LOL...as in what's trending in FBI created news
Never saw a headline saying " FBI seeks peaceful end to
occupy movement"
Back in the 1940's through today more than half
the membership of the American Communist Party
were taxpayer funded FBI informants.
Oklahoma City bombing celebrity Timothy McVeigh was a FBI
informant.
1st 1993 World Trade Center bombing organizer Ahmed Salem was
a FBI informant.
2008 Mumbai attack organizer David Headley was a FBI informant.
The Omargh bombing in Ireland also had a FBI informant David Rupert.
Yes the San Bernadino shooters were white.
How dull life would be without FBI agents who are kept in business
with our taxes, eh?
couple of stories
1.
News
Jan 4 2016, 11:44 am ET
http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/fbi ... ng-n489606" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
FBI Seeks 'Peaceful' End to Armed Standoff at Oregon Federal Building
The FBI was leading efforts Monday to bring a "peaceful" end to a standoff with armed protesters who occupied a federal building in rural Oregon.
The group seized the remote Malheur National Wildlife Refuge headquarters Saturday after splintering off from a larger protest about ranchers' rights in the small town of Burns.
2.
FBI Occupy Wall Street Memos Skip Infiltration Of Occupy Cleveland
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/.../fbi-o ... veland_n_2.." onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;.
Jan 8, 2013 - Shaquille Azir, ex-con, bank robber, forger, passer of bad checks, and FBI informant, first visited Occupy Cleveland the night the activists were ...
"Occupy" Movement Was Infiltrated By FBI Informant In Cleveland ...
http://www.thesmokinggun.com/.../fbi/fb ... upy-moveme.." onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;.
May 1, 2012 - 5/2 UPDATE: FBI's confidential informant is unmasked. The federal probe that resulted last night in the arrest of five purported anarchists for ...
FBI Withheld Details of Assassination Plot of Occupy ... - AnonHQ
anonhq.com/fbi-withheld-details-assassination-plot-occupy-houston-move...
Feb 16, 2015 - The Occupy Houston Movement is said to be a subsidiary group of a ... the FBI's withholding of the names of the informants, claiming there is no ...
FBI Withheld Details of Assassination Plot of Occupy Houston ...
news.infoshop.org/police-state/fbi-spying-occupy-houston
Feb 15, 2015 - The FBI was right to withhold records about an alleged murder plot targeting the ... Plot of Occupy Houston Movement to Save Informants ...
the FBI, the Private Sector, and the Monitoring of Occupy Wall Street
http://www.prwatch.org/.../operation-tr ... onitoring-.." onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;.
May 24, 2013 - The FBI Houston information related to the "exploitation" of Occupy ... business sector "tripwire" informants were utilized in the Gainesville area ...
Meet the Guy Who Snitched on Occupy Wall Street to the FBI - Gawker
gawker.com/.../meet-the-guy-who-snitched-on-occupy-wall-street-to-the-fb...
Oct 15, 2011 - The Occupy Wall Street protests have been going on for a month. And it seems ... In a phone interview with us, Ryan denied being an informant.
Cleveland Occupy arrests are the latest in FBI's pattern of ...
http://www.theguardian.com" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false; › US News › FBI
May 28, 2012 - It appears the Occupy Wall Street movement is now worthy of the ... all with the help of the FBI informant dispatched to infiltrate the movement.
Sting nets 5 FBI says plotted to bomb bridge near Cleveland ...
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/sto ... -bomb.../1" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
May 1, 2012 - "The Occupy Movement is a social movement rooted in compassion ... refer to several conversations secretly recorded by the FBI informant in ...
Hacker-Informant "Sabu" Betrayed Anonymous – And ... - Occupy.com
http://www.occupy.com/.../hacker-inform ... anonymous-" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;–-and-n...
May 28, 2014 - Anonymous condemned the court's decision, saying the FBI uses captured informants to "pacify online dissent and snuff out journalistic ...
Brandon Darby - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandon_Darby" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
Darby started working as an FBI informant in November 2007, which Darby ... that the Occupy Wall Street movement is violent, and was organized with the ...
How many FBI informants in the Bundy Militia group in Oregon?
-
msfreeh
- Level 34 Illuminated
- Posts: 7718
How many FBI informants in the Bundy Militia group in Oregon?
Last edited by msfreeh on January 4th, 2016, 12:10 pm, edited 3 times in total.
-
msfreeh
- Level 34 Illuminated
- Posts: 7718
Re: How many FBI informants in the Bundy Militia group in Oregon?
History of the Communist Party USA - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_o ... _Party_USA" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
The Communist Party greatly suffered under the ensuing period of McCarthyism, ... out and, meeting with the expelled delegates, formed the Communist Labor Party on August 30, 1919. ..... Some 1,500 of these "members" were FBI informants.
https://books.google.com/books?id=zCOzq ... gs&f=false" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_o ... _Party_USA" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
The Communist Party greatly suffered under the ensuing period of McCarthyism, ... out and, meeting with the expelled delegates, formed the Communist Labor Party on August 30, 1919. ..... Some 1,500 of these "members" were FBI informants.
https://books.google.com/books?id=zCOzq ... gs&f=false" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
-
msfreeh
- Level 34 Illuminated
- Posts: 7718
Re: How many FBI informants in the Bundy Militia group in Oregon?
also available here in Braille
http://www.occurrencesforeigndomestic.com/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
up to our necks
January 3, 2016 Uncategorized Saudi Arabia, Israel, 9/11, Iran, Hilary, Russia, Bundy, Europe, Islam, gun control, Waco, Malheur, Hammonds, Oath Keepers, 3%, Codrea, Oregon wildlife refuge, affluenza, the CIA and Ukraine, skyscrapers, flash riots and crowd psychology, the spark
up to our necks
Like it or not, we’re all in it up to our necks.
Tweet, Posted by David Codrea at 1/03/2016 07:26:00 PM
[&&]{**}[##]
“Armed protesters, including three sons of a Nevada rancher who battled with the government in 2014, vowed to occupy a federal building in Oregon for ‘as long as it takes,’ as state and federal officials on Sunday sought to defuse the situation,” Fox News, among others, is reporting. It’s a dangerous situation some of us have been following since yesterday’s takeover of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge headquarters following a protest in support of rancher Dwight Hammond and his son Steven.
The Hammonds were convicted of arson after a fire they said they started on their property to burn off wildfire-threatening invasive species inadvertently spread onto federal land, consuming 139 acres. The government charged they were covering up evidence of poaching, and the jury bought the prosecution’s arguments. A new controversy arose after it was ruled the trial court sentence was not harsh enough, and Chief Judge Ann Aiken of the United States District Court for the District of Oregon tacked on an additional five years.
“The Hammond family does not want an armed standoff, and nobody has a right to force one on them,” Oath Keepers told its members. “Since Dwight and Steven Hammond, through their attorney, have made it clear they intend to turn themselves in and serve out the additional time, Oath Keepers cannot, and will not, try to interfere with that decision (peaceable assembly and protest is, of course, fine, but going beyond that against their wishes is not).”
“The 3% of Idaho, 3% of Oregon, The Oregon Constitutional Guard, and PPN organizations in no way condone nor support these actions,” the 3% of Oregon declared in a Facebook press release. “They do not mirror our vision, mission statement, or views in regards to upholding the Constitution, The Rule of Law, or Due Process.”
Also complicating matters for the protesters, some of the locals are scared. And the ranchers at the heart of the dispute, through their lawyer, declared they have nothing to do with the takeover.
Ammond Bundy disagrees with Oath Keepers, says the Hammonds distancing themselves has been coerced after government threats, and has put out a call for people to come to Oregon and support his actions. So now what we have is a serious split between those who do not agree with Bundy’s methods, and an angry backlash against anyone speaking out against his actions, with plenty of name-calling going in both directions.
That schism has to please those who benefit from an opportunity to “divide and conquer,” and that’s very apparent on social media. But here’s the thing — even if you are someone who opposes the action, you’re still affected by it. Like it or not, we’re all in it up to our necks.
That’s because the monopoly of violence “progressives” will use the Oregon occupation to tar everyone who believes in the right to keep and bear arms as an “insurrectionist,” an “extremist” and a “domestic terrorist.” That will be extended to mainstream groups like NRA, always a convenient media punching bag. And the smear job won’t be limited to gun rights defenders. Expect it to cover anyone who espouses “conservative” values. And expect attacks on the Republicans, especially on the presidential candidates.
Don’t be surprised to see some in the GOP reconsider how committed they’re willing to be opposing Obama’s anticipated executive orders. And don’t’ be surprised to see the administration looking to emergency powers to deal not just with the Oregon situation, but to do whatever they think they can get away. Don‘t be surprised to see Democrats, gun-grabber groups and the press cheering it on.
There are still plenty of unknowns, including how many people are actually at the wildlife refuge, and what it is that would induce them to depart. When questioned by CNN, Ammon Bundy spoke in general terms, making it sound like nothing less than the dismantling of the federal Leviathan is what it will take. His colleague John Ritzenheimer sounded more fatalistic, in what could be characterized as a “goodbye” video message to his family.
So what are the administration’s options? Assuming functionaries had their New Years weekends cut short, you can bet they‘re focus-grouping and war-gaming, and weighing scenarios and options. You can also bet special tactical teams are on alert, if not on their way — and if DOJ approaches this as domestic terrorism, the feds will totally marginalize the local sheriff.
They could talk the guys down, although from the rhetoric of the takeover leaders and Bundy’s conviction that he is carrying out the Lord’s will, that doesn’t sound likely. If they do come out, don’t expect the Justice Department to show leniency.
They could lay siege and wait them out, turn off all power and water, and see if a week or two might soften some resolve. On the other hand, depending on how many answer Bundy‘s call, the enforcers could find the greater cause for their concern is amassing outside their perimeter.
The third option would be to go full Waco, making sure the media is kept back so the narrative could be whatever they wanted to put out through a spokesman. It’s been done before.
That’s why an analysis by Mike Vanderboegh on his Sipsey Street Irregulars blog is important for the government (and for all of us) to understand, so that people with access to decision-makers know, in no uncertain terms, the precipitous situation a brutal reaction will produce — for everyone.
If things blow up in Oregon, things could quickly get out of control everywhere, and while we can only imagine what that will look like, the certainty is things would be ugly and prolonged. The government will act and affected people who will not comply will react. It’s an incredibly dangerous situation, where a shot, whether intentional or an “accidental” discharge — and it may not even matter which “side” fires it — could be the “Time’s up” spark that changes all the rules.
Follow us: @Ammoland on Twitter | Ammoland on Facebook
http://www.ammoland.com/2016/01/powder- ... s-a-spark/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
[##]
[Ed.: Watching the first part https://vimeo.com/144459907" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false; of Scott Noble’s documentary film Plutocracy: Divide et Impera (Divide and Rule) last night after I posted, I was struck by the notion that, in at least one case of confrontation, no one knew who fired that fateful first shot. The same was true at Lexington.
More than one person has speculated about the presence of an “agent provocateur”, a paid actor (novel idea, no?), whose sole purpose was to provide the ignition.
I commend the film to you.
I must point out, though, having spent time there, that the name of the county noted, the location of the state capital and a major seat of political involvement in the coal wars, is not “con-a-wha”, but “/kəˈnɔː/ kə-naw or /kəˈnɔːə/ kə-naw-ə”.]
[&&]{**}[##]
From earlier today:
http://waronguns.blogspot.com/2016/01/o ... eport.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false; (David Codrea)
[##]
http://sipseystreetirregulars.blogspot. ... deral.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
[##]
http://www.cnn.com/2016/01/03/us/oregon ... e-protest/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
[##]
http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/mili ... t-36063609" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
[Ed.: Smells like Federal infilitration and COINTELPRO from over on the East Coast.]
[##]
Renewing his emphasis on the need for more gun restrictions, President Obama on Thursday will participate in a live televised town hall meeting to discuss gun violence in America, according to the White House.
[##]
https://www.google.com/search?q=ammon+bundy" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
[##]
See realtime coverage
[##]
http://sipseystreetirregulars.blogspot.com/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
[##]
“… While the Bundy’s stand against the Federal government should be applauded, there is something to be said for picking ones battles, as Karl Denninger notes:
There’s an old saying that I’ve heard many times before — if you think it’s time to take a stand grab your rifle and head out the front door. If you’re the only one out there it’s not time.
The question now is how far the Bundy’s are willing to take this? We can be 100% certain that the multiple federal agencies involved are more than willing to kill to ensure compliance with Federal law…..”
http://www.shtfplan.com/headline-news/f ... d_01032016" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
[&&]{**}[##]
SUNDAY, JANUARY 03, 2016
Knees-up
“The Rise of the Regressives.” Everybody involved in this is beneath contempt.
“A generation of failed politicians has trapped the west in a tawdry nightmare”
“Slouching Toward Global Disaster” Marred by the total lack of judgment in the words “even the most optimistic scenario that brings Hillary Clinton to the White House”.
“Cameron, Osborne and Murdoch back together at mogul’s Christmas knees-up”
“The Misinformation Mess” (Parry)
“Recep Erdoğan: First as Tragedy; second, Farce; third as… Monty Python” “Does Erdogan really intend to eliminate all Kurds from Turkey?” “Erdogan’s ‘Kurdish Disaster’ in the Making”
Bonus points for the fact that Biden’s son has a big seat at the trough!: “Corruption in Ukraine is so bad, a Nigerian prince would be embarrassed”. Maiden remorse in the most awkwardly named ‘country’ in the world, Nudelman-Kaganistan: “Gallup: Ukrainians Loathe the Kiev Government Imposed by Obama”.
The great mystery of the day seems to be the universal simultaneous collapse of professionalism and even marginal competence in politics in the West.
“The tale of a mysterious mound of Iraqi cash seized at the border, and the oddball cast that’s fighting for it” Christian Zionists, who are full of amusing surprises, are speculating in some of the worthless dinars no doubt ‘liberated’ by American soldiers/mercenaries from occupied Iraq.
“Star-Crossed Lovers’ Tale Banned from Israeli Schools”
“Russia Vindicated by Terrorist Surrenders in Syria”
“Surreal: West Mourns Death of Al Qaeda Collaborator in Syrian Airstrike”
“Spying On The Internet Is Orders Of Magnitude More Invasive Than Phone Metadata” It seems we have been misdirected.
“ISIS New Years Eve Terror Plot Story Is Totally Bogus” No more bogus than all the rest of them but the FBI is getting sloppy and arrogant in releasing too many of the ridiculously damning details.
AT 1/03/2016 09:16:00 AM
[&&]{**}[##]
Obama gave military weapons to ISIS and Al Qaeda in Syria and Iraq, and also to Mexican drug criminals through the “Fast and Furious” gunwalking program, but think law-abiding American citizens should be disarmed, and defend their homes by calling for the police, who can take anywhere from 15-22 minutes to respond to a 911 call, steal more from the American people than criminals do using civil forfeiture laws , and after being trained by Israel, murdered more innocent Americans last year than terrorists and mass shooters combined! What is wrong with this picture?
http://whatreallyhappened.com/node/483163#axzz3wCh7G3cw" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
[&&]{**}[##]
http://abcnews.go.com/International/mex ... n-in-room/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
[&&]{**}[##]
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/04/world ... lam-differ" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;?
[Next week’s Q&A: How a small minority of the world’s people managed to insidiously wrest control of the known world.]
http://www.occurrencesforeigndomestic.com/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
up to our necks
January 3, 2016 Uncategorized Saudi Arabia, Israel, 9/11, Iran, Hilary, Russia, Bundy, Europe, Islam, gun control, Waco, Malheur, Hammonds, Oath Keepers, 3%, Codrea, Oregon wildlife refuge, affluenza, the CIA and Ukraine, skyscrapers, flash riots and crowd psychology, the spark
up to our necks
Like it or not, we’re all in it up to our necks.
Tweet, Posted by David Codrea at 1/03/2016 07:26:00 PM
[&&]{**}[##]
“Armed protesters, including three sons of a Nevada rancher who battled with the government in 2014, vowed to occupy a federal building in Oregon for ‘as long as it takes,’ as state and federal officials on Sunday sought to defuse the situation,” Fox News, among others, is reporting. It’s a dangerous situation some of us have been following since yesterday’s takeover of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge headquarters following a protest in support of rancher Dwight Hammond and his son Steven.
The Hammonds were convicted of arson after a fire they said they started on their property to burn off wildfire-threatening invasive species inadvertently spread onto federal land, consuming 139 acres. The government charged they were covering up evidence of poaching, and the jury bought the prosecution’s arguments. A new controversy arose after it was ruled the trial court sentence was not harsh enough, and Chief Judge Ann Aiken of the United States District Court for the District of Oregon tacked on an additional five years.
“The Hammond family does not want an armed standoff, and nobody has a right to force one on them,” Oath Keepers told its members. “Since Dwight and Steven Hammond, through their attorney, have made it clear they intend to turn themselves in and serve out the additional time, Oath Keepers cannot, and will not, try to interfere with that decision (peaceable assembly and protest is, of course, fine, but going beyond that against their wishes is not).”
“The 3% of Idaho, 3% of Oregon, The Oregon Constitutional Guard, and PPN organizations in no way condone nor support these actions,” the 3% of Oregon declared in a Facebook press release. “They do not mirror our vision, mission statement, or views in regards to upholding the Constitution, The Rule of Law, or Due Process.”
Also complicating matters for the protesters, some of the locals are scared. And the ranchers at the heart of the dispute, through their lawyer, declared they have nothing to do with the takeover.
Ammond Bundy disagrees with Oath Keepers, says the Hammonds distancing themselves has been coerced after government threats, and has put out a call for people to come to Oregon and support his actions. So now what we have is a serious split between those who do not agree with Bundy’s methods, and an angry backlash against anyone speaking out against his actions, with plenty of name-calling going in both directions.
That schism has to please those who benefit from an opportunity to “divide and conquer,” and that’s very apparent on social media. But here’s the thing — even if you are someone who opposes the action, you’re still affected by it. Like it or not, we’re all in it up to our necks.
That’s because the monopoly of violence “progressives” will use the Oregon occupation to tar everyone who believes in the right to keep and bear arms as an “insurrectionist,” an “extremist” and a “domestic terrorist.” That will be extended to mainstream groups like NRA, always a convenient media punching bag. And the smear job won’t be limited to gun rights defenders. Expect it to cover anyone who espouses “conservative” values. And expect attacks on the Republicans, especially on the presidential candidates.
Don’t be surprised to see some in the GOP reconsider how committed they’re willing to be opposing Obama’s anticipated executive orders. And don’t’ be surprised to see the administration looking to emergency powers to deal not just with the Oregon situation, but to do whatever they think they can get away. Don‘t be surprised to see Democrats, gun-grabber groups and the press cheering it on.
There are still plenty of unknowns, including how many people are actually at the wildlife refuge, and what it is that would induce them to depart. When questioned by CNN, Ammon Bundy spoke in general terms, making it sound like nothing less than the dismantling of the federal Leviathan is what it will take. His colleague John Ritzenheimer sounded more fatalistic, in what could be characterized as a “goodbye” video message to his family.
So what are the administration’s options? Assuming functionaries had their New Years weekends cut short, you can bet they‘re focus-grouping and war-gaming, and weighing scenarios and options. You can also bet special tactical teams are on alert, if not on their way — and if DOJ approaches this as domestic terrorism, the feds will totally marginalize the local sheriff.
They could talk the guys down, although from the rhetoric of the takeover leaders and Bundy’s conviction that he is carrying out the Lord’s will, that doesn’t sound likely. If they do come out, don’t expect the Justice Department to show leniency.
They could lay siege and wait them out, turn off all power and water, and see if a week or two might soften some resolve. On the other hand, depending on how many answer Bundy‘s call, the enforcers could find the greater cause for their concern is amassing outside their perimeter.
The third option would be to go full Waco, making sure the media is kept back so the narrative could be whatever they wanted to put out through a spokesman. It’s been done before.
That’s why an analysis by Mike Vanderboegh on his Sipsey Street Irregulars blog is important for the government (and for all of us) to understand, so that people with access to decision-makers know, in no uncertain terms, the precipitous situation a brutal reaction will produce — for everyone.
If things blow up in Oregon, things could quickly get out of control everywhere, and while we can only imagine what that will look like, the certainty is things would be ugly and prolonged. The government will act and affected people who will not comply will react. It’s an incredibly dangerous situation, where a shot, whether intentional or an “accidental” discharge — and it may not even matter which “side” fires it — could be the “Time’s up” spark that changes all the rules.
Follow us: @Ammoland on Twitter | Ammoland on Facebook
http://www.ammoland.com/2016/01/powder- ... s-a-spark/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
[##]
[Ed.: Watching the first part https://vimeo.com/144459907" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false; of Scott Noble’s documentary film Plutocracy: Divide et Impera (Divide and Rule) last night after I posted, I was struck by the notion that, in at least one case of confrontation, no one knew who fired that fateful first shot. The same was true at Lexington.
More than one person has speculated about the presence of an “agent provocateur”, a paid actor (novel idea, no?), whose sole purpose was to provide the ignition.
I commend the film to you.
I must point out, though, having spent time there, that the name of the county noted, the location of the state capital and a major seat of political involvement in the coal wars, is not “con-a-wha”, but “/kəˈnɔː/ kə-naw or /kəˈnɔːə/ kə-naw-ə”.]
[&&]{**}[##]
From earlier today:
http://waronguns.blogspot.com/2016/01/o ... eport.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false; (David Codrea)
[##]
http://sipseystreetirregulars.blogspot. ... deral.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
[##]
http://www.cnn.com/2016/01/03/us/oregon ... e-protest/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
[##]
http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/mili ... t-36063609" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
[Ed.: Smells like Federal infilitration and COINTELPRO from over on the East Coast.]
[##]
Renewing his emphasis on the need for more gun restrictions, President Obama on Thursday will participate in a live televised town hall meeting to discuss gun violence in America, according to the White House.
[##]
https://www.google.com/search?q=ammon+bundy" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
[##]
See realtime coverage
[##]
http://sipseystreetirregulars.blogspot.com/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
[##]
“… While the Bundy’s stand against the Federal government should be applauded, there is something to be said for picking ones battles, as Karl Denninger notes:
There’s an old saying that I’ve heard many times before — if you think it’s time to take a stand grab your rifle and head out the front door. If you’re the only one out there it’s not time.
The question now is how far the Bundy’s are willing to take this? We can be 100% certain that the multiple federal agencies involved are more than willing to kill to ensure compliance with Federal law…..”
http://www.shtfplan.com/headline-news/f ... d_01032016" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
[&&]{**}[##]
SUNDAY, JANUARY 03, 2016
Knees-up
“The Rise of the Regressives.” Everybody involved in this is beneath contempt.
“A generation of failed politicians has trapped the west in a tawdry nightmare”
“Slouching Toward Global Disaster” Marred by the total lack of judgment in the words “even the most optimistic scenario that brings Hillary Clinton to the White House”.
“Cameron, Osborne and Murdoch back together at mogul’s Christmas knees-up”
“The Misinformation Mess” (Parry)
“Recep Erdoğan: First as Tragedy; second, Farce; third as… Monty Python” “Does Erdogan really intend to eliminate all Kurds from Turkey?” “Erdogan’s ‘Kurdish Disaster’ in the Making”
Bonus points for the fact that Biden’s son has a big seat at the trough!: “Corruption in Ukraine is so bad, a Nigerian prince would be embarrassed”. Maiden remorse in the most awkwardly named ‘country’ in the world, Nudelman-Kaganistan: “Gallup: Ukrainians Loathe the Kiev Government Imposed by Obama”.
The great mystery of the day seems to be the universal simultaneous collapse of professionalism and even marginal competence in politics in the West.
“The tale of a mysterious mound of Iraqi cash seized at the border, and the oddball cast that’s fighting for it” Christian Zionists, who are full of amusing surprises, are speculating in some of the worthless dinars no doubt ‘liberated’ by American soldiers/mercenaries from occupied Iraq.
“Star-Crossed Lovers’ Tale Banned from Israeli Schools”
“Russia Vindicated by Terrorist Surrenders in Syria”
“Surreal: West Mourns Death of Al Qaeda Collaborator in Syrian Airstrike”
“Spying On The Internet Is Orders Of Magnitude More Invasive Than Phone Metadata” It seems we have been misdirected.
“ISIS New Years Eve Terror Plot Story Is Totally Bogus” No more bogus than all the rest of them but the FBI is getting sloppy and arrogant in releasing too many of the ridiculously damning details.
AT 1/03/2016 09:16:00 AM
[&&]{**}[##]
Obama gave military weapons to ISIS and Al Qaeda in Syria and Iraq, and also to Mexican drug criminals through the “Fast and Furious” gunwalking program, but think law-abiding American citizens should be disarmed, and defend their homes by calling for the police, who can take anywhere from 15-22 minutes to respond to a 911 call, steal more from the American people than criminals do using civil forfeiture laws , and after being trained by Israel, murdered more innocent Americans last year than terrorists and mass shooters combined! What is wrong with this picture?
http://whatreallyhappened.com/node/483163#axzz3wCh7G3cw" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
[&&]{**}[##]
http://abcnews.go.com/International/mex ... n-in-room/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
[&&]{**}[##]
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/04/world ... lam-differ" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;?
[Next week’s Q&A: How a small minority of the world’s people managed to insidiously wrest control of the known world.]
-
msfreeh
- Level 34 Illuminated
- Posts: 7718
Re: How many FBI informants in the Bundy Militia group in Oregon?
Militia groups meet with leaders of Oregon occupation, pledge support
Source: Reuters - Sat, 9 Jan 2016 00:11 GMT
http://www.trust.org/item/20160109001352-n3tlg" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
Source: Reuters - Sat, 9 Jan 2016 00:11 GMT
http://www.trust.org/item/20160109001352-n3tlg" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
-
msfreeh
- Level 34 Illuminated
- Posts: 7718
Re: How many FBI informants in the Bundy Militia group in Oregon?
http://www.whosarat.websitetoolbox.com" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
-
msfreeh
- Level 34 Illuminated
- Posts: 7718
Re: How many FBI informants in the Bundy Militia group in Oregon?
see link for full story
anuary 8, 2016
Rancher Rebels: the Rise of the Wise-Use Movement
by Jeffrey St. Clair - James Ridgeway
http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/01/08/ ... -movement/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
Out in the high desert of Nevada’s basin and range country, down roads with names like the Extraterrestrial Highway that run off into the sky, and where the hardscrabble rancher and the miner still call the shots, a full-scale insurrection was born.
You drive through this sagebrush landscape for miles and never see another car. Then, suddenly, you come across a man sitting by the side of the road, staring off into the distance of a bombing test range, watching for the latest incarnation of the Stealth bomber or maybe a UFO. This is Edward Abbey country, home to loners and drifters, people on the lam, desert anarchists.
In the corner of a Tonopah coffee shop, called the Station, next door to the incessant cacophony of a casino, where old ladies play the slots and men gather in clouds of ambient smoke around the roulette wheels, sat Wayne Hage, a top icon of the Sagebrush Rebels. Three years after his death in 2006, Hage remains a heroic figure for Western traditionalists in their fight against the evil doers in Washington and the environmentalist menace.
Here at the Station House, Hage sat, day after day, drinking bottomless cups of bitter cowboy coffee and looking out the window at the rusting remnants of mining derricks strewn across the town. Trucks thundered past, and in the sky, the odd Japanese tourist teetered precariously with his camera from a hot air balloon that carried him past the wonders of the old mining world, being celebrated at the annual Jim Baker Days, a weeklong drunkfest in honor of the miner who, the story goes, discovered Tonopah’s silver load when his mule kicked at him and dislodged some rocks that glistened in the sun.
Wayne Hage was the man to see if you really wanted to know what motivated the Wise Use Movement’s battle against environmentalists and the federal government. Hage was reluctant to meet on this blistering day in early June. He said he’d been hammered by the press too often, especially by the liberal press with an ax to grind against the Wise Users.
The Wise Use Movement consists of more than a thousand local organizations across the country, representing roughly three million people—people who fear the infringement of their property rights, mostly by what they see as oppressive federal government regulations. These are Palin people– rural, gun-packing Christians.
Some of these groups are simply out for money: they want the federal government to pay them considerable sums in exchange for changing traditional uses of their property that have run afoul of federal laws or even in exchange for cutbacks in the commercial use of public lands or resources. Custom and culture, they call it.
Other Wise Use groups have congealed as a political force to demand unrestricted access to federal lands, whether it be to log, run cattle, or for less than environmentally friendly recreational pursuits, such as off-road motorcycling or snowmobiling.
Corporate America has also invested heavily in certain factions of the Wise Use movement, using them as a grassroots stalking horse in their efforts to the preserve the archaic system of laws and regulations that allow them heavily subsidized entry to the natural wealth of the public domain. With the active help of Republicans in congress and a weak, conflict-averse executive branch , the big transnationals are intensifying their efforts to exploit the land, notably through the revival of gold mining and wide-spread oil and gas drilling.
The federal lands are at the center of a growing political struggle over the concept of property rights. Making up one-third of the nation, the public domain is by federal agencies, such as the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management, and encompasses what remains of the nation’s valuable minerals, old growth forests, native grasslands and the extremely valuable oil and gas reserves—from the Rocky Mountain Front to the outer continental shelf.
Although shown as a lush green on road maps, much of this territory has been grotesquely transformed over the last half century by big companies into kind of industrial wasteland, consisting of atomic and other bombing ranges, ammo dumps, military and energy facilities, strip mines, clearcuts, dammed, dredged and scoured rivers, and leaching mounds of cyanide. Still, though victim to decades of abuse and neglect, the public lands also hold the last remnants of wild America, its salmon and trout, elk, grizzlies, spotted owls and wolves, its ancient forests, deserts and mountains—the American wilderness.
The Wise Use movement has created a profile of its enemy. They see themselves as being engaged in a high-stakes chess game with the elite legions of the environmental movement, who are covertly carrying out a sinister master plan, a vast socialist experiment to depopulate the rural West. As evidence they point to the Wildlands Project and to quotes from various greens calling for a 50 percent reduction in North America’s population by the year 2100. The Wise Use movement often suggests that the real goal of the environmental movement is to clear rural Westerners off the land, so the West can be turned into an “eco-theme park” for the pleasures of vacationing suburbanites.
In order to advance their socialist agenda, the Wise Users argue, environmental infiltrated the federal government. Under Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, the thinking goes, embedded key leaders into powerful positions inside the EPA, Interior and Agriculture Departments, and then, acting through their positions on government regulatory bodies, the environmentalists have set out to first reduce and then eliminate all grazing and logging on public lands and sharly curtail mining by driving up the cost of doing business.
Furthermore, Wayne Hage argued, through the Endangered Species Act, environmentalists have covertly turned fights over such seemingly innocent creatures as the coho salmon, northern spotted owl and gray wolf into national symbols of a broad land use planning instrument, a kind of bureaucratic club wielded against rural landowners.
Occupying a ranking position on the Wise Use movement’s enemies list is former Clinton Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt, who initiated the National Biological Survey in 1993—known in the ominous parlance of the Wise Use movement as the NBS. “The NBS is fascist, man, it’s socialist,” proclaimed Chuck Cushman, head of the American Land Rights Association, based in Battle Ground, Washington. “These guys map your property with infrared satellite photos, looking for plants, you know, then they can actually come on your property without your permission. If they find one of those plants, you know you’re screwed worse than if they found dope.”
But, of course, in the minds of many of these Sagebrush populists, the real menace lies not with the environmentalists, but with the political and financial powers that prop them up. It is the big East Coast foundations who now provide the principle financing of the big green organizations that are pulling the strings. And who is behind these
anuary 8, 2016
Rancher Rebels: the Rise of the Wise-Use Movement
by Jeffrey St. Clair - James Ridgeway
http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/01/08/ ... -movement/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
Out in the high desert of Nevada’s basin and range country, down roads with names like the Extraterrestrial Highway that run off into the sky, and where the hardscrabble rancher and the miner still call the shots, a full-scale insurrection was born.
You drive through this sagebrush landscape for miles and never see another car. Then, suddenly, you come across a man sitting by the side of the road, staring off into the distance of a bombing test range, watching for the latest incarnation of the Stealth bomber or maybe a UFO. This is Edward Abbey country, home to loners and drifters, people on the lam, desert anarchists.
In the corner of a Tonopah coffee shop, called the Station, next door to the incessant cacophony of a casino, where old ladies play the slots and men gather in clouds of ambient smoke around the roulette wheels, sat Wayne Hage, a top icon of the Sagebrush Rebels. Three years after his death in 2006, Hage remains a heroic figure for Western traditionalists in their fight against the evil doers in Washington and the environmentalist menace.
Here at the Station House, Hage sat, day after day, drinking bottomless cups of bitter cowboy coffee and looking out the window at the rusting remnants of mining derricks strewn across the town. Trucks thundered past, and in the sky, the odd Japanese tourist teetered precariously with his camera from a hot air balloon that carried him past the wonders of the old mining world, being celebrated at the annual Jim Baker Days, a weeklong drunkfest in honor of the miner who, the story goes, discovered Tonopah’s silver load when his mule kicked at him and dislodged some rocks that glistened in the sun.
Wayne Hage was the man to see if you really wanted to know what motivated the Wise Use Movement’s battle against environmentalists and the federal government. Hage was reluctant to meet on this blistering day in early June. He said he’d been hammered by the press too often, especially by the liberal press with an ax to grind against the Wise Users.
The Wise Use Movement consists of more than a thousand local organizations across the country, representing roughly three million people—people who fear the infringement of their property rights, mostly by what they see as oppressive federal government regulations. These are Palin people– rural, gun-packing Christians.
Some of these groups are simply out for money: they want the federal government to pay them considerable sums in exchange for changing traditional uses of their property that have run afoul of federal laws or even in exchange for cutbacks in the commercial use of public lands or resources. Custom and culture, they call it.
Other Wise Use groups have congealed as a political force to demand unrestricted access to federal lands, whether it be to log, run cattle, or for less than environmentally friendly recreational pursuits, such as off-road motorcycling or snowmobiling.
Corporate America has also invested heavily in certain factions of the Wise Use movement, using them as a grassroots stalking horse in their efforts to the preserve the archaic system of laws and regulations that allow them heavily subsidized entry to the natural wealth of the public domain. With the active help of Republicans in congress and a weak, conflict-averse executive branch , the big transnationals are intensifying their efforts to exploit the land, notably through the revival of gold mining and wide-spread oil and gas drilling.
The federal lands are at the center of a growing political struggle over the concept of property rights. Making up one-third of the nation, the public domain is by federal agencies, such as the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management, and encompasses what remains of the nation’s valuable minerals, old growth forests, native grasslands and the extremely valuable oil and gas reserves—from the Rocky Mountain Front to the outer continental shelf.
Although shown as a lush green on road maps, much of this territory has been grotesquely transformed over the last half century by big companies into kind of industrial wasteland, consisting of atomic and other bombing ranges, ammo dumps, military and energy facilities, strip mines, clearcuts, dammed, dredged and scoured rivers, and leaching mounds of cyanide. Still, though victim to decades of abuse and neglect, the public lands also hold the last remnants of wild America, its salmon and trout, elk, grizzlies, spotted owls and wolves, its ancient forests, deserts and mountains—the American wilderness.
The Wise Use movement has created a profile of its enemy. They see themselves as being engaged in a high-stakes chess game with the elite legions of the environmental movement, who are covertly carrying out a sinister master plan, a vast socialist experiment to depopulate the rural West. As evidence they point to the Wildlands Project and to quotes from various greens calling for a 50 percent reduction in North America’s population by the year 2100. The Wise Use movement often suggests that the real goal of the environmental movement is to clear rural Westerners off the land, so the West can be turned into an “eco-theme park” for the pleasures of vacationing suburbanites.
In order to advance their socialist agenda, the Wise Users argue, environmental infiltrated the federal government. Under Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, the thinking goes, embedded key leaders into powerful positions inside the EPA, Interior and Agriculture Departments, and then, acting through their positions on government regulatory bodies, the environmentalists have set out to first reduce and then eliminate all grazing and logging on public lands and sharly curtail mining by driving up the cost of doing business.
Furthermore, Wayne Hage argued, through the Endangered Species Act, environmentalists have covertly turned fights over such seemingly innocent creatures as the coho salmon, northern spotted owl and gray wolf into national symbols of a broad land use planning instrument, a kind of bureaucratic club wielded against rural landowners.
Occupying a ranking position on the Wise Use movement’s enemies list is former Clinton Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt, who initiated the National Biological Survey in 1993—known in the ominous parlance of the Wise Use movement as the NBS. “The NBS is fascist, man, it’s socialist,” proclaimed Chuck Cushman, head of the American Land Rights Association, based in Battle Ground, Washington. “These guys map your property with infrared satellite photos, looking for plants, you know, then they can actually come on your property without your permission. If they find one of those plants, you know you’re screwed worse than if they found dope.”
But, of course, in the minds of many of these Sagebrush populists, the real menace lies not with the environmentalists, but with the political and financial powers that prop them up. It is the big East Coast foundations who now provide the principle financing of the big green organizations that are pulling the strings. And who is behind these
-
msfreeh
- Level 34 Illuminated
- Posts: 7718
Re: How many FBI informants in the Bundy Militia group in Oregon?
http://www.occurrencesforeigndomestic.c ... the-union/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
stay home
“… stay home and get your own AO squared away.
Got a community Quick Reaction Force (QRF)?
Have a neighborhood watch with real teeth?
Can you answer the three critical questions of “who’s on your buddy team? Who’s on your fire team? Who’s on your squad?”
Got a posse behind a good constitutional sheriff?
Got a Minuteman unit?
Got a civil defense unit?
Got militia?
If not, then you need to get that done before you even think of running off to another state….”
stay home
“… stay home and get your own AO squared away.
Got a community Quick Reaction Force (QRF)?
Have a neighborhood watch with real teeth?
Can you answer the three critical questions of “who’s on your buddy team? Who’s on your fire team? Who’s on your squad?”
Got a posse behind a good constitutional sheriff?
Got a Minuteman unit?
Got a civil defense unit?
Got militia?
If not, then you need to get that done before you even think of running off to another state….”
-
msfreeh
- Level 34 Illuminated
- Posts: 7718
Re: How many FBI informants in the Bundy Militia group in Oregon?
http://thehill.com/blogs/floor-action/h ... d-standoff" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
January 13, 2016, 06:11 pm
Oregon Dem: Where is Justice Dept. in armed standoff?
More than a week into an armed standoff at a wildlife refuge in his state, Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-Ore.) wants the Justice Department to more aggressively go after the protesters.
“Well, the lights and the heat are on the Malheur Wildlife Refuge illegally occupied by ultra right-wing, anti-government extremists,” DeFazio said on the House floor Wednesday. “But you gotta wonder if the lights are on or anybody’s home down at the Justice Department.”
“Hello!” he yelled, waving his right hand. “I don’t think there’s anybody there.”
The FBI, which is housed within the Justice Department, is already working with local law enforcement to monitor the situation that began Jan. 2. But DeFazio argued that the Justice Department isn’t doing enough to deter people from staging armed protests against the federal government.
DeFazio suggested that Cliven Bundy, the Nevada rancher who clashed with authorities over unpaid grazing fees on federal land in 2014, had encouraged his sons, who are currently leading the Oregon standoff.
“He stood down the government at the point of a gun and he’s still illegally grazing and nobody — nobody — at the Justice Department has seen fit to lift a finger against him. There’s no ongoing prosecution,” DeFazio said.
“It’s time for the Justice Department to take some actio
January 13, 2016, 06:11 pm
Oregon Dem: Where is Justice Dept. in armed standoff?
More than a week into an armed standoff at a wildlife refuge in his state, Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-Ore.) wants the Justice Department to more aggressively go after the protesters.
“Well, the lights and the heat are on the Malheur Wildlife Refuge illegally occupied by ultra right-wing, anti-government extremists,” DeFazio said on the House floor Wednesday. “But you gotta wonder if the lights are on or anybody’s home down at the Justice Department.”
“Hello!” he yelled, waving his right hand. “I don’t think there’s anybody there.”
The FBI, which is housed within the Justice Department, is already working with local law enforcement to monitor the situation that began Jan. 2. But DeFazio argued that the Justice Department isn’t doing enough to deter people from staging armed protests against the federal government.
DeFazio suggested that Cliven Bundy, the Nevada rancher who clashed with authorities over unpaid grazing fees on federal land in 2014, had encouraged his sons, who are currently leading the Oregon standoff.
“He stood down the government at the point of a gun and he’s still illegally grazing and nobody — nobody — at the Justice Department has seen fit to lift a finger against him. There’s no ongoing prosecution,” DeFazio said.
“It’s time for the Justice Department to take some actio
-
msfreeh
- Level 34 Illuminated
- Posts: 7718
Re: How many FBI informants in the Bundy Militia group in Oregon?
BI Agents Weren't Posing as Militia, Ex-Fire Chief Clarifies
Miscommunication whips up worries about infiltration.
Ryan Bundy talks on the phone at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge near Burns, Ore., Sunday, Jan. 3, 2016. Bundy is one of the protesters occupying the refuge to object to a prison sentence for local ranchers for burning federal land.
Ryan Bundy talks on the phone at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge near Burns, Ore. Bundy is one of the protesters occupying the refuge to object to a prison sentence for local ranchers for burning federal land.
By Steven Nelson
Jan. 14, 2016, at 5:47 p.m.
+ More
An allegation that undercover FBI agents were caught posing as militia members in southeast Oregon splashed around the Internet this week, but the story’s purported source says he made no such claim.
Chris Briels, who recently resigned his position as Harney County fire chief, says Nevada Assemblywoman Michele Fiore, whose Wednesday press release sparked concern about a throwback to FBI infiltration and dirty tricks against activists, must have misunderstood him.
Fiore’s release said Briels had determined “men posing as ‘militia’ were the FBI.” Briels tells U.S. News he did indeed catch undercover FBI agents in small-town Burns, near where armed protesters are occupying a federal wildlife refuge, but that they were not posing as militia.
“They weren’t posing as anything other than dishonest people,” he says. “They were perceived as militia by the locals, but they weren’t posing out there with a shirt that said ‘I’m militia.’”
The refuge takeover that began Jan. 2 has strained Briels’ friendships in small-town Burns, prompting him to keep an eye out for trouble. He serves on a committee set up by activists, and a
Miscommunication whips up worries about infiltration.
Ryan Bundy talks on the phone at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge near Burns, Ore., Sunday, Jan. 3, 2016. Bundy is one of the protesters occupying the refuge to object to a prison sentence for local ranchers for burning federal land.
Ryan Bundy talks on the phone at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge near Burns, Ore. Bundy is one of the protesters occupying the refuge to object to a prison sentence for local ranchers for burning federal land.
By Steven Nelson
Jan. 14, 2016, at 5:47 p.m.
+ More
An allegation that undercover FBI agents were caught posing as militia members in southeast Oregon splashed around the Internet this week, but the story’s purported source says he made no such claim.
Chris Briels, who recently resigned his position as Harney County fire chief, says Nevada Assemblywoman Michele Fiore, whose Wednesday press release sparked concern about a throwback to FBI infiltration and dirty tricks against activists, must have misunderstood him.
Fiore’s release said Briels had determined “men posing as ‘militia’ were the FBI.” Briels tells U.S. News he did indeed catch undercover FBI agents in small-town Burns, near where armed protesters are occupying a federal wildlife refuge, but that they were not posing as militia.
“They weren’t posing as anything other than dishonest people,” he says. “They were perceived as militia by the locals, but they weren’t posing out there with a shirt that said ‘I’m militia.’”
The refuge takeover that began Jan. 2 has strained Briels’ friendships in small-town Burns, prompting him to keep an eye out for trouble. He serves on a committee set up by activists, and a
-
Elizabeth
- Level 34 Illuminated
- Posts: 11796
- Location: East Coast Australia
Re: How many FBI informants in the Bundy Militia group in Oregon?
http://freedomoutpost.com/2016/01/false ... ty-armory/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
"Following the Idaho Three Percenter's engagement with the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the bombshell revelation that there is an eyewitness to the Bureau of Land Management starting a fire at the Hammond Ranch, which was claimed to be the result of lightning, for which Dwight and Steven Hammond had to start backfires to protect their property and are serving five years in prison, Harney County fire chief Chris Briels, who has been the county fire chief since 1984, resigned his position and sided with Ammon Bundy and protesters in Oregon against the federal government. And by the looks of what Briels described, it appears that the FBI was getting ready to perform a false flag against the patriots who are occupying the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge.
The Harney County fire chief resigned Wednesday because he says he no longer trusts the local government.
Chris Briels stood next Ammon Bundy, the leader of an armed group that has taken over the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Burns, and announced he had turned in his resignation to county Judge Steve Grasty.
Briels accused the Bureau of Land Management of land grabbing and supports the effort to hand over the land to ranchers, but he also feels betrayed by Grasty and other members of the county government, a first sign of fracture among local leaders.
Briels said Grasty confronted him when he questioned why some undercover FBI agents were at the county armory. He said Grasty told him to back off.
According to Briels, he has "served the community till the day he stepped on the soil."
He admitted in the press conference that his being aboard a "Committee of Safety" scared him because he "did not want a bloodbath in his county" because the militia might be called in.
However, just like the Second Amendment argument scares a lot of people who are hoplophobic, the reality is that when people understand what the constitutional militia actually is, they should be far less frightened of militia than they should be of their local police officer.
Briels went on to elaborate that since he began this journey with the Bundys, he has "learned more about the Constitution of the united States" and says it should be "first and foremost in everyone's mind."
"It has to do with our rights," said Briels. "It is so important for everyone to understand what's going on."
Briels went on to say that they were barred from meeting in county buildings regarding any of the redress of grievances, which Ammon Bundy and those surrounding him are seeking.
Briels and others have sought a peaceful reconciliation through dialogue, but at every turn they have been met with those who only want what the feds want rather than what the Constitution demands.
In stating that he wanted everyone, including law enforcement, to return safely to their homes, Briels said, "I want to figure out what we can do as citizens of the united States of America to retain our rights. I guess that must be a bad thing."
"No sir," said one observer.
He then referenced Judge Grasty's words claiming that Breils is and "old man and… has nothing left" that his "perception is all wrong." Briels would not even address him as "judge" because he deemed that term of respect as something unworthy of Grasty, which I completely agree with.
He then went on to add, concerning his resignation, "I will not work for a government or a person who I do not believe in or have faith in. I will not work for someone I don't trust."
Former Chief Briels echoed the words of our founding father in stating the right of assembly and right to free speech to address the various problems cause by the federal government's overreach concerning land. According to Briels, he has been intimidated in many ways, but still he stands strong.
He then referenced the FBI at the armory around 8:40 in the video, and said the one of his friends said he needed to look into it. Upon following the men who were showing up at the armory, Briels said he eventually stopped behind them when they stopped the men and asked them what they were doing and they told him that they were looking for a place to start a business. They then told him that they were not at the armory, but when Breils told them that he followed them from the armory, they said that they were only there to look at the deer.
Thought Briels went up to the see the Country Sheriff, David Ward, he was not allowed, even though he had taken pictures of the men's vehicles. So much for a constitutional sheriff! Instead of meeting with Briels, Ward told him he was to call 911. Can you believe this?
However, Briels called 911 and the dispatcher told him that the license plates were those of undercover FBI agents. Yet, it as Judge Grasty who told Briels he was the one causing everyone to fear, when the opposite was true, and the Briels has no right to question what undercover FBI agents are doing at the county armory.
"What do you think?" asked Briels of the media and the American people. "Do I have the right to talk to another human being? Do I have the right to ask what's going on in my community?"
"This is absolutely appalling to me," said Briels.
While Briels life has been, in his words, "turned upside down and inside out" since joining the committee, he was asked why he didn't distance himself from the event surrounding what is taking place in Oregon, he responded that the only place he knew of that had ostriches was the zoo.
"I never learned to stick my head in the sand, and I stand before you right now and will not stick my head in the sand, and anytime anybody has any questions of me, here I am," he thundered.
More men of the caliber of Chief Briels are needed in our day and age. These must be men of conviction, not of compromise like our current politicians and those that follow them. The must be dedicated to the truth and resolve. Thank God, Chief Briels has seen the light and seen what tyranny actually is and what freedom actually is. May God give him grace to stand in the face of adversity and may God give others the same grace not only to save men from sin, but to be courageous defenders of liberty!"
"Following the Idaho Three Percenter's engagement with the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the bombshell revelation that there is an eyewitness to the Bureau of Land Management starting a fire at the Hammond Ranch, which was claimed to be the result of lightning, for which Dwight and Steven Hammond had to start backfires to protect their property and are serving five years in prison, Harney County fire chief Chris Briels, who has been the county fire chief since 1984, resigned his position and sided with Ammon Bundy and protesters in Oregon against the federal government. And by the looks of what Briels described, it appears that the FBI was getting ready to perform a false flag against the patriots who are occupying the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge.
The Harney County fire chief resigned Wednesday because he says he no longer trusts the local government.
Chris Briels stood next Ammon Bundy, the leader of an armed group that has taken over the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Burns, and announced he had turned in his resignation to county Judge Steve Grasty.
Briels accused the Bureau of Land Management of land grabbing and supports the effort to hand over the land to ranchers, but he also feels betrayed by Grasty and other members of the county government, a first sign of fracture among local leaders.
Briels said Grasty confronted him when he questioned why some undercover FBI agents were at the county armory. He said Grasty told him to back off.
According to Briels, he has "served the community till the day he stepped on the soil."
He admitted in the press conference that his being aboard a "Committee of Safety" scared him because he "did not want a bloodbath in his county" because the militia might be called in.
However, just like the Second Amendment argument scares a lot of people who are hoplophobic, the reality is that when people understand what the constitutional militia actually is, they should be far less frightened of militia than they should be of their local police officer.
Briels went on to elaborate that since he began this journey with the Bundys, he has "learned more about the Constitution of the united States" and says it should be "first and foremost in everyone's mind."
"It has to do with our rights," said Briels. "It is so important for everyone to understand what's going on."
Briels went on to say that they were barred from meeting in county buildings regarding any of the redress of grievances, which Ammon Bundy and those surrounding him are seeking.
Briels and others have sought a peaceful reconciliation through dialogue, but at every turn they have been met with those who only want what the feds want rather than what the Constitution demands.
In stating that he wanted everyone, including law enforcement, to return safely to their homes, Briels said, "I want to figure out what we can do as citizens of the united States of America to retain our rights. I guess that must be a bad thing."
"No sir," said one observer.
He then referenced Judge Grasty's words claiming that Breils is and "old man and… has nothing left" that his "perception is all wrong." Briels would not even address him as "judge" because he deemed that term of respect as something unworthy of Grasty, which I completely agree with.
He then went on to add, concerning his resignation, "I will not work for a government or a person who I do not believe in or have faith in. I will not work for someone I don't trust."
Former Chief Briels echoed the words of our founding father in stating the right of assembly and right to free speech to address the various problems cause by the federal government's overreach concerning land. According to Briels, he has been intimidated in many ways, but still he stands strong.
He then referenced the FBI at the armory around 8:40 in the video, and said the one of his friends said he needed to look into it. Upon following the men who were showing up at the armory, Briels said he eventually stopped behind them when they stopped the men and asked them what they were doing and they told him that they were looking for a place to start a business. They then told him that they were not at the armory, but when Breils told them that he followed them from the armory, they said that they were only there to look at the deer.
Thought Briels went up to the see the Country Sheriff, David Ward, he was not allowed, even though he had taken pictures of the men's vehicles. So much for a constitutional sheriff! Instead of meeting with Briels, Ward told him he was to call 911. Can you believe this?
However, Briels called 911 and the dispatcher told him that the license plates were those of undercover FBI agents. Yet, it as Judge Grasty who told Briels he was the one causing everyone to fear, when the opposite was true, and the Briels has no right to question what undercover FBI agents are doing at the county armory.
"What do you think?" asked Briels of the media and the American people. "Do I have the right to talk to another human being? Do I have the right to ask what's going on in my community?"
"This is absolutely appalling to me," said Briels.
While Briels life has been, in his words, "turned upside down and inside out" since joining the committee, he was asked why he didn't distance himself from the event surrounding what is taking place in Oregon, he responded that the only place he knew of that had ostriches was the zoo.
"I never learned to stick my head in the sand, and I stand before you right now and will not stick my head in the sand, and anytime anybody has any questions of me, here I am," he thundered.
More men of the caliber of Chief Briels are needed in our day and age. These must be men of conviction, not of compromise like our current politicians and those that follow them. The must be dedicated to the truth and resolve. Thank God, Chief Briels has seen the light and seen what tyranny actually is and what freedom actually is. May God give him grace to stand in the face of adversity and may God give others the same grace not only to save men from sin, but to be courageous defenders of liberty!"
-
msfreeh
- Level 34 Illuminated
- Posts: 7718
Re: How many FBI informants in the Bundy Militia group in Oregon?
http://m.starcourier.com/article/ZZ/201 ... /-1/sports" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
Armed group occupying refuge clash with environmentalists
Posted Jan 16, 2016 at 6:08 PM
Updated at 10:31 PM
BURNS, Ore. " The armed activists occupying a national wildlife refuge in southeastern Oregon clashed with environmentalists Saturday as a standoff stretched into a 15th day.
A shouting match erupted as members of the Center for Biological Diversity, a national nonprofit conservation group, tried to speak at a news briefing, The Oregonian reported (http://goo.gl/yHnphm" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false; ). As the center's executive director Kieran Suckling began speaking, the armed activists screamed and booed him.
"We're here to speak up for public land, which belongs to the public," Suckling said over the yelling. "These people are trying to take the land away."
The armed group took over the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge to protest federal land use policies. So far, authorities have not tried to remove the group from refuge.
The shouting match happened just after occupiers arrived for the briefing carrying a basket of security cameras they said they had removed at the request of residents, the newspaper reported.
"This in my opinion is unreasonable search," said LaVoyce Sinicum, referencing the Fourth Amendment. He invited the FBI to pick up the cameras, which he claimed it had installed. He also condemned the government for harassing families.
Suckling told the newspaper that his group had a more civil interaction with other occupiers afterward. He said it was important to be present and to not criticize the occupation from the sidelines.
The occupation started Jan. 2 as a protest over two area ranchers who had been convicted of arson
Armed group occupying refuge clash with environmentalists
Posted Jan 16, 2016 at 6:08 PM
Updated at 10:31 PM
BURNS, Ore. " The armed activists occupying a national wildlife refuge in southeastern Oregon clashed with environmentalists Saturday as a standoff stretched into a 15th day.
A shouting match erupted as members of the Center for Biological Diversity, a national nonprofit conservation group, tried to speak at a news briefing, The Oregonian reported (http://goo.gl/yHnphm" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false; ). As the center's executive director Kieran Suckling began speaking, the armed activists screamed and booed him.
"We're here to speak up for public land, which belongs to the public," Suckling said over the yelling. "These people are trying to take the land away."
The armed group took over the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge to protest federal land use policies. So far, authorities have not tried to remove the group from refuge.
The shouting match happened just after occupiers arrived for the briefing carrying a basket of security cameras they said they had removed at the request of residents, the newspaper reported.
"This in my opinion is unreasonable search," said LaVoyce Sinicum, referencing the Fourth Amendment. He invited the FBI to pick up the cameras, which he claimed it had installed. He also condemned the government for harassing families.
Suckling told the newspaper that his group had a more civil interaction with other occupiers afterward. He said it was important to be present and to not criticize the occupation from the sidelines.
The occupation started Jan. 2 as a protest over two area ranchers who had been convicted of arson
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msfreeh
- Level 34 Illuminated
- Posts: 7718
Re: How many FBI informants in the Bundy Militia group in Oregon?
Black Oregon militiaman: Black Lives Matter can learn from occupiers
Brandon Dowd encourages more people to visit refuge and get schooled on constitutional rights – and insists he’s among a handful of non-white members
Brandon Dowd at Malheur wildlife refuge on Saturday.
Brandon Dowd at Malheur wildlife refuge on Saturday. Photograph: Sam Levin/the Guardian
http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016 ... nstitution" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
Sunday 17 January 2016 08.48 EST
Brandon Dowd encourages more people to visit refuge and get schooled on constitutional rights – and insists he’s among a handful of non-white members
Brandon Dowd at Malheur wildlife refuge on Saturday.
Brandon Dowd at Malheur wildlife refuge on Saturday. Photograph: Sam Levin/the Guardian
http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016 ... nstitution" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
Sunday 17 January 2016 08.48 EST
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msfreeh
- Level 34 Illuminated
- Posts: 7718
Re: How many FBI informants in the Bundy Militia group in Oregon?
Bill Clinton’s FBI Head Is Called In to Show Bill Clinton ‘Not Present’ at Jeffrey Epstein Underage Sex Orgy
bill-clinton APJacquelyn Martin(L) and Jeffrey Epstein
AP Photo / Jacquelyn Martin; Florida Department of Law Enforcement
by Patrick Howley10 Jan 2016
http://www.breitbart.com/big-government ... i-head-is/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
Famed attorney Alan Dershowitz has retained former President Bill Clinton’s FBI director to help show Clinton was not present at alleged sex orgies thrown by his former client, a convicted pedophile and close Clinton friend.
2 stories
1.
https://www.rawstory.com/2016/01/fbi-fi ... hird-week/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
FBI finally contacts Ammon Bundy as Oregon occupation nears third week
Bethania Palma Markus
21 Jan 2016 at 15:55 ET
It does not appear a resolution is near, however. Local KOIN reported Wednesday that so-called militia members were coming to the occupation from other parts of the country and they believe they’re on a mission from God.
“God wants us here, there’s a sense that’s beckoning and it comes from heaven,” militiaman Kelly Gneiting said. “We’re doing what’s right, we’re doing what the founding fathers would do because we’re inspired by God, also.”
2.
FBI agents caught creating child porn addiction.
FBI ran website sharing thousands of child porn images
January 21 2016
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2016 ... /79108346/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
WASHINGTON — For nearly two weeks last year, the FBI operated what it described as one of the Internet’s largest child pornography websites, allowing users to download thousands of illicit images and videos from a government site in the Washington suburbs.
The operation — whose details remain largely secret — was at least the third time in recent years that FBI agents took control of a child pornography site but left it online in an attempt to catch users who officials said would otherwise remain hidden behind an encrypted and anonymous computer network. In each case, the FBI infected the sites with software that punctured that security, allowing agents to identify hundreds of users.
The Justice Department acknowledged in court filings that the FBI operated the site, known as Playpen, from Feb. 20 to March 4, 2015. At the time, the site had more than 215,000 registered users and included links to more than 23,000 sexually explicit images and videos of children, including more than 9,000 files that users could download directly from the FBI. Some of the images described in court filings involved children barely old enough for kindergarten.
That approach is a significant departure from the government’s past tactics for battling online child porn, in which agents were instructed that they should not allow images of children being sexually assaulted to become public. The Justice Department has said that children depicted in such images are harmed each time they are viewed, and once those images leave the government’s control, agents have no way to prevent them from being copied and re-copied to other parts of the internet
bill-clinton APJacquelyn Martin(L) and Jeffrey Epstein
AP Photo / Jacquelyn Martin; Florida Department of Law Enforcement
by Patrick Howley10 Jan 2016
http://www.breitbart.com/big-government ... i-head-is/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
Famed attorney Alan Dershowitz has retained former President Bill Clinton’s FBI director to help show Clinton was not present at alleged sex orgies thrown by his former client, a convicted pedophile and close Clinton friend.
2 stories
1.
https://www.rawstory.com/2016/01/fbi-fi ... hird-week/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
FBI finally contacts Ammon Bundy as Oregon occupation nears third week
Bethania Palma Markus
21 Jan 2016 at 15:55 ET
It does not appear a resolution is near, however. Local KOIN reported Wednesday that so-called militia members were coming to the occupation from other parts of the country and they believe they’re on a mission from God.
“God wants us here, there’s a sense that’s beckoning and it comes from heaven,” militiaman Kelly Gneiting said. “We’re doing what’s right, we’re doing what the founding fathers would do because we’re inspired by God, also.”
2.
FBI agents caught creating child porn addiction.
FBI ran website sharing thousands of child porn images
January 21 2016
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2016 ... /79108346/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
WASHINGTON — For nearly two weeks last year, the FBI operated what it described as one of the Internet’s largest child pornography websites, allowing users to download thousands of illicit images and videos from a government site in the Washington suburbs.
The operation — whose details remain largely secret — was at least the third time in recent years that FBI agents took control of a child pornography site but left it online in an attempt to catch users who officials said would otherwise remain hidden behind an encrypted and anonymous computer network. In each case, the FBI infected the sites with software that punctured that security, allowing agents to identify hundreds of users.
The Justice Department acknowledged in court filings that the FBI operated the site, known as Playpen, from Feb. 20 to March 4, 2015. At the time, the site had more than 215,000 registered users and included links to more than 23,000 sexually explicit images and videos of children, including more than 9,000 files that users could download directly from the FBI. Some of the images described in court filings involved children barely old enough for kindergarten.
That approach is a significant departure from the government’s past tactics for battling online child porn, in which agents were instructed that they should not allow images of children being sexually assaulted to become public. The Justice Department has said that children depicted in such images are harmed each time they are viewed, and once those images leave the government’s control, agents have no way to prevent them from being copied and re-copied to other parts of the internet
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msfreeh
- Level 34 Illuminated
- Posts: 7718
Re: How many FBI informants in the Bundy Militia group in Oregon?
http://www.valuewalk.com/2016/01/ammon- ... ing-video/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
Ammon Bundy – Anonymous Releases Video Supporting Oregon Occupiers
January 30, 2016 9:31 pm in Politics
This morning, News2Share received a video from the hacktivist group Anonymous responding to the FBI shooting in Oregon. In the video, the group voices support for Ammon Bundy and speaks out against the recent FBI shooting death of LaVoy Finicum. Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PhYaCAJJ-m0" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
Article (Including Video Transcript): http://news2share.com/start/2016/01/30/anonymousbundy/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
Early this morning, News2Share received a video from a member of Anonymous. In it, an obscured male voice explains that Anonymous sides with the occupiers in the Oregon standoff. It specifically vocalizes a demand for justice in the shooting death of Robert “LaVoy” Finicum by the FBI.
In the video, helicopter footage showing the Finicum shooting is used twice paired w
Ammon Bundy, LaVoy Finicum, and the others only wanted peace. They even met with the FBI face to face.
And yet Finicum was killed in cold blood, as his hands were in the air. Just as Anonymous called for justice in the killing of Michael Brown we call for justice now.
The FBI has the weapons but they do not have the heart. It is time for Anonymous to engage.
We do not call for violence, or armed uprising. We call for Anonymous members to spread this fight online. Every citizen of the United States must hear our call. We want the identity of every agent who fired their weapon that day. We want justice for LaVoy. We stand with Ammon Bundy.
This fight is not over. As patriots sit in jail and await trial Anonymous will give them our full support.
When the government no longer fights for justice the internet will. We are justice.
We are Legion.
We do not forgive
We do not Forget.
We are Anonymous.”
Read more at http://news2share.com/start/2016/01/3" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;…
Ammon Bundy – Anonymous Releases Video Supporting Oregon Occupiers
January 30, 2016 9:31 pm in Politics
This morning, News2Share received a video from the hacktivist group Anonymous responding to the FBI shooting in Oregon. In the video, the group voices support for Ammon Bundy and speaks out against the recent FBI shooting death of LaVoy Finicum. Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PhYaCAJJ-m0" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
Article (Including Video Transcript): http://news2share.com/start/2016/01/30/anonymousbundy/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
Early this morning, News2Share received a video from a member of Anonymous. In it, an obscured male voice explains that Anonymous sides with the occupiers in the Oregon standoff. It specifically vocalizes a demand for justice in the shooting death of Robert “LaVoy” Finicum by the FBI.
In the video, helicopter footage showing the Finicum shooting is used twice paired w
Ammon Bundy, LaVoy Finicum, and the others only wanted peace. They even met with the FBI face to face.
And yet Finicum was killed in cold blood, as his hands were in the air. Just as Anonymous called for justice in the killing of Michael Brown we call for justice now.
The FBI has the weapons but they do not have the heart. It is time for Anonymous to engage.
We do not call for violence, or armed uprising. We call for Anonymous members to spread this fight online. Every citizen of the United States must hear our call. We want the identity of every agent who fired their weapon that day. We want justice for LaVoy. We stand with Ammon Bundy.
This fight is not over. As patriots sit in jail and await trial Anonymous will give them our full support.
When the government no longer fights for justice the internet will. We are justice.
We are Legion.
We do not forgive
We do not Forget.
We are Anonymous.”
Read more at http://news2share.com/start/2016/01/3" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;…
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msfreeh
- Level 34 Illuminated
- Posts: 7718
Re: How many FBI informants in the Bundy Militia group in Oregon?
The BLM's arms race on the range
The agency has armed up since 1978, but it's still outgunned without local backup.
http://www.hcn.org/issues/48.2/the-blms ... -the-range" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
Feb. 2, 2016 Fro
The agency began hiring rangers who thought of themselves more as police officers. “We brought in people who told their buddies in Border Patrol or wherever else, ‘Hey, come to the BLM, there’s a lot of kick-@#$ stuff going on here,’ ” says Martin.
The shift on the ground reflected changes at the top. In the wake of 9/11, the agency peeled away its special agents — who specialize in long-term investigations — from civilian field managers and put them under the command of a newly created director position, filled by Bill Woody, who had never worked for the BLM. The number of agents increased, sometimes drawn from the ranks of the FBI and other traditional law enforcement agencies. Today, the agency has 75 agents, up nearly 50 percent from a decade ago, while
The agency has armed up since 1978, but it's still outgunned without local backup.
http://www.hcn.org/issues/48.2/the-blms ... -the-range" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
Feb. 2, 2016 Fro
The agency began hiring rangers who thought of themselves more as police officers. “We brought in people who told their buddies in Border Patrol or wherever else, ‘Hey, come to the BLM, there’s a lot of kick-@#$ stuff going on here,’ ” says Martin.
The shift on the ground reflected changes at the top. In the wake of 9/11, the agency peeled away its special agents — who specialize in long-term investigations — from civilian field managers and put them under the command of a newly created director position, filled by Bill Woody, who had never worked for the BLM. The number of agents increased, sometimes drawn from the ranks of the FBI and other traditional law enforcement agencies. Today, the agency has 75 agents, up nearly 50 percent from a decade ago, while
-
msfreeh
- Level 34 Illuminated
- Posts: 7718
Re: How many FBI informants in the Bundy Militia group in Oregon?
High school students can learn more about FBI
February 7 2016
http://www.newsnet5.com/news/local-news ... l-students" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
CLEVELAND - The Cleveland Federal Bureau of Investigation is seeking applications from high school students, between the ages of 16 and 18, that have ever wondered if the TV shows featuring the FBI are realistic? Individuals that are curious about what it takes to be an FBI agent or member of the FBI’s professional staff? High school students that wonder what investigating a federal case is actually like?
If you are a high school student between 16 and 18 years of age, living in the area served by the FBI’s Cleveland field office, and these questions along with many more you would like answered, the Cleveland FBI office would like to hear from you.
+1
Cleveland FBI office coverage area
The 2016 Cleveland FBI Future Agents In Training (FAIT) will be held Tuesday, June 14 through Friday, June 17 at FBI Cleveland field office headquarters. Any high school student, 16 – 18 years of age attending a public, private, charter, or home school and currently residing within the Northern District of Ohio served by the FBI Cleveland field office may apply. Applicant qualifications are specified in the FAIT application.
Students selected for the FBI FAIT Academy spend four fun, interactive days at the FBI’s Cleveland field office headquarters and other locations participating in both classroom and hands-on activities. Classes offer insight into a number of topics and specialties including the importance of making good choices when using online communication platforms, what violations of federal law the FBI investigates, what is required of all FBI applicants, and the FBI’s domestic and international roles. Students will also enjoy numerous hands-on experiences involving specialized areas of the FBI, such as the Evidence Response Team and forensic photography. After completing the class, students are more aware of challenges their communities face, better understand how the FBI serves their region, and are prepared to mentor their peers.
Application packages are currently available at http://www.fbi.gov/cleveland/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;. Students interested should complete and submit all required application materials via U.S. mail to the Cleveland field office headquarters at Cleveland FBI, Attention: FAIT Academy, 1501 Lakeside Avenue, Cleveland, Ohio 44114, postmarked by March 31.
February 7 2016
http://www.newsnet5.com/news/local-news ... l-students" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
CLEVELAND - The Cleveland Federal Bureau of Investigation is seeking applications from high school students, between the ages of 16 and 18, that have ever wondered if the TV shows featuring the FBI are realistic? Individuals that are curious about what it takes to be an FBI agent or member of the FBI’s professional staff? High school students that wonder what investigating a federal case is actually like?
If you are a high school student between 16 and 18 years of age, living in the area served by the FBI’s Cleveland field office, and these questions along with many more you would like answered, the Cleveland FBI office would like to hear from you.
+1
Cleveland FBI office coverage area
The 2016 Cleveland FBI Future Agents In Training (FAIT) will be held Tuesday, June 14 through Friday, June 17 at FBI Cleveland field office headquarters. Any high school student, 16 – 18 years of age attending a public, private, charter, or home school and currently residing within the Northern District of Ohio served by the FBI Cleveland field office may apply. Applicant qualifications are specified in the FAIT application.
Students selected for the FBI FAIT Academy spend four fun, interactive days at the FBI’s Cleveland field office headquarters and other locations participating in both classroom and hands-on activities. Classes offer insight into a number of topics and specialties including the importance of making good choices when using online communication platforms, what violations of federal law the FBI investigates, what is required of all FBI applicants, and the FBI’s domestic and international roles. Students will also enjoy numerous hands-on experiences involving specialized areas of the FBI, such as the Evidence Response Team and forensic photography. After completing the class, students are more aware of challenges their communities face, better understand how the FBI serves their region, and are prepared to mentor their peers.
Application packages are currently available at http://www.fbi.gov/cleveland/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;. Students interested should complete and submit all required application materials via U.S. mail to the Cleveland field office headquarters at Cleveland FBI, Attention: FAIT Academy, 1501 Lakeside Avenue, Cleveland, Ohio 44114, postmarked by March 31.
-
msfreeh
- Level 34 Illuminated
- Posts: 7718
Re: How many FBI informants in the Bundy Militia group in Oregon?
Former refuge occupier hopes to help FBI negotiate with holdouts ...
February 9 2016
Willingham, 48, of Leadville, Colorado, is offering himself up as a mediator between the FBI and the last four people left at the refuge, 30 miles southeast of ...
February 9 2016
Willingham, 48, of Leadville, Colorado, is offering himself up as a mediator between the FBI and the last four people left at the refuge, 30 miles southeast of ...
-
msfreeh
- Level 34 Illuminated
- Posts: 7718
Re: How many FBI informants in the Bundy Militia group in Oregon?
http://www.examiner.com/article/amnesty ... ga-s-death" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
Amnesty International investigator on Wopashitwe Mondo Eyen we Langa's death
March 18, 2016 4:39 PM MST
Waposhitwe Mondo Eyen we Langa died at the Nebraska State Penitentiary
Amnesty International investigated the case of the Omaha Two, Edward Poindexter and Wopashitwe Mondo Eyen we Langa, former David Rice, in the late 1970's. Mondo and Poindexter were Black Panther leaders in the National Committee to Combat Fascism and had been convicted in April 1971 for the bombing murder of an Omaha policeman. The two men had been targets of both the Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms Division and rival Federal Bureau of Investigation. The Omaha Two were victims of COINTELPRO counterintelligence measures but much of the story was still hidden in classified files.
A German investigator, Claus Walischewski, was assigned the case. Walischewski and his team studied the case for two years before concluding Mondo and Ed Poindeter were political prisoners: “The cooperation with the FBI, the FBI’s own activities, the promise of leniency to Peak, even evidence—all these were kept secret at the trial. The key witnesses disappears after the trial. There is only one conclusion to these peculiarities: Rice and Poindexter were readily implicated with a murder because they were the most prominent political activists in Omaha and had to be silenced.”
“They became victim of a frame-up by the police and the FBI and of the racial and political biases in court. Mr. Kingman Brewster, President of Yale University, stated in 1970 that he was “skeptical of the ability of black revolutionaries to achieve a fair trial anywhere in the United States,” wrote Walischewski.
The Amnesty International work group stated their opinion: “David Rice and Ed Poindexter are political prisoners. They were sentenced for a crime they didn’t commit because of their radical political beliefs….The murder of patrolman Minard appeared to be a welcome pretext to incriminate the two activists and strike a blow against the NCCF from which it couldn’t recover. The legal system was misused and they were unjustly convicted.”
Forty-five years later, Claus Walischewski still believes in Mondo's innocence. Walischewski commented on Mondo's recent death at the Nebraska State Penitentiary: “I just want to express my shock and disbelief when I learned of Mondo's death....I had heard that Mondo's health problems had worsened but I had no idea how serious they were, that's why the news of his death took me by surprise.”
“I deeply deplore the fact that he had to spend most of his life in prison for a crime I believe he didn't commit. He was born the same year as I and that makes it the more horrendous to me: so many years confined in prison, such injustice, no chance of living a normal life - how could he endure all this? Amnesty International took on his case in 1977 and only one year later I joined AI and started working on this case. In the 1990s I went to Nebraska and Minnesota and had a chance to meet Mondo and Ed in prison and thus developed a more personal commitment to their case. Numerous letters I wrote on their behalf - to no avail,” complained Walischewski.
“It makes me sad to know how harshly the US legal and political system deals with supposed enemies and is rarely willing to make up for injustices and manipulations that victims of racism have suffered. Another precious life spent! Can we hope that one day Mondo will be rehabilitated and cleared of the crime? That is still important, not only for Ed Poindexter, but als
Amnesty International investigator on Wopashitwe Mondo Eyen we Langa's death
March 18, 2016 4:39 PM MST
Waposhitwe Mondo Eyen we Langa died at the Nebraska State Penitentiary
Amnesty International investigated the case of the Omaha Two, Edward Poindexter and Wopashitwe Mondo Eyen we Langa, former David Rice, in the late 1970's. Mondo and Poindexter were Black Panther leaders in the National Committee to Combat Fascism and had been convicted in April 1971 for the bombing murder of an Omaha policeman. The two men had been targets of both the Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms Division and rival Federal Bureau of Investigation. The Omaha Two were victims of COINTELPRO counterintelligence measures but much of the story was still hidden in classified files.
A German investigator, Claus Walischewski, was assigned the case. Walischewski and his team studied the case for two years before concluding Mondo and Ed Poindeter were political prisoners: “The cooperation with the FBI, the FBI’s own activities, the promise of leniency to Peak, even evidence—all these were kept secret at the trial. The key witnesses disappears after the trial. There is only one conclusion to these peculiarities: Rice and Poindexter were readily implicated with a murder because they were the most prominent political activists in Omaha and had to be silenced.”
“They became victim of a frame-up by the police and the FBI and of the racial and political biases in court. Mr. Kingman Brewster, President of Yale University, stated in 1970 that he was “skeptical of the ability of black revolutionaries to achieve a fair trial anywhere in the United States,” wrote Walischewski.
The Amnesty International work group stated their opinion: “David Rice and Ed Poindexter are political prisoners. They were sentenced for a crime they didn’t commit because of their radical political beliefs….The murder of patrolman Minard appeared to be a welcome pretext to incriminate the two activists and strike a blow against the NCCF from which it couldn’t recover. The legal system was misused and they were unjustly convicted.”
Forty-five years later, Claus Walischewski still believes in Mondo's innocence. Walischewski commented on Mondo's recent death at the Nebraska State Penitentiary: “I just want to express my shock and disbelief when I learned of Mondo's death....I had heard that Mondo's health problems had worsened but I had no idea how serious they were, that's why the news of his death took me by surprise.”
“I deeply deplore the fact that he had to spend most of his life in prison for a crime I believe he didn't commit. He was born the same year as I and that makes it the more horrendous to me: so many years confined in prison, such injustice, no chance of living a normal life - how could he endure all this? Amnesty International took on his case in 1977 and only one year later I joined AI and started working on this case. In the 1990s I went to Nebraska and Minnesota and had a chance to meet Mondo and Ed in prison and thus developed a more personal commitment to their case. Numerous letters I wrote on their behalf - to no avail,” complained Walischewski.
“It makes me sad to know how harshly the US legal and political system deals with supposed enemies and is rarely willing to make up for injustices and manipulations that victims of racism have suffered. Another precious life spent! Can we hope that one day Mondo will be rehabilitated and cleared of the crime? That is still important, not only for Ed Poindexter, but als
-
msfreeh
- Level 34 Illuminated
- Posts: 7718
Re: How many FBI informants in the Bundy Militia group in Oregon?
March 22 2016
City & Region
Bookstore owner turns tables, questions why he was target of FBI probe
Bookstore owner was target of 2-year investigation
Theresa Baker-Pickering and her husband, Leslie Pickering, have learned that they were the subjects of an FBI investigation.
on March 17, 2016 - 8:06 PM, updated March 18, 2016 at 6:29 AM
http://www.buffalonews.com/city-region/ ... e-20160317" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
Pickering, long a target of the FBI, turns his story into an art exhibit
FBI asked for tracking of Pickering mail in 2012
Former Earth Liberation Front spokesman files federal suit for information from FBI
The FBI kept tabs on a Buffalo bookstore owner for two years.
Agents watched Leslie Pickering’s home and store, monitored his mail and used grand jury subpoenas to gather information about him.
At the core of the investigation was the allegation, still unproven, that Pickering, a longtime environmental activist, was operating an eco-terrorism cell out of Burning Books, his West Side bookstore.
The investigation turned up no evidence of a threat and was shut down after a confidential informant recanted part of her story, according to newly released FBI documents
City & Region
Bookstore owner turns tables, questions why he was target of FBI probe
Bookstore owner was target of 2-year investigation
Theresa Baker-Pickering and her husband, Leslie Pickering, have learned that they were the subjects of an FBI investigation.
on March 17, 2016 - 8:06 PM, updated March 18, 2016 at 6:29 AM
http://www.buffalonews.com/city-region/ ... e-20160317" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
Pickering, long a target of the FBI, turns his story into an art exhibit
FBI asked for tracking of Pickering mail in 2012
Former Earth Liberation Front spokesman files federal suit for information from FBI
The FBI kept tabs on a Buffalo bookstore owner for two years.
Agents watched Leslie Pickering’s home and store, monitored his mail and used grand jury subpoenas to gather information about him.
At the core of the investigation was the allegation, still unproven, that Pickering, a longtime environmental activist, was operating an eco-terrorism cell out of Burning Books, his West Side bookstore.
The investigation turned up no evidence of a threat and was shut down after a confidential informant recanted part of her story, according to newly released FBI documents
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msfreeh
- Level 34 Illuminated
- Posts: 7718
Re: How many FBI informants in the Bundy Militia group in Oregon?
http://www.eenews.net/stories/1060037048" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
PUBLIC LANDS:
The Bundy witness BLM won't talk about
Phil Taylor, E&E reporter
Greenwire: Wednesday, May 11, 2016
Correction appended.
As federal prosecutors seek to
PUBLIC LANDS:
The Bundy witness BLM won't talk about
Phil Taylor, E&E reporter
Greenwire: Wednesday, May 11, 2016
Correction appended.
As federal prosecutors seek to
-
msfreeh
- Level 34 Illuminated
- Posts: 7718
Re: How many FBI informants in the Bundy Militia group in Oregon?
Militia leader vows to ‘strike back’ in video
http://www.mohavedailynews.com/news/mil ... l?mode=jqm" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
http://www.mohavedailynews.com/news/mil ... l?mode=jqm" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
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msfreeh
- Level 34 Illuminated
- Posts: 7718
Re: How many FBI informants in the Bundy Militia group in Oregon?
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/201 ... undy-oreg/
also see
http://www.oregonlive.com/tv/2017/05/fb ... akers.html
FBI agents posed as filmmakers to infiltrate the Bundy family, 'Frontline' documentary reveals | OregonLive.com
OregonLive.com › 2017/05 › fbi_agents...
May 15, 2017 - The story is explored again in a new "Frontline" documentary called "American Patriot: Inside the Armed Uprising Against the Federal Government," which airs at 10 p.m. Tuesday, May 16 on PBS. ... But near the end of "American Patriot," we see portions of undercover video filmed by FBI ...
http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/dona ... -1.3401110
How young Donald Trump was slapped and punched until he made his bed
Friday, August 11, 2017, 5:00 AM
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/nationa ... -1.3403079
Email reveals Florida troopers told to issue two speeding tickets per hour — 'We have a goal to reach'
BY BRIAN LISI
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS Friday, August 11, 2017, 10:50 AM
https://www.policeone.com/officer-misco ... aving-sex/
cop sentenced for using PD helicopter to film couple having sexTwo other officers and two pilots who were in the helicopter when the video was filmed were cleared of misconduct
August 8, 2017
SOUTH YORKSHIRE, England — An ex-officer who used a police helicopter to film a couple having sex was sentenced Friday to a year in prison.
Adrian Pogmore, who was fired in 2015, plead guilty to four counts of misconduct in a public office, Sky News reported. He used the South Yorkshire Police helicopter to film a couple having sex on their patio, a woman sunbathing naked and two naturists sitting outside a caravan.
Judge Peter Kelson QC told Pogmore, 50, that his crimes were “offensive and invasive.”
"In short, you used a £2m helicopter which costs something like $1,000 an hour to run to advance your own sexual curiosities when it should have been detecting crime,” Kelson said. "You, quite literally, considered yourself above the law. Nobody is above the law."
Two other officers and two pilots who were in the helicopter when the video was filmed were cleared of misconduct.
https://robertscribbler.com/2017/08/11/ ... peratures/
Bad Heat Rising: 4 C Global Warming Brings Super Heatwaves Packing 131 Degree (F) “Apparent Temperatures”
On the present emissions pathway, it’s likely that the world will hit 4 degrees Celsius warming by 2100. And this level of warming will be enough to bring on heatwaves so hot that staying outside for even brief periods will be deadly. Such unimaginably severe heatwaves will affect heavily populated regions such as Eastern Europe, the U.S. East Coast, coastal China, India, and South America with bi-annual frequency.
(Probability that summer heat index values will exceed 40 C [104 F] and 55 C [131 F] under 1.5, 2 and 4 C warming. Note that biannual frequency of 55 C heat indexes over large regions under 4 C warming implies that strong heatwaves would be considerably more severe. Image source: Superheatwaves of 55 C Emerge if Global Warming Continues.)
These were the findings of a ground-breaking new report produced by Europe’s Joint Research Center. The report notes that many of these heatwaves will combine very hot air and high humidity to produce deadly conditions — implying wet bulb readings in the range of 35 degrees Celsius or the threshold for human survivability over densely populated regions. Such high levels of heat would be both crippling and life-threatening — bringing activity in these areas to a grinding halt, spiking cooling based energy demand, and making it impossible to stay in non climate controlled environments for more than very brief periods.
The report predicts that the rising global temperatures, due to fossil fuel burning, will bring about this new brand of super heatwave afflicting many of today’s most populated cities:
However, if temperatures rise to 4°C a severe scenario is on the horizon. Scientists predict that a new super-heatwave will appear with apparent temperature peaking at above 55°C– a level critical for human survival. It will affect densely populated areas such as USA’s East coast, coastal China, large parts of India and South America. Under this global warming scenario Europe is likely to suffer annual heatwaves with apparent temperature of above 40°C regularly while some regions of Eastern Europe may be hit by heatwaves of above 55°C.
55 degrees Celsius translates to 131 degrees Fahrenheit. Today’s Death Valley summer temperatures typically range between 115 and 120 F. By comparison, the hottest temperature ever recorded on Earth, according to Christopher C. Burt from Weather Underground is presently 129.2 degrees Fahrenheit. But under continued fossil fuel regimes, apparent temperatures or heat indexes exceeding those very high values will occur with a very high regularity. That means it will feel like it’s hotter than Death Valley. Hotter than today’s highest ever recorded temperatures.
(Heatwaves like the one dubbed ‘Lucifer’ in Europe this year are just a mild foreshadowing of what’s to come if humans continue burning fossil fuels. Image source: Tropical Tidbits.)
Such heatwaves would regularly dwarf the impacts of today’s multi-billion dollar disasters like the heatwave dubbed Lucifer that impacted Europe this year. But the study authors note that even their worrying estimates may be conservative.
The report’s press release goes on to state that:
According to the study, the effect of relative humidity on heatwaves’ magnitude and peak might be underestimated in current research. The results of the study support the need for urgent mitigation and adaptation action to address the impacts of heatwaves, and indicate regions where new adaptation measures might be necessary to cope with heat stress.
Links:
Superheatwaves of 55 C Emerge if Global Warming Continues
Allan Barr / August 12, 2017
There is an old saying in the financial industry, money talks and @#!!$#!% walks. Investors are not interested in @#!!$#!%, they want the facts before they invest. Looks like the money men are suggesting temps of 7.8 C by end of this century on our current path. They appear to be far ahead of mainstream climate scientists in their predictions. Just how valid do you believe this opinion to be Robert?
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/arti ... s-possible
http://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/ ... 559952001/
FBI raids Catholic Worker house in Des Moines in search of pipeline ...
DesMoinesRegister.com-
The FBI raided a Catholic Worker House in Des Moines early Friday in search of evidence linked to efforts to sabotage construction of the ...
http://chicago.suntimes.com/columnists/ ... nfessions/
LAURA WASHINGTON: FBI report raises specter of false confessions
COLUMNISTS 08/11/2017, 04:24pm
Terrill Swift announces a lawsuit against Chicago Police and Cook County State's Attorney's office during news conference at Northwestern School of Law in 2012. I John H. White~Sun-Times
In FBI jargon, it’s called a “302.”
It’s more than a number. The six-page report, recently released by a federal judge, contains explosive revelations about Cook County’s criminal “justice” system.
EDITORIAL
The “extraordinary document” confirms what many civil rights attorneys have long believed, “mainly, that the prosecutors and the police collude together to facilitate and accomplish a false confession,” said Locke E. Bowman, executive director of the MacArthur Justice Center at Northwestern University.
Bowman represents Terrill Swift, a defendant in the infamous “Englewood Four” murder case. In 1994, four black men were convicted of raping and murdering Nina Glover, a 30-year-old prostitute. They all served 15 years in prison before being exonerated. Now they are suing, alleging they were railroaded into making false confessions.
The 302 details an interview the FBI conducted with Terence Johnson, an assistant state’s attorney in the county’s Felony Review Unit. In it, Johnson admitted he had misgivings about the case, and told the FBI he felt it was “going to come back.”
Swift, 39, is poised and soft-spoken as he recalls the travesty that cost him nearly half his life.
In 1995, he was 17, living with his mother on the South Side, planning for college. Chicago police officers took him in for questioning under false pretenses, he said in an interview.
Sponsored by Charles Schwab
Why Portfolio Diversification Is Important
By investing in stocks, bonds, and other asset classes, you can help spread your risk around.
See More
Swift was handcuffed to a bench, shuttled between dim cells and bleak interrogation rooms. Officers surrounded him, making dark accusations for “what felt like an eternity.”
He asked for his mother. He asked for a lawyer. No.
They told him, over and over: “You guys raped and murdered this woman. You’re dying in jail. You’re never going home.”
“I was 17,” he recalled. “And all I’m hearing is ‘you’re dying.’ You’re never seeing your family. And I’m sitting there and I’m just crying.”
He told them, “I didn’t do anything.”
As we talk, the tears flow once more. The officers, he said, accused, threatened, coached. If he just signed a confession, he could be a witness against the others, they promised. “You’ll go home.”
http://www.startribune.com/restraining- ... 439932193/
Former FBI agent is ordered to stay away from Sheriff Stanek
An ex-FBI agent is accused of assaulting Hennepin sheriff at a law enforcement conference.
By Libor Jany Star Tribune AUGUST 11, 2017 — 10:03PM
http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-alt ... story.html
Squeezed out by Silicon Valley, the far right is creating its own corporate world
http://www.nydailynews.com/newswires/ne ... -1.3404408
Suit accuses SC power co. of nuclear negligence
Friday, August 11, 2017, 8:13 PM
A South Carolina power company was negligent in charging its customers more than $1 billion to build nuclear reactors that have now been abandoned, according to a lawsuit filed late Friday afternoon.
http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-m ... story.html
Woman says ICE agent pulled gun on her in freeway road rage incident
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/nationa ... -1.3404216
Omarosa appearance at black journalist conference doesn’t go well
Friday, August 11, 2017, 6:52 PM
The White House Office of Public Liaison's Omarosa Manigault attended a chaotic panel at the National Association of Black Journalists' conference. Above, she attends a briefing in February.
President Trump staffer and “Apprentice” contestant Omarosa Manigault-Newman was met with a chaotic reception during a trip to the National Association of Black Journalists.
The White House public liaison worker, generally referred to only by her first name, attended a panel on police brutality at the organization’s meeting in New Orleans on Friday.
However, some attendees turned their backs on her as she sat down for the panel moderated by BET journalist Ed Gordon that included Philando Castile’s mother Valerie Castile and Alton Sterling’s aunt Sandra Sterling.
Omarosa and Gordon got into repeated tense exchanges when he began asking about the President’s views.
http://www.nydailynews.com/newswires/ne ... -1.3404237
Lawsuit claims teenage detainees were wrongly tied to gangs
Friday, August 11, 2017, 6:41 PM
Some teenagers who entered the United States under the unaccompanied-children program are being illegally detained because of allegations of gang affiliation, the American Civil Liberties Union says in a lawsuit.
The lawsuit was filed in San Francisco on behalf of three teenagers recently detained on Long Island, just east of New York. An ACLU lawyer says the lawsuit was filed there because the teenagers were taken to a government facility in northern California.
4 years for $35 million?
http://www.nydailynews.com/newswires/ne ... -1.3404547
Ex-executives sentenced in sweeping Navy corruption case
August 11, 2017, 8:06 PM
Two former executives of a contractor linked to a globe-spanning U.S. Navy corruption scandal have been sentenced to federal prison.
Neil Peterson received a nearly six-year sentence and Linda Raja got nearly four years on Friday in San Diego.
They worked for Singapore-based Glenn Defense Marine Asia, which supplied fuel, food and other services to Navy ships in Asian ports.
Prosecutors said the company and its CEO, nicknamed "Fat Leonard," bribed Navy officials with cash, prostitutes and gifts to obtain classified information that helped the firm overbill the Navy by nearly $35 million.
https://www.policeone.com/investigation ... amond-OIS/
Judge approves search warrant for phones of cops involved in Justine Damond OISThe application states that the information "may more clearly define" the officers' actions before and after Justine Damond was killed on July 15
https://robertscribbler.com/2017/08/11/ ... -per-year/
India and China Building Solar Like Gangbusters, Electric Revolution Continues as GM Sells EV for $5,300 in China, Tesla Plans 700,000 Model 3s Per Year
by robertscribbler
If we're going to halt destructive carbon emissions now hitting the atmosphere, then the world is going to have to swiftly stop burning oil, gas and coal. And the most effective and economic pathway for achieving this removal of harmful present and future atmospheric carbon emissions is a rapid renewable energy build-out to replace fossil fuel energy coupled by increases in energy efficiency.
(To halt and reverse climate change related damages, fossil fuel based greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere need to stop.)
This week, major advances in the present renewable energy build and introduction rate were reported. Chiefly, India and China are rapidly adding new solar panels to their grid, the monthly rate of global EV sales surpassed 100,000 in June, GM is offering a very inexpensive electrical vehicle in China, and Tesla has ramped up plans for Model 3 EV production from 500,000 vehicles per year to 700,000 vehicles per year.
India and China Solar Gangbusters
In the first half of 2017, India is reported to have built 4.8 gigawatts (GW) of new solar energy capacity. This construction has already exceeded all 2016 additions. The country is presently projected to build more than 10 GW of new solar energy capacity by year-end. Large solar additions are essential to India meeting its goal of having 100 GW of solar electrical generation available by 2022. It is also crucial for reducing carbon emissions from fossil fuel fired power plants (coal and gas).
(Total solar capacity in India could hit 30 GW by end 2018. India will need to add solar more rapidly if it is to achieve its goal of 100 GW by 2022. Image source: Clean Technica.)
Further east, China added 24.4 Gigawatts of new solar energy in just the first half of this year. This pushed China's total solar energy generating capacity to a staggering 101 GW. It also puts China firmly in a position to surpass last year's strong rate of solar growth of 34 GW. China's previous goal was to achieve 105 GW of solar production by 2020. One it will hit three and a half years ahead of schedule. China now appears to be on track to overwhelm that goal by achieving between 190 and 230 GW of solar generation by decade's end.
(China has already overwhelmed its 2020 target for added solar capacity. Recalculating based on present build rates finds that end 2020 solar generation levels are likely to hit between 190 and 230 GW for this global economic powerhouse. Image source: China National Energy Administration.)
Such strong solar growth numbers in traditional coal-burning regions provides some hope that carbon emissions growth rates in these countries will continue to level off or possibly start to fall in the near future. Adding in ambitious wind energy and electrical vehicle build-outs in these regions provides synergy to the larger trend. If an early carbon emissions plateau were to be achieved due to rapid renewable energy build-outs in China and India, it would be very helpful in reducing overall levels of global warming during the 21st Century.
GM's $5,300 EV for the Chinese Market
Adding to the trend of growing movement toward an energy switch in Asia this week was GM's introduction of a small, medium-range electrical vehicle for the Chinese auto market. GM is partnering with China's Baojun to produce the E100. A small EV that's about the size of the U.S. Smart Car. The E100 has about a 96 mile all-electric range, a 62 mph top speed, and goes for $14,000 dollars before China's generous EV incentives. After incentives, a person in China can purchase the vehicle for $5,300. GM states that 5,000 buyers registered to purchase the first 200 E100s hitting the market last month, while a second batch of 500 vehicles will be made available soon.
100,000 Electrical Vehicle Sales Per Month by Mid 2017
Globally, electrical vehicle sales have ramped up to 100,000 per month during June of 2017. This growth is being driven primarily by increased sales volumes in China, India, Japan, Australia, Europe and the U.S. as more and more attractive EV models are becoming available and as governments seek to limit the sale of petroleum-burning vehicles in some regions.
(Projected growth rates for EV sales appear likely to surpass present projections through 2020. Image source: Cleantechnica.)
Meanwhile range, recharge rates, acceleration, and other capabilities for these vehicles continue to rapidly improve. This compares to fossil fuel vehicles which have been basically stuck in plateauing performance ranges for decades. 2017 will represent the first year when sales of all EV models globally surpass 1 million per year. With a possible doubling to tripling of EV production through 2020.
Telsa Aiming for 700,000 Per Year Model 3 Sales
2018 will likely see continued growth as new vehicles like the Model 3, the Chevy Bolt, and Toyota Prius Prime provide more competitive and attractive offerings. This past month, the Chevy Bolt logged more than 1,900 vehicles sold in the U.S. in one month. If GM continues to ramp production, marketing, and availability of this high-quality, long range electrical vehicle, the model could easily sell between 3,000 and 5,000 per month to the U.S. market. Another vehicle -- the plug in electric hybrid Toyota Prius Prime -- is also capable of achieving high sales rates in the range of 5,000 per month or more on the U.S. market due to a combined high quality and low price so long as production for this model also rapidly ramps up.
But the big outlier here is the Tesla Model 3. By end 2017, Tesla is aiming to ramp Model 3 production to 5,000 vehicles per week. It plans to hit more than 40,000 vehicles per month by end of 2018. And, according to Elon Musk's recent announcement, will ultimately aim to achieve 700,000 Model 3 sales per year. If such a rapid ramp appears, the Model 3 along with other increasingly attractive EVs could hit close to 2 million per year annual combined sales in 2018 and surpass 3 million at some time between 2019 and 2020. This is well ahead of past projections of around 2.2 million EV sales per year by 2020. Representing yet another early opportunity to reduce massive global carbon emissions coming from oil, gas, and coal.
Links:
India Installs 4.8 GW of Solar During First Half of 2017
China's New 190 GW Solar Guiding Opinion Wows
China Could Reach 230 GW Solar by end 2020
GM Should Bring Baojun E100 EV to USA
EV News for the Month
Joint Venture for Baojun E100
Model 3 Annual Demand Could Surpass 700,000
also see
http://www.oregonlive.com/tv/2017/05/fb ... akers.html
FBI agents posed as filmmakers to infiltrate the Bundy family, 'Frontline' documentary reveals | OregonLive.com
OregonLive.com › 2017/05 › fbi_agents...
May 15, 2017 - The story is explored again in a new "Frontline" documentary called "American Patriot: Inside the Armed Uprising Against the Federal Government," which airs at 10 p.m. Tuesday, May 16 on PBS. ... But near the end of "American Patriot," we see portions of undercover video filmed by FBI ...
http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/dona ... -1.3401110
How young Donald Trump was slapped and punched until he made his bed
Friday, August 11, 2017, 5:00 AM
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/nationa ... -1.3403079
Email reveals Florida troopers told to issue two speeding tickets per hour — 'We have a goal to reach'
BY BRIAN LISI
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS Friday, August 11, 2017, 10:50 AM
https://www.policeone.com/officer-misco ... aving-sex/
cop sentenced for using PD helicopter to film couple having sexTwo other officers and two pilots who were in the helicopter when the video was filmed were cleared of misconduct
August 8, 2017
SOUTH YORKSHIRE, England — An ex-officer who used a police helicopter to film a couple having sex was sentenced Friday to a year in prison.
Adrian Pogmore, who was fired in 2015, plead guilty to four counts of misconduct in a public office, Sky News reported. He used the South Yorkshire Police helicopter to film a couple having sex on their patio, a woman sunbathing naked and two naturists sitting outside a caravan.
Judge Peter Kelson QC told Pogmore, 50, that his crimes were “offensive and invasive.”
"In short, you used a £2m helicopter which costs something like $1,000 an hour to run to advance your own sexual curiosities when it should have been detecting crime,” Kelson said. "You, quite literally, considered yourself above the law. Nobody is above the law."
Two other officers and two pilots who were in the helicopter when the video was filmed were cleared of misconduct.
https://robertscribbler.com/2017/08/11/ ... peratures/
Bad Heat Rising: 4 C Global Warming Brings Super Heatwaves Packing 131 Degree (F) “Apparent Temperatures”
On the present emissions pathway, it’s likely that the world will hit 4 degrees Celsius warming by 2100. And this level of warming will be enough to bring on heatwaves so hot that staying outside for even brief periods will be deadly. Such unimaginably severe heatwaves will affect heavily populated regions such as Eastern Europe, the U.S. East Coast, coastal China, India, and South America with bi-annual frequency.
(Probability that summer heat index values will exceed 40 C [104 F] and 55 C [131 F] under 1.5, 2 and 4 C warming. Note that biannual frequency of 55 C heat indexes over large regions under 4 C warming implies that strong heatwaves would be considerably more severe. Image source: Superheatwaves of 55 C Emerge if Global Warming Continues.)
These were the findings of a ground-breaking new report produced by Europe’s Joint Research Center. The report notes that many of these heatwaves will combine very hot air and high humidity to produce deadly conditions — implying wet bulb readings in the range of 35 degrees Celsius or the threshold for human survivability over densely populated regions. Such high levels of heat would be both crippling and life-threatening — bringing activity in these areas to a grinding halt, spiking cooling based energy demand, and making it impossible to stay in non climate controlled environments for more than very brief periods.
The report predicts that the rising global temperatures, due to fossil fuel burning, will bring about this new brand of super heatwave afflicting many of today’s most populated cities:
However, if temperatures rise to 4°C a severe scenario is on the horizon. Scientists predict that a new super-heatwave will appear with apparent temperature peaking at above 55°C– a level critical for human survival. It will affect densely populated areas such as USA’s East coast, coastal China, large parts of India and South America. Under this global warming scenario Europe is likely to suffer annual heatwaves with apparent temperature of above 40°C regularly while some regions of Eastern Europe may be hit by heatwaves of above 55°C.
55 degrees Celsius translates to 131 degrees Fahrenheit. Today’s Death Valley summer temperatures typically range between 115 and 120 F. By comparison, the hottest temperature ever recorded on Earth, according to Christopher C. Burt from Weather Underground is presently 129.2 degrees Fahrenheit. But under continued fossil fuel regimes, apparent temperatures or heat indexes exceeding those very high values will occur with a very high regularity. That means it will feel like it’s hotter than Death Valley. Hotter than today’s highest ever recorded temperatures.
(Heatwaves like the one dubbed ‘Lucifer’ in Europe this year are just a mild foreshadowing of what’s to come if humans continue burning fossil fuels. Image source: Tropical Tidbits.)
Such heatwaves would regularly dwarf the impacts of today’s multi-billion dollar disasters like the heatwave dubbed Lucifer that impacted Europe this year. But the study authors note that even their worrying estimates may be conservative.
The report’s press release goes on to state that:
According to the study, the effect of relative humidity on heatwaves’ magnitude and peak might be underestimated in current research. The results of the study support the need for urgent mitigation and adaptation action to address the impacts of heatwaves, and indicate regions where new adaptation measures might be necessary to cope with heat stress.
Links:
Superheatwaves of 55 C Emerge if Global Warming Continues
Allan Barr / August 12, 2017
There is an old saying in the financial industry, money talks and @#!!$#!% walks. Investors are not interested in @#!!$#!%, they want the facts before they invest. Looks like the money men are suggesting temps of 7.8 C by end of this century on our current path. They appear to be far ahead of mainstream climate scientists in their predictions. Just how valid do you believe this opinion to be Robert?
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/arti ... s-possible
http://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/ ... 559952001/
FBI raids Catholic Worker house in Des Moines in search of pipeline ...
DesMoinesRegister.com-
The FBI raided a Catholic Worker House in Des Moines early Friday in search of evidence linked to efforts to sabotage construction of the ...
http://chicago.suntimes.com/columnists/ ... nfessions/
LAURA WASHINGTON: FBI report raises specter of false confessions
COLUMNISTS 08/11/2017, 04:24pm
Terrill Swift announces a lawsuit against Chicago Police and Cook County State's Attorney's office during news conference at Northwestern School of Law in 2012. I John H. White~Sun-Times
In FBI jargon, it’s called a “302.”
It’s more than a number. The six-page report, recently released by a federal judge, contains explosive revelations about Cook County’s criminal “justice” system.
EDITORIAL
The “extraordinary document” confirms what many civil rights attorneys have long believed, “mainly, that the prosecutors and the police collude together to facilitate and accomplish a false confession,” said Locke E. Bowman, executive director of the MacArthur Justice Center at Northwestern University.
Bowman represents Terrill Swift, a defendant in the infamous “Englewood Four” murder case. In 1994, four black men were convicted of raping and murdering Nina Glover, a 30-year-old prostitute. They all served 15 years in prison before being exonerated. Now they are suing, alleging they were railroaded into making false confessions.
The 302 details an interview the FBI conducted with Terence Johnson, an assistant state’s attorney in the county’s Felony Review Unit. In it, Johnson admitted he had misgivings about the case, and told the FBI he felt it was “going to come back.”
Swift, 39, is poised and soft-spoken as he recalls the travesty that cost him nearly half his life.
In 1995, he was 17, living with his mother on the South Side, planning for college. Chicago police officers took him in for questioning under false pretenses, he said in an interview.
Sponsored by Charles Schwab
Why Portfolio Diversification Is Important
By investing in stocks, bonds, and other asset classes, you can help spread your risk around.
See More
Swift was handcuffed to a bench, shuttled between dim cells and bleak interrogation rooms. Officers surrounded him, making dark accusations for “what felt like an eternity.”
He asked for his mother. He asked for a lawyer. No.
They told him, over and over: “You guys raped and murdered this woman. You’re dying in jail. You’re never going home.”
“I was 17,” he recalled. “And all I’m hearing is ‘you’re dying.’ You’re never seeing your family. And I’m sitting there and I’m just crying.”
He told them, “I didn’t do anything.”
As we talk, the tears flow once more. The officers, he said, accused, threatened, coached. If he just signed a confession, he could be a witness against the others, they promised. “You’ll go home.”
http://www.startribune.com/restraining- ... 439932193/
Former FBI agent is ordered to stay away from Sheriff Stanek
An ex-FBI agent is accused of assaulting Hennepin sheriff at a law enforcement conference.
By Libor Jany Star Tribune AUGUST 11, 2017 — 10:03PM
http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-alt ... story.html
Squeezed out by Silicon Valley, the far right is creating its own corporate world
http://www.nydailynews.com/newswires/ne ... -1.3404408
Suit accuses SC power co. of nuclear negligence
Friday, August 11, 2017, 8:13 PM
A South Carolina power company was negligent in charging its customers more than $1 billion to build nuclear reactors that have now been abandoned, according to a lawsuit filed late Friday afternoon.
http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-m ... story.html
Woman says ICE agent pulled gun on her in freeway road rage incident
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/nationa ... -1.3404216
Omarosa appearance at black journalist conference doesn’t go well
Friday, August 11, 2017, 6:52 PM
The White House Office of Public Liaison's Omarosa Manigault attended a chaotic panel at the National Association of Black Journalists' conference. Above, she attends a briefing in February.
President Trump staffer and “Apprentice” contestant Omarosa Manigault-Newman was met with a chaotic reception during a trip to the National Association of Black Journalists.
The White House public liaison worker, generally referred to only by her first name, attended a panel on police brutality at the organization’s meeting in New Orleans on Friday.
However, some attendees turned their backs on her as she sat down for the panel moderated by BET journalist Ed Gordon that included Philando Castile’s mother Valerie Castile and Alton Sterling’s aunt Sandra Sterling.
Omarosa and Gordon got into repeated tense exchanges when he began asking about the President’s views.
http://www.nydailynews.com/newswires/ne ... -1.3404237
Lawsuit claims teenage detainees were wrongly tied to gangs
Friday, August 11, 2017, 6:41 PM
Some teenagers who entered the United States under the unaccompanied-children program are being illegally detained because of allegations of gang affiliation, the American Civil Liberties Union says in a lawsuit.
The lawsuit was filed in San Francisco on behalf of three teenagers recently detained on Long Island, just east of New York. An ACLU lawyer says the lawsuit was filed there because the teenagers were taken to a government facility in northern California.
4 years for $35 million?
http://www.nydailynews.com/newswires/ne ... -1.3404547
Ex-executives sentenced in sweeping Navy corruption case
August 11, 2017, 8:06 PM
Two former executives of a contractor linked to a globe-spanning U.S. Navy corruption scandal have been sentenced to federal prison.
Neil Peterson received a nearly six-year sentence and Linda Raja got nearly four years on Friday in San Diego.
They worked for Singapore-based Glenn Defense Marine Asia, which supplied fuel, food and other services to Navy ships in Asian ports.
Prosecutors said the company and its CEO, nicknamed "Fat Leonard," bribed Navy officials with cash, prostitutes and gifts to obtain classified information that helped the firm overbill the Navy by nearly $35 million.
https://www.policeone.com/investigation ... amond-OIS/
Judge approves search warrant for phones of cops involved in Justine Damond OISThe application states that the information "may more clearly define" the officers' actions before and after Justine Damond was killed on July 15
https://robertscribbler.com/2017/08/11/ ... -per-year/
India and China Building Solar Like Gangbusters, Electric Revolution Continues as GM Sells EV for $5,300 in China, Tesla Plans 700,000 Model 3s Per Year
by robertscribbler
If we're going to halt destructive carbon emissions now hitting the atmosphere, then the world is going to have to swiftly stop burning oil, gas and coal. And the most effective and economic pathway for achieving this removal of harmful present and future atmospheric carbon emissions is a rapid renewable energy build-out to replace fossil fuel energy coupled by increases in energy efficiency.
(To halt and reverse climate change related damages, fossil fuel based greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere need to stop.)
This week, major advances in the present renewable energy build and introduction rate were reported. Chiefly, India and China are rapidly adding new solar panels to their grid, the monthly rate of global EV sales surpassed 100,000 in June, GM is offering a very inexpensive electrical vehicle in China, and Tesla has ramped up plans for Model 3 EV production from 500,000 vehicles per year to 700,000 vehicles per year.
India and China Solar Gangbusters
In the first half of 2017, India is reported to have built 4.8 gigawatts (GW) of new solar energy capacity. This construction has already exceeded all 2016 additions. The country is presently projected to build more than 10 GW of new solar energy capacity by year-end. Large solar additions are essential to India meeting its goal of having 100 GW of solar electrical generation available by 2022. It is also crucial for reducing carbon emissions from fossil fuel fired power plants (coal and gas).
(Total solar capacity in India could hit 30 GW by end 2018. India will need to add solar more rapidly if it is to achieve its goal of 100 GW by 2022. Image source: Clean Technica.)
Further east, China added 24.4 Gigawatts of new solar energy in just the first half of this year. This pushed China's total solar energy generating capacity to a staggering 101 GW. It also puts China firmly in a position to surpass last year's strong rate of solar growth of 34 GW. China's previous goal was to achieve 105 GW of solar production by 2020. One it will hit three and a half years ahead of schedule. China now appears to be on track to overwhelm that goal by achieving between 190 and 230 GW of solar generation by decade's end.
(China has already overwhelmed its 2020 target for added solar capacity. Recalculating based on present build rates finds that end 2020 solar generation levels are likely to hit between 190 and 230 GW for this global economic powerhouse. Image source: China National Energy Administration.)
Such strong solar growth numbers in traditional coal-burning regions provides some hope that carbon emissions growth rates in these countries will continue to level off or possibly start to fall in the near future. Adding in ambitious wind energy and electrical vehicle build-outs in these regions provides synergy to the larger trend. If an early carbon emissions plateau were to be achieved due to rapid renewable energy build-outs in China and India, it would be very helpful in reducing overall levels of global warming during the 21st Century.
GM's $5,300 EV for the Chinese Market
Adding to the trend of growing movement toward an energy switch in Asia this week was GM's introduction of a small, medium-range electrical vehicle for the Chinese auto market. GM is partnering with China's Baojun to produce the E100. A small EV that's about the size of the U.S. Smart Car. The E100 has about a 96 mile all-electric range, a 62 mph top speed, and goes for $14,000 dollars before China's generous EV incentives. After incentives, a person in China can purchase the vehicle for $5,300. GM states that 5,000 buyers registered to purchase the first 200 E100s hitting the market last month, while a second batch of 500 vehicles will be made available soon.
100,000 Electrical Vehicle Sales Per Month by Mid 2017
Globally, electrical vehicle sales have ramped up to 100,000 per month during June of 2017. This growth is being driven primarily by increased sales volumes in China, India, Japan, Australia, Europe and the U.S. as more and more attractive EV models are becoming available and as governments seek to limit the sale of petroleum-burning vehicles in some regions.
(Projected growth rates for EV sales appear likely to surpass present projections through 2020. Image source: Cleantechnica.)
Meanwhile range, recharge rates, acceleration, and other capabilities for these vehicles continue to rapidly improve. This compares to fossil fuel vehicles which have been basically stuck in plateauing performance ranges for decades. 2017 will represent the first year when sales of all EV models globally surpass 1 million per year. With a possible doubling to tripling of EV production through 2020.
Telsa Aiming for 700,000 Per Year Model 3 Sales
2018 will likely see continued growth as new vehicles like the Model 3, the Chevy Bolt, and Toyota Prius Prime provide more competitive and attractive offerings. This past month, the Chevy Bolt logged more than 1,900 vehicles sold in the U.S. in one month. If GM continues to ramp production, marketing, and availability of this high-quality, long range electrical vehicle, the model could easily sell between 3,000 and 5,000 per month to the U.S. market. Another vehicle -- the plug in electric hybrid Toyota Prius Prime -- is also capable of achieving high sales rates in the range of 5,000 per month or more on the U.S. market due to a combined high quality and low price so long as production for this model also rapidly ramps up.
But the big outlier here is the Tesla Model 3. By end 2017, Tesla is aiming to ramp Model 3 production to 5,000 vehicles per week. It plans to hit more than 40,000 vehicles per month by end of 2018. And, according to Elon Musk's recent announcement, will ultimately aim to achieve 700,000 Model 3 sales per year. If such a rapid ramp appears, the Model 3 along with other increasingly attractive EVs could hit close to 2 million per year annual combined sales in 2018 and surpass 3 million at some time between 2019 and 2020. This is well ahead of past projections of around 2.2 million EV sales per year by 2020. Representing yet another early opportunity to reduce massive global carbon emissions coming from oil, gas, and coal.
Links:
India Installs 4.8 GW of Solar During First Half of 2017
China's New 190 GW Solar Guiding Opinion Wows
China Could Reach 230 GW Solar by end 2020
GM Should Bring Baojun E100 EV to USA
EV News for the Month
Joint Venture for Baojun E100
Model 3 Annual Demand Could Surpass 700,000
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Re: How many FBI informants in the Bundy Militia group in Oregon?
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/d ... -copied-it
Portugal’s radical drugs policy is working. Why hasn’t the world copied it?
Since it decriminalised all drugs in 2001, Portugal has seen dramatic drops in overdoses, HIV infection and drug-related crime.
the drugs came, they hit all at once. It was the 80s, and by the time one in 10 people had slipped into the depths of heroin use – bankers, university students, carpenters, socialites, miners – Portugal was in a state of panic.
Álvaro Pereira was working as a family doctor in Olhão in southern Portugal. “People were injecting themselves in the street, in public squares, in gardens,” he told me. “At that time, not a day passed when there wasn’t a robbery at a local business, or a mugging.”
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The crisis began in the south. The 80s were a prosperous time in Olhão, a fishing town 31 miles west of the Spanish border. Coastal waters filled fishermen’s nets from the Gulf of Cádiz to Morocco, tourism was growing, and currency flowed throughout the southern Algarve region. But by the end of the decade, heroin began washing up on Olhão’s shores. Overnight, Pereira’s beloved slice of the Algarve coast became one of the drug capitals of Europe: one in every 100 Portuguese was battling a problematic heroin addiction at that time, but the number was even higher in the south. Headlines in the local press raised the alarm about overdose deaths and rising crime. The rate of HIV infection in Portugal became the highest in the European Union. Pereira recalled desperate patients and families beating a path to his door, terrified, bewildered, begging for help. “I got involved,” he said, “only because I was ignorant.”
In truth, there was a lot of ignorance back then. Forty years of authoritarian ruleunder the regime established by António Salazar in 1933 had suppressed education, weakened institutions and lowered the school-leaving age, in a strategy intended to keep the population docile. The country was closed to the outside world; people missed out on the experimentation and mind-expanding culture of the 1960s. When the regime ended abruptly in a military coup in 1974, Portugal was suddenly opened to new markets and influences. Under the old regime, Coca-Cola was banned and owning a cigarette lighter required a licence. When marijuana and then heroin began flooding in, the country was utterly unprepared.
Pereira tackled the growing wave of addiction the only way he knew how: one patient at a time. A student in her 20s who still lived with her parents might have her family involved in her recovery; a middle-aged man, estranged from his wife and living on the street, faced different risks and needed a different kind of support. Pereira improvised, calling on institutions and individuals in the community to lend a hand
http://www.oregonlive.com/oregon-stando ... ed_at.html
Bundy Case FBI Misconduct
Prosecutors shared recorded attorney-client jail phone calls with defense in NV Bunkerville case
Defense lawyers in the Bunkerville standoff case were stunned last month to receive recorded phone calls between co-defendant Blaine Cooper and his Oregon defense lawyer from federal prosecutors who had previously denied possessing any attorney-client privileged jailhouse calls.
Prosecutors shared 12 recorded jail phone calls between Cooper and Portland lawyer Krista Shipsey with defense lawyers for co-defendants Cliven Bundy, his two sons and Ryan Payne, who are now on trial in federal court in Las Vegas.
Cooper has pleaded guilty to federal conspiracy charges in both the 2014 standoff with federal agents near Bunkerville, Nevada, and in the 2016 Oregon armed takeover of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge. He is cooperating with the government and was a government witness in this year's Oregon trial.
The recordings captured calls Cooper made to his lawyer while in custody at the Las Vegas City jail between Jan. 22 and Feb. 17, 2017. The conversations related to the Bunkerville case, including discussions about preparation, the criminal allegations and strategy, according to court documents.
"I didn't know, nor did Blaine,'' Shipsey said in a recent interview. "It's extremely concerning. We were assured those conversations would be confidential.'
Assistant federal public defenders Brenda Weksler and Ryan Norwood, who represent Payne in Nevada, have called for the dismissal of the case, alleging the prosecution has acted with "flagrant misconduct,'' based on the "government's misrepresentations regarding the most sacrosanct of client communications.''
Shipsey also last week asked to review copies of the recorded calls with her client that were shared.
"It is negligence at its best and deliberate indifference to a defendant's substantive rights at its worst,'' Weksler and Norwood wrote in motions to the court.
Payne's lawyers cited the sharing of Cooper's privileged calls to his attorney with co-defendants as just one in a series of discovery blunders by prosecutors in the Bunkerville case. In the days leading up to trial and even once trial started, prosecutors have been ordered to turn over emails and other evidence -- regarding the FBI's use of a camera outside the Bundy Ranch, FBI surveillance of the residence and threat assessments made before the 2014 standoff -- that they previously did not share or said didn't exist.
Prosecutors this week countered that even were the defense to show the government violated an attorney-client privilege by sharing Cooper's calls, Payne's lawyers have failed to show that Payne or any other defendant on trial has been prejudiced in any way by the sharing of the calls or that their ability to defend themselves has been impaired.
A so-called taint team of FBI agents, set up to act separately and apart from the FBI agents on the prosecution team, reviewed all recorded jail calls and identified relevant nonprivileged calls. They then provided to the prosecution team a summary of the content of those calls, according to Assistant U.S. Attorney Nadia Ahmed.
The taint team further identified privileged calls between defendants and their lawyers. Once they determined a call was between a defendant and their lawyer, the agents on the team "did no further review, did not listen to the call and therefore did not summarize the contents,'' Ahmed wrote in a response.
Those privileged calls were entered into an Excel spreadsheet and characterized as "minimized,'' meaning the agents did not further review the call's contents, Ahmed wrote. The FBI agent on the taint team classified Cooper's calls with his lawyer under the name "Christa,'' presumably referring to defense lawyer Krista Shipsey.
Yet the prosecution team shared Cooper's privileged calls with his co-defendants and their lawyers in September. Last month, Payne's lawyers discovered them among hundreds of phone calls the government turned over relating to potential trial witnesses.
Federal prosecutors say they haven't listened to the Cooper calls.
"To date, no one on the prosecution team has listened to Mr. Cooper's privileged attorney-client calls or was aware of such calls,'' Ahmed wrote in her response filed late Monday night. "No one on the prosecution team intends to listen to the attorney-client calls. The prosecution cannot direct the jail not to record such calls or force the jail to review them and weed such calls out before providing them to the government.''
Payne's defense lawyers continue to question if the government has obtained recorded phone calls between Payne and his lawyers. They had initially asked prosecutors if they had any recorded attorney-client phone calls involving Payne in October 2016 after learning of another attorney's calls with an inmate at the Nevada Southern Detention Center in Pahrump, Nevada, that prosecutors had obtained in an unrelated federal criminal case. By mid-November 2016, federal prosecutors in the Bunkerville case responded to Payne's lawyers that the government had "no recordings of conversations between Payne and his counsel or between Payne's co-defendants and their counsel.''
"It has become abundantly clear that the government and the agents who they are supervising concerning these matters, are not taking the necessary precautions to ensure that attorney-client phone calls are not recorded or disbursed to co-defendants or government counsel,'' Weksler wrote in a court filing.
Nevada's U.S. District Judge Gloria M. Navarro has yet to rule on Payne's motion to dismiss stemming from the sharing of privileged attorney-client jail calls.
The recording of attorney-client jail calls is a violation and a big deal, according to Oregon prosecutors and defense lawyers.
Cooper, whose calls were recorded with his attorney and shared, would have standing to allege his Sixth Amendment right to effective assistance of counsel was violated, Portland criminal defense lawyer Lisa Ludwig said.
Kevin Sali, a Portland criminal defense lawyer not involved in either the Oregon or Nevada cases, said he believes it will be harder for the rest of the Nevada defense team to show Payne or the others on trial now have been harmed. The government's use of a special taint team to review calls is a common practice. And it will be hard to show how Payne or Cliven Bundy or his two sons were prejudiced by having recorded jail calls involving Cooper, who is not on trial and is cooperating with the government.
The federal government's possession of attorney-client jail calls arose in the high-profile federal prosecution in Oregon of Joey Pedersen in a quadruple murder case and led to a stinging rebuke by a federal judge in 2014, but in that case the investigating detective kept recordings of the privileged attorney-client calls. A similar misstep occurred in a federal case in Las Vegas in October 2016, where a federal prosecutor admitted she inadvertently obtained recordings of confidential jailhouse phone conversations between a bank robbery defendant an
Branding the FBI Octopus
http://mulletwrapper.net/retired-fbi-ag ... library-2/
Retired FBI agent Shepard speaks Dec. 7 at Foley Library
Mulletwrapper-
David Shepard, retired FBI Agent, will present a program on Thursday, Dec 7 at 2 p.m. at the Foley Public Library entitled The Mission of the FBI Abroad. Mr. Shepard is an energetic and engaging speaker. He will share stories about his time abroad as an FBI agent and all that entailed. David made a wonderful donation to ...
http://www.startribune.com/longtime-fbi ... 462154693/
Longtime FBI agent Harold 'Hal' Fabriz dies at 85
DECEMBER 5, 2017 — 5:10PM
Harold “Hal” Fabriz, a veteran FBI agent who worked the front lines of the civil rights movement in the 1960s, helped prevent violence in Mississippi by calming angry bigots and keeping his cool after being spit in the face by hostile Ku Klux Klan members.
Fabriz, who also played a small role in investigating the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy and civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., died at age 85 on Nov. 25. He was a longtime resident of Falcon Heights.
“Hal was a great arbitrator,” said Bob Agnew, a former FBI agent who worked with Fabriz for three years in Mississippi. “I think he contributed a great deal to keeping the peace to the greatest extent possible in Mississippi during some very turbulent times.
Born in Minneapolis, Fabriz — who stood 6 feet, 6 inches tall and wore a size 15 shoe — attracted the nicknames “Moose” and “Big Foot” as a student at Roosevelt High School. He heard about police work as a young child from his father, Wilzel “Duke” Fabriz, who spent 20 years on the force in Minneapolis and later served as chief deputy sheriff of Hennepin County.
After earning a degree in criminal science from Michigan State University, Fabriz joined the FBI in 1962. His first posting was in San Antonio, Texas, arriving a few months before the Kennedy assassination. As part of the investigation, he interviewed friends of Marina Oswald, the widow of Kennedy’s killer, Lee Harvey Oswald.
His next posting was in Mississippi, where Fabriz handled civil rights investigations, bank robberies and other high-profile cases from 1964 to 1973, a period of extraordinary civil unrest.
“We’d be working with the police one day and investigating them the next,” Agnew said.
Fabriz often shadowed KKK members and other agitators. Once, after hearing about a white farmer firing a gun at activists who were trying to register black voters on his property, Fabriz convinced the man to go to court for a restraining order if the invaders returned instead of using his gun. Agnew said Fabriz always found creative ways to defuse tense situations.
“Dad was a lawman — he wasn’t a crusader,” said daughter Sharon Fabriz. “He carried out his duties with as much integrity as possible, but he never made it into a personal cause.”
Sharon said her father sheltered the family from his work as much as possible.
“We were nervous about him getting home safely every day, but he didn’t lay the worries of the world on his family,” she said.
Sharon said her father didn’t open up about his work until the movie “Mississippi Burning” came out in 1988. The film, which chronicled the federal response to the death of three civil rights workers in Philadelphia, Miss., prompted questions from his family about his role in the case. Fabriz was one of hundreds of FBI agents involved in an investigation that led to the convictions of seven men, including the deputy sheriff who originally arrested the workers.
“He always minimized his role,” Sharon said. “He was a humble man.”
Fabriz finished his FBI career in Minnesota, retiring in 1987. He spent the last 16 years of his professional life doing drug testing for the National Football League, primarily working with the Vikings.
http://jfkmurdersolved.com/bush3.htm
Behind the Bushes
+ The architects for the Bay of Pigs were Vice President Richard Nixon and CIA director Allen Dulles. JFK inherited the plan from the Eisenhower administration. Nixon lost the race for the presidency to JFK and Dulles was fired by JFK for the failure of the Bay of Pigs. Yet Dulles is appointed by president Johnson as a Warren Commission member to "investigate" JFK's murder. The proof for Bush's lie about his CIA past can be found in a document, declassified in 1988.
It's a memorandum of FBI director J Edgar Hoover to the State department, dated 29 November 1963. It describes a meeting, one day after JFK's murder, between FBI and CIA officials talking about the reaction of the Cuban exile community to the Kennedy Assassination. The last paragraph states that the "the substance of the foregoing information was orally furnished to us and George Bush of the Central Intelligence agency". Here we have the name of George Bush mentioned as a CIA official in direct connection to the Kennedy assassination. When asked by journalists, he initially stated "It's not me, must be another Bush!" This was checked and found to be NOT true. When asked again, a spokesperson for Bush declined to comment any further. The obvious question is: Why does Bush need to lie about it?
+ Let's see how the Assassinations Records Review Board dealt with this information in their final report, chapter 6 :
4. George Bush
A November 29, 1963, memorandum from FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover to the Director of the Bureau of Intelligence and Research at the Department of State refers to the fact that information on the assassination of President Kennedy was "orally furnished to Mr. George Bush of the Central Intelligence Agency." At the request of the Review Board, the CIA made a thorough search of its records in an attempt to determine if the "George Bush" referred to in the memorandum might be identical to President and former Director of Central Intelligence George Herbert Walker Bush. That search determined that the CIA had no association with George Herbert Walker Bush during the time frame referenced in the document.
The records that the Review Board examined showed that the only other "George Bush" serving in the CIA in 1963 was a junior analyst who has repeatedly denied being the "George Bush" referenced in the memorandum. The Review Board staff found one reference to an Army Major General George Bush in the calendars of Director of Central Intelligence Allen Dulles. There was no indication if this General Bush could be the referenced George Bush. The Review Board marked the calendar page as an assassination record.
+ So the George Bush mentioned in this memorandum could not be found by the CIA? Neither the Major General George Bush mentioned in the calendar of CIA director Allen Dulles? Even though Dulles, as we have seen, was on a first name basis with Prescott Bush? Was the Assassinations Records Review Board not advised that it is practically standard procedure for the CIA to purge the files of sensitive covert intelligence operatives? Why did the ARRB ask the fox to investigate who ate the chickens, and was then satisfied with the answer? Why are there no records on James Files, the man who claims to be the gunman on the grassy knoll? Why does his birth certificate state "deceased at birth"? How can this man be alive and well in prison, if he was deceased at birth? Did Hoover and Dulles make up a fictional George Bush?
+ It can now be conclusively shown that both Gerald Ford and Arlen Specter (now a senator for Pennsylvania) tampered with the medical evidence of JFK's autopsy and put these lies in the Warren Report.
+ Hale Boggs sat on the Warren Commission, which concluded that President Kennedy was slain by a lone assassin. Later, in 1971 and '72, Boggs said that the Warren Report was false and that J. Edgar Hoover's FBI not only helped cover up the JFK murder but blackmailed Congress with massive wire-tapping and spying. He named Warren Commission staff member Arlen Specter as a major cover-up artist. Congressman Boggs' plane disappeared on a flight to Alaska in 1972. The press, the military, and the CIA publicly proclaimed the plane could not be located. Investigators later said that was a lie, that the plane had been found. On the plane were Nick Begich, a very popular Democratic Congressman, and Don Jonz, an aide to Mr. Boggs. All were killed.
+ In 1976, George H.W. Bush was appointed CIA director by president and former Warren Commission member Gerald Ford at the exact time that newly erected investigative committees were probing the possible role of the CIA into the assassination plots to kill Fidel Castro, Martin Luther King and John F. Kennedy. Bush appoints his old friend from JM/Wave and the Bay of Pigs, Theodore Shackley, as his deputy director for Special Operations, the CIA's most important division. The above-mentioned investigations are heavily stonewalled by the CIA, holding back crucial documents and witnesses. Nevertheless, the House Select Committee on Assassinations concludes its investigation with a 95% probability that at least 4 shots were fired and Kennedy was killed as a result of a conspiracy, along with the recommendation to the Justice Department to follow up with a further investigation. This recommendation was never honored.
+ During the preparations of the House Select Committee on Assassinations, pressure is applied to Texan Bill Lord not to testify for the committee. Bill Lord was a fellow marine and roommate of Lee Harvey Oswald on a ship voyage to France. Lord expresses his concern in a letter to president Carter. He writes that Oswald was connected to the FBI and CIA and concludes that the CIA and the FBI are complicit in JFK's death and the coup d'etat that occurred on 11/22/1963. He also states that one of the Midland, TX politicians applying pressure to him, was Mr. George W. Bush junior . This letter to President Carter was declassified some years ago. Here's a fragment:
One of the parties which has blitzed me with telephone calls trying to persuade me to tell them what I know about Oswald, is engaged in a very costly project which allows them to locate, interview, monitor, and influence every single available person who ever knew Lee Oswald--and this, just in advance of the new governmental investigation by the house select committee on Assassinations. I finally consented, not to grant an interview, but to allow the publication's representative to explain their project to me in person. After a lunch interview with this researcher, I was told that if I had refused even to meet with him, pressure was in the offing from two Midland men: Mr. Jim Allison, publisher of the ultra-conservative Reporter-Telegram, my employer (out of necessity, and for the moment!), and Mr. George Bush, Jr.
... Shortly thereafter, my mother discovered that her telephone had been tampered with. The casing around the dialing aparatus had been pulled out about one-half inch... we cannot doubt that someone entered the house at a time when I was at work and my mother was away; she returned to the house, however, at an unaccustomed time... I have been in anguish for weeks, Mr. President, trying my best to laugh at my apprehensions and to see these events as fortuitous ones... Speaking as the man who spent more than two weeks in the same ship's cabin with Lee Oswald at the time of his 1959 "defection", and speaking as a man who has been the subject of the above.
See the original letter here (page 1) here (page 2) and here (page 3)
+ There are numerous indications and allegations that Nixon's Watergate scandal had a direct connection with the Kennedy assassination and that every time that Nixon is talking about the danger that the "Bay of Pigs thing" might be exposed because of Watergate, he was actually covertly referring to the Kennedy assassination. None of these rumours could solidify, because shortly before his resignation, Nixon replaced Spiro Agnew by Gerald Ford as his vice president, who promptly pardoned him from further prosecution. The allegations of a direct connection with Dallas are certainly not unfounded, considering the incomplete official story and the preponderance of Watergate individuals connected to the Bay of Pigs and the Kennedy assassination. When it became clear that Watergate may not be kept under the lid, Nixon fires and replaces his entire administration with the exception of George H.W. Bush, because "he will do anything for our cause".
From a radio interview with investigative journalist Jim Marrs:
J – Yes, George, and let me say this: I don't want everybody to think that just Lyndon Johnson was involved in this, or that it was just the democrats or whatever. I’m looking here at a book written by H.R Haldeman, who was ...
G – He was one of Nixon’s men!
J – Yes, one of Nixon’s boys, and here he writes , he says, if you all remember during Watergate the Nixon Tapes and all the focus over that: Nixon went to pay 2 million dollars to E. Howard Hunt, a CIA officer, who was leading and training the anti-Castro Cubans, he (Nixon) said: "Pay him the 2 million dollars! This could open up the whole Bay of Pigs thing! This could look bad for us, this could look bad for the CIA!"And in Haldeman's book, he says that it seems that in all these Nixon references to the Bay of Pigs, he was actually referring to the Kennedy assassination! More information here
+ George H.W. Bush failed to disclose his friendship with George De Mohrenschildt, a renowned oil geologist and Lee Harvey Oswald's best friend in Dallas. They knew each other since 1942, probably even longer, because in 1939 he went to work for Humble Oil, a company founded by Prescott Bush. In 1977, when De Mohrenschildt is located by investigators of the House Select Committee on Assassinations, who want to interview him, he allegedly commits suicide the following day. The last person to interview him on the day he died, is Jay Edward Epstein, a writer/historian and a known apologist for the Warren Report since day one. Epstein married a CIA agent and is the biographer of former CIA-director James Jesus Angleton, presumably in charge of Oswald's "defection" to Russia. Interestingly, Epstein is also the "consultant" that was suddenly hired by NBC in 1995, when NBC was making a program for national TV on the confession of James E. Files. The program was promptly cancelled.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-10-26/j ... ld/9087384
JFK files' release could expose CIA and FBI cover-up on Lee Harvey Oswald, experts say - ABC News (Australian Broadcasting ...
Australian Broadcasting Corporation › au › ...
from www.abc.net.au
Oct 25, 2017 · The deadline is looming for the release of hundreds of thousands of pages of documents on the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy and experts say it could expose a CIA cover-up. The Warren Commission established after Kennedy's death concluded Lee Harvey Oswald was the sole ...
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story ... cia-213197
HISTORY DEPT.
Yes, the CIA Director Was Part of the JFK Assassination Cover-Up
John McCone was long suspected of withholding information from the Warren Commission. Now even the CIA says he did.
October 06,
http://www.themonitor.com/news/local/ar ... c397d.html
Mercedes police officer charged with driving while intoxicated
MERCEDES — A Texas Department of Public Safety trooper arrested a Mercedes police officer last week on suspicion of driving while intoxicated.
Angel Serrata, 27, was arrested on Tuesday, Nov. 28 at about 2:33 a.m.
A trooper stopped Serrate for driving 11 miles per hour over the speed limit on Farm-to-Market 88 near Mile 14 North Road south of Elsa, according to a criminal complaint.
Serrate “showed signs of intoxication” and performed standard field sobriety tests “poorly,” according to the criminal complaint.
When asked to provide a blood sample for testing, Serrata refused, according to the complaint.
A judge charged Serrata with driving while intoxicated, a Class B misdemeanor. It’s his first offense.
https://apnews.com/232760e427c64638ae47 ... o-lawsuits
Police escape being fired
taxpayer not so lucky
gets hit with cost of supporting bad cops
Philadelphia pays $250,000 to settle police photo lawsuits
PHILADELPHIA Philadelphia will pay $250,000 to two people who say they were roughed up while taking photographs of police officers.
The Pennsylvania chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union on Tuesday announced settlements in the cases of Amanda Geraci and Rick Fields.
Fields says an officer handcuffed him and broke the screen of his phone because he was taking photos of police responding to what looked like the scene of a party in 2013. He says the officer asked him, “Do you like taking pictures of grown men?”
Geraci says an officer pinned her up against a pillar and shouted in her face because she took photographs of an arrest in 2012.
A Philadelphia spokesman says settling the lawsuits was in the city’s “best interests.”
https://robertscribbler.com/2017/12/05/ ... -year-end/
U.S. Electrical Vehicle Sales Rose by 30 Percent in November, Likely to Hit Near 200,000 by Year End
by robertscribbler
Good news continues in the U.S. on the renewable energy front where electrical vehicle sales increased by about 30 percent in November of 2017 vs November of 2016.
In all, 17,178 electrical vehicles sold on the U.S. market in November. This number compares to 13,327 sold during November of 2016. Top selling brands for the month were the Chevy Bolt EV, The Tesla Model X, the Chevy Volt, the Toyota Prius Prime, and the Tesla Model S. The Chevy Bolt topped the list of monthly best sellers with nearly 3,000 vehicles going to owners during the month. The top annual seller remains the Model S (at 22,085 estimated sales so far) -- which the lower-priced Bolt is unlikely to surpass this year.
U.S. Electrical Vehicle Sales Rose by 30 Percent in November, Likely to Hit Near 200,000 by Year End
Good news continues in the U.S. on the renewable energy front where electrical vehicle sales increased by about 30 percent in November of 2017 vs November of 2016.
In all, 17,178 electrical vehicles sold on the U.S. market in November. This number compares to 13,327 sold during November of 2016. Top selling brands for the month were the Chevy Bolt EV, The Tesla Model X, the Chevy Volt, the Toyota Prius Prime, and the Tesla Model S. The Chevy Bolt topped the list of monthly best sellers with nearly 3,000 vehicles going to owners during the month. The top annual seller remains the Model S (at 22,085 estimated sales so far) — which the lower-priced Bolt is unlikely to surpass this year.
(Over the past few years, the performance of electrical vehicles has been steadily catching up to or outpacing that of conventional fossil fuel vehicles. The Tesla Roadster by 2019-2020 will have a 620 mile range, hyperfast charging, a top speed of 250 mph, and be able to go from 0-60 in 1.9 seconds. A combined set of specs that no gas guzzler could hope to match. By 2022, most EVs will cost less and perform better than their comparable fossil fuel counterparts. Image source: Tesla.)
Total electrical vehicle sales for the year so far has hit nearly 174,000 through November. This compares to 158,614 for all of 2016. Given that December is often a top sales month and that Model 3 production is continuing to ramp, it’s likely that final sales for 2017 will hit close to or exceed the 200,000 mark for the year in the U.S.
Model 3 Production Ramp Rate Still a Mystery
Model 3 sales will likely continue to ramp through December as Tesla works through scaling production. Considering the fact that there are more than 500,000 Model 3s on order, the big question is — how fast? For even if Tesla were able to produce 10,000 Model 3s per week, it would take more than a year to fill all the orders.
Production is presently considerably lower. But it more than doubled in November to an estimated 345. A similar rate of increase would result in 800 of the vehicles being sold in December. Meanwhile, the company plans to be making 5,000 Model 3s per week by Q1 of 2018.
There are some indications that Tesla is preparing for a start of mass market releases. It is filling an LA Model 3 distribution site even as it has opened up ordering to customers outside of employees. Meanwhile, Panasonic recently announced that battery production issues will soon clear. Which raises the possibility of a faster ramp going forward.
Updated Nissan Leaf Begins Mass Production
New developments also include the start to mass production of the 2018 Nissan Leaf in the U.S during December. The 2018 Leaf features longer range (150 miles), lower cost (700 dollars less) and higher performance (more horsepower) than the previous Leaf. And it will be followed on by a (higher-priced) 225 mile range version in 2019 which will put it in a distance capability class similar to that of the Bolt and the base line Model 3.
Electrical Vehicles — Key Aspect of the Renewable Energy Transition
In context, solar energy, wind, and battery storage are the triad of new renewable energy systems that have the serious potential to really start cutting down global carbon emissions as they replace fossil fuels.
All these energy systems are getting less expensive. All have what they call a positive learning curve. And all can work together in a synergistic fashion while leveraging technological advances. Economic advantages that fossil fuel based systems lack.
In addition, renewable energy sources help to drive efficiency, even as they clean up transportation, power generation, and manufacturing chains they are linked to by producing zero carbon emissions in use.
(By transitioning to renewable energy as the basis for economic systems, we can dramatically reduce global carbon emissions. In order to stave off very harmful impacts from climate change, this transition will have to be very rapid. In the best case, more rapid than the scenario depicted above. Video source: IRENA.)
On the battery storage side, electrical vehicles are a crucial link in the battery development chain. As electrical vehicles are mass produced, this process drives down the cost of batteries which can then be used to store electricity and to replace base-load fossil fuel power generators like coal and gas plants. Meanwhile, battery electrical vehicles are considerably more efficient than gas or diesel powered vehicles and those linked to wind and solar or other renewable energy sources emit zero carbon in use.
Both electrical vehicles and other renewable energy systems have a long way to grow before they provide the same level of energy produced by dirty fossil fuels today. This large gap represents a great opportunity to cut back on the volume of harmful gasses hitting our atmosphere in the near future.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/201 ... le-breaker
Survey: two in three Trump supporters want a president who breaks the rules
The latest American Values Survey finds a deepening polarisation, as Trump diehards stay loyal but fractures appear in the Republican party
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/201 ... enate-race
Roy Moore rival: 'Men who hurt little girls should go to jail, not the Senate'
Shifting tactics in Alabama Senate race, Democrat Doug Jones hammers Roy Moore over allegations of sexual misconduct involving teenagers
https://apnews.com/beeba31e5a5a41cebcc1 ... sentencing
Evidence a little different at ex-officer’s sentencing
CHARLESTON, S.C. — A judge overseeing the federal sentencing of a white former police officer who pleaded guilty in the shooting death of an unarmed black motorist is allowing expert defense testimony about disputed audio and video recordings.
On Tuesday, one of those experts said his analysis showed that former North Charleston officer Michael Slager fought with Walter Scott before their fatal encounter and the ex-officer said: “Let go of my Taser before I shoot you.”
The defense team believes that evidence bolsters Slager’s contention that Scott was aggressive and that the officer shot him in self-defense. A microphone on Slager’s uniform also picked up Scott saying, “F--k the police” after Slager asked him to get on the ground, Grant Fredericks testified.
Prosecutors counter that there is no way to definitively tell what is being said on the recordings, and they have used their own experts to show how Slager fired at Scott as he was running away, nowhere near the officer’s stun gun.
Slager, 36, pleaded guilty in federal court in May to violating Scott’s civil rights by shooting him without justification on April 4, 2015. Slager had pulled Scott over for a broken brake light, and the 50-year-old Scott ran. After deploying his stun gun, Slager fired eight times at Scott as he ran away, hitting him five times in the back.
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyl ... -kids-moms
Finland: the only country where dads spend more time with kids than moms
From paid paternity leave to universal daycare, Finland is closing the gender gap. What can it teach the rest of the world?
America is failing mothers. Help us change that
To Americans and Britons, the Nordic countries have come to represent a near-mythical paradise of gender equality and family harmony, where legions of happy fathers push prams through the streets, relaxed mothers enjoy lengthy paid maternity leaves, and well-nourished children in chunky sweaters glow from their free healthcare.
But even against that backdrop, one statistic about Finland, a nation of 5.5 million, stands out: according to a recent OECD report, it’s the only country in the developed world where fathers spend more time with school-aged children than mothers, to the tune of eight minutes a day.
Th Global Gender Gap report rated Finland the second most equal country in the world in 2016, and the Economist recently rated it the third best country to be a working mom.
How did Finland get there? And what can the rest of us learn from this small Nordic nation that might accelerate the battle for gender equity in other places? It’s a story of collective action and political will, of a strong tradition of social democracy and an accommodating tax system. But it also boils down to a key difference in how Finland frames the conversation: it’s not about what’s good for adults – it’s about what’s good for children.
“This is a question of gender equality, but it’s more a question of the rights of the child,” says Annika Saarikko, Finland’s minister of family affairs and social services, one of six female ministers out of a cabinet of eleven. “This is not about the mother’s right or the father’s right – but the child’s right to spend time with both parents.”
Finland believes fathers play a crucial role in child development. The government offers fathers nine weeks of paternity leave, during which they are paid 70% of their salary. And to encourage fathers to take advantage of the benefit, it recently launched a new campaign – with flyers showing a burly construction worker joyfully pushing a pram – called “It’s Daddy Time!”
“We want fathers to take more of the shared parental leave available,” says Saarikko. “We are quite sure if we look at the research that the connection between the baby and the father is really important – the early years are vital and we believe in investing in that.”
Link du jour
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2017/d ... -interview
Portugal’s radical drugs policy is working. Why hasn’t the world copied it?
Since it decriminalised all drugs in 2001, Portugal has seen dramatic drops in overdoses, HIV infection and drug-related crime.
the drugs came, they hit all at once. It was the 80s, and by the time one in 10 people had slipped into the depths of heroin use – bankers, university students, carpenters, socialites, miners – Portugal was in a state of panic.
Álvaro Pereira was working as a family doctor in Olhão in southern Portugal. “People were injecting themselves in the street, in public squares, in gardens,” he told me. “At that time, not a day passed when there wasn’t a robbery at a local business, or a mugging.”
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The crisis began in the south. The 80s were a prosperous time in Olhão, a fishing town 31 miles west of the Spanish border. Coastal waters filled fishermen’s nets from the Gulf of Cádiz to Morocco, tourism was growing, and currency flowed throughout the southern Algarve region. But by the end of the decade, heroin began washing up on Olhão’s shores. Overnight, Pereira’s beloved slice of the Algarve coast became one of the drug capitals of Europe: one in every 100 Portuguese was battling a problematic heroin addiction at that time, but the number was even higher in the south. Headlines in the local press raised the alarm about overdose deaths and rising crime. The rate of HIV infection in Portugal became the highest in the European Union. Pereira recalled desperate patients and families beating a path to his door, terrified, bewildered, begging for help. “I got involved,” he said, “only because I was ignorant.”
In truth, there was a lot of ignorance back then. Forty years of authoritarian ruleunder the regime established by António Salazar in 1933 had suppressed education, weakened institutions and lowered the school-leaving age, in a strategy intended to keep the population docile. The country was closed to the outside world; people missed out on the experimentation and mind-expanding culture of the 1960s. When the regime ended abruptly in a military coup in 1974, Portugal was suddenly opened to new markets and influences. Under the old regime, Coca-Cola was banned and owning a cigarette lighter required a licence. When marijuana and then heroin began flooding in, the country was utterly unprepared.
Pereira tackled the growing wave of addiction the only way he knew how: one patient at a time. A student in her 20s who still lived with her parents might have her family involved in her recovery; a middle-aged man, estranged from his wife and living on the street, faced different risks and needed a different kind of support. Pereira improvised, calling on institutions and individuals in the community to lend a hand
http://www.oregonlive.com/oregon-stando ... ed_at.html
Bundy Case FBI Misconduct
Prosecutors shared recorded attorney-client jail phone calls with defense in NV Bunkerville case
Defense lawyers in the Bunkerville standoff case were stunned last month to receive recorded phone calls between co-defendant Blaine Cooper and his Oregon defense lawyer from federal prosecutors who had previously denied possessing any attorney-client privileged jailhouse calls.
Prosecutors shared 12 recorded jail phone calls between Cooper and Portland lawyer Krista Shipsey with defense lawyers for co-defendants Cliven Bundy, his two sons and Ryan Payne, who are now on trial in federal court in Las Vegas.
Cooper has pleaded guilty to federal conspiracy charges in both the 2014 standoff with federal agents near Bunkerville, Nevada, and in the 2016 Oregon armed takeover of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge. He is cooperating with the government and was a government witness in this year's Oregon trial.
The recordings captured calls Cooper made to his lawyer while in custody at the Las Vegas City jail between Jan. 22 and Feb. 17, 2017. The conversations related to the Bunkerville case, including discussions about preparation, the criminal allegations and strategy, according to court documents.
"I didn't know, nor did Blaine,'' Shipsey said in a recent interview. "It's extremely concerning. We were assured those conversations would be confidential.'
Assistant federal public defenders Brenda Weksler and Ryan Norwood, who represent Payne in Nevada, have called for the dismissal of the case, alleging the prosecution has acted with "flagrant misconduct,'' based on the "government's misrepresentations regarding the most sacrosanct of client communications.''
Shipsey also last week asked to review copies of the recorded calls with her client that were shared.
"It is negligence at its best and deliberate indifference to a defendant's substantive rights at its worst,'' Weksler and Norwood wrote in motions to the court.
Payne's lawyers cited the sharing of Cooper's privileged calls to his attorney with co-defendants as just one in a series of discovery blunders by prosecutors in the Bunkerville case. In the days leading up to trial and even once trial started, prosecutors have been ordered to turn over emails and other evidence -- regarding the FBI's use of a camera outside the Bundy Ranch, FBI surveillance of the residence and threat assessments made before the 2014 standoff -- that they previously did not share or said didn't exist.
Prosecutors this week countered that even were the defense to show the government violated an attorney-client privilege by sharing Cooper's calls, Payne's lawyers have failed to show that Payne or any other defendant on trial has been prejudiced in any way by the sharing of the calls or that their ability to defend themselves has been impaired.
A so-called taint team of FBI agents, set up to act separately and apart from the FBI agents on the prosecution team, reviewed all recorded jail calls and identified relevant nonprivileged calls. They then provided to the prosecution team a summary of the content of those calls, according to Assistant U.S. Attorney Nadia Ahmed.
The taint team further identified privileged calls between defendants and their lawyers. Once they determined a call was between a defendant and their lawyer, the agents on the team "did no further review, did not listen to the call and therefore did not summarize the contents,'' Ahmed wrote in a response.
Those privileged calls were entered into an Excel spreadsheet and characterized as "minimized,'' meaning the agents did not further review the call's contents, Ahmed wrote. The FBI agent on the taint team classified Cooper's calls with his lawyer under the name "Christa,'' presumably referring to defense lawyer Krista Shipsey.
Yet the prosecution team shared Cooper's privileged calls with his co-defendants and their lawyers in September. Last month, Payne's lawyers discovered them among hundreds of phone calls the government turned over relating to potential trial witnesses.
Federal prosecutors say they haven't listened to the Cooper calls.
"To date, no one on the prosecution team has listened to Mr. Cooper's privileged attorney-client calls or was aware of such calls,'' Ahmed wrote in her response filed late Monday night. "No one on the prosecution team intends to listen to the attorney-client calls. The prosecution cannot direct the jail not to record such calls or force the jail to review them and weed such calls out before providing them to the government.''
Payne's defense lawyers continue to question if the government has obtained recorded phone calls between Payne and his lawyers. They had initially asked prosecutors if they had any recorded attorney-client phone calls involving Payne in October 2016 after learning of another attorney's calls with an inmate at the Nevada Southern Detention Center in Pahrump, Nevada, that prosecutors had obtained in an unrelated federal criminal case. By mid-November 2016, federal prosecutors in the Bunkerville case responded to Payne's lawyers that the government had "no recordings of conversations between Payne and his counsel or between Payne's co-defendants and their counsel.''
"It has become abundantly clear that the government and the agents who they are supervising concerning these matters, are not taking the necessary precautions to ensure that attorney-client phone calls are not recorded or disbursed to co-defendants or government counsel,'' Weksler wrote in a court filing.
Nevada's U.S. District Judge Gloria M. Navarro has yet to rule on Payne's motion to dismiss stemming from the sharing of privileged attorney-client jail calls.
The recording of attorney-client jail calls is a violation and a big deal, according to Oregon prosecutors and defense lawyers.
Cooper, whose calls were recorded with his attorney and shared, would have standing to allege his Sixth Amendment right to effective assistance of counsel was violated, Portland criminal defense lawyer Lisa Ludwig said.
Kevin Sali, a Portland criminal defense lawyer not involved in either the Oregon or Nevada cases, said he believes it will be harder for the rest of the Nevada defense team to show Payne or the others on trial now have been harmed. The government's use of a special taint team to review calls is a common practice. And it will be hard to show how Payne or Cliven Bundy or his two sons were prejudiced by having recorded jail calls involving Cooper, who is not on trial and is cooperating with the government.
The federal government's possession of attorney-client jail calls arose in the high-profile federal prosecution in Oregon of Joey Pedersen in a quadruple murder case and led to a stinging rebuke by a federal judge in 2014, but in that case the investigating detective kept recordings of the privileged attorney-client calls. A similar misstep occurred in a federal case in Las Vegas in October 2016, where a federal prosecutor admitted she inadvertently obtained recordings of confidential jailhouse phone conversations between a bank robbery defendant an
Branding the FBI Octopus
http://mulletwrapper.net/retired-fbi-ag ... library-2/
Retired FBI agent Shepard speaks Dec. 7 at Foley Library
Mulletwrapper-
David Shepard, retired FBI Agent, will present a program on Thursday, Dec 7 at 2 p.m. at the Foley Public Library entitled The Mission of the FBI Abroad. Mr. Shepard is an energetic and engaging speaker. He will share stories about his time abroad as an FBI agent and all that entailed. David made a wonderful donation to ...
http://www.startribune.com/longtime-fbi ... 462154693/
Longtime FBI agent Harold 'Hal' Fabriz dies at 85
DECEMBER 5, 2017 — 5:10PM
Harold “Hal” Fabriz, a veteran FBI agent who worked the front lines of the civil rights movement in the 1960s, helped prevent violence in Mississippi by calming angry bigots and keeping his cool after being spit in the face by hostile Ku Klux Klan members.
Fabriz, who also played a small role in investigating the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy and civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., died at age 85 on Nov. 25. He was a longtime resident of Falcon Heights.
“Hal was a great arbitrator,” said Bob Agnew, a former FBI agent who worked with Fabriz for three years in Mississippi. “I think he contributed a great deal to keeping the peace to the greatest extent possible in Mississippi during some very turbulent times.
Born in Minneapolis, Fabriz — who stood 6 feet, 6 inches tall and wore a size 15 shoe — attracted the nicknames “Moose” and “Big Foot” as a student at Roosevelt High School. He heard about police work as a young child from his father, Wilzel “Duke” Fabriz, who spent 20 years on the force in Minneapolis and later served as chief deputy sheriff of Hennepin County.
After earning a degree in criminal science from Michigan State University, Fabriz joined the FBI in 1962. His first posting was in San Antonio, Texas, arriving a few months before the Kennedy assassination. As part of the investigation, he interviewed friends of Marina Oswald, the widow of Kennedy’s killer, Lee Harvey Oswald.
His next posting was in Mississippi, where Fabriz handled civil rights investigations, bank robberies and other high-profile cases from 1964 to 1973, a period of extraordinary civil unrest.
“We’d be working with the police one day and investigating them the next,” Agnew said.
Fabriz often shadowed KKK members and other agitators. Once, after hearing about a white farmer firing a gun at activists who were trying to register black voters on his property, Fabriz convinced the man to go to court for a restraining order if the invaders returned instead of using his gun. Agnew said Fabriz always found creative ways to defuse tense situations.
“Dad was a lawman — he wasn’t a crusader,” said daughter Sharon Fabriz. “He carried out his duties with as much integrity as possible, but he never made it into a personal cause.”
Sharon said her father sheltered the family from his work as much as possible.
“We were nervous about him getting home safely every day, but he didn’t lay the worries of the world on his family,” she said.
Sharon said her father didn’t open up about his work until the movie “Mississippi Burning” came out in 1988. The film, which chronicled the federal response to the death of three civil rights workers in Philadelphia, Miss., prompted questions from his family about his role in the case. Fabriz was one of hundreds of FBI agents involved in an investigation that led to the convictions of seven men, including the deputy sheriff who originally arrested the workers.
“He always minimized his role,” Sharon said. “He was a humble man.”
Fabriz finished his FBI career in Minnesota, retiring in 1987. He spent the last 16 years of his professional life doing drug testing for the National Football League, primarily working with the Vikings.
http://jfkmurdersolved.com/bush3.htm
Behind the Bushes
+ The architects for the Bay of Pigs were Vice President Richard Nixon and CIA director Allen Dulles. JFK inherited the plan from the Eisenhower administration. Nixon lost the race for the presidency to JFK and Dulles was fired by JFK for the failure of the Bay of Pigs. Yet Dulles is appointed by president Johnson as a Warren Commission member to "investigate" JFK's murder. The proof for Bush's lie about his CIA past can be found in a document, declassified in 1988.
It's a memorandum of FBI director J Edgar Hoover to the State department, dated 29 November 1963. It describes a meeting, one day after JFK's murder, between FBI and CIA officials talking about the reaction of the Cuban exile community to the Kennedy Assassination. The last paragraph states that the "the substance of the foregoing information was orally furnished to us and George Bush of the Central Intelligence agency". Here we have the name of George Bush mentioned as a CIA official in direct connection to the Kennedy assassination. When asked by journalists, he initially stated "It's not me, must be another Bush!" This was checked and found to be NOT true. When asked again, a spokesperson for Bush declined to comment any further. The obvious question is: Why does Bush need to lie about it?
+ Let's see how the Assassinations Records Review Board dealt with this information in their final report, chapter 6 :
4. George Bush
A November 29, 1963, memorandum from FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover to the Director of the Bureau of Intelligence and Research at the Department of State refers to the fact that information on the assassination of President Kennedy was "orally furnished to Mr. George Bush of the Central Intelligence Agency." At the request of the Review Board, the CIA made a thorough search of its records in an attempt to determine if the "George Bush" referred to in the memorandum might be identical to President and former Director of Central Intelligence George Herbert Walker Bush. That search determined that the CIA had no association with George Herbert Walker Bush during the time frame referenced in the document.
The records that the Review Board examined showed that the only other "George Bush" serving in the CIA in 1963 was a junior analyst who has repeatedly denied being the "George Bush" referenced in the memorandum. The Review Board staff found one reference to an Army Major General George Bush in the calendars of Director of Central Intelligence Allen Dulles. There was no indication if this General Bush could be the referenced George Bush. The Review Board marked the calendar page as an assassination record.
+ So the George Bush mentioned in this memorandum could not be found by the CIA? Neither the Major General George Bush mentioned in the calendar of CIA director Allen Dulles? Even though Dulles, as we have seen, was on a first name basis with Prescott Bush? Was the Assassinations Records Review Board not advised that it is practically standard procedure for the CIA to purge the files of sensitive covert intelligence operatives? Why did the ARRB ask the fox to investigate who ate the chickens, and was then satisfied with the answer? Why are there no records on James Files, the man who claims to be the gunman on the grassy knoll? Why does his birth certificate state "deceased at birth"? How can this man be alive and well in prison, if he was deceased at birth? Did Hoover and Dulles make up a fictional George Bush?
+ It can now be conclusively shown that both Gerald Ford and Arlen Specter (now a senator for Pennsylvania) tampered with the medical evidence of JFK's autopsy and put these lies in the Warren Report.
+ Hale Boggs sat on the Warren Commission, which concluded that President Kennedy was slain by a lone assassin. Later, in 1971 and '72, Boggs said that the Warren Report was false and that J. Edgar Hoover's FBI not only helped cover up the JFK murder but blackmailed Congress with massive wire-tapping and spying. He named Warren Commission staff member Arlen Specter as a major cover-up artist. Congressman Boggs' plane disappeared on a flight to Alaska in 1972. The press, the military, and the CIA publicly proclaimed the plane could not be located. Investigators later said that was a lie, that the plane had been found. On the plane were Nick Begich, a very popular Democratic Congressman, and Don Jonz, an aide to Mr. Boggs. All were killed.
+ In 1976, George H.W. Bush was appointed CIA director by president and former Warren Commission member Gerald Ford at the exact time that newly erected investigative committees were probing the possible role of the CIA into the assassination plots to kill Fidel Castro, Martin Luther King and John F. Kennedy. Bush appoints his old friend from JM/Wave and the Bay of Pigs, Theodore Shackley, as his deputy director for Special Operations, the CIA's most important division. The above-mentioned investigations are heavily stonewalled by the CIA, holding back crucial documents and witnesses. Nevertheless, the House Select Committee on Assassinations concludes its investigation with a 95% probability that at least 4 shots were fired and Kennedy was killed as a result of a conspiracy, along with the recommendation to the Justice Department to follow up with a further investigation. This recommendation was never honored.
+ During the preparations of the House Select Committee on Assassinations, pressure is applied to Texan Bill Lord not to testify for the committee. Bill Lord was a fellow marine and roommate of Lee Harvey Oswald on a ship voyage to France. Lord expresses his concern in a letter to president Carter. He writes that Oswald was connected to the FBI and CIA and concludes that the CIA and the FBI are complicit in JFK's death and the coup d'etat that occurred on 11/22/1963. He also states that one of the Midland, TX politicians applying pressure to him, was Mr. George W. Bush junior . This letter to President Carter was declassified some years ago. Here's a fragment:
One of the parties which has blitzed me with telephone calls trying to persuade me to tell them what I know about Oswald, is engaged in a very costly project which allows them to locate, interview, monitor, and influence every single available person who ever knew Lee Oswald--and this, just in advance of the new governmental investigation by the house select committee on Assassinations. I finally consented, not to grant an interview, but to allow the publication's representative to explain their project to me in person. After a lunch interview with this researcher, I was told that if I had refused even to meet with him, pressure was in the offing from two Midland men: Mr. Jim Allison, publisher of the ultra-conservative Reporter-Telegram, my employer (out of necessity, and for the moment!), and Mr. George Bush, Jr.
... Shortly thereafter, my mother discovered that her telephone had been tampered with. The casing around the dialing aparatus had been pulled out about one-half inch... we cannot doubt that someone entered the house at a time when I was at work and my mother was away; she returned to the house, however, at an unaccustomed time... I have been in anguish for weeks, Mr. President, trying my best to laugh at my apprehensions and to see these events as fortuitous ones... Speaking as the man who spent more than two weeks in the same ship's cabin with Lee Oswald at the time of his 1959 "defection", and speaking as a man who has been the subject of the above.
See the original letter here (page 1) here (page 2) and here (page 3)
+ There are numerous indications and allegations that Nixon's Watergate scandal had a direct connection with the Kennedy assassination and that every time that Nixon is talking about the danger that the "Bay of Pigs thing" might be exposed because of Watergate, he was actually covertly referring to the Kennedy assassination. None of these rumours could solidify, because shortly before his resignation, Nixon replaced Spiro Agnew by Gerald Ford as his vice president, who promptly pardoned him from further prosecution. The allegations of a direct connection with Dallas are certainly not unfounded, considering the incomplete official story and the preponderance of Watergate individuals connected to the Bay of Pigs and the Kennedy assassination. When it became clear that Watergate may not be kept under the lid, Nixon fires and replaces his entire administration with the exception of George H.W. Bush, because "he will do anything for our cause".
From a radio interview with investigative journalist Jim Marrs:
J – Yes, George, and let me say this: I don't want everybody to think that just Lyndon Johnson was involved in this, or that it was just the democrats or whatever. I’m looking here at a book written by H.R Haldeman, who was ...
G – He was one of Nixon’s men!
J – Yes, one of Nixon’s boys, and here he writes , he says, if you all remember during Watergate the Nixon Tapes and all the focus over that: Nixon went to pay 2 million dollars to E. Howard Hunt, a CIA officer, who was leading and training the anti-Castro Cubans, he (Nixon) said: "Pay him the 2 million dollars! This could open up the whole Bay of Pigs thing! This could look bad for us, this could look bad for the CIA!"And in Haldeman's book, he says that it seems that in all these Nixon references to the Bay of Pigs, he was actually referring to the Kennedy assassination! More information here
+ George H.W. Bush failed to disclose his friendship with George De Mohrenschildt, a renowned oil geologist and Lee Harvey Oswald's best friend in Dallas. They knew each other since 1942, probably even longer, because in 1939 he went to work for Humble Oil, a company founded by Prescott Bush. In 1977, when De Mohrenschildt is located by investigators of the House Select Committee on Assassinations, who want to interview him, he allegedly commits suicide the following day. The last person to interview him on the day he died, is Jay Edward Epstein, a writer/historian and a known apologist for the Warren Report since day one. Epstein married a CIA agent and is the biographer of former CIA-director James Jesus Angleton, presumably in charge of Oswald's "defection" to Russia. Interestingly, Epstein is also the "consultant" that was suddenly hired by NBC in 1995, when NBC was making a program for national TV on the confession of James E. Files. The program was promptly cancelled.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-10-26/j ... ld/9087384
JFK files' release could expose CIA and FBI cover-up on Lee Harvey Oswald, experts say - ABC News (Australian Broadcasting ...
Australian Broadcasting Corporation › au › ...
from www.abc.net.au
Oct 25, 2017 · The deadline is looming for the release of hundreds of thousands of pages of documents on the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy and experts say it could expose a CIA cover-up. The Warren Commission established after Kennedy's death concluded Lee Harvey Oswald was the sole ...
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story ... cia-213197
HISTORY DEPT.
Yes, the CIA Director Was Part of the JFK Assassination Cover-Up
John McCone was long suspected of withholding information from the Warren Commission. Now even the CIA says he did.
October 06,
http://www.themonitor.com/news/local/ar ... c397d.html
Mercedes police officer charged with driving while intoxicated
MERCEDES — A Texas Department of Public Safety trooper arrested a Mercedes police officer last week on suspicion of driving while intoxicated.
Angel Serrata, 27, was arrested on Tuesday, Nov. 28 at about 2:33 a.m.
A trooper stopped Serrate for driving 11 miles per hour over the speed limit on Farm-to-Market 88 near Mile 14 North Road south of Elsa, according to a criminal complaint.
Serrate “showed signs of intoxication” and performed standard field sobriety tests “poorly,” according to the criminal complaint.
When asked to provide a blood sample for testing, Serrata refused, according to the complaint.
A judge charged Serrata with driving while intoxicated, a Class B misdemeanor. It’s his first offense.
https://apnews.com/232760e427c64638ae47 ... o-lawsuits
Police escape being fired
taxpayer not so lucky
gets hit with cost of supporting bad cops
Philadelphia pays $250,000 to settle police photo lawsuits
PHILADELPHIA Philadelphia will pay $250,000 to two people who say they were roughed up while taking photographs of police officers.
The Pennsylvania chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union on Tuesday announced settlements in the cases of Amanda Geraci and Rick Fields.
Fields says an officer handcuffed him and broke the screen of his phone because he was taking photos of police responding to what looked like the scene of a party in 2013. He says the officer asked him, “Do you like taking pictures of grown men?”
Geraci says an officer pinned her up against a pillar and shouted in her face because she took photographs of an arrest in 2012.
A Philadelphia spokesman says settling the lawsuits was in the city’s “best interests.”
https://robertscribbler.com/2017/12/05/ ... -year-end/
U.S. Electrical Vehicle Sales Rose by 30 Percent in November, Likely to Hit Near 200,000 by Year End
by robertscribbler
Good news continues in the U.S. on the renewable energy front where electrical vehicle sales increased by about 30 percent in November of 2017 vs November of 2016.
In all, 17,178 electrical vehicles sold on the U.S. market in November. This number compares to 13,327 sold during November of 2016. Top selling brands for the month were the Chevy Bolt EV, The Tesla Model X, the Chevy Volt, the Toyota Prius Prime, and the Tesla Model S. The Chevy Bolt topped the list of monthly best sellers with nearly 3,000 vehicles going to owners during the month. The top annual seller remains the Model S (at 22,085 estimated sales so far) -- which the lower-priced Bolt is unlikely to surpass this year.
U.S. Electrical Vehicle Sales Rose by 30 Percent in November, Likely to Hit Near 200,000 by Year End
Good news continues in the U.S. on the renewable energy front where electrical vehicle sales increased by about 30 percent in November of 2017 vs November of 2016.
In all, 17,178 electrical vehicles sold on the U.S. market in November. This number compares to 13,327 sold during November of 2016. Top selling brands for the month were the Chevy Bolt EV, The Tesla Model X, the Chevy Volt, the Toyota Prius Prime, and the Tesla Model S. The Chevy Bolt topped the list of monthly best sellers with nearly 3,000 vehicles going to owners during the month. The top annual seller remains the Model S (at 22,085 estimated sales so far) — which the lower-priced Bolt is unlikely to surpass this year.
(Over the past few years, the performance of electrical vehicles has been steadily catching up to or outpacing that of conventional fossil fuel vehicles. The Tesla Roadster by 2019-2020 will have a 620 mile range, hyperfast charging, a top speed of 250 mph, and be able to go from 0-60 in 1.9 seconds. A combined set of specs that no gas guzzler could hope to match. By 2022, most EVs will cost less and perform better than their comparable fossil fuel counterparts. Image source: Tesla.)
Total electrical vehicle sales for the year so far has hit nearly 174,000 through November. This compares to 158,614 for all of 2016. Given that December is often a top sales month and that Model 3 production is continuing to ramp, it’s likely that final sales for 2017 will hit close to or exceed the 200,000 mark for the year in the U.S.
Model 3 Production Ramp Rate Still a Mystery
Model 3 sales will likely continue to ramp through December as Tesla works through scaling production. Considering the fact that there are more than 500,000 Model 3s on order, the big question is — how fast? For even if Tesla were able to produce 10,000 Model 3s per week, it would take more than a year to fill all the orders.
Production is presently considerably lower. But it more than doubled in November to an estimated 345. A similar rate of increase would result in 800 of the vehicles being sold in December. Meanwhile, the company plans to be making 5,000 Model 3s per week by Q1 of 2018.
There are some indications that Tesla is preparing for a start of mass market releases. It is filling an LA Model 3 distribution site even as it has opened up ordering to customers outside of employees. Meanwhile, Panasonic recently announced that battery production issues will soon clear. Which raises the possibility of a faster ramp going forward.
Updated Nissan Leaf Begins Mass Production
New developments also include the start to mass production of the 2018 Nissan Leaf in the U.S during December. The 2018 Leaf features longer range (150 miles), lower cost (700 dollars less) and higher performance (more horsepower) than the previous Leaf. And it will be followed on by a (higher-priced) 225 mile range version in 2019 which will put it in a distance capability class similar to that of the Bolt and the base line Model 3.
Electrical Vehicles — Key Aspect of the Renewable Energy Transition
In context, solar energy, wind, and battery storage are the triad of new renewable energy systems that have the serious potential to really start cutting down global carbon emissions as they replace fossil fuels.
All these energy systems are getting less expensive. All have what they call a positive learning curve. And all can work together in a synergistic fashion while leveraging technological advances. Economic advantages that fossil fuel based systems lack.
In addition, renewable energy sources help to drive efficiency, even as they clean up transportation, power generation, and manufacturing chains they are linked to by producing zero carbon emissions in use.
(By transitioning to renewable energy as the basis for economic systems, we can dramatically reduce global carbon emissions. In order to stave off very harmful impacts from climate change, this transition will have to be very rapid. In the best case, more rapid than the scenario depicted above. Video source: IRENA.)
On the battery storage side, electrical vehicles are a crucial link in the battery development chain. As electrical vehicles are mass produced, this process drives down the cost of batteries which can then be used to store electricity and to replace base-load fossil fuel power generators like coal and gas plants. Meanwhile, battery electrical vehicles are considerably more efficient than gas or diesel powered vehicles and those linked to wind and solar or other renewable energy sources emit zero carbon in use.
Both electrical vehicles and other renewable energy systems have a long way to grow before they provide the same level of energy produced by dirty fossil fuels today. This large gap represents a great opportunity to cut back on the volume of harmful gasses hitting our atmosphere in the near future.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/201 ... le-breaker
Survey: two in three Trump supporters want a president who breaks the rules
The latest American Values Survey finds a deepening polarisation, as Trump diehards stay loyal but fractures appear in the Republican party
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/201 ... enate-race
Roy Moore rival: 'Men who hurt little girls should go to jail, not the Senate'
Shifting tactics in Alabama Senate race, Democrat Doug Jones hammers Roy Moore over allegations of sexual misconduct involving teenagers
https://apnews.com/beeba31e5a5a41cebcc1 ... sentencing
Evidence a little different at ex-officer’s sentencing
CHARLESTON, S.C. — A judge overseeing the federal sentencing of a white former police officer who pleaded guilty in the shooting death of an unarmed black motorist is allowing expert defense testimony about disputed audio and video recordings.
On Tuesday, one of those experts said his analysis showed that former North Charleston officer Michael Slager fought with Walter Scott before their fatal encounter and the ex-officer said: “Let go of my Taser before I shoot you.”
The defense team believes that evidence bolsters Slager’s contention that Scott was aggressive and that the officer shot him in self-defense. A microphone on Slager’s uniform also picked up Scott saying, “F--k the police” after Slager asked him to get on the ground, Grant Fredericks testified.
Prosecutors counter that there is no way to definitively tell what is being said on the recordings, and they have used their own experts to show how Slager fired at Scott as he was running away, nowhere near the officer’s stun gun.
Slager, 36, pleaded guilty in federal court in May to violating Scott’s civil rights by shooting him without justification on April 4, 2015. Slager had pulled Scott over for a broken brake light, and the 50-year-old Scott ran. After deploying his stun gun, Slager fired eight times at Scott as he ran away, hitting him five times in the back.
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyl ... -kids-moms
Finland: the only country where dads spend more time with kids than moms
From paid paternity leave to universal daycare, Finland is closing the gender gap. What can it teach the rest of the world?
America is failing mothers. Help us change that
To Americans and Britons, the Nordic countries have come to represent a near-mythical paradise of gender equality and family harmony, where legions of happy fathers push prams through the streets, relaxed mothers enjoy lengthy paid maternity leaves, and well-nourished children in chunky sweaters glow from their free healthcare.
But even against that backdrop, one statistic about Finland, a nation of 5.5 million, stands out: according to a recent OECD report, it’s the only country in the developed world where fathers spend more time with school-aged children than mothers, to the tune of eight minutes a day.
Th Global Gender Gap report rated Finland the second most equal country in the world in 2016, and the Economist recently rated it the third best country to be a working mom.
How did Finland get there? And what can the rest of us learn from this small Nordic nation that might accelerate the battle for gender equity in other places? It’s a story of collective action and political will, of a strong tradition of social democracy and an accommodating tax system. But it also boils down to a key difference in how Finland frames the conversation: it’s not about what’s good for adults – it’s about what’s good for children.
“This is a question of gender equality, but it’s more a question of the rights of the child,” says Annika Saarikko, Finland’s minister of family affairs and social services, one of six female ministers out of a cabinet of eleven. “This is not about the mother’s right or the father’s right – but the child’s right to spend time with both parents.”
Finland believes fathers play a crucial role in child development. The government offers fathers nine weeks of paternity leave, during which they are paid 70% of their salary. And to encourage fathers to take advantage of the benefit, it recently launched a new campaign – with flyers showing a burly construction worker joyfully pushing a pram – called “It’s Daddy Time!”
“We want fathers to take more of the shared parental leave available,” says Saarikko. “We are quite sure if we look at the research that the connection between the baby and the father is really important – the early years are vital and we believe in investing in that.”
Link du jour
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2017/d ... -interview
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msfreeh
- Level 34 Illuminated
- Posts: 7718
Re: How many FBI informants in the Bundy Militia group in Oregon?
http://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-wa ... ohn-744823
Former FBI agent and TRUMP AMBASSADOR BEAT AND ‘KIDNAPPED’ WOMAN IN WATERGATE COVER-UP: REPORTS
BY JEFF STEIN ON 12/11/17 AT 4:41 PM
Updated | American presidents have a long history of awarding ambassadorships to colorful characters as a way to thank them for their campaign donations. Roughly a third of U.S. ambassadors have no diplomatic experience beyond rounding up cash for successful presidential candidates.
Among them is Stephen King, 76, a longtime confidante and booster of House Speaker Paul Ryan, who is the new U.S. ambassador to the Czech Republic. King, who is also a former business partner of Ryan’s brother Tobin, has no diplomatic experience and had never spent a day in Prague before taking up his post there on December 7. Radio Prague, the official state news outlet, called him “a rich Republican businessman…who worked for the FBI early in his career.”
Left unsaid was that King played a crucial role in the 1972 Watergate affair—and not a good one. According to several accounts over the years, King helped cover up ties between President Richard Nixon’s re-election campaign and the burglars arrested inside the Democratic Party headquarters at the Watergate complex—and in a particularly violent fashion. None of that came up during his confirmation hearing.
In June 1972, King was an ex-FBI agent working as a security aide for the Committee to Re-elect the President, or CREEP, Nixon’s campaign arm. His duty on the week of the break-in was to protect—and keep a close eye on—Martha Mitchell, the talkative wife of Nixon’s campaign director and former attorney general John Mitchell, while the Mitchells were on a campaign swing in California.
An outspoken Arkansan dubbed “the Mouth of the South” in press reports, Martha Mitchell had been complaining vaguely to anyone who would listen about campaign operatives carrying out “dirty tricks” against the Democrats. So when she learned that James McCord, the security director of CREEP, who had served as her bodyguard, was among those arrested at the Watergate—and described by her husband as a private security contractor who was “not operating either on our behalf or with our consent”—she picked up the telephone and called a favorite reporter, UPI’s Helen Thomas.see link for full story
https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/ ... readsheet/
December 11, 2017
Miami Police releases a single row of a nearly 100 page spreadsheet
Department’s sole sexual harassment case from 2016 is surrounded by an ocean of black bars
Written by JPat Brown
Edited by Michael Morisy
A few weeks back, I filed with the ten largest police departments in the country for a list of all sexual harassment complaints or lawsuits from the past five years. The Miami Police Department was among the first to complete the request, releasing a single closed case from 2016.
While that in itself is notable, what really stood out was they manner in which they released this information: a 96-page spreadsheet that was completely redacted …
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politic ... -1.3690301
Roy Moore suggested rescinding amendments adopted after Bill of Rights on 2011 radio show
BY NICOLE HENSLEY
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS Monday, December 11, 2017, 12:35 AM
http://www.thecannabist.co/2017/12/11/t ... ine/94306/
Teen marijuana use in Colorado down post-legalization
The latest results from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health align with data collected by the state's Healthy Kids Colorado Survey.
https://theintercept.com/2017/12/08/bar ... nequality/
NEW REPORT LOOKS AT HOW OBAMA’S HOUSING POLICIES DESTROYED BLACK WEALTH
Zaid Jilani
December 8 2017, 10:31 a.m.
Link du jour
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politic ... -1.3691968
https://theintercept.com/2017/12/07/ant ... ace-panel/
http://www.blackberryfarm.com/farm/artisans/gardeners
https://theintercept.com/2017/12/08/vid ... lefront-2/
https://gcn.com/articles/2017/12/11/fbi ... r.aspx?m=2
FBI mum on Georgia's wiped election server
By Derek B. Johnson
Dec 11, 2017
Georgia is currently facing a lawsuit in federal court by voters and advocacy groups that claim a June 2017 special election may have been compromised because of insufficient security practices by Georgia officials and the organization that oversaw election infrastructure, Kennesaw State University (KSU).
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/201 ... re-to-win/
Russian Propagandists Are Pushing for Roy Moore to Win
Kremlin-linked trolls have also joined Trump and Fox News in targeting the FBI.
DENISE CLIFTONDEC. 11, 2017 3:00 PM
https://theintercept.com/2017/12/09/the ... -happened/
The U.S. Media Suffered Its Most Humiliating Debacle in Ages and Now Refuses All Transparency Over What Happened
Glenn Greenwald
December 9 2017, 10:17 a.m.
https://theintercept.com/2017/12/11/sta ... wn-fallis/
AN ACTIVIST STANDS ACCUSED OF FIRING A GUN AT STANDING ROCK. IT BELONGED TO HER LOVER — AN FBI INFORMANT.
Will Parrish
December 11 2017, 4:11 p.m.
Photo: Mike McCleary/The Bismarck Tribune/AP
Oil and WaterOil and Water
The case of Red Fawn Fallis provides a window into federal law enforcement’s infiltration and surveillance of the water protector movement.
VIEW MORE FROM THIS TIMELINE STORY
AS LAW ENFORCEMENT officers advanced in a U-shaped sweep line down North Dakota Highway 1806 last October, pushing back Dakota Access opponents from a camp in the pipeline’s path, two sheriff’s deputies broke formation to tackle a 37-year-old Oglala Sioux woman named Red Fawn Fallis. As Fallis struggled under the weight of her arresting officers, who were attempting to put her in handcuffs, three gunshots allegedly went off alongside her. According to the arrest affidavit, deputies lunged toward her left hand and wrested a gun away from her.
Well before that moment, Fallis had been caught in a sprawling intelligence operation that sought to disrupt and discredit opponents of the pipeline. The Intercept has learned that the legal owner of the gun Fallis is alleged to have fired was a paid FBI informant named Heath Harmon, a 46-year-old member of the Fort Berthold Reservation in western North Dakota. For at least two months, Harmon took part in the daily life of DAPL resistance camps and gained access to movement participants, even becoming Fallis’s romantic partner several weeks prior to the alleged shooting on October 27, 2016.
In an interview with agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives and the North Dakota Bureau of Criminal Investigation, a recording of which was obtained by The Intercept, Harmon reported that his work for the FBI involved monitoring the Standing Rock camps for evidence of “bomb-making materials, stuff like that.” Asked what he discovered, Harmon made no mention of protesters harboring dangerous weapons, but he acknowledged storing his own weapon in a trailer at the water protectors’ Rosebud Camp: the same .38 revolver Fallis is accused of firing.
Harmon spent the day of October 27 with Fallis and was nearby during her arrest. He continued to withhold his FBI affiliation from his then-girlfriend in phone conversations with her while she was being held at the Morton County jail in Mandan, North Dakota, records show. Investigators’ notes on those calls were distributed to the ATF, two local sheriff’s departments, and the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Bismarck, among others.
Federal prosecutors are charging Fallis with civil disorder, possession of a firearm by a convicted felon, and discharge of a firearm in relation to a felony crime of violence — perhaps the most serious charges levied against any water protector. If convicted of discharging the weapon, she faces a minimum of 10 years in prison and the possibility of a life sentence. She has pleaded not guilty.
Attorneys for Fallis argue their client was seized without probable cause while engaging in speech protected by the First Amendment, pointing to the account of one of her arresting officers that Fallis was shouting “water is life and you’re killing Mother Earth and stuff of that nature.” Drone footage appears to show her being tackled just minutes after arriving in the vicinity of the police line. In a hearing that concluded Monday, her lawyers challenged the admissibility of any property seized or statements Fallis made immediately after the incident, arguing they represent the products of an unconstitutional arrest. Defense attorneys declined to comment or make Fallis available for this story, citing her pending trial.
Drone footage from Oct. 27, 2016, shows Red Fawn Fallis driving an ATV north alongside the highway, then parking and approaching the police line. A few minutes later, as she begins to walk parallel to law enforcement, she is tackled and arrested.
As the struggle to limit the mining and burning of fossil fuels has developed into a potent force, indigenous activists like Fallis have frequently been at the forefront. Documents and recordings reviewed for this story provide a window into federal law enforcement’s use of counterterrorism tactics to target pipeline opponents based on the threat of “environmental rights extremism” — and reveal infiltration of the water protector movement as the latest chapter in the FBI’s long history of repression of indigenous political activism.
The intelligence operation targeting DAPL opponents was based at an emergency operations center in Bismarck, as well as the North Dakota State and Local Intelligence Center, known as the SLIC, a fusion center established to facilitate information sharing in the aftermath of 9/11. Although local law enforcement frequently served as the public face of the operation, federal agents played a central role soon after the first civil disobedience actions kicked off in August 2016. By early September, the operations center was hosting daily meetings involving representatives of the FBI, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the U.S. Marshals Service, and state and local police.
In his interview with the ATF and Bureau of Criminal Investigation on December 13, 2016, Harmon described how he came to be an FBI asset: He had reached out to his brother, a BIA police officer in North Dakota, to see if he could help by “being an observer” of the protest movement. “He said he knew people and they would get ahold of me,” Harmon stated. “That’s when the FBI contacted me. That’s the reason why I was down there in the first place.” By August, Harmon was regularly visiting the Rosebud Camp, which is where he met Fallis, according to his interview. He said he helped the FBI confirm the presence of specific “AIM members” at the camp, in reference to the American Indian Movement, and reported a vehicle carrying lockdown devices used by protesters to disrupt pipeline construction.
she was 5 or 6 years old, Morris said.
Founded at the height of the civil rights era, AIM fought for religious freedom and the fulfillment of treaties the U.S. government signed with indigenous nations. Yellow Wood was part of the organization’s struggle on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. In that case, AIM famously took up arms in 1973 and occupied the town of Wounded Knee — site of the U.S. 7th Calvary’s massacre of Lakota people in 1890 — as a show of opposition to a corrupt tribal government that was working behind the scenes to sell off lands rich in uranium and other resources.
Harmon is part of a different lineage. In his interview with law enforcement, he noted that his uncle Gerald Fox had been on the “other side” of the AIM struggle at Pine Ridge. Fox was a BIA officer who stood off against AIM during the 71-day occupation of Wounded Knee, alongside members of the U.S. Marshals Service and the FBI. According to a 2010 obituary in the Bismarck Tribune, Fox went on to join a BIA special operations unit, and between 1976 and 1984 “was detailed to every major Native conflict that happened in the United States.”
In the aftermath of the Pine Ridge standoff, the FBI looked the other way while a paramilitary organization known as the GOONs — whose leaders included members of the BIA tribal police force — carried out a multiyear campaign of extrajudicial killings and brutal physical assaults of AIM members and supporters.
DENVER, CO -NOVEMBER 07: Family and friends of Denver Native American woman, arrested during pipeline protest in North Dakota, hold a press conference, at 4 Winds American Indian Council in Denver, to show support, November 07, 2016. Red Fawn Fallis remains in jail in North Dakota after being arrested. (Photo by RJ Sangosti/The Denver Post via Getty Images)
Family and friends of Red Fawn Fallis hold a news conference at the Four Winds American Indian Council in Denver on Nov. 7, 2016. Photo: RJ Sangosti/The Denver Post/Getty Images
IN RECENT YEARS, as climate justice activists have taken on pipelines, coal mining, hydro-fracking, and Artic oil drilling, law enforcement agencies have established formal collaborations with the oil and gas industry in the name of preventing threats to so-called critical infrastructure, Jeff Monaghan, a Carleton University professor who studies the surveillance of social movements, told The Intercept. “That discourse has been the gateway for fusing the corporate energy sector and the national security apparatus in both the U.S. and Canada,” he said.
Sara Jumping Eagle, a physician on the Standing Rock Sioux reservation who was among the first DAPL opponents arrested in August, said the heavy-handed law enforcement response at Standing Rock was not altogether surprising. “There’s a long history of the U.S. labeling people who stand up as terrorists, so some of us figured they were gonna use those same tactics against this movement as well,” she said.
Jumping Eagle was among some two dozen activists featured on an early blueprint for the intelligence operation at the North Dakota fusion center, a “links chart on leaders of the movement,” obtained by The Intercept via public records request. The document mapped out connections between DAPL opponents purportedly affiliated with the Red Warrior and Sacred Stone camps, two of the main nerve centers of pipeline resistance on the Northern Great plains. Nearly everyone on the chart is an indigenous person.
Fallis appeared on the diagram more than seven weeks prior to her October 27 arrest. She was listed under her Facebook profile name, Luta Wi Redfawn, alongside the allegation that she had purchased pepper spray at Scheels, a sporting goods chain with a store in Bismarck.
Cheyenne River Sioux tribal member Cody Hall, who served as a spokesperson for the Red Warrior Camp, also featured prominently on the chart. On September 8, 2016, around the time the document was completed, Hall was pulled over by Highway Patrol officers who served him a warrant for two charges of misdemeanor trespass. Hall recalled a disproportionate number of officers on hand for his arrest.
After he was booked into the Morton County jail, Hall said two FBI agents attempted to interview him, but he asserted his right to remain silent. After a three-day stint in solitary confinement, he was released. “The experience was “unsettling” and “completely over the top,” Hall told The Intercept. “They were treating me like I was the native Osama.”
A Dakota Access Pipeline protester is arrested and waiting transportation to the Morton County jail on Tuesday, Nov. 15, 2016, after a large gathering of protesters tried to block a railroad crossing on Old Highway 10 and County Road 82 west of Mandan, N.D. (Mike McCleary /The Bismarck Tribune via AP)A Dakota Access pipeline opponent under arrest awaits transportation to the Morton County jail on Nov. 15, 2016, after protesters tried to block a railroad crossing on Old Highway 10 and County Road 82 west of Mandan, N.D. Photo: Mike McCleary/The Bismarck Tribune/AP
In addition to mapping out connections to the NoDAPL camps, the chart linked individuals to the hacker group Anonymous and the Black Lives Matter movement and even attempted to track romantic relationships among pipeline opponents.
Rana Karaya, a Chicago resident from the P’urhépecha tribe in Mexico, was listed as having a relationship with David Vlow Rodriguez, who had been “maced by DAPL security,” the document noted. After reviewing a section of the chart, Karaya labeled it “disgustingly intrusive.”
According to Monaghan, the links analysis reflects broader trends in the policing of domestic dissent. “Since 9/11, police have more widely adopted surveillance practices to enable them to identify and disrupt protest actions,” he said. “And one technique has been the mapping of so-called persons of interest lists and then engaging in punitive, pre-emptive arrests or disruptions of people on those lists.”
Cecily Fong, public information officer for the SLIC fusion center and the North Dakota Department of Emergency Services, provided a different explanation for the chart. “The primary purpose for the links chart was to attempt to identify any leaders in the protest camps that our law enforcement could approach to engage in diplomatic talks,” Fong told The Intercept. She said she was unable to find a concrete example of the chart being used for diplomatic purposes and directed The Intercept to the Morton County Sheriff’s Department, which similarly failed to provide such an example.
edit-Links-Chart-on-Leaders-of-the-move-Redacted-1512665629-1512750376
A “links chart on leaders of the movement,” developed by the North Dakota fusion center in early September 2016, maps pipeline opponents’ purported connections to the Red Warrior and Sacred Stone camps, as well as Anonymous and Black Lives Matter. Source: North Dakota State and Local Intelligence Center
EMAILS AND REPORTS documenting intelligence collection on pipeline opponents, which The Intercept obtained through records requests, show a heightened focus on the threat of “environmental rights extremist violence,” while revealing a broader effort on the part of law enforcement to keep digital tabs on activists.
In an October 2016 email to federal, state, and local law enforcement, a Bismarck police officer relayed information from a North Dakota patrol sergeant about “AIM propaganda” on Facebook. “Free Peltier” stickers appeared in the posts of an individual believed to be a longtime AIM member, the sergeant noted, in reference to AIM activist Leonard Peltier, who was imprisoned for killing two FBI agents during a 1975 shootout on Pine Ridge, in what indigenous activists and human rights groups have labeled a wrongful conviction. Another purported member appeared to be “pro-violence,” the sergeant warned.
The message was part of a shared thread among law enforcement representatives affiliated with the emergency operations center who referred to themselves as the “intel group,” monitoring the DAPL protests in real time. Additional emails concerning Standing Rock operations plans were sent to multiple Department of Homeland Security and FBI addresses, including that of E.K. Wilson, a special agent with the FBI’s Minneapolis office. According to press reports, Wilson was previously the supervisory special agent for one of the FBI’s largest domestic counterterrorism operations since 9/11: a probe of the Shabab militant group’s recruitment of Somali-Americans.
Michael German, a former FBI special agent who is now a fellow at New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice, notes the concept of environmental extremism originated as part of the broader war on terror and is based on a model of radicalization that argues that people who develop ideas the FBI deems extremist have embarked on a dangerous path that might eventually lead them to commit an attack.
“It’s an intellectual framework that’s saying, ‘We’re only interested in using our surveillance and investigative tools on the terrorists, but the terrorists come from this specific pool of activists,’” German told The Intercept. “They can then justify surveilling the activists, suppressing the activists, and also selectively prosecuting the activists. We’ve seen that in the prosecutions of people following the January 20 protests, and we’ve certainly also seen it with Standing Rock.”
Following the breakup of Standing Rock resistance camps, the North Dakota SLIC offered information on DAPL opponents to a central Florida fusion center monitoring opposition to the Sabal Trail Pipeline, according to an April 2017 intelligence bulletin. The document, which repeatedly uses the terminology of “domestic violent extremists,” notes the migration of pipeline opponents to struggles in Minnesota, South Dakota, Oklahoma, Oregon, Texas, and Iowa.
“Our SLIC, when asked, has provided information to other SLICs in states that are, have, or may experience protests similar to the one that occurred in North Dakota,” Fong told The Intercept. “The ND SLIC is not actively monitoring anyone associated with the NoDAPL protests.”
A May 2017 report prepared by the DHS Office of Intelligence and Analysis and fusion centers across seven states defines “environmental rights extremists” as “groups or individuals who facilitate or engage in acts of unlawful violence against people, businesses, or government entities perceived to be destroying, degrading, or exploiting the natural environment.”
The report claims that “suspected environmental rights extremists exploited Native American anti-DAPL protests to attract new members to their movement, gain public sympathy, and justify criminal and violent acts,” a narrative later repeated in a conspiracy lawsuit DAPL parent company Energy Transfer Partners filed against environmentalist groups. Yet widely disparate individuals are included under the extremist label, including Canadian indigenous people who traveled to North Dakota and a member of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe, Dean Dedman, whose “suspicious drone use” raised concerns of attempted countersurveillance. To Dedman, the extremist designation fits with police officials’ broader effort to discredit water protectors. “They’re putting it in their words to portray that we’re terrorists or we’re somehow trying to disrupt the peace, which is totally bogus,” he told The Intercept.
The document categorizes a broad range of protest activities as violent, noting that while “environmental rights extremists often consider themselves to be nonviolent because their attacks tend to be against property,” tactics such as tampering with pipeline valves and setting fire to construction equipment “carry an inherent risk of death or serious of injury, regardless of intent.” Its authors identify ominous intelligence gaps as to the existence of “training camps established to teach violent tactics” and “which camps house individuals who have an interest in using lethal weapons such as IEDs against law enforcement or pipeline entities.”
In a section describing “use of potentially lethal devices,” the report holds up Red Fawn Fallis as an example of extremist violence. Without mentioning Fallis by name, the report claims she “shot a firearm at law enforcement officers who had confronted her while taking her into custody,” echoing an allegation long since discarded by prosecutors — that Fallis intentionally shot at police.
The same section cites a November 2016 incident in which a Standing Rock protester “threw small IEDs at officers, resulting in near amputation of her arm after one of the IEDs exploded prematurely, according to law enforcement and DHS reporting.” But according to multiple sworn witnesses, the woman in question, Sophia Wilansky, sustained the gruesome injury after police shot her with “less than lethal” munition during a confrontation that saw officers spray protesters with water hoses and rubber bullets amid subfreezing temperatures, resulting in hundreds of injuries.
As The Intercept previously reported, an FBI informant played a key role in defining the version of events law enforcement promoted about Wilansky’s injury. In an email to several FBI and Department of Justice addresses after the incident, Terry Van Horn, a national security intelligence specialist with the U.S. Attorney’s Office, noted that an FBI “source from the camp reported people were making IEDs from small Coleman-type propane canisters.”
Neither the FBI nor the Department of Homeland Security would address specific questions from The Intercept related to intelligence collection. “The FBI investigates activity which may constitute a federal crime or pose a threat to national security. Our focus is not on membership in particular groups or adherence to particular ideologies but on criminal activity,” a spokesperson for the FBI said in a statement.
A spokesperson for DHS wrote, “DHS works with federal partners, including the FBI, and state and local law enforcement through the National Network of Fusion Centers to assess threats and analyze trends in activity from all violent extremist groups, regardless of ideology. DHS is prohibited from engaging in intelligence activities for the sole purpose of monitoring activities protected by the First Amendment.”
FILE - In this Oct. 27, 2016 file photo, Dakota Access Pipeline protesters sit in a prayer circle at the Front Line Camp as a line of law enforcement officers make their way across the camp to remove the protesters and relocate to the overflow camp a few miles to the south on Highway 1806 in Morton County, N.D. Members of more than 200 tribes from across North America have come to the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe's encampment at the confluence of the Missouri and Cannonball rivers since August, the tribe says. Estimates at the protest site have varied from a few hundred to several thousand depending on the day _ enough for tribal officials to call it one of the largest gatherings of Native Americans in a century or more. (Mike McCleary/The Bismarck Tribune via AP, File)
Dakota Access pipeline opponents sit in a prayer circle at the Front-Line Camp as law enforcement officers remove protesters and relocate them to an overflow camp a few miles south on Highway 1806 in Morton County, N.D., on Oct. 27, 2016. Photo: Mike McCleary/The Bismarck Tribune/AP
THE DRAMATIC CIRCUMSTANCES of Fallis’s arrest have frequently been used by law enforcement and fossil fuel interests to bolster the portrayal of water protectors as reckless and violent. Fallis’s attorneys have argued that it is impossible for her to receive a fair trial in North Dakota because of the intense level of negative publicity, pointing to counterinformation efforts by police and DAPL security to push an extremist narrative of the protests.
The attempted murder charges North Dakota initially filed against Fallis were dismissed within a month, but public Facebook posts by the Morton and Cass County sheriff’s departments linking her to the more serious crime have never been corrected. Both departments shared a video in which a Highway Patrol captain claimed it was lucky no officers were shot, but “it wasn’t because she was trying to aim away from law enforcement.” Meanwhile, Energy Transfer Partners singled out Fallis as a “radical eco-terrorist” in its racketeering lawsuit filed against Greenpeace and other groups.
red-fawn-fallis-1512676091Red Fawn Fallis, second from left, poses with members of the International Indigenous Youth Council at the Rosebud Camp in October 2016. Photo: Provided by Mia Stevens
But those who know Fallis describe a woman who had come into her own as a camp medic and mentor to younger activists after traveling to Standing Rock at a crossroads in her own life. Fallis was grieving the recent death of her mother, said Mia Stevens, 23, a family friend. Troy Lynn Yellow Wood was “a really important woman” among indigenous communities in Denver, Stevens said. “After Red Fawn’s mom passed, she just stepped up how she cared about people and took on a bigger role. Everything her mom would say, pray about, and do — that became Red Fawn’s place.”
Fallis developed a close bond with members of the International Indigenous Youth Council, a group of adolescents and young adults at the forefront of numerous demonstrations. Lauren Howland, a 22-year-old member of the San Carlos and Jicarilla Apache tribes and Navajo Nation, who got to know Fallis through the council, described what she viewed as one of Fallis’s defining moments at Standing Rock.
On October 22, 2016, roughly 200 people conducted a prayer walk to a remote part of the pipeline’s path, where protesters had locked themselves to disabled vehicles to block the advance of construction equipment. The group was surrounded by police flanked by armored personnel carriers, Howland recalled, and officers began tackling people and using pepper spray. An officer in military gear clubbed Howland’s hand and wrist with a baton, fracturing her wrist in two places.
Howland said she was attempting to lead a 10-year-old boy away from the melee when the pain overwhelmed her and she had to sit down on a hillside far from the water protectors’ camps. Fallis, who had been riding a four-wheeler in and out of the area to assist vulnerable people, located Howland and the boy and transported them to safety.
“Red Fawn really saved my @#$,” Howland recalled. “I don’t even know how many times she went back and forth helping people that day, helping elders and other people who were hurt.”
CANNON BALL, ND - DECEMBER 3: A hand painted drawing of Sitting Bull decorates the Rosebud camp Just outside of the Lakota Sioux reservation of Standing Rock, North Dakota, on December 3, 2016. Over two hundred tribes, joined by environmental activists and hundreds of United States military veterans, camp and demonstrate against the Dakota Access Pipeline, which plans to be built under the Missouri River adjacent to the reservation. The gathering has been the largest meeting of Native Americans since the Little Bighorn camp in 1876. (Photo by Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis via Getty Images)
A painting depicts Sitting Bull at the Rosebud Camp outside of the Lakota Sioux reservation of Standing Rock, N.D., on Dec. 3, 2016. Photo: Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis/Getty Images
IN HIS INTERVIEW with the ATF and North Dakota Bureau of Criminal Investigation, Harmon said the reason he kept a gun in the trailer at the Rosebud Camp was for “peace of mind” — not because he felt that pipeline opponents presented a threat but “because there was rumors of DAPL security posing as protesters that were armed.”
On the morning after Fallis’s arrest, Harmon said, he called his contacts at the FBI. “I said, you know, the gun that was in that shooting, I said, that’s my firearm. They said, ‘Report it.’ So I reported it stolen.” In an interview with the Mandan Police Department the same day, he claimed the gun had been stolen two to three weeks prior. But he changed his story when talking to the ATF and BCI, saying that he’d last seen the gun a couple of days before the incident. “I left it in the trailer,” he added, “and Red Fawn knew where it was.”
Law enforcement records related to the case suggest the situation was complicated for Harmon, who had come to stay with his mother in Mandan after the downturn in the Bakken oil industry, according to comments she made to the BCI.
Hours of phone conversations recorded by the Morton County jail show Harmon and Fallis planning for their future together and Harmon offering words of encouragement as Fallis coped with the intensity of her legal situation. On one call, Harmon appears to break down as the two discussed Fallis’s uncertain future.
In his December 2016 interview, after telling investigators he had developed a relationship with Fallis after becoming a source for the FBI, Harmon added, “My judgment was wrong.”
At the conclusion of the interview, ATF Special Agent Derek Hill informed Harmon that he might be called as a witness at Fallis’s trial and noted his concern that Harmon’s affiliation with the FBI would leak. “I’m familiar with her family from Pine Ridge and in Colorado,” said Hill, who according to court testimony, spent over a decade based in Rapid City, primarily working on Pine Ridge. “If you start getting harassed in any way, shape, or form, I would like you to reach out to us and let us know.”
The Intercept’s repeated attempts to reach Harmon for comment have been unsuccessful. The FBI did not respond to questions about its use of informants at Standing Rock or Harmon’s connection to Fallis’s case. Spokespeople for the ATF and the North Dakota Bureau of Criminal Investigation declined to address questions related to an ongoing case.
Edgar Bear Runner, co-coordinator of the 25th anniversary of Wounded Knee 1973, stands by the graves of Anna Mae Aquash and Joe Stuntz on Wednesday, Feb. 18, 1998, at the Little Family Cemetery in Oglala, S.D. Aquash and Stuntz were killed during the violence that followed the 71 day occupation of Wounded Knee in 1973. The anniversary begins Friday Feb. 27 at the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. (AP Photo/Jill Kokesh)Edgar Bear Runner, co-coordinator of the 25th anniversary of Wounded Knee 1973, stands by the graves of Anna Mae Aquash and Joe Stuntz on Feb. 18, 1998, at the Little Family Cemetery in Oglala, S.D. Photo: Jill Kokesh/AP
The FBI has long relied on informants, from COINTELPRO to the war on terror, who act not only as observers but as agents provocateur, facilitating acts for which their targets are penalized. After 9/11, according to German, the former FBI agent, the bureau adopted what it called a “disruption strategy” that involved “the use of informants as a tool to suppress the activities of targeted groups, even when there is no actual evidence of criminality.”
It was, in many ways, a new name for an old set of tactics. In the 1970s, the American Indian Movement was a target of FBI informants, most notably AIM’s chief security officer, Douglas Durham, a close confidant of the group’s leaders who was on the FBI’s payroll for two years. During that period, various other AIM members were internally accused of working for the bureau. Many have come to believe the rumors began with actual informants like Durham deploying a strategy meant to sow division.
“They had us on their list to be infiltrated and disrupted and neutralized,” said Clyde Bellecourt, who helped found AIM and survived a near-fatal shooting in 1973 he says was fomented by an FBI operation involving Durham. Nearly half a century later, Bellecourt, who is Ojibwe from Minnesota, was among those the North Dakota SLIC put on its links chart of movement leaders at Standing Rock, having traveled there on three occasions.
After the revelation that Durham had worked for the FBI, fears of infiltration would intensify, bringing about one of AIM’s most painful chapters. Some members became convinced that Anna Mae Aquash, an activist from the Mi’kmaq First Nation in Canada, was working for the bureau. Aquash was driven into South Dakota’s Badlands and shot in the back of the head.
Fallis’s mother, Yellow Wood, found herself in the middle of the controversy. She testified in one of the resulting murder trials that Aquash had been staying in her home, which served as a kind of AIM safe house, when she was convinced by a group of visitors to leave. “She said that if this occurred, if they took her back to South Dakota, that I would never see her again,” Yellow Wood stated in 2004.
Decades after Aquash’s body was discovered, two AIM members were convicted of her murder. Meanwhile, the cases of numerous AIM members and supporters believed to be killed by the GOONs have never been prosecuted.
Sunaina Maira, a professor at the University of California, Davis who has studied the effects of FBI surveillance of Muslim and Arab Americans, said a major function of such activity is to fray the bonds of trust that knit communities and social movements together. “One of the implicit, if not explicit, objectives is to try to undermine any kind of organizing, mobilization, and collective solidarity,” she said. “It creates a chilling situation, particularly when it involves the use of native informants from people’s own communities. People start having to wonder who’s who.”
More details on Fallis’s case are certain to emerge at trial, scheduled to begin January 29. After defense lawyers requested her case be transferred out of North Dakota to ensure an impartial jury pool, a judge ordered the trial moved from Bismarck roughly 200 miles east to Fargo, the seat of Cass County, where Sheriff Paul Laney helped spearhead a National Sheriffs’ Association public relations campaign to discredit DAPL opponents. Fallis will be tried in the same federal courthouse where an all-white jury handed down Leonard Peltier’s murder conviction in 1977.
After spending a year in jail, Fallis was recently moved to a halfway house in Fargo. According to Glenn Morris, she “is prepared to defend herself vigorously in court against these fabricated charges.”
Morris believes it was Fallis’s political activism that drew the attention of law enforcement — her belief in indigenous self-determination and role in the largest mobilization against a fossil fuel infrastructure project in U.S. history. “Anyone who believes in the same things Red Fawn does can become the next Red Fawn, can become the next target,” Morris said. “That’s why people need to watch what happens with her case.”
Documents published with this story:
May 2017 Field Analysis Report
April 2017 Joint Intelligence Bulletin
Links Chart on Leaders of the Movement
Intel Thread 2016-10-22
Intel Thread 2016-10-17
SLIC Operations Email 2016-09-01
https://apnews.com/8ef07bbb07794418bc05 ... lling-teen
Murder trial underway for ex-officer accused of killing teen
DALLAS
— An off-duty police officer chased two teenagers who were burglarizing his SUV and killed one of them after firing his gun more than a dozen times, prosecutors told a Dallas jury on Monday during the former officer’s murder trial.
http://www.santafenewmexican.com/news/l ... d638a.html
State police chief: Make misconduct cases more accessible to public
By Justin Horwath | The New Mexican Dec 10, 2017
http://www.wcti12.com/news/local-news/c ... /670816477
MOREHEAD CITY, Carteret County - A Craven County Sheriff's Office lieutenant is behind bars, charged with assault in a neighboring county.
David Craft, a lieutenant in the patrol division, was booked into the Carteret County Jail early Sunday morning an assault charges. The assault on a female occurred outside Jack's Waterfront Bar in Morehead City.
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politic ... -1.3692384
House Democrats ask Justice Department to provide evidence that FBI had political bias against Hillary Clinton
BY ELIZABETH ELIZALDE
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS Updated: Monday, December 11, 2017, 10:36 PM
Former FBI agent and TRUMP AMBASSADOR BEAT AND ‘KIDNAPPED’ WOMAN IN WATERGATE COVER-UP: REPORTS
BY JEFF STEIN ON 12/11/17 AT 4:41 PM
Updated | American presidents have a long history of awarding ambassadorships to colorful characters as a way to thank them for their campaign donations. Roughly a third of U.S. ambassadors have no diplomatic experience beyond rounding up cash for successful presidential candidates.
Among them is Stephen King, 76, a longtime confidante and booster of House Speaker Paul Ryan, who is the new U.S. ambassador to the Czech Republic. King, who is also a former business partner of Ryan’s brother Tobin, has no diplomatic experience and had never spent a day in Prague before taking up his post there on December 7. Radio Prague, the official state news outlet, called him “a rich Republican businessman…who worked for the FBI early in his career.”
Left unsaid was that King played a crucial role in the 1972 Watergate affair—and not a good one. According to several accounts over the years, King helped cover up ties between President Richard Nixon’s re-election campaign and the burglars arrested inside the Democratic Party headquarters at the Watergate complex—and in a particularly violent fashion. None of that came up during his confirmation hearing.
In June 1972, King was an ex-FBI agent working as a security aide for the Committee to Re-elect the President, or CREEP, Nixon’s campaign arm. His duty on the week of the break-in was to protect—and keep a close eye on—Martha Mitchell, the talkative wife of Nixon’s campaign director and former attorney general John Mitchell, while the Mitchells were on a campaign swing in California.
An outspoken Arkansan dubbed “the Mouth of the South” in press reports, Martha Mitchell had been complaining vaguely to anyone who would listen about campaign operatives carrying out “dirty tricks” against the Democrats. So when she learned that James McCord, the security director of CREEP, who had served as her bodyguard, was among those arrested at the Watergate—and described by her husband as a private security contractor who was “not operating either on our behalf or with our consent”—she picked up the telephone and called a favorite reporter, UPI’s Helen Thomas.see link for full story
https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/ ... readsheet/
December 11, 2017
Miami Police releases a single row of a nearly 100 page spreadsheet
Department’s sole sexual harassment case from 2016 is surrounded by an ocean of black bars
Written by JPat Brown
Edited by Michael Morisy
A few weeks back, I filed with the ten largest police departments in the country for a list of all sexual harassment complaints or lawsuits from the past five years. The Miami Police Department was among the first to complete the request, releasing a single closed case from 2016.
While that in itself is notable, what really stood out was they manner in which they released this information: a 96-page spreadsheet that was completely redacted …
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politic ... -1.3690301
Roy Moore suggested rescinding amendments adopted after Bill of Rights on 2011 radio show
BY NICOLE HENSLEY
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS Monday, December 11, 2017, 12:35 AM
http://www.thecannabist.co/2017/12/11/t ... ine/94306/
Teen marijuana use in Colorado down post-legalization
The latest results from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health align with data collected by the state's Healthy Kids Colorado Survey.
https://theintercept.com/2017/12/08/bar ... nequality/
NEW REPORT LOOKS AT HOW OBAMA’S HOUSING POLICIES DESTROYED BLACK WEALTH
Zaid Jilani
December 8 2017, 10:31 a.m.
Link du jour
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politic ... -1.3691968
https://theintercept.com/2017/12/07/ant ... ace-panel/
http://www.blackberryfarm.com/farm/artisans/gardeners
https://theintercept.com/2017/12/08/vid ... lefront-2/
https://gcn.com/articles/2017/12/11/fbi ... r.aspx?m=2
FBI mum on Georgia's wiped election server
By Derek B. Johnson
Dec 11, 2017
Georgia is currently facing a lawsuit in federal court by voters and advocacy groups that claim a June 2017 special election may have been compromised because of insufficient security practices by Georgia officials and the organization that oversaw election infrastructure, Kennesaw State University (KSU).
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/201 ... re-to-win/
Russian Propagandists Are Pushing for Roy Moore to Win
Kremlin-linked trolls have also joined Trump and Fox News in targeting the FBI.
DENISE CLIFTONDEC. 11, 2017 3:00 PM
https://theintercept.com/2017/12/09/the ... -happened/
The U.S. Media Suffered Its Most Humiliating Debacle in Ages and Now Refuses All Transparency Over What Happened
Glenn Greenwald
December 9 2017, 10:17 a.m.
https://theintercept.com/2017/12/11/sta ... wn-fallis/
AN ACTIVIST STANDS ACCUSED OF FIRING A GUN AT STANDING ROCK. IT BELONGED TO HER LOVER — AN FBI INFORMANT.
Will Parrish
December 11 2017, 4:11 p.m.
Photo: Mike McCleary/The Bismarck Tribune/AP
Oil and WaterOil and Water
The case of Red Fawn Fallis provides a window into federal law enforcement’s infiltration and surveillance of the water protector movement.
VIEW MORE FROM THIS TIMELINE STORY
AS LAW ENFORCEMENT officers advanced in a U-shaped sweep line down North Dakota Highway 1806 last October, pushing back Dakota Access opponents from a camp in the pipeline’s path, two sheriff’s deputies broke formation to tackle a 37-year-old Oglala Sioux woman named Red Fawn Fallis. As Fallis struggled under the weight of her arresting officers, who were attempting to put her in handcuffs, three gunshots allegedly went off alongside her. According to the arrest affidavit, deputies lunged toward her left hand and wrested a gun away from her.
Well before that moment, Fallis had been caught in a sprawling intelligence operation that sought to disrupt and discredit opponents of the pipeline. The Intercept has learned that the legal owner of the gun Fallis is alleged to have fired was a paid FBI informant named Heath Harmon, a 46-year-old member of the Fort Berthold Reservation in western North Dakota. For at least two months, Harmon took part in the daily life of DAPL resistance camps and gained access to movement participants, even becoming Fallis’s romantic partner several weeks prior to the alleged shooting on October 27, 2016.
In an interview with agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives and the North Dakota Bureau of Criminal Investigation, a recording of which was obtained by The Intercept, Harmon reported that his work for the FBI involved monitoring the Standing Rock camps for evidence of “bomb-making materials, stuff like that.” Asked what he discovered, Harmon made no mention of protesters harboring dangerous weapons, but he acknowledged storing his own weapon in a trailer at the water protectors’ Rosebud Camp: the same .38 revolver Fallis is accused of firing.
Harmon spent the day of October 27 with Fallis and was nearby during her arrest. He continued to withhold his FBI affiliation from his then-girlfriend in phone conversations with her while she was being held at the Morton County jail in Mandan, North Dakota, records show. Investigators’ notes on those calls were distributed to the ATF, two local sheriff’s departments, and the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Bismarck, among others.
Federal prosecutors are charging Fallis with civil disorder, possession of a firearm by a convicted felon, and discharge of a firearm in relation to a felony crime of violence — perhaps the most serious charges levied against any water protector. If convicted of discharging the weapon, she faces a minimum of 10 years in prison and the possibility of a life sentence. She has pleaded not guilty.
Attorneys for Fallis argue their client was seized without probable cause while engaging in speech protected by the First Amendment, pointing to the account of one of her arresting officers that Fallis was shouting “water is life and you’re killing Mother Earth and stuff of that nature.” Drone footage appears to show her being tackled just minutes after arriving in the vicinity of the police line. In a hearing that concluded Monday, her lawyers challenged the admissibility of any property seized or statements Fallis made immediately after the incident, arguing they represent the products of an unconstitutional arrest. Defense attorneys declined to comment or make Fallis available for this story, citing her pending trial.
Drone footage from Oct. 27, 2016, shows Red Fawn Fallis driving an ATV north alongside the highway, then parking and approaching the police line. A few minutes later, as she begins to walk parallel to law enforcement, she is tackled and arrested.
As the struggle to limit the mining and burning of fossil fuels has developed into a potent force, indigenous activists like Fallis have frequently been at the forefront. Documents and recordings reviewed for this story provide a window into federal law enforcement’s use of counterterrorism tactics to target pipeline opponents based on the threat of “environmental rights extremism” — and reveal infiltration of the water protector movement as the latest chapter in the FBI’s long history of repression of indigenous political activism.
The intelligence operation targeting DAPL opponents was based at an emergency operations center in Bismarck, as well as the North Dakota State and Local Intelligence Center, known as the SLIC, a fusion center established to facilitate information sharing in the aftermath of 9/11. Although local law enforcement frequently served as the public face of the operation, federal agents played a central role soon after the first civil disobedience actions kicked off in August 2016. By early September, the operations center was hosting daily meetings involving representatives of the FBI, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the U.S. Marshals Service, and state and local police.
In his interview with the ATF and Bureau of Criminal Investigation on December 13, 2016, Harmon described how he came to be an FBI asset: He had reached out to his brother, a BIA police officer in North Dakota, to see if he could help by “being an observer” of the protest movement. “He said he knew people and they would get ahold of me,” Harmon stated. “That’s when the FBI contacted me. That’s the reason why I was down there in the first place.” By August, Harmon was regularly visiting the Rosebud Camp, which is where he met Fallis, according to his interview. He said he helped the FBI confirm the presence of specific “AIM members” at the camp, in reference to the American Indian Movement, and reported a vehicle carrying lockdown devices used by protesters to disrupt pipeline construction.
she was 5 or 6 years old, Morris said.
Founded at the height of the civil rights era, AIM fought for religious freedom and the fulfillment of treaties the U.S. government signed with indigenous nations. Yellow Wood was part of the organization’s struggle on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. In that case, AIM famously took up arms in 1973 and occupied the town of Wounded Knee — site of the U.S. 7th Calvary’s massacre of Lakota people in 1890 — as a show of opposition to a corrupt tribal government that was working behind the scenes to sell off lands rich in uranium and other resources.
Harmon is part of a different lineage. In his interview with law enforcement, he noted that his uncle Gerald Fox had been on the “other side” of the AIM struggle at Pine Ridge. Fox was a BIA officer who stood off against AIM during the 71-day occupation of Wounded Knee, alongside members of the U.S. Marshals Service and the FBI. According to a 2010 obituary in the Bismarck Tribune, Fox went on to join a BIA special operations unit, and between 1976 and 1984 “was detailed to every major Native conflict that happened in the United States.”
In the aftermath of the Pine Ridge standoff, the FBI looked the other way while a paramilitary organization known as the GOONs — whose leaders included members of the BIA tribal police force — carried out a multiyear campaign of extrajudicial killings and brutal physical assaults of AIM members and supporters.
DENVER, CO -NOVEMBER 07: Family and friends of Denver Native American woman, arrested during pipeline protest in North Dakota, hold a press conference, at 4 Winds American Indian Council in Denver, to show support, November 07, 2016. Red Fawn Fallis remains in jail in North Dakota after being arrested. (Photo by RJ Sangosti/The Denver Post via Getty Images)
Family and friends of Red Fawn Fallis hold a news conference at the Four Winds American Indian Council in Denver on Nov. 7, 2016. Photo: RJ Sangosti/The Denver Post/Getty Images
IN RECENT YEARS, as climate justice activists have taken on pipelines, coal mining, hydro-fracking, and Artic oil drilling, law enforcement agencies have established formal collaborations with the oil and gas industry in the name of preventing threats to so-called critical infrastructure, Jeff Monaghan, a Carleton University professor who studies the surveillance of social movements, told The Intercept. “That discourse has been the gateway for fusing the corporate energy sector and the national security apparatus in both the U.S. and Canada,” he said.
Sara Jumping Eagle, a physician on the Standing Rock Sioux reservation who was among the first DAPL opponents arrested in August, said the heavy-handed law enforcement response at Standing Rock was not altogether surprising. “There’s a long history of the U.S. labeling people who stand up as terrorists, so some of us figured they were gonna use those same tactics against this movement as well,” she said.
Jumping Eagle was among some two dozen activists featured on an early blueprint for the intelligence operation at the North Dakota fusion center, a “links chart on leaders of the movement,” obtained by The Intercept via public records request. The document mapped out connections between DAPL opponents purportedly affiliated with the Red Warrior and Sacred Stone camps, two of the main nerve centers of pipeline resistance on the Northern Great plains. Nearly everyone on the chart is an indigenous person.
Fallis appeared on the diagram more than seven weeks prior to her October 27 arrest. She was listed under her Facebook profile name, Luta Wi Redfawn, alongside the allegation that she had purchased pepper spray at Scheels, a sporting goods chain with a store in Bismarck.
Cheyenne River Sioux tribal member Cody Hall, who served as a spokesperson for the Red Warrior Camp, also featured prominently on the chart. On September 8, 2016, around the time the document was completed, Hall was pulled over by Highway Patrol officers who served him a warrant for two charges of misdemeanor trespass. Hall recalled a disproportionate number of officers on hand for his arrest.
After he was booked into the Morton County jail, Hall said two FBI agents attempted to interview him, but he asserted his right to remain silent. After a three-day stint in solitary confinement, he was released. “The experience was “unsettling” and “completely over the top,” Hall told The Intercept. “They were treating me like I was the native Osama.”
A Dakota Access Pipeline protester is arrested and waiting transportation to the Morton County jail on Tuesday, Nov. 15, 2016, after a large gathering of protesters tried to block a railroad crossing on Old Highway 10 and County Road 82 west of Mandan, N.D. (Mike McCleary /The Bismarck Tribune via AP)A Dakota Access pipeline opponent under arrest awaits transportation to the Morton County jail on Nov. 15, 2016, after protesters tried to block a railroad crossing on Old Highway 10 and County Road 82 west of Mandan, N.D. Photo: Mike McCleary/The Bismarck Tribune/AP
In addition to mapping out connections to the NoDAPL camps, the chart linked individuals to the hacker group Anonymous and the Black Lives Matter movement and even attempted to track romantic relationships among pipeline opponents.
Rana Karaya, a Chicago resident from the P’urhépecha tribe in Mexico, was listed as having a relationship with David Vlow Rodriguez, who had been “maced by DAPL security,” the document noted. After reviewing a section of the chart, Karaya labeled it “disgustingly intrusive.”
According to Monaghan, the links analysis reflects broader trends in the policing of domestic dissent. “Since 9/11, police have more widely adopted surveillance practices to enable them to identify and disrupt protest actions,” he said. “And one technique has been the mapping of so-called persons of interest lists and then engaging in punitive, pre-emptive arrests or disruptions of people on those lists.”
Cecily Fong, public information officer for the SLIC fusion center and the North Dakota Department of Emergency Services, provided a different explanation for the chart. “The primary purpose for the links chart was to attempt to identify any leaders in the protest camps that our law enforcement could approach to engage in diplomatic talks,” Fong told The Intercept. She said she was unable to find a concrete example of the chart being used for diplomatic purposes and directed The Intercept to the Morton County Sheriff’s Department, which similarly failed to provide such an example.
edit-Links-Chart-on-Leaders-of-the-move-Redacted-1512665629-1512750376
A “links chart on leaders of the movement,” developed by the North Dakota fusion center in early September 2016, maps pipeline opponents’ purported connections to the Red Warrior and Sacred Stone camps, as well as Anonymous and Black Lives Matter. Source: North Dakota State and Local Intelligence Center
EMAILS AND REPORTS documenting intelligence collection on pipeline opponents, which The Intercept obtained through records requests, show a heightened focus on the threat of “environmental rights extremist violence,” while revealing a broader effort on the part of law enforcement to keep digital tabs on activists.
In an October 2016 email to federal, state, and local law enforcement, a Bismarck police officer relayed information from a North Dakota patrol sergeant about “AIM propaganda” on Facebook. “Free Peltier” stickers appeared in the posts of an individual believed to be a longtime AIM member, the sergeant noted, in reference to AIM activist Leonard Peltier, who was imprisoned for killing two FBI agents during a 1975 shootout on Pine Ridge, in what indigenous activists and human rights groups have labeled a wrongful conviction. Another purported member appeared to be “pro-violence,” the sergeant warned.
The message was part of a shared thread among law enforcement representatives affiliated with the emergency operations center who referred to themselves as the “intel group,” monitoring the DAPL protests in real time. Additional emails concerning Standing Rock operations plans were sent to multiple Department of Homeland Security and FBI addresses, including that of E.K. Wilson, a special agent with the FBI’s Minneapolis office. According to press reports, Wilson was previously the supervisory special agent for one of the FBI’s largest domestic counterterrorism operations since 9/11: a probe of the Shabab militant group’s recruitment of Somali-Americans.
Michael German, a former FBI special agent who is now a fellow at New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice, notes the concept of environmental extremism originated as part of the broader war on terror and is based on a model of radicalization that argues that people who develop ideas the FBI deems extremist have embarked on a dangerous path that might eventually lead them to commit an attack.
“It’s an intellectual framework that’s saying, ‘We’re only interested in using our surveillance and investigative tools on the terrorists, but the terrorists come from this specific pool of activists,’” German told The Intercept. “They can then justify surveilling the activists, suppressing the activists, and also selectively prosecuting the activists. We’ve seen that in the prosecutions of people following the January 20 protests, and we’ve certainly also seen it with Standing Rock.”
Following the breakup of Standing Rock resistance camps, the North Dakota SLIC offered information on DAPL opponents to a central Florida fusion center monitoring opposition to the Sabal Trail Pipeline, according to an April 2017 intelligence bulletin. The document, which repeatedly uses the terminology of “domestic violent extremists,” notes the migration of pipeline opponents to struggles in Minnesota, South Dakota, Oklahoma, Oregon, Texas, and Iowa.
“Our SLIC, when asked, has provided information to other SLICs in states that are, have, or may experience protests similar to the one that occurred in North Dakota,” Fong told The Intercept. “The ND SLIC is not actively monitoring anyone associated with the NoDAPL protests.”
A May 2017 report prepared by the DHS Office of Intelligence and Analysis and fusion centers across seven states defines “environmental rights extremists” as “groups or individuals who facilitate or engage in acts of unlawful violence against people, businesses, or government entities perceived to be destroying, degrading, or exploiting the natural environment.”
The report claims that “suspected environmental rights extremists exploited Native American anti-DAPL protests to attract new members to their movement, gain public sympathy, and justify criminal and violent acts,” a narrative later repeated in a conspiracy lawsuit DAPL parent company Energy Transfer Partners filed against environmentalist groups. Yet widely disparate individuals are included under the extremist label, including Canadian indigenous people who traveled to North Dakota and a member of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe, Dean Dedman, whose “suspicious drone use” raised concerns of attempted countersurveillance. To Dedman, the extremist designation fits with police officials’ broader effort to discredit water protectors. “They’re putting it in their words to portray that we’re terrorists or we’re somehow trying to disrupt the peace, which is totally bogus,” he told The Intercept.
The document categorizes a broad range of protest activities as violent, noting that while “environmental rights extremists often consider themselves to be nonviolent because their attacks tend to be against property,” tactics such as tampering with pipeline valves and setting fire to construction equipment “carry an inherent risk of death or serious of injury, regardless of intent.” Its authors identify ominous intelligence gaps as to the existence of “training camps established to teach violent tactics” and “which camps house individuals who have an interest in using lethal weapons such as IEDs against law enforcement or pipeline entities.”
In a section describing “use of potentially lethal devices,” the report holds up Red Fawn Fallis as an example of extremist violence. Without mentioning Fallis by name, the report claims she “shot a firearm at law enforcement officers who had confronted her while taking her into custody,” echoing an allegation long since discarded by prosecutors — that Fallis intentionally shot at police.
The same section cites a November 2016 incident in which a Standing Rock protester “threw small IEDs at officers, resulting in near amputation of her arm after one of the IEDs exploded prematurely, according to law enforcement and DHS reporting.” But according to multiple sworn witnesses, the woman in question, Sophia Wilansky, sustained the gruesome injury after police shot her with “less than lethal” munition during a confrontation that saw officers spray protesters with water hoses and rubber bullets amid subfreezing temperatures, resulting in hundreds of injuries.
As The Intercept previously reported, an FBI informant played a key role in defining the version of events law enforcement promoted about Wilansky’s injury. In an email to several FBI and Department of Justice addresses after the incident, Terry Van Horn, a national security intelligence specialist with the U.S. Attorney’s Office, noted that an FBI “source from the camp reported people were making IEDs from small Coleman-type propane canisters.”
Neither the FBI nor the Department of Homeland Security would address specific questions from The Intercept related to intelligence collection. “The FBI investigates activity which may constitute a federal crime or pose a threat to national security. Our focus is not on membership in particular groups or adherence to particular ideologies but on criminal activity,” a spokesperson for the FBI said in a statement.
A spokesperson for DHS wrote, “DHS works with federal partners, including the FBI, and state and local law enforcement through the National Network of Fusion Centers to assess threats and analyze trends in activity from all violent extremist groups, regardless of ideology. DHS is prohibited from engaging in intelligence activities for the sole purpose of monitoring activities protected by the First Amendment.”
FILE - In this Oct. 27, 2016 file photo, Dakota Access Pipeline protesters sit in a prayer circle at the Front Line Camp as a line of law enforcement officers make their way across the camp to remove the protesters and relocate to the overflow camp a few miles to the south on Highway 1806 in Morton County, N.D. Members of more than 200 tribes from across North America have come to the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe's encampment at the confluence of the Missouri and Cannonball rivers since August, the tribe says. Estimates at the protest site have varied from a few hundred to several thousand depending on the day _ enough for tribal officials to call it one of the largest gatherings of Native Americans in a century or more. (Mike McCleary/The Bismarck Tribune via AP, File)
Dakota Access pipeline opponents sit in a prayer circle at the Front-Line Camp as law enforcement officers remove protesters and relocate them to an overflow camp a few miles south on Highway 1806 in Morton County, N.D., on Oct. 27, 2016. Photo: Mike McCleary/The Bismarck Tribune/AP
THE DRAMATIC CIRCUMSTANCES of Fallis’s arrest have frequently been used by law enforcement and fossil fuel interests to bolster the portrayal of water protectors as reckless and violent. Fallis’s attorneys have argued that it is impossible for her to receive a fair trial in North Dakota because of the intense level of negative publicity, pointing to counterinformation efforts by police and DAPL security to push an extremist narrative of the protests.
The attempted murder charges North Dakota initially filed against Fallis were dismissed within a month, but public Facebook posts by the Morton and Cass County sheriff’s departments linking her to the more serious crime have never been corrected. Both departments shared a video in which a Highway Patrol captain claimed it was lucky no officers were shot, but “it wasn’t because she was trying to aim away from law enforcement.” Meanwhile, Energy Transfer Partners singled out Fallis as a “radical eco-terrorist” in its racketeering lawsuit filed against Greenpeace and other groups.
red-fawn-fallis-1512676091Red Fawn Fallis, second from left, poses with members of the International Indigenous Youth Council at the Rosebud Camp in October 2016. Photo: Provided by Mia Stevens
But those who know Fallis describe a woman who had come into her own as a camp medic and mentor to younger activists after traveling to Standing Rock at a crossroads in her own life. Fallis was grieving the recent death of her mother, said Mia Stevens, 23, a family friend. Troy Lynn Yellow Wood was “a really important woman” among indigenous communities in Denver, Stevens said. “After Red Fawn’s mom passed, she just stepped up how she cared about people and took on a bigger role. Everything her mom would say, pray about, and do — that became Red Fawn’s place.”
Fallis developed a close bond with members of the International Indigenous Youth Council, a group of adolescents and young adults at the forefront of numerous demonstrations. Lauren Howland, a 22-year-old member of the San Carlos and Jicarilla Apache tribes and Navajo Nation, who got to know Fallis through the council, described what she viewed as one of Fallis’s defining moments at Standing Rock.
On October 22, 2016, roughly 200 people conducted a prayer walk to a remote part of the pipeline’s path, where protesters had locked themselves to disabled vehicles to block the advance of construction equipment. The group was surrounded by police flanked by armored personnel carriers, Howland recalled, and officers began tackling people and using pepper spray. An officer in military gear clubbed Howland’s hand and wrist with a baton, fracturing her wrist in two places.
Howland said she was attempting to lead a 10-year-old boy away from the melee when the pain overwhelmed her and she had to sit down on a hillside far from the water protectors’ camps. Fallis, who had been riding a four-wheeler in and out of the area to assist vulnerable people, located Howland and the boy and transported them to safety.
“Red Fawn really saved my @#$,” Howland recalled. “I don’t even know how many times she went back and forth helping people that day, helping elders and other people who were hurt.”
CANNON BALL, ND - DECEMBER 3: A hand painted drawing of Sitting Bull decorates the Rosebud camp Just outside of the Lakota Sioux reservation of Standing Rock, North Dakota, on December 3, 2016. Over two hundred tribes, joined by environmental activists and hundreds of United States military veterans, camp and demonstrate against the Dakota Access Pipeline, which plans to be built under the Missouri River adjacent to the reservation. The gathering has been the largest meeting of Native Americans since the Little Bighorn camp in 1876. (Photo by Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis via Getty Images)
A painting depicts Sitting Bull at the Rosebud Camp outside of the Lakota Sioux reservation of Standing Rock, N.D., on Dec. 3, 2016. Photo: Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis/Getty Images
IN HIS INTERVIEW with the ATF and North Dakota Bureau of Criminal Investigation, Harmon said the reason he kept a gun in the trailer at the Rosebud Camp was for “peace of mind” — not because he felt that pipeline opponents presented a threat but “because there was rumors of DAPL security posing as protesters that were armed.”
On the morning after Fallis’s arrest, Harmon said, he called his contacts at the FBI. “I said, you know, the gun that was in that shooting, I said, that’s my firearm. They said, ‘Report it.’ So I reported it stolen.” In an interview with the Mandan Police Department the same day, he claimed the gun had been stolen two to three weeks prior. But he changed his story when talking to the ATF and BCI, saying that he’d last seen the gun a couple of days before the incident. “I left it in the trailer,” he added, “and Red Fawn knew where it was.”
Law enforcement records related to the case suggest the situation was complicated for Harmon, who had come to stay with his mother in Mandan after the downturn in the Bakken oil industry, according to comments she made to the BCI.
Hours of phone conversations recorded by the Morton County jail show Harmon and Fallis planning for their future together and Harmon offering words of encouragement as Fallis coped with the intensity of her legal situation. On one call, Harmon appears to break down as the two discussed Fallis’s uncertain future.
In his December 2016 interview, after telling investigators he had developed a relationship with Fallis after becoming a source for the FBI, Harmon added, “My judgment was wrong.”
At the conclusion of the interview, ATF Special Agent Derek Hill informed Harmon that he might be called as a witness at Fallis’s trial and noted his concern that Harmon’s affiliation with the FBI would leak. “I’m familiar with her family from Pine Ridge and in Colorado,” said Hill, who according to court testimony, spent over a decade based in Rapid City, primarily working on Pine Ridge. “If you start getting harassed in any way, shape, or form, I would like you to reach out to us and let us know.”
The Intercept’s repeated attempts to reach Harmon for comment have been unsuccessful. The FBI did not respond to questions about its use of informants at Standing Rock or Harmon’s connection to Fallis’s case. Spokespeople for the ATF and the North Dakota Bureau of Criminal Investigation declined to address questions related to an ongoing case.
Edgar Bear Runner, co-coordinator of the 25th anniversary of Wounded Knee 1973, stands by the graves of Anna Mae Aquash and Joe Stuntz on Wednesday, Feb. 18, 1998, at the Little Family Cemetery in Oglala, S.D. Aquash and Stuntz were killed during the violence that followed the 71 day occupation of Wounded Knee in 1973. The anniversary begins Friday Feb. 27 at the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. (AP Photo/Jill Kokesh)Edgar Bear Runner, co-coordinator of the 25th anniversary of Wounded Knee 1973, stands by the graves of Anna Mae Aquash and Joe Stuntz on Feb. 18, 1998, at the Little Family Cemetery in Oglala, S.D. Photo: Jill Kokesh/AP
The FBI has long relied on informants, from COINTELPRO to the war on terror, who act not only as observers but as agents provocateur, facilitating acts for which their targets are penalized. After 9/11, according to German, the former FBI agent, the bureau adopted what it called a “disruption strategy” that involved “the use of informants as a tool to suppress the activities of targeted groups, even when there is no actual evidence of criminality.”
It was, in many ways, a new name for an old set of tactics. In the 1970s, the American Indian Movement was a target of FBI informants, most notably AIM’s chief security officer, Douglas Durham, a close confidant of the group’s leaders who was on the FBI’s payroll for two years. During that period, various other AIM members were internally accused of working for the bureau. Many have come to believe the rumors began with actual informants like Durham deploying a strategy meant to sow division.
“They had us on their list to be infiltrated and disrupted and neutralized,” said Clyde Bellecourt, who helped found AIM and survived a near-fatal shooting in 1973 he says was fomented by an FBI operation involving Durham. Nearly half a century later, Bellecourt, who is Ojibwe from Minnesota, was among those the North Dakota SLIC put on its links chart of movement leaders at Standing Rock, having traveled there on three occasions.
After the revelation that Durham had worked for the FBI, fears of infiltration would intensify, bringing about one of AIM’s most painful chapters. Some members became convinced that Anna Mae Aquash, an activist from the Mi’kmaq First Nation in Canada, was working for the bureau. Aquash was driven into South Dakota’s Badlands and shot in the back of the head.
Fallis’s mother, Yellow Wood, found herself in the middle of the controversy. She testified in one of the resulting murder trials that Aquash had been staying in her home, which served as a kind of AIM safe house, when she was convinced by a group of visitors to leave. “She said that if this occurred, if they took her back to South Dakota, that I would never see her again,” Yellow Wood stated in 2004.
Decades after Aquash’s body was discovered, two AIM members were convicted of her murder. Meanwhile, the cases of numerous AIM members and supporters believed to be killed by the GOONs have never been prosecuted.
Sunaina Maira, a professor at the University of California, Davis who has studied the effects of FBI surveillance of Muslim and Arab Americans, said a major function of such activity is to fray the bonds of trust that knit communities and social movements together. “One of the implicit, if not explicit, objectives is to try to undermine any kind of organizing, mobilization, and collective solidarity,” she said. “It creates a chilling situation, particularly when it involves the use of native informants from people’s own communities. People start having to wonder who’s who.”
More details on Fallis’s case are certain to emerge at trial, scheduled to begin January 29. After defense lawyers requested her case be transferred out of North Dakota to ensure an impartial jury pool, a judge ordered the trial moved from Bismarck roughly 200 miles east to Fargo, the seat of Cass County, where Sheriff Paul Laney helped spearhead a National Sheriffs’ Association public relations campaign to discredit DAPL opponents. Fallis will be tried in the same federal courthouse where an all-white jury handed down Leonard Peltier’s murder conviction in 1977.
After spending a year in jail, Fallis was recently moved to a halfway house in Fargo. According to Glenn Morris, she “is prepared to defend herself vigorously in court against these fabricated charges.”
Morris believes it was Fallis’s political activism that drew the attention of law enforcement — her belief in indigenous self-determination and role in the largest mobilization against a fossil fuel infrastructure project in U.S. history. “Anyone who believes in the same things Red Fawn does can become the next Red Fawn, can become the next target,” Morris said. “That’s why people need to watch what happens with her case.”
Documents published with this story:
May 2017 Field Analysis Report
April 2017 Joint Intelligence Bulletin
Links Chart on Leaders of the Movement
Intel Thread 2016-10-22
Intel Thread 2016-10-17
SLIC Operations Email 2016-09-01
https://apnews.com/8ef07bbb07794418bc05 ... lling-teen
Murder trial underway for ex-officer accused of killing teen
DALLAS
— An off-duty police officer chased two teenagers who were burglarizing his SUV and killed one of them after firing his gun more than a dozen times, prosecutors told a Dallas jury on Monday during the former officer’s murder trial.
http://www.santafenewmexican.com/news/l ... d638a.html
State police chief: Make misconduct cases more accessible to public
By Justin Horwath | The New Mexican Dec 10, 2017
http://www.wcti12.com/news/local-news/c ... /670816477
MOREHEAD CITY, Carteret County - A Craven County Sheriff's Office lieutenant is behind bars, charged with assault in a neighboring county.
David Craft, a lieutenant in the patrol division, was booked into the Carteret County Jail early Sunday morning an assault charges. The assault on a female occurred outside Jack's Waterfront Bar in Morehead City.
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politic ... -1.3692384
House Democrats ask Justice Department to provide evidence that FBI had political bias against Hillary Clinton
BY ELIZABETH ELIZALDE
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS Updated: Monday, December 11, 2017, 10:36 PM
-
msfreeh
- Level 34 Illuminated
- Posts: 7718
Re: How many FBI informants in the Bundy Militia group in Oregon?
FBI agent Mark Putnam gets informant pregnant then murders unborn baby
and informant.
FBI agents try to cover up murders.State police solve case arrest Putnam.
FBI coverup deleted in tv show ? Read Sharkey’s book. I did.
Discovery channel is MSM
http://www.kentucky.com/news/local/crim ... 64614.html
She was an FBI informant who was murdered. Now her story is an episode of a TV
https://www.theepochtimes.com/justice-d ... 01511.html
Attorney General Sessions planning 2018 version of PALMER RAIDS?
Justice Department May Have Something Big in the Works: Over 9,000 Sealed Indictments
By Joshua Philipp, The Epoch Times
January 1, 2018 11:29 pm Last Updated: January 2, 2018 4:03 pm
https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/201 ... minal-case
Prosecutors urge judge to not dismiss Bundy criminal case
January 02, 2018
Federal prosecutors are urging a Nevada judge to not dismiss criminal charges against Cliven Bundy, the Nevada cattleman and antigovernment icon, and three other men, claiming the government’s failure to release certain records was merely inadvertent.
In declaring a mistrial last month, U.S. District Judge Gloria Navarro said she was dismissing a jury panel and halting the criminal conspiracy trial because federal prosecutors had failed to turn over certain FBI reports to defense attorneys.
The judge has set a hearing for next Monday where she’s expected to rule whether her mistrial order will be with or without prejudice.
If the mistrial order is accompanied by a “without prejudice” ruling, Cliven Bundy, his sons Ammon and Ryan Bundy and Montana militiaman Ryan Payne will return to a Las Vegas courtroom next month for another jury trial.
http://americanpatrol.com/SPLC/Churchof ... 01100.html
The church of Morris Dees
How the Southern Poverty Law Center profits from intolerance
By Ken Silverstein
How the Southern Poverty Law Center profits from intolerance
Ah, tolerance. Who could be against something so virtuous? And who could object to the Southern Poverty Law Center, the Montgomery, Alabama-based group that recently sent out this heartwarming yet mildly terrifying appeal to raise money for its "Teaching Tolerance" program, which prepares educational kits for schoolteachers? Cofounded in 1971 by civil rights lawyer cum direct-marketing millionaire Morris Dees, a leading critic of "hate groups" and a man so beatific that he was the subject of a made-for-TV movie, the SPLC spent much of its early years defending prisoners who faced the death penalty and suing to desegregate all-white institutions like Alabama's highway patrol. That was then.
Today, the SPLC spends most of its time--and money--on a relentless fund-raising campaign, peddling memberships in the church of tolerance with all the zeal of a circuit rider passing the collection plate. "He's the Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker of the civil rights movement," renowned anti- death-penalty lawyer Millard Farmer says of Dees, his former associate, "though I don!t mean to malign Jim and Tammy Faye." The Center earned $44 million last year alone--$27 million from fund-raising and $17 million from stocks and other investments--but spent only $13 million on civil rights program , making it one of the most profitable charities in the country.
The Ku Klux Klan, the SPLC's most lucrative nemesis, has shrunk from 4 million members in the 1920s to an estimated 2,000 today, as many as 10 percent of whom are thought to be FBI informants <http://www.servtech.com/~grugyn/kkk-5.htm> . But news of a declining Klan does not make for inclining donations to Morris Dees and Co., which is why the SPLC honors nearly every nationally covered "hate crime" with direct-mail alarums full of nightmarish invocations of "armed Klan paramilitary forces" and "violent neo-Nazi extremists," and why Dees does legal battle almost exclusively with mediagenic villains-like Idaho's arch-Aryan Richard Butler-eager to show off their swastikas for the news cameras.
In 1987, Dees won a $7 million judgment against the United Klans of America on behalf of Beulah Mae Donald, whose son was lynched by two Klansmen. The UKA's total assets amounted to a warehouse whose sale netted Mrs. Donald $51,875. According to a groundbreaking series of newspaper stories in the Montgomery Advertiser, the SPLC, meanwhile, made $9 million from fund-raising solicitations featuring the case, including one containing a photo of Michael Donald's corpse.
Horrifying as such incidents are, hate groups commit almost no violence. More than 95 percent of all "hate crimes," including most of the incidents SPLC letters cite (bombings, church burnings, school shootings), are perpetrated by "lone wolves." Even Timothy McVeigh, subject of one of the most extensive investigations in the FBI's history-and one of the most extensive direct-mail campaigns in the SPLC's-was never credibly linked to any militia organization.
No faith healing or infomercial would be complete without a moving testimonial. The student from whose tears this white schoolteacher learned her lesson is identified only as a child of color. "Which race," we are assured, "does not matter." Nor apparently does the specific nature of "the racist acts directed at him," nor the race of his schoolyard tormentors. All that matters, in fact, is the race of the teacher and those expiating tears. "I wept with him, feeling for once, the depth of his hurt," she confides. "His tears washed away the film that had distorted my white perspective of the world." Scales fallen from her eyes, what action does this schoolteacher propose? What Gandhi-like disobedience will she undertake in order to "reach real peace in the world"? She doesn't say but instead speaks vaguely of acting out against "the pain." In the age of Oprah and Clinton, empathy--or the confession thereof--is an end in itself.
Any good salesman knows that a products "value" is a highly mutable quality with little relation to actual worth, and Morris Dees-who made millions hawking, by direct mail, such humble commodities as birthday cakes, cookbooks (including Favorite Recipes of American Home Economics Teachers), tractor seat cushions, rat poison, and, in exchange for a mailing list containing 700,000 names, presidential candidate George McGovern-is nothing if not a good salesman. So good in fact that in 1998 the Direct Marketing Association inducted him into its Hall of Fame. "I learned everything I know about hustling from the Baptist Church," Dees has said. "Spending Sundays on those hard benches listening to the preacher pitch salvation-why, it was like getting a Ph.D. in selling." Here, Dr. Dees (the letter's nominal author) masterfully transforms, with a mere flourish of hyperbole, an education kit available "at cost" for $30 on the SPLC website into "a $325 value."
This is one of the only places in this letter where specific races are mentioned. Elsewhere, Dees and his copywriters, deploying an arsenal of passive verbs and vague abstractions, have sanitized the usually divisive issue of race of its more disturbing elements-such as angry black people-and for good reason: most SPLC donors are white. Thus, instead of concrete civil rights issues like housing discrimination and racial profiling, we get "communities seething with racial violence." Instead of racially biased federal sentencing laws, or the disparity between poor predominantly black schools and affluent white ones, or the violence against illegals along the Mexican border, the SPLC gives us "intolerance against those who are different," turning bigotry into a color-blind, equal-opportunity sin. It's reassuring to know that "Caucasians" are no more and no less guilty of this sin than African Americans, Asian Americans, Native Americans, and Hispanics. In the eyes of Morris Dees, we're all sinners, all victims, and all potential contributors.
Morris Dees doesn't need your financial support. The SPLC is already the wealthiest civil rights group in America, though this letter quite naturally omits that fact. Other solicitations have been more flagrantly misleading. One pitch, sent out in 1995-when the Center had more than $60 million in reserves-informed would-be donors that the "strain on our current operating budget is the greatest in our 25-year history." Back in 1978, when the Center had less than $10 million, Dees promised that his organization would quit fund-raising and live off interest as soon as its endowment hit $55 million. But as it approached that figure, the SPLC upped the bar to $100 million, a sum that, one 1989 newsletter promised, would allow the Center "to cease the costly and often unreliable task of fund raising. " Today, the SPLC's treasury bulges with $120 million, and it spends twice as much on fund-raising-$5.76 million last year-as it does on legal services for victims of civil rights abuses. The American Institute of Philanthropy gives the Center one of the worst ratings of any group it monitors, estimating that the SPLC could operate for 4.6 years without making another tax-exempt nickel from its investments or raising another tax-deductible cent from well-meaning "people like you."
The SPLC's "other important work justice" consists mainly in spying on private citizens who belong to "hate groups," sharing its files with law-enforcement agencies, and suing the most prominent of these groups for crimes committed independently by their members-a practice that, however seemingly justified, should give civil libertarians pause. The legal strategy employed by Dees could have put the Black Panther Party out of business or bankrupted the New England Emigrant Aid Company in retaliation for crimes committed by John Brown. What the Center's other work for justice does not include is anything that might be considered controversial by donors. According to Millard Farmer, the Center largely stopped taking death-penalty cases for fear that too visible an opposition to capital punishment would scare off potential contributors. In 1986, the Center's entire legal staff quit in protest of Dees's refusal to address issues-such as homelessness, voter registration, and affirmative action-that they considered far more pertinent to poor minorities, if far less marketable to affluent benefactors, than fighting the KKK. Another lawyer, Gloria Browne, who resigned a few years later, told reporters that the Center's programs were calculated to cash in on "black pain and white guilt." Asked in 1994 if the SPLC itself, whose leadership consists almost entirely of white men, was in need of an affirmative action policy, Dees replied that "probably the most discriminated people in America today are white men when it comes to jobs."
Contributors to Teaching Tolerance might be surprised to learn how little of the SPLC's reported educational spending actually goes to education. In response to lobbying by charities, the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants in 1987 began allowing nonprofits to count part of their fundraising costs as "educational" so long as their solicitations contained an informational component. On average, the SPLC classifies an estimated 47 percent of the fund-raising letters that it sends out every year as educational, including many that do little more than instruct potential donors on the many evils of "militant right-wing extremists" and the many splendid virtues of Morris Dees. According to tax documents, of the $10. 8 million in educational spending the SPLC reported in 1999, $4 million went to solicitations. Another $2.4 million paid for stamps.
In the early 1960s, Morris Dees sat on the sidelines honing his direct-marketing skills and practicing law while the civil rights movement engulfed the South. "Morris and I...shared the overriding purpose of making a pile of money," recalls Dees's business partner, a lawyer named Millard Fuller (not to be confused with Millard Farmer). "We were not particular about how we did it; we just wanted to be independently rich." They were so unparticular, in fact, that in 1961 they defended a man, guilty of beating up a journalist covering the Freedom Riders, whose legal fees were paid by the Klan. ("I felt the anger of a black person for the first time," Dees later wrote of the case. "I vowed then and there that nobody would ever again doubt where I stood.") In 1965, Fuller sold out to Dees, donated the money to charity, and later started Habitat for Humanity. Dees bought a 200-acre estate appointed with tennis courts, a pool, and stables, and, in 1971, founded the SPLC, where his compensation has risen in proportion to fund-raising revenues, from nothing in the early seventies to $273,000 last year. A National Journal survey of salaries paid to the top officers of advocacy groups shows that Dees earned more in 1998 than nearly all of the seventy-eight listed, tens of thousands more than the heads of such groups as the ACLU, the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, and the Children's Defense Fund. The more money the SPLC receives, the less that goes to other civil rights organizations, many of which, including the NAACP, have struggled to stay out of bankruptcy. Dees's compensation alone amounts to one
I’ve written in the past on various occasions about Morris Dees, head of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), the bogus “civil rights organization” whose chief (and wildly successful) mission has been to separate wealthy liberals from their money. Last time I checked, the SPLC had more than $150 million in its treasury, more than the GNP of some of the world’s smaller countries, yet it did very little work to advance civil rights or fight poverty.
At a personal level, though, Dees has been able to avoid deprivation of any type. Over the weekend a friend sent me a slide show from a recent story in the Montgomery Advertiser, which offered an inside look at the local Dees estate.
Dees made a lot of money prior to founding the SPLC so he didn’t just get rich off of his “civil rights” work. But does a man this wealthy really need a compensation package worth — according to his group’s latest tax filing — $350,000?
https://harpers.org/blog/2010/04/morris ... g-poverty/
https://www.thenation.com/article/king-hate-business/
King of the Hate Business
With haters on the wane, what will the hate-seekers do?
The sun is dipping low in the evening sky over the Republican Party as the Other Leading Brand. A mere 21 percent of the adult population identify themselves as Republicans. Senator Arlen Specter sees the writing on the wall. He prefers to make his sixth senatorial run under the ample Democratic banner, rather than get mangled in the tiny shark tank of a Republican primary attended only by people who want to see the country run by Limbaugh and Hannity. With Al Franken certified, Specter crossing the aisle and Joe Biden in reserve, the Democrats can no longer hide behind the excuse of a Republican filibuster. They’ll figure out a way, no doubt, but it could be embarrassing.
It’s also horrible news for people who raise money and make money selling the notion that there’s a right resurgence out there in the hinterland with legions of haters ready to march down Main Street draped in Klan robes, a copy of Mein Kampf tucked under one arm and a Bible under the other, available for sneak photographs from minions of Chip Berlet, a prime promoter of the Christian menace.
What is the archsalesman of hatemongering, Morris Dees of the Southern Poverty Law Center, going to do now? Ever since 1971, US Postal Service mailbags have bulged with his fundraising letters, scaring dollars out of the pockets of trembling liberals aghast at his lurid depictions of a hate-sodden America in dire need of legal confrontation by the SPLC. Nine years ago Ken Silverstein wrote a devastating commentary on Dees and the SPLC in Harper’s, dissecting a typical swatch of Dees’s solicitations. At the time, Ken pointed out, the SPLC was “the wealthiest civil rights group in America,” with $120 million in assets.
As of October 2008 the net assets of the SPLC were $170,240,129. The merchant of hate, Mr. Dees, was paid an annual $273,132 as chief trial counsel, and the SPLC’s president and CEO, Richard Cohen, $290,133. Total revenue in 2007 was $44,727,257, and program expenses $20,804,536. In other words, the Southern Poverty Law Center was raising much more than it was spending on its proclaimed mission. Fundraising and administrative expenses accounted for $9 million, leaving more than $14 million to be put in the center’s vast asset portfolio.
http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-lup ... story.html
Lupe Valdez is a gay Latina sheriff running for Texas governor, and she could win even if she loses
Guadalupe “Lupe” Valdez was making the rounds in jeans and a purple blouse on a recent Sunday at Norma’s Cafe, a popular diner packed with a diverse mix of Texans.
“Hey, sheriff!” exclaimed a Latino in a Dallas Cowboys jersey, and Valdez was soon at his side, grinning.
“I was afraid people wouldn’t recognize me without the uniform,” she said.
The week before, Valdez — the state’s first openly gay and first Latina sheriff — with almost four terms under her belt as Dallas County’s top cop — announced she was resigning to run for governor. In a crowded Democratic primary, she’s the front-runner with the potential to boost party voter registration and turnout long-term, especially among Latinos. Though Valdez is unlikely to beat Republican Greg Abbott, a popular governor in a red state with $50 million to spend, she could benefit from a backlash against Trump, mobilizing Latino voters.
http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/San- ... 425117.php
This nurse commutes 2,600 miles to work in Oakland. Is he nuts?
David Curran Updated 10:11 pm, Sunday, December 31, 2017
https://www.metrotimes.com/city-slang/a ... ng-for-now
ICP loses case, Juggalos to remain on FBI watch list as 'hybrid gang' for now
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1 ... 105.x/full
Graffiti from Qusayr `Amra: A note on dating of Arabian rock carvings
http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/M ... 467556.php
Mike Tyson breaks ground on marijuana farm and luxury resort in California
By Michelle Robertson, SFGATE Updated 12:03 pm, Tuesday, January 2, 2018
Link du jour
https://www.policemisconduct.net
http://trac.syr.edu/tracfbi/
http://www.gosanangelo.com/story/news/l ... 982149001/
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politic ... -1.3734261
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/world/d ... -1.3733635
https://books.google.com/books?id=2SohA ... ok&f=false
http://www.internetarchaeology.org
http://www.politicususa.com/2018/01/02/ ... ation.html
In One Explosive Moment Rachel Maddow Puts Her Finger On Why Trump Is Terrified Of The Russia Investigation
By Jason Easley on Tue, Jan 2nd, 2018 at 9:36 pm
https://www.rt.com/usa/414841-trump-doj ... te-abedin/
Trump slams DOJ as ‘deep state,’ wants jail time for Hillary aide
2 Jan, 2018 18:46
Trump slams DOJ as ‘deep state,’ wants jail time for Hillary aide
US Democratic presidential candidate Senator Hillary Clinton (R) walks with her traveling chief-of-staff Huma Abedin after cancelling a rally in Fort Worth, Texas February 22, 2008. © Jessica Rinaldi / Reuters
https://lasvegassun.com/news/2018/jan/0 ... ifle-inju/
‘Negligent’ discharge of Las Vegas police rifle injures man
https://apnews.com/4199475e899248419d7d ... jures-girl
Wichita police officer’s shot misses dog, injures girl
https://nationonenews.com/2018/01/02/ju ... -russians/
Home News Judicial Watch: Huma sent State Passwords to Yahoo-Enter the Russians
NEWS
Judicial Watch: Huma sent State Passwords to Yahoo-Enter the Russians
By Kari Donovan - January 2, 2018
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1 ... 12132/full
THE GOLDEN CODE OF THE BIRD-MEN: ICONOGRAPHIC AND SOCIAL INTERPRETATION OF THE MOÑES I DIADEM-BELT (ASTURIAS, NORTH-WEST IBERIAN PENINSULA, FIRST CENTURY BC)
Authors
https://dailygazette.com/article/2018/0 ... -bad-movie
Watching FBI is like watching a bad movie
Probe provides comic relief
Letter To The Editor | January 1, 2018
http://thehill.com/homenews/administrat ... andling-of
Congressional investigators find irregularities in FBI's handling of Clinton email case
http://www.courant.com/politics/hc-pol- ... story.html
Ganim Hopes To Complete Political Comeback With Gubernatorial Bid
Hartford Couran
“It's kind of a black eye that he was re-elected as mayor of Bridgeport again,” said Clark, the retired FBI agent and Farmington Republican chairman. Gresko, the state legislator from Stratford, acknowledged that Ganim's criminal past is an immediate no-go for some voters. “If that's what they're thinking right out of the chute ...
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/nationa ... -1.3732992
New Yorkers brace for monster 'bomb cyclone' as brutal cold continues to cripple North
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents ... eport.html
Grand jury to state police: Give up trooper shooting probes
EASTON, Pa. (AP) — The “arrogant” Pennsylvania State Police should stop investigating shootings by its own troopers to ensure such probes are transparent and “free from potential bias or conflicts of interest,” a grand jury said in a scathing report released Tuesday.
https://apnews.com/1ea5eeb41655484dbbcc ... ing-probes
and informant.
FBI agents try to cover up murders.State police solve case arrest Putnam.
FBI coverup deleted in tv show ? Read Sharkey’s book. I did.
Discovery channel is MSM
http://www.kentucky.com/news/local/crim ... 64614.html
She was an FBI informant who was murdered. Now her story is an episode of a TV
https://www.theepochtimes.com/justice-d ... 01511.html
Attorney General Sessions planning 2018 version of PALMER RAIDS?
Justice Department May Have Something Big in the Works: Over 9,000 Sealed Indictments
By Joshua Philipp, The Epoch Times
January 1, 2018 11:29 pm Last Updated: January 2, 2018 4:03 pm
https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/201 ... minal-case
Prosecutors urge judge to not dismiss Bundy criminal case
January 02, 2018
Federal prosecutors are urging a Nevada judge to not dismiss criminal charges against Cliven Bundy, the Nevada cattleman and antigovernment icon, and three other men, claiming the government’s failure to release certain records was merely inadvertent.
In declaring a mistrial last month, U.S. District Judge Gloria Navarro said she was dismissing a jury panel and halting the criminal conspiracy trial because federal prosecutors had failed to turn over certain FBI reports to defense attorneys.
The judge has set a hearing for next Monday where she’s expected to rule whether her mistrial order will be with or without prejudice.
If the mistrial order is accompanied by a “without prejudice” ruling, Cliven Bundy, his sons Ammon and Ryan Bundy and Montana militiaman Ryan Payne will return to a Las Vegas courtroom next month for another jury trial.
http://americanpatrol.com/SPLC/Churchof ... 01100.html
The church of Morris Dees
How the Southern Poverty Law Center profits from intolerance
By Ken Silverstein
How the Southern Poverty Law Center profits from intolerance
Ah, tolerance. Who could be against something so virtuous? And who could object to the Southern Poverty Law Center, the Montgomery, Alabama-based group that recently sent out this heartwarming yet mildly terrifying appeal to raise money for its "Teaching Tolerance" program, which prepares educational kits for schoolteachers? Cofounded in 1971 by civil rights lawyer cum direct-marketing millionaire Morris Dees, a leading critic of "hate groups" and a man so beatific that he was the subject of a made-for-TV movie, the SPLC spent much of its early years defending prisoners who faced the death penalty and suing to desegregate all-white institutions like Alabama's highway patrol. That was then.
Today, the SPLC spends most of its time--and money--on a relentless fund-raising campaign, peddling memberships in the church of tolerance with all the zeal of a circuit rider passing the collection plate. "He's the Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker of the civil rights movement," renowned anti- death-penalty lawyer Millard Farmer says of Dees, his former associate, "though I don!t mean to malign Jim and Tammy Faye." The Center earned $44 million last year alone--$27 million from fund-raising and $17 million from stocks and other investments--but spent only $13 million on civil rights program , making it one of the most profitable charities in the country.
The Ku Klux Klan, the SPLC's most lucrative nemesis, has shrunk from 4 million members in the 1920s to an estimated 2,000 today, as many as 10 percent of whom are thought to be FBI informants <http://www.servtech.com/~grugyn/kkk-5.htm> . But news of a declining Klan does not make for inclining donations to Morris Dees and Co., which is why the SPLC honors nearly every nationally covered "hate crime" with direct-mail alarums full of nightmarish invocations of "armed Klan paramilitary forces" and "violent neo-Nazi extremists," and why Dees does legal battle almost exclusively with mediagenic villains-like Idaho's arch-Aryan Richard Butler-eager to show off their swastikas for the news cameras.
In 1987, Dees won a $7 million judgment against the United Klans of America on behalf of Beulah Mae Donald, whose son was lynched by two Klansmen. The UKA's total assets amounted to a warehouse whose sale netted Mrs. Donald $51,875. According to a groundbreaking series of newspaper stories in the Montgomery Advertiser, the SPLC, meanwhile, made $9 million from fund-raising solicitations featuring the case, including one containing a photo of Michael Donald's corpse.
Horrifying as such incidents are, hate groups commit almost no violence. More than 95 percent of all "hate crimes," including most of the incidents SPLC letters cite (bombings, church burnings, school shootings), are perpetrated by "lone wolves." Even Timothy McVeigh, subject of one of the most extensive investigations in the FBI's history-and one of the most extensive direct-mail campaigns in the SPLC's-was never credibly linked to any militia organization.
No faith healing or infomercial would be complete without a moving testimonial. The student from whose tears this white schoolteacher learned her lesson is identified only as a child of color. "Which race," we are assured, "does not matter." Nor apparently does the specific nature of "the racist acts directed at him," nor the race of his schoolyard tormentors. All that matters, in fact, is the race of the teacher and those expiating tears. "I wept with him, feeling for once, the depth of his hurt," she confides. "His tears washed away the film that had distorted my white perspective of the world." Scales fallen from her eyes, what action does this schoolteacher propose? What Gandhi-like disobedience will she undertake in order to "reach real peace in the world"? She doesn't say but instead speaks vaguely of acting out against "the pain." In the age of Oprah and Clinton, empathy--or the confession thereof--is an end in itself.
Any good salesman knows that a products "value" is a highly mutable quality with little relation to actual worth, and Morris Dees-who made millions hawking, by direct mail, such humble commodities as birthday cakes, cookbooks (including Favorite Recipes of American Home Economics Teachers), tractor seat cushions, rat poison, and, in exchange for a mailing list containing 700,000 names, presidential candidate George McGovern-is nothing if not a good salesman. So good in fact that in 1998 the Direct Marketing Association inducted him into its Hall of Fame. "I learned everything I know about hustling from the Baptist Church," Dees has said. "Spending Sundays on those hard benches listening to the preacher pitch salvation-why, it was like getting a Ph.D. in selling." Here, Dr. Dees (the letter's nominal author) masterfully transforms, with a mere flourish of hyperbole, an education kit available "at cost" for $30 on the SPLC website into "a $325 value."
This is one of the only places in this letter where specific races are mentioned. Elsewhere, Dees and his copywriters, deploying an arsenal of passive verbs and vague abstractions, have sanitized the usually divisive issue of race of its more disturbing elements-such as angry black people-and for good reason: most SPLC donors are white. Thus, instead of concrete civil rights issues like housing discrimination and racial profiling, we get "communities seething with racial violence." Instead of racially biased federal sentencing laws, or the disparity between poor predominantly black schools and affluent white ones, or the violence against illegals along the Mexican border, the SPLC gives us "intolerance against those who are different," turning bigotry into a color-blind, equal-opportunity sin. It's reassuring to know that "Caucasians" are no more and no less guilty of this sin than African Americans, Asian Americans, Native Americans, and Hispanics. In the eyes of Morris Dees, we're all sinners, all victims, and all potential contributors.
Morris Dees doesn't need your financial support. The SPLC is already the wealthiest civil rights group in America, though this letter quite naturally omits that fact. Other solicitations have been more flagrantly misleading. One pitch, sent out in 1995-when the Center had more than $60 million in reserves-informed would-be donors that the "strain on our current operating budget is the greatest in our 25-year history." Back in 1978, when the Center had less than $10 million, Dees promised that his organization would quit fund-raising and live off interest as soon as its endowment hit $55 million. But as it approached that figure, the SPLC upped the bar to $100 million, a sum that, one 1989 newsletter promised, would allow the Center "to cease the costly and often unreliable task of fund raising. " Today, the SPLC's treasury bulges with $120 million, and it spends twice as much on fund-raising-$5.76 million last year-as it does on legal services for victims of civil rights abuses. The American Institute of Philanthropy gives the Center one of the worst ratings of any group it monitors, estimating that the SPLC could operate for 4.6 years without making another tax-exempt nickel from its investments or raising another tax-deductible cent from well-meaning "people like you."
The SPLC's "other important work justice" consists mainly in spying on private citizens who belong to "hate groups," sharing its files with law-enforcement agencies, and suing the most prominent of these groups for crimes committed independently by their members-a practice that, however seemingly justified, should give civil libertarians pause. The legal strategy employed by Dees could have put the Black Panther Party out of business or bankrupted the New England Emigrant Aid Company in retaliation for crimes committed by John Brown. What the Center's other work for justice does not include is anything that might be considered controversial by donors. According to Millard Farmer, the Center largely stopped taking death-penalty cases for fear that too visible an opposition to capital punishment would scare off potential contributors. In 1986, the Center's entire legal staff quit in protest of Dees's refusal to address issues-such as homelessness, voter registration, and affirmative action-that they considered far more pertinent to poor minorities, if far less marketable to affluent benefactors, than fighting the KKK. Another lawyer, Gloria Browne, who resigned a few years later, told reporters that the Center's programs were calculated to cash in on "black pain and white guilt." Asked in 1994 if the SPLC itself, whose leadership consists almost entirely of white men, was in need of an affirmative action policy, Dees replied that "probably the most discriminated people in America today are white men when it comes to jobs."
Contributors to Teaching Tolerance might be surprised to learn how little of the SPLC's reported educational spending actually goes to education. In response to lobbying by charities, the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants in 1987 began allowing nonprofits to count part of their fundraising costs as "educational" so long as their solicitations contained an informational component. On average, the SPLC classifies an estimated 47 percent of the fund-raising letters that it sends out every year as educational, including many that do little more than instruct potential donors on the many evils of "militant right-wing extremists" and the many splendid virtues of Morris Dees. According to tax documents, of the $10. 8 million in educational spending the SPLC reported in 1999, $4 million went to solicitations. Another $2.4 million paid for stamps.
In the early 1960s, Morris Dees sat on the sidelines honing his direct-marketing skills and practicing law while the civil rights movement engulfed the South. "Morris and I...shared the overriding purpose of making a pile of money," recalls Dees's business partner, a lawyer named Millard Fuller (not to be confused with Millard Farmer). "We were not particular about how we did it; we just wanted to be independently rich." They were so unparticular, in fact, that in 1961 they defended a man, guilty of beating up a journalist covering the Freedom Riders, whose legal fees were paid by the Klan. ("I felt the anger of a black person for the first time," Dees later wrote of the case. "I vowed then and there that nobody would ever again doubt where I stood.") In 1965, Fuller sold out to Dees, donated the money to charity, and later started Habitat for Humanity. Dees bought a 200-acre estate appointed with tennis courts, a pool, and stables, and, in 1971, founded the SPLC, where his compensation has risen in proportion to fund-raising revenues, from nothing in the early seventies to $273,000 last year. A National Journal survey of salaries paid to the top officers of advocacy groups shows that Dees earned more in 1998 than nearly all of the seventy-eight listed, tens of thousands more than the heads of such groups as the ACLU, the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, and the Children's Defense Fund. The more money the SPLC receives, the less that goes to other civil rights organizations, many of which, including the NAACP, have struggled to stay out of bankruptcy. Dees's compensation alone amounts to one
I’ve written in the past on various occasions about Morris Dees, head of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), the bogus “civil rights organization” whose chief (and wildly successful) mission has been to separate wealthy liberals from their money. Last time I checked, the SPLC had more than $150 million in its treasury, more than the GNP of some of the world’s smaller countries, yet it did very little work to advance civil rights or fight poverty.
At a personal level, though, Dees has been able to avoid deprivation of any type. Over the weekend a friend sent me a slide show from a recent story in the Montgomery Advertiser, which offered an inside look at the local Dees estate.
Dees made a lot of money prior to founding the SPLC so he didn’t just get rich off of his “civil rights” work. But does a man this wealthy really need a compensation package worth — according to his group’s latest tax filing — $350,000?
https://harpers.org/blog/2010/04/morris ... g-poverty/
https://www.thenation.com/article/king-hate-business/
King of the Hate Business
With haters on the wane, what will the hate-seekers do?
The sun is dipping low in the evening sky over the Republican Party as the Other Leading Brand. A mere 21 percent of the adult population identify themselves as Republicans. Senator Arlen Specter sees the writing on the wall. He prefers to make his sixth senatorial run under the ample Democratic banner, rather than get mangled in the tiny shark tank of a Republican primary attended only by people who want to see the country run by Limbaugh and Hannity. With Al Franken certified, Specter crossing the aisle and Joe Biden in reserve, the Democrats can no longer hide behind the excuse of a Republican filibuster. They’ll figure out a way, no doubt, but it could be embarrassing.
It’s also horrible news for people who raise money and make money selling the notion that there’s a right resurgence out there in the hinterland with legions of haters ready to march down Main Street draped in Klan robes, a copy of Mein Kampf tucked under one arm and a Bible under the other, available for sneak photographs from minions of Chip Berlet, a prime promoter of the Christian menace.
What is the archsalesman of hatemongering, Morris Dees of the Southern Poverty Law Center, going to do now? Ever since 1971, US Postal Service mailbags have bulged with his fundraising letters, scaring dollars out of the pockets of trembling liberals aghast at his lurid depictions of a hate-sodden America in dire need of legal confrontation by the SPLC. Nine years ago Ken Silverstein wrote a devastating commentary on Dees and the SPLC in Harper’s, dissecting a typical swatch of Dees’s solicitations. At the time, Ken pointed out, the SPLC was “the wealthiest civil rights group in America,” with $120 million in assets.
As of October 2008 the net assets of the SPLC were $170,240,129. The merchant of hate, Mr. Dees, was paid an annual $273,132 as chief trial counsel, and the SPLC’s president and CEO, Richard Cohen, $290,133. Total revenue in 2007 was $44,727,257, and program expenses $20,804,536. In other words, the Southern Poverty Law Center was raising much more than it was spending on its proclaimed mission. Fundraising and administrative expenses accounted for $9 million, leaving more than $14 million to be put in the center’s vast asset portfolio.
http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-lup ... story.html
Lupe Valdez is a gay Latina sheriff running for Texas governor, and she could win even if she loses
Guadalupe “Lupe” Valdez was making the rounds in jeans and a purple blouse on a recent Sunday at Norma’s Cafe, a popular diner packed with a diverse mix of Texans.
“Hey, sheriff!” exclaimed a Latino in a Dallas Cowboys jersey, and Valdez was soon at his side, grinning.
“I was afraid people wouldn’t recognize me without the uniform,” she said.
The week before, Valdez — the state’s first openly gay and first Latina sheriff — with almost four terms under her belt as Dallas County’s top cop — announced she was resigning to run for governor. In a crowded Democratic primary, she’s the front-runner with the potential to boost party voter registration and turnout long-term, especially among Latinos. Though Valdez is unlikely to beat Republican Greg Abbott, a popular governor in a red state with $50 million to spend, she could benefit from a backlash against Trump, mobilizing Latino voters.
http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/San- ... 425117.php
This nurse commutes 2,600 miles to work in Oakland. Is he nuts?
David Curran Updated 10:11 pm, Sunday, December 31, 2017
https://www.metrotimes.com/city-slang/a ... ng-for-now
ICP loses case, Juggalos to remain on FBI watch list as 'hybrid gang' for now
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1 ... 105.x/full
Graffiti from Qusayr `Amra: A note on dating of Arabian rock carvings
http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/M ... 467556.php
Mike Tyson breaks ground on marijuana farm and luxury resort in California
By Michelle Robertson, SFGATE Updated 12:03 pm, Tuesday, January 2, 2018
Link du jour
https://www.policemisconduct.net
http://trac.syr.edu/tracfbi/
http://www.gosanangelo.com/story/news/l ... 982149001/
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politic ... -1.3734261
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/world/d ... -1.3733635
https://books.google.com/books?id=2SohA ... ok&f=false
http://www.internetarchaeology.org
http://www.politicususa.com/2018/01/02/ ... ation.html
In One Explosive Moment Rachel Maddow Puts Her Finger On Why Trump Is Terrified Of The Russia Investigation
By Jason Easley on Tue, Jan 2nd, 2018 at 9:36 pm
https://www.rt.com/usa/414841-trump-doj ... te-abedin/
Trump slams DOJ as ‘deep state,’ wants jail time for Hillary aide
2 Jan, 2018 18:46
Trump slams DOJ as ‘deep state,’ wants jail time for Hillary aide
US Democratic presidential candidate Senator Hillary Clinton (R) walks with her traveling chief-of-staff Huma Abedin after cancelling a rally in Fort Worth, Texas February 22, 2008. © Jessica Rinaldi / Reuters
https://lasvegassun.com/news/2018/jan/0 ... ifle-inju/
‘Negligent’ discharge of Las Vegas police rifle injures man
https://apnews.com/4199475e899248419d7d ... jures-girl
Wichita police officer’s shot misses dog, injures girl
https://nationonenews.com/2018/01/02/ju ... -russians/
Home News Judicial Watch: Huma sent State Passwords to Yahoo-Enter the Russians
NEWS
Judicial Watch: Huma sent State Passwords to Yahoo-Enter the Russians
By Kari Donovan - January 2, 2018
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1 ... 12132/full
THE GOLDEN CODE OF THE BIRD-MEN: ICONOGRAPHIC AND SOCIAL INTERPRETATION OF THE MOÑES I DIADEM-BELT (ASTURIAS, NORTH-WEST IBERIAN PENINSULA, FIRST CENTURY BC)
Authors
https://dailygazette.com/article/2018/0 ... -bad-movie
Watching FBI is like watching a bad movie
Probe provides comic relief
Letter To The Editor | January 1, 2018
http://thehill.com/homenews/administrat ... andling-of
Congressional investigators find irregularities in FBI's handling of Clinton email case
http://www.courant.com/politics/hc-pol- ... story.html
Ganim Hopes To Complete Political Comeback With Gubernatorial Bid
Hartford Couran
“It's kind of a black eye that he was re-elected as mayor of Bridgeport again,” said Clark, the retired FBI agent and Farmington Republican chairman. Gresko, the state legislator from Stratford, acknowledged that Ganim's criminal past is an immediate no-go for some voters. “If that's what they're thinking right out of the chute ...
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/nationa ... -1.3732992
New Yorkers brace for monster 'bomb cyclone' as brutal cold continues to cripple North
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents ... eport.html
Grand jury to state police: Give up trooper shooting probes
EASTON, Pa. (AP) — The “arrogant” Pennsylvania State Police should stop investigating shootings by its own troopers to ensure such probes are transparent and “free from potential bias or conflicts of interest,” a grand jury said in a scathing report released Tuesday.
https://apnews.com/1ea5eeb41655484dbbcc ... ing-probes
