rigorousintuition.ca

see link for full story
http://www.omaha.com/article/20101218/NEWS97/712189880

Saturday December 18, 2010
FBI tries ‘shocking' technique

By Todd Cooper
WORLD-HERALD STAFF WRITER


WORLD-HERALD EXCLUSIVE
An attorney said it seemed like something out of “Star Wars.”

From a field office on 108th Street, FBI agents could press a button and activate a device that allowed them to listen inside two rooms at the Douglas County Jail in downtown Omaha.

These weren't just any rooms. They were the attorney-clergy privilege rooms, places where inmates are supposed to be able to meet in confidence with their attorneys or pastors.

The goal of the wire: to have cooperating inmate Richard “Ricky” Conway obtain information about reputed marijuana ringleader Shannon Williams and Williams' former attorney, the late Eric Whitner.

see link for full story
http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn ... veillance/


Monday, Dec 20, 2010 06:21 ET
The government's one-way mirror
By Glenn Greenwald


One of the hallmarks of an authoritarian government is its fixation on hiding everything it does behind a wall of secrecy while simultaneously monitoring, invading and collecting files on everything its citizenry does. Based on the Francis Bacon aphorism that "knowledge is power," this is the extreme imbalance that renders the ruling class omnipotent and citizens powerless.

In The Washington Post today, Dana Priest and William Arkin continue their "Top Secret America" series by describing how America's vast and growing Surveillance State now encompasses state and local law enforcement agencies, collecting and storing always-growing amounts of information about even the most innocuous activities undertaken by citizens suspected of no wrongdoing. As was true of the first several installments of their "Top Secret America," there aren't any particularly new revelations for those paying attention to such matters, but the picture it paints -- and the fact that it is presented in an establishment organ such as The Washington Post -- is nonetheless valuable.

Counterterrorism and You

— By Kevin Drum
| Mon Dec. 20, 2010 11:56 AM PST

http://motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2010/ ... sm-and-you

see link for full story
http://rockwallheraldbanner.com/local/x ... yment-case

December 17, 2010
Sentence issued in Schlotzsky’s employment case

By JIM HARDIN Herald-Banner Staff The Zope Gazette Fri Dec 17, 2010, 12:00 PM CST

ROCKWALL — The former owner of a fast food restaurant in Rockwall has been sentenced in a federal courtroom for using illegal alien workers.

Ann Cox, 49, of Rockwall, was also a former FBI agent and was placed on probation following the hearing Wednesday in the Dallas court of Chief U.S. District Judge Sidney A. Fitzwater.

Who do you think made the phone call to Weber? The Police
the FBI or a Punk?
see link for full story
http://www.annarbor.com/news/fbi-interv ... k-arrests/


Witness to Punk Week arrests says he was interviewed by the FBI


Posted: Dec 21, 2010 at 6:00 AM [Today]

Bob Weber is still troubled by a voicemail message he says he received days after witnessing Ann Arbor police arrest eight people during a Punk Week gathering in August at Bandemer Park.

Weber, 62, saw a heated exchange on Aug. 15 between officers who ordered people out of the park and the punks who claimed they had a right to be there.

Officers had responded to a report that people were smoking marijuana, lounging naked and having sex, the police report says. Ultimately, police arrested eight people, who were later charged with resisting and obstructing police and disturbing the peace. Two people who were naked were cited that afternoon for disorderly conduct.

Weber, who thought officers were unnecessarily rough with people and the arrests were unjust, wrote his name and phone number on a scrap piece of paper, which he gave to a young couple at the park, he said.

He offered to testify on behalf of the accused, then went fishing as planned and never expected to hear about it again. Days later, Weber was checking his voicemail and listened to a message from a man, who said he heard Weber was "offering" to be a witness.

“So…you are going to be a witness?” Weber says the caller said, according to an Aug. 25 narrative of the incident Weber said he provided to the FBI.

see link for full story


SAN FRANCISCO, Dec. 21, 2010
Judge: Feds Must Pay $2.5M in Wiretapping Case
Investigators Wiretapped Phones of Suspected Terrorist Organization without Warrant, Says Judge


(AP) A federal judge on Tuesday ordered the U.S. government to pay more than $2.5 million in attorney fees and damages after he concluded investigators wiretapped the phones of a suspected terrorist organization without a warrant.


http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/12/ ... ag=topnews

2 reads about your bodyguards

a species that hires bodyguards to protect them looses the ability to protect itself and is doomed to
extinction


1st read
see link for full story
http://www.lasvegassun.com/news/2010/de ... nslaughte/



Jury finds ex-FBI special agent guilty of manslaughter in hammer death
Judge sets sentencing for February for 63-year-old former law enforcement officer


Tuesday, Dec. 21, 2010 | 4:54 p.m.
Edward Preciado-Nuno
Sun Archives


A jury found retired San Diego FBI special agent Edward Preciado-Nuno guilty of voluntary manslaughter with use of a deadly weapon Tuesday afternoon in Clark County District Court.


In his opening statements, Pesci said the evidence would show that Long was trying to defend herself. He showed the jury an autopsy photo of Long's head. It showed 13 places where Preciado-Nuno had hit her with a claw hammer.

Pesci also showed the jurors photos of cuts and bruises from the hammer marks on her arm, plus an X-ray that showed her arm had been broken. There were 34 areas of injury on her body, he said.

2nd read
see link for full story
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/co ... 03783.html

ARLINGTON COUNTY
Ex-FBI Official Gets Six Years
19-Year Veteran Tortured Girlfriend


By Kirstin Downey
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, March 13, 2008



"This obviously was a horrific crime," Circuit Court Judge James F. Almand said. "It requires a substantial sentence and a substantial amount of time."

Almand sentenced Spicocchi to 10 years in prison, suspending four of them.

Spicocchi, who is married, believed his girlfriend was dating another man and attacked her in a jealous rage, according to court records. But the girlfriend, who said she was too fearful of Spicocchi to appear in court yesterday, said in a statement that she was not unfaithful.

"He thought she was cheating on him, but she wasn't," said Assistant Commonwealth's Attorney Lisa Bergman. The attack "came completely out of the blue," Bergman said.

In the statement, read by Bergman, the woman gave this account: When she came home that day, she found Spicocchi hiding in a closet, armed with a gun and a 10-inch knife. He stripped her and wrapped her in tape, then dragged her around the apartment by her hair. He forced the gun into her mouth and held the knife to her throat. He beat her repeatedly. He told her that he would cut open her veins and that, because of his training, he knew how long it would take the blood to drain from her body.

"He said I had met my match," she said in the statement.

He told her that he planned to kill her and that she would soon join her father, who had died 10 months earlier. He said that he would write a check for $100,000 from her account and flee to South America after she was dead and that he had a plane ticket for a 6 a.m. flight.

Finally, the woman said, she escaped by running into the hall and screaming for help. "The attack on me was unprovoked," she said in her statement. "I feel lucky to have escaped the monster."

She said Spicocchi had told her he had been divorced for four years.

Fun & Games on FBI.gov

http://blogs.forbes.com/billsinger/2010 ... omepageFAN

Tommy Douglas: Air secret RCMP files
Published On Wed Dec 22 2010
see link for full story
http://www.thestar.com/opinion/editoria ... rcmp-files

Few Canadians are more revered than Tommy Douglas, the former Saskatchewan premier, national NDP leader, Baptist minister, and father of medicare. When he died in 1986, he was a national icon.

But his critique of capitalism made him a target for the RCMP security service during the Cold War era of “Reds under the beds.” It was a time when FBI boss J. Edgar Hoover compiled vast and damaging dossiers on U.S. presidents Dwight Eisenhower and John Kennedy, Pierre Trudeau, Albert Einstein, Martin Luther King, Sammy Davis Jr. and a host of others.

The RCMP shadowed Douglas with Hoover-like zeal -- eavesdropping on private conversations, probing his links to the peace movement and analyzing his every remark. They assembled a thick file, of which 1,142 pages survive. Some go back 70 years. Yet Library and Archives Canada has released only 456 heavily-censored pages. Improbably, Ottawa cites national security in holding back the rest.

Ex-FBI Agent Convicted in Bludgeoning Death of Woman
By Stephanie Woodrow | December 22, 2010 12:24 pm
SEE LINK FOR FULL STORY
http://www.mainjustice.com/2010/12/22/e ... ing-death/

Edward Preciado-Nuno

A retired FBI agent was found guilty of voluntary manslaughter on Tuesday for using a hammer to beat his son’s girlfriend to death, the Las Vegas Sun reported.

Edward Presciado-Nuno, whose trial began last week, had worked at the FBI bureau in San Diego until 2003,when he resigned.

District Judge Donald Mosley has the option of sentencing him to probation.

The Judge welcomes your comments....

New trial for inmate claiming FBI setup



Inmate gets new trial in alleged FBI framing






Posted: 12/23/2010

see link for full story
http://www.abc15.com/dpp/news/region_ph ... -fbi-setup

PHOENIX - A county inmate who claims he was framed by the FBI will get a new trial after a judge's ruling last week.

"It was a frame-up," said Chris Alexander. "All the evidence that they had was from this crooked agent."

Alexander was arrested in 2002 and found guilty of conspiracy to commit armed robbery. But the investigating federal agent, Joe Gordwin, and a confidential informant were also accused of having an affair with two women connected with Alexander.

MEDIAlternative: WTF: CIA edition
by Kevin Howley
December 25, 2010
see link for full story
http://www.bloomingtonalternative.com/a ... 2/25/10621


File this one under: “You can’t make this stuff up.”

According to Greg Miller at the Washington Post: “The Central intelligence Agency (CIA) has launched a task force to assess the impact of the exposure of thousands of U.S. diplomatic cables and military files by WikiLeaks. Officially, the panel is called the WikiLeaks Task Force. But at CIA headquarters, it's mainly known by its all-too-apt acronym: WTF.”

Posted by Dr Stuart Jeanne Bramhall at 10:09 pm
December 25, 2010
http://blogs.alternet.org/refugee/2010/ ... -for-2010/
Prague Spring: Implications for 2010
Posted by Dr Stuart Jeanne Bramhall on @ 10:09 pm
Article printed from speakeasy: http://blogs.alternet.org/refugee
URL to article: http://blogs.alternet.org/refugee/2010/ ... -for-2010/

For me the section on Prague spring and the student/intellectual uprising in Czechoslovakia is one of the most valuable sections of Mark Kurlansky’s 1968: the Year that Rocked the World. With the distressing level of FBI and police repression occurring in the US, I find it heartening to learn that organized resistance occurred even in the brutal totalitarian regimes of cold war Eastern Europe. Moreover I feel it’s important to understand the circumstances in which resistance developed – a well as it’s significance in the ultimate collapse of the Soviet bloc.

It’s quite common for the US power elite to attribute the collapse of the Soviet Union to the Soviet invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, which ultimately bankrupted their economy. In, fact some of them take credit it: Zbigniew Brzezinski brags that the US ingeniously “lured” them into Afghanistan. Hopefully American intellectuals are too sophisticated to be taken in by this simplistic and jingoistic view of world history.

Posted: December 27, 2010 10:21 AM

Capo's Drive-By Sighting Outs Cohort as FBI Informant

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jerry-cap ... 01360.html

see link for full story on how Portland FBI agents created a terrorist event to force the city to join the JTTF
http://weaselzippers.us/2010/12/27/port ... cus-group/


The JTTF is one of numerous multijurisdictional anti-terrorism task forces formed around the country after the 9/11 attacks in New York and at the Pentagon. The council voted to withdrawn [sic] the Portland Police Bureau from the JTTF after former Mayor Tom Potter complained he could not adequately supervise them as police commission. The issue resurfaced after the FBI arrested Mohamed Osman Mohamud for allegedly plotting to bomb the Nov. 26 Christmas tree lighting ceremony in Pioneer Courthouse Square on the day after Thanksgiving.

In his letter, Adams said he is keeping an open mind on the question. The majority of the public comments posted on his website are against rejoining the JTTF, however. For example, one unidentified caller to his office said, “I, myself, do not think we should. The real help to stop this comes from the communities where the terrorist springs from, and not by the FBI profiling people of Muslim faith.” An unidentified emailer said, “I hope you will maintain your principled stand against Portland joining the JTTF. It seems to me that the recent episode involving Mohamed Osman Mohamud’s alleged plan to detonate a device at Pioneer Courthouse Square was specifically concocted by the FBI in order to pressure Portland to join the repressive task force.”