LINK DE JOUR
http://www.lankaweb.com/news/items/2013 ... me-change/http://www.opposingviews.com/i/society/ ... r-argumentsee link for full story
http://www.finalcall.com/artman/publish ... 9926.shtmlKill shot? Man linked to Tsarnaev took FBI bullet to top of head
Jun 6, 2013 - 12:27:16 PM
todashev_06-11-2013.jpg
Abdul-Baki Todashev holds a photo he claims is of his dead son Ibragim Todashev during a news conference in Moscow, Russia, May 30. The father of a Chechen immigrant killed in Florida while being interrogated by the FBI about his ties to a Boston Marathon bombings suspect says agents killed his son “execution style.” Abdul-Baki Todashev showed journalists 16 photographs of his son, Ibragim, in the morgue with what he said were six gunshot wounds to his torso and one to the back of the head. He said the pictures were taken by his son’s friend Khusen Taramov. Photo: AP/Wide World photos
Ibragim Todashev, who was killed by the FBI during a questioning, was shot six times, once in the crown of his head, photos shown at a press conference in Moscow reveal. His father suspects it could have been a kill shot.
“I can show you the photos taken after the killing of my son. I have 16 photographs. I just would like to say that looking at these photos is like being in a movie. I only saw things like that in movies: shooting a person, and then the kill shot. Six shots in the body, one of them in the head,” Abdulbaki Todashev said at the press conference at RIA Novosti news agency in the Russian capital.
He explained that the photos were taken by friends of his son in the U.S., to whom the FBI handed the body.
“I want justice and I want an investigation to be carried out, I want these people (the FBI agents) to be put on trial in accordance with U.S. law. They are not FBI officers, they are bandits. I cannot call them otherwise, they must be put on trial,” he said.
Ibragim had been questioned twice by the FBI in connection with the Boston bombings, but not about the murder in which he was allegedly suspected, his father said.
The 2011 triple murder in Massachusetts, in which the Boston bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev was also implicated, was reportedly the subject of the third and final FBI interrogation of Ibragim Todashev.
His friend Khusen Taramov told the father that Ibragim had refused to come in for questioning on May 22, and instead asked the FBI agents to come and question him at home.
“Should something happen to me, call my parents,” Mr. Taramov quoted the last thing he heard from his friend.
On the day of Ibragim’s death, Mr. Taramov was questioned by the FBI separately on the street, and was refused entry back into his friend’s house, Mr. Todashev’s father claimed. He was “sent off” to wait in a nearby café on the grounds that Ibragim Todashev was still being questioned and that “the interrogation would take a long time.” After some eight hours passed since the start of interrogation and his (Todashev’s) phone still was not answering, Mr. Taramov returned, only to find the street cordoned off with police cars and an ambulance.
“They tortured a man for eight hours with no attorney, no witnesses, nobody. We can only guess what was going on there, until there is an official investigation,” Abdulbaki Todashev said.
Referring to the Boston bombings, Mr. Todashev said his son believed it was a “set-up.” But Ibragim never sympathized with radical or terrorist ideas, and was not a follower of a radical Islam, he added.
Also, Ibragim was never a close friend of Boston bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev—he and Tamerlan only “went boxing at the same gym” and “exchanged phone numbers,” the father said.
So far, Mr. Todashev has received “no official explanation” of his son’s death from the U.S. side. He said he was only told there is an ongoing investigation “inside the FBI.”
Mr. Todashev called the earlier claims that Ibragim was shot attempting to attack an FBI agent “absurd,” saying four or five police and FBI officers could have easily handled such an attack without needing to kill his son.
“Maybe my son knew something, some information the police did not want to be made public. Maybe they wanted to silence my son,” Mr. Todashev’s father said.
Abdulbaki Todashev said his main aim now is to go to the U.S. and get his son’s body.
“My brother and I, we went to the American embassy today. We both want to fly there, we’ve applied for a visa,” he explained.
‘Indications of extrajudicial killing’
Mr. Todashev’s killing “shows signs of international human rights violations,” and “indications of an extrajudicial killing,” war correspondent, political analyst, and member of the Presidential Council of Human Rights Maksim Shevchenko, said at the RIA conference. It looks like a “cold-blooded murder,” he claimed.
Ibragim Todashev was killed just two days before he was due to fly back home to Russia, Mr. Shevchenko said as he pointed to a “striking chain of coincidences” in the U.S.
Two “key witnesses” of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s arrest have also died recently, Mr. Shevchenko said, referring to the “accidental” death of members of the FBI’s elite counterterrorism unit, who fell a “significant distance” from a helicopter May 23.
Lawyer Zaurbek Sadakhanov of the Moscow Interterritorial Bar Association said he fully believes this is a case of an extrajudicial execution.
Atty. Sadakhanov questioned why international human rights organizations, as well as Russian rights activists, have ignored the shooting.
He also urged Mr. Todashev’s friend Khusen Taramov to return to Russia as “being a witness in the U.S. is not safe.”
This is not the first time experts have questioned whether the FBI acted lawfully when shooting at Ibragim Todashev after he allegedly attacked an officer, with what some called “a use of excessive force.”
But a recent report revealed Mr. Todashev was completely unarmed when the FBI agent opened fire, raising questions over why lethal force was deemed necessary to subdue the strongly outnumbered man.
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http://www.bradenton.com/2013/06/06/455 ... lding.htmlFormer Sen. Graham: FBI holding back on 9/11 probe
Published: June 6, 2013
TIFFANY
TOMPKINS-CONDIE/ttompkins@bradenton.com Former Florida Governor and Senator Bob Graham before speaking on national security at a presentation at the Hyatt
By DAN CHRISTENESEN and ANTHONY SUMMERS — BrowardBulldog.org
Former Sen. Bob Graham has accused the FBI in court papers of having impeded a joint congressional inquiry into 9/11 by withholding information about a Florida connection to the al-Qaeda attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people.
The information, first reported byBrowardBulldog.org in 2011, includes a recently declassified FBI report that ties a Saudi family who once lived in Sarasota "to individuals associated with the terrorist attacks on 9/1 1/2001."
"The FBI's failure to call (to the Joint Inquiry's attention) documents finding 'many connections' between Saudis living in the United States and individuals associated with the terrorist attack(s) ... interfered with the Inquiry's ability to complete its mission," said Graham, co-chairman of the Joint Inquiry.
Graham said the FBI kept the 9/11 Commission in the dark, too. He said co-chairmen Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton and Executive Director Philip Zelikow all told him they were unaware of the FBI's Sarasota investigation.
Graham said Deputy FBI Director Sean Joyce, the Bureau's second in command, personally intervened to block him from speaking with the special agent-in-charge of the Sarasota investigation.
"I am troubled by what appears to me to be a persistent effort by the FBI to conceal from the American people information concerning possible Saudi support of the Sept. 11 attacks," Florida's former governor said.
Graham's remarks are contained in a 14-page sworn declaration made in a Freedom of Information lawsuit brought byBrowardBulldog.org in federal court in Fort Lauderdale.
The suit seeks the records of an FBI investigation into Esam Ghazzawi, a former adviser to a senior Saudi prince, his wife, Deborah, and son-in-law and daughter, Abdulaziz and Anoud al-Hijji, respectively.
The Ghazzawis owned the home at 4224 Escondito Circle in the gated neighborhood of Prestancia where the al-Hijjis lived until about two weeks before 9/11. Their hurried departure -- leaving behind cars, furniture and personal effects -- prompted neighbors to call the FBI.
News of the subsequent investigation didn't surface until Sept. 8, 2011 when its existence was disclosed in a story published simultaneously by BrowardBulldog.org and The Miami Herald.
The story reported a counterterrorism officer, as well as Prestancia's former administrator, Larry Berberich, said gatehouse logbooks and photographs of license plates showed vehicles used by the future hijackers had visited the al-Hijji home. Phone record analysis linked the hijackers to their house, the counterterrorism officer said.
Graham told reporters in September 2011 that, while Congress had relied on the FBI to provide all of its information about 9/11, he had not been made aware of the Sarasota probe.
After the story broke, the FBI acknowledged its investigation but claimed it found no evidence to connect the Ghazzawis or the al-Hijjis to the hijackers or the 9/11 plot. Agents maintained the FBI made all of its 9/11 records available to Congress.
The Freedom of Information lawsuit was filed last September after the FBI declined to release any records on the matter.
In March, as the case moved toward trial this summer, the FBI unexpectedly released 31 of 35 pages it said had been located. The partially censored records flatly contradict earlier FBI public comments and state the Sarasota Saudis had "many connections" to persons allied with the hijackers.
Last month, the Department of Justice asked U.S. District Judge William Zloch to end the lawsuit, citing national security and saying the FBI has identified and released all documents responsive to its Sarasota probe.
But Graham, a former chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee and former governor of Florida, said those few pages "do not appear to be the full record of the FBI investigation." He dismissed the government's assertion it lacks further documentation as "entirely implausible."
"On a matter of this magnitude and significance, my expectation is that the FBI would have hundreds or even thousands of pages of documents," Graham stated.
As evidence that records continue to be withheld, Graham cited a Sept. 16, 2002, FBI report about Sarasota that he was allowed to see after making inquiries at the FBI. That report should have been released, he said, but was not.
We brought former FBI agent William Turner to speak our FBI conference in 2002
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http://www.ammoland.com/2013/06/all-the ... -not-know/All the Things We Do Not Know
Thursday, June 06, 2013
On January 8, 1959 as Fidel Castro was entering Havana after the dictator, Fulgencio Batista, fled the revolution that Castro had led.
There was much joy among the Cuban people except for those closely allied with the Batista regime and those who saw Fidel as a communist. Many of them fled and Miami would become an outpost and a hotbed of hatred for Castro.
That year I was a 22-year-old senior at the University of Miami where some wealthier Cuban families sent their sons and daughters for a higher education. I recall discussing the events with a young Cuban, Blas Herero, who was wondering if he should return. I was utterly clueless. Other than reading some articles that portrayed Castro as a liberator, what I knew about Cuba and Castro could have fit nicely in a bug’s ear.
Castro had been actively trying to overthrow Batista since 1953. His brother, Raul, was known to be a communist and Che Guevera was a Marxist. As far as the U.S. government was concerned, Castro was a problem. He was a problem, too, for the Mafia that owned the casinos in Havana that were a major source of income. Batista received his payoff, and the skim, overseen by Meyer Lansky, went to the Mafia bosses, who had invested in the casinos. Castro would close them down.
Someone who knows a lot about such matters is William Wayand Turner, the author of a new book, “The Cuban Connection: Nixon, Castro, and the Mob” ($25.00, Prometheus Books). Turner is a former FBI agent who became an investigative journalist and author. Among his other books are “Deadly Secrets: The CIA War Against Castro” and “The Assassination of JFK” with co-author Warren Hinkle. Turner has personally interviewed many top Mafia members and many who were with Castro at the time and since.
Castro had more lives than the proverbial cat. He has survived more assassination attempts on his life that are known. He had the kind of luck that’s rare, but many of the attempts, frequently the plots of the CIA and some in collusion with the Mafia, simply were bungled failures.
The most famous effort to overthrow Castro was the Bay of Pigs invasion on April 16, 1961, organized by the CIA and it was a huge embarrassment to President Kennedy and his brother Robert who at the time was the Attorney General. A year later, in October 1962 when I was in the U.S. Army, we all waited thirteen days to learn the outcome of the Cuban Missile Crisis. I was part of the Second Infantry Division and we were on full alert. Still in my twenties at the time, I was still essentially clueless about what had occurred except for what I heard on television. I was relieved the crisis was over and was discharged shortly thereafter.
It’s what you do not know about what the government is up to that can get a lot of people killed. For example, on June 3rd 2013, President Obama will sign off on a UN treaty which, if ratified by the Senate, would override the Second Amendment and deprive Americans of the right to own guns. A petition by the National Association of Gun Rights is circulating a petition to be sent to our senators to oppose it.
The problems the U.S. government encountered with Castro and his revolution began in April 1959 when the American Society of Newspaper Editors invited him to visit the U.S. President Eisenhower avoided meeting with him by being conveniently absent to play a round of golf in North Carolina. Richard Nixon, the Vice President, was assigned to meet Castro and Nixon, who had risen to fame as an anti-communist, had a three-hour meeting with him that destroyed any of Castro’s hopes to align Cuba with the U.S. The Soviet Union stepped in to become Cuba’s best friend.
“There are opinions pro and con,” writes Wayand, “as to whether Castro was a communist before his revolutionary victory. Jim Noel, the CIA station chief in Havana, traveled to the Sierra Maestra range, where the revolutionary was based, to see for himself. His take was that Castro was not a communist. Representative Charles Porter, who spent quality time with Castro in Washington, was convinced he wasn’t in the shadow of Karl Marx. The evidence stacks up that when Castro left Washington for home, he was not a believer in communism. This is convincingly illustrated by his vehement reaction to Nixon’s charge that his administration was riddled with communists.”
Fifty-five years later Cuba is firmly a communist nation with an authoritarian government and a captive population just ninety miles off the coast of Florida. For that we can thank Nixon. An irony of history was the fact that many of those caught during the bungled Watergate break-in were CIA contractors who had taken a role in some of the assassination attempts.
It’s the things we do not know about that the government is doing that shape history and which currently are eroding rights that Americans take for granted.
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http://www.motherjones.com/politics/201 ... -anonymousExclusive: Leader of Anonymous Steubenville Op on Being Raided by the FBI
"They want to make an example of me, saying, 'You don't fucking come after us.'"
Thu Jun. 6, 2013
Deric Lostutter, the hacker formerly known as KYAnonymous
In April, the FBI quietly raided the home of the hacker known as KYAnonymous in connection with his role in the Steubenville rape case. Today he spoke out for the first time about the raid, his true identity, and his motivations for pursuing the Steubenville rapists, in an extensive interview with Mother Jones.
"The goal of the media interviews is to get the entire nation to say 'fuck you' to these guys," said KYAnonymous, whose real name is Deric Lostutter. He was referring to the federal agents who raided his home in Winchester, Kentucky, and carted off his computers and XBox.
Lostutter may deserve more credit than anyone for turning Steubenville into a national outrage. After a 16-year-old girl was raped by two members of the Steubenville High football team last year, he obtained and published tweets and Instagram photos in which other team members had joked about the incident and belittled the victim. He now admits to being the man behind the mask in a video posted by another hacker on the team's fan page, where he threatened action against the players unless they apologized to the girl. (The rapists were convicted in March.)
Lostutter's hip-hop alter-ego, Shadow
A 26-year-old corporate cybersecurity consultant, Lostutter lives on a farm with his pit bull, Thor, and hunts turkeys, goes fishing, and rides motorcycles in his free time. He considers himself to be a patriotic American; he flies an American flag and enjoys Bud Light. He's also a rapper with the stage name Shadow, and recently released a solo album under the aegis of his own label, Nightshade Records. The name dovetails with that of his Anonymous faction, KnightSec.
Lostutter first got involved in Anonymous about a year ago, after watching the documentary We Are Legion. "This is me," he thought as he learned about the group's commitment to government accountability and transparency. "It was everything that I'd ever preached, and now there's this group of people getting off the couch and doing something about it. I wanted to be part of the movement."
If convicted for hacking a Steubenville football fan site, he could face 10 years. The rapists got 1 and 2.
He'd read about the Steubenville rape in the New York Times, but didn't get involved until receiving a message on Twitter from Michelle McKee, a friend of an Ohio blogger who'd written about the case. McKee gave Lostutter the players' tweets and Instagram photos, which he then decided to publicize because, as he put it, "I was always raised to stick up for people who are getting bullied."
The ensuing tornado of media coverage took him by surprise. He mostly avoided the spotlight, except for a brief interview that he gave to CNN while wearing his Guy Fawkes mask. "I was real scared," but also inspired, he told me. "There were so many people standing behind the cause that it felt like you had an army at your disposal and you could just stick up for what's right."
Yet sometimes the Steubenville army seemed to lack discipline, ignoring the letter of the law as it pursued its own brand of justice. Lostutter says he played no role in the hacking the team's fan page; he points out that another hacker, Batcat, has publicly taken the credit. Still, Lostutter knew from a tipster that the FBI was watching him, he says, and stopped tweeting a few months ago. The FBI knocked on his door just two days after he finally went back online.
At first, he thought the FBI agent at the door was with FedEx. "As I open the door to greet the driver, approximately 12 FBI SWAT team agents jumped out of the truck, screaming for me to "Get the fuck down!" with M-16 assault rifles and full riot gear, armed, safety off, pointed directly at my head," Lostutter wrote today on his blog. "I was handcuffed and detained outside while they cleared my house."
"I'd do it again," Lostutter says.
He believes that the FBI investigation was motivated by local officials in Steubenville. "They want to make an example of me, saying, 'You don't fucking come after us. Don't question us."
see link for full story
http://au.businessinsider.com/rich-paul ... ans-2013-6New Hampshire Pot Activist Says He’s Being Persecuted By The FBI
June 7 2013
Rich Paul
Rich Paul has become a martyr for the legal marijuana movement, risking a life in prison rather than accept that something he loves should be a crime.
As Harry Cheadle of Vice reported earlier this year, the New Hampshire libertarian was arrested last May on four charges of selling marijuana and one of selling LSD. Paul refused to bargain with the FBI or accept a plea bargain — even when offered a deal with no jail time — and when his trial came Paul tried in vain to convince the jury not to convict him.
At his sentencing on Friday, Paul faces a maximum of 100 years in prison, even if he is likely to get far less.
While his story has been held up as a paragon of ludicrous drug laws, the 40-year-old claims that he’s really being targeted because of his membership in a libertarian political group.
It may sounds crazy, but when you hear some of the strange elements of his arrest — and the recent scandal over the IRS targeting Tea Party groups — you have to wonder if he has a point.
Paul was arrested in Keene County after being recorded selling around a pound of marijuana and a substance he had described as “acid” to an FBI informant on a number of occasions.
Paul claims that rather than be booked for his crimes, he was taken into a room at the police station with an FBI officer named Phillip Christiana. The officer allegedly told him the charges would go away if he wore a wire to meetings of the Keene Activist centre (KAC), a libertarian club of which he was a member. Paul also claims that he was asked to entrap other members of the group in drug deals or even acts of violence — despite the group being explicitly non-violent and engaging only in civil disobedience.
An FBI spokesperson confirmed to Business Insider that an officer did discuss cooperation with Paul, but he refused to comment on investigations into the Keene Activist centre.
In a phone call to the New Hampshire jail where Paul is now housed, we asked why a non-violent group would be targeted so aggressively. “The same reason that the IRS wants to revoke the tax free status of libertarian groups,” he responded. “We are critics of the federal government in general, and the Obama administration in particular, and the Obama administration does not like critics.”
Paul says he knows of three other activists approached by the FBI. “This was really never a drug case,” he told the FBI. “This was a political case.”
Paul refused to accept the plan, and was released without charge —an experience he says was so bizarre that he thought to himself “my God, this guy is going to shoot me in the back” as he walked out the station. A few months later he was indicted on four charges of selling marijuana and one of selling LSD. The FBI agent had told him in May that he could face 81 years in jail if he didn’t go along with the plan, Paul says. He would later learn that the sentence could actually be up to 100 years. To put that number in context, Robert Platshorn, accused of smuggling 500 tons in the late 1970s as part of the notorious Black Tuna gang, was sentenced to only got 64 years.
After his indictment, Paul decided to fight the law rather than accept a plea bargain that would have kept him out of jail.
“What happened to me is wrong, and the way our system is set up, the only way to get it out in the public is to get it out to trail,” Paul told Business Insider. “Effectively I have to bet my life that someone will say ‘this isn’t right’.”
The activist calls his trial a “travesty.” He used a public defender named Kim Kassick, who he says advised him not to testify in his own defence, a decision he now regrets, and that same public defender apparently did not call the other activists approached by the FBI as witnesses. Paul has always fully admitted selling the weed (though he does say that the hallucinogenic he was selling was actually a legal high), and his defence rested on the practice of “jury nullification,” a legal concept which allows a jury to acquit people who have broken the law if they think that the law itself is wrong.
Jury nullification worked last year in New Hampshire, when a Rastafarian named Doug Darrell had marijuana had felony drug cultivation charges for growing marijuana plants behind his house nullified by a jury who decided he was just trying to follow his religion.
The plan didn’t work for Paul, however, who was found guilty on all counts.
Paul plans to appeal his conviction using a private attorney paid for by donations from supporters. He hopes that the ambiguity over the jury nullification will help him. In a relatively new quirk of New Hampshire law, defence lawyers are allowed to explain to the jury that they have the option of jury nullification. In this instance, however, Judge John C. Kissinger didn’t allow adequate explain of jury nullification, presumably finding the Kassick’s arguments “too strenuous” and overruling them (Cheadle explains the logistics of this law well in a follow up post at Vice).
The nature of the FBI involvement in the case also seems unusual — Paul’s lawyer told Business Insider she had never seen such a level of involvement for a minor case, and she too suspected something bigger was at work.
Even now, who started the investigation targeting Paul remains unclear. At Paul’s trial, FBI agent Christiana said that he was brought onto the investigation targeting Paul at the request of the attorney general’s drug task force, due to surveillance equipment he had at his disposal. At a later point, however, members of the drug task force contradicted this assertion. Christiana told the court that he had asked Paul to cooperate, but could not answer anymore questions on the subject.
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http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2013/06/ ... -everyone/What if laws applied to everyone?
June 06, 2013
What if government officials have written laws that apply only to us and not to them? What if we gave them the power to protect our freedoms and our safety and they used that power to trick and trap some of us? What if government officials broke the laws we hired them to enforce? What if they prosecuted others for breaking the same laws they broke?
What if the government enacted a law making it a crime to provide material assistance to terrorist organizations? What if that law was intended to stop people from giving cash and weapons to organizations that bomb and maim and kill? What if the government looked at that law and claimed it applied to a dentist or a shopkeeper who sold services or goods to a terrorist organization, and not just to financiers and bomb makers?
What if an organization that killed also owned a hospital or a school and the law made it a crime to contribute to the hospital or the school? What if the Supreme Court ruled that the law is so broad that it covers backslapping, advocacy and free speech? What if the court ruled that the law makes it a crime to encourage any terrorist organization to do anything -- fix teeth, educate children, save lives or kill people? What if the law makes it a crime to talk to any person known to be a terrorist? What if the law is so broad that it punishes ideas and the free expression of those ideas, even if no one is harmed thereby?
What if it is a crime to backslap terror fighters and to encourage their terrorist-affiliated organizations to fight, except if the backslapper is an FBI agent or a senator?
What if FBI agents pretended to be members of these terrorist organizations and set out to find people in America who were willing to join? What if the people they found really did want to join a real terrorist organization, but the organizations were located in the Middle East? What if the FBI offered plane tickets and cash to the people they found who said they were interested in joining these groups?
What if FBI agents actually encouraged these people to fly to the Middle East and take up arms in a violent civil war? What if the FBI arrested the people it found and encouraged just as they were about to leave the U.S. and then charged them with providing material assistance to terrorist organizations? What if the president boasted that in his mind these duped dopes were really terrorists and their arrests kept us all safer? What if no material assistance had in fact ever been supplied by those dopes to any terrorist organization?
What if the very members of Congress who voted for this law that prohibits providing material assistance to terrorists by deed or word went and visited people in the Middle East who were fighting a violent civil war? What if these members of Congress concluded that the warriors they visited were good because their adversaries were evil? What if, during a visit, one senator was actually photographed with two Al Qaeda-affiliated leaders? What if that was confirmed on national television by the Bush administration ambassador to the United Nations? What if that senator was furious at the former ambassador and insisted that he had not met with Al Qaeda?
What if that senator encouraged whoever he met with to wage a war of terror on the government of the country they were trying to control? What if that senator insisted that the warriors with whom he met were good warriors because the government they were fighting was evil?
What if the government prosecuted the dopes whom the FBI duped just because it wanted to boast that it caught them? What if the FBI agents who tricked and trapped these dopes encouraged them to join terrorist groups? What if the FBI agents who tricked and trapped these dopes encouraged them to provide material assistance to terrorist-affiliated organizations in the Middle East? What if the senator that the former ambassador exposed offered to get the U.S. government to provide material assistance to terrorist-affiliated organizations? What if he did the same in Libya a few years ago and that brought anarchy to our former ally? What if our own ambassador to Libya was killed by a terrorist group because there was no effective government there to protect him?
What if it is a crime to backslap terror fighters and to encourage their terrorist-affiliated organizations to fight, except if the backslapper is an FBI agent or a senator? What if these terror-fought wars are simply not in the best interests of the American people? What if the backslappers love war because it makes the government stronger? What if the backslappers love war because it is easier to raise taxes, regulate behavior and acquire power for the government when wars are being fought? What if the backslappers are worried that the military might atrophy if it goes a long time without fighting?
my suspicion is a FBI agent provacteur was behind the disruption
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http://www.tullahomanews.com/?p=15807Thursday, June 06, 2013
Hostile crowd greets diversity speakers
Thursday, June 6, 2013
What was intended to be a forum to educate the community about the lives of American Muslims and discuss public discourse in a racially and religiously diverse community turned into a free-for-all on Tuesday night, with loud hecklers in the audience attempting to shout down nearly every speaker who approached the lectern.
Nearly 1,000 people gathered at the Manchester-Coffee County Convention Center on Tuesday evening for a program titled “Public Disclosure in a Diverse Society.” The event drew such a large crowd that dozens of people stood along the walls of the meeting room or sat on the floor, while many others were denied admission since the room had reached capacity.
Roughly an hour before the doors of the convention center opened to the public, a rally was held on the center’s steps to fire up the crowd featuring a variety of speakers including Lou Ann Zelenik, who ran an unsuccessful campaign last year for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives, and Pamela Geller, a blogger, political activist and executive director of the American Freedom Defense Initiative.
Many of the speakers asserted the FBI and U.S. Attorney’s presence was indicative of the government’s intention to strip American citizens of their Constitutionally protected freedoms.
“Without freedom of speech, peaceful men must resort to violence and we don’t want that,” Gellar told the crowd through a megaphone.
Among those waiting outside for the meeting to start was John Anderson, a teacher from Bell Buckle, who was holding a sign that read “In America you are free to practice your religion and I am free to insult it. There will be no blasphemy laws in America.”
Click here for a slideshow of still photographs and audio from the event.
Anderson said concerns about the government trying to limit free speech prompted him to attend, adding that he “resents being patronized.”
“It concerns me that a federal prosecutor and an FBI agent would presume to give me a civics lesson,” he said. “I can’t imagine what they can tell us that we don’t already know. A federal prosecutor will presume to tell me what I can and cannot say. I don’t like the idea of him bringing along an FBI agent.”
AMAC-sponsored event
The event was sponsored by the American Muslim Advisory Council of Tennessee (AMAC), a 15-member board based in Murfreesboro. The group was founded two years ago when the state legislature was considering a bill that would have made following the Islamic code of Sharia law a felony, carrying a maximum penalty of 15 years in prison.
The AMAC invited U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Tennessee Bill Killian and Kenneth Moore, special agent in charge of the FBI’s Knoxville Division, to speak about where free speech stops and hate speech starts, as well as how the Muslim community has assisted in law enforcement investigations.
Zak Mohyuddin, seated, and Sabina Mohyiddin, both of Tullahoma and members of the American Muslim Advisory Council, were speakers at Tuesday’s event, held at the Manchester-Coffee County Conference Center. -- Staff Photo by John Coffelt
Zak Mohyuddin, a member of the AMAC, said a recent Facebook posting by Coffee County Commissioner Barry West “catalyzed” this week’s meeting, but said the gathering was not scheduled to address West’s actions specifically. Several weeks ago, West posted a photo of a man pointing a gun at a camera over a caption reading, “How to wink at a Muslim.” The county commissioner removed the photo and apologized, but not before the story about his posting went viral.
The first several speakers, including Zak Mohyuddin and AMAC member Sabina Mohyuddin, were interrupted sporadically by protesters in the audience, including a loud cheer from some in the crowd when Sabina Mohyuddin mentioned and showed a photo of a mosque in Columbia, Tenn. that was burned down in 2008. Throughout the evening, many people in the audience tried, with little success, to quiet the hecklers.
Crowd calls for Killian’s resignation
But Killian received the most hostile reaction from the protestors, some of whom shouted “traitor,” “why are you here” and demands for his resignation just seconds into the U.S. attorney’s remarks.
Killian ignored the jeers from the crowd and continued to dryly proceed with his PowerPoint presentation until the noise from the hecklers became overwhelming. At this point, Killian looked up from his notes and said, “Folks, I’m not going to fight this,” a remark which drew a loud, sustained cheer from many in the crowd. When the room quieted down, Killian completed his speech.
Moore was the next to speak.
“Our presence here tonight has generated controversy,” he said. “But that did not deter me from coming.”
Click here for video from the event.
Moore said some of the protesters believed the reason the federal officials attended the meeting was to step on their First Amendment rights.
“I guess if it’s posted on the Internet, it must be true,” he said. “Nothing can be further from the truth.”
Moore said citizen involvement, including cooperation from the Muslim community, is a vital tool the FBI uses as it conducts its investigations.
“We cannot do it alone,” he said. “We rely upon you as we conduct our investigations.”
The question-and-answer session scheduled for the end of the meeting was limited to two questions, since the interruptions throughout the program threw the schedule off track.
Moore answered the first question, which had been written on a slip of paper earlier in the evening. The question was if the purpose of the FBI and U.S. Attorney’s presence at the meeting was to limit free speech.
“Absolutely not,” Moore responded. “If you looked, there were protests outside before this and there probably will be after. That’s part of the First Amendment. Not a single person in here has been ushered out despite the shouting. We are not here to intimidate anyone.”
Killian handled the second question, which asked under what authority he was there, responding by saying he was appointed by the Senate, confirmed by the Senate to a position created by federal statute.
By the time the event had concluded, some in the audience felt the disruptions had deprived them of the information they had come to hear.
Actions of some were ‘embarrassing’
Jeff Allen, a conservative and a comedian, said he made the trip to Manchester because he was interested in what the speakers had to say – something which became nearly impossible as the program progressed. As a comedian, Allen said he has made his living with free speech since the 1970s, and he drove to Manchester expecting to return home having learned something.
“I thought it was going to be a discussion of the First Amendment and what we, as citizens, have coming down the pike,” he said.
By the time the meeting ended, Allen said he headed back to Fairview with no more information than he had when he left thanks to the constant interruptions.
Although he said the people in the audience who arrived with genuine interest far outnumbered the vocal objectors, Allen said he suspects that the loudest protesters in the group came with the intention of disrupting the meeting. He said he and his wife even “thought they might have imbibed” beforehand.
“I was embarrassed,” he said. “It was a waste of my time. I went to see what Killian and the FBI agent had to say. To me, it was like a theatrical production, I came to see the actors, not to see the audience.”
“I understand that people are upset and angry, but this isn’t the way to go about it,” he added.
Allen, who said he had never attended this kind of event before, said he might not be interested in repeating the experience after what he witnessed in Manchester this week.
“I drove an hour and a half to get information. I wanted to see it because it was in my backyard,” he said. “I’ll rethink that next time.”
On Thursday, Moore said the FBI was expecting a large crowd to turn out in Manchester given how news of the meeting was circulated online and through social media in the weeks leading up to the event.
“The overwhelming majority of people there were very receptive and came to learn something,” he said, attributing the disruptions to “six or seven people” out of the hundreds who attended.
“I think those who came to hear the message, did,” he added.
Moore said he did not know if the protesters in the audience were area residents or if they came from outside the county and added that the FBI made no attempt to gather that kind of information.
Moore said he often takes part in public forums like the one in Manchester. “I have a responsibility to build relationships with the all the communities we serve,” he said, adding the gatherings like this week’s event in Coffee County are “a great opportunity for me to put forward the FBI’s message” in regard to investigations into terrorism and civil rights violations.
That message is simple, according to Moore.
“The FBI does not initiate investigations against anyone based on First Amendment rights,” he said.
As the federal agency responsible for investigating civil rights violations, the FBI undertakes those probes regardless of who the victim is, Moore said, adding the agency is aggressive in all its terrorism investigations.
He said reaction he and the other speakers received from the hecklers this week was unusual, and attributed the response to the dissemination of “misinformation about what the purpose was.”
“It was designed to be a community outreach,” Moore said, “but it was misconstrued as a First Amendment issue.”
After the meeting, Zak Mohyuddin agreed with Allen and Moore’s assessment that the majority of the heckling was the result of only a handful of individuals.
“They stepped on their own message with their disruptions,” he said, adding that he appreciated the audience members who tried to calm down the objectors
see link for full story
http://www.couriermail.com.au/news/worl ... 6658594774Jill Kelley sues feds over David Petraeus sex scandal
June 06, 2013 1
JILL Kelley, the socialite who triggered the federal investigation that exposed CIA Director David H. Petraeus' extramarital affair and forced his resignation, is suing the FBI and Pentagon for violating her privacy and turning her into an object of national ridicule.
Kelley says U.S. officials obtained unauthorised access to her personal emails after she reported receiving anonymous, threatening messages beginning in June 2012. She also alleges that officials unlawfully disclosed her name to the news media after Petraeus' affair became public.
General David Petraeus sex scandal on the front page of the Daily News newspaper.
Source: Supplied
Headlines like this in The Daily News are part of the lawsuit as Kelley says her name was released to the media without her permission.
The FBI and Pentagon "wilfully and maliciously thrust the Kelleys into the maw of public scrutiny concerning one of the most widely reported sex scandals to rock the United States government," according to a complaint filed Monday in U.S. District Court in Washington. The complaint says Kelley and her husband, Scott, are seeking an apology and unspecified monetary damages.
Petraeus scandal
<div class="iframe-alt">(Frame content direct link: <a href="http://resources.news.com.au/files/2012/11/16/1226517/961863-petraeus-scandal2.JPG">http://resources.news.com.au/files/2012/11/16/1226517/961863-petraeus-scandal2.JPG</a>.)</div>
An FBI spokesman said the bureau couldn't comment on a pending legal matter.
The threatening emails were determined to have been sent by Paula Broadwell, Petraeus' mistress and biographer, who viewed Kelley as a rival for his affections. Kelley never engaged in adultery, the complaint says, and met Petraeus through social events she organised in Tampa while he served as commander of U.S. Central Command, based at nearby MacDill Air Force Base.
The November scandal also ensnared Gen. John R. Allen, who received the first threatening email and passed it on to Kelley, whom he also met as Centcom commander. The inquiry into their relationship - including hundreds of emails they exchanged - held up Allen's bid to become commander of NATO.
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Petraeus player Kelley sues FBI
% Source: AP
FBI agent Frederick Humphries- also known as agent shirtless- seen here in 2005. Picture: AP Photo/Kevin P. Casey
A Pentagon investigation cleared Allen of wrongdoing, but the general announced his retirement soon afterwards.
Kelley says federal investigators wrongly turned her into the focus of their investigation, denied her protection she was entitled to as a cyberstalking victim and failed to protect her privacy.
"Instead we received highly hurtful and damaging publicity from wilful leaks from high-level government officials that were false and defamatory," she said in a statement released by her lawyers. As the inquiry expanded, the complaint says, FBI agents saw it as possibly a career-making case and ignored Kelley's rights. Kelley's lawyers also say the Pentagon inspector general is investigating whether officials had unauthorised access to Kelley's case file.
The scandal focused a spotlight on a narrow segment of high society in Tampa, an unusual mix of military brass, foreign officials posted to Central Command and affluent civilians like Kelley, whose husband is a prominent cancer surgeon. The Kelleys hosted parties for military officials and visiting dignitaries at their home on Bayshore Boulevard, in one of the city's top neighbourhoods.
Kelley, a mother of three, was widely portrayed as a relentless striver who sought to parlay her good looks and connections into cushy jobs. She obtained a pass giving her special access to MacDill and was appointed honorary consul for South Korea - a position that was revoked after bad publicity.
see link for full story
http://www.theinvestigativefund.org/blo ... ng_on_you/Is Homeland Security Spying on You?
June 6, 2013
Since 9/11 the United States has spent a staggering $791 billion on homeland security, according to Mattea Kramer and Chris Hellmann of the National Priorities Project. In a post for TomDispatch they describe the Department of Homeland Security, which was formally created in 2002. It brought together 22 existing government departments as a "miniature Pentagon," a kind of bureaucratic black hole into which billions of taxpayer dollars are funneled.
By this measure the $103,000 no-bid contract awarded by the Pennsylvania Department of Homeland Security to the Institute of Terrorism Research and Response (ITRR) in 2009 is a drop in the bucket. ITRR, a private security firm headed by a former PA chief of police, was given the task of providing the department with thrice-weekly intelligence bulletins that identified threats to the state's critical infrastructure. Instead of focusing on real threats, however, ITRR turned its attention to law-abiding activist groups including Tea Party protesters, pro-life activists, and anti-fracking environmental organizations. The bulletins included information about when and where local environmental groups would be meeting, upcoming protests, and anti-fracking activists' internal strategy. As I recently wrote in my Investigative Fund/Earth Island Journal story, the bulletins were then distributed to local police chiefs, state, federal, and private intelligence agencies, and the security directors of the natural gas companies, as well as industry groups and PR firms. The state's Department of Homeland Security was essentially providing intelligence to the natural gas industry about their detractors. And Pennsylvania taxpayers were footing the bill.
Perhaps because it was a relatively small contract the Pennsylvania spy scandal was brushed aside as an unfortunate mistake. Then-Governor Ed Rendell, whose own ties to the natural gas industry have recently been exposed, called the episode "deeply embarrassing." The state terminated its contract with ITRR, a one-day Senate hearing was held, and the matter largely forgotten. But the Pennsylvania story is not an isolated case. In fact, it represents a larger pattern of corporate and policy spying on activists and everyday citizens exercising their First Amendment rights.
A report published by the Center for Media and Democracy last month detailed how Homeland Security fusion centers, corporations, and local law enforcement agencies have teamed up to spy on Occupy Wall Street protesters. Fusion centers, created between 2003 and 2007 by the Department of Homeland Security, are centers for the sharing of federal-level information between the CIA, FBI, US military, local governments, and more. The more than 70 fusion centers, whose primary task is to analyze and share information with public and private actors, are part of Homeland Security's growing "Information Sharing Environment" (ISE). According to their website, ISE "provides analysts, operators, and investigators with integrated and synthesized terrorism, weapons of mass destruction, and homeland security information needed to enhance national security and help keep our people safe." The other big domestic public-private intelligence sharing ventures are Infragard, managed by the FBI's Cyber Division Public/Private Alliance Unit, and the Domestic Security Alliance Council (DSAC), which openly states that its mission includes "advancing the ability of the U.S. private sector to protect its employees, assets and proprietary information."
The little known DSAC brings together representatives from the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security's Office of Intelligence and Analysis, and some of the nation's most powerful corporations. Twenty-nine corporations and banks are on the DSAC Leadership Board, including Bank of America, ConocoPhillips, and Wal-Mart. The Department of Homeland Security also has a Private Sector Information-Sharing Working Group, which includes representatives from more than 50 Fortune 500 companies. They have pushed for increased funding of public-private intelligence sharing partnerships, largely through the expansion of fusion centers. According to the Department of Homeland Security website, "Our nation faces an evolving threat environment, in which threats not only emanate from outside our borders, but also from within our communities. This new environment demonstrates the increasingly critical role fusion centers play to support the sharing of threat related information between the federal government and federal, state, local, tribal, and territorial partners."
But these fusion centers are only part of the picture. Corporations are also investing heavily in building up their own intelligence networks. As I reported in Earth Island Journal, annual spending on corporate security and intelligence is now roughly $100 billion, double what it was a decade ago (To give some perspective, the DHS budget was about $60 billion last year). If cyber security and surveillance were included, the figure would be much higher. In this light it is hardly surprising that groups like the Pennsylvania-based anti-fracking group Gas Drilling Awareness Coalition and Occupy Wall Street have been swept up in the national security net. As Mike German, an FBI special agent for 16 years who now works for the ACLU told me, "These systems and this type of collection is so rife with inappropriate speculation and error — both intentional and unintentional — that your good behavior doesn't protect you."
As the impact of climate change becomes more acute, the fossil fuel industry is seeking to protect itself from an increasingly restless environmental movement. One way of doing so is to paint the opposition as extremists or potential terrorists. "It's the new politics of the petro-state," Jeff Monaghan, a researcher with the Surveillance Studies Center at Queen's University in Ontario, said. "It's like this is not only environmental activism it's activism against our way of life. It's activism against the economy and the system. Because the system is now a petro system."
Indeed, because of its enormous shale gas reserves, the United States is already being talked of as a future petro-state, and shale gas development a matter of national security. In his keynote address at the 2011 Shale Gas Insight Conference sponsored by the Marcellus Shale Coalition, Tom Ridge, former head of the Department of Homeland Security, described shale gas as vital to US national security. Everything that goes along with it — the rigs, pipelines, and compressor stations (not to mention air and water pollution) — will be viewed as part of the nation's critical infrastructure. According to the Center for Media and Democracy report, "The stated purpose of protecting 'critical infrastructure/key resources' has come to serve as the single largest avenue for corporate involvement in the 'homeland security' apparatus."
by elfismiles » Fri May 31, 2013 8:59 am 
