rigorousintuition.ca

http://foxsanantonio.com/news/local/mmw-angelika-nino


MMW: Angelika Nino
BY YAMI VIRGIN
MONDAY, DECEMBER 5TH 2016

If you have any information on Angelika Nino please call the U.S. Marshals at 210-657-8500.


The U.S. Marshals need your help to find Angelika Nino. Nino had done 97 months behind bars for 2 counts of Bank Fraud, 2 counts of Witness Tampering and 9 Counts of Wire Fraud. Nino is the ex-wife of a former FBI agent, who was in a tough situation after she was arrested for defrauding victims of more than 200,000 dollars. While doing supervised release, 5 years ordered by a judge, Nino allegedly violated the rules by failing to pay restitution. She also stopped reporting to her probation officer.

If you have any information you can call the U.S. Marshals' Lone Star Fugitive Task Force at 210-657-8500.

link du jour


http://farsight.org/demo/Time_Cross_Pro ... _page.html


http://touch.latimes.com/#section/1133/ ... -92035786/



http://touch.latimes.com/#section/2426/ ... -91731669/

Dec. 5, 2016
How free coupons for patients help drugmakers hike prices by 1,000%



Matt Schmitt, an assistant professor at the UCLA Anderson School of Management, co-wrote a study that found coupons covering patients' co-pays are propelling drug companies to charge the "the highest price possible."

December 5, 2016, 9:00 a.m.
Horizon Pharma charges more than $2,000 for a month’s supply of a prescription pain reliever that is the combination of two cheap drugs available separately over the counter.

Another company, Novum, sells a small tube of a prescription skin rash cream, containing two inexpensive decades-old medicines, for nearly $8,000.

What is key to the companies’ business plan of raising prices by 1,000% or more?  

The answer: coupons that deliver Horizon’s pain reliever Vimovo and Novum’s skin cream Alcortin A for as little as nothing to the patient, while leaving America’s health system to pick up much of the rest of the price.

Experts warn that the coupons, increasingly being used by dozens of companies, are sharply adding to the nation’s medicine bill. That cost is passed along to most Americans through higher insurance premiums and taxes needed to pay for government health programs.

The success of Horizon and Novum using this strategy demonstrates how America’s convoluted and opaque system of paying for prescription drugs enables executives to set extraordinary prices on modest medicines that have been around for years. The coupons





http://www.philly.com/philly/news/20161 ... ?mobi=true


FBI Agent: Sting informant says he was told not to target Republicans
Updated: DECEMBER 4, 2016 —


Tyrone B. Ali, right, along with attorney Alan J.Tauber, left, arrive at the Dauphin County Court house for a hearing Monday, March 28, 2016 in Harrisburg, Pa.
by Craig R. McCoy and Angela Couloumbis, STAFF WRITERS
An FBI agent has said the undercover operative in the controversial sting run by the state Attorney General's Office told him he was discouraged from targeting Republicans, raising questions about the integrity of an investigation that has netted five convictions of Democrats.

In a new court filing by the last sting defendant still fighting charges, FBI Special Agent Robert J. Haag said that the operative, Tyron Ali, told him the state office seemed "more interested in targeting Democrats than Republicans."

And in an email Haag wrote in 2013, he said Ali told him he was "reprimanded" for contacting Republicans during the probe and instructed "not to take any initiative in contacting Republicans in the future."


On Saturday, former state prosecutor Frank Fina and Philadelphia District Attorney Seth Williams rejected any suggestion the probe had a partisan agenda - or that Ali was told to go after only Democrats.

Said Fina: "Never, ever was he told to steer towards one party or another."

They said the idea that Ali was told to keep clear of Republicans was a distortion of tactical decisions made to avoid certain officials for fear his cover would be blown.


Fina launched the probe before former State Attorney General Kathleen Kane shut it down. Williams resurrected the investigation into the payments and obtained the convictions.

Kane said Saturday that the filing vindicated her.

"The FBI file speaks for itself and confirms what I have always said: that this investigation was fatally flawed from the beginning."

A sworn affidavit by Haag, along with the email, quoted in length in the filing, was recently turned over by federal prosecutors in response to a demand for sting-related documents by defense








http://touch.capitalgazette.com//#secti ... -92040214/

Annapolis caucus plans rating system for law enforcement agencies





CIVIL RIGHTS LEADER CARL SNOWDEN TALKS ABOUT RACIAL ISSUES DURING A MEETING OF THE CAUCUS OF AFRICAN-AMERICAN LEADERS THAT RESULTED IN A VOTE OF NO-CONFIDENCE FOR ANNAPOLIS POLICE CHIEF MICHAEL PRISTOOP.

Updated December 3, 2016
The Caucus of African-American Leaders hopes to develop a criteria to rate departments with law enforcement officers in Anne Arundel County and the Baltimore metropolitan area.

A subcommittee of the caucus has been formed to put together those plans and the group is meeting this weekend to refine its goals and criteria before taking the plans to police leadership. The group hopes to include Anne Arundel County, Annapolis and Baltimore County fire and police departments as well as Anne Arundel and Harford County sheriff's offices.

Caucus convener Carl Snowden declined to speak on the subject as the final plans were still underway. The caucus is a local advocacy group that focuses on equality issues in the city and county.

But emails obtained by The Capital shed light on the early plans for the rating criteria.

"The idea is to create a criteria to rate police departments," Snowden wrote in his email to Caucus members and an ACLU attorney. "The proposed criteria would include how diverse their departments are, how many complaints of alleged police misconduct has been filed against the agency... How transparent is the police department?"

There currently is no rating system like it in the area, hence their desire to create it.

An Annapolis police spokeswoman declined to comment on the planned system until there were more details. ACLU attorney David Rocah declined to talk about the proposed program as well.

But The Capital did receive a copy of his response to Snowden's inquiry. He provided some guidance to set up the program and compare data especially between departments of varying sizes.

"So to make comparisons between departments, you'd need to not only file public records requests to get the total number of complaints filed by year, but you'd also need to file requests to get information on the size of the force, and perhaps look up census data for size of the jurisdiction."

While there is no rating system locally, law enforcement agencies can seek accreditation from the aptly named Commission on Accreditation for Law Enforcement Agencies. That agency sets up criteria within six major law enforcement areas such as relationships with other agencies, organization and management, personnel, law enforcement operations and court-related and technical services, according to the CALEA website.

The caucus is hoping to release a report from the rating system around the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, Jan. 16, according to the emails.

The emails on the caucus' rating program were sent about 10 days after the caucus held a vote of no confidence in Annapolis Police Chief Michael Pristoop. The caucus laid out several claims alleging the police department treats white and black police officers differently.

The main case they have championed is former police officer Jason Thomas, who was fired after a protracted legal battle regarding an injury he suffered while on duty.

The department claims it ordered Thomas back to work full-duty and eventually fired him when he did not return. Thomas claims his doctors ordered him back to work at least on modified or light duty. He filed a federal lawsuit on Monday alleging discrimination.

Pristoop has defended his department from these claims. The Annapolis City Council set up a subcommittee to review and investigate the claims made by the caucus.

Emails by city officials obtained by The Capital through a request under the Maryland Public Information Act after that vote show a concentrated effort to show support for the chief after the caucus vote as well as sharing stories and comments of the city's legal victories

Snowden tipped off the vote in a column in The Capital in which he discussed the caucus plan to hold the vote that night. After the vote, Alderman Ross Arnett and Jared Littmann sent emails noting their support for the chief. Arnett's support led to a resolution of support being drafted, but that was delayed after the subcommittee was created.

News media reporters also began sending inquiries after the no confidence vote. Annapolis Captain Scott Williams wrote "And so it begins" after seeing an inquiry from WBAL-TV.

Pristoop also received support from FBI Special Agent Wendy Hassett, who wrote "I like it!" when Pristoop shared a comment admonishing The Capital on a story about Thomas losing his lawsuit in state




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

With regards to pedophellia, ever since Donald Trump brought to light the allegations against Bill Clinton and his treatment of women, others have come forward to corroborate his story.

One of the most recent examples is former U.S. State Department official Steve Pieczenik. His roles within U.S. politics were many, having been the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State under Henry Kissinger, Cyrus Vacne, and James Baker, and also serving the presidential administrations of Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Regan, and George H.W. Bush. If you’ve done research into U.S. politics, being associated with names like Kissinger and Bush is an automatic red flag. What’s even more concerning to some is that he was a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a group many consider to be corrupt and even evil, operating under the guise of good deeds. However, he was removed from the membership as early as October 2012, the same time he started whistleblowing.

He says: “We know that both of them have been a major part and participant of what’s called The Lolita Express, which is a plane owned by Mr. Jeff Epstein, a wealthy multi-millionaire who flies down to the Bahamas and allows Bill Clinton and Hillary to engage in sex with minors, that is called Pedophilia.”  (source)

Here is some background coverage that was done on it last year. I’m not saying these examples are proof of a massive elitist global pedophile ring, but there have been several examples like this, and various scandals that have gone completely unreported by mainstream media.

Former U.S. representative Cynthia McKinney also knew about pedophilia within the government in 2005. She grilled Donald Rumsfeld on DynCorp’s child trafficking business of selling women and children. (source)

This is important information to share, especially with all that’s going on with the Pizzagate scandal,  which the elite are also trying to debunk. Here is another Pizzagate video put together by the underground resistance network.

It’s hardly surprising that they are trying to discredit this story, but with all of the other stories from investigations out there that are already verified, it’s important that we don’t ignore this and that somebody within the power structure actually initiates an investigation.

Investigations Reveal That It Goes Far Beyond Pedophilia

Unfortunately, investigations into this type of behaviour reveal that many working for mainstream politics, its corporate structure, the big banks, and parts of the military industrial complex (CIA, contractors, etc.) could be involved in even more disturbing things.

Not only are these children abused, they are tortured and often murdered as part of ‘satanic’ sacrifice ceremonies. Many of them, based on my research




http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/an- ... hirtyEight
Politics
An FBI Error Opens A Window Into Government Demands For Private Info

Dec 3, 2016 at 1:14 PM
An FBI Error Opens A Window Into Government Demands For Private Info

The Internet Archive, a nonprofit organization that has built a digital library and maintains an archive of web pages on the internet, revealed on Thursday that it had received a National Security Letter from the FBI demanding information about the services the library provided to a possible user. National Security Letters such as this one have been criticized by civil liberties groups in part because they can include a nondisclosure requirement or “gag order” that prevents recipients from revealing anything about the letters — including the fact that they received them.
This letter was particularly troublesome to privacy advocates because it contained misinformation about the rights of a letter recipient to challenge the nondisclosure requirement. The letter stated that the Internet Archive could “make an annual challenge to the nondisclosure requirement.” The Electronic Frontier Foundation, an advocacy organization that is legally representing the Internet Archive, pointed out in a press release that the passage of the USA Freedom Act in June of 2015 changed the law to allow letter recipients to challenge the National Security Letter at any time, not just once annually. In response to the EFF’s claim, the FBI withdrew its National Security Letter, allowed the Internet Archive to publish a redacted version of the letter containing the error and promised to correct the mistake by informing everyone else who got the same erroneous language.


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



FBI Chief Exposes MK Ultra Programs That Murder, Use, & Traffic ...
Collective Evolution-7 hours ago
FBI Chief Exposes MK Ultra Programs That Murder, Use, & Traffic Children – High .... Ted Gunderson, former FBI special agent and head of their L.A. office, ...



http://motherboard.vice.com/read/enter- ... oes-to-die

http://motherboard.vice.com/read/enter- ... oes-to-die
Enter 'The Glass Room,' Where Privacy Goes To Die
Motherboard-5 hours ago
... Congress failed to block a procedural rule change that gives the FBI the legal authority to hack millions of computers around the globe under a single warrant.








http://ticklethewire.com/2016/12/02/bor ... thorities/

http://ticklethewire.com/2016/12/02/bor ... thorities/
Border Patrol Agent Headed to Trial for Allegedly Lying to Federal Authorities
By Steve Neavling
ticklethewire.com
The Border Patrol agent accused of lying to federal agents about a drug conspiracy case is headed to trial in early January.
Eduardo Bazan Jr. pleaded not guilty Thursday in federal court, the Monitor reports.
Bazan, 48, of Edinburg, was arrested on Nov. 3 and has been on administrative leave since.
Authorities allege he lied to Homeland Security investigators during an Oct. 31 interview.
“Bazan admitted he had lied to agents Oct. 31, 2016, and that Bazan had in fact received information from an individual that led to a seizure of 66 kilograms of cocaine; seized on Feb. 18, 2007,” the criminal complaint reads.


http://www.santafenewmexican.com/news/b ... 08e3a.html

US judge won't release IDs of informants in prison gang case
Santa Fe New Mexican-
The Albuquerque Journal reports that an FBI case agent wrote in a search warrant affidavit that all nine informants would be marked for death if their identities





FBI refuses to investigate pedophile

http://www.theadvocate.com/new_orleans/ ... 569c5.html

Teen at center of Mike Yenni sexting scandal reveals identity to rebut claims he is lying
BY RAMON ANTONIO VARGAS | RVARGAS@THEADVOCATE.COM DEC 3, 2016 - 7





https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/p ... story.html


CIA blows up Cuban airliner

1976 bombing that killed Cuban fencing team requires painful reflection



Protesters carry portraits of victims on Oct. 6, during a 40th-anniversary remembrance of the Cubana Flight 455 bombing. (Ernesto Mastrascusa/European Pressphoto Agency)
By Kevin B. Blackistone December 4 at 7:33 PM Follow @ProfBlackistone
By noon on Oct. 6, 1976, at Seawell International Airport in Barbados, it was humid, raining and 80 degrees. A McDonnell Douglas four-engine DC-8 jet adorned with Cubana Airlines’ blue, white and red tail sat on the tarmac, just arrived from Port of Spain, Trinidad. It was in the midst of a hopscotch trip across the Caribbean that started in Georgetown, Guyana; was headed to Kingston, Jamaica; and destined for Havana, Cuba.

Among the passengers were 24 teenage athletes. They were members of Cuba’s national fencing team. They caught their country’s flagship airliner in Trinidad after competing in a tournament of Central American and Caribbean countries.

But neither the Cuban fencers nor the other 49 souls on Cubana Flight 455 made it home.

At what must have been the nadir of the U.S. government’s detestation for Fidel Castro, who died last week at age 90 after a lifetime of being a burr in Washington’s saddle on the Western Hemisphere, Cubana Flight 455 exploded in the sky above the Caribbean Sea after two bombs planted by men working for once-CIA-connected, anti-Castro Cuban exiles detonated.


The Cubana Flight 455 mass murder is not seared in our memory like the massacre of 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Summer Games. It didn’t play out live on national television like the bloodshed in Munich. It hasn’t been memorialized in dramatic film.

But the two dozen Cuban athletes who perished represent the most horrific attack against innocent sportsmen we’ve ever seen. The downing of their flight remains a rare mid-air bombing of a civilian airliner in the Western Hemisphere.

And the U.S. government’s behavior in the 40-year wake of those deaths remains shameful.

[Fidel Castro laid to rest in private, closed-door funeral]

To be sure, just two months ago, on the 40th anniversary of Cubana Flight 455’s downing, the National Security Archive, which has done yeoman’s work on this event, asked the Obama administration to declassify what intelligence records remain on Luis Posada Carriles, the onetime CIA operative convicted in Panama of Cubana 455’s bombing but pardoned in 2004 by then-outgoing Panamanian President Mireya Moscoso, who was supported by Washington. Posada, now 88, resides in Miami.

A 1976 document sent at the time to Secretary of State Henry Kissinger by two high-ranking State Department officials who investigated Castro’s charge that the United States had downed Cubana 455 implicated Posada as the likely planner.


Walk the streets of NYC with a teenage photography sensation
From skate parks to midtown, Ryan Parrilla captures the energy of the city that never stops moving.
“We have now pursued in detail with CIA (1) what we know about responsibility for the sabotage of the Cubana airliner and (2) how any actions by CIA, FBI, or Defense attache´s might relate to the individuals or groups alleged to have responsibility,” the document stated, “… but any role that these people may have had with the demolition took place without the knowledge of the CIA.”

Posada’s co-conspirator in planning the bombing was Orlando Bosch, who was acquitted in a foreign court of the attack. But a declassified CIA report quoted Posada as saying: “We are going to hit a Cuban airplane” and “Orlando has the details.” An FBI report quoted an informant as saying that one of the men who planted a bomb on the plane called Bosch afterward to tell him that the plan succeeded.

Bosch died in 2011 in Miami, where he lived at least since 1988, when he was arrested there for violating parole. The anti-Castro Cuban community in Miami successfully lobbied President George H. W. Bush, through Jeb Bush, to grant Bosch a pardon on all charges, of which there were many, against him in the states.

Investigations showed that Posada and Bosch had hatched their plan during a meeting in Washington. Posada originally tried to defeat Castro by helping organize the failed Bay of Pigs invasion. After this he became an agent for the CIA, trained at Fort Benning and joined a series of United States-backed efforts




http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/04/opini ... .html?_r=0


Who started Fake News Planting?
The FBI





http://www.commondreams.org/news/2016/1 ... ble-ethics

Monday, December 05, 2016

Career of Trump's Top Ethics Lawyer Marred by Questionable Ethics
Don McGahn is a "vociferous defender" of Citizens United, among other things

Election lawyer Don McGahn was described by Politico as "one of a growing number of people with ties to the Kochs to join Trump's administration." (Photo: Getty)

The attorney named as President-elect Donald Trump's White House counsel, Donald McGahn, has been called "kryptonite to campaign finance reform," "a totally partisan politico," and "notorious for politicizing and crippling enforcement of federal campaign finance laws."

Indeed, journalist Jon Schwarz wrote at The Intercept on Sunday that McGahn "bears as much responsibility as any single person for turning America's campaign finance system into something akin to a gigantic, clogged septic tank."

As one of six members of the Federal Election Commission (FEC) from 2008-2013, McGahn "demonstrated a much stronger interest in expanding the money-in-politics swamp than draining it," Common Cause vice president Paul S. Ryan told Schwarz.

As the Center for Public Integrity reported in May, when McGahn was merely serving as an adviser to the Trump campaign:

McGahn was "perhaps the most consequential member of the FEC in its history," said Jan Witold Baran, a well-regarded Republican election lawyer and co-chairman of the election law and government ethics practice at law firm Wiley Rein. Baran said McGahn checked the authority of the agency's staff and general counsel and used his experience as a lawyer representing clients to win rights for political committees under the FEC's jurisdiction, including those the commission is investigating.

FEC Commissioner Ellen Weintraub, a Democratic appointee, who frequently clashed with McGahn while both were on the commission, sees it differently.

"He was consequential like a sledgehammer was consequential," she said, adding, "he did his best to undermine the law."

"Now, as Trump's White House lawyer, McGahn will provide crucial advice on the nomination of judges, including to the Supreme Court," Schwarz noted. "While Trump has criticized Citizens United, and called the Super PACs that sprang up in its wake 'horrible' and a 'total phony deal,' McGahn is a vociferous defender of the ruling."

As White House counsel, McGahn will also be tasked with managing and mitigating Trump's many conflicts of interest and potentially establishing a trust to manage the president-elect's business holdings.

In other words, USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism professor Marty Kaplan wrote last week, "If a U.S. foreign policy decision appears to favor a Trump commercial project, it's McGhan's job to blow the whistle on the president."

"If you think that's going to happen," Kaplan quipped, "I've got a golf course with a nice view of a wind farm that I'd like to sell you."

He's already shown he's not up to the job, Arn Pea





http://www.nydailynews.com/news/crime/c ... -1.2899684

Inter-Racial Couple finds spray-painted racial slurs, swastikas in Ohio home
BY ELIZABETH ELIZALDE
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS Monday, December 5, 2016, 8:07 PM




FBI agent create another terrorist event


http://arstechnica.co.uk/tech-policy/20 ... er-was-ok/


Court: Secret spying of would-be Christmas tree bomber was OK
Ars Technica UK-
Undercover FBI agents posed as jihadis and presented Mohamud with the means to conduct the operation, which turned out to be wholly bogus. Mohamud was ...



http://sports.yahoo.com/news/child-porn ... 43609.html

Child porn on government devices: A hidden security threat
Explicit images of minors, which have been discovered on federal workers' computers across the government, can be gateways for criminal hackers and foreign spies. What's the best way to combat the problem?


Daniel Payne, director of the Pentagon's Defense Security Service, admitted this spring to encountering “unbelievable” amounts of child pornography on government computers.

The comment came during an event in Virginia where military and intelligence officials gathered to address threats posed by federal workers. Mr. Payne, who spent much of his career in senior CIA and intelligence community roles before taking the Pentagon post, wanted to stress the value of monitoring employees' systems to ensure they remained fit to handle top-secret information.

But the revelation raised many more troubling questions. Who was downloading the sexually explicit and criminal material? How much of it was on intelligence agency networks? And why didn't the federal government deploy more robust technologies to keep child pornography from spreading on its networks?

While the notion of government employees and contractors with high levels of security clearance looking at child pornography was disturbing on its own, internal records retrieved through the Freedom of Information Act revealed the problem is not limited to military and intelligence agencies.

In the past three years, agencies ranging from the Postal Service to the Federal Highway Administration substantiated about 40 allegations that employees or contractors opened child

https://www.rt.com/news/369878-iceland- ... -minister/






http://motherboard.vice.com/read/defens ... a-director

Defense Fund Launched for Alleged Member of Group That Hacked ...
Motherboard-3 hours ago
One of those alleged members, Justin Liverman, didn't actually do much of the hacking, according to an FBI affidavit. Instead, Liverman allegedly encouraged ...







http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/ ... hould.html


Dec. 10 2016 3:28 PM
Harry Reid: FBI Chief Comey Covered Up Russian Hacking, Should Resign

FBI Director James Comey testifies before the House Judiciary Committee on Sept. 28, 2016 in Washington, D.C.
Win McNamee/Getty Images
Outgoing Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid came out guns blazing against FBI chief James Comey on Sunday, saying he should be ousted for covering up information regarding Russia’s efforts to meddle with the U.S. elections. Reid went as far as to call Comey the “new J. Edgar Hoover,” saying he had the information of Russian involvement in the election and kept it from the American public.
In an interview with MSNBC, Reid said the FBI knew that the CIA had concluded with a high level of certainty that the Russian government was trying to get Donald Trump elected, as reported in an explosive story in the Washington Post. “This is not fake news. Intelligence officials are hiding connections to the Russian government. There is no question,” Reid said. “Comey knew and deliberately kept this info a secret.”

Reid said he was “disappointed in Comey,” adding that the FBI chief “let the country down for partisan purposes.” Democrats were already angry at Comey for revealing less than two weeks before the election that the FBI had come across additional emails that could be related to Hillary Clinton’s private email server. Two days before the election he once again cleared Clinton of wrongdoing, but many in her campaign say that ended up hurting the Democratic candidate more than helping because it fed into the storyline that the election was rigged.
Reid said Comey needs to be investigated on all fronts. “I think he should be investigated by the Senate. I think he should be investigated by other agencies in the government, including the security agencies,” Reid said, before adding, “If ever there was a matter of national security, it is this.”
Incoming Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer said there should be a full, bipartisan investigation into the reports of Russian meddling in the presidential election. "Senate Democrats will join with our Republican colleagues next year to demand a congressional investigation and hearings to get to the bottom of this. It’s imperative that our intelligence community tur




https://www.rt.com/news/369878-iceland- ... -minister/
FBI sent planeload of agents to frame Assange in Iceland, got snubbed by minister
Published time: 10 Dec, 2016 14:21
Get short URL
WikiLeaks still under investigation, but not its supporters, says DOJ
Later in the summer 2011, the US “sent a planeload of FBI agents to Iceland seeking our cooperation in what I understood as an op

Bonus read


http://www.lobster-magazine.co.uk/articles/9-11.htm


9/11's Trainer in Terrorism Was an FBI Informant
(Peter Dale Scott Talk in Palo Alto, October 27, 2006)
If I had an hour, I would talk to you about how the 9/11 Report failed to reconcile Dick Cheney's conflicting accounts, which cannot all be true, of what he did on the morning of 9/11 in the bunker beneath the White House. But that story takes two whole chapters of my forthcoming book, The Road to 9/11. So instead I will expand on what I spoke about a month ago in Berkeley, concerning Ali Mohamed, Washington's double agent inside al-Qaeda, and also a chief 9/11 plotter.(1) I want to add important new material tonight. Ali Mohamed, an Egyptian, was a close ally of Osama bin Laden. As he later confessed in court, he also aided the terrorist Ayman al-Zawahiri, a co-founder of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, and by then an aide to bin Laden, when he visited America to raise money.(2) It is now generally admitted that Ali Mohamed worked for the FBI, the CIA, and U.S. Special Forces.
Patrick Fitzgerald, who testified to the 9/11 Commission about Ali Mohamed, knew him well. In 1994 he had named him as an unindicted co-conspirator in the New York landmarks case, yet allowed him to remain free. This was because, as Fitzgerald knew, Ali Mohamed was an FBI informant, from at least 1993 and maybe 1989.(3) Thus, from 1994 "until his arrest in 1998 [by which time the 9/11 plot was well under way], Mohamed shuttled between California, Afghanistan, Kenya, Somalia and at least a dozen other countries."(4)
What I first wrote in 2004, and again in 9/11 and American Empire, has to my knowledge has not yet been in the US press: it is that in 1993 Ali Mohamed had been detained by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in Canada, (when he inquired at an airport after an incoming al Qaeda terrorist who turned out to be carrying two forged Saudi passports). Mohamed immediately told the RCMP to make a phone call to the FBI in the United States, and the call secured his release.(5) This release enabled Ali to go on to Kenya, take pictures of the U.S.. Embassy, and deliver them to bin Laden for the Embassy bombing plot.
In August 2006 there was a National Geographic Special on Ali Mohamed. We can take this as the new official fallback position on Ali Mohamed, because John Cloonan, the FBI agent who worked with Fitzgerald on Mohamed, helped narrate it. I didn't see the show, but here's what TV critics said about its contents:
Ali Mohamed manipulated the FBI, CIA and U.S. Army on behalf of Osama bin Laden. Mohamed trained terrorists how to hijack airliners, bomb buildings and assassinate rivals. [D]uring much of this time Mohamed was ... , an operative for the CIA and FBI, and a member of the U.S. Army.(6) ... Mohamed turned up in FBI surveillance photos as early as 1989, training radical Muslims who would go on to assassinate Jewish militant Meir Kahane and detonate a truck bomb at the World Trade Center. He not only avoided arrest, but managed to become an FBI informant while writing most of the al Qaeda terrorist manual and helping plan attacks on American troops in Somalia and U.S. embassies in Africa.(7)
That Mohamed trained al Qaeda in hijacking planes and wrote most of the al Qaeda terrorist manual is confirmed in a new book, The Looming Tower, by Lawrence Wright, who has seen US Government records.(8) Let me say this again: one of al-Qaeda's top trainers in terrorism and how to hijack airplanes was an operative for FBI, CIA, and the Army.
But what we have heard so far is a fall-back cover-up of even worse truths. Peter Lance, who first wrote the script for the National Geographic special, told about Mohamed's detention and release in Toronto. This important detail, along with others, was cut from the program. Lance withdrew from the project and complained on his website about these and other cuts, such as this one:
"Within days of 9/11 Cloonan ... interviewed Ali, whom the Feds had allowed to slip into witness protection, and demanded to know the details of the plot. At that point Ali wrote it all out - including details of how he'd counseled would-be hijackers on how to smuggle box cutters on board aircraft and where to sit, to effect the airline seizures."(9)
So let us sum up what we know so far about Ali Mohamed:
A key planner of the 9/11 plot, and trainer in hijacking, was simultaneously an informant for the FBI.
This operative trained the members for all of the chief Islamist attacks inside the United States -- the first WTC bombing, the New York landmarks plot, and finally 9/11, as well as the attacks against Americans in Somalia and Kenya.
And yet for four years Mohamed was allowed to move in and out of the country as an unindicted conspirator. Then, unlike his trainees, he was allowed to plea-bargain. To this day he may still not have been sentenced for any crime, and may even be in witness protection.(10)
Peter Lance has charged that Fitzgerald had evidence before 1998 to implicate Mohamed in the Kenya Embassy bombing, yet did nothing and let the bombing happen.(11) In fact, the FBI was aware back in 1990 that Mohamed had engaged in terrorist training on Long Island; yet it acted to protect Mohamed from arrest, even after one of his trainees had moved beyond training to an actual assassination.(12)
Mohamed's trainees were all members of the Al-Kifah Center in Brooklyn, which served as the main American recruiting center for the Makhtab-al-Khidimat, the "Services Center" network that after the Afghan war became known as al Qaeda.(13) The Al-Kifah Center was headed in 1990 by the blind Egyptian Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, who like Ali Mohamed had been admitted to the United States, despite being on a State Department Watch List. (14) As he had done earlier in Egypt, the sheikh "issued a fatwa in America that permitted his followers to rob banks and kill Jews."(15)
In November 1990, three of Mohamed's trainees conspired together to kill Meir Kahane, the racist founder of the Jewish Defense League. The actual killer, El Sayyid Nosair, was caught by accident almost immediately; and by luck the police soon found his two co-conspirators, Mahmoud Abouhalima and Mohammed Salameh, waiting at Nosair's house. They found much more: There were formulas for bomb making, 1,440 rounds of ammunition, and manuals [supplied by Ali Mohamed] from the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center at Fort Bragg marked "Top Secret for Training," along with classified documents belonging to the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff. The police found maps and drawings of New York City landmarks like the Statue of Liberty, Times Square -- and the World Trade Center. The forty-seven boxes of evidence they collected also included the collected sermons of blind Sheikh Omar, in which he exhorted his followers to "destroy the edifices of capitalism."(16)
All three had been trained by Ali Mohamed back in the late 1980s at a rifle range, where the FBI had photographed them, before terminating this surveillance in the fall of 1989.(17)
The U.S. Government was thus in an excellent position to arrest, indict, and convict all of the terrorists involved, including Mohamed.
Yet only hours after the killing, Joseph Borelli, Chief of NYPD detectives, struck a familiar American note and pronounced Nosair a "lone deranged gunman.."(18) Some time later, he actually told the press that "There was nothing [at Nosair's house] that would stir your imagination ... ..Nothing has transpired that changes our opinion that he acted alone."[19]
Borelli was not acting alone in this matter. His position was also that of the FBI, who said they too believed "that Mr. Nosair had acted alone in shooting Rabbi Kahane." "The bottom line is that we can't connect anyone else to the Kahane shooting," an F.B.I. agent said."(20)
In thus limiting the case, the police and FBI were in effect protecting Nosair's two Arab co-conspirators in the murder of a U.S. citizen. Both of them were ultimately convicted in connection with the first WTC bombing, along with another Mohamed trainee, Nidal Ayyad. The 9/11 Report, summarizing the convictions of Salameh, Ayyad, Abouhalima, and the blind Sheikh for the WTC bombing and New York landmarks plots, calls it "this superb investigative and prosecutorial effort" (i.e. by Cloonan and Fitzgerald).(21) It says nothing about the suppressed evidence found in Nosair's house, including "maps and drawings of New York City landmarks," which if pursued should have prevented both plots from developing.
Almost certainly, the 9/11 Commission knew more about this scandalous situation than they let on. It cannot be just a coincidence that they selected to write the staff reports about al Qaeda and the 9/11 plot, and conduct the relevant interviews, Dietrich Snell, who had been Fitzgerald's colleague in the Southern District of New York U.S. Attorney's office. (Thus Snell presumably drafted the praise for the superb effort by his former colleague Patrick Fitzgerald and the FBI). Of the nine people on Snell's team, all but one had worked for the U.S. Government, and all but two for either the Justice Department or the FBI.(22)
If you go to my website, www.peterdalescott.net, you will know that: Shortly after 9/11, in October 2001, U.S. and British newspapers briefly alleged that the paymaster for the 9/11 attacks was a possible agent of the Pakistani intelligence service ISI, Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh. There was even a brief period in which it was alleged that the money had been paid at the direction of the then ISI Chief, Lieutenant-General Mahmoud Ahmad.(23)
Others have since argued that Saeed Sheikh worked for both America and Britain, since "both American and British governments have studiously avoided taking any action against Sheikh despite the fact that he is a known terrorist who has targeted U.S. and UK citizens."(24) The claim what Saeed Sheikh was recruited by MI-6 in Great Britain has been made by myself, by John Newman, and by Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed; recently it has been pointed to in the new book by Pervez Musharraf, the President of Pakistan.(25)
And there may have been other double agents. Last month Robert Baer, a former CIA officer, told an Australian newspaper that ''In 1996, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed [the al-Qaeda mastermind of the 9/11 plot] was in Doha [the capital of Qatar], the CIA found out about it, and wanted to arrest him and people in Washington stopped them. That has never been answered in the 9/11 commission report, why that arrest was stopped."(26)
One week after 9/11, in a story for Pacific News Service, I wrote the following (which is still on my website):
It is important to learn from the serious mistakes made by the United States and CIA in the past. The usual CIA mode of undermining foreign governments it does not like -- from Russia to Cuba to Iran -- has been to organize and train their opponents in criminal activities, including sabotage and smuggling. But time and again this strategy backfires. The problem is that as soon as the United States loses interest in its agents' cause, the sabotage techniques it has taught will more than likely be turned back against it.(27)
This is what happened with al Qaeda.
When I wrote this I did not yet know about the scandal of Ali Mohamed's tolerated terrorism. In 2004, when I did know, I reported a story in the London Independent (but not this country) that Mohamed was on the U.S. payroll at the time he was training the Arab Afghans, and that the CIA, reviewing the case five years after the first WTC bombing, concluded in an internal document that the CIA itself was "partly culpable" in the World Trade Center attack.(28)
I cannot tell you whether (as I would like to think) Mohamed and Saeed were examples of rogue agents out of control (in which case we have a CIA problem), or whether they were agents not out of control (in which case we have of course a much worse CIA problem). One way or the other, we have a fundamental and on-going problem, for which we need a more serious remedy than just putting a Democrat in the White House. As has happened after past intelligence fiascoes, our intelligence agencies were strengthened as a result of the 9/11 Commission, not brought under control, and their budgets were increased.
It's time to confront the reality that these agencies themselves, and their own sponsorship and protection of terrorist activities, have aggravated the greatest threats to our national security. Scott Ritter and others have written that, at this very moment, CIA-backed bombings are being undertaken in Iran by the Mujahideen e-Khalq (MEK or MKO), an opposition group listed by the United States State Department as a Foreign Terrorist Organization.(29) It appears that, as if having learned nothing, the CIA is still sponsoring terrorists.
I want to admit, in all fairness, that certain notable victories have been achieved in the narrow pursuit of al Qaeda. At the same time, after five years of the new broadened war on terrorism, we can say with confidence that the net result to date is a far more dangerous world than we had before.
Peter Dale Scott's latest book (co-edited with David Ray Griffin) is 9/11 & American Empire: Intellectuals Speak Out (Olive Branch Press, 2006). His website is http://www.peterdalescott.net.
Notes
I discuss Ali Mohamed in a book I co-edited with David Ray Griffin: David Ray Griffin and Peter Dale Scott (eds.), 9/11 & American Empire: Intellectuals Speak Out (Northampton, MA: Olive Branch Press, 2006), 74, 76-77.
This admitted connection to al-Zawahiri has led some to identify Mohamed (Abu Mohamed al Amriki) with the al-Amriki alleged by Yossef Bodansky to have acted as go-between between Zawahiri and the CIA: "In the first half of November 1997 Ayman al-Zawahiri met a man called Abu-Umar al-Amriki (al-Amriki means "the American") at a camp near Peshawar, on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. High-level Islamist leaders insist that in this meeting Abu-Umar al-Amriki made al-Zawahiri an offer: The United States would not interfere with or intervene to prevent the Islamists' rise to power in Egypt if the Islamist mujahideen currently in Bosnia-Herzegovina would refrain from attacking the U.S. forces there. Moreover, Abu-Umar al-Amriki promised a donation of $50 million (from unidentified sources) to Islamist charities in Egypt and elsewhere. This was not the first meeting between Abu-Umar al-Amriki and Zawahiri. Back in the 1980s Abu-Umar al-Amriki openly acted as an emissary for the CIA with various Arab Islamist militant and terrorist movements ... then operating under the wings of the Afghan jihad ... . In the late 1980s, in one of his meetings with Zawahiri, Abu-Umar al-Amriki suggested that Zawahiri would need "$50 million to rule Egypt." At the time, Zawahiri interpreted this assertion as a hint that Washington would tolerate his rise to power if he could raise this money. The mention of the magic figure, $50 million, by Abu-Umar al-Amriki in the November 1997 meeting was interpreted by Zawahiri and the entire Islamist leadership, including Osama bin Laden, as a reaffirmation of the discussions with the CIA in the late 1980s about Washington's willingness to tolerate an Islamic Egypt. In 1997 the Islamist leaders were convinced that Abu-Umar al-Amriki was speaking for the CIA -- that is, the uppermost echelons of the Clinton administration" (Bodansky, Bin Laden, 212-13). As we shall see, it is the case that Mohamed was allowed to travel to Afghanistan even after his designation as an unindicted co-conspirator in 1994 (San Francisco Chronicle, 10/21/01).
Peter Lance, "Triple Cross: National Geographic Channel's Whitewash of the Ali Mohamed Story," Huffington Post, 8/29/06, http://news.yahoo.com/s/huffpost/20060829/ cm_huffpost/028270. Unfortunately Lance's book on Mohamed, Triple Cross, was not yet available as this book went to press. Cf. Lawrence White, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (New York: Knopf, 2006), 181-82; Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon, The Age of Sacred Terror (New York: Random House, 2002), 236; Lawrence Wright, New Yorker, 9/16/02: "In 1989 -- Mohamed talked to an F.B.I. agent in California and provided American intelligence with its first inside look at Al Qaeda."
Raleigh News & Observer, 10/21/01, http://www.knoxstudio. com/shns/story.cfm?pk=ALIMOHAMED-10-24-01&cat=AN.
Toronto Globe and Mail, 11/22/01, http://www.mail-archive. com/hydro@topica.com/msg00224.html; Peter Dale Scott, "How to Fight Terrorism," California Monthly, September 2004, http://www.alumni.berkeley.edu/Alumni/C ... rorism.asp. Mohamed's companion, Essam Marzouk, is now serving 15 years of hard labor in Egypt, after having been arrested in Azerbaijan. Mohamed's detention and release was months after the first WTC bombing in February 1993, and after the FBI had already rounded up two of the plotters whom they knew had been trained by Ali Mohamed.
Dave Shiflett, Bloomberg News, 8/28/06, http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid= ... refer=home.
Glenn Garvin, Miami Herald, http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/en ... 310462.htm
Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (New York: Knopf, 2006), 181. The Report claims (56) that "Bin Ladin and his comrades had their own sources of support and training, and they received little or no assistance from the United States." But Wright reports that Mohamed, while on a leave from the U.S. army, went to Afghanistan and trained "the first al-Qaeda volunteers in techniques of unconventional warfare, including kidnappings, assassinations, and hijacking planes." This was in 1988, one year before Mohamed left active U.S. Army service and joined the Reserve.
Peter Lance, "Triple Cross: National Geographic Channel's Whitewash of the Ali Mohamed Story," Huffington Post, 8/29/06, http://news.yahoo.com/s/huffpost/20060829/cm _huffpost/028270.
According to publicity for the National Geographic special, Mohamed is "currently in U.S. custody," but "his whereabouts and legal status are closely guarded secrets" (Rocky Mountain News, 8/28/06, 2D). Lance wrote that Mohamed was put into the witness protection program. "David Runke [Ruhnke], a defense attorney in the African embassies bombing case, says, ``I think the most likely thing that will happen is he'll be released, he'll be given a new name and a new identity, and he will pick up a life someplace.''' (Shiflett, Bloomberg News, 8/28/06). As of November 2001, Mohamed had not been sentenced and was still believed to be supplying information from his prison cell.
"Ali Mohamed had stayed in [El-Hage's] Kenyan home in the mid 90's as they plotted the bombings. Another agent in Fitzie's squad Dan Coleman, had searched El-Hage's home a year before the bombings and found direct links to Ali Mohamed and yet Fitzgerald failed to connect the dots" (Lance, "Triple Cross," Huffington Post, 8/29/06).
Peter Lance, 1000 Years for Revenge (New York: Regan Books/ Harper Collins, 2003), 29-37.
Robert Dreyfuss, Devil's Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam (New York: Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt, 2005), 278; John K. Cooley, Unholy Wars: Afghanistan, America, and International Terrorism (London: Pluto Press, 1999), 87-88; Lance, 1000 Years for Revenge, 29-31; Independent, 11/1/98.
Rahman was issued two visas, one of them "by a CIA officer working undercover in the consular section of the American embassy in Sudan" (Peter L.. Bergen, Holy War, Inc.: Inside the Secret World of Osama bin Laden [New York: Free Press, 2001], 67). FBI consultant Paul Williams writes that Ali Mohamed "settled in America on a visa program controlled by the CIA" (Paul L. Williams, Al Qaeda: Brotherhood of Terror [[Upper Saddle River, NJ]: Alpha/ Pearson Education, 2002], 117). Others allege






http://www.pennlive.com/news/2016/12/fb ... _miss.html

FBI investigating what happened to $300K in missing drug money seized by AG's office: report




on December 11, 2016 at 4:59 PM
Missing drug money from a local bust has prompted an FBI investigation into the whereabouts of the cash, according to a report from The Morning Call.

Agents from the attorney general's office stopped a van carrying $1.77 million in June 2014 on the Pennsylvania Turnpike near Carlisle. It is believed that $300,000 from that seizure is missing. The Drug Enforcement Agency sent the attorney general's office a letter explaining that a wiretapped conversation revealed more money should have been in the van, according to the report.

Officials with the FBI and the attorney general's office did not confirm the investigation, but the FBI has been inquiring about the missing money since last fall, according to the report. The owner of the van, Frederick Goldberg, of Florida, pleaded guilty to running a nationwide marijuana ring in November 2015.

The attorney general's office waited nearly two years to disclose the seizure, according to a separate report from the Morning Call. Additional questions have swirled around the incident, including whether proper protocol was followed and if the relevant parties were notified of the seizure. Cumberland County


https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/cr ... story.html

FBI agent who stole heroin sentenced to 3 years in prison - The ...
Washington Post › crime › 2015/07/09
Jul 9, 2015 - A onetime FBI agent who fed his drug addiction by stealing heroin seized as evidence in criminal cases was sentenced Thursday to ...



Link du jour

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/201 ... up-kitchen


https://www.prisonactivist.org


http://boydownthelane.com/2016/12/11/en ... reativity/

http://fortunesociety.org

http://www.humankindness.org/newsletters/




Heat is Online


https://www.theguardian.com/environment ... -in-a-year

Fossil fuel divestment
Fossil fuel divestment funds double to $5tn in a year
UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon welcomes new total revealing concern over coal, oil and gas investments has entered financial mainstream


A demonstration demanding divestment from fossil fuel at the New York Stock Exchange, Wall Street, New York. Photograph: Dorothy Chi Hung Lam/Courtesy 350.org
Damian Carrington
Monday 12 December 2016 11.00 EST
The value of investment funds committed to selling off fossil fuel assets has jumped to $5.2tn, doubling in just over a year.

The new total, published on Monday, was welcomed by the UN secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, who said: “It’s clear the transition to a clean energy future is inevitable, beneficial and well underway, and that investors have a key role to play.”

The fossil fuel divestment campaign began on university campuses in 2011 but the new report reveals that concerns over investments in coal, oil and gas have now entered the financial mainstream, with more than 80% of the funds now committed to divest being managed by commercial investment and pension funds.

The report found that 688 institutions and more than 58,000 individuals across 76 countries are now committed to divestment, including major financial institutions such as the world’s biggest sovereign wealth fund, owned by Norway, and Allianz and Aegon.


Institutions worth $2.6 trillion have now pulled investments out of fossil fuels
Read more
“I commend today’s announcement that a growing number of investors are backing a shift away from the most carbon-intensive energy






https://robertscribbler.com/2016/12/09/ ... r-the-gun/

Rendered Uninhabitable by Heat — It’s Not Just Sudan, Parts From North Africa to the Middle East are Under the Gun
“North Africa is already hot and is strongly increasing in temperature. At some point in this century, part of the region will become uninhabitable.” — Dr. Johannes Lilieveld

“The number of climate refugees could increase dramatically in future. Researchers of the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry and the Cyprus Institute in Nicosia have calculated that the Middle East and North Africa could become so hot that human habitability is compromised.” — The Max Planck Institute

****

Heatwaves so hot that it’s impossible to perform any activity outdoors without threat of injury or worse. Raging dust storms that make the very air unbreathable. Massive droughts that wreck agricultural productivity and biodiversity altogether. Sections of Africa and the Middle East are currently getting a taste of these new, dangerous climate conditions. But their frequency could increase by five fold or more over the next 30-40 years — threatening harm, government collapse, and the forced dislocation of millions.

Sudan Could be Made Uninhabitable by Climate Change

Due to human-caused warming, these kinds of events are already happening in places like Sudan with increasing frequency. And a recent report by CNN shows that this North African state is under threat of becoming uninhabitable to human beings due to climate change.



(A new infertile crescent. Climate change increases desertification risks for semi-arid regions across Africa. Image source: Grid-Arendal, Columbia University and CNN.)

Drought has impacted agriculture to the extent that 1.9 million people in this nation of 40 million could face hunger over the next couple of years. A further 3.2 million face water shortages. And in the ironic juxtaposition that often comes with climate change — since 2013 about 600,000 people have been displaced due to the deluges that have more and more often come at the end of the long, dry periods.

For Sudan, the problems are just beginning. By mid-Century surface temperatures in the region could warm by between 1.1 and 3.1 degrees Celsius. And so much additional warming will multiply the occurrence of the kinds of harmful heatwaves, droughts, and dust storms that are happening today many times over. In the end, Sudan is at risk of being abandoned as its lands are taken in by a climate unfit for human habitation.

500 Million People Under Extreme Heat and Drought in Africa and Middle East by mid-Century

But it’s not just Sudan that’s facing a flip into nation-wrecking climate conditions. By 2050, extreme heat related events will be happening five times more frequently as the Earth warms up along a desiccating crescent in Africa and onward throughout a good chunk of the Middle East. During summers, by mid Century, temperatures throughout this vulnerable zone could be as much as 5 degrees Celsius hotter than they are today.



(Temperatures are set to rise to extreme levels across Africa and the Middle East due to fossil fuel burning and related Earth System warming. The impacts produce a high risk for mass migration away from these regions as hothouse conditions take hold. Image source: The Max-Planck Institute.)

Including Sudan, more than 500 million people live in this region. And according to the Max-Planck Institute, extremely hot days — of which there were 16 each year within this vulnerable area from 1986 to 2005 — will increase five-fold to 80 by 2050 and up to 118 to 200 by 2100.

Added extraordinary and persistent heat will bake moisture out of soils, ruin forests, and advance deserts. It will produce days when wet bulb temperatures approach or exceed the limit of human endurance (35 C) time and time again. Such a high prevalence and intensity of adverse conditions will make the current problems faced by the region seem mild and moderate by comparison. In the end, numerous places are likely to become basically unlivable.

Call For Action

Given the coming hardship and what is likely to be a preventable mass migration, scientists and environmentalists are calling for action. CNN and others have highlighted a need for aid to Africa and the Middle East. But as helpful as aid is to those desperate and struggling to survive, the primary driver of the whole problem is human-based fossil fuel emissions. And unless that stops, this region and its highly vulnerable peoples, among others around the world, will be very hard hit.

Michelle Yonetani, a senior advisor on disasters from the Internal Displacement Monitoring Center noted that encouraging governments to increase commitments to act on climate is “perhaps one of the most indirect ways [to help], but [it is] globally the most important. Now really is the time to push governments to act…” Otherwise, vast regions within Africa and the Middle East face destabilization, collapse, and mass migration over rather short time horizons.

Links:

Climate Change Could Render Sudan Uninhabitable

The Max Planck Institute

Internal Displacement Monitoring Center

Grid-Arendal, Columbia University





http://anthraxvaccine.blogspot.com/2016 ... -dave.html


Saturday, December 10, 2016
The Heroin Epidemic and the News/ DC Dave
The following piece was written by DC Dave, who shares my take on the opioid crisis, and its roots in the US deployment in Afghanistan.  He has elaborated on the heroin epidemic, noting how the mass media have shied away from a realistic discussion and interpretation of the epidemic of injected opioids sweeping the world, which killed (newly reported this week by CDC) 15,000 Americans in 2015.  Why did it take a year to come up with the 2015 number?   I previously discussed the fact that CDC has been assigning deaths in which fentanyl was found (even when the death was obviously due to injection) as "prescription opioid deaths." I suspect that as fentanyl use and deaths skyrocketed faster than those due to heroin during the past two years, this turned into a problem for CDC.  Fentanyl tends to be mixed with heroin or to replace heroin as a similar, stronger, cheaper alternative narcotic, which can be synthesized without poppies or opium.  So assigning all fentanyl deaths to prescription drugs is being noticed, and criticized.  The states and communities know whether people are dying from prescription fentanyl or from a needle.  My last post showed that Massachusetts is now releasing its own statistics.  While CDC claims over 50% of narcotic OD deaths are due to prescription drugs, Massachusetts says sorry, but our illicit narcotic OD deaths are 80%, and prescription OD deaths are only 20%.  Here is DC Dave's piece:

Heroin Epidemic and the News

When you discover something that seems to you to be important but then you notice that the people who tell us what is supposed to be news are ignoring it, you know that it must be really important.  I can cite a number of examples just from my own web site.  Most recently we had the almost total press blackout of the justice system wrist slap of the man most responsible for the flood of illegal aliens into the country.  It figures that they would black out the news of the piddling punishment that the man, Stan Eury, received, because they had blacked out his prosecution, and most of what they had reported on his operations previously had, amazingly enough, been favorable.

Before that we had their total failure to report in 2004 that the long suppressed report on the suspicious 1949 death of Secretary of Defense James Forrestal had at long last been made public.  The press silence was extremely telling.  They couldn’t report it because it was full of information that contradicted what they had unanimously told us for 55 years, that is, that Forrestal, the leading opponent in the U.S. government of recognition of the new state of Israel, had killed himself. 

Before that, in 1997, the press had completely blacked out the news that Kenneth Starr’s report on the death of deputy White House counsel Vincent W. Foster, Jr., contained, by judges’ order, 20 pages that thoroughly undermined the conclusion that Foster had committed suicide.  In Part 3 of my “America’s Dreyfus Affair, the Case of the Death of Vincent Foster,” I called it “The Great Suppression of ’97.”

These stories are plainly of enormous importance, and the fact that they are completely ignored by the American news media magnifies their importance.  So too is the story of the heroin-death epidemic that is currently ravaging the country.   In this case the news hasn’t been ignored completely, but it has been spun in such a way that one would hardly realize its magnitude.  In the first place, only the lesser news organs dare suggest that the sharply rising death rate in the country from drug overdoses might be coming from widely available cheap heroin.  “Heroin’s Death Toll Reaches Another Gruesome Landmark,” a headline that appeared above an October 16, 2016, article in the leftist Mother Jones magazine is one that you will never see in The Washington Post, The New York Times, or one of their many clones around the country.  The article’s subtitle was even more disturbing: “Most states now lose more citizens to overdoses than to car accidents.” 

The heroin factor in drug overdose deaths is also played down by the major news media by focusing all of what inadequate attention they have given to the problem on the deaths from prescription opioids.  The Washington Post furnished a good recent example of what I am talking about on October 22 of this year.  I posted an online comment, which received a supporting response from a medical doctor.  Since, together, they get us right into the heart of the distorted reporting on the matter, I reproduce them both here:

I believe this is a very misleading statement: "Prescription narcotics cause more overdose deaths every year than any street drug, including heroin." 
 
The following is from an article by Meryl Nass, MD:  
 
"According to CDC itself, 'CDC has programmatically characterized all opioid pain reliever deaths (natural and semisynthetic opioids, methadone, and other synthetic opioids) as ‘prescription’ opioid overdoses.' That means illegally produced drugs in these categories are being designated as prescription drugs, when they are not. A further confounder is that heroin metabolizes to morphine, which is a prescription drug. So if fully metabolized at the time of autopsy, a death due to heroin will be labeled as due to a prescription narcotic." 
 
Dr. Nass observes further: "While nationally, heroin overdoses jumped from 1.0 per 100,000 in 2010 to 3.4 per 100,000 in 2014, the number of prescribed narcotics held steady over the same period. A 2015 UN document noted that 'A recent [US government] household survey in the United States indicated that there was a significant decline in the misuse of prescription opioids from 2012 to 2013.'" 
 http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2016/01/ ... wrong.html *
 
Furthermore, the statistics do not distinguish between accidental and intentional drug overdose deaths. You know what you're getting from a prescription drug, but not from heroin bought on the street. I believe that all this fuss about out-of-control prescription drugs is a big smokescreen to cover for what is overwhelmingly an epidemic of deaths from heroin overdoses. Most of that heroin comes from Afghanistan and the producers are protected by our government.

To which “Pathologist, MD,” replied:

You are exactly spot-on correct. I've been saying this for over two years to deaf/blind ears/eyes including the CDC who's just fine with their bogus statistics. A competent high school math student should be able to debunk CDC stats which are hyperbole and designed for one thing - the addictionologists who've taken over at the CDC (like Andrew Kolodny - a psychiatrist/addictionologist who worked with Tom Frieden while they were together in NYC before Friedenbecame head of the CDC). If anyone will do a bit of research, instead of getting to the root causes of this problem, a band of zealots took over the CDC so-called 'prescription drug epidemic' and embellished everything in the language of addiction when only a small fraction of legitimate chronic pain patients have ANY problems with addiction issues (around 5%). Instead, they inflate numbers and create problems for patients while doing nothing for the real problem - illicit drugs and mostly young addicts. Then the major networks (like CNN and 60 minutes) pile on without doing any research whatsoever to further embellish the illegal side by taking pain medication away from legitimate patients. And NO ONE wants to hear from patients - I'm a 30 year senior in-house staff hospital physician who can't get an audience with anyone in power - they'd rather mislead everyone. Editors of major media outlets are aware of this but have chosen to take the low road and are doing nothing but making it all worse for everyone. Whether they're innumerate (bad at math) or prefer hyperbole, it's all the same. Misinformation on a grand scale and screwing over patients. How honorable.

Ignoring for the moment the last point in my letter, that most of the heroin behind the drug overdose surge is coming from Afghanistan, we can easily find support for Dr. Nass’s claim that heroin deaths are mainly behind the drug-death surge in the CDC’s own literature. 

From 2000 through 2013, the age-adjusted rate for drug-poisoning deaths involving heroin nearly quadrupled from 0.7 per 100,000 in 2000 to 2.7 per 100,000 in 2013. During this 14-year period, the age-adjusted rate showed an average increase of 6% per year from 2000 through 2010, followed by a larger average increase of 37% per year from 2010 through 2013…

Several factors related to death investigation and reporting may affect measurement of death rates involving specific drugs. For example, toxicological tests to determine the types of drugs present may vary by jurisdiction. Measurement errors related to these factors are more likely to affect substance-specific death rates than the overall drug-poisoning death rate. In 2013, 22% of drug-poisoning deaths did not include information on the specific types of drugs involved. Some of these deaths could potentially involve heroin or opioid analgesics.

Metabolic breakdown of heroin into morphine in the body can make it difficult to distinguish between deaths from heroin and deaths from morphine based on the information on the death certificate. Some deaths reported to involve morphine could actually be deaths from heroin.  This may result in an undercount of heroin-related deaths.

A person examining the tables and charts in that report entitled “Drug-poisoning Deaths Involving Heroin: United States 2000-2013” can easily come to the conclusion that it is readily available cheap heroin that is primarily responsible for the surge in drug overdose deaths in recent years.  As Dr. Nass says in another article, “The true cause of the current heroin epidemic is massive amounts of heroin flooding into the U.S., exceeding what can be sold in our large cities, and now finding its way into even the tiniest hamlets.”

Local Reporting Better
One of those hamlets is Nashville, the county seat of my home county of Nash in North Carolina.  The chief of Nashville’s police department recently instituted a program inviting addicts to turn themselves in for treatment, with a promise of no punishment by the law.  
Of the 32 people who responded, “29 were addicted to heroin or opioid painkillers, two were crack-cocaine users and one abused alcohol.” "If you've got a thousand-percent increase here, it's not really something you can sweep under the rug," [Town Manager Hank] Raper said. "It's already here. It's not a matter of 'We'll address it when it gets her





http://ticklethewire.com

Reid: FBI Director Comey Should Be Investigated Over Russian Hacking Probe


Sen. Harry Reid.

By Steve Neavling
ticklethewire.com

Sen. Harry Reid has called on an investigation of FBI Director James Comey on Saturday, alleging he refused to reveal information about Russia’s alleged interference in the 2016 presidential election.

The Senate Democratic leader alluded to reports that the CIA had concluded people with Russian connections disclosed hacked Democratic emails to WikiLeaks to help Donald Trump win the election, the Washington Post reports.

“The FBI had this material for a long time but … Comey, who’s of course a Republican, refused to divulge this information,” Reid told MSNBC. “… He has let the country down for partisan purposes.”

Reid even compared Comey to J. Edgar Hoover and said he should be investigated by the Senate and “should be investigated by other agencies of the government including the security




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


FBI Warned Illinois Republican Party That Its Email System May Have Been Hacked


The FBI warned the Illinois Republican Party in June that hackers may have targeted GOP political email accounts.

But party officials said the FBI never mentioned potential links to the investigation of Russia trying to hack America’s political system, the Chicago Triune reports, citing the state GOP’s executive director.

Nick Klitzing said the party found of its 18 emails on DCLeaks.com, which appears to be connected to a unit controlled by Russia’s military intelligence agency, GRU.

But the emails in question largely belong to inactive or rarely used accounts andante back to 2015.

Republicans are trying to distance themselves from the hacking controversy after the CIA said there’s substantial ev



then see FBI agents caught committing voter fraud


https://books.google.com/books?id=ZesCA ... UQ6AEINDAH


https://article25news.wordpress.com/201 ... -long-ago/




http://www.thelandesreport.com/donsanto.htm

DOJ and FBI - The Landes Report
www.thelandesreport.com › donsanto
In the 1979 election, which is the focus of the deposition – Gates said he received ... Another Cincinnati Bell employee, named Bob Draise, admitted to being ...
[DOC]
Download - The Landes Report
www.thelandesreport.com › Lynn'sArticles
It appears that elements within the FBI may have not only been aware of ... Cincinnati Bell officials denied Gates' allegations that are part of a six-year-old civil suit ...
[PDF]
FROM THE votefraud.org ARCHIVES - The Landes Report
www.thelandesreport.com › Gates-Condit
May 15, 1986 - The commercial also features former Bell employee Robert Draise , who was ... Gates'deposition claims he told the FBI, the U.S. Attorney's ofice in.

Bonus Read


http://whowhatwhy.org/2016/12/18/open-l ... keup-call/

THREATS TO DEMOCRACY
DECEMBER 18, 2016 | RUSS BAKER
OPEN LETTER TO JOHN PODESTA: THIS IS YOUR FBI WAKEUP CALL
Though Incompetent, FBI is America’s Secret Police



Dear John Podesta:

I get that you’re upset about the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) role in the outcome of the recent presidential election. I read your op-ed.

You noted that the FBI had its agents crawling all over every aspect of Hillary Clinton’s email server, and that the director, James Comey, re-fanned that scandal’s flames in late October in a way that may have swung the election. Yet as you pointed out, Comey couldn’t be bothered to send a single agent to the Democratic National Committee to share the Bureau’s conclusion that the Dems were being hacked by Russians.

And you said:

Congress should more vigorously exercise its oversight to determine why the FBI responded overzealously in the Clinton case and insufficiently in the Russian case. The FBI should also clarify whether there is an ongoing investigation into Trump, his associates and their ties to Russia. If ever there were a case of ‘intense public interest,’ this is it. What’s broken in the FBI must be fixed and quickly.

But, as you are experienced in the ways of Washington, it is hard to believe that you are just discovering something “broken” in this enormously powerful institution.

Or just learning that it marches to the beat of some other drummer — never truly conforming to the dictates of the president, or the public.

Since you blew it with Hillary Clinton’s campaign, it seems self-serving to announce only now that there’s something troubling at the J. Edgar Hoover Building — and to confine your comments to the narrowest possible issue, the one that deals only with your candidate.

If you really want to do something for the country, you should take a good look at the broader and deeper — much deeper — range of problems related to an agency that is, in some respects —America’s secret police.

WhoWhatWhy has been almost alone among news organizations in asking questions about the FBI — about the frequent “mistakes” it makes, about its imperviousness to outside investigation or legitimate criticism.

These “mistakes” are inextricably linked to basic threats to democracy in America  —  and even to the physical safety of its citizens.

And we can prove it. Here are a few stories that are well-documented — and that is why they are so hair-raising:

The FBI had advance knowledge of a contingency plot to assassinate Occupy leaders in Houston and issued no warning to those in danger.

The FBI targeted friends of the Boston bombers to silence them — to keep them from revealing, among other matters, some curious Russian aspects to the story.

The FBI was warned about the future NY/NJ bomber but did nothing.

The 1993 World Trade Center bombing occurred after the bureau pulled a key informant out of the ring behind the attack. That same year, the FBI had a human source in direct contact with Osama bin Laden and discovered that he was eager to finance terror attacks on the United States.

The FBI ignored and then covered up warnings, from one of its own agents, about a 9/11 conspirator, the so-called “20th pilot”.

The FBI discovered direct ties between 9/11 hijackers and a Florida family wired into the Saudi royal family — and has covered that up ever since.

The FBI warned the former head of the Senate Intelligence Committee to stop looking into aspects of the 9/11 attacks.

The FBI had a snitch in the middle of the Oklahoma City bombing conspiracy — before the bombing.

Reports of interviews filed by FBI agents are known to be so unreliable and dishonest that in one case, a federal judge refused to be interviewed by agents unless he was allowed to review their report and make corrections.

The FBI went viciously after selected individuals whose public-spirited acts threatened corporate interests. 

The FBI sat back while its snitch directed cyber-attacks and tried to entrap others.

The Department of Justice admitted that the FBI “microscopic hair comparison unit”regularly overstated forensic matches when testifying against criminal defendants  — which may have led to wrongful convictions in hundreds of cases.

Instead of correcting the problems they exposed, the FBI punished agents who quietly brought those problems to their attention, and who became whistleblowers only as a last resort.

Half a century ago, the FBI hyped false claims about Lee Harvey Oswald in order to connect Fidel Castro to the assassination of John F. Kennedy. 

The FBI continues to withhold evidence related to Pearl Harbor 75 years later. At the time, Hoover had been informed of a “general investigative delinquency in the field during the period immediately prior to and subsequent to Pearl Harbor.” But Hoover pointed the finger at others.

And that’s just a sampling.

***

Curious why the FBI still holds its vaunted and enormously powerful position atop the American establishment after so many egregious “missteps”? Why J. Edgar Hoover’s ghost has never been exorcised from the place?

In part, the blame rests with the media, which has been complicit with the FBI by continuously presenting the FBI in a falsely flattering light from its inception until now.

And in part, it rests with Democrats who wear the mantle of reformers, but perpetually play it safe, and avoid asking tough questions or demanding change.

As for Republicans, they — with the exception of Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley — have never shown the slightest interest. Indeed, the GOP has long viewed the FBI as a reliable ally with shared values.

With Trump’s election, we may have a better sense why.



https://www.google.com/search?q=fbi+age ... sQ_AUIBigC

Feds were in no hurry to investigate $2M check's alleged ties to Reid ...
Salt Lake Tribune
State and federal agents may have waited nearly three years to pursue financial ... (DPS) agent Scott Nesbitt, who worked alongside the FBI during a multiyear ...





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

NEW FILES REVEAL US SOLD ARGENTINA MILITARY AIRCRAFT TO DUMP BODIES IN OCEAN
Published: December 17, 2016





Heat is Online
http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencen ... story.html


Atmospheric rivers fueled by climate change could decimate wild oysters in San Francisco Bay



http://www.cnbc.com/2016/12/18/fbi-agen ... er-us.html

FBI agent leaked insider trading probe involving gambler, pro golfer
CNBC-
U.S. prosecutors said on Friday that an FBI agent had confessed to being a "significant source" of leaks to journalists covering an insider trading probe involving ...


http://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/t ... st-look-at


Trump smart to be skeptical of FBI, CIA — just look at their track record
The Hill (blog)-
The FBI knew about but did not pursue the eventual hijackers. ... J. Edgar Hoover, head of Americas' FBI, apparently didn't trust the agent and declined to pass ...





https://www.muckrock.com/project/subjec ... -files-10/

From Abbie Hoffman to Malcolm X, Ol' Dirty Bastard to the Insane Clown Posse, FBI files read like a veritable Who's Who of the 20th Century. This project aims to sift through the hundreds of thousands of agency archival material we've managed to get released, so we can better understand why the FBI Bureau had an eye on these people - and through that, better understand who they're keeping tabs on today.




https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/201 ... california

California
Police say 73-year-old shot by officer had crucifix that was mistaken for gun
Francisco Serna was killed in Bakersfield, California after police responded to a 911 call from Serna’s neighbor claiming that he was armed with a gun



http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/off ... -1.2911148



Cop in fatal wrong-way crash was full of beer
BY GRAHAM RAYMAN
December 14, 2016, 10:47 PM


http://www.nydailynews.com/news/crime/w ... -1.2915464


-Oregon trooper convicted of abusing son still owns his gun
BY ELIZABETH ELIZALDE
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS Sunday, December 18, 2016, 7:46 PM




Susan SurfTone to release new single “A Mess Of Blues” on ...
Guitar Girl Mag-
In addition, the former FBI agent turned surf-guitarist and singer/songwriter will be releasing her new EP in the Spring of 2017. RELATED STORY: Susan ...






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



Alameda County fires sheriff's deputies who are charged with beating a man with batons



https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01MQUOF65/re ... =zak+mucha

Emotional Abuse: A manual for self-defense Kindle Edition
by Zak Mucha (Author), Joel Dvoskin (Introduction),




be written.”
*

Like any self-defense, we have to first identify “what hurts.” We have to recognize our own pain.

We have been socialized to believe emotional abuse is not serious. We have been taught emotional abuse itself is nothing more than “hurt feelings” and there is no “real” evidence other than the victim’s complaints. And if the only evidence is the victim’s complaints, we wrongly justify, there is no way to verify whether a person was “actually hurt.” The victim of





https://consortiumnews.com/2016/12/18/a ... n-america/


A Spy Coup in America?
December 18, 2016

Exclusive: As the Electoral College assembles, U.S. intelligence agencies are stepping up a campaign to delegitimize Donald Trump as a Russian stooge, raising concerns about a spy coup in America, reports Robert Parry.


By Robert Parry

As Official Washington’s latest “group think” solidifies into certainty – that Russia used hacked Democratic emails to help elect Donald Trump – something entirely different may be afoot: a months-long effort by elements of the U.S. intelligence community to determine who becomes the next president.

I was told by a well-placed intelligence source some months ago that senior leaders of the Obama administration’s intelligence agencies – from the CIA to the FBI – were deeply concerned about either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump ascending to the presidency. And, it’s true that intelligence officials often come to see themselves as the stewards of America’s fundamental interests, sometimes needing to protect the country from dangerous passions of the public or from inept or corrupt political leaders.


CIA Director John Brennan addresses officials at the Agency’s headquarters in Langley, Virginia. (Photo credit: CIA)
It was, after all, a senior FBI official, Mark Felt, who – as “Deep Throat” – guided The Washington Post’s Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein in their Watergate investigation into the criminality of President Richard Nixon. And, I was told by former U.S. intelligence officers that they wanted to block President Jimmy Carter’s reelection in 1980 because they viewed him as ineffectual and thus not protecting American global interests.

It’s also true that intelligence community sources frequently plant stories in major mainstream publications that serve propaganda or political goals, including stories that can be misleading or entirely false.

What’s Going On?

So, what to make of what we have seen over the past several months when there have been a series of leaks and investigations that have damaged both Clinton and Trump — with some major disclosures coming, overtly and covertly, from the U.S. intelligence community led by CIA Director John Brennan and FBI Director James Comey?


FBI Director James Comey
Some sources of damaging disclosures remain mysterious. Clinton’s campaign was hobbled by leaked emails from the Democratic National Committee – showing it undercutting Clinton’s chief rival, Sen. Bernie Sanders – and from her campaign chairman John Podesta – exposing the content of her speeches to Wall Street banks that she had tried to hide from the voters and revealing the Clinton Foundation’s questionable contacts with foreign governments.

Clinton – already burdened with a reputation for secrecy and dishonesty – suffered from the drip, drip, drip of releases from WikiLeaks of the DNC and Podesta emails although it remains unclear who gave the emails to WikiLeaks. Still, the combination of the two email batches added to public suspicions about Clinton and reminded people why they didn’t trust her.

But the most crippling blow to Clinton came from FBI Director Comey in the last week of the campaign when he reopened and then re-closed the investigation into whether she broke the law with her sloppy handling of classified material in her State Department emails funneled through a home server.

Following Comey’s last-minute revival of the Clinton email controversy, her poll numbers fell far enough to enable Trump to grab three normally Democratic states – Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin – enough to give him a victory in the Electoral College.

Taking Down Trump

However, over the past few weeks, the U.S. intelligence community, led by CIA Director Brennan and seconded by FBI Director Comey, has tried to delegitimize Trump by using leaks to the mainstream U.S. news media to pin the release of the DNC and Podesta emails on Russia and claiming that Russian President Vladimir Putin was personally trying to put Trump into the White House.


Russian President Vladimir Putin during a state visit to Austria on June 24, 2014. (Official Russian government photo)
This remarkable series of assessments from the CIA – now endorsed by the leadership of the FBI – come on the eve of the Electoral College members assembling to cast their formal votes to determine who becomes the new U.S. president. Although the Electoral College process is usually simply a formality, the Russian-hacking claims made by the U.S. intelligence community have raised the possibility that enough electors might withhold their votes from Trump to deny him the presidency.

If on Monday enough Trump electors decide to cast their votes for someone else – possibly another Republican – the presidential selection could go to the House of Representatives where, conceivably, the Republican-controlled chamber could choose someone other than Trump.

In other words, there is an arguable scenario in which the U.S. intelligence community first undercut Clinton and, secondly, Trump, seeking — however unlikely — to get someone installed in the White House considered more suitable to the CIA’s and the FBI’s views of what’s good for the country.

Who Did the Leaking?

At the center of this controversy is the question of who leaked or hacked the DNC and Podesta emails. The CIA has planted the story in The Washington Post, The New York Times and other mainstream outlets that it was Russia that hacked both the DNC and Podesta emails and slipped the material to WikiLeaks with the goal of assisting the Trump campaign. The suggestion is that Trump is Putin’s “puppet,” just as Hillary Clinton alleged during the third presidential debate.


Former British Ambassador Craig Murray
But WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has publicly denied that Russia was the source of the leaks and one of his associates, former British Ambassador to Uzbekistan Craig Murray, has suggested that the DNC leak came from a “disgruntled” Democrat upset with the DNC’s sandbagging of the Sanders campaign and that the Podesta leak came from the U.S. intelligence community.

Although Assange recently has sought to muzzle Murray’s public comments – out of apparent concern for protecting the identity of sources – Murray offered possibly his most expansive account of the sourcing during a podcast interview with Scott Horton on Dec. 13.

Murray, who became a whistleblower himself when he protested Britain’s tolerance of human rights abuses in Uzbekistan, explained that he consults with Assange and cooperates with WikiLeaks “without being a formal member of the structure.”

But he appears to have undertaken a mission for WikiLeaks to contact one of the sources (or a representative) during a Sept. 25 visit to Washington where he says he met with a person in a wooded area of American University. At the time, Murray was at American University participating in an awards ceremony for former CIA officer John Kiriakou who was being honored by a group of former Western intelligence officials, the Sam Adams Associates, named for the late Vietnam War-era CIA analyst and whistleblower Sam Adams.

Former CIA analyst Ray McGovern, a founder of the Sam Adams group, told me that Murray was “m-c-ing” the event but then slipped away, skipping a reception that followed the award ceremony.

Reading Between LInes

Though Murray has declined to say exactly what the meeting in the woods was about, he may have been passing along messages about ways to protect the source from possible retaliation, maybe even an extraction plan if the source was in some legal or physical danger.


President-elect Donald J. Trump (Photo credit: donaldjtrump.com)
Murray has disputed a report in London’s Daily Mail that he was receiving a batch of the leaked Democratic emails. “The material, I think, was already safely with WikiLeaks before I got there in September,” Murray said in the interview with Scott H


http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2016/12/64282.html


Story That Russia Does Not Want You to See: The Rosneft Share “Sale” as a Sham Transaction
Posted on December 17, 2016 by WashingtonsBlog
By John Helmer, the longest continuously serving foreign correspondent in Russia, and the only western journalist to direct his own bureau independent of single national or commercial ties. Helmer has also been a professor of political science, and an advisor to government heads in Greece, the United States, and Asia. He is the first and only member of a US presidential administration (Jimmy Carter) to establish himself in Russia. Originally published at Dances with Bears

Preface (and title above) by Naked Capitalism:

John Helmer’s site came under heavy attack as soon as he posted this story. It was not the usual DDoS attack, which can be launched by script kiddies, but a sophisticated hack aimed at the internals of his site. It succeeded in taking his site down.

This effort to quash Helmer’s story has backfired. It is being rushed into print in two different countries. The attacks had the effect of validating its importance.

As Helmer said via e-mail:

For obvious reasons, not one of the Russian agitprop sites will run it, and the Moscow Russian press cannot. Sechin is suing them for reporting the obvious.

As famous hoaxers go, Igor Sechin, the chief executive of Rosneft, Russia’s largest oil company, is at least as clever as Clever Hans, a German horse of the late 19th century.

Hans was apparently good at arithmetic. If his owner asked him to multiply three by four, he would tap his hoof twelve times. He could tell the square root of sixteen by tapping four times. He was also able to give answers to questions he hadn’t heard before. So he was a very famous horse in Germany. That was until a sceptical psychologist realized Hans would only get the answers right if his owner also knew the answers, and if the horse could see him when the questions were asked. If the owner or another questioner was invisible to the horse’s eye, Hans would fail. He even bit the psychologist after a string of tests produced wrong answers. The psychologist’s conclusion was that the horse was gifted, but not at arithmetic. Hans could detect the visual cues his questioner would give out when the horse was reaching the correct number of hoof taps, and he would stop. The owner wasn’t attempting a fraud, and Hans was exceptionally intelligent. But his calculations were a hoax.

In last week’s Rosneft share sale — the deal President Vladimir Putin has called the biggest privatization in Russia, and also the biggest oil sector sell-off in the world this year — clever Igor, like clever Hans, has proved his indubitable intelligence. But the arithmetic which the president has announced — €10.5 billion paid into the Russian state budget – is a hoax. That’s because a curtain has been drawn across all questions of where the money has come from.

In fact, Kremlin and Russian banking sources acknowledge, the money originated from the Central Bank of Russia, recycled through the Russian state banks to Rosneft and back, and finally concealed inside secret fiduciary agreements with a consortium of Glencore, the Swiss trading company, and the Qatar Investment Authority (QIA), an Arabian Gulf state agency. The agreements appear to make Glencore and QIA the owners of a 19.5% shareholding in Rosneft – when they are fiduciary shareholders – and that’s not the same thing as owners.

“The transaction has been financed by money creation by the Central Bank”, said a source close to the dealmakers. “The Central Bank can’t simply print money and give it to the federal budget. So this deal was engineered for Glencore and the Qataris to appear to be buying shares when the terms of the agreement reward them for acting as fiduciaries, but ensure they cannot vote the shares without instruction from the Russian state; that’s Mr Sechin. This means the privatization of the shares isn’t genuine. Also, three-quarters of the money going into the state budget is coming from the Central Bank.”

A Russian banker in London comments: “There’s a golden rule in Russian banking. If you fiddle around, never involve foreigners because in the end they will expose you. The announced terms of the Rosneft deal cannot stand the light of day. Inevitably, the truth will come out.” According to Swiss sources, the truth has already been demanded by the US Government of the Swiss Government, which will obtain the contracts from Glencore.

Until the start of this month, the Russian government held 69.5% of Rosneft through a wholly owned state enterprise called Rosneftegaz. British Petroleum (BP) owned 19.75%, and the National Settlement Depository, 10.36%. https://www.rosneft.com/Investors/Equit ... structure/

When Putin met Sechin on December 7 to announce the privatization sale of a 19.5% shareholding in Rosneft, it was pats on the back all round. http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/53431



Source: Kremlin, December 7, http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/53431

“[PUTIN] Mr Sechin, I would like to congratulate you on the conclusion of a privatisation deal to sell a large stake in our leading oil and gas company Rosneft: 19.5 percent. The deal was made on an upward trend in the price of oil and it therefore reflects on the value of the company itself. In this respect, the timing is very good and the overall value of the deal is significant: 10.5 billion euros…I very much hope that new investors – a consortium of the Qatar state fund and Glencore, a major international trading company – I hope that their participation in managing bodies will improve corporate procedure and the company’s transparency and will ultimately increase its capitalisation. Meanwhile, the company’s controlling stake will remain in the hands of the Russian state: over 50 percent. Overall, this is a very good result. I would like to congratulate all of you, your colleagues who have worked on it. And naturally, the question arises: when will the money come to the Russian budget?”

“[SECHIN] “This amounts to over 1 trillion rubles, which will come to the budget, including 10.5 billion euros for Rosneft’s 19.5 percent stake. The consortium that will become Rosneft’s shareholder was established by the Qatar Sovereign Wealth Fund and Glencore trading company, which is our long-standing partner. The consortium participants hold equal stakes: 50 percent each. Payment to the state budget will be made both with our own resources and with a loan organised by one of Europe’s largest banks…Overall, the privatisation of 49 percent of Rosneft in a series of transactions has earned us $30 billion, no, nearly $34 billion, which is four times more than returns from all other privatisation transactions in Russia’s oil and gas sector.”

“I am sure that the high standards of our investors and Rosneft’s transition to a new dividend payment system, which the Government has approved at 35 percent, will definitely improve the company’s capitalisation, including the state-owned stake. We estimate the state-owned stake after the transaction at approximately 80 billion rubles…Also, I would like to say that we received the necessary amount of assistance from the Government while preparing the deal.”

“[PUTIN] “The budget must receive the full sum in the ruble equivalent, in rubles.”

The London market, where Rosneft is listed, was not persuaded by the valuation of the 19.5% shareholding. By conversion of €10.5 billion into US dollars on the deal day, December 7 — $11.13 billion – the transaction figure turns out to be $300 million less than the market capitalization of Rosneft the day before at $11.43 billion. Glencore and QIA got themselves a 3% bargain.

ONE-YEAR TRAJECTORY FOR ROSNEFT SHARE PRICE



Source: https://www.bloomberg.com/quote/ROSN:LI The market capitalization of Rosneft on December 7 was $58.6 billion.

The pickup in the Rosneft share price since has followed the rise of the crude oil price. That has helped enhance the subsequent gain in the value of the foreign consortium’s side of the deal. The market value of Glencore’s and QIA’s 9.75% stakes on December 7 was $5.7 billion apiece. With the rise in Rosneft’s share price by December 13, their stakes are now worth $6.8 billion.



http://www.occurrencesforeigndomestic.com/tag/iraq/


OUT OF PRISON, BARRETT BROWN RECOMMITS HIMSELF TO AGITATING AGAINST EXISTING ORDER

After four years behind bars, journalist and activist Barrett Brown was released from federal prison on the morning of November 29, 2016, and ordered to report to a halfway house in Dallas, Texas. “I was picked up by my parents and Alex Winter and his camera crew,” Brown told Shadowproof. “They filmed me on the six-hour drive over to Dallas. We had to get to the halfway house by 4:00 pm, or it would be an escape charge. So, we barely made it.” “[The Bureau of Prisons] originally gave me less time than was necessary to get there, and I had to go in there and forcibly get them to give me an hour more,” he said. “They also told me falsely that I could go in any car, and it wouldn’t be any problem, when in fact I could actually go back to jail for not being in a registered car.” SOURCE: SHADOWPROOF






https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/201 ... il-company

US politics
Leak reveals Rex Tillerson was director of Bahamas-based US-Russian oil firm
Documents from tax haven will raise more questions over suitability of Donald Trump’s pick for US secretary of state






http://www.sltrib.com/home/4721700-155/ ... o-hurry-to

Mormon FBI agents were in no hurry to investigate $2M check's alleged ties to Reid ...

State and federal agents may have waited nearly three years to pursue financial ... (DPS) agent Scott Nesbitt, who worked alongside the FBI during a multiyear ...


By JENNIFER DOBNER AND TOM HARVEY | The Salt Lake Tribune
First Published Dec 18 2016 06:51AM    •    Last Updated Dec 18 2016 07:17 am

Bonus Read

http://whowhatwhy.org/2016/12/21/berlin ... ft-behind/

DEEP POLITICS, THREATS TO DEMOCRACY
DECEMBER 21, 2016 | WHOWHATWHY STAFF
BERLIN TRUCK TERROR SUSPECT AND THE CURIOUS MATTER OF ID PAPERS LEFT BEHIND
Not the First Time a Terror Suspect Apparently Left a Paper Trail -- or Was Previously Known


Photo credit: Adapted by WhoWhatWhy from DutchGamingCommunity DGC / YouTube, Bundesrepublik Deutschland / Wikimedia and Screenshot
Today, WhoWhatWhy has seen heavy traffic coming from Google searches that point to a story we ran almost two years ago. Why the sudden interest? It took us only a moment to discover the connection: We had written about the odd phenomenon of terrorists repeatedly leaving ID papers behind at the scene. And now, with the Berlin truck attack, we see yet another such example.

We also see that, in a pattern we have previously reported on with other terror incidents, the suspect was already known to authorities — had even been in custody, but was released.

From CNN:

The Berlin truck attack suspect had been arrested in August with forged documents on his way to Italy but was released by a judge, a German security official tells CNN.

The suspect’s identity papers were found inside the truck used in Monday’s attack on a Christmas market, which left 12 people dead, German security officials said.

The suspect was known to German security services as someone in contact with radical Islamist groups, and had been assessed as posing a risk, Interior Minister of North Rhine-Westphalia Ralf Jaeger told reporters.

The suspect was believed to have entered Germany in July 2015, Jaeger said. His asylum request was refused in June, and Tunisian authorities were informed when the deportation process started.

What does it all mean? That’s for you to decide. You can start by reading the original article, below.

Original story:
One intriguing—if barely discussed—aspect of the Paris massacre was the quick progress authorities made in their investigation.

According to CNN, this was thanks to a staggering error—by one of the two now-dead alleged perpetrators. The man, Said Kouachi, reportedly left his identification card in the abandoned getaway vehicle. “It was their only mistake,” Dominique Rizet, police and justice consultant for CNN-affiliate BFMTV, opined.


Said Kouachi’s ID card. Allegedly found in the getaway car.

Nonetheless, it was a most curious mistake.

After all, this is the same man who went to such trouble to seemingly hide his identity by wearing a mask.

***

Intriguingly, such apparent gaffes have marked other watershed violence. Consider these examples, and draw your own conclusion:

The Bundle of James Earl Ray: The accused killer of Martin Luther King escaped from a prison shortly before the attack, and left several items on the sidewalk near the assassination site—in a bundle that included his rifle, binoculars, clothing, his prison radio, and a newspaper clipping revealing where King would be staying.


Bundle of evidence dropped by James Earl Ray.

The Wallet of Lee Harvey Oswald: The alleged assassin of John F. Kennedy and killer of Officer J.D.Tippit purportedly dropped his wallet, which was found at the scene of Tippit’s murder. To some, this appeared a little too neat. In any case, original law enforcement reports with this scenario were almost immediately replaced by another version: that the police took the wallet from him after he was arrested. (See “Assignment: Oswald” by former FBI agent James P. Hosty.)


Oswald’s military ID, said to have been stained by FBI fingerprinting fluid.


Contents of Oswald’s wallet.

The Visa of Satam al-Suqami: This identify document of one of the alleged 9/11 hijackers somehow survived unscathed a few blocks from the twin towers, though the plane itself was virtually obliterated.


Visa belonging to Satam al-Suqami

The Passports belonging to Ziad Jarrah and Saeed al-Ghamdi: The passports of two alleged hijackers of United Airlines Flight 93 supposedly survived the fiery crash in Pennsylvania that left the aircraft itself charred and widely scattered—with one passport entirely intact.


Remains of Ziad Jarrah’s visa.


Passport of Saeed al-Ghamdi



http://mattofboston.com/general-james-m ... ent-71504/

General James “Mad Hog” Mattis: A Typical Trump Appointment
December 24, 2016
As a Marine my initial impression was that Mad Hog was a good appointment as secretary of defense. I had read somewhere after it was first announced that he was not like the other generals who left service in retirement. He was substantially different. A bachelor and a scholar of military history. The article I read spoke of his independence and unwillingness to be like those who sold their souls to the industries surviving on military contracts.

I heard he had a stellar reputation. He reportedly served the American people from 1969 to 2013 a period of 44 years. It was actually 41 years because he did not go on active service until 1972. He retired on May 22, 2013, three and a half years ago. I pictured him sitting at home studying his books and living on his $237,144 yearly pension while shaking his head at those other greedy bastards who sold themselves to the highest bidder. A true patriot and man of the people.

Then I learned the truth. It turned my stomach to learn he is probably worse than the others. He has turned himself into an industry whore seeking to benefit the people employing him and himself by using his military connections to get contracts for his new bosses. I feel so bad that he went for the big bucks. I now question where his loyalties lie. What will do once he has control of the defense department?

Just recently at a friend’s house in Maine I was telling how great it was that Maddis had been nominated for the position. I explained how after he served in the Marines he was not tempted to sell himself to some private industry so he could use his connections with his underlings to get good deals for himself and his company.

Maybe it is just me that gets turned off by these people constantly ripping off the taxpayers by using inside connections to help their new best friend get contracts they can not get competing on the merits. I know it is common practice. Inside dealings will become more common under the president-elect but it still turns me off seeing all the undeserving pigs at the government trough.

Are you aware as noted here the Pentagon has buried “an internal study that exposed $125 billion in administrative waste in its business operations.” The Pentagon spends $134 billion dollars a year not on preparation for war but on “core business operations such as accounting, human resources, logistics and property management.” You want to know why. It’s because of hogs like Mattis.

Mad Hog went to work for General Dynamics three months after retiring gaining a position on its board of directors. General Dynamics is a big military contractor and as noted here “a $30-billion colossus that heavily relies on Pentagon contracts overseen by the Defense Secretary.” which is vying to get its share of the budget. He has received from General Dynamics in his three years almost $600,000 in salary and $900, 00 in company stock.

You know one thing, General Dynamics is not a charity. It expects a good return on its money. While working there Mad Hog went before Congress saying the caps on spending were jeopardizing our national security.

It gets worse. He was pushing a company’s product while in a command position and then went to work for the company, Theranos, two months after retiring. In 2012 while the head of operations in the Middle East and Central Asia he pressured the Army to buy Theranos blood testing equipment which had not been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for use. Last year Theranos was warned by the FDA to stop using an uncleared blood collection device.

Mattis and the president of Theranos 27-year-old Eizabeth Holmes (shown above) met in 2011 at a Marine Memorial event. Mattis, was smitten. Despite being busy overseeing the war in Afghanistan as commander of the U.S. Central Command, he expressed interest in testing Theranos’s technology in combat areas, according to the e-mails. “I’ve met with my various folks and we’re kicking this into overdrive,” Mattis wrote to Holmes in June 2012. “I’m convinced that your invention will be a game-changer for us and I want it to be given the opportunity for a demonstration in-theater soonest.”

Mattis knew nothing about the field. Theranos “was running most of its tests on devices made by other firms instead of its own “breakthrough” technology.” Here you can read more. There’s more here and here.

I had Mattis on a pedestal until I saw he was just another military hog. Bad enough he signed with General Dynamics but what about while in charge pushing an untested device to be used in combat when lives were on the line. I wonder what and how Theranos paid him.

I guess you could say that Ike was very prescient. Does capitalism really ruin a man’s soul? Are there no good men left?







Link du jour



https://wronghands1.com/gallery-june-2011/

http://www.crownofmaineproductions.com/


https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/gal ... us-gallery




http://www.nydailynews.com/news/nationa ... -1.2920020

Black family brutalized by Texas cop for reporting assault

Thursday, December 22, 2016, 9:33 AM


http://www.waynemadsenreport.com/articles/20161221


December 21-22, 2016 -- Obama's Halloween scare for America: he threatened Putin over the "Red Phone" with war
publication date: Dec 21, 2016
Obama almost became the final president of the United States on October 31, 2016.


http://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/Je ... 67875.html

Several police officers with the Jersey City Police Department are under federal criminal investigation in connection with an alleged private security and no-show job scandal.
Sources familiar with the investigation said as many as 10 police officers could be charged with corruption early next year.


Jersey City police officers can work security jobs while off duty, but private business must hire them through the city and pay extra administrative fees to the city. But a group of officers allegedly ran their own security operation, according to investigators, at times demanding cash payments from construction firms to avoid city rules and fees.
In many cases, off-duty officers were paid even though they did not show up at sites where private security


http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainmen ... -1.2921353

All the celebrities who turned down performing at inauguration
BY NICOLE BITETTE
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS Friday, December 23, 2016, 10:48 AM



http://www.nydailynews.com/news/nationa ... -1.2921407

Son of Ohio cop dies after shooting himself with father's gun



Updated: Friday, December 23, 2016, 1:09 PM





http://www.nydailynews.com/news/nationa ... -1.2920815

L.I. officer commits suicide three days before Christmas: cops



Friday, December 23, 2016, 12:08 AM





http://www.nydailynews.com/life-style/r ... -1.2921313

Rockettes get Scrooged as they're told to dance for Trump
or else!
Friday, December 23, 2016, 9:39 AM





nx
Brooklyn
Manhattan

http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/bro ... -1.2922017

Cop busted after posting photo of NYC family cuffed on Snapchat
December 23, 2016, 11:13 PM




http://www.nydailynews.com/news/nationa ... -1.2921532


Texas teen who recorded violent arrests of mom, sister speaks out
Friday, December 23, 2016, 1:42 PM


Mother and daughter who were arrested speak in front of police station

The black Texas teenager who recorded video of a white officer violently arresting her little sister and mom said she was scared for her life and wanted to document the altercation in case the cop pulled out his gun.

“We see police kill people every day on video. And that could have easily been my mother, myself or my 15-year-old sister,” Brea Hymond, 19, said at a news conference Thursda



http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/off ... -1.2922477

Off-duty NYPD cop accidentally shoots himself in the hand

NEW YORK DAILY NEWS Saturday, December 24, 2016, 10:55 AM



The 24-year-old cop called 911 and paramedics took him to Elmhurst Hospital, where he was in stable condition. (VIC NICASTRO/FOR NEW YORK DAILY NEWS )
An off-duty police officer accidentally shot himself in the hand in Queens early Saturday, officials said.

The 24-year-old cop was sitting in his car at Steinway St. and 23rd Ave. in Astoria when the gun discharged





http://whowhatwhy.org/2016/12/22/classi ... ter-guess/


WAR & PEACE
DECEMBER 22, 2016 | RYAN MCNAMARA
CLASSIC WHO: IRAN IS NOT THE BIGGEST NUCLEAR CHEATER — GUESS WHO IS

Photo Credit: Steve Jurvetson / Wikimedia adapted by WhoWhatWhy
Many leading conservative voices are telling President-elect Donald Trump to trash the international nuclear deal with Iran.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he looks forward to speaking to Trump about “what to do about this bad deal.”

Rep. Mike Pompeo (R-KS), nominated as director of the Central Intelligence Agency, said: “I look forward to rolling back this disastrous deal with the world’s largest state sponsor of terrorism.”

Retired General James Mattis, Trump’s choice for Secretary of Defense, said, “The Iranian regime, in my mind, is the single most enduring threat to stability and peace in the Middle East.”

Former Defense Intelligence Agency Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, Trump’s choice for national security adviser, said: “I don’t trust Iran. … What I’ve seen over certainly the last 10 years, if not the last 30, they are not a nation to be trusted. … Stop all engines on this nuclear deal. Take a step back. Really take a deep-dive look at everything going on in the Middle East.”

We suggest they also take a “deep-dive look” at the US track record when it comes to complying with these kinds of deals. See our story below, first published August 4, 2015.

Trump, who fancies himself a master negotiator, is also an expert when it comes to not honoring agreements. None of this bodes well for US-Iranian relations and the future of a deal involving six countries that took years to craft.

**********************************************************************
If you think Iran presents the greatest danger of nuclear war today, think again.

It is none other than the United States that has consistently violated the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty—and it’s these violations that are one of the main drivers of the spread of nuclear weapons and the threat of nuclear war across the world.

While some worry about inspecting Iran’s nuclear facilities, Americans should be pushing first for inspecting something nearer to home: the embarrassing and dangerous record of nuclear treaty violations committed by the US and its fellow nuclear states.

And there’s something else that bears closer inspection: how the mainstream media’s misreporting about nuclear armaments played a key role in justifying the Iraq war and other recent conflicts.




http://bordc.org



Meet Trump’s Worst Nominees For Civil Liberties


December 19, 2016 – Throughout the campaign, President-elect Donald Trump made shocking promises to create a Muslim registry, championed stop and frisk, and in general promised us more profiling, more surveillance, and less protections for civil liberties. His cabinet nom… [Read More]
What Does Gen. John Kelly Mean for Civil Liberties?


December 19, 2016 – DHS is responsible for a number of areas where civil liberties are concerned. It oversees immigration enforcement, as well as, the US response to the border. DHS has been implicated in the monitoring of domestic social movements. It is therefore highly inappropriate that Kelly, given his background of human rights abuses and anti-civil libertarian views, would be named to head the DHS.

Heat Is Online

http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-hot ... story.html
NATION
The hottest year in history sees the election of a new president who questions climate science

https://robertscribbler.com/2016/12/22/ ... ble-power/

This is What The Resistance Looks Like — Cities, States and Nations Run on 100 Percent Renewable Power
The sparks of resistance to a harmful domination of energy supplies by the fossil fuel industry are out there. They are the lights of clean power generation blooming like stars across a world blackened by smokestack emissions and imperiled by climate change.

****

In the U.S., backward-looking republicans like Donald Trump, Paul Ryan, James Inhofe and Mitch McConnell appear to be gearing up to fight against both a necessary and helpful science that provides us with a life-saving awareness of the threats posed by human caused climate change and a highly beneficial renewable energy renaissance that has now gone global. Trump’s presidential cabinet is filled to the brim with climate change deniers and fossil fuel pushers. Pledges to de-fund climate science, implied threats to fire employees at the Department of Energy who worked on climate and renewable energy related issues, and belligerent boasting about dismantling much-needed policies like the Clean Power Plan, EPA fuel efficiency standards, and the Paris Climate Summit abound.

It’s the great loud, sad, and ignorance-filled reaction against a better future. A political and legislative backlash funded by oil, gas, and coal company campaign donations, advertising dollars, and indirect media investments. One that seeks to remove the possibility for a time when energy does not pollute the air or water — resulting in 7 million premature deaths each year globally. For one when



Blink Tank


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






http://www.seattletimes.com/nation-worl ... heir-eyes/



Homeland Security agents took $15M in bribes, closed their eyes
The Seattle Times-
Homeland Security agents took $15M in bribes, closed their eyes ... And Mark Morgan



http://www.wvgazettemail.com/news-cops- ... ing-claims

Feds look into retired WV trooper’s beating claims
Kate White , Staff Writer
December 28, 2016








https://www.scmagazine.com/federal-inte ... le/628502/



by Larry Jaffee
December 28, 2016
Federal intelligence agencies sued over Russian Interference in U.S.






A quick response to the FOIA requests is not expected.
Two transparency gadflies are suing in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C. four federal intelligence agencies to disclose all evidence related to alleged interference by the Russian government in the 2016 presidential election.
Separately, the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) has filed a separate FOIA request on the same topic.
Invoking the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), Vice investigative journalist Jason Leopold and Massachusetts Institute of Technology academic Ryan Shapiro in their lawsuit are seeking judicial relief to force the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) to release publicly all records that informed the highest levels of the U.S. government that there had been tampering with the electoral process. The defendants include the FBI, CIA and the Department of Justice.
“The American public absolutely deserves to know what role Russian interference played in President-elect Trump's victory over Hillary Clinton, and how U.S. intelligence agencies responded to any such Russian interference,” Shapiro said in a statement. “





JonBenet Ramsey's Brother Sues CBS for $750 Million Over 'The ...
SFGate-
... James R. Fitzgerald, a retired FBI agent; Stanley B. Burke, a retired FBI agent; Dr. Werner Spitz, a forensic pathologist; and Dr. Henry Lee, a forensic scientist






http://louisianarecord.com/stories/5110 ... ation-suit

Police captain accused of tampering with evidence at murder ...
The Louisiana Record-
Hayes' attorneys initially refused to identify their witness to anyone, including the FBI. However, Criminal District Judge Camille Buras ordered the witness to be ...






https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20161 ... -use.shtml

South Carolina Legislators Introduce Three Bills Targeting Police Stingray Use
from the some-fullwits-hidden-among-the-halfwits dept
It's really, really difficult to give the South Carolina legislature any credit whatsoever. In the past few years, it has offered up bills that:
- required journalists to register with the government before enjoy their First Amendment rights (to make a point about the Second Amendment)
- criminalized profanity in public forums (including the internet)
- criminalized the recording of criminal acts
- required computer sellers to install default porn blockers in devices (that could be removed for $20)
The track record of this state's legislature is less than stellar. Hell, it's less than passable. 1/5 would not re-elect.
But there are still a few legislators with good ideas trying to do good things within the confines of a state where adultery is still considered a criminal act. The Tenth Amendment Center briefly highlights three new bills targeting law enforcement Stingray device use, all with their own merits.
The first, brought by state rep J. Todd Rutherford, is the most extreme of the three.
The legislation would prohibit any state or local law enforcement agency in South Carolina from purchasing cell site simulators, commonly known as “stingrays.”
At this point, use of these devices by South Carolina law enforcement is unconfirmed. If, indeed, no agencies are in possession of IMSI catchers, this bill would maintain the status quo. If agencies are already in possession of the devices, the bill would require these agencies





http://m.mondovisione.com/media-and-res ... 0-million/

Another DOJ fix for Cable Corp

DOJ knocks $20 million off minimum fine.



U.S. Department Of Justice: General Cable Corporation Agrees To Pay $20 Million Penalty For Foreign Bribery Schemes In Asia And Africa
General Cable Corporation, a Kentucky-based manufacturer and distributor of cable and wire, entered into a non-prosecution agreement and agreed to pay a $20 million penalty, reflecting a 50 percent reduction off the bottom of the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines fine range, to resolve the government’s investigation into improper payments to government officials in Angola, Bangladesh, China, Indonesia and Thailand to corruptly gain business



http://www.thelibertyconservative.com/s ... ent-calls/


Secret Law Enforcement Cell-Phone Surveillance System Can Jam ...
The Liberty Conservative-
The FBI reportedly has 194 Stingray devices in use; the Marshals Service has 70; Immigration and Customs Enforcement has 59, and the Internal Revenue ...







http://www.theolympian.com/opinion/lett ... 48089.html

Washington Times
Why FBI Director Comey should be in jail
The Olympian
When FBI Director James Comey informed Congress that he had discovered new material related to Hillary Clinton's private email server, he drew sharp







http://cbs12.com/news/local/4-deputies- ... an-4-weeks

Behind the Badge: 4 PBSO deputies arrested in less than 4 weeks
WPEC-
The fourth was done by the FBI with the help of the sheriff's office. The Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office released the following statement: “The Palm Beach ...






FBI threatens cop Mark Dougan who blew whistle on PBSO cop corruption
Here is his new websites


http://PBSOTalk.ru/

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




http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/the-s ... le/2610425

Secret Service is its own worst enemy

By GARY BYRNE • 12/27/16 7:00 PM

On Inauguration Day, the extensive premises of Washington, D.C., will





http://spartacus-educational.com/JFKSinvestSS.htm


American History  > The Assassination of JFK  >
JFK Theory: FBI/Secret Service

After the death of John F. Kennedy, his deputy, Lyndon B. Johnson, was appointed president. He immediately set up a commission to "ascertain, evaluate and report upon the facts relating to the assassination of the late President John F. Kennedy." The seven man commission was headed by Chief Justice Earl Warren and included Gerald Ford, Allen W. Dulles, John J. McCloy, Richard B. Russell, John S. Cooper and Thomas H. Boggs.

Lyndon B. Johnson also commissioned a report on the assassination from J. Edgar Hoover. Two weeks later the Federal Bureau of Investigation produced a 500 page report claiming that Lee Harvey Oswald was the sole assassin and that there was no evidence of a conspiracy. The report was then passed to the Warren Commission. Rather than conduct its own independent investigation, the commission relied almost entirely on the FBI report.

Mark North (Act of Treason) and George O'Toole (The Assassination Tapes) both believe that J. Edgar Hoover either knew of plans to kill Kennedy and did nothing to stop them, or he helped to organize the assassination. In his book, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK (1993) Peter Dale Scottprovides information that Hoover and the Federal Bureau of Investigation helped to cover-up the real identity of the people who assassinated John F. Kennedy.

In his book, Best Evidence, David Lifton claims that members of the Secret Service agents were involved in the killing of Kennedy. This included providing the assassins with a good opportunity to kill Kennedy. Lifton was highly critical of the behaviour of William Greer, Roy Kellerman and Winston G. Lawson during the assassination. Lifton believes that after the assassination of Kennedy they hijacked the body in order to alter the corpse. In the book, Mortal Error, Bonar Menninger, claims that SS agent George Hickey killed Kennedy by accident.


James H. Fetzer believes the Secret Service played a role in the assassination. In his book, Assassination Science, he writes: "I have discovered at least fifteen indications of Secret Service complicity in the assassination of John F. Kennedy, from the absence of protective military presence to a lack of coverage of open windows, to motorcycles out of position, to Secret Service agents failing to ride on the Presidential limousine, to the vehicles arranged in an improper sequence, to the utilization of an improper motorcade route, to the driver bringing the vehicle to a halt after bullets began to be fired, to the almost total lack of response by Secret Service agents, to the driver washing out the back seat with a bucket and sponge at Parkland Hospital, to the car being dismantled and rebuilt (on LBJ's orders), to the driver giving false testimony to the Warren Commission, to the windshields being switched, to the autopsy photographs being taken into custody before they were developed".


Clint Hill, Roy Kellerman, and William Greer after
giving evidence to the Warren Commission (March, 1964)
(P1) William Manchester, The Death of a President (1967)

There was a sudden, sharp, shattering sound. Various individuals heard it differently. Jacqueline Kennedy believed it was a motorcycle noise. Curry was under the impression that someone had fired a railroad torpedo. Ronald Fischer and Bob Edwards, assuming that it was a backfire, chuckled. Most of the hunters in the motorcade - Sorrels, Connally, Yarborough, Gonzalez, Albert Thomas - instinctively identified it as rifle fire.

But the White House Detail was confused. Their experience in outdoor shooting was limited to two qualification courses a year on a range in Washington's National Arboretum. There they heard only their own weapons, and they were unaccustomed to the bizarre effects that are created when small-arms fire echoes among unfamiliar structures - in this case, the buildings of Dealey Plaza. Emory Roberts recognized Oswald's first shot as a shot. So did Youngblood, whose alert response may have saved Lyndon Johnson's life. They were exceptions. The men in Halfback were bewildered. They glanced around uncertainly. Lawson, Kellerman, Greer, Ready, and Hill all thought that a firecracker had been exploded. The fact that this was a common reaction is no mitigation. It was the responsibility of James J. Rowley, Chief of the Secret Service, and Jerry Behn, Head of the White House Detail, to see that their agents were trained to cope with precisely this sort of emergency. They were supposed to be picked men, honed to a matchless edge. It was comprehensible that Roy Truly should dismiss the first shot as a cherry bomb. It was even fathomable that Patrolman James M. Chaney, mounted on a motorcycle six feet from the Lincoln, should think that another machine had backfired. Chaney was an ordinary policeman, not a Presidential bodyguard. The protection of the Chief Executive, on the other hand, was the profession of Secret Service agents. They existed for no other reason. Apart from Clint Hill - and perhaps Jack Ready, who started to step off the right running board and was ordered back by Roberts - the behaviour of the men in the follow-up car was unresponsive. Even more tragic was the perplexity of Roy Kellerman, the ranking agent in Dallas, and Bill Greer, who was under Kellerman's supervision. Kellerman and Greer were in a position to take swift evasive action, and for five terrible seconds they were immobilized.

Why was William Manchester critical of the way the Secret Service responded to the shooting at the motorcade in the Dealey Plaza?



Assassination of John F. Kennedy Encyclopedia

(P2) William Greer interviewed by Arlen Specter on behalf of the Warren Commission (9th March, 1964)

Arlen Specter: Now, how many shots, or how many noises have you just described that you heard?

William Greer: I know there was three that I heard - three. But I cannot remember any more than probably three. I know there was three anyway that I heard.

Arlen Specter: Do you have an independent recollection at this moment of having heard three shots at that time?

William Greer: I knew that after I heard the second one, that is when I looked over my shoulder, and I was conscious that there was something wrong, because that is when I saw Governor Connally. And when I turned around again, to the best of my recollection there was another one, right immediately after.

Arlen Specter: To the best of your ability to recollect and estimate, how much time elapsed from the first noise which you have described as being similar to the backfire of a motor vehicle until you heard the second noise?

William Greer: It seems a matter of seconds, I really couldn't say. Three or four seconds.

Arlen Specter: How much time elapsed, to the best of your ability to estimate and recollect, between the time of the second noise and the time of the third noise?

William Greer: The last two seemed to be just simultaneously, one behind the other, but I don't recollect just how much, how many seconds were between the two. I couldn't really say.

Arlen Specter: Describe as best you can the types of sound of the second report, as distinguished from the first noise which you said was similar to a motorcycle backfire?

William Greer: The second one didn't sound any different much than the first one but I kind of got, by turning around, I don't know whether I got a little concussion of it, maybe when it hit something or not, I may have gotten a little concussion that made me think there was something different to it. But so far as the noise is concerned, I haven't got any memory of any difference in them at all...

Arlen Specter: Did you step on the accelerator before, simultaneously or after Mr. Kellerman instructed you to accelerate?

William Greer: It was about simultaneously.

According to William Greer, how did he react when he first heard the shots being fired at President John F. Kennedy?

(P3) Roy Kellerman interviewed by Arlen Specter, John S. Cooper and Gerald Ford on behalf of the Warren Commission (9th March, 1964)

Arlen Specter: When was it that Mrs. Kennedy made the statement which you have described, "My God, what are they doing?"

Roy Kellerman: This occurred after the flurry of shots.

Arlen Specter: At that time you looked back and saw Special Agent Hill across the trunk of the car, had your automobile accelerated by that time?

Roy Kellerman: Tremendously so; yes.

Does Roy Kellerman agree with the testimony of William Greer?

(P4) Michael L. Kurtz, Crime of the Century: The Kennedy Assassination From a Historians Perspective (1982)

The Zapruder and other films and photographs of the assassination clearly reveal the utter lack of response by Secret Service agents Roy Kellerman and William Greer, who were in the front seat of the presidential limousine. After the first two shots, Greer actually slowed the vehicle to less than five miles an hour. Kellerman merely sat in the front seat, seemingly oblivious to the shooting. In contrast, Secret Service Agent Rufus Youngblood responded instantly to the first shot, and before the head shots were fired, had covered Vice-President Lyndon Johnson with his body.

Trained to react instantaneously, as in the attempted assassinations of President Gerald Ford by Lynette Fromme and Sara Jane Moore and of President Ronald Reagan by John Warnock Hinckley, the Secret Service agents assigned to protect President Kennedy simply neglected their duty. The reason for their neglect remains one of the more intriguing mysteries of the assassination.

Does Michael L. Kurtz agree with the accounts of William Greer (P2) and Roy Kellerman (P3)?

(P5) Joachim Joesten, How Kennedy Was Killed (1968)

One of the most eminent authorities on the subject, former Secret Service chief U.E. Baughman, who headed that agency from 1948 to 1961, has publicly taken issue, in several newspaper interviews, with the lack of adequate precautions which is so painfully apparent in the Dallas tragedy.

A UPI dispatch from Washington, dated December 8, 1963 quoted Mr. Baughman as saying that "there are a lot of things' to be explained" concerning the assassination.

One thing Baughman wanted to know - nobody has explained it yet - is why Lee H. Oswald was permitted to leave

the Book Depository after the shooting.

He asked, also, assuming that the shots did come from the sixth-floor window of that building, why the Secret Service didn't immediately pepper that -window with machine gun fire?

This is one of the most obvious - and least asked - of all "unanswered questions" about the Kennedy murder. Why, indeed, was all the shooting done only by one side - that of the assassins?

There were dozens of Secret Service men on the scene, all former FBI agents and tested marksmen, quick on the trigger and with their service guns and submachine guns at the ready - to say nothing of the hundreds of Dallas policemen who were also present when the President died in a hail of bullets. And not a single shot was fired by any of these alert guardians of the law!

Had the Secret Service men reacted as Baugham says they should have, by instantly 'peppering' the TSBD window with machine gun fire, the sniper crouching behind that window would certainly not have been able to get off a second or third shot, as the Commission says he did.

In a subsequent interview with Seth Kantor of the Scripps-Howard newspaper chain, Mr. Baughman declared that it was a "basic, established rule" of the Secret Service to see to it that people were kept out of the upper stories of buildings along a presidential parade route. The manager of the Texas School Book Depository therefore "should have been under firm instructions by the police" to close the upper floors of that building to unauthorized persons...

The Secret Service couldn't spare a man either for checking the grassy knoll, a textbook location for a guerilla-type ambush. This breathtaking deficiency came to light when there were reports that a man who identified himself as a member of the Secret Service was encountered near the knoll just after the assassination. These reports drew a firm denial from the Secret Service which stated explicitly that it had no man posted there. It would have been better for the Secret Service to have said that the knoll had been swarming with agents who didn't notice a damn thing than thus to admit another such glaring dereliction of duty.

According to former Secret Service chief U.E. Baughman, what mistakes were made during the visit to Dallas?

(P6) Evidence of four police officers protecting the motorcade about what the presidential car did when the shots were fired in the Dealey Plaza.

James Chaney (motorcyclist on motorcade): "From the time the first shot ran out, the car stopped completely, pulled to the left and stopped."

Bobby Hargis (motorcyclist on motorcade): "The car stopped immediately after that and stayed stopped for about half a second, then took off."

Earle Brown (police officer on overpass): "When the shots were fired, it (the car) stopped."

J. W. Foster (police officer on overpass): "Immediately after Kennedy was struck... the car pulled to the curb."

Do these accounts support the testimony of William Greer and Roy Kellerman?

(P7) The Warren Commission Report (September, 1964)

The Commission has concluded that some of the advance preparations in Dallas made by the Secret Service, such as the detailed security measures taken at Love Field and the Trade Mart, were thorough and well executed. In other respects, however, the Commission has concluded that the advance preparations for the President's trip were deficient.

Although the Secret Service is compelled to rely to a great extent on local law enforcement officials, its procedures at the time of the Dallas trip did not call for well-defined instructions as to the respective responsibilities of the police officials and others assisting in the protection of the President.

The procedures relied upon by the Secret Service for detecting the presence of an assassin located in a building along a motorcade route were inadequate. At the time of the trip to Dallas, the Secret Service as a matter of practice did not investigate, or cause to be checked, any building located along the motorcade route to be taken by the President. The responsibility for observing windows in these buildings during the motorcade was divided between local police personnel stationed on the streets to regulate crowds and Secret Service agents riding in the motorcade. Based on its investigation the Commission has concluded that these arrangements during the trip to Dallas were clearly not sufficient.

The configuration of the Presidential car and the seating arrangements of the Secret Service agents in the car did not afford the Secret Service agents the opportunity they should have had to be of immediate assistance to the President at the first sign of danger.

Within these limitations, however, the Commission finds that the agents most immediately responsible for the President's safety reacted promptly at the time the shots were fired from the Texas School Book Depository Building.

What criticisms did the Warren Commission make of the Secret Service on 22nd November, 1963?

(P8) House Select Committee on Assassinations (1979)

Findings of the Select Committee on Assassinations in the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas, Texas, November 22, 1963.

The committee believes, on the basis of the evidence available to it, that President John F. Kennedy was probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy. The committee is unable to identify the other gunman or the extent of the conspiracy....

Agencies and departments of the U.S. Government performed with varying degrees of competency in the fulfillment of their duties. President John F. Kennedy did not receive adequate protection. A thorough and reliable investigation into the responsibility of Lee Harvey Oswald for the assassination of President John F. Kennedy was conducted. The investigation into the possibility of conspiracy in the assassination was inadequate. The conclusions of the investigations were arrived at in good faith, but presented in a fashion that was too definitive.

The Secret Service was deficient in the performance of its duties.

The Secret Service possessed information that was not properly analyzed, investigated or used by the Secret Service in connection with the President's trip to Dallas; in addition, Secret Service agents in the motorcade were inadequately prepared to protect the President from a sniper.

In what ways was the House Select Committee on Assassinations critical of the Secret Service?

(P9) James H. Fetzer, Assassination Science and the Language of Proof, included in Assassination Science (1998)

I have discovered at least fifteen indications of Secret Service complicity in the assassination of John F. Kennedy, from the absence of protective military presence to a lack of coverage of open windows, to motorcycles out of position, to Secret Service agents failing to ride on the Presidential limousine, to the vehicles arranged in an improper sequence, to the utilization of an improper motorcade route, to the driver bringing the vehicle to a halt after bullets began to be fired, to the almost total lack of response by Secret Service agents, to the driver washing out the back seat with a bucket and sponge at Parkland Hospital, to the car being dismantled and rebuilt (on LBJs orders), to the driver giving false testimony to the Warren Commission, to the windshields being switched, to the autopsy photographs being taken into custody before they were developed, and more.

What evidence does James H. Fetzer provide to support his view that the Secret Service might have been involved in the assassination of John F. Kennedy?

(P10) Edward Jay Epstein, Legend: The Secret World of Lee Harvey Oswald (1978)

The possibility that Oswald was encouraged or assisted in the act by some unknown party can certainly not be excluded. But there is one piece of evidence which strongly argues against the possibility that Oswald was part of an intelligent and purposeful conspiracy - the note which Oswald purportedly wrote to the FBI a week or so before Kennedy arrived in Dallas.

In this note, Oswald threatened to blow up the local FBI headquarters in Dallas unless FBI agents stopped harassing his wife. The note itself was never divulged to the Warren Commission. Instead, after Oswald was shot by Jack Ruby, the local FBI agent, undoubtedly on orders from his superiors destroyed the note. Its existence was only admitted by FBI officials in 1975 when FBI employees in Dallas, who had seen the note, revealed its contents. They testified, moreover, that Oswald had delivered the note to the FBI office.

If there was a conspiracy, it is difficult to understand why it should risk revealing itself to the FBI by having Oswald, their; main actor, walk into the FBI office with a threatening note. He might have been arrested on the spot, or at the very least, the FBI could have been expected to warn the President security force that Oswald, who was employed on the President's route, had made a violent threat to federal officials. Even if the conspirators only meant to frame Oswald, the delivery of the note would jeopardize that plan since it risked having Oswald arrested prior to the President's arrival. It therefore seems reasonable to assume that, if the note is authentic, Oswald was not part of a conspiracy.

Why does Edward Jay Epstein believe that Lee Harvey Oswald was not a FBI agent?

(P11) Peter Dale Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK (1993)

The House Committee on Assassinations confirmed that the Hosty entry had been deleted in the retyping of the memo. It called the incident "regrettable," but "trivial", even though what was at stake was an apparently false statement by FBI officials under oath....

The FBI's handling of Hall, and of the whole Odio story, suggests they had something to hide. To begin with, the agents they sent to interview Silvia Odio, and who asked no questions about the "double agent" story, were James P. Hosty, Jr., and his partner, Bardwell D. Odum. Hosty also interviewed Juan B. Martin, the man Odio had been interested in buying arms from; yet his write-up of this interview is utterly trivial and makes no reference to gunrunning at all.

James Hosty was hardly the right agent to send for an impartial investigation. As the FBI agent assigned to handle both arms trafficking and the Oswalds before the assassination, Hosty quickly became a party to some of the FBI's most serious cover-up activities. On November 24, 1963, long before he finally interviewed Silvia Odio in December, Hosty had already destroyed a threatening note which Oswald had left for him at the Dallas FBI office. He had done so on orders from his boss, Gordon Shanklin, which almost certainly came from Washington.

Why does Peter Dale Scott believe it was significant that the FBI employed James Hosty to interview Silvia Odio and Juan B. Martin?

(P12) Jim Garrison, On the Trail of the Assassins (1988)

According to Dallas Police Lieutenant Jack Revill, an F.B.I, agent came up to him at Dallas police headquarters at 2:50 P.M. and said that the Bureau had "information that this suspect was capable of committing the assassination." The agent who brought this welcome news and was the first to mention the name of Lee Harvey Oswald was none other than James Hosty.

Was Hosty merely an innocent messenger, or had he and possibly others in the Bureau been involved in a plot to set up Oswald as the patsy? If F.B.I, employees had been part of the conspiracy, then that might explain why the Bureau had mysteriously failed to act on the warning sent over its telex system five days before the assassination and why no one responded to the letter of warning that Richard Case Nagell claimed to have sent to J. Edgar Hoover. It also might explain why Oswald, who evidently did not get along with Hosty and may have sensed that he was being set up, had sent a telegram to the secretary of the Navy ten days before the assassination.

I began to formulate a possible scenario. Long in advance, the engineers of the assassination had selected the idealistic and gullible Oswald as a patsy. His close-mouthed intelligence background helped assure not only success in the venture but subsequent support from the government, which would not want to admit that the assassination originated in its own intelligence community.

If Oswald was on the government payroll as a confidential informant in Dallas and New Orleans, he might well have believed that his job was to penetrate subversive organizations, including Fair Play for Cuba and perhaps Guy Banister's apparatus, in order to report back to the F.B.I, about them. Along the way, he was allowed to penetrate a marginal part of the assassination project, again with the idea that he was engaged in an officially sponsored effort to obtain information about it. He may even have filed reports on the plot to kill the President with his contact agent, James Hosty. When Oswald sensed that Hosty was not responsive, he may have gone over his head and telegraphed some kind of warning to the secretary of the Navy, who in turn may have informed the F.B.I.'s Washington headquarters, which then sent out its warning telex.

What did Jim Garrison believe James Hosty's role was in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy?

(P13) Peter Dale Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK (1993)

Such an explanation is less plausible for the FBI's interference with leads that appeared to be guiding its agents to the actual assassins of the President - a case, seemingly, of obstruction of justice, or worse. How else should one assess the response of FBI headquarters to a report from Miami that Joseph Adams Milteer, a white racist with Klan connections, had in early November 1963 correctly warned that a plot to kill the President "from an office building with a high-powered rifle" was already "in the working"? These words are taken from a tape-recording of a discussion between Milteer and his friend, Miami police informant Bill Somersett. Miami police provided copies of this tape to both the Secret Service and the FBI on November 10, 1963, two weeks before the assassination, and this led to the cancellation of a planned motorcade for the President in Miami on November 18.20

Although an extremist, Milteer was no loner. Southern racists were well organized in 1963, in response to federal orders for desegregation; and Milteer was an organizer for two racist parties, the National States Rights party and the Constitution party. In addition he had attended an April 1963 meeting in New Orleans of the Congress of Freedom, Inc.,

which had been monitored by an informant for the Miami police. A Miami detective's report of the Congress included the statement that "there was indicated the overthrow of the present government of the United States," including "the setting up of a criminal activity to assassinate particular persons." The report added that "membership within the Congress of Freedom, Inc., contain high ranking members of the armed forces that secretly belong to the organization."

In other words, the deep politics of racist intrigue had become intermingled, in the Congress as elsewhere, with the resentment within the armed forces against their civilian commander. Perhaps the most important example in 1963 was that of General Edwin Walker, whom Oswald was accused of stalking and shooting at. Forced to retire in 1962 for disseminating right-wing propaganda in the armed forces, Walker was subsequently arrested at the "Ole Miss" anti-desegregation riots. Nor was the FBI itself exempt from racist intrigue: Milteer, on tape, reported detailed plans for the murder of Martin Luther King, Jr., whom Hoover's FBI, by the end of 1963, had also targeted for (in their words) "neutralizing... as an effective Negro leader."

Four days after the assassination Somerset! reported that Milteer had been "jubilant" about it: "Everything ran true to form. I guess you thought I was kidding you when I said he would be killed from a window with a high-powered rifle." Milteer also was adamant that he had not been "guessing" in his original prediction. In both of the relevant FBI reports from Miami, Somersett was described as "a source who had furnished reliable information in the past."

Why was Peter Dale Scott critical of FBI's behaviour in the weeks leading up to the assassination of John F. Kennedy?

(P14) Matthew Smith, JFK: The Second Plot (1992)

One of the outstanding examples of a witness being frustrated in his attempt to speak out when he had something important to say is to be found in the story of Abraham Bolden. Abraham Bolden was a member of the White House detail of the Secret Service, and was the first negro to be appointed to that body. Bolden had heard of a Chicago plot to kill the President and was anxious to tell what he knew. He was also critical of the personnel appointed to guard the President, claiming they were lax in their duties. It was believed that an attempt on Kennedy's life had been foiled on 1st November in Chicago, but three weeks before he was killed in Dallas, and it would have been extremely embarrassing to the Warren Commission, heavily involved in establishing their "lone killer - no conspiracy" theory, to have had Bolden telling of a Chicago plot. Bolden's superior officers blocked his request. A few months later Abraham Bolden was charged with soliciting a huge bribe for disclosing secret information on a counterfeiter, Joseph Spagnoli, and he was jailed for six years. Spagnoli later confessed he had lied about Bolden, at the request of Prosecutor Richard Sikes, he claimed. In spite of this Bolden was made to serve his full sentence.

What is the significance of the story of Abraham Bolden in the search to discover who was responsible for the assassination of John F. Kennedy?

Link du jour


http://boydownthelane.com/2016/12/28/pressing-matters/




http://www.nydailynews.com/news/world/p ... -1.2932946


http://www.nydailynews.com/news/nationa ... -1.2933475






http://www.latimes.com/local/california ... story.html

LOCAL CALIFORNIA
L.A. sheriff's deputies disciplined after horrific torture death of 8-year-old boy


It was the worst case of child abuse that local officials had ever seen.

The death of 8-year-old Gabriel Fernandez became a grim symbol of the failure of Los Angeles County’s child welfare system, prompting criminal charges against four social workers and far-reaching reforms of how authorities oversee abused and neglected children. Gabriel’s mother and her boyfriend were charged with his murder.


But far less public scrutiny has been given to the role of L.A. County sheriff’s deputies who investigated Gabriel’s situation in the months before his 2013 death.

A Times review of grand jury testimony, child welfare records and recently filed court documents shows that deputies visited Gabriel’s home multiple times during the eight months prosecutors say he was being tortured and beaten. But the deputies found no signs of abuse and did not file paperwork that





http://www.nydailynews.com/news/nationa ... -1.2933221

SEE IT: North Carolina cop slams high school student to ground
: Tuesday, January 3, 2017, 3:54 PM





http://www.nydailynews.com/news/crime/p ... -1.2933151




Philadelphia PD investigating officer fight video
BY BRETT BODNER
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS Tuesday, January 3, 2017, 2:58 PM


Police are looking into a video that shows allegedly shows a female police officer fighting a teenage girl.
Police in Philadelphia are looking into a disturbing video that appears to show an officer fighting a teenage girl




http://www.nydailynews.com/news/nationa ... -1.2933113



NAACP protesters arrested for occupying Jeff Sessions' office
BY CHRISTOPHER BRENNAN JASON SILVERSTEIN
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS Updated: Tuesday, January 3, 2017, 8:21 PM



http://ticklethewire.com/2017/01/03/ame ... bi-agents/

Americann University Removes Controversial Statue of Man Convicted of Killing FBI Agents



American University is removing a controversial statue of a Native American activist who was convicted of murdering two FBI agents in 1977.

The decision to remove the statue of Leonard Peltier came after the president of the FBI agents association urged the university to take down the work of art because it was offensive.

Many Native Americans believe Peltier was wrongly convicted and sentenced to two life terms.

The university released the following statement:

“American University strongly supports the mission of museums to present thought provoking art to inform and educate. Within the AU Museum at the Katzen Arts Center, we have hosted numerous







http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/201 ... w-deemed-/



FBI Won’t Follow Nevada’s New Gun Control Law, Saying It’s Unenforceable



A voter-approved measure in Nevada to require more gun background checks isn’t enforceable, says the FBI and Nevada’s attorney general.

Under the measure, which was supposed to go into effect on Jan. 1, gun transactions between private citizens must involve federal screenings through the FBI’s National Instant Criminal Background Check System.

But according to the Washington Times, the FBI won’t conduct the checks.

In a letter to state officials, the FBI said the state is tasked with background checks and the ballot initiative’s approval “cannot dictate how federal resources are applied.”

The measure prohibits the state from conducting the background checks involving private sales.

“It is manifestly unjust to criminally penalize someone for failing to perform an act that is impossible to perform,” Nevada Attorney General Adam Laxalt, a Republican





http://www.readingeagle.com/news/articl ... =mobileart

Daily Planner: January 4
Reading Eagle
"Suicide Bombers Today," talk by Ron Loose, Alvernia University professor and retired FBI agent, 7 p.m., West Lawn-Wyomissing Hills Library, 101 Woodside ...





http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/tri ... -1.2934729

SEE IT: Trio of NYPD cops beats Bronx man as he lies on ground
BY THOMAS TRACY
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS Updated: Wednesday, January 4, 2017, 4:24 PM






http://whowhatwhy.org


CATEGORIES: PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION
JANUARY 3, 2017 | KLAUS MARRE
Trump’s FEC Filings Reveal Ominous Patterns
If Donald Trump runs his administration the way he ran his campaign, expect a lot of subterfuge and large sums of money finding its way into his own pocket.


CATEGORIES: EARTH
JANUARY 2, 2017 | KLAUS MARRE
Youth Activists Want Tillerson Deposed on Suppression of Climate Change Facts
Activists suing to force the federal government to fight climate change want ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson (now Donald Trump’s choice for Secretary of State) to reveal when the fossil fuel industry knew of its effect on global warming — and what it did to hide it.





http://www.reviewjournal.com/business/c ... ding-probe

US prosecutors identify FBI agent accused of leaking insider trading ...
Las Vegas Review-Journal-
NEW YORK — U.S. prosecutors on Wednesday identified the FBI agent who they say admitted to leaking information to reporters about an ...

Bonus Read



http://www.nydailynews.com/news/nationa ... -1.2939003






Brother of Fla. airport shooting suspect blames FBI

Saturday, January 7, 2017, 11:08 PM



The unhinged Army veteran who flew 5,000 miles to execute five strangers at a Florida airport could face the death penalty for his baggage carousel killing spree.

Esteban Santiago, described by his brother as a walking time bomb, was charged with an act of violence resulting in death at an international airport — making him eligible for federal execution.

“(The) charges represent the gravity of the situation and reflect the commitment of federal, state and local law enforcement personnel to continually protect the community and prosecute those who target our residents and visitors,” said U.S. Attorney Wifredo Ferrer.


A day after the massacre — the nation’s first mass shooting of 2017 — investigators were still stumped over why Santiago, 26, flew from his home in Alaska to target passengers at the Fort Lauderdale airport.

Victims identified after mass shooting at Fort Lauderdale Airport
A federal complaint revealed the New Jersey-born Santiago told the investigators that his carnage was planned, right down to purchasing a one-way ticket to Florida.


Esteban Ruiz Santiago, 26, was taken into custody after the shooting. (BROWARD SHERIFF'S OFFICE/AP)
As officials searched for a motive, Santiago’s brother said the assault could easily have been prevented if the FBI had stepped up and used a little common sense.

“We’re not talking about someone who emerged from anonymity to do something like this,” siblin




Link du jour



http://www.occurrencesforeigndomestic.c ... tegorized/


http://www.lesliejamespickering.com


http://www.eightmartinis.com


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


https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/ ... ecords-do/


Blink Tank


http://www.miff.org/?film=american-port ... -levasseur



https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=uktod7x_6s4










http://www.ibtimes.com/black-lives-matt ... ce-2471266


Black Lives Matter And Police: In Portland, Unusual Punishment For Civil Disobedience
Protesters in Maine cut a plea deal with prosecutors.

01/06/17 AT 3:19 PM
Black Lives Matter Protesters Block M4 Route Into Heathrow Airport

Activists in Portland, Maine, were arrested last summer after blocking a downtown intersection for several hours to protest the shooting deaths of unarmed black men in Minnesota and Louisiana. The 17 protesters struck a plea deal Thursday with the local district attorney. Their punishment? Talk with police.

The defendants are the first in the history of the state of Maine to enter a restorative justice program for civil



http://whowhatwhy.org/2017/01/07/reward ... arassment/


THREATS TO DEMOCRACY
JANUARY 7, 2017 | MARTIN EDWIN ANDERSEN
REWARD FOR WHISTLEBLOWER’S WARNING OF HIJACK DANGER: ENDLESS HARASSMENT






http://www.heraldandnews.com/news/orego ... cdcec.html

Blogger is asked to delete info on Oregon refuge informants
Herald and News (blog)-
Hunt said an FBI agent on Thursday handed him a cease-and-desist order signed by Holsinger, chief of the criminal division in the Oregon U.S. Attorney's Office, ...


FBI Octopus


http://www.reporternews.com/story/money ... /96189320/

Ex-Abilene FBI agent Macnoll growing beef cattle dream
ReporterNews.com
Former FBI agent Gary Macnoll has become a successful beef cattle ... With a interest in law enforcement, Macnoll eventually began a career with the FBI.





http://www.cleveland.com/court-justice/ ... _us_a.html

Four being considered for U.S. attorney in northern Ohio, sources say
cleveland.com
He is a former FBI agent and also worked as a special assistant U.S. attorney. McCaffrey has taken on several high-profile cases, including defending Jerrell ...









https://marketexclusive.com/fbi-use-bes ... ion/63973/


Did The FBI Use Best Buy Co Inc's (NYSE:BBY) Informant To ...
Market Exclusive-
Best Buy Co Inc (NYSE:BBY) is at the center of a controversy of having submitted to an FBI agent a hard drive evidencing child pornography. The drive is from a ...



http://www.thedunlap-tribune.com/syndic ... lyzed-man/

No Civil Rights Charges in Police Killing of Paralyzed Man
The Dunlap Tribune-2 hours ago
Officials from the U.S. attorney's office in Delaware, the U.S. Justice Department's civil rights division and the FBI met Friday with representatives of Jeremy ...


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


FBI Dismisses Child Porn Prosecution After Refusing To Hand Over ...
Techdirt-3 hours ago
The FBI has decided to let one of its Playpen defendants walk rather than turn over information on its Network Investigative Technique. The NIT, deployed





http://satprnews.com/2017/01/08/reporte ... s-revived/


Reporter's Notebook: I Wrote to Carlos the Jackal, and an Israeli's ...
Satellite PR News (press release
Last month, the F.B.I. revealed that it had reopened its investigation into the killing of Colonel Alon. Why? An F.B.I. agent based in Paris, Eugene Casey, had ...






http://www.kfdi.com/news/national/airpo ... -confesses

Airport shooting suspect used gun once seized by police, confesses
KFDI-
(CNN) -- When Esteban Santiago was in an Alaska FBI office in November, saying ... George Piro, the FBI's special agent in charge in Miami, said Santiago flew ...





http://www.itwire.com/security/76370-ip ... -data.html


The Indian Express
iPhone stoush: FBI hides identity of firm that obtained data
iTWire-
Exactly who managed to obtain access to the data on an iPhone 5C, the centre of a row between Apple and the FBI last year, is unlikely to be known after the ...




http://www.nysun.com/editorials/nat-hentoff/89858/

Nat Hentoff
New York Sun
The superintendent rejected the bribe and arrested the hapless fellow who proffered it, only to discover that “briber” was attempting a sting for the FBI. Bridgeport ...

Bonus Read


http://stevehochstadt.blogspot.com

Taking Back Our Lives

Tuesday, January 10, 2017

Trump’s Billionaire Cabinet


Donald Trump won election as our next President partly by appealing to Americans who are unhappy with the way the economy has left them behind, while benefitting only the wealthy.

Nearly all Americans told pollsters just before the election that they think the American economy is rigged in favor of the powerful. Almost 90% said the economy is rigged to benefit the rich generally, banks and bank executives in particular, and corporations.

Trump told these angry voters that they were right: middle-class Americans can't get ahead, because big political donors, big businesses and big bureaucrats are keeping wages down and hogging all the gains of the growing economy for themselves. Only he could fix this broken system. “The economy is rigged. The banking system is rigged. There’s a lot of things that are rigged in this world of ours, and that’s why a lot of you haven’t had an effective wage increase in 20 years, folks. And we’re going to change it.”

Trump specifically pointed the finger at Wall St. He told an audience in Ottumwa, Iowa, “I know the people on Wall Street. I'm not going to let Wall Street get away with murder. Wall Street has caused tremendous problems for us. I don’t care about the Wall Street guys. I’m not taking any of their money.” He stressed the unfairness of the tax system. “The hedge fund guys are getting away with murder. They're paying nothing, and it's ridiculous.”

Now that he has won election with those arguments, Trump has been assembling his team to run the government. His cabinet choices are not yet complete, and none of them have been confirmed by the Senate. But his selections so far give us some idea of what he plans to do.

Trump’s cabinet will be the richest group in American history, dominated by the very people he criticized on the campaign trail. For Secretary of Commerce, Trump is nominating Wilbur L. Ross Jr., a billionaire Wall St. speculator. He owned Sago Mine, a West Virginia coal mine where a dozen miners lost their lives in a 2006 explosion. His company settled a lawsuit for negligence in their deaths. A few months ago, Ross’s company paid a $2.3 million fine for charging his investors excess management fees.

Just under Ross, Trump is nominating Todd Ricketts as Deputy Commerce Secretary. His father founded the online broker Ameritrade. Ricketts is even richer than Ross, and is co-owner of the Chicago Cubs and CEO of Ending Spending, an organization “dedicated to educating and engaging American taxpayers about wasteful and excessive government spending,” according to its site.

As head of the Small Business Administration, Trump selected another billionaire, Linda McMahon, former chief executive of World Wrestling Entertainment, and one of Trump’s biggest donors. The Treasury Department will be headed by Steven Mnuchin, another big donor and a former Goldman Sachs executive, now CEO of a hedge fund. He is worth only about $665 million.

Much further down the list of richest Americans, Trump’s Secretary of Labor will be Andrew F. Puzder, chief executive of CKE Restaurants, which owns fast-food outlets Hardee’s and Carl’s Jr. Puzder opposes increasing the minimum wage, because his restaurants would have to pay more to their workers, meaning less income for shareholders.

Another billionaire with input into Trump’s economic policies will be Carl Icahn, a Special Adviser on Regulatory Reform. Icahn began as a stockbroker and now is one of the richest Americans, buying and selling companies and a business partner with Trump.

Another cabinet secretary who is worth billions will be Betsy DeVos, Trump’s nominee for Secretary of Education, whose family started the multilevel marketing company Amway. Amway has been successfully sued in the US, Canada and the United Kingdom for fraud, and has paid millions in fines.

Rex W. Tillerson will head Trump’s State Dept. He was president and chief executive of Exxon Mobil, and will get a severance package worth $180 million for leaving his job. Some other billionaires have been appointed by Trump to serve on his economic advisory committee or inaugural committee.

The Republican-dominated Senate appears to be rushing the process of confirming these nominations. They have scheduled six hearings for this Wednesday, apparently hoping to minimize media scrutiny. Several of Trump’s picks have not completed the usual vetting process, which includes tax returns and ethics clearances, which might be complicated for some of the billionaires with vast financial holdings. The head of the Office of Government Ethics, Walter M. Shaub Jr., has said that the Senate has never before held hearings before his office completed its review.

We don’t know yet exactly what policies Trump will direct his cabinet to implement, or even if they all will be confirmed. This is what we do know: none of them have shown the slightest interest in the economic plight of the voters who backed Trump. They are precisely the people who have profited the most from the financial system that Trump said was rigged against most Americans.

Trump not only took plenty of money from the Wall St. Guys. Now he is hiring them to run the government.

Steve Hochstadt
Jacksonville IL
Published in the Jacksonville Journal-Courier, January 10, 2017




http://www.latimes.com/politics/essenti ... story.html

JAN. 10, 2017, 3:04 P.M.
REPORTING FROM WASHINGTON
California's Rep. Dana Rohrabacher is latest lawmaker to pull down painting in Capitol depicting police as pigs


Hours after members of the Congressional Black Caucus rehung the controversial painting depicting police officers as pigs that Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-Alpine) pulled down Friday, it's been pulled down twice more by Republican House members.

The painting depicts a clash between police and protesters on a street. In it, gun-w





http://www.nydailynews.com/news/nationa ... -1.2943045

Donald Trump engaged in 'perverted sexual acts,' report says

NEW YORK DAILY NEWS Updated: Tuesday, January 10, 2017, 7:23 PM

An unconfirmed report says that Donald Trump engaged in "perverted sexual acts" while at a Moscow hotel in 2013.
Russian intelligence monitored Donald Trump engaging in "perverted sexual acts" during his stay in a luxury Moscow hotel, according to an unconfirmed report about compromising material on the President-elect.

A document published in full by BuzzFeed News on Tuesday said that during a 2013 trip to the Russian capital, Trump made Russian prostitutes defile a bed where President Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama had stayed on a previous occasion.

The accusations are unconfirmed, tho






http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/bro ... -1.2943015

Every victim. Every time.

That was the message from dozens of women who gathered Tuesday outside Brooklyn’s 94th Precinct to protest an NYPD commander’s dismissive comments about rape.

Days after Capt. Peter Rose landed in hot water for suggesting at a community council meeting last week that some rapes aren’t as bad as others, he was lambasted by representatives of one of the nation’s largest women’s groups.






https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/ ... enhut-fbi/




January 10, 2017


From FBI reject to private warlord: the rise of George Wackenhut
File on GEO Group founder illustrates Bureau’s reluctantly close ties to for-profit security

In early February 1945, a 26-year-old man from Upper Darby, Pennsylvania submitted his application for employment to the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Like many of his generation, he had just finished his time in the U.S. Army, first in Hawaii and then in Virginia, where he was a Physical Reconditioning Officer and learned to be a fine marksman. Now he wanted a job with the feds, preferably in a position as a physical education instructor and a starting annual salary of $3500.

At the time, the Bureau could offer him no such position; he could take another job at half his asking price. The young man respectfully declined, and the agency felt no great loss. After all, as his files noted, they weren’t too keen on the cut of his jib anyway.



It would not be the last time Hoover’s agency would hear from him. In the decades to come, his relationship to the Bureau would vacillate between one of mutual respect to skepticism and sycophancy. He would, not so long later, get his job with the men in black, and from there he would soon turn his employment into leverage in the private sector, as he would go on to help create - then lead - one of the largest private security firms in the country, an organization that would branch out into corrections and evolve into today’s biggest global name in private imprisonment, GEO Group.

But, at the end of World War II, this man, clocking in at just under 6-feet tall and 190 pounds, was just known as George R. Wackenhut.



Despite ultimate FBI employment of about four years, Wackenhut’s FBI file is hundreds of pages long, a collection of his applicationd assessments, clippings kept by a Hoover concerned by the use of his Bureau’s name to promote profit, and Wackenhut’s letters to its directors - first Hoover and then each other - offering support and help with each transition and public criticism.



By the time George attempted FBI employment again five years after his first attempt, the observing agent had upgraded his impression of the applicant.



This time, it seems, the well-kept man who had spent the intervening years as Chairman of the Physical Education Department at John Hopkins University looked to be a better match for the Agency.



His neighbors and former employers offered positive reviews during the FBI’s background check, though maybe his wife talked too much - not necessarily more than many other ladies but enough to count her as the talkative sort.

On January 27, 1951, J. Edgar Hoover sent Wackenhut his appointment letter. He would make $5000 a year and join the other agents who, at the time, were working six days a week. He would undergo training at Quantico, Virginia, where he made a good impression, and then he was assigned to Atlanta, Georgia, primarily working on check fraud.



His tenure with the Bureau only lasted until 1954, when he submitted his resignation letter, requesting in the process a signed photograph of Mr. Hoover; the man himself obliged.



After three years, a transfer to Indiana, commendations and censures, Wackenhut would join three others to begin their own private security and investigative firm: Fidelifax.



From the outset, it seems, Hoover’s Bureau was concerned about the possibility of their crossing over into the FBI’s jurisdiction, banking on their federal connections and obstructing their own inquiries into the Communist menace.



Nonetheless, Wackenhut kept up friendly relations with his connections at the Bureau, even as the name - Security Services Corporation - and personnel changed.

In 1961, Wackenhut officially introduced Hoover, by way of letter, to the evolution of the security company: The Wackenhut Corporation.



From its inception, the legality of the private security and investigative force has been under question, which nonetheless did little to prevent it from growing quickly.



Meanwhile, the Bureau remained interested in Wackenhut’s personal life, for record-keeping purposes. A rumor regarding the infidelity of both Wackenhut and his wife found its way into the files.



http://www.haaretz.com/us-news/1.764248

Wall Street Journal
Jewish Insider's Daily Kickoff - January 10, 2017
Haaretz-
Why? An F.B.I. agent based in Paris, Eugene Casey, had learned about Mr. Ramírez's letter to me. In a magazine called The Journal of Counterterrorism and ...


FBI Octopus

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/10/busi ... rster.html

DealBook|Former Top Justice Dept. Lawyer to Join Morrison ...
New York Times-
His prior experience includes serving as chief of staff and senior counsel to Robert S. Mueller III, a former director of the F.B.I. Mr. Carlin was later named to the ...



http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/fbis-use-best- ... be-1600279

Best Buy 'Geek Squad' technicians outed as paid FBI informants in ...
International Business Times UK-
The case, brought forward in a Californian district court, suggests the FBI placed a ... On 5 January 2012, the filings show, Meade emailed FBI agent Tracey Riley ...


http://motherboard.vice.com/read/314-ac ... pose-trump

This Group Wants Scientists to Run America
Motherboard-
Shaughnessy ran for Congress in Pennsylvania again in 2016, but lost to Brian Fitzpatrick, a former FBI agent. She says she can use the experience from her ...





http://www.militaryaerospace.com/press- ... rence.html

Advantest Opens Registration for VOICE 2017 Developer Conference
Military & Aerospace Electronics
The VOICE 2017 general session in Palm Springs will also feature a keynote on Cyber Security, by former FBI special agent Chris Tarbell, one of the most




http://fox17.com/news/nation-world/car- ... ter-banner

Did police egg car leave anti-Semitic note left after Md. couple hung Black Lives Matter banner?
Monday, January 9th 2017





http://www.wfmj.com/story/34220902/da-s ... lly-victim

DA says woman arrested in sex fantasy hoax was really victim
WFMJ-Jan 9, 2017
... his commitment to jihad, unaware his words were secretly being recorded by the FBI? .... The man that links the two women is Ian Diaz, an agent with the U.S. ...





https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/201 ... a-contacts

FBI chief given dossier by John McCain alleging secret Trump ...
The Guardian-
Senator John McCain passed documents to the FBI director, James Comey, last month alleging secret contacts between the Trump campaign and Moscow and ...






http://www.wzzm13.com/news/crime/hearin ... /384866627

Hearing set for FBI agent accused of shooting at Grand Rapids police
WZZM13.
Hernandez, an eight-year veteran of the FBI with a spotless record, was arraigned last month on two assault charges, including assault with intent to commit ...




http://www.aim.org/aim-column/the-top-t ... s-of-2016/

The Top Ten Misreported and Underreported Stories of 2016
Accuracy In Media
Now that Clinton has lost, postmortems of the election abound: media pundits blame fake news, FBI Director James Comey's FBI investigation, WikiLeaks, and ...







http://deadline.com/2017/01/boston-bomb ... 201882410/

Boston Bombing Book 'Maximum Harm' From ABC News Producer ...
Deadline-
... investigation of the Boston Marathon bombing and the accused brothers which uncovered evidence of one of the brothers' pre-existing relationship to the FBI



http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/fe ... ag-w460272

Why Lawyers Are Freaking Out About Jeff Sessions as Attorney ...
RollingStone.com
That would make Sessions the top law enforcement officer of the United States, in charge of everything from protecting civil rights to overseeing the FBI.




http://www.local10.com/news/crime/bso-d ... t-shooting
CRIME
BSO deputy suspended after tape leaked of Fort Lauderdale airport shooting
Cameraman recording video seen in reflection, mayor says

By Terrell Forney - Reporter , Amanda Batchelor - Senior Digital Editor
Posted: 12:18 PM, January 10, 2017
Updated: 9:40 PM, January 10, 2017






http://blog.tenthamendmentcenter.com/20 ... g-program/

Nebraska Bill Would Restrict ALPR Data, Help Block National ...
Tenth Amendment Center (blog)
With the FBI rolling out facial a nationwide recognition program, and the federal government building biometric databases, the fact that the feds can potentially ...



http://www.dailyfreeman.com/general-new ... apons-case

Kingston activist Shabazz asks to withdraw guilty plea in weapons ...
The Daily Freeman-
If Shabazz, 61, is allowed to wirthdraw his plea, he would stand trial on the 16-count indictment against him for allegedly selling weapons to undercover FBI ...
p


https://www.indianagazette.com/news/ind ... ,25680265/

Magistrate in Indiana running for third term
Indiana Gazette
He is a graduate of the Pennsylvania State Police Municipal Police Academy, The FBI National Academy and Indiana University of Pennsylvania, where he ...








https://www.romper.com/p/jeff-sessions- ... work-29257

Jeff Sessions' Conflicts of Interest Are Reportedly Missing From ...
Romper-
Each Cabinet appointee is required to submit to an FBI background check, a financial disclosure, and a letter clearly stating any conflicts of interest, which is







http://www.nj.com/hudson/index.ssf/2017 ... _amid.html

Police qre reportedly investigating the Jersey City Police Department's off-duty private security program.
on January 10, 2017 at 10:27 AM, updated January 10, 2017 at 3:30
UPDATE: 12 OFFICERS IDENTIFIED

In the midst of a federal probe of off-duty work performed by Jersey City police officers, the city has stripped 12 cops of their guns and placed them on non-enforcement duty.

The city confirmed the move this morning in a statement from city spokeswoman Jennifer Morrill. Morrill did not reveal the names of the 12 officers.

The news comes as the police department braces for arrests that sources with knowledge of the federal probe say are expected this month. The officers are being investigated possibly for taking improper payments in relation to the off-duty work program, according to law-enforcement sources.







https://caseclosedbylewweinstein.wordpr ... any-means/

« * Tara O’Toole, the undersecretary for biosecurity at Homeland Security Department, says that the FBI did not establish that the anthrax came from USAMRIID but that it was merely the FBI’s “working hypothesis” and a “supposition”; she mentioned other active hypotheses.* GAO: Why did the FBI redact this 302 interview statement in which its expert collecting samples explained that some of her material resembled the mailed anthrax? Who was responsible for the redaction and what was justification? »
* FBI genetics expert Claire Fraser-Liggett … I think that the (FBI’s use of the) evidence on science probably was misleading … I have no way to know whether or not Bruce Ivins was really the perpetrator

http://anthraxvaccine.blogspot.com/


Wednesday, January 11, 2017
Trump is saying/doing some great, important things, and people aren't getting it
I don't understand why many people are still upset about Donald Trump's election victory. The movement to keep all things Trump stirred up is unprecedented. The only conclusion I can draw is that many Americans have gotten lost in the jungle of identity politics that was created by and for the Hillary campaign, and are unable to see the Trump woods for the trees. Don't forget that Hillary and her team may have to face serious judicial music under Trump, and creating a post-election storm of disinfo and vitriol seems their only post-election Plan B.

Instead, forget about what Trump may have said, and look at what he is doing. Remember the last 8 years. When you examine what Obama said while he was campaigning, it sounded wonderful, but he failed to follow through on those campaign promises. Did the media hold his feet to the fire? Did they try to take him down with fake news? Media focus on words instead of deeds is deliberate. Don't be fooled.

Look at some big positives for Mr. Trump, positives that would have been inconceivable in a Hillary presidency.

1. Trump actually has the establishment freaked out. The establishment has been worsening things for the 99% for a long time -- and so i.m.h.o. freaking them out is a very good sign. We don't know where this is going to go, but the establishment hysteria has proved itself real, which tells us that Trump does intend to change things. I say give him a chance, and I say Bravo!

2. He is appointing billionaires to some Cabinet posts. Well, one thing you can say about billionaires is that they have no need to steal from the rest of us. While this doesn't mean they will be great Secretaries, it removes one strike against them that Hillary, and presumably her people, had: she used her position to steal, and had long-honed knowledge of how to do so. (More on that below.)

3. He says we should have lower drug prices and they should be negotiated. Well, that's a no brainer. Did Obama, the healthcare Prez, do anything about that? Bernie Sanders just backed Trump up on this. Update: thirteen Democrats in the Senate just voted down cheaper medications.

4. Trump says we need to look into vaccine safety. Of course we need the safest vaccines we can get. Why would this be controversial? Only because the drug/vaccine industry has bought the media, politicians and federal agencies, do we hear it's controversial, when it clearly is not.

How many television commercials advertise drugs? Pharma owns TV. How many Pharma lobbyists are there for each member of Congress? Three: a lobbyist army to be reckoned with.

The federal government has paid out $3.5 billion dollars' compensation for vaccine injuries. The chorus of 'medical authorities' who are having a cow over Trump's questioning vaccine safety choose to ignore the facts. Where does their media-anointed 'authority" come from, we should ask. Are their remarks thoughtful and well-informed, or designed to shut down discussion of something important to us all, the safety of what gets injected into ourselves and our families, often as a result of government mandates. Especially when the manufacturers have no legal liability for the end product.

Vaccines are a highly diverse group of substances, and their safety and effectiveness vary considerably between products and brands; due to the age, nutritional status, and genetics of the person being inoculated; and to the integrity of the manufacturing process. These are well-established facts. Every vaccine is relatively safe and relatively effective. If they were all 100% safe you wouldn't use doctors to prescribe them. Instead, you could buy them in bubble gum machines.

In fact, CDC emphasizes the importance of maintaining an "active and ongoing vaccine safety program" in its #1 vaccine reference book, the Pink Book:
"The Importance of Vaccine Safety Programs
Vaccination is among the most significant public health success stories of all time. However, like any pharmaceutical product, no vaccine is completely safe or completely effective. While almost all known vaccine adverse events are minor and self-limited, some vaccines have been associated with very rare but serious health effects. The following key considerations underscore the need for an active and ongoing vaccine safety program..."
So much for the medical establishment being up in arms because vaccine safety needs to be watched. Everyone but the Pharma-paid media and its carefully selected shills knows it needs to be watched. The meme that 'investigating vaccine safety is dangerous' is an oxymoron. It's just more fake news.
5. Trump is pissed off at the lying, war-making, fake news-spreading "intelligence" agencies and appears to want to rein them in. For this we should be immensely grateful, as they have caused so much damage around the world and domestically -- inciting wars we have no business to be in, wars in which the public has no idea why the US is involved. Not to mention fomenting plots to terrorize at home and abroad. Pretty please, do rein them in.

6. He wants peace with Russia, while Hillary did her best to antagonize Russia. Hang up the nukes for the next 4 years: I say that's a very good thing!

Obama said a lot of pretty things, but what did he do? Got us into more wars, didn't get us out of any. He sold us a pig in a poke 'Affordable Care Act' that many people (mainly those who never had to use it) were conned into thinking was a big improvement over what came before. In fact, Obamacare changed the landscape of health insurance, ushering in an era of higher copays and reduced benefits not only for beneficiaries of the A.C.A., but also for those buying commercial insurance in other markets.

What about Hillary? Come on, we know who her constituency really is: they 'donated' billions to her campaign and to her Foundation, and paid her killer fees for speeches. The Clinton Foundation, starting to unravel, is looking like a pay-to-play scheme that led to the resignation of the New Zealand PM (some of the NZ Herald reportage is no longer accessible) and announcements by Australia and Norway that they will cease funding the Foundation.

Don't people understand yet that her strategy to become President was to foster racial, religious, sexual orientation and gender divisiveness, and then ride in on a white horse to fix the mess she had fed and exploited? In truth, she represented only the Business and War Party. Her campaign relied on the politics of gender, religion, sexual orientation and race, because championing them does not cost business anything, and because it allowed her to skirt the much more threatening issue of economic injustice.

Hillary cheated Bernie out of the nomination. Sixteen years ago, she stole White House gifts and furniture. Were those items loot from pay-to-play when Bill was in office? I suspect she collected on foreign policy decisions made when she was Secretary. She certainly was the main cheerleader (why?) for the destruction of Libya and Syria, and bears significant responsibility for the current refugee crisis, which she says is bigger than any refugee crisis since the Second World War.

Hillary played us. Stop being played, the election is over. Let's see what Mr. Trump can do.
Posted by Meryl Nass, M.D. at 7:34 PM 0 comments

















New Bill Aims To Eliminate ‘Scandal-Ridden’ Bureau Of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms And Explosives


RUSS READ

Pentagon/Foreign Policy Reporter

5:03 PM 01/12/2017


Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2017/01/12/new-b ... z4VgAoyrOu






http://time.com/4634613/comey-fbi-investigation/

James Comey Cannot Be Trusted With a Trump-Russia Investigation
TIME-
It was always going to be difficult for FBI Director Jim Comey to oversee an ... by a former British intelligence agent that the Russian government engaged in an ...



http://www.breitbart.com/big-government ... gov-cuomo/



FBI Agents Allege Unpunished Domestic Terrorism by Murderer Granted Clemency by Gov. Cuomo

http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryla ... story.html
Baltimore police officer convicted of misconduct after tipping off drug ...
Baltimore Sun-
The FBI agents briefed Plater and other Baltimore police officers at the meeting on a Prince George's County Police investigation of four subjects suspected of ...


http://www.southstrandnews.com/opinion/ ... 6655a.html


Steve Williams column: The time is always right to do right
South Strand news-
Saltonstall met with an FBI agent and listened to details of King's private conversations. Later, he met with president Olds to dish the FBI's dirt on King. Saltonstall ...


http://rollingout.com/2017/01/13/escort ... e-station/


Escort service operated next to Atlanta area police station
Rolling Out-
FBI Special Agent Joe Fonseca told rolling out in a previous interview, “While looking at factors that might account for Atlanta's high rank regarding sex trafficking ...



http://www.hammondstar.com/news/sentenc ... 653fc.html

Sentencing continued to later date
Hammond Daily Star online-
DEA Agent Chad Scott was suspended from his job in 2016 after a state and ... Chief James Stewart have referred all questions related to that search to the FBI.



https://www.thenewspaper.com/news/51/5126.asp

Federal Appeals Court Upholds Ferrari Confiscation
TheNewspaper.com-
In 2008, the FBI grabbed a 1995 Ferrari F50 worth $750,000, which Assistant US Attorney J. Hamilton Thompson and an FBI agent proceeded to take on a ..



https://www.bostonglobe.com/news/nation ... story.html

NSA gets more latitude to share intercepted communications
The Boston Globe
Previously, the NSA filtered information before sharing intercepted communications with another agency, such as the CIA or the intelligence branches of the FBI ...


https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/201 ... y-congress

Angering Congress, James Comey won't address Trump-Russia ...
The Guardian-
James Comey said he would 'never comment' on a potential FBI investigation in an 'open forum like this'. Photograph: Cliff Owen/Associated Press.


https://www.rawstory.com/2017/01/parent ... nipulated/

Parents of teen found in gym mat allege time of death manipulated
Raw Story
The Johnsons have contended from the beginning their son was murdered by brothers Branden and Brian Bell, the sons of an FBI agent, despite alibis placing ...



http://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/n ... 55524.html
Search Results

Mad killers only slightly crazier than the criminal justice system
Miami Herald (blog)-
And just two months before he flew into Fort Lauderdale with no luggage other than his 9mm pistol, Santiago had complained to FBI agents in Anchorage that ...

Heat is Online


http://www.nydailynews.com/news/world/2 ... -1.2949779

2016 was third-straight record hot year
Wednesday, January 18, 2017, 7:58 PM



For Third Year in a Row, Earth Sets Heat Record

Earth sizzled to a third-straight record hot year in 2016, with scientists mostly blaming man-made global warming with help from a natural El Nino that's now gone.

Two U.S. agencies and international weather groups reported Wednesday that last year was the warmest on record. They measure global temperatures in slightly different ways, and came up with a range of increases, from minuscule to what top American climate scientists described as substantial.

They're "all singing the same song even if they are hitting different notes along the way. The pattern is very clear," said Deke Arndt of the National Oceanic and Atmo




FBI Octopus
exposing FBI tentacles

http://www.courier-journal.com/story/ne ... /96664118/

Next US attorney likely ex-McConnell aide FBI agent
The Courier-Journal-
The next U.S. attorney in the Western District of Kentucky is likely to be an ex-FBI agent who more recently served as counsel to Senate Majority Leader Mitch ...






https://buffalonews.com/2017/01/18/tolb ... ge-howard/

Tolbert eyes challenging Howard for Erie County sheriff
Buffalo News
Bernard A. Tolbert, the former FBI agent and 2013 Democratic candidate for mayor, is making serious inquiries about challenging

http://azbigmedia.com/ab/2-fbi-added-wgm-cyber

Former FBI agents added to WGM cyber/forensic team
AZ Big Media-
Scottsdale-based technology firm WGM added two former FBI agents to its fraud and cyber protection services team. Michael McAndrews recently


Link du jour


http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politic ... -1.2949762

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/ ... mp-waxwork


http://www.newyorker.com/news/amy-david ... s-sentence



http://ticklethewire.com/2017/01/18/pre ... -lied-fbi/


http://www.post-gazette.com/sports/psu/ ... 1701170100



Ex-Penn State leader must trim lawsuit against FBI director Louis Freeh
January 17, 2017 5:56 AM

BELLEFONTE, Pa. — A judge has ordered Penn State University’s former president to pare down his defamation


http://therealnews.com/t2/story:18134:F ... dom-Strugg


http://www.nydailynews.com/news/crime/c ... -1.2949695






Chicago cop charged in fatal shooting of unarmed man
BY ELIZABETH ELIZALDE
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS Wednesday, January 18, 2017, 5:17 PM



Jose Nieves was shot and killed by an off-duty Chicago transit officer on Jan.2. (
A Chicago police officer has been charged in the fatal


http://www.globalresearch.ca/trump-vs-the-cia/5569286

Trump vs. the CIA
Center for Research on Globalization-
The attack on Trump from the CIA and its media agents at the New York Times, ... Trump's trump question to the CIA, NSA, FBI is: So, you know the Russians ...


http://www.nydailynews.com/news/nationa ... -1.2130041



Florida cop suspended for slapping homeless man (VIDEO)
BY MEG WAGNER
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS Thursday, February 26, 2015, 9:39 AM




http://www.nydailynews.com/news/crime/h ... -1.2949573

Homeless man slapped by Florida cop captured on video files suit
BY ELIZABETH ELIZALDE
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS Wednesday, January 18, 2017, 4:19 PM

Homeless man Bruce LaClair slapped by a Florida police officer Victor Ramirez in February 2015 has filed a lawsuit against him. (WSVN)
A homeless man who was knocked to the ground and slapped by a Florida police officer captured on video has





http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/cop ... -1.2949532

Cops breaking rules more often, but discipline is limited: report
BY THOMAS TRACY
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS Wednesday, January 18, 2017, 3:22 PM


Out of the 518 cops the CCRB found fault with, none were fired and only 20 were suspended or forced to give up vacation days. (MICHAEL IP/FOR NEW YORK DAILY NEWS)
More NYPD cops are being accused of abuse and misconduct — but very few are being disciplined, the New York Civil Liberties Union charged Wednesday.

Tabulating year-end figures released by the city’s Civilian Complaint Review Board, the NYCLU determined the CCRB substantiated 1,179 cases brought to its office between 2014 and 2016 — an 82% increase over the 648 the board substantiated during the three prior years.

Yet neither former Police Commissioner Bill Bratton nor his successor James O’Neill seriously disciplined the cops the CCRB had substantiated cases against.







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Book Excerpt: The Spy Who Couldn’t Spell: A Dyslexic Traitor, an Unbreakable Code, and the FBI’s Hunt for America’s Stolen Secrets


Book Excerpt: ‘Missing Man: The American Spy Who Vanished in Iran’


Nine Years Later, Ex-FBI Agent Robert Levinson Still Missing After Visiting Iran




http://ticklethewire.com/2017/01/18/tam ... -policing/

Tampa Bay Times: Trump’s Justice Department Can’t Ignore Bad Policing

By Editorial Board
Tampa Bay Times

The Justice Department’s thorough report detailing the Chicago Police Department’s systemic disregard for civil rights is a sickening account of excessive force and abuse. It also is just one of the depressingly familiar federal investigations of police departments throughout the nation that have used discriminatory tactics. Yet President-elect Donald Trump’s choice for attorney general, Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions, has criticized such federal efforts as overreaching. Whether it’s civil rights or voting rights, Washington cannot look the other way when there is nowhere else to turn for help.

The Chicago situation is breathtaking in its scope, brutality and cynicism. The Justice Department’s report says police officers routinely use unnecessary force, from firing their guns at cars or during foot chases to using Tasers in nonthreatening situations. It describes officers taking gang members to the neighborhoods of their rivals in an attempt to force them to talk. And it recounts an instance when an officer pointed his gun and then handcuffed teens who were trespassing on their bikes. No wonder the police have difficulty getting cooperation from residents as the city’s murder rate soars.

In such a dysfunctional situation, it’s also understandable that the federal report describes a Chicago Police Department that is demoralized, lacks discipline and fails to follow its own policies. That is exactly why the Justice Department has to step in to protect the rights of citizens, independently spotlight the abuses and help change the system. Under the Obama administration, the department has investigated police department




http://www.king5.com/news/local/seattle ... /386769546

Seattle can't release info about FBI cameras, judge rules
Associated Press , KING 11:37 AM. PST January 17, 2017

SEATTLE - A federal judge has barred Seattle from releasing information about surveillance cameras the FBI has placed in the city.

Seattle had planned to release information about the cameras under a public records request, but the FBI said that would jeopardize its ability to conduct investigations and that the city had already promised not to disclose it.

U.S. District Judge Richard Jones issued a temporary restraining order last June preventing the city from releasing the relevant documents, and on Tuesday he issued a final order to that effect. He said the information is protected from disclosure for law enforcement reasons


FBI agents will not file charges in thousands of pedophile cases
it recently developed in their illegal hacking operation.
Instead it will blackmail politicians, ,lawyers,judges, police, members of msm
and other high level assets while prosecuting gas station attendents.
FBI refuses to release names of thousands downloading child porn.

http://www.sacbee.com/news/business/tec ... 04904.html

JANUARY 17, 2017 3:13 PM
FBI faces backlash for child porn investigation

A case involving the FBI taking over a child porn website as part of a sting operation has sparked an ethics debate among legal scholars and defense attorneys, including lawyers for a Texas man caught in the sting.

Federal prosecutors are defending the agency's decision to secretly seize, control and monitor a child pornography website for two weeks to catch child predators in 2015, The Dallas Morning News (http://bit.ly/2jkFt8v ) reports. During that time, tens of thousands of child porn images were uploaded to

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




https://krebsonsecurity.com/2017/01/who ... rm-author/

JAN 17 2017
Who is Anna-Senpai, the Mirai Worm Author?

On September 22, 2016, this site was forced offline for nearly four days after it was hit with “Mirai,” a malware strain that enslaves poorly secured Internet of Things (IoT) devices like wireless routers and security cameras into a botnet for use in large cyberattacks. Roughly a week after that assault, the individual(s) who launched that attack —




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



LAPD officer convicted of sending ‘harmful’ texts to teen, acquitted of child annoyance charges

A Los Angeles police cruiser in Hollywood in 2015. Officer Abel Montes De Oca has been convicted of two misdemeanors in connection with distributing "harmful matter" to a female teen cadet in an LAPD youth program. (Al Seib / Los Angeles Times)
Matt HamiltonContact Reporter
ALos Angeles police officer who worked in an LAPD youth program was convicted Tuesday of distributing harmful matter to a teenage girl, authorities said.

After a five-day trial, a downtown L.A. jury convicted Abel Montes De Oca of two misdemeanor counts: destroying evidence and distributing “harmful matter” to a juvenile, according to the L.A. city attorney’s office.


Montes De Oca, 32, was acquitted of two counts of child annoyance.

After the verdict was read, the judge remanded Montes De Oca into custody, and he is being held on $100,000 bail, prosecutors said.


He faces up to 18 months in jail at his sentencing, scheduled for Friday.

Prosecutors say that in September 2015, the officer met a then-16-year-old girl who was a cadet in the L.A. Police Department’s Community Youth Program. The program runs 18 weeks and provides physical training and criminal-justice education to students ages 13 to 20, according to the program’s website.

Through October 2015, prosecutors alleged that Montes De Oca sought an inappropriate relationship with the girl, sending her text messages and other missives via social media.

Once the officer’s mistreatment of the girl was disclosed, prosecutors alleged, he tried to delete photos and messages from his phone and computer. He also told the girl to wipe out any evidence of his correspondence, according to the city attorney’s office.

Police arrested Montes De Oca in August at the LAPD’s downtown headquarters.

Montes De Oca’s defense attorney, Lou Shapiro, said his client did not dispute that he inappropriately texted with the girl or destroyed evidence. Shapiro said the key issue was whether Montes De Oca was guilty of two counts of child annoyance — graver charges that carry stiffer penalties. The jury ultimately acquitted him of both counts.

“Defense expert Dr. Sanjay Sahgal testified that for a 31-year-old male to be sexually attracted to a 16-year-old post-pubescent female was not abnormal or unnatural from a clinical point of view,” Shapiro said. “[Sahgal] conceded that it was not normal from a moral point of view.”

Shapiro thanked the jurors “for being able to set aside the fact that he was a police officer and simply judge him based on the facts and evidence.”

Los Angeles City Atty. Mike Feuer had harsher words for Montes De Oca after the verdict was announced.

"This was an egregious breach of trust by an LAPD officer responsible for supervising student cadets,” Feuer said in a statement. “It is essenti





http://www.alternet.org/activism/free-leonard-peltier

◀
ACTIVISM
Ex-FBI Agent Pleads for the Release of Leonard Peltier for Humanitarian Reasons
Forty years in jail, six in solitary confinement, guilt questionable; it is time to let Peltier out of prison.
By John C. Ryan / AlterNet January 18, 2017


Photo Credit: Gary Stevens /Flickr Creative Commons

I was an agent with the FBI when two of my fellow agents were murdered at the Pine Ridge Reservation in 1975. Today I’m calling on President Obama to free the man convicted of killing them.

I didn’t know Special Agents Jack Coler and Ronald Williams personally, but I felt the same shock and horror everyone in the FBI felt at their deaths. Like former United States Attorney James Reynolds, who handled the prosecution in the critical post-trial period, I believe that clemency for Leonard Peltier “is in the best interest of justice.” I further believe that keeping him incarcerated any longer perverts the system of justice for which the two agents died, and which the agency is sworn to uphold.

I do not make this call lightly, and it should not be seen as a criticism of the actions of the well-meaning, patriotic agents of the Bureau, nor as a referendum on the Bureau itself. A benefit of hindsight is that sometimes it provides an opportunity to address an injustice like this.


According to the Eighth Circuit, witnesses were coerced and ballistics evidence was withheld from Peltier's attorneys at trial. U.S. Attorney Reynolds has re-emphasized in recent interviews that the government had no proof to support its trial theory that Peltier was the person who shot the two FBI agents, and he remains in jail today on a thin “accomplice” theory.

Despite the disturbing number of red flags, judicial criticism of government conduct, and his accomplice status, Peltier has been held in prison for more than four decades, four times longer than former FBI Special Agent Mark Putnam, who had an affair with an informant, murdered her when he learned she was pregnant and then obstructed the investigation into her disappearance. Over the course of those four decades, Leonard Peltier has spent no less than six years in solitary confinement; conditions



http://www.weeklystandard.com/fbi-relea ... le/2006365

FBI Releases 500 More Pages of Clinton Foundation Investigation ...
The Weekly Standard (blog)
One document released, dated November 18, 2004, is an "acknowledgement of exceptional work performance" by a special agent (name redacted) who was





http://njjewishnews.com/article/32895/j ... IBAPWZOm2c

Justice deferred: Ethel Rosenberg innocent, per Seton Hall Law team

Ethel and Julius Rosenberg in custody in 1951



January 18, 2017
Almost 64 years after Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were sent to the electric chair, a team of investigators from Seton Hall Law School in Newark uncovered a document showing that Ethel, a Jewish woman with two small sons, was executed wrongfully.

Heading the investigation was a law professor who believed anti-Semitism was partly behind the prosecution and punishment of the Rosenbergs. The couple was executed in 1953 on charges of conspiring against the United States by providing classified material on the country’s nuclear program to the Soviet Union.

The Seton Hall team unearthed a one-page memo written on July 17, 1950, from FBI special agent A.H. Belmont to D. Milton Ladd, assistant to FBI director J. Edgar Hoover. It relayed the findings of Assistant Attorney General James McInerney, who wrote that “there is insufficient evidence to issue process against her at the time.”

The memo added, “Mr. McInerney requested that any additional information concerning Ethel Rosenberg…might be possible to utilize her as a lever against her husband.”

In other words, prosecutors and FBI agents knew that evidence against Ethel was not strong enough to warrant putting her on trial. Nonetheless, the FBI urged prosecutors to threaten her with the death penalty unless she agreed to betray her husband. She stood fast in her refusal to do so and was put to death in the electric chair at Sing Sing prison on June 19, 1953.

“The reason for her prosecution seems clear: Ethel was executed because she refused to cooperate with the government to help convict her husband,” said Mark Denbeaux, the Seton Hall law professor who shepherded 25 of his students through a three-year review of the case. “Ethel was merely a pawn used for leverage in the government’s attempt to build a case against Julius Rosenberg.”

Their findings were published on Dec. 21.

Many scholars familiar with the case believe that anti-Semitism played a role in their prosecution, even suggesting it was a reason for their being electrocuted on a Friday night. Among them is Denbeaux, a Protestant whose opinion was strongly influenced by his father, a Presbyterian chaplain in World War II. The elder Denbeaux returned home keenly attuned to Jewish suffering after taking part in the liberation of two concentration camps. “My father never talked about combat,” said the professor, “only about the camps.”

When the Rosenbergs were arrested in 1950 for conspiracy to commit espionage, the professor’s father was skeptical of their guilt. “I grew up believing from him that they were both innocent and wouldn’t have been executed if it wasn’t for anti-Semitism. My dad saw anti-Semitism in many places,” he said.

One longstanding theory is that several Jews were given prominent roles in order to dispel the notion that officials’ motivation for pursuing the case was related to anti-Semitism. Noting that the judge in the case, Irving R. Kaufman, was a Jew, as were prosecutor Irving Saypol and his deputy, Roy Cohn, Denbeaux said his father believed their presence spoke volumes. “If you didn’t think religion mattered, why would you make sure the judge, the prosecutors, and the investigators were all Jews?” he asked.

Intrigued by the case, Denbeaux tasked his students in 2013 to start digging into 250,000 pages of testimony and evidence relating to the investigation, trial, and execution of the Rosenbergs, who were convicted of joining in a conspiracy to violate the Espionage Act of 1917.

Their alleged accomplices were Ethel’s brother and sister-in-law, David and Ruth Greenglass. Originally David told the FBI his sister had no involvement in the plot. Then he changed his testimony to implicate Ethel so his own wife would not be indicted. In 1996, he confessed to lying under oath, telling a New York Times reporter, “My wife is more important to me than my sister.”

Greenglass served 15 years in prison for his role in the alleged spy ring. His wife never spent a day behind bars.

“What’s revelatory is the government, the FBI, admitted it,” said Denbeaux. “It is one thing to say we want her to roll over, but it is another to say, ‘We’ve got nothing on her but we can use her as leverage.’ I can see that to be the significant statement in that memo.

“The government did not believe she was guilty and executed her anyway. That seems to me to be a dramatic, shocking fact. How often do you have people in the government say, ‘We’ve really got to hammer her to make her talk?’”

The law students wrote that what is known is that “even though Ruth and David played much larger roles in the conspiracy than Ethel, it was Ethel who was sent to the electric chair, while David received a 15-year sentence, and Ruth walked away without ever being indicted. That supports the theory that the government only actively prosecuted Ethel to obtain a confession, and cooperation, from her husband.”

Amanda Frankel, a third-year law student from South Orange who worked on the study, said that although she feels that Ethel’s execution was unjustified, she doesn’t consider it a result of anti-Semitism. “I just associated it with anti-communism,” she said.

Her work on the project taught her of






https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-edi ... i-file-art

This Artist Turned Her Father's 500-Page FBI File into Art
Artsy-
He was a founder of the Compton, California, chapter of the Black Panther Party for Self Defense, known as Section 9-A. FBI agents, working under





https://www.creators.com/read/judge-nap ... al-freedom

Personal Freedom
By Judge Andrew P. Napolitano
January 19, 2017 7 Min Read

On Jan. 3, outgoing Attorney General Loretta Lynch secretly signed an order directing the National Security Agency — America's 60,000-person-strong domestic spying apparatus — to make available raw spying data to all other federal intelligence agencies, which then can pass it on to their counterparts in foreign countries and in the 50 states upon request. She did so, she claimed, for administrative convenience. Yet in doing this, she violated basic constitutional principles that were erected centuries ago to prevent just what she did.
Here is the back story.
In the aftermath of former President Richard Nixon's abusive utilization of the FBI and CIA to spy on his domestic political opponents in the 1960s and '70s — and after Nixon had resigned from office in the wake of all that — Congress passed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which created a secret court that was charged with being the sole authority in America that can authorize domestic spying for non-law enforcement purposes.
The standard for a FISA court authorization was that the subject of the spying ne

http://ticklethewire.com/2017/01/27/par ... dly-force/


Parker: Supreme Court Strengthens Qualified Immunity for Law Enforcement Officers’ Use of Deadly Force


It was a tough year for law enforcement officers. Line of duty deaths, especially intentional killings of police, were up dramatically. Several categories of violent crime, including homicides, rose significantly after two decades of steady decline in crime statistics. Recruitment of new officers is becoming difficult, and officers confronting deadly situations are justifiably wary about the public (and media) second-guessing life or death decisions that had to be made under pressure within seconds.

Heather MacDonald, in her recent book The War On Cops, blames these developments on an anti-law enforcement movement led by groups like Black Lives Matter, accentuated by media attention, and facilitated by the policies of the Obama Administration. Whether you buy all of her conclusions, she does make a persuasive case that the current atmosphere in some segments of the public about law enforcement has resulted in officers being less aggressive in discretionary policing and that is a factor in a new crime wave, especially in the nation’s cities.

Into this troubling and dangerous situation, a potential boost in law enforcement confidence came this month from an unlikely source, a per curiam opinion by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Per curiam (Latin: by the Court) decisions are judgments by appellate courts as a whole in which no particular judge or Justice is identified as the author. In the Supreme Court per curiam opinions are almost always unanimous and usually represent brief rulings on non-controversial subjects. They tend to be short. They seldom set an important precedent or alter the rule of law.

But there are exceptions. In 1972 the per curiam opinion by the Court in Furman v. Georgia turned capital punishment upside down when it struck down every death penalty law and practice in the country as arbitrary and capricious under the 8th Amendment. It took four years for the states to re-institute death penalty statutes and, in many ways, the case began to diminish the role of the supreme penalty which continues to this day.

Bush v. Gore

In Bush v. Gore (2000) the Court issued a per curiam opinion in one of the most controversial cases in the Court’s history. The Court upheld the razor-thin Florida vote which gave the presidency to George Bush by a single electoral vote over Al Gore. The 5-4 vote followed party lines with the Republican appointed Justices in the majority, but the ruling was brief and unauthored. Harvard Professor Alan Dershowitz called it the “single most corrupt decision in Supreme Court history,” but others thought it was a profile in courage which preserved the republic.

new_mexico_state_police

Earlier this month the Court decided another per curiam opinion which has gotten much less attention but which could have profound implications, especially to law enforcement officers on the front line. White v. Pauly was an appeal from a civil ruling by a federal district court against New Mexico State Police Officer Ray White, who had shot and killed Samuel Pauley in a police confrontation outside of Santa Fe.

Witnesses had called 911 to report Pauley as a drunk driver. Two police officers went to his residence where he lived with his brother Daniel Pauly in a secluded area to talk with Pauly. They ordered him to open the door. It was asserted in the complaint that the brothers had not heard the officers identify themselves. The Paulys got their firearms.

A few minutes after the initial confrontation, Officer White arrived at the scene outside of the Pauly residence. The Paulys yelled that they had guns and Daniel fired two shotgun blasts outside the back door. Samuel stuck his handgun outside a window in the front of the house and pointed it in the officers’ direction. All three of the officers took cover, White behind a stone wall. One of the initial two officers fired his gun at Pauly and missed. Officer White fired and killed Samuel Pauly.


http://ticklethewire.com/2017/01/27/bor ... wall-plan/

Border Patrol Chief Steps Down After Trump Reveals Wall Plan
Border Patrol chief, Mark Morgan


The Border Patrol chief stepped down Thursday after President Trump signed executive orders increasing border security.

It remains unclear whether Border Patrol Chief Mark Morgan resigned voluntarily or under pressure, CNN reports.




http://www.post-gazette.com/opinion/edi ... 1701310059

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: FBI Went too Far Running a Child Porn Site



The FBI is supposed to protect children from predators, not use them as pawns in a pornography sting. That is what happened, however, and now the agency is under fire from civil rights groups, defense attorneys and even some scholars and federal judges. Not for the first time — remember when agents impersonated a journalist in pursuit of a teenager who was making bomb threats to a school? — the FBI has demonstrated embarrassingly poor judgment in an internet-based investigation.

For two weeks in 2015, after seizing control of a child porn website, the FBI not only allowed the site to remain operational but operated it, becoming what The Seattle Times called “one of the largest purveyors of child pornography on the internet.” The goal of Operation Pacifier was to identify those who used the site and file charges against them. By the time the FBI pulled the plug, it had the goods on nearly 190 people, thanks to special technology it used to hack into users’ computers.

When is distribution of child porn not a crime? According to the FBI, when it’s the one doing the distributing. Its operation of the site allowed visitors to access pornographic images, further exploiting the victims. It’s even been accused of improving the site’s functionality, making it friendlier for porn-seekers to use during the sting.


http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-t ... SKBN15922L


Trump May Bring Back Secret CIA Torture ‘Black Site’ Prisons



President Trump may bring back so-called CIA “black site” prisons where terrorism suspects are held and were once tortured.

President George W. Bush used the black sites to combat the “war on terrorism” following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, but former President Barack Obama closed them.

In the next few days, Trump is expected to sign an executive executive order to call for a high-level review into “whether to reinitiate a program of interrogation of high-value alien terrorists to be operated outside the United States” and if the CIA should run the facilities, Reuters reports.

The information comes from a copy of




http://gizmodo.com/the-fbis-colossal-fa ... 1791708294

The FBI's Colossal Failure Investigating GamerGate
Gizmodo-
The FBI appeared to find a lead on a bomb threat and interviewed the ... the FBI's utter misunderstanding of trolling and internet culture led an agent to ask an ...


http://www.cleveland.com/court-justice/ ... _of_1.html

North Randall police officer who sold guns to felons loses ...
cleveland.com-
Lumpkin also said FBI agent Michael Haynie should not have been allowed to testify about whether he thought Lumpkin was lying in an interview. Rogers wrote ...



http://www.whsv.com/content/news/Border ... 89515.html
Border Patrol chief says he's been forced out
WHSV-2
The former FBI agent briefly led the internal affairs department at the Border Patrol's parent agency before heading the agency of roughly 20,000 agents.


Reveal | from The Center for Investigative Reporting
https://www.revealnews.org/
America's Worst Charities Criminal Justice Day Care Education Guns Health Care Impact Inside the Newsroom Money and Politics National Security Religion ...
When it comes to Trump, this union is strong
Reveal (blog)-
Thursday's ouster of Border Patrol Chief Mark Morgan, a former FBI official who ... A former top agent in the FBI's El Paso office, Morgan was publicly assailed by ...



Trial for former BRPD officers accused of abuse of power involving sex act continues
Thursday, January 26th 2017, 6:25 pm ESTThursday, January 26th 2017, 6:25 pm EST


The trial of three former Baton Rouge Police officers accused of abuse of power related to a sex act that allegedly occurred in a park is now in its second day.

Travis Wheeler, Emerson Jackson, and Isaac Bolden are accused of going up to a man and woman in a car at a BREC park and telling the man to leave and asking the woman to perform a sex act on one of the officers while the two other officers watched.

http://www.ksla.com/story/34358417/tria ... -continues

Thursday's testimony included the man who was with the woman in the car, along with a





https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/ ... ry-edwards
Texas prisoner dies of lethal injection after last-minute appeal fails
The Guardian-
But Edwards' attorneys say a review they commissioned last year by a former FBI agent contradicts this, and argues: “The testing and evidence introduced at trial ...

http://www.thedenverchannel.com/news/lo ... adicalized

Denver Muslims warned FBI in Dec. that accused RTD shooter was 'very radicalized'
Blair Miller
12:48 PM, Feb 2, 2017

http://www.todaysiphone.com/2017/02/hac ... dino-case/

Hacker claims to have access to some data from security firm hired by FBI to unlock iPhone 5c in San Bernardino case
• February 2, 2017


Last year, there was a huge battle between Apple and the FBI in regards to iOS security. Specifically, the FBI asked Apple to compromise iOS security in order to get into the San Bernardino shooter’s iPhone 5c. The FBI then turned to Cellebrite to get into the phone. Now, Motherboard reports that a hacker has released files allegedly from Cellebrite that demonstrates how such tools can be dangerous.
The hacker claimed to have taken the newly released data from a remote Cellebrite server, and said they had extracted them from UFED images. They told Motherboard that the files were encrypted, likely in an attempt to protect Cellebrite’s intellectual property, but that they managed to bypass the protections.
Motherboard reports that Cellebrite had over 900GB of files stolen from its server last month which suggests that the firm sold cracking tools to Russia, Turkey, the UAE, and many others. Motherboard adds that the hacker responsible released some cached files from Cellebrite relating to cracking older iPhones.


http://sfbayview.com/2017/02/the-black- ... ed-states/


The Black Panther Party and Black anti-fascism in the United States
February 2, 2017


The Black Panther Party, the International Liberation School and the National Committees to Combat Fascism were the sponsors of the National Conference for a United Front Against Fascism in 1969. This poster spread the word. – Photo courtesy of Student Digital Gallery
Fascism has been thrust into the mainstream political vocabulary of the United States since the election of President Donald Trump on a platform grounded in xenophobia, corporate dominance and right wing white nationalism. After the election, search engines and online dictionaries reported a dramatic increase in users seeking to define the term.
News outlets from Al Jazeera (“The Foul Stench of Fascism in the Air”) to Forbes (“Yes, a Trump presidency would bring fascism to America”) to the Washington Post (“Donald Trump is actually a fascist”) published articles analyzing how Trump fits into fascist paradigms. Most recently, The Nation (“Anti-Fascists Will Fight Trump’s Fascism in the Streets”) chronicled the long history of anti-fascist organizing in Europe and the United States to inspire activists engaged in resistance at this political moment.
Black history has been marginalized in this burgeoning contemporary discourse about fascism. Analyses of the U.S. as fascist have a long history in the Black intellectual tradition. Black thinkers like Harry Hayward, Claudia Jones, George Jackson and Kuwasi Balagoon used fascism as an analytical framework to understand the rise of segregation in the South after Reconstruction; white populism at the turn of the 19th century; land and labor struggles in the Black Belt South, and the evolution of capitalism in the 1970s.
The Black Panther Party played a prominent role in the modern history of Black anti-fascism. Panther leaders were deeply influenced by “The United Front Against Fascism,” a report by Georgi Dimitroff delivered at the Seventh World Congress of the Communist International in July-August 1935.
Black history has been marginalized in this burgeoning contemporary discourse about fascism.
By 1969, the Panthers began to use fascism as a theoretical framework to critique the U.S. political economy. They defined fascism as “the power of finance capital” which “manifests itself not only as banks, trusts and monopolies but also as the human property of FINANCE CAPITAL – the avariciou



http://wjla.com/news/crime/man-shot-inj ... police-say

Former FBI agent shoots man intruding in home after fight in Anne Arundel Co., police say

aent



https://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/office ... ate-sector

Office of Private Sector
Federal Bureau of Investigation (press release) (blog)-
Brad Brekke, former FBI agent and former chief security officer for an ... According to Brad Brekke, the head of today's FBI Office of Private Sector (OPS), “We ...





http://www.journalgazette.net/news/loca ... s-17589572


Police admit to favors for witness
Fort Wayne Journal Gazette-15 hours ago
Jeffrey Robertson, a special agent with the FBI, described how Jasmine Griffin, the chief witness for the prosecution, provided information to the FBI on occasion ...
http://www.freep.com/story/news/local/m ... /97374496/
cop to plead guilty in Rizzo trash scandal; feds say he took bribes
Detroit Free Press-
6 in a case that alleges he took a $5,000 bribe from an undercover agent in ... Reynolds who unwittingly introduced Harris to the







http://www.hgazette.com/news/local_news ... 13d2a.html

The Harvell gazette-Jay White, a retired FBI agent and a former member of the Joint Terrorism Task Force, will lead the discussion. White is an adjunct faculty member at several ...
http://www.hgazette.com/news/local_news ... 13d2a.html



http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/fbi-uses-threa ... es-1604262



FBI uses threat of deportation to turn immigrants into snitches
International Business Times UK-
The FBI's Confidential Human Source Policy Guide identifies the agency's 'secret ... "If the [informant]'s location is unknown, the [FBI agent] must work with ICE to ...



http://fox59.com/2017/02/02/marion-coun ... sla-crash/



Marion County coroner releases cause, manner of death for 2 people killed in fiery Tesla crash


McCarthy, a former FBI agent, was the president and CEO of Case Pacer, an Indianapolis-based software company. Speckman, who was newly engaged, had recently graduated law school and was working at Case Pacers.










http://www.theeagleonline.com/article/2 ... ontroversy
Artist disappointed by University's removal of statue
The Eagle-
“The message being sent by AU to FBI Special Agents and their families, past and present, and to all members of the law enforcement community, is both clear ...




https://www.thecanary.co/2017/02/01/new ... liberties/

New revelations show the FBI still poses serious threats to civil ...
The Canary-
If an FBI agent wants to infiltrate a particular group, they must obtain approval and justify the operation's importance and alignment with the constitution. But not if ...





http://occupysf.net


Police withdraw from controversial FBI anti-terrorism task force - by ...
https://www.sfexaminer.com/police-withd ... m-task-for...


- The San Francisco Police Department has suspended its nearly decade-long cooperation with the FBI's anti-terrorism task force, the department announced ..







http://news.yale.edu/2017/02/01/yale-po ... th-academy


Yale Police, FBI to host second Future Law Enforcement Youth ...
Yale News-
Yale Police, FBI to host second Future Law Enforcement Youth Academy ... Antoine, and Kevin Kline, assistant special agent in charge for the





MuckRock
https://www.muckrock.com/

From Abbie Hoffman to Malcolm X, Ol' Dirty Bastard to the Insane Clown Posse, FBI files read like a veritable Who's Who of the 20th Century. This project aims to






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



Why Did The FBI Say It Couldn't Release Documents To 'FOIA Terrorist' Jason Leopold That It Released To Me Months Earlier?
from the hmmm dept
What's up, FBI? Back in early 2015, when the FBI and (specifically) Director James Comey ramped up their silly "going dark" moral panic about how strong encryption was making us less safe, I sent a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to the FBI for all of the FBI's internal talking points about "going dark" or other views on encryption. My main reason for this was really to see if I might uncover some of the reasoning for why the FBI had quietly deleted a page on its website that encouraged people to encrypt their phones. It took until May of last year, but the FBI finally delivered me a stack of talking points, mostly focused on talking point lists and speeches given by Comey. I never wrote about it because the talking points alone weren't even that interesting.
In fact, I'd almost totally forgotten about that entire request. But then, a few weeks ago, right here on this site, Tim Cushing wrote about the latest escapades of Jason Leopold, the reporter whose use of FOIA requests is so prolific that he's been dubbed a "FOIA terrorist" by the DOJ. It turns out that Leopold had made a similar request to the FBI... and was told that while they had found 487 responsive records, they were giving him a grand total of 0 of them, because they were all subject to restrictions on release. In that article, Cushing, rightly explains why this is ridiculous. The whole point of "talking points" is to share them with the public. There is simply no FOIA exemption that allows for blocking them.
But this was even more bizarre to me for the simple fact that the FBI had already sent me many of those documents. I didn't add up all the pages sent to me, but I can tell it's probably closer to about 100 pages than 487, so clearly the FBI is likely lying to me as well in terms of how many "responsive" documents there really were, but I'm confused as to why the FBI couldn't release these kinds of documents to Le






FB PROPAGANDA MACHINE STILL ACTIVE AT PBS


http://www.enidnews.com/news/new-film-t ... 61a6b.html

New film to air next week on PBS links McVeigh to far-right ahead of ...
Enid News & Eagle-
Jeff Jamar of the FBI, speaking in the documentary, said it seemed negotiations never really existed. "We were just in a situation where all it could do was grow ...




http://reason.com/blog/2017/02/02/dont- ... olent-extr


Don't Rebrand the 'Countering Violent Extremism' Program—Just ...
Reason (blog)-1 hour ago
... people showing signs of 'radicalization,'" comments Michael German, a former FBI agent who now hangs his hat at the Brennan Center for Justice.


For the Southern Poverty Law Center, the move suggests that "President Trump wants the government to stop its efforts to prevent terrorism by far-right extremists." For Jezebel, it's "another victory in a long series of wins for Neo Nazis, the KKK, and other violent and terroristic groups." Salon calls it "pandering to white supremacists." The target of their ire: a plan to rebrand the federal government's Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) program. According to Reuters, which cites "five people briefed on the matter," the Trump administration wants to rename it "Countering Radical Islamic Extremism," or maybe just "Countering Islamic Extremism," and to focus its attention on Muslim terrorists rather than the various domestic right-wing kinds.
In practice, CVE's efforts are already focused overwhelmingly on Muslims. But the big question here shouldn't be which groups ought to be the program's targets. It's whether the program should exist at all. No matter whether it's aimed at Islamists, white nationalists, or anyone else, the CVE approach has two big problems.
First: It rests on the idea that the best way to root out terrorism is to fight "radicalization." This idea has support among both Democrats and Republicans, but the evidence supporting it is sparse. When investigators at the British think tank








http://www.whas11.com/news/nation-now/r ... /395874586

Reports: Trump hung up on Australian PM
WHAS11.com
... for 120 days and orders the departments of State and Homeland Security to work with the FBI and CIA on "enhanced vetting" of those seeking refugee status.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/ ... c-violence

Russia
Putin approves change to law decriminalising domestic violence
Critics say amendment sends wrong message in country whe






http://www.nydailynews.com/news/nationa ... -1.2966610



KING: Trump’s 1st month is deadliest since 2015 for cop killings
Tuesday, February 7, 2017, 4:53 PM



President Trump’s first month in office ended with at least 105 people killed by American police.
Police brutality. Remember that? The issue that gripped our nation, catalyzed a movement, and got the attention of the world for two straight years.

Today, Sandra Bland would have and should have turned 30 years old. She should have never been pulled over by police in Texas. She damn sure shouldn’t have been threatened with violence, assaulted by police, arrested and thrown in a local jail where she died days later.

From the summer of 2014 until the start of the presidential election, it would be hard to argue that police brutality was anything other than one of our nation’s most pressing public issues. But the extended election cycle, from the primaries to the general, sucked the wind out of almost every important issue being discussed and debated across the country. Instead, like clockwork, our nation primarily obsessed over Donald Trump’s latest tweets, the wide variety of white supremacists and neo-Nazis who professed their undying love for him, and the latest twist and turn into the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s emails.





Trump is President, the Justice Department is about to be in the hands of a team who could care less about police brutality, and we just experienced the deadliest month at the hands of American police since 2015.

President Trump’s first month in office ended with at least 105 people killed by American police. That’s the highest number of people killed by American police in any one month since 2015. And because Trump’s claiming jobs gained for January, and because the major police unions all endorsed Trump, I’



POLITICS
Former FBI Agent: We Must Get to the Truth on Russia and Trump

Nancy Pelosi's right — we can't let up on this as-of-yet rumor.

BY SUSAN SURFTONE
FEBRUARY 06 2017 5:08



https://www.policeone.com/officer-misco ... l-affairs/

Texas cop fired over feces sandwich fired again– Jan 30, 2017
Matthew Luckhurst was originally given an indefinite suspension in October after giving a homeless man a feces sandwich





Woman says President Trump made her single again.

A retiree in Washington State told Reuters she called it quits with her husband of 22 years because he voted for Trump — something she saw as a “deal breaker.”

“It totally undid me that he could vote for Trump,” said Gayle McCormick, 73, a retired California prison guard who called herself a “Democrat leaning toward socialist.”

“It opened up areas between us I had not faced before,” she said.


http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-f ... story.html


FCC is stopping 9 companies from providing subsidized Internet to the poor



http://reason.com/archives/2017/02/06/f ... vestigated


FBI's Insider Trading Strategist Faces Criminal Inquiry Over Leaks to Press
The alleged misconduct could cast further doubt on U.S. attorney Preet Bharara's campaign against "insider trading."
| February 6, 2017

A New York-based FBI agent who played a leading role in a string of recent insider trading prosecutions is under criminal investigation for what federal prosecutors, in a recent court filing, call "unquestionable misconduct by an agent of the Government…improper and inexcusable."

It's the sort of story that ordinarily might be splashed across the front


http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/nyc ... e-1.296440



NYC correction officer busted for stealing her boyfriend’s phone
BY THOMAS TRACY
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS Saturday, February 4, 2017, 8:26 PM



http://www.waow.com/story/34439801/lawm ... uth-prison


Lawmaker demands FBI give up information on WI youth prison ...
WAOW-
Van Wanggaard of Racine sent a letter to Justin Tolomeo, special agent-in-charge of the FBI's Milwaukee office, on Jan. 30. Wanggaard asked Tolomeo to ...


http://www.oregonlive.com/oregon-stando ... _duan.html

Oregon standoff defendant Duane Ehmer gets into heated exchange ...
OregonLive.com
FBI agents testified that Ehmer voluntarily signed a consent form allowing the ... The agent said he told Ehmer that those who had no felony warrants




FBI Octopus
exposing FBI tentacles



http://www.bizjournals.com/buffalo/news ... nelli.html


Louis Ciminelli, two others resign from LPCiminelli
Buffalo Business First-
Frank Ciminelli said he has hired former FBI Special Agent and Chief Division Counsel Paul Moskal to handle risk assessment and an aggressive compliance ...





http://www.wcnc.com/news/politics/bill- ... /401189679



Bill adds police stop education to training

5:10 PM. EST February 06, 2017


CHARLOTTE, N.C. -- Would you know what to do if you got pulled over by a police officer? The House is talking about a bill that would spell out the procedures for everyone, and some in our area say it's long overdue.

No one wants to get pulled over, but it happens. Thing is, not everyone knows exactly what to do.

“This is perfect-- this is exactly what we’ve been lobbying for.”

M. Quentin Williams is a former FBI agent and prosecutor who also wrote a book called “How Not to get Killed by the Police




https://www.amazon.com/Plot-Kill-King-B ... J4HYYP9FEV

5 out of 5 stars

A Tour de Force of Investigative Reporting: Best Book Ever on the MLK Jr. Assassination!!
ByPhillip F. Nelsonon July 29, 2016
Format: Hardcover|Verified Purchase
The Plot to Kill King: The Truth Behind the Assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. This is an OUTSTANDING book, arguably the best ever compendium of the people, events and documented evidence related to the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. Do not let the "1 star" reviews confuse you, they have been written for the very purpose of reinforcing the lies and deceit that were planted decades ago to hide the true story of the outrageous plot. The trolls are easily identifiable because they are too cowardly to use their real names and hide behind the most ridiculous and banal monikers, which usually connote the opposite of what the term is meant to describe.

Dr. William Pepper has courageously--and nearly singlehandedly--completed the investigation that should have been done by the FBI nearly half a century ago. But, as he has amply demonstrated, since that was the organization behind the set-up for MLK's murder and cover-up, the reason for their failure to conduct that inquiry becomes painfully obvious. While Pepper has only hinted at the connection to the White House, to state that the plot to kill King was put in motion by high-level criminals in the FBI, with help from the local Memphis police, the CIA and the leaders of the Dixie Mafia, along with a cover up that repeated the same patterns as the JFK and RFK assassinations, as well the that of the Israeli attack on the USS Liberty in 1967, it is no stretch to complete the circle: That it was all done with either the blessing, the instigation or at least the acquiescence of the POTUS himself: LBJ.

There are many stunning discoveries that Dr. Pepper has uncovered as well, including the assertion that at least three men within MLK's own circle betrayed him, one of whom is still considered one of the "leaders" of the civil rights "movement." But under my "no spoilers" rule, those names will not be repeated here, let it be sufficient to say that they provided all that the FBI officials who were constructing the elaborate plans needed to know as to the "comings and goings" of MLK to complete their deadly mission.

Phillip F. Nelson, author of "LBJ: The Mastermind of the JFK Assassination" and "LBJ: From Mastermind to The Colossus"




http://news-sentinel.com/news/local/Par ... r-children


Parents: Learn more about dangerous mobile apps available to your ...
News Sentinel-
Scheduled speakers include FBI Special Agent Jeffrey Robertson, Det. Chris McCarty of the Fort Wayne Police Department and Crista Miller,




https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source= ... FXNo2_tM4g


Police Sexual Abuse of Teenage Girls: A Update on “Driving While Female - Samuel Walker
samuelwalker.net ›
by S Walker
on “Driving While Female” by the University of Nebraska at Omaha. The 2002 ... This report found 72 cases of police officer sexual abuse of teenage girls (and ...



http://www.cnn.com/2013/02/21/us/fbi-misbehavior/

FBI battling 'rash of sexting' among its employees
By Scott Zamost and Drew Griffin, CNN Special Investigations Unit




https://www.postguam.com/news/local/fbi ... 956be.html

FBI awards UOG master's grads
Grads receive award for campaign against sexting, cyberbullying

Post News Staff
Some of the University of Guam masters degree graduates yesterday received the 2016 Director’s Community Leadership Award from the FBI.

These graduates received national recognition for their creation of the nonprofit organization “Project Foresight Guam: Sexting & Cyberbullying Awareness Campaign” and the positive impact it has had on the community, according to a press release from the FBI.

FBI Honolulu Division’s Assistant Special Agent in Charge Tuan M. Nguyen recognized the graduates’ achievement.

Sixteen students from the Master of Public Administration’s Practicum class of Spring 2016, received the recognition


http://www.reuters.com/article/us-new-y ... SKBN15L2FH

Judge Rejects New York Mafia Informant’s Lawsuit Against FBI



Joseph Barone was a former Mafia informant for the FBI when he spent 19 months in a Brooklyn prison before a federal jury acquitted him in 2010.

Barone, now 55, sued the FBI, saying the bureau wanted to discipline him for refusing to trick a gangster from the Gambino crime family into confessing crimin


http://gizmodo.com/trumps-new-head-of-b ... 1791995136


Trump's New Head of Border Patrol Might Want to Delete This Tweet

US Custom and Border Protection’s new chief of Border Patrol, Ron Vietello (left) and a tweet he sent out in March of 2016 (right)
This week President Trump named Ronald



http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-sea ... story.html

NATION
Seattle becomes the first city to sever ties with Wells Fargo in protest of Dakota Access pipeline

Blink Tank
http://www.snowshoefilms.com/wellstone.html

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=0B5hv6scbBo

Link du jour


http://www.fbiauthors.com/non-fiction-b ... er-fbi.php

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1996/ ... he-hit-man


http://www.politico.com/states/new-york ... ers-067223


http://www.forbes.com/sites/kellyphilli ... o-a-hotel/



http://www.wkow.com/story/34479129/resi ... ncer-cases

FBI Octopus
http://beatricedailysun.com/news/local/ ... ace70.html

Beatrice to join human trafficking task force
Beatrice Daily Sun-
Anna Brewer, former FBI special agent who currently works as a training consultant at the Women's Fund of Omaha spoke on how human trafficking hits ...


http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/reco ... k-45396113

Records: Undercover FBI Agent Was Near Gunmen Before Attack
ABC News
An undercover FBI agent who was investigating terrorism was driving past two Arizona men just before they opened fire
Records: Undercover FBI agent was at Garland, Texas, attack

9:42 a.m. MT Feb. 10, 2017
PHOENIX - An undercover FBI agent who was investigating terrorism was driving past two Arizona men just before they opened fire outside a Prophet Muhammad cartoon contest in suburban Dallas in 2015, court records show, raising questions about whether authorities could have done more to stop the attack.





http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2 ... orist.html


FBI Agent Apparently Egged on ‘Draw Muhammad’ Shooter

Days before an ISIS sympathizer attacked a cartoon contest in Garland, Texas, he received a text from an undercover FBI agent.
“Tear up Texas,” the agent messaged Elton Simpson days before he opened fire at the Draw Muhammad event, according to an affidavit (pdf) filed in federal court Thursday.

“U know what happened in Paris,” Simpson responded. “So that goes without saying… No need to be direct.”
That revelation comes amidst a national debate about the use of undercover officers and human sources in terrorism cases. Undercover sources are used in more than half of ISIS-related terror cases, according to statistics kept by the George Washington University Program on Extremism, and civil-liberties advocates say some of those charged might not have escalated their behavior without those interventions.
“It would certainly be inappropriate for an FBI undercover agent or cooperating witness to provoke or inspire or urge a person to commit an act of violence,” Michael German, a former




TechCrunch
FBI Throws Up Digital Roadblock to Transparency
EFF-
It's well documented that the FBI is keen on adopting new technologies that intrude on our civil liberties. The FBI's enthusiasm for technology, ...




https://www.rt.com/shows/watching-the-h ... -facebook/

FBI vs. CIA, and reforming the Intelligence Community
RT-21
Tyrel Ventura and Tabetha Wallace welcome former CIA agent and whistleblower John Kiriakou and former FBI Special Agent Mark Rossini to the Hawks Nest ..


http://patch.com/california/lamorinda/5 ... agents-car

$5000 Reward: Submachine Gun, More Stolen From FBI Agent's Car
Patch.com-Feb 9, 2017
BAY AREA, CA - The FBI is offering a $5,000 reward for information leading to the recovery of a gun and several other items stolen out of





http://atlantablackstar.com/2017/02/10/ ... forcement/

Recently Uncovered FBI Report Reveals Long History of White Supremacists Infiltrating Law Enforcement
February 10, 20170599


White supremacists are infiltrating police departments around the country, drawing concern in the Trump era of white nationalism and reflecting a long history of domestic terrorists participating in law enforcement.

These domestic extremist groups remain vibrant in police departments and other law enforcement agencies, as The Intercept reported. A classified FBI Counter Terrorism Policy Guide from April 2015, obtained by The Intercept, revealed that “domestic terrorism investigations focused on militia extremists, white supremacist extremists and sovereign citizen extremists often have identified active links to law enforcement officers.” The white supremacist presence among the police is not a new problem, yet it is one that is not being publicly addressed. With no uniform national standards governing the nation’s 18,000 law enforcement agencies, many with a long history of racism, white rightist groups have fertile ground to expand their influence.

In light of this open attempt to further co-op law enforcement, Black officials are speaking out. As The Washington Post reported, Angelia Williams Graves, a Norfolk, Va., councilwoman, told a crowd at an NAACP luncheon last October that modern racists have “taken off their white hats and white-sheeted robes and put on police uniforms. Some of them have put on shirts and ties as policymakers and some of them have put on robes as judges.”

“I know I could never change the condition from the outside. I had to go for the inside,” Col. K.L. Williams, the Black chief of police in Kinloch, Mo., said at a CNN town hall meeting last July. “If you think that racism and white supremacy is not involved in police departments, you better check yourself. Because the KKK has been involved with law enforcement from when it just about started,” he continued.

For over a decade, the federal government has monitored white hate groups in policing. A redacted internal FBI report released in 2006 shows the inroads made by these groups in law enforcement is a concern because of




http://www.kcci.com/article/former-poli ... nt/8699595


police chief pleads guilty to stealing gun, lying to FBI agent
KCCI Des Moines-Feb 9, 2017
Jeffrey Filloon, 47, from Toledo is accused of stealing and pawning a Tama police service


http://www.alternet.org/environment/rev ... -activists

Revealed: FBI Terrorism Taskforce Investigating Standing Rock ...
AlterNet
The FBI is investigating political activists campaigning against the Dakota Access pipeline, diverting agen

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source= ... 2i-gft7oeQ



High-Ranking FBI Agent Convicted of Assaulting Teen at Gunpoint Receives Probation, Keeps Job as Counterterrorism Chief - PINAC News
- The high-ranking FBI Agent who was convicted for assaulting a teenager ... “You're already two hours late,” Rogero told the father, who was still ...





http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2 ... orist.html








https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source= ... R2j5HXBukA

agent identified after suicide, kidnapping, sexual assault of immigrants | Local News | themonitor.com
The Monitor › news › border-patrol-age...
Border Patrol agent Esteban Manzanares, 32, raped the woman and ... Susana, said an FBI agent told her Thursday that the father of her two ...




http://www.dailynews.com/general-news/2 ... civil-suit

Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca appeared in federal court in Riverside County Thursday to tell a judge if he planned to pay a pending $100,000 fine out as a result of a civil lawsuit that stems back to an inmate’s injuries in 2009.

The federal civil rights lawsuit brought by Tyler Willis alleged he was beaten by deputies with flashlights, punched, kicked and shocked with a Taser, resulting in fractures and head injuries, while he was awaiting trial on charges of lewd acts with a child. He was convicted of those charges.

In 2013, jurors found Baca, Capt. Daniel Cruz and deputies Anthony Vasquez, Mark Farino and Pedro Guerrero guilty of violating Willis’ rights. At the time, it was considered rare for a top law enforcement figure to be held personally liable for the action of his officers.

The parties agreed to pay $165,000 in punitive damages, which the defendants divided among themselves. Baca was to pay $100,000 — of his own pocket — but he appealed the fine and the issue has been pending since.

On Thursday, the deputies told U.S. Magistrate Judge David Bristow during a debtors hearing that they would pay their portion, said Samuel Paz, one of Willis’ attorneys. Baca was given until



https://www.eff.org/press/releases/fbi- ... -eff-tells



February 10, 2017
FBI Search Warrant That Fueled Massive Government Hacking Was Unconstitutional, EFF Tells Court

Appeals Court Should Find Warrant Violated Fourth Amendment Protections
Boston—An FBI search warrant used to hack into thousands of computers around the world was unconstitutional, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) told a federal appeals court today in a case about a controversial criminal investigation that resulted in the largest known government hacking campaign in domestic law enforcement history.

The Constitution requires law enforcement officers seeking a search warrant to show specific evidence of a possible crime, and tie that evidence to specific persons and places they want to search. These fundamental rules protect people from invasions of privacy and police fishing expeditions.

But the government violated those rules while investigating “Playpen,” a child pornography website operating as a Tor hidden service. During the investigation, the FBI secretly seized servers running the website and, in a controversial decision, continued to operate it for two weeks rather than shut it down, allowing thousands of images to be downloaded. While running the site, the bureau began to hack its visitors, sending malware that it called a “Network Investigative Technique” (NIT) to visitors’ computers. The malware was then used to identify users of the site. Ultimately, the FBI hacked into 8,000 devices located in 120 countries around






http://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news- ... to/1324339





FBI Agent Arrested For Selling Documents To Mafia

This undated police photo shows Michael Levin, a former FBI agent who works as a private detective in Las Vegas. Levin was arrested last week and charged with




https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source= ... MCDHmGj9Pg

Church Cmte Book III: FBI Program to Destroy the Black Panther Party
https://www.aarclibrary.org › book3 › pdf
Agent m Charge in San Diego boasted that the cartoons had caused these incidents ..... bers of the Blackstone Rangers were arrested on Chicago's South. Side.4” A ...


http://www.ksat.com/news/fifth-annual-w ... e-saturday

Fifth annual Women in Law Enforcement event takes place Saturday
KSAT San Antonio
"This is important to me because when I was growing up, I was always interested in becoming a special agent with the FBI, but I was never exposed to what that ...



http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/politic ... 44961.html


Top FBI agent in Seattle alleges sexual bias, claims superiors undercut her


WASHINGTON -- The Seattle-based FBI special agent who oversees all bureau operations in Washington state is embroiled in a legal fight with officials who she says have discriminated against her and undermined her work.

In a revealing lawsuit that partially cleared a key hurdle Thursday, Special Agent-in-Charge Laura M. Laughlin complained that she has been denied at least 10 promotions since she took over the FBI’s Seattle field office in early 2005. She also asserts she’s been pressured since 2007 to retire from the high-profile position and has been denied requests for added staffing.

“As a combined effect of all these matters, she is not respected as a leader by her subordinates and management chain in the way that (special agents-in-charge) normally are,” attorneys David Wachtel and Eliza Dermody wrote in one legal brief.

On Thursday, in a 31-page decision, U.S. District Judge John D. Bates sided with the FBI in dismissing some of the complaint that Laughlin filed in 2011. Bates, for instance, rejected Laughlin’s age discrimination claim with the observation that “pre



http://www.denverpost.com/2016/08/19/fb ... imination/


female agent sues FBI claiming sexual harassment, discrimination – ...
The Denver Post › 2016/08/19 › fbi-sued...
Aug 19, 2016 - A federal lawsuit by a former FBI agent in Denver offers an unusual glimpse ... Marks claims that she was “constructively fired” when she resigned ..




http://www.nydailynews.com/news/nationa ... -1.2969481

Black man shot in back by police dies




http://www.nydailynews.com/news/nationa ... -1.2969911


Politics
Unarmed Minneapolis man shot and paralyzed by Amtrak officer