Criminalizing Dissent - Chris Hedges' Columns. I was on the 15th floor of the Southern U.S. District Court in New York in the courtroom of Judge Katherine Forrest last Tuesday. It was the final hearing in the lawsuit I brought in January against President Barack Obama and Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta. I filed the suit, along with lawyers Carl J. Mayer and Bruce I. Afran, over Section 1021 of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA).
We were late joined by six co-plaintiffs including Noam Chomsky and Daniel Ellsberg. This section of the NDAA, signed into law by Obama on Dec. 31, 2011, obliterates some of our most important constitutional protections. “The essential thrust of the NDAA is to create a system of justice that violates the separation of powers,” Mayer told the court. In May, Judge Forrest issued a temporary injunction invalidating Section 1021 as a violation of the First and Fifth amendments. The language of the bill is terrifyingly vague. Chris Hedges / TruthDig Columnist. Secrecy News. The number of chronically homeless persons in the U.S. dropped from more than 120,000 in 2008 to around 84,000 in 2014, a new report from the Congressional Research Service notes. The federal government has undertaken to end chronic homelessness by 2017.
“One of the reasons that federal programs have devoted resources to ending chronic homelessness […] Read More The national census in 2020 will be the first to rely primarily on the Internet for collecting census data, thereby creating new avenues for fraud and disruption. A new report from the JASON scientific advisory panel describes the problem and outlines some solutions. Why would anyone want to interfere with the constitutionally-mandated census, which maps […] Read More Employees of the U.S. intelligence community are expected to be bold, innovative and imbued with moral courage. Read More Read More Read More Read More Read More Read More Read More Tomorrow Ronald W. Obama Leaks - Americans Should Be Worried About (the Lack of) Leaks.
When I was preparing my article "The Lethal Presidency of Barack Obama" for publication, I had a conversation with a source from the intelligence agencies. A month before, he had spoken to me, on the record; now he was in a panic. It wasn't that he had disclosed classified information; he hadn't. It was that, as he said, "everything had changed" in Washington, with the furor over the "leaks" that had resulted in the New York Times' two front-page stories on classified national-security programs, the first on targeted killing, the second on the Stuxnet computer virus.
He had originally spoken to me when the Obama administration appeared to be on the verge of officially acknowledging a targeting program that had taken the lives of three American citizens, including that of Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, a 16-year-old who had never been accused of terrorism. Is the problem with the Lethal Presidency the fact that Americans know too much about it or too little? High v. low-level leaking. US could put Assange to death if it gets him – former senior NSA official. Close[FLV] If America gets its hands on the WikiLeaks founder, they may go as far as execute him, a known National Security Agency whistleblower Thomas Andrews Drake told RT, adding that in the US, security has become a state religion.
An expert on electronic eavesdropping, Drake sacrificed his career to blow the whistle on perceived wrongdoings within the NSA. He was charged under the Espionage Act, though the charges were dropped only last year. He told RT that in America’s ‘soft tyranny’, everyone is subject or suspect in terms of surveillance. RT: What was the potential harm of the program that you challenged while working with the NSA? On the front end, it was designed to deal with a terrorist threat – and that was quite understandable. RT: There is a lot of debate about the proposed legislation CISPA enabling providers (Google, Facebook etc.) to share users’ personal data with the government. TD: I believe that is a part of it. RT: So what is the goal; is it total surveillance? CIA’s global warming center hidden from public, ignored by media - National Law Enforcement. The government agency responsible for providing national security data to the nation’s senior policymakers, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), operates a special center dedicated to global warming, according to a recent report.
One complaint often heard privately within law enforcement circles is that the Central Intelligence Agency over the years has morphed into a liberal-left -- or progressive -- think tank rather than maintaining its role as a strategic and tactical intelligence agency. An even bigger concern is that the agency has become overly politicized and prone to leaking information to the mainstream news media in order to have an impact upon the political climate within the Beltway. The need to insulate intelligence from political pressure is a powerful argument for maintaining a strong, centralized capability and not leaving intelligence bearing on national concern up to individual policymaking departments. National Archives: No new JFK docs - JFK. Acquiescing to CIA demands for secrecy, the National Archives announced Wednesday that it will not release 1,171 top-secret Agency documents related to the assassination of President Kennedy in time for the 5oth anniversary of JFK’s death in November 2013.
“Is the government holding back crucial JFK documents,” asked Russ Baker in a WhoWhatWhy piece that Salon published last month. The answer, unfortunately, is yes. In a letter released this week, Gary Stern, general counsel for the National Archives and Record Administration, said the Archives would not release the records as part of the Obama administration’s ongoing declassification campaign. Stern cited CIA claims that “substantial logistical requirements” prevented their disclosure next year. The records, requested by the nonprofit Assassination Archives and Research Center (AARC), will remain secret until at least 2017, when the 1992 JFK Records Act mandates public release of all assassination files in the government’s possession.