Last December, we attended and reported on oral argument before the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in a case in which the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) argued that TSA checkpoint staff have absolute immunity from lawsuits for assault, even sexual assault or rape, committed against travelers they are “screening”.
We’re pleased to report that today the 9th Circuit panel of judges rejected the TSA’s claim of impunity. The three judges found unanimously that the Federal Tort Clams Act (FTCA) allows lawsuits against the TSA for damages caused by checkpoint staff who assault travelers. The 9th Circuit thus joins every other Circuit Court of Appeals (the 3rd, 4th, and 8th) to have addressed this issue in a published opinion.
The case decided today by the 9th Circuit will now return to the U.S. District Court in Las Vegas for much-belated consideration of the claim against the TSA and its officers. The precedent set by today’s decision will apply throughout the 9th Circuit, the largest of the Federal judicial circuits, including all of the states on the West Coast.
Kudos to Jonathan Corbett, Esq., who has represented the plaintiffs in each of these cases. Coals for Christmas to the TSA for continuing to argue for impunity for its staff to one Circuit Court after another, despite the growing weight of precedent against the agency and, perhaps more importantly, the moral repugnance of arguing that any agents of the government should be entitled to assault or rape members of the public with impunity.
Statistics: Posted by Grizzly — Tue Jul 18, 2023 11:35 pm
TUSCALOOSA, Ala. — The majority of popular films, including those for children, have at least one torture scene, and the scenes are usually depicted as achieving the torturer’s goal, according to a study involving a researcher at The University of Alabama.
The depictions in high-earning films could have implications for how the public perceives the usefulness and effectiveness of torture, according to the forthcoming study in Perspectives in Politics.
“When people lack direct experience with something, media can help them understand the issue,” said Dr. Erin M. Kearns, UA assistant professor of criminology and criminal justice who co-authored the paper. “We find that the messages sent about torture are fairly consistent, which may have a stronger influence on public perceptions of torture.”
Kearns worked with Dr. Casey Delehanty, assistant professor of political science at Gardner-Webb University and corresponding author of the study. They created a database of scenes from the 20 top-grossing films in North America from 2008 through 2017. Of those, 60 percent had at least one torture scene.
In all, there were 275 scenes of torture from 27 R-rated movies, 108 PG-13 movies, 58 PG-rated movies and seven G-rated movies. There were nine torture scenes among the G-rated movies, although they were lighter actions, such as dropping characters from big heights, researchers found.
“I did not appreciate how prevalent torture was actually going to be,” Delehanty said. “The thing that shook me and what led to the title of our research – ‘Wait, There’s Torture in Zootopia?: Examining the Prevalence of Torture in Popular Movies’ – was how many kids movies have torture scenes in them.”
The vast majority of people, thankfully, lack experience with torture, so how media portrays it can influence perceptions about the efficacy of torture, Kearns said. It is not ethically possible to study whether torture works, but there is some evidence that shows the practice leads to false confessions during an integration and is counterproductive to an investigation, she said.
“Evidence suggests that torture does not work, but media often show that it does,” Kearns said.
Along with the finding that movies generally show torture to be effective, the researchers found torture was more acceptable and necessary when perpetrated by the protagonist and more harsh and unjustified when conducted by the antagonist.
Delehanty and Kearns’ study suggests other areas of future research, such as examining torture across other forms of media, including television shows and films popular in other countries. While their work determines the prevalence of torture in North American films, the findings cannot say what influence torture scenes have on public perceptions. To identify the impact media depictions of torture have on the public, additional studies would be necessary, Kearns said.
“As citizens of a democracy, our suggestion here is certainly not to constrain how media depict interrogations and torture,” Delehanty said. “Rather, our aim is to draw attention to the prevalence of this trope and hope that screenwriters will exercise more caution in using torture as a plot device.”]
Statistics: Posted by Grizzly — Fri Mar 06, 2020 8:27 pm
James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen will answer questions at a pre-trial hearing on the 9/11 attacks before a military tribunal in Guantánamo Bay.
They were paid $1,800 a day
Cunts. Forgo all ethics for a few bucks.
set up a private company, which provided most of the interrogators and most of the security staff at the “black sites”
Oh so proper cunts.
The American Psychological Association has disowned Mitchell and Jessen for “violating the ethics of their profession and leaving a stain on the discipline of psychology”.
Good.
But both men have insisted they did nothing wrong, arguing they were asked to do things that were declared legal by the George W Bush administration, and that they had to prevent the worst excesses of other interrogators.
Cunts.
Mitchell and Jessen said they had complained about Rahman’s treatment but their warnings were ignored by senior CIA officials.
Bullshit.
enemies who themselves had initiated the conflict
Bullshit.
Statistics: Posted by Grizzly — Mon Jan 20, 2020 10:25 pm
Raqqa’s dirty secret
13 November 2017 By Quentin Sommerville and Riam Dalati
The BBC has uncovered details of a secret deal that let hundreds of IS fighters and their families escape from Raqqa, under the gaze of the US and British-led coalition and Kurdish-led forces who control the city.
A convoy included some of IS’s most notorious members and – despite reassurances – dozens of foreign fighters. Some of those have spread out across Syria, even making it as far as Turkey.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt ... rty_secret
Video Emerges Of US Allowing ISIS Fighters To Escape Safely In Syria
Jun 14, 2017
Authored by Darius Shahtamasebi via TheAntiMedia.org
With numerous distractions unfolding on the newly released reality TV show that is “Keeping Up with the Trump Administration,” it may surprise readers to learn that the U.S. is using the terror group ISIS as a pawn in its depraved foreign policy.
Video footage obtained by Al-Masdar appears to show convoys of ISIS fighters fleeing the Syrian city of Raqqa untouched by the U.S. military, which is currently bombing that exact location. As Al-Masdar notes, despite having Kurdish and American drones hovering around the city of Raqqa, U.S. bombs are nowhere to be seen as hundreds of fighters pass safely. The release of this footage comes on the heels of accusations from both Russia and Iran that the U.S. is colluding with ISIS to allow the group’s safe passage into areas controlled by the Syrian government.
Iran claims to have direct proof but thus far has not released it. Even if Russia and Iran don’t have any secret documents that directly expose this collusion, the fact remains that we don’t necessarily need them.
After all, this is exactly how ISIS grew exponentially in Syria in the first instance – as a direct result of U.S. foreign policy strategy. In 2012, a classified Defense Intelligence Agency report predicted the rise of ISIS, something actively encouraged by the U.S. establishment. The report stated:
“If the situation unravels, there is the possibility of establishing a declared or undeclared Salafist principality in eastern Syria… and this is exactly what the supporting powers to the opposition want, in order to isolate the Syrian regime.”
Further, leaked audio of former Secretary of State John Kerry shows he knew ISIS was gaining momentum in Syria, and that in turn, the U.S. hoped this would bring Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to the negotiating table.
In recent times, the safe passage of ISIS fighters to areas under the control of the Syrian government has been an unspoken but official strategy and has been the reality on the ground in Iraq and Syria.
Late last year, Anti-Media reported on an anonymous military-diplomatic official’s claims that the United States was allowing safe passage to Syria for ISIS fighters exiting Mosul, Iraq – even though the U.S. was supposedly waging an offensive to defeat ISIS in the area. As we noted, acknowledging the admittedly undesirable, questionable nature of the anonymous source:
“An anonymous source claiming to a Russian newspaper something as conspiratorial as the U.S. directly aiding ISIS militants may seem a bit dubious, but since the offensive was launched on Monday of this week, this has been the reality on the ground.
“According to Army Lieutenant General Talib Shaghati, as reported by anti-Russian newspaper, the Guardian, ISIS militants are already fleeing Mosul to Syria. This was further confirmed by the Saudi foreign minister, Adel al-Jubeir, who said that if ISIS were forced out of Mosul, they would likely go on to Syria.”
Not long after, ISIS launched an offensive into a very strategic area in Syria called Deir ez-Zor, battling through Syrian government defenses. The most horrifying part of this offensive was the fact that, asnoted by the Guardian, the ISIS fighters who successfully broke through government defense lines in Syria were “primarily reinforcements coming over the border from Iraq’s Anbar province.”
Deir ez-Zor is not outside the U.S. military’s strike range capacity. This is the same city that was attacked by the American-led coalition in September of last year – an attack that targeted Syrian troops for over an hour, paving the way for a timely ISIS offensive. Yet when it comes to hundreds of reinforcements raging through the Iraqi border into Syria, the U.S. military is on a brief vacation.
We were told Raqqa was to be ISIS’ last stronghold in Syria, but this is clearly not true. In order for the U.S. to ultimately put pressure on the Syrian government, the real prize is not Raqqa but a combination of two very strategic locations that are very heavily interlinked.
As explained by Gulf News:
“There, a complex confrontation is unfolding, with far more geopolitical import and risk. Daesh [ISIS] is expected to make its last stand not in Raqqa but in an area that encompasses the borders with Iraq and Jordan and much of Syria’s modest oil reserves, making it important in stabilising Syria and influencing its neighbouring countries.
“Whoever lays claim to the sparsely populated area in this 21st-century version of the Great Game not only will take credit for seizing what is likely to be Daesh’s last patch of a territorial caliphate in Syria, but also will play an important role in determining Syria’s future and the post-war dynamics of the region.”
And this is ultimately the problem for the U.S.-led coalition of anti-Assad (and anti-Iranian) nations. The behind-closed-doors official rationale for targeting Syria’s government for regime change was to undermine Iranian influence in the region, according to Hillary Clinton’s email archive. Countries such as Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt, and the other Gulf States have long feared that a fully dominated Shia-led bloc of Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon could completely overthrow the regional balance of power. They have opposed such a development at all costs.
As Gulf News explains, the Iranians are in the process of fully implementing this Shia bridge, known as the “Shia Crescent”:
“The contested area also includes desert regions farther south with several border crossings, among them the critical highway connecting Damascus and Baghdad — coveted by Iran as a land route to Lebanon and its ally, the Hezbollah militia.”
This is why the U.S. military has set up a training base at the Aal-Tanf border crossing. If the Syrian government were to retake the area and open it up under its control, they would be able to directly link Iran to Syria and the rest of its allies, including Iraq and Lebanon.
This is also why the U.S. military has been engaging in illegal acts of aggression against Iranian-backed militias operating in the area — to defend this position.
Further, the Syrian government’s outpost in Deir ez-Zor is isolated, hence why these two offensives are running in tandem. They both rely on the liberation of the other to have any real value to the Syrian government and its Russian and Iranian allies.
As fascinating as the Comey testimony spectacle has been (don’t forget to tune in for tomorrow’s scandal of anonymous leaks and misspelled tweets), the real scandal lies in the fact that the U.S. is nowopenly siding with ISIS while allowing the terrorists safe passage into parts of Syria so that these extremists can battle a secular government. The U.S. is moments away from an all-out confrontation with Iran (and Russia, a nuclear power).
Don’t expect the corporate media to report on these damning facts anytime soon, as the public continues to sleepwalk into a global powder keg of deceit, death, and destruction.
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-06-1 ... fely-syria
Statistics: Posted by Spiro C. Thiery — Wed Nov 15, 2017 4:50 am
The story of Elsebeth Bumgartner's battle for her First Amendment rights is one that stretches back about 20 years.
Read the story about Elsebeth's fight for her First Amendment rights.
1991: Elsebeth's husband, Joseph, starts working for the Benton-Carroll-Salem school board.
1995: Elsebeth starts asking questions about financial irregularities within the school district.
1999: She claims to see a clear discrepancy with the money being spent between boys and girls sports.
2000: The Baumgartner family is harassed with death threats and vandalism. Elsebeth presses charges related to the harassment in Judge Frederick Hany's court in November.
June, 2001: Elsebeth travels to Washington, D.C., to discuss the harassment case with federal officials.
October, 2001: Grievance filed against Elsebeth.
January 2002: Elsebeth charged with falsification.
July 2002: Elsebeth placed on probation and was told she was not allowed to file complaints against any private citizens, among other restrictions. She starts to fight the probation requirements.
September 2002: Elsebeth arrested for violation of probation. Judge Hany testifies against her.
2003: She is incarcerated for most of the year for probation violations.
Early 2004: Elsebeth moves out of state.
Fall 2004: Elsebeth starts her website, erievoices.com, to tell her story.
May 2005: She returns to northern Ohio to visit her business partner. Police attempt to arrest her for an alleged probation violation. Elsebeth drives in her friend's car to Huron County to seek a "fair hearing." She was arrested and taken back to Ottawa County and charged with fleeing and alluding.
June 2005: Elsebeth indicted on grand theft auto, fleeing and alluding charges.
July 2005: She is indicted on intimidation charges for internet postings.
February 2006: Her website erievoices.com is shut down.
November 2006: Elsebeth pleaded no contest to intimidation charges, sentenced to eight years in prison.
2007: Elsebeth is out on an appeal bond, but served 120 days for contempt of court.
May 9, 2008: Elsebeth sent to prison for the intimidation charges.
Aug. 30, 2013: Elsebeth released early on judicial release.
Dec. 17, 2013: She is barred from Ottawa County Municipal Court.
July 2014: Elsebeth finishes serving probation.
Statistics: Posted by divideandconquer — Wed Feb 03, 2016 9:37 pm
Statistics: Posted by Transient — Sat May 02, 2015 11:14 am
Statistics: Posted by coffin_dodger — Fri Jan 30, 2015 11:21 am
Statistics: Posted by Grizzly — Thu Jan 29, 2015 10:13 pm