Human Rights

CRIMINAL WRONGDOING AND THE CIA

 

 

Too often “the law” is nothing more than prejudice embedded in jargon.  

So the Obama administration, in its attempt to hammer another national security leaker, is directly challenging the right of journalists to protect confidential sources. Administration lawyers, arguing this week before the Supreme Court — which rejected New York Times reporter James Risen’s appeal of a Circuit Court decision that could require him to testify in the case against a former CIA officer — asserted, according to the Times, that “reporters have no privilege to refuse to provide direct evidence of criminal wrongdoing by confidential sources.”

He could not hit the broad side of a barn

 

 

 

The Free Press previously reported on a standoff in Yellow Springs on July 31 of 2013 that lead to the death of a resident, Paul E. Schenck, at the hands of a police sniper. Attorney General Mike DeWine personally delivered a summary of the final report by the Bureau of Criminal Investigation (BCI) that lead to no findings of wrongdoing on the part of the officers involved. Laborious comparison of the police records from the 17 responding agencies to the BCI report and raw investigative materials paints a picture of belligerence, sloth, criminality and incompetence. Since the release of the report, one of the officers involved has been indicted on firearms charges in federal court for partially unrelated conduct.

How the intelligence community controls your vote

 

Critics of internet and computer voting have an axiom: the election is never over until the cybervote comes in. Now there is a Spanish-based company planning to count U.S. overseas and military votes from Europe. It also has the technology to manufacture, manipulate and rig the vote count. Welcome to the world of Scytl. This spooky new world is held together through a complex assortment of interlocking directorships and investment deals.

The dangers to free and fair elections posed by electronic voting are well documented. Partisan goals can be achieved through the subversion of the central tabulation via an attack on the voting network. Wealthy politicians or their friends can invest in and own the voting machine manufacturers. The manufacturers themselves can be openly partisan. The threat to the universal franchise posed by the intelligence community controlling the manufacture of voting equipment from design and development to sales and integration outweighs all previous dangers.

Oakland Police make a deal with the snitch Next Door

 

 

Neighborhoods are small communities. Communities have bonds. They also have rivalries. They also have gossip and intrigue, albeit on a petty scale. Through the efforts of Mayor Jean Quan and NextDoor.com, the intelligence community and the Oakland Police Department (OPD) are now privy to these tiny pieces of personal information and the larger patters they reveal. Under the auspices of community building and public safety, the public's participation is can now be freely enlisted in the creation of a database of that information.

Through the new partnership, the OPD and the CIA now know what Oakland residents had for breakfast, who their children have a playdate with, and if their dog wanders around the block. NextDoor.com is Oakland's social media surveillance experiment.

Time will tell what the results of that experiment will be. A metropolitan police department can easily fail at social media as the New York Police Department recently showed with their social media debacle with the #myNYPD twitter campaign.

USAID's "Technological Mercenaries" Deceive Cubans

BANGKOK, Thailand -- The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) used "technological mercenaries" in a dumb, secret, illegal assault against Cuba's government and unsuspecting population, comparable to the strategy of deceptive Nazi propaganda, according to Cuban Ambassador Victor Ramirez Pena. "ZunZuneo, in the two years that it was in operation, didn't have enough time to do what it wanted, which was to subvert the order in Cuba," Ambassador Pena said in an interview, referring to USAID's Internet-based social media site named ZunZuneo "It was working on profiling people," in Cuba who had no idea that USAID was sucking up their personal data by secretly hosting and spying on their accounts, to later spam them with anti-communist and pro-American propaganda, he said. "That is something that nobody should be doing because it's illegal by U.S. law, it's illegal by international regulations," Ambassador Pena said. "Does one have to accept that the continuous use of deceit, lies -- as Goebbels said -- to make it a truth, is something that we have to accept?

Four still dead in Ohio

Back when “tin soldiers and Nixon” were “cutting us down” in 1970, a group of Ohio State University students and campus activists started an underground newspaper in Columbus. Driven mostly by the murder of four students at Kent State – Allison Krause, Jeff Miller, Sandy Scheuer and Bill Schroeder – shot during a demonstration that was opposing President Nixon’s illegal attack on Cambodia and the Vietnam War, the Columbus Free Press was born. Not surprisingly, the Free Press was the first western newspaper to expose Cambodia’s killing fields thanks to international law professor John Quigley’s reporting from Southeast Asia. In the first issue of the Free Press, the October 11, 1970 issue, a Free Press opinion attacked a special grand jury’s decision not to indict Ohio National Guardsmen for the Kent State killings.
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