Paramilitary Police State & Private Prisons
The Criminal Behavior of G-20 Police in Pittsburgh
October 1, 2009Salem-News (Salem, Ore.) – U.S. media outlets are writing about the new LRAD or “audio cannon” device used on demonstrators Thursday at the G-20 Summit in Pittsburgh in a way that only brain-dead sold out scoundrels can. LRAD stands for “Long Range Acoustic Device” and the name does not betray the weapon’s objective.
It is a “hands off” tool that blasts out an extremely high pitched sound. I wouldn’t be surprised if it actually has the ability to drive people stark raving mad. It’s a futuristic fascism device if described accurately.
Americans, especially journalists writing about this, should be horrified by this new form of police abuse. I predict that it will ultimately be the last straw in a society that has too high of a threshold for this type of torture. The device disburses crowds by emitting a high decibel sound so painful that it causes people to freeze and try to run. Apparently they can not always do this.
Picture your fellow Americans, they could be any age, in a state of pain that is “excruciating,” according to those who have experienced it. Like the Taser, which is frequently present when suspects die, (even though the company claims it is very safe), there is no way the LRAP is good for people, at minimum, how could it not cause permanent hearing loss?
It is only the latest weapon that police are drawing to use against us, our children, and theirs. Rogue cops all over the nation abuse people with Tasers on a regular basis, and that company profits and profits. Good thing, their team of lawyers is very busy wrestling with death-related claims, even if they beat most of them.
Then you have the American gestapo (translates to secret police) movement of unmarked police cars sneaking around, nailing the unsuspecting through trickery and deceit. California bans the practice, it is taking place every day in Oregon, and Washington’s fleet of poser police cars are everywhere in that state. Unmarked means, among other things, they can abuse people and not be identified. They want to keep you confused and guessing, that is the new police approach in the United States.
Unmarked traffic enforcement allows criminals to replicate police very easily and strike victims. The police don’t care, almost across the board, and they will tell you that. Why should they? They love using your tax money to sneak up and nab you in a spendy traffic violation.
Considering the hypocrisy of a nation that constantly lauds its supposed “freedoms” so damned often, especially while justifying wars like the one in Iraq, the U.S. government is as criminal, dangerous and immoral than any other in the world. Oh, but how we go on about our greatness, and we are so quick to criticize other nations when their police roll in and control crowds.
Senate Judiciary Committee Extends PATRIOT Act Provisions
October 8, 2009Raw Story - Key US lawmakers passed legislation Thursday extending three key provisions of the PATRIOT Act, the sweeping intelligence bill enacted after the September 11, 2001 attacks.
Backing a White House request, the Senate Judiciary Committee passed the measure 11 votes to 8 to extend until 2013 three clauses that would have expired by 31 December. The bill now heads to the full Senate for a vote.
The provisions include the "roving wiretap" clause, used to monitor mobile communications of individuals using multiple telephone lines, and the "lone-wolf" provision, which enables spying on individuals suspected of terrorist activity but with no obvious connection to extremist groups.
Lawmakers also extended the life of controversial section 215, known as the "library records provision" that allows government agencies to access individual's library history.
The committee had earlier met in a closed-door meeting with members of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the intelligence community on ensuring their actions would not impede investigations already underway.
The senators also debated freeing up law enforcement actions that have been hampered by legislation and court rulings since the first program was launched by former president George W. Bush in the wake of 9/11, which enabled collecting sensitive information for years without a court order...
Criminalizing Everyone
October 5, 2009Washington Times - "You don't need to know. You can't know." That's what Kathy Norris, a 60-year-old grandmother of eight, was told when she tried to ask court officials why, the day before, federal agents had subjected her home to a furious search.
The agents who spent half a day ransacking Mrs. Norris' longtime home in Spring, Texas, answered no questions while they emptied file cabinets, pulled books off shelves, rifled through drawers and closets, and threw the contents on the floor.
The six agents, wearing SWAT gear and carrying weapons, were with - get this- the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
Kathy and George Norris lived under the specter of a covert government investigation for almost six months before the government unsealed a secret indictment and revealed why the Fish and Wildlife Service had treated their family home as if it were a training base for suspected terrorists. Orchids.
That's right. Orchids.
By March 2004, federal prosecutors were well on their way to turning 66-year-old retiree George Norris into an inmate in a federal penitentiary - based on his home-based business of cultivating, importing and selling orchids.
Mrs. Norris testified before the House Judiciary subcommittee on crime this summer. The hearing's topic: the rapid and dangerous expansion of federal criminal law, an expansion that is often unprincipled and highly partisan.
Chairman Robert C. Scott, Virginia Democrat, and ranking member Louie Gohmert, Texas Republican, conducted a truly bipartisan hearing (a D.C. rarity this year).
These two leaders have begun giving voice to the increasing number of experts who worry about "overcriminalization." Astronomical numbers of federal criminal laws lack specifics, can apply to almost anyone and fail to protect innocents by requiring substantial proof that an accused person acted with actual criminal intent.
Mr. Norris ended up spending almost two years in prison because he didn't have the proper paperwork for some of the many orchids he imported. The orchids were all legal - but Mr. Norris and the overseas shippers who had packaged the flowers had failed to properly navigate the many, often irrational, paperwork requirements the U.S. imposed when it implemented an arcane international treaty's new restrictions on trade in flowers and other flora.
The judge who sentenced Mr. Norris had some advice for him and his wife: "Life sometimes presents us with lemons." Their job was, yes, to "turn lemons into lemonade."
The judge apparently failed to appreciate how difficult it is to run a successful lemonade stand when you're an elderly diabetic with coronary complications, arthritis and Parkinson's disease serving time in a federal penitentiary. If only Mr. Norris had been a Libyan terrorist, maybe some European official at least would have weighed in on his behalf to secure a health-based mercy release.
Krister Evertson, another victim of overcriminalization, told Congress, "What I have experienced in these past years is something that should scare you and all Americans." He's right. Evertson, a small-time entrepreneur and inventor, faced two separate federal prosecutions stemming from his work trying to develop clean-energy fuel cells.
The feds prosecuted Mr. Evertson the first time for failing to put a federally mandated sticker on an otherwise lawful UPS package in which he shipped some of his supplies. A jury acquitted him, so the feds brought new charges. This time they claimed he technically had "abandoned" his fuel-cell materials - something he had no intention of doing - while defending himself against the first charges. Mr. Evertson, too, spent almost two years in federal prison.
As George Washington University law professor Stephen Saltzburg testified at the House hearing, cases like these "illustrate about as well as you can illustrate the overreach of federal criminal law." The Cato Institute's Timothy Lynch, an expert on overcriminalization, called for "a clean line between lawful conduct and unlawful conduct." A person should not be deemed a criminal unless that person "crossed over that line knowing what he or she was doing." Seems like common sense, but apparently it isn't to some federal officials.
Former U.S. Attorney General Richard Thornburgh's testimony captured the essence of the problems that worry so many criminal-law experts. "Those of us concerned about this subject," he testified, "share a common goal - to have criminal statutes that punish actual criminal acts and [that] do not seek to criminalize conduct that is better dealt with by the seeking of regulatory and civil remedies." Only when the conduct is sufficiently wrongful and severe, Mr. Thornburgh said, does it warrant the "stigma, public condemnation and potential deprivation of liberty that go along with [the criminal] sanction."
The Norrises' nightmare began with the search in October 2003. It didn't end until Mr. Norris was released from federal supervision in December 2008. His wife testified, however, that even after he came home, the man she had married was still gone. He was by then 71 years old. Unsurprisingly, serving two years as a federal convict - in addition to the years it took to defend unsuccessfully against the charges - had taken a severe toll on him mentally, emotionally and physically.
These are repressive consequences for an elderly man who made mistakes in a small business. The feds should be ashamed, and Mr. Evertson is right that everyone else should be scared. Far too many federal laws are far too broad.
Mr. Scott and Mr. Gohmert have set the stage for more hearings on why this places far too many Americans at risk of unjust punishment. Members of both parties in Congress should follow their lead.
House Passes Hate Crimes Legislation on Defense Spending Bill
October 8, 2009McClatchy Newspapers - So-called "hate crimes" will be punished more severely under legislation passed Thursday by the House of Representatives.
The controversial measure tacked onto page 1,350 of a must-pass defense bill stiffens penalties for those convicted of committing violent offenses because of the "sexual orientation, gender, gender identity or disability" of the victim.
The provision expands an existing federal hate crime law, which covers race, religion and ethnicity. Now, hurting any member of these specially protected populations could lead to a 10-year federal prison sentence on top of other sentences.
"This law says it's no longer appropriate to treat gays as social pariahs," said Jay Hubbell, founder and treasurer of Fresno Stonewall Democrats. "I think it's important, because it will create momentum for full equality; it's saying gay people are entitled to the same civil rights as others."Supporters and opponents, though, clash sharply over the prevalence of hate crimes as well as the wisdom of enhancing penalties to protect some populations more than others. On the one hand, the FBI counted a total of 7,624 hate crime incidents in 2007, the most recent year for which statistics are available...
The FBI already has been collecting information on hate crimes targeting sexual orientation, although until now it hasn't been covered by the federal hate crimes statute. Hate-crimes legislation advocates believe the number of crimes, particularly targeting gays, is probably under-reported...
Advocates have been pushing for an expanded hate crimes bill for several years, under the name the Matthew Shepard and James J. Byrd Hate Crimes Act. Shepard was a 21-year-old gay student murdered in Wyoming in 1998. Byrd was a 49-year-old African-American killed in Texas in 1998.
By attaching the hate crimes measure to the $680 billion defense authorization package, lawmakers provided the legislation the momentum it lacked on its own.
"I'm opposed to hate crimes legislation, and I'm particularly opposed to the idea of putting it on a defense bill in a time of war," said Rep. Buck McKeon of Palmdale, the senior Republican on the House Armed Services Committee.In an effort to address potential constitutional challenges, involving limits to congressional power, lawmakers specified that the hate crimes must be connected in some way to interstate commerce. This might include, for instance, using a gun that crossed state lines.
In April, Democratic Reps. Dennis Cardoza of Merced, Jim Costa of Fresno and Jerry McNerney of Pleasanton voted for a standalone version of the hate crimes legislation, while Republican Reps. Devin Nunes of Visalia and George Radanovich of Mariposa opposed it...
The defense bill now goes to the Senate for final passage, and then to the White House.
Obama Will Bypass Congress to Detain Suspects Indefinitely
September 24, 2009Raw Story - President Barack Obama has quietly decided to bypass Congress and allow the indefinite detention of terrorist suspects without charges.
The move, which was controversial when the idea was first floated in The Washington Post in May, has sparked serious concern among civil liberties advocates. Such a decision allows the president to unilaterally hold “combatants” without habeas corpus — a legal term literally meaning “you shall have the body” — which forces prosecutors to charge a suspect with a crime to justify the suspect’s detention.
Obama’s decision was buried on page A 23 of The New York Times’ New York edition on Thursday. It didn’t appear on that page in the national edition. (Meanwhile, the front page was graced with the story, “Richest Russian’s Newest Toy: An N.B.A. Team.”)
Rather than seek approval from Congress to hold some 50 Guantanamo detainees indefinitely, the administration has decided that it has the authority to hold the prisoners under broad-ranging legislation passed in the wake of Sept. 11, 2001. Former President George W. Bush frequently invoked this legislation as the justification for controversial legal actions — including the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping program.
“The administration will continue to hold the detainees without bringing them to trial based on the power it says it has under the Congressional resolution passed after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, authorizing the president to use force against forces of Al Qaeda and the Taliban,” the Times‘ Peter Baker writes. “In concluding that it does not need specific permission from Congress to hold detainees without charges, the Obama administration is adopting one of the arguments advanced by the Bush administration in years of debates about detention policies.”Constitutional scholar and Salon.com columnist Glenn Greenwald discussed the policy in a column in May. He warned that the ability for a president to “preventively” detain suspects could mushroom into broader, potentially abusive activity.
“It does not merely allow the U.S. Government to imprison people alleged to have committed terrorist acts yet who are unable to be convicted in a civilian court proceeding,” Greenwald wrote. “That class is merely a subset, perhaps a small subset, of who the Government can detain. Far more significant, ‘preventive detention’ allows indefinite imprisonment not based on proven crimes or past violations of law, but of those deemed generally ‘dangerous’ by the Government for various reasons (such as, as Obama put it yesterday, they ‘expressed their allegiance to Osama bin Laden’ or ‘otherwise made it clear that they want to kill Americans’). That’s what ‘preventive’ means: imprisoning people because the Government claims they are likely to engage in violent acts in the future because they are alleged to be ‘combatants.’”
“Once known, the details of the proposal could — and likely will — make this even more extreme by extending the ‘preventive detention’ power beyond a handful of Guantanamo detainees to anyone, anywhere in the world, alleged to be a ‘combatant,’” Greenwald continues. “After all, once you accept the rationale on which this proposal is based — namely, that the U.S. Government must, in order to keep us safe, preventively detain “dangerous” people even when they can’t prove they violated any laws — there’s no coherent reason whatsoever to limit that power to people already at Guantanamo, as opposed to indefinitely imprisoning with no trials all allegedly ‘dangerous’ combatants, whether located in Pakistan, Thailand, Indonesia, Western countries and even the U.S.”...
Justice Department Supports Renewal of Patriot Act Provisions
Joe Palazzolo - The Obama administration has blessed three controversial provisions of the Patriot Act that expand the government’s reach in counter-terrorism investigations.In a Sept. 14 letter to lawmakers, Assistant Attorney General Ron Weich said the Justice Department supports the use of roving wiretaps, the authority to access business records and the ability to track so-called “lone-wolf” terrorists, or those without visible ties to a foreign terrorist organization. The provisions sunset at the end of the year.
The Justice Department’s position was expected. During his confirmation hearings, Attorney General Eric Holder told members Congress he would review the provisions but said he would likely endorse their re-authorization.
“The tools that we have been given by Congress in FISA are important ones, so I would look at all three and make the determination of whether I would be able to support them,” Holder told member of the Senate Judiciary Committee. “I expect that I will.”Weich said the administration is willing to consider changes that would increase privacy protections, as long as they preserve the effectiveness of the tools. Still, his letter embittered civil libertarians who have long opposed the measures.
“We are very encouraged to learn that the Obama administration has stated a willingness to discuss reforming the deeply flawed provisions in the Patriot Act, though we are disappointed at its support for the reauthorization of the three expiring provisions,” Michael Macleod-Ball, acting director of the ACLU’s Washington Legislative Office, said in a statement.A refresher on the three provisions:
- Lone wolf: Allows government to track a target without any discernible affiliation to a foreign power, such as an international terrorist group. The provision only applies only to non-U.S. persons. It has never been used in a FISA application.
- Business records: Allows investigators to compel third parties, including financial services and travel and telephone companies, to provide them access to a suspect’s records without the suspect’s knowledge. From 2004 to 2007, the FISA court issued about 220 orders to produce business records.
- Roving wiretaps: Allows the government to monitor phone lines or Internet accounts that a terrorism suspect may be using, whether or not others who are not suspects also regularly use them. The government must provide the FISA court with specific information showing the suspect is purposely switching means of communication to evade detection. The government has applied for roving wiretaps an average of 22 times a year since 2001.
Bush Surveillance Program Was Massive
July 10, 2009Associated Press – The Bush administration built an unprecedented surveillance operation to pull in mountains of information far beyond the warrantless wiretapping previously acknowledged, a team of federal inspectors general reported Friday, questioning the legal basis for the effort but shielding almost all details on grounds they're still too secret to reveal.
The report, compiled by five inspectors general, refers to "unprecedented collection activities" by U.S. intelligence agencies under an executive order signed by President George W. Bush after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.
Just what those activities involved remains classified, but the IGs pointedly say that any continued use of the secret programs must be "carefully monitored."
The report says too few relevant officials knew of the size and depth of the program, let alone signed off on it. They particularly criticize John Yoo, a deputy assistant attorney general who wrote legal memos undergirding the policy. His boss, Attorney General John Ashcroft, was not aware until March 2004 of the exact nature of the intelligence operations beyond wiretapping that he had been approving for the previous two and a half years, the report says.
Most of the intelligence leads generated under what was known as the "President's Surveillance Program" did not have any connection to terrorism, the report said. But FBI agents told the authors that the "mere possibility of the leads producing useful information made investigating the leads worthwhile."
The inspectors general interviewed more than 200 people inside and outside the government, but five former Bush administration officials refused to be questioned. They were Ashcroft, Yoo, former CIA Director George Tenet, former White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card and David Addington, an aide to former Vice President Dick Cheney.
According to the report, Addington could personally decide who in the administration was "read into" — allowed access to — the classified program.
The only piece of the intelligence-gathering operation acknowledged by the Bush White House was the wiretapping-without-warrants effort. The administration admitted in 2005 that it had allowed the National Security Agency to intercept international communications that passed through U.S. cables without seeking court orders.
Although the report documents Bush administration policies, its fallout could be a problem for the Obama administration if it inherited any or all of the still-classified operations.
Bush brought the warrantless wiretapping program under the authority of a secret court in 2006, and Congress authorized most of the intercepts in a 2008 electronic surveillance law. The fate of the remaining and still classified aspects of the wider surveillance program is not clear from the report.
The report's revelations came the same day that House Democrats said that CIA Director Leon Panetta had ordered one eight-year-old classified program shut down after learning lawmakers had never been apprised of its existence.
The IG report said that President Bush signed off on both the warrantless wiretapping and other top-secret operations shortly after Sept. 11 in a single presidential authorization. All the programs were periodically reauthorized, but except for the acknowledged wiretapping, they "remain highly classified."
The report says it's unclear how much valuable intelligence the program has yielded. The report, mandated by Congress last year, was delivered to lawmakers Friday. Rep. Jane Harman, D-Calif., told The Associated Press she was shocked to learn of the existence of other classified programs beyond the warrantless wiretapping. Former Bush Attorney General Alberto Gonzales made a terse reference to other classified programs in an August 2007 letter to Congress. But Harman said that when she had asked Gonzales two years earlier if the government was conducting any other undisclosed intelligence activities, he denied it. "He looked me in the eye and said 'no,'" she said Friday. Robert Bork Jr., Gonzales' spokesman, said, "It has clearly been determined that he did not intend to mislead anyone."
In the wake of the new report, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt, renewed his call Friday for a formal nonpartisan inquiry into the government's information-gathering programs...
The report says Yoo's analysis approving the program ignored a law designed to restrict the government's authority to conduct electronic surveillance during wartime, and did so without fully notifying Congress. And it said flaws in Yoo's memos later presented "a serious impediment" to recertifying the program.
Yoo insisted that the president's wiretapping program had only to comply with Fourth Amendment protections against search and seizure — but the report said Yoo ignored the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which had previously overseen federal national security surveillance.
"The notion that basically one person at the Justice Department, John Yoo, and Hayden and the vice president's office were running a program around the laws that Congress passed, including a reinterpretation of the Fourth Amendment, is mind boggling," Harman said.
House Democrats are pressing for legislation that would expand congressional access to secret intelligence briefings, but the White House has threatened to veto it.
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