Civil Rights / Liberties

Humanity Versus a Corrupt State: 

Coups and Cash Machines in Rio de Janeiro

By John Grant

We have an update on the case of John Brennan, the man who stripped naked at a TSA checkpoint in April of 2012.

By Alfredo Lopez

For two years, starting in 2010, the United States Agency for International Development ran a social networking service -- similar to Twitter -- for the Cuban people. Its long-term objective was to forment popular revolt against the government and de-stabilize the country.

By Alfredo Lopez

"Connectivity," Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a CNN interview last year, "is a human right."

By Alfredo Lopez

"Connectivity," Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a CNN interview last year, "is a human right."

Our whistleblower buddy Jason Harrington has written another exposé. We were the first site in the blabbosphere to publicize Harrington’s TSA tell-all blog, calledTaking Sense Away. That was two years ago. And we wrote about him several times thereafter.

By Linn Washington Jr.

Philadelphia’s District Attorney, Rufus Seth Williams, the first African-American in Pennsylvania to hold a powerful top prosecutor post, persistently projects himself as an expert on racism.

Commendably Williams has acknowledged the corrosive impact of racism within the criminal justice system.

By Dave Lindorff

In the voluminous report issued by Florida State’s Attorney Jeff Ashton’s Office on the killing in Orlando last May 22 of a witness/suspect under interrogation by the FBI -- an investigation that concluded that the shooting was “justified” -- there is not a single mention of the bruise and contusion on the left side of Todashev’s head.

Cross-Posted from DeSmogBlog

In light of ongoing geopolitical tensions in Russia, Ukraine and hotly contested Crimea, three (yes, three!) U.S. Congressional Committees held hearings this week on the U.S. using its newfangled oil and gas bounty as a blunt tool to fend off Russian dominance of the global gas market.

U.S. Sen Mary Landrieu at the U.S. Sen. Committee on Energy and Natural Resources; Photo Credit:  U.S. Sen. Committee on Energy and Natural Resources

Though 14 combined witnesses testified in front of the U.S. Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, the U.S. House Energy and Commerce Committee's Subcommittee on Energy and Power and U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, not a single environmental voice received an invitation. Climate change and environmental concerns were only voiced by two witnesses. 

Using the ongoing regional tumult as a rationale to discuss exports of U.S. oil and gas obtained mainly via hydraulic fracturing ("fracking"), the lack of discussion on climate change doesn't mean the issue isn't important to national security types.

Indeed, the Pentagon's recently published Quadrennial Defense Review coins climate change a "threat force multiplier" that could lead to resource scarcity and resource wars. Though directly related to rampant resource extraction and global oil and gas marketing, with fracking's accompanying climate change and ecological impacts, "threat force multiplication" impacts of climate change went undiscussed. 

With another LNG (liquefied natural gas) export terminal approved by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) in Coos Bay, Ore., to non-Free Trade Agreement countries on March 24 (the seventh so far, with two dozen still pending), the heat is on to export U.S. fracked oil and gas to the global market.   

So, why wasn't the LNG climate trump card discussed in a loud and clear way? Well, just consider the source: ten of the witnesses had ties in one way or another to the oil and gas industry.

By Dave Lindorff

(This article was written as an exclusive for Counterpunch magazine, where the full story can be read, along with photos of the crime scene)

As usual, the mainstream media are a day late and a dollar short. The Los Angeles Times not only has an article reporting information that's been out there for years, but even the headline to the article is inaccurate and equivocal: "Enhanced airport security may waste money, study says." 

By Dave Lindorff

I can't keep up with all these stories. They come too fast and furious, one more idiotic than the next. Although there is sometimes method to the TSA's madness, as in this case where the employees clearly wanted to steal somebody's expensive perfume.

Read the rest at ABombazine.

By Michael Uhl

By Dave Lindorff

Of all the people to come to the rescue of the Constitution, who would have thought it would be Sen. Diane Feinstein (D-CA).

Feinstein, after all, as head of the Senate Intelligence Committee since 2009, has yet to see an NSA violation of the Constitution, an invasive spying program or a creative “re-interpretation” of the law that she hasn’t applauded as being lawful and “needed” to “keep people safe.”

By Alfredo Lopez

Federal prosecutors last week dropped several of the most significant charges facing Internet activist and journalist Barrett Brown -- charges that could have drawn a jail sentence of 105 years.

The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) are two different agencies operating under the aegis of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Therefore, it shouldn't come as a surprise that they have sensibilities, practices, and impunity in common. The major difference is that the TSA has no law enforcement authority while CBP does. That power makes the latter even more dangerous.

Read the rest at ABombazine.

Originally Posted at PopularResistance.org

http://youtu.be/B5QYPiqk6hg

The co- founder and national coordinator of the Poor People’s Economic Human Rights Campaign and vice president of the Green Shadow Cabinet. Cheri is nationally and internationally respected for her anti-poverty work. Honoring the legacy Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Poor People’s Campaign of 1967-68 Cheri inspires a new generation of leaders working to end poverty.

In this exclusive interview, Dennis Trainor, Jr. and Cheri Honkala discuss the Earth Day to May Day Climate Convergence, the U.S. Social Forum, and what motivates a life of social justice organizing.

tags

By Dave Lindorff

If you want to make moral or legal pronouncements, or to condemn bad behavior, you have to be a moral, law-abiding person yourself. It is laughable when we see someone like Rush Limbaugh criticizing drug addicts or a corrupt politician like former Sen. John Ensign (R-NV) voting for more prisons, more cops, and tougher rules against appeals of sentences.

The same thing goes for nations.

Someone who describes himself as an anarchist believes what the TSA is saying? Really?

Davi Barker, I'd check my anarchist credentials if I were you.

Barker has written a post detailing his most recent experience at the hands of the TSA. He titled it, rather misleadingly . . . .

A round-up of some stories in the news lately about the TSA and TSA-similar organizations:

Nice to know that UK security can be just as idiotic as US security . . . .

By Dave Lindorff

Ukraine’s new rulers, in one of their first acts, have disbanded that country’s riot police.

By Alfredo Lopez

It might seem like a game of Monopoly played by real monopolies and, with a tired groan, one might be tempted to dismiss it as part of an ugly but irreversible trend. But the merger of cable-television mammoth Comcast with its runner-up competitor Time-Warner Cable [1] is a huge piece of news whose outcome, if it goes forward, will be crippling to communications in this country.

By Dave Lindorff

(This article originally ran in WhoWhatWhy News)

If you’re a small-town police chief, or perhaps the chief of a university security department, the US Department of Defense has got a deal for you!

Thanks to the ending of the Iraq War, and the winding down of the war in Afghanistan, the Pentagon has 11,000 heavily armored vehicles that it has no use for.  Called MRAPs—Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected—they are designed to protect against AK-47s, rocket-propelled grenades and IEDs. And as pitchman Paul Richards used to say of the ’69 Pontiac Firebird, “They’re practically giving them away!”

Correction, they are giving them away.

All a local police department has to do to get itself an 18-ton MRAP—which originally cost taxpayers between $400,000-$700,000 complete with gun turret and bullet-proof windows—is send a few cops to pick it up and pay for the gas.

There are a few downsides: the things get only five miles to the gallon, can’t go over most bridges (or under them), and have a nasty habit of tipping over on rough terrain.

By Linn Washington, Jr.

Philadelphia -- Back in 1978, a respected newspaper columnist in in this city blasted local black elected officials for their failure to criticize police brutality – the scourge that ravaged blacks for decades, often with the sanction of white elected officials like then Philadelphia Mayor Frank Rizzo, a former city police commissioner.

Snowden Was Justified from Intelligence Squared U.S. Debates on FORA.tv

In the on-going sordid history of TSA agents bullying, harassing, robbing, and sexually assaulting people, we have a new story, this time about a cancer survivor.
 

The man is 36 years old and suffers from an overactive bladder because of a past bout with prostate cancer. Therefore, he wears an adult incontinence garment -- a disposable brief -- something that hundreds of thousands of people are familiar with in this country, especially with our aging population.

  I was setting out our trash when Ann Willard came up the street, walking their St. Bernard, Boris.  “How’ya doing, Ann?” I said.  “Have a good holiday?”

She looked a little red-faced, but that was probably the stiff, cold wind gusting up from the river.  Or being a hundred pound woman being dragged by a two hundred pound dog.  “I don’t want to sound like a complainer,” she said, “but we’ve had better.”

By Dave Lindorff

I never really knew Pete Seeger, but he taught me how to play the banjo.