Lawyers from Reprieve face a jail sentence after officials from the US department of defence had the nerve to complain about their ‘unprofessional conduct’

Lawyers for Binyam Mohamed face the incredible prospect of a six-month jail sentence in America after writing a letter to President Obama detailing their client’s allegations of torture by US agents.

The privilege review team – officials from the US department of defence who monitor and censor communication between Guantánamo prisoners and their lawyers – have previously been accused of using their powers to suppress evidence of the abuse and mistreatment of detainees.

Clive Stafford Smith, director of legal charity Reprieve, and his colleague Ahmed Ghappour have been summoned to appear before a Washington court on May 11 after a complaint was made by the privilege review team.

Stafford Smith had written to the president after judges in the UK ruled against the release of US evidence detailing Mohamed’s alleged torture at Guantánamo. The letter [PDF] asked the president to reconsider the US position and urged him to release the evidence into the public domain. He attached a memo summarising the case because his US security clearance gives him access to the classified material. In order to comply with classification guidelines, the memo did not identify individual officers by name or specify locations of the abuse.

He and Gappour submitted the memo to the privilege team for clearance but the memo was redacted to just the title, leaving the president unable to read it. Stafford Smith included the redacted copy of the memo in his letter to illustrate the extent to which it had been censored. He described it as a “bizarre reality”. “You, as commander in chief, are being denied access to material that would help prove that crimes have been committed by US personnel. This decision is being made by the very people who you command.”

The privilege team argue that by releasing the redacted memo Reprieve has breached the rules that govern Guantánamo lawyers and have made a complaint to the court of “unprofessional conduct”.

Stafford Smith described their actions as intimidation, saying the complaint “doesn’t even specify the rule supposedly breached”.

Thanks Guardian

Details continue to emerge from Binghamton, New York, where a gunman identified as Jiverly Voong, 41, barricaded the back door of the American Civic Association Friday morning, then went in the front door shooting at everyone in the room, killing 13 and then shooting himself.

Early reports say the gunman was deeply upset over being laid off and for being disrespected for not speaking English well.

That event, as well as three policemen wounded in a Pittsburgh shooting after responding to a domestic disturbance call – friends said that gunman was also upset about his recent firing – fit a larger pattern of mass killings which have seemed to proliferate since America’s economic downturn, experts say. Forty-four people have died in a string of five such incidents in the past month, from Oakland, California to Alabama to North Carolina.

Monitor reporter Patrik Jonsson reported on this trend earlier this week.

Voong “had lost a job recently and was somewhat angry,” Mayor Matthew Ryan told ABC’s “Good Morning America.” “He had language issues, didn’t speak English that well, and was really concerned about his employment situation,” Ryan said.

Police Chief Joseph Zikuski told NBC that the shooter had worked in Binghamton for Shop-Vac, which closed in November. And early reports claimed Voong had been laid off from IBM, although an IBM spokesman has denied the link. Henry Voong, Jiverly Voong’ father, works there as a contractor.

Immigrant groups across the nation have been expressing sadness and concern about the Binghamton shootings, and mentioning the pressure of the down turned economy.

“Violence against vulnerable populations, including immigrants, is disturbingly becoming more common now that the economy is impacting us all,” wrote Angelica Salas, executive director of Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles (CHIRLA) said in a statement Saturday.

Criminologists say other cultural factors could be at play as well – ranging from the possibility of shame and embarrassment for immigrants as well as the modern isolation of men in US society.

“Men in America tend to not have a support system outside work to get through hard times,” says James Allan Fox, professor of criminal justice at Northeastern University in Boston, and author of “Extreme Killing: Understanding Mass and Serial Murder. “Men rarely have friends outside work so when they lose their job they lose all the people that were around them and they feel abandoned.”

More important, community doesn’t just offer support but perspective, says Fox.

“Men also lose anyone who might give them a reality check on their attitude or behavior,” he says, adding that they lose something as “simple as a buddy who could lean over and say, ‘think again.’”

Fox and others are quick to point out that clusters of mass murders are not new. They happened in earlier decades. What stands in stark contrast to an earlier era such as the 50s and the 70s is a disintegration of neighborhoods and tight-knit communities.

“People today don’t know their neighbors, don’t know what they do and certainly don’t know what to say if they lose their job,” Fox says. He suggests that if people wonder what they can do in response to such extreme circumstances, they should consider reaching out to people they don’t know and even “getting to know their neighbors.”

Staff writer Gloria Goodale contributed to this report.

Thanks The Christain Science Monitor

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette has posted an article on its website by Dennis R. Roddy attempting to link Richard Poplawski, the Pittsburgh man accused of killing three police officers on April 4, to radio talk show host Alex Jones.

“Believing most media were covering up important events, Mr. Poplawski turned to a far-right conspiracy Web site run by Alex Jones, a self-described documentarian (sic) with roots going back to the extremist militia movement of the early 1990s,” writes Roddy.

Alex Jones is a paleoconservative and is not connected to the so-called militia movement. The militia movement Roddy mentions is largely a creation of the FBI, the Anti-Defamation League, the Southern Poverty Law Center, and the corporate media. Timothy McVeigh and the Nichols brothers — fingered as the poster children of the militia movement by the corporate media — were not connected to an established militia. “Militia units in Michigan wanted nothing to do with them,” Mack Tanner wrote for Reason Magazine in July of 1995. Tanner documents how the myth of a violent and even racist militia movement is the creation of the government and the corporate media.

Muriel Kane, writing for Raw Story, and Eric Boehlert’s blog on the Media Matters website reference the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette story in an effort to connect Alex Jones to the Philly shooting.

According to Kane, the alleged cop killer Poplawski read Prison Planet and found the information there “disturbing.” Kane specifically mentions a September 24, 2008 article by Paul Joseph Watson, U.S. Troops In Homeland “Crowd Control” Patrols From October 1st.

In the article Watson reports on the deployment of the 3rd Infantry Division’s 1st Brigade Combat Team from duty in Iraq to the United States for the purpose of “civil unrest and crowd control” under the control of the Northern Command. This information was reported on September 8 by the Army Times.

However, it was apparently not disturbing enough to be reported by much of the corporate media, as noted by Salon’s Glenn Greenwald, who is hardly a frothing radical. “As is typical, very few members of the media even mentioned any of this, let alone discussed it,” he wrote on September 24. In October, CNN reported on the deployment.

The militarization of state and local law enforcement and the deployment of battle-hardened soldiers for the stated – by Northern Command – purpose of “civil unrest and crowd control” in violation of the Posse Comitatus Act are not extremist conspiracy theories — they are facts largely ignored by the corporate media. In many cases Alex Jones is the only source reporting this information.

If not for Alex Jones and his journalists, the Missouri Information Analysis Center would still be in the business of designating Ron Paul, Chuck Baldwin, and Bob Barr as dangerous leaders of a violent “Modern Militia Movement.”

Kane would have us believe Prison Planet and Alex Jones shaped Poplawski’s worldview and somehow radicalized him to the point where he shot three policemen to death. According to the writer, Prison Planet was a sort of stepping stone that led Poplawski to “far more extreme sources” of information, in particular the white supremacist website Stormfront.

Kane’s insinuations, however, pale when compared to the those of Eric Boehlert, who cites the neocon blog Little Green Footballs (these are odd bedfellows: Media Matters is operated by the former neocon turned lib David Brock and LGF is a pet project of Charles Johnson, who describes himself as a lib before the false flag attacks of September 11, 2001).

“We’ve also learned, via the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, that Poplawski was an avid fan of conspiracist and radical talk show host Alex Jones. A ‘freak,’ was how the conservative web blog, Little Green Footballs, described Jones today,” writes Boehlert on the Media Matters blog, County Fair. “Who’s been mainstreaming the ‘freak’ Alex Jones in recent days? Who’s been embracing his loony conspiratorial rants and giving them a platform and legitimacy? Fox News, course.”

This is a reference to Alex’s appearance on Judge Napolitano’s “Freedom Watch” program on March 18, 2009. During a simulcast Alex was asked by Napolitano what he was talking about on his show that day and Alex responded by saying he was covering numerous references to the New World Order in the corporate media (see the  video here). According to Boehlert and Johnson, these mainstream news stories are “loony conspiratorial rants” and a disgrace to Fox News, never mind Obama, Gordon Brown, Henry Kissinger, and other establishment figures have taken to using the phrase repeatedly over the last few months and particularly since the G20 summit in London.

As of this writing, a Google News search pulls up 52,136 matches to the search criteria “New World Order,” including matches from the likes of Bloomberg, the New York Times, the Financial Times, and other stalwart establishment newspapers and news outlets. Are we to assume the editors and publishers of AFP and the Wall Street Journal are loony too?

“During his webcast on FoxNews.com, Alex Jones also notes with pride how FNC’s Glenn Beck has recently been warning about the emerging New World Order on the air, just like Jones,” writes Boehlert. As should be obvious, there are distinct differences between Glenn Beck and Alex Jones, but Boehlert is not interested in pointing out such differences. Instead, he conflates all under the rubric of the “GOP Noise Machine,” even though Alex Jones is as opposed to the policies of the GOP as he is of those of the Democrats.

Finally, it should be noted that on numerous occasions Alex Jones has advocated non-violence and advised listeners to avoid confrontation with the police and authorities. None of the critics cited above have bothered to note this fact as they attempt to make a connection between the deranged Poplawski and Jones.

In the days ahead, we should expect the corporate media and liberal and neocon blogs to further link Jones to Poplawski and the Pittsburgh shootings. In this way the government, corporate media, and blogs on either side of the false right-left paradigm will attempt to discredit the message broadcast by Alex Jones — a message warning about the evils of a government controlled by international bankers who are determined to disarm the American people in order to impose slavery upon them.

Kurt Nimmo
Infowars
April 5, 2009

This happening in the U.K. When will it show up here?

Police are taking a leaf out of Google’s book with their latest weapon in the war on motorists.

They are using cars with spy cameras on a mast. Drivers talking on their mobile phones, eating, applying make-up or otherwise driving illegally will be pictured.

And as the telescopic cameras can zoom in from some distance, the first inkling that they have been snapped could be when a £60 fine lands on the doorstep.

Police say the new cars – similar to those used by Google to map town and city streets – will help reduce road deaths. But motorists say the Big Brother vehicles will merely be another cash cow for the Government and a further ‘tax’ on hard-pressed motorists.

Little Brother is watching you: One of the police Smart cars

The Treasury already rakes in more than £105million in fines each year from speed cameras and driving-offence fixed penalties.

Two Smart cars are pioneering the scheme in Greater Manchester, where distracted motorists are said to have caused more than 400 accidents in the past two years, killing or seriously injuring 25 victims.

Drivers who are caught using their mobiles will be sent a £60 fine and will have three penalty points on their licence. 

Those caught on camera without a seatbelt or driving erratically while eating will be fined £30.

Anyone who refuses to accept a fine – which will go into Treasury coffers – could be hauled before the courts.

Karen Delaney from DriveSafe, the road safety group behind the latest scheme, said: ‘Many vehicles are now better equipped than offices or homes, with the latest technology in satellite navigation, telecommunications and state-of-the-art music systems all to hand. 

Spy cameras: Google’s car which takes pictures of UK streets

‘Add in other distractions such as complex dashboard instrumentation, a hot cup of coffee and a conversation with other vehicle occupants, and it is no wonder that some drivers are not paying attention.’

She added: ‘The Smart enforcement vehicles are fully police liveried and working in areas where our data analysis has identified a high occurrence of “driver distraction” collisions and where officers have regularly observed offences being committed.’

Nigel Humphries, from the Association of British Drivers, said: ‘This is a total infringement. They might as well put something in cars to test what drivers are thinking – to see if they are concentrating on the road or thinking about something else.

‘Apart from that it’s going to be counter-productive. There’s no excuse for not having police officers watching the road to look out for motorists who are driving erratically.’

Peter Roberts, from the Drivers’ Alliance, said: ‘People shouldn’t be using mobile phones when they are driving in the car, especially handheld ones. But I am not comfortable with spy cameras which can see into your car and see what you are doing.

‘The old-fashioned type of policing where coppers are sitting by the side of the road watching people go past to see if they are using a mobile is a far better way of doing things.’

Thanks The Daily Mail