rule of law: some "people" are just more deserving

Reuters | WASHINGTON – The marble façade of the U.S. Supreme Court building proclaims a high ideal: “Equal Justice Under Law.”

But inside, an elite cadre of lawyers has emerged as first among equals, giving their clients a disproportionate chance to influence the law of the land.

A Reuters examination of nine years of cases shows that 66 of the 17,000 lawyers who petitioned the Supreme Court succeeded at getting their clients’ appeals heard at a remarkable rate. Their appeals were at least six times more likely to be accepted by the court than were all others filed by private lawyers during that period.

The lawyers are the most influential members of one of the most powerful specialties in America: the business of practicing before the Supreme Court. None of these lawyers is a household name. But many are familiar to the nine justices. That’s because about half worked for justices past or present, and some socialize with them.

They are the elite of the elite: Although they account for far less than 1 percent of lawyers who filed appeals to the Supreme Court, these attorneys were involved in 43 percent of the cases the high court chose to decide from 2004 through 2012.

The Reuters examination of the Supreme Court’s docket, the most comprehensive ever, suggests that the justices essentially have added a new criterion to whether the court takes an appeal – one that goes beyond the merits of a case and extends to the merits of the lawyer who is bringing it.

The results: a decided advantage for corporate America, and a growing insularity at the court. Some legal experts contend that the reliance on a small cluster of specialists, most working on behalf of businesses, has turned the Supreme Court into an echo chamber – a place where an elite group of jurists embraces an elite group of lawyers who reinforce narrow views of how the law should be construed.

without torture prosecutions america can't claim to be a nation of laws...,

LATimes |  There’s a lot to be appalled about in the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee’s CIA torture report -- and yes, what the CIA did was torture. Beyond the atrocious physical abuse of detainees, the report details the agency’s incompetence -- it doesn’t know how many people it detained -- and its willful efforts to hide its misdeeds by lying to the president and Congress and maintaining a disinformation campaign with the media.

As others have noted, the conduct by the CIA and some of its contractors was inhumane and disgusting, regardless of whether they thought they were covered by Bush administration attorney John Yoo's legal rationalization. Much has been made that in the end, the “intelligence” the agents squeezed out of their victims was of little value, which makes a point of painful irony but obscures the darker reality. Even if the CIA had tortured a morsel of useful information out of someone, they still resorted to indefensible practices.

Imagine what the U.S. reaction -- from government officials to everyday people -- would be if we learned that agents of another country had grabbed people from outside its borders, spirited them away to clandestine chambers in third countries, and tortured them. Special forces would be deployed. The United Nations Security Council would convene. Sanctions would be imposed amid talk of isolating a rogue nation from the civilized world.

But because it was the U.S., it's likely nothing will happen despite calls for prosecutions. The Justice Department, which has already passed on prosecutions once, affirmed Tuesday that it will not reopen investigations into possible illegal acts committed by CIA agents and officials, or the people hired by them (yes, the U.S. even outsources torture).

If it is true that we are at war with terrorist organizations, then how is it not a war crime when U.S. agents take prisoners to secret complexes, deprive them of sleep, force them to stand on broken feet, manacle their hands above their heads, and “feed” them rectally?

Torture is illegal. Letting those responsible for such inhumane acts slip away without being brought to justice compounds the crime. We like to think of ourselves as a nation governed by laws, but to shrug off torture by agents of our own government tells the world that we not only find the crimes inconsequential, but we’ve turned off the international beacon of justice.

The Times editorial board read the report for what it is: An indictment:

you recall that the cia violated the constitution to keep its shotwell catacombs perversions secret...,

washingtontimes | “The CIA unconstitutionally spied on Congress by hacking into Senate intelligence committee computers. This grave misconduct not only is illegal, but it violates the U.S. Constitution’s requirement of separation of powers,” said Mr. Udall, a member of the committee. “These offenses, along with other errors in judgment by some at the CIA, demonstrate a tremendous failure of leadership, and there must be consequences.”

The internal CIA audit was conducted by the agency’s inspector general. It remains classified, but agency spokesman Dean Boyd said it showed that employees “acted in a manner inconsistent with the common understanding” of how documents were to be treated.

Mr. Boyd said Mr. Brennan has formed an accountability board to look into the findings and that employees could be disciplined.

The showdown stemmed from a yearslong Senate investigation into harsh interrogation techniques used in the years after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. A key document known as the Panetta review, named after former CIA Director Leon E. Panetta, laid out a number of concerns including whether the interrogations were producing valuable information.

CIA officials accused Senate staffers of stealing the Panetta review, and Mr. Brennan’s top legal aide made an official referral asking the Justice Department to pursue a criminal case against staffers. Senators countered by starting their own investigation, demanding Mr. Brennan’s cooperation, and taking their own complaint to the Justice Department.

The CIA said Thursday that the Justice Department review has concluded without any finding on either side. The Senate is continuing its investigation.

one of the two sadistic leather tops who showed cia the "stick of truth" for $81 million...,

nbcnews |  One of two psychologists whose firm was paid $81 million to design the CIA's interrogation techniques for terror suspects is blasting a Senate report that criticized the program's brutality and effectiveness. 

"I always sleep comfortably at night," James Mitchell told NBC News on Wednesday. 

"I think the American people ought to know the men and women of the CIA and the armed services have given up their lives and their security to protect them. It's not always pretty," he added. "I wish this report had come out in a bipartisan way." 

In an earlier interview with the Associated Press, Mitchell said Senate report's accusation that he and his partner did not have experience as interrogators or an understanding of Al Qaeda is "flat wrong." He said he understood the shocked reaction to the report's claims. "I would be upset by it too, if it were true," he said. 

"What they are asking you to believe is that multiple directors of the CIA and analysts who made their living for years doing this lied to the federal government, or were too stupid to know that the intelligence they were getting wasn't useful," Mitchell told the AP. 

Mitchell, who spent 30 years in the U.S. Air Force, is identified by the alias Grayson Swigert in the report. His former business partner, John "Bruce" Jessen, is identifed as Hammond Dunbar. The report says that their firm had a $180 million contract but collected just $81 million before the contract was terminated in 2009.

rule of law: vote, protest, all you like - DC residents have no rights congress is bound to acknowledge....,

csmonitor |  Efforts to secure full voting representation in Congress for D.C. residents have a long history of frustration. The reality is that the federal enclave is not a state, and therefore its residents do not enjoy the same voting rights of states, as granted by the US Constitution. The Constitution also grants Congress jurisdiction over the District.

In 1973, Congress established “home rule” in D.C., allowing local officials to govern the District. But Congress maintains the right to overrule local decisions, including ballot measures.

Most of the time, Congress leaves D.C. alone, but on social policy, congressional Republicans have been known to jump in. On abortion policy, the District is not allowed to use its own tax revenues to fund the procedure for low-income residents. Republicans in Congress blocked sales of medical marijuana in D.C. for 11 years.

In the current Congress, Rep. Andy Harris (R) of Maryland is spearheading the effort to thwart legalized recreational marijuana in D.C. He claims “fairly broad-based support in Congress against legalization.”

But marijuana advocates aren’t taking this lying down.

shock and anal probe...,

guardian |  The Senate’s report confirms what we’ve long known: the United States systematically tortured detainees, sometimes to the point of death, and relied on the complicity of health professionals to commit and conceal these crimes.

Psychologists developed and actively participated in the CIA’s torture methods, and both psychologists and doctors were used to create a fiction of “safe, legal, and effective” interrogation practices. In reality, health professionals monitored and calibrated the infliction of severe physical and mental pain, withheld medical treatment, and failed to document medical evidence of intentional harm.

Torture is always illegal and immoral and, as the report shows, it provided little to no actionable intelligence. It compromised everything the United States stands for as a country based on the rule of law, but torture betrayed the core tenet of the healing professions – to do no harm.

The report is a critical step in establishing a public record of the nature and extent of CIA torture, but the question remains: Will those responsible for the authorization and implementation of torture be held accountable to ensure that these crimes never happen again? —Dr Vincent Iacopino, senior medical advisor, Physicians for Human Rights

While the torture report provides many new horrifying details, the saddest part is that even those who championed this much-needed report have failed to respond to its lessons going forward. Consider how casually the report describes that Abd al Rahim al-Nashiri – the alleged mastermind of the USS Cole bombing – went on a hunger strike. 

As if the response to a hunger strike should ever be to feed someone rectally!

Indeed, the comment – and the evidence such “rectal feeding” left on his body, suggests that Nashiri was anally probed as punishment for hunger-striking. Indeed, a doctor who recently testified about Nashiri’s torture as part of his military commission testified that he had the kind of “anal-rectal complaints” that “survivors of sexual assault experience”.

After 10 years of working on CIA abuses, I didn’t know it was possible to be shocked but not surprised.

We already knew of the brutal stress positions, forced standing, waterboarding and extended sleep deprivation with light and noise; now we know about the use of punitive “anal feeding” or “anal rehydration”, about forcing detainees with broken leg bones to stand shackled against a wall. Now we know about all the lies.

who was the first person to receive an alien anal probe?

jasoncolavito |  Why it is that aliens want to probe our butts; or, more specifically, when exactly did people start claiming that aliens gave them anal probes? I know this is a silly question, but silly questions often end up revealing hidden layers and secrets. And I have not been able to find a satisfactory answer to what should have been a simple question.

Anal probes are now such an established part of the UFO phenomenon that you’d think there’d be a clear answer to that question, but if there is, I can’t find one. Many UFO books refer to it, and many assume that it’s just a given during an abduction, but I can’t find a catalog of anal probing events or a timeline of when they supposedly started. Even the otherwise exhaustive Wikipedia lacks an entry for alien anal probes. There must be something about it somewhere, but since I am not as familiar with modern UFO material, I am not sure where to look for it.

Ufology isn’t much help in the matter. In his A UFO Hunter’s Guide (2012), Brad Lueder simply denies that there were any anal probes, dismissing the formulation as “misinterpreted and misunderstood” sex experiments. He’s wrong, of course, but it shows that some ufologists want to distance themselves from what Lueder calls the “sneers and jokes” of “modern popular culture.” On the other hand, Zen Benefiel self-published a book this year called Alien Agendas and Anal Probes that promised to investigate “the science behind the anal probes” and what these probes can tell us about why the aliens are really here. But his book isn’t a history so much as New Age-influenced fringe speculation.

We can probably put a terminus ante quem and terminus pro quem on our search by establishing that the trope was famous enough in 1997 to be the subject of South Park’s pilot episode, “Cartman Gets an Anal Probe.” The probing can’t be part of the abduction experience before there was an abduction experience, so it had to have developed after 1964, when under hypnosis Betty and Barney Hill claimed to have been subjected to surgical examination (Betty claimed a needle entered her naval) during a 1961 alien abduction. Or at least it would have developed after 1962, when claims that Antonio Vilas-Boas had been seduced into sex by an alien following a medical examination on a spaceship in 1957 were first published.

The interesting thing is that Barney Hill actually did claim to be anally probed, but because that claim was not included in The Interrupted Journey (1965), the account by John G. Fuller of the hypnotic regression he performed on the Hills, this claim was not generally known until a 1965 report by NICAP investigator Walter Webb was popularized much later. In that report, Webb stated that during the hypnotic regression, Barney Hill stated that “A cylindrical object was inserted up the rectum, and once again the witness believed something was extracted.” Fuller left this out of the book, along with a claim by Hill that a cup was used to extract sperm.

BD says there are NO rules - and stupid sheeple just go along with that...,

being a cop showed me just how racist and violent the police are and there’s only one fix

WaPo |  I won’t say all, but many of my peers were deeply racist.

One example: A couple of officers ran a Web site called St. Louis Coptalk, where officers could post about their experience and opinions. At some point during my career, it became so full of racist rants that the site administrator temporarily shut it down. Cops routinely called anyone of color a “thug,” whether they were the victim or just a bystander.

This attitude corrodes the way policing is done.

As a cop, it shouldn’t surprise you that people will curse at you, or be disappointed by your arrival. That’s part of the job. But too many times, officers saw young black and brown men as targets. They would respond with force to even minor offenses. And because cops are rarely held accountable for their actions, they didn’t think too hard about the consequences.

Once, I accompanied an officer on a call. At one home, a teenage boy answered the door. That officer accused him of harboring a robbery suspect, and demanded that he let her inside. When he refused, the officer yanked him onto the porch by his throat and began punching him.

Another officer met us and told the boy to stand. He replied that he couldn’t. So the officer slammed him against the house and cuffed him. When the boy again said he couldn’t walk, the officer grabbed him by his ankles and dragged him to the car. It turned out the boy had been on crutches when he answered the door, and couldn’t walk.

Back at the department, I complained to the sergeant. I wanted to report the misconduct. But my manager squashed the whole thing and told me to get back to work.

michael vick did more time for dogfighting than the "rape by instrumentality" crew will do for crimes against humanity...,

motherjones |  On Tuesday morning, the Senate intelligence committee released an executive summary of its years-long investigation into the CIA's detention and interrogation program. President George W. Bush authorized the so-called "enhanced interrogation" program after the 9/11 attacks. The United States government this week has warned personnel in facilities abroad, including US embassies, to be ready in case protests erupt in response.

The full report includes over 6,000 pages and 35,000 footnotes. You can read the executive summary here. Here are some of the lowlights:

1. The CIA used previously unreported tactics, including "rectal feeding" of detainees (p. 100, footnote 584):

2. CIA officers threatened the children of detainees (p. 4):

3. Over 20 percent of CIA detainees were "wrongfully held." One was an "intellectually challenged" man who was held so the CIA could get leverage over his family (p. 12):

4. One detainee, Abu Hudhaifa, was subjected to "ice water baths" and "66 hours of standing sleep deprivation" before being released because the CIA realized it probably had the wrong man (p. 16, footnote 32):

5. The CIA, contrary to what it told Congress, began torturing detainees before even determining whether they would cooperate (p. 104):

6. CIA officers began torturing Khalid Sheikh Mohammed "a few minutes" after beginning to question him (p. 108):

7. The CIA planned to detain KSM incommunicado for the rest of his life, without charge or trial (p. 9):

8. During waterboarding sessions, KSM made up a story that Al Qaeda was trying to recruit African-American Muslims…in Montana (p. 118):

you're looking a little dry: dick cheney and all who came behind, KNOW you keepin secrets in'nat azz....,

digsbysblog |  But keep in mind that doctors and nurses have been performing "anal" torture duty in the CIA and the military for quite some time. Recall this from Jane Mayer's book The Dark Side:

"A former member of a C.I.A. transport team has described the 'takeout' of prisoners as a carefully choreographed twenty-minute routine, during which a suspect was hog-tied, stripped naked, photographed, hooded, sedated with anal suppositories, placed in diapers, and transported by plane to a secret location. A person involved in the Council of Europe inquiry, referring to cavity searches and the frequent use of suppositories during the takeout of detainees, likened the treatment to 'sodomy.' He said, 'It was used to absolutely strip the detainee of any dignity. It breaks down someone’s sense of impenetrability. The interrogation became a process not just of getting information but of utterly subordinating the detainee through humiliation.' The former C.I.A. officer confirmed that the agency frequently photographed the prisoners naked, 'because it’s demoralizing."

Or this, reported in the New York Times:

None of the approved techniques, however, covered some of what people have now said occurred. Mr. Kahtani was, for example, forcibly given an enema, officials said, which was used because it was uncomfortable and degrading.

Pentagon spokesmen said the procedure was medically necessary because Mr. Kahtani was dehydrated after an especially difficult interrogation session. Another official, told of the use of the enema, said, however, "I bet they said he was dehydrated," adding that that was the justification whenever an enema was used as a coercive technique, as it had been on several detainees.

rule of law: two psychologists received $81 million to run the cia torture program...,

marketwatch |  The Central Intelligence Agency’s torture of detainees was developed by two inexperienced contractors who were eventually paid $81 million for their work, according to a Senate Intelligence Committee report on the program released Tuesday.

The two psychologists were working at the U.S. Air Force Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape school prior to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. They had no knowledge of interrogation techniques, al Qaeda, counterterrorism or “any relevant cultural or linguistic expertise,” the report said.

The report suggests that the program was poorly managed with limited oversight. A surprisingly small number of officials were running the program.

The two contractors played a central role — they developed, operated and assessed its interrogation operations. 

rule of law: useless as the war on drugs except for revealing ugly truths within...,

chicagotribune |  The Senate Intelligence Committee released a 499-page executive summary Tuesday, which includes graphic details about sexual threats and other harsh interrogation techniques the CIA meted out to captured militants in the years after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States.

The report also details how the CIA’s brutal interrogation program lost track of captives, led to false confessions and fabricated information, and produced no useful intelligence about imminent terrorist attacks.

The document, the result of a six-year investigation by Democrats on the committee, concludes that the CIA provided “extensive inaccurate information” to Congress about its interrogation techniques, that CIA management of the program was “inadequate and deeply flawed,” and that the methods were “far more brutal” than the CIA has acknowledged.

rule of law: pardons for patriots?

NYTimes |  BEFORE President George W. Bush left office, a group of conservatives lobbied the White House to grant pardons to the officials who had planned and authorized the United States torture program. My organization, the American Civil Liberties Union, found the proposal repugnant. Along with eight other human rights groups, we sent a letter to Mr. Bush arguing that granting pardons would undermine the rule of law and prevent Americans from learning what had been done in their names.

But with the impending release of the report from the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, I have come to think that President Obama should issue pardons, after all — because it may be the only way to establish, once and for all, that torture is illegal.

That officials at the highest levels of government authorized and ordered torture is not in dispute. Mr. Bush issued a secret order authorizing the C.I.A. to build secret prisons overseas. The C.I.A. requested authority to torture prisoners in those “black sites.” The National Security Council approved the request. And the Justice Department drafted memos providing the brutal program with a veneer of legality.

My organization and others have spent 13 years arguing for accountability for these crimes. We have called for the appointment of a special prosecutor or the establishment of a truth and reconciliation commission, or both. But those calls have gone unheeded. And now, many of those responsible for torture can’t be prosecuted because the statute of limitations has run out.

To his credit, Mr. Obama disavowed torture immediately after he took office, and his Justice Department withdrew the memorandums that had provided the foundation for the torture program. In a speech last year at the National Defense University, Mr. Obama said that “we compromised our basic values — by using torture to interrogate our enemies, and detaining individuals in a way that ran counter to the rule of law.”

But neither he nor the Justice Department has shown any appetite for holding anyone accountable. When the department did conduct an investigation, it appeared not to have interviewed any of the prisoners who were tortured. And it repeatedly abused the “state secrets” privilege to derail cases brought by prisoners — including Americans who were tortured as “enemy combatants.”

What is the difference between this — essentially granting tacit pardons for torture — and formally pardoning those who authorized torture? In both cases, those who tortured avoid accountability.

illegitimacy in team america's world police operations? say it isn't so....,

NYTimes |  “The president believes it is important for us to be as transparent as we possibly can about what exactly transpired, so we can just be clear to the American public and people around the world that something like this should not happen again.”

The administration appeared to have qualms Friday when Secretary of State John Kerry telephoned the Democratic chairwoman of the Intelligence Committee, Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, to warn her about unrest that might erupt because of the report.

The director of national intelligence, James R. Clapper, repeated those warnings in a briefing Saturday with several members of the Intelligence Committee. But Mr. Clapper told the senators that he favored the release of the report, officials said.

Mr. Kerry was not putting pressure on Ms. Feinstein to delay the report, administration officials said, but merely informing her about the latest assessment of the security risks, which at that time included a threat to an American hostage then being held in Yemen. The hostage, Luke Somers, a photographer, was killed by his captors several hours later during a rescue attempt by American commandos.

In addition to tightening security at embassies, the Pentagon will bolster the protection of its forces in Afghanistan, officials said. Intelligence agencies will ramp up their monitoring of the communications of terrorist groups like Al Qaeda and the Islamic State.

Among the administration’s concerns is that terrorist groups will exploit the disclosures in the report for propaganda value. The Islamic State already clads its American hostages in orange jumpsuits, like those worn by prisoners in C.I.A. interrogations. Hostages held by the Islamic State in Syria were subjected to waterboarding, one of the practices used by the C.I.A. to extract information from suspected terrorists.

Mr. Cheney, who was one of the Bush administration’s most outspoken champions of this tough approach, said on Monday he had not read the report, but from news reports about it had heard nothing to change his mind about the wisdom or effectiveness of the program.

“What I keep hearing out there is they portray this as a rogue operation, and the agency was way out of bounds and then they lied about it,” Mr. Cheney said in a telephone interview. “I think that’s all a bunch of hooey. The program was authorized. The agency did not want to proceed without authorization, and it was also reviewed legally by the Justice Department before they undertook the program.”

Mr. Cheney said he never believed the C.I.A. was withholding information from him or the White House about the nature of the program, nor did he think the agency exaggerated the value of the intelligence gained from waterboarding and other techniques widely considered to be torture.

“They deserve a lot of praise,” he said. “As far as I’m concerned, they ought to be decorated, not criticized.”

american overseeing became illegitimate a loooong time ago....,

rollingstone |  He was on the street July 17, selling untaxed cigarettes one at a time — which, as inconsequential as it seems, happens to be a crime.

The press and the people who don't live in these places want you to focus only on the incidents in question. It was technically a crime! Annoying, but he should have complied! His fault for dying – and he was a fat guy with asthma besides!

But the real issue is almost always the hundreds of police interactions that take place before that single spotlight moment, the countless aggravations large and small that pump up the rage gland over time.

Over the last three years, while working on a book about the criminal justice gap that ended up being called The Divide, I spent a lot of time with people like Eric Garner. There's a shabby little courthouse at 346 Broadway in lower Manhattan that's set up as the place you go to be sentenced and fined for the kind of ticket Staten Island cops were probably planning on giving Garner.

I sat in that courtroom over and over again for weeks and listened to the stories. I met one guy, named Andre Finley, who kept showing up to court in an attempt to talk his way into jail as a way out of the $100 fine he'd got for riding a bike on a sidewalk in Bedford-Stuyvesant. He couldn't afford the hundred bucks. It took a year and multiple all-day court visits to clear up.

I met a woman who had to hire a sitter so she could spend all day in court waiting to be fined for drinking wine on her own front porch. And in the case of a Bed-Stuy bus driver named Andrew Brown, it was that old "obstructing traffic" saw: the same "offense" that first flagged Ferguson police to stop Michael Brown. 

In Andrew's case, police thought the sight of two black men standing in front of a project tower at 1 a.m. was suspicious and stopped them. In reality, Andrew was listening to music on headphones with a friend on his way home after a long shift driving a casino shuttle. When he balked at being stopped, just like Garner balked, cops wrote him up for "obstructing" a street completely empty of pedestrians, and the court demanded 50 bucks for his crime.

This policy of constantly badgering people for trifles generates bloodcurdling anger in "hot spot" neighborhoods with industrial efficiency. And then something like the Garner case happens and it all comes into relief. Six armed police officers tackling and killing a man for selling a 75-cent cigarette.

That was economic regulation turned lethal, a situation made all the more ridiculous by the fact that we no longer prosecute the countless serious economic crimes committed in this same city. A ferry ride away from Staten Island, on Wall Street, the pure unmolested freedom to fleece whoever you want is considered the sacred birthright of every rake with a briefcase.

If Lloyd Blankfein or Jamie Dimon had come up with the concept of selling loosies, they'd go to their graves defending it as free economic expression that "creates liquidity" and should never be regulated.

Taking it one step further, if Eric Garner had been selling naked credit default swaps instead of cigarettes – if in other words he'd set up a bookmaking operation in which passersby could bet on whether people made their home mortgage payments or companies paid off their bonds – the police by virtue of a federal law called the Commodity Futures Modernization Act would have been barred from even approaching him.

correctional facilities urban school districts use metal detectors and stop and frisk to welcome students....,

NYTimes |  With a rapid-response team and regular lockdown drills, the school district here, like many across the country, has long been steeling itself for the nightmare scenario of a school shooting.

But over the past two years, a new high-tech approach has been tested at one of the schools here — officials will not say which one — to see whether it is possible to react more effectively.

Engineers from a company called Shooter Detection Systems have installed infrared sensors and microphones that can pick up the sound of gunfire and immediately notify school and law enforcement officials where and when it has occurred. It was installed free of charge, and school officials were hoping they could find the money to put the system, which costs between $20,000 and $100,000, into more schools.

It does not stop the first shot, but company officials say the system can shorten an attack by taking the human element out of alerting the authorities.

“The time it takes for police to even be notified can take many, many minutes,” said Christian Connors, the company’s chief executive. “What our device does is lessen the time.”

But there is debate about whether military-style measures like a gunshot-detection system are as valuable as more prevention-minded methods. Many experts say limited resources may be better spent on mental health services, training for teachers and students on what to do if their peers talk about bringing a gun to school, or on officers trained to keep schools safe.

Officials in this city of about 50,000, on the New Hampshire border, say their district’s five buildings are no more likely than any other to experience a mass shooting, although they do perimeter lockdowns from time to time when there is crime in the area. But Police Chief Joseph Solomon said he nevertheless tried to stay ahead on school safety practices.

“You can’t just look at your location — you have to look at how is the world changing,” Chief Solomon said. “You see a propensity for violence to increase.”

are overseers killing folks like hotcakes and lying about it?

pbs |  HARI SREENIVASAN: The nation’s been focused on Staten Island, Ferguson, and Cleveland in the last few weeks as citizens and law enforcement assess how they have and how they should deal with one another.

This as a new investigation by the The Wall Street Journal reveals that accounting for killings by police might be grossly underestimated.

Wall Street Journal reporter Rob Barry joins us now. So, how did you do your reporting, and what did you find?

ROB BARRY: Thanks for having me. What we did was we asked about 105 departments to give us the number of people who have been killed over a five or six year period.

And we compared those numbers to what had reported to the FBI. And we found that there was a lot of stuff that wasn’t in the FBI’s information.

HARI SREENIVASAN: You said that at least 550 police killings between 2007 and 2012 never made it onto the books?

ROB BARRY: Yeah, and that’s only among the top 105, 110 largest agencies in the country.

So there’s 18,000 jurisdictions. So you know, that’s just a small estimate of the total.

HARI SREENIVASAN: OK, so for example, some jurisdictions could call something a justifiable homicide versus an unjustifiable homicide? Discrepancies in definitions? What do you mean?

ROB BARRY: Yes, it was a wide range of things. That was certainly one of the issues there, that what we’re dealing with here are essentially crime reports.

And agencies who are forced to report information about unfortunate events where officers take someone’s life. They don’t really want to include that in a crime report.

It’s not a crime in their eyes. It was a justifiable event. 

tactical evolution is a two-edged sword: nypd uses military sonic weapon on civil rights 2.0 protesters...,

rawstory |  Shay Horse, an independent photojournalist who was on the scene, posted on the internet that “The NYPD began using it after glass bottles were thrown at them when they made several violent arrests when a march tried to cross Madison Ave.”

One person who was present at the scene, Moth Dust, a photographer, said people became aggravated after the LRAD was used and began throwing trash and rocks in the direction of police. She said she was affected by the sound waves.

“I thought I was fine until I realized I was getting dizzy and migraine was spreading to all over my face,” she said.

LRADs were used in the first days of unrest in Ferguson Missouri, and have been used by police at protests throughout the world. They were developed by the US military after an insurgent attack on the US.S. Cole in Yemen in 2000, and were used by the NYPD against Occupy Wall Street protesters.

According to Radio Free Europe Radio Liberty,

“The LRAD can reach decibel levels as high as 162. For comparison, a normal conversation is usually 60 decibels, while a lawn mower can reach to 90 decibels. A level of 130 decibels is typically considered the average pain threshold for most humans.”

Furthermore, Informed Health Online notes that a jet engine registers at about 140 decibels. Anything at or above this range, IHO explains, “is called acoustic trauma. Depending on how long the ears are exposed to the sound and how intense it is, it may damage the eardrum, the middle ear and/or the inner ear. Damage like this is usually temporary, but some hearing loss may remain.”

The head investor and media relations for the LRAD Corporation in San Diego, California, told Radio Free Europe Radio Liberty that the weapon is so precise that those “standing behind or next to” the device can hardly hear it. However, the YouTube footage shows dozens of people scurrying away from the sound blasts, which can be heard clearly on film.

No coverage of the LRAD use was reported in the mainstream media. Earlier in the night, around 11 PM, CNN correspondent Brooke Baldwin praised the behavior of protesters and the NYPD’s response to the protests, remarking on live television, “This is exactly how it’s supposed to be.”

Noel Leader, a former 20 year sergeant of the NYPD and co-founder of 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement Who Care, was incredulous about the possibility that an LRAD had been used.

“I haven’t heard anything about that,” he told AlterNet. “I’d be surprised if that was the case, because most of the protesters have been nonviolent and peaceful, even though they have been disruptive.

civil rights 2.0: the war on 99% liberties by 1% authoritarianism

theconversation |  Undeniably, African Americans are disproportionately affected by police violence – but it also affects people of all races. Within months of Michael Brown’s death at the hands of the Ferguson police, there were two less publicised cases of excessive police violence against white suspects in the surrounding area: Joseph Jennings, who was shot 16 times outside a Kansas hardware store, and 17-year-old Bryce Masters, who ended up in a coma after a police officer tasered him when he refused to roll down his window after being stopped.

Obama echoed this need to both recognise the racial dynamic driving much of this violence while also the importance of treating it as a national not just “black” or “minority” crisis. He maintained: “The problem is not just a Ferguson problem. It’s an American problem.”

In order to address the problem, we have to confront its deeper causes, ones that certainly involve but are by no means limited to the country’s ongoing structural racism. Rising inequality and poverty, especially in the wake of the financial crisis, have done much to contribute to police brutality. These economic factors have been exacerbated by the growing domination of US politics by elites.

Framing police violence as principally a “black problem” reinforces the underlying notion that African-Americans are somehow separate from other Americans and that authoritarian crackdowns on them are reactive, not active. This plays into an established tactic of strategically highlighting racial divisions within the country to distract attention from other issues such as class polarisation and oligarchy.

Ultimately, this is a way to freeze out solidarity across race, geography and even class, leaving Americans with an identity politics of distrust and conflict.

This strategy is part of the culture of fear that has driven much of the US government’s policy for decades. From the War on Drugs to the War on Terror, chronic and growing issues of unemployment, economic insecurity and declining social welfare are channelled into anger and action against existential “enemies” – most of whom are non-white, or in some way portrayed as less than “American”.

These policy “wars” have been mounted in the service of a growing authoritarianism in contemporary America. The militarisation of the police force, for instance, reflects the government’s need to neutralise urban areas marked by often extreme poverty and violence. Instead of an attack on the economic and social causes of ghettoisation and urban blight, we’ve seen a move away from “community policing” toward what has been called: “The United Police States of America”.

To overcome this strategy, then, it must be tackled as more than just a programme of racism. What must be emphasised is the authoritarianism and deeper shared disenfranchisement that motivates the state violence we see today – a tendency that certainly includes structural racism, but which is by no means limited to it.

In the words Obama used when responding to the Eric Garner case, it must be framed as an “American problem”.