegal warrantless eavesdropping, torture, and lawless imprisonment of US citizens among friends? We all make mistakes. Just keep Looking Forward.

msfreeh
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Re: Obama choses James Tomey, a man who tortures to head the

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http://www.hrw.org/news/2013/07/01/us-q ... ture-memos" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;



US: Question FBI Nominee on ‘Torture Memos’
Senate Should Scrutinize James Comey’s Record on Detainee Abuse
July 1, 2013





The Bush administration’s ‘torture memos’ sought to evade the clear prohibitions against torture under US and international law. The Senate Judiciary Committee should closely question James Comey about his apparent endorsement of some of those memos
Andrea Prasow, senior counterterrorism counsel

(Washington, DC) – United States Senate Judiciary Committee members considering James Comey for the next director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) should question him on his apparent approval of legal memos authorizing torture, Human Rights Watch and six other human rights and civil liberties groups said in a letter today to committee members.

While serving as deputy attorney general from 2003-2005, Comey wrote that he “concurred” with two legal memoranda that approved the use of waterboarding, prolonged sleep deprivation, and other forms of torture and ill-treatment.

“The Bush administration’s ‘torture memos’ sought to evade the clear prohibitions against torture under US and international law,” said Andrea Prasow, senior counterterrorism counsel at Human Rights Watch. “The Senate Judiciary Committee should closely question James Comey about his apparent endorsement of some of those memos.”

The FBI is the lead federal agency in interrogating suspects and is responsible for investigating allegations of torture by government officials. Before voting on Comey’s confirmation, the Senate should fully examine his past and current views on the use of torture and other forms of abuse against people in US custody.

In 2004, the Office of the Legal Counsel, which provides legal advice to the executive branch, wrote a memo addressed to Comey that upheld a 2002 “torture memo” that arguably approved the use of waterboarding and other forms of torture against Abu Zubaydah, an alleged close aid of Osama Bin Laden. Comey also “concurred” with a 2005 Office of the Legal Counsel memo that authorized interrogation methods such as cramped confinement, wall-standing, water dousing, extended sleep deprivation, and waterboarding, despite recognizing these techniques as “simply awful” and recommending against their use in combination.

“Comey was at the center of the Justice Department when important decisions were being made about torture,” Prasow said. “The public has a right to know what positions he took, and the Judiciary Committee should demand full disclosure of his role during the confirmation process.”

msfreeh
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Posts: 7691

Re: Obama choses James Tomey, a man who tortures to head the

Post by msfreeh »

2 stories


1st story



see link for full story
http://www.foxnews.com/on-air/oreilly/2 ... bi-and-irs" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;


Bill O'Reilly: The FBI and the IRS
July 04, 2013
A conservative group called The American Center for Law and Justice says that the Federal Bureau of Investigation has not even contacted, has not even contacted any of the 41 groups involved in a class action suit against the IRS.

As you may know, the federal tax agency admits it targeted some conservative organizations and individuals, delaying tax exempt status and auditing some people because of their political beliefs. That's a huge scandal, if true. And it is the FBI's job to see if anything criminal was going on.

But two weeks ago, Director Robert Mueller stunned the nation when he testified in front of the House committee.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JORDAN: Can you tell me some basics? Can you tell me how many agents, investigators you have assigned to the case?

MUELLER: We may be able to do that but I have to get back to you.

JORDAN: Can you tell me who the lead investigator?

(END VIDEO CLIP)

O'REILLY: Flat out embarrassing. After hearing Mr. Mueller say that I said this.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

O'REILLY: Mueller doesn't know? Are you kidding me? Surely he knew he'd be asked about the IRS investigation in front of the judiciary committee. Surely he knew that. If Mueller doesn't know specifics about the IRS investigation, it's because he doesn't want to know.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

O'REILLY: Well, today there are charges my analysis was correct that the FBI is either dragging its collective feet or stonewalling the IRS investigation. Between 2010 and 2012, at least five different IRS offices improperly handled requests from conservative operations for tax exempt status.

Also, the former director of the IRS Douglas Shulman was signed into the White House 157 times, far more than any other federal official. Why was Shulman there? It is the FBI's job to find out. But apparently the bureau considered by some to be the finest investigative agency in the world, not up and running yet on the biggest federal case in some time. Does that make any sense to anyone? The answer is no. It makes no sense at all.



2nd story
http://www.aclu.org/blog/human-rights-n ... -bush-time" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

07/05/2013

James Comey: A Closer Look
Obama’s Pick to Lead FBI Approved Waterboarding Under Bush: Time to Speak Out
By Chris Anders, Senior Legislative Counsel, ACLU Washington Legislative Office at 7:52pm

While most of us are enjoying an extra-long July 4th weekend, James Comey, a top Bush lawyer who approved waterboarding and torture, is getting ready for one of his last hurdles before becoming FBI director. I'm sure that torture supporters are hoping that we spend more time at the beach and pool, and don't dig into Comey’s record.

Behind this nomination is a strange and ironic story. Beginning on Tuesday, President Obama might end up getting done what President Bush failed to do during nearly all of his last four years in office. All President Obama needs is for the Senate—and all of us—to look the other way while rubber-stamping his choice to head the FBI for the next 10 years.

As you may remember, after getting Alberto Gonzales confirmed as attorney general at the start of his second term, President Bush spent the next four years trying—and failing—to get the Senate to confirm any other members of his torture policy team. The Senate, under both Republican control and Democratic control, stood up to President Bush and turned away nominee after nominee with a record of approving water boarding or other torture. It was a principled and bipartisan rejection of rewarding the Bush administration’s torture policies.

But in a bizarre twist, James Comey—who served as deputy attorney general under both John Ashcroft and Alberto Gonzales, and who twice gave a thumbs-up to torture—has been nominated to be the FBI director for the next decade. As FBI director, Comey would oversee nearly all of the country's most important interrogations and criminal investigations of government officials who torture or abuse prisoners at home or abroad.”

Will the fox be put in charge of the henhouse? Will someone who at least twice gave a thumbs-up to waterboarding and torture be put in charge of the FBI? Will torture be treated as a serious crime if there is an FBI director who ordered a Justice Department legal memo written that was designed to keep torturers from ever being prosecuted for their crimes?

On Tuesday, the Senate Judiciary Committee will hold a one-day hearing on whether it will confirm Comey as the next FBI director. Will he glide through based on his backing by President Obama, or will senators stand up and ask the same tough questions that they asked of a parade of Bush nominees with torture-approving records?

Two senior senators on the Judiciary Committee—Sens. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) and Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.)—courageously stepped forward this week and wrote a letter to Comey asking him to explain his torture record and making clear their deep concern. They are asking the very same questions that they asked of many nominees with torture records during the Bush administration.

(Read a coalition letter from the ACLU and six other human rights to the Senate Judiciary Committee, raising concerns over Comey’s record on torture.)

But it is now up to all of us too. Ask your senators to ask the same tough questions and apply the same rigorous test to Comey that they applied to everyone else who was part of the inner circle of Bush lawyers who schemed to try to keep torturers from ever being prosecuted for their crimes.

Comey had a big job as deputy attorney general under Attorneys General Ashcroft and Gonzales. And he is now up for a huge job as FBI director. Every senator—and every one of us—should be demanding to know exactly what role he had in the waterboarding and torture program.

Ask your senators not to let this one slide through unnoticed—and let your senators know that you will be following the hearing on Tuesday (which will be webcast here).

There is no more patriotic way to spend the July 4 weekend than to say NO to waterboarding and torture.

For a deeper look into James Comey’s record as the second-highest-ranking official in the Bush Department of Justice, please see "James Comey: A Closer Look."

msfreeh
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Re: Obama choses James Tomey, a man who tortures to head the

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http://www.humanrightsfirst.org/2013/07 ... detention/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;


FBI Agents Urge Senate Judiciary Committee to Question Comey on Torture, Indefinite Detention

For Immediate Release: July 5, 2013

Washington, DC –Five former agents who have worked in or with the FBI are urging members of the Senate Judiciary Committee to fully vet James Comey’s views on detention and interrogation of terrorism suspects as the committee holds Comey’s July 9 confirmation hearing and considers his nomination to be Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The agents made their request in a letter to the committee that was signed by Jack Cloonan, Mike Marks, Jim Clemente, Joe Navarro, and Luis Busquets.

The group’s letter noted, “The next Director of the FBI will lead the nation’s premier federal law enforcement agency, which plays a primary role in debriefing, interrogating, and prosecuting terrorism suspects. Any candidate should have a record that reflects the capability and willingness to carry out these functions in a lawful and effective manner.”

The agents credited Comey for his well-documented opposition to reauthorizing a controversial warrantless wiretapping program while serving as Deputy Attorney General at the Department of Justice. However, they raised concerns about his support for a legal memorandum justifying torture and his defense of holding an American citizen indefinitely without charge. They note that Comey concurred with a May 10, 2005, Office of Legal Counsel opinion that authorized torture. While the agents credited Comey for opposing torture tactics in combination and on policy grounds, they note that Comey still approved the legal basis for use of specific torture tactics.

“These techniques include cramped confinement, wall-standing, water dousing, extended sleep deprivation, and waterboarding, all of which constitute torture or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment in contravention of domestic and international law,” the letter states.

Those signing the letter to the committee also objected to Comey’s defense of detaining Americans without charge or trial and observed, “Further, Mr. Comey vigorously defended the Bush administration’s decision to hold Jose Padilla, a United States citizen apprehended on U.S. soil, indefinitely without charge or trial for years in a military brig in Charleston, South Carolina.”

The agents urged Senate Judiciary Committee members to ask Comey to reject the May, 10, 2005 Office of Legal Counsel opinion with which he concurred, and all other Office of Legal Counsel opinions authorizing “enhanced interrogation techniques.” They note that Comey should also support a process by which the Senate Intelligence Committee can make public its 6,000 plus page report on the post-9/11 CIA interrogation program, which was in substantial part authorized by the Office of Legal Counsel while Mr. Comey served as Deputy Attorney General. Finally, committee members should provide Comey the opportunity to make clear that it is not lawful or appropriate to hold individuals picked up within the United States indefinitely without charge or trial.

“President Obama has banned torture—including waterboarding—and overturned the Office of Legal Counsel opinions authorizing it. The Obama Administration has also stated that it is never appropriate to hold individuals picked up within the United States in indefinite detention without charge or trial. Senators should ask Mr. Comey to explain and clarify these aspects of his record, which appear to be contrary not only to established law, but also the policies put forth by the current administration,” the agents wrote.

The letter sent by these five agents echoes concerns raised by Human Rights First. In a statement last month, Elisa Massimino, Human Rights First’s President and CEO, observed, “If James Comey is confirmed to take the helm at the FBI, he will be responsible for making sure our nation’s federal law enforcement work is both effective and legal. Comey has been deservedly praised for objecting to some of the worst abuses of the Bush Administration, but his role in justifying unlawful practices relating to the detention and interrogation of terrorism suspect raises questions about his commitment to the FBI’s adherence to humane interrogation standards. At his confirmation hearing, Senators should ask him hard questions about his record.”

For more information about this letter, to speak with one of its signers or for information ahead of Tuesday’s confirmation hearing, please contact Brenda Bowser Soder at [email protected] or 202-370-3323.

msfreeh
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FBI Director Candidate Comey Complicit in “Dark Chapter” in US History
Posted by Bill Conroy - June 1, 2013


Former Deputy Attorney General Played Leading Role in Cover-Up of US Government Informant’s Participation in Mass Murder in Mexico

President Barack Obama is expected to nominate former George W. Bush-era Deputy Attorney General James Comey as the next director of the FBI, according to multiple media outlets that have published fawning reports about Comey’s supposed independence and upstanding moral character.

Comey, according to those reports, is deemed the ideal pick because he is a Republican who also is admired by Democrats for his principled stand against the Bush Administration’s warrantless surveillance program — a still highly-classified program Comey ultimately acquiesced to after some unspecified technical changes were adopted by the Bush administration.

But is Comey, who now serves on the board of the giant British Lender HSBC, really the guy in the white hat the commercial media – always enamored of power and not so much principle – paints him to be?

HSBC must think so. The bank brought Comey onboard, providing him annual compensation of some $190,000, to serve as window dressing for their recovery from over-indulging in the illegal drug market. The lender late last year received a slap on the wrist from the US Department of Justice (paying a relatively small fine compared to its billions in annual profits in exchange for promising to be good citizens in the future) — but only after admitting to allowing its US and Mexican subsidiaries to serve as money-laundering machines for Mexican and Colombian narco-traffickers.

Comey this past March was brought on board to serve on HSBC’s Financial Systems Vulnerability Committee — which is supposed to help the bank improve its legal compliance. So, in some senses, it could be argued Comey is now collecting a consulting fee that is, in part, being paid to him from the fruit of drug-money laundering.

However, there is a far more sinister story buried in Comey’s record of government service that is not likely to be aired publicly in our democracy by its commercial media, or examined by a self-interested Congress, unless Narco News, or another independent voice like it, brings that news to light yet again.

There is little likelihood that these facts about Comey’s past will have any effect on the PR steamroller that is now clearing the path for his anointment as the next director of the FBI, arguably the most powerful law enforcement post in the country and one that he could occupy for at least 10 years — well beyond the term of the current president, so this is an issue that reverberates far beyond simple partisan politics.

In other words, folks, this one really does matter — even if Comey's appointment is a fait accompli.

According to former DEA Special Agent in Charge Sandalio Gonzalez, Comey played a key role in helping to cover up what he describes as “one of the darkest chapters in the history of US federal law enforcement.”

The case to which Gonzalez is referring is the House of Death — in which a US government informant assisted, and even participated in, the torture and murder of a dozen people, mostly Mexican citizens, who were then buried in the backyard of a house in Juarez, Mexico.

In addition, due to the informant’s Department of Justice-condoned homicidal activities, a DEA agent and his family were pulled over in the streets of Juarez by the House of Death killers [Juarez cops working with the Juarez Drug Organization] and also nearly delivered to the grave — forcing the DEA to subsequently evacuate all of its personnel from Juarez.

Gonzalez, incensed by the House of Death murders and the near assasination of a fellow DEA agent and his family, wrote a letter to his counterpart at US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, denouncing the informant’s activities and the complicity of federal agents and prosecutors in the bloodshed. The informant, Guillermo Ramirez Peyro (aka, Lalo) was under the supervision of ICE as well as the US Attorney’s Office for Western Texas — then headed by Johnny Sutton — while Comey was deputy attorney general and Sutton’s boss.

From Gonzalez Feb. 24, 2004, letter, directed to ICE the ICE division head in El Paso:

I’ve had an opportunity to digest what you’ve said as well as to conduct a careful review of the material in this case. I am now writing to express to you my frustration and outrage at the mishandling of the (Vicente Carrillo Fuentes drug organization) investigation that has resulted in unnecessary loss of human life in the Republic of Mexico, and endangered the lives of Special Agents of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and their immediate families assigned to the DEA Office in (Ciudad Juarez) Mexico.

Gonzalez’ letter made its way to then-US Attorney Sutton, who, rather than investigating the serious charges contained in the letter, instead complained to his superiors at DOJ headquarters in Washington.

Comey served as deputy attorney general from 2003 to 2005. The House of Death murders played out between August 2003 and January 2004. The commercial media, though, to this day has been silent about the ensuing cover-up orchestrated at the highest levels of DOJ that has assured no one in Justice has been held accountable for the House of Death murders — which were carried out by an informant who had made his US government handlers aware of his assistance and even participation in the murders, often in advance of the murders.

From a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit filed in 2006 by a professor at the University of Texas at El Paso:

Between August 2003, and January, 2004, Ramirez [the informant] was sent to Juarez by ICE for various missions and operations. During that time, Ramirez witnessed and participated in numerous murders ordered by Heriberto Santillan Tabares (Santillan), then a high-ranking member of the Juarez Cartel. Victims, drug dealers and transporters of drugs, were brought to the house at Calle Parsioneros 3633 in Ciudad Juarez (Parsioneros House), tortured for information as to the location of drugs or money, and then murdered.

After each murder, Ramirez reported the murder to agents of ICE. Ramirez also testified that ICE agents [who were working the case closely with a DOJ prosecutor] were aware in advance that murders would take place. For example, the following exchange occurred during testimony at an immigration hearing concerning Ramirez, who is presently in U.S. custody:

“Lashus [Government Counsel]: Did you tell your — the ICE officers that you were aware that Mr. Santillan had ordered the deaths of people associated with the cartel?

Ramirez Peyro: Yes.

Lashus: Did you tell them before, right before it happened?

Ramirez Peyro: Yeah, several occasions. For example, in one occasion in Chicago, and Santillan talks to me, so I could send the boy there to open the [Parsioneros] house and me being in Chicago with the agents from ICE, and they knew because I authorize for them to hear my phone conversations. And besides that, I told them what’s going on, and in El Paso [federal agents] they were listening my phone calls.”

DEA commander Gonzalez personally briefed the staffs of Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, and Sen. Patrick Leahy, D.-Vt., about the House of Death carnage and DOJ officials’ complicity in the murders.

Still, no one at DOJ (which oversees the DEA) or the Department of Homeland Security (which oversees ICE) has ever been questioned publicly, under oath, by any member of Congress about their role in allowing the informant, Ramirez Peyro, himself a former Mexican cop, to participate in murder while working a case for DOJ — while Comey was managing the department.

In fact, the only investigation ever conducted was an internal agency probe, known as the JAT, undertaken jointly by DEA and ICE, that to this day —despite numerous FOIA requests filed by Narco News seeking its release — remains buried, its findings never made public.

The assertion that Comey played a role in the House of Death cover-up, in light of his pending nomination to be the top dog at the FBI, should be a big deal, given one of the FBI’s jobs is to handle informants during criminal investigations, and to also deal with the intricacies and sensitivities of law enforcement operations carried out on foreign soil. Narco News did contact Comey previously to ask him about his role in the House of Death case, but he declined to comment.

However, the allegation that he did play some role in the cover-up is not based on a flimsy six-degrees-of-separation conspiracy theory. There is a long paper trail illuminating the facts, which has been uncovered by Narco News over the course of years, but, again, ignored to this day by a commercial media now fawning over the impending nomination of Comey as the next FBI director.

“The situation is perplexing, for it appears that both White House staff and mainstream media have ignored the indisputable facts,” Gonzalez says. “The House of Death murder cover-up is a total joint fiasco by the departments of Justice and Homeland Security, and one of the darkest chapters in the history of U.S. federal law enforcement.

“It is ironic for the president to aggressively preach accountability in government while nominating as FBI Director the person [Comey] who managed the Justice Department when those tragic events took place. The people deserve better.”

The Paper Trail

Gonzalez penned his letter to ICE in late February 2004. After Sutton ran the letter up the DOJ chain of command, then-Associate Deputy Attorney General Catherin O’Neil, on March 4, 2004, responded with an email titled: “Possible press involving the DEA (Juarez) ICE Informant issue.”

That email was sent to then-Attorney General John Ashcroft’s chief of staff, David Ayers, to one of his counsels, Jeff Taylor; and to then-Deputy Attorney General James B. Comey. Then-DEA Administrator Karen Tandy also was cced on the email.

Although some information in the email, discovered via a FOIA request by Narco News, is redacted, most of the missing information was obtained from Narco News’ very reliable sources. (In the excerpts below, text that has been redacted is inside text brackets.)

From the O'Neil email:

We just heard from Johnny Sutton that the DEA SAC in El Paso [Special Agent in Charge Gonzalez] wrote a rather lengthy and inflammatory letter to the ICE SAC regarding the “mishandling of the [Santillan] investigation that has resulted in unnecessary loss of human life in the Republic of Mexico and endangered the lives of (DEA agents).” [REDACTED] and I are getting a copy of the letter, as well as an ICE response. I am also speaking with [Sutton] at 8 pm (CST) tonight on this matter. (He was driving and could not talk at length.)

Please be aware that, according to [Sutton], [REDACTED] has reached out to get a copy of certain reports of interview of the CI [confidential informant] in the investigation. The [REDACTED] Times apparently had enough information to ask for the report which states that the CI [known as “Lalo”] “supervised the murders” of certain individuals. (Sutton) was not sure who was talking, but we are certainly concerned that there may be press and there may be inquiries here in DC as well.…

The next day, March 5, then DEA Administrator Karen Tandy sent off another email to O’Neil, Ayers, Taylor and Comey (as well as others within DEA, including Michele Leonhart, the current DEA administrator) — an email that later showed up as an exhibit in a court case filed by Gonzalez.

Subject: Re: Possible press involving the DEA Juarez /ICE informant issue

DEA HQ officials were not aware of our el paso SAC’s inexcusable letter until last evening – although a copy of the letter first landed in the foreign operations section sometime the day before. The SAC [Gonzalez] did not tell anyone at HQ that he was contemplating such a letter, and did not discuss it or share it with HQ until we received the copy as noted above, well after it was sent.

I apologized to Johnny Sutton last night and he and I agreed on a no comment to the press. [Emphasis added.]

Mike Furgason, [DEA] Chief of Operations, notified the El Paso SAC last night that he is not to speak to the press other than a no comment, that he is to desist writing anything regarding the Juarez matter and related case and defer to the joint management and threat assessment teams out of HQ – and he is to relay these directions to the rest of his El Paso Division.

The SAC, who reports to Michele [Leonhart], will be brought in next week for performance discussions to further address this officially.

So, within a bit more than a week of Gonzalez’ Feb. 24, 2004, letter, which blew the whistle on US Attorney Sutton and ICE’s role in the House of Death murders, a cover-up had already been put in motion, with Comey right in the middle of it.

The “joint management and threat assessment teams” were the same ICE and DEA agents that prepared the so-called JAT (Joint Assessment Team) report that was immediately deep-sixed upon its completion in March 2004. The “SAC” who was to be brought in for “performance discussions” was, in fact, Gonzalez.

As part of those “discussions,” Gonzalez received a negative job-performance review as retaliation for writing the letter blowing the whistle on the House of Death and was eventually pressured into retiring from DEA. He later filed a discrimination lawsuit against DOJ based, in part, on the retaliation he suffered after exposing the US government’s complicity in the House of Death — which led to a dozen gruesome murders and the near-assassination of a DEA agent and his family. DOJ agreed to settle the case in 2007 and paid Gonzales and his attorney $385,000.

But as part of that discrimination litigation, both former DEA Administrator Tandy as well as current DEA Administrator Leonhart were each compelled to testify under oath about the House of Death cover-up.

Following are some excerpts from those sworn testimonies that prove Comey was fully aware of the events surrounding the House of Death murders.

Jury Trial, Dec. 4, 2006 — Michele Leonhart questioned under oath:

Q. Okay. Now, did there come a time in which the Office of the Attorney General, in fact, the Attorney General of the United States himself [John Ashcroft at the time], wanted to know what was going on with this matter [the House of Death murders]?

A.. Yes.

Q And was there a plan in place with the acknowledged approval of the attorney general on how to handle the investigation of what events occurred in Ciudad Juarez?

A. Yes. We notified the attorney general of the United States and the deputy attorney general of the United States [James Comey] of what we had learned and the events and our concerns. We told him that we had talked to customs [ICE] and let them know what we had found out. Our administrator [then Karen Tandy] had also contacted the U.S. Attorney's Office [Sutton in San Antonio], and we thought the best thing we could do is get the agencies together, put an independent review team together to go down and find the facts because the person I was talking to said he had a different set of facts and didn't see it the way that we saw it. [Emphasis added.]

Again, that independent review team produced the internal JAT report, which was buried by DOJ and Homeland Security as part of the House of Death cover-up.

Following are some excerpts from then-DEA Administrator Tandy’s Aug. 23, 2005, deposition, in the Gonzalez discrimination lawsuit, which was filed in federal court in Miami. Tandy is being questioned by former DEA agent Gonzalez’ attorney, Richard Diaz.

Diaz: Based on your recollection of the letter, do you believe that anything that Mr. Gonzalez wrote in the [Feb. 24, 2004] letter was untruthful?

Tandy: I don’t have a recollection either way. It was such colossally poor, fatal judgment on Sandy’s [Gonzalez’] part, to get in the middle of what he knew was a sensitive, established, ongoing process to deal with the issues.

Diaz: Were you aware of the matters that were raised in the letter [which included the alleged complicity of ICE agents, US prosecutors and a U.S. informant in mass murder] before you became aware of the letter [Gonzalez’ letter] itself?

Tandy: Absolutely. I had already briefed the Attorney General [Ashcroft] and Deputy Attorney General [Comey] on the issues, the underlying issues with ICE’s handling of this informant, along with the AUSA [Fielden, who worked under Sutton and was the federal prosecutor directly overseeing the House of Death case]. [Emphasis added.]

[Recall: Tandy sent an e-mail on March 5, 2004, to a number of high ranking Department of Justice officials — including Comey — concerning Gonzalez’ letter, indicating that she only recently became aware of it. In the e-mail, Tandy describes Gonzalez’ letter as “inexcusable” and indicates that she “apologized to Johnny Sutton … and he and I agreed on a no comment to the press.”]

Burying the Dead

And for those who might still have some lingering doubts that a cover-up did play out in the House of Death case, consider the following events that took place after Gonzalez was silenced and his letter, along with the JAT report, were buried in 2004.

• U.S. Attorney Johnny Sutton in San Antonio, Texas, announced in April 2005 that his office cut a plea bargain with Heriberto Santillan-Tabares, who U.S. prosecutors claimed was a top lieutenant in Vicente Carrillo Fuentes’ Juarez drug organization and who employed Ramirez Peyro (the US government informant) to oversee the Juarez House of Death—including assuring the bodies were buried.

Santillan had been charged with cocaine and marijuana smuggling along with five counts of murder. His case was slated to go to trial in May 2005 in federal district court in San Antonio.

The plea deal capped more than a year-long effort at that point by DOJ prosecutors and ICE officials to keep a lid on the US government’s complicity in multiple murders in the Mexican border town of Ciudad Juarez.
The Santillan case was investigated by federal agents under the jurisdiction of Sutton, who was plugged into the Bush administration. Sutton, a former policy coordinator for the Bush-Cheney Transition Team, served as the Criminal Justice Policy director from 1995-2000 for then-Governor George W. Bush.

Under the plea deal, Santillan was sentenced to 25 years in prison for “conducting a continuing criminal enterprise,” according to Sutton’s office. However, all of the murder charges against him were dropped.

A sanguine reading of the plea deal exposes a callous racism was at play in this case. In other words, because the homicide victims were Mexican citizens, the murder charges were expendable, particularly if avoiding prosecution — thereby preventing embarrassing facts from becoming public -- helped to protect the careers of U.S. law enforcers.

• On Feb. 12, 2004, nearly a month after the arrest of Santillan and the unearthing of the House of Death victims, ICE informant Ramirez Peyro traveled to the office of the Mexican General Consulate in Dallas, Texas, to provide a statement to a representative of the Mexican Attorney General’s Office.

As part of that statement, Ramirez Peyro described a double execution in which he played a participatory role — and this was after he told ICE agents about his participation in the initial House of Death murder in early August 2003:

Another execution that I remember was on November 23, 2003. The municipal police of Juarez seized 70 kilograms of marijuana belonging to [Mexican state police] commander Miguel Loya that was going to be transported via the Puente Libre (free bridge) in Ciudad Juarez. This seizure caused the deaths of “Paisa” and “El Chapo” because Santillan ordered me to have these drug mules meet him in the little Parsioneros house [the House of Death].

In July 2009, Ramirez Peyro also described in detail those same murders during a recorded interview with Narco News that was aired on Mike Levine’s Expert Witness show on Pacifica Radio in New York City.

Following is an excerpt from that interview:

I call Santilllan … and he said why don’t you come to the house just to talk. So I said all right and we went to the house and then Santillan arrived, and then another 15 state police agents, among them Comandante [Miguel] Loya [a Mexican state police commander who worked as an enforcer for Santillan].

… So I explain to these guys [Paisa and Chapo] the situation that I already told them, that they can’t mess with us [the VCF organization]. If they don’t feel respect for me, they better feel respect for the organization because behind me there was a very big team of people and they were messing with all of us.

… In the mean time, Comandante Loya comes for their IDs and he leave for the kitchen and starts running their names over several channels, and then Santillan basically repeats what I told to them and then Comandante Loya repeats it again, and at some point he said, “… You need to cover your head. Just pull up your shirts and put it around your head.”

So they did it, and he just grabbed them by the neck and put them face down on the floor. They start to put like some kind of duck tape around their head, but one of them started doing noise so Comandante Loya made signs to someone [one of the other state cops] to pass him a gun with a silencer; so he shot this guy. And this other one, he heard the shots also and started making noise, so he shot him also.

And so, after driving Paisa and Chapo to the House of Death on Parsioneros Street in Juarez at the request of Santillan, the informant remains at the house and threatens the victims just prior to the pair being shot by a Mexican state police commander while 14 other state cops look on — one handing Commander Loya a gun with a silencer to carry out the cold-blooded murders.

The murders of Paisa and Chapo mark the second and third known homicides carried out at the House of Death in which Ramirez Peyro played a direct role — either by supervising the murder, as in the case of Mexican attorney Fernando Reyes, or by delivering the victims to their assassins, as in the case of Paisa and Chapo.

In both cases, Ramirez Peyro claims he informed his ICE handlers, who were working the case under the direction of DOJ prosecutors, about his role in those murders.

In the wake of the unraveling of the House of Death, Ramirez Peyro was picked up by federal agents and spent nearly six years behind bars, most of that in solitary confinement, fighting DHS’ efforts to deport him back to Mexico and to a certain death at the hands of the narco-traffickers he betrayed.

msfreeh
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Gerald Ford's motto: Attack is Best Defense.
Gerald Ford, former President and last surviving member of the Warren Commission, has demonstrated his strategy again: Disguise your crimes by attacking the attacker. I am increasingly flabbergasted about what is possible in America. Why is the world and the History Channel swallowing his attack on the documentary "The guilty men"? For those who missed this headline news, it is the last episode of "The men who killed Kennedy" series, aired last November and originally scheduled for re-runs over the next nine years, which makes a case for Lyndon Johnson as a main conspirator in JFK's murder. Ford's coordinated protest with former Johnson cronies like Bill Moyers, Jack Valenti and Johnson's widow, has now even resulted in complete cancellation of all three new episodes, including those which were not attacked, like "The Love Affair" with Judyth Vary Baker, who makes a credible case for having been Lee Harvey Oswald's girlfriend, exonerating him from the Government's THEORY that he was the lone assassin. To my knowledge, this is an unprecedented form of censorship in the United States.

In all the heated discussions and controversy about the History Channel's documentary, whether LBJ had a role in the JFK assassination or not, it seems that one thing is overlooked : In this case, Lyndon Baines Johnson and his next door neighbor and close buddy J. Edgar Hoover are guilty of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, not because we can prove they ordered it or because we can prove they had any direct connection to the killing, but because we can prove beyond any reasonable doubt that those two men took steps and took actions that covered up the truth of the crime. Washing out and refurbishing the President's limousine is just one of many examples of destroying crucial evidence. This makes them AT LEAST accessories after the fact. And was it not to Bill Moyers that Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach sent the infamous memo: "The public should be satisfied that Oswald was the lone assassin"?

But what's more, Ford himself is guilty! Not only was it learned that he was secretly reporting on the Commission to FBI Director Hoover, but also, forced by declassified files, he has admitted that he instructed the Warren Commission to move Kennedy's backwound up by several inches !!! The significance of this cannot be overstated! For with a wound in the original location, there cannot be a single bullet theory and without a single bullet theory there cannot be a lone gunman. Last time I looked, this was called "tampering with evidence", which is a federal crime and in such an important case as the death of a president, it is also TREASON. Raised with my naive and Dutch set of values on freedom and democracy, I believe the man should be in jail, despite his rehearsed repetitions that the Commission "found no evidence of a conspiracy, foreign or domestic". Instead, he is allowed to bury essentially good documentaries. What is happening to America?

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We brought attorney Linda Backiel to speak at our 5th annual conference investigating
crimes committed by FBI agents during the early 1990's.

Defense Lawyer Is Jailed Over Client Confidentiality
February 15, 1991

For almost two decades, Linda Backiel has used her law degree to defend people who disagreed vehemently and sometimes violently with the policies of the Federal Government.
And she has watched many of her clients, including opponents of the Vietnam War and advocates of Puerto Rican independence, go to prison for what they considered matters of principle.
Now it is her turn.
For more than two months, Ms. Backiel has been held in the Bucks County Correctional Facility here on a civil contempt charge because she refuses to testify before a Federal grand jury investigating a client who the authorities say jumped bail.
In an interview at the prison over the weekend, Ms. Backiel, 46 years old, said she had spurned a subpoena and later an order from a Federal judge because her testimony would violate a fundamental canon of the relationship between lawyers and clients: the guarantee of confidentiality. 'That's Not My Job'

msfreeh
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also available in Braille for the uneducated and the uneducable


Obama FBI nominee James Comey is not a Good Guy; he’s just less bad than Cheney
7/17/2013

Update: Listen to this Righteous Rant by humorist Matt Filipowicz for more on eager torturer James Comey. Makes you wonder, doesn’t it?
________

Consider this a warning against left-wing hero-worship of bogus right-wing posterboys. By whom I mean Obama FBI Director-nominee James Comey, he of the Ashcroft Hospital Drama™. (Note the implicit lionizing at the link by the National Journal.)

Think Comey is a Good Guy? Rick Perlstein has the goods (my emphasis):

Some of us have been shouting from mountaintops, others from molehills: James Comey, currently sailing smoothly through Senate Judiciary Committee hearings for confirmation as chief of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, was:

(a) in charge, and proudly so, of a “terrorism” case that began with a detention without charges, continued with made-up and spurious charges, and ended with a conviction won against an American whose treatment during confinement (on the American mainland) turned his brain to jello;

(b) general counsel for a defense contractor while it was busy hushing up a whistleblower who exposed $24 billion contract that they were building vessels for the Coast Guard, on a $24 billion contract, that buckled and leaked on the high seas;

(c) as of three months ago on the board of a bank, in charge of cleaning up their reputation after it paid a $1.92 billion fine for laundering drug money from Mexico; and

(d) the man who, as former FBI agent Colleen Rowley pointed out this morning in The New York Times, “sign[ed] off on most of the worst of the Bush administration’s legal abuses and questionable interpretations of federal and international law. He ultimately approved the C.I.A.’s list of “enhanced interrogation” techniques, including waterboarding, which experts on international law consider a form of torture.

Lots of shouting going on. But not much listening.

msfreeh
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Haiti: Political Assassination? Suspicious Death of Judge Who Called for Prosecution of Presidential Family
By Francklyn B. Geffrard
Global Research, July 19, 2013


The highly suspicious death last weekend of an Investigating Judge (Juge d’instruction) who was probing alleged corruption in the presidential family has shocked Haiti and started a cycle of charges and counter-charges which will surely widen Haiti’s ever-growing political divide.

Judge Jean Serge Joseph was investigating a corruption case implicating President Michel Martelly’s wife and son, Sophia and Olivier Martelly. Both stand accused of siphoning off hundreds of thousands of dollars from bogus social and sports programs, which have made token gestures at reducing Haiti’s surging poverty while being hyped by expensive propaganda campaigns and counter-productive publicity stunts, critics charge.

The judge, 58, died in a Port-au-Prince hospital on Jul. 13 from what the hospital described in an unprecedented next-day press conference as a “cerebrovascular accident” or ACV, in short, a kind of brain embolism.

Sources close to Judge Jean Serge Joseph say that in the days leading up to his death, he was under intense pressure to drop the case, having received many threats. According to several accounts, pressure particularly intensified after the judge called for the prosecution of the presidential family in Port-au-Prince’s criminal court due to the findings of his investigation into their alleged corruption.

According to sources in Martelly’s entourage, the President was not at all happy about Judge Jean Serge Joseph’s decision, which reportedly even caused him to lose sleep. This case was a sort of Achilles heel of the government, which portrays itself as promoting the rule of law with lots of propaganda.

...Judge Jean Serge Joseph did not merely refer the case to criminal court. On Jul. 2, 2013, he issued a surprisingly bold order summoning as witnesses Prime Minister Laurent Lamothe and other senior state officials following a complaint filed by two young lawyers, André Michel and Newton Saint-Juste, who accused Sophia and Olivier Martelly of embezzlement and fraud. According to several sources close to the judge, it is following this order that the judge’s torments really began. “The threats became more pronounced and were more specific,” one source stressed. Some of the president’s advisers say that the issue had become too embarrassing for the presidential family.

Some judges and others involved in the justice system who requested anonymity say that judges are constantly working under pressure whenever they are dealing with a case involving people close to executive power. These judicial officers believe that the executive branch holds the judiciary hostage and hinders its operation. According to them, the courts will not operate freely as long as the executive continues to interfere in judicial affairs.

More specifically President Martelly and Prime Minister Lamothe, in the presence of Justice Minister Jean Renel Sanon and Dean of Port-au-Prince’s Civil Court Raymond Jean Michel, browbeat and intimidated the judge during two meetings at the law offices of Martelly advisor Gary Lissade last week on Jul. 10 and 11, said a prominent lawyer and former deputy who was a close friend of the late judge. Speaking on Jul. 14 on TV Plural (Télé Plurielle) in Port-au-Prince, Samuel Madistin claims to have spoken with the judge before his death, the day after the meetings, and said that Jean Serge Joseph was not allowed to be driven by his personal driver or to be accompanied by his bodyguards. According to Madistin, Martelly and Lamothe “demanded” that the judge drop the case.

...Other sources close to the judge say these two meetings involved harassment and “mental torture” in which he was clearly asked to scuttle the case, which is currently under appeal. Twenty-four hours after these stressful meetings, on Fri., Jul. 12, the judge supposedly had a stroke that left him in a deep coma, although, according to his family, he did not suffer from any serious illnesses. Admitted to the Bernard Mevs Hospital in “critical condition” (according to a hospital spokesman) on Saturday at about 3 a.m., he died later that evening at around 8 p.m., hospital sources said.

The Martelly regime, implicated in many scandals, each more embarrassing than the next, now has a corpse on its hands, and not just any corpse, but that of a judge who was trying to shed light on a matter which is fueling debate in all spheres of society. Across Haiti and Haitian diaspora, the regime is considered one of the most corrupt that the country has ever known. The judge’s investigation could have allowed the presidential family, if it is not involved in corruption, to prove their innocence and clear their name. However, the regime’s methods have certainly not dispelled suspicions about First Lady Sophia Martelly and her son Oliver Martelly. On the contrary, public mistrust of the regime has deepened.

Sanon, Jean Michel, and Lissade have denied that they took part in the meeting alleged by Mr. Madistin. In fact, they deny that any such meeting ever took place. Mr. Lissade, a former justice minister, said in a press release, that Mr. Madistin’s “allegations were not the expression of any truth but were rather of a lying nature.” Minister Sanon said Mr. Madistin’s statements were “the product of his imagination.”

“I didn’t participate in any meeting with the president, the prime minister, and Serge Joseph,” Sanon said. “I don’t know what’s being talked about.”

The president’s spokesman, Lucien Jura, has also denied the meetings took place.

In response, Mr. Madistin insisted that the threats made by Martelly and Lamothe in the presence of Sanon and Jean Michel took place in Lissade’s offices. Madistin vowed that he would sue for Judge Jean Serge Joseph’s wrongful death.

Who and what should we believe? Is it all a fabrication? Has Samuel Madistin concocted this scenario alone? Why would he make such charges? There are many gray areas in this case which need to be cleared up.

Lawyers Newton Saint-Juste and André Michel have called the judge’s death “a political assassination.” According to them, the deceased judge was constantly under pressure from President Martelly to abandon the investigation and prosecution of his wife and son. The two young lawyers express their determination to pursue this matter to the end so that all light be shed on the alleged involvement of the presidential family.

Meanwhile, the Rev. Edouard Paultre, the head of the Haitian Council of Non State Actors (CONHANE), declared that Judge Joseph Serge’s death merits serious investigation to elucidate its cause.

Pierre Esperance, Executive Director of the National Network for the Defense of Human Rights (RNDDH), says the judge was under pressure and death threats from the Martelly regime. Mr. Esperance described the Martelly regime as a “wrongdoer power” which does not respect human rights.

Alterpresse reported on Jul. 16 that RNDDH and the Platform of Haitian Organizations to Defend Human Rights (POHDH) sent a letter to the Superior Council of Judicial Power (CSPJ) saying that there is another “trusted person” who is ready to come forward to confirm Madistin’s account. In their letter, the RNDDH and POHDH said that Judge Serge Joseph “made important declarations to friends as well as to other judges affirming that he was the object of huge pressures from to executive to go back on his decision” to summon high government officials as witnesses in the case.

For Anthony Barbier, a sociologist and former Planning and External Cooperation Minister, what happened to the judge is one more element that illustrates the need for the population to mobilize to throw out a regime that does not respect its commitments and human rights. “You can not build a democratic state of law while at the same time human rights are being trampled,” he said.

Outspoken Sen. Moïse Jean-Charles also held a press conference to denounce Judge Serge Joseph’s death as the responsibility of the Martelly regime.

There are other elements which should not be overlooked. First, Judge Serge Joseph was admitted to the Bernard Mevs Hospital a 3 a.m., but he was not seen by a doctor for four hours, until 7 a.m., according to the two doctors (at least one of them North American) who spoke to the press about the matter (Télé-Plurielle, Jul. 14, 2013).

Secondly, this is the first time in Haiti, a hospital had seen fit to hold a press conference following the death of a patient where the institution and the doctors at the bedside of the deceased patient were not implicated in malpractice. Is this not strange?

Finally, one of the doctors who met the press blatantly sported a pink bracelet, which is worn by avid supporters of the Martelly regime. Bizarre! In addition to an autopsy on the deceased, this hospital should also be investigated.

After the sudden death of Judge Serge Joseph, what will be the result of the alleged corruption case involving the first lady and the president’s son? Will there be an honest judge who will take up the investigation of this matter? Can a judge look into this matter in peace, without being intimidated or threatened by the National Palace? The list of questions goes on and on. Nothing is certain in this case. The coming months will reveal more about the true nature of this regime which uses the concept of “rule of law” as a political slogan to fool the weak-minded.

msfreeh
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Re: Obama choses James Tomey, a man who tortures to head the

Post by msfreeh »

We brought investigative reporter Greg Flannery and Leonard Gates to speak at our conference dealing with crimes committed by FBI agents in the early 1990's. Here is a new article written by him.
see link for full story

http://article25news.wordpress.com/2013 ... -long-ago/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Privacy Died Long Ago
06/03/2013

The great forgotten Cincinnati wiretap scandal

By Gregory Flannery

Americans no longer assume their communications are free from government spying. Many believe widespread monitoring is a recent change, a response to terrorism. They are wrong. Fair warning came in 1988 in Cincinnati, Ohio, when evidence showed that wiretapping was already both common and easy.

Twenty-five years ago state and federal courtrooms in Cincinnati were abuzz with allegations of illegal wiretaps on federal judges, members of Cincinnati City Council, local congressional representatives, political dissidents and business leaders.

Two federal judges in Cincinnati told 60 Minutes they believed there was strong evidence that they had been wiretapped. Retired Cincinnati Police officers, including a former chief, admitted to illegal wiretapping.

Even some of the most outrageous claims – for example, that the president of the United States was wiretapped while staying in a Cincinnati hotel – were supported by independent witnesses.

National media coverage of the lawsuits, grand jury hearings and investigations by city council and the FBI attracted the attention of U.S. Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont) and the late U.S. Sen. Paul Simon (D-Ill.).

As Americans wonder about the extent to which their e-mails, cell-phones and text messages are being monitored, they would do well to look back at a time before any of those existed. Judging by what was revealed in Cincinnati, privacy died long before anyone had ever heard of Osama bin Laden or al Q’aeda.

Turbulence

In 1988 Leonard Gates, a former installer for Cincinnati Bell, told the Mount Washington Press, a small independent weekly, that he had performed illegal wiretaps for the Cincinnati Police Department, the FBI and the phone company itself.

A week after the paper published his allegations, a federal grand jury began hearing testimony.

Gates claimed to have performed an estimated 1,200 wiretaps, which he believed illegal. His list of targets included former Mayor Jerry Springer, the late tycoon Carl Lindner Jr., U.S. District Judge Carl Rubin, U.S. Magistrate J. Vincent Aug, the late U.S. Sen. Howard Metzenbaum (D-Ohio), the Students for a Democratic Society (an anti-war group during the Vietnam War), then-U.S. Rep. Tom Luken (D-Cincinnati) and then-President Gerald Ford.

A second former Cincinnati Bell installer, Robert Draise, joined Gates, saying he, too had performed illegal wiretaps for the police. His alleged targets included the Black Muslim mosque in Finneytown and the General Electric plant in Evendale. Draise’s portfolio was much smaller than Gates’s, an estimated 100 taps, because he was caught freelancing – performing an illegal wiretap for a friend.

Charged by the FBI, Draise claimed he had gone to his “controller” at Cincinnati Bell, the person who directed his wiretaps, and asked for help. If he didn’t get it, he said, he’d tell all. When the case went to federal court, Draise didn’t bother to hire an attorney. He didn’t need one. In a plea deal, federal prosecutors dropped the charge to a misdemeanor. Found guilty of illegal wiretapping, his sentence was a $200 fine. The judge? Magistrate J. Vincent Aug.

If Gates and Draise had been the only people to come forward, they could easily be dismissed as cranks – disgruntled former employees, as Cincinnati Bell claimed. But some police office officers named by Gates and Draise confirmed parts of their allegations, insisting, however, that there were only 12 illegal wiretaps. Other officers not known to Gates and Draise also admitted to illegal wiretaps. Some of the officers received immunity from prosecution in exchange for their testimony. Others invoked their Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate themselves.

“Due to the turbulent nature of the late ’60s and early ’70s, wiretaps were conducted to gather information,” said a press release signed by six retired officers. “This use began in approximately 1968 and ended completely during the Watergate investigation.”

The press release, whose signers included former Police Chief Myron Leistler, listed 12 wiretaps, among them “a black militant in the Bond Hill area” and a house on either Ravine or Strait streets rented by “the SDS or some other radical group.”

The retired cops’ lawyer said there were actually three Cincinnati Bell installers doing illegal wiretaps, but declined to identify the third.

The retired officers denied knowledge of “any wiretaps involving judges, local politicians, prominent citizens and fellow law enforcement officers or city employees.”

Getting rid of Aug

Others had that knowledge, however.

Howard Lucas, former security chief at the Stouffer Hotel downtown, said he caught Gates and three cops trying to break into a telephone switching room shortly before President Gerald Ford stayed at the hotel.

“I said, ‘Do you have a court order?’ and they all laughed,” Lucas told the Mount Washington Press.

The four men left. But they returned.

“A couple days later, in the back of the room, I found a setup, a reel-to-reel recorder concealed under some boxes,” Lucas said.

Ford stayed at the Stouffer Hotel in July 1975 and June 1976 – two years after the Watergate scandal, when Cincinnati Police officers claimed the bugging ended.

Then there was the matter of a former guard at the U.S. Courthouse downtown. He said he had found wiretap equipment there in 1986 and 1987, just a year before the wiretap scandal broke.

“I heard conversations you wouldn’t believe,” he said. “I heard a conversation one time. they were talking about getting rid of U.S. Magistrate Aug.”

The wiretapping started with drug dealers and expanded to political and business figures, according to Gates. In 1979, he testified, he was ordered to wiretap the Hamilton County Regional Computer Center, which handled vote tabulations. His handler at the phone company allegedly told Gates the wiretap was intended to manipulate election results.

“They had the ability to actually alter what was being done with the votes. … He was very upset through some of the elections with a gentleman named Blackwell,” Gates testified.

J. Kenneth Blackwell is a former member of Cincinnati Council, and 1979 was an election year for council.

Something went wrong on Election Night, Gates testified. His handler at the phone company called him.

“He was panicking,” Gates testified. “He said we had done something to screw up the voting processor down there, or the voting computer.”

News reports at the time noted an unexpected delay in counting votes for city council because of a computer malfunction.

Cincinnati Bell denied any involvement in illegal wiretapping by police or its own personnel. Yet police officers, like Gates, testified the police received equipment – even a truck – and information necessary to effectuate the wiretaps. The owners of a greenhouse in Westwood even came forward, saying the police stored the Cincinnati Bell truck on their property.

‘Say it louder’

Gates claimed that his handler at Cincinnati Bell repeatedly told him the wiretaps were at the behest of the FBI. He named an FBI agent who, he said, let him into the federal courthouse to wiretap federal judges.

Investigations followed – a federal grand jury, which indicted no one; a special investigator hired by city council, the former head of the Cincinnati FBI office; the U.S. Justice Department, sort of.

U.S. Sen. Paul Simon asked then-Attorney General Richard Thornburgh to look into the Cincinnati wiretap scandal. Federal judges, members of Congress and even the president of the United States had allegedly been wiretapped. Simon’s effort went nowhere. His press secretary told the Mount Washington Press that it took three months for the Attorney General to respond.

“The senator’s not pleased with the response,” Simon’s press secretary said. “It didn’t have the attorney general’s personal attention, and it said Justice (Department) was aware of the situation, but isn’t going to do anything.”

The city of Cincinnati settled a class-action lawsuit accusing it of illegal wiretapping, paying $85,000 to 17 defendants. It paid $12,000 to settle a second lawsuit by former staffers of The Independent Eye, an underground newspaper allegedly wiretapped and torched by Cincinnati Police officers in 1970.

Cincinnati Bell sued Leonard Gates and Robert Draise, accusing them of defamation. The two men had no attorneys and represented themselves at trial. Hamilton County Common Pleas Judge Fred Cartolano refused to let the jury hear testimony by former police officers who had admitted using Gates and Draise and Cincinnati Bell equipment. In a 4-2 vote, the jury ruled in the phone company’s favor, officially adjudging the two whistleblowers liars.

During one of the many hearings associated with the wiretap scandal, an FBI agent was asked what the agency would do if someone accused the phone company of placing illegal wiretaps. He testified the FBI would be powerless; it needed the phone company to check for a wiretap.

“It would go back to Bell,” the agent testified. “We would have no way of determining if there was any illegal wiretapping going on.”

The FBI agent was the person Gates had accused of opening the federal courthouse at night so he could wiretap federal judges.

One police sergeant offered no excuses for the illegal wiretapping. Asked why he didn’t bother with the legal niceties, such as getting a warrant, as required then by federal law, he said, “I didn’t deem it was necessary. We wanted the information, and went out and got it.”

At one point, covering the scandal for the Mount Washington Press, I received a phone call from a sergeant in the Cincinnati Police Department. He invited me to the station at Mount Airy Forest, where he proceeded to wiretap a fellow police officer’s phone call. I listened as the other officer talked to his wife.

“Say hello,” the sergeant told me.

I did. There was no response.

“Say it louder,” the sergeant said.

I did. No response.

“You can hear them, but they can’t hear you,” the sergeant said. “Any idiot can do a wiretap. You know that’s true because you just saw a policeman do it.”

Privacy is dead. Its corpse has long been moldering in the grave.

msfreeh
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Re: Obama choses James Tomey, a man who tortures to head the

Post by msfreeh »

see link for full story
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-07-2 ... -2001.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;




Senate Confirms Comey as FBI’s First New Head Since 2001
Jul 29, 2013


The U.S. Senate confirmed James B. Comey Jr. to be the next director of the FBI, giving the agency its first new head since before the September 11, 2001 attacks.

Comey, the former No. 2 official in the Justice Department under President George W. Bush, was confirmed 93-1. Once sworn in, he will take over for Robert Mueller, who has led the agency since days before the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon.

“We need strong, principled, ethical leaders who steadfastly adhere to the law,” Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, a Vermont Democrat, said on the Senate floor. “I’m confident that James Comey is such a leader.”

Comey, 52, will lead a law enforcement agency that has been changing to address increased threats posed by cyber attacks and domestic terrorism, at a time of heightened public concerns over the reach and scope of classified surveillance programs disclosed by a former intelligence contractors.

Senator Rand Paul, a Kentucky Republican, said he’d hold up the nomination until he received answers from the FBI about the agency’s domestic use of unmanned aerial vehicles. He voted against Comey’s confirmation.

The agency, in a response to Paul, said in a letter that it didn’t require a warrant to use the drones to conduct surveillance on specific investigations.

Paul said in a statement that while he disagreed with the FBI’s interpretation, he would release the hold on Comey.
Drones Unarmed

The Federal Bureau of Investigation, in a letter from its congressional affairs office, said it has used the vehicles to conduct surveillance in eight criminal cases and two national-security cases.

The vehicles aren’t armed and aren’t used to conduct general surveillance, Stephen D. Kelly, the assistant director for congressional affairs, said in a July 19 letter to Paul.

Senator Charles Grassley of Iowa, the top Republican on the Judiciary panel, said Comey gave him assurances that he’d review policies that guide the FBI’s use of domestic drones.

Paul is among the lawmakers who have expressed concern about expanding government surveillance. Two programs, one that collects domestic phone records and another that targets the Internet use of foreigners suspected of having ties to terrorism, were disclosed by former intelligence contractor Edward Snowden.
‘Valuable Tool’

Comey said during his confirmation hearing that while he wasn’t aware of the details of the current programs, he found bulk collection of data -- a method used by the National Security Agency to gather the phone records of millions of Americans -- a “valuable tool.”

msfreeh
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Posts: 7691

Re: Obama choses James Tomey, a man who tortures to head the

Post by msfreeh »

I want to introduce you to Greg Flannery
who is an investigative reporter living in Cincinnati.
We brought Greg to speak at Bates College in the early 1990's
to discuss how Cincinnati lost it's privacy to the FBI.
I found out about Mr Flannery by reading an article he wrote in
1989 called REACH OUT AND TAP SOMEONE
for a national publication IN THESE TIMES see link
https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http ... r22/12-14/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

A couple of weeks ago Greg Flannery wrote an article in response to the article he wrote in 1989. It is called PRIVACY DIED LONG AGO
see link for article

http://article25news.wordpress.com/2013 ... -long-ago/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

msfreeh
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Posts: 7691

Re: Obama choses James Tomey, a man who tortures to head the

Post by msfreeh »

TWO STORIES



see link for full story
http://www.capecodonline.com/apps/pbcs. ... /-1/NEWS11" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;


Gonsalves: Cape man revisits Flight 800

August 04, 2013

July 17, 1996. TWA Flight 800 departed from John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York City.

Shortly after takeoff, the Paris-bound 747 exploded in the early night air as it ascended to 13,800 feet, crashing into the waters off Long Island. All 230 passengers and crew members aboard were killed.
IF YOU GO

What: A screening of the documentary "TWA Flight 800," made by Falmouth native Tom Stalcup. The film will be followed by a Q&A with Stalcup and a discussion about the filmmaker's petition asking the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) to reopen the investigation.

When: 7:30 p.m. Aug. 15

Where: Falmouth High School

Admission: Free ($10 for reserved seats)

For more information: http://www.flight800doc.com" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;.

Falmouth native Tom Stalcup, who now lives in Sandwich, was working on his doctorate in physics then. He didn't start to pay close attention to the tragedy until he happened to see the FBI press conference laying out the official story.

It was a CIA video shown during the press conference, Stalcup told me, that started him down the path that would eventually convince him the official explanation was contradicted by the government's own evidence — a disturbing story of an alleged cover-up Stalcup and other investigators tell in the recently released documentary "TWA Flight 800."

"This video came on during the press conference that said it was produced by the Central Intelligence Agency. That got my attention because I had never seen that before in my life. What's the CIA doing on TV talking directly to me?" Stalcup told me on Friday, hours before his documentary was shown at the Traverse City Film Festival in Michigan.

"It got weirder and weirder," he recalled. "The (video) narrator said, 'This was not a missile.' And I was like: Why are they telling us what it wasn't, rather than what it was?"

The official story, according to the FBI and the National Transportation Safety Board, was that Flight 800 exploded because an electrical short circuit made its way into the center wing fuel tank and detonated the fuel vapors.

Though hundreds of eyewitnesses said they saw what looked like a missile taking off from the water and hitting the plane before it exploded, the CIA video emphasized how Flight 800 was NOT hit by a missile, relegating skeptics to tin-foil hat-wearing conspiracy theorists.

NTSB investigators said the flaming streak eyewitnesses described was most likely burning fuel leaking from the plane's wing tank.

Stalcup, who founded the Falmouth-based weather data transmitter company Upward Innovations Inc., began contacting eyewitnesses, all of whom said the CIA video was "a bunch of baloney."

"What kept me intrigued all these years is the disconnect between the official story and what the reality is and what the evidence shows," Stalcup explained.

Through Freedom of Information Act requests, Stalcup was able to get the radar data, internal investigative documents from the CIA, as well reams of other forensic evidence.

He coupled that with his knowledge of physics and the first-hand accounts of official investigators speaking out after they retired. Stalcup believes it all corroborates eyewitness accounts and clearly contradicts the official story.

The film has garnered national media attention, largely because it sparked a petition campaign in June requesting the NTSB reopen the investigation. And while some dismiss the film as paranoid propaganda, it's hard to ignore the investigators in the film who say the crash was caused by an "external detonation" just as 670 eyewitnesses initially reported.

Among the investigators in the film who call the official narrative into question are Hank Hughes, who served as a senior accident investigator with the NTSB and helped reconstruct the downed aircraft; Bob Young, a TWA investigator who was also involved with the official probe; and Jim Speer, an accident investigator for the Airline Pilots Association.

You don't have to be a physicist, Stalcup said, to know "there has never been an in-flight fuel-air explosion of any commercial aircraft ever," adamant that the voltage in airline fuel tanks are too low to ignite jet fuel.

The documentary doesn't offer a theory as to who or exactly what shot down Flight 800 (Was it alleged terrorism? An accidental strike from a U.S. military exercise?). Stalcup said they didn't delve into possible culprits because he considers it irresponsible to speculate, which is why he rejects the notion that he's peddling conspiracy theories.

"I'm a scientist. I'll go in front of any scientific body in the country and present the radar evidence. And they will agree. You can't have a low-velocity explosion create high-velocity debris. It's physically impossible," Stalcup said.

Most of us can't judge the science in this story. But Stalcup's documentary was convincing enough to get picked up by the EPIX TV network and distributed by Lions Gate Entertainment Corporation. Also, Stalcup said, "60 Minutes Australia" recently bought the rights to the film to show the movie Down Under.

Still, as CNN reported last month, Joe Lychner, whose wife and two daughters were killed on Flight 800, said he was skeptical of the missile theory.

"So far as I can tell, this is just a rehash of what's been out on the Internet," Lychner told CNN. But, he added, "If they do have new information and it's provable, it's a game changer. I will watch this thing with a very critical eye."




see link for full story
http://dailycaller.com/2013/08/05/reute ... americans/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Reuters: Secret DEA unit using intel to investigate Americans
08/05/2013

Federal drug agents are being instructed to conceal the involvement of a secret Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) unit during the course of their investigations, a unit which helps law enforcement launch criminal investigations of Americans, Reuters reports.
The unit forwards tips acquired from the National Security Agency, “wiretaps by foreign governments, court-approved domestic wiretaps and a database called DICE to federal agents and local law enforcement officers,” Reuters reports.
Two dozen partner agencies comprise the unit, created in 1994, including the CIA, FBI, Internal Revenue Service, National Security Agency and Department of Homeland Security.
Through a decades-old law enforcement technique called “parallel construction,” law enforcement officials pretend that their investigation began with something like a traffic stop, during which the agent discovered incriminating evidence by use of a tool like a drug dog.
The technique “may be legal” in order to establish probable cause for an investigation, defense lawyers and prosecutors told the publication, but it is kept secret in order to protect sources and methods.
“But they said employing the practice as a means of disguising how an investigation began may violate pretrial discovery rules by burying evidence that could prove useful to criminal defendants,” wrote Reuters.
“DEA officials who oversee the unit say the information sent to law enforcement authorities was obtained through subpoena, court order and other legal means,” said Reuters.
Justice Department policy, revealed in documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union, is that it does not need to seek a warrant when investigating the electronic communications of Americans.

msfreeh
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Re: Obama choses James Tomey, a man who tortures to head the

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http://www.businessinsider.com/lavabit- ... fbi-2013-8" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;



Snowden's Super Secret Email Service Closes, Summing Up Why Tech Is Losing Billions Overseas
Aug. 8, 2013, 6:14 PM 3,867 26


The super secret, encrypted email service that Edward Snowden used to communicate with Glenn Greenwald has officially closed down, writes Xeni Jardin for BoingBoing.

Lavabit not only offered encrypted email, but their operators don't collect your metadata and sell it to advertising companies — an obvious plus for anyone looking to be ultra private.

The implication is that they shut down because the U.S. government apparently served them with an order to either allow snooping, or shut down.

Obviously they decided to shut down.

Concurrently, the Washington Post reports that American tech companies are losing tens of billions of dollars to overseas customers who don't want the NSA or FBI or CIA (take your pick) snooping on them.

From the Washington Post:

This leads ITIF to conclude the NSA leaks “will likely have an immediate and lasting impact on the competitiveness of the U.S. cloud computing industry if foreign customers decide the risks of storing data with a U.S. company outweigh the benefits.”

msfreeh
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Re: Obama choses James Tomey, a man who tortures to head the

Post by msfreeh »

google title for full story


FRENCH CONNECTION, THE SMOKING GUN
If Bush went to Paris, the French and U.S. have documents to prove it

If there is a smoking gun in the allegations that George Bush flew to Paris in October 1980 to arrange for the delay of the release of 52 American hostages, it will be found in a file cabinet in the French SDECE office, or in secure U.S. government computers.
While Bush was allegedly in Paris, the French intelligence service (SDECE) was asked to make certain the Vice Presidential candidate was not seen. French security succeeded in that task and wrote a routine memo on the incident. A man who spent 18-years in the U.S. intelligence service has testified that he actually saw that memo in December 1980 in the files of the C.I.A. The file of the Paris meeting was given to the CIA on November 18, 1980. The agent testifies that Bush had to meet with three different factions of the Iranian revolution. The meeting took place at the Rafael Hotel. The agent not only names Bush, but also William Casey, Donald Gregg and Richard Allen as participants. Bush did not attend the first meeting, only the second.
Afraid that Bush would be recognized by the French press, his aircraft landed at the military part of Orlee. He was whisked away in a closed car and brought directly to the Rafael Hotel. He was there for about two hours, the agent states. This agent has the highest CIA clearance and worked the entire time in the Directorate of Operations in the CIA and was with the Agency since 1965. The agent also testified that the $40 million the Iranians received as a "down payment" in the deal was actually funds left over from a $60 million illegal contribution to the Committee to Reelect the President (Richard Nixon's 1972 reelection campaign) from the Shah of Iran.
In a taped interview, to be released by the Napa Sentinel to KING Radio in Seattle, the agent states that Bush was "out of the loop" from midnight, October 18, 1980 to 5 p.m., October 19. He states that Bush was in a meeting with Hashemi Rafsanjani, representatives of the Ayatollah Behisti, and Javad Bahonar. A key figure was also there for the French SDECE, Robert Benes, the son of Czech President Edward Benes who died in 1948 when the Communists took over his country.
The agent further testifies that Maurice Stans obtained the funds from Mexico. After November 20, 1980. Col. Alexandre de Marenches, head of the SDECE met with President-elect Ronald Reagan in California and presented the Paris meeting report to him. He did
not visit President Jimmy Carter. The French intelligence chief warned Reagan not to trust
the CIA.
The U.S. agent said Bush and the CIA go back to 1959 and 1960. A memo from FBI
Director J. Edgar Hoover was sent in 1963 to CIA agent George Bush addressing the
assassination of John F. Kennedy and the possible reaction of Cubans in Miami who might
have believed Fidel Castro was responsible for the plot.
But that is not the only smoking gun that could prove the Bush trip to Paris, a trip that he
denies. The computers in Washington have codes buried in them, codes that would identify
the Bush-Paris activity. In fact, using the right code name and code number, a complete
history of the trip, the manifest of the aircraft and other details, including briefing notes,
would emerge. According to three separate CIA sources, the operation was conducted in
three stages and had three codes:
 Part One was Magdelen.
 Part Two was Maggellan.
 Part Three was Michaelangelo.
Each has a separate code access. The Maggellan access code is reported to be 0221-001-666.
Some of the records can be found at Quantico and others at Andrews Air Force Base. The
source of this later information could not be double checked.
Navy Captain Gunther Russbacher, who has been verified by several separate agency
members and intelligence sources, claims he flew Bush to Paris in a aircraft owned by the
Saudi Royal Family, the aircraft was a reconfigured BAC-111, which refueled in
Newfoundland. Russbacher's credibility has been a see-saw for awhile because much of his
files are missing, and like many agents has a strange and sometimes silent past.
Russbacher, is currently serving a short sentence in Terminal Island for allegedly
impersonating a U.S. Attorney. The U.S. Defenders Office indicates that the information
published about Russbacher is "on the right track". Others have confirmed the same thing.
But the Sentinel has not been totally satisfied with the complete testimony of Russbacher
and has pressed other sources and Russbacher, himself, for more detail. Records will now
prove that Russbacher is the cousin of Richard Brennecke, who was acquitted of perjury
by a federal jury. He was charged with perjury when he testified that Bush went to Paris.
Brennecke originally denied knowing Russbacher, but now admits he knows him. They
virtually grew up in Nevada together after their families secretly left Austria after World
War II and were recruited by U.S. intelligence. Russbacher indentified Brennecke as a
member of the flight crew.
One of the difficulties in tracing the steps of CIA agents is the smoke screen, disinformation
and attacks on their credibility. The Sentinel has learned that Russbacher escaped from a
U.S. Federal Prison in Secoville, Texas in 1975. On national radio, Russbacher openly
admitted the escape and said he was placed on the escape list and spent 10 years in Europe
and the United States, working with the CIA. The fact that he has been in the United States
and the focus of public attention, he has never been rearrested for the escape. But sources very high up in the intelligence community verify his authenticity.
After receiving information from other sources and pressing Russbacher, he has confirmed the reports of other intelligence officials that Robert Gates was also on the aircraft that flew Bush to Paris. "Gates had a strong hand in it," Russbacher finally admitted. Russbacher, who did not originally seek publicity on this case, was very reluctant to bring in Gates' name. Gates has just been appointed by President Bush to head the CIA and is facing Senate confirmation. Intelligence sources indicate that Russbacher is a key figure in CIA financial matters.

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New Details on FBI Agent Driving without pants

The story of Special Agent John A. Yervelli arrest just keeps getting stranger. New information reveals that Special Agent Alan Raines was in the vehicle at the time of the act.

13 Dec 2012
see link for full story
http://www.pressking.com/press-releases ... nts-036333" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;



Federal prosecutors conducting an internal review of criminal cases involving an FBI agent facing a charge of public lewdness got more than they bargained for. U.S. Attorney William J. Hochul Jr. ordered the review after Special Agent John A. Yervelli was arrested Friday night by state police. New details have emerged that Special Agent Alan Raines was traveling in the vehicle with Yervelli at the time of the incident.

Troopers said they received a report from a truck driver that Yervelli made lewd gestures toward him while not wearing pants and driving on the Thruway in Eden.Yervelli, 48, of Lake View, faces up to 30 days in jail and a $500 fine if convicted of the misdemeanour charge.“At this point, no determination has been made as to the guilt or innocence of this individual,” Hochul said in a statement. “However, it is the obligation of this office to conduct an internal review to determine if, at all, this could impact any existing cases. That internal review has begun.”

A source familiar with Yervelli’s work as a FBI agent said he is involved in at least one pending criminal case.He also was involved in a large-scale federal probe of narcotics, gun and gang activity on Buffalo’s West Side that resulted in federal charges against 27 people in 2010.

Raines' history is more checkered, flagged with disciplinary proceedings. Raines was involved in a April 4th 2009 raid of then Lancaster Highway Superintendent Richard Reese, when Raines filed a criminal compliant. The complaint goes on to say that Reese looked at Special Agent Raines and stated words to the effect that "if I wanted to, I could have taken you both down." Reese was later charged for assaulting federal agents due to the compliant, the charges were later dropped.

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WTC 1993 was an FBI job


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2vpcABWJiY" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

msfreeh
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see link for full story

http://www.pollstar.com/news_article.aspx?ID=806725" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
FBI Wants Insane Clown Posse Lawsuit Dismissed
Tuesday 8/27/13

Nearly a year after the Insane Clown Posse sued the Federal Bureau of Investigations over its fans being listed on the National Gang Threat Assessment, the FBI is asking a federal judge to dismiss the suit, saying the hip hop/horrorcore duo doesn’t have a case.

ICP filed a lawsuit in September 2012 after the FBI’s 2011 National Gang Threat Assessment Emerging Trends report listed its fans, famously known as Juggalos, as “a loosely-organized hybrid gang rapidly expanding into many U.S. communities.”

July 29, 2013

The assessment reported, “Most crimes committed by Juggalos are sporadic, disorganized, individualistic, and often involve simple assault, personal drug use and possession, petty theft and vandalism. However, open source reporting suggests that a small number of Juggalos are forming more organized subsets and engaging in more gang-like criminal activity, such as felony assaults, thefts, robberies and drug sales.”

ICP was absolutely shocked by the claims and wrote in a statement on its site that, “The idea of calling the Juggalos and Juggalettes a ‘gang’ is straight up @#!!$#!%. We are not a gang! We are a family!” The band said it was suing the FBI because it had failed “to produce any documentary evidence” that the Juggalos are a gang.

In the lawsuit, the band says its lawyer requested information from the FBI via the Freedom of Information Act about the investigation that landed the Juggalos on the Gang Threat Assessment, according to the Flint Journal/Mlive.com.

The FBI filed a motion for summary disposition Aug. 23, explaining that the bureau already turned in all pertinent records. The Journal reports “the FBI claims that it reviewed 63 pages of records and released 62 of them on Dec. 6, 2012, and reviewed 93 more pages of records before releasing 40 pages of them on Jan. 30.”

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http://www.scribd.com/doc/4812391/Fbi-D ... eich-Files" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;


Wilhelm Reich declassified FBI Files

see link for his files

Physician-scientist Wilhelm Reich, best known for his claims of a cosmic life force associated with sexual orgasm, died in federal prison, and the government burned tons of his books and other publications and destroyed his equipment.

But half a century later, a small number of scientists and other believers are working to advance the European-born psychiatrist's work on what he called "orgone energy" — a theory largely forgotten in the scientific mainstream.

"Personally, I think it's going to be a long time before all of his work is understood and recognized," said Reich's granddaughter, Renata Reich Moise, a nurse-midwife and artist in the coastal town of Han****.

Reich died on Nov. 3, 1957, in a federal prison in Lewisburg, Pa., where he was sent for ignoring an injunction obtained by the Food and Drug Administration that outlawed a device he called an orgone energy accumulator. Reich believed it could charge the body with essential life energy, heightening vitality and potentially helping to heal disease.

Critics point to some of these more unconventional ideas in deriding him as a quack. But supporters say he was a brilliant man whose ideas warrant further exploration.

The 50th anniversary of his death is being marked by a major exhibition on Reich and his work that opens Nov. 15 at the Jewish Museum in Vienna, the city where he attended medical school, began his psychiatric practice and studied under Sigmund Freud.

Also this month, archives of Reich's unpublished papers, which have been stored at Harvard Medical School, will become available to researchers for the first time. Reich had stipulated that his papers only be opened 50 years after his death.

He also specified that his laboratory at the 175-acre site he dubbed Orgonon, which overlooks Rangeley Lake, be converted to a museum. It opened in 1960.

In Rangeley, where Reich spent his latter years, scientists and doctors from the U.S. and Europe gathered this summer for a conference that explored the prospects of seeking FDA approval for clinical trials of orgone accumulator blankets to treat burn victims.

Reich is described by the American Psychoanalytic Association as "one of the most brilliant, creative and controversial of the pioneering analysts." He was the first to focus on character analysis rather than neurotic symptoms. He linked a healthy sex life, which he called "orgastic potency," to emotional wellness, believing that failure to discharge sexual energy resulted in neurotic disorders.

His more controversial work came after he veered away from psychotherapy into laboratory experiments in Norway that led to the discovery of what he called "bions" — basic life forms that gave off orgone energy.

After moving to the U.S. just before the start of World War II, he focused on isolating and collecting that energy and went on to test its effect on cancer.

His orgone accumulators eventually caught the attention of the FDA.

After an investigation, the agency branded the devices consisting of alternating metallic and nonmetallic materials a fraud. In 1954 it sought an injunction in U.S. District Court in Portland. Reich refused to appear in court, triggering a default judgment and order that his books and accumulators be destroyed.

He was sentenced to two years in prison for contempt of court. He served only eight months before he died of a heart attack.

The FDA's injunction, supporters say, had a chilling effect on his work that persists even today. Moise said she believes there's merit in the orgone accumulator blanket, which her mother used in her medical practice.

Moise has tried it herself to heal burns.

"It's not crazy. It actually works," she said.

Even as the anniversary-related events rekindle memories of Reich and his theories, some of his supporters worry that they are in a race against time.

The challenge, they say, is to keep his work alive and advance it through new studies and experimentation at a time when Reich is not being taught in either medical schools or physics classes.

Kevin Hinchey, who is writing a book about Reich's work in the U.S., said most of the doctors and scientists who've taken an interest in Reich's life are baby boomers.

"If something dramatic isn't done to bring his work before the medical and scientific community, I really wonder what's going to happen when the baby boomers die. There's not a lot of younger people who are reading Reich."

msfreeh
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see link for full story


see link for full story
http://www.pjstar.com/news/x1343096393/ ... -to-prison" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Judge spares ex-FBI agent return trip to prison

Posted Sep 05, 2013


A former FBI agent was spared a return trip to prison Thursday after he admitted to violating terms of his release by being arrested for drunken driving and failing to tell his probation officer about the incident.

Jerry Nau apologized to U.S. District Judge James Shadid, asked for leniency and promised to enter counseling so that he could learn to make better decisions in the future.

"I'm an idiot for not showing up, your honor," Nau said, referring to the hearing he skipped last week that resulted in a no-bond arrest warrant and seven days in jail. "I do not want to disgrace my family because they've been through enough grief, and I keep putting them through it again."

Shadid, in pronouncing his decision not to revoke Nau's supervised release and sentence him to time served for the violations, told Nau that he needed to learn how to pick himself back up and fully comply with the terms of his release.

"Somehow, you think you can ignore matters and make things go away," Shadid said. "We all have better things to do than baby-sit you on supervised release."

Nau was convicted in November 2011 of making false statements related to more than $43,000 in missing drug money and sentenced to five months in the Federal Bureau of Prisons, followed by five months of home confinement. He was arrested for drunken driving in Tazewell County in April and pleaded guilty to that charge in May.

He pleaded guilty Thursday to violating two rules of his supervised release: being involved in criminal activity and failing to report his arrest to his probation officer in a timely manner.

U.S. Attorney James Warden, an Indiana prosecutor brought in to handle the case because of Nau's ties to the area, had argued for a six-month sentence. He said Nau had previously been informally admonished for violating terms of his home confinement, and the DUI showed a pattern of disrespect for the justice system.

Defense attorney Jeffrey Flanagan, however, countered tha

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Former Head of FBI’s Boston Office Accused of Exploiting Connections to Bureau The former special agent in charge of Boston’s FBI office has been slapped with a federal ethics violation for consulting professionally with a former colleague within a year of service.
Kenneth Kaiser, 57, who became an assistant director at FBI headquarters when he left the Boston office in 2006, met with agents investigating his new company, LocatePlus Holding Corp., in July 2009, the same month he retired.
- See more at: http://www.ticklethewire.com/2013/09/13 ... uRBiY.dpuf" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

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http://dissidentvoice.org/2013/10/the-p ... ate-wants/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;



The Police State Wants What the Police State Wants

by William Boardman / October 19th, 2013

[Note: Since the lifting of the federal court gag order on October 2, Ladar Levison and his company, Lavabit, have been getting some media attention (including a somewhat snide and incomplete story on page one of the New York Times). What follows in an effort to reconstruct at least the outline of a personal nightmare inflicted by our government on a small business owner who had done no wrong, even in the government’s eyes ­– at least until he started taking his constitutional rights seriously.]

The Fourth Amendment of the U. S. Constitution is anti-police-state

“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.” [emphasis added]

The founding document of the United States is inherently suspicious of a government’s willingness to abuse its powers, a suspicion rooted in centuries of tyranny around the world. Even the U.S. government, as well as state and local governments, have abused their powers from time to time since the country’s beginning. The drift toward an American police state intensified under the guise of anti-Communism, but that was mostly a convenient cover for state intrusion into people’s lives. The Soviet Union collapsed, but the nascent American police state kept growing. The Patriot Act of 2001, a massive assault on personal and political liberty, was largely written before 9/11 and passed, largely unexamined, in the hysterical atmosphere and raw panic of that over-hyped “new Pearl Harbor.”

Now we have a police state apparatus of almost unimagined dimension, most of which is kept secret and remains unknown, despite the efforts of a few reporters and whistle blower, who tell the truth at their personal peril.

The “American police state” is likely an abstraction in the minds of many people, and as long as they remain unknowing and passive, it’s likely to leave them alone. But even law-abiding innocence is not a sure protection of a person’s right to be secure. And when the police state comes after you in one of its hydra-headed forms, the assault can be devastating.

For starters, the state won’t always tell you when it begins

The intrusion of the police state into your life can shatter your world even before you realize it’s begun. Fight it, or surrender to it, the cost is huge. Recovery may be possible, eventually, if it’s ever allowed, but it will be hard, and it will take time.

In May 2013, Ladar Levison was 32 when the police state first came after him. The dreaded “knock on the door” was actually only an FBI business card on his door at home. And Levison’s initial interactions with the FBI were reportedly mild and civil, at first by email and later in person. The FBI was interested in Levision because he owned and operated a secure email service called Lavabit. From the FBI point of view, Lavabit was too secure, because the NSA and the rest of the security state couldn’t get into it.

Right out of college, Levison had started Lavabit as a sole proprietorship in April 2004 (the same month Google launched Gmail at a much greater scale). Having grown up in San Francisco, Levison studied computer science at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, where he still lives. While working on his start-up, he supported himself mostly with internet security projects for financial services. He also worked as a consultant on website development for clients such as Dr Pepper, Nokia, and Adidas.

What Lavabit was selling was secure email, much more secure than anything Google, Microsoft, or most other email providers were offering. The demand was not that great at first. It took six years for Lavabit to gather enough paying subscribers to allow Levison to devote himself to the business fulltime in 2010. Even when the FBI became interested in Lavabit in May 2013, it was still a small company, with two employees and about 400,000 subscribers. But one of those subscribers was another American about Levison’s age, 30-year old Edward Snowden, the whistleblower whose leaked documents have added so much to our understanding of the dimensions and activities of the American police state. Snowden opened his moc.tibaval@nedwonsde email account in 2010.

Political repression may not be the government’s overt intent, but it works

At this point, there’s no indication that Levison and Lavabit ever had anything but a commercial relationship with Snowden. It’s even possible that Snowden had nothing to do with the FBI’s initial interest in Lavabit. It may be that Lavabit’s effective security was sufficient offense to the surveillance forces to make it an object of attack for its own sake. In May 2013, Levison says he had the impression the FBI agents who talked to him didn’t even know who or what was the subject of their investigation. The FBI hasn’t said.

Levison is not an obviously political person, he hasn’t been revealed to be involved in party politics or political causes. “Until last summer, Mr. Levison, a Republican of libertarian leanings, had not been active in politics,” according to the New York Times October 9. He seems to be the person he seems to be: a thoughtful, hardworking, physically fit, computer business guy who has had a dog named Princess since January 2010 and who spends a lot of his spare time keeping in shape playing beach volleyball.

Princess has her own album on his Facebook page, where the dominant theme by far is Levison’s competition in beach volleyball (with albums for Sunday Night, as well as Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday Nights) and there is one picture of Levison with Rep. Ron Paul. Levison’s page shows membership in just one Facebook group, “OCCUPY (Support) EDWARD SNOWDEN and All Other Whistleblowers,” to which someone else added him about two months ago. Among his 43 “Likes,” Levison lists two Interests (programming and computers), lots of volleyball Activities, and six books, including William Gibson’s Neuromancer, George Orwell’s 1984, and Dostoevski’s Crime and Punishment.

From another perspective, Levison is as political as the Fourth Amendment, which is as profoundly political as it gets. It was the Patriot Act’s assault on the Fourth Amendment, Levison says, that contributed to his decision to start Lavabit in 2004, when the act was up for renewal and much in the news. Among the many objections to the act was that it gave to federal agents excessive authority to, in effect, write their own search warrants on no other authority but their own. In the Orwellian language of the act, these personal searched warrants are known as “national security letters.” Levison designed the security architecture of the Lavabit email and storage services to be beyond the reach of unwarranted searches, even in national security letters. As Levison recalled on Democracy Now! in August:

“And as I was designing and developing the custom platform, it was right around when the PATRIOT Act came out. And that’s really what colored my opinion and my philosophy, and why I chose to take the extra effort and build in the secure storage features and sort of focus on the privacy niche and the security focus niche…. [for] people who want email but don’t necessarily want it lumped in and profiled along with their searches or their browsing history or any of their other Internet activities.”

You can’t reveal what you don’t know – and that provides more security

During May 2013, Levison met for “a couple hours” with FBI agents at his office, where he explained how his security system and his business operated. As Levison told Democracy NOW! the service included his personal pledge of security:

“I’ve always liked to say my service was by geeks, for geeks. It’s grown up over the last 10 years, it’s sort of settled itself into serving those that are very privacy-conscious and security-focused. We offered secure access via high-grade encryption. And at least for our paid users, not for our free accounts—I think that’s an important distinction—we offered secure storage, where incoming emails were stored in such a way that they could only be accessed with the user’s password, so that, you know, even myself couldn’t retrieve those emails.

“And that’s what we meant by encrypted email. That’s a term that’s sort of been thrown around because there are so many different standards for encryption, but in our case it was encrypted in secure storage, because, as a third party, you know, I didn’t want to be put in a situation where I had to turn over private information. I just didn’t have it. I didn’t have access to it.”

Over the years, Lavabit has received and complied with “at least two dozen subpoenas” from the local sheriff’s office to the federal courts, Levison says, “I’ve always complied with the law.” Each of those subpoenas targeted a specific individual and appeared to Levison to be consistent with the Fourth Amendment. As recently as June 2013, he complied with an unrelated subpoena seeking information on one of his subscribers accused of violating child pornography law.

A secret subpoena from the American police state is different

On June 6, 2013, the Guardian began publishing surveillance state revelations based on documents from Edward Snowden, the Lavabit.com email subscriber. On June 9, Snowden revealed that he was the whistlblower who leaked documents to the Guardian and others. The first secret court order against Lavabit came the next day.

On or about June 10, the Justice Dept., on behalf of the FBI, went to federal court to compel Lavabit to provide information “relevant and material to an ongoing criminal investigation” involving someone with a single Lavabit email account. The FBI has not identified the subject of this investigation, but it is widely believed to be Snowden.

The United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia (the Fourth Circuit) granted the FBI’s request and issued the disclosure order against Lavabit that same day. A one-page, single-spaced attachment to the order listed the categories of information to be disclosed, including names, addresses, phone records, other subscriber identities, billing records, activity records, and “information about each communication” – in other words, everything about the email account “not including the contents of communications.” The order did not mention encryption keys, SSL keys, or the like. These are closely guarded secrets in a security business like Lavabit.

The U.S. Magistrate Judge who signed the initial order gave Lavabit 10 days to comply. He also sealed the court records from public view and further ordered that Lavabit “shall not disclose the existence of the application of the United States, or the existence of this order” to anyone except “an attorney for Lavabit.” In other words, Levison was subject to a gag order before he ever found out the FBI was definitely coming after him.

In the meantime, on June 14, the Justice Dept. filed a sealed criminal complaint against Snowden, who was then in Hong Kong. The government accused him of three offenses – theft of government property and two forms of “unauthorized communication” the Espionage Act of 1917. The criminal complaint, which was made public a week later, gave the government 60 days to file a formal indictment.

Getting unsatisfying compliance, the FBI decided to raise the stakes

According to a later Justice Dept. filing: “Mr. Levison received that order on June 11, 2013. Mr. Levison responded by mail, which was not received by the government until June 27, 2013. Mr. Levison provided very little of the information sought….” [emphasis added]

On June 28, the day after getting Levison’s belated response to the June 10 order, the Justice Dept. went back to the Fourth Circuit Court in Alexandria seeking an order “authorizing the installation and use of a pen register/trap device on an electronic mail account” – an FBI wiretap on email. Levison had no notice of the government motion and no opportunity to contest it. A new judge on the case, Magistrate Judge Theresa Buchanan, promptly ordered the wiretap installed on the basis that the government “has certified that the information likely to be obtained by such installation and use is relevant to an ongoing criminal investigation….” Like the first order, this order did not mention encryption keys, SSL keys, or the like.

FBI special agents met with Levison in Dallas the same day to discuss the new order, which Levison had not yet received, as well as a prior summons to appear before a grand jury. The agents presumably explained to Levison that the court had issued a secret order based on a secret motion, itself based on secret evidence (or none at all) and that Levison was not only compelled to comply but was also still under court order to keep the whole secret process a secret, this time with no exception even for his attorney.

According to a later government filing, “Mr. Levison told the agents that he would not comply with the pen register order and wanted to speak to an attorney. It was unclear whether Mr. Levison would not comply with the order because it was technically not feasible or difficult or was not consistent with his business practice of providing secure, encrypted email service for his customers.”

As Levison months later explained to reporters about Lavabit: “We’re wholly focused on secure email. Without it, we have no business.” In Levison’s view, breaking Lavabit’s security without the right to tell his customers would have been to commit commercial fraud.

Judge Buchanan keeps the pressure on Levison and Lavabit

Following this meeting, the Justice Dept. immediately went before Judge Buchanan seeking an order to compel Lavabit to comply with the other Magistrate’s earlier order and install the FBI wiretap and to “furnish agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, forthwith, all information, facilities, and technical assistance necessary to accomplish the installation and use of the pen/trap device…” as ordered pursuant to federal law [U.S. Code, Title 18, sec. 3123].

Judge Buchanan immediately granted the “Order Compelling Compliance Forthwith,” based in part on her findings that “Lavabit informed the Federral Bureau of Investigation that the user of the account had enabled Lavabit’s encryption services and thus the pen/trap device would not collect the relevant information” and that “Lavabit informed the FBI that it had the technological capability to obtain the information but did not want to ‘defeat [its] own system’…”

Judge Buchanan ordered Lavabit to provide “unencrypted data pursuant to the Order.” Noting that failure to comply “forthwith” would subject Lavabit to “any penalty within the power of the court,” Judge Buchanan added in her own handwriting, “including the possibility of criminal contempt of court.” This order was issued under seal.

Previously, Levison faced the possibility of being fined for civil contempt if he failed to comply. Now he also faced going to jail. And the court’s most recent orders, in their plain language, prevented Levison from discussing his situation with anyone, not even an attorney.

According to the FBI, agents “made numerous attempts, without success, to speak and meet directly with Mr. Levison” during the next ten days. On July 9, the Justice Dept. returned to the Fourth Circuit court seeking an order for Lavabit to show cause why it “has failed to comply with the orders entered June 29” by Magistrate Buchanan, and why Lavabit should not be held in contempt of court for its failure to comply.

Judge Hilton decides a hearing with the parties present might help

Judge Claude Hilton issued the show cause order the same day, including a summons for Lavabit to appear at a hearing a week later. Judge Hilton is a secrecy case veteran, having served on the secretive FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) court from 2000 to 2007. The Judge continued to keep the Lavabit case under seal, but reinstated Lavabit’s exception to the gag rule when consulting with an attorney.

The next day, Levison went to the FBI field office in Dallas for a meeting/conference call that included prosecutors and FBI agents in Washington and his attorney in San Francisco, convened “to discuss Mr. Levison’s questions and concerns… [that] focused primarily on how the pen register device would be installed on the Lavabit LLC system, what data would be captured by the device, what data would be viewed and preserved by the government… [and] whether Mr. Levison would be able to provide ‘keys’ for encrypted information.”

The parties did not reach an agreement at the meeting and the next day, July 11, Levison’s attorney informed the FBI that she no longer represented Levison or Lavabit. The same day, Levison “indicated that he would not come to court [for the July 16 show cause hearing] unless the government paid for his travel,” according to a government filing.

Rather than engage in a dispute over travel expenses, the FBI served Levison with a subpoena to appear before a Fourth Circuit grand jury, also on July 16. The government is responsible for the travel arrangements of grand jury witnesses, and the FBI so advised Levison by email. The grand jury subpoena left little wriggle room in its effort to force Lavabit to surrender the encryption keys that were essential to its business:

“In addition to your personal appearance, you are directed to bring to the grand jury the public and private encryption keys used by lavabit.com in any SSL (Secure Socket Layer) or TLS (Transport Security Layer) sessions, including HTTPS sessions with clients using lavabit.com website and encrypted SMTP communications (or Internet communications using other protocols) with mail servers;

“Any other information necessary to accomplish the installation and use of the pen/trap device ordered by Judge Buchanan on June 28….”

“I don’t trust you, but you should trust me” and vice-versa

Levison responded on July 13 with an email to the U.S. Attorney’s office, offering an alternative to the FBI-operated wiretap. Levison proposed that he would collect the court-designated data himself. While he didn’t state it in the email, this would address one of Levison’s primary concerns, that there was no effective oversight to prevent the FBI from gathering more data than the court had allowed. Levison proposed to design and implement the solution, gather the data manually, and provide it to the FBI at the end of the 60-day court order – for a price of $2,000. For another $1,500, he offered to provide data “more frequently,” which would require implementing an automated system.

The U.S. Attorney chose not to explore the offer. In a brusque and internally contradictory reply email the same day, an assistant U.S. Attorney explained “that the proposal was inadequate because, among other things, it did not provide for real-time transmission of results, and it was not clear that Mr. Levison’s request for money constituted the ‘reasonable expenses’ authorized by the statute.” The government later admitted to the court that it was “unclear” as to precise details of the proposal. The clear implication of Levison’s proposal is a willingness to provide real-time transmission for reasonable compensation. But that would leave Levison in control. The government didn’t consider that a useful compromise.

On July 15, Levison flew to Washington for his show cause hearing at 10 the next morning, although he thought it was set for 10:30 and arrived late. He was appearing pro se, representing himself without an attorney.

Even a federal court hearing can be a comedy of errors

The government goal for the July 16 hearing remained unchanged: “Lavabit LLC may comply with the pen register order by simply allowing the FBI to install the pen register devise and provide the FBI with the encryption keys.” Lacking compliance, the government asked the court to impose a civil contempt sanction of $1,000 a day until Lavabit complied.

The government also requested a search warrant for the encryption keys. Judge Hilton granted the search warrant before the hearing began.

As it turned out, the 20-minute hearing resulted in no change in the legal standing of the parties, but did produce a transcript with moments of unintentional hilarity.

Present in the courtroom were Judge Hilton and the court staff. U.S. Attorney James Trump represented the government, along with three other lawyers and an FBI agent. Levison was alone.

The U.S. Attorney wanted to know if Levison was going to comply with the wiretap order, but Judge Hilton wouldn’t ask and Levison wouldn’t say. Or rather, Levison said he had always been ready and willing to comply with installation of the wiretap, but he was reluctant to give up the encryption codes, which would give the FBI access to all 400,000 of his subscribers even though the court order named only one. “There was never an explicit demand that I turn over those keys,” Levison said.

The U.S. Attorney argued that Judge Buchanan had effectively if not specifically ordered Levison to turn over the encryption keys. Judge Hilton wasn’t touching that: “I’m not sure I ought to be enforcing Judge Buchanan’s order.” Judge Hilton said that his order was to install the wiretap and Levison had said he’d do that, so – “You’re trying to get me to deal with a contempt before there’s any contempt, and I have a problem with that.”

Levison moved to unseal all but the sensitive information in the proceedings. Judge Holton denied the motion, based on the underlying criminal investigation. Levison asked the judge to order “some sort of external audit to ensure that your oders are followed to the letter” as to FBI data collection. The judge refused. Levison moved to continue the hearing to allow him to retain counsel. Judge Hilton granted the continuance.

Levison and Lavabit get legal representation from a Virginia firm

Levison’s new attorney is Jesse Binnall of Bronley & Binnall PLLC in Fairfax, Virginia. Binnall, 34, was a communication major at George Mason University and graduated from the Law School there in 2009. Binnall and Levison would later be among the first guests on the New Ron Paul Channel in mid-August.

On July 25, Binnall filed under seal a “Motion to quash” the outstanding grand jury subpoena and the search warrant against Lavabit. The motion requested “that this Court direct that Lavabit does not have to produce its Master Key. Alternatively, Lavabit and Mr. Levinson request that they be given an opportunity to revoke the. current encryption key and reissue a new encryption key at the Government’s expense. Lastly, Lavabit and Mr. Levinson request that, if they are required to produce the Master Key, that they be reimbursed for its costs which were directly incurred in producing the Master Key….”

In support of his motion, Binnall made a number of arguments against the actions of the government, which had not faced serious legal opposition up to this point.

Binnall pointed out that giving the government access to Lavabit’s Master Key is tantamount to giving the government access to all of Lavabit’s 400,000 users. That amounts to a general warrant that is unconstitutional, Binnall wrote, and:

“It is axiomatic that the Fourth Amendment prohibits general warrants [with Supreme Court cases cited]…. The Fourth Amendment’s particularity requirement is meant to ‘prevent the seizure of one thing under a warrant describing another’ [citation omitted]. This is precisely the concern with the Lavabit Subpoena and Warrant and, in this circumstance, the particularity requirement will not protect Lavabit. By turning over the Master Key, the Government will have the ability to search each and every ‘place,’ ‘person [and] thing’ on Lavabit’s network…. Additionally, the Government has no probable cause to gain access to the other users accounts.”

The government seemed unconcerned about Levison’s business survival

Bindall also argued that the court should quash the subpoena and search warrant as creating an “undue burden” on Lavabit as defined by law [U.S. Code Title 18, sec. 2703]:

“Not only has Lavabit expended a great deal of time and money in attempting to cooperate with the Government thus far, but, Lavabit will pay the ultimate price –the loss of its customers’ trust and business – should the Court require that the Master Key be turned over. Lavabit’s business, which is founded on the preservation of electronic privacy, could be destroyed if it is required to produce its Master Key.”

Also on July 25, Binnall filed a motion to unseal court records and to lift the gag order on his client, since the “gag order infringes upon freedom of speech under the First Amendment, and should he subjected to constitutional case law. “

Unsurprisingly, the U.S. Attorney filed a motion in opposition.

At the motion hearing on August 1, Judge Hilton engaged in lengthy colloquy with attorney Binnall. Before the 25-minute hearing was half over, the judge had denied both motions and the U.S. Attorney had said little more than “Good morning.” Judge Hilton gave Levison and Lavabit until 5 p.m. Dallas time on August 2 to comply.

Levison’s compliance took an unexpected form

The next day in Dallas, at about 1:30 p.m., Levison provided information that purported to be full compliance with the court’s orders. Whether it was actual compliance remains uncertain. The government was not happy and engaged with attorney Binnall to achieve satisfactory compliance, without success. On August 5 the government filed a motion for sanctions against Levison, calling his apparent compliance “unworkable” and describing it as follows:

“Mr. Levison gave the FBI a printout of what he represented to be the encryption keys needed to operate the pen register. This printout, in what appears to be 4-point type, consists of 11 pages of largely illegible characters. See Attachment A. (The attachment was created by scanning the document provided by Mr. Levison; the original document was described by the Dal!as FBI agents as slightly clearer than the scanned copy but nevertheless illegible.) Moreover, each of the five encryption keys contains 512 individual characters — or a total of 2560 characters. To make use of these keys, the FBI would have to manually input all 2560 characters, and one incorrect keystroke in this laborious process would render the FBI collection system incapable of collecting decrypted data.”

When this compliance effort became public two months later, TechCrunch called it “an epic troll.” At the time, the government was not amused and called for the court to sanction Levison $5,000 a day, beginning at noon August 5. The court promptly granted the motion, while reminding the parties that all aspects of the matter remained under seal. Known only to the participants and some court employees, the case was still unknown to the public.

Levison makes a tantalizing public announcement

That secrecy ended on August 8, when Ladar Levison shut down Lavabit, posting a short notice on the Lavabit.com website, together with a link to the Lavabit Legal Defense Fund. As Levison explained:

“I have been forced to make a difficult decision: to become complicit in crimes against the American people or walk away from nearly ten years of hard work by shutting down Lavabit. After significant soul searching, I have decided to suspend operations. I wish that I could legally share with you the events that led to my decision. I cannot. I feel you deserve to know what’s going on – the first amendment is supposed to guarantee me the freedom to speak out in situations like this. Unfortunately, Congress has passed laws that say otherwise. As things currently stand, I cannot share my experiences over the last six weeks, even though I have twice made the appropriate requests.

“What’s going to happen now? We’ve already started preparing the paperwork needed to continue to fight for the Constitution in the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals. A favorable decision would allow me resurrect Lavabit as an American company.

“This experience has taught me one very important lesson: without congressional action or a strong judicial precedent, I would _strongly_ recommend against anyone trusting their private data to a company with physical ties to the United States.”

Also on August 8, Levison fully complied with the Fourth Circuit courts orders, turning over the encryption keys to a now defunct service. He had incurred 2 days of sanctions – owing the government $10,000 – which remains pending.

The next day, Silent Circle, a global encrypted communications service, stayed in business but preemptively wiped out its email service (about 5 per cent of its customers) in anticipation of a government request that the company wouldn’t want to have to obey. “Meanwhile, Silent Circle is working on replacing its defunct e-mail service with a system that doesn’t rely on traditional e-mail protocols and keeps no messages or metadata within the company’s grasp. It is based on a protocol often used for instant messages and other applications. [CEO Mike] Janke says the goal is for this to not be e-mail, but ‘for all intents and purposes it looks, feels, and acts like e-mail,’” according to MIT Technology Review.

Lavabit’s closing drew some news coverage over the next week, but any story was hampered by the gag order that severely limited what Levison and Binnall could safely say. As Levison told Forbes the day after shutting down Lavabit:

“This is about protecting all of our users, not just one in particular. It’s not my place to decide whether an investigation is just, but the government has the legal authority to force you to do things you’re uncomfortable with….The fact that I can’t talk about this is as big a problem as what they asked me to do…. The methods being used to conduct those investigations should not be secret.”

The FBI and the Justice Dept. Have not commented publicly about the Lavabit case beyond their court filings.

Being secret, federal court appeal gets no news coverage

On August 15, Lavabit attorney Binnall filed notice – under seal – that he was appealing the federal district court’s rulings of August 1 and August 5 to the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. In other words, the government can not only keep the public ignorant of what it’s doing, it can also prevent the public from knowing that anyone objects to the government’s actions as unconstitutional.

In the Lavabit case, at least, this changed abruptly on October 2, when Judge Claude Hilton ordered a censored version of 23 documents (162 pages) made public. The redactions in these documents appear, from context, to be intended mostly to conceal details of the criminal investigation into Snowden or some other lavabit.com user. Since the unsealing of the court documents, news coverage had expansed, and Levison and Binnall have appeared in public across the country to argue their cause. As Levison put it on his Facebook page October 2:

“If the Obama administration feels compelled to continue violating the privacy rights of the masses just so they can conduct surveillance on the few then he should at least ask Congress for laws providing that authority instead of using the courts to force businesses into secretly becoming complicit in crimes against the American people.”

On 2005, a U.S. Senator addressed a similar concern, when Congress was about to pass a law creating the “national security letter,” a secret government process much more intense and unforgiving what Levison went through last summer:

“This is legislation that puts our own Justice Department above the law. When national security letters are issued, they allow federal agents to conduct any search on any American, no matter how extensive, how wide-ranging, without ever going before a judge to prove that the search is necessary. All that is needed is a sign-off from a local FBI agent. That’s it.

“Once a business or a person receives notification that they will be searched, they are prohibited from telling anyone about it, and they’re even prohibited from challenging this automatic gag order in court. Even though judges have already found that similar restrictions violate the First Amendment, this conference report disregards the case law and the right to challenge the gag order.

“If you do decide to consult an attorney for legal advice, hold on. You will have to tell the FBI that you’ve done so. Think about that. You want to talk to a lawyer about whether or not your actions are going to be causing you to get into trouble. You’ve got to tell the FBI that you’re consulting a lawyer. This is unheard of. There is no such requirement in any other area of the law. I see no reason why it’s justified here.

“And if someone wants to know why their own government has decided to go on a fishing expedition through every personal record or private document, through the library books that you read, the phone calls that you’ve made, the emails that you’ve sent, this legislation gives people no rights to appeal the need for such a search in a court of law. No judge will hear your plea; no jury will hear your case. This is just plain wrong.”

The question is: how much of a police state do we have already?

That Senator was concerned eight years ago, and that Senator was Barack Obama. Today, national security letters are part of the law of the land, the Obama administration uses them, and if you get one, talking about it is against the law. In that context, since Ladar Levison apparently did not get a national security letter, he was lucky. The country, not so much.

On October 10, in the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, Lavabit filed the opening brief of its appeal of the lower court’s orders. The United States has until November 4 to file its answer. This will take awhile, it will take effort to follow, but it matters.

William M. Boardman has over 40 years experience in theatre, radio, TV, print journalism, and non-fiction, including 20 years in the Vermont judiciary. He has received honors from Writers Guild of America, Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Vermont Life magazine, and an Emmy Award nomination from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences. This article was first published in Reader Supported News. Read other articles by William.

This article was posted on Saturday, October 19th, 2013 at 1:59pm and is filed under Corporate Globalization, Fascism, Legal/Constitutional, Police, Security.

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