George Orwell shake hands with Charles Darwin

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msfreeh
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Re: George Orwell shake hands with Charles Darwin

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Trump campaign chief’s hidden ties to Sarasota grifter
Posted on September 21, 2016 by Daniel Hopsicker
When Donald Trump’s campaign manager Steve Bannon hastily changed his voter registration residence from an empty house in Miami to a beach house on Casey Key in Sarasota, it made news. The man he moved in with was described  as one of Bannon’s Breitbart writers. But  Andrew M. Badolato the owner of Bannon’s new ‘registered to vote here’ digs — is a lot more than that.




Trump campaign chief Bannon and Andy Badolato are not just comrades-in-right wing-arms. Bannon was business partners with the Sarasota-born Badolato, who has been — take your pick: either the unluckiest man in American business history, or a penny-ante penny stock fraudster.

In his favor, he has a few powerful associates: a Tampa man with New York Mob ties, a former CIA agent, several former members of U.S. military intelligence. On the other hand, a handful of Badolato’s business associates — presumably the less-powerful ones  — are currently in prison for financial fraud.

That this kind of shady activity is occurring just one degree of separation away from a major American Presidential candidate no longer seems surprising.  It’s exactly the kind of chaos, though on a far grander scale, that caused a global melt-down in 2007.

Tagging ‘homie’ Andy Badolato as a Bannon underling ‘might could’ be a little like saying Al Capone used to run a bar in Cicero: true as far as it goes, but well-short of an adequate description.

Fleeing the mere taint of voter fraud

The story begins when Steve Bannon gets tipped to an upcoming Guardian report — one of a spate of negative reporting   after his announcement as Trump’s new campaign chief, — revealing Bannon  “was registered to vote in a key swing state at a vacant house in Miami where he does not live, in an apparent breach of election laws.”


Bookends: Bannon (left) and Trump

The Guardian reported:

 “Donald Trump’s campaign chief has moved his voter registration to the home of one his website’s writers, after the Guardian disclosed that he was previously registered at an empty house in Florida where he did not live.



That’s when Bannon turned to Badolato. Bannon would also surely get help from Supervisor of Elections Kathy Dent, in getting fixed up, voter registration-wise. He realized Sarasota offers a certain amount of cover, if you’re trying to keep your name out of the papers. The place has a decades-long reputation as a center of intrigue.

There’s E. Howard Hunt, who lived here, and the Saudi family that disappeared days before 9/11; there also a Lebanese “businessman, who sold Mohamed Atta his cell phone, who went to prison a few years later for soliciting the beheading of an uncooperative law enforcement official.

And, of course, there’s the original MILF, Sarasota’s own  Katherine Harris, who did yeoman’s duty after the 2000 Presidential election as Florida’s Secretary of State.

Not for nothing is Sarasota known as “the meanest city in America.“As we heard someone say recently, “Believe me folks.”  There’s much, much more.

From the Guardian:

“Badolato states on his website that he is an “entrepreneur, senior level executive, venture capitalist and seed stage investor” and claims to have founded companies that reached a total of $26bn in market capitalization.

Guardian reporter Jon Swain apparently thought Badolato’s boast to be a dubious claim. He indicated there might be more to be learned about Bannon buddy Badolato:

“(Yet) according to federal court records, he has filed for bankruptcy four times since 2008.”

Guardian reporter Swain’s instincts were right.

So, just who is Andy Badolato? And what does his relationship with Donald Trump’s campaign manager say about the 2016 Presidential election?

Shady people in a sunny state

The 52-year old Badolato has a checkered business past, littered with numerous lawsuits, judgments, unpaid debt, and ignoring ‘hints’ from the IRS to come in and sit down. Budget Self-Storage of Sarasota may even have sold the contents of his storage locker.

More important is the wreckage of plundered public companies Badolato has left strewn in his path.  He was assisted in this endeavors by a roving  group of ‘business associates’ — many of whom are currently incarcerated — including three officers  from one of his companies who were all sent to prison at the same time.

A now-defunct Mark Cuban-owned internet site called Sharesleuth, suspicious of Badolato’s involvement in a company called UTEK, ran a routine check of online court records in Sarasota County and found at least 15 financial-related suits listing Badolato as a defendant, including foreclosures, suits by investors in Badolato ventures, a judgment by American Express, and one from a Bahamian resort and casino for unpaid bills.

To give vent to hurt feelings, one irate investor even created a website, where the first thing that confronts you is a bold headline reading “Andy Badolato is a con-artist.”

It gets worse from there.

Comrades-in-arms, and more


Andy Badolato

Bannon and Badolato collaborated, The MadCowNews has learned, in a failed but well-publicized attempt  to wrest control of a public company  they targeted called  Sinofresh, in Venice, Florida, from its owner, a local inventor.

Bannon played  the plaintiff  in the Badolato-led enterprise, pretending to be an independent company Director.  Owner Charles Fust retaliated by kicking Bannon off his Board, citing his closeness to a Badolato-controlled company.  Ironically, of a half-dozen Badolato public companies examined, it’s the only one still going. 

 

Entrepreneur, Capitalist, Completed “Hat Trick” on Drudge





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msfreeh
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Posts: 7683

Re: George Orwell shake hands with Charles Darwin

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QUOTEWORTHY

"The earth is speaking now, but man won't listen."

-- Darryl "Grey Eagle" Brown, a spiritual leader of the Choctaw tribe, June 12, 2016

"Like any grandfather, I want my grandchildren to enjoy the beauty and bounty of a healthy planet. And like any human being, it grieves me to see that floods, droughts and fires are getting worse, that island nations will disappear and uncounted species will become extinct."

-- U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, Nov. 26, 2015

QUOTEWORTHY

“Let us sing as we go. May our struggles and our concern for this planet never take away the joy of our hope.”

-- ENCYCLICAL LETTER LAUDATO SI’ OF THE HOLY FATHER FRANCIS ON CARE FOR OUR COMMON HOME, May 24, 2015

QUOTEWORTHY

"This generation has altered the composition of the atmosphere on a global scale through radioactive materials and a steady increase in carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels."

-- President Lyndon B. Johnson, Feb. 2, 1965

"God always forgives, but the earth does not. Take care of the earth so it does not respond with destruction,"

-- Pope Francis, at a UN conference in Rome, Nov. 19, 2014

"To anyone who continues to deny the reality that is climate change, I dare you to ... go to the islands of the Pacific, the islands of the Caribbean and the islands of the Indian Ocean and see the impacts of rising sea levels ... If that is not enough, you may want to pay a visit to the Philippines right now."

-- Yeb Sano, Philippine delegate to the Warsaw round of climate talks, announcing he will fast until the conference develops a meaningful action plan, Nov. 2013



“Those of us who spend our days trawling . . .the scientific literature on climate change are becoming increasingly gloomy about the future of human civilization. We are well past the time of niceties, of avoiding the dire nature of what is unfolding, and politely trying not to scare the public.”

-- Elizabeth Hanna, of the Australian National University, on that country's record heat wave and wildfire epidemic

“We have spent our entire existence adapting, okay? So we will adapt to this. Changes to weather patterns that move crop production areas around — we’ll adapt to that. It’s an engineering problem, and it has engineering solutions.”

--Rex Tillerson, CEO of ExxonMobil, June 27, 2012

“There’s no such thing as clean coal, and shipping it abroad doesn’t clean up the problem. . .Improving the efficiency in how much energy you get from burning a pound of coal doesn’t make clean coal.”

---- Bill Ritchie, former manager of several large Montana coal mines, The Missoulian (Mt), April 17, 2012

"The melt-off from the world's ice sheets, ice caps and glaciers over eight years of the past decade would have been enough to cover the United States in about 18 inches of water, according to new data" from Nasa Satellites.

-- The Christian Science Monitor, Feb. 8, 2012

msfreeh
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Posts: 7683

Re: George Orwell shake hands with Charles Darwin

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https://thinkprogress.org/global-warmin ... 3a1ddca521" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Joe Romm
Dr. Joe Romm is Founding Editor of Climate Progress, “the indispensable blog,” as NY Times columnist Tom Friedman describes it.
yesterday4 min read
Hurricane Matthew is super strong — because of climate change
“Category 4 and 5 hurricanes could double or triple in the coming decades,” expert warns.


Hurricane Matthew, October 4 (via NASA)
Hurricane Matthew is slowly approaching the East Coast where it is expected to wreak havoc with storm surge, wind, and rain. Matthew has already set a number of records — and global warming is giving it a boost.
Hurricanes “extract heat energy from the ocean to convert it to the power of wind, and the warmer the ocean is, the stronger a hurricane can get if all other conditions that it needs to exist are present,” meteorologist and former hurricane hunter Jeff Masters explained last month on Living on Earth. “So, scientists are confident that as we continue to heat up the oceans, we’re going to see more of these high-end perfect storms.”
Case in point, as meteorologist Philip Klotzbach has noted:
Matthew set a new record as the longest lived Category 4 (or higher) Atlantic hurricane in October — 84 hours.
By Monday, it had already “generated the most accumulated cyclone energy” of any Atlantic hurricane ever recorded in the eastern Caribbean.
As a result, the 2016 hurricane season has “already generated the most accumulated cyclone energy in the Atlantic in October since 2005” (the year of Katrina, Rita, and Wilma).

Let’s look at some of the latest climate science. One 2013 paper found that “since 1975 there has been a substantial and observable regional and global increase in the proportion of Category 4–5 hurricanes of 25–30 percent per °C of anthropogenic global warming.” Another 2013 paper concluded that “dramatic changes in the frequency distribution of lifetime maximum intensity (LMI) have occurred in the North Atlantic,” and the stronger hurricanes “have become more intense.”
In other words, warming oceans create stronger hurricanes, like the one we’re seeing now.
We just lived through the hottest summer in recorded history

And possibly the hottest in “thousands of years.”
thinkprogress.org
Matthew spun up from a tropical storm to a Category 5 superstorm in an alarming 36 hours. The latest research says this is also a result of global warming. “Storms are intensifying at a much more rapid pace than they used to 25 years back,” explained the author of a 2012 study. “They are getting stronger more quickly and also [to a] higher category. The intensity as well as the rate of intensity is increasing.”
A 2015 study, “A climatological study of the effect of sea-surface temperature on North Atlantic hurricane intensification,” found a statistically significant relationship between higher intensification values and higher sea surface temperature [SST] values. “On average, mean intensification increases by 16 percent for every 1°C increase in mean SST.”
This warming-driven trend toward more rapid intensification [RI] is very worrisome. “The vast majority (79 percent) of major storms are RI storms,” and “the most intense storms are those that undergo RI,” according to a 2016 study.
The latest storm tracks for superstorm Matthew have it threatening the southeast coast.

Global warming makes all of these dangerous impacts more destructive for superstorms like Sandy and Matthew. For instance, as leading climatologist Kevin Trenberth has explained, “Owing to higher SSTs from human activities, the increased water vapor in the atmosphere leads to 5 to 10 percent more rainfall and increases the risk of flooding.” He elaborates on that here.
More concerning is that warming-driven sea level rise makes storm surges more destructive. A 2012 study found that “the 600-mile stretch of coastline from North Carolina to Massachusetts is experiencing [sea level rise] rates that are nearly three to four times higher than the global average, a trend that may continue during the coming decades.”
Another 2012 study found that landfalling hurricanes cause the biggest storm surges, that hurricanes with the biggest storm surges caused the most destruction, and that Katrina-sized surges “have been twice as frequent in warm years compared with cold years.”
A 2013 paper, “Projected Atlantic Hurricane Surge Threat from Rising Temperatures,” found that the most extreme storm surge events “are especially sensit

msfreeh
Level 34 Illuminated
Posts: 7683

Re: George Orwell shake hands with Charles Darwin

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Heat is Online





https://robertscribbler.com/2016/10/20/ ... -protests/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

North Dakota Tramples Journalist Deia Schlosberg’s Constitutional Right to Cover Historic Climate Protests
“We already have five times as much oil and coal and gas on the books as any scientist thinks is safe to burn.” — Bill McKibben

*****

Deia Schlosberg seems to me to be an exceptionally responsible person. A producer of the Josh Fox film How to Let Go of the World and Love all the Things that Climate Can’t Change, Deia has already helped thousands of people to more deeply understand the very serious risks associated with our continued burning of fossil fuels. To understand it on an intimate, personal level. And for this we owe her not only our gratitude, but the firm affirmation of our voices lifted to support her during her time of unjust persecution.



(Deia Schlosberg [left] and climate activists who briefly shut down TransCanada Tar Sands production on October 11 [right]. Image source: Desmogblog.)

For Deia appears to have earned herself the ire of some of the most powerful and destructive private economic interests on planet Earth. Interests that are apparently now involved in leveraging the loyalty of politically aligned persons within North Dakota law enforcement in an attempt to intimidate and silence this responsible and compassionate journalist.

Journalistic Documentation of an Unprecedented Protest Action

Back on October 11th, Deia provided journalistic coverage of a pipeline protest in Walhalla, North Dakota. The protest involved an act of civil disobedience in which 5 people used shut-off valves to stop tar sands crude transported by TransCanada pipelines from entering the U.S. These five locations were private holdings of TransCanada and represented the main access points for corporate-produced tar sands. When the protesters operated the shut-off valves, TransCanada’s significant flow of greenhouse gas producing syncrude was temporarily halted.



(TransCanada is a corporate producer of tar sands — one of the most environmentally and climatologically destructive fuels on planet Earth. An energy source whose continued use risks extraordinarily damaging climate outcomes. Now that replacement fuels and renewable energy sources such as wind, solar, biofuels, and electric vehicles are much more readily available, we have an opportunity to turn away from such dangerous activities. For years now, climate activists have been fighting to make the public aware of risks and harms associated with tar sands extraction all while challenging an unhealthy level of economic dominance by fossil fuel interests that prevents and delays access to far less damaging energy sources. Image source: Desmogblog.)

Deia, according to her statements to Desmogblog, was recording the act of civil disobedience by one of the activists operating the shut-off valves — documenting what is likely to become an event of historic importance as a filmmaker and a climate journalist.

Deia noted to Desmogblog:

In general, I felt like this was an extremely important action to document because it was unprecedented — shutting down all of the oil sands coming into the U.S. from Canada. And as a climate reporter and someone who worries about the impacts of climate change and our future, I know that the Canadian oil sands are a pretty scary source of energy to be exploiting at this point.

False Charges That Violate a Journalist’s Constitutionally Protected Freedoms

To be very clear, Deia was both performing a public service by recording an event of historic significance and exercising journalistic freedoms that are held sacred by the Constitution of the United States. The Constitution plainly states:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Prosecutors apparently aligned with fossil fuel special interests in North Dakota obviously did not agree. Instead, on October 13th, they brought unwarranted, trumped-up charges against Deia for simply excising her Constitutionally protected First Amendment freedoms. Prosecutors claimed that Deia was involved in a conspiracy to steal property, a conspiracy to steal services, and a conspiracy to tamper with or damage a public service.

Ironically, not only do these charges serve to infringe upon the protected freedoms of an American citizen, they also have no legal basis whatsoever. For, acting as an event-documenting journalist, Deia in no way served as an accessory to or conspirator for any crime. Furthermore, the charges leveled by North Dakota do not in any way fit events as they transpired or match the legal definitions of possible crimes as they are technically defined. No property or services were stolen as part of the protest action. Access to tar sands crude was simply briefly interrupted. And since TransCanada is a private corporation that profits from its sales of tar sands to agencies within the U.S., labeling its wealth-seeking activity as a ‘public service’ is the very definition of inaccurate legalistic contortion.

Moreover, Deia’s record of the pipeline shut-off by activists has been unjustly and probably unlawfully confiscated. An action that removes from the public eye a critical piece of reporting related to an event of historic human welfare significance.

The Risk From Continuing to Burn Fossil Fuels is Human Civilization Collapse, Mass Extinction

In the context of Deia’s climate journalism, we should very clearly identify the climate harms and risks that arise from continuing to burn fossil fuels and in expanding that rate of burning. And we should also state plainly that it is these harms, these risks which provide strong justification on moral, survival, and human safety and welfare grounds for the actions made by protesters covered by Deia.

The science is pretty clear on the fact that of the five major mass extinction events that have occurred on planet Earth, at least four were set off or greatly contributed to by large environmental carbon releases and related rising global temperatures. This includes the worst mass extinction event — the Permian — in which hothouse temperatures may have produced a Canfield Ocean that, in turn, wiped out most of life on Earth.

Based on our best understanding, it takes an atmospheric equivalent CO2 level (CO2e) of around 550 to 1000 parts per million under current conditions to generate an appreciable risk of setting off a hothouse mass extinction event. This is particularly true if, as is the case today, such an initial carbon spike occurs following periods of glaciation when Earth’s available carbon stores for providing added warming feedbacks are at their highest levels. Meanwhile, the currently unprecedented rate at which human beings are adding carbon to the atmosphere through fossil fuel burning presents further risks outside the context of past hothouse events.


(Neil Degrasse Tyson — ‘I don’t want Earth to look like Venus.’)

We’ve already pushed CO2 levels, through our burning of fossil fuels and through other industrial activities, to above 400 parts per million (and to around 490 parts per million on the CO2 equivalent scale during 2016). The amount of carbon in the atmosphere already is currently enough to risk raising global temperatures this Century to 1.6 to 2.1 degrees Celsius above 188os values, to risk amplifying feedbacks in which the Earth System produces its own carbon spike that adds to the human sources, and to present serious challenges to the resiliency of human civilization and life on Earth.

But, even worse, there’s presently enough carbon listed as proven reserves on the books of coal, oil, and gas companies across the world to push atmospheric CO2 equivalent levels well above 900 parts per million. If we burn all this carbon, or if we discover and extract even more, we will see between 4 and 9 degrees Celsius warming this century and possibly as much as 9-18 C warming in the centuries to follow. So much burning and resulting heating of the Earth would set off a catastrophe that no current human civilization would be likely to survive. One that could also cause the worst mass extinction event in all of the deep, deep time of Earth’s long history.

These basic facts may be difficult for some to hear and understand — especially when they’ve staked their aspirations for economic growth on the false hope represented by fossil fuels. But, as tough as these facts are to listen to, they remain. Continuing to burn fossil fuels will wreck civilizations, disrupt growing seasons, raise sea levels, generate storms the likes of which we have never seen, evaporate water supplies, and transform our now benevolent and life-supporting oceans into a toxin-producing mass extinction engine.

In the face of such terrible harms, we as American citizens and as human beings have the responsibility to stand up and do what we can to help people avoid them. To help people make the right choices and to shine a light in the dark places where harms are currently being committed. Deia was within her rights to do just that in documenting a climate action by protesters who voluntarily risked arrest so that the rest of us could, yet again, have the opportunity to make the right choices before it’s too late.

Links:

How to Let Go of the World and Love all the Things that Climate Can’t Change

Petition (Please Sign): Drop Charges Against Deia Schlosberg

350.org Please Support

Exclusive Q&A With Deia Schlosberg on Her Arrest While Filming Activist Shutdown of Tar Sands Pipeline

Fossil Fuel Reliance: Tar Sands

First Amendment of the Constitution

Canfield Ocean

Neil Degrasse Tyson Climate Change

NOAA ESRL

Carbon Tracker

Hat tip to Bill McKibben

Hat tip to Seal

Hat tip to DT Lange



Bonus Read

http://www.sltrib.com/news/4467584-155/ ... ck-oil-gas" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;



BLM pulls back oil & gas leases bought by Utah activist, author ...
Salt Lake Tribune-Oct 19, 2016
(Trent Nelson | The Salt Lake Tribune) Terry Tempest Williams (holding her bidding number) and Brooke Williams in the BLM's Salt Lake City ...



http://www.sltrib.com/home/3845389-155/ ... -us-lauded" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;



Terry Tempest Williams is leaving her University of Utah teaching post and walking away from the Environmental Humanities program she founded rather than agree to administrators' demands she move her teaching from the state's desert landscapes onto campus.
"For reasons I will never know or understand, the University of Utah wanted me gone — and in the end, what was most threatening was my teaching. Why? Because each of you and our current students are challenging the status quo, each in your own way with the gifts that are yours," the acclaimed author wrote in an email last week to about 80 current and past students of the U.'s Environmental Humanities graduate program.

Known as Utah's most eloquent homegrown voice for conservation, Williams helped launch what has become one of the U.'s premier educational experiences, connecting highly motivated students with the nation's most adventurous writers and artists. Now some are accusing university administrators of being more concerned with procedural bureaucracy than with ensuring Williams continued her leadership.
Williams' departure came as a shock to students, colleagues, program supporters, and at least one foundation, whose executive director said it would not renew a $50,000 grant awarded last year for Williams' "Reading the Book Cliffs" project.
"We saw this course as a national model on how to engage people in new ways for critical issues, such as climate change," said Ellen Friedman of the Compton Foundation, which had premised its support on Williams' field teaching. "We are extremely disappointed."
Williams' supporters are heaping criticism on U. administration for failing to find a way to keep her on faculty, and some suspe



http://www.americanswhotellthetruth.org ... t-williams" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;



Biography
The Ecology Hall of Fame, adding Terry Tempest Williams to its honorees, noted that she “combines all the major strains of environmental passion.” Her life´s work is driven by love of the desert, and other naturally beautiful places; a passion for multigenerational land stewardship, which ties her to the region where she was born and still lives; and opposition to resource destruction, especially when it affects human health.

Williams is a Utah native, descended from five or six generations of Mormon pioneers. “I write through my biases of gender, geography, and culture,” she says. “I am a woman whose ideas have been shaped by the Great Basin and Colorado Plateau.”

Williams is perhaps best known for her book Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place (Pantheon, 1991), in which she chronicles the epic rise of Great Salt Lake and the flooding of the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge in 1983, alongside her mother's diagnosis with ovarian cancer, believed to be caused by radioactive fallout from the nuclear tests in the Nevada desert in the 1950s and 60s. Refuge is now regarded as a classic in American nature writing, a testament to loss and the earth's healing grace.

Williams’ other books include Red: Patience and Passion in the Desert, 2001; An Unspoken Hunger (Pantheon, 1994); Desert Quartet: An Erotic Landscape (Pantheon, 1995); Coyote's Canyon (Gibbs M. Smith, 1989); and Pieces of White Shell: A Journey to Navajoland (Charles Scribner's Sons, 1984). She is also the author of two children's books: The Secret Language of Snow (Sierra Club/Pantheon, 1984); and Between Cattails (Little Brown, 1985).

In 2004, Terry Tempest Williams published The Open Space of Democracy, in which she tried to define how we might break down the partisanship and polarization in our society so that we can come together to solve the political and environmental problems which threaten our democracy and our land. In it she says, “I do not think we can look for leadership beyond ourselves. I do not think we can wait for someone or something to save us from our global predicaments and obligations. I need to look in the mirror and ask this of myself: If I am committed to seeing the direction of our country change, how must I change myself?”


Link du jour


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Portland City Council approves police contract amid unruly protest



Tumult ensued on the steps of Portland City Hall as police pepper-sprayed and arrested protesters in the aftermath of an unruly demonstration Wednesday over a newly approved contract for rank-and-file officers.
The scene devolved into a lengthy standoff, with dozens of protesters swarming Southwest Fifth Avenue and blocking traffic and light-rail trains until an estimated 75 officers in riot gear intervened.
Police had already shoved protesters out of City Hall, dousing some with pepper spray, after they disrupted a City Council hearing. Demonstrators wouldn't begin dispersing until just after 5 p.m., some eight hours after the unparalleled protest began.
The source of contention: City Council's 3-1 vote for a controversial new police contract, and Mayor Charlie Hales' unprecedented maneuvering within City Hall to conduct the vote in meeting room cordoned off from protesters.

Portland police push, pepper spray protesters out of city hall
Hales, who made the contract a top priority before he leaves office Jan. 1, said fallout was unlikely to be avoided because protesters were determined to make a scene.
"This is a good day," Hales said of the contract's approval. "It will pay dividends, for a bureau that has a good relationship with the city, over time."
The contract raises officers' pay, amid a staffing shortage, and ends a contentious rule that let officers wait 48 hours to speak with internal investigators after using deadly force.
Officials said concerns over rules for body-worn cameras will be publicly vetted next year under the new mayor, Ted Wheeler. But that hasn't satisfied opponents, who also wanted expanded civilian oversight powers.
Protesters also claimed a victory of sorts, arguing the City Council's closed-door vote — broadcast online, over television screens and remotely in the City Council chambers — may help them file a complaint over a violation of public meeting laws.


"They wouldn't have gotten this passed if they did it in a democratic way," said Gregory McKelvey, spokesman for protest group Don't Shoot Portland.
Wednesday's protest capped a fiery few weeks at City Hall as tensions mounted over Hales' proposed three-year contract with the Portland Police Association. Longtime City Hall staffers couldn't recount a similar scene aside from the Occupy Portland movement of 2011 that overtook three city parks.
"I regret it ever got to that point," said Commissioner Nick Fish, who supported the police contract. "We have to find a way to have these kinds of charged discussions and debates without having disruptions to our building and to our ability to conduct the people's business."
The demonstration began in earnest Tuesday as protesters set up tents outside City Hall and hung a large banner for the Black Lives Matter movement. And, as they'd done in weeks past, protesters came prepared to disrupt Wednesday's City Council meeting – with one person even writing an email warning that "after we take city hall maybe we will take bridges and freeways too."
City officials took public testimony about the contract last month and weren't required to listen again before voting. So protesters signed up to speak on other matters, hoping to nonetheless criticize the police contract, a tactic they used last week.
But protesters' frequent outbursts and interruptions prompted Hales to adjourn Wednesday's public meeting less than 3


https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Mark_Dougan" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

John Mark Dougan

John Dougan arriving to his photoshoot (April 14, 2016)
Born John Mark Dougan
December 15, 1976 (age 39)
Wilmington, Delaware, U.S.
Nationality American
Website http://www.johnmark.ru" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
John Dougan (Russian: Джон Марк Дуган) is a former police officer who fled the United States for Moscow, Russia to obtain political asylum in 2016. Dougan was running a website that had been critical of Ric Bradshaw, the sheriff of Palm Beach County, Florida. Dougan fled after his home was raided by law enforcement authorities on March 14, 2016.[1][2][3]

Dougan stated that after the raid on his home, the FBI was following him and his family, so he decided that he needed to escape from them and flee the country. He did so by wearing various disguises, sneaking into Canada, so that he did not have to go through American Customs, who he suspected had him on a no-fly list. Dougan then took a flight from Toronto to Istanbul, and boarded another flight to his final destination, Moscow, Russia.[4]

An anonymous source told independent television station WHDT that the website, PBSOTalk.com, was taken down by GoDaddy after being pressured by law enforcement agencies.[5] The site was moved to PBSOTalk.ru and hosted in the Russian Federation.[6][7]

Dougan started PBSOtalk in 2009 and began making public records requests bases on tips from readers and anonymous posters on the website. In 2012, he received information, and public records, that the elected Sheriff of Palm Beach County was using taxpayer money to take campaign contributors, some with ties to organized crime, to dinners. After filing a complaint with the Florida Commission on Ethics, the Sheriff was cleared "because he didn't know it was a violation of the law." However, the Commission stated the money he used to take those people to dinner was "inconsistent with the proper performance of his public duties".[8]

Shortly after the ethics complaint was filed, the Chief Deputy of Palm Beach County filed a SLAPP (Strategic lawsuit against public participation) suit against Dougan [9] after the Sheriff's office tried unsuccessfully to purchase the web site from Dougan.

In what was billed as a digital election-day dirty trick the night before the November 2012 elections,[10] an email was sent out to the A-list of voters in Palm Beach County from BurtAaronson.com, a domain owned by Dougan. The email stated that BurtAaronson.com no longer endorsed the Sheriff as a candidate and instead endorsed the other candidate in the race. The real Burt Aaronson, who was, at the time, a county commissioner, stated he was outraged and had no knowledge of the email. He accused Dougan of identity theft, and attempted to have Dougan arrested. The Palm Beach County State Attorney's office, however, determined since Dougan owned the domain, he was legally justified in using it, however, called the email "outrageous conduct," further saying that laws have not kept up with mischief that can be wreaked on the Internet.[10]

In 2015, Dougan obtained and posted a collection of audio recordings of a Palm Beach County detective speaking to an unidentified woman. The recordings revealed targeted retaliations and investigations against the Sheriff's political enemies, including Dougan, that speak critically of the Sheriff.[11] The FBI and Palm Beach County raid on Dougan's home was motivated by the posting of these audio files, which was deemed to be wiretapping. The other reason listed on the warrant was for suspected hacking, and posting of names, of thousands of names, addresses and phone numbers of law enforcement officers, judges and FBI agents, though the property appraiser claimed nothing was ever hacked.[12] Dougan claimed it was merely a reason to seize his computers and attempt to locate the sources of his information as well as to shut down his web site.

External links Edit
PBSOTalk.ru
John Mark Dougan's personal website
References Edit
^ Правда (Pravda), Юрий БЕЛЯТ | АО ИД «Комсомольская (2016-05-05). "Американский полицейский, ищущий убежище в России: У нас в Штатах шантаж, коррупция и продажные суды" [American policeman searching for refuge in Russia: In the states, we have blackmail, corruption and corrupt courts]. АО ИД «Комсомольская правда» (in Russian). Pravda News. Retrieved 2016-05-10.
^ "Американский полицейский сбежал в Россию от произвола США" [John Dougan asked for political asylum in Russia after the US began to pursue him for his human rights activities.]. РЕН ТВ (in Russian). 2016-04-12. Retrieved 2016-05-10.
^ "Отступник. Джон Дуган бежал в Россию от политического преследования" [John Dougan fled to Russia from political persecution Подробнее: http://vm.ru/news/2016/04/10/otstupnik- ... 17095.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;]. Вечерняя Москва. Retrieved 2016-05-10.
^ ""Достало!": американский полицейский объяснил свое желание переехать в Россию" ["Enough!": American policeman explained his desire to move to Russia]. НТВ (in Russian). Retrieved 2016-05-08.
^ WHDT WORLD NEWS (2016-04-21), Did Ric Bradshaw Finally Take Down PBSOTALK.COM? - Interview with PBSO Whistleblower Mark Dougan, retrieved 2016-05-09
^ "EXCLUSIVE — From Russia With No Love: Anti-Sheriff Ric Bradshaw PBSOTalk Back On The Web … New BSOTalk Takes Aim At Broward Sheriff Scott Israel And State Attorney". Gossip Extra. 2016-04-25. Retrieved 2016-05-10.
^ "We're Back! Stronger than ever! - PBSOTalk.ru". http://www.pbsotalk.ru" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;. Retrieved 2016-05-10.
^ "Palm Beach County Sheriff Ric Bradshaw chided for using tax money". The Palm Beach Post. Retrieved 2016-05-10.
^ "Sheriff's Office second-in-command files defamation lawsuit". The Palm Beach Post. Retrieved 2016-05-10.
^ a b "Aaronson seeks investigation into faux email blasting Bradshaw...". The Palm Beach Post. Retrieved 2016-05-10.
^ "Deputy who said he went after Bradshaw's enemies investigated". The Palm Beach Post. Retrieved 2016-05-10.
^ Writer, By Lawrence Mower - Palm Beach Post Staff. "PBSO investigating release of confidential law enforcement addresses". http://www.mypalmbeachpost.com" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;. Retrieved 2016-05-10



http://www.realchangenews.org/2016/10/1 ... ice-action" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
Black Lives Matter march triggers massive Seattle police action
by Laurel Holliday | October 19th, 2016
Nationwide, Black Lives Matter (BLM) has successfully increased public awareness of police violence against people of color. In Seattle, BLM and other racial-justice activists just convinced Mayor Ed Murray and the
Seattle City Council to suspend the construction of a new $149 million North Precinct Police “bunker” that activists said would lead to further police militarization and excessive use of force.

Even before the City Council, police precinct showdown, the Seattle Police





https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/pu ... story.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Justice Dept. asks to join civil rights suit by fired police officials in Pocomoke, MD
p





Two reads about FBI Assistant Director Kallstrom


1.

http://www.foxbusiness.com/politics/201 ... untry.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;



Assistant Director Blasts Bureau Leadership Over Clinton Probe


FBI Director James Comey



Former FBI Assistant Director James Kallstrom blasted the bureau’s Director James Comey for his handling of the Hillary Clinton email scandal, saying the alleged “quid pro quo” deal with the State Department appears on the surface to be illegal.

James Kallstrom responded to an FBI agent’s acknowledgment that he offered to declassify an email in exchange for opening two spots for



2.

http://www.veteranstoday.com/2015/05/01 ... 0-coverup/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
New Evidence Points to TWA-800 Coverup | Veterans Today
http://www.veteranstoday.com" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false; › 2015/05/01
May 1, 2015 - Focusing on whether TWA Flight 800 was brought down by an internal (i.e., ..... Kallstrom of the FBI was the big liar and cover-up man who should  ...
Was TWA Flight 800's fiery crash part of a massive cover-up? | New York Post
New York Post › 2016/07/04 › was-twa-f...
Jul 4, 2016 - In his new book “TWA 800: The Crash, the Cover-Up, and the Conspiracy” ... 8, 1996, Jim Kallstrom, then-FBI assistant director, was forced ...
CNN - FBI's Kallstrom angrily denies any TWA probe cover-up - Nov. 8, 1996
CNN.com › twa.update
Nov 8, 1996 - FBI's Kallstrom angrily denies any TWA probe cover-up ... Secretary Pierre Salinger that a Navy missile might have shot down TWA Flight 800 .
You visited this page on 9/18/16.



http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-m ... story.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
LOCAL L.A. Now
Judge: Ex-LAPD sergeant violated ethics rules after stop of 'Django Unchained' actress, but shouldn't be fined



https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/201 ... e-shooting" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

New York
Bronx woman wrote essay on fears of police years before an officer killed her
Deborah Danner agonized over the deaths of mentally ill people like her at the hands of police five years before police sergeant fatally shot her in her apartment

msfreeh
Level 34 Illuminated
Posts: 7683

Re: George Orwell shake hands with Charles Darwin

Post by msfreeh »

Bonus Read


http://whowhatwhy.org/2016/11/20/distru ... ount-ways/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

THREATS TO DEMOCRACY
NOVEMBER 20, 2016 | THE WHOWHATWHY TEAM
WHY DISTRUST THE FBI? LET US COUNT THE WAYS

J. Edgar Hoover FBI Building in Washington, DC. Photo credit: Cliff / Flickr (CC BY 2.0)
In our podcast of November 18, 2016, journalist Sarah Kendzior noted that one of the issues this election has revealed is the growing distrust of institutions, such as the FBI.

Regular WhoWhatWhy readers know that we cover the Bureau extensively – and that there is much to be distrustful about.

For new readers, here is a small sampling of our own articles on how the FBI abused its powers, botched investigations, risked national security, and deceived the public on a wide range of issues, some of which had life or death consequences.

FBI, Snipers & Occupy

FBI’s Amazing Trick to Avoid Accountability

FBI Sat Back While Snitch Directed Cyber-Attacks and Potentially entrapped Others

Saudi Royal Ties to 9/11 Hijackers Via Saudi Florida Family?

FBI Disparages its own 9/11 Report

New FBI Tactic Hints at Big DC Cover-Up of Saudi 9/11 Funding

FBI Had Direct Link to Bin Laden — in 1993

FBI: Knew About Saudi 9/11 Hijacker Ties — But Lied to Protect “National Security”

Tsarnaev Case Judge: FBI Interview Reports Are Unreliable — and Cast in Stone

FBI War on Boston Witnesses

Does New Boston Bombing Report Hint at Hidden Global Intrigue?

The Unexplained Connection Between the FBI and Two Muslim Friends Killed by Law Enforcement

Missing Evidence of Prior FBI Relationship with Boston Bomber

Was Tamerlan Tsarnaev a Double Agent Recruited by the FBI?

New Cover-Up in Boston Bombing Saga — Blaming Moscow

Why CIA’s Richard Helms Lied About Oswald: Part 1



Link du jour


https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2016/ ... s-of-color" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesig ... n-pictures" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;


http://www.pressherald.com/2016/11/20/i ... olunteers/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;







http://www.nydailynews.com/news/nationa ... -1.2881245" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Politics
Alabama police officer fired for racist Michelle Obama meme
BY MEGAN CERULLO
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS Sunday, November 20, 2016, 3:25 PM




police officer in Alabama was fired after posting racist memes on Facebook, including one of First Lady Michelle Obama, officials announced.

The controversial post featured text over a picture of Melania Trump reading, “Fluent in Slovenian, English, French, Serbian, and German.” Below it, the words “Fluent in Ghetto” were laid over a photo of Obama.

The officer, Joel Husk, is a Tr



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'White Lives Matter' protest leads to clashes and arrests in Texas
Counter-protesters confronted group at Texas capitol after governor dedicates monument recognizing African American contributions to the state





https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/ ... l-suspects" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

According to Amnesty International, police are responsible for 2,500 deaths in the past seven years. Human Rights Watch says one-fifth of all killings in the city are carried out by police. Three-quarters of the victims are black men.

Funerals will be held on Monday for the four officers who died in the helicopter, along with a military policeman who was shot in the operation in Jacarepaguá region.



Heat is Online




https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/po ... 41affb83e8" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

A climate negotiator explains why Trump might not be a total disaster for the planet
By Stephen Stromberg November 20 2016


https://robertscribbler.com/2016/11/18/ ... mber-2016/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Pair of Arctic Storms Sparked Severe Polar Warming, Sea Ice Melt for November 2016
 

Folks — we’re in a climate emergency. Tell everyone you know. — Eric Holthaus

There are weather and climate records, and then there are truly exceptional events that leave all others in the dust. Such has been the case across Earth’s high latitudes during this last quarter of 2016… — Bob Henson at WeatherUnderground

Global warming doesn’t care about the election. — Dr Gavin Schmidt of NASA GISS

*****

The dramatic Arctic warmth and related damage to sea ice continued today. It’s a situation that Bob Henson at Weather Underground has aptly dubbed ‘the crazy cryosphere.’ But from this particular observer’s perspective, the situation is probably worse than simply crazy. It appears that we are now in the process of losing an element — Arctic sea ice — that is critical to the integrity of seasonality as we know it.



(Extreme Arctic warmth was drawn in by two warm storms — one running north from the Barents on November 14. Another emerging from Kamchatka on November 16 and 17. Warm storms have, during recent years, run up along high amplitude waves in the Jet Stream and into the Arctic during both summer and winter — with apparent strong impacts to sea ice [see NASA video below]. Image source: Climate Reanalyzer.)

On November 17, according to Arctic sea ice expert Zack Labe, the Arctic Ocean actually lost about 50,000 square kilometers of ice coverage. This would be odd on any given November day — which typically sees a trend of rapid freeze as the Arctic cools down into winter. But it is particularly strange considering that the Arctic Ocean is presently in a severe sea ice deficit of around 700,000 square kilometers below previous record lows. One that follows on the heels of both a very warm October and an exceptionally warm November for the Polar region of our world.

These losses occurred just one day before overall temperature anomalies for the climate zone above 66 degrees North Latitude went through the roof. For today, according to Climate Reanalyzer, temperatures for the entire Arctic spiked as high as 7.26 degrees Celsius above average. This occurred even as readings near the North Pole hit to near or above freezing in some locations.



(Warm Storm running up through the Fram Strait on November 14 — an event which flooded the high Arctic with abnormal late fall heat. Image source: Earth Nullschool.)

And though these warming events have been widely reported in climate media, what has not been reported is the fact that a pair warm storms similar to the one that hammered sea ice and brought North Pole temperatures to above freezing during late December of 2015 were also the triggers for the present Arctic Ocean warming event.

Such intense warm air invasions can have a dramatic impact on sea ice. According to NASA, last year’s late December warm storm event resulted in considerable ice thinning and melt over the critical sea ice region surrounding the North Pole. Ice in the Barents was reduced by 10 percent. Sea surface temperatures in some locations jumped to 20 degrees (F) above average. And throughout the month of January, there was little rebuilding of sea ice into the recently melted regions.


(A recent NASA study found that warm storms can have a serious impact on sea ice. And for both 2015 and 2016, this appears to be the case.)

This year’s warming event was also accompanied by a storm running north out of the Barents. On November 14, a 955 mb storm ran directly up through the Fram Strait. It ushered in warm, moist winds from the south which then spread northward over the Central Arctic — bringing with them above freezing temperatures. On November 16, a 966 mb storm crossed over Kamchatka. It subsequently weakened. But it still possessed enough oomph to pull in a strong plume of warmth and moisture as it entered the Arctic Ocean near the region of the East Siberian Sea. And the result has been a flood of warm air coming in from the Beaufort and East Siberian Sea to meet with the similar onrush coming from the Barents. The result is the huge Polar heat spike that we see today.

Following a very warm October, this is a kind of insult to injury situation for the sea ice. And though temperatures are expected to fall back a bit over the coming week in the High Arctic, atmospheric and ocean conditions running into December seem to favor the potential for more warm air influxes to this fragile climate zone.

UPDATE: On November 19, it had become apparent that significant sea ice losses were ongoing in the Arctic. According to the JAXA sea ice monitor, about 140,000 square kilometers of sea ice had been lost over the period of November 16 through 18. As Arctic Ocean ice typically freezes quite rapidly during November, such counter trend losses are highly extraordinary. Now, sea ice in the Arctic, according to JAXA is 995,000 square kilometers below the previous record low set during 2012.






Blink Tank


New documentary about Franklin Coverup Pedophile Ring




http://qctimes.com/news/local/filmmaker ... a952d.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;


Over the years, a man who publicly claimed to be Johnny has made headlines, and several other people – including a man who claims he helped kidnap Johnny -- have come forward to say that Johnny’s disappearance was linked to an elaborate and well-guarded pedophile ring that involved high-level politicians.

No arrests have been made in connection with Johnny’s disappearance.

Johnny's mother says police, FBI botched investigation
Noreen Gosch, formerly of Eldridge, the mother of a 12-year-old paper carrier who went missing in 1982, maintains that her son was kidnapped and trafficked.

Johnny was born to the Gosches when they lived in Eldridge, she said. “We moved there in 1967 and moved when Johnny was two. He was born Nov. 12, 1969.”

Her son was 12 when he disappeared. She says he visited her once in 1997 for only a few hours.

Meanwhile, no arrests have been made in connection with the case.

“The police department and FBI did a very poor job on Johnny's case,” Gosch said. On the morning Johnny disappeared, by the time police arrived Gosch had contacted the newspaper and had gathered statements from other paper carriers who had been folding the papers they were preparing to deliver.

“I gave that to the police with all the contact information for (the paper carriers’) parents,” she said. “I knew about the man who was there and the second man on the street, as we had five witnesses in the case,” she said.

Gosch then called the FBI, and agents David Oxler and Ed Maul came to the Gosch residence. “As they set foot into our home, they announced they would not enter the case because the police chief didn't want their help. And it was up to us to prove Johnny was in danger.”

Gosch told the agents there were five witnesses, but “It did no good. They refused to enter the case. So I told them to get out of our home.”

One of the witnesses, Gosch said, was an attorney who later became a highly respected judge. “He tried and tried to get the police to do their job,” she said.

“We know what happened to Johnny... how, why, who,” Gosch said. “We just have a few smaller pieces of the case left to acquire.”

If Gosch had not stepped forward, none of the progress in the area of missing children would have occurred, she said. “The FBI would have been allowed to continue to push parents around when their children were taken.”

“Why would a police chief do this? Therein lies part of the answer to the case,” she said.

Throughout the years, Gosch never has lost sight of the fact that Johnny is the victim. “Many times, parents in this situation take on the role of a victim. It is easy to lose strength, focus and effectiveness when you do that. The fact we did not have police / FBI support meant it was up to me to run the investigation.

“I stayed focused, as any interruptions could mean Johnny's life,” she said.

Gosch continues to give “kind but practical advice” to other parents when kidnappings take place. “It is important for the families to be involved,” she said. “After a few weeks of a kidnapping, the law enforcement/FBI go home. The parents need to have a Plan B for when that happens,” she said.


https://www.inverse.com/article/24001-p ... -abuse-act" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

FBI Cyber Chief Won't Comment on Controversial Digital Law
Inverse-
Philip Celestini, section chief of the FBI's cyber division, has a motto when it comes to talking about cyber security. “First I'm gonna scare you, then I'm going to ..


https://ca.news.yahoo.com/ralph-nader-s ... 00238.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Ralph Nader says Trump's 'unstable personality' means trouble
Yahoo News Canada (blog)-
Nader cited the FBI director's decision to look into Hillary Clinton's emails just days before the election as part of the reason why Trump was elected. But Nader ...




http://www.concordmonitor.com/The-windi ... en-5878655" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Jonathan P. Baird: Tom Hayden's exceptional life
Concord Monitor
The FBI and its director, J. Edgar Hoover, took notice. Later in his life there is a picture of Hayden with his 22,000 page FBI file. Hayden spent years organizing ...



FBI Octopus


New Legislature could change odds for marijuana
Las Cruces Sun-News-
The current district attorney, Mark D'Antonio, is a former FBI agent, federal prosecutor and private defense attorney. He focuses his office on more serious crimes ...

msfreeh
Level 34 Illuminated
Posts: 7683

Re: George Orwell shake hands with Charles Darwin

Post by msfreeh »

FBI Octopus


http://internet.itbusinessnet.com/artic ... 17-4734102" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;



HMG Strategy Recognizes IT Thought Leaders and Business ...
IT Business Net-
... E. Jeffrey Hutchinson, VP, Enterprise Services Leader, Honeywell; John Iannarelli, Former FBI Special Agent and Senior Executive Advisor on cyber matters; ...



http://www.star-telegram.com/news/local ... 26028.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;



Dallas FBI official will fill Trophy Club post
Fort Worth Star Telegram
Tom Class, 56, of Trophy Club, special agent in charge of the FBI's Dallas office, has been selected as Trophy Club's new town manager. Courtesy of city of ...


http://www.vice.com/en_ca/read/everythi ... cking-mess" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;



Know About This Whole Russian Hacking Mess
Senior Editor
December 12, 2016
So, you want to know about the whole Russia thing. The "Russia thing" is as good a name as any for the confusing, thorny series of stories about hacking operations that were allegedly initiated by Russian-backed operatives in an attempt to influence the presidential election in favor of Donald Trump. Whether it was the Russians, whether they were looking to get Trump elected, and what should or is likely to happen next are all controversial questions, and that's before you start going down the rabbit hole of competing Twitter threads and other conflicting sources that can muddy the




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DECEMBER 12, 2016 AT 5:23 AM
FBI scrubs contracts to hide how much it paid 9/11 Review Commission members



The award notice and signature page of the FBI’s personal services contract with 9/11 Review Commission member Ed Meese.
The three men who served as members of the 9/11 Review Commission were on the FBI’s payroll, but the bureau is refusing to say how much they were paid.

Florida Bulldog obtained copies from the FBI of its personal services contracts with the commissioners and staff during ongoing Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) litigation.

Scrubbed from the contracts, however, are all details about financial compensation terms – hourly rates of pay, contract maximums – for both the commissioners’ services and travel for as long as two years. The FBI did not make public invoices submitted by the commissioners or its own paymaster records.

Congress authorized the 9/11 Review Commission to conduct an “external review” of the FBI’s post-9/11 performance and to assess new evidence. The contracts, however, make clear that the Review Commission was instead under the FBI’s direction and control.

“The contractor [each commissioner and staffer signee] agrees that the performance of services … shall be subject to the supervision, inspection and acceptance of the FBI,” the contracts say.

The 9/11 Review Commission members were Reagan-era Attorney General Edwin Meese, former ambassador and congressman Timothy Roemer and Georgetown professor Bruce Hoffman. In an apparent oversight, the FBI released only two pages of Meese’s contract, and in place of the rest of Meese’s contract enclosed a second copy of Hoffman’s contract.

Meese, Roemer and Hoffman signed their contracts with the FBI on Jan. 22, 2014. The contracts required them to submit their report to the FBI by Dec. 15, 2014 for “appropriate classification and legal review.”

Top Secret clearance

The three commissioners and staff were require to have Top Secret security clearance and what the FBI calls “Sensitive Compartmented Information (SCI)’’ access. SCI clearance has been called “above Top Secret,” according to Wikipedia.

The 9/11 Review Commission staffers whose contracts were released are: Executive director John Gannon, a former deputy director of the CIA; L. Christine Healey, a senior counsel and team leader for the 9/11 Commission; Caryn A. Wagner, a former Under Secretary for Intelligence and Analysis at the Department of Homeland Security; Jamison Pirko, an ex-staff assistant at the Commission on the Prevention of WMD Proliferation and Terrorism; and William E. Richardson.

According to the Review Commission’s final report, the commissioners traveled to eight FBI field offices and six FBI legal attaché posts in Ottawa, Beijing, Manila, Singapore, London and Madrid. Travel invoices submitted by commissioners and staff have not been made public.


9/11 suicide hijack pilots Mohamed Atta, right, and Ziad Jarrah. The two men apparently visited the home of Saudis living in the Sarasota area.
As described in the contract, the Review Commission’s duties included assessing “any evidence now known to the FBI that was not considered by the 9/11 Commission related to any factors that contributed in any manner to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.”

One matter the Review Commission took a limited look at was the FBI’s investigation more than a decade earlier of Saudis living in Sarasota with apparent ties to the 9/11 hijackers.

Abdulaziz al-Hijji and his wife, Anoud, lived in the gated community of Prestancia 13 miles north of Venice Municipal Airport, where Mohamed Atta and two other 9/11 hijack pilots trained. The al-Hijjis came under FBI scrutiny after neighbors alerted authorities that they’d suddenly moved out of their upscale home about two weeks before 9/11 – leaving behind their cars, clothes, furniture, food in the refrigerator and other personal belongings.

The home at 4224 Escondito Circle was owned by Anoud’s father, Esam Ghazzawi, an advisor to the late Prince Fahd bin Salman bin Abdulaziz al Saud, a nephew of former King Fahd and eldest son of Saudi Arabia’s current monarch, King Salman. The prince died in July 2001 at age 46.

According to former Florida Sen. Bob Graham and others, the FBI did not disclose its Sarasota investigation to either Congress’ Joint Inquiry into the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington or to the subsequent 9/11 Commission. Graham co-chaired the Joint Inquiry. In its public statements, the FBI has disputed that – saying both 9/11 panels were informed of its Sarasota investigation.

Florida Bulldog, working with Irish author Anthony Summers, first reported the existence of the FBI’s Sarasota investigation in September 2011. Among other things, the story reported that investigators had found evidence in Prestancia’s gatehouse security records that showed Atta and other terrorist figures had visited the al-Hijjis’ home.

What 9/11 Review Commission didn’t do

The 9/11 Review Commission’s final report, made public in March 2015, did not seek to determine whether the FBI did or did not notify Congress and the 9/11 Commission about Sarasota. Likewise, it did not speak with witnesses in the case or examine evidence other than an April 2002 FBI report.

The report, released to Florida Bulldog in 2013 amid other FOIA litigation, said that agents found “many connections” between the Sarasota hijackers and “individuals associated with the terrorist attacks on 9/11/2001” – flatly contradicting FBI public statements that its once-secret Sarasota inquiry had found no connection to the 9/11 plot.

The Review Commission’s inquiry was confined to recounting the efforts of unidentified FBI officials to discredit the April 2002 report. They called it “poorly written and wholly unsubstantiated” and said the unnamed agent who wrote it could not justify doing so.

The FBI has declined to explain its findings or make available the agent who wrote the report to request, unsuccessfully, that a more urgent investigation of the Sarasota Saudis be opened.

Florida Bulldog sued the FBI and the Justice Department in June under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) seeking records generated by the 9/11 Review Commission. Latst month, the FBI released about 200 pages of material – including the personal services contracts and several highly redacted reports.

Meanwhile, the Bulldog’s 2012 FOIA lawsuit seeking the FBI’s files on its Sarasota investigation remains pending before Fort Lauderdale U.S. District Court Judge William J. Zloch.


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-Tama Police Chief faces federal indictment

December 12, 2016

Jeffrey Filloon, 47, Toledo, was indicted by a federal Grand Jury in Cedar Rapids on Dec. 6 for allegedly selling impounded vehicles and firearms which were police department weapons or weapons held in evidence and pocketing the proceeds. He is charged with two counts of makin

msfreeh
Level 34 Illuminated
Posts: 7683

Re: George Orwell shake hands with Charles Darwin

Post by msfreeh »

Heat is Online






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70 per cent of Japan's biggest coral reef is dead due to global warming

It follows a mass bleaching event on the






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FBI withdrew national security letter after Cloudflare lawsuit
ZDNet-
Cloudflare received a national security letter (NSL) from the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) back in February 2013, its transparency report for ...



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Despite paper trail, Tillerson denies Exxon lobbied against sanctions
FOX 61-
In a letter reported first by CNN, the Democratic-aligned opposition research group American Bridge 21st Century is asking FBI Director James Comey to ...

http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense ... nitor.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;



Did a Federal Surveillance Court Really “Reject” an FBI Application ...
Slate Magazine (blog)-
But one piece of information from the Guardian deserved a closer look: The FBI allegedly tried to obtain a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court order to 


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Chelsea Manning Can't See The FBI's Files About Her, Judge Rules
Tech Featured-
Chelsea Manning can't see the FBI's files about her, a federal judge in Washington, DC, ruled on Wednesday. Manning went to court after the government ...










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The British ex-spy behind the Trump dossier was a FBI asset
Yahoo NewsJanuary 12, 2017
View photos
President-elect Donald Trump speaks during a news conference in New York on Jan. 11, 2017. (Photo: Evan Vucci/AP Photo)
More
The man behind the sensational story concerning information the Russian government had supposedly collected about Donald Trump is a former British intelligence operative and was a longtime intelligence source for the U.S. government who had assisted the FBI during an investigation into corruption by FIFA, the world soccer association, according to sources familiar with the matter.

The operative — identified today by the Wall Street Journal as Christopher Steele, a former Russian operations officer for Britain’s MI6 intelligence agency — had worked as a consultant for the FBI’s Eurasian organized crime section, helping to develop information about ties between suspected Russian gangsters and FIFA, said one of the sources, who is directly familiar with Steele’s work.

Steele had been hired originally to investigate Trump by his political opponents, and he decided to share his information with the FBI last year. The preexisting relationship





http://www.eenews.net/greenwire/2017/01 ... 1060048191" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;


REGON STANDOFF
Blogger outs FBI informants as prosecutors howl
Jeremy P. Jacobs, E&E News reporter
Published: Wednesday, January 11, 2017
Federal prosecutors have run into another headache in their efforts to convict those involved in the armed takeover of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge last winter: a blogger who appears to be revealing the identities of the FBI's confidential informants.


http://bgr.com/2017/01/11/fbi-iphone-un ... ernardino/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;



Three different companies told the FBI they could hack the iPhone
BGR-
One of Apple's most public bits of drama from 2016 was its clash with the FBI over an iPhone 5c belon

msfreeh
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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/bil ... 95vkl9dx6r" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;





POLITICS
North Dakota Bill Would Protect Drivers Who ‘Accidentally’ Hit And Kill Protesters
It’s aimed at Dakota Access protesters, and it doesn’t bode well.
01/14/2017 11:56

msfreeh
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Re: George Orwell shake hands with Charles Darwin

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http://ticklethewire.com/2017/02/21/la- ... es-russia/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

LA Times: AG Sessions Must Recuse Himself from Probes of Trump Ties to Russia

AG Jeff Sessions at his confirmation hearing.
By Editorial Board
Los Angeles Times
If Donald Trump’s campaign colluded with efforts by Russia to help him defeat Hillary Clinton — a nightmare scenario for which no evidence has been produced so far — it would be first and foremost a political and constitutional crisis. But it also likely would involve violations of federal law. And even if such collusion didn’t take place, there could be other matters involving Russia and Trump associates that would require decisions by the Department of Justice.
That department is now headed by Atty. Gen. Jeff Sessions, who as a senator from Alabama was an early and enthusiastic supporter of Trump’s candidacy. And President Trump, as he made clear at his stream-of-consciousness news conference last Thursday, rejects concerns about improper relationships between his campaign and Russia as a “ruse” and “fake news” fabricated “to try and make up for the loss of the Democrats.”




http://journaltimes.com/news/local/fbi- ... f32a0.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

FBI comes to Gilmore to help
Journal Times-
An FBI agent speaks to students at Gilmore Middle School about cybercrime. The FBI has chosen Gilmore as their “adopt-a-school,” a program which helps ...



News Orgs. Demand FBI Discloseh Was Paid For San Bernardino iPhone Hack
©https://sputniknews.com/us/201702211050 ... -hack/ack/ REhttps://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s ... .amcUTERS/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
https://sputniknews.com/us/201702211050 ... hone-hack/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;


Several media outlets, including the Associated Press, filed a brief with a federal court on Monday to require that the FBI make public certain evidence regarding the San Bernardino investigation, including information on the cost of the software tool the FBI used to hack an iPhone and the identity of the person or persons who sold it to the FBI.
The AP, Vice, and Gannet, the news conglomerate that owns USA Today, filed a suit in September 2016 demanding information about a mysterious transaction that allowed the FBI to bypass Apple’s assistance in unlocking an iPhone belonging to the employer of Syed Rizwan Farook, who, along with his wife,Tashfeen Malik, killed 14 people in the San Bernardino shooting attack.


http://wjla.com/news/nation-world/intel ... motivation" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;


Intelligence leaks against Trump suggest a political motivation
WJLA-20 hours ago
Colleen Rowley is a retired FBI special agent and a whistleblower who brought to light major lapses in intelligence prior to 9/11. Rowley sees officials within the ...




http://www.hudsonreporter.com/pages/bus ... d=49187943" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;


Art Now: Hasan Elahi - Tracking Transience - an Artist Talk
The Hudson Reporter-
Although initially created for his FBI agent, the public can also monitor the artist's communication records, banking transactions, and transportation logs along ...


http://canadafreepress.com/article/judi ... nd-tyranny" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;


“Judicial Discretion” and Tyranny
Canada Free Press-
In those articles, I exposed FBI informants associated with the occupation of .... not to be out done, they filed an Affidavit of FBI Special Agent Ronnie Walker in ...







http://thefederalist.com/2017/02/21/dis ... ael-flynn/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;




Disclosures Suggest Deep State Surveillance Extends Well Beyond ...
The Federalist-8 hours ago
An investigation would be the responsibility of FBI Director James Comey, who in ... black-hooded, Palestinian-styled agent provocateurs roaming the streets, ...

https://www.propublica.org/article/did- ... nformation" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;


Did Jury in Etan Patz Murder Case Receive Improper Information?




http://www.forbes.com/sites/danalexande ... 7c5bf41aae" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;



FBI informant involved in James Hoffa murder


In his younger years, Sheldon Yellen helped run the Southfield Athletic Club, which played a pivotal part in one of the greatest mysteries of the 20th century. On July 30, 1975, one of the regulars at the club--Anthony Giacalone, known as "Mr. G" to Yellen--was scheduled to meet with ex-Teamsters boss Jimmy Hoffa at the Machus Red Fox restaurant at 2 p.m., according to federal officials. At 2:15 p.m., Hoffa called his wife, apparently concerned that Giacalone hadn't showed.
It was the last time she ever heard from him. Authorities declared Hoffa dead in 1982, even though they never found his body. Giacalone, who was indicted on RICO charges in 1996 but died before the case went to trial, was a prime suspect in Hoffa's disappearance but was never charged. He had an airtight alibi, having spent July 30 at his favorite hangout, the Southfield Athletic Club. When asked about Hoffa, Giacalone allegedly said, "Maybe he took a little trip."
Investigators spent years chasing down people who might know something, including Yellen's mentor, Leonard Schultz, who authorities say was a Mafia associate, friend of Giacalone, head of the Southfield Athletic Club and FBI informant. Schultz, who was eventually convicted of conspiracy to distribute cocaine in 1987, took any secrets he may have had to the grave in 2013. "I always thought Lenny knew more about the Hoffa disappearance than he ever told us about," says retired FBI agent John Insogna.






http://www.cnn.com/2017/02/21/world/mel ... ane-crash/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
Melbourne plane crash: CEO, lawyer, ex-FBI agent among Americans killed

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https://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/show.html

Sea Ice Extent in Antarctica Bottoming Out at Lowest on Record
By: Bob Henson, 5:50 PM GMT on March 03, 2017

As summer draws to a close across the Southern Hemisphere, the extent of sea ice ringing Antarctica has fallen to the lowest values ever observed in satellite records dating back to 1979. On Wednesday, March 1, the daily extent data from the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) showed 2,109,000 square kilometers of Antarctic sea ice, its lowest value on record. That value nudged up slightly on Thursday, but a more useful measure, the five-day rolling average, h...

Antarctic Sea Ice
Updated: 4:23 PM GMT on March 04, 2017

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Echoes of a 1920s Calamity in Deadly Midwest Tornado Outbreak
By: Bob Henson and Jeff Masters, 6:48 PM GMT on March 01, 2017

Several long-lived supercell thunderstorms cranked out destructive tornado families across the Midwest from late Tuesday into Wednesday morning. At least 3 deaths had been reported, according to a weather.com summary. Power was knocked out for tens of thousands of people as the wind-packing storms barreled east toward the Appalachians.

The NOAA/NWS Storm Prediction Center received 24 preliminary tornado reports for the period from 6:00 am CST Tuesday to ...

Severe Weather Tornado
Updated: 8:12 PM GMT on March 01, 2017

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Glacial Pace for Southern Hemisphere Cyclone Season; Tornado Threat in Midwest
By: Bob Henson and Jeff Masters, 5:06 PM GMT on February 28, 2017

From Antananarivo to Darwin to Suva, an odd tranquility has filled the heart of the Southern Hemisphere’s tropical cyclone season. In a turn of events that’s mystified even the experts, hurricane-strength cyclones have been virtually absent since July from the entire Indian Ocean and Pacific Ocean south of the equator. (Tropical cyclones are quite rare over the Atlantic Ocean south of the equator, though they do occur.)

In much the same way as the Nor...

Updated: 4:03 AM GMT on March 01, 2017

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More Record Heat Invading the U.S. as Cleanup From Rare February Tornadoes Begins
By: Bob Henson and Jeff Masters, 6:04 PM GMT on February 27, 2017

Record warmth slathered the Northeast on Friday and Saturday, the latest chapter in a phenomenal sequence of unseasonal mildness during the last half of February. As of Monday morning, NOAA’s U.S. Records site had catalogued 5857 daily record highs for the month, with only 95 daily record lows. Most of the record lows have occurred across the western U.S., whereas the bulk of record warmth has been east of the Rockies. The warmth has been even more impressive when...

Heat Severe Weather Tornado
Updated: 9:23 PM GMT on February 27, 2017

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All-Time Warmth for February Stretches to New England
By: Bob Henson and Jeff Masters, 5:47 PM GMT on February 24, 2017

A February remarkable for its long stretches of mildness steamed onward Thursday, with more all-time records for the month continuing to tumble across wide stretches of the U.S. The apex of the record-setting warmth expanded on Thursday from the Midwest (which we covered in our last post) into New York and New England (see below). A staggering number of daily record highs have been set in recent days, especially when juxtaposed against the sparse number of record lo...

Updated: 12:10 AM GMT on February 25, 2017

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https://robertscribbler.com/2017/03/20/ ... /#comments


March Climate Madness — Wildfires, Scorching Summer Heat Strike Central and Southwestern U.S. By Winter’s End
In Colorado today the news was one of fire. There, a wildfire just south of Boulder had forced emergency officials to evacuate 1,000 residents as more than 2,000 others were put on alert Sunday. Smoke poured into neighborhoods as dead trees killed by invasive beetles or a developing drought, exploded into flames. Depleted snowpacks along the front range of the Rockies combined with temperatures in the 80s and 90s on Sunday to increase the fire risk. Thankfully, so far, there have been no reports of injuries or property loss. A relieving contrast to the massive fires recently striking Kansas, Texas and Oklahoma — where farmers and communities are still recovering.


(The ignition source for the recent fire near Boulder appears to be due to human activity. But the on-the ground climate conditions enhancing tree deaths, reducing snow packs, and blanketing the region with record or near record heat increases the likelihood that a spark will turn into a dangerous fire.)

The record heat building into Colorado on Sunday and contributing to increased wildfire risk had spread up into the Central U.S. from the Desert Southwest. There, cities like Phoenix have experienced summer-like heat for at least the past week. On Sunday, the city saw a second day of record temperatures as the mercury hit 96 degrees (Fahrenheit). Saturday temperatures were almost as hot at 95 F. This was the 8th consecutive day of 90 degree (F) or hotter temperatures (the record stretch of 90 degree + readings for March was set in 1972 at 17 days). Meanwhile, forecast highs in the mid 90s for Phoenix today set the possibility for another record-breaker.

Much of the southwest also experienced record or near-record temperatures. Las Vegas broke new records Sunday as the thermometer struck past 90 (F). Meanwhile, Yuma broke its previous daily record high on Sunday as temperatures rocketed to 98 F.



(Extreme heat builds through the Central and Southwest U.S. on monday as a wildfire forces evacuations south of Boulder, Colorado. Image source: Climate Reanalyzer.)

Today, heat is also expected to again build into the central U.S. as parts of Kansas, Texas, Oklahoma and Colorado are predicted to experience temperatures ranging from the upper 80s to well into the mid 90s. Pecos is expected to hit 96 F — which is about 20 degrees (F) above average for a typical March day. And in some regions, such as parts of Kansas, these temperature departures are as much as 25 F above normal. These extreme high temperatures are expected to break numerous records for the region as most of the previous record highs for this area range in the upper 80s.

The heat will bring with it more risk of wildfires and a front sweeping in on Tuesday could increase windspeeds and dry conditions for some regions. Record warm global temperatures, (spurred by human greenhouse gas emissions primarily coming from fossil fuel burning) which are aiding in the systemic, longer term, loss of ice and snow cover while increasing the rate at which drought sets in and spiking the top potential range of temperatures during heatwaves, appears to be combining with a post La Nina trend that typically favors heat and drying in the Central U.S. to set the stage for these extreme conditions.

Links:

Fire Near Boulder Forces Evacuations

Drought Monitor

Will Phoenix Break Heat Records for Three Days in a Row?

Record Heat: Hot Temperatures Continue Today

Climate Reanalyzer

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http://www.dailyclimate.org/



Clearing the air in Utah.
By Libby Coleman OZY Apr 03
It just so happens that public health and climate change are issues that are growing ever closer. more…

Editor comments: “I think it’s ridiculous that the government thinks that porn is more of a health crisis than our air quality,” -Utah citizen Caroline Lewis.
Global warming fears are driving Malibu home buyers to higher ground.

Roman Königshofer/flickr
By Alexandria Abramian Hollywood Reporter Apr 03
Beach buyers including Brad Pitt and Lady Gaga are moving on up (literally) and over to the once-unimaginable side of the Pacific Coast Highway for not only more privacy but rising sea level fears. more…

India's sugarcane farmers: A cycle of debt and suicide.
By Janos Chiala, Vinith Xavier Al Jazeera Apr 03
How rising debts, pesticides and erratic rainfall are pushing some farmers in southern India to suicide. more…

Extreme heat threat rises for megacities.
By Tim Radford Climate News Network Apr 03
Scientists warn that even a modest rise in average global temperatures will put millions of city dwellers at greater risk from extreme heat. more…

Vital groundwater depleted faster than ever.

European Commission DG ECHO/flickr
By Alex Kirby Climate News Network Apr 03
Global use of irreplaceable groundwater is exhausting the supply so fast that researchers say it will drive up food prices and hit international trade. more…

Tidal turbine maker bids to turn UK into a green Saudi Arabia.
By Anna Hirtenstein Bloomberg News Apr 03
A British developer is bidding to build power turbines under the sea in Scotland in a contest for government contracts that starts Monday, aiming to prove for the first time that its technology is commercially viable. more…

EPA chief says Paris climate agreement 'bad deal' for US.
By Valerie Volcovici Reuters Apr 03
The United States should continue to be "engaged" in international climate change discussions but the Paris climate change agreement is a "bad deal" for the country, the head of the EPA said Sunday. more…

Trump buildings are among the biggest polluters in NYC.
By Jillian Jorgensen New York Daily News Apr 03
If Mayor de Blasio wants to challenge President Trump on climate change, he can start with the buildings bearing the billionaire’s name, an environmental group says. more…

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https://robertscribbler.com/2017/04/26/ ... ion-years/


Key Heat Trapping Gas Crosses 410 Parts Per Million Threshold — Highest Level in Past 5-20 Million Years
This past week, atmospheric carbon dioxide levels passed a new ominous milestone.

Clocking in at 410.7 parts per million at the Mauna Loa Observatory, this key heat trapping gas hit a range not seen on Earth for many millions of years.



(The world crossed the 410 part per million milestone in the daily measure this week. Image source: The Keeling Curve.)

These levels now correspond with the Miocene Climate Epoch when seas were 120 to 190 feet higher than today and when global temperatures ranged from 3 to 5 degrees Celsius hotter than preindustrial averages.

Record Rates of Accumulation

These new records come following two years of record rates of atmospheric CO2 accumulation. According to NOAA, carbon dioxide accumulated by 3.03 parts per million during 2015 and by 3.00 parts per million during 2016. These now represent the two fastest rates of carbon dioxide accumulation in the climate record to date. By comparison, the substantial warming at the end of the last ice age was accompanied by an approximate 0.01 part per million per year rate of CO2 increase averaged over 10,000 years.

2017 rates of atmospheric CO2 accumulation, according to NOAA, appear to have backed off somewhat in the first quarter. Comparative gains from Q1 2016 to Q1 2017 are about 2.8 parts per million. A weak La Nina in the Pacific during late 2016 probably helped ocean surfaces to cool and to draw down a bit more CO2. However, the rate of increase is still disturbingly rapid. A 2.8 ppm increase in 2017, should it emerge, would be the 4th highest annual rate of increase in the record and would be substantially above past decadal averages. Hopefully, this still-disturbingly-rapid rate of increase will continue to tail off a bit through the year. But it is increasingly clear that the time for urgent action to reduce carbon emissions and this very harmful related rate of accumulation is now upon us.



(The CO2 growth rate has recently been ramping higher due to record carbon emissions during the present decade. Rates of carbon emission will need to fall away from record high rates in order to tamp down the presently high rate of accumulation which will tend to trend higher even if such emissions remain at plateau due to various faltering carbon sinks and leaking natural carbon stores. Image source: NOAA.)

The total CO2 increase since major fossil fuel burning began in the 19th Century is now in the range of 130 parts per million from 280 (ppm) to today’s high of 410 (ppm). By comparison, during the end of the last ice age, levels of this heat trapping gas jumped by about 100 (ppm) from around 180 (ppm) to 280 (ppm). Atmospheric averages for 2017 should range about 3-4 ppm lower than the April-May high mark (which might still hit daily highs of 411 ppm or more). But at present rates of increase, we’ll be leaving the 410 ppm threshold level in even the lower average months behind in just a handful of years.

Depending on How You Look at it, We’re 5 to 30 Million Years Out of the Holocene Context

The primary driver of the present extreme rate of CO2 increase is global carbon emissions (primarily from fossil fuel burning) in a record range near 11 billion tons per year (or nearly 50 billion tons of CO2 equivalent gas each year). Though 2014 through 2016 saw a plateau in the rate of global carbon emission, the decadal average accumulation of this emission is still at record highs. Meanwhile, it appears that warming oceans, lands more susceptible to deluges and wildfires, increasingly deforested regions like the Amazon, and thawing Arctic permafrost are less able to take in this record excess. As a result of these factors, human fossil fuel emissions will need to fall for a number of years before we are likely to see an impact on the average annual rate of atmospheric accumulation of this potent heat-trapping gas.



(Past paleoclimate proxy records show that we are millions of years out of the Holocene context when it comes to present levels of atmospheric CO2 accumulation. Image source: Skeptical Science.)

Paleoclimate studies of past epochs are unable to provide 100 percent accuracy for past atmospheric CO2 levels. However, proxy data provides a good range of estimates. Based on these measures, it appears that the most recent likely time when atmospheric CO2 levels were comparable to those we now see today occurred around 5 million years ago. Meanwhile, it appears possible that the last time CO2 levels were so high extended as far back as 20 to 25 million years ago.

Unfortunately, carbon dioxide is not the only heat trapping gas humans have emitted into the atmosphere. Add in methane and other greenhouse gasses and you end up with a heat forcing roughly equivalent to 493 parts per million of CO2 (CO2e) during 2017 at present rates of increase. This level is very close to the maximum Miocene boundary level of 500 parts per million — a total amount of heat forcing that likely hasn’t been seen in 20-30 million years.

Serious, Concerted Action Required to Avoid Worsening Disasters

The only safe and reliable way to halt the rapid rise of heat trapping gasses and concurrent warming is to cease emitting carbon to the atmosphere. Such an undertaking would primarily involve a major shift away from fossil fuel burning machines and infrastructure. Present low-cost renewable energy provides a powerful option for just such a transition. In addition, various forms of atmospheric carbon capture from changes to land use, to biofuel-based carbon capture, to materials-based carbon capture will be necessary to draw down the extraordinarily high level of carbon overburden that has already been emitted. Failing such an undertaking, however ambitious, would consign the world to increasingly harmful temperature increases and related damaging geophysical changes for the foreseeable future.

Links:

The Keeling Curve

NOAA

Skeptical Science

Entering the Middle Miocene

Renewable Energy Technology is Now Powerful Enough to Significantly Soften the Climate Crisis

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http://www.cnn.com/2017/05/01/politics/ ... ia-greene/

FBI agent married ISSIS jihadi she was investigating
The Australian-
Daniela Greene, 38, an FBI linguist, lied to her bosses and went to Syria in 2014 to marry an Isis recruiter who had previously been a rapper in Germany.

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/pow ... be5046338a


Report finds sloppy handling of sexual misconduct cases in Justice Department



June 2 2017

Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz testifies on Capitol Hill in September 2012. (J. Scott Applewhite/AP)
Everything wasn’t civil within the Civil Division of the Justice Department.

For an agency filled with lawyers familiar with handling evidence and detailing investigations, the agency’s management of sexual harassment and misconduct cases was surprisingly sloppy, according to the department’s Office of Inspector General (OIG).

While the number of documented harassment cases is not great, “we identified significant weaknesses in the Civil Division’s tracking, reporting, and investigating of the 11 sexual harassment and misconduct allegations that we reviewed” during fiscal 2011-2016, the report said, “as well as inconsistencies among penalties imposed for substantiated allegations.”

In one case, a male attorney allegedly spied on two female lawyers while they pumped breast milk. “The investigation into the allegation consisted of the male attorney’s supervisor speaking with him,” according to the report. “Thereafter, his supervisor accepted the male attorney’s explanation of the incident as an honest mistake and imposed on him an informal disciplinary action of oral counseling.”





http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-m ... story.html

7 out of 10 men will return to prison once they are released from prison.


At $75,560 a year, housing a prisoner in California now costs more than a year at Harvard


The cost of imprisoning each of California’s 130,000 inmates is expected to reach a record $75,560 in the next year





http://www.nydailynews.com/news/crime/t ... -1.3218563


Texas sheriff asks DOJ for help after deputy’s husband beats 24-year-old drunk man to death
BY TERENCE CULLEN
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS Updated: Saturday, June 3, 2017, 5:00 PM






http://www.blacklistednews.com/Supreme_ ... 8/Y/M.html


SUPREME COURT RULES THAT POLICE CAN BREAK INTO YOUR HOUSE WITHOUT A WARRANT AND SHOOT YOU
Published: June 3, 2017






Link du jour
https://www.theguardian.com/science/201 ... d-biopsies


http://www.climatecentral.org/



https://uinterview.com/news/dr-steven-g ... exclusive/


https://skepticalscience.com/2017-SkS-W ... up_22.html


https://www.theguardian.com/society/201 ... biraterone

http://www.dailyclimate.org/






http://www.collective-evolution.com/201 ... restrials/


JFK’S PILOT REVEALS WHAT THE PRESIDENT KNEW ABOUT UFOS & EXTRATERRESTRIALS
ARJUN WALIAMAY 31, 2017
a

msfreeh
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Link du jour


https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radi ... g-news-fox

http://www.malooffoundation.org

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pIhHiI3LkcY

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/ ... j-eberhart

http://www.rigorousintuition.ca/board2/ ... start=7005



https://theintercept.com/2017/06/25/ral ... n-history/


http://www.newsreel.us




http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Dair ... 262326.php


Dairy cow carcasses pile up following California heat wave


Updated 1:53 pm, Sunday, July 2, 2017



https://www.desmogblog.com/2017/07/23/w ... and-denial


Western Fuels Association's Decades Of Dollars For Climate Science Doubt And Denial
By John Mashey • Friday, June 23, 2017 -



Alpha Natural Resources, Arch Coal and Peabody Energy have filed bankruptcies, incidentially revealing payments to cllimate anti-science groups. The Western Fuels Association (WFA) may be smaller and less known, but its long history of funding climate denial is already better exposed. It was called out by Senator Tom Udall in his #WebOfDenial remarks in July 2016. Its earliest well-known disinformation effort is detailed in MedievalDeception 1991: Lindzen Hijacks Curve For Western Fuels Video - Early Fake News.

Its front group Greening Earth Society (GES) claimed “sound information” following the “sound science” theme of The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition (TASSC), started as front for Philip Morris in 1993, but like WFA, also involved Pat Michaels.

Newly-assembled information adds evidence that #WesternFuelsKnew the science was against them, decades ago.

Ross Gelbspan began writing about WFA in the mid-1990s. DeSmog offers a detailed profile (read first!), which includes WFA Annual Reports for 2005 and 2014/2015. Recent searches found the 1998-2003 reports, attached and annotated here, with a few especially instructive quotes, plus a few key events from other sources.

Annual Reports
1998 - The CO2 Issue 1996,1997 financials, and $583K was a substantial fraction of its non-coal costs

p.6 'We lost $583,000 in 1997, even though coal deliveries were substantially over 20 million tons.
1997's red ink was not due to adverse operational performance either in coal deliveries or by management. …
On an ongoing basis, Western Fuels is operating substantially “in the black.”
Our half-million dollar shortfall is due entirely to our advocacy in the area of climate change. The Board of Directors continues to provide financial support to programs designed to turn back efforts by the Clinton Administration to dial-out coalfired generation in the US energy supply mix.' (advocacy, not science)

p.7 'It is not that the science associated with the vision of apocalypse is uncertain. It simply is wrong.
Western Fuels' ongoing activity, including our creation of Greening Earth Society (described elsewhere in this report), is designed to convince Americans that warm is good, cold is bad; using more fossil fuels benefits everyone; and by using fossil fuels, conditions are being created on earth for humans to grow, both in numbers and living standards.' (strawman, but at least clear statement that the goal is convincing Americans, i.e., PR)

1999 Coal Fired Electricity Energizes the U.S. Economy 1998 financials

p.10 'The global-climate-change issue is about the wisdom of reducing emissions of carbon dioxide: a greenhouse gas, primary nutrient for plant life, and unavoidable consequence of humans using fossil fuels.
Western Fuels’ advocacy since 1988 reflects our understanding of this fundamental fact. (1988 important)
Coal is king among fossil fuels in terms of its generation of CO2 per unit of energy output …' (false)

p.15 'Our advocacy work was robust last year. … GES itself had an excellent first year. We premiered The Greening of Planet Earth Continues: The Promise for the 21st Century and Beyond at the Basin Electric annual meeting last November. It was very well received and many people believe it is superior to our earlier video,
The Greening of Planet Earth. … While Big Media and Big Government give no credence to either “Greening” video,
the science they depict has the advantage of being right. (false)

2000 Fuel for Thought - Transforming the debate over coal-fired electricity 1999 financials. The best to study.

p.5 '… we have continued our steadfast opposition to this jihad against CO2 and coal-fired electricity, and we will continue to do so. Our financial performance during the past year reflects this effort. Once again, our advocacy work has left us with a deficit for the year. … Western Fuels remains in a position to continue vigorous pursuit of our advocacy activity. This is particularly true because we continue to receive more and more support (financial and otherwise) from other industry participants. (inquiring minds might ask: who else paid?)

p.7 'Additionally, our early and effective advocacy work with respect to the benefits of cheap electricity through the work of Mark Mills, and now David Wojick, likewise has paid off. '

p.10 'Since Earth Day 1998, Western Fuels Association’s climate change advocacy has been rooted in Greening Earth Society… bi-weekly World Climate Report Online, … a host of studies by the ASU Climate Data Task Force. Together with The Heartland Institute, we now publish World Climate Report’s content in the monthly tabloid Environment & Climate News. Circulation is more than 40,000 nationwide. Pat Michaels, Bob Balling, Sallie Baliunas, and other scientists working under contract with New Hope Environmental Services increase their influence on public and political dialogue.' (ASU = Robert Balling)

p.11 'Mark Mills has worked with us for many years… Mark’s work has been featured in Forbes Magazine and has atracted the attention of high-tech futurist George Gilder.'
(GIlder was cofounder of the Discovery Institute (creationism) ; “men superior to women in work environment,” and seemed to to think Art Robinson and his son Noah great climate scientists watch first 2 minutes of this video. He also suggested that the Wall Street Journal seek a climate OpEd from the Robinsons.)

p.12 'Where does our advocacy stand, today? Based on work by our newest science advisor John Daly concerning the fatal flaws of the ground-based temperature record and revelations concerning agreement among ground-based thermometers, instruments onboard satellites, and carried aloft by weather balloons, Western Fuels is now prepared to argue that no reliable record exists to show a warming globe, and second, to establish the lack of warming, apocalyptic or otherwise.' (Tasmanian resident John Daly was not a scientist of any kind, but mostly known for his blog Still Waiting For Greenhouse, which was well debunked by scientist John Robert Hunter.
Daly's blog was filled with cherry-picking errors, and an important step in this MedievalDeception series. )

2001 WF/BW AR/00 2000 financials

p.2 'As a result of our steadfast advocacy of sound science and cheap electricity, we had been a target of derision and scornful attacks by environmental groups. While we do not rejoice in California’s woe, the situation presents a wake-up call for the energy sector. The science that Western Fuels has helped research and promote in the “global warming debate” has made important impacts on national energy policy. …'

p.3 'We maintain a presence in Washington, DC, as concern for energy moves from far down in the hierarchy of consumer and political concerns to the very top, even as we broaden the scope of our climate change advocacy through management of the Greening Earth Society.'

2002 Racing to Meet Demand 2001 financials

p.4 'and Western Fuels Association’s continued investment in climate change advocacy in 2001.'

p.12 'There is now bi-partisan opposition to designating carbon dioxide as a pollutant, and there is growing awareness of coal as an abundant, reliable, and increasingly clean energy resource. …
Western Fuels sustains its financial commitment to the Greening Earth Society and challenges the popular belief that carbon dioxide emissions will lead to catastrophic changes in earth’s climate. At the same time we
are staying in front of the issues by exploring with others in the coal-chain industry voluntary programs to sequester additional carbon in forests, croplands, and grazing lands.' (strawman, then “exploring”)

2003 Securing Your Energy Future 2002 financials

p.3 'Even that is not good enough for some in Congress who also insist on limits to carbon dioxide emissions….
As concerns carbon dioxide, we have loaned an executive to the Center for Energy and Economic Development to help CEED pursue a carbon sequestration initiative in behalf of the coal producers, utilities, and railroads that comprise its membership. The initiative encourages changes in agriculture practices and the management of forests and grasslands to sequester carbon. …
We also continue financial support of the climate change advocacy work of the Greening Earth Society.'

2006 Western Fuels Association Annual Report financials for 2004, 2005 (no mention of GES, advocacy, CO2, etc)

2015 Western Fuels Association Annual Report 2014/2015 2014 financials

p.7 'Over 1.1 million comments were filed opposing the EPA GHG proposals through www.tellEPA.com and www. Action.coop. Coal states are refusing to comply. County commissioners and state legislators are becoming engaged and writing comments supporting coal issues. Friends of Coal chapters and support rallies are being organized in the West. As a result, a 2015 poll of national concerns shows that climate change is ranked #22 in priority out of 23 issues.8 Such polls are allowing legislators to question and try to rescind or reign in regulatory overreach by the EPA and OSM, block funding for their implementation, and investigate the lucrative “sue-and-settle” industry.

Current benefits of carbon use to the economy and society overwhelmingly outweigh costs by 50-to-1 to 500- to-19 including increased quality and quantity of foods, for example. Carbon based fuels have raised the standard of living worldwide, increased lifespans by decades, and have elevated over a billion people out of poverty in the past 20 years. Western Fuels supports publicizing, indeed celebrating, the social benefits of carbon…benefits which far outweigh the social cost of carbon touted by environmental groups.'
'9 Management Information Services, Inc. (December 2013) for American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity, The Social Costs of Carbon? No, The Social Benefits of Carbon.'
(That report is by Roger Bezdek, who testified for Peabody in 2015 Minnesota Social Cost of Carbon Case. Jud

Image credit: Coal trains near North Antelope Rochelle Mine in Wyoming, photo by Kimon Berlin, plus WFA 1998.

* Ross Gelbspan wrote pioneering books on climate disinformation. He often mentioned WFA and its hired experts n The Heat is On (1997, 1998) and Boiling Point (2005)., complemented by Jeff Goodell's Big Coal (2007), all recommended.




http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/loca ... story.html


FBI agent's car, weapons and gear stolen in Chicago's West Loop



Early Monday, an FBI agent left his agency-issued SUV running and unattended long enough for a thief to get in the vehicle and flee, according to a news release.





Estranged Wife Charged in Former FBI Agent's Death




Estranged Wife Charged in Former FBI Agent's Death
The estranged wife of a former FBI agent has been charged with his death, Laurel police announced Monday.
Anne Reed Allen was arrested Friday and charged with the death of her estranged husband, Scott Alan Horn, police said.
On March 16, Horn was found unresponsive in the yard of a home on Patuxent Road. Horn, who was a retired special agent with the FBI, had major trauma to his upper body.
Investigators quickly identified Allen as a suspect in Horn's death.
Allen has been



Source: Estranged Wife Charged in Former FBI Agent's Death | NBC4 Washington http://www.nbcwashington.com/news/local ... z4lnIImoGd




http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/artic ... lite-team/

AMERICAN PATRIOT: INSIDE THE ARMED UPRISING AGAINST THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT
Charges for FBI Agent Renew Scrutiny of Elite Team

JUNE 29, 2017 /
When the FBI finally defused the armed occupation of a wildlife refuge in Oregon last year, the agency largely viewed the effort as a success. One of the occupation leaders had been killed by law enforcement, but a situation that threatened to become far more deadly had ended relatively peacefully.

But the operation has now come under increased scrutiny, with the indictment made public this week of an FBI agent for lying and obstructing justice.

The indictment says that the agent, W. Joseph Astarita, a member of the FBI’s hostage rescue team, lied about firing two shots at Robert “LaVoy” Finicum, one of the occupation’s leaders, after he drove his truck toward a roadblock set up by the FBI and Oregon State Police. Finicum was ultimately killed by the state police.






http://www.courthousenews.com/woman-say ... orced-sex/


Woman Says NM Officer Beat Her, Forced Her Into Sex


June 30, 2017
LAS CRUCES, N.M. (CN) — After arresting her as she stepped out of a shower in her home, handcuffing her and subjecting her to lewd comments, a New Mexico sheriff’s officer forced a woman into a sexual relationship with him, she claims in court.




FBI Octopus

http://www.santafenewmexican.com/news/l ... 5070d.html

“We are a town stamped by something that happened in 1947,” said Roswell Mayor Dennis J. Kintigh, a former state representative, FBI agent and Air Force veteran who worked in the aerospace industry. His background is enough to deepen the suspicion of conspiracy theorists.

“Roswell has a brand — and good, bad or indifferent, it is our brand,” Kintigh said.

That brand means money for a town struggling with a 6.3 percent unemployment rate — just under the state’s 6.6 percent average — and an uncertain oil and gas revenue base. The UFO Museum, which keeps handwritten logs of visitors, recorded more than 200,000 guests in 2016. The city’s 26 hotels reported a total of 248,476 room bookings last year.



Smile: Tricks to make yourself effortlessly charming
SDE Entertainment News-
Jack Schafer, a psychologist and retired FBI special agent who is a likeability coach and author of The Like Switch, points to Johnny Carson as a quintessential ...



http://www.courthousenews.com/sound-can ... ency-nypd/

Sound-Cannon Case Heralds E-Transparency for NYPD


June 30, 2017

In this 2004 photo, an officer with the New York City Police Department stands atop the hood of a vehicle equipped with a Long Range Acoustic Device used for crowd control at the Republican National Convention that year. (Photo by Peter Bergin via Wikipedia)
MANHATTAN (CN) — To learn how the New York City Police Department deploys sound cannons, the average citizen should simply be able to fire off an email under the state’s Freedom of Information Law.

That’s the conviction that guided Keegan Stephan to sue the NYPD last year for details about its use of crowd-control weapons known as LRADs, short for Long Range Acoustic Devices.

A politically active student at Yeshiva University’s Cardozo Law School, Stephan brought a federal civil rights lawsuit last year with five others, challenging how police use these devices.

The deal Stephan reached on his own Thursday with the NYPD, however, could have much broader implications for police accountability.

“NYPD will accept FOIL requests sent to the designated e-mail address, which is currently FOIL@NYPD.ORG,” the 15-page settlement states. “NYPD will also accept any follow-up correspondence regarding pending FOIL requests by e-mail if it is identified by the FOIL Unit file number.”

To the average New Yorker, these two sentences might not mean much, but Stephan believes the commitment could spell a new era of transparency for journalists, open-government activists and concerned citizens.

“Being forced to print, scan, and physically mail documents has derailed countless Freedom of Information requests upon the NYPD by myself and others,” Stephan said in a statement. “I’m thrilled with the outcome of this settlement, which I hope will empower the public to make the NYPD more transparent and accountable.”

In Stephan’s other sound-cannon case, he is part of a group of activists, journalists and filmmakers who all claim to have suffered hearing damage after police deployed the weapon indiscriminately at a Black Lives Matter protest in December 2014, two days after a grand jury declined to indict the police officer who killed Eric Garner.


Standing with their attorney on June 1, 2017, a group of journalists gathered outside the courthouse where they are suing police over their use of sound cannons as a method of crowd control. A federal judge in Manhattan refused to dismiss their case a day earlier.
U.S. District Judge Robert Sweet advanced assault and excessive-force allegations in this case on May 31.

As the challengers slog through the discovery, Thursday’s settlement gives evidence collection a shot in the arm. The NYPD must provide recordings of police communications from the days of the protests, charts depicting the use of LRADs, and training materials and emails related to the devices.

Elena Cohen, an attorney with the National Lawyers Guild who represents Stephan in both the open-records case and the civil-rights action, said the settlement will update and democratize the NYPD’s once-analog practices.

“This settlement makes requesting public documents more accessible and affordable for the public, recognizing that our right to be aware of governmental actions should not be thwarted by shrouding it with the cloak of secrecy or confidentiality- or the needless expense and time of paper mailing in our digital age,” Cohen said in a statement.

The NYPD has 90 days to update its website with the new protocols. A spokesman for the city declined to comment on Stephan’s settlement.

Related
NYPD Sound Cannons Case Hits Federal Court
January 26, 2017
In "Civil Rights"
Deafening ‘Sound Cannons’ Could Cost NYPD
June 1, 2017
In "Civil Rights"
Judge Raps NYPD for ‘Gotcha’ Tactics in Civil Seizures
May 22, 2017
In "Civil Rights"





http://www.courthousenews.com/s-d-droug ... -ranchers/

S.D. Drought Continues to Take a Toll on Ranchers


June 30, 2017



http://www.courthousenews.com/nypd-clea ... n-slaying/

NYPD Cleared of Evidence Destruction After Slaying

June 30, 2017



http://www.courthousenews.com/bronx-mom ... son-death/

Bronx Mom Claims NYPD Scorched Son

June 30, 2017



http://www.roanoke.com/washingtonpost/u ... e0d52.html


Police nationwide shot and killed 492 people in the first six months of this year, a number nearly identical to the count for the same period in each of the prior two years.

Fatal shootings by police in 2017 have so closely tracked last year’s numbers that on June 16, the tally was the same. While the number of unarmed people killed by police dropped slightly, the overall pace for 2017 through Friday was on track to approach 1,000 killed for a third year in row.

The Washington Post began tracking all fatal shootings by on-duty police in 2015 after the 2014 shooting in Ferguson, Missouri, of Michael Brown, who was unarmed and had an altercation with the officer who shot him.

The ongoing Post project has documented twice as many shootings by police in 2015 and 2016 as ever recorded in a single year by the FBI’s tracking of such shootings, a pattern that is emerging again in 2017.

Since Brown’s killing in Ferguson, other fatal shootings by police, many captured on video, have fueled protests and calls for reform. Some police chiefs have taken steps in their departments to reduce the number of fatal encounters, yet the overall numbers remain unchanged.

Academics who study shootings give weight to The Post’s accounting.

“These numbers show us that officer-involved shootings are constant over time,” said Geoffrey Alpert, a criminologist at the University of South Carolina who has studied police use of force. “Some places go up, some go down, but it’s averaging out. This is our society in the 21st century.”

As in previous years, the data gathered by The Post showed that police most frequently killed white males who were armed with guns or other weapons. One in four people killed this year were mentally ill. And police have continued to shoot and kill a disproportionately large number of black males, who account for nearly a quarter of the deaths, yet are only 6 percent of the nation’s




https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/06/30 ... o-account/


Hillsborough: Holding the Police to Account




“It is also a story of deceit and lies, of institutional defensiveness defeating truth and justice. It is evidence of a culture of denial within South Yorkshire Police.”

— Anne Burkett, BBC, Apr 27, 2016

It took 28 years for the tables to turn on the South Yorkshire police regarding the Hillsborough disaster that took the lives of 96 fans. The 1989 FA Cup semi-final between Liverpool and Nottingham Forest saw a sporting catastrophe that was portrayed as less a matter of institutional accountability as the consequence of loutish, irresponsible fans.

The finger pointing began instantly, with the police arguing that the bad behaviour of the fans, fuelled by alcohol consumption, was the primary cause. (This, notwithstanding the fact that some of the injured and dead were children.)

There were, in fact, no limits as to what the fans had done wrong. They supposedly arrived too late; they obstructed the police in accomplishing their tasks; they forced open a gate; many were supposedly ticketless. What mattered in the police narrative and technique was not safety but control.[1]

The ground was laid after the finding by inquest jurors in April 2016 that the fans in question had been unlawfully killed. It had been the longest jury case in British legal history, involving the families and supporters of the Hillsborough Family Support Group (HFSG) and Hillsborough Justice Campaign.

Interest naturally turned towards police conduct not merely on the day itself, but subsequently. The latter point was of particular interest to the Independent Police Complaints Commission, which was charged with the task of investigating allegations of a cover-up.

On Wednesday, six people, including two former senior police officers, were charged for criminal offences linked to the disaster. Significant here was the alleged cover-up that ensued. Sue Hemming of the Crown Prosecution Service’s head of special crime and counter-terrorism, after reviewing the material, “decided that there is sufficient evidence to charge six individuals with criminal offences.”

Prominently featured is David Duckenfield, the South Yorkshire officer who oversaw policing at the semi-final, charged for the manslaughter of 95 people. (The 96th, Tony Bland, would only die four years after the incident, making a charge of manslaughter inapplicable.) He had eluded the clutches of a private prosecution in 1999 with a stay by the senior judicial officer. For a prosecution to take place, that stay will have to be lifted by application from the prosecutors.

Duckenfield, the grim star of a very grim show, received specific mention from Hemming. During proceedings, the CPS intends to show that Duckenfield’s conduct that day was “extraordinarily bad and contributed substantially to the deaths of each of those 96 people who so tragically and unnecessarily lost their lives.”[2]

The focus on Sir Norman Bettison, former chief constable of Merseyside and West Yorkshire police, an inspector in the South Yorkshire force during the disaster, was one of misconduct. He faces four counts of the offence in public office.

“Given his role as a senior police officer,” stated Hemming, “we will ask the jury to find that this was misconduct of such a degree as to amount to an abuse of the public’s trust in the office holder.”

Donald Denton and Alan Foster, both former police chiefs, were charged with perverting the course of justice in allegedly fiddling witness statements used during the original investigation and inquest into the deaths. Dozens of such statements were allegedly doctored to suggest a picture of police control rather than lethal chaos. The police lawyer, Peter Metcalf, was charged for allegedly assisting the enterprise.

Completing the institutional circle is Graham Mackrell, Sheffield Wednesday Football Club’s company secretary and safety officer that day. His charges are less grave, but no less significant: the alleged contravention of safety rules and failing to take appropriate reasonable care for the health and safety of those on the grounds.

This is the season for a reckoning. The charred ruins of Grenfell Tower have drawn necessary accusations about public safety across London. The cult of the cheap and expedient is being challenged; the wisdom of authorities questioned.

The Hillsborough families proved relentless in seeking accountability for the losses of 1989, showing that doing things by the book in calmly directed rage transformed the alleged responsibility of the victims to accountability of the authorities. It is with some historical irony, given the state of Brexit, that these efforts would been further hampered but for the incorporation of the European Convention on Human Rights via the Human Rights Act 1998.

Notes.

[1] http://ohrh.law.ox.ac.uk/the-hillsborou ... d-justice/

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/201 ... rs-charged

msfreeh
Level 34 Illuminated
Posts: 7683

Re: George Orwell shake hands with Charles Darwin

Post by msfreeh »

http://www.wnd.com/2017/08/draw-muhamma ... d-us-dead/

'Draw Muhammad' conference organizer: FBI 'wanted us dead'
WND.com-
The paper has requested all documentation from the Garland Police Department that made mention or made reference to an FBI agent on the scene.

Two years ago, two Muslim terrorists, Elton Simpson and Nadir Soofi, drove from Phoenix to Garland, Texas, to attack a “Draw Muhammad” competition arranged by activist Pamela Geller.



They were stopped at a parking checkpoint, where they started shooting, and promptly were shot dead by police.

A few days later, police said they did not expect to identify other suspects in the attack for which ISIS later claimed responsibility.

However, a number of related investigative documents are being held in secret by Garland police, according to the Washington Examiner.

The paper has requested all documentation from the Garland Police Department that made mention or made reference to an FBI agent on the scene.

The Examiner said police say the investigation still is pending.

The “tight hold” on documents by police, the paper said, “is making it difficult for a security guard who was shot during the event to learn whether an undercover FBI agent was there at the scene and knew that a terrorism event was being planned.”

See Pamela Geller’s books, including “Stop the Islamization of America,” in the WND Superstore.

The report said the security guard’s lawyer “believes the FBI agent was trying to get close to the terrorists and may not have warned authorities of the event in order to keep his cover.”

Related stories:


The guard, Bruce Joiner, was shot in the knee, and he and his lawyer now want the details that led to a “60 Minutes” report claiming an undercover FBI agent was behind the car carrying Simpson and Soofi and was taking photographs as they opened fire.

The Examiner reported the FBI agent fled the scene as the attack began but was detained briefly by Garland police.


Read more at http://www.wnd.com/2017/08/draw-muhamma ... 85wHlU3.99







https://boingboing.net/2017/08/01/senat ... istie.html


New FBI director is Chris Christie's Bridgegate lawyer and has Christie's infamous cellphone

After firing James Comey for the crime of "showboating," Trump chose Christopher Wray to be the new FBI director. A Senate committee approved the nomination. This is the lawyer who collected over $600 thousand from New Jersey taxpayers for personally representing Chris Christie in the Bridgegate scandal

With Wray’s assistance, Christie wasn’t charged — though prosecutors at the trial said he knew about the closing of commuter bridge lanes as they were happening, which he has denied. Christie said he would have testified at the trial if subpoenaed, but he wasn’t called.
p>The only time Wray’s name surfaced during pretrial motions was when it was revealed that he had a cellphone, believed lost, that Christie had been using during the lane closures. Defense attorneys sought access to the phone but their request was denied by a judge.


The mystery over the missing cell phone that Gov. Chris Christie used during the period when there were legislative hearings on the brewing Bridgegate scandal has been solved

The phone, which lawyers for Bridgegate defendants Bill Baroni and Bridget Anne Kelly have been seeking, is in the custody of Christie's personal lawyer, Christopher Wray of King and Spalding.

Brian Murray, a spokesman for Christie, confirmed that Wray has the phone.

The news that Christie's lawyer has the phone comes just after a federal judge ruled Thursday against Baroni, the former deputy executive director of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, and Kelly, Christie's former deputy chief of staff, who issued a subpoena for the phone, as well as the electronic devices used by other top Christie staffers.

And according to Senator Jeff Merkley, Wray is a "consistent GOP donor" and is a partner in a law firm that "represents the Trump Trust and Russian oil."

Photo of Governor Chris Christie: Gage Skidmore






http://www.cnn.com/2017/08/01/politics/ ... index.html

Only 6 people have ever voted against an FBI director. Five of them did today
By Ryan Struyk, CNN
Updated 10:14 PM ET, Tue August 1, 2017







http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/john- ... le/2630358

John Barrasso to scold feds for quietly killing new FBI headquarters



Aug 2, 2017, 12:01 AM




"The security and efficiency arguments for this are clear. What is not clear is why this project was suddenly halted, why Congress was not notified in advance, and what happens now," Environment and Public Works Committee Chairman Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyo., will say at a morning hearing, according to an excerpt of his prepared remarks obtained by the Washington Examiner.

A top Senate Republican is expected to scold federal agencies Wednesday for scrapping plans last month to relocate the Federal Bureau of Investigation's headquarters without informing Congress, while simultaneously looking for ways to reopen the relocation review process.

"The security and efficiency arguments for this are clear. What is not clear is why this project was suddenly halted, why Congress was not notified in advance, and what happens now," Environment and Public Works Committee Chairman Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyo., will say at a morning hearing, according to an excerpt of his prepared remarks obtained by the Washington Examiner. "Senators should not have to find out about a decision of this magnitude" through the news media, he said.

Wednesday's hearing will be the first oversight hearing since the General Service Administration announced it was canceling the FBI relocation review on July 11 because of lack of funding and uncertainty in the procurement process. Barrasso's committee has direct oversight over large federal public works projects.





"I have no doubt that there is a need to replace the FBI's existing headquarters. The men and women of the FBI, who keep us all safe, deserve an office building that meets their needs," Barrasso said in his remarks.

Senior officials from the FBI, GSA, and the Government Accountability Office will be at the hearing.

"At this time, GSA and the FBI are working together to meet the FBI's short- and long-term housing needs and mission requirements, that necessarily includes deciding what investments to make in the Hoover Building now that we know the FBI will be housed there for longer than expected," said Michael Gelber, the GSA's acting public building commissioner, in prepared remarks.

"Additionally, the FBI's portfolio of leased space is being evaluated as well as options to procure a new headquarters for the FBI," he said. "In closing, GSA is committed to carrying out our mission of delivering the best value in real estate. The need for the FBI to have a modern headquarters remains. GSA will continue to work with members of this committee, the FBI, and others in the administration and Congress to meet this need."

The FBI official in his testimony, however, said the FBI's J. Edgar Hoover building in downtown Washington would be too costly to retrofit and is wholly inadequate to protect the agency from a physical or cyber attack.





Link du jour
https://www.standardmedia.co.ke/article ... -s-killing

http://www.govtech.com/data/Kansas-City ... -Data.html

http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryla ... story.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/13/sport ... oneer.html

https://wolbbaltimore.com/2050685/minne ... o-castile/


http://tucson.com/news/local/fbi-threat ... 440cc.html





http://thepowersreport.groupsite.com/page/about-me

Synopsis

Unjustified FBI harassment of Black mayors Coleman Young (Detroit), Harold Washington (Chicago) and Marion Barry (Washington, DC); white agents urinating on photographs of President Bill Clinton and Vice-President Al Gore; a white agents' fundraiser for white policemen accused of murdering a Black Detroit motorist; agents pasting the picture of an ape over the photo of an African American agent's child; sheet-clad classmates pretending to be Ku Klux Klansmen at the FBI Academy; the mysterious explosion of a "troublesome" Black agent's FBI-issued vehicle -- all of this, too, is the FBI, and former Special Agent Tyrone Powers tells it as only a conscious Black insider could.



http://www.independent.ie/irish-news/co ... 91403.html

Corbett may have suffered first blow while in bed, expert tells murder ...
Independent.ie-
A forensic scientist said blood spatter marks indicated retired FBI agent Thomas Michael Martens (67) was standing above Mr Corbett (39) when the Irish ...





https://wolbbaltimore.com/2050697/charg ... ideo-case/



Charges Dropped In Baltimore Body-Camera Video Case






https://sputniknews.com/us/201708021056 ... ffic-stop/


WATCH: California Cop Draws Gun During Traffic Stop (Strong Language) © Facebook/Feo Mas
US
01:43 02.08.2017(updated 03:44 02.08.2017) Get short URL91358312
A video made by a driver pulled over by a Campbell County police officer documents their interactions seconds after the officer pulled his gun on the driver and passenger during a routine traffic stop along California’s Highway 101 Thursday afternoon.
The roughly nine minute video, which was posted on Facebook, shows the officer point his weapon toward the passenger, even as the passenger repeatedly asks the cop to put his gun away, as his hands are clearly visible.


​"Why are you still pointing the gun at me, bro?" the passenger asked. "My hands are right here."

According to the Campbell Police Department, the pistol was drawn after the passenger, helping the driver look for her "additional paperwork," made an "unexpected movement towards the bottom of the seat," which caused the officer "to perceive a threat and draw his handgun."

As the officer called in for back-up personnel to assist him, the driver of the car can be heard asking him to put the gun away in favor of a taser gun. The officer did not comply.

"Don’t you have like a taser, or something, that you could use before you use [the gun]?" pleaded the driver. "You’re telling him to relax, but you have a gun on him."

"It is never a comfortable position to have a gun pointed at you, regardless of whether it is an officer," the department’s press release stated. "Unfortunately, the length of time that the officer’s gun was drawn lasted much longer than normal based on his location … If the same situation would have occurred closer to back-up officers, it would most likely have been resolved much sooner."


California Bill Would Mandate Release of Police Bodycam Footage
While the officer’s body camera recorded the entire incident, there is no word on whether the Silicon Valley police department will release the footage in its entirety or through excerpts, The Mercury News reported.
Gary Berg, the public information officer for the police department, noted that the first five minutes of the encounter captured by the body camera showed a "cordial conversation" between the occupants of the vehicle and the officer before the friendly environment soured.

Although the responding officer was outside of his jurisdiction, as a "peace officer in the State of California" the officer still had the authority to pull over



http://www.elpasotimes.com/videos/news/ ... 240629001/

A former Reeves County contracted prison guard received a lenient sentence for his role in a cocaine trafficking scheme after tearfully telling the judge he had committed the crime to buy a home for his two children.

Fabian Dominguez was sentenced July 28 in El Paso to a year and a day in prison in federal court after he pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to possess with intent to distribute more than 500 grams of cocaine.





http://www.blacklistednews.com/Israeli_ ... 8/Y/M.html

ISRAELI SPYWARE FOUND MINING USER DATA ON GOOGLE PLAY
Published: August 1, 2017






https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20170 ... rant.shtml

Another Appeals Court Denies Suppression Of Evidence Obtained With An Invalid FBI Warrant
from the so-much-for-valid-warrants-being-better-than-invalid-ones dept
A second appeals court has handed down a ruling on the constitutionality of the Network Investigative Technique (NIT) deployed by the FBI during its Playpen child porn investigation. The Tenth Circuit Appeals Court overturned the suppression of evidence granted by the lower court, ruling that the FBI's NIT warrant was invalid but that the agent's "good faith" reliance on the warrant prevented exclusion of the evidence.
Multiple courts have found the NIT warrant invalid. The warrant was obtained in Virginia but the search the FBI's malware performed accessed computers all over the world. Prior to the recent Rule 41 changes, warrant execution was limited to the jurisdiction it was obtained in. The Appeals Court worked around the jurisdictional limit by reasoning the NIT was sent from Virginia and returned info gathered in the same jurisdiction. It just kind of glossed over the part where computers located all over the nation were briefly infected by the NIT to obtain the information needed to pursue suspects.
The Eighth Circuit Appeals Court decision [PDF] finds more problems with the NIT warrant and execution than the Tenth Circuit did. The consolidated appeal, however, ultimately finds in favor of the government, overturning two lower court suppression orders.
First, the good news. The appeals court finds the FBI does indeed need warrants to perform these searches, even if IP addresses aren't necessarily protected by the Fourth Amendment.
In this case, the FBI sent computer code to the defendants’ respective computers that searched those computers for specific information and sent that information back to law enforcement. Even if a defendant has no reasonable expectation of privacy in his IP address, he has a reasonable expectation of privacy in the contents of his personal computer. [...] Moreover, the NIT retrieved content from the defendants’ computers beyond their IP addresses. We conclude the execution of the NIT in this case required a warrant.
The court also disposes of the government's "but it's kind of just a tracking device" argument:
Although plausible, this argument is belied by how the NIT actually worked: it was installed on the defendants’ computers in their homes in Iowa. The government rightly points out that our court interprets Rule 41 flexibly in light of advances in technology... but we agree with the district court that the “virtual trip” fiction “stretches the rule too far,” We agree with the majority of courts that have reviewed the NIT warrant. These courts have concluded that “the plain language of Rule 41 and the statutory definition of ‘tracking device’ do not . . . support so broad a reading as to encompass the mechanism of the NIT used in this case.” Id. Thus, we hold that the NIT warrant exceeded the magistrate judge’s jurisdiction.
It also agrees with the lower courts' findings the warrant was invalid from the moment it was obtained, since the NIT was clearly going to be traveling outside of the issuing judge's jurisdiction. But that's where the good news ends. The appeals court applies the "good faith" exception and declares the requesting agent -- who knew the NIT would travel outside the jurisdiction and suggested as much in the warrant request -- could rely on a warrant signed by a judge to execute these extrajurisdictional searches.
The defendants also argue that the NIT warrant was facially deficient because FBI agents should have known that a warrant purporting to authorize thousands of searches throughout the country could not be valid. Specifically, Horton argues that “there can be no credible argument that officers reasonably believed that none of the 214,898 members of [Playpen] were located outside of Virginia.” We, however, will not find an obvious deficiency in a warrant that a number of district courts have ruled to be facially valid. Further, we have declined to impose an obligation on law enforcement to “know the legal and jurisdictional limits of a judge’s power to issue interstate search warrants.” Law enforcement did not demonstrate bad faith, and we will apply the Leon balancing test as instructed by the Supreme Court.
So, law enforcement officers are not required to know the legal limits of the warrants they seek. Apparently, neither are judges, as the judge signed off on this warrant despite being told it would be executed outside of his jurisdiction.
But that's not the worst part of the opinion. The worst part is this: the court says there's no deterrent value in suppressing evidence obtained with a facially-invalid warrant because the law changed after the fact.
Because Rule 41 has been updated to authorize warrants exactly like this one, there is no need to deter law enforcement from seeking similar warrants.
Under this rationale, anyone currently incarcerated for marijuana possession or distribution in states where weed is now legal should have their sentences immediately vacated. After all, there's no deterrent effect in keeping them locked up, now that both actions have become legal.
So, it's now 2-0 in favor of the FBI in federal appeals courts. In the future, its NIT activities won't receive much scrutiny. But it appears everything it did in violation of Rule 41 prior to the rule changes is being forgiven by higher courts -- whether with generous applications of the "good faith" doctrine or by making the Rule 41 changes effectively retroactive.





https://www.gaystarnews.com/article/us- ... gs.kCwhzDM


US judge orders FBI investigation into records of 1953 Executive Order targeting LGBTI federal employees
President Eisenhower signed the Executive Order
US judge orders FBI investigation into records of 1953 Executive Order targeting LGBTI federal employeesWikipediaJudge orders FBI investigation into Executive Order signed by President Eisenhower (pictured) targeting LGBTI people1 August 2017 by Anya Crittenton
In a new ruling, a US federal judge ordered the FBI to conduct an investigation into Executive Order (EO) 10450. This decades-old order led to purging of gay and lesbian federal employees during the height of McCarthyism in the 1950s. It was signed by President Dwight Eisenhower in 1953.

Judge Royce Lamberth, against objections from the Department of Justice (DOJ), determined an earlier FBI search was ‘inadequate’. The ruling came days after the DOJ decided the 1964 Civil Rights Act does not protect LGBTI people.
Yahoo! News first reported the news of Lamberth’s ruling. They also published the entirety of Lamberth’s unyielding decision, which can be viewed and read here.
This order was a point of interest in Yahoo’s documentary, Uniquely Nasty: The U.S. Government’s War on Gays. In the film, Douglas Charles, a Penn State University historian, stated about the order: ‘In terms of FBI abuses, this ranks near the top. It was an effort to silence [gays], it was an effort to ruin their lives. Because if you were exposed as gay in the 1950s or 1960s, your life as you knew it was over.’
The Mattachine Society of Washington, D.C., an educational non-profit with the mission of performing archival research to uncover erased LGBTI stories, filed a lawsuit via the Freedom of Information Act against the DOJ last year to release documents related to EO 10450. In response, the FBI discovered 5,500 documents but determined it would be burdensome to sort through them all. They also stated no documents were found relating to Warren Burger, the assistant attorney general charged with enforcing the ban.
‘Thousands of LGBT Americans were ruthlessly investigated, interrogated and fired because of this order,’ Charles Francis, the president of the Mattachine Society, told Yahoo! News.
An inadequate investigation
Regarding Mattachine’s lawsuit, Lamberth wrote in his ruling: ‘The Court finds it nearly impossible to believe that a search for every permutation of the name of the man who was charged with carrying out EO 10450, a robust federal mandate that built upon an established FBI initiative, yielded zero responsive documents.’
Furthermore, in the FBI’s initial search, they looked for the key words ‘Executive Order 10450,’ ‘Sex Deviate,’ and ‘Sex Deviate Program’. However, the EO used another term — ‘Sexual Perversion’ — and the FBI never searched for this term.
Lamberth criticized this oversight in his ruling: ‘The language of EO 10450 uses the term ‘sexual perversion’ rather than ‘Sex Deviate’ and the FBI’s affidavit does not address this shift in institutional language.’



FBI Octopus


http://www.satprnews.com/2017/08/02/a-n ... ip-summit/


A New Dawn for Public-Private Sector Cyber Collaboration to Power ...
satPRnews
... ICF International; Hugo Fueglein, Managing Director, Diversified Search; John Iannarelli, Former Senior Executive Advisor, FBI; Alissa Johnson, VP & CISO, ...



http://www.deadlinedetroit.com/articles ... YFyr9EpChA

Crazy Times in Flint: Cops Visit Residents Who Sign Mayoral Recall Petition

By Allan Lengel

msfreeh
Level 34 Illuminated
Posts: 7683

Re: George Orwell shake hands with Charles Darwin

Post by msfreeh »

http://robinwestenra.blogspot.com/2017/ ... inati.html


Friday, 25 August 2017
Dutch Banker Who Exposed Illuminati, Found Dead
Ronald Bernard, Dutch Banker Who Exposed Illuminati, Found Dead

Ronald Bernard, the elite Dutch banker who exposed the financial industry Illuminati in a series of TV interviews, has been found dead in Florida. He was 61.

Newspunch,
24 August, 2017

Bernard, who was 61-year-old, had been living in Sebring, Florida for the past year after marrying an American citizen. The Highland County Sheriff’s Office said that Ronald Bernard called 911 at 3:46 p.m. saying he got lost after leaving for a walk at 1 p.m. on the nature trail on the west end of Sun ‘n Lake in Sebring.

Ronald Bernard, the elite Dutch banker who exposed the Illuminati in a series of TV interviews, has been found dead in Florida.ronald-bernard-dutch-bankerMore than a dozen deputies along with K-9 units, air units from Highlands and Polk counties, four-wheelers from HCSO and the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission searched for Ronald Bernard. “The terrain was very difficult, and searchers were at times in waist deep water as they tried to zero in on Fernandez’s location,” the sheriff’s office said.

Deputies pinged his cell phone but it kept showing different locations and Bernard called back several times — he said his life was in danger — but he kept moving despite being told to stay put, deputies said. The last contact dispatchers had with the former banker was at 6:13 p.m.

At 8:24 p.m., the Polk County helicopter spotted Bernard, who was face down in shallow water about 300 yards away from the last known location of his cell phone and 1.8 miles from the entrance to the trail at Sun ‘n Lake Boulevard and Balboa Boulevard.

The cause of death will be determined by the medical examiner.


[Banker: I Was Told To Sacrifice Children At Illuminati Party]
Ronald Bernard blew the whistle on occult practices and child sacrifice among banking industry elites, describing his experiences in a gut-wrenching TV interview that went viral earlier this year. Sharing explicit details about the way the Illuminati uses child sacrifice to test and blackmail its members, he said he was asked to sacrifice a child at a party.

“I was warned off when I got into this – don’t do this unless you can put your conscience 100% in the freezer. I heard myself laugh at it back then, but it wasn’t a joke at all.”

“I was training to become a psychopath and I failed.”

Describing the period his “freezer began to malfunction”, Ronald also told stories about crashing national economies and bankrupting companies. These actions led to suicides and destruction – successes worth celebrating, according to his banker colleagues.




http://www.motherjones.com/crime-justic ... e-prisons/

A Federal Judge Put Hundreds of Immigrants Behind Bars While Her Husband Invested in Private Prisons
Judge Linda Reade’s husband bought more prison stock five days before one of the nation’s biggest immigration raids.
SAMANTHA MICHAELSAUG. 24, 2017 6:00 AM



It was almost lunchtime inside the country’s largest kosher slaughterhouse in Postville, Iowa, on May 12, 2008. The meatpackers, mostly migrants from Guatemala and Mexico, wore earplugs to block out the noise of the machinery and couldn’t hear the two black helicopters hovering overhead or the hundreds of armed federal immigration agents closing in around them until the production line stopped. One worker tried to flee with his knives, stabbing himself in the leg when he was pushed to the ground. “They rounded us up toward the middle like a bunch of chickens,” a 42-year-old Guatemalan worker later recalled. “Those who were hiding were beaten and shackled.”






https://www.patreon.com/posts/kevin-consults-13829736

Kevin consults lawyers on anthrax, Palestine, and more!
Aug 12 at 10:15pm
KB-TJ_2017-0813_kissin-corrigan_web.mp3
First hour: Frederick, MD attorney Barry Kissin on Trump vs. the Deep State, the specter of World War III, Robert Mueller's connection to the 9/11-anthrax coverup, and much more. Barry is an expert on the anthrax aspect of the 9/11-anthrax false flag event. He has written numerous hard-hitting op-eds and letters in the Frederick News-Post, including this one on the push for war against Russia.
Second hour: London, Ontario human rights attorney Edward Corrigan on Israeli apartheid. He is the author of many articles including "Israel and Apartheid: A Framework for Legal Analysis," collected in Ghada Ageel, ed., Apartheid in Palestine. Edward Corrigan, like yours truly, is a frequent commentator on Press




http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainmen ... -1.3441206


British police missed chances to stop pedophile Lostprophets singer Ian Watkins' child sex abuse

Updated: Friday, August 25, 2017, 1:26 PM



http://www.nydailynews.com/news/nationa ... -1.3442699


Cash-strapped Secret Service spends $7,100 on luxury portable toilets for Trump’s Bedminster trip
BY DENIS SLATTERY JESSICA SCHLADEBECK
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS Friday, August 25, 2017, 4:06 PM





http://www.denverpost.com/2017/08/25/co ... atalities/

Exclusive: Traffic fatalities linked to marijuana are up sharply in Colorado. Is legalization to blame?
Authorities say the numbers cannot be definitively linked to legalized pot


Link du jour


http://www.denverpost.com/2016/05/26/ph ... s-gallery/


https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/ ... ayer-rally


Turd Reich: San Francisco dog owners lay minefield of poo for rightwing rally
‘I just had this image of alt-right people stomping around in the poop,’ says the organizer of an unusual protest ahead of Saturday’s Patriot Prayer rally







http://www.denverpost.com/2017/08/25/th ... supremacy/
A black Denver man went undercover as a digital white supremacist. This is what he learned.
Curious about where his trolls were getting their revisionist history lessons, Theo Wilson decided to go undercover






https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/ ... since-1945

France faces worst wine grape harvest since 1945
Wine production to fall by 18% on 2016 after spring frosts ravage vines, but hot summer could deliver top vintages



http://www.energyandpolicy.org/utilitie ... te-change/

Utilities Knew: Documenting Electric Utilities’ Early Knowledge and Ongoing Deception on Climate Change From 1968-2017

Scientists had begun to warn electric utilities about climate change by 1968, and by 1988 the industry’s official research and development organization had acknowledged that, “There is growing consensus in the scientific community that the greenhouse effect is real.”

Despite this early knowledge about climate change, electric utilities have continued to invest heavily in fossil fuel power generation over the past half a century, and since 1988 some have engaged in ongoing efforts to sow doubt about climate science and block legal limits on carbon dioxide emissions from power plants.

The Energy and Policy Institute’s new report provides a first look into the electric utility industry’s nearly 50-year long relationship with climate science, based largely on original research that reviewed scores of industry documents:



Download report
Utilities Knew: Documenting Electric Utilities’ Early Knowledge and Ongoing Deception on Climate Change From 1968-2017


Below are just a few of the key findings from the report.

The electric utility industry was warned about climate change in 1968

Dr. Donald F. Hornig, a science advisor to President Lyndon B. Johnson, warned the 1968 Annual Convention of the Edison Electric Institute about the threat that allowing CO2 emissions from burning fossil fuels to build up in the atmosphere could one day pose to the climate.

“Such a change in the carbon dioxide level might, therefore, produce major consequences on the climate – possibly even triggering catastrophic effects such as have occurred from time to time in the past,” Hornig said.



Utilities sponsored climate change research during the 1970s and 1980s

While the science on climate change was limited compared to what we know today, by 1971 electric utilities knew enough to include research into the “effects of CO2” in the industry’s long-term research and development goals for through the year 2000. More than 50 electric utilities contributed to the development of these goals, as did industry associations like EEI:


Acknowledgments section from the Electric Research Council’s 1971 report, “Electric Utilities Industry Research and Development Goals Through the Year 2000“
Utilities, through the largely customer funded Edison Electric Institute and Electric Power Research Institute, sponsored cutting edge climate research during the 1970s and 1980s. During the 1980s, EPRI funded research by influential scientist Charles Keeling and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography that documented “virtually all that we knew at the time from measurements of atmospheric CO2.” Between 1985 and 1988, EEI and EPRI co-sponsored another study which found that “climate changes possible over the next 30 years may significantly affect the electric utility industry.”



Utilities knew long ago that climate change concerns could warrant a shift away from fossil fuels

“If a consensus arose that we had to limit or curtail the use of hydrocarbons because of their impact on climate, the implications would be enormous,” Dr. Carroll L. Wilson, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, warned at EEI’s Annual Convention in 1971.



“If this turns out to be of major concern, then fossil fuel combustion will be essentially unacceptable, an important justification for expanding the nuclear and solar energy options,” Dr. Cyril Comar, director of EPRI’s environmental assessment department, told Congress in 1977.



“As consensus builds that man is changing the earth’s climate, policymakers are turning their attention to the issue and exploring potential responses,” the EPRI Journal reported in 1988.



By 1988, electric utilities were at a critical juncture. They could either be a part of the solution to climate change, or a part of the problem.

Some utility interests responded to the “growing consensus” on climate change with disinformation

“It is possible that an increase in concentration of atmospheric gases which absorb the outgoing infrared radiation could result in a rise in average global temperature,” William McCollam, Jr., then president of EEI, admitted to Congress in 1989. McCollam also acknowledged that climate change “could have significant effects on agriculture, rainfall, sea level, storm events, demography, and human health.”

However, McCollam claimed that “our knowledge is currently so limited that we cannot yet judge with any accuracy what might be the results of continued increases in greenhouse gases.”

“… we believe that any plan calling for urgent and extreme action to reduce CO2 emissions is premature at best,” McCollum told Congress.

“The electric utility industry is aggressively pursuing several paths which are designed to meet the nation’s energy needs while reducing atmospheric emissions,” McCollum nonetheless pledged.

Instead, that same year, EEI and some major electric utilities chose to “aggressively” work to sow doubt about climate science. American Electric Power, Consumers Power Company, EEI, Pacific Gas & Electric Company, and Southern Company joined the Global Climate Coalition, which for years worked to deny the causes and risks of climate change. In 1991, EEI and Southern Company spearheaded the Information Council on the Environment ad campaign, which listed as its top strategy an effort to “reposition global warming as theory (not fact).”


One of the misleading ads produced in 1991 for the Information Council on the Environment, which was backed by the Edison Electric Institute and Southern Company
Some utilities continue to mislead on climate change in 2017

Despite EEI’s 1989 pledge to reduce atmospheric emissions, annual CO2 emissions from the electricity sector remained higher in 2016 than they were when McCollum testified in 1989, due in large part to ongoing efforts by some in the industry to sow doubt about climate science and block legal limits on CO2 emissions from power plants.

Thomas Fanning, the CEO of Southern Company, continued to deny that CO2 emissions are the primary contributor to climate change during an interview with CNBC in 2017. At the time, Fanning was also the chairman of EEI and the face of the investor-owned electric utility industry. Yet no effort was made by EEI, Southern Company, or other utilities to set the record straight.


A 2017 interview and Tweet by CNBC served as a reminder of the ongoing culture of climate denial at Southern Company
Some electric utilities continue to back special interest groups – including the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity, American Legislative Exchange Council, U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and Utility Air Regulatory Group – that mislead on climate science and/or oppose legal limits on CO2 emissions from power plants.


Above is one of the U.S. Chamber’s “Public Policy Priorities for 2017.” A representative from Southern Company serves on the Chamber’s board of directors
Nearly 50 years after scientists began to warn the electric utility industry about climate change, some utilities continue to stand in the way of real progress in addressing the problem. It is a story with striking parallels to the investigations into ExxonMobil’s early knowledge and ongoing deception on climate change. Research has shown that electric utilities could face serious financial repercussions if ever held liable for the climate change damages incurred by their power plant emissions.

msfreeh
Level 34 Illuminated
Posts: 7683

Re: George Orwell shake hands with Charles Darwin

Post by msfreeh »

http://www.occurrencesforeigndomestic.c ... mpossible/



materially impossible

“President Donald Trump has forbidden members of his cabinet from making any reference whatsoever to the alleged “Islamist” conspirators, during the commemorations of the 9/11 terrorist attacks… On the evening of September 11, 2001, the real estate developer Donald Trump appeared on the TV channel New York 9, and revealed that the official narrative was physically untenable: it is materially impossible for two planes to manage to bring down the twin towers, much less a third tower. ….” More (with video):

http://www.voltairenet.org/article197886.html

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music:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NGvvRP-4RY

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“… While it is impossible to predict the outcome, when taken together, the US actions seem to indicate their intent to attack the DPRK, overtly or covertly, or through proxies, though the risks are catastrophic. Only the dangerous possibility of China’s involvement could deter this intent. North Korea is now being crushed economically and subjected to intolerable provocations. Although the “status quo” may appear to be in the interest of all parties, recalcitrant and irrational aggressive forces are being unleashed within US-NATO, with or without UN authorization. If US-NATO military power is permitted to obliterate North Korea, their resultant intoxication with military force, combined with their economic weakness makes it inevitable that China and Russia are their next quarry. It is imperative that Russia and China take this seriously, as they surely do. The time is long overdue for Russia and China to use their veto power. Their appeasement of US/NATO interests is short-sighted and enabling a war of possibly incalculable proportions. It is preferable to live with a nuclear armed North Korea than to die in a nuclear holocaust….”

https://www.globalresearch.ca/un-securi ... ar/5609257

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https://weather.com/storms/hurricane/ne ... r-antilles

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https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/09/15 ... -survivor/

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Ed.: Recently, I was challenged by a naysayer on the HAARP/hurricane issue to put up confirmation that HAARP was real, operational, etc.; here are six links found on the first search:

http://vlf.stanford.edu/research/experi ... ric-heater

https://www.nap.edu/read/18620/chapter/2#10

http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/cienc ... ange73.htm

https://www.wired.com/images_blogs/dang ... p_1990.pdf

http://ireap.umd.edu/sites/default/file ... d-IVEC.pdf

http://digitalcommons.usu.edu/cgi/viewc ... ics_facpub

[##]

[Ed.: The history of the military-industrial complex, from its early evolution since the final phases of World War Two as carefully nudged and nurtured by people whose membership in a secret society arguably bound them to a state other than the USofA, has been replete with the use of sword vs. shield Hegelian justification for “the other side has it and is going to use it against us so we must go beyond normal morality and humanitarian restraint”, as well as the taking of covert steps to ensure that the other side had the technology too.

This has been combined with the active seeding of espionage agents from the other side into technology programs, a constant race for perfection of technique, their use on human guinea pigs, the demonstration projects, and a “wink, wink” attitude toward mass destruction by any and all means possible in intermittent steps.

Operation Paperclip could be seen as a pivot around which this turned and, indeed, early research into Tesla technologies, as well as what we call mind control, may have been done covertly while Paperclip people were still detained or incarcerated in Germany immediately post-surrender.]

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https://www.mojahedin.org/images/2016/2 ... -Syria.jpg

[&&]{**}[##]

Moscow, SANA – The Russian warplanes destroyed workshops for making booby-trapped vehicles of ISIS terrorists in the countryside of Hama, Homs and Deir Ezzor provinces.

Lt. Gen. Alexander Lapin, chief of staff of the Russian Armed Forces in Syria said in a statement Saturday that the Russian fighter jets destroyed three workshops for making booby-trapped vehicles of ISIS where they were discovered by unmanned planes in the vicinity of Uqeirbat town in Hama countryside and in the countryside of Deir Ezzor and in al-Sukhnah city in Homs province.

Lapin pointed out that the terrorists fill the old military vehicles with explosives and use them for suicidal operations, adding that the destruction capability of these vehicles cover a circle with a diameter of 300 meters and cause huge destruction once they blow up.

http://sana.sy/en/?p=113926

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https://therearenosunglasses.wordpress. ... airstrike/

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http://pennyforyourthoughts2.blogspot.c ... -kill.html

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Russian forces fire on US-backed rebel group in Syria

CNN 2h ago

RELATED COVERAGE

Russian airstrikes intentionally hit Kurdish, Western forces in east Deir Ezzor: Coalition

Local Source AMN Al-Masdar News (registration) 6h ago

Jets strike US-backed forces in eastern Syria

Reuters 15h ago

Pentagon claims Syrian opposition troops wounded in Russian air strike

International TASS 35m ago

Syria’s Deir el-Zour Coming Back to Life After 3-year Siege

In Depth Voice of America 12h ago

View full coverage

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https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/09/15 ... e-charles/

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http://greencrowasthecrowflies.blogspot ... e-for.html

[&&]{**}[##]

D’accord, accord

WH: US staying out of climate accord

CNN 2h ago

RELATED COVERAGE

Sarah Sanders on Twitter: “Our position on the Paris agreement has not changed. @POTUS has been clear, US …

Most Referenced Twitter 1h ago

Paris climate deal: US denies it will stay in accord

BBC News 58m ago

Trump Administration Seeks to Avoid Withdrawal From Paris Climate Accord, International Climate Officials Say

Highly Cited Wall Street Journal (subscription) 5h ago

View full coverage

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http://money.cnn.com/2017/09/16/news/ch ... index.html

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SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 16, 2017

Cracks in the foundations

“Are the Shadow Brokers identical with the Second Source?”

“Shadow Brokers And The “Second Source””. emptywheel has been unconvincing lately, another victim of Putin/Trump Derangement Syndrome, now apparent due to The Clarification.

The careful Electrospaces conclusion is that Shadow Brokers is probably the Second Source (second to Snowden), and is probably an NSA insider based out of the NSA facility in San Antonio. All of these ‘hacks’ are actually leaks, and leaks pose a deep psychological problem for Imperialists (leaks drive them bat-$#!% insane; see also Angleton’s insane and destructive/self-destructive search for the supposed CIA mole back in the 60s). A hack is evidence of a technical problem which can be fixed, while a leak is a much deeper and darker problem, one involving dissent from the ideological foundations of Empire, and one that cannot ever truly be fixed, even by apprehending the leaker.

AT 9/16/2017 10:28:00 AM

[Ed.: Angleton was the mole. The simplest cover for that fact is his deep engagement over time in turning everything upside down to search for the mole. Read deeply about the fellow, his background, his history and his time in Italy.]

[&&]{**}[##]

The Barcelona Agreement

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IgL2CGDBYd4

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https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-akZEAlbV13k/ ... 4%2529.jpg

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The Democrats Have Become Socialists | RealClearPolicy

Posted by Michele Kearney at 9:34 AM

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http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2017/09 ... nc-emails/

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http://snippits-and-slappits.blogspot.c ... er_15.html

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Cops Say Suing Them for Killing Man with Down Syndrome Over a Movie Ticket Sets ‘Bad Precedent’

http://thefreethoughtproject.com/cops-d ... precedent/

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Here are the nine reports of police misconduct tracked for Wednesday, July 12, 2017:

https://www.policemisconduct.net/nation ... cap-71217/

National Police Misconduct Newsfeed Daily Recap 7/12/17

Author Jonathan Blanks Posted on July 13, 2017

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DOJ rolls back program intended to identify problems in police departments

The Department of Justice announced Friday that it’s rolling back an Obama-era program created to help improve trust between police agencies and the communities they serve.

The department said it’s making significant changes to an office that investigated and issued public reports about problems it found in individual police departments.

DOJ said the changes to the program “will return control to the public safety personnel sworn to protect their communities and focus on providing real-time technical assistance to best address the identified needs of requesting agencies to reduce violent crime.”

The move falls in line with Sessions’ tough-on-crime policies and President Trump’s pro-police administration.

Read the full story here

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https://willyloman.wordpress.com/2017/0 ... is-police/

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[Ed.: Quite apart from other issues and nonsense and the commercials which denote or make fun of the phenomenon, I detect a hidden poison operating inside the US today (and perhaps in other parts of the world, but I don’t travel), and that is the disappearance and degradation of interpersonal face-to-face communication. People don’t talk to one another, everyone is or acts estranged, there is an uptick of anomie and a downturn in the ability of people to connect. This is, of course, flying in the face of social media, Facebook, smart phones et alia which are in theory an attempt to enable connection but seem to be having the opposite effect.]

[##]

http://turcopolier.typepad.com/sic_semp ... 34198.html

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https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-ePR4teBzI0M/ ... 1%2529.GIF

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http://greencrowasthecrowflies.blogspot ... -from.html

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https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/09/15 ... e-charles/

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Judge blocks Trump from denying funds to sanctuary cities

A federal judge has blocked the Trump administration’s rules requiring so-called sanctuary cities to help enforce federal immigration laws in order to receive funding.

U.S. District Judge Harry Leinenweber issued a nationwide preliminary injunction against the Department of Justice (DOJ) on Friday after Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced new rules governing DOJ law enforcement grants.

Read the full story here

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McCain backs bill to block transgender troops ban

Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John McCain (R-Ariz.) is backing a bipartisan bill that would block President Trump’s ban on transgender people serving in the military.

“When less than one percent of Americans are volunteering to join the military, we should welcome all those who are willing and able to serve our country,” McCain said in a statement.

Read the full story here

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https://sputniknews.com/news/2017091610 ... mp-odessa/

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2 years for officer in child-porn case

Alan C. Vigiard, a 46 year old Sergeant with the Adams Police Department in Massachusetts who served as a child exploitation officer, was charged, October 2009, and pleaded guilty to 10 counts of child pornography. Vigiard was sentenced, 22 June 2011, to two years in jail, serving only one year, and five years supervised release. He was free pending sentencing. The Police Department allowed him to resign. On 1 November 2016, Vigiard was arrested for a second time on child pornography charges. He was held without bail pending sentencing and was sentenced, December 2016, to 10–12 years in jail. Vigiard was originally caught viewing child sexual abuse at work; spending, on average, one to six hours per shift viewing pornography, including child pornography, and was caught masturbating in the evidence room.

http://www.berkshireeagle.com/stories/2 ... ase,442007

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http://thefreethoughtproject.com/media- ... ng-people/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sally_Quinn

[Ed.: This woman, who has an interesting father, is a spoiled, elite, entitled sensationalist who should have been hired to co-write Hillary’s recent exercise in angst.]

msfreeh
Level 34 Illuminated
Posts: 7683

Re: George Orwell shake hands with Charles Darwin

Post by msfreeh »

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/G4S

Church Shooter has ties to G4S see second post below


https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nat ... 703066001/


Personal turmoil weighed on Nashville church shooting suspect
USA TODAY NETWORKAdam Tamburin, The Tennessean Published 8:14 a.m. ET Sept. 26, 2017 | Updated 12:21 p.m. ET Sept. 26, 2017


https://theintercept.com/2016/06/14/orl ... nary-firm/

ORLANDO SHOOTER WASN’T THE FIRST MURDERER EMPLOYED BY GLOBAL MERCENARY FIRM
Alex Emmons
June 14 2016, 1:44 p.m.


THE MAN WHO shot over 100 people and killed 49 in an Orlando nightclub Saturday worked at a retirement home as a security guard for G4S – a giant, often controversial global contracting corporation that provides mercenary forces, prison guards and security services. G4S is one of the world’s largest private security companies, with more than 620,000 employees and a presence in over 100 countries.

G4S confirmed in a statement that Omar Mateen had worked for the company since 2007, and said it was “shocked and saddened” by the shooting. A later statement said that Mateen was subject to “detailed company screening” in 2007 and again in 2013, “with no adverse findings.”

But one of Mateen’s former coworkers told the New York Times that he “saw it coming,” that Mateen “talked about killing people all the time,” and that he was “always angry, sweating, just angry at the world.”

The coworker, who said he quit his job due to harassment from Mateen, explained that he “complained multiple times” to G4S, because Mateen didn’t like “blacks, women, lesbians, and Jews.”

Yet G4S continued to employ Mateen, who was able to obtain a “security officer” license to buy firearms in addition to his state license and conceal carry permit.

Mateen was even allowed to work at G4S while under FBI investigation. According to the FBI, Mateen was suspected of involvement in terror in 2013. The FBI investigation included the use of paid informants, recording conversations, following him, electronic surveillance, and interviewing him three times, FBI Director James Comey said on Monday. The investigation was closed because it produced no hard evidence of terrorist complicity.

G4S’s statement says that Mateen was subject to “checks from a U.S. law enforcement agency with no findings reported to G4S.” But according to the New York Times, the investigation took place because of “reports from [Mateen’s] coworkers, that he… suggested he may have had terrorist ties.”




http://www.organiclifestylemagazine.com ... its-career


VACCINES, RETROVIRUSES, DNA, AND THE DISCOVERY THAT DESTROYED JUDY MIKOVITS’ CAREER

December 1, 2015 by Allene Edwards
Last updated on: March 15, 2017


Judy Mikovits, PhD is a biochemist and molecular biologist with more than 33 years of experience. Internationally known, a veritable “rock star” of the scientific world, she served as the director of the lab of Antiviral Drug Mechanisms at the National Cancer Institute before directing the Cancer Biology program at EpiGenX Pharmaceuticals. She later developed the first neuroimmune institute. Her early work focused on cancer and HIV, her latest on Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and autism. She has published more than 50 peer-reviewed articles.

In 2011, she made the discovery that destroyed her career. She found that at least 30% of our vaccines are contaminated with gammaretroviruses. Not only is this contamination associated with autism and chronic fatigue syndrome, it is also associated with Parkinson’s, Lou Gehrig’s disease, and Alzheimer’s.

When she released this shocking information, she was warned by Dr. Andrew Wakefield that she would become a target, just as he had been. But she assured him that all of her work had been properly reviewed and, of course, she was safe.

She was wrong. She was threatened and told to destroy her data; she refused. She was fired, then arrested for supposedly stealing her data from her worksite. She had been facing charges and was bound by a gag order from the court for the last four years. Recently, charges were dropped and the gag order was lifted. Dr. Mikovits is now free to talk, and boy is she talking.

The retroviruses contaminating vaccines originate from mice used for research. Dr. Mikovits asks, “How many new retroviruses have we created through all the mouse research, the vaccine research, gene therapy research? More importantly, how many new diseases have we created?”

“When they destroyed all of our work, and discredited everything I or Frank Ruscetti had ever published, and arranged for the publication of my mug shot in Science, the NIH very deliberately sent the message to researchers everywhere about what would happen to any honest scientist who dared ask those important questions.”

More:






Link du jour
http://www.cryptogon.com/?cat=4


http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/nyc ... -1.3528774

http://www.organiclifestylemagazine.com ... its-career


http://phibetaiota.net/2017/09/preston- ... ore-127286

https://alethonews.wordpress.com/2017/0 ... is-hiding/


http://pennyforyourthoughts2.blogspot.c ... ussia.html


http://www.hardcrackers.com/rainbow-coa ... class-war/

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/nationa ... -1.3528256

https://www.veteranstoday.com/2017/09/2 ... hats-next/




Blink Tank

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=NBFAB1NMIHM


Watch the doc on Maier



http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/new ... -1.3528729
i


http://phibetaiota.net/category/journal ... 9-justice/









https://www.rt.com/news/404833-11yo-gir ... osecutors/


11yo girl had ‘consensual’ sex with 28yo man, French prosecutors say citing lack of violence
Published time: 28 Sep, 2017 03:22
Edited time: 28 Sep, 2017 07:38

msfreeh
Level 34 Illuminated
Posts: 7683

Re: George Orwell shake hands with Charles Darwin

Post by msfreeh »

https://robertscribbler.com/2017/10/11/ ... alifornia/



Significant Monsters: Climate Change Enhanced Wildfires Tear Widening Swath Through California
“We are facing some pretty significant monsters,” — Cal Fire incident commander Bret Couvea to a room of about 200 firefighters and law enforcement officials at the Sonoma County Fairgrounds on Wednesday morning.

“Think of the climate change issue as a closet, and behind the door are lurking all kinds of monsters — and there’s a long list of them,” — Steve Pacala.

*****

As of Wednesday, the massive fires blazing across California and concentrated in the north had consumed over 141,000 acres, resulted in the loss of 17 lives, and destroyed more than 2,000 structures. Approximately 50,000 people are now evacuated from the fire zones. And about 500 individuals are reported missing. A grim tally that is unfortunately likely to worsen as the hours and days progress.


This outbreak is now one of the worst fire disasters ever to strike California. One which may break all previous records for tragic loss of life and property when this terrible event finally winds down many days from now and all losses are counted.

Significant Monsters…

In total, eight major fires are still burning across the state. As all but one fire remains uncontained, the area consumed continues to expand. The seven large out of control fires presently range in size from 7,500 to 37,000 acres each and have burned approximately 40,000 additional acres in just the past 24 hours alone. Lighter winds and cooler weather have aided firefighting efforts. But the sudden large scale of the fires erupting Sunday through Tuesday and very dry and occasionally gusty conditions with no rain in sight have produced serious challenges for firefighters.



(The skies of northern California blanketed by smoke from massive blazes streaming like ‘liquid fire’ across Northern California on Tuesday, October 10. Image source: NASA Worldview.)

As of yet, no direct initial cause for the fires has been identified. But the co-location of some fires with downed power lines due to wind gusts up to hurricane force late Sunday night have provided one potential ignition source. Human error or malicious activity have not yet been ruled out.

… Fed by Climate Change …

Regardless of direct cause of ignition, the fires lit in vegetative growth that sprang up after an abnormally wet winter and spring. This growth has flash-dried over summer in a region that received 10-20 percent of its typical moisture allotment over that period. Northern California over recent years has experienced severe drought, extreme rains, and during summer of 2017 flash drying of new vegetative growth. This is a cycle of extremes consistent with human caused climate change. So as with the major hurricanes blowing up over the ocean this year we can definitely say that climate change has played a role in setting conditions that enabled this event to hit a much more fierce than usual intensity.

… Caused by Bad Energy and Environmental Policy Choices

Bad choices — primarily involved with continued policies promoting fossil fuel burning (#1), harmful agricultural practices (#2), and deforestation (#3) have brought us to this pass. Failure to rapidly enable a renewable energy transition and to produce policies that promote less harmful consumption and more sustainable land use will result in an ever-increasing tempo of extreme events.

We see this high tempo now in events that bear the names Harvey, Irma, Maria, California fires and so, so many more over the past few years. Let us hope and pray that it relents enough to give us the space to make the right choices for ourselves, the life supports of our planet, and our children.

RELATED STATEMENTS AND INFORMATION:

A recent climate study found that warming oceans have weakened the southwestern monsoon generating a prevalence for droughts and wildfires in the region. This is a direct result of human-caused climate change:


Links:

The National Interagency Fire Center

NASA Worldview

Some Pretty Significant Monsters

Pure Devastation

California Fires: Before and After Photos

How Did the California Fires Become so Devastating?

Hat tip to Eleggua

Hat tip to Genomik




Exposing the Big Game / October 11, 2017
Reblogged this on The Extinction Chronicles.


Bill / October 11, 2017
Don’t expect any help from Trump/Pruitt to combat climate change…
Scott Pruitt unveiled his plan to repeal the Clean Power Plan to loud applause in Hazard, Kentucky, a sleepy coal town in the state’s mountainous south-east. “The war on coal is over,” said Mr Pruitt, head of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA),
https://www.economist.com/blogs/democra ... up-smoke-0


robertscribbler / October 11, 2017
I think we’re pretty clear that Trump/republicans/Pruitt are completely in bed with the harmful fossil fuel interests that are causing this nightmare to unfold with increasing intensity and regularity.


bostonblorp / October 11, 2017
OT: Something to keep an eye on – the Weddell polynya (a giant hole in the middle of Antarctica) has returned. Not specifically tied to GW (yet) but if it grows or more of them appear then we’ll have yet another problem.

“This is like opening a pressure relief valve – the ocean then releases a surplus of heat to the atmosphere for several consecutive winters until the heat reservoir is exhausted,” adds Professor Latif.

https://phys.org/news/2017-09-antarctic ... imate.html

Pls delete if a repost.


robertscribbler / October 11, 2017
Thanks for this. Completely helpful. Not off topic at all.


wili / October 11, 2017
I heard someone on the radio who was an eye witness express the same thought that I had after seeing some of the descriptions of this horrific destruction…that it looks like a bomb had been dropped on these neighborhoods. I thought the same thing about pictures of Barbuda and elsewhere.

This puts me in mind of the Hansen point that the amount of added energy we are adding to the system is on the order of a half-million atom bombs every single day. (Perhaps robert or others can update me on the latest numbers here?)

Mostly this is just a handy way to get across what the energy equivalent is of the enormous imbalances we are throwing into our only home.

But these images show that in a sense we are indeed dropping bomb-like destruction on our children and now clearly on ourselves.

Basically, since we started burning fossil-death-fuels, we started a war on the future. A war we had be ‘winning.’

But it is clear that now we have entered that future, we have switched over to the losing side. The bombs are now falling around our ears, seemingly on a weekly basis now, even in some of the most affluent parts of the most powerful country in the world.

And yet we continue hurling those hundreds of millions of bombs on ourselves even as we sink ever more deeply into the losing side of history.


wili / October 11, 2017
California fire official: 3,500 homes and businesses have been destroyed in deadly wine country wildfires.



wili / October 11, 2017
With 3,500 structures burned, the California fires are now officially the most destructive in state history.



wili / October 11, 2017
NWS Bay Area: Updated Red Flag Warning and Wind Advisory Information for later today. VERY HIGH FIRE DANGER! #cawx #northbay #napa #sonoma



wili / October 11, 2017
Dramatic footage shows a @sonomasheriff deputy driving through an advancing wildfire in Northern California cnn.it/2gblpso

Brief video at the link.


Paul / October 11, 2017
I wonder what DT would be saying about these fires if he were still with us…


eleggua / October 11, 2017
Elegy for DTLange.




Suzanne / October 11, 2017
Pictures at the LA Times from the fires. Just horrific…
http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-m ... story.html


Suzanne / October 12, 2017
What should have been…
“Hillary Clinton links CC to recent hurricanes, wildfires in Speech”
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/hillary- ... d=50385107

“It’s been a tough couple of weeks with hurricanes and earthquakes and now these terrible fires,” said Clinton. “So in addition to expressing our sympathy, we need to really come together to try to work to prevent and mitigate, and that starts with acknowledging climate change and the role that it plays in exacerbating such events,” Clinton said to applause.

Leave a Reply









http://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/i ... 12216.html

Immigration officer wanted sex for his service. That didn’t work out so well





https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions ... 800d68af43

Robert Mueller can’t save us from Trump
But the FBI gave us Trump.
go figure!





http://www.nydailynews.com/newswires/ne ... -1.3555011

Exhibit explores police surveillance as documenting history




Wednesday, October 11, 2017, 1:09 AM







http://www.nydailynews.com/newswires/en ... -1.3556764

APNewsBreak: Steve Bannon had ties to Harvey Weinstein




Wednesday, October 11, 2017, 4:50 PM






https://www.boston.com/news/national-ne ... ts-officer

Authorities: Black female Temple University student killed by police in Miami Beach after car hits officer
By FREIDA FRISARO and DENISE LAVOIE AP, 3:12 PM








Link du jour


http://bangordailynews.com/2017/10/11/e ... -students/

http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/f ... 271107.php


https://www.boston.com/culture/arts/201 ... sterpieces

http://www.thecannabist.co/2017/10/11/c ... ata/89751/


https://www.boston.com/news/local-news/ ... es-farming

http://www.denverpost.com/2017/10/11/ph ... ctober-11/


http://www.sacbee.com/news/state/califo ... 23651.html

http://bangordailynews.com/2017/10/11/n ... to-prison/




http://www.denverpost.com/2017/10/11/vi ... ng-police/


October 11, 2017 at 3:17 pm
A disabled Vietnam veteran has won a $760,000 jury award after Kremmling police brutalized him during an unjustified raid on his mobile home in 2013.

Robert Mark Smith was repeatedly harassed and victimized by the police, who were punishing him for his protests against their prior wrongdoings, according to a news release by the Denver law firm Killmer, Lane & Newman.








It speaks volumes when you have to put body cameras on your police because
you don't trust them



http://bangordailynews.com/2017/10/11/n ... y-cameras/

Portland, Maine police union strike deal to outfit police with body cameras




http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/nyc ... -1.3557030

‘Dominican Hulk’ and auxiliary cop busted in gun, drug sting


BY GRAHAM RAYMAN
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS Wednesday, October 11, 2017, 8:45 PM







http://www.nydailynews.com/news/nationa ... -1.3556987

‘White Lives Matter’ rallies planned for two Tennessee cities on same day
BY JESSICA SCHLADEBECK
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS Wednesday, October 11, 2017, 8:00 PM



http://www.denverpost.com/2017/10/11/de ... nitiative/


Denver Mayor Michael Hancock is against Green Roof Initiative, says it “goes too far too fast”
Denver Mayor Michael Hancock is opposing a citizen initiative on the November ballot that would require most new city buildings of at least 25,000 square feet to have gardens, solar panels or other “green roof” components, saying it “goes too far too fast.”







http://www.sacbee.com/news/article178368526.html

Ophelia is the 10th hurricane in a row. That hasn't happened since 1893.
BY JENNY STALETOVICH
jstaletovich@miamiherald.com
OCTOBER 11, 2017 3:39 PM

Ophelia became a hurricane late Wednesday, the tenth in a row and tying a record set more than a century ago.

Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/news/article17836 ... rylink=cpy





http://www.sfgate.com/technology/busine ... 269149.php

Trump reportedly asked for a tenfold increase in US nukes before Tillerson called him a 'moron'
Alex Lockie, provided by
Published 4:11 am, Wednesday, October 11, 2017





Florida school district to pay $3.6 million after blaming third-graders for being molested by teacher
BY JESSICA SCHLADEBECK
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS Wednesday, October 11, 2017, 5:16 PM







http://bangordailynews.com/2017/10/11/b ... bloomberg/

Anti-coal effort expands with $64M donation from Michael Bloomberg






http://bangordailynews.com/link/only-on ... peachment/


Only one remedy for Governor LePage’s threats to sheriffs — impeachment






https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/ ... -war-drugs


Rodrigo Duterte pulls Philippine police out of brutal war on drugs
Deadly crackdown, which has seen thousands killed, will be left to drug enforcement agency, president’s office says

msfreeh
Level 34 Illuminated
Posts: 7683

Re: George Orwell shake hands with Charles Darwin

Post by msfreeh »

Link du jour


https://www.pinterest.de/pin/540009811554997140/




FBI informant Scott Kimball killed at least three woman while working for the FBI as
an informant

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Lee_Kimball


Scott Lee Kimball (born September 21, 1966) is a convicted serial killer from Boulder County, Colorado. He is serving a 70-year sentence after pleading guilty in 2009 to the murders of Kaysi McLeod, 19; Jennifer Marcum, 25; LeAnn Emry, 24; and Kimball's uncle, Terry Kimball, 60. All four victims died between January 2003 and August 2004, while Kimball was on "supervised release" after a prior check fraud conviction, serving as an FBI informant. Marcum remains missing and is presumed dead, while the other three bodies were recovered in remote Colorado and Utah locations.[1]

Scott Lee Kimball
Born Scott Lee Kimball
September 21, 1966
Kimball has boasted to friends of multiple other murders, but authorities have uncovered no direct evidence corroborating his claims.[2]

In September 2010, it was reported that the FBI was investigating Kimball as a possible suspect in the murder and mutilation of a woman found in Westminster, Colorado, in October 2004, while Kimball lived in the area under FBI supervision.[3] In December 2010, Kimball told a cousin that he had been proposed as a suspect in the West Mesa murders in New Mexico, which were committed during the same 2003-2005 time period. He denied involvement.[4]

Kimball is currently serving his sentence at the Sterling Correctional Facility.



https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-wor ... e-attempt/


Colorado inmate, ex-FBI informant accused of escape attempt

Originally published October 19, 2017 at 7:08 pm


DENVER A former FBI informant who is in prison for four murders is accused of attempting to arrange a killing from behind bars and escape from the Sterling Correctional Facility.






https://www.aclu.org/blog/racial-justic ... -activists


Is the FBI Setting the Stage for Increased Surveillance of Black Activists?





OCTOBER 18, 2017 | 10:00

A recently leaked FBI “Intelligence Assessment” contains troubling signs that the FBI is scrutinizing and possibly surveilling Black activists in its search for potential “extremists.”

The report, which the FBI’s Counterterrorism Division prepared, identifies what it calls “Black Identity Extremists” as security threats. Their “perceptions of police brutality against African Americans … will very likely serve as justification” for violence against law enforcement officers, the report claims. Today, the ACLU filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the Center for Media Justice seeking other records regarding the FBI’s surveillance of Black people on the basis of a supposed shared ideology, including records using the term “Black Identity Extremists.”

The report is disturbing on several levels, starting with the label “Black Identity Extremist.” Its definition of the term is so confusing as to be unintelligible:

“The FBI defines black identity extremists as individuals who seek, wholly or in part, through unlawful acts of force or violence, in response to perceived racism and injustice in American society and some do so in furtherance of establishing a separate black homeland or autonomous black social institutions, communities, or governing organizations within the United States.”
What seems to be a made-up term raises concerns that the FBI created the designation to enhance government scrutiny of Black activists, including people involved in Black Lives Matter, which some wrongly blame for incidents of violence and label a hate group. By focusing on ideology and viewpoint in defining what constitutes a so-called “Black Identity Extremist,” the FBI is spending valuable resources to target those who object to racism and injustice in America.

The report is also flawed in its conclusions and methodology. Any violence against law enforcement officers is unacceptable, but the FBI’s focus on supposed “Black Identity Extremists” appears misplaced. Studies show that attacks against police officers are extremely rare and that white men carry out the overwhelming majority of those attacks.

STOP SENDING WEAPONS OF WAR TO OUR COMMUNITIES

TAKE ACTION NOWIn addition to missing that context, the report offers no evidence to support its assessment that “Black Identity Extremists” are a threat because they supposedly share a violent ideology. Instead, the FBI’s conclusion is premised on a description of six separate violent incidents and the “key assumption” that those incidents were ideologically motivated. In other words, the report appears to assume its own core conclusion. The report even contradicts itself by acknowledging that the six incidents appear to have been “influenced by more than one ideological perspective.”

The report is yet another indication that the FBI thinks it can identify security threats by scrutinizing people’s beliefs and speech. In making its assessment, the FBI relied on individuals’ use of social media, including who they associated with, what search terms they used, and what content they liked. But there’s nothing wrong with having radical or “extreme” ideas, and evidence shows that the overwhelming majority of people who hold radical beliefs do not engage in or support violence.

The danger, of course, is that Black activists now have even more reason to be concerned that the law enforcement will surveil and take action against them for engaging in constitutionally protected speech. In an interview with the Guardian, one BLM activist said the “Black Identity Extremist” classification would “criminalize anyone who is already in the movement.” This is a concern that even an international human rights expert from the U.N. expressed when reporting on the chilling effects of police practices against protesters. Such targeting of Black activists also throws open the door to racial profiling.

The FBI’s history gives Black activists plenty of cause for concern. In the 1960s, the FBI conducted extensive surveillance of those it deemed “Black Extremists” and “Black Nationalists” under the covert COINTELPRO program. The FBI has been “mapping” racial and ethnic communities in the United States, including the Black population in Georgia, based on crude and false stereotypes about particular communities' propensity to commit certain crimes. That mapping included scrutiny of protests against police killings.

And FBI domestic terrorism training presentations conflate examples of armed resistance, or armed self-defense, by older organizations like the Black Panthers and the Black Liberation Army with beliefs expressed by various modern groups to suggest, without evidence, that these latter-day groups pose a similar threat. More recently, Department of Homeland Security records from 2014 and 2015 show that government officials trolled social media accounts to map and collect information on Black Lives Matter protests and supposedly related events.

The FBI’s recent “Intelligence Assessment” is yet another example of using “domestic terror” and “extremism” as a smokescreen for silencing constitutionally protected speech and unfairly targeting civil rights activists through surveillance. By conjuring this category of “Black Identity Extremists,” the FBI dangerously equates domestic extremist movements that are actually on the rise, like white supremacists, with one that looks near nonexistent.

The public needs to know more about the FBI’s activities related to what it calls “Black Identity Extremism.” Obtaining the agency’s records on these activities is one step toward protecting the free speech and privacy rights of Black activists.





FBI Octopus

http://www.foxcarolina.com/story/366408 ... n-violence


FBI and DEA visit classrooms: Pledge against gun violence
FOX Carolina-
The FBI and DEA may have visited your child's classroom recently, but it was for a good cause. Thousands of students took a pledge against ...








https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATF_gunwalking_scandal


ATF gunwalking scandal

Weapons recovered by Mexican military in Naco, Sonora, Mexico on November 20, 2009. They include weapons bought two weeks earlier by Operation Fast and Furious suspect Uriel Patino, who bought 723 guns during the operation.[1]
"Gunwalking", or "letting guns walk", was a tactic of the Arizona Field Office of the United States Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), which ran a series of sting operations[2][3] between 2006[4] and 2011[2][5] in the Tucson and Phoenix area where the ATF "purposely allowed licensed firearms dealers to sell weapons to illegal straw buyers, hoping to track the guns to Mexican drug cartel leaders and arrest them".[6] These operations were done under the umbrella of Project Gunrunner, a project intended to stem the flow of firearms into Mexico by interdicting straw purchasers and gun traffickers within the United States.[7] The Jacob Chambers Case began in October 2009 and eventually became known in February 2010 as "Operation Fast and Furious" after agents discovered Chambers and the other suspects under investigation belonged to a car club.[1]

The stated goal of allowing these purchases was to continue to track the firearms as they were transferred to higher-level traffickers and key figures in Mexican cartels, with the expectation that this would lead to their arrests and the dismantling of the cartels.[6][8][9] The tactic was questioned during the operations by a number of people, including ATF field agents and cooperating licensed gun dealers.[10][11][12][13][14] During Operation Fast and Furious, the largest "gunwalking" probe, the ATF monitored the sale of about 2,000[1]:203[15] firearms, of which only 710 were recovered as of February 2012.[1]:203 A number of straw purchasers have been arrested and indicted; however, as of October 2011, none of the targeted high-level cartel figures had been arrested.[6]

Guns tracked by the ATF have been found at crime scenes on both sides of the Mexico–United States border, and the scene where United States Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry was killed in December 2010. The "gunwalking" operations became public in the aftermath of Terry's murder.[2] Dissenting ATF agents came forward to Congress in response.[16][17] According to Humberto Benítez Treviño, former Mexican Attorney General and chair of the justice committee in the Chamber of Deputies, related firearms have been found at numerous crime scenes in Mexico where at least 150 Mexican civilians were maimed or killed.[18] Revelations of "gunwalking" led to controversy in both countries, and diplomatic relations were damaged.[2]

As a result of a dispute over the release of Justice Department documents related to the scandal, Attorney General Eric Holder became the first sitting member of the Cabinet of the United States to be held in contempt of Congress on June 28, 2012.[19][20] Earlier that month, President Barack Obama had invoked executive privilege for the first time in his presidency over the same documents.[21][22]



Further information: Project Gunrunner and Mexican Drug War
One 20-year veteran of ATF's Tucson office told us that before Operation Wide Receiver, all of ATF's trafficking cases were very similar in their simplicity: ATF would get a tip from an FFL [Federal Firearms Licensee][14] about a buyer who wanted a large number of firearms and information about when the transaction was scheduled to take place, and would set up surveillance and arrest the buyer when he headed southbound or at the border. Sometimes the initial buyer would cooperate with ATF, and agents would arrest the actual buyer when he showed up to take possession of the guns. If the guns went to a stash house, agents would speak with subjects at the stash house or conduct a search of the stash house. This agent told us that ATF interdicted guns as a matter of course and had been "content to make the little cases," but that Wide Receiver represented a "different direction" from ATF’s typical practice.
—Report by the Office of the Inspector General on the Review of ATF's Operation Fast and Furious and Related Matters, September 2012[1]
ATF "gunwalking" operations were, in part, a response to longstanding criticism of the bureau for focusing on relatively minor gun violations while failing to target high-level gun smuggling figures.[23] U.S. firearms laws currently govern the possession and transfer of firearms and provide penalties for the violation of such laws. “Gun trafficking”, although not defined by statute, essentially includes the movement or diversion of firearms from legal to illegal markets.[24]:Summary A 2009 GAO report on efforts to combat arms trafficking to Mexico notes that straw purchasing is not in itself illegal, although it is illegal to provide false information in connection with a purchase.[25]

Four federal statutes govern U.S. commerce of firearms domestically and internationally. Many states supplement these federal statutes and have firearms laws of their own that are stricter. For example, some states require permits to obtain firearms and impose a waiting period for firearm transfers. Domestic commerce and importations into the United States are generally regulated under the National Firearms Act of 1934 (NFA) and the Gun Control Act of 1968 (GCA). The exportation of firearms from the United States is regulated by the Arms Export Control Act of 1976 and, to a lesser extent, the Export Administration Regulations (EAR).[24]:3

Defendants are often prosecuted and convicted under provisions of statutes such as the GCA that make it unlawful for certain persons to be in possession of firearms, govern the transaction process of obtaining firearms (e.g., straw purchases), and contain penalties for the use of a firearm in a crime of violence or a drug trafficking crime, or penalties for knowingly or fraudulently smuggling goods that would be contrary to U.S. law and regulation.[24]:18

In a 2012 case in San Juan, Texas, under existing 1968 Gun Control Act provisions on straw purchasing (Title 18 United States Code, Section 924(a)(1)(A)), straw purchaser Taisa Garcia received 33 months and buyer Marco Villalobos received 46 months, plus two years supervision after release.[26] In another Texas gun trafficking case, Oscar Bravo Hernandez received a sentence of 84 months for buying and sending to Mexico at least 55 firearms from a ring of nine straw purchasers who received sentences from 51 months for the most involved down to three years probation for the least involved.[27]

According to twenty-year ATF veteran Jay Wachtel, letting guns "walk" has been a practice done in a controlled manner that involved surveillance and eventual seizure of the weapons. "The idea was that you would follow it long enough until you were sure you had enough probable cause" to initiate an arrest, Wachtel said.[28] According to ATF field agents involved in Operation Fast and Furious, a part of Project Gunrunner, "ATF agents were trained to interdict guns and prevent criminals from obtaining them" and not to allow guns to walk and then disappear.[11] ATF agents assigned to Phoenix from other districts to work on Fast and Furious were critical of the operation.[29]

Operations Edit

There have been allegations of "gunwalking" in at least 10 cities in five states.[30] The most widely known and controversial operations took place in Arizona under the ATF's Phoenix, Arizona field division.

2006–2008: Operation Wide Receiver and other probes

The suspicious sale of AR-15s led to Operation Wide Receiver.[31]
The first known ATF "gunwalking" operation to Mexican drug cartels, named Operation Wide Receiver, began in early 2006 and ran into late 2007. Licensed dealer Mike Detty of Mad Dawg Global informed the ATF of a suspicious gun purchase that took place in February 2006 in Tucson, Arizona. In March he was hired as a confidential informant working with the ATF's Tucson office, part of their Phoenix, Arizona field division.[31]

With the use of surveillance equipment, ATF agents monitored additional sales by Detty to straw purchasers. With assurance from ATF "that Mexican officials would be conducting surveillance or interdictions when guns got to the other side of the border",[12] Detty would sell a total of about 450 guns during the operation.[30] These included AR-15s, semi-automatic AK-pattern rifles, and Colt .38s. The majority of the guns were eventually lost as they moved into Mexico.[6][31][32][33]

As the later DOJ OIG Report documented, under Wide Receiver coordination of ATF Tucson with the ATF Mexico City Office (MCO) and with Mexican law enforcement had been haphazard. Discussions of getting tracking devices from Raytheon were not followed up. ATF field agents and the cooperating gun dealer had been told by ATF supervisors that the guns were being interdicted before they could reach Mexico, but only 64 of the 474 guns had actually been seized. The kingpin sought by walking the guns, Israel Egurrola-Leon, turned out to be the target of a larger drug case Operation Iron River run by OCDETF. After Operation Wide Receiver was ended, several attorneys at the Phoenix USAO who reviewed the Wide Receiver cases for prosecution found the cases had been so poorly managed that they were reluctant to bring any of them to trial.[1]

At the time, under the Bush administration Department of Justice (DOJ), no arrests or indictments were made. After President Barack Obama took office in 2009, the DOJ reviewed Wide Receiver and found that guns had been allowed into the hands of suspected gun traffickers. Indictments began in 2010, over three years after Wide Receiver concluded. As of October 4, 2011, nine people had been charged with making false statements in acquisition of firearms and illicit transfer, shipment or delivery of firearms.[23] As of November, charges against one defendant had been dropped; five of them had pleaded guilty, and one had been sentenced to one year and one day in prison. Two of them remained fugitives.[31]

The Hernandez case
Another, smaller probe occurred in 2007 under the same ATF Phoenix field division. The Fidel Hernandez case began when the ATF identified Mexican suspects who bought weapons from a Phoenix gun shop over a span of several months. The probe ultimately involved over 200 guns, a dozen of which were lost in Mexico. On September 27, 2007, ATF agents saw the original suspects buying weapons at the same store and followed them toward the Mexican border. The ATF informed the Mexican government when the suspects successfully crossed the border, but Mexican law enforcement were unable to track them.[4][10]

Less than two weeks later, on October 6, William Newell, then ATF's Special Agent in Charge (SAC) of the Phoenix field division, shut down the operation at the behest of William Hoover, ATF's assistant director for the office of field operations.[34] No charges were filed. Newell, who was Phoenix ATF SAC from June 2006 to May 2011, would later play a major role in Operation Fast and Furious.[4][12]

The Hernandez case was referenced in a briefing paper prepared for Attorney General Michael Mukasey prior to his meeting with the Mexican Attorney General Medina Mora on November 16, 2007. The paper stated, "ATF has recently worked jointly with Mexico on the first-ever attempt to have a controlled delivery of weapons being smuggled into Mexico by a major arms trafficker" and that "the first attempts at this controlled delivery have not been successful". The paper also stated, "ATF would like to expand the possibility of such joint investigations and controlled deliveries—since only then will it be possible to investigate an entire smuggling network, rather than arresting simply a single smuggler."[35]

Investigators regarded the Hernandez Case as an example of "controlled delivery" with surveillance and involvement of Mexican authorities rather than "gunwalking" or failure to attempt interdiction.[1][36][37]

The Medrano case
The 2008 Alejandro Medrano case involved both ATF SAC William Newell and cooperating Tucson gun dealer Mike Detty of Operation Wide Receiver. ATF Phoenix allowed about 100 guns to be taken into Mexico over the objections of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) personnel who became aware of the case. Phoenix ATF SAC Newell acknowledged to ICE "that letting guns cross the border was part of ATF’s plan". In August 2010, Medrano was sentenced to 46 months, his associate Hernan Ramos received 50 months and their fellow conspirators received prison terms from 14 to 30 months, but the target, a Sinaloa Cartel kingpin, Javier Elenes Ruiz, nicknamed "Rambo," remained untouched inside Mexico.[36]

2009–2011: Operation Fast and Furious
On October 26, 2009, a teleconference was held at the Department of Justice in Washington, D.C. to discuss U.S. strategy for combating Mexican drug cartels. Participating in the meeting were Deputy Attorney General David W. Ogden, Assistant Attorney General Lanny A. Breuer, acting ATF Director Kenneth E. Melson, Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) Administrator Michele Leonhart, Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation Robert Mueller and the top federal prosecutors in the Southwestern border states. They decided on a strategy to identify and eliminate entire arms trafficking networks rather than low-level buyers.[3][38][39] Those at the meeting apparently did not suggest using the "gunwalking" tactic, but Phoenix ATF supervisors would soon use it in an attempt to achieve the desired goals.[40]

The strategy of targeting high-level individuals, which was already ATF policy, would be implemented by Bill Newell, special agent in charge of ATF's Phoenix field division. In order to accomplish it, the office decided to monitor suspicious firearms purchases which federal prosecutors had determined lacked sufficient evidence for prosecution, as laid out in a January 2010 briefing paper. This was said to be allowed under ATF regulations and given legal backing by U.S. Attorney for the District of Arizona Dennis K. Burke. It was additionally approved and funded by a Justice Department task force.[3] However, long-standing DOJ and ATF policy has required suspected illegal arms shipments to be intercepted.[4][5]


FN Five-sevens were among the weapons allowed to walk.[41]
The operation began on October 31, 2009, when a local gun store reported to the Phoenix ATF that four individuals had purchased multiple AK-47 style rifles.[42] In November 2009, the Phoenix office's Group VII, which would be the lead investigative group in Fast and Furious, began to follow a prolific gun trafficker. He had bought 34 firearms in 24 days, and he and his associates bought 212 more in the next month. The case soon grew to over two dozen straw purchasers, the most prolific of which would ultimately buy more than 600 weapons.[3][5][43] The effort would come to be called Operation Fast and Furious for the successful film franchise, because some of the suspects under investigation operated out of an auto repair store and street raced.[3]

Under the previous Operation Wide Receiver, there had been a formal ATF contract with the cooperating gun dealer and efforts were made to involve the ATF Mexico City Office (MCO) and Mexican law enforcement. Under Operation Fast and Furious, at Newell's insistence the cooperating gun dealers did not have contracts with ATF, and MCO and Mexican police were left in the dark.[1]

According to internal ATF documents, the operation was initially run in conjunction with the Phoenix DEA Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force (OCDETF).[44] On January 26, 2010, ATF formally applied to the Justice Department in Washington for funding through the OCDETF program. When it won approval and received additional funding, Operation Fast and Furious was reorganized as a Strike Force that included agents from ATF, FBI, DEA, and the ICE component of the Department of Homeland Security, which would be run through the U.S. Attorney's office rather than the ATF. This new Strike Force designation allowed the operation to take advantage of sophisticated surveillance techniques such as federal wiretaps, which would require court orders and interaction from Justice Department officials in Washington, D.C. since federal law requires certain individuals to review evidence and certify the necessity of such techniques.[45]

The dealers involved became concerned as months went by and the same individuals they reported to ATF as suspected straw purchasers returned and repeatedly bought identical weapons. As they later told the DOJ OIG, their previous experience was that after they reported a suspected straw to ATF, they did not see the straw again unless subpoenaed to testify against the straw at trial.[1] One cooperating dealer expressed his concerns in a series of emails in April and June 2010 to GS David Voth, who assured the dealer that ATF was monitoring the suspects using a variety of techniques that he could not discuss in detail.[14]

The tactic of letting guns walk, rather than interdicting them and arresting the buyers, led to controversy within the ATF.[5][46] As the case continued, several members of Group VII, including John Dodson and Olindo Casa, became increasingly upset at the tactic of allowing guns to walk. Their standard Project Gunrunner training was to follow the straw purchasers to the hand-off to the cartel buyers, then arrest both parties and seize the guns. But according to Dodson, they watched guns being bought illegally and stashed on a daily basis, while their supervisors, including David Voth and Hope MacAllister, prevented the agents from intervening.[3]

However, other accounts of the operation insist that ATF agents were prevented from intervening not by ATF officials, but rather by federal prosecutors with the Attorney General's office, who were unsure of whether the agents had sufficient evidence to arrest suspected straw-buyers.[47] According to some reports, many agents insisted they were prevented from making arrests because prosecutors were unwilling to engage in what could become a potentially contentious political battle over Second Amendment rights during an election year, particularly given the difficult nature of prosecuting straw buyers, and the weak penalties associated with it, even if successful.[47] Instead, prosecutors instructed ATF agents not to make arrests, but rather continue collecting evidence in order to build a stronger case. One tactic proposed for doing so was a wiretap of suspected straw-buyers, in an attempt to link the suspects to criminal activities taking place on the Mexican side of the border.[47] Between March 20 and July 30, 2010, nine wiretaps were sought and approved by Justice Department officials, resulting in a significant delay in concluding the case.[1]:247,274

One of the central targeted individuals was Manuel Fabian Celis-Acosta.[45] By December 2009, Celis-Acosta was being investigated by the ATF, which had placed a secret pole camera outside his Phoenix home to track his movements. Around this time, apparently by chance, ATF agents discovered Celis-Acosta was also a potential criminal target of the DEA, which was operating a wire room to monitor live wiretaps in order to track him. On April 2, 2010, Celis-Acosta was arrested on possession of cocaine and found in possession of a weapon purchased by Uriel Patino, who had already purchased at least 434 guns from cooperating gun dealers in the Phoenix area. By this time about a dozen ATF agents regularly surveilled Celis-Acosta as he recruited 20 friends and family to buy guns for him and regularly traveled to Texas to obtain funds from cartel associates to purchase firearms. On May 29, 2010, Celis-Acosta was detained in Lukeville, Arizona with 74 rounds of ammunition and 9 cell phones. He was then released by the chief ATF investigator on Fast and Furious, Hope MacAllister, after he promised to cooperate with her to find two specific Sinaloa cartel associates. After the redetention and arrest of Celis-Acosta in February 2011, the ATF learned that the associates they were after were FBI/DEA paid informants, and one of them was Celis-Acosta's financier. Since they were informants, they were unindictable under Operation Fast and Furious.[45][48][49][50][51]

Later, the DOJ inspector General concluded: "We did not find persuasive evidence that agents sought to seize firearms or make arrests during the investigative stage of the case and were rebuffed by the prosecutor. …We found that the lack of seizures and arrests was primarily attributable to the pursuit of a strategic goal shared by both the [Phoenix] ATF and the U.S. Attorney's Office—to eliminate a trafficking organization—and the belief that confronting subjects and seizing firearms could compromise that goal."[1]


Weapons bought by Fast and Furious suspect Uriel Patino, seized by Border Patrol and Tucson ATF agents on the Tohono O'odham Reservation from a vehicle headed toward the Mexican border, February 20, 2010.[1]
By June 2010, suspects had purchased 1,608 firearms at a cost of over US$1 million at Phoenix-area gun shops. At that time, the ATF was also aware of 179 of those weapons being found at crime scenes in Mexico, and 130 in the United States.[8] As guns traced to Fast and Furious began turning up at violent crime scenes in Mexico, ATF agents stationed there also voiced opposition.[3]

On the evening of December 14, 2010, U.S. Border Patrol agent Brian Terry and others were patrolling Peck Canyon, Santa Cruz County, Arizona, 11 miles from the Mexican border. The group came across five suspected illegal immigrants. When they fired non-lethal beanbag guns, the suspects responded with their own weapons, leading to a firefight. Terry was shot and killed; four of the suspects were arrested and two AK-pattern rifles were found nearby.[3] The Attorney General's office was immediately notified of the shooting incident by email.[52] The rifles were traced within hours of the shooting to a Phoenix store involved in the Fast and Furious operation, but the bullet that killed Terry was too badly damaged to be conclusively linked to either gun.[3] Acting Deputy Attorney General Gary Grindler and Deputy Chief of Staff Monty Wilkinson were informed about the guns, but they didn't believe the information was sufficiently important to alert the Attorney General about it or to make any further inquiry regarding the development.[1]:297

After hearing of the incident, Dodson contacted ATF headquarters, ATF's chief counsel, the ATF ethics section and the Justice Department's Office of the Inspector General, none of whom immediately responded. He and other agents then contacted Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa (R–IA), ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, who would become a major figure in the investigation of "gunwalking". At the same time, information began leaking to various bloggers and Web sites.[3]

On January 25, 2011, Burke announced the first details of the case to become officially public, marking the end of Operation Fast and Furious. At a news conference in Phoenix, he reported a 53-count indictment of 20 suspects for buying hundreds of guns intended for illegal export between September 2009 and December 2010. Newell, who was at the conference, called Fast and Furious a "phenomenal case," while denying that guns had been deliberately allowed to walk into Mexico.[3][12]

Altogether, about 2,000 firearms were bought by straw purchasers during Fast and Furious.[1]:203[3] These included AK-47 variants, Barrett .50 caliber sniper rifles, .38 caliber revolvers, and FN Five-sevens.[41] As of October 20, 2011, 389 had been recovered in the US and 276 had been recovered in Mexico. The rest remained on the streets, unaccounted for.[15] As of February 2012, the total number of recovered firearms was 710.[1]:203 Most of the guns went to the Sinaloa Cartel, while others made their way to El Teo and La Familia.[2][32]

Although most weapons were purchased by suspects under investigation by the program, there have been reports of at least one instance of ATF agents being directly involved in the transfer of weapons. On April 13, 2010, ATF Agent John Dodson, with assistance from Agents Casa and Alt, directed a cooperating straw purchaser to give three guns to Isaiah Fernandez, a suspected gun trafficker, and had taped the conversations without prosecutor approval.[47]

After being instructed by his superiors to obtain approval from prosecutors (albeit retroactively), Dodson's proposal was later rejected by his immediate superior David Voth, although he later received permission from Voth's supervisor after submitting a written proposal for the program. On June 1, 2010, Dodson used $2,500 of ATF funds to purchase six AK Draco pistols from local gun dealers, which he then gave to Mr. Fernandez, who reimbursed him for the expense of the guns, plus $700 for his assistance.[47] Two days later, Agent Dodson went on a scheduled vacation without interdicting the weapons. As a result, the weapons were never recovered, no arrests were ever made, and the case was closed without charges being filed.[47]

According to the DOJ OIG report, Agent Dodson, as the undercover posing as a straw buyer, was not expected to surveil the weapons after hand-off to Fernandez. Other ATF agents followed the weapons to a storage facility; then surveillance was terminated without interdiction.[1] The Fernandez case was dropped from Fast and Furious after it was determined that Fernandez was not connected to Mexican cartels and had ceased buying guns for resale.[1][53]

Aftermath and reaction Edit

Fate of walked guns Edit
Since the end of Operation Fast and Furious, related firearms have continued to be discovered in criminal hands. As reported in September 2011, the Mexican government stated that an undisclosed number of guns found at about 170 crime scenes were linked to Fast and Furious.[54] U.S. Representative Darrell Issa (R–Calif.–49) estimated that more than 200 Mexicans were killed by guns linked to the operation.[55] Reflecting on the operation, Attorney General Eric Holder said that the United States government is "...losing the battle to stop the flow of illegal guns to Mexico,"[56] and that the effects of Operation Fast and Furious will most likely continue to be felt for years, as more walked guns appear at Mexican crime scenes.[57]

In April 2011, a large cache of weapons, 40 traced to Fast and Furious but also including military-grade weapons difficult to obtain legally in the US such as an anti-aircraft machine gun and grenade launcher, was found in the home of Jose Antonio Torres Marrufo, a prominent Sinaloa Cartel member, in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. Torres Marrufo was indicted, but evaded law enforcement for a brief time.[58][59] Finally, on February 4, 2012, Marrufo was arrested by the Mexican Police.[60]

On May 29, 2011, four Mexican Federal Police helicopters attacked a cartel compound, where they were met with heavy fire, including from a .50 caliber rifle. According to a report from the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, this rifle is likely linked to Fast and Furious.[2]

There have been questions raised over a possible connection between Fast and Furious and the death of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent Jaime Zapata on February 15, 2011.[61][62] The gun used to kill Zapata was purchased by Otilio Osorio in the Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex, Texas[63] (outside the area of responsibility for the ATF Phoenix field division[64] which conducted Fast and Furious), and then smuggled into Mexico. Congressional investigators have stated that Osorio was known by the ATF to be a straw purchaser months before he purchased the gun used to kill Zapata, leading them to question ATF surveillance tactics[63] and to suspect a Texas-based operation similar to Fast and Furious.[65]

In addition to Otilio Osorio, a Texas-based drug and gun trafficker, Manuel Barba, was involved in trafficking another of the guns recovered in the Zapata shooting. The timeline of this case, called "Baytown Crew", shows guns were allowed to walk during surveillance that began June 7, 2010. On August 20, 2010, Barba received a rifle later recovered in the Zapata ambush and sent it with nine others to Mexico. The warrant for Barba's arrest was issued February 14, 2011, the day before Zapata was shot.[66] On January 30, 2012, Barba, who claimed to be working with Los Zetas in illegally exporting at least 44 weapons purchased through straw buyers, was sentenced to 100 months in prison.[67]

On November 23, 2012, two firearms linked to the ATF were found at the scene of a shootout between Sinaloa cartel members and the Mexican military. One of the weapons was an AK-47 type rifle trafficked by Fast and Furious suspect Uriel Patino, and the other was an FN Herstal pistol originally purchased by an ATF agent. Mexican beauty queen Maria Susana Flores Gamez and four others were killed.[68][69]

One of the nineteen guns Mexican authorities said they found at the hideout of Joaquin Guzman aka El Chapo, after his January 2016 capture, was associated with the Fast and Furious operation. The Justice Department confirmed that the .50-caliber rifle was bought in July 2010 in a straw purchase by someone not known to the ATF at the time, and stated the weapon was not associated with any other crime. In a letter to congressional leaders, Assistant Attorney General Peter Kadzik, head of the Justice Department's legislative affairs office, wrote, "ATF and the department deeply regret that firearms associated with Operation Fast and Furious have been used by criminals in the commission of violent crimes, particularly crimes resulting in the deaths of civilians and law enforcement officials."[70][71]

Investigations and fallout Edit
In the U.S. Congress, Representative Darrell Issa (R–CA–49), chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, and Senator Chuck Grassley (R–IA), ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, have been leading investigations of "gunwalking" operations.[72] There have also been investigations by the United States Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General and others.

2011 Edit
On January 27, 2011, Grassley wrote a letter to ATF Acting Director Kenneth E. Melson requesting information about the ATF-sanctioned sale of hundreds of firearms to straw purchasers. The letter mentioned a number of allegations that walked guns were used in the fight that killed Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry.[73] A second letter from Grassley on January 31 accused the ATF of targeting whistleblowers.[74]

On February 4, 2011, after review and comment from dozens of officials in the Justice Department Criminal Division, the Office of the Deputy Attorney General, the U.S. Attorney's Office in Phoenix, and ATF Headquarters,[1]:332 Assistant Attorney General Ronald Weich sent a response to Grassley regarding his two letters. Weich said claims "...that (the) ATF ‘sanctioned’ or otherwise knowingly allowed the sale of assault weapons to a straw purchaser who then transported them to Mexico [are] false. ATF makes every effort to interdict weapons that have been purchased illegally and prevent their transportation to Mexico.”[75][76] On February 28, Attorney General Eric Holder requested that the Department of Justice's Inspector General begin an investigation of Fast and Furious.[77]

On March 22, 2011, President Barack Obama appeared on Univision and spoke about the "gunwalking" controversy. He said that neither he nor Attorney General Holder authorized Fast and Furious. He also stated, "There may be a situation here in which a serious mistake was made, and if that's the case then we'll find out and we'll hold somebody accountable."[78]

On May 3, 2011, Attorney General Holder testified to the House Judiciary Committee that he did not know who approved Fast and Furious, but that it was being investigated. He also stated that he "probably heard about Fast and Furious for the first time over the last few weeks,"[79] a claim which would later be questioned[80][81][82] as explained below.

In June, ATF Agent Vince Cefalu, who helped to publicize Fast and Furious, was served with termination papers, in a move by the agency he described as politically motivated retaliation. He had been at odds with ATF management since he filed a complaint over tactics in an unrelated case in 2005. The ATF denied that the firing was retaliation, and Cefalu's termination letter noted that he leaked documents to the Internet and showed a "lack of candor" in other operations.[83]

On June 14, 2011, a preliminary joint staff report was released by Representative Issa and Senator Grassley.[11] Among the findings: agents were told to stand down rather than interdict weapons, they complained about the strategy and were ignored, and Fast and Furious led to increased violence and death in Mexico.[84] Agents were panicked, certain that "someone was going to die".[85]

Representative Issa continued to hold hearings in June and July where ATF officials based in Phoenix and Mexico, and at headquarters in Washington, testified before the committee.[86] ATF agent John Dodson stated that he and other agents were ordered to observe the activities of gun smugglers but not to intervene. He testified:[87][88]

Over the course of the next 10 months that I was involved in this operation, we monitored as they purchased hand guns, AK-47 variants, and .50 caliber rifles almost daily. Rather than conduct any enforcement actions, we took notes, we recorded observations, we tracked movements of these individuals for a short time after their purchases, but nothing more. Knowing all the while, just days after these purchases, the guns that we saw these individuals buy would begin turning up at crime scenes in the United States and Mexico, we still did nothing. ...

I cannot begin to think of how the risk of letting guns fall into the hands of known criminals could possibly advance any legitimate law enforcement interest.

A second joint staff report was released by the Republicans on July 26.[41]

In August, three important Fast and Furious supervisors were transferred to new management positions at ATF headquarters in Washington: William Newell and David Voth, field supervisors who oversaw the program from Phoenix, and William McMahon, an ATF deputy director of operations. The transfers were initially reported as promotions by the Los Angeles Times, but the ATF stated that they did not receive raises or take on greater responsibilities.[72][89] In late August, it was announced that Acting ATF Director Melson had been reassigned to the Justice Department, and U.S. Attorney Burke announced his resignation after being questioned by Congressional investigators earlier that month.[90]

In October, documents showing that Attorney General Holder's office had been sent briefings on Fast and Furious as early as July 2010, prompted questions about his May statement that he wasn't sure of the exact date, but had known about it for only a few weeks. The briefings were from the National Drug Intelligence Center and Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer. The Justice Department said that those briefings were about a different case started before Holder became Attorney General, and that while he had known about Fast and Furious, he didn't know the details of the tactics being used.[82]

On October 31, 2011, after the release of subpoenaed documents, Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer stated he found out about gunwalking in Operation Wide Receiver in April 2010, and that he wished he had alerted the deputy or the attorney general at the time.[91][92] The following day, in testimony before the Senate Judicial Committee in a hearing on International Organized Crime, when asked if he had reviewed the letter before it was sent to Senator Charles Grassley on February 4, 2011, denying gunwalking, Breuer replied, "I cannot say for sure whether I saw a draft of the letter that was sent to you. What I can tell you, Senator, is that at that time I was in Mexico dealing with the very real issues that we're all so committed to."[93]

On November 8, 2011, Holder stated for the first time in Congressional testimony that "gunwalking" was used in Fast and Furious. He remarked that the tactic is unacceptable, and that the operation was "flawed in its concept and flawed in its execution". He further stated that his office had inaccurately described the program in previous letters sent to Congress, but that this was unintentional. Reiterating previous testimony, he said that he and other top officials had been unaware that the "gunwalking" tactic was being used. Holder stated that his staff had not showed him memos about the program, noting, "There is nothing in any of those memos that indicates any of those inappropriate tactics that are of concern. Those things were not brought to my attention, and my staff, I think, made the correct decision in that regard."[80][94][95]

That same month, ex-US Attorney Burke admitted to leaking sensitive documents about ATF agent and whistleblower Dodson. Senator Grassley expressed concern that the Justice Department was using Burke as a scapegoat to protect higher officials and vowed to continue his probe.[96]

On December 2, 2011, the Justice Department formally withdrew its statement from February 4, 2011, denying gunwalking due to inaccuracies.[97]

Later that month, documents showed that some ATF agents discussed using Fast and Furious to provide anecdotal cases to support controversial new rules about gun sales. The regulation, called Demand Letter 3, would require 8,500 firearms dealers in Arizona, California, New Mexico and Texas that "have a significant number of crime guns traced back to them from Mexico" to report multiple rifle sales.[98]

2012 Edit
Investigations by Congress and the DOJ Inspector General continued into 2012. In January, Patrick Cunningham, who was the criminal division chief at the Phoenix office of the U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of Arizona and has since resigned, asserted his innocence and his constitutional right against self-incrimination to avoid testifying.[99] Cunningham worked directly under Burke during Fast and Furious. He was subpoenaed because of the role he might have played in the operation, and in the letter sent from the DOJ to Senator Grassley in February 2011 that claimed the ATF did not allow weapons to be trafficked to Mexico.[100]

On January 31, 2012, Democrats on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee released a report titled, "Fatally Flawed: Five Years of Gunwalking in Arizona".[36] The report concluded that there was no evidence of involvement by high-ranking appointees at the Justice Department in "gunwalking". Rather, Operation Fast and Furious was just one of four such operations conducted over five years during the Bush and Obama administrations, and was only "the latest in a series of fatally flawed operations run by ATF agents in Phoenix and the Arizona U.S. Attorney's Office".[101]

In May, it was reported that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Office of Inspector General had begun to investigate Fast and Furious, with a report expected in October. The DHS had Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents assigned to the operation after becoming involved in late 2009.[102]

On May 3, 2012, Congressman Issa released a memorandum to the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform that included a draft of a resolution to hold Attorney General Holder in contempt.[103] In the memo, Issa described the connection between Operation Fast and Furious and the OCDETF program since at least January 2009, which would involve multiple executive agencies including the ATF, DOJ, DEA, FBI, ICE, and DHS. He questioned how, why, or if oversight by high level Justice Department did not occur in such an important case. He further described the tragic death of Brian Terry, the whistleblowers and their mistreatment, and the damage the operation had to US-Mexico relations.

On June 7, 2012, under the threat of being held in contempt of Congress for not turning over additional requested documents, Attorney General Holder appeared at his seventh Congressional hearing, where he continued to deny knowledge of "gunwalking" by high-level officials. By then, the Justice Department had turned over more than 7,000 pages of documents.[104]

During the June 12, 2012, Senate hearing, Eric Holder stated, "If you want to talk about Fast and Furious, I'm the Attorney General that put an end to the misguided tactics that were used in Fast and Furious. An Attorney General who I suppose you would hold in higher regard was briefed on these kinds of tactics in an operation called Wide Receiver and did nothing to stop them—nothing. Three hundred guns, at least, walked in that instance." Holder cited a briefing paper on "Wide Receiver"; the DOJ Office of Legislative Affairs later clarified that the briefing paper was about the Fidel Hernandez case, prepared for Holder's predecessor, U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey before his meeting with Mexican Attorney General Mora on November 16, 2007.[35] The Hernandez Case had ended October 6, 2007,[105] before Mukasey entered office November 9, 2007.[106] The office further explained, "As Attorney General Holder also noted in his testimony, and as we have set forth in prior correspondence and testimony, he took measures and instituted a series of important reforms designed to ensure that the inappropriate tactics used in Fast and Furious, Wide Receiver, Hernandez, and other matters about which the Department has informed Congress are not repeated."[35] The later DOJ OIG investigation concluded "Attorney General Mukasey was not briefed about Operation Wide Receiver or gun 'walking,' but on a different and traditional law enforcement tactic that was employed in a different case."[1]

On June 20, 2012, the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee voted along party lines to recommend that Holder be held in contempt. At issue were 1,300 pages of documents that had not been turned over to Congress by the DOJ. Earlier that day, President Obama had invoked executive privilege over those documents, marking the first time the privilege has been asserted during his presidency.[21][22] Issa contends that the Obama executive privilege claim is a cover-up or an obstruction to the congressional probe. Issa said the department has identified "140,000 pages of documents and communications responsive to the committee's subpoena".[107]

On June 28, 2012, Holder became the first sitting member of the Cabinet of the United States to be held in criminal contempt of Congress by the House of Representatives for refusing to disclose internal Justice Department documents in response to a subpoena. The vote was 255–67 in favor, with 17 Democrats voting yes and a large number of Democrats walking off the floor in protest and refusing to vote. A civil contempt measure was also voted on and passed, 258–95. The civil contempt vote allows the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform to go to court with a civil lawsuit to look into the US Justice Department's refusal to turn over some of the subpoenaed documents and to test Obama's assertion of executive privilege. Holder dismissed the votes as "the regrettable culmination of what became a misguided—and politically motivated—investigation during an election year," and the White House called it "political theater rather than legitimate congressional oversight".[19][20] The National Rifle Association controversially lobbied for Holder to be held in contempt.[108][109][110][111][112][113]

In June 2012, a six-month-long investigation by Fortune magazine stated that the ATF never intentionally allowed guns to fall into the hands of Mexican drug cartels, in contrast to most other reports. Agents interviewed during the investigation repeatedly asserted that only one isolated incident of "gunwalking" ever occurred, and was performed independently by ATF Agent John Dodson (who later appeared on CBS News as a whistleblower to denounce the gunwalking scandal) as part of an unauthorized solo action outside the larger Fast and Furious operation.[47]

On July 31, 2012, the first part of a new three-part report, Fast and Furious: The Anatomy of a Failed Operation,[37] was released by Republican lawmakers. The report singled out five ATF supervisors for responsibility in Fast and Furious, all of whom had been previously reassigned. The report also said that Fast and Furious resulted from a change in strategy by the Obama Administration. The Justice Department was dismissive of the report, saying that it contained "distortions" and "debunked conspiracy theories," and that "gunwalking" tactics dated back to 2006.[114] DOJ spokeswoman Tracy Schmaler, while critical of the report, did credit it for acknowledging that the idea for "gun walking"—allowing illegal sales of weapons on the border—originated under the Republican administration before Eric Holder took office in 2009. Schmaler noted that Holder moved swiftly to replace the ATF's management and instill reforms.[115] On the same day, ATF Deputy Director William Hoover, who was one of the five blamed in the Congressional report, officially retired.[116] The report included an appendix disputing claims in the Fortune article.[53] Following its publication, Dodson's lawyer wrote the managing editor of Fortune stating the article was "demonstrably false" and that a retraction was in order.[117] After Fortune did not retract the article, Dodson sued for libel on October 12, 2012.[118][119]

On September 19, 2012,[120] the Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz publicly released a 471-page report[1] detailing the results of the Justice Department's own internal investigations. The Inspector General's report, which had access to evidence and interviews with witnesses not permitted in previous Congressional reports, recommended 14 federal officials for disciplinary action, ranging from ATF agents to federal prosecutors involved in the Fast and Furious operation.[120] It found "no evidence" that Attorney General Holder knew about Fast and Furious before early 2011.[121] It found no evidence that previous Attorneys General had been advised about gunwalking in Operation Wide Receiver.[1]

While the OIG report found no evidence that higher officials at the Justice Department in Washington had authorized or approved of the tactics used in the Fast and Furious investigations, it did fault 14 lower officials for related failures, including failures to take note of "red flags" uncovered by the investigation, as well as failures to follow up on information produced through Operation Fast and Furious and its predecessor, Operation Wide Receiver.[120][122] The report also noted ATF agents' apparent frustrations over legal obstacles from the Phoenix Attorney's Office to prosecuting suspected "straw-buyers," while also criticizing the agents' failure to quickly intervene and interdict weapons obtained by low-level suspects in the case.[120] The 14 Justice Department employees were referred for possible internal discipline. The Justice Department's Criminal Division head Lanny Breuer, an Obama administration presidential appointee, was cited for not alerting his bosses in 2010 to the flaws of Operation Wide Receiver.[123] Deputy Assistant Attorney General Jason Weinstein, who was responsible for authorizing a portion of the wiretap applications in Operation Fast and Furious and faulted in the report for not identifying the gunwalking tactics, resigned on the day of the report.[124]

On December 4, 2012, the ATF Professional Review Board delivered its recommendations to high-level ATF managers, who will decide whether to accept them. The recommendations included firing William McMahon, ATF Deputy Assistant Director; Mark Chait, ATF Assistant Director for Field Operations; William Newell, Phoenix ATF Special Agent in Charge; and George Gillett, Newell's second in command. Two additional ATF employees, Phoenix supervisor David Voth and lead agent Hope McAllister, received recommendations for demotion and disciplinary transfer to another ATF post, respectively.[125][126] It was reported the next day that McMahon had been fired. It was also announced that Gary Grindler, Eric Holder's chief of staff who was faulted in the OIG report, would be leaving the Justice Department.[122] Later that month, the family of Brian Terry sued seven government officials and a gun shop involved in Operation Fast and Furious for negligence and wrongful death.[127]

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Woody Harrelson smoked weed during 'brutal’ dinner with Donald Trump

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Suburban St. Louis mall briefly closed during protests



MANCHESTER, Mo. (AP) — A suburban St. Louis Wal-Mart and nearby shopping mall have briefly closed because of protests.The protests are part of an economic boycott effort. It’s organized by black St. Louis faith and civic leaders involved in recent protests over the acquittal in September of white former police officer Jason Stockley of first-degree murder in the death of a black drug suspect.









http://www.nydailynews.com/news/world/o ... -1.3659856
Outrage over fine for 85-year-old dementia patient sitting on bus stop bench
BY CHRISTOPHER BRENNAN
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS Monday, November 27, 2017, 4:14





http://www.nydailynews.com/news/nationa ... -1.3659760

Arlington National Cemtery police investigated for fake beating photo
BY CHRISTOPHER BRENNAN
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS Updated: Monday, November 27, 2017, 2:18 AM




https://theintercept.com/2017/11/26/hon ... testimony/

Members of the Honduran Directorate for the Fight against Drug Trafficking (DLCN) and the Military Police take part in an operation to seize 32 real estate, 15 vehicles and nine commercial companies of six Honduran police officers charged in absentia in New York late last month, in Tegucigalpa on July 14, 2016.The police officers were indicted in a cocaine smuggling and weapons conspiracy linked to a son of the troubled country's former president. The six defendants, aged 39 to 46, were charged a month after Fabio Lobo, son of former Honduran president Porfirio Lobo, pled guilty to conspiring to import cocaine into the United States. US prosecutors say the officers agreed to give cocaine safe passage through Honduras in exchange for nearly $1 million in bribes from purported Mexican drug smugglers, who were in fact undercover US agents. / AFP / ORLANDO SIERRA (Photo credit should read ORLANDO SIERRA/AFP/Getty Images)


TOP U.S.-BACKED HONDURAN SECURITY MINISTER IS RUNNING DRUGS, ACCORDING TO COURT TESTIMONY
Jake Johnston
November 26 2017, 8:29 a.m.
Photo: Orlando Sierra/AFP/Getty Images
THE HONDURAN MINISTER of security, who was intimately involved in solidifying the 2009 coup, is tied up in drug trafficking, according to testimony from a Mexican drug-trafficker-turned-Drug-Enforcement-Agency-informant in U.S. court.

In November 2016, as the world’s attention was fixated on the surprise election of Donald Trump as president of the United States, two nephews of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro were found guilty on drug trafficking charges. The conviction was another feather in the cap of U.S. prosecutors who have been targeting the Venezuelan government with corruption and drug trafficking investigations.

But in the South Florida courtroom, the testimony of José Santos Peña also implicated Julián Pacheco Tinoco, a former Honduran military official with long ties to the U.S. security apparatus.

A U.S. prosecutor asked the informant about a meeting in Honduras he had participated in a few years earlier. The purpose of the meeting with Honduras’s current security minister and then head of military intelligence Pacheco Tinoco was “so that he could give me help to receive shipments from Colombia to Honduras,” the informant told the court.

“What type of shipments?” the prosecutor asked.

“Cocaine,” the informant clarified.

According to the prosecution, one of the defendants in the case had deleted from his Samsung phone chat records and contact information bearing Pacheco’s name. But the allegation that the top security official of one of the United States’s closest regional allies was involved in drug trafficking was treated as a nonevent in Washington; not a single major media story mentioned the DEA informant’s testimony.

In March 2017, this time in a New York courtroom, Pacheco’s name would once again come up. More details of his and other Honduran government officials’ alleged involvement in drug trafficking were revealed.

Today, Pacheco remains the minister of security, in charge of the entire Honduran national police force. With hundreds of millions of dollars of U.S. assistance pouring into Honduras’s security forces, Pacheco is one of the most important players in the country’s security and counternarcotics cooperation with the United States.

In an e-mailed statement, Tim Rieser, the foreign policy aide to Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., said the senator is concerned with the allegations, but that more facts are needed. Leahy “believes the State Department should be looking at this carefully because the Security Minister needs to be someone of unimpeachable integrity,” Rieser wrote.

With future funding for Honduras threatened by some members of Congress — including Leahy — Pacheco was in Washington, D.C., earlier this month. It wasn’t the first time he had made a trip to protect the U.S.-Honduran relationship.

Authorities incinerate a load of cocaine seized to two Colombian nationals navigating along the Caribbean, in Tegucigalpa, on July 11, 2017. / AFP PHOTO / ORLANDO SIERRA (Photo credit should read ORLANDO SIERRA/AFP/Getty Images)
Authorities incinerate a load of cocaine seized to two Colombian nationals navigating along the Caribbean, in Tegucigalpa, on July 11, 2017. Photo: Orlando Sierra/AFP/Getty Images
PACHECO’S CONNECTION WITH the United States dates back decades. As a 21-year-old cadet, Pacheco traveled to the U.S. military’s School of the Americas in Fort Benning, Georgia. In September 1979, he graduated from a course on counterinsurgency tactics.

With the election of Ronald Reagan the following year, Honduras took on new prominence as a U.S. ally and as a staging ground for covert American support for the contra right-wing insurgency in Nicaragua. U.S. security aid to the country skyrocketed, as did allegations that the Honduran military was involved in drug trafficking and in dozens of disappearances of activists. U.S. diplomats largely looked the other way.

In the spring of 1986, at the height of the United States’s Cold War efforts in Central America, Pacheco was once again at the School of the Americas. This time, having been promoted to lieutenant, Pacheco graduated from a course in psychological operations.

After the Berlin Wall fell, the Pentagon changed tack in Central America and began focusing more on the “War on Drugs.”

In April 1988, the most notorious Honduran trafficker at the time, Juan Ramón Matta Ballesteros, was arrested and sent to the United States. As a key interlocutor between the Medellin Cartel in Colombia and Mexican traffickers, Ballesteros had compromised the highest levels of the Honduran military and government. He had also been a U.S. ally and owned a CIA-linked airline that had funneled weapons to the Nicaraguan contras – while sending drugs north.

Honduras’s constitution barred extradition, but working with rogue elements in the Honduran military, U.S. Marshal agents facilitated the capture of Matta Ballesteros. He was brought to the Dominican Republic, where he was officially turned over to U.S. authorities. The Honduran military officers who participated in the rendition were eventually criminally charged in their home country.

The following year, the United States invaded Panama, turning on another erstwhile ally involved in drug trafficking, Gen. Manuel Noriega. Noriega himself was head of military intelligence before becoming president and had been “our man in Panama,” receiving regular CIA payments for decades. Anyone – no matter their criminal record – could be a U.S. ally. That is, until they weren’t.

In Honduras, shifting U.S. priorities, a decrease in funding, and the arrest of Matta Ballesteros pushed the military into the background — at least for a little while. In June 2009, a military coup d’état ousted left-leaning elected president, Manuel Zelaya, who was dropped off in Costa Rica in his pajamas.

With relations tested, and the U.S. having temporarily suspending security assistance, then-Col. Pacheco Tinoco was sent to Washington, D.C., by the head of the Honduran armed forces. His mission was to convince the United States that the military acted properly, that there was no coup.

He met with senior State Department officials at the Old Ebbitt Grill near the White House and with congressional offices on Capitol Hill. He also met with a retired U.S. general who headed the Pentagon’s Center for Hemispheric Defense Studies and who allegedly helped facilitate meetings for Pacheco.

A continued relationship was a geostrategic interest of both militaries.

Later that summer, when Zelaya snuck back into Honduras and took refuge at the Brazilian embassy, U.S. diplomats intervened to ensure it was Pacheco who acted as “the key point of contact.”

Zelaya was not restored to office. In November of that year, the U.S. ended up backing controversial elections that were boycotted by opposition groups and considered illegitimate by most of the region’s governments. With the election, the coup was consolidated, as was the Honduran military’s return to political prominence. The declared winner of the election was Porfirio “Pepe” Lobo of the National Party, which had strong, historic ties to the nation’s military. Pacheco was named director of military intelligence.

The most prominent coup leaders from within the military were removed, and “in general,” wrote the U.S. ambassador, “respected officers have been promoted to positions of importance.” The shakeup would allow “the U.S. to begin to initiate a careful process of reengagement with the Honduran military,” the ambassador wrote to a host of intelligence agencies and other government agencies in Washington.

Honduran Security Minister Julian Pacheco prepares to deliver a press conference in Tegucigalpa, on March 7, 2017. Pacheco denied on Tuesday the accusations made by a former Honduran drug lord currently being held in the United States, of collaborating with drug trafficking. / AFP PHOTO / ORLANDO SIERRA (Photo credit should read ORLANDO SIERRA/AFP/Getty Images)
Honduran Security Minister Julian Pacheco prepares to deliver a press conference in Tegucigalpa, on March 7, 2017. Pacheco denied on Tuesday the accusations made by a former Honduran drug lord currently being held in the United States, of collaborating with drug trafficking. Photo: Orlando Sierra/AFP/Getty Images
SINCE THEN, MORE and more evidence has emerged linking senior Honduran officials to drug trafficking. In 2015, Pepe Lobo’s son, Fabio, was arrested in Haiti and quickly sent to the United States. To take down Fabio, U.S. prosecutors again relied on the work of Santos Peña, the Mexican DEA informant. More importantly, in late 2013 Devis Leonel Rivera Maradiaga, the infamous leader of the Honduran criminal organization the Cachiros, quietly reached out to the DEA and began cooperating.

In early March 2017, Maradiaga took the stand during Fabio’s ongoing trial. He told the court that he had given bribes to Pepe Lobo during his 2009 presidential campaign. He also described a meeting with Pepe, Fabio, and others at the president’s residence.

“[Pepe] said not to worry,” Maradiaga testified, “that if anything were to happen that we should talk to Juan Gómez, that Juan Gómez in turn would talk to [Fabio Lobo], and then [Fabio Lobo] would get in touch with General Pacheco Tinoco.”

Before his assassination in 2015, Gómez was governor of Colón, a rural Honduran department at the heart of the Cachiros’s drug trafficking enterprise. During the mid-2000s, when the enterprise began to boom, Pacheco led a military battalion stationed there. He and Gómez met nearly every week.The day of one of their meetings, Fabio called Pacheco from his father’s house and told him he would come by later that day, according to Maradiaga.

Maradiaga and Fabio became close. Maradiaga told prosecutors that he considered Fabio a member of the Cachiros. In the fall of 2013, just before beginning his cooperation with the DEA, Maradiaga told Fabio of an incoming shipment of more than 1,000 kilos of cocaine. “I knew that having him with me, everything would go well and I felt better supported if I was with the president’s son,” he testified. With his security detail of military police officers, Fabio drove to Tocoa, in Colón, to meet the shipment.

Maradiaga claims to have paid Fabio $50,000. “He asked me whether I could pay him a little bit more because he needed to give him — give more money to the boss, and I knew who that was,” Maradiaga testified. The boss was “General Pacheco,” he said.

In June 2014, Fabio and Maradiaga met at a body shop in San Pedro Sula, Honduras’s second city. A white Hummer was in the shop and Maradiaga suggested that this would be a perfect gift for one of their friends in the police. Fabio allegedly called Pacheco and sent him a photo of the car.

It was just weeks later when Fabio and the Mexican DEA informant visited Pacheco. The meeting was recorded. “We wanted to come here with something illegal. You know?” the informant began, after exchanging pleasantries, “Of course, we just want your, your authorization and consent.”

“What type of work?” Pacheco asked.

“Um, we want to come here with merchandise, with drugs.”

The minister of security, a licensed attorney, did not fall for the absurdly obvious ruse. “No, it’s not much,” Fabio tried to reassure him. Pacheco excused himself and exited the room.

Less than six months later, the recently elected Juan Orlando Hernández, also of the National Party, named Gen. Pacheco Security Minister. He was the first active-duty military officer to be named to the post. At the request of the U.S. Embassy, and following a strong outcry by human rights groups, Pacheco retired from the military.

Pacheco categorically rejected the “ill-intentioned” and “unfounded” allegations when Maradiaga’s testimony went public. The drug trafficker was attempting to secure favorable treatment from the United States and undermine the Honduran government’s efforts to crack down on criminal activity, Pacheco said.

In September, Fabio Lobo was sentenced to 24 years in prison. “I want to apologize to the government of the United States,” he said, “and especially to my father, who has nothing to do with this.” Now, it may be the current Honduran president, controversially standing for reelection November 26, whose family is in legal trouble.

Maradiaga has turned over to the DEA a recorded conversation he had with Honduran lawmaker Tony Hernández, the brother of President Juan Orlando Hernández. According to Maradiaga’s testimony, the two discussed funneling government monies to a Cachiro-controlled front company in return for bribes.

Last month, the allegations reached the president himself. The New York Times reported that Maradiaga had given U.S. authorities another recording from 2013 in which a drug trafficker said he “made a $250,000 payment intended for Juan Orlando Hernández.”A Hernández representative denied the charges to the Times, and in what was either an incredibly honest or naïve response to a local paper, the president’s chief of staff said:

If we’re going to look at how organized crime has permeated society in general and funneled money, placed deputies, placed judges, various offices, within the attorney general’s office and everywhere, hold on to your seats, because we’re talking about all colors here.

The takeover of the Honduran government hasn’t stopped the United States from continuing its support for Honduras. Earlier this year, White House Chief of Staff John Kelly referred to Hernández as a “great guy” and a “good friend.” Kelly was the head of the Pentagon’s Latin American subsidiary U.S. Southern Command under the Obama administration. Hernández told the press that relations were now “probably better than ever.”

Eager to try to improve its image internationally, the Honduran government has initiated a police reform process with financial support from the United States and other international donors. At least 14 drug trafficking suspects have recently been extradited to the United States.

But the Honduran government appears to be selective regarding which individuals involved in drug trafficking should be handed to U.S. authorities. Last month, it was reported that Ramon Matta Waldurraga had turned himself over to the DEA in August. He is the son of Ballesteros, the Honduran trafficker rendered to the US in 1988.

Pacheco told the press that the government had no arrest warrant or extradition request for Matta Waldurraga, though the United States later unsealed a 2014 indictment on money laundering and drug trafficking charges. Like his father before him, Waldurraga’s testimony threatens to implicate military and political actors across Honduras.

And so the Honduran government remains on the defensive.

TOPSHOT - A man rides a bike past graffiti of Honduran indigenous environmentalist Berta Caceres a year after her murder, in La Esperanza, 180 km west of Tegucigalpa, on March 2, 2017. Caceres, an organizer of the Lenca people, the largest native group in Honduras, was murdered on March 3, 2016 in this city. / AFP PHOTO / ORLANDO SIERRA (Photo credit should read ORLANDO SIERRA/AFP/Getty Images)
A man rides a bike past graffiti of Honduran indigenous environmentalist Berta Caceres a year after her murder, in La Esperanza, west of Tegucigalpa, on March 2, 2017. Photo: Orlando Sierra/AFP/Getty Images
ON MARCH 3, 2016, world-renowned environmental activist Berta Caceres was assassinated. A number of suspects have been arrested, including at least one U.S.-trained member of the Honduran military. But more than a year later, those who laid the groundwork for it remain free.

Caceres was the general coordinator of the National Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras, or COPINH. With Caceres at its head, COPINH had led the struggle against a large hydroelectric project in rural Honduras. The company, COPINH has argued, failed to consult with the local population as required by Honduran law.

The concession for the dam was awarded under the post-coup government in 2010. The company building the dam, DESA, counts some of Honduras’ richest and most powerful as investors.

Blocked from accessing the vast majority of the criminal file, and in the absence of an independent investigation, relatives of Caceres arranged for a group of international human rights lawyers to conduct their own. The report from the International Advisory Group of Experts (GAIPE) was released on October 31 in Tegucigalpa.

The team analyzed many gigabytes of data drawn from cell phones and computers of some of those involved, though it was still just a small portion of the full case file. Still, the report found WhatsApp messages suggesting a well-orchestrated conspiracy to assassinate Caceres that had lasted many months. The Honduran government had been sitting on the evidence for more than a year.

The authors of the report presented their findings to members of Congress in Washington, D.C., in early November.

“There is now little doubt about the identities of at least some of the intellectual authors who conceived of and paid for the assassination of Berta Caceres,” Leahy, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee, noted in a statement submitted to the congressional record. Yet, he added, “the Public Ministry has failed to act on this evidence, perhaps because it implicates DESA executives with ties to officials in the Honduran Government.”

The lack of accountability and unwillingness of the Honduran government to properly investigate the crime has put continued U.S. assistance “in jeopardy,” he said.

At the time of the assassination, Pacheco was security sinister. Two weeks after the report was released, more recent WhatsApp messages were leaked. They are allegedly from Pacheco. (Pacheco didn’t respond to a request for comment from The Intercept.)

In the messages, Pacheco complained about protective measures that have been decreed for members of COPINH and the cost to the government, though the vast majority have yet to be implemented. Pacheco referred to those whose lives have been threatened as a “mountain of moochers that take shelter behind the human rights banner.”

“This undermines peace and tranquility,” he continued, “this undermines national and international investment.”

In the coming weeks, the State Department is expected to let congressional appropriators know whether it considers that Honduras has complied with certain anticorruption and drug trafficking obligations attached to the majority of U.S. assistance to the country.

But back in early November, before the WhatsApp messages — and at the same time as Caceres’ family was presenting its findings — Pacheco was also in Washington.

Police officers from the anti-drug squad in Tegucigalpa on October 7, 2010 look after a load of 500 kilos of cocaine seized from traffickers during a joint operation by the Honduran Police, the Army and the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), in Brus Laguna, Mosquitia, Honduras. AFP PHOTO/Orlando SIERRA (Photo credit should read ORLANDO SIERRA/AFP/Getty Images)
Police officers from the anti-drug squad in Tegucigalpa on Oct. 7, 2010 look after a load of 500 kilos of cocaine seized from traffickers during a joint operation by the Honduran Police, the Army and the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), in Brus Laguna, Mosquitia, Honduras. Photo: Orlando Sierra/AFP/Getty Images
TOGETHER WITH MEMBERS of the police reform commission, Pacheco held high-level meetings with State Department staff and key congressional offices. On November 2, the delegation participated in a public event at the partially congressionally funded Woodrow Wilson Center, housed in the Ronald Reagan Building in downtown Washington.

At the very end of the two-hour event, an attendee, Christiam Sánchez, confronted Pacheco over his alleged role in drug trafficking. Pacheco “should be presenting his resignation and making himself available to authorities that are part of the investigation,” Sánchez said to the packed room. “How can you continue to be a part of the police reform process?” he asked Pacheco.

“I was serving the son of the ex-president,” Pacheco said about meeting with the now-jailed Fabio and the Mexican DEA informant, “and if I had to, I would do that again.”

“If I were a ‘narco’ like Christiam is saying,” he told the crowd, “I would not be seated here.”

Top photo: Members of the Honduran Directorate for the Fight against Drug Trafficking (DLCN) and the Military Police take part in an operation to seize 32 real estate, 15 vehicles and nine commercial companies of six Honduran police officers charged in absentia in New York late last month, in Tegucigalpa on July 14, 2016. The police officers were indicted in a cocaine smuggling and weapons conspiracy linked to a son of the troubled country’s former president. The six defendants were charged a month after Fabio Lobo, son of former Honduran president Porfirio Lobo, pled guilty to conspiring to import cocaine into the United States. U.S. prosecutors say the officers agreed to give cocaine safe passage through Honduras in exchange for nearly $1 million in bribes from purported Mexican drug smugglers, who were in fact undercover U.S. agents.



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Report: Juneau’s rape kit backlog is ‘one of the worst’





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Philly paying millions to resolve allegations of police misconduct
Updated: NOVEMBER 26, 2017 — 8:50 AM EST504






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Off-duty NYPD detective cuffed after fight at Brooklyn Outback Steakhouse
BY LAURA DIMON
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS Monday, November 27, 2017, 10:02 AM






http://www.publicopiniononline.com/stor ... 895960001/
Former Waynesboro man writes book about what it's really like in the FBI





http://www.mediachannel.org/hoovers-fbi ... th-estate/





Media Channel


Hoover’s FBI and the Fourth Estate
March 12, 2014



Note: In addition to the interview above, we are pleased to be able to offer you the Introduction to Professor Matthew Cecil’s Hoover’s FBI and the Fourth Estate: The Campaign to Control the Press and the Bureau’s Image. Our thanks to the author and the University Press of Kansas for making this content available. Please click HERE to purchase the book.

Introduction

Before the Freedom of Information Act opened up J. Edgar Hoover’s massive archive of meticulously indexed files to researchers in the 1970’s, the FBI enjoyed a unique and lofty position in American society. Hoover and his agents were heroes to many Americans. Tales of the FBI’s infallible laboratory and army of honest and professional agents became part of popular culture. Thanks to movies, television programs, books, magazines, and countless news reports, the FBI was widely considered to be an indispensable government agency. It was not always that way.

Created in the early 1900’s despite a storm of controversy and fear of federal law enforcement, the early FBI, originally known as the Bureau of Investigation, quickly established itself as precisely the corrupt, out-of-control agency critics feared it would be. It was not until the 1930’s that the FBI and Hoover, who was named director in 1924, began a three-decade period of cultural and jurisdictional growth. The arc of FBI power mirrored the arc of Hoover’s own life. Scandal and corruption (some of it enabled by Hoover) had nearly sunk the agency by the time he took over as director in 1924. By the late 1930’s, Hoover had calmed many critics’ fears by removing political cronies, professionalizing the agency, and modernizing its law enforcement techniques. During the 1940’s and 1950’s, Hoover became a ferocious anticommunist, utilizing the awesome power of the FBI to enforce a specific vision of what it meant to be an American. In the 1960’s and early 1970’s, Hoover’s vitality waned and critics became increasingly willing to attack the Bureau’s activities.

Hoover and the FBI first emerged as cultural icons in the mid-1930’s when the public became aware of the Bureau through its high-profile battles with enigmatic outlaws such as John Dillinger. Hoover personified the legendary G-man, and he and the Bureau became media darlings. Dramatic FBI cases became the fodder for newspaper and magazine stories, radio programs, and books. The 1940’s and 1950’s saw Hoover and the Bureau at their most powerful as they rooted out subversion (through both legal and illegal means) and maintained the loyal and outspoken support of a majority of Americans. As Hoover aged, though, his agency failed to shift with the times; the nation had moved beyond the director’s Victorian-era worldview, leaving him and the FBI out of step with society. The Bureau’s demonization of Hoover’s enemies on the Left became increasingly strident and anachronistic as leftists and their antiwar or pro–civil rights messages moved closer to the mainstream. In the years prior to Hoover’s death, public criticism of the FBI, once a dangerous and lonely undertaking, had become increasingly common. Hoover’s passing in 1972, after forty-eight years leading the FBI, eliminated the primary locus of the Bureau’s iconic power and control.

When historians and authors gained access to the FBI’s remarkable trove of information, the Hoover legend immediately began unraveling. A culture of secrecy that had shielded the Bureau from scrutiny for decades was removed, replaced with relative openness and limited public access to the information in the FBI files. Initial forays into the files allowed pioneering FBI scholars to sketch out the framework of what lay behind the Bureau’s public facade and create a timeline of Hoover’s many shameless illegalities and seemingly constant lesser offenses against civil liberties. That reality—of a lawless and uncontrolled Bureau that expended enormous amounts of time and resources policing political thought rather than investigating violations of federal law—confirmed more than six decades of critics’ complaints. Americans came to understand that Hoover, hired to clean up the Bureau, had ultimately transformed the FBI into an American secret police force, even as he convinced the public and many in the news media that he was a trustworthy defender of civil liberties.

It is interesting to consider how, in a nation so proud of its watchdog press, a high-profile federal agency managed to hide the reality of its activities for so long. The answer is as complex as the FBI’s decades-long deception, but it surely includes failings entrenched in the ideology of journalism and in readers’ and viewers’ often uncritical acceptance of news as truth.

For the news-consuming public, particularly during times of national crisis, Hoover’s stellar reputation likely fulfilled some inner need to believe that good people were working hard on their behalf and that better times lay ahead. For ordinary Americans, the question of how government news emerges from the messy process of journalism and public relations was not, and is not, a common topic of concern. Most of the time, news is a commodity consumed without great thought about how it has been produced. An examination of the requirements of news work and of the relationship between public relations messages and news content demonstrates that the production of news, because it involves human beings, is far from the objective ideal that has come to characterize journalists’ defense of their work. Instead, it is a human process that involves myriad choices of what to include, what to leave out, and how to express what is left as a simplified narrative that somehow reflects reality.

What about the journalistic canon of objectivity? As David T. Z. Mindich noted in his study of the development of objective journalism, it is surprising that “years after consciousness was complicated by Freud, observation was problematized by Einstein, perspective was challenged by Picasso, writing was deconstructed by Derrida, and ‘objectivity’ was abandoned by practically everyone outside newsrooms, ‘objectivity’ is still the style of journalism that our newspaper articles and broadcast reports are written in, or against.”

In fact, modern assertions of objective journalism are a twentieth-century phenomenon. Journalism in the early to middle 1800’s was an openly and explicitly partisan or “biased” activity, as newspapers associated with particular individuals or political factions presented their own editorial worldviews. With the advent of the Penny Press in the 1830’s, which relied on advertising rather than subscription revenues, newspapers filled their columns less with editorial matter, with its presumed potential to alienate advertisers, and more with relatively unbiased “news.” The arrival of the Associated Press in 1848 has sometimes been credited with signaling the rise of “objective” journalism. As journalism historian Michael Schudson suggested, however, the defensive journalistic objectivity that exists today did not begin to take shape until after World War I. In spite of minor challenges to the ideology of objectivity, it remains the core of the news paradigm today.

During most of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the objective news paradigm has not been defined by a clear set of guidelines or ethical standards. Objective news is an ideal in which “bias” or a lack of objectivity is minimized. Yet even that watered-down definition, a far cry from the blank-slate arguments of an “objective” scientist, is problematic, according to scholar Robert A. Hackett: “The ideal of objectivity suggests that facts can be separated from opinion or value judgments, and that journalists can stand apart from the real-world events whose truth or meaning they transfer to the news audience by means of neutral language and competent reporting techniques.” In journalistic practice, objectivity has become a “strategic ritual,” a set of established routines that, if applied properly, allows journalists to protect themselves against charges of bias. In practice, a journalist’s concern about how to maintain objectivity has become less a philosophical question than a logistical one. The objectivity journalists speak of and the objectivity they practice may be very different. Though they often speak of “truth” and “reality,” in practice, journalists learn to gather and juxtapose competing truth claims and proclaim the result to be an “objective” representation.

Thus, the process of reporting the news is a product of journalists and sources understanding those established routines, as noted by Richard V. Ericson, Patricia M Baranek, and Janet B. L. Chan in their study of crime news. “Staged performances in both the courtroom and newsroom are packaged as if they are based on more ‘natural’ events and therefore represent unmediated reality,” they wrote. “The realism helps them to constitute the truths of their discourses… as if theirs is not one way of seeing but the way of seeing.” The authors concluded that government news coverage, rather than providing a reflection of reality, often becomes “primarily a public conversation among journalists and government officials with others left to make only occasional utterances and to eavesdrop.” In his study of the media’s role in the emergence and disappearance of the New Left movement in the 1960’s, Todd Gitlin asserted that when considered in the context of law enforcement, that closed conversation ostensibly based on interdependence actually overwhelmingly empowers the police: “When the power to define news is, in effect, turned over to the police, the media are serving to confirm the existing control mechanisms in society.” It is the conventions of journalism that create a power imbalance between media and government, Gitlin said. By adhering to those conventions and routines, journalists “systematically frame the news to be compatible with the main institutional arrangements of the society. Journalists thus sustain the dominant frames through the banal, everyday momentum of their routines.”

Those understandings of the nature of journalism correspond to contemporary accounts during Hoover’s early tenure as director of the FBI. In his 1937 book The Washington Correspondents, Leo Rosten observed reporters in order to describe how they produced and reproduced government officials’ “way of seeing” through their work routines. According to Rosten, the work of reporters covering government was a vocation of “professional reflexes and individual temperament” rather than any application of objectivity:













https://robertscribbler.com/2017/11/27/ ... -underway/





54 Fahrenheit Above Average: Extreme Warming Event For Greenland, Baffin Bay Underway

At the mouth of Baffin Bay just off the West Coast of Greenland today hurricane force wind gusts are blowing in from the south.



This roaring invasion of warm air originates from the Central Atlantic along a latitude line south of the Azores. It climbs hundreds of miles north to where it is intensified between a grinding 975 mb low off Labrador and a massive 1042 mb high squatting over Central Greenland. Temperatures in this warm air mass range from near 50 degrees (F) over Southwestern Greenland to around 40 degrees (F) over the mouth of Baffin Bay. Or between 9 and 36 degrees (F) above normal for this time of year.







(Hurricane force wind gusts are driving a wedge of above freezing air into Baffin Bay and over Western Greenland at a time when these regions should be seeing well below freezing conditions. Image source: Earth Nullschool.)



This warm wind driven air mass is expected to move north over the next 24 to 48 hours. It will steadily blanket both glaciers and areas typically covered with sea ice. And as it does so, it will push temperatures above freezing for large sections of both Baffin Bay and Western Greenland with above 32 F readings progressing as far as the Petermann Glacier.



What this means is that temperatures will likely hit record ranges of up to 54 degrees Fahrenheit above average in some locations near the far northern extent of this expected warm air invasion. Overall, Greenland itself is expected to see 15 degree (F) above average readings for the entire island. This will generate brief surface melt conditions for parts of Greenland during late November.







(Large region of 20 to 30 C, or 36 to 54 F, above average temperatures is predicted to blanket Greenland and the Canadian Archipelago after moving north through Baffin Bay over the next two days. Image source: Global and Regional Climate Anomalies.)



Strong warm air invasions of the Arctic at this time of year are a signal coming from human-forced climate change. As the northern pole darkens with winter, a global warming related phenomena called polar amplification ramps up. In addition, during recent years, we’ve seen warm air slots tend to develop beneath strong ridging features in the upper level Jet Stream. This year, the warm air slots have tended to form over the Bering Sea along the Pacific side of the Arctic and progress northward into the Chukchi. This has resulted in a large zone of ice free waters for a typically frozen region between Alaska and Siberia as warm winds and storm force waves have continuously beat the ice back.



The present warm air invasion for Greenland may be a signal that a similar warm air slot is attempting to develop over Baffin Bay going forward. Or it may be a fluke in the overall pattern. Watch this space.

msfreeh
Level 34 Illuminated
Posts: 7683

Re: George Orwell shake hands with Charles Darwin

Post by msfreeh »

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-peop ... SKBN1F81XS

Fired FBI director James Comey to teach ethics at Virginia college





https://www.aol.com/article/news/2018/0 ... /23339381/


Senator says FBI lost crucial texts tied to Clinton probe

WASHINGTON The Federal Bureau of Investigation has lost about five months worth of text messages between two staffers who worked on probes into former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's emails and possible collusion between Russia and President Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign, according to a Republican lawmaker.



https://www.globalresearch.ca/russiagat ... ry/5626626

Russiagate Has Blown Up in the Face of Its Originators—the FBI ...
Center for Research on Globalization-Jan 20, 2018
It is exactly as I told you. Russiagate is a conspiracy between the FBI, the DOJ, and the Hillary campaign to overturn Donald Trump's election. We have treason committed at the highest levels of the FBI and Department of Justice and the Democratic National Committee. If you believed one word of ...





http://www.euronews.com/2018/01/19/-gan ... d-in-syria

'Gangster jihadist' rapper who married FBI translator killed in Syria

By Emma Beswick

last updated: 19/01/2018



https://gizmodo.com/we-sued-for-roger-a ... 1822194410

We Sued for Roger Ailes' FBI File—Here's What We've Got So Far


A batch of never-before-seen FBI files on late Fox News chief executive Roger Ailes, obtained exclusively by Gizmodo and



http://www.berkeleycopwatch.org

Berkeley Copwatch is hosting a special KNOW YOUR RIGHTS training before the 96 hours of direct action to help people get ready to deal with massive police presence in the streets. We will practice techniques for gathering evidence, challenging racist practices and dealing with police intimidation after the protests are over. The event is free and wheelchair accessible.





http://www.philly.com/philly/columnists ... 80120.html


Pa. State Police shooting case looks ugly under grand jury spotlight |
Updated: JANUARY 20, 2018 — 5:26 AM EST

Two troopers shot and killed a 47-year-old man, Anthony Ardo, who’d been threatening to blow himself up in Lower Mount Bethel Township. A lieutenant called District Attorney John Morganelli to see what he wanted to do. Then a higher-ranking captain got involved. He told Morganelli to buzz off; state cops would investigate the shooting by his officers instead — no ifs, ands, or buts.


Morganelli didn’t take it well: “I think it is a mistake to shut us out,” he warned the captain.

Morganelli put a grand jury on the case. State police, whom the grand jury later dubbed “arrogant,” tried to kill the grand jury probe.

In the end, troopers were cleared of wrongdoing. But the grand jury, in a Dec. 27 report, found a staggering degree of confusion among high-ranking state police over what the 4,300-member-strong department’s policy on police-involved shootings was in the first place.

One high-ranking official told the grand jury that Morganelli had the right to lead the probe. Commissioner Tyree Blocker testified that state police did.

Also, the troopers got preferential treatment from their comrades. They weren’t interviewed until 30 days later and had the chance to review video of the shooting before they were interviewed.




https://rightsanddissent.org/news/group ... r-protest/

Groups seek oversight of NYPD Strategic Response Group’s role in abusive and repressive protest policing and conflation of “anti-terror” and protest

January 16, 2018 by Rights & Dissent




Link du jour

https://www.centralmaine.com/2018/01/19 ... er-record/


http://peopleslawoffice.com



https://www.centralmaine.com/2018/01/20 ... aterville/


Woman’s March in Maine
2018
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Skojs6SYjSg

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=qWrsfwp2PzU


Woman’s March Vermont

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=c5Z5s7T9WNs


https://www.bostonglobe.com/magazine/20 ... l:trending

He just graduated from Harvard. He’s also undocumented. Will he be deported?
Dario Guerrero took his mom to Mexico when she was dying. It cost him his DACA status.





http://www.wsbtv.com/news/national/hot- ... /687310919

More than 1,000 cold-stunned sea turtles found in Florida bay

PUBLISHED: January 20, 2018 at 9:00 pm | UPDATED: January 20, 2018 at 9:10 pm





Blink Tank


https://www.nytimes.com/video/opinion/1 ... grid-click

https://m.youtube.com/watch?list=UUBjh- ... -iFgDK_D5s




https://rightsanddissent.org/news/new-f ... -protests/

With New FOIA Request, Defending Rights & Dissent and National Lawyers Guild Demand Answers About Infiltration of Inauguration Protests

January 11, 2018 by Rights & Dissent



WASHINGTON, D.C.— Defending Rights and Dissent (DRAD) and the National Lawyers Guild (NLG) have once again teamed up to seek information about the Metropolitan Police Department’s (MPD) conduct during Inauguration protests.

Earlier today, the two groups filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request seeking information about the infiltration of protest group DisruptJ20 by MPD, as well as the extent of MPD cooperation with non-law enforcement third parties like Project Veritas.

During the first criminal trials stemming from the J20 protests, Officer Bryan Adelmeyer testified in open court about MPD’s infiltration of protest planning meetings. He also confirmed in testimony that Project Veritas, an ultraconservative and widely discredited organization, did the same. Prosecutors played video footage for the jury during trial that was taken by a member of Project Veritas using a hidden button-camera. Ultimately all six defendants were acquitted by the jury; 188 defendants from the inauguration protests are still awaiting trial.

“MPD’s dragnet of J20 protesters apparently includes video obtained by white supremacists who infiltrated groups planning protected First Amendment activities,” said Maggie Ellinger-Locke, Executive Vice President of the NLG. “We call on the U.S. Attorney to put an end to this practice by dismissing all remaining charges against the 188 other J20 defendants.”

As explained in the FOIA request, MPD must comply with the “Police Investigations Concerning First Amendment Activities Act of 2004.” When asked at trial (and under oath) about his compliance with key components of this Act such as the requirement to obtain written authorization before infiltrating political groups, Officer Adelmeyer responded that he could not recall. The extent of Officer Adelmeyer’s directive was to “study the concerns and issues that are paramount within the anti-establishment community.”

“It is entirely inappropriate for the MPD to deem certain views ‘anti-establishment’ and then gather information on them. Political activism is not a crime and police infiltration of activist groups chills speech and deters political participation, which is why the City Council has explicitly imposed statutory restrictions on investigations of First Amendment protected activity. Officer Adelmeyer’s testimony raises serious questions about whether the MPD is following those restrictions and if they are relying on third parties, who have their own political goals, to evade these prohibitions,” said Chip Gibbons, Policy and Legislative Counsel for DRAD.

The FOIA seeks all unredacted videos, notes, training materials, and other records concerning MPD’s infiltration of DisruptJ20 and its collaboration with far-right organizations, including Project Veritas, Oath Keepers, The Rebel Media, and Media Research Center.

The full request can be read here.






https://ccrjustice.org/home/press-cente ... n-physical

Men Rounded Up in Post-9/11 Sweeps Push Suit Against Warden for Physical, Verbal, Religious Abuse


January 19, 2018, New York – Today, in a case heard by the U.S. Supreme Court last year, the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) urged a federal court to protect the ability of people detained in federal prisons to sue for damages over violence and other abusive treatment. In a June 2017 ruling, the Supreme Court held that high-level federal officials could not be individually sued for their policy of profiling and ultra-restrictive conditions of confinement during the post-9/11 detentions. The Court sent claims against the warden, who allowed physical and other abuse not required by the high-level officials’ policy, back to a lower court to determine whether the case against him may proceed.

The case, Turkmen v. Ashcroft (known in the Supreme Court as Ziglar v. Abbasi), was filed in the Eastern District of New York against prison administrators and high-level Bush officials for their roles in the profiling and abuse of detainees at the Metropolitan Detention Center (MDC) in New York City. In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, hundreds of non-citizen Muslim, Arab, and South Asian men were rounded up solely on the basis of their race, religion, ethnicity, and immigration status. They were held in extremely restrictive confinement and physically and psychologically abused. In sending claims against the warden back to the lower court, the Supreme Court questioned whether the men have the right to sue for damages, because although the Supreme Court had previously allowed such claims by people who were convicted and sentenced to prison, it hadn’t ruled on the distinct question of claims by immigration detainees not convicted of anything.

“It makes no sense that those who are suspected of violating the immigration law should have less recourse for abuse than those who have been convicted of a crime and sentenced to prison,” said Center for Constitutional Rights Senior Staff Attorney Rachel Meeropol. “These men were brutally beaten and harassed in a federal prison. There is no question that a prisoner in the next cell, beaten by the same guards, could sue the warden who allowed it to happen. To deny my clients this last opportunity for justice would be rank discrimination—and leave vulnerable thousands of other immigration detainees—at a time when racist and anti-immigrant violence demands our urgent attention.”

Many of the detained men were held in a specially created maximum security housing unit for months in solitary confinement, prohibited from contact with the outside world, beaten, deprived of sleep, and denied the ability to practice their religion. Upon arrival at MDC, many of the detainees had their faces smashed into a t-shirt pinned to a wall with a picture of the American flag and the words “These colors don’t run” and were told, “Welcome to America.” The blood-smeared shirt hung on the prison wall for months. Ultimately, the men were charged with civil immigration violations, such as overstaying a visa or working without authorization, cleared of any connection to terrorism, and deported.

“The Supreme Court has already allowed the most powerful people responsible for my treatment to evade accountability,” said Benamar Benatta. “If the courts let prison officials off the hook as well, I will have waited 16 years for no justice at all. Those in power will be free not only to profile people based on religion and race, but to assault and torment people while they are held.”

Former MDC Warden Dennis Hasty argued in a brief also to be submitted today that he can’t be held accountable for allowing the plaintiffs to be abused by the guards under his supervision because Bureau of Prisons’ policy requires a warden to “stay his hand” when he hears complaints of abuse. He also argued that he had no responsibility to protect the detainees in his facility because his superiors in the Bureau of Prisons were taking steps to prevent abuse. Meeropol called these arguments “unsupported and implausible” and “frankly shocking.”

Prior to the Supreme Court’s decision, few courts even questioned the idea that federal detainees, just like convicted prisoners, could sue their abusers for money damages, and every appellate judge on the Second Circuit agreed that these claims against Hasty should go forward. The Supreme Court’s June decision already reversed the balance of the historic ruling in the case by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, which had allowed claims to proceed against former Attorney General John Ashcroft, former FBI director Robert Mueller, and former Immigration and Naturalization Service Commissioner James Ziglar for ordering that the men be held on the basis of blatantly discriminatory tips about their race, religion, and ethnicity. Now the remainder of the case hangs in the balance.

The Turkmen plaintiffs are represented by the Center for Constitutional Rights, cooperating attorneys Michael Winger and Alexander A. Reinert, and Covington & Burling, LLP.

The case was first filed in April 2002 and has been working its way through the courts ever since.

Read the briefs filed today here and here. For more information, visit CCR’s case page.


The Center for Constitutional Rights is dedicated to advancing and protecting the rights guaranteed by the United States Constitution and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Founded in 1966 by attorneys who represented civil rights movements in the South, CCR is a non-profit legal and educational organization committed to the creative use of law as a positive force for social change.






https://www.denverpost.com/2018/01/20/b ... -research/

From a remote cabin in the snowy hills above Crested Butte, Billy Barr’s historical records make him an accidental apostle among climate researchers
Year-round citizen scientist’s data provides context for the pros who descend on the Rocky Mountain Biological Lab in summer

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