It’s back.
Did I already reblog this? Not sure, but posting this anyways.
Excerpt:
“Furthermore, articles that do mention the Palestinian casualties in Gaza consistently report that Israeli operations are in response to rockets from Gaza and to the injuring of Israeli soldiers. However, the chronology of events of the recent flare-up began on November 5, when an innocent, apparently mentally unfit, 20-year old man, Ahmad al-Nabaheen, was shot when he wandered close to the border. Medics had to wait for six hours to be permitted to pick him up and they suspect that he may have died because of that delay.
Then, on November 8, a 13-year-old boy playing football in front of his house was killed by fire from the IOF that had moved into Gazan territory with tanks as well as helicopters. The wounding of four Israeli soldiers at the border on November 10 was therefore already part of a chain of events where Gazan civilians had been killed, and not the triggering event.
We, the signatories, have recently returned from a visit to the Gaza strip. Some among us are now connected to Palestinians living in Gaza through social media. For two nights in a row Palestinians in Gaza were prevented from sleeping through continued engagement of drones, F16s, and indiscriminate bombings of various targets inside the densely populated Gaza strip.
The intent of this is clearly to terrorise the population, successfully so, as we can ascertain from our friends’ reports. If it was not for Facebook postings, we would not be aware of the degree of terror felt by ordinary Palestinian civilians in Gaza. This stands in stark contrast to the world’s awareness of terrorised and shock-treated Israeli citizens.”
(via theyoungradical)
(Source: kourtnoelle, via politicsd00d)
The chief executives of 80 large US corporations have issued a “Deficit Manifesto,” calling on the next president to “fix America’s debt” by making substantial “changes in the federal budget.” The statement was published by the Wall Street Journal on Thursday.
Behind the innocuous phrases is the demand by some of the richest individuals in America for the slashing of Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security and a general offensive against the working class.
The CEOs’ letter, signed by a “Who’s who” of CEOs at giant US banks, financial firms and industrial corporations, calls on politicians to acknowledge “that our growing debt is a serious threat to the economic well-being and security of the United States.” It calls for Washington to adopt “an effective plan [to] stabilize the debt as a share of the economy, and put it on a downward path.”
The plan should be enacted now, “but implemented gradually to protect the fragile economic recovery and to give Americans time to prepare for the changes in the federal budget.” In other words, their proposals would worsen life for wide layers of the population, who need to “prepare” themselves for a drastic decline in their conditions.
Making no reference to the trillions of dollars made available to the banks during the financial bailout nor the trillions more that go toward imperialist war and the global defense of their economic interests, the company heads insist that the target of a plan to “fix America’s debt” should concentrate on the programs that assist tens of millions of working people, the poor and retirees.
(via theyoungradical)
"It is not suicide…this is a mistake. They say they are going to die together resisting on their land if they removed by federal agents, the military or gunmen,” said Sposati, in an interview with APTN National News from Brasilia, Brazil’s capital. “They are going to stand up and if they start shooting they won’t run."
—
Brazilian Indigenous tribe denies mass suicide reports, says it plans mass resistance
(via thatsucia)
(Source: brujacore, via theyoungradical)
![johnbatcountryword:
I’ve never begged for anything to be reblogged and forgive me for the annoying pin but PLEASE reblog this for me if you see it. I don’t want my cousin to suffer for nothing.
It was just reported on NPR that John Kiriakou’s lawyers will enter a guilty plea deal tomorrow. People ask me why I refuse to support Obama (or Romney) and one reason I tell them is it’s personal. But it’s much more than that. This man is part of this admin’s family and our government stripped him of the right to defend himself and now of the right to be free. I will watch these two lying bastards tonight with no respect for either. If you think you are free, you are deluded. You just are hiding well enough and being silent enough to not be noticed.
We have covered the story of John Kiriakou extensively (More here). In short, John Kiriakou, a CIA agent of 14 years, has been charged with violating the Espionage Act of 1917, the same statute used to prosecute people like Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and Daniel Ellsberg, whose release of The Pentagon Papers to The New York Times was a seminal moment in ending the war in Vietnam. This is not a case about spying or espionage – John is not accused of sharing anything with a foreign government, selling information or enriching himself.
The charges against John allege that in answering questions from two reporters about suspicions that the CIA tortured detainees in its custody – the controversial Enhanced Interrogation Techniques that included waterboarding during the Bush-Cheney Administration – he violated this mostly obscure World War I-era law that aimed at punishing Americans who gave aid to enemies.
Most simply, the charges are that an American citizen answering questions from credible and mainstream American newspaper reporters somehow aided foreign enemies. While President Obama has since spoken out against and banned those techniques, no person who actually practiced torture will be punished, the only person even related with CIA led torture who might serve time in jail is John Kiriakou, the man who spoke out.From the NY Times in August
Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. announced Thursday that no one would be prosecuted for the deaths of a prisoner in Afghanistan in 2002 and another in Iraq in 2003, eliminating the last possibility that any criminal charges will be brought as a result of the bruta linterrogations carried out by the C.I.A.
Mr. Holder had already ruled out any charges related to the use of waterboarding and other methods that most human rights experts consider to be torture. His announcement closes a contentious three-year investigation by the Justice Department and brings to an end years of dispute over whether line intelligence or military personnel or their superiors would be held accountable for the abuse of prisoners in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
The closing of the two cases means that the Obama administration’s limited effort to scrutinize the counterterrorism programs carried out under President George W. Bush has come to an end. Without elaborating, Mr. Holder suggested that the end of the criminal investigation should not be seen as a moral exoneration of those involved in the prisoners’ treatment and deaths.
While no one has been prosecuted for the harsh interrogations, a former C.I.A. officer who helped hunt members of Al Qaeda in Pakistan and later spoke publicly about waterboarding, John C. Kiriakou, is awaiting trial on criminal charges that he disclosed to journalists the identity of other C.I.A. officers who participated in the interrogations.
Journalist Peter Van Buren writes in the Tom Dispatch…
Many observers believe however that the real “offense” in the eyes of the Obama administration was quite different. In 2007, Kiriakou became a whistleblower. He went on record as the first (albeit by then, former) CIA official to confirm the use of waterboarding of al-Qaeda prisoners as an interrogation technique, and then to condemn it as torture. He specifically mentioned the waterboarding of Abu Zubaydah in that secret prison in Thailand. Zubaydah was at the time believed to be an al-Qaeda leader, though more likely was at best a mid-level operative. Kiriakou also ran afoul of the CIA over efforts to clear for publication a book he had written about the Agency’s counterterrorism work. He maintains that his is instead a First Amendment case in which a whistleblower is being punished, that it is a selective prosecution to scare government insiders into silence when they see something wrong.
If Kiriakou had actually tortured someone himself, even to death, there is no possibility that he would be in trouble. John Kiriakou is 48. He is staring down a long tunnel at a potential sentence of up to 45 years in prison because in the national security state that rules the roost in Washington, talking out of turnabout a crime has become the only possible crime.
One of Kiriakou’s representatives, attorney Jesselyn Radack, told me, “It is a miscarriage of justice that John Kiriakou is the only person indicted in relation to the Bush-era torture program. The historic import cannot be understated. If a crime as egregious as state-sponsored torture can go unpunished, we lose all moral standing to condemn other governments’ human rights violations. By ‘looking forward, not backward’ we have taken a giant leap into the past.”
One former CIA covert officer, who uses the pen name “Ishmael Jones,” lays out a potential defense for Kiriakou: “Witness after witness could explain to the jury that Mr. Kiriakou is being selectively prosecuted, that his leaks are nothing compared to leaks by Obama administration officials and senior CIA bureaucrats. Witness after witness could show the jury that for any secret material published by Mr. Kiriakou, the books of senior CIA bureaucrats contain many times as much. Former CIA chief George Tenet wrote a book in 2007, approved by CIA censors, that contains dozens of pieces of classified information — names and enough information to find names.”
If only it was really that easy.
Never Again
For at least six years it was the policy of the United States of America to torture and abuse its enemies or, in some cases, simply suspected enemies. It has remained a U.S. policy, even under the Obama administration, to employ“extraordinary rendition” — that is, the sending of captured terror suspects to the jails of countries that are known for torture and abuse, an outsourcing of what we no longer want to do.
Techniques that the U.S. hanged men for at Nuremburg and in post-war Japanwere employed and declared lawful. To embark on such a program with the oversight of the Bush administration, learned men and women had to have long discussions, with staffers running in and out of rooms with snippets of research to buttress the justifications being so laboriously developed. The CIA undoubtedly used some cumbersome bureaucratic process to hire contractors for its torture staff. The old manuals needed to be updated, psychiatrists consulted, military survival experts interviewed, training classes set up.
Videotapes were made of the torture sessions and no doubt DVDs full of real horror were reviewed back at headquarters. Torture techniques were even reportedly demonstrated to top officials inside the White House. Individual torturers who were considered particularly effective were no doubt identified, probably rewarded, and sent on to new secret sites to harm more people.
America just didn’t wake up one day and start slapping around some Islamic punk. These were not the torture equivalents of rogue cops. A system, a mechanism, was created. That we now can only speculate about many of the details involved and the extent of all this is a tribute to the thousands who continue to remain silent about what they did, saw, heard about, or were associated with. Many of them work now at the same organizations, remaining a part of the same contracting firms, the CIA, and the military. Our torturers.
What is it that allows all those people to remain silent? How many are simply scared, watching what is happening to John Kiriakou and thinking: not me, I’m not sticking my neck out to see it get chopped off. They’re almost forgivable, even if they are placing their own self-interest above that of their country. But what about the others, the ones who remain silent about what they did or saw or aided and abetted in some fashion because they still think it was the right thing to do? The ones who will do it again when another frightened president asks them to? Or even the ones who enjoyed doing it?
The same Department of Justice that is hunting down the one man who spoke against torture from the inside still maintains a special unit, 60 years after the end of WWII, dedicated to hunting down the last few at-large Nazis. They do that under the rubric of “never again.” The truth is that same team needs to be turned loose on our national security state. Otherwise, until we have a full accounting of what was done in our names by our government, the pieces are all in place for it to happen again. There, if you want to know, is the real horror.
Today, Jessylyn Radack, director of the Government Accountability Project which supports Kiriakou and other whistleblowers wrote the following in the Daily Kos.
We are reposting in full and repeat strongly her plea to Call Attorney General Holder (202) 514-2001) to express your displeasure at the Justice Department’s protecting torturers and awarding investigators who decline to prosecute torturers while prosecuting whistleblowers.
Daily Kos. MON OCT 22, 2012 AT 05:32 AM PDTCIA Whistleblower to Spend Years in Jail for Revealing TorturebyJesselyn Radack
DO NOT let this become the headline.
As reported over the weekend, (here and here) Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) whistleblowerJohn Kiriakou is inches from being put in jail for allegedly “outing” a torturer. (“Outing” is in quotes because the allegations are not that Kiriakou told the public the torturer’s name, just that Kiriakou allegedly confirmed the name and eventually Guantanamo victims of torture learned the name and defense attorneys put the name in a sealed court filing.)
One of EmptyWheel’s two must-read pieces on the Kiriakou case over the weekend:
I flat out guarantee the import of that is the court put the brakes on the entire case as a result of an off the record joint request of the parties to facilitate immediate plea negotiation. As in they are doing it as you read this… . What I hear is the current offer is plead to IIPA [Intelligence Identities Protection Act] and two plus years prison. This for a man who has already been broken, and whose family has been crucified (Kiriakou’s wife also worked for the Agency, but has been terminated and had her security clearance revoked). Blood out of turnips is now what the “most transparent administration in history” demands.
EmptyWheel drilled down on what the Kiriakou case is really about – covering up the CIA’s torture program:
The CIA panicked because the subjects of CIA torture were learning the identities of their torturers. DOJ did an investigation to see whether any crime had been committed, and determined it hadn’t. CIA then started politicizing that decision, which led to Fitzgerald’s appointment.Fitzgerald confirmed what DOJ originally determined: the defense attorneys committed no crime by researching who their clients’ torturers were.
But along the way Fitzgerald gave the CIA a head–John Kiriakou’s–based partly on old investigations of him. And, surprise surprise, that head happens to belong to the only CIA officer who publicly broke the omerta about the torture program.
This entire case was an attempt to punish someone to restore the omerta on CIA’s illegal activities.
Do not let Kiriakou take the fall for the entire torture program, a program which Kiriakou refused to participate in and helped expose.
Call Attorney General Holder (202) 514-2001) to express your displeasure at the Justice Department’s protecting torturers and awarding investigators who decline to prosecute torturers while prosecuting whistleblowers.
According to press reports, Kiriakou’s “to plea or not to plea” decision hinges on the never-litigated Intelligence Identities Protection Act.
To date, there have been no reported cases interpreting the Intelligence Identities Protection Act (IIPA), but it did result in one conviction in 1985 pursuant to a guilty plea. In that case, Sharon Scranage, a former CIA clerk, pleaded guilty for providing classified information regarding U.S. intelligence operations in Ghana, to a Ghanaian agent, with whom she was romantically involved. She was initially sentenced to five years in prison, but a federal judge subsequently reduced her sentence to two years. That. Is. It.
The IIPA charge is based on Kiriakou’s allegedly confirming the name of one “Officer A” and that name eventually ending up in a SEALED Guantanamo defense filing.Who is this “Officer A” that the CIA and Justice Department are working hand-in-hand to protect? Kevin Gosztola of Firedoglake writes:
The identity of this individual is “not so secret.” In fact, as the former government official informed Firedoglake, at least ten individuals in the human rights community have known of this key CIA official for years.These individuals in the human rights community have known that the agent allegedly ensured detainees were “properly rendered and tortured,” according to the source, who alleges they have known he took part in “sadistic acts of horrendous conduct against the detainees” and have engaged in what appears to be a “code of silence” protecting the individual while the Justice Department prosecutes Kiriakou.
The name of “Officer A” showed up on Cryptocomb last week:
Source Sends – The CIA officer listed as “Officer A” in the John Kiriakou complaint has been revealed to be Thomas Donahue Fletcher. Born in 1953. Fletcher is currently a resident of Vienna, VA.Further – source states journalists have known identity of this person prior to August 2008, when Kiriakou allegedly confirmedthe identity in an email to Matthew Cole, formerly of ABC News.
As Marcy Wheeler put it:
That’s the background of this plea negotiation. I realize in the normal world of legal representation, pleas look really great.At this point, however, DOJ has serially served not to achieve justice, but to cover up the CIA’s illegal torture program. John Kiriakou and his lawyers will decide what they will. But that doesn’t make this plea deal a legitimate exercise of justice.
To Support John Kiriakou, go here or “like” the Defend John K Facebook page.
Source…](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_mcblrewOMG1qhnutro1_500.jpg)
I’ve never begged for anything to be reblogged and forgive me for the annoying pin but PLEASE reblog this for me if you see it. I don’t want my cousin to suffer for nothing.
It was just reported on NPR that John Kiriakou’s lawyers will enter a guilty plea deal tomorrow. People ask me why I refuse to support Obama (or Romney) and one reason I tell them is it’s personal. But it’s much more than that. This man is part of this admin’s family and our government stripped him of the right to defend himself and now of the right to be free. I will watch these two lying bastards tonight with no respect for either. If you think you are free, you are deluded. You just are hiding well enough and being silent enough to not be noticed.
We have covered the story of John Kiriakou extensively (More here). In short, John Kiriakou, a CIA agent of 14 years, has been charged with violating the Espionage Act of 1917, the same statute used to prosecute people like Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and Daniel Ellsberg, whose release of The Pentagon Papers to The New York Times was a seminal moment in ending the war in Vietnam. This is not a case about spying or espionage – John is not accused of sharing anything with a foreign government, selling information or enriching himself.
The charges against John allege that in answering questions from two reporters about suspicions that the CIA tortured detainees in its custody – the controversial Enhanced Interrogation Techniques that included waterboarding during the Bush-Cheney Administration – he violated this mostly obscure World War I-era law that aimed at punishing Americans who gave aid to enemies.
Most simply, the charges are that an American citizen answering questions from credible and mainstream American newspaper reporters somehow aided foreign enemies. While President Obama has since spoken out against and banned those techniques, no person who actually practiced torture will be punished, the only person even related with CIA led torture who might serve time in jail is John Kiriakou, the man who spoke out.
From the NY Times in AugustAttorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. announced Thursday that no one would be prosecuted for the deaths of a prisoner in Afghanistan in 2002 and another in Iraq in 2003, eliminating the last possibility that any criminal charges will be brought as a result of the bruta linterrogations carried out by the C.I.A.
Mr. Holder had already ruled out any charges related to the use of waterboarding and other methods that most human rights experts consider to be torture. His announcement closes a contentious three-year investigation by the Justice Department and brings to an end years of dispute over whether line intelligence or military personnel or their superiors would be held accountable for the abuse of prisoners in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
The closing of the two cases means that the Obama administration’s limited effort to scrutinize the counterterrorism programs carried out under President George W. Bush has come to an end. Without elaborating, Mr. Holder suggested that the end of the criminal investigation should not be seen as a moral exoneration of those involved in the prisoners’ treatment and deaths.
While no one has been prosecuted for the harsh interrogations, a former C.I.A. officer who helped hunt members of Al Qaeda in Pakistan and later spoke publicly about waterboarding, John C. Kiriakou, is awaiting trial on criminal charges that he disclosed to journalists the identity of other C.I.A. officers who participated in the interrogations.
Journalist Peter Van Buren writes in the Tom Dispatch…
Many observers believe however that the real “offense” in the eyes of the Obama administration was quite different. In 2007, Kiriakou became a whistleblower. He went on record as the first (albeit by then, former) CIA official to confirm the use of waterboarding of al-Qaeda prisoners as an interrogation technique, and then to condemn it as torture. He specifically mentioned the waterboarding of Abu Zubaydah in that secret prison in Thailand. Zubaydah was at the time believed to be an al-Qaeda leader, though more likely was at best a mid-level operative. Kiriakou also ran afoul of the CIA over efforts to clear for publication a book he had written about the Agency’s counterterrorism work. He maintains that his is instead a First Amendment case in which a whistleblower is being punished, that it is a selective prosecution to scare government insiders into silence when they see something wrong.
If Kiriakou had actually tortured someone himself, even to death, there is no possibility that he would be in trouble. John Kiriakou is 48. He is staring down a long tunnel at a potential sentence of up to 45 years in prison because in the national security state that rules the roost in Washington, talking out of turnabout a crime has become the only possible crime.
One of Kiriakou’s representatives, attorney Jesselyn Radack, told me, “It is a miscarriage of justice that John Kiriakou is the only person indicted in relation to the Bush-era torture program. The historic import cannot be understated. If a crime as egregious as state-sponsored torture can go unpunished, we lose all moral standing to condemn other governments’ human rights violations. By ‘looking forward, not backward’ we have taken a giant leap into the past.”
One former CIA covert officer, who uses the pen name “Ishmael Jones,” lays out a potential defense for Kiriakou: “Witness after witness could explain to the jury that Mr. Kiriakou is being selectively prosecuted, that his leaks are nothing compared to leaks by Obama administration officials and senior CIA bureaucrats. Witness after witness could show the jury that for any secret material published by Mr. Kiriakou, the books of senior CIA bureaucrats contain many times as much. Former CIA chief George Tenet wrote a book in 2007, approved by CIA censors, that contains dozens of pieces of classified information — names and enough information to find names.”
If only it was really that easy.
Never Again
For at least six years it was the policy of the United States of America to torture and abuse its enemies or, in some cases, simply suspected enemies. It has remained a U.S. policy, even under the Obama administration, to employ“extraordinary rendition” — that is, the sending of captured terror suspects to the jails of countries that are known for torture and abuse, an outsourcing of what we no longer want to do.
Techniques that the U.S. hanged men for at Nuremburg and in post-war Japanwere employed and declared lawful. To embark on such a program with the oversight of the Bush administration, learned men and women had to have long discussions, with staffers running in and out of rooms with snippets of research to buttress the justifications being so laboriously developed. The CIA undoubtedly used some cumbersome bureaucratic process to hire contractors for its torture staff. The old manuals needed to be updated, psychiatrists consulted, military survival experts interviewed, training classes set up.
Videotapes were made of the torture sessions and no doubt DVDs full of real horror were reviewed back at headquarters. Torture techniques were even reportedly demonstrated to top officials inside the White House. Individual torturers who were considered particularly effective were no doubt identified, probably rewarded, and sent on to new secret sites to harm more people.
America just didn’t wake up one day and start slapping around some Islamic punk. These were not the torture equivalents of rogue cops. A system, a mechanism, was created. That we now can only speculate about many of the details involved and the extent of all this is a tribute to the thousands who continue to remain silent about what they did, saw, heard about, or were associated with. Many of them work now at the same organizations, remaining a part of the same contracting firms, the CIA, and the military. Our torturers.
What is it that allows all those people to remain silent? How many are simply scared, watching what is happening to John Kiriakou and thinking: not me, I’m not sticking my neck out to see it get chopped off. They’re almost forgivable, even if they are placing their own self-interest above that of their country. But what about the others, the ones who remain silent about what they did or saw or aided and abetted in some fashion because they still think it was the right thing to do? The ones who will do it again when another frightened president asks them to? Or even the ones who enjoyed doing it?
The same Department of Justice that is hunting down the one man who spoke against torture from the inside still maintains a special unit, 60 years after the end of WWII, dedicated to hunting down the last few at-large Nazis. They do that under the rubric of “never again.” The truth is that same team needs to be turned loose on our national security state. Otherwise, until we have a full accounting of what was done in our names by our government, the pieces are all in place for it to happen again. There, if you want to know, is the real horror.
Today, Jessylyn Radack, director of the Government Accountability Project which supports Kiriakou and other whistleblowers wrote the following in the Daily Kos.
We are reposting in full and repeat strongly her plea to Call Attorney General Holder (202) 514-2001) to express your displeasure at the Justice Department’s protecting torturers and awarding investigators who decline to prosecute torturers while prosecuting whistleblowers.
Daily Kos. MON OCT 22, 2012 AT 05:32 AM PDT
CIA Whistleblower to Spend Years in Jail for Revealing Torture
byJesselyn RadackDO NOT let this become the headline.
As reported over the weekend, (here and here) Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) whistleblowerJohn Kiriakou is inches from being put in jail for allegedly “outing” a torturer. (“Outing” is in quotes because the allegations are not that Kiriakou told the public the torturer’s name, just that Kiriakou allegedly confirmed the name and eventually Guantanamo victims of torture learned the name and defense attorneys put the name in a sealed court filing.)
One of EmptyWheel’s two must-read pieces on the Kiriakou case over the weekend:
I flat out guarantee the import of that is the court put the brakes on the entire case as a result of an off the record joint request of the parties to facilitate immediate plea negotiation. As in they are doing it as you read this… . What I hear is the current offer is plead to IIPA [Intelligence Identities Protection Act] and two plus years prison. This for a man who has already been broken, and whose family has been crucified (Kiriakou’s wife also worked for the Agency, but has been terminated and had her security clearance revoked). Blood out of turnips is now what the “most transparent administration in history” demands.
EmptyWheel drilled down on what the Kiriakou case is really about – covering up the CIA’s torture program:
The CIA panicked because the subjects of CIA torture were learning the identities of their torturers. DOJ did an investigation to see whether any crime had been committed, and determined it hadn’t. CIA then started politicizing that decision, which led to Fitzgerald’s appointment.Fitzgerald confirmed what DOJ originally determined: the defense attorneys committed no crime by researching who their clients’ torturers were.
But along the way Fitzgerald gave the CIA a head–John Kiriakou’s–based partly on old investigations of him. And, surprise surprise, that head happens to belong to the only CIA officer who publicly broke the omerta about the torture program.
This entire case was an attempt to punish someone to restore the omerta on CIA’s illegal activities.
Do not let Kiriakou take the fall for the entire torture program, a program which Kiriakou refused to participate in and helped expose.
Call Attorney General Holder (202) 514-2001) to express your displeasure at the Justice Department’s protecting torturers and awarding investigators who decline to prosecute torturers while prosecuting whistleblowers.
According to press reports, Kiriakou’s “to plea or not to plea” decision hinges on the never-litigated Intelligence Identities Protection Act.
To date, there have been no reported cases interpreting the Intelligence Identities Protection Act (IIPA), but it did result in one conviction in 1985 pursuant to a guilty plea. In that case, Sharon Scranage, a former CIA clerk, pleaded guilty for providing classified information regarding U.S. intelligence operations in Ghana, to a Ghanaian agent, with whom she was romantically involved. She was initially sentenced to five years in prison, but a federal judge subsequently reduced her sentence to two years. That. Is. It.
The IIPA charge is based on Kiriakou’s allegedly confirming the name of one “Officer A” and that name eventually ending up in a SEALED Guantanamo defense filing.Who is this “Officer A” that the CIA and Justice Department are working hand-in-hand to protect? Kevin Gosztola of Firedoglake writes:
The identity of this individual is “not so secret.” In fact, as the former government official informed Firedoglake, at least ten individuals in the human rights community have known of this key CIA official for years.These individuals in the human rights community have known that the agent allegedly ensured detainees were “properly rendered and tortured,” according to the source, who alleges they have known he took part in “sadistic acts of horrendous conduct against the detainees” and have engaged in what appears to be a “code of silence” protecting the individual while the Justice Department prosecutes Kiriakou.
The name of “Officer A” showed up on Cryptocomb last week:
Source Sends – The CIA officer listed as “Officer A” in the John Kiriakou complaint has been revealed to be Thomas Donahue Fletcher. Born in 1953. Fletcher is currently a resident of Vienna, VA.Further – source states journalists have known identity of this person prior to August 2008, when Kiriakou allegedly confirmed
the identity in an email to Matthew Cole, formerly of ABC News.As Marcy Wheeler put it:
That’s the background of this plea negotiation. I realize in the normal world of legal representation, pleas look really great.At this point, however, DOJ has serially served not to achieve justice, but to cover up the CIA’s illegal torture program. John Kiriakou and his lawyers will decide what they will. But that doesn’t make this plea deal a legitimate exercise of justice.
To Support John Kiriakou, go here or “like” the Defend John K Facebook page.
(via theyoungradical)
The former CIA analyst who went public with the US government’s torturing of suspected terrorists has suffered a major setback this week in his attempt to avoid imprisonment amid a federal witch-hunt targeting whistleblowers.
John Kiriakou, the 48-year-old counter-terrorism expert once touted by the State Department for his role in capturing dozens of key al-Qaeda operatives, will now have to prove to prosecutors that he thought his admissions of the government’s top-secret water-boarding of prisoners posed no threat to national security. Kiriakou’s federal opponents believe the whistleblower exposed to journalists the identity of two other CIA agents, one of who led the controversial torture program that aimed to bring the accused as close to death as possible to coax confessions.
Kiriakou has been the subject of an intense federal investigation following a 2007 televised interview with ABC News where he confirmed that the US government’s interrogation of alleged war criminals involved water-boarding, a drowning-simulation technique that was banned under President Barack Obama two years later.
After he went public, Kiriakou was charged in January 2012 under the Espionage Act of 1917, among other crimes, for blowing the whistle on state secrets. Now amid pre-trial hearings being held outside of Washington, DC, US District Judge Leonie Brinkema has ordered that prosecutors will only have to prove that Kiriakou had “reason to believe” leaking the truth behind the torture method could have caused harm.
Defense attorneys for Kiriakou had hoped that the government would be tasked with having to show the former agent had intent to harm America when he went public to the press. Instead, now prosecutors will only need to prove that the former government employee was aware that his consequences had the potential to put the country in danger.
The court charges that Kiriakou opened up about water-boarding to three US journalists, believed to be The Washington Post’s Julie Tate, freelancer Matt Cole and the New York Times’ Scott Shane, and was aware of the impact of his allegations. Prosecutors say Kiriakou revealed to the reporters the identities of two CIA staffers who personally led the torture and interrogation of an al-Qaeda operative captured overseas.
Speaking on condition of anonymity, a former government official tells Firedoglake that the CIA was “totally ticked at Kiriakou for acknowledging the use of torture as state policy” and allegedly outing the identity of a covert CIA official “responsible for ensuring the execution” of the water-boarding program.
(via theyoungradical)
"Jill Stein and Cheri Honkala are now free from police custody after eight hours handcuffed to a metal chair in a remote police warehouse on Long Island. The Green Party presidential and vice-presidential candidates were arrested [on Tuesday] as they attempted to enter the grounds of today’s presidential debate organized by the Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD)."
—
Now free, Stein, Honkala pledge to ramp up fight for open debates
On her release, Dr. Stein said that, “It was painful but symbolic to be handcuffed for all those hours, because that’s what the Commission on Presidential Debates has essentially done to American democracy.” Stein and Honkala were eventually released into the cold at 10:30pm. Police provided no advance notice of the release to campaign lawyers and staff, and did not allow the two candidates to make any phone calls.
Democracy!
(via theamericanbear)
(via theyoungradical)
A third self-described anarchist from the Pacific Northwest has been jailed by federal officials for refusing to speak before a secretive grand jury that the accused have called a politically-motivated modern-day witch-hunt.
Leah-Lynn Plante, a mid-20s activist from Seattle, Washington, was ushered out of court by authorities on Wednesday after refusing for a third time to answer questions forced on her by a grand jury — a panel of prosecutors convened to determine if an indictment can be issued for a federal crime.
Plante was one of a handful of people targeted in a series of raids administered by the FBI and the Joint Terrorism Task Force on July 25 of this year which the feds say were in conjunction with an investigation into acts of vandalism that occurred during May Day protests in Seattle nearly two months prior. As part of their probe, search warrants were issued at multiple residences of activists in the area, including Plante’s, demanding that dwellers provide agents with“anti-government or anarchist literature” in their homes and any flags, flag-making material, cell phones, hard drives, address books, and black clothing.
“As if they had taken pointers from Orwell’s 1984, they took books, artwork and other various literature as ‘evidence’ as well as many other personal belongings even though they seemed to know that nobody there was even in Seattle on May Day,” Plante recalls in a post published this week to her Tumblr page.
Only one week after the raid, Neil Fox of the National Lawyers Guild told Seattle Times that raids like this are create a“chilling effect” by going after lawful, constitutionally-allowed private possessions.
“It concerns us any time there are law-enforcement raids that target political literature, First Amendment-protected materials,” Fox said.
This week Plante still maintains her innocence, now she has reason to believe that the raid that has left her suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome may have been more than an investigation into an activity, but an ideology. Plante says a Freedom of Information Act request she filed in the months after her apartment door was broken down by armed officials reveals that the grand jury investigating her was first convened in March, two months before the vandalism she is being accused of even occurred.
“They are trying to investigate anarchists and persecute them for their beliefs. This is a fishing expedition. This is a witch hunt,” she says this week.
On the day of her third meeting with the grand jury on Wednesday, Plante wrote on her blog that she’d almost certainly be jailed on charges of contempt for refusing once again to testify about herself but said she was willing to face the consequences for exercising her right to remain silent.
“I do not look forward to what inevitably awaits me today, but I accept it,” she writes. “My convictions are unwavering and will not be shaken by their harassment. Today is October 10th, 2012 and I am ready to go to prison.”
Hours later, her Tumblr was updated with a note authored by one of her supporters confirming that Plante “was thrown into prison for civil contempt” after her court date. Plante is now the third anarchist to be imprisoned in the last month for refusing to answer questions about their belief and behavior before a grand jury.
Last month, Plante spoke openly about the grand jury before refusing their questioning for only her second time. “I believe that these hearings are politically motivated,” she wrote in a September 16 statement. “The government wants to use them to collect information that it can use in a campaign of repression. I refuse to have any part of it, I will never answer their questions, I will never speak.”
“While I hate the very idea of prison, I am ready to face it in order to stay true to my personal beliefs. I know that they want to kidnap me and isolate me from my friends and my loved ones in an effort to coerce me to speak. It will not work. I know that if I am taken away, I will not be alone.”
Katherine “KteeO” Olejnik, a fellow anarchist from the Seattle area, was taken into federal custody on September 28 for refusing to cooperate with a grand jury, a decision she said was based on humanity and her First Amendment protections.
“I cannot and will not say something that could greatly harm a person’s life, and providing information that could lead to long term incarceration would be doing that,” Olejnik wrote before being booked. “Icannot and will not be a party to a McCarthyist policy that is asking individuals to condemn each other based on political beliefs.”
On the No Political Repression blog, a support of Olejnik writes that she was prohibited from taking notes during her time on the stand, during which she says she resisted questioning.
Days before her imprisonment began, Matt Duran was also jailed for contempt. According to his attorneys, Duran was not only imprisoned by placed in solitary confinement, denied intimate contact with his lawyer, denied visitor requests forms, personal dietary requirements and sunlight an fresh air.
(via theyoungradical)
"What made Guantanamo controversial was not its physical location: that it was located in the Caribbean Sea rather than on American soil (that’s especially true since the Supreme Court ruled in 2004 that U.S. courts have jurisdiction over the camp). What made Guantanamo such a travesty — and what still makes it such — is that it is a system of indefinite detention whereby human beings are put in cages for years and years without ever being charged with a crime. President Obama’s so-called “plan to close Guantanamo” — even if it had been approved in full by Congress — did not seek to end that core injustice. It sought to do the opposite: Obama’s plan would have continued the system of indefinite detention, but simply re-located it from Guantanamo Bay onto American soil."
—
Glenn Greenwald, The Obama GITMO myth via Salon.com
[…]
Long before, and fully independent of, anything Congress did, President Obama made clear that he was going to preserve the indefinite detention system at Guantanamo even once he closed the camp. President Obama fully embraced indefinite detention — the defining injustice of Guantanamo — as his own policy.
[..]
When the President finally unveiled his plan for “closing Guantanamo,” it became clear that it wasn’t a plan to “close” the camp as much as it was a plan simply to re-locate it — import it — onto American soil, at a newly purchased federal prison in Thompson, Illinois. William Lynn, Obama’s Deputy Defense Secretary, sent a letter to inquiring Senators that expressly stated that the Obama administration intended to continue indefinitely to imprison some of the detainees with no charges of any kind. The plan was classic Obama: a pretty, feel-good, empty symbolic gesture (get rid of the symbolic face of Bush War on Terror excesses) while preserving the core abuses (the powers of indefinite detention ), even strengthening and expanding those abuses by bringing them into the U.S.
(via jayaprada)
(via theyoungradical)
Safe abortions have always been available to the rich, Dan. You simply want to deny them to the poor, and if you succeed, poor woman will be forced to get them anyway. They’ll be forced into the alleys with hangers, plungers and vacuum cleaners, risking death or mutilation. But you’d like that, wouldn’t you, Dan? You sadistic, elitist, sexist, racist, anti-humanist pig!Saturday Night Live 3x18
This aired in 1978. Thirty-four years later, it’s still a fucking ~debate.
(via politicsd00d)
"Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that."
— Martin Luther King Jr. (via bearsandpocketsquares)
