It’s back.
Did I already reblog this? Not sure, but posting this anyways.
Exclusive: Justice Department Memo Concludes That Obama Administration Can Kill American Citizens With Drones
A confidential Justice Department memo concludes that the U.S. government can order the killing of American citizens if they are believed to be “senior…
If a Corporation (BP) Pleads Guilty to Manslaughter, Who Goes to Prison? | AllGov | Noel Brinkerhoff
Pleading guilty to killing someone usually means going to prison…unless the perpetrator is a corporation.
This week, BP agreed to 11 counts of manslaughter for…
‘Too Big to Fail’ banks including JP Morgan Chase, U.S. Bancorp and Bank of America have seized on an opportunity to profit off the nation’s jobless by siphoning millions of dollars in fees from state unemployment programs, according to a new report by the National Consumer Law Center.
Privatizing the task of distributing unemployment benefits, the banks have created a “fee-heavy” check card system. Instead of having payments deposited directly to bank accounts or recieving checks sent in the mail from their state governments, individuals across the nation are increasingly forced to use costly bank issued payment cards that are loaded with a “plethora” of costly fees for the recipient.
The large banks pitched the operation to states as a scheme that would “save millions in overhead costs” but have instead externalized such costs to America’s jobless.
The Associated Press reports:
People are using the fee-heavy cards instead of getting their payments deposited directly to their bank accounts. That’s because states issue bank cards automatically, require complicated paperwork or phone calls to set up direct deposit and fail to explain the card fees, according to a report issued Tuesday by the National Consumer Law Center, a nonprofit group that seeks to protect low-income Americans from unfair financial-services products. […]
Banks make more money when more people use the cards. In the past, some of their deals with states prevented states from offering direct deposit, or required states to promote the card program as a first option.
To cover the cost of issuing cards and running the programs, banks charge a plethora of fees, including charges for balance inquiries, phone calls to customer support, leaving an account inactive for a period of months, or making a purchase using a personal identification number.
Read more on this story here.
(via theyoungradical)
On the Front Lines of a New Pacific War:
On the small, spectacular island of Jeju, off the southern tip of Korea, indigenous villagers have been putting their bodies in the way of construction of a joint South Korean–US naval base that would be an environmental, cultural and political disaster. If completed, the base would hold more than 7,000 navy personnel, plus twenty warships including US aircraft carriers, nuclear submarines and destroyers carrying the latest Aegis missiles—all aimed at China, only 300 miles away.
Since 2007, when the $970 million project was first announced, the outraged Tamna people of Gangjeong village have exhausted every legal and peaceful means to stop it. They filed lawsuits. They held a referendum in which 94 percent of the electorate voted against construction—a vote the central government ignored. They chained themselves for months to a shipping container parked on the main access road, built blockades of boulders at the construction gate and occupied coral-reef dredging cranes. They have been arrested by the hundreds. Mayor Kang Dong-Kyun, who was jailed for three months, said, “If the villagers have committed any crime, it is the crime of aspiring to pass their beautiful village to their descendants.”
Jeju is just one island in a growing constellation of geostrategic points that are being militarized as part of President Obama’s “Pacific Pivot,” a major initiative announced late in 2011 to counter a rising China. According to separate statements by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, 60 percent of US military resources are swiftly shifting from Europe and the Middle East to the Asia-Pacific region. (The United States already has 219 bases on foreign soil in the Asia-Pacific; by comparison, China has none.) The Jeju base would augment the Aegis-equipped systems in South Korea, Japan, the Philippines, Singapore, Vietnam and the US colony of Guam. The Pentagon has also positioned Patriot PAC-3 missile defense systems in Taiwan, Japan (where the United States has some ninety installations, plus about 47,000 troops on Okinawa) and in South Korea (which hosts more than 100 US facilities).
[…]
On the island of Jeju, the consequences of the Pacific Pivot are cataclysmic. The UNESCO Biosphere Reserve, adjacent to the proposed military port, would be traversed by aircraft carriers and contaminated by other military ships. Base activity would wipe out one of the most spectacular remaining soft-coral forests in the world. It would kill Korea’s last pod of Indo-Pacific bottlenose dolphins and contaminate some of the purest, most abundant spring water on the planet. It would also destroy the habitats of thousands of species of plants and animals—many of which, such as the narrow-mouthed frog and the red-footed crab, are gravely endangered already. Indigenous, sustainable livelihoods—including oyster diving and local farming methods that have thrived for thousands of years—would cease to exist, and many fear that traditional village life would be sacrificed to bars, restaurants and brothels for military personnel.
read more at http://www.thenation.com/article/171767/front-lines-new-pacific-war
(via theyoungradical)
Israeli army ‘provoked Palestinian teenager and then shot him’
A Palestinian schoolboy killed by Israeli gunfire near the West Bank separation barrier had been reacting to insults shouted by soldiers with loudhailers before he was shot, eyewitnesses have said.
The teenager died on Tuesday after being shot three times. He was hit from behind as he was running away from Israeli troops in the village of Boudrous, according to his family. Doctors at Ramallah Hospital, where he was pronounced dead, said he had suffered gunshot wounds to his neck, leg and torso.
An Israeli Defence Forces spokesman said the shooting happened after soldiers initiated “standard rules of engagement”, which include live fire, to respond to such incidents.
That was challenged on Wednesday by Samir Awad’s family, teachers and school friends, who said he had approached the fence only after being incited by Israeli troops, who had used loudspeakers to provoke pupils at Boudrous Secondary School, which sits 200 yards away, into a confrontation.
“They were shouting, ‘Come dogs, Come to the wall,” 10-year-old Khaled Shaheen told The Daily Telegraph. “They were also calling us sons-of-bitches and saying your mothers are dogs and adulteresses. They were shouting on the loudspeakers before Samir left his class.
“When he came out of class, he and four friends told us younger children to stay inside the schoolyard while they approached the soldiers at the fence.”
His description was confirmed by several older pupils at the school, who said the soldiers uttered other obscenities they were reluctant to repeat.
An Arab language teacher, Nader Shalash, 37, said shouted insults from the army patrols were a daily occurrence.
“They went to say to the pupils, ‘We are here. Come and get a bit of trouble’,” said Mr Shalash, who described the teenager as intelligent and a good student. “Some of the soldiers are Druze and some are Jewish. They also play loud music. We built a wall and fence around the school and also erected three gates which we keep locked during school hours because we don’t want any provocations. However, they happen.”
Family and friends say Samir was running away from the security barrier after soldiers fired tear gas. As he tried to head towards the school, he was intercepted by two other soldiers who had been hiding in a trench dug by the Jordanian army during the 1967 Six-Day War.
While his friends managed to get away, Samir’s escape route was cut off, forcing him to run back towards the barrier. It was at that point he was shot, witnesses say.
The incident happened shortly before 10am on Tuesday just after the teenager had finished a midterm science exam.
The Israeli human rights group, B’tselem, say the Israeli soldiers called for an ambulance but apparently did not administer treatment. They left the scene when villagers, including Samir’s brother, Jibril, arrived and carried him away.
Last night the IDF said it could not comment on the allegations of incitement as an investigation was underway into the shooting which is beign carried out by the military police.
On Wednesday, as the Awad family observed three days of mourning, The Daily Telegraph witnessed further confrontations in the area between the school and the security barrier. Israeli soldiers fired rounds of tear gas after several Palestinian youths approached the barrier, which consists entirely of fencing in the region around Boudrous.
The village achieved fame after being the first West Bank village to organise regular protests against the barrier, eventually succeeding in getting its route changed. The Awad family say they lost five acres of land to the barrier’s construction and that four of Samir’s brothers have been wounded in clashes with Israeli soldiers.
(via theyoungradical)
Nike Hired Military to Intimidate Company Workers in Indonesia
Workers at a Nike shoe factory in Indonesia say the factory paid military personnel to intimidate them into working for less than the minimum wage.
After millions of workers went on strike last year in Indonesia over low pay and cost of living increases, the government lifted wage rates.
But workers at the Nike factory in the west Java city of Sukabumi say they were made to sign a petition supporting the factory’s claim to be exempt from paying the new wage.
In mobile phone footage of the factory, shown to the ABC, a man standing over workers can be heard telling them, “you all have to sign it”.
The woman who took the footage does not want to be named, but says she and other workers tried to reject the pay restriction.
“We got summoned by military personnel that the company hired to interrogate us and they intimidated us,” she said.
“The first thing that scared me was his high tone of voice and he banged the table.
“And also he said that inside the factory there were a lot of military intelligence officers. That scared me.”
Unions in Indonesia say at least six Nike-contracted factories have applied to be exempt from paying the increased rate.
The Trade Union Rights Centre’s Surya Tjandra says there is a loophole to get an exemption.
“You have to provide financial conditions of the company in the last two years which show some not profit, and then you have to accept some consent from the workers directly, which is not that easy because for the workers, the new wages is actually better and fairer,” he said.
If the factory gets an exemption, the employees will get paid $3.70 a day instead of $4.
Activists say that after rent and transport to work, it is only enough to afford one meal.
(via theyoungradical)
"The drone war violates both domestic and international law, and the Obama administration’s vehement disdain for transparency in government is the only thing keeping it from public and legal scrutiny. Beyond the law, it’s terrorism."
—
Obama Bombs Yemen Hours After Winning Reelection.
Business as usual by the Nobel Peace Prize winner.
(via mehreenkasana)
(via theyoungradical)
Monsanto’s GM seeds contributing to farmer suicides every 30 minutes
October 28, 2012In what has been called the single largest wave of recorded suicides in human history, Indian farmers are now killing themselves in record numbers. It has been extensively reported, even in mainstream news, but nothing has been done about the issue. The cause? Monsanto’s cost-inflated and ineffective seeds have been driving farmers to suicide, and is considered to be one of the largest — if not the largest — cause of the quarter of a million farmer suicides over the past 16 years.
According to the most recent figures (provided by the New York University School of Law), 17,638 Indian farmers committed suicide in 2009 — about one death every 30 minutes. In 2008, theDaily Mail labeled the continual and disturbing suicide spree as ‘The GM (genetically modified) Genocide’. Due to failing harvests and inflated prices that bankrupt the poor farmers, struggling Indian farmers began to kill themselves. Oftentimes, they would commit the act by drinking the very same insecticide that Monsanto supplied them with — a gruesome testament to the extent in which Monsanto has wrecked the lives of independent and traditional farmers.
To further add backing to the tragedy, the rate of Indian farmer suicides massively increased since the introduction of Monsanto’s Bt cotton in 2002. It is no wonder that a large percentage of farmers who take their own lives are cotton farmers, the demographic that is thought to be among the most impacted. Dr. Mercola, an osteopathic doctor that has been educating the world about natural health for many years, recently saw the destruction of traditional Indian farmers first hand. Dr. Mercola found out about the notorious ‘suicide belt’ of India, where 4,238 farmer suicides took place in 2007 alone.
Many families are now ruined thanks to the mass suicides, and are left to economic ruin and must struggle to fight off starvation:
‘We are ruined now,’ said one dead man’s 38-year-old wife. ‘We bought 100 grams of BT Cotton. Our crop failed twice. My husband had become depressed. He went out to his field, lay down in the cotton and swallowed insecticide.’
In India, around 60 percent of the population (currently standing at 1.1 billion) are directly or indirectly reliant on agriculture. Monsanto’s intrusion into India’s traditional and sustainable farming community is not only concerning for health and wellness reasons, but it is now clear that the issue is much more serious.
(Source: thepeoplesrecord, via theyoungradical)
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)
Pentagon Prisons Revealed: WikiLeaks Publishes Detainees Manual
Whistleblowing website WikiLeaks is releasing over 100 classified documents detailing US Department of Defense procedures for running Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, Camp Bucca and other infamous prisons where terror suspects are detained.
The directives and manuals, which for more than a decade directed the US military’s policy for treatment of its detainees, will be released chronologically over the next month, WikiLeaks said in a statement.
The first batch of the documents released is the 2002 Camp Delta – Guantanamo Bay prison – Standing Operating Procedure manuals.
In a statement, WikiLeaks criticised regulations it said had led to abuse and impunity and urged human rights activists to use the documents, to be released over the next month, to research what it called “policies of unaccountability”.
“This document is of significant historical importance. Guantanamo Bay has become the symbol for systematized human rights abuse in the West with good reason,” WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said.
The statement quoted WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange as saying: “The ‘Detainee Policies’ show the anatomy of the beast that is post-9/11 detention, the carving out of a dark space where law and rights do not apply, where persons can be detained without a trace at the convenience of the U.S. Department of Defense.”
“It shows the excesses of the early days of war against an unknown ‘enemy’ and how these policies matured and evolved,” it said, and led to “the permanent state of exception that the United States now finds itself in, a decade later.”
One document such document that has been previewed but not yet published is the ’Policy on Assigning Detainee Internment Serial Numbers’. Wikileaks claims it is a manual on how to “disappear” sensitive prisoners “by systematically holding off from assigning a prisoner record numbers”.
Another apparently contains the notorious instructions to “purge” interrogations tapes, which became notorious following the Abu Ghraib torture scandals in the mid 2000s. WikiLeaks called on NGOs, activists and the general public to thoroughly read the documents to gain a better understanding of the evolution of the Pentagon’s post-9/11 attitude towards prisoners.
(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)
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False accusations unfortunately do happen, but the number is hard to quantify. Depending on the source, the percentage of false rape reports is somewhere between 2% and 8%. Though ideally there would be no false reports, the percentage is not significantly higher than false reports for other crimes (an estimated 10% of automobile theft reports are false). Furthermore, the percentage often includes “unfounded reports,” which are sometimes classified as such if the victim is intoxicated, did not fight back, or has a history of mental illness. That is, if the victim is not “perfect,” the crime does not get prosecuted.
The myth perpetuated by Rivard’s words also implies that once a woman accuses a man of rape, he is immediately prosecuted and thrown in jail. In reality, rape is underreported and has an extremely low prosecution rate. According to RAINN, about 54% of rapes and sexual assaults are not reported to police. Of those reported, only about 12% lead to an arrest and 9% get prosecuted.
It’s time for politicians to stop making unfounded statements about women and rape. Our bodies do not have a way “shut that whole thing down.” Our bodies do not “secrete a certain secretion” to kill sperm during rape. If we don’t have cuts and bruises, it does not mean that it was not a “legitimate rape” or not “rape rape.” We do not “cry rape.” And finally, some women do not “just rape easy.” When we are raped it is not our fault. The blame lies with the rapist, pure and simple, and that is where the focus should remain.
"— Kerry Hogan, “Politicians Need to Stop Saying Awful Things About Women and Rape” (via unrelatedwaffle)
(via politicsd00d)
If you were a school administrator, what would you do if the school superintendent told you to have truant officers visit the homes of low-performing students and tell them not to come to school the next day when standardized tests were to be administered to determine how well students in the school were performing, which served the basis for teacher bonuses?
It sounded at first like a familiar story: school administrators, seeking to meet state and federal standards, fraudulently raised students’ scores on crucial exams.
But in the cheating scandal that has shaken the 64,000-student school district in this border city, administrators manipulated more than numbers. They are accused of keeping low-performing students out of classrooms altogether by improperly holding some back, accelerating others and preventing many from showing up for the tests or enrolling in school at all.
It led to a dramatic moment at the federal courthouse this month, when a former schools superintendent, Lorenzo Garcia, was sentenced to prison for his role in orchestrating the testing scandal. But for students and parents, the case did not end there. A federal investigation continues, with the likelihood of more arrests of administrators who helped Mr. Garcia.
Federal prosecutors charged Mr. Garcia, 57, with devising an elaborate program to inflate test scores to improve the performance of struggling schools under the federal No Child Left Behind Act and to allow him to collect annual bonuses for meeting district goals.
The scheme, elements of which were carried out for most of Mr. Garcia’s nearly six-year tenure, centered on a state-mandated test taken by sophomores. Known as the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills, it measures performance in reading, mathematics and other subjects. The scheme’s objective was to keep low-performing students out of the classroom so they would not take the test and drag scores down, according to prosecutors, former principals and school advocates.
Students identified as low-performing were transferred to charter schools, discouraged from enrolling in school or were visited at home by truant officers and told not to go to school on the test day. For some, credits were deleted from transcripts or grades were changed from passing to failing or from failing to passing so they could be reclassified as freshmen or juniors.
Others intentionally held back were allowed to catch up before graduation with “turbo-mesters,” in which students earned a semester’s worth of credit for a few hours of computer work. A former high school principal said in an interview and in court that one student earned two semester credits in three hours on the last day of school. Still other students who transferred to the district from Mexico were automatically put in the ninth grade, even if they had earned credits for the 10th grade, to keep them from taking the test.
“He essentially treated these students as pawns in a scheme to make it look as though he was achieving the thresholds he needed for his bonuses,” said Robert Pitman, the United States attorney for the Western District of Texas, whose office prosecuted Mr. Garcia.
Another former principal, Lionel Rubio, said he knew of six students who had been pushed out of high school and had not pursued an education since. In 2008, Linda Hernandez-Romero’s daughter repeated her freshman year at Bowie High School after administrators told her she was not allowed to return as a sophomore. Ms. Hernandez-Romero said administrators told her that her daughter was not doing well academically and was not likely to perform well on the test.
Ms. Hernandez-Romero protested the decision, but she said her daughter never followed through with her education, never received a diploma or a G.E.D. and now, at age 21, has three children, is jobless and survives on welfare.
“Her decisions have been very negative after this,” her mother said. “She always tells me: ‘Mom, I got kicked out of school because I wasn’t smart. I guess I’m not, Mom, look at me.’ There’s not a way of expressing how bad it feels, because it’s so bad. Seeing one of your children fail and knowing that it was not all her doing is worse.”
The program was known as “the Bowie model,” and Mr. Garcia had boasted of his success in raising test scores, particularly in 2008, when all of the district’s eligible campuses earned a rating of “academically acceptable” or better from the state. But parents and students had another name for what was happening: “los desaparecidos,” or the disappeared.
State education data showed that 381 students were enrolled as freshmen at Bowie in the fall of 2007. The following fall, the sophomore class was 170 students. Dozens of the missing students had “disappeared” through Mr. Garcia’s program, said Eliot Shapleigh, a lawyer and former state senator who began his own investigation into testing misconduct and was credited with bringing the case to light. Mr. Shapleigh said he believed that hundreds of students were affected and that district leaders had failed to do enough to locate and help them.
“Desaparecidos is by far the worst education scandal in the country,” Mr. Shapleigh said. “In Atlanta, the students were helped on tests by teachers. The next day, the students were in class. Here, the students were disappeared right out of the classroom.”
Court documents list six unindicted co-conspirators who assisted Mr. Garcia, but they have not been publicly identified. Parents and educators believe that several of those involved in the scandal continue to work in the system or have taken jobs at nearby districts. The El Paso district, meanwhile, has had trouble maintaining its leadership, with the board of trustees appointing three interim superintendents since Mr. Garcia’s arrest last year.
Mr. Garcia’s program led to an inquiry involving three federal entities: the F.B.I., Mr. Pitman’s office and the Education Department’s inspector general. The state’s education agency penalized the district in August by lowering its accreditation status, assigning a monitor and requiring it to hire outside companies to oversee testing and identify the structural defects that allowed the scheme to go unchecked.
On Wednesday, the newly appointed commissioner of the Texas Education Agency, Michael L. Williams, came to El Paso to speak with parents and administrators, telling them he had the power to take other steps, including installing a new board of trustees.
“I’m outraged by what happened,” Mr. Williams said after the meeting. “We’re going to give the district an opportunity to right the ship. And if that doesn’t happen, then obviously there are several options available to the commissioner of education, and I’ll look very, very carefully at those options.”
Former El Paso educators have criticized state officials and the local board as failing to hold Mr. Garcia accountable. In 2010, the Texas Education Agency issued letters clearing Mr. Garcia of wrongdoing, finding insufficient evidence on accusations of “disappeared” students and testing misconduct.
Mr. Garcia was the first superintendent in the country to be charged with manipulating data used to assess compliance with No Child Left Behind for financial gain, the authorities said. Before he was hired in 2006, Mr. Garcia was a deputy superintendent in Dallas and received a doctorate from the University of Houston. His annual salary was $280,314 when he resigned last November, three months after his arrest.
In June, Mr. Garcia pleaded guilty to two counts of conspiracy to commit mail fraud. One charge was connected to the scandal, and the other involved his efforts to secure a $450,000 no-bid contract for a consulting firm run by his former mistress. He was sentenced to three years and six months in federal prison and was ordered to pay $180,000 in restitution to the district.
He was also fined $56,500, the amount of testing-related bonuses he had received.
(via politicsd00d)
