Evidence

By Dave Lindorff

The American media is full of praise for President Obama for “brokering” a detente between Israel and Turkey, two former allies who have been at loggerheads since May 31, 2010 when heavily armed Israeli Defense Force fighters boarded the Mavi Marmara, a Turkish-flagged vessel seeking to break Israel’s illegal blockade of Gaza with non-military supplies, and killed nine unarmed peace flotilla activists.

By Alfredo Lopez

The recent order by Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, forbidding Yahoo employees from doing their Yahoo work at home, might seem justified. After all, companies tell their employees what to do and Mayer might have good reasons for this edict. But the memo and its fallout raise serious and significant questions about technology, culture and women's role in both.

By Dave Lindorff

Let’s not be too quick to dismiss the “ranting” of renegade LAPD officer Chris Dorner.

Dorner, a three-year police veteran and former Lieutenant in the US Navy who went rogue after being fired by the LAPD, has accused Los Angeles Police of systematically using excessive force, of corruption, of being racist, and of  firing him for raising those issues through official channels.

Here is the memo.  With a few tweaks and a more creative title -- like "Murder With Your Hands Clean" -- this memo could sell a lot of copies.

And why not?  Either there's a whistleblower in the Department of So-Called Justice about to be charged with espionage, and NBC is about to face the same persecution as WikiLeaks, or this is one of those "good" leaks that the White House wanted made public in an underhanded manner -- perhaps as an imagined boost to morality-challenged CIA director nominee John Brennan who faces his Senate Rejection Hearing on Thursday.

The memo, which is thought to be a summary of a longer one, says the United States can murder a U.S. citizen abroad (abroad but somehow "outside the area of active hostilities" even though killing him or her seems rather active and hostile) if three conditions are met:

"1. an informed, high-level official of the U.S. government has determined that the targeted individual poses an imminent threat of violent attack against the United States;"

The memo goes on to base its claims on the supposed powers of the President, not of some random official.  Who is such an official?  Who decides whether he or she is informed?  What if two of them disagree?  What if he or she disagrees with the President? or the Congress? or the Supreme Court? or the U.S. public? or the United Nations? or the International Criminal Court? What then?  One solution is to redefine the terms so that everyone has to agree.   "Imminent" is defined in this memo to mean nothing at all.  "The United States" clearly means anywhere U.S. troops may be. 

"2. capture is infeasible, and the United States continues to monitor whether capture becomes feasible;"

And if a high-level official claims it's infeasible, who can challenge that?

"3. the operation would be conducted in a manner consistent with applicable law of war principles."

When a U.S. drone strike killed Anwar al-Awlaki and Samir Khan, no one had shown either of them to meet the above qualifications.

When a U.S. drone strike targeted and killed 16-year-old Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, no one had shown him to meet the above qualifications; I don't think anyone has made such a claim to this day.  And what about his cousin who died for the crime of being with him at the wrong time? 

The sociopaths who wrote this memo have "legalized" the drone-killing of Americans with the exception of all the Americans known thus far to have been murdered by our government with the use of drones.

By Linn Washington, Jr.

Many millions around the world are convinced they know imprisoned journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal from closely examining the ‘whodunit’ contentions surrounding his contentious conviction for the December 9, 1981 slaying of a Philadelphia policeman.

By Dave Lindorff

New documents obtained from the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security by the Partnership for Civil Justice and released this past week show that the FBI and other intelligence and law enforcement agencies began a campaign of monitoring, spying and disrupting the Occupy Movement at least two months before the first occupation actions began in late September 2011.

http://bradleymanning.org

By Linn Washington, Jr.

Much is rightly made of the ‘maverick’ character of former Pennsylvania U.S. Senator Arlen Specter in obituaries and other media coverage since his recent death.

That maverick streak certainly animated Specter’s December 2010 Farewell Speech from the Senate where he criticized the lack of civility currently rampant in that body plus assailed both political parties for perpetuating legislative gridlock and abuses of Senate rules.

By Clint Henderson

The internet is full of videos exposing police officers' use of excessive physical force when trying to apprehend or detain "potential criminals". Every year in fact there seems to be an increase in YouTube video uploads, video views, and news stories depicting this type of injustice.

By Linn Washington, Jr.

Mumia Abu-Jamal, the internationally recognized American political prisoner, thwarted a Philadelphia judge’s secretive court order that could have eliminated his future appeal rights when he filed a last- minute motion on August 23rd challenging that order sentencing him to life-without-parole.

By Dave Lindorff

Bradley Manning Support Network
http://bradleymanning.org

David Coombs, civilian legal counsel for accused WikiLeaks whistle-blower PFC Bradley Manning, has published the "Article 13" motion that in July he said would "shock the conscience of the court." This document not only reveals new details about PFC Manning's brutal conditions at the Quantico Marine Brig in Virginia, but the shocking revelation that a three-star General, far removed from the brig, ordered this illegal treatment. Coombs writes that new emails show two different brig commanders then carried out these unlawful orders in clear violation of Article 13 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice which prohibits pre-trial confinement conditions "any more rigorous" than the minimum needed to ensure the accused appears for court hearings. Mr. Coombs will argue this motion for dismissal of all charges, based on these military law violations at a critical October 1-5 pre-trial hearing at Fort Meade, Maryland.

By Linn Washington

Pennsylvania Governor Tom Corbett, the same conservative Republican who recently cut 70,000 from receiving their meager welfare payments in order to cut government costs, is ready to spend millions of bucks to implement a voter suppression scheme that evidence indicates is a blatant partisan measure designed to help Mitt Romney gain a presidential election victory.

The stated purpose is to entrap whistleblowers, which is bad enough, but doing so by feeding them misinformation means feeding it to the rest of us too.

Wired:

Pentagon-funded researchers have come up with a new plan for busting leakers: Spot them by how they search, and then entice the secret-spillers with decoy documents that will give them away.

Computer scientists call it it “Fog Computing” — a play on today’s cloud computing craze. And in a recent paper for Darpa, the Pentagon’s premiere research arm, researchers say they’ve built “a prototype for automatically generating and distributing believable misinformation … and then tracking access and attempted misuse of it. We call this ‘disinformation technology.’”

Two small problems: Some of the researchers’ techniques are barely distinguishable from spammers’ tricks. And they could wind up undermining trust among the nation’s secret-keepers, rather than restoring it.

By AFP

From Pakalert Press

Paul Joseph Watson
Infowars

Fort Leonard Wood Public Affairs director Tiffany Wood has provided the first official response to the shocking U.S. Army document that outlines the implementation of re-education camps, admitting that the manual was “not intended for public release” and claiming that its provisions only apply outside the United States, a contention completely disproved by the language contained in the document itself.

After a reader sent Wood a link to where the manual, entitled FM 3-39.40 Internment and Resettlement Operations (PDF), can be downloaded on the army.mil website (but only by military employees with special credentials), Wood responded by stating that the document should not be in the public domain.

“The document was not intended for public release,” said Wood, adding, “Any other questions regarding the
document, you will need to file a FOIA request.”

This means that either hackers have obtained access to a secure military website and downloaded the manual or it was leaked by a military employee concerned about the content of the document.

As we have exhaustively illustrated, the document is a training manual for U.S. Army personnel that details how to treat detainees incarcerated in prison camps both abroad and inside the United States.

The manual outlines how officers will develop programs to “indoctrinate” “political activists” incarcerated in detention camps into developing an “understanding and appreciation of U.S. policies and actions.” The document also explains how “reeducating the I/R facility population or setting the stage for acceptance of future operations,” is the responsibility of ‘PSYOP’ personnel within the camp.

The document also makes clear that the internment facility is not only a re-education camp but also a forced labor camp. Page 277 of the manual states, “Detainees constitute a significant labor force of skilled and unskilled individuals. These individuals should be employed to the fullest extent possible in work that is needed to construct, manage, perform administrative functions for, and maintain the internment facility.”

From Wired

The U.S. military taught its future leaders that a “total war” against the world’s 1.4 billion Muslims would be necessary to protect America from Islamic terrorists, according to documents obtained by Danger Room. Among the options considered for that conflict: using the lessons of “Hiroshima” to wipe out whole cities at once, targeting the “civilian population wherever necessary.”

The course, first reported by Danger Room last month and held at the Defense Department’s Joint Forces Staff College, has since been canceled by the Pentagon brass. It’s only now, however, that the details of the class have come to light. Danger Room received hundreds of pages of course material and reference documents from a source familiar with the contents of the class.

By Dave Lindorff

As we slog towards another vapid, largely meaningless exercise in pretend democracy with the selection of a new president and Congress this November, it is time to make it clear that the current president, elected four years ago by so many people with such inflated expectations four years ago (myself included, as I had hoped, vainly it turned out, that those who elected him would then press him to act in progressive ways), is not only a betrayer of those hopes, but is a serial violator of his oath of office. He is, in truth, a war criminal easily the equal of his predecessor, George W. Bush, and perhaps even of Bush’s regent, former Vice President Dick Cheney.

Let me count the ways: