http://www.infowars.com/feds-visited-michael-hastings-house-day-before-his-death/
( I wonder who got to the wife to shut her up ? )
Hastings mystery death....
Feds Visited Michael Hastings’ House Day Before His Death
Agents were pursuing Rolling Stone journalist prior to suspicious crash
Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
August 6, 2013
Prison Planet.com
August 6, 2013
Rolling Stone journalist Michael Hastings, who was killed in a suspicious car crash after complaining that he was being harassed by the FBI, had his home visited by agents from an unnamed federal agency the day before his death, a close friend of Hastings told Infowars.
Image: Michael Hastings
While it’s known that Hastings had warned others, including Wikileaks, that the FBI was on his case, the fact that feds visited the home of the controversial journalist almost immediately prior to his untimely death is yet another facet to a story which has thrown up numerous questions about the circumstances surrounding the car crash that killed Hastings in the Hancock Park neighborhood of Los Angeles on June 18.
Through speaking to close friends of Hastings, Infowars has also gathered other astounding revelations about the circumstances surrounding his death that will be released in due course if those individuals are comfortable in going public.
Several of Hastings’ friends and colleagues were reticent to go public with the fact that the journalist had sent an email hours before his death stating he was “onto a big story” and needed “to go off the rada[r] for a bit.”
Yesterday, Hastings’ wife Elise Jordan appeared on CNN’s Piers Morgan Tonight to express the view that her husband’s death was a “tragic accident,” despite initially vowing to “take down” whoever was responsible.
The LAPD’s assertion that no foul play was involved in the death of Hastings has not satisfied journalists who are being stonewalled by both police and federal agencies.
Last week, investigative journalists Jason Leopold and Ryan Shapiro filed a lawsuit against the FBI after the agency’s refusal to respond to a Freedom of Information Act request which sought details on the death of the journalist.
“By suing the FBI for failure to comply with the Freedom of Information Act, [we] hope to obtain records pertaining both to the unusual circumstances of Michael Hastings’s death and to the broader issue of FBI surveillance of journalists and other critics of American national security policy,” Shapiro said.
Recently released surveillance camera footage which captures the crash of Hastings’ Mercedes shows three explosions before the vehicle comes to a rest, fueling speculation that some kind of incendiary device could have triggered the blasts. In at least three 911 calls, witnesses reported loud explosions accompanying the crash.
Speculation has also centered around whether Hastings’ Mercedes was remotely hijacked, a technology which academic studies confirm is a fairly straightforward method of taking control of a vehicle. Former counter-terror czar Richard Clarke remarked that the crash involving Hastings was “consistent with a car cyber attack.”
Hastings had made innumerable enemies in high places as a result of his controversial journalism and routinely received death threats. According to his friend Sgt. Joe Biggs, the journalist was working on “the biggest story yet” about the CIA before his death.
Boston......
Boston......
http://www.infowars.com/tsarnaev-narrative-change-instead-of-a-radical-muslim-tamerlan-a-rightwing-extremist/
Tsarnaev Narrative Change: Instead of a Radical Muslim, Tamerlan a Rightwing Extremist
Kurt Nimmo
Infowars.com
August 6, 2013
Infowars.com
August 6, 2013
In now familiar echo chamber fashion, the establishment media today is hyping a story about Tamerlan Tsarnaev posted by the Wall Street Journal. Hidden behind a pay wall, the story claims Tamerlan read “ring-wing literature” and delved into antigovernment conspiracy theories prior to the attack in Boston on April 15, 2013.
Al Gore’s Democrat television network, Current TV, ran with the politically correct recasting of Tamerlan Tsarnaev as a rightwing extremist. Note Cenk Uygur’s declaration at the outset that the Tsarnaevs are guilty despite the fact Dzhkokhar has yet to be convicted in a court of law.
The story follows a BBC production that aired on Monday titled “The Brothers Who Bombed Boston,” a rather provocative title considering Tamerlan was killed and his brother, Dzhkokhar Tsarnaev, has yet to be tried.
In the weeks following the Boston attack, the corporate media portrayed the pair as guilty. In late July, Rolling Stone cast aside any pretense at journalistic integrity and declared Dzhkokhar “The Bomber” on the cover of its magazine, a calculated if unethical decision resulting in a more than doubling of the magazine’s average sales for the prior year. The Washington Post characterized Rolling Stone’s propaganda triumph as “good journalism” and held it up as an example to be emulated by periodicals desperate to regain market share as news readers flock to the internet.
According to the International Business Times, The Wall Street Journal story claims the elder Tsarnaev read 9/11 conspiracy theories, antigovernment literature, and “other far-right wing literature.” In addition, according to the report, an “article in his possession discussed ‘the rape of our gun rights,’ while another white supremacist-oriented piece claimed ‘Hitler had a point.’”
The latest slant in the Brothers Tsarnaev story is a marked departure from previous theories of why they supposedly planted a bomb, an act allegedly captured by a surveillance camera but not revealed to the public. Now, instead of radical Islam, we are told Tamerlan was a student of “far-right wing literature” and was a defender of the Second Amendment while at the same time agreeing with Hitler.
Tamerlan Tsarnaev supposedly read “rightwing” newspapers.
“Tsarnaev also had a marked-up copy of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a long-discredited tract penned in Russia at the beginning of the 20th century,” Alan Cullison writes for WSJ.
The Wall Street Journal piece points to Donald Larking of Newton, Mass., a 67-year-old man who was disabled after being shot during the robbery of a convenience store where he worked. Tsarnaev allegedly read “far-right wing literature” while working as Larking’s caregiver. According to the Journal, the pair became close friends.
Newspapers in question include The Sovereign and the American Free Press, the latter described as an “anti-Semitic weekly” by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Since 9/11, the SPLC has worked closelywith the Department of Homeland Security to blur the distinctions between white supremacist and patriot organizations and individuals.
In March, the SPLC sent a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder and then Department of Homeland Security boss Janet Napolitano urging the government to establish a task force to investigate the supposed domestic terror threat posed by the likes of Alex Jones, We Are Change, Oath Keepers, the Constitution Party, the Tyranny Response Team and thousands of other Americans.
The transmogrification of Tamerlan Tsarnaev from a radical Muslim into a rightwing extremist conforms with the government’s ongoing effort to shift the locus of domestic terrorism over to its political enemies, who are demonized as contemptuous racists and hate criminals.
Radicalized Muslims, contrary to an endless stream of establishment propaganda, do not pose a serious threat to the corporate and bankster status quo. The real enemies of the state are those who support the Constitution and the Bill of Rights and oppose the Federal Reserve, who work to expose a subversive financial elite and draw attention to their endless wars and looting of the middle class.
And.....
http://whowhatwhy.com/2013/08/05/monday-morning-skeptic-questioning-authority-in-the-sprawling-boston-bombing-case/
****
A glib article published in the Boston Globe on July 27 suggested that those who question the opaque law enforcement narrative about the Boston Marathon bombing have a screw loose.
“There are those,” the writer begins, ”who believe the bombs and blood were staged, the amputees and others injured were actors in some kind of Hollywood production designed to justify martial law.”
David Abel’s lead is a splendid Straw Man ploy: dismiss an idea by seizing upon an absurd exaggeration, like looking at a reflection in a funhouse mirror.
For validation, Abel quotes Jeanne Kempthorne, a Massachusetts criminal defense lawyer who worked from 1992 to 2003 as an assistant U.S. attorney in Boston. She slapped aside skeptics.
“It’s just human nature,” Kempthorne told the paper. “There will always be flat-earthers or grassy knoll types, people who will go to great lengths to dispute the obvious or find conspiracies or come up with evidence-free speculation.”
But what she calls evidence-free speculation others call collaborative deduction.
A fast-forward evolution is happening in criminal justice as citizen gumshoes use the Internet and social media to wheedle out clues and, yes, even evidence.
In one instructive example, a blogger named Alexandria Goddard used evidence collected from social media to help expose the sexual assault of a 14-year-old girl last summer in Steubenville, Ohio.
“The authorities” view this as meddling by amateurs. But online gatecrashing by “grassy knoll types” is certain to increase as law enforcement agencies like the FBI, once viewed as virtually infallible, have grown increasingly furtive, under cover of the surveillance state.
We asked Martin Garbus, one of the country’s premier constitutional attorneys, about the issue of public trust for law enforcers. He suggested that Americans have been taught a lesson by recent revelations of wholesale spying on citizens by the National Security Agency.
“There is no more reason to think that the FBI will do the right thing,” Garbus told us, “than there is to think that the NSA will do the right thing.”
William Keating seems to agree, and he doesn’t seem like a kook. He is a Democratic U.S. Congressman who represents southeast Massachusetts, including Cape Cod, New Bedford and Plymouth. But he has respectful skepticism about law enforcement, learned on the job.
Like Kempthorne, Keating is a former prosecutor, having served 12 years as district attorney for Norfolk County, Massachusetts, before he was elected to Congress in 2010. He is a member of both the House Homeland Security and Foreign Affairs committees.
For three months, Keating has doggedly pursued answers about the Boston bombing from the FBI. He wants to know when the FBI recognized that Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the dead bombing suspect, was a threat to national security and why it did not share its intelligence with the Boston Police Department and other law enforcement agencies.
It would be charitable to describe the Bureau’s response as “less than forthcoming.”
So on July 31, Keating sent a wrathful three-page, 1,200 word letter letter to James Comey, the newly confirmed FBI director, demanding answers to seven questions related to the bombing investigation. Keating, who traveled to Russia in late May to investigate the case on his own, said he found the Russian intelligence agency, the Federal Security Service, to be more forthcoming than the FBI.
Keating complained that the FBI has three times declined invitations to appear before the House Homeland Security Committee to answer questions publicly. And in an Orwellian plot twist, FBI officials replied the next day–but not by contacting Keating. They planted a response in the New York Times.
The story begins, “The F.B.I. has concluded that there was little its agents could have done to prevent the Boston Marathon bombings, according to law enforcement officials, rejecting criticism that it could have better monitored one of the suspects before the attack.”
In other words, no mistakes were made.
Unnamed agency officials told the newspaper that the FBI has no intention of conducting an internal investigation. Nor, apparently, does it intend to cooperate with Keating’s committee.
If the congressman was seething when he sent the letter to Comey, he must have been apoplectic when he saw the response in the Times—by agency officials who were allowed by the newspaper to push back against the people’s representatives while remaining anonymous.
This has become a pattern for the FBI. Information is channeled without specific attribution through the major media, especially via John Miller, a CBS correspondent who once served as the agency’s spokesman. Often, the information has been flatly wrong.
One example was the New York Times’ report on April 22 about the weapons used by the Tsarnaev brothers, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar. One paragraph read:
“Along with determining that the suspects had made at least five pipe bombs, the authorities recovered four firearms that they believe the suspects used, according to a law enforcement official. The authorities found an M-4 carbine rifle — a weapon similar to ones used by American forces in Afghanistan — on the boat where the younger suspect was found Friday night in Watertown, Mass.”
The same story cited a “senior United States official” as describing a gunshot wound to Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s neck as “close-range, self-inflicted style.”
Two days later, an Associated Press story—again citing unnamed officials—reported that the brothers had had a single gun, a 9mm pistol, and that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was unarmed as local, state and federal law enforcers peppered his boat hideout with dozens of shots.
The April 22 story in the Times was corrected twice. One error concerned the geographic relationship of Watertown to Boston. The second clarified the use of the Miranda Warning exception used in the case. But the totally fallacious inventory of weapons was not corrected, and those details are still found in the electronic version of the story in the Times archive.
In fact, mistakes were made. Lots of them—and on more than a few significant aspects of the story.
But do such details really matter?
If you believe in the infallibility of the FBI, probably not. (The agency regards itself as infallible, as this perceptive –dare one say “skeptical”?– New York Times story about the FBI’s remarkable perfect record of faultlessness in agent-involved shootings dating to 1993.)
But the Boston Marathon bombing investigation has bloomed into a complex filigree of related inquiries—from the unsolved triple murder in 2011 in drowsy Waltham, Mass., to the rare “shelter-in-place” order and live-TV posse search for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev on April 19, to the puzzling FBI-agent shooting death in Florida of an unarmed friend of the Tsarnaevs who might have been able to answer crucial questions–had he lived.
Yes, details matter because they often can reveal larger truths.
So WhoWhatWhy joins flat-earthers like the American Civil Liberties Union and Congressman William Keating in asking questions that deserve answers.
And.....
http://whowhatwhy.com/2013/08/05/monday-morning-skeptic-questioning-authority-in-the-sprawling-boston-bombing-case/
****
Monday Morning Skeptic: Questioning Authority In The Sprawling Boston Bombing Case
By David J. Krajicek on Aug 5, 2013
A glib article published in the Boston Globe on July 27 suggested that those who question the opaque law enforcement narrative about the Boston Marathon bombing have a screw loose.
“There are those,” the writer begins, ”who believe the bombs and blood were staged, the amputees and others injured were actors in some kind of Hollywood production designed to justify martial law.”
David Abel’s lead is a splendid Straw Man ploy: dismiss an idea by seizing upon an absurd exaggeration, like looking at a reflection in a funhouse mirror.
For validation, Abel quotes Jeanne Kempthorne, a Massachusetts criminal defense lawyer who worked from 1992 to 2003 as an assistant U.S. attorney in Boston. She slapped aside skeptics.
“It’s just human nature,” Kempthorne told the paper. “There will always be flat-earthers or grassy knoll types, people who will go to great lengths to dispute the obvious or find conspiracies or come up with evidence-free speculation.”
But what she calls evidence-free speculation others call collaborative deduction.
A fast-forward evolution is happening in criminal justice as citizen gumshoes use the Internet and social media to wheedle out clues and, yes, even evidence.
In one instructive example, a blogger named Alexandria Goddard used evidence collected from social media to help expose the sexual assault of a 14-year-old girl last summer in Steubenville, Ohio.
“The authorities” view this as meddling by amateurs. But online gatecrashing by “grassy knoll types” is certain to increase as law enforcement agencies like the FBI, once viewed as virtually infallible, have grown increasingly furtive, under cover of the surveillance state.
We asked Martin Garbus, one of the country’s premier constitutional attorneys, about the issue of public trust for law enforcers. He suggested that Americans have been taught a lesson by recent revelations of wholesale spying on citizens by the National Security Agency.
“There is no more reason to think that the FBI will do the right thing,” Garbus told us, “than there is to think that the NSA will do the right thing.”
William Keating seems to agree, and he doesn’t seem like a kook. He is a Democratic U.S. Congressman who represents southeast Massachusetts, including Cape Cod, New Bedford and Plymouth. But he has respectful skepticism about law enforcement, learned on the job.
Like Kempthorne, Keating is a former prosecutor, having served 12 years as district attorney for Norfolk County, Massachusetts, before he was elected to Congress in 2010. He is a member of both the House Homeland Security and Foreign Affairs committees.
For three months, Keating has doggedly pursued answers about the Boston bombing from the FBI. He wants to know when the FBI recognized that Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the dead bombing suspect, was a threat to national security and why it did not share its intelligence with the Boston Police Department and other law enforcement agencies.
It would be charitable to describe the Bureau’s response as “less than forthcoming.”
So on July 31, Keating sent a wrathful three-page, 1,200 word letter letter to James Comey, the newly confirmed FBI director, demanding answers to seven questions related to the bombing investigation. Keating, who traveled to Russia in late May to investigate the case on his own, said he found the Russian intelligence agency, the Federal Security Service, to be more forthcoming than the FBI.
Keating complained that the FBI has three times declined invitations to appear before the House Homeland Security Committee to answer questions publicly. And in an Orwellian plot twist, FBI officials replied the next day–but not by contacting Keating. They planted a response in the New York Times.
The story begins, “The F.B.I. has concluded that there was little its agents could have done to prevent the Boston Marathon bombings, according to law enforcement officials, rejecting criticism that it could have better monitored one of the suspects before the attack.”
In other words, no mistakes were made.
Unnamed agency officials told the newspaper that the FBI has no intention of conducting an internal investigation. Nor, apparently, does it intend to cooperate with Keating’s committee.
If the congressman was seething when he sent the letter to Comey, he must have been apoplectic when he saw the response in the Times—by agency officials who were allowed by the newspaper to push back against the people’s representatives while remaining anonymous.
This has become a pattern for the FBI. Information is channeled without specific attribution through the major media, especially via John Miller, a CBS correspondent who once served as the agency’s spokesman. Often, the information has been flatly wrong.
One example was the New York Times’ report on April 22 about the weapons used by the Tsarnaev brothers, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar. One paragraph read:
“Along with determining that the suspects had made at least five pipe bombs, the authorities recovered four firearms that they believe the suspects used, according to a law enforcement official. The authorities found an M-4 carbine rifle — a weapon similar to ones used by American forces in Afghanistan — on the boat where the younger suspect was found Friday night in Watertown, Mass.”
The same story cited a “senior United States official” as describing a gunshot wound to Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s neck as “close-range, self-inflicted style.”
Two days later, an Associated Press story—again citing unnamed officials—reported that the brothers had had a single gun, a 9mm pistol, and that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was unarmed as local, state and federal law enforcers peppered his boat hideout with dozens of shots.
The April 22 story in the Times was corrected twice. One error concerned the geographic relationship of Watertown to Boston. The second clarified the use of the Miranda Warning exception used in the case. But the totally fallacious inventory of weapons was not corrected, and those details are still found in the electronic version of the story in the Times archive.
In fact, mistakes were made. Lots of them—and on more than a few significant aspects of the story.
But do such details really matter?
If you believe in the infallibility of the FBI, probably not. (The agency regards itself as infallible, as this perceptive –dare one say “skeptical”?– New York Times story about the FBI’s remarkable perfect record of faultlessness in agent-involved shootings dating to 1993.)
But the Boston Marathon bombing investigation has bloomed into a complex filigree of related inquiries—from the unsolved triple murder in 2011 in drowsy Waltham, Mass., to the rare “shelter-in-place” order and live-TV posse search for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev on April 19, to the puzzling FBI-agent shooting death in Florida of an unarmed friend of the Tsarnaevs who might have been able to answer crucial questions–had he lived.
Yes, details matter because they often can reveal larger truths.
So WhoWhatWhy joins flat-earthers like the American Civil Liberties Union and Congressman William Keating in asking questions that deserve answers.
1. If Russia recognized Tamerlan Tsarnaev as a potential security threat, why didn’t the FBI?
In March 2011, Russian security officials asked the U.S. to help determine whether Tsarnaev had gone radical. The agency did a cursory investigation, and then dropped it. In a justification published in the New York Times on Aug. 1, unnamed officials said the FBI had absolved itself of any missteps in “several internal reviews.” The agency also has claimed it was prevented by law from delving further into Tsarnaev’s activities.
A point of contrast concerning what the authorities can do, inside or outside the law: On July 31, six law officers showed up at the Boston-area home of Michelle Catalano because members of her family had Googled the terms “pressure cooker” and “backpack.” It turns out they had been shopping online.
A point of contrast concerning what the authorities can do, inside or outside the law: On July 31, six law officers showed up at the Boston-area home of Michelle Catalano because members of her family had Googled the terms “pressure cooker” and “backpack.” It turns out they had been shopping online.
2. How was Ibragim Todashev killed, and how has an FBI agent-involved shooting related to a high-profile terrorist bombing managed to become a state secret?
In an April 22, 2013, missive from the Russian FSB to the FBI, Ibragim Todashev’s name appeared under the heading “matters of significance.” He was a friend of Tamerlan Tsarnaev. One month later, on May 22, Todashev was shot and killed in his Orlando apartment by a Boston-based FBI agent.
The first gauzy explanation was channeled through John Miller of CBS, the agency’s former mouthpiece. As the story evolved, we were told that Todashev was armed with a knife. Or a broomstick. Or that he was unarmed—but that a samurai sword was hanging on the wall. The agent, who has never been publicly identified, fired five or six shots. A Massachusetts state trooper who was with him did not fire once. The Florida medical examiner’s office refused to release the autopsy report, by orders of the FBI.
Civil libertarians have demanded an accounting. As Howard Simon, executive director of the ACLU of Florida put it, “Secrecy fosters suspicion.”
Two points: If Todashev was considered a threat (and he should have been), informal questioning in the unsecured surroundings of the suspect’s own apartment was a glaring investigative mistake. Second, the case highlights, once again, a fundamental lack of accountability for federal law enforcement entities. State and local police agencies are held accountable to the elected officials who hire and fire the top administrators and set budgets. Unless there is pressure from Washington politicians, the FBI can stave off public inquiries with virtual impunity—as in this case.
3. How did the Waltham, Mass., Police Department and Massachusetts State Police go so wrong in its investigation of the triple murder in which Tamerlan Tsarnaev and Todashev were later implicated?
On Sept. 11, 2011, Brendan Mess, Erik Weissman and Raphael Teken were found dead in a house at 12 Harding Ave. in Waltham, a city of 60,000 west of Boston. Their throats were slit, and cash and marijuana were sprinkled on the bodies.
It should have been a high-priority crime in Waltham, where triple murders are about as rare as Halley’s Comet. Officials believed the victims knew their killers. Tsarnaev was a close friend of Mess’s and a frequent visitor to the Harding Avenue house.
Friends and loved ones of the victims have said they pointedly told police investigators to question Tsarnaev. The suggestions should have been unnecessary; it is template detective work to interview those closest to murder victims. But no cop ever questioned Tsarnaev about the murders. Why?
4. Who opened fire on the boat in Watertown, and why?
Amid the chaotic search for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev on April 19, David Henneberry alerted police that a bloody person seemed to be secreted in a drydocked boat in his backyard, at 67 Franklin St. in the Boston suburb of Watertown.
Officers from Boston police, Massachusetts state police and the FBI “set up a perimeter,” as Boston Police Commissioner Ed Davis put it, then “exchanged gunfire” with Tsarnaev for about an hour. Much of the action was viewed and heard on live television, included the reports of flash-bang percussion grenades.
Photos showed about 40 bullet holes in the port side of the 22-foot boat. The shot pattern was clustered toward the middle of the boat, precisely the spot where the helicopter imaging had shown him lying.
When a bloody Tsarnaev finally emerged, the media reported that he had been hunkered down with a small arsenal—including an M-4 rifle, as a Washington source told the New York Times—and that he had apparently shot himself in the neck. That was all wrong, it turned out.
In most cases, a law enforcement shooting siege against an unarmed person leads to a weapons-discharge investigation. Will that happen in this case?
5. Will Danny the Carjack Victim ever emerge from the shadows and tell his story publicly?
American crime heroes usually end up on the sofa at NBC’s “Today” show. But Danny has shied from the true-crime klieg lights, appearing in shadow with a fuzzed-up voice with both Today’s Matt Lauer and CBS’s Miller—after sitting with the Boston Globe, in an interview brokered by Jamie Fox, a Northeastern University criminology professor.
Is something stopping Danny from stepping into the sunshine and enjoying his media star turn?
6. Why was Sean Collier, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology police officer, killed?
Collier was shot and killed at about 10:20 p.m. on Thursday, April 18, as his sat in a patrol car near Vassar and Main streets on the nearly empty MIT campus in Cambridge. The public has been told that his assailants were almost certainly the Tsarnaev brothers, but produced no rationale or proof. WhoWhatWhy’s Russ Baker explored some of the questionsabout that particular component of this investigative labyrinth.
http://www.infowars.com/fema-demanding-24-hour-delivery-of-emergency-food-reserves/
FEMA Demanding 24 Hour Delivery of Emergency Food Reserves
Feds preparing for calamity?
Paul Joseph Watson
Infowars.com
August 6, 2013
Infowars.com
August 6, 2013
The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is contacting storable food suppliers requesting immediate delivery of food reserves within a 24 hour period, increasing suspicions that the federal government is accelerating its preparations for social disorder or an environmental calamity.
FEMA recently contacted My Patriot Supply, a provider of bulk food reserves, requesting “immediate delivery” of truckloads of food within a 24 hour period. Instead of soliciting for the food in the normal manner via the Federal Business Opportunities website and thereby saving money, FEMA is now directly contacting suppliers in order to secure overnight deliveries of bulk food. The snapshot above shows one of the emails My Patriot Supply received from FEMA.
While it’s certainly not unusual for FEMA to be buying storable food, the rushed manner with which the federal agency is now conducting such business has raised a few eyebrows, prompting the owner of My Patriot Supply to ask, “Why the sudden sense of urgency? What do they know that we do not?”
“I’m not one to cry that the sky is always falling, but when DHS/FEMA make a move to quietly buy up emergency food supplies and ask how much we can ship within 24 hours…I think this is far enough outside the realm of what is “normal” to beg some questions,“ remarked the company’s owner.
“In recent years the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has been regionalizing disaster supplies and rapidly procuring hundreds of millions of ready-to-eat meals, blankets, and body bags. Coupled with the Department of Homeland Security’s suspiciously massive purchases of ammunition, firearms, and riot gear, it is becoming increasingly clear that the U.S. government is positioning itself in advance of an as of yet unknown widespread calamity,” writes Mac Slavo.
Indeed, FEMA is not the only branch of the Department of Homeland Security demanding the immediate delivery of provisions within as quick a time frame as possible.
As we highlighted back in May, the DHS itself released a market survey asking companies if they were able to provide 2 million rounds of ammunition within a 30-60 day period.
“If you were awarded a contract for some of the calibers listed above, submitted a production lot of one million rounds and that lot or portion of the lot was not accepted, would you be able to replace that order with an additional one million rounds within 60 days?” the survey asked.
Similar to how the DHS’ huge bullet purchases over the last 18 months have caused shortages in ammunition, bulk food reserves are also becoming more scarce as a result of massive FEMA stockpiling, prompting concerns that “something is ready to pop off.”
Although FEMA is now purchasing storable food in quantities amounting to $1 billion dollars a year, individual Americans who follow their example by stocking up with bulk food buys are simultaneously being labeled as potential terrorists by the federal government.
As we reported last year, a flyer aimed at Military Surplus stores produced under the auspices of the FBI’s Communities Against Terrorism project, encourages owners to report people who “make bulk purchases of items to include….meals ready to eat”.
According to the flyer, the FBI advises store owners to demand ID’s from all new customers, as well as asking them questions about their purchase and being aware of “suspicious statements”.
Source: RT
The father of a Chechen man who was fatally shot by a Boston FBI agent has arrived in the United States, where he intends to file a lawsuit against the agency and investigate the mysterious death of his son.
Abdulbaki Todashev is the father of 27-year-old Ibragim Todashev, a mixed martial arts fighter who was fatally shot seven times by the FBI during an extensive interview about his connection to alleged Boston bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev, as well as any knowledge about a triple murder in Waltham, Massachusetts. Todashev, who lived in Orlando, Florida at the time of the interrogation, had been friends with the suspected bomber when they both lived in Massachusetts.
After several hours of questioning, Todashev was shot dead by the FBI in a case that continues to be shrouded in mystery. The man’s father, who lives in Chechnya, described the incident as an execution-style murder.
“He was shot seven times,” Mr. Todashev told TIME. “In the heart and in the head. What is that if not murder?”
Conflicting reports surfaced after the man’s death, with some suggesting that the young Todashev attacked an FBI agent with a knife, metal pole, or broomstick. Other reports claimed the Chechen-American was unarmed.
“The FBI has offered completely incompatible explanations, they have failed to explain how these inconsistent stories found their way into newspaper accounts of the shootings, and have not offered any clarifying comment about what really happened,” Howard Simon, the Florida executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), told TIME.
The victim’s grieving father does not believe that his son posed any serious danger to the officers who were interrogating him, especially since he was injured. A photograph of his son’s dead body shows a row of stitches over the right knee.
“He had just had surgery on his knee and was still walking with crutches,” Todashev said.
The FBI has opened an internal investigation into the killing, but refuses to comment on the case and blocked the release of the victim’s autopsy report.
The distressed father says he is determined to independently discover the truth behind his son’s death, and plans to travel to the US, where he will employ the help of human rights organizations to get answers. Todashev speaks little English, cannot afford a lawyer, and has nothing more than a tourist visa to the US, but the ACLU has vowed to help him.
He says he wants to sue the FBI – not for compensation, but for answers about his son’s death. However, uncovering the truth is likely to come with numerous hurdles: state investigators in Florida last week rejected an ACLU request for an independent investigation into the shooting, claiming it would be “inappropriate” for the human rights organization to intervene.
“Secrecy fosters suspicion and the people of Florida deserve better than to be left without an explanation from their government about what led to a person being shot to death,” Simon said in a statement last Wednesday. “This means it is more likely that the family of Ibragim Todashev will have to file a lawsuit in order to get answers about how their son died.”
An ACLU request to investigate the death was also rejected by the Massachusetts attorney general.
Todashev announced his plans to sue the agency just a few days after the ACLU’s requests were denied, and told TIME that he would file a wrongful death suit – which would force the FBI to reveal all the facts of his son’s death and accept responsibility for any wrongdoing.
“At least once they must be made to admit they were wrong,” he said. “What, is the FBI infallible?”
Source: NY Times[...]
With little fanfare, the agency best known for airport screenings has vastly expanded its reach to sporting events, music festivals, rodeos, highway weigh stations and train terminals. Not everyone is happy.
T.S.A. and local law enforcement officials say the teams are a critical component of the nation’s counterterrorism efforts, but some members of Congress, auditors at the Department of Homeland Security and civil liberties groups are sounding alarms. The teams are also raising hackles among passengers who call them unnecessary and intrusive.
“Our mandate is to provide security and counterterrorism operations for all high-risk transportation targets, not just airports and aviation,” said John S. Pistole, the administrator of the agency. “The VIPR teams are a big part of that.”
Some in Congress, however, say the T.S.A. has not demonstrated that the teams are effective. Auditors at the Department of Homeland Security are asking questions about whether the teams are properly trained and deployed based on actual security threats.
Civil liberties groups say that the VIPR teams have little to do with the agency’s original mission to provide security screenings at airports and that in some cases their actions amount to warrantless searches in violation of constitutional protections.
“The problem with T.S.A. stopping and searching people in public places outside the airport is that there are no real legal standards, or probable cause,” said Khaliah Barnes, administrative law counsel at the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington. “It’s something that is easily abused because the reason that they are conducting the stops is shrouded in secrecy.”
Read More...
Read More...
Lawmakers Issued License Plates That Make Them 'Invisible' To Traffic Cams And Parking Tickets
August 6, 2013Source: Tech Dirt
There are rules for the common people and rules for their "leaders," and only in rare cases do the same rules cover both. Chris Morran at the Consumerist points out how politicians (yet again) are being allowed to ignore the same laws that affect their constituents. Colorado legislators are immune from speeding tickets and parking tickets thanks to the special plates issued to lawmakers -- ones that aren't included in the DMV database.
According to CBS Denver, the info for these particular license plates is never entered into the DMV database, so when some state senator goes zooming by a speed camera, he or she won’t get a ticket, because the camera system looks up the license plate number through the DMV. Since no info comes up, no ticket is given.On the parking ticket side alone, there are $2,100 worth of unpaid tickets linked to these "invisible" plates. The Dept. of Public Works has decided it's "too costly" to pursue collection of those fines. Of course, now that this is public knowledge, a politician has "stepped up" to right the wrong.
This appears to be true for parking tickets as well. See, even though a parking enforcement officer might leave a ticket on the car, cities like Denver that rely on the DMV for addresses of vehicle owners come up empty when they try to collect on those tickets.
One state lawmaker recently stated his intention to close this loophole through legislative action in the next session, by simply doing away with the plates altogether.If only this sort of behavior were an aberration. Earlier this year, Iowa Governor Terry Branstad's speeding SUV was pursued by a highway patrol officer who decided (or was instructed) not to pull it over after realizing whose vehicle it was. Like in Colorado, certain public vehicles are issued plates that aren't listed with the Iowa DMV, which makes these vehicles automatically exempt from traffic cam tickets, parking violations and apparently, even speeding clocked by an on-duty state trooper. It should be noted that the trooper raising the complaint about the governor's speeding driver (another state trooper) was placed on leave after making this public.
“[I]t’s absolutely unfair,” said state representative Chris Holbert. “We should be held accountable like any other citizen. We are elected to represent the people and there’s no reason for us to be treated differently.”
After this small debacle, Governor Branstad too "stepped up" to rein in the injustice, except that his idea of "reining it in" falls far short of Colorado legislator Chris Holbert's plan. In Branstad's view, the problem isn't with the plates, per se. It's that there are too many of them.
Iowa Governor Terry Branstad is upset about the number of specialized license plates that have been given to state, local and federal agencies.Over 350 agencies in Iowa have these plates at their disposal (over 3,000 issued so far), a ridiculous amount considering the plates were originally intended for undercover use by various arms of Iowa law enforcement. Branstad probably isn't looking to give up his ticket-dodging plate but presumably will be forcing several others to play by the same set of rules as the public -- that same public these public servants are supposed to be serving.
More than 3 thousand plates have been issued that exempt the vehicles from getting traffic camera tickets. Brandstad has ordered state transportation officials to cut the number of the special plates.
But that's nothing compared to the staggering level of abuse (ranking between 'Chris Brown' and 'Foster Home' on the Abuse Chart) taking place in our nation's capital. Back in 2008, a report by the US Committee on Transportation detailed the astounding number of violations racked up by government employees and officials.
Municipal, state and federal government agencies are among the biggest offenders when it comes to illegal parking and non-payment of parking citations. A report released last week by the US House Committee on Transportation documented 4000 cases last year where employees in federal vehicles skipped out on paying parking tickets worth $700,000 in Washington, DC and New York City. The total does not include unpaid tickets in foreign countries and other cities throughout the fifty states where 642,000 automobiles registered to the US government are in use.The worst offender? The FBI, which the report found to be responsible for the largest number of delinquent parking tickets by a single agency. The FBI, properly chastened, examined the cases listed and, because it's such a shit-hot investigative agency, found itself "unable to come up any suspects who may have been responsible for illegally parking FBI vehicles on 218 occasions."
"Over one-half of all workers in the southernmost section of Manhattan are government employees," the report explained. "Essentially, all of lower Manhattan is a free parking lot for government vehicles."
Federal workers were not alone in ignoring parking laws. City workers in Washington and New York also disregarded citations issued by fellow employees.DC government vehicles generated 329 unpaid tickets worth $33,360 while New York city and state vehicles skipped out on paying 2562 tickets worth $490,939.
To the surprise of roughly no one, those responsible for enacting and enforcing laws are seldom as interested in following them. Apparently, performing the "business of government" is such a total sacrifice that illegal parking, speeding and other traffic violations should be waved off so that our nation's do-gooders are unimpeded in their good doings.
Source: Sherwood Ross, BlacklistedNews
State “civil-forfeiture”(CF) laws aimed at drug kingpins are being twisted to confiscate the property of people “never charged with a crime,” The New Yorker magazine (August 12) asserts.
State “civil-forfeiture”(CF) laws aimed at drug kingpins are being twisted to confiscate the property of people “never charged with a crime,” The New Yorker magazine (August 12) asserts.
Example: a Philadelphia couple fighting a home eviction after their son sold a small amount of marijuana to an informant.
What’s more, a high proportion of the victims appear to be African-Americans and Latinos, the magazine says.
Example: Tenaha, Texas, where victims of CF actions were motorists who had been pulled over for routine traffic stops, “and the targets were disproportionately black and Latino,” The New Yorker quotes one defense attorney as stating.
Under laws once enacted to penalize drug dealers and their ilk, the authorities using CF “are routinely targeting the workaday homes, cars, cash savings, and other belongings” of the innocent, writes magazine reporter Sarah Stillman.
“In general, you needn’t be found guilty to have your assets claimed by law enforcement; in some states, suspicion on par with ‘probable cause’ is sufficient. Nor must you be charged with a crime or even be accused of one,” Stillman adds.
“Unlike criminal forfeiture, which requires that a person be convicted of an offense before his or her property is confiscated, civil forfeiture is a lawsuit filed directly against a possession, regardless of its owner’s guilt or innocence.”
Owners who wish to contest CF often find that the cost of hiring a lawyer far exceeds the value of their seized goods, the magazine reports. “There’s this myth that they’re cracking down on drug cartels and kingpins,” says Lee McGrath, of the Institute for Justice, of Arlington, Va. In fact, the victims “aren’t entitled to a public defender and can’t afford a lawyer and the only rational response is to walk away from your property, because of the infeasibility of getting your money back.”
Since in many states law enforcement authorities can use CF revenue as they like, the temptation of easy money collides with ethical values. Reporter Stillman writes, in some Texas counties, more than 40 percent of law-enforcement budgets come from forfeiture” so that a system “that proved successful at wringing profits from drug cartels and white-collar fraudsters has given rise to corruption and violations of civil liberties.”
“What stands out to me is the nature of how pervasive and dependent police really are on civil-asset forfeiture—its their bread and butter—and, therefore, how difficult it is to engage in systemic reform,” says Vanita Gupta, a deputy legal director of the ACLU.
Jennifer Boatwright, one of the 140 CF plaintiffs in a suit against Tenaha, Tex., said the county district attorney threatened to put her in jail and her son into child protective services, if she did not sign over $6,000 in her car. “Where are we?” Stillman quotes her as saying. “Is this some kind of foreign country where they’re selling people’s kids off?”
(No, Ms. Boatwright: it’s worse than that. This is some kind of country where the president is ordering illegal drone strikes in foreign countries that are killing children by the score.)
In what should be front page news blasted out nationwide as a breaking news alert, the DHS has openly established extensive ‘Constitution free zones’ in which your Fourth Amendment does not exist.
It’s not ‘conspiracy’ and it’s not fraud, the DHS has literally created an imaginary ‘border’ within the United States that engulfs 100 miles from every single end of the nation. Within this fabricated ‘border’, the DHS can search your electronic belongings for no reason. We’re talking about no suspicion, no reasonable cause, nothing. No reason whatsoever is required under their own regulations. The DHS is now above the Constitution under their own rules, and even Wired magazine authors were amazed at the level of pure tyranny going on here.
******
The Wall Street Journal reports on the amazing capabilities of your smartphone:
The FBI develops some hacking tools internally and purchases others from the private sector. With such technology, the bureau can remotely activate the microphones in phones running Google Inc.’s Android software to record conversations, one former U.S. official said. It can do the same to microphones in laptops without the user knowing, the person said. Google declined to comment.
Court documents and interviews with people involved in the programs provide new details about the hacking tools used by federal agencies, including spyware delivered to computers and phones through email or Web links—techniques more commonly associated with attacks by criminals.
The FBI has been developing hacking tools for more than a decade, but rarely discloses its techniques publicly in legal cases.
Former NSA chief warns of cyber-terror attacks if Snowden apprehended
The former director of the National Security Agency and the CIA speculated on Tuesday that hackers and transparency groups were likely to respond with cyber-terror attacks if the United States government apprehends whistleblower Edward Snowden.
“If and when our government grabs Edward Snowden, and brings him back here to the United States for trial, what does this group do?” said retired air force general Michael Hayden, who from 1999 to 2009 ran the NSA and then the CIA, referring to “nihilists, anarchists, activists, Lulzsec, Anonymous, twentysomethings who haven’t talked to the opposite sex in five or six years”.
“They may want to come after the US government, but frankly, you know, the dot-mil stuff is about the hardest target in the United States,” Hayden said, using a shorthand for US military networks. “So if they can’t create great harm to dot-mil, who are they going after? Who for them are the World Trade Centers? The World Trade Centers, as they were for al-Qaida.”
Greenwald: NSA Supporters Exploiting “Terror Threats” to Kill Fourth Amendment
Journalist says Obama suddenly declared massive “terrorism threat” after downplaying al-Qaeda for years.
Kit Daniels
Infowars.com
August 6, 2013
Infowars.com
August 6, 2013
Glenn Greenwald, the journalist who broke Edward Snowden’s revelations on the NSA’s domestic spying, said that Senator Saxby Chambliss (R-GA) exploited the recent “terrorist threat” on U.S. embassies in order to promote the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping.
On the August 4 edition of MSNBC’s Meet the Press, Chambliss fully endorsed the NSA’s drag net, which surpasses the scale of Big Brother in 1984, and suggested that the surveillance obtained led to the closing of 19 embassies and consulates across North Africa and the Middle East.
“These programs are controversial, we understand that, they’re very sensitive, but they’re also very important because they’re what allow us to have the ability to gather this chatter that I referred to,” Chambliss said.
“If we did not have these programs, we simply would not be able to listen in on the bad guys.”
Chambliss further said that these recent “terrorism threats” are a “good indication” that the NSA’s Stasti-style spying is “important.”
In response to these statements, Greenwald told Democracy Now’s Amy Goodman that Chambliss’ comments were ludicrous.
“For eight straight years, literally, Democrats, every time there was a terrorist alert or a terrorist advisory issued by the United States government in the middle of a debate over one of the Bush-Cheney civil liberties abuses, would accuse the United States government and the national security state of exaggerating terrorism threats, of manipulating advisories, of hyping the dangers of al-Qaeda, in order to distract attention away from their abuses and to scare the population into submitting to whatever it is they wanted to do,” Greenwald said.
“And so, here we are in the midst of one of the most intense debates and sustained debates that we’ve had in a very long time in this country over the dangers of excess surveillance and suddenly an administration that has spent two years claiming that it has decimated al-Qaeda decides that there is this massive threat that involves the closing of embassies and consulates throughout the world.”
Greenwald also pointed out that Chambliss, like Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), is a leading NSA loyalist.
Chambliss and Graham both exploited the terrorist threat, Greenwald said, within mere hours of the embassy closings in order to defend domestic surveillance.
“What that has to do with the ongoing controversy about the NSA is completely mystifying,” he said.
“Nobody has ever questioned or disputed that the U.S. government, like all governments around the world, ought to be eavesdropping and monitoring the conversations of people who pose an actual threat to the United States in terms of plotting terrorist attacks.”
“The controversy is over the fact that they are sweeping up billions and billions of emails and telephone calls every single day from people around the world and in the United States who have absolutely nothing to do with terrorism.”
Greenwald also brought up the persuasive argument that many analysts made that when an agency collects everything indiscriminately, it becomes harder, not easier, to detect actual terrorist plots.
“If this agency really were devoted and if these surveillance programs were really devoted to finding terrorism, they would be much more directed and discriminating, but they’re not,” he said.
“They’re indiscriminate and limitless, and that’s one of the problems.”
No comments:
Post a Comment