FBI WATCH MAKING CRUELTY VISIBLE

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Re: FBI WATCH MAKING CRUELTY VISIBLE

Postby fruhmenschen » Mon Oct 07, 2013 1:38 am

see link for full story

http://www.komonews.com/news/local/Feds ... 90441.html

Feds drop charges against purported torture victim, secret warrant target
Oct 6, 2013

Weeks after cutting a deal with his Seattle codefendant, federal prosecutors have withdrawn money laundering-related charges against an Oregon man who accused the FBI of having him tortured while overseas.


Prosecutors previously indicted Yonas Fikre - a former Portland resident who publically accused federal agents of having him tortured - alongside Seattle resident Abrehaile Haile in a scheme to illegally wire $75,000 to United Arab Emirates and Sudan. Also charged was Fikre's brother Dawit Woldehawariat, of San Diego, Calif.

Court documents show investigators obtained secret warrants meant to investigate espionage and terrorism while investigating the apparent white collar crime.

Now, it appears none of the accused will receive jail time following a series of plea agreements and the prosecution's decision to drop the charges against Fikre, who was out of the country when the indictment came down did not return to the United States to face the charges.

Haile, a manager at money-wiring business in Seattle, received a deferred prosecution that would allow the charges to be dropped entirely from his record if he stays out of trouble for a year. Woldehawariat pleaded guilty to a single misdemeanor - failing to file a tax return - through a plea agreement, the details of which remain under seal.

Prosecutors previously claimed Haile, a Washington State University graduate who emigrated to the U.S. as a child, used his business to make small money transfers designed to avoid reporting the full scope of the transaction to financial regulators, as required by federal law.

The indictment came two weeks after Fikre and Portland attorney Thomas Nelson held a news conference in Sweden - Fikre had been living there since his release from a United Arab Emirates prison - and alleged Fikre had been tortured by U.A.E. police acting at the behest of the FBI.

Speaking with The Associated Press, Nelson and Fikre said Fikre was first contacted by FBI agents in April 2009 while he was traveling in Sudan. A native of Eritrea, Fikre lived in Sudan as a youth before moving to Southern California with his family and ultimately settling in Portland.

Firke told The AP the agents questioned him about Portland's Masjid as-Sabr mosque, a large mosque which has seen several attendees face terrorism-related charges in the past decade. Firke was later arrested while in the United Arab Emirates and held for three months. He that contends he was tortured and that his assailants asked the same questions the FBI agents previously put to him in Sudan.

"It was very hard, because you don't know why you are in there and the only person you speak to is either yourself, or the wall, or when you go to the restroom or when you go to the torture place," Fikre told The AP in April 2012 . "I have never been that isolated from human beings in my entire life."

The FBI and State Department have denied Fikre's claims. (Click the following link for the full Associated Press report on Fikre's allegations.)

Court papers filed in the case indicate investigators obtained materials collected through a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant issued by a secret court.

Created in the late 1970s in an attempt to curtail unjustified surveillance of Americans, the FISA system is a classified forum through which law enforcement agents - chiefly the FBI - obtain search warrants that will never be fully disclosed to their targets or the public. Even the identities of the judges seated on the court remain a closely held secret.

Under the FISA process, agents present the closed court with statements asserting they have probable cause to believe their target is an agent of a foreign government or terrorist organization, and receive a warrant to tap the target's phone or search the target's property. That probable cause statement remains classified, though it must be provided to the U.S. District Court judge hearing the criminal case if prosecutors hope to present evidence obtained through the FISA warrant at trial.

Aspects of the FISA system have drawn criticism in the past decade, in part because the number of FISA warrants has increased dramatically since the Sept. 11 attacks. Congress recently expanded the wiretapping authority available through FISA, notably through the FISA Amendments Act in 2008.

The FISA court almost always accede to law enforcement requests - in the court's 30-year history, just 11 of the 34,000 warrant applications have been rejected. Some have asserted FISA warrants are now being used in criminal investigations that have nothing to do with terrorism or spying.
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Re: FBI WATCH MAKING CRUELTY VISIBLE

Postby fruhmenschen » Fri Oct 11, 2013 9:35 pm

FBI agent convinces rabbis to kidnap, torture man to force him to grant religious divorce during stings
Thursday, October 10, 2013


http://abclocal.go.com/ktrk/story?secti ... id=9282342
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Re: FBI WATCH MAKING CRUELTY VISIBLE

Postby fruhmenschen » Fri Oct 18, 2013 1:12 am

Senators Grassely and Leahy are two made members of the FBI crime family.

see link for full story
http://www.myfoxboston.com/story/237227 ... g-response


Tough questions for FBI over Marathon Bombing response
Posted: Oct 17, 2013


Complete coverage of the Boston Marathon bombings

FOX UNDERCOVER (MyFoxBoston.com) -- A top U.S. Senator is demanding answers from the FBI about what they knew about the Tsarnaev brothers and when they knew it, asking if agents had recruited either suspected Marathon bomber as informants and if the bureau had the pair under surveillance before releasing their images to the public.

The FBI issued a strongly worded denial that the Joint Terrorism Task Force, which they lead, knew the identities of the Tsarnaevs before the shootout in Watertown that ended one of their lives or that they were ever sources for the FBI.

But in a letter to the head of FBI, which was obtained exclusively by FOX Undercover, U.S. Sen. Chuck Grassley is asking the questions that have been on the minds of many in state and local law enforcement. Grassley, a Republican from Iowa, is the ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, with broad oversight over the Department of Justice and the FBI.

Grassley's questions get to a nagging doubt in many minds: if the FBI had the Tsarnaev brothers on its radar before publicly identifying them, could the death of MIT Police Officer Sean Collier have been prevented along with the firefight in Watertown that nearly took the life of MBTA Transit Officer Richard Donohue.

"Did the FBI have the suspects under physical surveillance at any time prior to releasing the photos to the public?" Grassley wrote in his letter to FBI Director James B. Comey, Jr. The FBI aired the photos of the then-unnamed suspects during a 5 p.m. press conference on the Thursday after the bombing, about five hours before Collier was shot and killed.

Grassley also writes that his office has learned through sources that, "In the hours leading up to the shooting of Collier and the death of the older suspect involved in the bombing, sources revealed that uniformed Cambridge Police Department officers encountered multiple teams of FBI employees conducting surveillance in the area of Central Square in Cambridge. It is unclear who the FBI was watching, but these sources allege the Cambridge Police Department, including its representation at the (Joint Terrorism Task Force), was not previously made aware of the FBI's activity in Cambridge."

Grassley asks if the surveillance was being conducted in Cambridge, and if so, were the Tsarnaevs or their associates being watched.

The Cambridge surveillance drew such pointed questions from Grassley not only because it goes to the explosive question of whether the Tsarnaevs slipped through FBI surveillance and went on their path of destruction, but also because the information about surveillance, regardless of who was the target, wasn't shared with local police.

"Continued reluctance on the part of the FBI to share information with local law enforcement, especially in the wake of the Whitey Bulger saga and your ongoing Mark Rossetti investigation, would be extremely troubling," Grassley writes. Rossetti is a made captain in the Boston mafia, a suspected murderer, who was also revealed to be a long-time FBI informant, an issue that previously drew the scrutiny of Grassley as well as U.S. Rep. Stephen Lynch, D-South Boston.

FOX Undercover has learned one explanation why there were at least some FBI surveillance teams in Cambridge: several MIT students were being looked at as suspects.

Referring back to the FBI's review of Tamerlan Tsarnaev in 2011, prompted by a tip from the Russian government, Grassley asks if the FBI tried to recruit him as a source, and if not, why not.

In a statement, the special agent in charge of the Boston office, Vincent Lisi, said the Tsarnaev brothers were never sources for the FBI and denied knowing any link between the Tsarnaevs and the bombing until after the Watertown shootout.

""Members of the Joint Terrorism Task Force did not know their identities until shortly after Tamerlan Tsarnaev's death. Nor did the Joint Terrorism Task Force have the Tsarnaevs under surveillance at any time after the assessment of Tamerlan Tsarnaev was closed in 2011," Lisi said.

That was echoed by Rick DesLauriers, the special agent in charge during the Marathon Bombing, who said in an interview with FOX Undercover reporter Mike Beaudet that his office only learned their identities after fingerprinting Tamerlan's body after he was killed in the Watertown shootout. DesLauriers also called any suggestion that the FBI is somehow to blame for Collier's death, "irresponsible".
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Re: FBI WATCH MAKING CRUELTY VISIBLE

Postby fruhmenschen » Fri Oct 18, 2013 1:21 am

Anti-Establishment Journalist Has Spent 400 Days in Jail
see link for full story
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kevin-m-g ... 11865.html




10/17/2013 12:54 pm
cent report by the Committee to Protect Journalists, the Obama administration is not the most transparent in history, but rather the most secretive and least friendly to the press. Leak investigations and mass surveillance have together created a hostile environment for journalists and their sources.

It's interesting, then, that an American journalist, whose beat was largely surveillance and the privatized intelligence community, has been sitting in jail for over 400 days now. His name is Barrett Brown, the founder of Project PM, and he also spent some time as an activist embedded with Anonymous, which no doubt earned him the attention of the authorities.

As Glenn Greenwald wrote in March:

Brown is a serious journalist who has spent the last several years doggedly investigating the shadowy and highly secretive underworld of private intelligence and defense contractors, who work hand-in-hand with the agencies of the surveillance and national security state in all sorts of ways that remain completely unknown to the public. It is virtually impossible to conclude that the obscenely excessive prosecution he now faces is unrelated to that journalism and his related activism.

Tens of thousands of people have signed petitions demanding his release and for the charges to be dropped, and hundreds have donated to his legal defense. Numerous reputable organizations have made statements of support or expressing concern, to include: WikiLeaks, CPJ, EFF, Reporters Without Borders, Free Press, Article 19, Demand Progress and Fight for the Future.

Despite all this, the Department of Justice remains largely unresponsive, and seems intent on allowing him languish in jail until he can get in front of a jury who will weigh whether he should be punished with decades of imprisonment. All for being a committed dissenter and angering the powers-that-be.

The charges pursued against him equate to a dangerous precedent, especially for anyone who reports on hacking or leaks of stolen information. It means that one can be charged with fraud and identity theft for simply pasting a hyperlink.

A slew of questionable, yet apparently routine, DOJ/FBI tactics have been demonstrated in this tangled case.

In the videos which led to his arrest, Brown contends that it was the FBI's own informants and security contractors who put him at risk, by publishing his address to the internet while he and Anonymous were engaged in challenging a very ruthless Mexican drug cartel during late 2011. Due to their actions, Brown had to fly to New York and spent several weeks below the radar while things cooled down.

The threat to his livelihood was so palpable, and the effects of informants concocting false intelligence about him so concrete, that he was in the midst of preparing civil lawsuits against those involved when he was arrested.

The government was so interested in the book he was writing about Anonymous, that on March 6, 2012 they paid his apartment and his mother's house a visit, taking with them his computers and the notes and manuscript for the book.

Afterward they were so intent on sending an intimidating message, that they brought criminal charges against his mother. This is what made him outraged at the FBI in the first place. Her sentencing has repeatedly been delayed, perhaps in order to secure her silence.

They were so worried that Brown might be able to hire a real lawyer with money that an independent legal defense fund had raised, that they asked the court to seize the funds -- a move which was ultimately shot down.

They were so annoyed that media coverage of the case was favorable to Brown and critical of the government, that they succeeded in gagging he and his lawyers from speaking to the press.

Brown was deemed such a threat to the establishment and a risk to the community that it was decided he would be indefinitely detained pending trial. We'll never know the faulty arguments which were made to support that decision, because the transcripts of the hearing were sealed.

Does this sound like justice to you?
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Re: FBI WATCH MAKING CRUELTY VISIBLE

Postby fruhmenschen » Fri Oct 18, 2013 1:31 am

see link for full story

http://www.democracynow.org/2013/10/17/ ... n_jabara_i
Arab-American Attorney Abdeen Jabara: I Was Spied on by the National Security Agency 40 Years Ago
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Topics
National Security Agency, Domestic Spying, Arabs and Muslims in America
Guests

Abdeen Jabara, civil rights attorney in New York. He helped found the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee.
Related
Snowden Documents Reveal NSA Gave Israeli Spies Raw Emails, Texts, Calls of Innocent Americans
Sep 12, 2013 | Story
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Sep 06, 2013 | Story
NSA Violated Surveillance Rules Thousands of Times, Intercepted All 202 Area Code Calls By Accident
Aug 16, 2013 | Story
Links
"Meet the Arab-American lawyer who the NSA spied on–back in 1967." By Alex Kane. (Mondoweiss)
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As more revelations come to light about the National Security Agency, we speak to civil rights attorney Abdeen Jabara, co-founder of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. He was involved in a groundbreaking court case in the 1970s that forced the NSA to acknowledge it had been spying on him since 1967. At the time of the spying, Jabara was a lawyer in Detroit representing Arab-American clients and people being targeted by the FBI. The disclosure was the first time the NSA admitted it had spied on an American.
Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to turn now to a—perhaps related, but certainly to the climate, I want to end today’s show on the National Security Agency. Our guest here in New York, Abdeen Jabara, who was co-founder of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, was involved in a groundbreaking court case in the 1970s that forced the National Security Agency to acknowledge it had been spying on him since 1967. The disclosure was the first time, I believe, that the NSA admitted it had spied on an American. I mean, this is at a time, Abdeen Jabara, that most people had no idea what the NSA was. This is not like these last few months.

ABDEEN JABARA: Well, it was—this is very interesting. I didn’t know what the NSA was. I mean, I started a lawsuit against the FBI, because I thought that the FBI had been spying on me and monitoring my activities—

AMY GOODMAN: Why?

ABDEEN JABARA: —and that of my clients. Well, I’ll tell you why. Because I had been very, very active in Palestinian support work. And one day I read in Newsweek magazine, in the Periscope section, that 26 Arabs in the United States had been targeted for surveillance, electronic surveillance. So, I thought, surely, some of those had been clients of mine or had talked to me on the phone about issues and so forth. And that’s when I brought the lawsuit. And—

AMY GOODMAN: So you sued the FBI in 1972.

ABDEEN JABARA: Right, I sued the FBI in 1972, and the FBI answered. And on the issue about electronic surveillance, they declined to answer on the basis that it was privileged and state secret. At that point in time, the ACLU came in to represent me, and we forced them to answer that question. They admitted that there had been some overhears, alright, that I had not been personally targeted for electronic surveillance, but there had been overhears of my conversations with some of my clients. And they also said they received information from other federal agencies. And they didn’t want to answer that, who that agency was. And the court compelled them to answer. And it turned out that other agency was the NSA. And we didn’t know, you know, what the NSA was. Jim Bamford’s book, The Puzzle Palace, hadn’t yet been published. And we found out that the FBI had requested any information that the NSA had, and the NSA had six different communications that I had made. I was president of the Association of American Arab University Graduates in 1972, so I had a great deal of work on my plate as the president of the association. And I don’t know what these communications were.
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Re: FBI WATCH MAKING CRUELTY VISIBLE

Postby fruhmenschen » Mon Oct 21, 2013 12:52 am

see link for full story



FBI Investigated PETA for Anthrax Plot in '90s
Sunday, Oct 20, 2013

http://www.nbcwashington.com/news/local ... 29851.html

FBI Investigated PETA for Anthrax Plot in '90s


FBI documents show that the agency investigated People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals in the late 1990s after hearing claims that the group was planning an anthrax attack.

The Virginian-Pilot says PETA obtained the documents earlier this year through a Freedom of Information Act request.

According to the documents, FBI investigators were told that PETA planned to release anthrax at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases in Washington, D.C.

PETA president Ingrid Newkirk tells the newspaper that the group didn't learn about the anthrax allegations until this year. She calls the allegations "total fantasy."
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Re: FBI WATCH MAKING CRUELTY VISIBLE

Postby fruhmenschen » Mon Oct 21, 2013 8:44 pm

I still feel the FBI has not gotten enough credit for assassinating President Kennedy Pittsburgh FBI agent Orsini did his best to silence Dr Cyril Wecht a few years ago, eh?
google wecht orsini fbi

Subject: A Great Conference on the JFK Assassination-- The Future of Freedom Foundation BEST CONFERENCE IN 20 YEARS
Date: Mon, 21 Oct 2013 18:24:31 -0400

http://fff.org/2013/10/21/a-great-confe ... niversity/
or
http://tinyurl.com/qfr4mt9
This completely sold out conference was a 5 Star Event, conducted by Cyril Wecht, at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, run by Ben Wecht, Debbie and staff, and was flawless. There is a link to the program inside this review by Jacob Hornberger.
Moreover, for the first time under one roof, in the book room were exhibits by COPA, Coalition On Political Assassinations, displaying their “Hidden History Museum” concept, as well as JFK Lancer-- November in Dallas, both registering researchers for their upcoming Dallas Conferences next month.
COPA www.politicalassassinations.com
JFK Lancer www.jfklancer.com
Also were Walt Brown, who recently completed his JFK Chronology consisting of 32,000 pages on a single digital disk, Rex Bradford & the Mary Ferrell Foundation had the new edition of the late Gaeton Fonzi’s masterpiece, “The Last Investigation”, [which sold out the first day] with a new introduction and forward by Marie Fonzi, who also asked the publisher to do an audio version, which has Gaeton’s voice speaking at the beginning, (a first according to Skyhorse Publishing).
Dr. Cyril Wecht made one of his wonderful passionate speeches, confirming the progress that we have made in the past, with the enactment of the JFK Act, which released millions of documents providing some transparency to the assassination. In addition to attempting the release of remaining documents, Wecht stated that there are not enough young people investigating this case, which was also echoed by Oliver Stone. Since the case is an open murder case in the Dallas Police Department (Cold Case), we must now work on REOPENING THE CASE in the future.
I suggest that perhaps we should supplant the original “Free The Files” 4 inch buttons, seen in 1993, with “Reopen the JFK Case” in 2013. There is no statute of limitations in a murder case. Most Americans have no idea that the case was never closed, in the City of Dallas.
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Re: FBI WATCH MAKING CRUELTY VISIBLE

Postby fruhmenschen » Tue Oct 22, 2013 10:48 pm

READ VIEWERS COMMENTS
http://www.bostonmagazine.com/news/blog ... n-bombing/



FBI: The Tsarnaev Brothers Were Not Informants
The agency is refuting recent reports and probes into whether or not officials were working with them.
October 18, 2013 1:56 pm


Law enforcement officials want to make it “absolutely clear” that they were not conducting any sort of surveillance on the alleged Boston Marathon bombers after the April 15 attack.

“There has been recent reporting relating to whether or not the FBI, Boston Police, Massachusetts State Police or other members of the Joint Terrorism Task Force knew the identities of the bombers before the shootout with the alleged marathon bombing suspects, and were conducting physical surveillance of them on April 18,” officials said in a joint press release on Friday. “These claims have been repeatedly refuted by the FBI, Boston Police, and Massachusetts State Police.”

The statement was made jointly by FBI Special Agent in Charge of the Boston Division, Vincent Lisi, Colonel Timothy Alben, of the Massachusetts State Police, and Boston Commissioner Edward Davis.

The press release was issued in response to both media inquiries, and requests made by an out-of-state Senator, wondering whether officials had the Tsarnaev brothers on their radar prior to the shootout with the suspects in Watertown in the days following the bombings.

Officials said they have refuted these claims in the past and continue to deny that they had any clue who the Tsarnaevs were, until after the older brother, Tamerlan, was killed during the shootout in Watertown. “Members of the Joint Terrorism Task Force did not know their identities until shortly after Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s death when they fingerprinted his corpse,” according to the statement.

U.S. Sen. Chuck Grassley recently sent a letter to the head of the FBI, asking questions about the exact time they had identified the alleged suspects. In a letter obatined by Fox 25, Grassley wrote:

In the hours leading up to the shooting of [Officer Sean Collier] and the death of the older suspect involved in the bombing, sources revealed that uniformed Cambridge Police Department officers encountered multiple teams of FBI employees conducting surveillance in the area of Central Square in Cambridge. It is unclear who the FBI was watching, but these sources allege the Cambridge Police Department, including its representation at the (Joint Terrorism Task Force), was not previously made aware of the FBI’s activity in Cambridge.

Questions about whether or not the Tsarnaev brothers were FBI informants were also raised this week—something the Joint Terrorism Task force and other top cops adamantly deny. “The Tsarnaev brothers were never sources for the FBI nor did the FBI attempt to recruit them as sources,” they said. “To be absolutely clear: No one was surveilling [sic] the Tsarnaevs and they were not identified until after the shootout. Any claims to the contrary are false.”
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Re: FBI WATCH MAKING CRUELTY VISIBLE

Postby fruhmenschen » Wed Oct 23, 2013 2:16 am

Human Rights
How the FBI blacklisted US’ largest Muslim civil rights group
Charlotte Silver
The Electronic Intifada
San Francisco
22 October 2013
http://electronicintifada.net/content/h ... roup/12867

CAIR says that the blacklisting has undermined its work advocating for the rights of US Muslims.
(Rod Veal / ZUMA Press)

Based on flimsy evidence, the FBI has sabotaged efforts to be on good terms with Muslim communities in the US by accusing the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) of being linked to a “terrorist organization.”

Founded in 1994, CAIR monitors policies that affect Muslim Americans and provides legal representation in cases of civil rights violations. The largest nationwide organization advocating for Muslims’ rights in the US, CAIR says the blacklisting has undermined its work at a time when it is needed the most.

The group first became aware of its change of status on 8 October 2008, when James Finch, the special agent in charge of the FBI’s Oklahoma City field office, sent a letter to participants of the state’s Muslim Community Outreach Program. In the letter, he informed them that the upcoming quarterly meeting between members of the Muslim community and local law enforcement would be canceled due to CAIR’s participation.

“It was surprising because up until that point, CAIR in Oklahoma had enjoyed a very good relationship with the FBI,” Adam Soltani told The Electronic Intifada. Soltani is the third and current executive director of the Oklahoma chapter of CAIR.

“They had attended our events, annual banquet, our training functions on ‘know your rights,’” recalled Soltani, who served on the chapter’s board of directors from 2006 until 2008.

That was the first communication that CAIR had received suggesting that the organization’s relationship with the FBI was to about to change. Two weeks later — on 22 October 2008 — the FBI met with the national director of CAIR and informed the organization of the new “parameters for any future interaction” with the FBI: as of that point the FBI would no longer attend CAIR-sponsored events and CAIR would not be invited to attend any FBI-sponsored event.
“Unindicted co-conspirator”

The events that precipitated the blacklisting of CAIR can be traced back to May 2007, when CAIR was listed — along with 246 individuals and organizations — as an “unindicted co-conspirator” in the federal government’s case against the Holy Land Foundation, the largest Islamic charity in the US until it was shut down by a Bush administration executive order in December 2001.

The sprawling list of “unindicted co-conspirators” was divided into 11 categories, identifying those included on the list by their alleged membership in or participation with Hamas or Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated groups. CAIR, for instance, was listed under “members of the US Muslim Brotherhood’s ‘Palestine Committee’ and/or its organizations.”

There is very little precise information available about the Palestine Committee. The Investigative Project on Terrorism, an anti-Muslim website founded by Steven Emerson, describes it as a group formed by leaders of “the Muslim Brotherhood of the Levant.” Corey Saylor, the current communications director of CAIR, knows only that it was “a group that existed in the early 1990s that seemed to have strengthening pro-Palestinian work at its core.”

The Palestine Committee is alleged to have initially spawned four US-based organizations, the Holy Land Foundation being one of them.

The government’s first case against the Holy Land Foundation ended in mistrial. But the foundation was re-prosecuted in 2008, and found guilty by the jury. From 2008 to 2012, the case weaved its way through the courts, stopping short of the Supreme Court. For the first time in the history of the US court system, prosecutors were allowed to admit anonymous expert testimony — by an Israeli intelligence agent — significantly limiting the defense’s ability to cross-examine.
Tenuous

The evidence the FBI used to implicate CAIR as a “co-conspirator” with the Holy Land Foundation is tenuous.

It includes the claims that CAIR received money from the foundation in 1994 — before it was designated a “terrorist organization” — and that Omar Ahmad, the former chairperson of CAIR, and Nihad Awad, the founder of CAIR, were present at an October 1993 meeting of the Palestine Committee in Philadelphia.

Participants in this two-day meeting allegedly expressed support for “the Movement,” which the FBI interpreted as Hamas, and opposition to the Oslo agreement between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization that had been formally signed only the month before.

Court transcripts and documents in the FBI’s case available on Emerson’s Investigative Project on Terrorism site show that the meeting was bugged by the FBI (“Testimony of FBI Agent Lara Burns [and others], 9/29/2008,” p. 123-4 [PDF]).

In 1994 Hamas had not yet been criminalized in the US. Hamas was placed on the list of terrorist organizations in 1995, when President Bill Clinton signed an executive order designating Palestinian groups that rejected the Oslo accords as “terrorist organizations which threaten to disrupt the Middle East peace process.”

Prior to this policy, the US government had maintained tepid diplomatic relations with Hamas. But in the early 1990s, Israel began making the case that Hamas was as much a threat to US national security as it was to Israel’s.

In a 2008 article published by the Journal of Palestine Studies, lawyers Michael E. Deutsch and Erica Thompson document how the Israeli government, in the early 1990s, built its campaign to accuse Palestinian American Muhammad Salah as a terrorist and Hamas leader by arguing that Hamas had established its leadership in the US.

As Deutsch and Thomas write: “The [Government of Israel] press office released a diagram of Hamas’ operational structure, reproduced in a number of publications, which put ‘US leadership’ at the top and drew lines that extended to several Middle Eastern states, including Iran” (“Secrets and Lies: The Persecution of Muhammad Salah”).

This doctrine — that the US must abort the germinating “nerve center” of Hamas operatives in the US — was eventually codified in Clinton’s 1995 executive order and exemplified in the government’s case against the Holy Land Foundation, which would not reach the courts until May 2007. Salah was put on a list of “designated terrorists” following a decision by the Clinton administration, and though a federal court acquitted Salah of all terrorism charges in 2007, he was not removed from the list until 2012 after a legal challenge.

At that point, the government filed its first brief charging the Holy Land Foundation with conspiracy to provide support to Hamas, now a designated terrorist organization. After nearly 13 years of investigating the Holy Land Foundation, the government found no evidence it supported or incited any violence. Instead, the government’s case relied entirely on the fact that Hamas controlled the Palestinian charities — known as zakat committees — the foundation assisted.
Witch hunt

While the government’s brief specified just seven individuals as defendants, it announced a political witch hunt for Hamas: “The focal point of this case is the designated terrorist group Hamas … As noted in the case summary, the defendants were operating in concert with a host of individuals and organizations dedicated to sustaining and furthering the Hamas movement.”

The list of “unindicted co-conspirators” that was appended to the 2007 brief sounded an alarm bell for Muslim and Palestinian organizations around the country.

“It’s a scary-sounding thing and we now have to labor under this designation,” CAIR’s communications director Corey Saylor said.

“Institutions that don’t like us use it as a hammer on us all the time. It interferes with our relations with other institutions, interferes with our donors. We used to be able to approach the FBI with a problem. Now we can’t do that. Now it’s more combative in the media and the lawsuits and that doesn’t help anyone.”

Michael German, senior policy counsel with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), said that the practice of naming “unindicted co-conspirators” allows prosecutors to get around prohibitions against the admission of hearsay evidence in a trial. Rather than needing to prove the allegations that CAIR and the other 246 individuals and organizations on the list committed a crime — or conspired to — with the Holy Land Foundation case, the government is able to level an unsubstantiated smear.

In a 2004 article, Professor Ira Robbins of American University Washington College of Law argues that the process of naming “unindicted co-conspirators” unavoidably violates individuals’ Fifth Amendment rights because by not criminally indicting them, those listed “have neither the right to present evidence nor the opportunity to clear their names.”

Robbins presciently forewarns that while the government had not employed “unindicted co-conspirators” for some time, the domestic terrorism trials occurring in the wake of the 11 September attacks presented “fertile ground” for the reintroduction the legal tactic.

In fact, the manual for US attorneys instructs prosecutors not to make public “unindicted co-conspirators.” On why the US attorneys failed to comply with that rule, the ACLU’s German said: “That’s a good question.”

Before joining the ACLU, German worked in the FBI for 16 years, 12 of which he spent working on domestic terrorism cases. He left the FBI in 2004 after becoming increasingly disturbed by the agency’s methods after the 11 September 2001 atrocities.

“After spending 12 years trying to change it from the inside, I decided I would be a better advocate for civil rights on the outside,” he said.
Damage already done

In 2010, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals did indeed find that the publication of the list of “unindicted co-conspirators” violated the individuals’ and groups’ Fifth Amendment rights.

But the damage was already done. “You can’t put toothpaste back in the tube,” as German noted.

Further corroborating claims that the allegations against CAIR were baseless, Attorney General Eric Holder stated in 2011 that after reviewing the facts of the case his Justice Department had reached the same conclusion as that of the Bush administration not to prosecute CAIR (“Holder: DOJ nixed CAIR leader’s prosecution,” Salon, 26 April 2011).

Moreover, after Representative Peter King criticized Holder’s decision, Jim Jacks, lead prosecutor of the Holy Land Foundation, announced his approval of the decision not to prosecute CAIR (“US attorney in Dallas says Obama’s White House didn’t meddle in case,” The Dallas Morning News, 29 April 2011).

“Considering that the government has broad powers to prosecute organizations that have provided material support to terrorism, the fact that they haven’t brought more cases is evidence that they don’t have any evidence against them,” German said.

But while the government never charged CAIR with criminal activity, its lingering status as an “unindicted co-conspirator” remains the bedrock for the FBI’s blacklisting of the organization until this day.

In 2008, a year after the government sued the Holy Land Foundation, a still-unknown entity within the FBI instructed all field offices to sever official relations with CAIR. Up until that point, FBI field offices throughout the country had cultivated relationships with local CAIR chapters in order to engage cooperatively with Muslim communities.

“We don’t always see eye to eye, but there used to be a healthy relationship,” Saylor explained.

“For example, there was a meeting between the FBI and CAIR in 2004 regarding a ‘know your rights’ pocket book CAIR distributed,” Saylor added. “The FBI was concerned about some of the language in that and asked us to change it. So we agreed to add, ‘If you know of any criminal activity taking place in your community, it is both your religious and civic duty to immediately report such activity to local and federal law enforcement agencies.’”
Devastating

Adam Soltani from CAIR’s Oklahoma office said that for many states, including his, CAIR is the only organization representing Muslims’ civil rights. Eliminating CAIR’s role as a mediator between Muslim communities and the FBI has been devastating.

The new policy received praise from certain members of Congress. In February 2009, Senators Jon Kyl, Charles Schumer and Tom Coburn wrote to FBI Director Robert Mueller applauding the agency’s decision to cut ties with CAIR, and suggested the entire government adopt a similar policy.

But some FBI field offices had trouble implementing the policy. Mongi Dhaouadi, the executive director of CAIR’s Connecticut chapter, told The Electronic Intifada, “The policy has very clearly frustrated agents because it has hindered their efforts to reach out to the Islamic community in Connecticut.”

That the policy has disrupted the practices of local FBI offices is clear in a Department of Justice’s Office of Inspector General report published last month (“Review of FBI interactions with the Council on American-Islamic Relations,” 19 September 2013 [PDF]).

In response to a request by Representative Frank Wolf from Virginia, the Office of Inspector General launched an investigation into the handful of instances in which field offices were non-compliant with the guidelines established in late 2008. Despite the absence of criminal charges or incriminating evidence against CAIR, the Office of Inspector General has still failed to conduct a review of the policy itself.

“One of the troubling things for me as a former FBI agent is that the FBI should be responsible for enforcing civil rights laws. That the FBI would be a part of violating civil rights and the Inspector General would fail to investigate it at all, and instead investigate a violation of internal policy is problematic,” the ACLU’s German said.

In a scathing letter sent to Inspector General Michael Horowitz on 7 October, the ACLU writes: “Rather than criticize the FBI officials who resisted this policy, the OIG [Office of Inspector General] should have applauded them for honoring their oaths to defend the constitutional rights of all Americans, and reprimanded instead the FBI officials who formulated and implemented the policy.”
Secrecy

In the Office of Inspector General’s review of the program, much pertinent information is redacted, including what entity instructed the FBI to alter its relationship with CAIR; the full explanation for why this policy was implemented; and the precise language of the policy.

“That’s very troubling because the only thing that should be redacted is information that should not be disclosed for national security purposes. I’m not aware of any division within the FBI that is itself classified, so that strikes me as an inappropriate redaction, and perhaps designed more to evade public accountability, than protect security in any way.” German said.

The information that is not redacted states that the policy was developed in part because of CAIR’s listing as an “unindicted co-conspirator.”

“The OIG [Office of Inspector General] compounds the original constitutional error by continuing to reference this list as evidence of guilt when there has been no opportunity for CAIR to defend itself and in fact no charge,” German said. “The government continues to use it in a way that is inappropriate and misleading.”

Likewise, the report provides only a partial explanation for why the policy was deemed necessary: “in order to stop CAIR senior leadership from exploiting any contact with the FBI, it is critical to control and limit any contact with CAIR.” A second reason is redacted.

While the Office of Inspector General’s report is intended to reinforce the FBI’s ban on relating to CAIR, it only, albeit unintentionally, reveals the senselessness of the policy.

In his conclusion, the Inspector General Michael Horowitz writes: “It appears that the common mission of OPA [the Office of Public Affairs] and the field divisions to foster interactions with the Muslim community ran counter to and some cases, effectively undermined the intent of the FBI’s [redacted — likely a policy title] to sever such non-investigative community relations with CAIR.”

This admission seems only to have emboldened CAIR’s political enemies. Following the publication of the Inspector General’s report, Rep. Frank Wolf demanded the OIG “immediately remove” all non-compliant FBI agents.

When phoned for comment, a spokesperson for the FBI directed all questions The Electronic Intifada put to him to a letter the FBI sent to Horowitz in response to his report (see Appendix I). In the letter, the FBI assures Inspector General Horowitz that they will incorporate his recommendations and implement safeguards against breaches of the policy from occurring again.

On whether the Office of Inspector General should review the 2008 policy, spokesperson Chris Allen said, “I would not presume to know what the IG [Inspector General] should do.”

Despite all that it has encountered, CAIR has kept on working to advocate for the rights of Muslims in the US. As Saylor said, “We’ve continued being effective without going to the FBI’s roundtables. The attacks still continue but you don’t attack non-effective groups.”
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Re: FBI WATCH MAKING CRUELTY VISIBLE

Postby fruhmenschen » Fri Oct 25, 2013 12:06 am

TWO READS -ONE ABOUT TAXPAYER FUNDED FBI AGENTS FIXING WHO GETS APPOINTED JUDGE
SECOND READ-HOW TAXPAYER FUNDED JUDGES RETURN THE FAVOR TO THE FBI



1st read
see link for full story
http://www.gvpt.umd.edu/lpbr/subpages/r ... charns.htm


Vol. 2 No. 11 (November, 1992) pp. 187-188

CLOAK AND GAVEL: FBI WIRETAPS, BUGS, INFORMERS, AND THE SUPREME COURT by Alexander Charns. Champaign, Illinois: University of Illinois, 1992. 206 pp. Cloth $24.95.

Reviewed by David M. O'Brien, Department of Government and Foreign Affairs, University of Virginia.

This engaging and often disturbing book sheds new light on the illegal and unethical activities of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), along with some Supreme Court justices' highly questionable associations and unethical collaboration with the bureau. Based primarily on FBI files, Alexander Charns, a practicing attorney, begins by recounting his eight year-long litigation battle to force the bureau to release under the Freedom of Information Act its files on the Supreme Court and individual justices. In addition, Charns draws on several of the justices' papers at the Library of Congress and, notably, obtained access to Justice Abe Fortas's papers, which are located at Yale University and closed to the public until the year 2000.

The obsession of FBI director J. Edgar Hoover with combating Communism and Left-wing "subversives" through infiltration, wiretapping, and bugging has been well documented elsewhere. But, the extent to which Hoover directed his campaign at the Court has not received much attention. That, of course, has been largely because the FBI's files have remained secret. And that is where Charns's persistence and research makes a genuine contribution. His story of the FBI and federal judges' collaboration remains far from complete, to be sure, due to the bureau's secret filing systems, destruction of records, and censorship of materials that have been made available. Yet, Charns reveals that Hoover made it a practice to try to curry favor with some justices, to promote or cut short the careers of others, and to otherwise influence the federal judiciary. Moreover, between 1945 and 1974 at least twelve justices were overheard in more than 100 wiretapped conversations and Charns establishes some highly inappropriate connections between Hoover and members of the Supreme Court and the federal judiciary.

Not surprisingly, as with much of the Washington community Hoover sought covert access to and influence in the Court. And as the Warren Court moved in more liberal directions when dealing with alleged Communists in the 1950s and then the rights of the accused in the 1960s, Hoover became increasingly concerned. Hoover persuaded Court employees to inform FBI agents about the Court's deliberations, for example, in the case of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. Later, he directed an investigation of Earl Warren and maintained files on Justice William 0. Douglas, among other justices, that included material obtained through unauthorized wiretaps. On the basis the latter material, according to Charns, Hoover may have dissuaded President Harry Truman from elevating Justice Douglas to chief justice in 1946. But, on this score Charns's evidence appears weak and circumstantial. And the competing influences and pressures on Truman when naming his friend Fred Vinson to the Court's center chair are greater and more complex that Charns concedes. In illuminating detail, however, Charns recounts how almost two decades later Hoover armed Representative Gerald R. Ford with his file on Douglas prior to Ford's bungled attempt to impeach the justice in the House of Representatives.

More revealing and disturbing is Charns's reconstruction of events in 1966 when Hoover managed to persuade Justice Abe Fortas, whom he once considered a "sniveling liberal," to keep FBI agents abreast of the Court's deliberations in a pending case. The case involved the bureau's unauthorized bugging of the hotel room of Washington lobbyist Fred Black, a close friend of Bobby Baker, who -- like Justice Fortas -- was one of President Lyndon Johnson's intimate associates. Although Justice Fortas recused himself from the case, this story of judicial impropriety comprises the heart of Charns's book and adds another chapter to the volumes already written about Justice Fortas's indiscretions and improper activities on and off the bench.

Page 188 follows:

Admittedly, as a relentless foe of the FBI and advocate-turned-author, Charns occasionally gets carried away. The significance of the FBI's assisting various justices in making travel arrangements, running background checks on potential law clerks and judicial fellows, or helping Chief Justice Warren Burger bring Oriental rugs back to the United States from England in 1985, for instance, appears highly debatable.

Still, Charns makes a strong case for his claim that "An FBI report on a nominee's background should be viewed with as much skepticism as reports submitted by other interest groups." (p. 130) He does so by revealing Hoover's directives in the 1950s to FBI field offices to identify potential judicial nominees who appear friendly to the bureau, and which turned up the likes of Potter Stewart and Warren E. Burger. Charns also highlights the importance of the FBI's uneven reports on judicial nominees and their selective use by the bureau, as well as the FBI's occasional memos to Department of Justice attorneys suggesting that they forum shop in order to have cases heard by judges known to be sympathetic to the bureau.

Finally, and even more disturbing than Justice Fortas's indiscretions and some other revelations, is the evidence Charns unearths concerning Chief Justice Burger's links with the FBI and federal Judge Edward Tamm (a former FBI assistant director) and their efforts to recruit former FBI agents as court administrators.
Copyright 1992


2nd read
see link for full story
http://www.businessweek.com/news/2013-1 ... rt-rules-1



FBI Can Keep Race Data From ACLU, U.S. Appeals Court Says
By Sophia Pearson October 23, 2013

The Federal Bureau of Investigation can withhold data from a civil liberties group on its use of ethnic and racial information, a U.S. appeals court in Philadelphia ruled.

The American Civil Liberties Union sued the FBI in May 2011 under the Freedom of Information Act, seeking records that included the use of race and ethnicity by six field offices in New Jersey in conducting investigations. The appeals court upheld a trial judge’s finding that the information the ACLU sought was exempt from disclosure requirements.

“The harm from disclosure lies in revealing, indirectly, the FBI’s targeting preferences and investigative techniques -- not in revealing demographic information that is already available to the public,” the court said in unanimous decision.
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Re: FBI WATCH MAKING CRUELTY VISIBLE

Postby fruhmenschen » Sun Oct 27, 2013 6:50 pm

see link for full story or google title

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-3460_162-57 ... ssination/


October 27, 2013 10:09 AM



New book reveals how much FBI, CIA knew about Oswald before Kennedy assassination



It has long been known that the Warren Commission, the blue ribbon panel of public officials appointed by former President Lyndon Johnson to investigate the assassination of former President John F. Kennedy, was flawed in ways that led to generations of conspiracy theories about what happened on Nov. 22, 1963. A forthcoming book from former New York Times reporter Philip Shenon digs into exactly what the commission got wrong, both by intentional concealment, or, in Shenon's view, extensive attempts by both the CIA and FBI to withhold just how much they knew about Kennedy assassin Lee Harvey Oswald in the weeks and months before he killed the president.

"In many ways, this book is an account of my discovery of how much of the truth about the Kennedy assassination has still not been told, and how much of the evidence about the president's murder was covered up or destroyed - shredded, incinerated, or erased - before it could reach the commission," Shenon writes in the prologue to A Cruel and Shocking Act: The Secret History of the Kennedy Assassination, which draws its title from the first sentence of the commission's report. "Senior officials at both the CIA and the FBI hid information from the panel, apparently in hopes of concealing just how much they had known about Lee Harvey Oswald and the threat that he posed."

Shenon was interviewed by Bob Schieffer on CBS' "Face the Nation" Sunday morning. He started the book in 2008, when one of the former staff lawyers from the commission contacted him to suggest he write a history of the Warren Commission like one he had just authored on the 9/11 Commission.

Much of the evidence Shenon includes in his book shows the amount of information about Oswald's time in Mexico that either never reached the Warren Commission investigators or was directly contradicted in reports by the CIA. One example is a June 1964 memo to the commission's lead investigator from J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI director at the time of Kennedy's assassination, in which Hoover wrote about a report from "our people in Mexico" that " [Oswald] stormed into the embassy, demanded the visa, and when it was refused to him, headed out saying, 'I'm going to kill Kennedy for this.'" (it was unclear to Hoover whether the embassy in question was the Cuban or Soviet embassy in Mexico City). The investigators told Shenon they were certain they had never seen the memo, which disappeared before it reached them and only turned up in the classified archives of the CIA years later.

Another previously unknown revelation in the book: Cuban dictator Fidel Castro submitted to questioning by the Warren Commission in a secret meeting with one of the commission's investigators, William Coleman, off the coast of Cuba.

Some of the FBI's other attempts to cover up their connections with Oswald have previously been revealed, such as the fact that Dallas-based FBI agent James Hosty had received and later destroyed a letter from Oswald protesting the FBI's questioning of Oswald's Russian-born wife, Marina. Under orders from his superior, Hosty destroyed the letter by ripping it into pieces, then flushing the pieces down the toilet at the Dallas FBI office, two days after the assassination when Oswald was killed by Jack Ruby.

Tom Johnson, a former press secretary to President Johnson who later became publisher of The Dallas Times Herald and The Los Angeles Times as well as a president of CNN, described Oswald's letter to the FBI as "a note threatening to blow up the Dallas office of the FBI, the building, if the agents did not cease trying to interview Oswald's wife Marina." Johnson confirmed the existence of the latter with former FBI director Clarence Kelley during his time at the Dallas Times Herald.

"The decision was made two days after the assassination to destroy this note. In truth, we'll never know exactly what was in that note, and its been described in different ways," Shenon told host Bob Schieffer. "The Warren Commission knew absolutely nothing about it.

Despite the intentional destruction of evidence, Kelley, who succeeded Hoover as the head of the agency, came to see Hosty as a victim when he later conducted a private search of the FBI's own files about the investigation. "He was convinced that if Hosty had been told everything that FBI headquarters knew about Oswald's Mexico trip, he would have alerted the Secret Service to the obvious threat that Oswald posed," Shenon writes. "The FBI, Kelley said, would have 'undoubtedly taken all necessary steps to neutralize Oswald.' And that was Kelley's larger conclusion - that President Kennedy's assassination could have been prevented, perhaps easily. "

Hosty's note from Oswald was one of the earliest pieces of evidence the commission might have examined that disappeared, but it was certainly not the only example. In the first chapter of the book, Shenon tells the story of how Navy pathologist James Humes threw his blood-stained notes from Kennedy's autopsy into the fire after he transcribed a fresh copy of the report. He said that he wanted to keep the documents from falling into the hands of "ghouls," and gave a similar rationale for ordering that the sheets that covered Kennedy's head wounds in Dallas be laundered during the autopsy.

The commission's investigators never even saw the photos and X-rays from the autopsy, which were in Robert Kennedy's custody at the Justice Department. The Kennedy family - and Earl Warren, the Chief Justice and chairman of the commission - decided to withhold the photos for fear that they would be leaked to the public and destroy the public image of Kennedy as a handsome young president instead of a crime victim with a gruesome bullet wound to his head.

"Repeatedly in the history of the Warren Commission you see the chief justice making decisions that were designed to protect the [Kennedy] legacy," Shenon said. The decision to block access to the autopsy photos caused "huge turmoil" among the commission's staff, he added.

Shenon also points to the CIA as having taken great steps to cover up their knowledge of Oswald's visit to Mexico City before the assassination. The book's prologue opens with the story of diplomat Charles William Thomas, a career State Department employee who uncovered details about Oswald's time in Mexico, including his affair with a Mexican woman who was a supporter of dictator Fidel Castro. The reports Thomas wrote to CIA Mexico City Station Chief Winston Scott with those details were ignored, as was the memo he sent to then-Secretary of State William P. Rogers when Thomas was forced out of the State Department in 1969. Thomas committed suicide in 1971.

"There is some evidence to suggest [Oswald] had a brief relationship with a young Mexican woman ho worked at the Cuban embassy in Mexico City," Shenon said on "Face the Nation." "The Warren Commission actually wanted to interview that woman but Chief Justice Warren made the decision she would not be interviewed because he said 'she was a communist and we don't interview communists.'"

A section of Scott's memoirs - which included details about the extent of the CIA's monitoring of Oswald in Mexico - was only declassified in the 1990s. The agency photographed Oswald outside of the Cuban and Soviet embassies in Mexico City, and recorded his phone calls while he was in Mexico, evidence that never reached the commission. Scott's memoirs also reveal that he thought there might have been a foreign conspiracy to kill Kennedy involving Oswald as a Communist agent, which contradicted what he told the Warren Commission.

"Scott told the Warren Commission that he did not believe there was a conspiracy, and apparently in his memoirs he says he exactly the opposite," Shenon said.
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Re: FBI WATCH MAKING CRUELTY VISIBLE

Postby fruhmenschen » Tue Oct 29, 2013 1:13 am

see link for full story
http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/this-s ... thing-else

This Sabu-Dread Pirate Roberts Conspiracy Theory Is Something Else


LulzSec hacker Sabu, above, is a known canary, but could he really have taken down Dread Pirate Roberts?

How's this for an internet blockbuster in the making: Dread Pirate Roberts, the mastermind behind the electronic drug market Silk Road, was brought down by FBI informant and former LulzSec member Sabu. Sure, at the moment it's purely online speculation with no hard evidence, yet it's somehow become the lead theory as to how FBI agent Christopher Tarbell was able to identify DPR as Ross William Ulbricht.

In a Newsweek story describing the bust, Tarbell, dubbed “the Eliot Ness of online crime," is cited as relying on a mysterious Agent-1 to make his case against Ulbricht. Tarbell, apparently needing extra help in parsing the Deep Web, was aided by Agent-1 in navigating the Silk Road underworld. Because of the apparent skill of the unnamed Agent-1, some in the hacker and activist community believe agent-1 is Sabu, who has been cooperating with the federal government since June 2011—after being arrested by none other than Tarbell himself.

Sabu, real name Hector Xavier Monsegur, first gained Internet notoriety for leading a series of hacks carried out by Anonymous offshoot LulzSec, and again for building cases against fellow hackers—including Stratfor hacker Jeremy Hammond—who were unaware he was an informant.

Sabu has “literally [since] the day he was arrested… been cooperating with the government proactively," said Assistant US Attorney James Pastore at a secret bail hearing in 2011. A recent note from imprisoned Hammond supports Pastore’s statement and takes it a step further, stating “Sabu was also used by his handlers to facilitate the hacking of targets of the government’s choosing—including numerous websites belonging to foreign governments.”

Tarbell’s investigation into Ulbricht’s identity is said to have taken nearly two years, which would at least fit the Sabu timeline. Combine that with the fact that Tarbell actually knows confirmed informant Sabu personally, and you've got some dots to start connecting.

That brings us to last Friday, when Sabu was supposed to finally be sentenced, but was not. According to journalist Andrew Blake, this is the fourth time Sabu’s sentence was delayed. Why has his sentencing been delayed again? Online speculation has credited Sabu’s involvement in former Reuters editor Matthew Key’s hacking case as the reason for these delays. But the delay in sentencing so shortly after the DPR arrest has only fueled the DPR-Sabu-Agent-1 connection.
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Re: FBI WATCH MAKING CRUELTY VISIBLE

Postby fruhmenschen » Fri Nov 01, 2013 12:59 pm

see link for full story
http://cajunvsmachine.com/2013/10/31/fb ... tired-fbi/


October 31, 2013
FBI whistleblower skewers former Warren Commission member on JFK assassination by M. Wesley Swearingen, Retired FBI
Daily Home Page Blog Posts, Government Conspiracy • Tags: 3 Rifles flown to Dallas, Assassination of John F. Kennedy, David Ferrie, E Howard Hunt, FBI, Grassy Knoll, J. Edgar Hoover, Jack Ruby, JFK Conspiracy, John F Kennedy, Kennedy, Lee Harvey Oswald, Lone Gunman, M. Wesley Swearingen, Mont Swearingen, New Evidence, Press Release, Richard Cain, Richard Mosk, Saint John Hunt, Stanley Mosk, Warren Commission

I just received this press release from my good friend, M. Wesley Swearingen (retired FBI & then lead investigator of the Kennedy Assassination), and he’s authorized me to publish it far and wide. Wes is a leading expert on the JFK assassination and is the author of several best selling books, including “To Kill a President” and “FBI Secrets.” Wes has continued his research and continues to uncover and share groundbreaking revelations that further expose the true events, players, and motives surrounding the Kennedy Assassination and subsquent coverup. Everything below this line is a direct cut and paste of Wes’ press release. – Bryan “Cajun Against The Machine” Lambert

Richard M. Mosk, a former member of the staff of the Warren Commission, is now a justice on the California Court of Appeal in Los Angeles. Richard is the son of the late Stanley Mosk, who was California’s attorney general when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated.

Stanley became a California Court of Appeal justice and was there when Los Angeles Black Panther Party member Geronimo Pratt was wrongfully convicted of murder in 1972. Stanley remained there during the entire 25 years of Pratt’s imprisonment.

Chief Justice Earl Warren hired Richard, then 24, to work for the commission.

In a Los Angeles Times article dated October 27, 2013, entitled “NOV.22, 1963: 50 years later, and still no conspiracy,” Richard writes that, “with a top-secret clearance I had full access to the work of the staff, and I never saw anything untoward.” Richard writes of the Warren Commission investigation, “It may still stand as the most extensive and thorough criminal investigation in history.”

FBI whistleblower and author of two books on FBI wrongdoing, M. Wesley Swearingen, has personal knowledge of Pratt’s wrongful conviction and of Kennedy’s assassination. Swearingen was working Cuban Counterintelligence in Chicago when Fidel Castro captured Cuba in 1959.

One of Swearingen’s Cuban sources told him in 1962, that the CIA was plotting to kill President Kennedy. Swearingen took copious notes on who was to be involved. One of the men involved turned out to be one of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover’s top Echelon informants in the Chicago Mafia, Richard Cain. Chicago’s top mob boss Sam Giancana and Johnny Roselli were also named. When Swearingen reported this conspiracy to his superiors they were, in Swearingen’s opinion, in denial.

Justice Richard Mosk implies that J. Edgar Hoover was telling the Warren Commission the truth while all the time Hoover was covering up the FBI’s mishandling of Lee Harvey Oswald as an informant and the fact that Richard Cain was present on the grassy knoll in Dallas, along with Johnny Roselli, who admitted to a high ranking mafia member that he, Roselli, actually shot at President Kennedy.

In all of the Warren Commission notes there is not one word about Jack Ruby’s mafia connections in Chicago. There is no mention of the fact that Jimmy Hoffa’s body guard delivered three rifles to David Ferrie to be flown to Dallas just days before the Kennedy assassination. Richard Mosk does not mention that FBI agents of the FBI Laboratory knowingly falsified evidence so that Hoover could proclaim Oswald as the lone assassin. It was Swearingen’s knowledge that Hoover passed the word that he would fire any agent who spoke publicly of a conspiracy to kill JFK.

With all due respect, it is Swearingen’s opinion that Warren Commission staff member, Richard Mosk, was grossly mislead by Hoover’s FBI, just as Swearingen believes his father, Stanley, was misled by Hoover’s FBI in the wrongful conviction of Geronimo Pratt in 1972.

Anyone, including Justice Richard Mosk, who wants the truth behind Kennedy’s assassination should read TO KILL A PRESIDENT, which is available at Amazon.com in paperback and Kindle format.

David Ferrie was found dead February, 1967, after being identified by Jim Garrison as a potential witness; Jimmy Hoffa murdered July, 1972; Richard Cain murdered December, 1973; Sam Giancana possibly murdered by an FBI informant June, 1975; Johnny Roselli murdered August, 1976.

Another interesting read on Hoover’s wrongdoing is the book entitled FBI SECRETS, also available at Amazon.com in paperback.

Anyone interested in Hoover’s FBI may wish to check out websites www.fbisecrets.com and www.oswalddidnotkilljfk.com .
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Re: FBI WATCH MAKING CRUELTY VISIBLE

Postby fruhmenschen » Mon Nov 04, 2013 12:10 am

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Re: FBI WATCH MAKING CRUELTY VISIBLE

Postby fruhmenschen » Thu Nov 07, 2013 1:24 am

see link for full story

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/201311 ... site.shtml
FBI 'Mistake' Leads To Six Years Of Monitoring Anti-War Website
from the too-bad-this-'screw-up'-only-affects-the-people-who-didn't-screw-up dept

If you've received a fairly serious threat against you or your business, you might think turning that info over to the FBI would be a good idea. Think again. The owners of antiwar.com found themselves on the receiving end of more than six years of monitoring and surveillance for doing just that, as Spencer Ackerman details at The Guardian.

The FBI monitored a prominent anti-war website for years, in part because agents mistakenly believed it had threatened to hack the bureau’s own site.

Internal documents show that the FBI’s monitoring of antiwar.com, a news and commentary website critical of US foreign policy, was sparked in significant measure by a judgment that it had threatened to “hack the FBI website” and involved a formal assessment of the “threat” the site posed to US national security.

But antiwar.com never threatened to hack the FBI website. Heavily redacted FBI documents, obtained through the Freedom of Information Act and shared with the Guardian, show that Eric Garris, the site’s managing editor, passed along to the bureau a threat he received against his own website.

These documents are part of antiwar.com's ongoing lawsuit against the FBI (brought with the assistance of the ACLU). What's been released so far is heavily redacted and severely limited. The FBI's FOIA reply letter indicates it has only released 47 out of 170 "reviewed" pages. More details of this incursion on antiwar.com owners' First Amendment rights is sure to surface if the lawsuit is successful.
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