Riot Control: DHS Spends $500,000 on Fully Automatic Pepper Spray Launchers
Homeland Security to purchase “riot expansion kits” & 240,000 pepper spray projectiles as agency prepares for domestic unrest
Paul Joseph Watson
Infowars.com
October 30, 2013
Infowars.com
October 30, 2013
The Department of Homeland Security is increasing its preparations for domestic unrest by spending half a million dollars on fully automatic pepper spray launchers and projectiles that are designed to be used during riot control situations.
In an announcement of a no bid contract posted on the Federal Business Opportunities website, the federal agency signals its intention to purchase nearly 240,000 pepper spray projectiles, 100 pepper spray launchers, as well as 36 “riot expansion kits”.
The PepperBall TAC-700 pepper spray launcher “features full auto, semi-auto, or 3 round burst providing up to 700 rounds per minute,”according to the company which will provide the DHS with the weapons. It is also “accurate to 60 feet with area saturation up to 150 feet.” The weapon is routinely used in riot control situations around the world.
According to a video demonstration, the TAC-700 has a “strong psychological influence” on the people it is being used against because it is so loud and sounds like an automatic machine gun.
Although the weapons are being purchased by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the document makes it clear that they will be used to train Federal Protective Service (FPS) agents.
The total cost of the contract amounts to $498,970 dollars and mandates that delivery of the weapons will be made within 60 days of the award.
Although the contract states that the pepper spray projectiles will be used for “training purposes,” 117,000 of them are inert compared to 120,000 “Live X Projectiles,” which are the most powerful projectiles available on PepperBall’s website, and are designed to be used during riot control situations.
The “riot expansion kits” being purchased by the DHS are holsters that accompany the PepperBall products and can be used to store projectiles. According to one website, they represent, “the perfect non-lethal crowd management tool for gaining compliance over rioters, organized protesters, and unlawful assemblies,” and can be used to, “Gain psychological advantage over unruly crowds.”
The purchase of these items sends another clear signal that the DHS is preparing for some form of civil disorder.
In June it emerged that the DHS was purchasing top of the range body armor and helmets for FPS guards as part of preparations for “riot control situations.” This followed a controversial drill last year dubbed “Operation Shield,” during which FPS agents armed with semiautomatic guns were posted outside a Social Security office in Florida. The unannounced exercise centered around “detecting the presence of unauthorized persons and potentially disruptive or dangerous activities.” Residents were forced to show identification papers to the guards during the drill.
Back in May, FPS guards were stationed outside an IRS building in St. Louis during a Tea Party demonstration, and the DHS has also used its sub-branch to spy on protesters.
As we reported last week, Homeland Security is spending $80 million dollars on hiring armed guards in New York to be used during “public demonstration(s),” as well as “civil disturbances, or other unanticipated events on an as-needed basis.”
Fox News host Neil Cavuto speculated that the guards could be linked to cuts in food stamp benefits set to take effect on November 1st.
Watch another video of the Pepperball TAC-700 in action below.
White House Orders Insurance Companies Not to Criticize Obamacare
Executives fear “retribution” if they speak out
Paul Joseph Watson
Infowars.com
October 30, 2013
Infowars.com
October 30, 2013
The White House is ordering insurance companies not to criticize Obamacare and threatening “retribution” against executives who speak out, according to CNN reporter Drew Griffin.
During a segment on CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360 last night, Griffin revealed that insurance companies had been told to “keep quiet” about the fact that millions of Americans are being told that they cannot keep their existing policies, contradicting Barack Obama’s promise that, “If…you like your plan, you can keep your doctor, you can keep your plan.”
“Basically, if you speak out, if you are quoted, you’re going to get a call from the White House, pressure to be quiet. Several sources tell me and my colleague Chris Frates that insurance executives are being told to keep quiet,” said Griffin, adding, “Sources (are) telling us they fear White House retribution.”
The fact that the White House is threatening private companies with undisclosed forms of “retribution” if they criticize government policy is a shocking display of authoritarianism that wouldn’t look out of place in countries like Communist China or Stalinist North Korea.
As Griffin explains in his report, the Obama administration is trying to keep a lid on the dirty little secret that millions of Americans are losing their coverage as a result of Obamacare, illustrating how Obama blatantly lied when he made assurances that people could keep their existing policy.
COOPER: So, I mean, what specifically are, do they say they’re being told to keep quiet about?GRIFFIN: About the fact that clarifications were made to the Affordable Care Act after the law was passed, and those clarifications are forcing the insurance industry to drop insurance plans that do not meet ObamaCare requirements. There is a lot of coverage now required in these plans that was not part of many people’s private healthcare plans. Those are the people, Anderson, who are being dropped. And despite all the rhetoric, I should say, from the president, you simply cannot keep your current healthcare plan if it does not meet these requirements. Laszewski says the insurance industry is embarrassed about cancelling the plans, but in an interview last week, he told me the administration was warned about this very scenario and ignored the advice.
Griffin also suggested that insurance companies were adhering to the White House gag order because, “It is the federal government that’s the biggest customer for these insurance companies.”
White House spokesman Jay Carney labeled the accusations “preposterous and inaccurate,” which is similar to how the administration reacted when it was accused of having foreknowledge of the fact that millions of Americans would lose their healthcare coverage due to Obamacare. It subsequently emerged that White House officials knew this would be the case at least three years in advance.
The Obama administration’s desperation in threatening insurance companies to keep quiet about the Obamacare train wreck provides us with the clearest indication yet that the Affordable Care Act is a disaster for America, built on a foundation of lies and deception, which threatens to cause an economic meltdown.
Obama, NSA Spying and the Dangers of Secretive, Authoritarian Government
October 30, 2013
By John W. Whitehead
While this may come as a shock to most Americans, I’ve been writing about the NSA’s illegal surveillance tactics since the 1980s, which features prominently in my new book A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State. However, this latest development in the spying saga—that the NSA has been aiming its surveillance activities at the citizens of allied countries, including France and Germany—has thrown a kink into the Obama administration’s attempts at maintaining a cozy relationship with its foreign allies.
Specifically, according to comments by an anonymous “high-level” NSA official to a German newspaper, President Barack Obama personally approved spying on the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel. These comments come despite claims made by the White House last week that Obama had no idea that the NSA had tapped her phone. The NSA has denied the reports that Obama was personally briefed on the Merkel spying operation in 2010, but did not indicate whether he may have learned about it via other means.
According to a report by German newspaper Der Spiegel, the NSA had been spying on Merkel since 2002, before she was Chancellor and acting as an opposition leader. The NSA had also allegedly been spying on French and German citizens, an accusation which prompted both countries to demand an explanation from the United States about the purpose and reasoning behind the spying programs. The US spying on German communications was apparently conducted from the American embassy in Berlin.
According to another anonymous US official, the United States was engaged in espionage on 35 world leaders, but most of these programs have been terminated or are set to be terminated. This official also claims that Obama was unaware of the program, and that the NSA had chosen not to brief him on all their various spying operations, saying, “These decisions are made at the NSA. The president doesn’t sign off on this stuff.”
Whatever the exact truth of the matter, there are two possible scenarios. Either the President was fully aware of the extent of the NSA’s criminal activities, which violate both domestic and international law, and was willing to go along with them or the NSA has amassed so much power in Washington that it literally operates outside the chain of command and above the rule of law. In either case, we face a tyrannical force the likes of which have never been seen in the United States before.
In just one month (January 2013), the NSA spied on some 125 billion phone calls worldwide, 3 billion of which originated in the United States. In addition to German and French citizens, the NSA has targeted Spain as well, sweeping up some 60 million communications in the span of one month.
Of course, this global surveillance program should come as no surprise. Since September 11, 2001, the United States has spent over $500 billion on an intelligence community that, according to the Washington Post, constitutes an “espionage empire with resources and a reach beyond those of any adversary, sustained even now by spending that rivals or exceeds the levels at the height of the Cold War.” The CIA and NSA have both begun to engage in so-called “offensive cyber operations,” which involves hacking into foreign computer networks in order to either steal information or sabotage the network itself.
In fact, the NSA has been conducting worldwide surveillance for quite some time. Echelon, a global electronic surveillance network that allows security agencies of Great Britain and the United States, as well as Canada, Australia and New Zealand, to collect and exploit intelligence collected worldwide, was developed by the NSA. Created in the heat of the Cold War, Echelon intercepts and analyzes virtually every phone call, fax and email message sent anywhere in the world. It does so by positioning “listening stations” (including land bases, satellites and ships sailing the seven seas) all over the globe to capture data, satellite, microwave, cellular and fiber-optic communications traffic.
Although Echelon was originally established as an international spy system, suspicions arose at the dawn of the new millennium that its intelligence ambitions might have turned inward. A Congressional investigation determined that Echelon had not only turned inward, targeting such peaceful political groups as Amnesty International, Greenpeace and several Christian groups, but had actually broadened the scope of its mission to include political espionage. It also became a means of benefiting big business and advancing personal political agendas. For example, in March 2003, the British Observer asserted that the Bush Administration had used its Echelon satellite station in New Zealand to spy on council members from Angola, Bulgaria, Camaroon, Chile, Guinea and Pakistan in its effort to garner support for the impending war against Iraq.
The other main object of Echelon seems to be corporate espionage. In 1993, President Bill Clinton directed the NSA to use Echelon facilities to spy on Japanese car manufacturers developing zero-emission cars and to pass on critical information to the three largest American car manufacturers, Ford, General Motors and Chrysler. In the 1990s, German firm Enercon, a wind generator manufacturer, developed innovative wind related technology. However, by the time it was ready to sell the technology to the US, the US rival company had already patented a similar project. Later, an NSA employee admitted to stealing the technology through phone taps and computer link line spying.
Given the NSA’s history, there is nothing innocent about a worldwide program of surveillance. Rather, this is the dawning of a new era, an expansion of the Cold War mentality of tracking an unknown enemy which only exists in the imagination of those who seek more power. Al-Qaeda’s capability to penetrate the American homeland is nil. The chances of dying in a terrorist attack are miniscule. There is no justification for these programs, which is why they have been conducted and approved in secret. Any public scrutiny would demonstrate their ineffectiveness and uselessness.
Unfortunately, our so-called representatives in Congress are doing very little to combat the menace of unlawful surveillance, going out of their way to justify these programs and give them the trappings of legitimacy. For example, Rep. Mike Rogers, head of the House Intelligence Committee, made the bizarre claim that the rise of fascism in Europe in the early 20th century could be attributed to the United States failing to spy on its allies: “We said: ‘We’re not going to do any kinds of those things, that would not be appropriate’ Look what happened in the 30s: the rise of fascism, the rise of communism, the rise of imperialism. We didn’t see any of it. And it resulted in the deaths of tens of millions of people.”
Battles are being waged between civil liberties-minded representatives and law-and-order types such as Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), who is drafting a bill that would codify the NSA’s program of collecting the metadata of American communications. She supports her position by making nonsensical statements such as, “People believe it’s surveillance, but it’s not.”
Contrary to Feinstein’s claims, the NSA is collecting personal information on every single person in the United States who uses a computer or phone. The NSA is able to crack the security of all major smartphones, including iPhone, Android, and Blackberry devices, which gives agents access to information such as contacts, SMS messages, and location data. The NSA is also suspected to be engaging in so-called “man in the middle” attacks, which involve NSA agents pretending to be legitimate web services (in this case search engine Google) in order to obtain private information. These and other programs, such as PRISM and XKEYSCORE, open our private lives to government agents who are only a computer click away from knowing what we do on a daily basis.
Ultimately, it comes down to whether you want an open, transparent and therefore free government or a closed, secretive, authoritarian regime. For those who claim to want open and free government, it’s time to restore the rightful balance in government and make it clear to our leaders that these spying programs are unacceptable and will not be tolerated. Remember, a true patriot is one who upholds the principles upon which his country was founded, not the power of those who have hijacked the nation.
John Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute, a nonprofit civil liberties and human rights organization.
http://whowhatwhy.com/2013/10/29/feds-accused-of-harassing-boston-bomber-friends-and-friends-of-friends/
In the six months since the Boston Marathon bombing, the FBI has by all appearances been relentlessly intimidating, punishing, deporting and, in one case, shooting to death, persons connected, sometimes only tangentially, with the alleged bombers.
All of these individuals have something in common: If afforded constitutional protections and treated as witnesses instead of perpetrators, they could potentially help clear up questions about the violence of April 15. And they might also be able to help clarify the methods and extent of the FBI’s recruitment of immigrants and others for undercover work, and how that could relate to the Bureau’s prior relationship with the bombing suspects—a relationship the Bureau has variously hidden or downplayed.
Who Cares? We Do
The Boston tragedy may seem like a remote, distant memory, yet the bombing warrants continued scrutiny as a seminal event of our times. It was, after all, the only major terror attack in the United States since 9/11. With its grisly scenes of severed limbs and dead bodies, including that of a child, it shook Americans profoundly.
As importantly, in its aftermath we’ve seen public acquiescence in an ongoing erosion of civil liberties and privacy rights that began with 9/11—and to an unprecedented expansion of federal authority in the form of a unique military/law enforcement “lockdown” of a major metropolitan area.
Nonetheless, at the time, most news organizations simply accepted at face value the shifting and thin official accounts of the strange events. Today few give the still-unfolding saga even the most minimal attention. And it is most certainly still unfolding, as we shall see.
The Little-Noticed Post-Marathon Hunt
The FBI’s strange obsession with marginal figures loosely connected to the bombing story began last May, with the daily questioning of a Chechen immigrant, Ibragim Todashev, and of his girlfriend and fellow immigrant, Tatiana Gruzdeva. Todashev had been a friend of the alleged lead Boston Marathon bomber, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who died in a hail of police gunfire four days after the bombing. Tsarnaev’s younger brother Dzhokhar barely survived a massive police strafing of a trailered boat in which he was hiding, trapped and unarmed.
During one interrogation in Orlando, Florida, where Todashev was living, something went awry and he ended up dead from gunshots. Although to date the FBI has provided only hazy and inconsistent accounts of that incident, the killing of a suspect and potential witness in custody was clearly a highly irregular and problematical occurrence, replete with apparent violations of Bureau and standard law-enforcement procedure.
On the heels of those two deaths and the one near-death has followed what appears to be a concerted effort directed against a larger circle of people connected, if not to the Tsarnaevs, then to Todashev.
The purpose of this campaign is not clear, but it has raised some eyebrows.
In an interview with WhoWhatWhy, Hassan Shibly, executive director of the Florida chapter of the Center for American Islamic Relations (CAIR), described aggressive behavior directed by FBI agents at vocal friends of the dead Todashev: using suspected informants to monitor their press conferences, following targeted individuals around, interrogating them for hours—often without an attorney, and jailing them on what he says are trumped-up charges.
Shibly further claims that government agents are threatening these immigrants with deportation unless they agree to “cooperate”—a tactic which he portrays as seeking to enroll these people as de facto spies for the federal government.
Two people have left the country to escape further harassment. Another has been deported, while a fourth is currently facing deportation; none of them has a criminal record. The bulk of this group were at most friends of a friend of Tamerlan Tsarnaev—and apparently didn’t personally know either of the Tsarnaevs.
***
One of these targets was Tatiana Gruzdeva, Todashev’s 20-year-old girlfriend. She was deported to Russia on October 11.
Gruzdeva had been in the US on a student visa. According to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) public affairs officer Carissa Cutrell, Gruzdeva had overstayed that visa—a common situation for foreign students studying in the US—but on August 9 she had been granted a “deferred action” status valid for one year, and therefore was for that period in the country legally.
Gruzdeva was nonetheless picked up by FBI and ICE agents on Oct. 1 while attending a scheduled meeting with an immigration officer to obtain a work visa. According to Gruzdeva, she was told she was being taken because she had“talked to Boston Magazine” and had described Todashev as “a good guy.”
Actually, she had done more than that. She had described for the magazine in vivid detail what happened when several FBI agents back in May had showed up at the Orlando apartment she and Todashev shared and accused him of involvement in the Boston bombing. Days of harassment and interrogation followed, she said, as the FBI tried to get Todashev to confess to involvement in the Boston bombing, and to get her to make statements implicating her boyfriend, but she continued to insist Todashev had been in Orlando with her when the bombing occurred.
Then, she said, the government agents surprised her with a new accusation: Todashev, they alleged, had been involved in a gruesome, drug-related, 2011 triple murder in Waltham, Massachusetts. The agents tried, without success, to force her to implicate Todashev in that crime. Then, while she was still in shock from that latest assertion, they demanded she tell them what further criminal activities he had in store.
When she did not tell them what they apparently wanted to hear, she says, they had her arrested on immigration violation charges. Soon after, she was thrown into solitary confinement—treatment normally used only to protect inmates from other inmates, or to punish them for bad behavior. She was not released until August 8.
It was while she was held in solitary confinement that she learned of Todashev’s shooting death at the hands of an FBI agent.
Miraliev’s “Voluntary” Questioning Without an Attorney
Gruzdeva also told Boston Magazine about the FBI’s treatment of Ashurmamad Miraliev, a 20-year-old friend of Todashev’s also living in Florida.
Just days before the magazine interview, agents had grabbed Miraliev, she said, denied his request for an attorney, and then interrogated him for over six hours before dumping him in the Orange County Correctional Facility, a local jail.
Miraliev remained locked up for over three weeks on $50,000 bail on what CAIR’s Shibly, contends were trumped-up charges of brawling outside a bar and “intimidating a witness.” According to Shibly, an attorney who is representing Miraliev, the charges were subsequently tossed out as baseless.
That didn’t end the young man’s problems, however. When the county no longer had grounds for holding him, the FBI had Miraliev transferred to an immigration detention center, where he is now awaiting deportation. (Shibly says his client is currently requesting to be allowed to voluntarily leave the country, rather than be forcibly deported by ICE.)
WhoWhatWhy tried without success to obtain comment from both the FBI and the immigration authorities concerning these two cases and the other examples of alleged harassment of Todashev associates. The FBI refused to respond. A public affairs officer from ICE said she could not disclose reasons for why Gruzdeva and Miraliev were being deported because of “privacy concerns.”
When asked (by a reporter from the Miami Herald) why Miraliev’s request for an attorney during his interrogation was ignored, the FBI’s public affairs director, Paul Bresson, said that while he couldn’t comment about an “ongoing investigation,” he could state unequivocally that “anytime the FBI interviews an individual it is done either with his/her consent or with an attorney present.”
In fact, agents are actually permitted to question witnesses without an attorney, against their will, in certain narrow circumstances. This is the case when authorities assert a timely matter of “public safety”—for example when they have basis to believe that a bomb is about to go off. (FBI agents claimed such justification when they questioned the gravely wounded alleged Boston Marathon Bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev for hours in the hospital shortly after his capture. That interrogation was stopped by a federal judge, who did not accept the Bureau’s assertion that Tsarnaev might know about other imminent terror attacks.)
In Miraliev’s case, the FBI never even claimed that he posed an imminent threat. Initially, they told him they wanted to question him about the alleged bar fight and the allegation that he had “intimidated a witness.” But these are local, not federal matters; clearly trivial; and not even the FBI’s responsibility.
After that ordeal, Miraliev told CAIR the FBI had never even asked about those local matters. Instead, he said, they focused only on Todashev and his presumed relationship to Tsarnaev.
Shibly calls Bresson’s implication that Miraliev willingly gave up his right to counsel “absurd”: “Knowing that his friend Todashev was killed by an agent during his FBI interrogation, it’s hardly voluntary if Miraliev agrees to answer questions after the agents holding him tell him he can’t have an attorney.”
Courts have held that authorities need not necessarily read a detainee Miranda rights—but they must desist as soon as a demand for an attorney has been made.
Release of Autopsy Report Forbidden
The FBI has shut down any attempts at unraveling the ongoing mystery. It demanded that Todashev’s autopsy’s report be sealed, and not released even to family members.
“The FBI has ordered us not to release the autopsy report while they are investigating the shooting,” says Tony Miranda, forensic records coordinator for Florida’s Orange and Osceola counties. “The hold is currently on until the first week of November, when they will contact us again and let us know if it is extended.”
Such holds on coroner’s reports, especially such lengthy holds, even in cases of police shootings, are unusual, to say the least. And that hold is certain to interfere with the Florida state’s attorney in Orlando, Jeff Ashton, who is also actively investigating the FBI shooting of Todashev.
Shibly believes, based on its overall behavior, that the FBI’s sealing of the Todashev autopsy report has nothing to do with its stated reason of enabling an ongoing investigation into the shooting. “It’s very possible that the FBI is just delaying the release of the coroner’s report because they know it will be embarrassing,” he says.
“He felt inside he was going to get shot.”
Khusn Taramiv, a friend of Todashev’s, said the FBI had begun questioning both young men shortly after the April 15 Boston Marathon bomb attack. But by May 22, the day Todashev died, according to Taramiv, his friend believed something bad was about to happen to him.
“He felt inside [that] he was going to get shot,” Taramiv told WESH-TV in Orlando.
The Waltham matter, a two-year-old, extravagantly staged, ritualistic drug homicide, was apparently a cold case when, after the Marathon bombing, local authorities began focusing on Tamerlan Tsarnaev as the possible killer—and then on Todashev as a possible accomplice—an allegation Todashev’s friends have challenged as baseless.
***
While some of this circle of friends in Florida, like Todashev, faced pressure to confess to participating in or having knowledge of the Waltham crime, others, according to CAIR’s Shibly, have been told that if they want to be left alone and not deported, they need to become informants. He says several of those harassed have opted to return to Russia rather than become spies for the FBI in Florida’s Muslim community.
“I know of a half dozen who’ve been contacted,” says Shibly. “They’ve been told to cooperate and to spy for the FBI on mosques and local restaurants–or the government will go after their legal status.” He says the FBI’s harassment campaign is continuing and is spreading to more people in the Florida area who knew the slain Todashev.
Gruzdeva’s deportation shows that the agency’s deportation threats were no bluff. As mentioned above, on October 11 Gruzdeva, despite her clean record and her “deferred action” legal status, was whisked to the airport for a flight to Russia by ICE agents so fast she was not even able to fetch her winter coat from her apartment. She has reportedly gone to her native Moldova, a country neighboring Romania that was formerly a part of the old Soviet Union.
Miraliev, who had been granted asylum by the US and saw it as a safe haven, is awaiting what may be a similar fate.
Spreading the Net
Shibly says several other family members and friends of Todashev’s have also been harassed by the FBI since his slaying. One is the mother of Todashev’s former wife. The mother, who works for the federal government, was interrogated by the FBI “right after attending a press conference about his killing,” Shibly says, adding that a suspected FBI informant had, unannounced, also attended that press event, apparently monitoring who participated. He says the person was identified by CAIR lawyers investigating the FBI’s harassment campaign.
By shooting Todashev, then claiming he was about to confess to a crime, then hounding Todashev’s friends and family, and sending or driving them out of the country to Russia or other regions of the former Soviet Union, says Shibly, the FBI gives the impression it is urgently trying to hide something.
“Look, the FBI screwed up in killing Todashev,” Shibly told WhoWhatWhy from Saudi Arabia, where he was on Hajj — a pilgrimage to Mecca that Muslims are supposed to try to make at least once in their lives. He added: “Now it is clear that they’re trying to get as much dirt on him as they can to make what they did to him look less heinous.”
What really happened? Pick a story.
From the first moments after the Boston Bombing, the public has been besieged with official accounts, often rendered through news leaks, whose profound inconsistencies have never been ironed out. (For more on that, see previous WhoWhatWhy stories, including this, this, this, and this.)
The same is true of Todashev’s killing, where essential details have varied greatly. But certain elements can be established:
Late in the day on May 22, FBI agents went to Todashev’s house and interrogated him—without an attorney present—according to some accounts, for eight hours.
The agents were accompanied by officers from the Massachusetts State Police, who were investigating the 2011 Waltham murders.
According to the Washington Post, at some point after midnight, the state cops—and, allegedly, all but one member of the FBI contingent—left the room, leaving Todashev, unrestrained, alone with one agent.
If that’s correct, then the FBI violated one of its rules: a suspect should always be in the company of more than one agent. Perhaps even more striking is that they purportedly left that one agent alone with an unrestrained man known by the FBI to have had martial arts training—and, moreover, a man very publicly being investigated for possible participation in a multiple murder case. You couldn’t have created a more perfect scenario for a no-questions-asked, quick disposition of a problematical person.
This curious scenario is further compounded by the several conflicting explanations for the incident offered by “FBI sources” who were not identified by reporters:
As noted earlier, only one agent was left in the room alone with Todashev, according to the Washington Post. That scenario seems supported by the fact that all shots fired came from one agent’s gun. Shibly notes that, by training and protocol, if Todashev had constituted an imminent threat, and more officers were present in the room, all would have fired at him.
The attorney argues that there are “only two possibilities” to explain what happened to Todashev:
Either the FBI violated its own protocol by having one agent left alone in the room or there were actually two or more agents in the room and only one fired.
FBI Accountability: Zero
After Todashev’s slaying, the FBI claimed—though it produced no evidence—that he had been “about to” sign a confession to the triple murder in Waltham, Massachusetts.
Incredibly, no one had taped the interrogation—or, if anyone did, the Bureau is neither admitting it nor offering it as evidence to back up its assertions. When Christina Sterling, the US prosecutor in the Dzhokhar Tsarnaev terrorism case in Boston, cited Todashev’s alleged confession during interrogation by FBI agents, she did not say she had a tape to back up the FBI’s claim. In a court filing asking the judge in that case to deny Tsarnaev’s defense team access to investigative files from the Waltham case, the only evidence she referenced was the reported hearsay from the agents who were in the room with Todashev.
***
No high officials in the Bureau or the Justice Department have publicly expressed concern about this shooting of an unarmed man in custody. The FBI says only that it is “investigating” the incident. And if past experience is any indication, the Bureau is unlikely to find itself or its agents at fault. The New York Times reports that though FBI agents have killed 70 “subjects” and injured another 80 in the last two decades, the Bureau’s self-investigations have never once found that an agent’s shooting of a suspect was unjustified.
This tragicomedy of “errors” must generate some head-shaking in a community made up of immigrants from the old Soviet Union, where people being interrogated routinely happened to fall down stairs or jump out of high windows.
At minimum, given the appearance of a cover-up, one must wonder why the FBI would kill a key associate of Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, especially when the latter is currently facing murder and terrorism charges in federal court in Boston for the Boston Marathon bombing. Todashev could have been an important defense witness. Could he also have had damaging information about links between Tamerlan Tsarnaev and the FBI that predated the interest of the Russian authorities in him?
The American people have to this moment not been leveled with by their government—and are only being provided with hints by the establishment media that anything is seriously amiss. Indeed, few are aware of the larger pattern, and understandably give the FBI the benefit of the doubt in light of the fear following the bloodshed of April 15. A few elected representatives have expressed concerns (see this and this) but these have been isolated and not followed by concrete action.
Moreover, no one has taken the politically explosive step of asking whether, like the friends of Todashev, Tamerlan Tsarnaev himself could have been pressured—successfully— to become an FBI undercover informant/provocateur. Such inquiries lead to places that make Americans deeply uncomfortable. But certain indisputable facts do suggest a basis for pursuing these questions. For one thing, there’s the FBI’s effort to hide its prior relationship with the Tsarnaevs. After claiming it didn’t know who the Tsarnaev brothers were when they were first identified as suspects on the basis of spectators’ photos of the bombing scene, the FBI was essentially forced—by the Russian government, no less—to admit that it had been monitoring and interacting with the Tsarnaev family two years before the Boston bombing.
This must be coupled with Tamerlan’s striking transition in the last few years. A seemingly happy and comparatively “normal” young man eager to become an American citizen and live the American dream morphed into a conspicuous radical, loudly acting out in a mosque and traveling to his home in Dagestan, where he aroused suspicion of being a provocateur, openly trying to convince others to take up arms.
He could have been an authentic convert, or he could have been something else.
As is well established and well documented, the FBI has a long history of recruiting vulnerable individuals to infiltrate organizations and networks, gain their trust, and in some cases to encourage violent acts. Just one of many examples is the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center (the “first” attack on the WTC), with an FBI undercover informant at the core of the plot—which resulted in a bomb attack that killed six people and did considerable structural damage to one of the buildings’ basement pilings.
Deeper and Deeper
In the case of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, we’ve noticed a perplexing discrepancy. While the FBI claims that it began interviewing the Tsarnaevs in response to a request from the Russians, the New York Times has cited a meeting that would predate the Russian request:
“The perception here is of a United States where security has trumped liberty, intelligence agencies run amok (vacuuming up data of friend and foe alike), and the once-admired “checks and balances” built into American governance and studied by European schoolchildren have become, at best, secret reviews of secret activities where opposing arguments get no hearing.” – New York Times columnist Roger CohenRecent reports indicating that President Obama was aware of and personally approved an NSA program that involved spying on the personal communications of various international leaders, including German Chancellor Angela Merkel, have once again highlighted the deception and intransigence of the Obama administration in dealing with the revelations that the National Security Agency has been acting outside the bounds of the law, sucking up electronic communications the world over.
While this may come as a shock to most Americans, I’ve been writing about the NSA’s illegal surveillance tactics since the 1980s, which features prominently in my new book A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State. However, this latest development in the spying saga—that the NSA has been aiming its surveillance activities at the citizens of allied countries, including France and Germany—has thrown a kink into the Obama administration’s attempts at maintaining a cozy relationship with its foreign allies.
Specifically, according to comments by an anonymous “high-level” NSA official to a German newspaper, President Barack Obama personally approved spying on the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel. These comments come despite claims made by the White House last week that Obama had no idea that the NSA had tapped her phone. The NSA has denied the reports that Obama was personally briefed on the Merkel spying operation in 2010, but did not indicate whether he may have learned about it via other means.
According to a report by German newspaper Der Spiegel, the NSA had been spying on Merkel since 2002, before she was Chancellor and acting as an opposition leader. The NSA had also allegedly been spying on French and German citizens, an accusation which prompted both countries to demand an explanation from the United States about the purpose and reasoning behind the spying programs. The US spying on German communications was apparently conducted from the American embassy in Berlin.
According to another anonymous US official, the United States was engaged in espionage on 35 world leaders, but most of these programs have been terminated or are set to be terminated. This official also claims that Obama was unaware of the program, and that the NSA had chosen not to brief him on all their various spying operations, saying, “These decisions are made at the NSA. The president doesn’t sign off on this stuff.”
Whatever the exact truth of the matter, there are two possible scenarios. Either the President was fully aware of the extent of the NSA’s criminal activities, which violate both domestic and international law, and was willing to go along with them or the NSA has amassed so much power in Washington that it literally operates outside the chain of command and above the rule of law. In either case, we face a tyrannical force the likes of which have never been seen in the United States before.
In just one month (January 2013), the NSA spied on some 125 billion phone calls worldwide, 3 billion of which originated in the United States. In addition to German and French citizens, the NSA has targeted Spain as well, sweeping up some 60 million communications in the span of one month.
Of course, this global surveillance program should come as no surprise. Since September 11, 2001, the United States has spent over $500 billion on an intelligence community that, according to the Washington Post, constitutes an “espionage empire with resources and a reach beyond those of any adversary, sustained even now by spending that rivals or exceeds the levels at the height of the Cold War.” The CIA and NSA have both begun to engage in so-called “offensive cyber operations,” which involves hacking into foreign computer networks in order to either steal information or sabotage the network itself.
In fact, the NSA has been conducting worldwide surveillance for quite some time. Echelon, a global electronic surveillance network that allows security agencies of Great Britain and the United States, as well as Canada, Australia and New Zealand, to collect and exploit intelligence collected worldwide, was developed by the NSA. Created in the heat of the Cold War, Echelon intercepts and analyzes virtually every phone call, fax and email message sent anywhere in the world. It does so by positioning “listening stations” (including land bases, satellites and ships sailing the seven seas) all over the globe to capture data, satellite, microwave, cellular and fiber-optic communications traffic.
Although Echelon was originally established as an international spy system, suspicions arose at the dawn of the new millennium that its intelligence ambitions might have turned inward. A Congressional investigation determined that Echelon had not only turned inward, targeting such peaceful political groups as Amnesty International, Greenpeace and several Christian groups, but had actually broadened the scope of its mission to include political espionage. It also became a means of benefiting big business and advancing personal political agendas. For example, in March 2003, the British Observer asserted that the Bush Administration had used its Echelon satellite station in New Zealand to spy on council members from Angola, Bulgaria, Camaroon, Chile, Guinea and Pakistan in its effort to garner support for the impending war against Iraq.
The other main object of Echelon seems to be corporate espionage. In 1993, President Bill Clinton directed the NSA to use Echelon facilities to spy on Japanese car manufacturers developing zero-emission cars and to pass on critical information to the three largest American car manufacturers, Ford, General Motors and Chrysler. In the 1990s, German firm Enercon, a wind generator manufacturer, developed innovative wind related technology. However, by the time it was ready to sell the technology to the US, the US rival company had already patented a similar project. Later, an NSA employee admitted to stealing the technology through phone taps and computer link line spying.
Given the NSA’s history, there is nothing innocent about a worldwide program of surveillance. Rather, this is the dawning of a new era, an expansion of the Cold War mentality of tracking an unknown enemy which only exists in the imagination of those who seek more power. Al-Qaeda’s capability to penetrate the American homeland is nil. The chances of dying in a terrorist attack are miniscule. There is no justification for these programs, which is why they have been conducted and approved in secret. Any public scrutiny would demonstrate their ineffectiveness and uselessness.
Unfortunately, our so-called representatives in Congress are doing very little to combat the menace of unlawful surveillance, going out of their way to justify these programs and give them the trappings of legitimacy. For example, Rep. Mike Rogers, head of the House Intelligence Committee, made the bizarre claim that the rise of fascism in Europe in the early 20th century could be attributed to the United States failing to spy on its allies: “We said: ‘We’re not going to do any kinds of those things, that would not be appropriate’ Look what happened in the 30s: the rise of fascism, the rise of communism, the rise of imperialism. We didn’t see any of it. And it resulted in the deaths of tens of millions of people.”
Battles are being waged between civil liberties-minded representatives and law-and-order types such as Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), who is drafting a bill that would codify the NSA’s program of collecting the metadata of American communications. She supports her position by making nonsensical statements such as, “People believe it’s surveillance, but it’s not.”
Contrary to Feinstein’s claims, the NSA is collecting personal information on every single person in the United States who uses a computer or phone. The NSA is able to crack the security of all major smartphones, including iPhone, Android, and Blackberry devices, which gives agents access to information such as contacts, SMS messages, and location data. The NSA is also suspected to be engaging in so-called “man in the middle” attacks, which involve NSA agents pretending to be legitimate web services (in this case search engine Google) in order to obtain private information. These and other programs, such as PRISM and XKEYSCORE, open our private lives to government agents who are only a computer click away from knowing what we do on a daily basis.
Ultimately, it comes down to whether you want an open, transparent and therefore free government or a closed, secretive, authoritarian regime. For those who claim to want open and free government, it’s time to restore the rightful balance in government and make it clear to our leaders that these spying programs are unacceptable and will not be tolerated. Remember, a true patriot is one who upholds the principles upon which his country was founded, not the power of those who have hijacked the nation.
John Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute, a nonprofit civil liberties and human rights organization.
http://whowhatwhy.com/2013/10/29/feds-accused-of-harassing-boston-bomber-friends-and-friends-of-friends/
Feds Accused Of Harassing “Boston Bomber” Friends, And Friends Of Friends
By Dave Lindorff, Russ Baker and Milicent Cranor on Oct 29, 2013
In the six months since the Boston Marathon bombing, the FBI has by all appearances been relentlessly intimidating, punishing, deporting and, in one case, shooting to death, persons connected, sometimes only tangentially, with the alleged bombers.
All of these individuals have something in common: If afforded constitutional protections and treated as witnesses instead of perpetrators, they could potentially help clear up questions about the violence of April 15. And they might also be able to help clarify the methods and extent of the FBI’s recruitment of immigrants and others for undercover work, and how that could relate to the Bureau’s prior relationship with the bombing suspects—a relationship the Bureau has variously hidden or downplayed.
Who Cares? We Do
The Boston tragedy may seem like a remote, distant memory, yet the bombing warrants continued scrutiny as a seminal event of our times. It was, after all, the only major terror attack in the United States since 9/11. With its grisly scenes of severed limbs and dead bodies, including that of a child, it shook Americans profoundly.
As importantly, in its aftermath we’ve seen public acquiescence in an ongoing erosion of civil liberties and privacy rights that began with 9/11—and to an unprecedented expansion of federal authority in the form of a unique military/law enforcement “lockdown” of a major metropolitan area.
Nonetheless, at the time, most news organizations simply accepted at face value the shifting and thin official accounts of the strange events. Today few give the still-unfolding saga even the most minimal attention. And it is most certainly still unfolding, as we shall see.
The Little-Noticed Post-Marathon Hunt
The FBI’s strange obsession with marginal figures loosely connected to the bombing story began last May, with the daily questioning of a Chechen immigrant, Ibragim Todashev, and of his girlfriend and fellow immigrant, Tatiana Gruzdeva. Todashev had been a friend of the alleged lead Boston Marathon bomber, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who died in a hail of police gunfire four days after the bombing. Tsarnaev’s younger brother Dzhokhar barely survived a massive police strafing of a trailered boat in which he was hiding, trapped and unarmed.
During one interrogation in Orlando, Florida, where Todashev was living, something went awry and he ended up dead from gunshots. Although to date the FBI has provided only hazy and inconsistent accounts of that incident, the killing of a suspect and potential witness in custody was clearly a highly irregular and problematical occurrence, replete with apparent violations of Bureau and standard law-enforcement procedure.
On the heels of those two deaths and the one near-death has followed what appears to be a concerted effort directed against a larger circle of people connected, if not to the Tsarnaevs, then to Todashev.
The purpose of this campaign is not clear, but it has raised some eyebrows.
In an interview with WhoWhatWhy, Hassan Shibly, executive director of the Florida chapter of the Center for American Islamic Relations (CAIR), described aggressive behavior directed by FBI agents at vocal friends of the dead Todashev: using suspected informants to monitor their press conferences, following targeted individuals around, interrogating them for hours—often without an attorney, and jailing them on what he says are trumped-up charges.
Shibly further claims that government agents are threatening these immigrants with deportation unless they agree to “cooperate”—a tactic which he portrays as seeking to enroll these people as de facto spies for the federal government.
Two people have left the country to escape further harassment. Another has been deported, while a fourth is currently facing deportation; none of them has a criminal record. The bulk of this group were at most friends of a friend of Tamerlan Tsarnaev—and apparently didn’t personally know either of the Tsarnaevs.
***
Tatiana Gruzdeva
Gruzdeva had been in the US on a student visa. According to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) public affairs officer Carissa Cutrell, Gruzdeva had overstayed that visa—a common situation for foreign students studying in the US—but on August 9 she had been granted a “deferred action” status valid for one year, and therefore was for that period in the country legally.
Gruzdeva was nonetheless picked up by FBI and ICE agents on Oct. 1 while attending a scheduled meeting with an immigration officer to obtain a work visa. According to Gruzdeva, she was told she was being taken because she had“talked to Boston Magazine” and had described Todashev as “a good guy.”
Actually, she had done more than that. She had described for the magazine in vivid detail what happened when several FBI agents back in May had showed up at the Orlando apartment she and Todashev shared and accused him of involvement in the Boston bombing. Days of harassment and interrogation followed, she said, as the FBI tried to get Todashev to confess to involvement in the Boston bombing, and to get her to make statements implicating her boyfriend, but she continued to insist Todashev had been in Orlando with her when the bombing occurred.
Then, she said, the government agents surprised her with a new accusation: Todashev, they alleged, had been involved in a gruesome, drug-related, 2011 triple murder in Waltham, Massachusetts. The agents tried, without success, to force her to implicate Todashev in that crime. Then, while she was still in shock from that latest assertion, they demanded she tell them what further criminal activities he had in store.
When she did not tell them what they apparently wanted to hear, she says, they had her arrested on immigration violation charges. Soon after, she was thrown into solitary confinement—treatment normally used only to protect inmates from other inmates, or to punish them for bad behavior. She was not released until August 8.
It was while she was held in solitary confinement that she learned of Todashev’s shooting death at the hands of an FBI agent.
Todashev and Gruzdeva during happier times.
Gruzdeva also told Boston Magazine about the FBI’s treatment of Ashurmamad Miraliev, a 20-year-old friend of Todashev’s also living in Florida.
Just days before the magazine interview, agents had grabbed Miraliev, she said, denied his request for an attorney, and then interrogated him for over six hours before dumping him in the Orange County Correctional Facility, a local jail.
Miraliev remained locked up for over three weeks on $50,000 bail on what CAIR’s Shibly, contends were trumped-up charges of brawling outside a bar and “intimidating a witness.” According to Shibly, an attorney who is representing Miraliev, the charges were subsequently tossed out as baseless.
That didn’t end the young man’s problems, however. When the county no longer had grounds for holding him, the FBI had Miraliev transferred to an immigration detention center, where he is now awaiting deportation. (Shibly says his client is currently requesting to be allowed to voluntarily leave the country, rather than be forcibly deported by ICE.)
WhoWhatWhy tried without success to obtain comment from both the FBI and the immigration authorities concerning these two cases and the other examples of alleged harassment of Todashev associates. The FBI refused to respond. A public affairs officer from ICE said she could not disclose reasons for why Gruzdeva and Miraliev were being deported because of “privacy concerns.”
When asked (by a reporter from the Miami Herald) why Miraliev’s request for an attorney during his interrogation was ignored, the FBI’s public affairs director, Paul Bresson, said that while he couldn’t comment about an “ongoing investigation,” he could state unequivocally that “anytime the FBI interviews an individual it is done either with his/her consent or with an attorney present.”
Ashurmamad Miraliev and Tatiana Gruzdeva
In Miraliev’s case, the FBI never even claimed that he posed an imminent threat. Initially, they told him they wanted to question him about the alleged bar fight and the allegation that he had “intimidated a witness.” But these are local, not federal matters; clearly trivial; and not even the FBI’s responsibility.
After that ordeal, Miraliev told CAIR the FBI had never even asked about those local matters. Instead, he said, they focused only on Todashev and his presumed relationship to Tsarnaev.
Shibly calls Bresson’s implication that Miraliev willingly gave up his right to counsel “absurd”: “Knowing that his friend Todashev was killed by an agent during his FBI interrogation, it’s hardly voluntary if Miraliev agrees to answer questions after the agents holding him tell him he can’t have an attorney.”
Courts have held that authorities need not necessarily read a detainee Miranda rights—but they must desist as soon as a demand for an attorney has been made.
Release of Autopsy Report Forbidden
The FBI has shut down any attempts at unraveling the ongoing mystery. It demanded that Todashev’s autopsy’s report be sealed, and not released even to family members.
“The FBI has ordered us not to release the autopsy report while they are investigating the shooting,” says Tony Miranda, forensic records coordinator for Florida’s Orange and Osceola counties. “The hold is currently on until the first week of November, when they will contact us again and let us know if it is extended.”
Such holds on coroner’s reports, especially such lengthy holds, even in cases of police shootings, are unusual, to say the least. And that hold is certain to interfere with the Florida state’s attorney in Orlando, Jeff Ashton, who is also actively investigating the FBI shooting of Todashev.
Shibly believes, based on its overall behavior, that the FBI’s sealing of the Todashev autopsy report has nothing to do with its stated reason of enabling an ongoing investigation into the shooting. “It’s very possible that the FBI is just delaying the release of the coroner’s report because they know it will be embarrassing,” he says.
“He felt inside he was going to get shot.”
Khusn Taramiv, a friend of Todashev’s, said the FBI had begun questioning both young men shortly after the April 15 Boston Marathon bomb attack. But by May 22, the day Todashev died, according to Taramiv, his friend believed something bad was about to happen to him.
“He felt inside [that] he was going to get shot,” Taramiv told WESH-TV in Orlando.
They were talking to us, both of us, right? And they said they need him for a little more, for a couple more hours, and I left, and they told me they’re going to bring him back.
They never brought him back.
The FBI asserts that Todashev had implicated Tamerlan Tsarnaev in the Waltham drug dealer murders, and was about to sign a confession to his own involvement in the crime just before he was shot.The Waltham matter, a two-year-old, extravagantly staged, ritualistic drug homicide, was apparently a cold case when, after the Marathon bombing, local authorities began focusing on Tamerlan Tsarnaev as the possible killer—and then on Todashev as a possible accomplice—an allegation Todashev’s friends have challenged as baseless.
***
While some of this circle of friends in Florida, like Todashev, faced pressure to confess to participating in or having knowledge of the Waltham crime, others, according to CAIR’s Shibly, have been told that if they want to be left alone and not deported, they need to become informants. He says several of those harassed have opted to return to Russia rather than become spies for the FBI in Florida’s Muslim community.“I know of a half dozen who’ve been contacted,” says Shibly. “They’ve been told to cooperate and to spy for the FBI on mosques and local restaurants–or the government will go after their legal status.” He says the FBI’s harassment campaign is continuing and is spreading to more people in the Florida area who knew the slain Todashev.
Gruzdeva’s deportation shows that the agency’s deportation threats were no bluff. As mentioned above, on October 11 Gruzdeva, despite her clean record and her “deferred action” legal status, was whisked to the airport for a flight to Russia by ICE agents so fast she was not even able to fetch her winter coat from her apartment. She has reportedly gone to her native Moldova, a country neighboring Romania that was formerly a part of the old Soviet Union.
Miraliev, who had been granted asylum by the US and saw it as a safe haven, is awaiting what may be a similar fate.
Spreading the Net
Shibly says several other family members and friends of Todashev’s have also been harassed by the FBI since his slaying. One is the mother of Todashev’s former wife. The mother, who works for the federal government, was interrogated by the FBI “right after attending a press conference about his killing,” Shibly says, adding that a suspected FBI informant had, unannounced, also attended that press event, apparently monitoring who participated. He says the person was identified by CAIR lawyers investigating the FBI’s harassment campaign.
By shooting Todashev, then claiming he was about to confess to a crime, then hounding Todashev’s friends and family, and sending or driving them out of the country to Russia or other regions of the former Soviet Union, says Shibly, the FBI gives the impression it is urgently trying to hide something.
“Look, the FBI screwed up in killing Todashev,” Shibly told WhoWhatWhy from Saudi Arabia, where he was on Hajj — a pilgrimage to Mecca that Muslims are supposed to try to make at least once in their lives. He added: “Now it is clear that they’re trying to get as much dirt on him as they can to make what they did to him look less heinous.”
What really happened? Pick a story.
From the first moments after the Boston Bombing, the public has been besieged with official accounts, often rendered through news leaks, whose profound inconsistencies have never been ironed out. (For more on that, see previous WhoWhatWhy stories, including this, this, this, and this.)
The same is true of Todashev’s killing, where essential details have varied greatly. But certain elements can be established:
Late in the day on May 22, FBI agents went to Todashev’s house and interrogated him—without an attorney present—according to some accounts, for eight hours.
The agents were accompanied by officers from the Massachusetts State Police, who were investigating the 2011 Waltham murders.
According to the Washington Post, at some point after midnight, the state cops—and, allegedly, all but one member of the FBI contingent—left the room, leaving Todashev, unrestrained, alone with one agent.
If that’s correct, then the FBI violated one of its rules: a suspect should always be in the company of more than one agent. Perhaps even more striking is that they purportedly left that one agent alone with an unrestrained man known by the FBI to have had martial arts training—and, moreover, a man very publicly being investigated for possible participation in a multiple murder case. You couldn’t have created a more perfect scenario for a no-questions-asked, quick disposition of a problematical person.
This curious scenario is further compounded by the several conflicting explanations for the incident offered by “FBI sources” who were not identified by reporters:
First, they claimed thatTodashev—who had just undergone knee surgery–had nonetheless lunged at the lone officer with a knife. No mention of how Todashev would have produced a knife since they would presumably have routinely frisked a potentially dangerous suspect.
Next, they said he had upended a table, possibly injuring the agent.
Then, they said he had attempted to grab a sword. The notion that this possible terrorist, triple homicide suspect would be left alone with a single officer, with a knife and/or even more stunningly a sword ought to raise serious questions about whom we can trust to tell us the truth. And if that weren’t enough, the weapon of choice later morphed in some reports into a metal pole, and then into a broom handle.
There is more variation in the accounts of what happened just before Todashev allegedly lunged:
After two hours, Todashev asked to take a break, went to “get a cigarette or something and then he goes off the deep end… and goes after theagent.” It was not clear “why, with at least three law enforcement officials in the room, deadly force was used…”
He started to write a statement while sitting across from the agent and one of the detectives “when the agent briefly looked away….Todashev picked up the table.”
After one of the detectives left the room, the other noticed Todashev was acting odd, and he texted that sense to the FBI agent with him… Suddenly, Todashev knocked over a table…”
Hassan Shibly
The attorney argues that there are “only two possibilities” to explain what happened to Todashev:
Either the FBI violated its own protocol by having one agent left alone in the room or there were actually two or more agents in the room and only one fired.
FBI Accountability: Zero
After Todashev’s slaying, the FBI claimed—though it produced no evidence—that he had been “about to” sign a confession to the triple murder in Waltham, Massachusetts.
Incredibly, no one had taped the interrogation—or, if anyone did, the Bureau is neither admitting it nor offering it as evidence to back up its assertions. When Christina Sterling, the US prosecutor in the Dzhokhar Tsarnaev terrorism case in Boston, cited Todashev’s alleged confession during interrogation by FBI agents, she did not say she had a tape to back up the FBI’s claim. In a court filing asking the judge in that case to deny Tsarnaev’s defense team access to investigative files from the Waltham case, the only evidence she referenced was the reported hearsay from the agents who were in the room with Todashev.
***
No high officials in the Bureau or the Justice Department have publicly expressed concern about this shooting of an unarmed man in custody. The FBI says only that it is “investigating” the incident. And if past experience is any indication, the Bureau is unlikely to find itself or its agents at fault. The New York Times reports that though FBI agents have killed 70 “subjects” and injured another 80 in the last two decades, the Bureau’s self-investigations have never once found that an agent’s shooting of a suspect was unjustified.
This tragicomedy of “errors” must generate some head-shaking in a community made up of immigrants from the old Soviet Union, where people being interrogated routinely happened to fall down stairs or jump out of high windows.
At minimum, given the appearance of a cover-up, one must wonder why the FBI would kill a key associate of Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, especially when the latter is currently facing murder and terrorism charges in federal court in Boston for the Boston Marathon bombing. Todashev could have been an important defense witness. Could he also have had damaging information about links between Tamerlan Tsarnaev and the FBI that predated the interest of the Russian authorities in him?
The American people have to this moment not been leveled with by their government—and are only being provided with hints by the establishment media that anything is seriously amiss. Indeed, few are aware of the larger pattern, and understandably give the FBI the benefit of the doubt in light of the fear following the bloodshed of April 15. A few elected representatives have expressed concerns (see this and this) but these have been isolated and not followed by concrete action.
Moreover, no one has taken the politically explosive step of asking whether, like the friends of Todashev, Tamerlan Tsarnaev himself could have been pressured—successfully— to become an FBI undercover informant/provocateur. Such inquiries lead to places that make Americans deeply uncomfortable. But certain indisputable facts do suggest a basis for pursuing these questions. For one thing, there’s the FBI’s effort to hide its prior relationship with the Tsarnaevs. After claiming it didn’t know who the Tsarnaev brothers were when they were first identified as suspects on the basis of spectators’ photos of the bombing scene, the FBI was essentially forced—by the Russian government, no less—to admit that it had been monitoring and interacting with the Tsarnaev family two years before the Boston bombing.
This must be coupled with Tamerlan’s striking transition in the last few years. A seemingly happy and comparatively “normal” young man eager to become an American citizen and live the American dream morphed into a conspicuous radical, loudly acting out in a mosque and traveling to his home in Dagestan, where he aroused suspicion of being a provocateur, openly trying to convince others to take up arms.
He could have been an authentic convert, or he could have been something else.
As is well established and well documented, the FBI has a long history of recruiting vulnerable individuals to infiltrate organizations and networks, gain their trust, and in some cases to encourage violent acts. Just one of many examples is the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center (the “first” attack on the WTC), with an FBI undercover informant at the core of the plot—which resulted in a bomb attack that killed six people and did considerable structural damage to one of the buildings’ basement pilings.
Deeper and Deeper
In the case of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, we’ve noticed a perplexing discrepancy. While the FBI claims that it began interviewing the Tsarnaevs in response to a request from the Russians, the New York Times has cited a meeting that would predate the Russian request:
“In January 2011, two counterterrorism agents from the bureau’s Boston field office interviewed Tamerlan and family members, a senior law enforcement official said.”
Yet, in an article that appeared three days later, the same authors reported that,
“The first Russian request came in March of 2011 through the F.B.I.’s office in the United States Embassy in Moscow.”
If these dates are correct, then the FBI was talking to Tamerlan before the Russians asked them to. Why? (An email from WhoWhatWhy to Eric Schmitt, the Times’s lead reporter on the two articles, remains unanswered.)Which Is Worse: A Rogue NSA … Or A President Who Gives His Approval And Then Lies About It?
October 29, 2013
Source: Washington’s Blog
The NSA has been tapping German leader Angela Merkel’s phone for a decade.
German papers say that President Obama approved the spying program.
Obama denies he knew anything about it.
Which is worse:
The NSA has been tapping German leader Angela Merkel’s phone for a decade.
German papers say that President Obama approved the spying program.
Obama denies he knew anything about it.
Which is worse:
- A rogue NSA which doesn’t tell the commander-in-chief that it is going to tap a foreign leader’s private phone?
- Or a president who approves it … and then lies about it?
Facebook has the largest biometric database in the world and the potential to recognize anybody's face
October 29, 2013
Source: NPR
Look at Facebook, says Amie Stepanovich, director of the domestic surveillance project at the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington, D.C.
Facebook has the largest biometric database in the world — "and it's all been formed by people voluntarily submitting pictures to Facebook and identifying who they belong to," she says.
Theoretically, every time you label faces by tagging a picture, you're chipping away at those two big challenges for universal facial recognition. First, you're helping to build a super-database of labeled faces. Second, you're uploading multiple versions of each person's face, which can improve a system's accuracy.
"If you had lots of photos of each person ... you could build a model for Martin, a model for me, a model for other people. Now you have a custom-tuned model for each person," Kumar, from the University of Washington, says.
Multiply that by a billion — a billion custom-tuned facial "models."
Facebook would not answer NPR's questions about what it does with facial recognition information; social media companies rarely talk about their internal systems.
But they're surely aware of their huge database's potential. Last year, Facebook bought Face.com, whose company's founders had titled "Leveraging Billions of Faces to Overcome Performance Barriers in Unconstrained Face Recognition."
Read More...
Look at Facebook, says Amie Stepanovich, director of the domestic surveillance project at the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington, D.C.
Facebook has the largest biometric database in the world — "and it's all been formed by people voluntarily submitting pictures to Facebook and identifying who they belong to," she says.
Theoretically, every time you label faces by tagging a picture, you're chipping away at those two big challenges for universal facial recognition. First, you're helping to build a super-database of labeled faces. Second, you're uploading multiple versions of each person's face, which can improve a system's accuracy.
"If you had lots of photos of each person ... you could build a model for Martin, a model for me, a model for other people. Now you have a custom-tuned model for each person," Kumar, from the University of Washington, says.
Multiply that by a billion — a billion custom-tuned facial "models."
Facebook would not answer NPR's questions about what it does with facial recognition information; social media companies rarely talk about their internal systems.
But they're surely aware of their huge database's potential. Last year, Facebook bought Face.com, whose company's founders had titled "Leveraging Billions of Faces to Overcome Performance Barriers in Unconstrained Face Recognition."
Read More...
After KPIX 5 reported on Google’s mysterious project on a barge off Treasure Island, reports have surfaced of the tech giant building similar floating structures outside of the Bay Area.
A report appearing in the Portland (Maine) Press Herald showed shipping containers stacked on a barge in Maine – with the structure appearing virtually identical to the Bay Area barge. Also, an unconfirmed report suggested a Google barge is taking shape in New London, Connecticut.
Both the Maine and Bay Area barges are owned by a company called By and Large, reports KPIX 5.
and.....
http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2013/10/28/google-reportedly-building-more-floating-structures-outside-bay-area/
SAN FRANCISCO (KPIX 5) — After KPIX 5 reported on Google’s mysterious project on a barge off Treasure Island, reports have surfaced of the tech giant building similar floating structures outside of the Bay Area.
A report appearing in the Portland (Maine) Press Herald showed shipping containers stacked on a barge in Maine – with the structure appearing virtually identical to the Bay Area barge. Also, an unconfirmed report suggested a Google barge is taking shape in New London, Connecticut.On Friday, the tech website CNET first disclosed the barge buildingand speculated Google might be building a floating data
center to house server banks on the water. KPIX subsequently reported Friday evening Google is actually building the floating structures to market Google Glass — the cutting edge wearable computer that the company has under development.
center to house server banks on the water. KPIX subsequently reported Friday evening Google is actually building the floating structures to market Google Glass — the cutting edge wearable computer that the company has under development.
“They’re building on both coasts,” said a source familiar with the Google project.
- Twitter Persona Surfaces For Mystery ‘Google Barge’
- Google To Expand Availability Of Google Glass Eyewear
Google, for its part, maintained a stolid silence on the matter, as did many Bay Area maritime officials. Google is reliably said to have spent upwards of $10 million on the project so far. With that kind of money in play, and presumably more to come, no one is anxious to speak out of turn.
But Larry Goldzband, executive director of the Bay Conservation and Development Commission, told KPIX 5 the Portland barge structure appeared to be the same kind of floating building that Google is constructing in the Bay Area.
Both the Maine and Bay Area barges are owned by a company called By and Large, which has leased a large swath of pier and an abandoned U.S. Navy hangar from the Treasure Island Development Authority – a lease reliably said to be costing $100,000 a month. Officials have not responded to requests for comment.
hangar from the Treasure Island Development Authority – a lease reliably said to be costing $100,000 a month. Officials have not responded to requests for comment.- KCBS’ Matt Bigler Reports
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Informed sources told KPIX 5 that Google wants to tow the Treasure Island barge from Treasure Island to a dock at Fort Mason in San Francisco’s Marina District, where it would open to the public as a Google Glass marketing center. Among other things, the center’s docking fees could be an important source of revenue to the cash-pressed park.
But work on the barge abruptly stopped a few weeks ago.
- Phil Matier
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One reason for the stoppage may be Google’s failure to obtain a permit it would need from the BCDC to park the barge on the waterfront. A barge that remained in one place for an extended period of time might technically be considered “Bay fill.”
“We shouldn’t use the Bay as a lost opportunity for that which can be done on land,” Goldzband said Monday in an interview with KPIX 5. “We need to ensure that whatever this permit is applied for actually fits into what the Bay should be used for.”
Some said Google might solve that problem if the barge did not remain at Fort Mason – that a true floating center, in transit from San Francisco to Oakland and elsewhere, might not need a permit.
But Goldzband sounded skeptical. “It’s not that easy,” he said.
And the absence of a permit may not be Google’s only concern. One person close to the Treasure Island project said it was stalled because of technical difficulties with the Google Glass product itself.
“The barge is basically done,” he said. “The problem is the product. It needs more work. They’re not ready to promote it yet.”
California Cops Impose Police State Following Shooting
Kurt Nimmo
Infowars.com
October 27, 2013
Infowars.com
October 27, 2013
If a cop or some other official of the government gets shot in your neighborhood, expect the imposition of a police state and the termination of the Bill of Rights. That’s what happened in Roseville, California, on Friday night following a shootout between a parolee and law enforcement.
Because an officer was shot in the jaw, a fed immigration agent was shot in the leg, and other cops were lightly injured residents of the neighborhood were not allowed to return to their homes for more than 24 hours. They had to endure checkpoints and orders to evacuate their homes.
An AP article on the incident concentrates on the danger posed by the man wanted for parole violation and says nothing about the danger of cops engaged in a vendetta. Cops routinely shoot and kill people when they perceive a threat, even kids with toy guns and small dogs, and they are especially violent when one of their own is killed or wounded.
“The incident created scenes of panic and chaos in a typically quiet middle class suburb of about 120,000 that is 20 miles northeast of the state capitol,” the AP reports. “At least 15 homes were evacuated, and the area remained a crime scene late Saturday.”
An armed criminal certainly poses a danger, but so do “helicopters… circling overhead and armored vehicles and other police cars” converging on the area with irate cops on a mission to take down a man who shot members of one of the largest and most organized, heavily armed (some cops even get Pentagon cast offs) and dangerous gangs in the state.
This AP photo of a cop threatening a motorist with a weapon at a checkpoint says it all.
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