These torture guidelines were contained in a ream of internal government documents made public over the past year, including a legal review of Bush-era CIA interrogations by the Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility released late last month.
Though public, the hundreds of pages of documents authorizing or later reviewing the agency’s “enhanced interrogation program” haven’t [...]
Perhaps it is time for the agencies to pool their resources and create a single entity that is responsible for all jurisdictions of the country and has the mandate to protect all critical infrastructures for all levels of government, private sector and its citizens. DHS and the FBI need to refocus on their other duties [...]
Filed in News Blurbs, Technology
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Also tagged BATF, CIA, Counterterrorism, Cyber Attacks, Cybersecurity, DARPA, DHS, DOD, FBI, FEMA, Hackers, Hacking, Intelligence, National Security, Networks, NSA, Pentagon, Robert Mueller, RSA Conference, STRATCOM, TSA
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We’ve all seen a television show or a movie about an undercover narcotics cop who become crooked. He loses the trust of his colleagues, then his family. Soon, the only contacts he has are with the world of drug dealers that he originally set out to destroy. Now picture this scenario of the criminal cop [...]
Filed in News Blurbs
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Also tagged Afghanistan, CIA, Cocaine, Colombia, Corruption, DEA, Douglas Valentine, Drug Policy, Drug Trafficking, FBI, Heroin, Informers, Intelligence, Law, Narcs, Pakistan, Terrorism, The Phoenix Program, Vietnam War, War on Drugs
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Sunday, February 28, 2010
(Michael) Frisch eviscerated both the OPR report and the David Margolis memo. The key ethics inquiry, he argued, was under Rule 1.2(d)—whether Yoo, Bybee, and Bradbury were actually counseling a crime. In this case, the evidence that their advice was designed to facilitate torture is clear-cut, torture is a felony, and multiple players putting a [...]
Filed in News Blurbs
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Also tagged ABA, David Margolis, DOJ, Ethics, Felonies, Jay Bybee, John Yoo, Law, Michael Frisch, OPR, Torture
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Monday, February 15, 2010
KARL: … waterboarding, clearly, what was your…
CHENEY: I was a big supporter of waterboarding. I was a big supporter of the enhanced interrogation techniques that…
KARL: And you opposed the administration’s actions of doing away with waterboarding?
CHENEY: Yes.
He just admitted being an accomplice. To date approximately 100 detainees (at minimum), including CIA-held detainees, have died during [...]
Filed in News Blurbs, Notable
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Also tagged Afghanistan War, Caught on Tape, CIA, Detainees, Dick Cheney, Evidence, Guantanamo, Iraq War, JSOC, Military, Torture, War Crimes, Waterboarding
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Monday, February 15, 2010
There are times when governments fight to keep documents secret to protect sensitive intelligence or other vital national security interests. And there are times when they are just trying to cover up incompetence, misbehavior or lawbreaking.
Last week, when a British court released secret intelligence material relating to the torture allegations of a former Guantánamo prisoner, [...]
Filed in News Blurbs
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Also tagged Barack Obama, Binyam Mohamed, CIA, Courts, Detainees, Dick Cheney, George W Bush, Guantanamo, Hillary Clinton, Intelligence, Law, MI5, Rendition, Torture, War Crimes
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Sunday, February 14, 2010
You can have any opinion you want about waterboarding, but it is a fact that it is defined as “torture” under the relevant international treaties and federal law. That is a fact. In short, it is not “torture” to critics, it is “torture” under the law. And there is no dispute that the Bush Administration [...]
Is there any hope at all that the larger players in the Bush-era criminal activities – Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rove, Perle, Feith and Wolfowitz most prominently – will be brought to justice when those two lesser lights (Yoo and Bybee) are allowed to return to a law school classroom and a seat on the federal [...]
Filed in News Blurbs
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Also tagged Accountability, Barack Obama, Condoleezza Rice, Corporatism, Corruption, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Douglas Feith, George W Bush, Jay Bybee, John Yoo, Karl Rove, Law, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Rule of Law, War Crimes, William Rivers Pitt
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Assassinating non-Americans is just as illegal as assassinating Americans. The leap here is not to victims of a different citizenship, but to the legalization of murder.
The director of U.S. national intelligence told the House Intelligence Committee the government has the right to kill Americans abroad.
Here are 10 problems with this:
1. Acts that are crimes under [...]
You’ve heard plenty about the big banks’ role in the Great Recession, but their headaches are about to get worse.
At a packed hearing today, the Senate investigations subcommittee led by Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI) shed new light on banks’ negligence and wrongdoing—and this time it’s not credit-default swaps or derivatives but money laundering and arms dealers. The [...]
Filed in News Blurbs
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Also tagged Angola, Bailouts, Bank of America, Banking, Carl Levin, Citibank, Corporatism, Corruption, Financial Sector, Great Recession, HSBC, Lobbyists, Money Laundering, Senate, Shell Corporations
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In sum, there is clearly a bipartisan and institutional craving for a revival (more accurately: ongoing preservation) of the core premise of Bush/Cheney radicalism: that because we’re “at war” with Terrorists, our standard precepts of justice and due process do not apply and, indeed, must be violated. To relieve ourselves of guilt and of the bad [...]
In February 2004, David J. Evans, a marine biologist and photographer, was engaged as part of a team working on the Pentagon’s Legacy Program, which documents the cultural and environmental aspects of Defense Department operations. His assignment was to survey and photograph the rich array of wildlife and vegetation at Guantánamo Naval Base. After publication [...]
Thursday, January 28, 2010
After Ali’s death, some of Mohammed’s friends came to him and asked him if the death had changed his attitude toward the Americans. It hadn’t, he told them. “I honestly separate distinctly between Blackwater and the American people and the American government,” he says. “I honestly love America and the American people. What happened to [...]
Extended interview with top TARP cop, Harvard Professor, Elizabeth Warren. Shes sassy and real and tells it like it is…
Thursday, January 21, 2010
The FBI and telecom companies collaborated to routinely violate federal wiretapping laws for four years, as agents got access to reporters’ and citizens’ phone records using fake emergency declarations or simply asking for them.
The Justice Department Inspector General’s internal audit, released Wednesday, harshly criticized how the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Communications Analysis Unit — a counterterrorism [...]
Filed in News Blurbs
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Also tagged DOJ, Electronic Communications Protection Act, Espionage, FBI, Inspector General, Intelligence, Law, Phone Records, Spying, Surveillance, Telecoms, Wiretapping
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Listening To
