For-profit prisons have created a “neo-slavery” in the US, according to award-winning journalist Chris Hedges. Inmates work eight hours per day for major corporations such as Chevron, Motorola, Nordstrom’s and Target, yet only have the possibility of making up $1.25 an hour. In addition, companies that provide services like phone calls overcharge prisoners on even the most basic services, making hundreds of millions in profits annually. RT’s Ben Swann speaks to Hedges, who explains how this shadowy system came into existence. This system is now even expanding around the world. First by crossing the boarder down south to make more Neo-Slavery prisons in Mexico and soon expanding this same Neo-Slavery prison system into Canada, Europe and the rest of the world if we are not vigilant and careful of what kind of Neo-Slavery these Slave masters will try to force onto all of us.
The history of prison camps dates way back to the dawn of time, with victorious battles leading to enslavement and eventual death for the defeated. In the middle ages, these practices moved to trades and ransoms. From those ancient times until now, civilizations have battled on how to properly treat prisoners of war, and Gitmo is no different. www.infographicworld.com has created an infographic exploring the history of prisoners of war, along with the present conditions – and the future – of Gitmo.
Gitmo has a sordid history, which was brought prominently into light after the September 11th attacks. Gitmo is a financial hog, costing $454 million in 2013 alone. Since 2002, the naval station has amassed over $5 billion in total costs to the U.S. Since 2002, 779 prisoners have been held at Gitmo, costing $3 million per prisoner per year.
From political lines, to the overall public perception of the prison, this infographic from www.infographicworld.com covers everything you need to know about Gitmo.
An Interview with Police Militarization Expert Radley Balko:How Cops Became Soldiers
Non-Violent Marijuana Arrests surpass Violent Crime Arrests- Prison Industry Profits Running Wild! GMO’s making it into ‘Natural’ vitamins & supplements
Monsanto (the Fox) buys Beelogics (The Henhouse). Nature in jeopardy of getting Hi-jacked!
Dick Cheney finally admits he lied on 9/11… kind of.
Palestinian workers line up to get checked by a Palestinian security officer before entering the Israeli controlled industrial zone in Erez area between Israel and the Gaza Strip.
A look at life under occupation.
Gaza has the look of a Third World country, with pockets of wealth surrounded by hideous poverty. It is not, however, undeveloped. Rather it is “de-developed,” and very systematically so, to borrow the term from Sara Roy, the leading academic specialist on Gaza.
Even a single night in jail is enough to give a taste of what it means to be under the total control of some external force.
And it hardly takes more than a day in Gaza to appreciate what it must be like to try to survive in the world’s largest open-air prison, where some 1.5 million people on a roughly 140-square-mile strip of land are subject to random terror and arbitrary punishment, with no purpose other than to humiliate and degrade.
Such cruelty is to ensure that Palestinian hopes for a decent future will be crushed, and that the overwhelming global support for a diplomatic settlement granting basic human rights will be nullified. The Israeli political leadership has dramatically illustrated this commitment in the past few days, warning that they will “go crazy” if Palestinian rights are given even limited recognition by the U.N.
This threat to “go crazy” (“nishtagea”)–that is, launch a tough response–is deeply rooted, stretching back to the Labor governments of the 1950s, along with the related “Samson Complex”: If crossed, we will bring down the Temple walls around us.
Thirty years ago, Israeli political leaders, including some noted hawks, submitted to Prime Minister Menachem Begin a shocking report on how settlers on the West Bank regularly committed “terrorist acts” against Arabs there, with total impunity.
Disgusted, the prominent military-political analyst Yoram Peri wrote that the Israeli army’s task, it seemed, was not to defend the state, but “to demolish the rights of innocent people just because they are Araboushim (a harsh racial epithet) living in territories that God promised to us.”
Gazans have been singled out for particularly cruel punishment. Thirty years ago, in his memoir “The Third Way,” Raja Shehadeh, a lawyer, described the hopeless task of trying to protect fundamental human rights within a legal system designed to ensure failure, and his personal experience as a Samid, “a steadfast one,” who watched his home turned into a prison by brutal occupiers and could do nothing but somehow “endure.”
Since then, the situation has become much worse. The Oslo Accords, celebrated with much pomp in 1993, determined that Gaza and the West Bank are a single territorial entity. By that time, the U.S. and Israel had already initiated their program to separate Gaza and the West Bank, so as to block a diplomatic settlement and punish the Araboushim in both territories.
Punishment of Gazans became still more severe in January 2006, when they committed a major crime: They voted the “wrong way” in the first free election in the Arab world, electing Hamas.
Displaying their “yearning for democracy,” the U.S. and Israel, backed by the timid European Union, immediately imposed a brutal siege, along with military attacks. The U.S. turned at once to its standard operating procedure when a disobedient population elects the wrong government: Prepare a military coup to restore order.
Gazans committed a still greater crime a year later by blocking the coup attempt, leading to a sharp escalation of the siege and attacks. These culminated in winter 2008-09, with Operation Cast Lead, one of the most cowardly and vicious exercises of military force in recent memory: A defenseless civilian population, trapped, was subjected to relentless attack by one of the world’s most advanced military systems, reliant on U.S. arms and protected by U.S. diplomacy.
Of course, there were pretexts–there always are. The usual one, trotted out when needed, is “security”: in this case, against homemade rockets from Gaza.
In 2008, a truce was established between Israel and Hamas. Not a single Hamas rocket was fired until Israel broke the truce under cover of the U.S. election on Nov. 4, invading Gaza for no good reason and killing half a dozen Hamas members.
The Israeli government was advised by its highest intelligence officials that the truce could be renewed by easing the criminal blockade and ending military attacks. But the government of Ehud Olmert–himself reputedly a dove–rejected these options, resorting to its huge advantage in violence: Operation Cast Lead.
The internationally respected Gazan human-rights advocate Raji Sourani analyzed the pattern of attack under Cast Lead. The bombing was concentrated in the north, targeting defenseless civilians in the most densely populated areas, with no possible military basis. The goal, Sourani suggests, may have been to drive the intimidated population to the south, near the Egyptian border. But the Samidin stayed put.
A further goal might have been to drive them beyond the border. From the earliest days of the Zionist colonization it was argued that Arabs have no real reason to be in Palestine: They can be just as happy somewhere else, and should leave–politely “transferred,” the doves suggested.
This is surely no small concern in Egypt, and perhaps a reason why Egypt doesn’t open the border freely to civilians or even to desperately needed supplies.
Sourani and other knowledgeable sources have observed that the discipline of the Samidin conceals a powder keg that might explode at any time, unexpectedly, like the first Intifada in Gaza in 1987, after years of repression.
A necessarily superficial impression after spending several days in Gaza is amazement, not only at Gazans’ ability to go on with life but also at the vibrancy and vitality among young people, particularly at the university, where I attended an international conference.
But one can detect signs that the pressure may become too hard to bear. Reports indicate that there is simmering frustration among young people–a recognition that under the U.S.-Israeli occupation the future holds nothing for them.
Gaza has the look of a Third World country, with pockets of wealth surrounded by hideous poverty. It is not, however, undeveloped. Rather it is “de-developed,” and very systematically so, to borrow the term from Sara Roy, the leading academic specialist on Gaza.
The Gaza Strip could have become a prosperous Mediterranean region, with rich agriculture and a flourishing fishing industry, marvelous beaches and, as discovered a decade ago, good prospects for extensive natural gas supplies within its territorial waters. By coincidence or not, that’s when Israel intensified its naval blockade. The favorable prospects were aborted in 1948, when the Strip had to absorb a flood of Palestinian refugees who fled in terror or were forcefully expelled from what became Israel – in some cases months after the formal cease-fire. Israel’s 1967 conquests and their aftermath administered further blows, with terrible crimes continuing to the present day.
The signs are easy to see, even on a brief visit. Sitting in a hotel near the shore, one can hear the machine-gun fire of Israeli gunboats driving fishermen out of Gaza’s territorial waters and toward land, forcing them to fish in waters that are heavily polluted because of U.S.-Israeli refusal to allow reconstruction of the sewage and power systems they destroyed.
The Oslo Accords laid plans for two desalination plants, a necessity in this arid region. One, an advanced facility, was built: in Israel. The second one is in Khan Yunis, in the south of Gaza. The engineer in charge at Khan Yunis explained that this plant was designed so that it can’t use seawater, but must rely on underground water, a cheaper process that further degrades the meager aquifer, guaranteeing severe problems in the future.
The water supply is still severely limited. The U.N. Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), which cares for refugees but not other Gazans, recently released a report warning that damage to the aquifer may soon become “irreversible,” and that without quick remedial action, Gaza may cease to be a “livable place” by 2020.
Israel permits concrete to enter for UNRWA projects, but not for Gazans engaged in the huge reconstruction efforts. The limited heavy equipment mostly lies idle, since Israel does not permit materials for repair.
All this is part of the general program that Dov Weisglass, an adviser to Prime Minister Olmert, described after Palestinians failed to follow orders in the 2006 elections: “The idea,” he said, “is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger.”
Recently, after several years of effort, the Israeli human rights organization Gisha succeeded in obtaining a court order for the government to release its records detailing plans for the “diet.” Jonathan Cook, a journalist based in Israel, summarizes them: “Health officials provided calculations of the minimum number of calories needed by Gaza’s 1.5 million inhabitants to avoid malnutrition. Those figures were then translated into truckloads of food Israel was supposed to allow in each day … an average of only 67 trucks–much less than half of the minimum requirement–entered Gaza daily. This compared to more than 400 trucks before the blockade began.”
The result of imposing the diet, Middle East scholar Juan Cole observes, is that “about 10 percent of Palestinian children in Gaza under age 5 have had their growth stunted by malnutrition. … In addition, anemia is widespread, affecting over two-thirds of infants, 58.6 percent of schoolchildren, and over a third of pregnant mothers.”
Sourani, the human-rights advocate, observes that “what has to be kept in mind is that the occupation and the absolute closure is an ongoing attack on the human dignity of the people in Gaza in particular and all Palestinians generally. It is systematic degradation, humiliation, isolation and fragmentation of the Palestinian people.”
This conclusion has been confirmed by many other sources. In The Lancet, a leading medical journal, Rajaie Batniji, a visiting Stanford physician, describes Gaza as “something of a laboratory for observing an absence of dignity,” a condition that has “devastating” effects on physical, mental and social well-being.
“The constant surveillance from the sky, collective punishment through blockade and isolation, the intrusion into homes and communications, and restrictions on those trying to travel, or marry, or work make it difficult to live a dignified life in Gaza,” Batniji writes. The Araboushim must be taught not to raise their heads.
There were hopes that Mohammed Morsi’s new government in Egypt, which is less in thrall to Israel than the western-backed Hosni Mubarak dictatorship was, might open the Rafah Crossing, Gaza’s sole access to the outside that is not subject to direct Israeli control. There has been a slight opening, but not much.
The journalist Laila el-Haddad writes that the reopening under Morsi “is simply a return to status quo of years past: Only Palestinians carrying an Israeli-approved Gaza ID card can use Rafah Crossing.” This excludes a great many Palestinians, including el-Haddad’s own family, where only one spouse has a card.
Furthermore, she continues, “the crossing does not lead to the West Bank, nor does it allow for the passage of goods, which are restricted to the Israeli-controlled crossings and subject to prohibitions on construction materials and export.”
The restricted Rafah Crossing doesn’t change the fact that “Gaza remains under tight maritime and aerial siege, and continues to be closed off to the Palestinians’ cultural, economic and academic capitals in the rest of the (Israeli-occupied territories), in violation of U.S.-Israeli obligations under the Oslo Accords.”
The effects are painfully evident. The director of the Khan Yunis hospital, who is also chief of surgery, describes with anger and passion how even medicines are lacking, which leaves doctors helpless and patients in agony.
One young woman reports on her late father’s illness. Though he would have been proud that she was the first woman in the refugee camp to gain an advanced degree, she says, he “passed away after six months of fighting cancer, aged 60 years.
“Israeli occupation denied him a permit to go to Israeli hospitals for treatment. I had to suspend my study, work and life and go to sit next to his bed. We all sat, including my brother the physician and my sister the pharmacist, all powerless and hopeless, watching his suffering. He died during the inhumane blockade of Gaza in summer 2006 with very little access to health service.
“I think feeling powerless and hopeless is the most killing feeling that a human can ever have. It kills the spirit and breaks the heart. You can fight occupation but you cannot fight your feeling of being powerless. You can’t even ever dissolve that feeling.”
A visitor to Gaza can’t help feeling disgust at the obscenity of the occupation, compounded with guilt, because it is within our power to bring the suffering to an end and allow the Samidin to enjoy the lives of peace and dignity that they deserve.
Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor & Professor of Linguistics (Emeritus) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the author of dozens of books on U.S. foreign policy. He writes a monthly column for The New York Times News Service/Syndicate.
Former CIA agent John Kiriakou pleaded guilty Tuesday morning to crimes related to blowing the whistle on the US government’s torture of suspected terrorists and was sentenced to two-and-a-half years in prison.
The Wall Street Journal reports that Kiriakou, 48, agreed to admit to one count of disclosing information identifying a covert agent early Tuesday, just hours after his attorney entered a change of plea in an Alexandria, Virginia courtroom outside of Washington, DC.
Kiriakou was originally charged under the Espionage Act of 1917 after he went public with the Central Intelligence Agency’s use of waterboarding on captured insurgents in the wake of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack. On Monday morning, though, legal counsel for the accused former CIA agent informed the court that Kiriakou was willing to plead guilty to a lesser crime.
Initially, Kiriakou pleaded not guilty to the charge that he had outted two intelligence agents directly tied to the drowning-simulation method by going to the press with their identities.
As RT reported last week, defense attorneys had hoped that the government would be tasked with having to prove that Kiriakou had intent to harm America when he went to the media. Instead, however, prosecutors were told they’d only need to prove that the former government employee was aware that his consequences had the potential to put the country in danger.
Had Kiriakou been convicted under the initial charges filed in court, he could have been sentenced to upwards of five decades behind bars.
“Let’s be clear, there is one reason, and one reason only, that John Kiriakou is taking this plea: for the certainty that he’ll be out of jail in 2 1/2 years to see his five children grow up,” Jesselyn Raddack, a former Justice Department official who blew the whistle on Bush administration’s mishandling in the case of “American Taliban” John Walker Lindh, wrote Tuesday.
Kiriakou, Raddack wrote, was all but certain to enter the Alexandria courthouse on Tuesday and plead guilty to the lesser charge of violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act (IIPA), explaining, “there are no reported cases interpreting it because it’s nearly impossible to prove–for “outing” a torturer.”
“’Outing’ is in quotes because the charge is not that Kiriakou’s actions resulted in a public disclosure of the name, but that through a Kevin Bacon-style chain of causation, GITMO torture victims learned the name of one of their possible torturers,” Raddack wrote. “Regardless, how does outing a torturer hurt the national security of the U.S.? It’s like arguing that outing a Nazi guarding a concentration camp would hurt the national security of Germany.”
Speaking on condition of anonymity, a former government official told Firedoglake recently that the CIA was “totally ticked at Kiriakou for acknowledging the use of torture as state policy” and allegedly outing the identity of a covert CIA official “responsible for ensuring the execution” of the water-boarding program.
Kiriakou “outted” to the reporters the identities of the CIA’s “prime torturer” under its Bush-era interrogations, Firedoglake wrote. “For that, the CIA is counting on the Justice Department to, at minimum, convict Kiriakou on the charge of leaking an agent’s identity to not only send a message to other agents but also to continue to protect one of their own.”
Former National Security Agency staffer Thomas Drake suffered a similar fate in recent years after the government went after him for blowing the whistle on the NSA’s poorly handled collection of public intelligence. A grand jury indicted Drake on five counts tied to 1917’s Espionage Act as well as other crimes, but prosecutors eventually agreed to let him off with a misdemeanor computer violation that warranted zero jail time.
Together, Drake and Kirakou are two of six persons charged under the Espionage Act during the administration of US President Barack Obama. The current White House has indicted more people under the antiquated World War 1-era legislation than all previous presidents combined.
It is hard for me to express how much I appreciate your letter, which is the first I have received here, along with the support I’ve reportedly gotten from others so far. Before I forget, let me request that you also send a tweet of support to Jenna, @ElviraXMontana on Twitter; as my girlfriend, she had to watch as the FBI crushed my ribs (which I believe will be healed in time even if I’ve had trouble acquiring medical attention due to me under Geneva; put in formal request for X-ray last night here at Mansfield, whereas last week at Lew Sterrett I was sent to medic by an officer Tamer before being instead re-directed to what is intended as a temporary holding cell for those about to be released on bond, this change of plan being instigated by an officer Roeun (sic?) whom I have since reported to the proper authorities. Despite my having explained her mistake politely twice over the course of the next seven hours, and despite my condition having been serious enough to have prompted other inmates to suggest I check for internal bleeding, I was screamed at and then later simply ordered to lay down, all of which was witnessed by two other inmates, one of whom promised to inform Tim Rogers of D Magazine that I was potentially dying and needed intervention ASAP as soon as he himself was released a few minutes hence (again, this was the temporary outgoing holding cell, not meant for housing inmates for anything longer than an hour or so as their bond is processed; as such, I was not fed, either, much less given my medication, suboxone. Note that none of the treatment I received at Lou Sterrit had anything to do with who I am or what I am accused of, – it is simply the natural result of the inhumane and degenerate mentality found within the Texas “corrections” system, something I first described in a 2005 article for Towards Freedom. It is something we will have to address more firmly over the coming years, just as we have addressed North Africa and the intelligence contracting industry since late 2010. And I note all of this not merely to complain—although to complain is among the few vices I have been left aside from bragging to my fellow inmates – but to illustrate the fundamental problem that so many of us have sacrificed or risked to combat. This problem, which even Richard Nixon recognized and spoke about on that famed evening at the Lincoln Memorial, is that a republic built with the blood of giants has since become a “wild animal.” – one that now feeds upon us all.
I try to avoid metaphors, which can illuminate but in practice are too often used to obscure. Like many aspects of language, the false metaphor kills and enslaves. And at any rate, there will be time to discuss these broader issues later. For now, I must ask you to publish this on pastebin, Anonpaste, piratepad.de, and all other available venues, and that you also send it to some of the journalists that have been kind enough to follow my work as well as the consequences thereof, particularly my friend Michael Hastings, Barry Eisler, Michael Riley (Bloomberg), Ryan Gallagher (Guardian), and Josh at Daily Caller (forgot his last name) – plus the former editor of The Yemen Times who’s now at Global Times or some such and who, along with a certain Washington Times correspondent known to Gregg Housh, plus one or two others that I know of, who are now looking into Romas/COIN due in part to my release of the NYT e-mails earlier this month. Along with others in both the mainstream and independent media, these are most likely to report accurately on this matter. Having been mischaracterized at least a hundred times by “professional” journalists since I first appeared on Fox News in January 2009 to denounce Obama’s association with the goofy fascist Rick Warren – and was introduced as being spokesman for the non-existent “American Atheist Society” rather than GAMPAC. This would be a good time to note, particularly for the benefit of certain journalists, that I am not and never have been the spokesman for Anonymous, nor its “public face” or, worse, “self-proclaimed” “face” or “spokesperson” or “leader” (as the CIA-funded Radio Free Europe called me last year when I felt compelled to “quit” the non-group that I’d never technically joined in the first place, but rather gradually attached myself to as Wikileaks and Tunisia went down in December of 2010). Anyone who cares to learn what happens to a person who decides to help deal with such issues at the request and with the knowledge of active Anons can search my name in conjunction with those terms, and then see the article “Barrett Brown is Anonymous” from April 2011 in which I explain clearly, as I have countless times since, that no one has the authority to designate me as such. It is known to some of those who worked out of Anonops or were otherwise particularly active in the beginning of 2011 that I wrote or edited a number of the press releases of that time, and that the al-Jazeera article written in the first few days of January and which appeared later that month under the title “Anonymous and the Global Correction” was also my work – something I revealed privately to the brilliant cyberpunk essayist Bruce Sterling after he openly speculated as to the author’s background in Wired, noting the sentiments to be that of a true revolutionary. Among those who now agree with him are the FBI, which has since responded accordingly – and unethically.
Contrary to the countless claims to the effect that I hold some official role in Anonymous, I can think of only one occasion in which any Anon has come close to actually deeming me as such, that being the day on which HBGary was hacked in retaliation for HBGary Federal CEO Aaron Baar’s claim – shown to be entirely false – that he had identified Anon’s “lieutenants” and “co-founder” and that he had been contacted by the FBI about this. In fact, he had conflated three different people including a professional gardener and, as shown in the notes Anon released along with the e-mails taken from HBGary Federal, had made a huge number of additional mistakes – something since confirmed by everyone concerned including Barr himself. (That the Financial Times writer who had bought Barr’s self-promotion would again essay to write about Anonymous months later, this time taking the claims of a Dutch kid at face value in the course of “reporting” various negative things about how the movement operates, is only one of numerous bizarre and depressing twists to this story; I myself would later encounter him on Canada television as a panelist during a discussion in which he accused Anon of being particularly anti-“American interest”, to which I responded that it is difficult to avoid stepping on the empire’s toes when one assists North Africans in fighting off dictatorships that the US has supported for years.) (Oh snap!) On that day, as recorded on pastebin from the discussion on the #OPHBGary channel at Anonops, I was referred to in passing as “our public face” to a journalist. I was on the phone to HBGary President Penny Hoglund at the time, apologizing that HBGary’s e-mails had been seized by Sabu in addition to HBGary Federal’s, instructing her on how to get on IRC in order to make her case directly to the hackers, and promising to remove the link I had put up to the 70,000 e-mails acquired in the operation, a link I had placed upon a Daily Kos post put up to explain the situation to the great many who would miss the “makeover” done to HBGary.com. Had I known that Penny was lying to me about what she and husband Greg Hoglund had known about Barr’s irresponsible attempt to save his own career at the expense of the innocent and heroic alike, I would have simply hung up. Instead, I was polite – but I recorded the call, just as I recorded the next call with Barr, the next call with HBGary exec Jim Butterworth, and finally the drunken call I received months later from Greg Hoglund himself. “Trust but verify,” as Reagan said in the context of a different set of villains.
With the exception of the ten minute convo I released between myself and Aaron Barr, all of the other recordings – and plenty of others – are in the possession of the FBI, which raided my apartment as well as my mother’s home on March 6th. For more on those events, as well as the criminal conspiracy to which I have been subjected by elements of the FBI, HBGary, and paid informant/contractor Jennifer Emick (among other parties both known and undiscovered), please see the last 3 videos I uploaded to my YouTube account, as well as documents I linked to on my Twitter account @BarrettBrownLOL in the final days before my most recent (and dramatic!) arrest. Not everything is released; I was interrupted by armed, mediocre federal agents and DPD officers (“No complicity in assassination of a chief executive since 1963!”) before I could finish making my case, which was to be done over several days before the entirety would be sent to the FBI and the judge who signed my March search warrant. This was to be followed by the instigation of a civil suit against HBGary and other parties to be named in the next 2 months. My plan has been disrupted – plans often are, as history tells us – but it has not been rendered obsolete. It will evolve, just as ProjectPM itself has evolved steadily since 2009, when this war became evident to me, when I first realized that my future as a political satirist would have to be abandoned in favor of this dirty, grueling struggle.
But why was I arrested this time? I would love to tell you. But the prosecution wouldn’t like that. I, and everyone else in the court room, were ordered to refrain from discussing the complaint, affidavits, and warrant, all of which are sealed at the request of the author, one FBI special agent whom I shall not name lest I give him cause for fright (or pretend fright – I am allegedly a danger to one especially skittish special agent whom I shall be careful not to name again until such time as I am prepared to list him in the civil suit I’ve been preparing for weeks now). Frankly, I do not blame this other special agent for requesting that the document be sealed – if I had written something of such low quality and demonstrable untruth, I would burn it and ask forgiveness of every deity invented by man and the higher apes/dolphins/whales. Likewise, if I were the US attorney who signed the Motion for Detention dated September 13 2012 – the document that, after having been approved by Judge Paul D. Stickney, ensured I would not only be prevented from discussing what I’m being accused of but also made a prisoner of the state until such time as a trial or some such can be concocted out of the jurisprudential magick I struggle to follow, in my innocence. Apparently I am not just a danger to the fragile FBI agents who have taken to threatening my mother and fracturing my ribs in the course of heavily-armed raids on my uptown Dallas apartment, but must be prevented from explaining to my associates, followers, and even enemies why I have again been subjected to violence and indignity.
I explained the first raid against me (March 6th, 6:30 a.m. CST) and the second against my mother (about six hours later) in several pastebin messages at that time. It was not until 2 months ago that I learned how a judge had been tricked into permitting this raid on me – how the disgraced contracting firm HBGary hired the paid FBI informant Jennifer Emick to, in their words, “find something to get [me] picked up on,” even as this bizarre former Anon made public accusations against me under both her real name and her adopted contractor persona: “FakeGreggHoush” on Twitter (now “AsherahResearch”) and Asherah on IRC – particularly the 2600 server where she frequented the #jester channel alongside various ex-military men and current “security’ contractors who all found themselves inclined to associate with the admitted criminal hacker th3J35T3R, one of several parties who have taken credit for DoS attacks on Wikileaks. I should not have to remind anyone that 40 U.S. homes were raided in January 2011 due to a similar but less effective series of DDoS attacks on Visa, MasterCard, PayPal, and Amazon which were clearly an act of protest against an unprecedented economic blockade ordered by the U.S. regime. 14 of the “criminals” in question are being charged such that they face up to 15 years in prison. Thanks largely to Jay Leiderman the California attorney and John Penley the NYC activist and veteran, many of them are being represented for free. Likewise, I will seek and accept only pro bono assistance from this point on, though with the stipulation that I will pay any such lawyers what I can from the defense funds that have been set up for me thus far by well-wishers. As of this writing I dismiss Tom Mills, whom I retained for $3,500 after receiving bad advice from a well-meaning person. I will also expect that money returned within 60 days of the publication of this missive online (ProjectPM participants, please ensure that he receives this message, which I have also delivered through my mother – whom he falsely claimed to be representing on the matter of the FBI threats against her despite having been paid by me, not her). And as I had noted both publicly and privately earlier this month, I am still seeking additional attorneys with skill in civil litigation to pursue at least two suits I’ll be filing by the end of the year. Those interested may write to me at my new home, Some Jail in Texas. I am able to arrange for phone conversations with any applicants (or anyone else who is either especially interesting or who is able to accept a collect call or contribute $5 to my commissary/phone fund, that being the cost of a 15-minute call instigated by me). Anyone who writes me without us having been formerly introduced, I will guarantee a response if you send self-addressed stamped envelope. Also I believe that only mail with a return address will be delivered to me, though I’m not sure.
I hate that I have spent so much time in conflict over the past two years, and that so much of this has involved my fellow American citizens rather than the Middle Eastern dictators that I got involved in this to combat. I feel sorrow at the lost opportunities, and as for the way it has changed me as a person… I like to think that I am wiser and less naïve than I was, but I know too well how foolish and unsophisticated I was to begin with. I cannot excuse the mistakes I myself have made on both the strategic and tactical levels in my short career. I shudder when I look back on some of the things I wrote or said when I got my first real taste of power at the dawn of 2011, and I continue to bring shame upon myself and upon my family and work by some of the things I say even lately. In particular I have made comments about the U.S. military that I do not mean and which are obviously not entirely accurate. Along with other nonsense I have said, felt, written throughout my life, many of these things originate from my own fears and weaknesses. I am humiliated at not being able to protect my own mother from the FBI, or to shield my own girlfriend from watching heavily-armed men step on my spine as I scream in pain. I cannot forget how my mom cried on March 6th after the FBI had left with my equipment and hers, and how she whispered through tears that she wanted to be able to protect me from prison but couldn’t; I will never forget the look on Jenna’s face as the federal thugs swept through my efficiency apartment with guns drawn and safeties off, in search of hidden assailants and non-existent weapons. That these things are unjust and increasingly insane does not change the fact that they are the result of my own behavior, my own miscalculations, my own choices.
Having said that, I regret nothing. For the last week I was denied opiates and thus forced to feel not just rage, hatred, all the primal things, but forced to endure them while sicker than most humans can imagine and in a jail that is overcrowded and filled with common criminals. I have gained something extraordinary in that process, which ended this morning when I was given the first of 30 days of suboxone. I will personally thank everyone on the outside who has helped me and this movement particularly at this critical time, when I have regained the freedom that I did nothing to lose. For now, and until that time, it is war, on paper as always, but war.
Barrett Brown Founder ProjectPM Prisoner #35047177 Mansfield Law Enforcement Center 1601 Heritage Parkway Mansfield, TX 76063
Postscript-
[redacted], if you are able to relay this message to the Anons, my ProjectPM people, journalists, etc, you will have done me a finer deed than most men ever have occasion to do for another. I am transmitting a copy of this to another individual to ensure that the FBI does not manage to silence me on this (incidentally, the local jail here in Mansfield has proven to be run by honorable, trustworthy, even friendly people, but it is nonetheless subject to the Yankee boot (no offense)). Tell journalists, etc that they may contact [redacted]. My future and that of ProjectPM depends on you and a handful of others. Thank you for your loyalty at this time. Finally, please include this PS when forwarding and ask people to see my original search warrant as published on Buzzfeed a few months back. Echelon2.org is part of the key to this affair, but not all. More to be revealed when all is prepared. Good luck to you.
Prison Industrial Complex Explained: Learn how Corporations are outsourcing & privatizing labor costs to the Prison Industry and how there are massive profits exploding from within this corrupted Incarceration System. Slave Labor Camps, Return of the Debtor Prisons, Products most often created by Prisoners, Recent Wallstreet investments & the Goldman Sachs connection. SERCO, UNICOR, Federal Prison Industries, Inc. and the astronomical nationwide per-capita figures that will make your head spin.
“To whom it may concern: I, Oliver Kenneth Goff, was a member of the Communist Party and the Young Communist League from May 2, 1936 to October 9, 1939. During this period of time, I operated under the alias of John Keats and the number 18-B-2. My testimony before the Government is incorporated in Volume 9 of the Un-American Activities Report for the year 1939.
“While a member of the Communist Party, I attended Communist underground training schools outside the City of New York in the Bues Hall and 113 East Wells Street, Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The East Wells Street School operated under the name of the Eugene Debs School. Here, under the tutoring of Eugene Dennis, M. Sparks, Morris Chyilds, Jack Kling and others, we were schooled in the art of revolutionary overthrow of the established Government.
“We discussed quite thoroughly the fluoridation of water supplies and how we were using it in Russia as a tranquilizer in the prison camps. The leaders of our school felt that if it could be induced into the American water supply, it would bring about a spirit of lethargy in the nation; where it would keep the general public docile during a steady encroachment of Communism. We also discussed the fact that keeping a store of deadly fluoride near the water reservoir would be advantageous during the time of the revolution, as it would give us opportunity to dump this poison into the water supply and either kill off the populace or threaten them with liquidation, so that they would surrender to obtain fresh water.
“We discussed in these schools, the complete art of revolution: the seizure of the main utilities, such as light, power, gas and water, but it was felt by the leadership that if a program of fluoridating the water could be carried out in the nation, it would go a long way toward the advancement of the revolution.” Oliver Kenneth Goff, 1957
Matrix III – Volume Two – Use of Sodium Fluoride for Population Behaviour Control
“It is a matter of record that sodium fluoride has been used for behavior control of populations. In an “Address in reply to the Governor’s Speech to Parliament,” [Victorian Hanstard, August 12, 1987, Nexus, Aug/Sept 1995], Mr. Harley Rivers Dickinson, Liberal Party Member of the Victorian Parliament for South Barwon, Australia, made a statement on the historical use of fluorides for behaviour control.
“Mr. Dickinson reveals that, “At the end of the Second World War, the United States Government sent Charles Elliot Perkins, a research worker in chemistry, biochemistry, physiology and pathology, to take charge of the vast Farven chemical plants in Germany. While there, he was told by German chemists of a scheme which had been worked out by them during the war and adopted by the German General Staff. This scheme was to control the population in any given area through mass medication of drinking water. In this scheme, sodium fluoride will in time reduce an individual’s power to resist domination by slowly poisoning and narcotising a certain area of the brain, and will thus make him submissive to the will of those who wish to govern him. Both the Germans and the Russians added fluoride to the drinking water of prisoners of war to make them stupid and docile.”
“According to Chemical Engineering News in 1988, each year in the United States, 80,000 tons of hydrofluosilicic acid, 60,000 tons of sodium silicofluoride and 3,000 tons of sodium fluorides are put into public water supplies (Chemical Engineering News, Vol 66, August 1, 1988, pg. 39). In view of all known research, it would be safe and accurate to rephrase the previous sentence and say that each year the United States Government allows 143,000 tons of fluoride products to be added to public water supplies in order to numb, disempower, and render docile a large percentage of the population. Present estimates in 1995 run about 200,000 tons annually. Now, why on earth would any oligarchic group (a small group) want to do this to tens of millions of people, deliberately and knowingly?
“All of these fluoride chemicals are byproducts of the aluminum and chemical fertilization industries that are considered to be hazardous wastes by the EPA, says the scientific assessment of the health risks of fluorides in 1985 “omits 90% of the literature which suggests fluoride is a mutagen – causes cellular and genetic mutation.” (Water Fluoridation: A Case of Truth Decay). Several scientists in the United States and other countries have done research or written reports questioning the benefits of water fluoridation or suggesting health risks, were discouraged by their employers from actually publishing their findings.”
Anyone who questions the use of fluoride in the drinking water is labeled a nut case. Fluoride helps prevent tooth decay! I have been drinking bottled water for 30 years. In 1991, I woke up and besides researching the “Federal” Reserve, the IRS, the UN and other one world government mechanisms, I also began looking at the fluoride issue. In 1993, I had all the metal fillings removed from my teeth and my daughter’s. These metal fillings were replaced with gold; a very expensive undertaking. We also stopped using any products with fluoride, i.e. toothpaste, mouthwash and any application from our dentist. The difference in our dental health changed dramatically.
My mother, her brother and my grandparents (from Sicily) never used toothpaste in their lifetime, they used baking soda. Same as my father’s side of the family who came over from Munich. Both sets of grandparents died with all their teeth and never had gum disease. My mom and my uncle both have their own teeth, no bridges, no root canals, no gum disease. To this day, they use baking soda. They live in areas where the water has never been fluoridated. My four brothers and sisters have all had gum disease to some degree and huge problems with their teeth. They all use products with fluoride, all have metal fillings and two of them still drink tap water. I find these differences interesting.
Some may think it’s just a bunch of conspiracy fodder, but having read thousands of pages from hundreds of documents, both historical and from research, there’s no doubt in my mind that fluoride is deadly and explains much about why Americans are so apathetic and lethargic about the very real dangers crushing our Republic. The American people simply have no will to resist and you can see it all across this country. Fluoride was introduced into the drinking water in this country around 1954. Think about it. Add into the mix the millions of gallons of diet soda pop consumed by Americans every day, ingesting deadly aspartame, also contained in more than 5,000 food products being eaten everyday, along with Splenda to “sweeten” and what you have is a population loading their bodies with deadly poisons. See the video ‘Sweet Misery’
While I haven’t drank more than a half dozen cans of soda in my entire life, I did use toothpaste and mouthwash which contains fluoride until 1993 when I made major changes. Everyday I thank God for my good health, but I also have worked very hard at staying healthy and keeping my weight within seven pounds from the day I graduated from high school. It’s not easy, but it all boils down to will power, self control and a desire not to be a burden to myself or my family in my later years.
Education is everything. Research means giving up your fun times to thoroughly explore an issue. I have taken the time to scan several documents which contain thoroughly researched documentation and data on fluoride. Dentists all across this country will tell you that fluoride is good for your teeth and gums. City fathers will continue to tell you fluoridating the drinking water is good for you. Most of them refuse to even look at all the scientific research that’s available. Thousands of cities across this country fluoridate their water. Conversely, hundreds of of cities in the U.S. refuse to fluoridate their water and dozens of countries refuse to poison their citizenry by fluoridating their water supply.
For the sake of your health and your family, I urge you to take the time to read all this important, fully documented research. You will see the major players and recognize names and companies (like Alcoa) who have been involved in this fluoride scam for decades. Americans deserve the truth and they deserve accurate information so they can make informed choices. Also, read the book The Fluoride Deception.
Click here to my Reading Room and you will see the section on fluoride. Read on-line or print out the 73 pages and share it with others. Friendly advice: keep your body free of toxic poisons – no matter how “good” you think it tastes. In my humble opinion, if the FDA says it’s okay, that’s the product to keep out of your body. Go natural!
If you live in the United States of America, you live in a giant prison where liberty and freedom are slowly being strangled to death. In this country, the control freaks that run things are obsessed with watching, tracking, monitoring and recording virtually everything that we do. Nothing is private anymore. Everything that you do on the Internet is being monitored. All of your phone calls are being monitored. In fact, if law enforcement authorities suspect that you have done something wrong, they will use your cell phone microphone to listen to you even when you think your cell phone is turned off. In many areas of the country, when you get into your car automated license plate readers track you wherever you go, and in many major cities when you are walking on the streets a vast network of security cameras and “smart street lights” are constantly watching you and listening to whatever you say. The TSA is setting up “internal checkpoints” all over the nation, Homeland Security is encouraging all of us to report any “suspicious activity” that our neighbors are involved in and the federal government is rapidly developing “pre-crime” technology that will flag us as “potential terrorists” if we display any signs of nervousness. If you are flagged as a “potential terrorist”, the U.S. military can arrest you and detain you for the rest of your life without ever having to charge you with anything. Yes, the United States of America is rapidly being turned into a “Big Brother” prison grid, and most Americans are happily going along with it.
The sad thing is that this used to be “the land of the free and the home of the brave”.
So what in the world happened?
A fundamental shift in our culture has taken place. The American people have eagerly given up huge chunks of liberty and freedom in exchange for vague promises of increased security.
Our country is now run by total control freaks and paranoia has become standard operating procedure.
We were told that the terrorists hate our liberties and our freedoms, and that we needed to fight the terrorists so that we could keep our liberties and our freedoms.
But instead, the government keeps taking away all of our liberties and our freedoms.
How in the world does that make any sense?
Have the terrorists won?
As a country, we have moved so far in the direction of communist China, the USSR and Nazi Germany that it is almost impossible to believe.
Yes, turning the United States of America into a giant prison may make us all slightly safer, but what kind of life is this?
Do we want to be dead while we are still alive?
Is this the price that we want to pay in order to feel slightly safer?
Where are the millions of Americans that still yearn to breathe free air?
America is supposed to be a land teeming with people thirsting for independence. For example, “Live Free or Die” is supposedly the official motto of the state of New Hampshire.
But instead, the motto of most Americans seems to be “live scared and die cowering”.
We don’t have to live like this.
Yes, bad things are always going to happen. No amount of security is ever going to be able to keep us 100% safe.
We need to remember that a very high price was paid for our liberty and we should not give it up so easily.
As one very famous American once said, when we give up liberty for security we deserve neither.
The following are 30 signs that the United States of America is being turned into a giant prison….
#1 A new bill that is going through the U.S. Senate would allow the U.S. military to arrest American citizens and hold them indefinitely without trial. This new law was recently discussed in an article posted on the website of the New American….
In what may be a tale too bizarre to be believed by millions of Americans, the U.S. Senate appears ready to pass a bill that will designate the entire earth, including the United States and its territories, one all-encompassing “battlefield” in the global “war on terror” and authorize the detention of Americans suspected of terrorist ties indefinitely and without trial or even charges being filed that would necessitate a trial.
U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham is a big supporter of the bill, and he says that it would “basically say in law for the first time that the homeland is part of the battlefield”.
According to the PPJ Gazette, the following are three things that this new law would do….
1) Explicitly authorize the federal government to indefinitely imprison without charge or trial American citizens and others picked up inside and outside the United States;
(2) Mandate military detention of some civilians who would otherwise be outside of military control, including civilians picked up within the United States itself; and
(3) Transfer to the Department of Defense core prosecutorial, investigative, law enforcement, penal, and custodial authority and responsibility now held by the Department of Justice.
#2 U.S. Senator Joe Lieberman is asking Google to install a “terrorist button” on all Blogger.com blogs so that readers can easily flag “terrorist content” for authorities.
#3 Most Americans have no idea how sophisticated the “Big Brother” prison grid has become. For example, in Washington D.C. the movements of every single car are tracked using automated license plate readers (ALPRs). The following comes from a recent Washington Post article….
More than 250 cameras in the District and its suburbs scan license plates in real time, helping police pinpoint stolen cars and fleeing killers. But the program quietly has expanded beyond what anyone had imagined even a few years ago.
With virtually no public debate, police agencies have begun storing the information from the cameras, building databases that document the travels of millions of vehicles.
Nowhere is that more prevalent than in the District, which has more than one plate-reader per square mile, the highest concentration in the nation. Police in the Washington suburbs have dozens of them as well, and local agencies plan to add many more in coming months, creating a comprehensive dragnet that will include all the approaches into the District.
#4 In some American schools, RFID chips are now being used to monitor the attendance and movements of children while they are at school. The following is how one article recently described a program that has just been instituted at a preschool in California….
Upon arriving in the morning, according to the Associated Press, each student at the CCC-George Miller preschool will don a jersey with a stitched in RFID chip. As the kids go about the business of learning, sensors in the school will record their movements, collecting attendance for both classes and meals. Officials from the school have claimed they’re only recording information they’re required to provide while receiving federal funds for their Headstart program.
#5 Increasingly, incidents of misbehavior at many U.S. schools are being treated as very serious crimes. For example, when a little girl kissed a little boy at one Florida elementary school recently, it was considered to be a “possible sex crime” and the police were called out.
#6 But what happened to one very young student in Stockton, California earlier this year was even worse….
Earlier this year, a Stockton student was handcuffed with zip ties on his hands and feet, forced to go to the hospital for a psychiatric evaluation and was charged with battery on a police officer. That student was 5 years old.
#7 In the United States today, police are trained to respond to even the smallest crimes with extreme physical force. For example, one grandfather in Arizona was recently filmed laying unconscious in a pool of his own blood after police rammed his head into the flood inside a Wal-Mart on Black Friday night. It was thought that he was shoplifting, but it turns out that he says that he was just trying to tuck a video game away so other crazed shoppers would not grab it out of his hands.
#8 Did you know that the government actually sets up fake cell phone towers that can intercept your cell phone calls? The following is how a recent Wired article described these “stingrays”….
You make a call on your cellphone thinking the only thing standing between you and the recipient of your call is your carrier’s cellphone tower. In fact, that tower your phone is connecting to just might be a boobytrap set up by law enforcement to ensnare your phone signals and maybe even the content of your calls.
So-called stingrays are one of the new high-tech tools that authorities are using to track and identify you. The devices, about the size of a suitcase, spoof a legitimate cellphone tower in order to trick nearby cellphones and other wireless communication devices into connecting to the tower, as they would to a real cellphone tower.
The government maintains that the stingrays don’t violate Fourth Amendment rights, since Americans don’t have a legitimate expectation of privacy for data sent from their mobile phones and other wireless devices to a cell tower.
#9 U.S. border agents are allowed by law to search any laptop being brought into the United States without even needing any reason to do so.
#10 In the United States of America, everyone is a “potential terrorist”. According to FBI Director Robert Mueller, “homegrown terrorists” represent as big a threat to American national security as al-Qaeda does.
#11 Most Americans are not that concerned about the Patriot Act, but that might change if they understood that the federal government has a “secret interpretation” of what the Patriot Act really means. U.S. Senator Ron Wyden says that the U.S. government interprets the Patriot Act much more “broadly” than the general public does….
“We’re getting to a gap between what the public thinks the law says and what the American government secretly thinks the law says.”
#12 The FBI is now admittedly recording Internet talk radio programs all over the United States. The following comes from a recent article by Mark Weaver of WMAL.com….
If you call a radio talk show and get on the air, you might be recorded by the FBI.
The FBI has awarded a $524,927 contract to a Virginia company to record as much radio news and talk programming as it can find on the Internet.
The FBI says it is not playing big brother by policing the airwaves, but rather seeking access to what airs as potential evidence.
#13 The federal government has decided that what you and I share with one another on Facebook and on Twitter could be a threat to national security. According to a recent Associated Press article, the Department of Homeland Security will soon be “gleaning information from sites such as Twitter and Facebook for law enforcement purposes”.
#14 What you say on your cell phone is never private. The truth is that that the FBI can demand to see your cell phone data whenever it wants. In addition, according to CNET News the FBI can remotely activate the microphone on your cell phone and listen to whatever you are saying….
The FBI appears to have begun using a novel form of electronic surveillance in criminal investigations: remotely activating a mobile phone’s microphone and using it to eavesdrop on nearby conversations.
The technique is called a “roving bug,” and was approved by top U.S. Department of Justice officials for use against members of a New York organized crime family who were wary of conventional surveillance techniques such as tailing a suspect or wiretapping him.
#15 In some areas of the country, law enforcement authorities are pulling data out of cell phones for no reason whatsoever. According to the ACLU, state police in Michigan are now using “extraction devices” to download data from the cell phones of motorists that they pull over. This is taking place even if the motorists that are pulled over are not accused of doing anything wrong.
The following is how a recent article on CNET News described the capabilities of these “extraction devices”….
The devices, sold by a company called Cellebrite, can download text messages, photos, video, and even GPS data from most brands of cell phones. The handheld machines have various interfaces to work with different models and can even bypass security passwords and access some information.
#16 The federal government has become so paranoid that they have been putting GPS tracking devices on the vehicles of thousands of people that have not even been charged with committing any crimes. The following is a short excerpt from a recent Wired magazine article about this issue….
The 25-year-old resident of San Jose, California, says he found the first one about three weeks ago on his Volvo SUV while visiting his mother in Modesto, about 80 miles northeast of San Jose. After contacting Wired and allowing a photographer to snap pictures of the device, it was swapped out and replaced with a second tracking device. A witness also reported seeing a strange man looking beneath the vehicle of the young man’s girlfriend while her car was parked at work, suggesting that a tracking device may have been retrieved from her car.
Then things got really weird when police showed up during a Wired interview with the man.
The young man, who asked to be identified only as Greg, is one among an increasing number of U.S. citizens who are finding themselves tracked with the high-tech devices.
The Justice Department has said that law enforcement agents employ GPS as a crime-fighting tool with “great frequency,” and GPS retailers have told Wired that they’ve sold thousands of the devices to the feds.
#17 New high-tech street lights that are being funded by the federal government and that are being installed all over the nation can also be used as surveillance cameras, can be used by the DHS to make “security announcements” and can even be used to record personal conversations. The following is from a recent article by Paul Joseph Watson for Infowars.com….
Federally-funded high-tech street lights now being installed in American cities are not only set to aid the DHS in making “security announcements” and acting as talking surveillance cameras, they are also capable of “recording conversations,” bringing the potential privacy threat posed by ‘Intellistreets’ to a whole new level.
#18 If you choose to protest in the streets of America today, there is a good chance that you will be brutalized. All over the United States law enforcement authorities have been spraying pepper spray directly into the faces of unarmed protesters in recent weeks.
#19 In many areas of the United States today, you will be arrested if you do not produce proper identification for the police. In the old days, “your papers please” was a phrase that was used to use to mock the tyranny of Nazi Germany. But now all of us are being required to be able to produce “our papers” for law enforcement authorities at any time. For example, a 21-year-old college student named Samantha Zucker was recently arrested and put in a New York City jail for 36 hours just because she could not produce any identification for police.
#20 According to blogger Alexander Higgins, students in kindergarten and the 1st grade in the state of New Jersey are now required by law to participate “in monthly anti-terrorism drills”. The following is an excerpt from a letter that he recently received from the school where his child attends….
Each month a school must conduct one fire drill and one security drill which may be a lockdown, bomb threat, evacuation, active shooter, or shelter-in place drill. All schools are now required by law to implement this procedure.
So who in the world ever decided that it would be a good idea for 1st grade students to endure “lockdown” and “active shooter” drills?
To get an idea of what these kinds of drills are like, just check out this video.
#21 With all of the other problems that we are having all over the nation, you would think that authorities would not be too concerned about little kids that are trying to sell cups of lemonade. But sadly, over the past year police have been sent in to shut down lemonade stands run by children all over the United States.
#22 The federal government has decided to invest a significant amount of time, money and energy raiding organic farms. The following example comes from Natural News….
It is the latest case of extreme government food tyranny, and one that is sure to have you reeling in anger and disgust. Health department officials recently conducted a raid of Quail Hollow Farm, an organic community supported agriculture (CSA) farm in southern Nevada, during its special “farm to fork” picnic dinner put on for guests — and the agent who arrived on the scene ordered that all the fresh, local produce and pasture-based meat that was intended for the meal be destroyed with bleach.
#23 It is an absolute disgrace that all of us (including grandmothers and young children) must either go through body scanners that reveal the intimate details of our naked bodies or endure “enhanced pat-downs” during which our genitals will be touched before we are allowed to get on an airplane.
It is also an absolute disgrace that the American people are putting up with this.
#24 Invasive TSA security techniques are not just for airports anymore. Now, TSA “VIPR teams” are actively conducting random inspections at bus stations and on interstate highways all over the United States. For example, the following comes from a local news report down in Tennessee….
You’re probably used to seeing TSA’s signature blue uniforms at the airport, but now agents are hitting the interstates to fight terrorism with Visible Intermodal Prevention and Response (VIPR).
“Where is a terrorist more apt to be found? Not these days on an airplane more likely on the interstate,” said Tennessee Department of Safety & Homeland Security Commissioner Bill Gibbons.
Tuesday Tennessee was first to deploy VIPR simultaneously at five weigh stations and two bus stations across the state.
#25 More than a million hotel television sets all over America are now broadcasting propaganda messages from the Department of Homeland Security promoting the “See Something, Say Something” campaign. In essence, the federal government wants all of us to become “informants” and to start spying on one another constantly. The following comes from an article posted by USA Today….
Starting today, the welcome screens on 1.2 million hotel television sets in Marriott, Hilton, Sheraton, Holiday Inn and other hotels in the USA will show a short public service announcement from DHS. The 15-second spot encourages viewers to be vigilant and call law enforcement if they witness something suspicious during their travels.
#26 Certain “types” of American citizens are being labeled as potential threats in official U.S. government documents. An unclassified Department of Homeland Security report published a couple years ago entitled “Right-wing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment” claims that a belief in Bible prophecy “could motivate extremist individuals and groups to stockpile food, ammunition and weapons.” The report goes on to state that such people are potentially dangerous.
#27 Back on February 20, 2009, the State of Missouri issued a report entitled “MIAC Strategic Report: The Modern Militia Movement“. That report warned that the following types of people may be potential terrorists….
*anti-abortion activists
*those that are against illegal immigration
*those that consider “the New World Order” to be a threat
*those that have a negative view of the United Nations
#28 As I have written about previously, a very disturbing document that Oath Keepers has obtained shows that the FBI is now instructing store owners to report many new forms of “suspicious activity” to them. According to the document, “suspicious activity” now includes the following….
*paying with cash
*missing a hand or fingers
*”strange odors”
*making “extreme religious statements”
*”radical theology”
*purchasing weatherproofed ammunition or match containers
*purchasing meals ready to eat
*purchasing night vision devices, night flashlights or gas masks
Do any of those “signs of suspicious activity” apply to you?
#29 Soon you may get labeled as a “potential terrorist” if you are just feeling a little nervous. A new “pre-crime” technology system that is currently being tested by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security will soon be in use all over the nation. It is called “Future Attribute Screening Technology” (FAST), and it is very frightening. The following description of this new program comes from an article in the London Telegraph….
Using cameras and sensors the “pre-crime” system measures and tracks changes in a person’s body movements, the pitch of their voice and the rhythm of their speech.
It also monitors breathing patterns, eye movements, blink rate and alterations in body heat, which are used to assess an individual’s likelihood to commit a crime.
The Future Attribute Screening Technology (FAST) programme is already being tested on a group of government employees who volunteered to act as guinea pigs.
Once again, despite all of this outrageous “security”, it is inevitable that a lot of really bad things are going to happen in the United States in the years ahead.
When there are incidents of violence, it is also inevitable that there will be calls for even more “Big Brother” security measures.
We are going to be caught in a never ending spiral of tyranny where the “solution” is always even tighter security.
Eventually, we will have lost all of our liberties and freedoms, and we will probably be even less safe than we are today.
Do not be deceived. We could put a soldier on every corner, a video camera in every room of every home and an RFID chip in every citizen but that would not make us “safe”.
Every single lawmaker that is backing these laws which strip our liberties and freedoms away deserves to be voted out of office.
If you love the United States of America, please stand up and say something while you still can.
Please use this article and other articles like it as tools. Share them with your friends and your family. If we can get enough people to wake up, perhaps there is still enough time to turn the direction of this country around.
Will the final chapters of the history of the United States of America be mentioned in the same breath as communist China, the USSR and Nazi Germany, or will the final chapters of the history of the United States of America be the greatest chapters of all?
Sirhan Sirhan is taken into custody after the fatal shooting of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy in 1968.
Sirhan Sirhan, convicted of the 1968 assassination of presidential candidate Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, should be freed from prison or granted a new trial based on “formidable evidence” asserting his innocence and “horrendous violations” of his rights, defense attorneys said in federal court papers filed this week.
In a U.S. District Court brief, Sirhan’s lawyers also say that an expert analysis of recently uncovered evidence shows two guns were fired in the assassination and that Sirhan’s revolver was not the gun that shot Kennedy.
Attorneys William F. Pepper and Laurie D. Dusek also allege that fraud was committed in Sirhan’s 1969 trial when the court allowed a substitute bullet to be admitted as evidence for a real bullet removed from Kennedy’s neck.
The attorneys further assert that Sirhan was hypno-programmed to be a diversion for the real assassin and allege that Sirhan would be easily blamed for the assassination because he is an Arab. Sirhan, 67, is a Christian Palestinian born in Jerusalem whose parents brought him and his siblings to America in the 1950s.
Sirhan “was an involuntary participant in the crimes being committed because he was subjected to sophisticated hypno programming and memory implantation techniques which rendered him unable to consciously control his thoughts and actions at the time the crimes were being committed,” court papers said.
The California Attorney General’s office declined to comment Saturday on Sirhan’s court filings, said spokeswoman Lynda Gledhill.
Court papers filed by Sirhan’s attorneys say the state “refuses to acknowledge that hypno programming/mind control is not fiction but reality and has been used for years by the U.S. military, Central Intelligence Agency and other covert organizations.
“Though the practices of hypno programming/mind control is hardly new, the public has been shielded from the darker side of the practice. The average person is unaware that hypnosis can and is used to induct antisocial conduct in humans,” Sirhan’s court filings say.
Pepper and Dusek represented Sirhan earlier this year in his unsuccessful request for parole from Pleasant Valley State Prison in Coalinga, California, 200 miles northwest of downtown Los Angeles. He is serving a life sentence.
Sirhan was convicted of killing Kennedy and wounding five other people during the June 5, 1968, shooting inside the kitchen service pantry of the former Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles.
COXSACKIE – Inside a converted dormitory is a set-up that could pass for any typical office until you notice that all the workers are wearing prison jump suits.
When New Yorkers place calls to DMV’s general purpose telephone numbers, they will be answered here at Greene Correctional, or at a similar set-up at Bedford Hills women’s prison.
“Obviously, it saves taxpayer dollars,” said the Commissioner of Corrections and Community Supervision Brian Fischer. “Number two, it provides what we call a transferable skill.”
Officials say the call center position is one of the most coveted jobs inside the prison. Not for the pay, it’s about a dollar an hour, but for other reasons.
“A lot of times we need to feel like we are appreciated and it builds self-esteem,” said inmate John Howard, originally from Brooklyn. “It allows me the opportunity to speak to different people of different nationalities, regardless of what ethnicity and it makes me feel like wow, I can do better.”
Corrections and Motor Vehicles stress that no personal information is displayed to the prisoners.
They don’t have access to computers and are pretty closely monitored, but at no time are callers informed they’re talking to a prisoner.
The idea is to make it a standard, polite conversation on both ends.
“Most of the time people are very pleasant,” said inmate Andrew Cooper from Brooklyn. “We have situations where people call and they’re irate, however, we’re trained to diffuse those situations.”
The President of the Civil Service Employees Association, Danny Donohue described the arrangement as ” a bad idea generally and even worse considering the current economy”. He noted that New York State has decided to help prisoners develop “marketable skills” rather than make appropriate and necessary jobs available to law abiding citizens.
THE COMMERCE MATRIX Everything is a Contract.All contracts must be consensual.Knowledge of US Code, UCC, Trust & Common Law…Sets us Free. Escape the Financial Matrix of Control by Over-Standing Commerce, Contracts, Negotiable Instruments, and Courtroom...
Nuremberg trials are now regarded as a milestone toward the establishment of a permanent international court, and an important precedent for dealing with later instances of genocide and other crimes against humanity.
this is the issue of this election, whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon, the american revolution and confess that
a little intellectual elite
in a far distant capital can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves?
#GiselleMaxwell’s list became unsealed some time yesterday and here’s what happened WHAT THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA IGNORED COMPLETELY Republican Tim Nolan, chairman of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign in Kentucky, pled guilty to child sex trafficking and on...
Its horrible, its unbelievable, its grotesque and insane that something like this could actually happen. But that stops now, because the light is on them like never before.
So I’m certain you’ve seen the news non stop, Chapo escaped, again. Happened on a Saturday night, he disappeared from the view of a surveillance camera in his cell and went underground into a tunnel under the Altiplano maximum security prison and wasn’t seen again. That’s the summary of the official story, and the video does appear to show that he went out through the tunnel dug where his shower was located. The story being spun is that since they couldn’t see him escape because Chapo was in a blind spot for the cameras. The authorities stated that out of respect for “human rights” they didn’t want to invade a prisoner’s privacy by placing a surveillance camera that could look into the shower area. That’s their trick up their sleeve, and the one that brings the story down.
An ex prisoner of the very same jail Chapo was doing time in said there is no respect for human rights let alone privacy rights in that prison. The authorities made it seem like they thought Chapo might have just been getting ready to shower. The ex prisoner explained that showers at night are not allowed. You can only shower once, at six in the morning. So there goes that part. He also states that there are indeed cameras that can see into the shower, even the toilet. That you’re only allowed ten minutes in the shower but really about 8 since the guards rush the prisoners to finish. He says the only blind spot in a jail cell at Altiplano is under your bed. You have to take into account that the authorities have stressed that the reason for these so called blind spots, is their concern for human rights. Okay.
If you’ve read enough about the Mexican government and their many hands, then you know that the last thing on their mind is a concern for human rights for its citizens. You can look at a photo of what police did to a young student that will verify that, Google that if you would like to but a face ripped off isn’t something I recommend you look at. The Mexican authorities aren’t concerned with human rights for its citizens let alone prisoners. The conditions at that jail and many others throughout Mexico are nightmarish. Put aside that we all know they don’t care about privacy, because don’t forget about this right here.
Secretary of the Interior Osorio Chong had repeatedly stated that the reason for the blind spots was out of respect for human rights, that turned into backlash as people began to say they looked the other way. He had to state that respecting human rights for a prisoner is not the same as helping them escape. That is true, it isn’t the same thing, but he wasn’t respecting human rights, so let’s get that straight.
It was obvious from the beginning of the story that Chapo must have had help from the inside, and you could ask any Mexican if they thought he had bought his way out and they’ll laugh and explain to you how reasoning works. It was confirmed that several prison workers including the director of Altiplano were detained for their alleged roles in Chapo’s escape. The former prisoner however stated that Chapo needed to have four departments under his control in that prison because of its maximum security status. He needed to control the federal, the prison guards, the prison officials and the special guards. So obviously he was able to do that, since he’s out of prison. Outside the prison is another link of the story of how Chapo was released.
The house at the end of the tunnel had no permit to be built. How could a maximum security prison not notice a building being built not far from its walls? You can say that Mexican authorities are very relaxed with their regulations, but a maximum security prison that houses the most wanted criminals is something else. Not only did it house Chapo, it had the leader of The Zetas Cartel, leader of the Knights Templar Cartel, “La Barbie” of the Beltran-Leyva Cartel, it is the prison of the most high profile cartel leaders. Surely they would notice a house being built about a mile from their walls, right? People familiar with the area have stated how secure that entire area is, you can’t even pick up radio signals there. With regards to how Chapo could’ve pulled this off, again, it isn’t how but why. Chapo didn’t escape if the authorities allowed all the pieces to be put into place for him to leave. He didn’t escape, he just left. He left behind a nice gift at least. That little bracelet used to monitor his location.
The bracelet that kept track of him doesn’t work outside the prison walls, pretty neat feature there for a maximum security prison. That’s another story in itself, the bracelet isn’t of importance because he removed it before going down the tunnel. How did he remove it so easily? What kind of bracelet for prisoner monitoring be so easily removable? Well, it was left behind and even if he couldn’t remove it, it would have stopped working once he was out. To be honest, he could have a huge lighthouse blaring out his location on top of his head and the authorities will still not find him, because they’re not looking for him. They released him. Well, for certain the local authorities did.
Shit rolls downhill, and so does money. This is an embarrassment for the upper echelons of power. President Enrique Peña Nieto is looking like quite the fool for being en route to France as the most prolific drug trafficker in the world just slipped out of prison on a motorcycle through a tunnel. Secretary of the Interior Osorio Chong looked like he was about to suffer an anxiety attack as he held a press conference over Chapo’s escape. They might not be happy about it, but certainly the lower level officials have quite a nice family retirement plan because of this. Sorry, us Mexicans usually think about, “I hope my family is taken care of” not, “I hope the president and the top brass is happy.” I can assure you, anyone involved in letting Chapo go aren’t worrying about the future of their family. They might go to jail, but just like those who sacrifice their being to work endlessly in the US to send money back home to ensure their families are taken care of, that’s all that matters. Speaking of money, that might be the key to the whole story.
Not going to get into specifics here, but the biggest buzz from the Left in Mexico on this story is, the bigger picture. Yeah Chapo is the head of arguably the biggest and most powerful cartel in the world. It was that way when he was in jail, and when he wasn’t in jail. So why all the effort to find him, arrest him, jail him? Well, the biggest bit on that has to do with a general goal with the EPN administration. Privatization and more oversight from the US government over Mexico. There has been talks about the need to privatize Mexican prisons, among other neoliberal proposals such as in the education sector which has met with fierce resistance from education workers. There’s lots of quotes in US media from law enforcement agents saying this is an embarrassment for the corrupt and weak Mexican judicial system, that it needs more US assistance, and you get the idea. This of course is the US lead war on drugs, and they have the final say and if need be, final action. Loretta Lynch went as far to say that the US is ready to “help” Mexico find and capture Chapo. Anytime the US says they’re ready to help another country find “justice” well you know how that story ends. Sovereignty or any resemblance to it not only flies out the window, it leaves a bloody mess. Wow, sorry but I’m looking at this post and it is rather long and tedious to write and I’m certain it’s getting tedious to read as well so I’ll break this down to the core, just a moment.
The rumors, Chapo was allowed to walk right out the front door of the prison. Let’s say that was the truth, that the tunnel was just a prop to assist this novela like story streaming from the TV networks. Even if it wasn’t, his release, yes release, serves a powerful purpose. Either the Mexican state is weak and corrupt, it is. Or, it’s another excuse for a “soft” intervention from the US. It can be both, it most certainly feels that way. We forget the War on Drugs is an actual war, and propaganda is a tool of war. You can point to the bad guy and say that’s enough reason to go to war, but at least recognize that this is part of a war. So treat it like one. Bin Laden was sought after in the War on Terror and many innocent people died going after the bad guy. Remember that lives are a factor here, it’s war after all.
If you were murdered today, there’s only a 60% chance of police catching the person who did it. That number drops to 3% if you’re raped. 50 years ago, that number was much higher. What happened?
Despite overwhelming disapproval from the public, the war on drugs wages on and we are witnessing the inevitable materialization of a fascist police state before us.
The irony here is that no matter how much money the state steals from us to fund themselves, and no matter how many tanks or AR-15s they acquire, they are solving far fewer crimes than before.
Police aren’t getting any closer to “winning” this ridiculous and immoral war on drugs either.
So, why aren’t police solving crimes?
The answer to that question can be found by looking at where police allocate much of their time and resources.
Civil asset forfeiture pays. Busting low-level drug dealers by the dozen and confiscating their drugs, guns, cars, houses, and money pays. Writing tickets for victimless crime pays. Pulling you over for window tint, seat belts, arbitrary traveling speeds, and expired license plates; these are the things that pay, not solving crimes.
In criminal justice, clearance rates are used as a measure of crimes solved by the police. The clearance rate is calculated by dividing the number of crimes that are “cleared” (a charge being laid) by the total number of crimes recorded.
In the United States, the murder clearance rate in 1965 was more than 90 percent. Since the inception of the war on drugs, the murder clearance rate has plummetted to an average of less than 65 percent per year.
Despite the near complete erosion of the constitutional protections against unlawful search and seizure, the clearance rate for murder continued its free fall. This highlights the fact that no matter how many rights are given up or freedoms diminished, police cannot guarantee your safety.
It’s not just murders that police fail to investigate, it’s rapes too.
According to the Department of Justice, there are currently over 400,000 untested rape kits collecting dust in police evidence rooms nationwide, and many other estimates suggest that this number could be as high as one million.
As a result of this horrific negligence, roughly 3% of rape cases in America are actually solved. This is in spite of the fact that many rape kits have a high chance of leading to an arrest since most rapists are career criminals who have their DNA on file.
In some cases, the victims even know who their attackers were, but they can not prosecute these criminals because the evidence has yet to be processed by police.
Arresting rapists and murderers simply falls short in the two areas police are worried about; revenue collection and keeping their inflated drug war budgets flowing.
It’s not that police are incapable of solving these crimes either; they’re just not interested in doing so.
“Take for example, homicides of police officers in the course of their duty,” University of Maryland criminologist Charles Wellfordpoints out. On paper, they’re the kind of homicide that’s hardest to solve — “they’re frequently done in communities that generally have low clearance rates … they’re stranger-to-stranger homicides, they [have] high potential of retaliation [for] witnesses.” And yet, Wellford says, they’re almost always cleared.
This is why people don’t like the police.
This lack of solving crimes coupled with the increase in shakedowns of non-violent citizens has created a rift between the rest of society and police.
“One of the consequences of the war on drugs is people have stopped looking at police as their protectors and more see them as their potential persecutors,” explains Sean Dunagan, Former DEA Senior Intelligence Specialist.
The war on drugs has driven a wedge between citizens and police. If you keep locking up millions of people for victimless crimes, eventually you’ll effect enough lives to vastly tarnish your reputation.
“The police department basically becomes the “other” to the community. Once you have that breakdown, then information stops flowing, so you don’t learn about crimes. And the only crime you become interested in is the one you can solve, which is locking up people up for using drugs,” says Ed Burns, Former Baltimore Narcotics and Homicide Detective.
Locking up drug users has proven to be quite the profitable venture.
It is much easier to walk out on the street corner and shakedown a teenager who may have an illegal plant in his pocket than it is to examine the evidence in a rape or murder case. The so-called “Private” Prisons know this and have subsequently found their niche in this immoral war on drugs.
The term Private Prison is a farce from the get-go.
A truly Private prison would not be solely funded by taxpayer dollars. These Private prisons are nothing more than a fascist mixture of state and corporate, completely dependent upon the extortion factor of the state, i.e., taxation, as a means of their corporate sustenance.
A truly Private prison would have a negative incentive to boost its population for the simple fact that it is particularly expensive to house inmates. On the contrary, these fascist, or more aptly, corporatist prisons contractually require occupancy rates of 95%-100%.
The requirement for a 95% occupancy rate creates a de facto demand for criminals. Think about that for a second; a need or demand for people to commit crimes is created by this corporatist arrangement. The implications associated with demanding people commit crimes are horrifying.
Creating a completely immoral demand for “criminals” leads to the situation in which we find ourselves today. People, who are otherwise entirely innocent, are labeled as criminals for their personal choices and thrown in cages. We are now witnessing a vicious cycle between law enforcement, who must create and arrest criminals, and the corporatist prison system which constantly demands more prisoners.
The police and prison corporations know that without the war on drugs, this windfall of money, cars, and houses — ceases to exist.
If you want to know who profits from ruining lives and throwing marijuana users in cages, we need only look at who bribes (also known as lobbies) the politicians to keep the war on drugs alive.
Below is a list of the top five industries who need you locked in a cage for possessing a plant in order to ensure their job security.
Police Unions: Coming in as the number one contributor to politicians for their votes to lock you in a cage for a plant are the police themselves. They risk taking massive pay cuts and losing all their expensive militarized toys without the war on drugs.
Private Prison Corporations: No surprise here. The corporatist prison lobby is constantly pushing for stricter laws to keep their stream of tax dollars flowing.
Pharmaceutical Corporations: The hypocrisy of marijuana remaining a Schedule 1 drug, “No Medical Use Whatsoever,” seems criminal when considering that pharmaceutical companies reproduce a chemical version of THC and are able to market and sell it as such. Ever hear of Marinol? Big pharma simply uses the force of the state to legislate out their competition; which happens to be nature.
Prison Guard Unions: The prison guard unions are another group, so scared of losing their jobs, that they would rather see thousands of non-violent and morally innocent people thrown into cages, than look for another job.
What does it say about a society who’s resolute in enacting violence against their fellow human so they can have a job to go to in the morning?
The person who wants to ingest a substance for medical or recreational reasons is not the criminal. However, the person that would kidnap, cage, or kill someone because they have a different lifestyle is a villain on many fronts.
When does this vicious cycle end?
The good news is, that the drug war’s days are numbered. Evidence of this is everywhere. States are defying the federal government and refusing to lock people in cages for marijuana. Colorado and Washington state served as a catalyst in a seemingly exponential awakening to the government’s immoral war.
Following suit were Oregon, D.C., and Alaska. Medical marijuana initiatives are becoming a constant part of legislative debates nationwide. We’ve even seen bills that would not only completely legalize marijuana, but unregulate it entirely, like corn.
As more and more states refuse to kidnap and cage marijuana users, the drug war will continue to implode. We must be resilient in this fight.
If doing drugs bothers you, don’t do drugs. When you transition from holding an opinion to using government violence to enforce your personal preference, you become the bad guy.
Anonymous radio host know as Lorax aka Adam Bennett Anon was arrested (full article).
Everybody who has known Adam ‘Lorax’ Bennett aka Adam Bennett Anon knows he’s an awesome anon. Furthermore, the article now let us know he was also involved in his local community as an experienced life saver and a fundraising manager for Cancer Support. This kind of person doesn’t belong in jail! He belong to it’s people. The people he give each day of is life to protect.
If you’ve know Lorax, or Adam John Bennett, now is the time to get involved and help!
The lifesaving Lorax’s tale took an interesting turn the last few nights, as the internets and ircs were ablaze with controversy, flame wars, and a little good-ole-fashioned ‘he-said she-said.’ What was already looking like a classic tale of governmental overreach and the suppression of Adam John Bennett’s Civil-Rights is turning into a dark tale of deception, duplicity, and police-led treachery. While there was much argument among the anons present, one thing was very clear, the Australian government had tricked and deceived a minor in an unsuccessful attempt to lure the Lorax into a hacking scheme. Having failed in that they have continued to attempt to argue that the research work that he did at his job for a Cancer fighting charity that showed a clear problem with the same security protocol that the Australian Government was proposing using with it’s upcoming, Telecommunications (Interception and Access) Amendment (Data Retention) Bill 2014, plan for telecoms to keep their customer’s e-mail and phone metadata for two years.
Soon after Bennett began criticizing the plan there was an alleged hack into AATP (third-largest telecom in Australia) and the Indonesian government, Anonymous was blamed. The Government initially charged the Lorax and two hackers with the breach. After nearly a year of delays and continuations, the court announced that all of the charges for hacking by Bennett would be dropped, but replaced with obscure sounding charges like, “aiding and harassment.” It has become ever more clear that there wasn’t ever much of a case and the government is using Bennett’s bail restrictions to keep his LoraxLive show off of the air.
This dark tale really begins in 2011, even before the government started suggesting an ill-conceived data retention scheme, before anyone hacked AATP and the Indonesian government. Back in the heyday of lulzsec a 15 year-old hacker who we’ll call Hacker-Z (not his real hacker handle) was caught up in the glamour and prestige of the lulzsec-style direct-action hacking. Hacker-Z was like almost nearly ever teenage boy he wanted to listen to loud music and raise a little hell. That sounds anti-social perhaps, but when you see that the things that young hacktivists want to break are things like evil autocratic governments like Libya or Tunisia, or on-line bullying groups, that anti-social streak can begin to turn an odd shade of heroic on a young person. Apparently, according to general consent, it wasn’t hard for the same sort of Five Eyes investigators–who were at that same time acting as the nefarious Sabu’s puppet masters, in a separate scheme to entrap Anons–to get a hold of this inspired, if naive teenager.
Having entrapped the would-be activist with an illegal hacking scheme, they first terrified the lad and his mother with the prospect of nearly life in prison for his unsuccessful attempt, while being directed by undercover government agents, to hack government and military websites; according to some in the chatroom. Having scared his mother as best they could it was easy for the police to convince her to give consent for them to use their son as a mole to keep an eye on on-line hacktivists. Any mother if, confronted with the prospect of sending her only child to prison, for probably, the rest of his life would almost surely make the same decision. Having Hacker-Z as a mole worked well for the police apparently, he was generally reported to be a friendly, helpful, and affable young man. No one on this side of things is sure how much information he really got in his few years, probably, working for the police, but needless to say when he was arrested with the Lorax, many a hard drive was wiped, just in case.
It seems the feds kept Hacker-Z on ice until the day they needed him. That day came, apparently, during the summer of 2012, when the Australian Government first proposed the current anti-privacy legislation that they are quietly pushing through the legislature right now. When The Lorax caught wind of the Government’s plan he immediately saw the obvious problems with warehousing the entire Australian population’s personal web data. Even if the government could show an actual need for all of this personal, which they can’t, Bennett honed in on the first and most obvious problem, security. Eventually Bennett showed, at his workplace, while testing their server, that recent flaws found in OpenSSL, the so called “Heartbleed Bug” could eventually lead to losses of citizen’s personal data to criminals or terrorists, if the government continued with their data retention plan.
Seeing the problem the Lorax did what the Lorax does when the community is in danger; he warned people through his popular show, Lorax Live, whose archives, that haven’t been seized by the government, can be heard here and here. Obviously, the leaders and politicians backed by corporatism and fully vested in the telecom industry, couldn’t afford to have a lot people aware of or critical of their massive transfer of both citizen’s data and the nation’s wealth, in the form of fees paid by taxes, to the nation’s telecoms. No, classically, power becomes annoyed when confronted by truth, this story is no different.
By the Winter of 2012, as far as the Australian government and the Australian Federal Police were concerned; the Lorax had to be silenced. Later when they learned that, while at his job testing his employer’s server’s security, Bennett had discovered a way that the “Heartbleed Bug” might be used to access encrypted files on a server, the very sort of thing that privacy advocates had been screaming about ever since the government first suggested the data retention program, government agents hatched a plan to silence the Lorax.
The police knew that they would never convince a reputable, white-hat security researcher like Adam John Bennett to participate in a criminal attack on the internet’s infrastructure. It is rumored that the police devised a plan to implicate the Lorax without needing him to take part in any illegal activity. To do this, they gathered up their friendly young, unfortunate mole, Hacker-Z and sent him into an irc chat with the Lorax and had him plead with Bennett to give him, Hacker-Z, Bennett’s note’s from his research work on OpenSSL. The authorities, it seems, hoped that by obtaining information on how one might be able to attack encryption from the researcher they could implicate him in a crime and, at least, keep his radio show off the Internet until they got their data retention plans passed into law.
Perhaps more despicable than the government’s attempt frame and implicate a man are its motives, of depriving a citizen of his civil-rights, and its methods of abusing the criminal justice system through the attempted entrapment of an innocent man, and misuse of a citizen’s right to bail in order to silence a benign, but vocal critic of governmental corruption and malfeasance. This is not Syria or Zimbabwe where a critic can simply be tossed in a hole or executed by despots, in “free” societies, like Australia, you must design administrative and judicial straps with which to bind their tongues and hands to things like restrictive bail requirements or plea agreements, to trumped up or false charges. The critic is silenced, the powers-that-be have no blood on their hands, the media calls the former hero-of-the-people a villain, and whatever danger the critic was fighting against is forgotten. It’s all very civilized.
If the police were unaware of who they were dealing with or simply unfamiliar with the world of white-hats is unclear. Bennett did not give their mole any help or information, and not because he believed he was a mole. (As a white-hat researcher Bennett was well aware of cyber-crime and the need for enforcement in the field, it can assuredly be assumed then that he supports law-enforcement and legitimate undercover operations, but any thinking adult would have to wonder about the wisdom of using children as moles to bait and entrap adult criminals.) No, it is rumored that Bennett refused to help the boy, not because he believed he was working with police, rather he believed that the youth might be an impassioned young hacktivist who could possibly do something unwise or damaging with the information, something that might hurt others as well as get the lad in trouble with the law. Most likely, in Bennett’s mind, the young Hacker-Z would be better off waiting until the bugs in OpenSSL were fixed to get a look at the Lorax’s research notes.
Blown off course, but not sunk by the Adam John Bennett’s integrity, the Australian Government tried a new, indirect tack to get their entrapment scheme back on course. They would have Hacker-Z engage an intermediary, another White Hat researcher, someone the Lorax would trust. They found him in a passionate young researcher we’ll call Hacker-X. Hacker-X was known as a knowledgeable and helpful security expert. He had long been very helpful getting newbloods on the right track on-line and helping others secure their computer systems. Like a lot of hacker culture Hacker-X believes in education and the open-sharing of information, not to cause damage but to protect from damage.
Imagine you bought a lock for your front door, it’s a common lock, and there are many like it in your neighborhood. If there was a flaw in that lock that could allow criminals to enter your home then you would like to know about it, wouldn’t you? Of course you would, and it would be good for you to know so you could find a way to fix it or replace it, so the burglars can’t come in. Certainly, you wouldn’t want burglars to know about the flaw, but luckily the vast majority of humans aren’t burglars, likewise very few people interested in computer security are criminals. So, for a researcher such as Hacker-X to want to share something that could easily be used to help secure a network, is understandable and legal. It’s not clear if he already had possession of the notes from Lorax’s research into OpenSSL, or if he actually obtained them on behalf of Hacker-Z, regardless, sharing information about a weakness in an encryption protocol is not illegal, as the Australian Government’s delays and recent charge droppings indicate.
Whether the police were directly involved in or only supervising the alleged hacks on AATP and the Indonesian government isn’t clear, but it has become very clear that they never had any evidence against Adam John Bennett, the Lorax. In an extraordinary judicial move they have dropped all of the charges against Bennett, but have come up with ten new charges that, they claim they will commit to at his next hearing in June. While on one hand it is great to think that the Lorax may end up getting the justice he deserves in a dismissal of all charges at his next hearing, what is maddening is the obvious and bald faced way in which the Australian Government is misusing the criminal justice system to keep him Bennett on the restrictive bail terms that prevent him from broadcasting his show, LoraxLive and his protest about the government’s data retention plan.
The case of Matt DeHart, a former U.S. drone pilot turned hacktivist, is as strange as it is disturbing. The 29-year-old was recently denied asylum in Canada, having fled there with his family after — he claims — he was drugged and tortured by agents of the FBI, who accused him of espionage and child pornography.
Prosecutors have shown they’re willing to say anything to convict a hacktivist, even if it means lying
Last week the Canadian Border Services Agency said he will be deported to the U.S. to stand trial “in very short order,” after a Canadian Immigration and Refugee Board ruling earlier this month denying his request for refugee status. He is being denied access to two thumb drives that he says contain evidence of illegal acts perpetrated by a U.S. government agency. Now after three unsuccessful attempts to gain political asylum, he fears that he and the files will be delivered to the very government he sought to escape.
“I cannot imagine any life in a country which has already tortured me,” Matt DeHart told reporter Adrian Humphreys, whose astonishing five-part series in Canada’s National Postdocuments the bizarre case. “Am I now to be given into the hands of my torturers?”
It’s tempting to dismiss DeHart’s claims based on their sheer outlandishness and his equally outlandish attempts to defect to Russia and Venezuela, which he now says he regrets. But given President Barack Obama’s administration’s penchant for punishing hacktivists and whistleblowers, a disturbing decades-long trend of prosecutorial misconduct and the now established fact that the U.S. has, as Obama put it, “tortured some folks,” it’s clear that the U.S. government’s claims in this case warrant even more skepticism.
Matt DeHart
According to government documents, Matt DeHart admitted during an interrogation to becoming involved with a spy ring during his time as a drone pilot, agreeing to broker the sale of military secrets for up to $100,000 per month through a Russian agent in Canada. But he claims he was being drugged and tortured and simply made the story up.
“I would have told them anything,” he told The National Post of his encounter with the FBI agents, during which he was denied a lawyer. “Information that is derived from torture — to use it against somebody is ridiculous. It’s garbage. I already said it’s not true.”
He testified that the agents admitted the child porn charges were fabricated — a ruse to enable investigation into his involvement with the nebulous hacktivist collective Anonymous. He says the investigation stems from a file he uploaded twice to a hidden website, hosted on the anonymous Tor network from a server in his parents’ house. DeHart claims it contained evidence of government wrongdoing, “an FBI investigation into the [CIA’s] practices.” Screen shots of the WikiLeaks website found on his computer suggest he intended to send the file to the whistleblowing organization.
After the asylum ruling earlier this month, three courts — two in the U.S. and one in Canada — have expressed strong doubts about the child pornography charges that triggered a search warrant onMatt DeHart’s parents’ home in the U.S. Those accusations date to 2008 and stemmed from his association with two teenagers while playing the online game “World of Warcraft,” one of whom was also involved with Anonymous; the charges were ultimately not proved.
After DeHart was arrested while crossing from Canada to the U.S. in 2010, a judge in Bangor, Maine, found it odd that prosecutors were suddenly citing the two-year-old porn accusations and that police hadn’t analyzed Matt DeHart computers for illicit files seven months after they were seized. A judge in Tennessee, where Matt DeHart ‘s family lived before moving to Canada, admitted that “the weight of the evidence is not as firm as I thought it was.” And most recently, the Canadian Immigration and Refugee Board concluded there was “no credible or trustworthy evidence” that DeHart had solicited child porn.
Prosecutorial misconduct helps the government railroad journalists, whistleblowers, hacktivists and any who dare to speak truth to power.
To be sure, Matt DeHart strange behavior throughout this ordeal doesn’t place him in a particularly flattering light. But it’s worth noting that these kinds of serious accusations are often made in cases against hacktivists and whistleblowers, helping place them in the government’s crosshairs and paint them as nefarious even when the accusations are easily disproved.
Barrett Brown, a journalist who investigated links between the U.S. government and private intelligence contractors, had all manner of ridiculous false accusations thrown at him before being sentenced last month to five and a half years in prison. He was initially charged for the innocuous act of copying and pasting a hyperlink to a public file stolen by Anonymous from one chat room into another. The charge was dropped, but the linking was still used to increase the length of his sentence, despite the fact that prosecutors had no evidence Brown had looked at the file or even known what was in it.
At one point, prosecutors claimed that Brown conspired with members of Anonymous to overthrow the U.S. government. They also accused him of participating in “SWATting,” the practice of making fake 911 calls to harass people in their homes, and even of plotting with another journalist to hack the Bahraini government. Not one of these claims was supported by the voluminous collection of chat logs that the government provided as evidence. Nor did additional logs obtained by The Daily Dot, which the prosecution had withheld under seal.
Brown was not entirely without fault in the case, having obstructed a search warrant and posted a YouTube video threatening an FBI agent in response to the seizure of his laptops. But in retrospect, it seems clear the impetus for the case was that the government saw Brown’s investigations as a threat and would say anything to guarantee his conviction, even if that meant knowingly making false statements. As Brown put it during his allocution, “This is not the rule of law … It is the rule of law enforcement.”
Close scrutiny
What can we expect from the Matt DeHart case if this is the prosecutorial legacy it follows?
As The New York Times editorial board recently noted, defendants have no recourse when police and prosecutors lie, cheat and conceal evidence in the courtroom, leading to what one federal judge has described (PDF) as a national epidemic of prosecutorial misconduct. Sometimes it leads to wrongful convictions. Other times, as in Brown’s case, it helps the government railroad journalists, whistleblowers, hacktivists and any who dare to speak truth to power.
Remember Aaron Swartz, an information activist who prosecutors pursued vigorously for the act of downloading too many academic articles from an MIT library? Much like in Brown’s case, prosecutors were accused of withholding evidence and coercing Swartz into taking a guilty plea. Swartz committed suicide in 2013 amid mounting legal costs and the possibility of up to 35 years in prison, triggering the DeHarts’ decision to flee the country.
“Aaron Swartz had very similar psychological makeup, similar age, same circumstances as Matt DeHart,” DeHart’s father, Paul DeHart, a retired U.S. Air Force major, told The National Post. “I do not want to wake up one day and find my son hanging from a rope in the garage of our house. And I have noplace to go to bring this to anyone’s attention.”
With Matt DeHart’s attempted defections and other erratic behavior, it’s admittedly difficult to determine where his true intentions lie. But the government’s actions against him have been just as sketchy, if not more so. His claims must be taken seriously, and his case should be closely scrutinized, lest another potential whistleblower fall prey to the state’s merciless war on leaks.
by Joshua Kopstein, a cyberculture journalist and researcher from New York City. His work focuses on Internet law and disorder, surveillance and government secrecy.
Aaron Swartz was a computer programmer and Internet activist who is often referred to as the third founder of Reddit.
Early Years
Aaron Swartz was born on November 8, 1986, in Chicago. Precocious from the start, Swartz taught himself to read when he was only three, and when he was 12, Swartz created Info Network, a user-generated encyclopedia, which Swartz later likened to an early version of Wikipedia.
Info Network landed Swartz in the finals for the ArsDigita Prize, and he also was invited to join the RDF Core Working Group of W3C (World Wide Web Consortium), a group assembled to help the Web evolve.
RSS & Creative Commons
Swartz’s next steps were co-authoring news aggregator RSS 1.0 (which went on to become the industry standard) and moving to San Francisco to write code for Creative Commons, a public domain watchdog group. He then headed to California to study sociology at Stanford University. At Stanford, he downloaded law review articles from the Westlaw database and used the data to write an important paper about the connection between research funders and biased results. However, he left academia after only a year, taking a leave of absence to join Y Combinator, an incubator for up-and-coming Internet talent.
Also around this time, Swartz’s new project, Infogami, merged with Reddit.com, making Swartz a co-founder of the resulting company. Reddit had millions of visitors per month when Condé Nast bought it a year later (2006).
In 2008 Swartz wrote “Guerilla Open Access Manifesto,” which was an argument against information being hoarded and controlled by any particular group. The document ended with a demand that information be freely available and grabbed forcibly, if need be: “We need to take information, wherever it is stored, [and] make our copies and share them with the world.”
Felony Charges
That fall, Swartz decided to take on PACER, a system that charged users to download court documents. Through an algorithm he wrote, Swartz downloaded 19,865,160 pages of text from the database. By the spring of 2009, FBI agents were at Swartz’s door, questioning him about the downloads. The investigation was dropped, but a year later Swartz began downloading academic articles from the JSTOR archive at MIT, ending up with around 5 million documents. Swartz’s motivation for downloading the articles was never fully determined, however, friends and colleagues believe his intention was either to upload them to the Internet to share them with the public or analyze them to uncover corruption in the funding of climate change research.
After launching activist group Progressive Change Campaign Committee and later Demand Progress, in January 2011, Swartz was detained in Cambridge, Mass. by police and Secret Service agents. Since his activities in PACER, the government had been watching, and by July 2011, Swartz was facing multiple counts of computer and wire fraud, charges that could have resulted in 35 years in federal prison.
Suspicious Death – Murdered?
When Aaron Swartz refused to deal with the devil, did the government “suicide” him?
“You could eat a sandwich in the time it takes to suffocate from hanging. If he really was as depressed as media says, he could have easily gotten a prescription for Xanex, put on some nice music, light some candles and gone to sleep and never wake up. Why hanging? “
Aaron Swartz was found hung in his Brooklyn apartment. The coroner and Media say he killed himself.
Swartz was no Occupy Wall Street hippie. At 27, he’d already reached the top of his field. He was a software genius and Internet champion. He co-authored the “RSS 1.0” a widely-used syndication format. he also co-founded Reddit which was sold to Conde Naste. He founded Open Library, an internet database dedicated to obtaining public domain documents that had been appropriated by private interests. He ‘hacked’ the Library of Congress database and uploaded it to Open Library making it available for free.
The “social media” industry has virtually taken over every aspect of human communication. This industry increasingly is synonymous with erosion of privacy and commercialism. The movie, ‘The Social Network’ glorified Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg, as a ‘genius’ at betrayal of friends and classmates in order to get sex, money, and power.
Aaron Swartz wasn’t as famous as Mark Zuckerberg – but he was an effective advocate for freedom of information. He wasn’t billionaire, or even a millionaire, though he could have been. Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig said, “He never did anything for the money”.
LEGAL PROBLEMS
In 2010, Swartz downloaded the entire JSTOR archives because the organization pays the publishers of scholarly articles, not the authors.
On July 19th, 2011, the Attorney General of Massachusetts threw the book at him. He was charged under the 1986 Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, otherwise known as “hacking”. But this broad, fuzzy law wasn’t a good fit for downloading uncopyrighted articles with intent to redistribute.
At the moment, that’s not a crime yet. Making such a thing a crime is what the PIPA / SOPA bills meant to do. Undaunted by the warning from Federal muscle to “chill”, last year Swartz was a significant organizer against the SOPA bill that threatened freedom of information access on the internet.
Lawrence Lessig, said, “The government was not gonna stop until he admitted he was a felon. In a world where the architects of the financial crisis regularly dine at the White House, it’s ridiculous to think Aaron Swartz was a felon.”
Lessig knew Aaron for twelve years. He was Swartz’ advisor on intellectual property law for Creative Commons and Open Library.
WAS HE MURDERED?
The mainstream media has been doing a snow job to make us believe that Aaron Swartz committed suicide by tying a rope around his neck and hanging himself.
Personally, I think he would have been creative enough to think of a less horrible way to die. You could eat a sandwich in the time it takes to suffocate from hanging. If he really was as depressed as media says, he could have easily gotten a prescription for Xanex, put on some nice music, light some candles and gone to sleep and never wake up. Why hanging?
Hanging is a horrible way to die. The sentence of hanging was intended to send a message to other offenders “this could happen to you”. I think that’s why Aaron Swartz died by hanging. It’s a message to other activists — probably those he knew who worked with him.
Swartz’s father is an intellectual property consultant to MIT’s computer lab. At Aaron’s funeral, he said his son was killed by the government.
Media has since spun Swartz’ father’s remark as if it he was speaking figuratively. Don’t you believe it. I don’t like the way mainstream media writers frame Swartz’s hanging as a reaction to ‘bullying’. It implies Swartz was afraid of the government, that he was a coward, or mentally ill.
That’s not it. Swartz’s career shows the familiar pattern of attempts to assimilate him into the system – scholarship to Stanford, lucrative job under auspices of WIRED, a fellowship from Harvard’s institution on ethics. All these perks failed to control him, so they switched to Federal muscle tactics.
Each attempt to control him drove him further beyond the pale. But I think his death warrant wasn’t issued till last year when he became an effective leader of a million people and stopped the PIPA and SOPA bills. Effective leaders aren’t allowed.
Bertrand Russell wrote frankly that geniuses would be carefully offered a place with the elite, but those that persisted in bucking the system would be exterminated. From “The Scientific Outlook”, 1931, Russell wrote;
“On those rare occasions, when a boy or girl who has passed the age at which it is usual to determine social status shows such marked ability as to seem the intellectual equal of the rulers, a difficult situation will arise, requiring serious consideration. If the youth is content to abandon his previous associates and to throw in his lot whole-heartedly with the rulers, he may, after suitable tests, be promoted, but if he shows any regrettable solidarity with his previous associates, the rulers will reluctantly conclude that there is nothing to be done with him except to send him to the lethal chamber before his ill-disciplined intelligence has had time to spread revolt. This will be a painful duty to the rulers, but I think they will not shrink from performing it.”
Lessig said “Aaron Swartz is now an icon, an ideal. He is what we will be fighting for, all of us, for the rest of our lives.”
The Chicago police department operates an off-the-books interrogation compound, rendering Americans unable to be found by family or attorneys while locked inside what lawyers say is the domestic equivalent of a CIA black site.
The facility, a nondescript warehouse on Chicago’s west side known as Homan Square, has long been the scene of secretive work by special police units. Interviews with local attorneys and one protester who spent the better part of a day shackled in Homan Square describe operations that deny access to basic constitutional rights.
Alleged police practices at Homan Square, according to those familiar with the facility who spoke out to the Guardian after its investigation into Chicago police abuse, include:
Keeping arrestees out of official booking databases.
Beating by police, resulting in head wounds.
Shackling for prolonged periods.
Denying attorneys access to the “secure” facility.
Holding people without legal counsel for between 12 and 24 hours, including people as young as 15.
At least one man was found unresponsive in a Homan Square “interview room” and later pronounced dead.
Brian Jacob Church, a protester known as one of the “Nato Three”, was held and questioned at Homan Square in 2012 following a police raid. Officers restrained Church for the better part of a day, denying him access to an attorney, before sending him to a nearby police station to be booked and charged.
“Homan Square is definitely an unusual place,” Church told the Guardian on Friday. “It brings to mind the interrogation facilities they use in the Middle East. The CIA calls them black sites. It’s a domestic black site. When you go in, no one knows what’s happened to you.”
The secretive warehouse is the latest example of Chicago police practices that echo the much-criticized detention abuses of the US war on terrorism. While those abuses impacted people overseas, Homan Square – said to house military-style vehicles, interrogation cells and even a cage – trains its focus on Americans, most often poor, black and brown.
Unlike a precinct, no one taken to Homan Square is said to be booked. Witnesses, suspects or other Chicagoans who end up inside do not appear to have a public, searchable record entered into a database indicating where they are, as happens when someone is booked at a precinct. Lawyers and relatives insist there is no way of finding their whereabouts. Those lawyers who have attempted to gain access to Homan Square are most often turned away, even as their clients remain in custody inside.
“It’s sort of an open secret among attorneys that regularly make police station visits, this place – if you can’t find a client in the system, odds are they’re there,” said Chicago lawyer Julia Bartmes.
Chicago civil-rights attorney Flint Taylor said Homan Square represented a routinization of a notorious practice in local police work that violates the fifth and sixth amendments of the constitution.
“This Homan Square revelation seems to me to be an institutionalization of the practice that dates back more than 40 years,” Taylor said, “of violating a suspect or witness’ rights to a lawyer and not to be physically or otherwise coerced into giving a statement.”
Much remains hidden about Homan Square. The Chicago police department did not respond to the Guardian’s questions about the facility. But after the Guardian published this story, the department provided a statement insisting, without specifics, that there is nothing untoward taking place at what it called the “sensitive” location, home to undercover units.
“CPD [Chicago police department] abides by all laws, rules and guidelines pertaining to any interviews of suspects or witnesses, at Homan Square or any other CPD facility. If lawyers have a client detained at Homan Square, just like any other facility, they are allowed to speak to and visit them. It also houses CPD’s Evidence Recovered Property Section, where the public is able to claim inventoried property,” the statement said, something numerous attorneys and one Homan Square arrestee have denied.
“There are always records of anyone who is arrested by CPD, and this is not any different at Homan Square,” it continued.
The Chicago police statement did not address how long into an arrest or detention those records are generated or their availability to the public. A department spokesperson did not respond to a detailed request for clarification.
When a Guardian reporter arrived at the warehouse on Friday, a man at the gatehouse outside refused any entrance and would not answer questions. “This is a secure facility. You’re not even supposed to be standing here,” said the man, who refused to give his name.
A former Chicago police superintendent and a more recently retired detective, both of whom have been inside Homan Square in the last few years in a post-police capacity, said the police department did not operate out of the warehouse until the late 1990s.
But in detailing episodes involving their clients over the past several years, lawyers described mad scrambles that led to the closed doors of Homan Square, a place most had never heard of previously. The facility was even unknown to Rob Warden, the founder of Northwestern University Law School’s Center on Wrongful Convictions, until the Guardian informed him of the allegations of clients who vanish into inherently coercive police custody.
“They just disappear,” said Anthony Hill, a criminal defense attorney, “until they show up at a district for charging or are just released back out on the street.”
‘They were held incommunicado for much longer than I think should be permitted in this country – anywhere – but particularly given the strong constitutional rights afforded to people who are being charged with crimes,” said Sarah Gelsomino, the lawyer for Brian Jacob Church. Photograph: Phil Batta/Guardian
Jacob Church learned about Homan Square the hard way. On May 16 2012, he and 11 others were taken there after police infiltrated their protest against the Nato summit. Church says officers cuffed him to a bench for an estimated 17 hours, intermittently interrogating him without reading his Miranda rights to remain silent. It would take another three hours – and an unusual lawyer visit through a wire cage – before he was finally charged with terrorism-related offenses at the nearby 11th district station, where he was made to sign papers, fingerprinted and photographed.
In preparation for the Nato protest, Church, who is from Florida, had written a phone number for the National Lawyers Guild on his arm as a precautionary measure. Once taken to Homan Square, Church asked explicitly to call his lawyers, and said he was denied.
“Essentially, I wasn’t allowed to make any contact with anybody,” Church told the Guardian, in contradiction of a police guidance on permitting phone calls and legal counsel to arrestees.
Church’s left wrist was cuffed to a bar behind a bench in windowless cinderblock cell, with his ankles cuffed together. He remained in those restraints for about 17 hours.
“I had essentially figured, ‘All right, well, they disappeared us and so we’re probably never going to see the light of day again,’” Church said.
The Disappeared
Brian Church, Jared Chase and Brent Vincent Betterly, known as the ‘Nato Three’
Though the raid attracted major media attention, a team of attorneys could not find Church through 12 hours of “active searching”, Sarah Gelsomino, Church’s lawyer, recalled. No booking record existed. Only after she and others made a “major stink” with contacts in the offices of the corporation counsel and Mayor Rahm Emanuel did they even learn about Homan Square.
They sent another attorney to the facility, where he ultimately gained entry, and talked to Church through a floor-to-ceiling chain-link metal cage. Finally, hours later, police took Church and his two co-defendants to a nearby police station for booking.
After serving two and a half years in prison, Church is currently on parole after he and his co-defendants were found not guilty in 2014 of terrorism-related offenses but guilty of lesser charges of possessing an incendiary device and the misdemeanor of “mob action”.
It’s almost like they throw a black bag over your head and make you disappear for a day or two
-Brian Jacob Church
The access that Nato Three attorneys received to Homan Square was an exception to the rule, even if Jacob Church’s experience there was not.
Three attorneys interviewed by the Guardian report being personally turned away from Homan Square between 2009 and 2013 without being allowed access to their clients. Two more lawyers who hadn’t been physically denied described it as a place where police withheld information about their clients’ whereabouts. Church was the only person who had been detained at the facility who agreed to talk with the Guardian: their lawyers say others fear police retaliation.
One man in January 2013 had his name changed in the Chicago central bookings database and then taken to Homan Square without a record of his transfer being kept, according to Eliza Solowiej of Chicago’s First Defense Legal Aid. (The man, the Guardian understands, wishes to be anonymous; his current attorney declined to confirm Solowiej’s account.) She found out where he was after he was taken to the hospital with a head injury.
“He said that the officers caused his head injuries in an interrogation room at Homan Square. I had been looking for him for six to eight hours, and every department member I talked to said they had never heard of him,” Solowiej said. “He sent me a phone pic of his head injuries because I had seen him in a police station right before he was transferred to Homan Square without any.”
Bartmes, another Chicago attorney, said that in September 2013 she got a call from a mother worried that her 15-year-old son had been picked up by police before dawn. A sympathetic sergeant followed up with the mother to say her son was being questioned at Homan Square in connection to a shooting and would be released soon. When hours passed, Bartmes traveled to Homan Square, only to be refused entry for nearly an hour.
An officer told her, “Well, you can’t just stand here taking notes, this is a secure facility, there are undercover officers, and you’re making people very nervous,” Bartmes recalled. Told to leave, she said she would return in an hour if the boy was not released. He was home, and not charged, after “12, maybe 13” hours in custody.
On February 2, 2013, John Hubbard was taken to Homan Square. Hubbard never walked out. The Chicago Tribune reported that the 44-year old was found “unresponsive inside an interview room”, and pronounced dead. After publication, the Cook County medical examiner told the Guardian that the cause of death was determined to be heroin intoxication.
Homan Square is hardly concerned exclusively with terrorism. Several special units operate outside of it, including the anti-gang and anti-drug forces. If police “want money, guns, drugs”, or information on the flow of any of them onto Chicago’s streets, “they bring them there and use it as a place of interrogation off the books,” Hill said.
‘The real danger in allowing practices like Guantanamo or Abu Ghraib is the fact that they always creep into other aspects,’ criminologist Tracy Siska told the Guardian. Photograph: Chandler West/Guardian
A former Chicago detective and current private investigator, Bill Dorsch, said he had not heard of the police abuses described by Church and lawyers for other suspects who had been taken to Homan Square. He has been permitted access to the facility to visit one of its main features, an evidence locker for the police department. (“I just showed my retirement star and passed through,” Dorsch said.)
Transferring detainees through police custody to deny them access to legal counsel, would be “a career-ender,” Dorsch said. “To move just for the purpose of hiding them, I can’t see that happening,” he told the Guardian.
Richard Brzeczek, Chicago’s police superintendent from 1980 to 1983, who also said he had no first-hand knowledge of abuses at Homan Square, said it was “never justified” to deny access to attorneys.
“Homan Square should be on the same list as every other facility where you can call central booking and say: ‘Can you tell me if this person is in custody and where,’” Brzeczek said.
“If you’re going to be doing this, then you have to include Homan Square on the list of facilities that prisoners are taken into and a record made. It can’t be an exempt facility.”
Indeed, Chicago police guidelines appear to ban the sorts of practices Church and the lawyers said occur at Homan Square.
A directive titled “Processing Persons Under Department Control” instructs that “investigation or interrogation of an arrestee will not delay the booking process,” and arrestees must be allowed “a reasonable number of telephone calls” to attorneys swiftly “after their arrival at the first place of custody.” Another directive, “Arrestee and In-Custody Communications,” says police supervisors must “allow visitation by attorneys.”
Attorney Scott Finger said that the Chicago police tightened the latter directive in 2012 after quiet complaints from lawyers about their lack of access to Homan Square. Without those changes, Church’s attorneys might not have gained entry at all. But that tightening – about a week before Church’s arrest – did not prevent Church’s prolonged detention without a lawyer, nor the later cases where lawyers were unable to enter.
The combination of holding clients for long periods, while concealing their whereabouts and denying access to a lawyer, struck legal experts as a throwback to the worst excesses of Chicago police abuse, with a post-9/11 feel to it.
On a smaller scale, Homan Square is “analogous to the CIA’s black sites,” said Andrea Lyon, a former Chicago public defender and current dean of Valparaiso University Law School. When she practiced law in Chicago in the 1980s and 1990s, she said, “police used the term ‘shadow site’” to refer to the quasi-disappearances now in place at Homan Square.
I’ve never known any kind of organized, secret place where they go and hold somebody before booking for hours and hours
James Trainum, former detective, Washington DC
“Back when I first started working on torture cases and started representing criminal defendants in the early 1970s, my clients often told me they’d been taken from one police station to another before ending up at Area 2 where they were tortured,” said Taylor, the civil-rights lawyer most associated with pursuing the notoriously abusive Area 2 police commander Jon Burge. “And in that way the police prevent their family and lawyers from seeing them until they could coerce, through torture or other means, confessions from them.”
Police often have off-site facilities to have private conversations with their informants. But a retired Washington DC homicide detective, James Trainum, could not think of another circumstance nationwide where police held people incommunicado for extended periods.
“I’ve never known any kind of organized, secret place where they go and just hold somebody before booking for hours and hours and hours. That scares the hell out of me that that even exists or might exist,” said Trainum, who now studies national policing issues, to include interrogations, for the Innocence Project and the Constitution Project.
Regardless of departmental regulations, police frequently deny or elide access to lawyers even at regular police precincts, said Solowiej of First Defense Legal Aid. But she said the outright denial was exacerbated at Chicago’s secretive interrogation and holding facility: “It’s very, very rare for anyone to experience their constitutional rights in Chicago police custody, and even more so at Homan Square,” Solowiej said.
Church said that one of his more striking memories of Homan Square was the “big, big vehicles” police had inside the complex that “look like very large MRAPs that they use in the Middle East.”
Cook County, home of Chicago, has received some 1,700 pieces of military equipment from a much-criticized Pentagon program transferring military gear to local police. It includes a Humvee, according to a local ABC News report.
Tracy Siska, a criminologist and civil-rights activist with the Chicago Justice Project, said that Homan Square, as well as the unrelated case of ex-Guantánamo interrogator and retired Chicago detective Richard Zuley, showed the lines blurring between domestic law enforcement and overseas military operations.
“The real danger in allowing practices like Guantánamo or Abu Ghraib is the fact that they always creep into other aspects,” Siska said.
“They creep into domestic law enforcement, either with weaponry like with the militarization of police, or interrogation practices. That’s how we ended up with a black site in Chicago.”
