The US vs the US

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http://original.antiwar.com/mcgovern/2011/12/21/pvt-manning-and-imperative-of-truth/

Pvt. Manning and Imperative of Truth by Ray McGovern

When I was asked to speak at Saturday’s rally at Fort Meade in support of Pvt. Bradley Manning, I wondered how I might provide some context around what Manning is alleged to have done. (In my talk , so as not to think I had to insert the word “alleged” into every sentence, I asked for unanimous consent to using the indicative rather than the subjunctive mood.) What jumped into my mind was the letter Rev.
Yesterday the Justice Department unsealed an indictment that charges eight men from three countries with running "a sophisticated online drug marketplace that sold everything from marijuana to mescaline to some 3,000 people around the world," A.P. reports : "The Farmer's Market"...allowed suppliers of drugs—including LSD, Ecstasy and ketamine—to anonymously sell their wares online. They hooked up with buyers in 34 countries and accepted various forms of payment, including cash, Western Union and PayPal transactions, the indictment claims.... The market "provided a controlled substances storefront, order forms, online forums, customer service, and payment methods for the different sources of supply" and charged the suppliers a commission based upon the value of the order, according to a statement from the U.S. attorney's office in Los Angeles. http://reason.com/blog/2012/04/17/your-government-keeping-the-drug-market

Your Government: Committed to Keeping the Drug Market As Dangerous As Possible

How the US uses sexual humiliation as a political tool to control the masses | Naomi Wolf | Comment is free

The discussion continues today at 12pm ET (5pm UK time) when Naomi Wolf takes your questions about her column. Join us for an hour long live chat about the supreme court, strip searches and sexual humiliation. In a five-four ruling this week, the supreme court decided that anyone can be strip-searched upon arrest for any offense, however minor, at any time. This horror show ruling joins two recent horror show laws: the NDAA, which lets anyone be arrested forever at any time, and HR 347, the "trespass bill", which gives you a 10-year sentence for protesting anywhere near someone with secret service protection. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2012/apr/05/us-sexual-humiliation-political-control
[ Glenn Greenwald is on vacation this week and three writers will be filling in for him ] By Jesselyn Radack Former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officer John Kiriakou — the sixth whistleblower the Obama administration has indicted under the Espionage Act for alleged mishandling of classified information — was arraigned this morning in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia. As expected, Kiriakou pleaded “not guilty” to all the charges. http://www.salon.com/2012/04/13/feds_prep_whistleblower_trial/

Feds ready whistleblower trial - Glenn Greenwald

The real criminals in the Tarek Mehanna case

http://www.salon.com/2012/04/13/the_real_criminals_in_the_tarek_mehanna_case/ TAREK’S SENTENCING STATEMENT APRIL 12, 2012 Read to Judge O’Toole during his sentencing, April 12th 2012. In the name of God the most gracious the most merciful Exactly four years ago this month I was finishing my work shift at a local hospital. As I was walking to my car I was approached by two federal agents.
[ Glenn Greenwald is on vacation this week and three writers will be filling in for him .] More than three years into the presidency of Barack Obama, it’s almost a cliché now to ask: What if George W. Bush did it?

The liberal betrayal of Bradley Manning

http://www.salon.com/2012/04/10/the_liberal_betrayal_of_bradley_manning/
http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/04/10/the-hollow-point-men/ I’ve often wondered why so many innocent people who are shot by police end up dead. Granted that police officers spend a fair amount of time training with their service revolvers, and are thus likely to be better shots with a pistol than your average gun-owner. But even so, in so many cases where some unarmed person is shot by police, the result is death, and it makes you wonder how cops, often in the dark and on the run, manage with their notoriously hard-to-aim pistols to hit a vital organ with such depressing regularity. The answer, I’ve learned, is that police in most jurisdictions these days routinely use hollow-point bullets, which are designed to do maximum damage to soft tissue targets. Because the tip of the projectile is composed of hollowed-out lead, it flattens on impact and spreads out, vastly enlarging the hole made upon entry into a body, causing catastrophic damage to vital organs, internal bleeding and wounds that are hard to repair even in an emergency room.

The Hollow Point Men

https://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/04/09-14 Privacy is eroding fast as technology offers government increasing ways to track and spy on citizens. The Washington Post reported there are 3,984 federal, state and local organizations working on domestic counterterrorism. Most collect information on people in the US.

Thirteen Ways Government Tracks Us

Someone You Love: Coming to a Gulag Near You

The security and surveillance state does not deal in nuance or ambiguity. Its millions of agents, intelligence gatherers, spies, clandestine operatives, analysts and armed paramilitary units live in a binary world of opposites, of good and evil, black and white, opponent and ally. There is nothing between. You are for us or against us. https://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/04/02-1
Posted by JacobSloan on April 7, 2012 Did the CIA accidentally turn San Francisco into America’s grooviest city? SF Weekly on newly uncovered details on Operation Midnight Climax, one of the absolute strangest slices of U.S. history: Wayne Ritchie may be among the last of the living victims of MK-ULTRA, a Central Intelligence Agency operation that covertly tested LSD on unwitting Americans in San Francisco and New York City from 1953 to 1964.

How The CIA Doped San Franciscans With LSD

http://www.disinfo.com/2012/04/how-the-cia-doped-san-franciscans-with-lsd/

Fighting to Repeal California Execution Law They Championed

Jim Wilson/The New York Times Ron Briggs, who was once behind Proposition 7, a tough death penalty initiative passed in 1978, now wants it repealed. The campaign was run by Ron Briggs, today a farmer and Republican member of the El Dorado County Board of Supervisors. It was championed by his father, John V.
Posted by Join Or DIE on April 5, 2012 Reports Andy Greenberg on Forbes : If Americans aren’t disturbed by phone carriers’ practices of handing over cell phone users’ personal data to law enforcement en masse–in many cases without a warrant–we might at least be interested to learn just how much that service is costing us in tax dollars: often hundreds or thousands per individual snooped.

These Are The Prices AT&T, Verizon and Sprint Charge For Cellphone Wiretaps

Defense Department seeks new authorities for counterterrorism fight - The Hill's DEFCON Hill

As the Pentagon begins to wind down the war in Afghanistan, the smaller conflicts elite U.S. forces are fighting around the world are heating up. But DOD needs more than just men and materiel to meet these challenges — it needs additional authority from Congress to do so. "Most of the authorities that we have right now are narrowly construed to counterterrorism ... [but] I think for some countries we may need a little bit more flexibility to go in there," Michael Sheehan, assistant secretary of defense for special operations and low-intensity conflict, told lawmakers on Tuesday. The majority of counterterrorism missions by U.S. special forces have been focused on al Qaeda and Taliban cells in Afghanistan and the Middle East region. But growing numbers and types of threats, particularly in Africa and South America, require a new approach to U.S. counterterrorism operations, Sheehan told members of the Senate Armed Services’ subcommittee on emerging threats and capabilities.

NYPD Too Busy Beating Man on the Ground to Notice Being Recorded

Here I thought the police brutality in New York was reserved for just Occupy Wall Street activists. But here a group of New York City police officers were so busy kicking and beating a man with their batons that it took them a little while to realize they were being recorded. They had the man on his back, ordering him to put his hands behind his back while continually beating him with their batons, and stomping him with their feet making it impossible to actually comply with their orders as he was trying to dodge the blows.

The Most Transparent Administration Ever™

(updated below) New York Times , Editorial, November 1, 2004 : [O]ne of the more worrisome domestic policy developments of the past four years [is] the Bush administration’s drastic expansion of needless government secrecy. John Dean, Worse than Watergate , 2007 : In fact, the Bush-Cheney presidency is strikingly Nixonian, only with regard to secrecy far worse . New York Times Editorial, June 24, 2007 :