US steps up brutal efforts to break Guantánamo hunger strike

CitizensforLegitGov

Increasingly brutal tactics are being used in an attempt to break the hunger strike by detainees at Guantánamo Bay, according to fresh testimony from the last British resident still held in the camp. Shaker Aamer claims that the US authorities are systematically making the regime more hardline to try to defuse the strike, which now involves almost two-thirds of the detainees. Techniques include making cells "freezing cold" to accentuate the discomfort of those on hunger strike and the introduction of "metal-tipped" feeding tubes, which Aamer said were forced into inmates' stomachs twice a day and caused detainees to vomit over themselves. The 46-year-old from London tells of one detainee who was admitted to hospital 10 days ago after a nurse had pushed the tube into his lungs rather than his stomach, causing him later to cough up blood.

FBI Director says FBI uses drones to spy in US

TheHill

The FBI uses drones to watch specific targets within the United States, the bureau’s chief said Wednesday.

FBI Director Robert Mueller told senators the agency uses drones infrequently for surveillance in the U.S., and only in regards to specific investigations.  

“Our footprint is very small,” Mueller said in testimony. “We have very few and have limited use.”

Mueller said the FBI was in “the initial stages” of developing privacy guidelines for how the agency balances civil liberty concerns with security threats.

Mueller made the revelation before the Senate Judiciary Committee after being questioned by the panel’s ranking member, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa). The news comes amid a debate over National Security Agency programs used to collect U.S. phone records and overseas Internet data.  

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), the chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, told Mueller that she believes drones are the most dangerous threat to the privacy of Americans, particularly the use of drones by private companies.

Mueller sought to assure Feinstein that the FBI’s use of drones was “very seldom” and only used in isolated instances.

“It’s very seldom used and generally used in a particular incident where you need the capability,” said Mueller.

“It is very narrowly focused on particularized needs in particularized cases, and that is the principle of privacy limitations we have.”

Mueller said he wasn’t certain whether the FBI had any official agreements with other agencies — such as the Department of Defense or the Department of Homeland Security — to receive assistance in the agency’s use of drones.

“To the extent that it relates to the air space there would be some communication back and forth [between agencies],” Mueller said.

Mueller’s acknowledgment Wednesday comes in the wake of a series of escalating tensions between the Obama administration and Congress over the broad use of drones, both domestically and overseas.

While Mueller told lawmakers that the FBI uses drones domestically only for surveillance purposes, members have had growing concerns over the use of armed drones.

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) made headlines in the lead-up to CIA Director John Brennan’s confirmation earlier this year when he delivered a 13-hour talking filibuster aimed at delaying the vote until the administration told him that it could not legally kill U.S. citizens on American soil using a drone strike, which Attorney General Eric Holder ultimately did.

Read more: http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/306503-mueller-fbi-uses-drones-in-us-for-limited-surveillance#ixzz2X1b7peGR 

 

The Lies of Empire: Don’t Believe a Word They Say

4th Media

The U.S. reprises Iraq, inventing a WMD threat from Syria. The FBI concocts home-grown terror through stings, while the NSA claims it has secretly saved many lives. “Why this steady stream of government-invented terror, if the real thing is so abundant?” And, isn’t the U.S. arming and funding the same jihadists they are supposed to be listening for on our telephones?

The rulers would have you believe that the world is becoming more complex and dangerous all the time, compelling the United States to abandon previous (and largely fictional) norms of domestic and international legality in order to preserve civilization.

In truth, what they are desperately seeking to maintain is the global dominance of U.S. and European finance capital and the racist world order from which it sprang.

The contradictions of centuries have ripened, overwhelming the capacity of the “West” to contain the new forces abroad in the world. Therefore, there must be endless, unconstrained war – endless, in the sense that it is a last ditch battle to fend off the end of imperialism, and unconstrained, in that the imperialists recognize no legal or moral boundaries to their use of military force, their only remaining advantage.

To mask these simple truths, the U.S. and its corporate propaganda services invent counter-realities, scenarios of impending doomsdays filled with super-villains and more armies of darkness than J.R.R. Tolkien could ever imagine.

Indeed, nothing is left to the imagination, lest the people’s minds wander into the realm of truth or stumble upon a realization of their own self-interest, which is quite different than the destinies of Wall Street or the Project for a New American Century (updated, Obama “humanitarian” version). It is a war of caricatures.

Saddam “must go” – and so he went, along with a million other Iraqis. Gaddafi “must go” – and he soon departed (“We came, we saw, he died,” quipped Hillary), along with tens of thousands of Black Libyans marked for extermination. “Assad must go” – but he hasn’t left yet, requiring the U.S. and its allies to increase the arms flow to jihadist armies whose mottos translate roughly as “the western infidels must also go…next.”

Afghanistan’s Soviet-aligned government was the first on the U.S. “must go” list to be toppled by the jihadist international network created as a joint venture of the Americans, Saudis and Pakistanis, in the early Eighties – a network whose very existence now requires that Constitutional law “must go” in the American homeland.

Naturally, in order to facilitate all these exits of governments of sovereign states, international law, as we have known it “must go.” In its place is substituted the doctrine of “humanitarian” military intervention or “Responsibility to Protect” (R2P), a rehash of the “White Man’s Burden” designed to nullify smaller powers’ rights to national sovereignty at the whim of the superpower. [MORE

Chomsky: Obama “dedicated to increasing terrorism” throughout the world

Mediate 

Continuing his streak of fiercely criticizing President Obama’s foreign policy and civil liberties record, pre-eminent left-wing scholar Noam Chomsky told GRITtv that this administration is “dedicated to increasing terrorism” throughout the world via its own “terrorist” drone strikes in foreign lands.

Speaking with GRITtv host Laura Flanders about the National Security Agency snooping scandal, Chomsky remarked that “the Obama administration is dedicated to increasing terrorism; it’s doing it all over the world.”

He continued: “Obama is running the biggest terrorist operation that exists, maybe in history: the drone assassination campaigns, which are just part of it [...] All of these operations, they are terror operations.” Drone strikes are “terror” because, Chomsky said, the attacks have the effect of “terrorizing” locals.”

“You are generating more terrorist operations,” Chomsky pointedly said. “People have a reaction” when they lose a loved one to an American drone strike, he added. “They don’t say, ‘Fine, I don’t care if my cousin was murdered.’ They become what we call terrorists. This is completely understood from the highest level.”

4th Media

Experts agrees that indiscriminate drone strikes are war crimes (more here andhere).

The U.S. is not only killing people whose identity it doesn’t even know (more), but it is also  killing children.  And it is using the justifiably-vilified Al Qaeda tactic of killing people attending funerals of those killed – and targeting people attempting to rescue people who have been injured by – ourprevious strikes.

Chomsky has previously extensively documented U.S. terrorism.  As Wikipedia notes:

Chomsky and Herman observed that terror was concentrated in the U.S. sphere of influence in the Third World, and documented terror carried out by U.S. client states in Latin America. They observed that of ten Latin American countries that had death squads, all were U.S. client states.

***

They concluded that the global rise in state terror was a result of U.S. foreign policy.

***

In 1991, a book edited by Alexander L. George [the Graham H. Stuart Professor of Political Science Emeritus at Stanford University] also argued that other Western powers sponsored terror in Third World countries. It concluded that the U.S. and its allies were the main supporters of terrorism throughout the world.

Indeed, the U.S. has created death squads in Latin America, Iraq and Syria.

Popular Seattle Teacher Forced Out for Teaching Kids About Racism

Yahoo

As a senior at Seattle’s Center School, an alternative arts intensive public high school with a stellar academic performance record, Zak Meyer was thrilled to land a spot in Jon Greenberg’s “Citizenship and Social Justice” class.  

Space in Greenberg’s popular humanities class is coveted. Hundreds of current and former pupils credit the teacher with creating a curriculum that is “life-changing,” “highly transformative,” and “a highlight of lots of students’ time at the school.”

It turned out to be everything Meyer had hoped for.  

“We’ve been diving into stuff that I will be dealing with in my freshman year of college, and getting deeply into issues of our society,” Meyer told the Seattle Post Intelligencer. “I am a minority in that I have a disability. The course preaches tolerance of all backgrounds. It opens the world to me, not just from my point of view but in understanding the views of others...”

Students study speeches by Dr. Martin Luther King and Malcolm X and invite local community leaders to speak in the class. They are prompted to talk honestly about racism, class disparity, and privilege in their day to day lives at the start of every session. Assignments include analyzing “the way media and society fetishize both women and people of color.”

But the provocative discussions that Meyer found so revelatory abruptly ended a few months ago when a female white student accused the teacher of creating an “intimidating educational environment.”

The Seattle School Board agreed and decided to transfer Greenberg to another school next year. The board also banned future use of the Courageous Conversations teaching method employed by Greenberg to address issues of race and gender.

The structure of the curriculum has been an integral part of Greenberg’s class for the last decade.

District officials have revealed little about the nature of the complaint. The parents who filed the grievance against Greenberg have remained silent about what their daughter found offensive.

Seattle Schools Superintendent Jose Banda said, moving forward, parents need to be told ahead of time if a classroom activity could cause “a high degree of emotion for students or potential distress.”

A statement released by the district said: “Seattle Public Schools strongly believes that race and social justice should be taught in our schools. These are important conversations for our students and staff. But we don’t want to put any child into a situation where he or she feels so intimidated by the manner in which these issues are being taught that the course is no longer effective.”

 

Parents and students have rallied around Greenberg and the Courageous Conversations element of the curriculum. Last week, hundreds of Greenberg supporters protested a school board meeting, spoke on his behalf, and called on the board to reverse their decision to transfer Greenberg. Their efforts were not successful.

“Of course, it makes people uncomfortable. The class would talk about ‘white privilege.’ I felt uncomfortable, because I did not know the extent of it,” Meyer said to the Seattle Post Intelligencer‎. Now that he’s taken the class, he said, he’s become aware of the unintentional racism that exists against minorities.

Classmate Rachel Livengood, who is also white, added, “The discomfort was with ourselves, not with the class . . . Experiencing discomfort is normal.”

Indeed, conversations about race, discrimination and social injustice are touchy and difficult. National conferences, summits, and graduate schools of education devote massive resources to finding the best strategies for addressing these issues with students.

The fact that we come to the conversation with diverse racial realities and experiences causes us discomfort.

The Courageous Conversations curriculum developed by Glenn Singleton invites teachers and students to deliberately push beyond polite conversation in order to get to the heart of controversial and often incendiary issues dealing with social inequities.

“An indication that we are engaging in an authentic conversation about race is when people can share their racial truths derived from multiple perspectives,” Singleton said. “The fact that we come to the conversation with diverse racial realities and experiences causes us discomfort.”

This is due in part to the fact that many believe racism no longer exists, according to Singleton.

“Others struggle because they see and/or experience racism on a daily basis, and know that it can create great pain and limit opportunities.”

Teachers at the Center School are concerned that the school board’s disapproval of the Courageous Conversations engagement tactics will have a chilling effect throughout the school district.

Doug Edelstein, a teacher at another Seattle public high school says he worries how it will affect discussions about other controversial topics.

“That it will create a chilling effect is an understatement,” Edelstein told The Seattle Times. “Student discomfort will become the arbiter of curriculum.”

In a keynote address at the National Conference on Race and Ethnicity in American Higher Education, Melissa Harris-Perry, a political science professor at Tulane University, advised educators to get out of the classroom to teach students about race.

"Race talk often works better when it's associated with race walks. It's not just talking, but actually doing things," Harris-Perry said. "Students want to think about solutions to the problem."

In 2006 Harris-Perry took a class of Princeton University freshman to help gut homes in post-Katrina New Orleans. She said the experience radicalized them and was probably the most valuable experience of the semester.

“It was for students of such privilege an insight into the definition of what inequality is."

 

Building long-term partnerships between students and their communities and allowing community members to do most of the talking is key to teaching about race, said Harris-Perry.

Research shows that the earlier adults and family members help young children begin understanding the realities of race, the better they are at negotiating this phenomenon as they grow older.

Singleton says children notice racial differences and begin asking questions quite early.  That is why it is imperative for schools to “intervene and create safe spaces for children to process.”

“We have to answer their questions in such a way that it does not create for them a feeling that they shouldn't be asking about skin color, or that race is somehow taboo or a problem.”

The Battle of Chicago Teachers Union Vs. Out-of-Town Billionaires

CitizensforLegitGov

In a recently released video, Chicago Teachers Union shows the games played by wealthy elites to smear the Union in the midst of heated contract negotiations. Chicago Teachers Union has maintained that it will not bargain in the press over a fair contract, but associates of Mayor Rahm Emanuel have apparently used backroom deals in Springfield, paid protesters and even members of the Michigan Tea Party to distort the public's image of the Union. The video, "Astroturf Billionaires Vs. The Chicago Teachers Union" shows all of these tricks in graphic detail.

EEOC Lawsuit: BMW and Dollar General's Background Checks Discriminate Against Black Workers

ColorLines

Today the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission filed lawsuits against two companies, BMW and Dollar General, for allegedly discriminating against workers and job applicants who'd had interactions with the criminal justice system. The EEOC lawsuits charge that both companies' practices had a disparate impact on black workers. 

Dollar General, the nation's largest small-box discount retailer, makes job offers contingent on applicants' first clearing a criminal background check. One worker filed a complaint with the EEOC after she was fired because of a felony which showed up erroneously in a convictions report on her. Even when she cleared her name with the company they would not give her back her job, EEOC says.

And a BMW manufacturing facility in South Carolina kept an exclusionary policy which barred employees and employees of subcontractors from entering a facility if they had certain criminal convictions, EEOC says. They held onto the policy when it came time to transition workers from a phased-out contractor, even though those workers had already cleared the contractor's background checks. Workers, even longtime employees, who didn't clear the new checks lost their jobs and could not get them back, according to the EEOC.

NYPD Detective Indicted for Hacking Email

FBI

Preet Bharara, the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, and George Venizelos, the Assistant Director in Charge of the New York Office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), announced today the arrest of Edwin Vargas, a detective with the New York City Police Department (NYPD), for computer hacking crimes. Vargas was arrested this morning outside his residence in Bronxville, New York, and will be presented in Manhattan federal court later today before U.S. Magistrate Judge Sarah Netburn.

Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara said, “As alleged, Detective Edwin Vargas paid thousands of dollars for the ability to illegally invade the privacy of his fellow officers and others. He is also alleged to have illegally obtained information about two officers from a federal database to which he had access based on his status as an NYPD detective. When law enforcement officers break the laws they are sworn to uphold, they do a disservice to their fellow officers, to the department, and to the public they serve, and it will not be tolerated.”

FBI Assistant Director in Charge George Venizelos said,  “As alleged, the defendant illegally acquired log-in information for the e-mail accounts of dozens of people, including police department co-workers. Of all places, the police department is not a workplace where one should have to be concerned about an unscrupulous fellow employee. Unlike the e-mail accounts, the defendant didn’t need to pay anyone to gain access to the NCIC database. But access is not authorization, and he had no authorization.”

According to the complaint unsealed today in Manhattan federal court:

E-mail hacking services have the ability to gain unauthorized access to any e-mail account in exchange for a fee. Between March 2011 and October 2012, Vargas, an NYPD detective assigned to a precinct in the Bronx, hired an e-mail hacking service to obtain log-in credentials, such as the password and username, for certain e-mail accounts. In total, Vargas purchased at least 43 personal e-mail accounts and one cellular phone belonging to at least 30 different individuals, including 21 who are affiliated with the NYPD; of those 21, 19 are current NYPD officers, one is a retired NYPD officer, and one is on the NYPD’s administrative staff.

After receiving the log-in credentials he had purchased from the e-mail hacking services, Vargas accessed at least one personal e-mail account belonging to a current NYPD officer. He also accessed an online cellular telephone account belonging to another victim. Vargas paid a total of more than $4,000 to entities associated with the e-mail hacking services.

An examination of the contents of the hard drive from Vargas’ NYPD computer revealed, among other things, that the Contacts section of his Gmail account included a list of at least 20 e-mail addresses, along with what appear to be telephone numbers, home addresses, and vehicle information corresponding to those e-mail addresses, as well as what appear to be the passwords for those e-mail addresses.

Vargas also accessed the National Crime Information Center (NCIC) database, a federal database, to obtain information about at least two NYPD officers without authorization.

The e-mail accounts of those two officers were among the e-mail accounts Vargas paid the e-mail hacking services to hack into so he could obtain log-in credentials.

* * *

Vargas, 42, of Bronxville, New York, is charged with one count of conspiracy to commit computer hacking and one count of computer hacking. Each count carries a maximum sentence of one year in prison.

Mr. Bharara praised the investigative work of the FBI. He also thanked the NYPD and its Internal Affairs Bureau for their cooperation and assistance in the investigation.

The prosecution of this case is being handled by the Office’s Complex Frauds Unit. Assistant United States Attorney Rosemary Nidiry is in charge of the prosecution.

The charges contained in the complaint are merely accusations, and the defendant is presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty

What an IP Address Can Reveal About You

Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada 

 IP Address - General remarks on IP address functionality

Knowledge of an IP address allows a searcher to obtain other information about a network, device or service. Specifically, one can:

  • determine who owns and operates the network. Searching the WHOIS database using an IP address can provide a range of information about the individual4 (which could, in turn, reveal organizational affiliations) or organization to which the address is assigned, including a name, phone number, and civic address5;

  • perform a reverse lookup (the resolution of
    an IP address to its associated domain name) to obtain a computer name6, which often contains clues to logical and physical location;

  • conduct a traceroute (a computer diagnostic tool for displaying the route (path) of packets across an IP network) to find the logical path to the computer, which often contains clues to logical and physical location;

  • determine the geolocation of the computer, with varying degrees of accuracy. Depending on the lookup tool used7, this could include country, region/state, city, latitude/longitude, telephone area code and a location- specific map;

  • search the Internet using the IP address or computer names. The results of these searches might reveal peer-to-peer (P2P) activities (e.g., file sharing), records in web server log files, or glimpses of the individual's web activities (e.g., Wikipedia edits). These bits of individuals’ online history may reveal their political inclinations, state of health, sexuality, religious sentiments and a range of other personal characteristics, preoccupations and individual interests; and/or

  • seek information on any e-mail addresses used from a particular IP address which, in turn, could be the subject of further requests for subscriber information.

    According to Electronic Frontier Canada8, even non-commercial Internet activity, such as reading documents on web pages, invariably requires the transmission of IP address information that can identify what one reads online.

What we found ...

To illustrate the process, a simple test was conducted using, as a starting point, the IP address of the web proxy of the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada.

A WHOIS lookup revealed that the IP address was assigned to Public Works and Government Services (PWGSC), with an address of 350 KEDC (this is the King Edward Avenue Data Centre), Ottawa, ON, K1A 0S5. The technical point of contact is listed in this entry, including full name, email address, and phone number.

Using the IP address as a search term yielded more than 240 ”hits.” The results revealed that individuals working behind the IP address had visited sites dealing with, for example:

  • search engine optimization training;

  • Canada's advertising and marketing community;

  • web governance;

  • identity management;

  • privacy issues;

  • legal advice related to insurance law and personal injury litigation;

  • a specific religious group;

  • fitness;

  • online photo sharing;

  • the revision history of a Wikipedia entry; and

  • specific entertainers which, in turn, exposed a variety of usernames.

    3. IP Address - Information about individuals

    It should be noted that the above information was based on the online activity of a group of computers, not an individual work station. Having said that, the process used to derive these results applies equally well to the case of a residential subscriber. The specific information that can be retrieved however depends on how active the subscriber is online and how the websites he/she visits treat IP addresses (i.e., do they expose them to indexing by search engines).

    To show what an IP address can unlock about an individual, a similar analysis was undertaken using IP addresses more representative of an individual subscriber.

6

What we found ...

Starting with people who were active contributors to Wikipedia, we found that conducting searches using the IP address shown by this site often reveals a detailed profile of an individual's activities.

For example, the IP address of one individual Wikipedia contributor9 revealed that the person has:

  • Edited hundreds of pages on Wikipedia about television shows, both North American and international. The interest in TV shows was extensive and specific, but the details are not included here for privacy reasons;

  • Edited dozens of pages on Wikipedia related to history topics;

  • Participated in a discussion board about a television channel; and

  • Visited a site devoted to sexual

    preferences following an online search for a specific type of person. [MORE

The Difficulties Of Proving Racial Targeting when Ignoring the Operating System of White Supremacy

NPR

Closing arguments have wrapped up in a lawsuit challenging the New York Police Department's stop-and-frisk policy. Plaintiffs say the majority of the stops involved black and Hispanic men. But New York City says there's no racial motivation whatsoever. Host Michel Martin asks the tricky question: how exactly do you prove racial profiling?

[That is, how do you do this while ignoring that white supremacy is the cause for racial targeting?

Smoking gun evidence such as racial slurs, white kkk hoods and pronouncements by the police such as, "I'm assaulting you because you are Black" is what the court is looking for. The court's fake search for tangible evidence from the mind of a bigoted decision maker ignores white supremacy as an operating system of oppression- the Court's inquiry is done only for show and will rarely result in justice for the victims of white supremacy.This is the refinement of white supremacy. Like the scripted white folks you see on TV everyday interacting with non-whites. There is no white supremacy on TV - except in Kung Fu flicks!  TV is not real, it is a mind shampoo. In reality, you should presume that all white people you encounter are racist and expect white supremacy/racism from all of them. If they are not racist then be pleasantly surprised. bw] 

MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:

I'm Michel Martin, and this is TELL ME MORE, from NPR News. We'd like to start today by mentioning that, as you would imagine, NPR is continuing to follow developments concerning that deadly tornado that struck Oklahoma yesterday. We hope you will stay tuned to your public radio station or check our website, npr.org, for the latest updates.

Now, though, we are going to turn to the debate about balancing safety and civil liberties in New York City. On Monday, closing arguments were heard in a federal court challenge to the New York City Police Department's stop-and-frisk policy. For years, civil rights groups have accused the department of racial profiling and point to data that 87 percent of the stops last year were of black and Hispanic people.

But city officials, including New York City's Mayor Michael Bloomberg, continue to defend stop-and-frisk.

(SOUNDBITE OF SPEECH)

MAYOR MICHAEL BLOOMBERG: I can't imagine any rational person saying that the techniques are not working and that we should stop them.

MARTIN: We wanted to talk more about the whole question of racial profiling, in this case and more broadly. So we're joined now by two law professors who have been following this issue for decades. David Harris is professor of law and a distinguished faculty scholar at the University of Pittsburgh. Professor Harris, thank you so much for joining us.

DAVID HARRIS: It's good to be with you, Michel.

MARTIN: Thank you. And Delores Jones-Brown is a professor in the department of law and police science at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York. Professor Jones-Brown, thank you so much for joining us.

DELORES JONES-BROWN: Thank you for having me.

MARTIN: For people who have not been following these events in New York City, why is it that this policy in New York City has come under such intense scrutiny from so many people for so many years?

JONES-BROWN: Well, there are two primary issues. One is that 87 percent of those stops involve black and Latino persons, and almost 90 percent of those stops are people who are innocent, as opposed to who are found to be involved in criminality. There is the suggestion that the stops are for the purpose of finding guns. However, in 98.8 percent of all cases, no guns are found.

MARTIN: Professor Harris, if you'd pick up the thread there.

HARRIS: Sure. It is legal for police officers to do this, as long as there is reasonable suspicion. But it became a tactic that looks like it was over-relied on to the point that people felt this was not a tactic being done for them to provide greater public safety, but being done to the them, and the people subjected to this in an outsized way were overwhelmingly people of color.

MARTIN: Professor Jones-Brown, I mean, the plaintiffs in the case presented a secret recording of a police leader who told officers explicitly that black males 14 to 21 were the right people to stop. What's the city's response to this specific kind of evidence that says that these particular people were targeted because of their race?

JONES-BROWN: The city seems to support the notion - you may know that the commissioner was on "Nightline" the other evening suggesting that blacks are being under-stopped under this policy, because 75 percent of violent crime perpetrators are described as African-American males, while only 56 percent of folks who are stopped are black.

So black and Latino males between the ages of 14 and 21, or 14 and 24 are believed by the commissioner to be the crime problem in the city. No differentiation is being made between those who are law-abiding and those who are not. In addition to the recording that you spoke of, Senator Eric Adams testified that the commissioner said to him in front of then-Governor Paterson that, yes, stop-and-frisk focuses on black and Latino males because they want to instill fear in those males.

And when the commissioner was questioned about whether he thought that was, you know, fair or valid, he said: How else are we going to get guns off the street?

MARTIN: That's actually what I was going to ask you, though. If you're just - and if you're just joining us, we're talking about a case involving New York City's stop-and-frisk policy. That case is being challenged in federal court, and closing arguments were heard on Monday. We're talking about this with law professors Delores Jones-Brown and David Harris, who have been following the issue closely through the years.

But, Professor Harris, I mean, again, what's the answer to the argument that if that is indeed the group of people where crime is most present, then that's the appropriate group of people to subject to this level of scrutiny? What's the answer to that?

HARRIS: The answer to that is that targeting them based on their racial or ethnic appearance is not a successful crime-fighting strategy, despite what the commissioner and the mayor seem to believe. What they say is, see? It's working. By this method, they say, of instilling fear in people, we don't want people to carry their guns. That's why we do this.

So they win either way. Targeting people based on race or ethnicity has never been shown - not in New York, not in anywhere else where this has been statistically tracked - to be the successful way to get guns, to get drugs, to get bad guys. Because what you do is you force people overall to pay an enormous cost across an entire racial or ethnic group for the actions of a very few people.

And it also leaves out the fact that you could certainly use other methods, as other cities do, to force crime down that don't rely on this kind of very aggressive stop-and-frisk activity that embarrasses and humiliates, and most importantly, drives people away from police. It gives them the idea that the police are their enemy. So what they are doing is they are simply saying it works because we know it works. Look at the results. And, of course, heads I win, tails you lose.

MARTIN: Professor Delores Jones-Brown, you're in New York. Why do you believe that the city officials are so vigorously defending this policy?

JONES-BROWN: I think part of it is in the investment in the stereotype, that if the commissioner actually believes that the crime problem in the city and the mayor believes that the crime problem in the city are black and Latino folks, then they can't move off of that belief. The other notion is if they were - they believe that if they were to change tactics now - in 2012, we now have data that stops were reduced by 22 percent and crime did not go up.

We also have data from the first quarter of 2013, where stops are down again and crime has not gone up. And so it's a really good question that you ask. Given this information, why isn't the mayor or the police commissioner changing position some to at least recognize we can reduce the number of stops without jeopardizing the public safety?

MARTIN: Professor Harris, you have any final thought here?

HARRIS: It just points out the fact that they can do the same kind of crime reduction with a much lesser degree of this very intensive stop-and-frisk activity. Stop-and-frisk is legal. It's done in every city, as long as there is reasonable suspicion. There's no reason that police can't do it. What we don't want to have is this kind of overreliance on one tactic that takes an incredible chunk out of the cooperation and the partnership that you need to have between police and the people they serve.

MARTIN: Professor Jones-Brown, before we let you go...

JONES-BROWN: Mm-hmm.

MARTIN: ...both of you are critics of the policy. Both of you clearly believe that the policy has kind of passed the point of being constructive, to the point where it's destructive to the social fabric. Apart from the city officials who are defending it, what do people think about it in the city overall?

JONES-BROWN: People are confused. There are members of the communities of color who have accepted the notion that this is what they need to be safe in their community. And I think it's a sad position, because those folks don't accept the fact that they have as much a right to be able to walk to the store to get that quart of milk without getting stopped, as if they lived in a different community. And so that's problematic.

So communities are divided over whether they support or they oppose stop-and-frisk. There are other policing tactics - something called hot spots policing - that's being used by the NYPD that doesn't necessarily involve stop-and-frisk that researchers have found have, in fact, contributed to the crime reduction in the city. So one of my suggestions recently has been to do more of that, and less of stop-and-frisk, because we can see a direct causal or relationship between that kind of a practice, hot spots policing or something else where we focus on the few dangerous people that can be identified individually and remove those people from the street while leaving the law abiding people alone.

MARTIN: I just think a lot of people listening to our conversation will not understand what is wrong with what the police are doing. I mean the police - I think pretty much anywhere in the country, I think most people would agree, if they see something suspicious, then I think most people would believe that the police should stop and intervene in whatever is going on. So what is it that in your view the New York City Police Department is doing wrong?

JONES-BROWN: In my view, the department is engaging in something I call appearance profiling, and so if they see a young black or Latino male in certain types of clothing, like a hoodie or sagging pants and they appear to be seen between certain ages, they automatically suspect them, but there's nothing criminal about being young, being black, being Latino, being male and wearing saggy pants or a hooded sweatshirt or wearing particular colors that the police assume are gang-related.

And so it is the way in which people are not allowed to walk on the street without being suspected simply because of how they appear. It's not even their behavior, because the majority of stops are based on something called furtive movement. It's a very ambiguous term that New Jersey has almost outlawed as a reason for a reasonable suspicion or a reasonable stop. But it is, more than 50 percent of the time, cited as a reason why a police officer, in combination with other factors, has stopped a person on the street in the city of New York.

And so the notion is that you should not be suspicious simply based on what you look like, simply for where you're standing or walking. The notion of high crime area is often cited, but people live in an area because that's where they can afford to live, and so everyone who lives in a high crime area should not automatically be suspected of being criminal, and in fact the crime statistics in this city indicate that not everyone, and in fact a very small number of folks who live in high crime or low crime areas, are involved in serious violent offending, and the rhetoric around Stop and Frisk doesn't make that point clear.

MARTIN: Delores Jones-Brown is a professor in the department of law and police science at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York. She was with us from our bureau in New York. David Harris is professor of law and a distinguished faculty scholar at the University of Pittsburgh. He joined us from member station WESA in Pittsburgh.

Thank you both so much for speaking with us.

JONES-BROWN: Thank you for having us.

HARRIS: It was a pleasure.

MARTIN: Needless to say, there are other perspectives about Stop and Frisk. Tomorrow we expect to hear from Paul Brown, the deputy commissioner of the NYPD. We'd also like to hear from you. We'd like to hear if you have an experience with Stop and Frisk, either as a person who's been stopped, as a bystander or as a law enforcement officer. Send us a tweet using hash tag #TMMFrisk.

A million Israeli landmines planted in occupied Palestinian West Bank

BlackListedNews

About a million landmines have been planted by the Israeli occupation in occupied Palestinian West Bank, official Palestinian data has shown.

The Commissioner General of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation in Washington, Maan Erekat, said: "The number of Israeli landmines planted is between 800,000 to a million."

During his meeting with UN and NGO officials in New York on Wednesday, Erekat said: "This significant number of landmines poses great direct danger to the safety and security of Palestinian citizens." He discussed efforts with the officials he met to remove these landmines.

Erekat reiterated the importance of "continuing the efforts being exerted by the UN and NGO in cooperation with Palestinian parties to remove the landmines planted around the occupied West Bank."

Obama Expands Militarization of Police

BlackListedNews

Men in heavy armor carry assault rifles, patrolling streets alongside armored personnel carriers. These are scenes from the manhunt in Watertown, following April 15′s Boston Marathon Bombings. After locking down the area, local, state, and federal agencies sent SWAT teams out in force in search of the remaining suspect. The images from those days are striking, and raise serious questions about how and when the use of paramilitary policing tools should be used.

SWAT teams originated in the late 1960s, but their use greatly expanded in the 1980s as the Reagan administration doubled down on the drug war. In 1988 the Byrne Grant Program passed Congress, allocating substantial funding for anti-drug policing. As money was awarded for drug arrests, resources shifted toward drug raids, increasingly using SWAT teams for this purpose. Meanwhile federal programs were introduced increasing training and cooperation between the military and domestic law enforcement to battle drug crime.

Other Reagan-era policies encouraged the transfer of surplus military hardware to law enforcement, which in the 1990s became firmly established by the Clinton Administration’s 1033 Program, incorporating millions of pieces of equipment designed for war zones into domestic policing agencies.

Obama asks Congress to establish special court or board to authorise legal drone action

CitizensforLegitGov

Proposals to vet future US drone strikes risk creating "kill courts" according to human rights campaigners who say Barack Obama's promise of new legal oversight does not go far enough to end what they regard as extrajudicial executions. The president has asked Congress to consider establishing a special court or oversight board to authorise lethal action outside warzones under a new counter-terrorism doctrine which he says will end the "boundless war on terror". But responses to his speech from leading campaign groups, though broadly welcoming, highlight how little change Obama is proposing to the underlying principle that the US has a legal right to kill suspected terrorists abroad without trial.

John Kerry defends US use of assassination drones

ColorLines

US Secretary of State John Kerry has defended Washington’s use of assassination drones, which has already led to massive civilian casualties in different countries around the world. During a trip to the Ethiopian capital city of Addis Ababa on Sunday, Kerry said the drones were needed to hunt down "terrorists" and that each attack was carried out after "a great deal of vetting." He also said the drone program was one of the most "accountable" of programs.

Racially Segregated 'Black-Only Pods' in Florida County Jail

ColorLines

U.S. Department of Justice investigators found a number of unconstitutional practices at the Escambia County Jail facility in northwest Florida that "constitute serious risks to prisoner safety," according to the Justice Department's findings letter. Among those problems were insufficient access to mental healthcare for the inmates, and racial segregation of black prisoners. Said the U.S. Department of Justice in a release:

Specifically, the department concluded that known systemic deficiencies at the facility, stemming mainly from staffing shortages, continue to subject prisoners to excessive risk of assault by other prisoners and to inadequate mental health care. Additionally, the department found that until recently, the jail had an informal policy and practice of designating some of its housing units as only for African-American prisoners. By segregating some of its prisoners on the basis of race, the jail not only stigmatized and discriminated against many of its African-American prisoners, it also fanned combustible racial tensions within the jail.

The racial segregation of black inmates into "black-only pods" had been occurring for decades. Justice officials first discovered the practice in October last year during a tour. They warned Escambia County Jail officials then that this was a breach of 14th Amendment equal protection rights. According to the findings letter, "For decades, the Jail's officials have assumed that segregating on the basis of race would lead to a safer facility."

Deputy Assistant Attorney General Roy Austin, Jr., who wrote the findings letter, said such assumptions were "unproven and untethered to data" and "insufficient to justify an explicit racial classification."

Escambia County's population is 23.1 percent African-American, and 70 percent white. The county jail has 1,442 prisoners, 65 percent of whom are black and 35 percent white.

A new sheriff for Escambia, David Morgan, told the Justice Department this past April that the segregation had stopped but Austin wrote that the Justice Department "will want to ensure that any agreement we reach with the Jail completely and permanently eliminates racially segregated housing units." Their investigation concluded that "the practice of segregating on the basis of race has compromised security by exacerbating racial tensions within the Facility."

Escambia County is 23.1 percent African-American, and 70 percent white.

Other Justice Department findings:

  • Prisoner-on-prisoner assaults are a common occurrence, owed to a shortage of correctional staff, resulting in serious harm to prisoners
  • The jail does not provide timely and adequate access to appropriately skilled mental health care professionals
  • The jail routinely fails to provide appropriate medications to prisoners with mental illness
  • The jail provides inadequate housing and observation for prisoners with serious mental illness who are at risk for self injury or suicide

Austin wrote that these are all violations of the 14th amendment and the 8th amendment, which protects those convicted of criminal offenses.

Was Violent Felon Ban on Food Stamps Accepted With False Data?

ColorLines

When Democrats and Republicans unanimously accepted Sen. David Vitter's amendment (#1056) that would ban violent felons from receiving food stamps during a Senate debate earlier this week, that proposal may have been launched from poor facts.

In Sen. Vitter's press release about the amendment, he exclusively cites a report from Louisiana's legislative auditor's report to justify his amendment. For Vitter's focus on those convicted of violent felonies, you'd think there was some information about the abundance of felons using food stamps. Quite the contrary, there's not a single word in the report about violent felons.

Vitter's press release doesn't mention anything from the report on felons abusing food stamps either. He does point to other fraud the auditor found:

The audit covered the fiscal years from 2010 to 2012 and found that there were duplicate and overpayments of millions. The results show that more than $1.1 million was issued to 1,761 people who were in prison, 322 people gained benefits even though their wages exceeded $50,000, and 3,060 people used $2 million worth of benefits in a state other than Louisiana.

Few things here: One, that same report noted that 1,157 cases that resulted in $841,615 in overpayments happened because of state agency errors -- mistakes "such as a caseworker entering incorrect income amounts or failing to remove an ineligible member from the case."

That may seem like a big deal, but consider those are totals for 2010 and 2011. Total SNAP benefits in those years totaled $2.5 billion in Louisiana. $840,000 in overpayments from $2.5 billion is rather minute. What this has to do with former incarcerated citizens with violent felonies is unclear.

Not to mention, Louisiana has one of the lowest overpayment rates in the nation -- of all the states last year they ranked fourth in low overpayment error rates, and had the second highest improvement among all the states.

This improvement happened while the state's administrative burdens increased. From 2008 to 2012 the workload for SNAP administrative increased 76 percent -- 259,770 cases to 380,011 cases -- mostly because of the economic recession. Meanwhile, staffing at the state's SNAP offices decreased from 1,315 to 1,090 caseworkers.

But the number of erroneous cases alone might explain some of the questionable findings in the auditor's report, such as prison inmates using food stamps (How exactly does that work?).

As for the 3,060 who spent $2 billion in SNAP benefits in other states, Vitter fails to mention that this is legal. SNAP beneficiaries receive their food allocations by their resident state, but those can be used anywhere in the United States. That this might indicate fraud is purely speculative.

Fraud isn't a major problem in the SNAP program at large. According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, the national program achieved its lowest overpayment error rate on record in 2011. "The overwhelming majority [of errors] result from honest mistakes by recipients, eligibility workers, data entry clerks, or computer programmers," writes CBPP senior policy analyst Dottie Rosenbaum.