U.N. war crimes investigators know of 14 potential chemical attacks in Syria since they began monitoring Syrian human rights abuses in September 2011, the team's chairman said on Monday. link here
MINT NEWS STATEMENT ON DALE GAVLAK STORY link
Syria Chemical Attacks (from Wikipedia) link here
The Syrian government has been accused of conducting several chemical attacks, the most serious of them being the 2013 Ghouta attacks.
On 29 April, another chemical attack was reported, this time in Saraqib, in which 2 died and 13 were injured.
On 13 June, the United States announced that there is definitive proof that the Assad government has used limited amounts of chemical weapons on multiple occasions on rebel forces, killing 100 to 150 people.
On 5 August, another chemical attack by the Syrian army was reported by the opposition, who documented the injured with video footage. The activists claim up to 400 people were effected by the attack in Adra and Houma of the Damascus suburbs.
On 21 August, Syrian activists reported that Assad regime forces struck Jobar, Zamalka, 'Ain Tirma, and Hazzah in the Eastern Ghouta region with chemical weapons. At least 635 people were killed in a nerve gas attack.
The rebels have also been accused of conducting several chemical attacks, the most serious of which was the Khan al-Assal chemical attack. The Khan al-Assal attack took place On 19 March 2013
Breaking News Guide---what wrong information gets reported link
Kenya Nairobi Mall Shooting, 11 killed** (update is 39 killed, more than 150 injured, including family of Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta) link
The Somali militant group al-Shabab has said it carried out the attack.
On its Twitter feed, the al-Qaeda-linked group said it confirmed it was behind what it called the "Westgate spectacle".
Al-Shabab has carried out a string of attacks in Kenya since 2011, when Kenyan troops moved into southern Somalia to fight the militants there.
"They came and said: 'If you are Muslim, stand up. We've come to rescue you," said Elijah Lamau.
He said the Muslims left with their hands up, and then the gunmen shot two people.
The US state department says it has reports that American citizens were injured in what it called "a senseless act of violence".
TIME magazine graphic compares Navy Yard Shooter to Nidal Hassan, Snowden, Manning ""slipping through the cracks"" link here
ATF success, illegal guns, tough judge gives harsher sentence link
Federal Judge John Gleeson could have given 23-year-old weapon peddler Angel Tejeda 30 months to 37 months in prison — if he had stuck to the guidelines. But Gleeson handed Tejeda a 44-month sentence after Assistant U.S. Attorney Jack Dennehy made note of the recent high-profile shootings.Gleeson, a former prosecutor who won the conviction of Gambino crime boss John (Teflon Don) Gotti, said he was mystified how Tejeda could be looking at such little time.
Tejeda, 23, and co-defendant Amaury Delarosa, 25, were nabbed last year in a Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives sting operation dubbed “Operation Young Guns.”
Tejeda was buying the handguns and shotguns from a dealer, and selling the small arsenal to an undercover agent in a Fairway supermarket parking lot on W. 131st St. in Harlem, said ATF agent Patrick Collins.
Military Rape, MJIA, Article 32 hearings, Court Martial link
In a public hearing, they asked the woman, who has accused the three athletes of raping her, whether she wore a bra, how wide she opened her mouth during oral sex
The aggressive tactics on display this month and last are part of a case that has generated intense public scrutiny and raised alarms about what are called Article 32 proceedings, which help determine whether cases are sent to courts-martial. Article 32 hearings permit questions not allowed in civilian courts and can include cross-examinations of witnesses so intense that legal experts say they frighten many victims from coming forward.
NYPD spies on Muslims, NSA gets email about terror attack from monitoring Pakistan link here
NO new laws needed, NO new interpretation or FISA court needed!! FIX THE NSA!!!! FIX THE NYPD!! no spying (Didnt lead to any terror cases stopped, STOP stop and frisk!!!)
Ray Kelly in 2000 ""stop and frisk hurts communities, doesnt help link here
By KEVIN FLYNN
Published: April 5, 2000
Former Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly (1992-1994) assailed the Giuliani administration's police strategies last weekend, saying it had abandoned community policing, increased firepower and fumbled minority hiring in a way that bred mistrust among many blacks and Latinos.
''A large reservoir of good will was under construction when I left the Police Department in 1994,'' Mr. Kelly said. ''It was called community policing. But it was quickly abandoned for tough-sounding rhetoric and dubious stop-and-frisk tactics that sowed new seeds of community mistrust.''
Soon after taking office, Mayor Giuliani replaced Mr. Kelly with William J. Bratton and denigrated the community policing program, which used beat officers to build community relationships, as an ineffectual policy that resembled social work.
Police officials characterized Mr. Kelly's speech, which included criticism of the decision to switch from 10-shot to 16-shot pistols, as unfair. They denied that they had abandoned community policing and said that, despite the increase in firepower, the number of shots fired by officers had declined in recent years.
ACLU report on Marijuana use versus arrests---usage is equal among blacks and whites, but blacks are arrested more often link here
Twitter DM Spam DONT OPEN THE LINKS DONT SIGN INTO FACEBOOK
http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2012/09/24/twitter_direct_message_hack_facebook_youtube_video_links_lead_to_malware.html
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1009_3-57519494-83/twitter-users-may-be-victims-of-direct-message-malware/
Thomas Drake, NSA Whistleblower
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/05/23/110523fa_fact_mayer
When President Barack Obama took office, in 2009, he championed the cause of government transparency, and spoke admiringly of whistle-blowers, whom he described as “often the best source of information about waste, fraud, and abuse in government.” But the Obama Administration has pursued leak prosecutions with a surprising relentlessness. Including the Drake case, it has been using the Espionage Act to press criminal charges in five alleged instances of national-security leaks—more such prosecutions than have occurred in all previous Administrations combined. The Drake case is one of two that Obama’s Justice Department has carried over from the Bush years.
Drake, a registered Republican, had not only expected the President to roll back the prosecutions launched by the Bush Administration; he had thought that Bush Administration officials would be investigated for overstepping the law in the “war on terror.
Drake says ""I did not tell secrets. I am facing prison for having raised an alarm, period. I went to a reporter with a few key things: fraud, waste, and abuse, and the fact that there were legal alternatives to the Bush Administration’s ‘dark side’ ”—in particular, warrantless domestic spying by the N.S.A.""
Jack Balkin, a liberal law professor at Yale, agrees that the increase in leak prosecutions is part of a larger transformation. “We are witnessing the bipartisan normalization and legitimization of a national-surveillance state,
On March 28th, Obama held a meeting in the White House with five advocates for greater transparency in government. During the discussion, the President drew a sharp distinction between whistle-blowers who exclusively reveal wrongdoing and those who jeopardize national security. The importance of maintaining secrecy about the impending raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound was likely on Obama’s mind. The White House has been particularly bedevilled by the ongoing release of classified documents by WikiLeaks, the group led by Julian Assange. Last year, WikiLeaks began releasing a vast trove of sensitive government documents allegedly leaked by a U.S. soldier, Bradley Manning; the documents included references to a courier for bin Laden who had moved his family to Abbottabad—the town where bin Laden was hiding out. Manning has been charged with “aiding the enemy.”
THOMAS DRAKE
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/why-are-we-subverting-the-constitution-in-the-name-of-security/2011/08/25/gIQANnrheJ_story.html
THOMAS DRAKE
http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/NSAW
Daniel Ellsberg on Wikileaks
http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2010/07/daniel_ellsberg_interview
Ellsberg says ""I would've thought that the National Security Agency could penetrate them and keep them from giving anonymity to leakers""
But the administration's surprise at these revelations indicates that Julian Assange is delivering to sources what he said he could—anonymity. And the reason that one person has been brought up on charges, Bradley Manning, is not due to any fault in the Wikileaks technology, but to Bradley Manning's own choice to reveal himself to someone who in turn informed on him. So I hope that his being under charges won't discourage other people from using the Wikileaks technology. I understand that Assange has offered, or plans to offer, this same technology or software to newspapers so that they can do Wikileaks's job on a larger scale. And I hope they take advantage of that.
Two of whom are being prosecuted for acts carried out under George Bush and for which Bush chose not to prosecute—Thomas Drake, who is under indictment, and Shamai Leibowitz, who pleaded guilty (a mistake in my mind)
So Obama's famous position of not looking backward seems to apply only to crimes like torture or illegal warrantless surveillance
The Apache video was wrongly withheld from Reuters, which tried for two years to get it in order to shed light on why their two employees, unarmed journalists, were shot in Iraq
I don't advise people to put out classified material they haven't read
What I did say was that my first choice still would be the press. In fact, it would be the press rather than Congress—I think I wasted a year and half trying to get hearings in Congress without the pressure of the press. Of course, I was unsuccessful there—they just held on to the papers.
Nixon brought a dozen CIA assets, under the direction of Howard Hunt and Gordon Liddy, up from Miami on May 3rd 1972, with orders to incapacitate me totally. That was done covertly and was one of the factors that led to Nixon's resignation. Obama has now announced, through his then-head of intelligence, Dennis Blair, that we have a list of those who can be assassinated by special-forces operators. And this president has even approved names of American citizens on that list. Now that's an astonishing change, not in our covert policy—presidents have been involved in covert assassination plots repeatedly—but to announce that publicly as a supposedly legitimate policy. That negates the Magna Carta. It's a kind of power that no king of England has asserted since John I.
THOMAS DRAKE
http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/NSAW
Daniel Ellsberg on Wikileaks
http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2010/07/daniel_ellsberg_interview
Ellsberg says ""I would've thought that the National Security Agency could penetrate them and keep them from giving anonymity to leakers""
But the administration's surprise at these revelations indicates that Julian Assange is delivering to sources what he said he could—anonymity. And the reason that one person has been brought up on charges, Bradley Manning, is not due to any fault in the Wikileaks technology, but to Bradley Manning's own choice to reveal himself to someone who in turn informed on him. So I hope that his being under charges won't discourage other people from using the Wikileaks technology. I understand that Assange has offered, or plans to offer, this same technology or software to newspapers so that they can do Wikileaks's job on a larger scale. And I hope they take advantage of that.
Two of whom are being prosecuted for acts carried out under George Bush and for which Bush chose not to prosecute—Thomas Drake, who is under indictment, and Shamai Leibowitz, who pleaded guilty (a mistake in my mind)
So Obama's famous position of not looking backward seems to apply only to crimes like torture or illegal warrantless surveillance
The Apache video was wrongly withheld from Reuters, which tried for two years to get it in order to shed light on why their two employees, unarmed journalists, were shot in Iraq
I don't advise people to put out classified material they haven't read
What I did say was that my first choice still would be the press. In fact, it would be the press rather than Congress—I think I wasted a year and half trying to get hearings in Congress without the pressure of the press. Of course, I was unsuccessful there—they just held on to the papers.
Nixon brought a dozen CIA assets, under the direction of Howard Hunt and Gordon Liddy, up from Miami on May 3rd 1972, with orders to incapacitate me totally. That was done covertly and was one of the factors that led to Nixon's resignation. Obama has now announced, through his then-head of intelligence, Dennis Blair, that we have a list of those who can be assassinated by special-forces operators. And this president has even approved names of American citizens on that list. Now that's an astonishing change, not in our covert policy—presidents have been involved in covert assassination plots repeatedly—but to announce that publicly as a supposedly legitimate policy. That negates the Magna Carta. It's a kind of power that no king of England has asserted since John I.
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