The immediate cause of the riots was a police raid on a blind pig. That is public knowledge.
A college professor once told me that the 1967 riots were planned by left-wing fellow faculty members and he witnessed the planning. The rioting was commenced on Twelfth Street, only one block away from the Wayne State University football field.
Today the high-paying UAW jobs are cutailed and incoming Ford Motor employees earn about $35,000 per annum for the first three years.
I was residing in Detroit during the rioting of 1967.
43 died and scores wounded. The "Algiers Motel Incident" by John Hersey chronicled the rioting and the conflicts between police and the black community of that era. This police brutality was the key reason of the riots.
There were armored personnel carriers rolling down Eight Mile Road (the north border of Detroit - which inspired the Eminem movie name)which decamped at the State Fair grounds for deployment against the rioters. These were not National Guardsmen but active-duty U.S. Army personnel, many with Vietnam experience(what about the Posse Comitatus Act?). Although many National Guardsmen were deployed as well as volunteers from other police jurisdictions to haul away the large amount of arrestees. Many attorneys who had no experience in criminal law volunteered to represent arrestees in arraignments that clogged the court system in Detroit.
At the time the city was mostly white and had a police force that was about 85% white. Today the city is close to 85% black, Hispanic and Asian minorities and the police force is mostly composed of minorities.
The population of Detroit now is less than half than when I moved out in 1969. The City of Detroit is replete with burned out and abandoned structures, eyesores, defective and unmaintained roads. Police tell me they are afraid to pull over citizens for traffic violations for fear of being shot. Public schools often do not even have toilet paper. Homeless citizens were actually attempting to get arrested during winter in order to find a place to eat and sleep in a Wayne County jail cell.
Detroit looks like a Third World country. Very sad.
Pamela Byrnes, formerly a state representative from Ann Arbor currently working for the University of Michigan in China, has just announced her candidacy as a Democrat against conservative U.S. Congressman Tim Walberg.
Per her LinkedIn page, she served as an intelligence analyst for the National Security Agency from 1969 through 1974. Her page was just amended to reflect her Congressional candidacy.
Byrnes is viewed as a moderate Democrat and enjoyed the support of many GOP activists when she ran for a state senate seat in Michigan in 2010 but lost.
Mike Rogers is a former FBI special agent who is currently considering a run at the United States Senate to fill the vacancy created by Senator Carl Levin - the former public defender attorney from Detroit who is a liberal and a supporter of the civil rights movement.
Rogers is one of the most conservative members of the U.S. House and hails from rural Michigan which is overwhelmingly conservative in a political sense.
Rogers is trying to bulid publicity for a U.S. Senate bid.
Something like 80% of all prison inmates in the U.S. are the product of a broken home.
A cohesive and nurturing family structure for a child is undoubtedly a key determinant on whether or not the child develops an anti-social personality.
Over half of young black Americans are either incarcerated, free on bond, or on probation or parole under criminal proceedings.
There is a cycle of poverty and lack of education which is self-perpetuating.
The military service option for many young poor blacks and Hispanics is a way toward education and steady gainful employment. Approximately 26% of the U.S. Marine Corps personnel are Hispanic-Americans.
I agree with your analysis relative to secular Jews - I was not including them and should have been more precise by specifying "observant" Jewry. Generally, the population of Israeli Jewry has been historically overwhelmingly either secular or Orthodox.
I was referring to the other two Jewish groups "prominent in America" as being Conservative or Reformed.
The Haredi Jewish community in Israel has had explosive growth of population due to an impressively high birth rate over the years however.
Secular Jewry made a great impact upon Israel and many formed the Israel Communist Party and supported solidarity with the Palestinian Arabs - Meir Vilner comes to mind. Today the successor Marxist political party is known as Hadash. Mapai, the forerunner of the Labor Party had many secular Jews as well.
No, ultraorthodox Jews oppose the State of Israel due to the religious grounds, although many do reside in Israel due to affinity to the land itself in a historic sense.
Orthodox Jews compose the vast majority of Jewish Israelis and the other two Jewish groups prominent in America were almost non-existent within Israel during prior decades.
Iranian intelligence assisted in the military rise of Hezbollah and Iran's elite soldiers manned missile batteries during the Second Lebanon War. There are 40,000 rockets Hezbollah has that could be used against Israel. 165 Israels died in that brief conflict.
Iran has also assisted both Hamas and Islamic Jihad in Gaza and many of the militant leaders reportedly visit Iran on a regular basis - Hamas military chief Muhammad Deif supposedly had surgery in Iran to remedy injuries received in prior Israeli assassination attempts.
Iran is assisting the Assad regime in Damascus which has prolonged the civil war that has caused 100,000 deaths so far.
Iran sustained more battle deaths in the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s than the U.S. did during WWII.
Iran is a major force in Middle Eastern politics that Israel is rightfully concerned about and has been a source of financial and military support to the Palestinian and Lebanese groups that have taken paramilitary actions against Israel in recent yaers.
Ironically, the Bedouins have a reputation as pathfinders and bore the brunt of the casualties in the occupation of Gaza as members of the Israel Defense Forces. It was a Bedouin Arab sergeant in the IDF that was convicted of manslaughter in the death of British civil rights activist Tom Hurndall and a Bedouin IDF officer identified in the shooting death of the co-producer of the award-winning "Death in Gaza" documentary, James Miller. Hamas at one point sent an open letter to the Bedouin community recognizing their honorable heritage and to refrain from service in the IDF - Hamas even established a scholarship award program for Bedouins to encourage their avoidance of IDF service.
It is also notable that Israel has no constitution so the existence of a court system at all is legislative enactment by the Knesset under the "Basic Law" can be rescinded or modified. The concept of separation of powers under the Bassic law is far from absolute as the Knesset can, and does, regulate the Israel Supreme Court's authority.
The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) was intended to stem the tide of abuses from COINTELPRO and Operation CHAOS that had been revealed during Watergate committee hearings and investigations of the Rockerfeller Commission and Church Committee during the 1970s.
In practice, however, FISC does little more than immunize and rubber-stamp the actions of the U.S. intelligence community from Fourth Amendment scrutiny and liability.
Very few Americans were previously even aware of the existence of such a tribunal until the Snowden affair. I first became aware of this court when I read a legal journal interview a number of years ago of United States District Court Judge Wendell Miles, now 97 years of age, of the Western District of Michigan, who indicated he had served on FISC and found the service "interesting".
FISC was created by an Act of Congress and has no direct federal constitutional basis. Its judges are appointed by the chief justice and do not require congressional approval like other members of the U.S. judiciary. Because the chief justice is the sole appointing authority, in practice some of the most ultraconservative members of the federal bench sit on FISC (Chief Justice Rehnquist's wife worked as a CIA employee) Most of FISC's functioning is secret. In practice most of its warrant requests are approved, very, very few are denied, and a small number are modified.
Critics of FISC point out that its secrecy and lack of congressional oversight has resulted in a lack of accountability for conduct that does little to protect the civil liberties and privacy rights of Americans.
In Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, for example, the per capita income is $79,000 - however this small Michigan city was the home to Lee Iacooca and many other auto executives, professional sports figures and entertainers - leaving the "average" a lot higher than the "median" per capita income.
I can recall sitting on a bench in the Michigan Court of Appeals awaiting for my case to be called and seeing a public appellate defender standing before a three-judge panel and telling them at a scheduled oral argument he had nothing to say - and left the courtroom; the taxpayers were paying an appointed defender to appear and say nothing! He could have stayed home, waived oral argument, but instead got a taxpayer-funded fee for saying zilch to the appeals judges on behalf of his client during the oral argument phase of his appeal.
The three reasons you cite are all valid in my experience.
The "logic" I was refering to was the fact both Detroit and D.C. had high murder rates with blacks being the primary victims, yet since no death penalty existed to punish any of the perpetrators, the apparent Amnesty International point being made was not entirely valid i.e. the death penalty less likely to be imposed where the victim is African-American.
I was personally acquainted with at least three elected former County Prosecutors from Metro Detroit - two supported the death penalty and one opposed it. The one who opposed it was from Wayne County, which had 2 million residents - he told me that after touring Michigan's notorious Jackson Prison - the largest walled prison in the world - the conditions were so poor, that the mandatory life in prison without parole first-degree murder statute in Michigan was, in his estimation, actually a more severe punishment than death.
Would a constitutional amendment authorizing capital punishment in Michigan actually deter the homicide rate? No one knows.
Every time some horrific murder event occurs in Michigan the call for reinstatement of the death penalty begins anew.
Michigan has not had a death penalty in its court system since 1846 and was only the third jurisdiction in the world to abolish it - after the duchies of Liechtenstein and Tuscany in Europe. The ban was most previously written and adopted into the State of Michigan Constitution in 1963 during the last state constitutional convention.
I do have concerns that if the death penalty were reinstated in Michigan there could be a potential for disparity in application depending on the racial classification of the defendant - or of the victim.
One interesting statistic regarding Louisiana is that it has a death penalty and judges and juries are not hesitant abut imposing it. Yet it has a very high rate of violent crimes reported in comparison to other states.
The three U.S. states with the lowest reported rate of violent crime per FBI statistics are (1)Maine,(2)Vermont, and(3)New Hampshire. Of the three, only New Hampshire has the death penalty - but has not executed anyone since 1939. A black man is the single death row inmate in N.H. for killing a police officer.
Minority defendants in murder cases often face black and/or Hispanic-dominated juries in New York, Detroit, Chicago and Los Angeles, but these juries do convict fellow minorities of violent crimes on a regular basis.
California, while having the death penalty, does not impose it as readily as courts in Texas and Louisiana.
There are several innocent explanations for this phenomenon.
Firstly, jurisdictions with a high black population often are liberal in orientation and have either abolished the death penalty altogether or very sparingly impose it.
Michigan was the first state to abolish the death penalty via its Michigan Constitution. Every attempt to revive it has failed since its prohibition in the 1800s. In the 1970s the City of Detroit had earned the nickname "The Murder City" and was identified as having the highest homicide rate in the world of any municipality with a population of over 1.5 million persons. The vast majority of the victims in Detroit during that time were black but none could face the death penalty due to the state constitutional prohibition against capital punishment. A similar logic exists in the District of Columbia which has a high percentage of black citizens, a significantly elevated murder rate and blacks being the chief victims.
There is also no death penalty currently imposed in New York, New Jersey and Illinois - which all contain significant percentages of African-Americans. When the State of New York did have a death penalty, it was rarely imposed anyway.
Texas and Florida have traditionally led the states in the number of annual executions and have been conservative politically - but neither have had a comparatively large percentage of citizens that are black.
The U.S. in the past has used its CIA connections with military leaders and others to foment demonstrations and coups d'état to subvert leaders it deems inimical to American interests.
Remember the overthrow of Salvador Allende in Chile in 1973, Dr. Mossadegh in Iran in 1953.
Does the U.S. have intelligence assets within the organizers of the demonstrations? Probably.
But try gauging the extent of CIA involvement and it will be next to impossible without the Agency admitting such.
Your logic is misplaced to the extent the current "patriot" movement opposes a strong central government and are civil libertarians. There are black militia units in the U.S. Many of the Tea Party members are either minorities or non-Protestant. Note the Hispanic U.S. senator from Texas. Congressman Justin Amash of Michigan is a Palestinian-American and is a follower of Ron Paul.
The Republican Party is currently split between the Tea Party populist movement and, on the other hand, the corporate insiders who generally oppose gun control and support a strong police presence.
Regarding the Hutaree militia members and their case:
The 9/11 terror-related indictments and the Hutaree case both had James Thomas, an Arab-American, as defense counsel for a defendant in each. He publicly lambasted the prosecution in both cases and was a prosecution witness against Richard Convertino in the obstrution of justice case against Covertino and his co-defendant.
The backgrounds of the federal judges were different and that likely played a difference.
Gerald Rosen, whom I was acquainted with when he represented banks in the 1980s, got a federal appointment to the bench after serving as legal counsel to the Michigan Republican Party; Rosen had ran for Congress as a GOP nominee and lost. Rosen set aside the convictions only after the Office of United States Attorney had asked him to do so.
Victoria Roberts was a Clinton appointee whose background was bringing civil rights actions for plaintiffs. While the Hutaree case was pending, it was Attorney General Eric Holder who publicly labeled the Hutarees as a dangerous organization. The United States Attorney who brought the charges against the Hutaree was Barbara McQuade, a Democrat from Ann Arbor who was appointed by Obama.
After being exonerated, one Hutaree defendant was elected as constable of Bridgewater Township, Michigan as a GOP nominee. The public, in general, never believed that there was any substance to the case against them - despite some of their odd name and beliefs.
While the Hutaree case by the FBI was completely discredited, the Koubriti case remains highly controversial. One of the jurors said the proofs were lacking against Convertino and his co-defendant. Later, Convertino ran for the Michigan Legislature as a GOP candidate, but lost a close race. He was lauded by many for his work in fighting perceived terrorism.
The Detroit Free Press reported in an article by staff writer Tamara Audi dated November 12, 2002 of a massive build-up and deployment in Metro Detroit of federal investigative personnel in the months following 9/11:
"....(t)he breadth of the probe is astounding. Every aspect of Arab immigrant life is being watched......(including) FBI surveillance of local meeting places....."
That intense federal presence led to the FBI securing indictments and eventual jury convictions of several Arab immigrants on terror-related charges prosecuted by Assistant United States Attorney Richard Convertino. These were the first post-9/11 convictions in the U.S. on such charges.
Those convictions were later vacated due to government misconduct found by the judge who had presided over the trial proceedings, Hon. Gerald Rosen, and Convertino and a State Department investigator were later indicted themselves in the same U.S. Courthouse for alleged misconduct arising out the prior case. The latter case was brought by the Public Integrity Section of the U.S. Department of Justice and tried; bothh Convertino and his co-defendant were exonerated by a federal court jury.
Lawsuits were filed by the terror defendants, including Karim Koubriti for their arrest and long pre-trial incarceration bt they were dismissed. Convertino sued the federal government but his case was also dismissed.
Rick Convertino became a staunch critic of the federal government's "War on Terrorism" and left the Department of Justice after a long career in public service with a history of commendations by that department.
Converino's website containing his most interesting version of events is:
In the "Gulag Archipelago", Solzhenitsyn describes the code of criminal procedure applicable in the Soviet Union, but states it took great pains for him to actually be able to locate a copy of the document within Russia.
The protections granted to Soviet citizen of that era were rarely actually accorded in practice.
The RevTribunals created to suppress counter-revolutionary activity had no legal standards applicable to find a defendant guilty of counter-revolutionary conduct and had only one punishment authorized - death. Solzhenitsyn indicates that one preferred the criminal courts for that reason.
One former NSA director who had been discussed for possible high public office was retired Navy Adm. Bobby Inman. Bill Clinton wanted him as his secretary of defense but his appointment was opposed by the Israel Lobby. Inman did not believe the Israelis were trustworthy enough to share intelligence with and he blamed Israel for intentional misconduct in the USS Liberty attack of 1967 during the Six Day War.
Veterans of the U.S. intelligence community, especially retired CIA Associate Deputy Director of Operations Ted Shackley, backed the 1980 presidential candidacy of former Director of Intelligence George H.W. Bush due to Jimmy Carter's massive personnel reductions at the CIA beginning in 1977 in which hundreds of employees lost their jobs.
The Reagan-Bush years were a glory period for U.S. intelligence veterans of the anti-Castro projects, as many came back to work in the Contra War in Nicaragua. These include Shackley, Luis Posada Carilles, and Felix Rodriguez. Dr. Orlando Bosch, one of the most violent of the Cuban anti-Castro exiles of Miami, received a pardon from President Bush in 1989 during protracted parole violation proceedings in federal court.
Many Americans see the "alphabet agencies" as bastions of democracy in the world.
I question that he does not have "diplomatic immmunity".
I can recall that an Israeli official with an arrest warant against him issued by a British court sat in a plane in an airport and was allowed to depart back home to Israel when it had been discovered by the official that the warrant existed and he was advised not to disembark.
I can also recall an incident where the U.S. government tricked a Lebanese national whom it charged with complicity in the 1985 Beirut TWA hijacking to going onto a boat in international waters where he had to be taken via the Mediterranean Sea to the Atlantic Ocean to the U.S. without touching foreign soil - otherwise the U.S. had no continuous jurisdiction over him.
The Achille Lauro incident concerned the murder of a U.S. national, however it was an Italian court that adjudicated the matter - and dismissed charges against Palestinian
Liberation Front leader Mahmoud Abu Abbas but convicted two others in the incident.
Many, if not most,extradition treaties will not extradite for crimes of a "political character" and the Department of Justice has cleverly attempted to avoid this exception by also charging Snowden with theft.
"PRISM and TEMPORA surveillance programs ....in contravention of the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution."
I know of no federal court that has passed on the legality of that program.
However, United States District Court Judge Anna Diggs-Taylor in Detroit several years ago declared the ECHELON surveillance program of the NSA in violation of the Fourth Amendment. She was later reversed by the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati.
There is a real issue as to whether the Espionage Act and the theft statutes charged by the U.S. Department of Justice have any legal or factual basis.
If Snowden were extradited to the U.S., I suspect you would have the largest media circus in a court proceeding since the O.J. Simpson murder prosecution.
"....Maduro pointed to the U.S. allowing Luis Posada Carriles to live freely in Miami, even though he blew up a plane with 73 persons aboard..."
What President Madura does not mention is that Posada, a former U.S. Army officer, was acquitted in Venezuela by a military court and later by a civilian court of complicity in those two bombings. Posada spent years in detention that nation before escaping prison awaiting a prosecutor's appeal of the second acquittal.
The United States Justice Department attempted to try him for giving false information to the Immigration and Naturalization Service, but a jury acquitted him in Texas in 2008.
Luis Posada is revered in Miami as a hero of the anti-Castro Cuban exile movement and had long-documented ties to the U.S. intelligence community.
Jury nullication was used by Northern juries during the pre-Civil War slavery era to avoid convicting those charged under the unpopular Fugitive Slave Law.
In Michigan, jury nullification is recognized, but a binding Michigan Court of Appeals decision holds that a judge may not instruct a jury that this right exists.
Richard Convertino was the Assistant U.S. Attorney in Detroit who obtained the first post 9/11 terror convictions.
Previous to that he received a commendation by United States Attorney General Janet Reno for receiving an unprecedented number of convictions against organized crime figures in Michigan while serving with the Office of United States Attorney in Detroit.
Convertino later criticized the government for trying to create public hysteria in order to justify government spending that created jobs and job security for those involved in federal law enforcement.
The U.S. Department of Justice later vacated the 9/11 terror convictions obtained by Convertino, who faced federal obstruction indictments, civil rights suits by the criminal defendants in his terror case investigation. Convertino was cleared in all those cases and now is in private practice defending criminal cases.
The Earl Warren-led U.S. Supreme Court championed the greatest civil rights revolution since the Abraham Lincoln era.
Those years saw indigent rights expanded via interpretation of the Fourth, Fifth and Sixth Amendments. The Miranda, Katz and Gideon decisions were landmark opinions that gave reasonable and thoughtful protections to not only criminal defendants but the average citizen from police intrusions.
The Rehnquist era generally saw limitations imposed upon citizen rights. One area this manifested itself in was police-initiated forfeitures of money and property that was purportedly linked to drug activity. Police seized your effects and you had to sue them and post a bond to try and recover your things back.
In 1991, I sued the Michigan State Police on behalf of client alleging that the state's drug forfeiture statute violated the Due Process Clause and Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment for indigents unable to post a bond in such proceedings. A state circuit court agreed and the Office of Attorney General told me they did not want to appeal or otherwise further contest the matter since that law realized 11 million dollars in revenue for law enforcement in the state and a binding Court of Appeals ruling . I later learned a number of other attorneys had obtained rulings invalidating that law on the same grounds in trial court proceedings.
These forfeiture proceedings I came to realize were primarily revenue-generating gimmicks that had little to do with guilt or innocence of criminal accused - in fact often police did not bother to bring criminal charges for drug possession and very often no drugs were found. If one was carrying around a wad of cash in his pocket he was assumed to be a drug seller - even if he was a successful businessman and presumably could show a source for the cash. The County Prosecutor had a special office that routinely negotiated settlements in these cases in accepting an amount less than it would cost for the claimant to try his case in court with an attorney. Minorities were targeted for these forfeiture proceedings, or so it seemed by the percentage of claimants I saw trying to get their seized property returned. These proceedings, I concluded, were an abuse of police power and a waste of resources that could be better used targeting narcotics distribution networks that had a serious and deleterious impact on American society.
I feel that the Fourth Amendment is one of the cornerstones of American democracy and protects all Americans from arbitrary and overly intrusive law enforcement conduct.
Morsi drew his primary support at elections from rural voters in Egypt. Cairo was secular, for the most part.
The fact these demonstrations are taking place cannot surprise me. It is a sign that there is freedom of assembly and freedom of expression within Egypt which was not occurring under the Mubarak regime.
The austerity policies referred to are almost always protested against wherever they may be implemented. Remember PM Thatcher and her unpopular tax policies.
The National Security Agency did have members testify before Congress during the Church Committee hearings.
I have read transcripts of Church Committee proceedings where the NSA was described by a panel member as having its charter not authorized by an Act of Congress but by executive order of the president, and the fact most Americans were unaware of its existence.
NSA Deputy Director Benson Buffham had testified at that juncture before the Church Committee. Buffham had led a code-breaking unit in the Army during WWII, and later oversaw the early years of growth at the NSA. Buffham had been vocal about his belief that the USS Liberty attack was intentional (an NSA civilian employee died in that incident). He has given interviews on the history of U.S. intelligence (subject to NSA redaction before publication) Buffham today is in his 90s and lives in Florida.
One thing I have not seen mentioned in the recent NSA controversy mentioned is the Privacy Act. During the ACLU litigation of FBI and National Security Agency surveillance of Abdeen Jabara, both the violation of the Privacy Act and attorney-client privilege were argued before the federal judiciary in Detroit and a number of those rulings were published in the Federal Supplement or Federal Reporter series. Wholesale surveillance by the NSA will necessarily encompass snaring communications that are statutorily protected for legal or medico-legal purposes. The federal judiciary did not dismiss attorney-client privilege concerns in the Jabara case but indicated that the client rather than the attorney had standing to bring those claims for violations of their privacy.
The FBI began survellance of Arab-Americans during Operation Boulder in response to the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre and Jabara became a public figure as defense counsel of Sirhan Sirhan from 1968 to 1972, when Sirhan's death sentence was vacated by the California Supreme Court; however federal surveillance of Jabara began, according to court records, in 1967 - well before the RFK shooting or the Munich incident - so neither of these events caused the surveillance being initiated against Jabara.
Another prominent defense attorney from Detroit, William Bufalino, who defended Jimmy Hoffa, had in the 1960s, discovered Detroit Police Department wiretaps of his law firm's telephones and sued Michigan Bell for its complicity in the affair. Bufalino, like Jabara, was never convicted of anything. Walter Sheridan, who had headed the "Get Hoffa Squad" on behalf of Robert F. Kennedy, was an NSA counter-intelligence officer.
The ACLU litigation brought on behalf of Jabara uncovered highly questionable tactics of the FBI, CIA and NSA being directed at a U.S. citizen. During that case, affidavits were filed containing conclusory statements by CIA personnel to justify surveillance. The Snowden allegations do not surprise me as the Jabara court proceedings contain public record disclosure of extremely invasive government behavior. The ACLU/Jabara litigation commenced in 1972 and continued well into the 1980s before a settlement was reached.
Abdeen Jabara currently lives in Manhattan and practices law - often collaborating with former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark.
In Detroit, we had Detroit P.D. intelligence unit members who had been deputized into the U.S. Marshals Service, thus allowing them to cross municipal and state lines to investigate cases.
During the early 1980s, that police unit worked with the FBI to place surveillance equipment inside the home of Detroit's first African-American mayor, Coleman Young, pursuant to a search warrant issued by a federal judge, which did not become public knowledge until the Vista Disposal federal corruption indictments were handed down and tried in 1983. Young was never charged in that or any other case as a result of the surveillance but a city officials and a number of businesspersons were convicted - although Young had been the clear target of the investigation.
The Office of Naval Intelligence the the oldest continuous intelligence agency in the U.S., founded in 1882.
Some of the most famous persons who have served as the ONI's commanders include Bobby Inman(later NSA director), and Rufus Taylor (later CIA deputy director).
James Di Eugenio, author of Destiny Betrayed, and an expert of the Jim Garrison investigation had urged the Assassination Records Review Board (AARB)to push for release of National Security Agency files relating to the JFK assassination, citing the fact that New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison's key obstructionist, Walter Sheridan, was an NSA counter-intelligence officer. Sheridan also played a key role in coordinating the "Get-Hoffa Squad" on behalf of U.S. Attorney General Robert Kennedy that eventually resulted in the Teamster leader's conviction and imprisonment on federal charges.
The AARB later reported that the NSA had documents responsive to the request and was cooperataing to receive those papers.
It was ironic that dozens and dozens of books and hundreds of periodical articles have been published regarding the speculation of possible Defense Department, FBI, or CIA conspiracy in the JFK assassination, but America's largest intelligence-gathering organization has almost never been mentioned, other than by Mr. Di Eugenio, in this vein.
Actually, the McGowan versus Maryland opinion of the U.S. Supreme Court in 1961 did validate the Sunday closure laws since they had achieved a secular purpose, although their initial intent may have been religious in nature. However, I do agree that "blue laws" in general are deemed by U.S. courts to be unconstitutional and the McGowan holding was expressly re-affirmed in 2005 by the Supreme Court to strike down the display of the Ten Commandments at court facilities in Kentucky as the intent of the display was ruled to promote a religious purpose.
In 1967, The U.S. Supreme Court reversed the felony conviction of a white man arising out of his marriage to a black woman(Loving versus Virginia)on Equal Protection Clause grounds and put an end to enforcement of criminal laws in Southern states barring interracial marriage. The concept of regulating marriage is nothing new from Sourthern legislators.
The Establishment Clause of the First Amendment was not likely implicated in the review of the Court since much of our laws in America are based on Judeo-Christian principles. The doctrine of separation of powers and the death penalty for murder have been rooted in such origins. The Supreme Court has addressed issues previously - such as Sunday closure laws - that reflect the government adopting or giving deference to religious principles.
In Jabara vs. Kelley, 75 FRD 475(ED Mich 1977)the federal court, Judge Ralph Freeman, analyzed the "state secrets privelege" under the 1953 Supreme Court decision in Reynolds in the context of a FOIA enforcement action brought by the ACLU in the name of Abdeen Jabara, former defense counsel to Sirhan Sirhan and an executive director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. The court held that such matters could be reviewed "in camera" (i.e. in the judge's chambers) to protect national security.
The court also held the "ongoing criminal investigation privilege" is not indefinite and expires after the elapsing of a reasonable amount of time, even if the investigation remains "open" in the government.
Qatar is unusual in the Mideast to the extent of its ties and orientation to Western interests.
After the U.S. Armed Forces removed themselves from Saudi Arabia, Qatar became home to a regional command for the U.S. military.
Qatar gave several milion dollars in foreign assisatance to Israel as a reward for its 2005 Gaza disengagement to construct a soccer stadium that could be used by Arabs and Jews alike.
Qatar denounced the continued detention of IDF corporal Gilad Shalit by Gazan militants.
The Daily Star(Lebanon)reported on May 2, 2013 a rare meeting occurred between Christian rivals MP Samir Gemayel (Phalange Party) and MP Suleiman Franjieh at Gemayel's residence in Bikfaya. It was there agreed that it would be in the best interest for Lebanon to steer clear of the Syrian Civil War.
Lebanese MP Franjieh is a close friend of Syrian President Assad.
The Kataeb (Phalangist Party) may be with the rebels in general (as the Obama administartion is) but few Western-oriented governments or political parties are supportive of the extremist al-Nusra Front - who owe their allegiance to Al-Qaeda.
The rights of convicted felons to vote varies from state to state.
In Florida, the post-Civil War enfranchisement of former slaves led authorities in the late 1800s to obtain trumped-up criminal charges against ex-slaves to prevent them from voting.
Currently, the relatively minor crimes that often constitute felony convictions - e.g. personal use drug possession, unpaid child support, shoplifting etc. may result in lifetime disenfranchisement in some jurisdictions.
The subject of felon voting rights has been discussed:
Idriss was a brigadier general in the Syrian Army Corps of Engineers.
He has no known experience as a battlefield commander.
Once rebel leaders who have been "vetted" to receive U.S.-supplied weaponry get them there is no guarantee where they eventually wind up. Guns and artillery pieces have generally high intrinsic value in the black market.
While the emphasis has been on the "Free Syrian Army" as the "good guys" fighting Assad, and the Al-Nusra Front as the "bad rebels", the truth is likely that somewhere around half of the Syrian rebel forces are Islamic fundamentalists of varying degrees and orientation.
The Syrian Islamic Front and the Syrian Islamic Liberation Front are composed of Muslim fundamentalists; the former is composed of Salafists who deem Al-Nusra Front as an ally and the latter are composed of both Salafists and Muslim Brotherhood adherents. The Syrian Islamic Front and Syrian Islamic Liberation Front together field about 65,000 fighters.
These two Islamic forces are needed to oust Assad and are being funded via Persian Gulf oil-rich states. To the extent that they are excluded from U.S.-supplied weaponry, this will likely engender enmity between those forces and the Free Syrian Army.
Looks like the State Department may have dropped the ball by revoking Snowden's American passport yesterday - only after he was already flown to Moscow by an Aeroflot jet.
Thank you for the link. That article correctly contains information about the fear that anti-aircraft missiles and posiibly other weaponry will fall into the hands of dangerous Islamic extremist groups.
What the article does not reveal in that the Syrian anti-Assad forces are highly fragmented and about half the fighters are Islamic fundamentalists in origin.
Besides the well-publicized Al-Nusra Front, which has an estimated 6,000 fighters under arms, there are:
(A)the Syrian Islamic Front adhering to Salafist doctrine with about 25,000 combatants whose goal is to make Syria an Islamic state and ruled by Sharia - they consider the Al-Nusra Front an ally;
(B)the Syrian Islamic Liberation Front with about 40,000 armed personnel principally adhering either to the Muslim Brotherhood or to Salafist principles -they see their organizing principle as Islam but do not consider the extremist Al-Nusra Front as an allied force;
The danger with the U.S arming and training Syrian rebels is that when and if this long civil war to topple Assad may be over, a second civil war may erupt in this nation of 22 million between the Free Syrian Army (FSA) and the equally numerous forces of the aforesaid Islamic fundamentalist groups. An FSA leader has already said the FSA will turn its guns on Al-Nusra once the Russian-backed Assad regime falls.
Nowhere in the 41 recommendations of the 9/11 Commission Report is there mention of the National Security Agency and in the hundreds of pages of that report - often critical of the FBI and CIA - the NSA is only fleetngly mentioned a few times, and even then in a usually positive manner.
The National Security Agency did claim to have uncovered proof of a terrorist conspiracy in the death of U.S. Ambassador to Sudan Cleo Noel in 1974 when it said it had intercepts of communications between P.L.O. chairman Yasser Arafat and his military chief Khalil al-Wazir ordering Noel's execution after he and two Western diplomats were kidnapped in the Sudan. Their information did not prevent the deaths of three diplomatic personnel but it did evidence the apparent complicity of Arafat in that tragedy.
It is interesting that the NSA, the largest U.S. intelligence-gathering organization, was previously rarely ,if ever, mentioned in major Congressional investigations of government misconduct- while the FBI and CIA are often a political hot potato on Capitol Hill.
Only the Church Committee received appreciable amounts of testimony from NSA leaders - Congress previously has otherwise steered away from real confrontation or scrutiny of the NSA and the personnel that operate it.
"Only a few percent of the U.S. population is locked up."
Russia and the U.S. have had in the last few years the highest incarceration rates of any nation on Earth.
Americans are going to jail for unpaid child support, jaywalking, driving on expired driver's licenses, talking too loud on their cell phone, using vulgar language and consumers purchasing untaxed cigarettes. These are actual cases.
It is estimated that 50% of all young black males in the U.S. are either incarcerated, on parole or serving probation for criminal matters.
Usually the homeowner was the victim or being used as a pawn by a loan officer or mortgage broker trying to rake in a commission knowing some bank would would eventually get stuck with an uncollectible promissory note down the road.
Besides mortgage brokers, there were "foreclosure specialists" who often victimized homeowners promising to save their home, although there were some legitimate and helpful groups such as Greenpath, who have achieved success in advocating for homeowners in financial distress.
"....no prosecutions were pursued after the 2008 financial crisis."
In actuality, I spent the last 15 years litigating cases with banking institutions in the court system. Fraud and misconduct abounded.
I questioned bank attorneys why would someone who simutaneously took out two mortgages on the same property without disclosing this to the relevant financial institutions was not prosecuted - they replied the FBI is too busy going after more serious crime.
A state police detective once told me that they would not prosecute mortgage fraud unless the loss sustained was over $350,000.00.
An FBI agent once told me that the pre-occupation with terrorism prevented his agency from investigating most forms of financial fraud.
I witnessed tremendous amounts of financial fraud civil cases wind their way through the federal and state judiciaries - sometimes the perpetrators were banks, sometimes they were customers - but it was exceedingly rare that any criminal prosecutions occurred, but if there were, the sentences were light - often probation.
Very often a homeowner or businessman lied to a loan officer or mortgage broker to get loan - the officer or broker did not care if the loan was procured via fraud because he was getting paid on commission. And the financial institution underwriting the transaction sold the mortgage a few weeks later to a bank who would get stuck when the mortgage went into default and was uncollectible and secured by realty that was close to valueless.
I had one case in Detroit where a bank was actually sued for catching a customer committing fraud and freezing his account. The federal judge is dismissing the case called it "peculiar" that a bank should be sued in a such a circumstance.
It is my belief that this type of fraud contributed to the 2008 financial meltdown. I blame the state and federal government authorities for not vigorously prosecuting these cases criminally as it encouraged many to engage in fraud with little fear of accountability.
The Patriot Act cannot repeal the Bill of Rights; the U.S. Constitution is higher authority under the Supremacy Clause.
I also would say that the U.S. Supreme Court has had its share of members with intelligence connections. Lewis Powell served in Army Intelligence and William Rehnquist's wife was a CIA agent. Thurgood Marshall was an FBI informant.
Much of the federal judiciary is drawn from members of the bar who have backgrounds in the FBI or Department of Justice who will not hesitate to interpret the Constitution in a friendly way to the U.S. intelligence community.
ECHELON was initially held to be unconstitutional by U.S. District Court Judge Anna Diggs-Taylor in Detroit - she was a former civil rights activist from the MLK era. That ruling was reversed by the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati.
Yeah, but think of all the sharholders and employees of DuPont, Dow Chemical, Colt Industries, Raytheon, Boeing, Northrop, Grumman Aerospace, Fairchild, General Dynamics, Wedtech, Bell Helicopter and all of the other defense contractors who have done very well due to the wars throughout history.
Dupont made record profits for a U.S. corpoaration during WWI as every artillery shell fired by the American Expeditionary Force was maufactured by their workers.
Not to mention the Krupp empire in Germany and Beretta in Italy. War equals profits.
The Central Intelligence Agency, per the NY Times report, is supposed to be ensuring that only approved rebel groups will receive arms procured through their efforts - however once the weapons enter Syria no one can guarantee who they will be sold or otherwise re-distributed to by the "approved" rebels.
The Syrian National Coalition has attempted to get the State Department's terrorist designation lifted for Jabhat al-Nusra so they would apparently be unconcerned about using their connections in the Free Syrian Army to see the al-Nusra Front is well-armed.
Were American Indians consulted before the "Trail of Tears" was imposed on them?
Were the Palestinian families living in refugee camps since 1948 ever asked about how they felt about giving up their land to recent Jewish immigrants from post-war Europe?
My opinion all along is that the Syrian Civil War is fueled not out of concern for human rights violations by the Assad regime - but rather political opportunism of the U.S. and Israelis to rid themselves of a Russian naval installation at Tartus and disrupting the supply line from Iran to Lebanon as to Hezbollah. The Syrian opposition are merely pawns of superpowers in international politics, and are heavily reliant on foreign aid to survive against Assad's modern armed forces.
What is the West doing to help Syrian refugees in Turkey, Iraq, and Jordan?
What are they doing to contain Jabhat al-Nusra - who have been engaged in terrorist acts against Shi'ites and others?
America's good faith shall be judged by the level of its humanitarian aid rendered to the Syrian populace.
There is unlikely to be any "negotiated settlement" without Assad leaving power.
In my opinion, one side will have to militarily defeat the other. An that is not likely to happen any time soon without direct foreign military intervention. So casualties may mount for years as a stalemate exists on the battlefield.
And if the Free Syrian Army wins, will they turn their guns on Jabhat al-Nusra as some have suggested?
One criticism I am hearing of the Obama administration plan to supply arms to rebels is that it will only consist of small arms rather than items such as anti-aircraft missiles that could defend against the formidable air power ofthe Assad regime.
This current plan will only extend the civil war in Syria by causing gridlock between the warring factions.
"I remain deeply confused about Israel's ambivalence on the issue of Syria."
The Israeli Foreign Ministry has no reason to like Assad since he has allowed his country to be used as an arms pipeline to Hezbollah from Iran, however overt suport of the opposition in Syria would do little to assist rebels, but may discredit them.
There are reports from Debka, the military news periodical published in Israel, that Al-Nusra Front fighters are receiving medical attention in Israel.
It would not surprise me if Israel had been rendering some level of covert assistance to the rebels, however the danger in doing so would be to create a situation in which a successor to the Baathist regime may be a greater threat to Israel than Assad.
Although President Jose Napoleon Duarte had CIA ties and Robert D'Aubuisson received limited training at the School of the Americas, the ultraconservative death squads of that era and the murders that occurred were internally generated in nature.
America did its best to keep leftist elements from acquiring power in San Salvador during the Reagan administration.
"Nobody remembers Clinton's paralysis in Algeria."
It is worse than that - the American public never knew in the first place.
How many Americans actually were aware of the human rights violations and murder in East Timor - even though almost as many died there as American servicemen in WWII?
How many Americans knew of the mass killings by Hafez Assad's armed forces in Hama? While Sabra and Shatila made international headlines Hama was barely noticed by anyone outside the Middle East - even though the death toll exceeded 9/11 WTC hijackings.
Syria - like many international hotspots - has had its internal affairs long ignored by the outside world. The only interest the West has currently is that it is an oppportunity to take out a Putin ally and close down Russia's naval base at Tartus.
I thought the same thing - there are only a few non-Alawite Shi'ite Muslims within Syria when contrasted with the rest of the Syrian populace - and when the article did not mention the victms were Alawite, I assumed they were not.
"....the idea that there is a number of secular-minded rebels is by now questionable...."
The Free Syrian Army (FSA)has been led by former senior army officers of the Assad regime who opposed atrocities against Syrian protestors.The FSA has previously given its allegiance to the Qatar-based 64-member Syrian National Coalition (SNC) as the government-in-exile .
The SNC has George Sabra, an Orthodox Christian as its Acting President; Sabra was named to the central committee of the Syrian Communist Party in 1985 and produced the Syrian version of "Sesame Street". He also heads the Syrian National Council, the Istanbul-based longtime group of Syrian exiles.
The SNC also has Suheir Atassi, an attorney and prominent feminist, serving as an influential vice-president.
The SNC as well as the Free Syrian Army have had a broad cross-section of Syrian society among their respective ranks. This includes the business sectors, in addition to those identifying with Islamic goals.
The truly extremist Islamic elements among the rebels have fought separate from the FSA in such groups as Jabhat al-Nusra - many of these are foreign fighters, primarily Iraqi, who are responsible for many of the terror attacks similar to the one described above.
Remembering what was done to Daniel Ellsberg, Jim Garrison, Philip Agee, Karen Silkwood, and what is now being done to Bradley Manning, it would not surprise me in the least to see those in certain quarters doing everything possible to dig up whatever they could on Snowden to discredit him.
Eric Snowden does deserve some type of punishment for what he did so as to act, at very least, as a deterrent to U.S. intelligence contractors and personnel who consider to violate confidentiality clauses and oaths. Many cheered when a Palestinian-American immigrant tossed a pie into the face of Senate Armed Services Committee chairman Carl Levin at a town hall meeting not too long ago, but the 30-day jail term for a federal misdemeanor conviction was necessary to prevent every activist from doing the same thing to a U.S. Congressman.
Unlike Daniel Ellsberg, a Harvard University graduate and doctorate holder, Snowden appears to have had little formal education and, like Pfc. Manning, was placed in a sensitive position in U.S. intelligence that he should not have been allowed in. Manning and Snowden may have produced positive impacts upon the public interest due to their conduct - but the disloyal manner in which these security breaches occurred cannot and should not be condoned by the President nor the United States Department of Justice. I am rather surprised to see Ron Paul and his son Rand, a member of the U.S. Senate cheer on Mr. Snowden.
There is no doubt Mr. Snowden will face a long road of legal action that will take years and years to play itself out.
What I have noted as interesting is that unlike the FBI, CIA, and MI-6, the National Security Agency has rarely been the subject of publicity via Hollywood.
Maybe the Snowden story will resurrect interest in the box office dud sci-fi thriller entitled "The Box", in which Frank Langella portrays an NSA agent who rises from the dead and approaches and offers everyday American families the opportunity to press a button on a box in exchange for payment of one million dollars only to discover the adverse implications imposed afterward by mysterious NSA personnel.
A great irony is that Snowden may be able to take advantage of an extradition treaty exemption between China and the U.S. that forbids extradition for crimes of a political character.
This exemption provision was inserted by U.S. negotiators to protect Chinese wishing to defect to America but may now be used to protect Snowden.
"Questions will be raised about Snowden's mental balance."
Yes, that was done after the Meir Kahane assassination when federal officials announced the gunman was emotionally unstable, thus allaying the American public's concern about a possible terrorist act.
After the gunman was acquitted of murder, the Justice Department eventually convicted him of RICO conspiracy after alleging criminal association with the terror organization that was involved in the WTC bombing - and claiming the Kahane killing was in furtherance of a conspiracy, thus avoiding application of a double jeopardy defense.
The feds have already released information on Bradley Manning suggesting an unstable family background and being a misfit in the Army.
During the Vietnam War, members of the Foreign Service often had disagreements on the State Departments Indochina policy. As a result a "dissent channel" was created on the theory that such expression was beeficial to overall Department functioning.
Nevertheless, there have been claims of retaliation against whistleblowers or dissenters who have questioned the legality or wisdom of the conduct of superiors in the Foreign Service.
The federal courts allowed the Justice Department and the U.S. Congress in the 1980s to twist the U.S. Constitution language to death to allow "administrative drug forfeiture" proceedings in which the DEA or other federal authority could seize property and hold it and the owner or possessor would have to sue the government to get their property back. States passed the same forfitre laws modeled after federal legislation.
This was part of the War on Drugs initiated by the Reagan administration.
Many citizens could not post a bond required by law in order to commence court proceedings. Some courts held these forfeiture statutes as unconstitutional. I persuaded a state court judge in Michigan in 1992 to declare the statute unconstitutional as the law prevented indigents from initiating court action to recover their property.
Instead of the War on Drugs, we have the War on Terrorism and in lieu of the forfeiture statute, we have the Patriot Act that is constitutionally questionable. Over the last almost dozen years, the federal judiciary has analyzed this Act of Congress and held, at various times, certain aspects to be violative of the U.S. Constitution.
GOP Congressman James Sensenbrenner of Wisconsin introduced the Patriot Act bill shortly after 9/11 and got it hastliy passed during the public panic after the World Trade Center attacks. He has recently commented on the recent NSA scandal and commented that he did not believe the conduct of the NSA was the type contemplated by the framers of the Patriot Act. Sensenbrenner has sat for decades in Congress and has been one of the strongest advocates of law enforcement interests.
We must remember that the NSA does not derive its authority form either the U.S. Constitution or any Act of Congress - but rather an obscure executive order of the President that could be rescinded at any time. This particular point was mentioned on the record of the Church Committee proceedings in the 1970s. The Central Intelligence Agency and Department of Defense, on the other hand, have their respective origins in the National Security Act of 1947.
Her prison warden has granted her a compassionate release due to her cancer which awaits approval in the bureaucracy in Washington D.C.
The U.S. Government acquired the "proof" you refer to due to a FISA warrant and NSA surveillance that violated the attorney-client privilege.
Her co-counsel, Abdeen Jabara, spent years under NSA surveiilance commencing in 1967 and was never charged with any criminal offense. Much of that surveillance infringed upon matters of attorney-client privelege. The ACLU litigated years of casework in the federal court system on Jabara's behalf resulting in a settlement.
Regarding the Lynne Stewart case, her intial sentence was only 28 months. Even though she had been diagnosed with Stage IV cancer, the U.S. Court of Appeals vacated the sentence and she was eventually re-sentenced to 10 years imprisonment; this enhancement was due to alleged trial perjury - under federal sentencing guidelines if a jury rejects your trial testimony the sentencing judge can give you a heavier sentence than if you simply did not testify at all and were convicted of the underlying charge. She is in her 70s and currently serving time in a federal prison.
She defended, along with Ramsey Clark and Abdeen Jabara, the "Blind Sheikh" who was convicted in the initial WTC bombing in 1993.
It is now being said that his freedom is in the hands of the Chinese government. If they decide to hand him over then He could be in a United States District Court within 24 hours.
In the past, the government has taken a dim view of disgruntled former personnel who have disclosed confidential matters or criticized the Agency.
The Department of State in 1981 won a case in the U.S. Supreme Court against former CIA officer Philip Agee, who authored "Inside the Company: A CIA Diary" to revoke his passport. He eventually died in Cuba.
In the early 1970s the U.S. government, in the first case of censorship of a book, obtained an injunction against the full publication "The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence" by former CIA official Victor Marchetti and ex-State Department analyst John Marks. This book eventually became a key factor in the impanelling of the Church Committee.
We can go well back before 1978 in Metro Detroit to discover evidence of highly questionable surveillance against U.S. citizens.
William Bufalino had been a prominent attorney that repesented the Teamsters union and its then-president Jimmy Hoffa - Mr. Hoffa had been under FBI investigation and prosecution during the 1950s and 1960s.
Bufalino sued Michigan Bell Telephone Company after ithad been discovered that his law firm's telephones were subject to surveillance equipment. That action reached the United States Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals during 1969.
Abdeen Jabara, who successfully appealed the death sentence of Sirhan Sirhan and received a ruling reducing the sentence to life imprisonment in 1972, filed suit via the ACLU in United States District Court in Detroit in late 1972 alleging improper surveillance by the FBI, CIA, and National Security Agency. That case was litigated for over a decade and established landmark judicial opinions on the legality of government surveillance and acccess of citizens to government records about them pursuant to the Freedom of Information Act.
"...his administration was soon sabotaged and he (Carter) lost re-election."
Yes, you mean when Jimmy Cater "cleaned house" and appointed Stansfield Turner as CIA director in the late 1970s.
Ted Shackley, the CIA Associate Deputy Director of Operations, who was forced to retire after an internal investigation found improprieties, later helped George H. W. Bush climb to becoming a plausible presidential candidate and had weely meetings with him during the 1980 campaign. Everything was done to humiliate Carter during his re-election run and Shackley's man became vice-president.
Shackley would eventually, as a private citizen, become deeply involved in running the Nicaraguan Contra war in the mid-1980s along with fellow former CIA official Felix Rodriguez.
The Central Intelligence Agency kept files on over 300,000 Americans under Operation CHAOS during the Vietnam War. The program was run by CIA Director Richard Helms to determine if the US anti-war movement was being controlled or influenced by foreign governments - Helms later reported to the President that there was no proof of this uncovered.
The only real opposition to the aggressive conduct of US intelligence organizations against its own citizens is Congressional committees and public interest organizations such as the American Civil Liberties Union.
Some interesting federal cases arising out of Detroit:
United States District Judge Anna Diggs-Taylor in Detroit initially held the ECHELON program of the NSA was unconstitutional as it violated the Fourth Amendment. She was however reversed by the U.S. Court of Appeals in Cincinnati. Diggs-Taylor had been a civil rights activist who marched with MLK in the Selma-to-Montgomery demonstration and who later saw her then-husband, Charles Diggs, sitting in U.S. Congress in the 1970s convicted of taking kickbacks after an FBI investigation.
Abdeen Jabara, the former defense counsel to Sirhan Sirhan who later became executive director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, had FBI, NSA, and CIA surveillance imposed on him since 1967 and, via the ACLU, fought a long court battle in the United States District Court in Detroit and U.S. Court of Appeals over this surveillance, which was eventually settled. His case established landmark judicial opinions on the government's ability to initiate such surveillance and a citizen's right to access of such information under the Freedom of Information Act.
One major question is using surveillance for purposes for which it was intended. Recall the Karim Koubriti terror cell case in Detroit that wound up in the convictions being vacated for prosecutorial misconduct. At least one of the defendants was later convicted of insurance fraud after his personal life came under extreme scrutiny. Assistant U.S. Attorney Rick Convertino and a State Department investigator were later tried and acquitted of obstruction of justice in the terror prosecution.
In the Hutaree terror case, there was the criminal defense attorney who got his client out on bail over vigorous U.S. Atotrney objctions and was sued three days later for non-payment of a long dormant student loan obligation.
N.C. Deday LaRene, one of Detroit's most prominent criminal defense counsel, was charged with tax evasion several years after winning acquittal in the sedition indictment in Detroit of white supremacist leader Robert Miles.
Geoffrey Fieger, longtime civil rights attorney and former Democratic nominee for governor, was indicted and acquitted of campaign finance violations in federal court in Detroit. The judge presidng over his trial stated that he rarely seen such a massive FBI investigation in his career on the bench.
Metro Detroit's most prominent Palestinian-American attorney, Tim Attalla, was charged with obstruction of justice and drug possession in federal court. The alleged obstruction was advising an arrestee not to answwer a detective's interrogation. The drug charge stemmed from an informant allegedly seeing Attalla with a Viagra tablet. Attalla was acquitted after a bench trial. Attalla had been earlier cited by an Israeli newspaper as a prominent pro-Arab political figure in Michigan.
Every one of these cases involved allegations of politically-motivated or otherwise opppresive government conduct targeting individuals who had been vocal opponents or of government action or policy or engaged in the legal representation of such persons.
The circumstances are reminiscent of the massacre of German camp administration and guards at Dachau upon its liberation in April 1945. Even the American commander who entered the camp admitted murders took place of Germans, the only dispute being the number. Yet no court-martial took place. General Patton wanted the matter dropped.
There is about as much public sympathy in the U.S. over the Nazi guards at Dachau as the alleged Al-Qaeda inmates in GITMO.
Abdul Rashid Dostum, an ethnic Uzbek, has been a key player in Afghanistan for the last several decades.
He had been an army commander during the Marxist regimes ruling in Afghnistan from the 1970s until 1992. He later turned on the Marxists and joined the U.S.-backed rebel forces that took Kabul. He was a key leader of the Northern Alliance that opposed the Taliban and gained stature when a powerful ally, the charismatic Ahmed Shah Massoud, was assassinated two days prior to the 9/11 hijackings in 2001.
Gen. Dostum has always had questions about his human rights record as a warlord administering areas of Afghanistan.
The likely reason Obama has not wanted to investigate the incident in question is that Gen. Dostum extended an olive branch to the U.S. in 2009 and has been friendly to the U.S-backed Hamid Karzai. America will not want to implicate a leader that is helping to stabilize the Karzai government in Kabul.
Someone needs to listen to Sean Baker the Army Specialist who went "undercover" as a detainee in a guard training exercise at GITMO.
He was assaulted and beaten so bad by American servicemen he sustained alleged brain damage and is now collecting disability benefits and suing the government.
The Army captors being trained in cell extraction were told the undercover Baker was a unruly detainee who was held for assaulting an American soldier. Baker's pleas that he was really an American soldier were ignored during the beating until the assaultive guards saw his Army uniform underneath the prison-issued inmate jumpsuit they were tearing away from his body.
Exactly. Why should U.S. Congressman advocate for the rights of these prisoners when there is no corresponding political benefit?
The argument also is deterrence. The U.S. wants to let Al-Qaeda know that in the event of capture, a place exists like Guantanamo in which they can expect painful retribution. Same argument for deploying the drones. Don't committ acts of terror and you will not have to worry about America's "bad side".
France had Devil's Island - this place in Cuba is not
uch better. The Soviets had the Gulag system to stifle political dissent and the Nazis had the SS-administered concentration camps.
The punishment and deterrent objectives of Guantanamo are impressive -even if they violate international law.
Remember the abduction and torture of CIA chief of station William F. Buckley in Beirut. Within a short period of time the CIA informants in the area turned up dead or missing and it was presumed that Buckley passed secrets during the torture sessions. Buckley died after repeated torture sessions, per information received by the U.S. government.
Islamic Jihad was righfuly castigated over the killing, abduction, and torture of Western individuals in Beirut during the 1980s. The Buckley incident caused great discomfiture among top government officials within the Reagan administration and he was eventually awarded the CIA's highest honor posthumously.
America's employment of the same methods used by terrorist elements results in a loss of moral standing and only encourages further like acts by those elements it so vehemently denounces.
Yes, Hezbollah has also become involved in the political processes, successfully fielding candidates for the Lebanese parliament unlike Al-Qaeda or its affiliates - whose activities seem confimed to terror attacks and paramilitary conflict.
You are correct in indicating that the Baathist Arab states were pro-Soviet in orientation under Nasser in Egypt, Assad in Syria and Saddam Hussein's Iraq.
The Red Army and air force of the USSR piloted jets and anti-aircraft batteries over the Sinai Peninsula in the 1973 Yom Kippur War.
The Soviet Union also supplied advanced weaponry to Libya up until the mid-1980s to prop up the Khadafy regime.
The chief sponsor of the Palestine Liberation Organization since its inception in 1964 was the USSR and its Soviet bloc satellites. PLO fighters were trained in Russia and the Palestinians had substantial capital investments in factories in these satellites. Lieutenant General Ion Pacepa, military intelligence chief in Romania under Ceaucescu and author of "Red Horizons", disclosed Yasser Arafat's tight relationship with the KGB and Romanian intelligence. Declassified CIA documents also have substantiated a realtionship between the most violent Palestinian splinter groups and the Communist-era Romanian government - including ties to Abu Nidal and even Hassan bin Salameh.
There was one story that the Operation Galilee invasion in 1982 actually pre-empted a Soviet-backed PLO planned invasion of Israel from Lebanon that had been imminent.
Syria is a literal hodgepodge of sects and foreign interests jockeying for position much like Lebanon was during the 1970s and 1980s. This has had international repercussions and will have a continuing devastating effect on the Syria population.
The Alawite sect of Shi'ite Islam comprises about 12% of the Syrian population. But President Assad and his Alawite minority have extensive, even a controlling, influence over the Syrian government via the Baath Party. Some prominent Alawites have joined the Syrian opposition movements. There is a very small percentage of the Syria population that is non-Alawite Shi'ite, however the most active Shi'ites in the civil war in Syria have been foreign fighters from Iraq and elsewhere that have been split in their loyalties between Assad and the rebels.
Christian Syrians, who comprise about 9% of the population in Syria, have done relatively well under Assad, however many have joined Sunni Muslims in anti-government demonstrations.
The primary sectarian force behind the Free Syrian Army and the Islamic fundamentalist factions have been Sunni in orientation. Sunnis are the majority within Syria and have held a substantial number of seats in the Syrian National Coalition.
Russia wants their Mediterranean Sea base at Tartus retained and are therefore supporting the Assad regime.
Israel wants to see Assad gone since he has allowed Syria to have maintained the existence of a line of military supplies from Iran to Hezbollah in Lebanon.
America sees Assad as a sponsor of terrorism due to his Hezbollah ties and prefers his removal. Senator McCain has even gone into rebel-held terrotory to embrace the anti-Assad fighters. The CIA has been exposed by investigative reporters to be running the logistical side of arming Syria's rebels.
The Lebanese Sunnis want to see Assad fall due to his regimes constant intermeddling in Lebanese affairs in support of Hezbollah.
Jordan is having a serious refugee problem due to the ongoing civil war in Syria.
Both Iraq and Iran governments see an ally in Assad and need his teritory so that Hezbollah can be supplied with arms.
Syria is headed to a long-term civil war where years will likely elapse before anyone will have any chance of prevailing to restore any semblance of civil order. The death tolls could reach into the hundreds of thousands and billions of dollars of weaponry furnished by world powers to assist in this annihilation.
We have previously seen this scenario in Indochina, the Balkans, Afghanistan, Iraq, Sri Lanka, and East Timor amongst other areas of the world.
A number of the survivors of the Holocaust, like Menachem Begin, had a survival mentality that dictated practicality of force as a preferred instrument of control against the Arab populations.
Many of the terror gang leaders, such as Begin and Yitzhak Shamir became post-independence political leaders -while other founding Jews of the State of Israel- such as Meir Vilner - adopted a conciliatory approach toward Arabs. Many of these ex-terror gang members joined the Likud Party.
Since the 1970s, the conservative Likud bloc has largely dominated the Israeli government and has taken a hard line against Palestinian human rights.
Arab Israelis are de facto stateless due to the clever legal loopholes that they create to deny Arabs rights of citizenship.
For instance, eligibilty for government benefit programs in Israel is conditioned on having a family member acquire service in the Israel Defense Forces. Since universal conscription exists for Israeli Jews (with limited exceptions)and almost no Arabs serve in the IDF (with notable exception of the Druzes) this means, as a general rule, Jewish Israelis have access to benefits from Israeli government social welfare programs and Arab Israelis do not.
The Kingdom of Jordan and the United Nations have tried to administer and fund educational and social programs to assist Palestinians under occupation, however Jordan had largely curtailed these efforts.A number of Isreali civil rights organizations have criticized Israeli government over its treatment of Palestinians, including Yesh Din, the Israeli Coalition Against Housing Demolitions, Machsom Watch, and B'Tselem.
In the sixty-five years of the existence of Israel, only one Arab Muslim has ever sat in the Israeli cabinet an no Arab has ever sat in the powerful foreign relations or defense committees of the Knesset.
Of course, Arabs living in the Occupied Territories have no voting rights in Israeli government elections and are governed by the Civil Administration, a division of the Israel Defense Forces headed by a brigadier general, that imposes martial law upon Arabs in the West Bank. The West Bank is divided into military districts governed by an Israeli army colonel who acts as a district governor.
West Bank Palestinians are tried in military tribunals administered by the Israel Defense Forces. Fifteen years may be added to a criminal sentence for disrepect exhibited to the tribunal and conviction rates of Arab youhs exceed 99%. Jewish setttlers in the West Bank, in contrast, have their court cases heard in civilian courts within Israel.
Israel also uses a "adminisrative detention" system to hold Palestinians it has suspicions are engaged in subversive activity but does have sufficient proof to level criminal charges against. As many as 6,000 Palestinians have been held at one time using this legal process. This type process was described in the "Gulag Archipelago" by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn as being implemented in the Soviet Union during the Lenin and Stalin eras.
There's always been a fine line in that area about who are the good and bad guys.
Remember in the 1980s in Lebanon where we had the warring factions, including Amal, Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, the Phalange, and the various Palestinian liberation groups. Nabih Berri was either the most respected stateman in Lebanon or a terrorist depending on who you spoke to.
The most infamous photo op that never occurred was when Gulbuddin Hekmyatar, the Afghan warlord, made speeches in America to Afghan exiles but turned down an invitation to the White House to visit President Reagan - although many Afghan leaders did so and submitted to a photo op with the Commmander-in-Chief in the Oval Office.
Hekmyatar's rebel group received covert training assistance and weapons via the U.S. and Israel during the 1980s.
Hekmyatar later became Afghan prime minister in 1994, but by 2002, the Bush administration deemed him expendable and attempted to assassinate him in a drone strike. The drone missed and Hekmyatar later announced support for al-Qaeda and a bounty on U.S. servicemen.
The recent report of the battle death of a Flint, Michigan mother, Nicole Mansfield, and the prior FBI arrest of American ex-serviceman Eric Harroun begs the question of how many Americans are involved in the Syrian Civil War and what organizations may be facilitating this?
Harroun's father has publicly stated his son worked for the CIA and there is already one YouTube video that has questioned whether Ms. Mansfield may have had such ties.
The fact that the U.S. Senate is apparently gung-ho about the arming of anti-government militants and one of its members has apparently met with extremist elements does remind one of the initiation of U.S. involvement in Afghanistan.
Yair Lapid and his father, Yossi, were no friends of the ultra-orthodox community within Israel.
The ultra-orthodox community in Israel has long been the allies of Likud and this hasbeen a mutually beneficial relationship for decades.
Yair Lapid would likely pursue a two-state solution that is more realistic than that proposed by Netanyahu and his party, Yesh Atid strongy supports peace initiatives with the Palestinians.
Expect the PM to give in to Lapid to keep his position.
The map of Africa correctly identifies the Belgian Congo.
The story behind it was the brutal colonization by King Leopold II commencing in 1885. Inhabitants were summarily executed, traded as slaves, , conscripted into the army, and had their orphaned children indoctrinated into Christianity.
It is one of the great untold chapters in world history.
In the 2009 Lebanese Parliament elections, the Amal Party won 13 seats and Hezbollah 12 to help form the ruling coalition.
Nabih Berri has retained his long-held position as Speaker of the Lebanese Parliament.
Hezbollah rules in a de facto manner areas of south Lebanon via its militia, but the Amal Party commands the loyalty of the Shi'ite Lebanese community in the major population centers, such as around Beirut.
Amal is respected as a centrist secular political party and Hezbollah is viewed by most Lebanese, even among Shi'ites, as extremist in orientation.
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The immediate cause of the riots was a police raid on a blind pig. That is public knowledge.
A college professor once told me that the 1967 riots were planned by left-wing fellow faculty members and he witnessed the planning. The rioting was commenced on Twelfth Street, only one block away from the Wayne State University football field.
Today the high-paying UAW jobs are cutailed and incoming Ford Motor employees earn about $35,000 per annum for the first three years.
I was residing in Detroit during the rioting of 1967.
43 died and scores wounded. The "Algiers Motel Incident" by John Hersey chronicled the rioting and the conflicts between police and the black community of that era. This police brutality was the key reason of the riots.
There were armored personnel carriers rolling down Eight Mile Road (the north border of Detroit - which inspired the Eminem movie name)which decamped at the State Fair grounds for deployment against the rioters. These were not National Guardsmen but active-duty U.S. Army personnel, many with Vietnam experience(what about the Posse Comitatus Act?). Although many National Guardsmen were deployed as well as volunteers from other police jurisdictions to haul away the large amount of arrestees. Many attorneys who had no experience in criminal law volunteered to represent arrestees in arraignments that clogged the court system in Detroit.
At the time the city was mostly white and had a police force that was about 85% white. Today the city is close to 85% black, Hispanic and Asian minorities and the police force is mostly composed of minorities.
The population of Detroit now is less than half than when I moved out in 1969. The City of Detroit is replete with burned out and abandoned structures, eyesores, defective and unmaintained roads. Police tell me they are afraid to pull over citizens for traffic violations for fear of being shot. Public schools often do not even have toilet paper. Homeless citizens were actually attempting to get arrested during winter in order to find a place to eat and sleep in a Wayne County jail cell.
Detroit looks like a Third World country. Very sad.
Pamela Byrnes, formerly a state representative from Ann Arbor currently working for the University of Michigan in China, has just announced her candidacy as a Democrat against conservative U.S. Congressman Tim Walberg.
Per her LinkedIn page, she served as an intelligence analyst for the National Security Agency from 1969 through 1974. Her page was just amended to reflect her Congressional candidacy.
Byrnes is viewed as a moderate Democrat and enjoyed the support of many GOP activists when she ran for a state senate seat in Michigan in 2010 but lost.
Mike Rogers is a former FBI special agent who is currently considering a run at the United States Senate to fill the vacancy created by Senator Carl Levin - the former public defender attorney from Detroit who is a liberal and a supporter of the civil rights movement.
Rogers is one of the most conservative members of the U.S. House and hails from rural Michigan which is overwhelmingly conservative in a political sense.
Rogers is trying to bulid publicity for a U.S. Senate bid.
I agree.
Something like 80% of all prison inmates in the U.S. are the product of a broken home.
A cohesive and nurturing family structure for a child is undoubtedly a key determinant on whether or not the child develops an anti-social personality.
Over half of young black Americans are either incarcerated, free on bond, or on probation or parole under criminal proceedings.
There is a cycle of poverty and lack of education which is self-perpetuating.
The military service option for many young poor blacks and Hispanics is a way toward education and steady gainful employment. Approximately 26% of the U.S. Marine Corps personnel are Hispanic-Americans.
@Melvin Backstrom:
I agree with your analysis relative to secular Jews - I was not including them and should have been more precise by specifying "observant" Jewry. Generally, the population of Israeli Jewry has been historically overwhelmingly either secular or Orthodox.
I was referring to the other two Jewish groups "prominent in America" as being Conservative or Reformed.
The Haredi Jewish community in Israel has had explosive growth of population due to an impressively high birth rate over the years however.
Secular Jewry made a great impact upon Israel and many formed the Israel Communist Party and supported solidarity with the Palestinian Arabs - Meir Vilner comes to mind. Today the successor Marxist political party is known as Hadash. Mapai, the forerunner of the Labor Party had many secular Jews as well.
No, ultraorthodox Jews oppose the State of Israel due to the religious grounds, although many do reside in Israel due to affinity to the land itself in a historic sense.
Orthodox Jews compose the vast majority of Jewish Israelis and the other two Jewish groups prominent in America were almost non-existent within Israel during prior decades.
"Iran is a small weak country....."
Iranian intelligence assisted in the military rise of Hezbollah and Iran's elite soldiers manned missile batteries during the Second Lebanon War. There are 40,000 rockets Hezbollah has that could be used against Israel. 165 Israels died in that brief conflict.
Iran has also assisted both Hamas and Islamic Jihad in Gaza and many of the militant leaders reportedly visit Iran on a regular basis - Hamas military chief Muhammad Deif supposedly had surgery in Iran to remedy injuries received in prior Israeli assassination attempts.
Iran is assisting the Assad regime in Damascus which has prolonged the civil war that has caused 100,000 deaths so far.
Iran sustained more battle deaths in the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s than the U.S. did during WWII.
Iran is a major force in Middle Eastern politics that Israel is rightfully concerned about and has been a source of financial and military support to the Palestinian and Lebanese groups that have taken paramilitary actions against Israel in recent yaers.
Ironically, the Bedouins have a reputation as pathfinders and bore the brunt of the casualties in the occupation of Gaza as members of the Israel Defense Forces. It was a Bedouin Arab sergeant in the IDF that was convicted of manslaughter in the death of British civil rights activist Tom Hurndall and a Bedouin IDF officer identified in the shooting death of the co-producer of the award-winning "Death in Gaza" documentary, James Miller. Hamas at one point sent an open letter to the Bedouin community recognizing their honorable heritage and to refrain from service in the IDF - Hamas even established a scholarship award program for Bedouins to encourage their avoidance of IDF service.
It is also notable that Israel has no constitution so the existence of a court system at all is legislative enactment by the Knesset under the "Basic Law" can be rescinded or modified. The concept of separation of powers under the Bassic law is far from absolute as the Knesset can, and does, regulate the Israel Supreme Court's authority.
The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) was intended to stem the tide of abuses from COINTELPRO and Operation CHAOS that had been revealed during Watergate committee hearings and investigations of the Rockerfeller Commission and Church Committee during the 1970s.
In practice, however, FISC does little more than immunize and rubber-stamp the actions of the U.S. intelligence community from Fourth Amendment scrutiny and liability.
Very few Americans were previously even aware of the existence of such a tribunal until the Snowden affair. I first became aware of this court when I read a legal journal interview a number of years ago of United States District Court Judge Wendell Miles, now 97 years of age, of the Western District of Michigan, who indicated he had served on FISC and found the service "interesting".
FISC was created by an Act of Congress and has no direct federal constitutional basis. Its judges are appointed by the chief justice and do not require congressional approval like other members of the U.S. judiciary. Because the chief justice is the sole appointing authority, in practice some of the most ultraconservative members of the federal bench sit on FISC (Chief Justice Rehnquist's wife worked as a CIA employee) Most of FISC's functioning is secret. In practice most of its warrant requests are approved, very, very few are denied, and a small number are modified.
Critics of FISC point out that its secrecy and lack of congressional oversight has resulted in a lack of accountability for conduct that does little to protect the civil liberties and privacy rights of Americans.
I agree.
In Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, for example, the per capita income is $79,000 - however this small Michigan city was the home to Lee Iacooca and many other auto executives, professional sports figures and entertainers - leaving the "average" a lot higher than the "median" per capita income.
"Is it due to poor legal representation?"
I can recall sitting on a bench in the Michigan Court of Appeals awaiting for my case to be called and seeing a public appellate defender standing before a three-judge panel and telling them at a scheduled oral argument he had nothing to say - and left the courtroom; the taxpayers were paying an appointed defender to appear and say nothing! He could have stayed home, waived oral argument, but instead got a taxpayer-funded fee for saying zilch to the appeals judges on behalf of his client during the oral argument phase of his appeal.
The three reasons you cite are all valid in my experience.
@JTMcPhee:
The "logic" I was refering to was the fact both Detroit and D.C. had high murder rates with blacks being the primary victims, yet since no death penalty existed to punish any of the perpetrators, the apparent Amnesty International point being made was not entirely valid i.e. the death penalty less likely to be imposed where the victim is African-American.
I was personally acquainted with at least three elected former County Prosecutors from Metro Detroit - two supported the death penalty and one opposed it. The one who opposed it was from Wayne County, which had 2 million residents - he told me that after touring Michigan's notorious Jackson Prison - the largest walled prison in the world - the conditions were so poor, that the mandatory life in prison without parole first-degree murder statute in Michigan was, in his estimation, actually a more severe punishment than death.
Would a constitutional amendment authorizing capital punishment in Michigan actually deter the homicide rate? No one knows.
Every time some horrific murder event occurs in Michigan the call for reinstatement of the death penalty begins anew.
Michigan has not had a death penalty in its court system since 1846 and was only the third jurisdiction in the world to abolish it - after the duchies of Liechtenstein and Tuscany in Europe. The ban was most previously written and adopted into the State of Michigan Constitution in 1963 during the last state constitutional convention.
I do have concerns that if the death penalty were reinstated in Michigan there could be a potential for disparity in application depending on the racial classification of the defendant - or of the victim.
See http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org
One interesting statistic regarding Louisiana is that it has a death penalty and judges and juries are not hesitant abut imposing it. Yet it has a very high rate of violent crimes reported in comparison to other states.
The three U.S. states with the lowest reported rate of violent crime per FBI statistics are (1)Maine,(2)Vermont, and(3)New Hampshire. Of the three, only New Hampshire has the death penalty - but has not executed anyone since 1939. A black man is the single death row inmate in N.H. for killing a police officer.
Minority defendants in murder cases often face black and/or Hispanic-dominated juries in New York, Detroit, Chicago and Los Angeles, but these juries do convict fellow minorities of violent crimes on a regular basis.
California, while having the death penalty, does not impose it as readily as courts in Texas and Louisiana.
There are several innocent explanations for this phenomenon.
Firstly, jurisdictions with a high black population often are liberal in orientation and have either abolished the death penalty altogether or very sparingly impose it.
Michigan was the first state to abolish the death penalty via its Michigan Constitution. Every attempt to revive it has failed since its prohibition in the 1800s. In the 1970s the City of Detroit had earned the nickname "The Murder City" and was identified as having the highest homicide rate in the world of any municipality with a population of over 1.5 million persons. The vast majority of the victims in Detroit during that time were black but none could face the death penalty due to the state constitutional prohibition against capital punishment. A similar logic exists in the District of Columbia which has a high percentage of black citizens, a significantly elevated murder rate and blacks being the chief victims.
There is also no death penalty currently imposed in New York, New Jersey and Illinois - which all contain significant percentages of African-Americans. When the State of New York did have a death penalty, it was rarely imposed anyway.
Texas and Florida have traditionally led the states in the number of annual executions and have been conservative politically - but neither have had a comparatively large percentage of citizens that are black.
The U.S. in the past has used its CIA connections with military leaders and others to foment demonstrations and coups d'état to subvert leaders it deems inimical to American interests.
Remember the overthrow of Salvador Allende in Chile in 1973, Dr. Mossadegh in Iran in 1953.
Does the U.S. have intelligence assets within the organizers of the demonstrations? Probably.
But try gauging the extent of CIA involvement and it will be next to impossible without the Agency admitting such.
Your logic is misplaced to the extent the current "patriot" movement opposes a strong central government and are civil libertarians. There are black militia units in the U.S. Many of the Tea Party members are either minorities or non-Protestant. Note the Hispanic U.S. senator from Texas. Congressman Justin Amash of Michigan is a Palestinian-American and is a follower of Ron Paul.
The Republican Party is currently split between the Tea Party populist movement and, on the other hand, the corporate insiders who generally oppose gun control and support a strong police presence.
Regarding the Hutaree militia members and their case:
The 9/11 terror-related indictments and the Hutaree case both had James Thomas, an Arab-American, as defense counsel for a defendant in each. He publicly lambasted the prosecution in both cases and was a prosecution witness against Richard Convertino in the obstrution of justice case against Covertino and his co-defendant.
The backgrounds of the federal judges were different and that likely played a difference.
Gerald Rosen, whom I was acquainted with when he represented banks in the 1980s, got a federal appointment to the bench after serving as legal counsel to the Michigan Republican Party; Rosen had ran for Congress as a GOP nominee and lost. Rosen set aside the convictions only after the Office of United States Attorney had asked him to do so.
Victoria Roberts was a Clinton appointee whose background was bringing civil rights actions for plaintiffs. While the Hutaree case was pending, it was Attorney General Eric Holder who publicly labeled the Hutarees as a dangerous organization. The United States Attorney who brought the charges against the Hutaree was Barbara McQuade, a Democrat from Ann Arbor who was appointed by Obama.
After being exonerated, one Hutaree defendant was elected as constable of Bridgewater Township, Michigan as a GOP nominee. The public, in general, never believed that there was any substance to the case against them - despite some of their odd name and beliefs.
While the Hutaree case by the FBI was completely discredited, the Koubriti case remains highly controversial. One of the jurors said the proofs were lacking against Convertino and his co-defendant. Later, Convertino ran for the Michigan Legislature as a GOP candidate, but lost a close race. He was lauded by many for his work in fighting perceived terrorism.
The Detroit Free Press reported in an article by staff writer Tamara Audi dated November 12, 2002 of a massive build-up and deployment in Metro Detroit of federal investigative personnel in the months following 9/11:
"....(t)he breadth of the probe is astounding. Every aspect of Arab immigrant life is being watched......(including) FBI surveillance of local meeting places....."
See: link to factsofisrael.com
That intense federal presence led to the FBI securing indictments and eventual jury convictions of several Arab immigrants on terror-related charges prosecuted by Assistant United States Attorney Richard Convertino. These were the first post-9/11 convictions in the U.S. on such charges.
Those convictions were later vacated due to government misconduct found by the judge who had presided over the trial proceedings, Hon. Gerald Rosen, and Convertino and a State Department investigator were later indicted themselves in the same U.S. Courthouse for alleged misconduct arising out the prior case. The latter case was brought by the Public Integrity Section of the U.S. Department of Justice and tried; bothh Convertino and his co-defendant were exonerated by a federal court jury.
Lawsuits were filed by the terror defendants, including Karim Koubriti for their arrest and long pre-trial incarceration bt they were dismissed. Convertino sued the federal government but his case was also dismissed.
Rick Convertino became a staunch critic of the federal government's "War on Terrorism" and left the Department of Justice after a long career in public service with a history of commendations by that department.
Converino's website containing his most interesting version of events is:
http://www.convertino.org
In the "Gulag Archipelago", Solzhenitsyn describes the code of criminal procedure applicable in the Soviet Union, but states it took great pains for him to actually be able to locate a copy of the document within Russia.
The protections granted to Soviet citizen of that era were rarely actually accorded in practice.
The RevTribunals created to suppress counter-revolutionary activity had no legal standards applicable to find a defendant guilty of counter-revolutionary conduct and had only one punishment authorized - death. Solzhenitsyn indicates that one preferred the criminal courts for that reason.
One former NSA director who had been discussed for possible high public office was retired Navy Adm. Bobby Inman. Bill Clinton wanted him as his secretary of defense but his appointment was opposed by the Israel Lobby. Inman did not believe the Israelis were trustworthy enough to share intelligence with and he blamed Israel for intentional misconduct in the USS Liberty attack of 1967 during the Six Day War.
Veterans of the U.S. intelligence community, especially retired CIA Associate Deputy Director of Operations Ted Shackley, backed the 1980 presidential candidacy of former Director of Intelligence George H.W. Bush due to Jimmy Carter's massive personnel reductions at the CIA beginning in 1977 in which hundreds of employees lost their jobs.
The Reagan-Bush years were a glory period for U.S. intelligence veterans of the anti-Castro projects, as many came back to work in the Contra War in Nicaragua. These include Shackley, Luis Posada Carilles, and Felix Rodriguez. Dr. Orlando Bosch, one of the most violent of the Cuban anti-Castro exiles of Miami, received a pardon from President Bush in 1989 during protracted parole violation proceedings in federal court.
Many Americans see the "alphabet agencies" as bastions of democracy in the world.
Even Pres. Obama cited the Trayvon Martin tragedy, indicating that if he had a son he would look like Trayvon.
It was politics pure and simple. Exploitation by outsiders of a tragedy impacting not only the Martin family but that of Mr. Zimmerman.
As a legal matter, the prosecution will be fortunate to get a conviction on a lesser charge than murder.
I question that he does not have "diplomatic immmunity".
I can recall that an Israeli official with an arrest warant against him issued by a British court sat in a plane in an airport and was allowed to depart back home to Israel when it had been discovered by the official that the warrant existed and he was advised not to disembark.
I can also recall an incident where the U.S. government tricked a Lebanese national whom it charged with complicity in the 1985 Beirut TWA hijacking to going onto a boat in international waters where he had to be taken via the Mediterranean Sea to the Atlantic Ocean to the U.S. without touching foreign soil - otherwise the U.S. had no continuous jurisdiction over him.
The Achille Lauro incident concerned the murder of a U.S. national, however it was an Italian court that adjudicated the matter - and dismissed charges against Palestinian
Liberation Front leader Mahmoud Abu Abbas but convicted two others in the incident.
Many, if not most,extradition treaties will not extradite for crimes of a "political character" and the Department of Justice has cleverly attempted to avoid this exception by also charging Snowden with theft.
None.
It was abolished by the 13th Amendment.
Very few cases cited this provision after it went into effect in 1865.
"PRISM and TEMPORA surveillance programs ....in contravention of the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution."
I know of no federal court that has passed on the legality of that program.
However, United States District Court Judge Anna Diggs-Taylor in Detroit several years ago declared the ECHELON surveillance program of the NSA in violation of the Fourth Amendment. She was later reversed by the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati.
There is a real issue as to whether the Espionage Act and the theft statutes charged by the U.S. Department of Justice have any legal or factual basis.
If Snowden were extradited to the U.S., I suspect you would have the largest media circus in a court proceeding since the O.J. Simpson murder prosecution.
"....Maduro pointed to the U.S. allowing Luis Posada Carriles to live freely in Miami, even though he blew up a plane with 73 persons aboard..."
What President Madura does not mention is that Posada, a former U.S. Army officer, was acquitted in Venezuela by a military court and later by a civilian court of complicity in those two bombings. Posada spent years in detention that nation before escaping prison awaiting a prosecutor's appeal of the second acquittal.
The United States Justice Department attempted to try him for giving false information to the Immigration and Naturalization Service, but a jury acquitted him in Texas in 2008.
Luis Posada is revered in Miami as a hero of the anti-Castro Cuban exile movement and had long-documented ties to the U.S. intelligence community.
Jury nullication was used by Northern juries during the pre-Civil War slavery era to avoid convicting those charged under the unpopular Fugitive Slave Law.
In Michigan, jury nullification is recognized, but a binding Michigan Court of Appeals decision holds that a judge may not instruct a jury that this right exists.
"Terrorism is a scam."
Richard Convertino was the Assistant U.S. Attorney in Detroit who obtained the first post 9/11 terror convictions.
Previous to that he received a commendation by United States Attorney General Janet Reno for receiving an unprecedented number of convictions against organized crime figures in Michigan while serving with the Office of United States Attorney in Detroit.
Convertino later criticized the government for trying to create public hysteria in order to justify government spending that created jobs and job security for those involved in federal law enforcement.
The U.S. Department of Justice later vacated the 9/11 terror convictions obtained by Convertino, who faced federal obstruction indictments, civil rights suits by the criminal defendants in his terror case investigation. Convertino was cleared in all those cases and now is in private practice defending criminal cases.
The Earl Warren-led U.S. Supreme Court championed the greatest civil rights revolution since the Abraham Lincoln era.
Those years saw indigent rights expanded via interpretation of the Fourth, Fifth and Sixth Amendments. The Miranda, Katz and Gideon decisions were landmark opinions that gave reasonable and thoughtful protections to not only criminal defendants but the average citizen from police intrusions.
The Rehnquist era generally saw limitations imposed upon citizen rights. One area this manifested itself in was police-initiated forfeitures of money and property that was purportedly linked to drug activity. Police seized your effects and you had to sue them and post a bond to try and recover your things back.
In 1991, I sued the Michigan State Police on behalf of client alleging that the state's drug forfeiture statute violated the Due Process Clause and Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment for indigents unable to post a bond in such proceedings. A state circuit court agreed and the Office of Attorney General told me they did not want to appeal or otherwise further contest the matter since that law realized 11 million dollars in revenue for law enforcement in the state and a binding Court of Appeals ruling . I later learned a number of other attorneys had obtained rulings invalidating that law on the same grounds in trial court proceedings.
These forfeiture proceedings I came to realize were primarily revenue-generating gimmicks that had little to do with guilt or innocence of criminal accused - in fact often police did not bother to bring criminal charges for drug possession and very often no drugs were found. If one was carrying around a wad of cash in his pocket he was assumed to be a drug seller - even if he was a successful businessman and presumably could show a source for the cash. The County Prosecutor had a special office that routinely negotiated settlements in these cases in accepting an amount less than it would cost for the claimant to try his case in court with an attorney. Minorities were targeted for these forfeiture proceedings, or so it seemed by the percentage of claimants I saw trying to get their seized property returned. These proceedings, I concluded, were an abuse of police power and a waste of resources that could be better used targeting narcotics distribution networks that had a serious and deleterious impact on American society.
I feel that the Fourth Amendment is one of the cornerstones of American democracy and protects all Americans from arbitrary and overly intrusive law enforcement conduct.
This reminds me of "Seven Days in May".
Pres. Morsi as Frederic March's role.
Morsi drew his primary support at elections from rural voters in Egypt. Cairo was secular, for the most part.
The fact these demonstrations are taking place cannot surprise me. It is a sign that there is freedom of assembly and freedom of expression within Egypt which was not occurring under the Mubarak regime.
The austerity policies referred to are almost always protested against wherever they may be implemented. Remember PM Thatcher and her unpopular tax policies.
The National Security Agency did have members testify before Congress during the Church Committee hearings.
I have read transcripts of Church Committee proceedings where the NSA was described by a panel member as having its charter not authorized by an Act of Congress but by executive order of the president, and the fact most Americans were unaware of its existence.
NSA Deputy Director Benson Buffham had testified at that juncture before the Church Committee. Buffham had led a code-breaking unit in the Army during WWII, and later oversaw the early years of growth at the NSA. Buffham had been vocal about his belief that the USS Liberty attack was intentional (an NSA civilian employee died in that incident). He has given interviews on the history of U.S. intelligence (subject to NSA redaction before publication) Buffham today is in his 90s and lives in Florida.
One thing I have not seen mentioned in the recent NSA controversy mentioned is the Privacy Act. During the ACLU litigation of FBI and National Security Agency surveillance of Abdeen Jabara, both the violation of the Privacy Act and attorney-client privilege were argued before the federal judiciary in Detroit and a number of those rulings were published in the Federal Supplement or Federal Reporter series. Wholesale surveillance by the NSA will necessarily encompass snaring communications that are statutorily protected for legal or medico-legal purposes. The federal judiciary did not dismiss attorney-client privilege concerns in the Jabara case but indicated that the client rather than the attorney had standing to bring those claims for violations of their privacy.
The FBI began survellance of Arab-Americans during Operation Boulder in response to the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre and Jabara became a public figure as defense counsel of Sirhan Sirhan from 1968 to 1972, when Sirhan's death sentence was vacated by the California Supreme Court; however federal surveillance of Jabara began, according to court records, in 1967 - well before the RFK shooting or the Munich incident - so neither of these events caused the surveillance being initiated against Jabara.
Another prominent defense attorney from Detroit, William Bufalino, who defended Jimmy Hoffa, had in the 1960s, discovered Detroit Police Department wiretaps of his law firm's telephones and sued Michigan Bell for its complicity in the affair. Bufalino, like Jabara, was never convicted of anything. Walter Sheridan, who had headed the "Get Hoffa Squad" on behalf of Robert F. Kennedy, was an NSA counter-intelligence officer.
The ACLU litigation brought on behalf of Jabara uncovered highly questionable tactics of the FBI, CIA and NSA being directed at a U.S. citizen. During that case, affidavits were filed containing conclusory statements by CIA personnel to justify surveillance. The Snowden allegations do not surprise me as the Jabara court proceedings contain public record disclosure of extremely invasive government behavior. The ACLU/Jabara litigation commenced in 1972 and continued well into the 1980s before a settlement was reached.
Abdeen Jabara currently lives in Manhattan and practices law - often collaborating with former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark.
The African National Congress leadership undoubtedly had Marxist elements.
Joe Slovo was the General Secretary of the South African Communist Party and also was one of the leaders of the military wing of the ANC.
In Detroit, we had Detroit P.D. intelligence unit members who had been deputized into the U.S. Marshals Service, thus allowing them to cross municipal and state lines to investigate cases.
During the early 1980s, that police unit worked with the FBI to place surveillance equipment inside the home of Detroit's first African-American mayor, Coleman Young, pursuant to a search warrant issued by a federal judge, which did not become public knowledge until the Vista Disposal federal corruption indictments were handed down and tried in 1983. Young was never charged in that or any other case as a result of the surveillance but a city officials and a number of businesspersons were convicted - although Young had been the clear target of the investigation.
The Office of Naval Intelligence the the oldest continuous intelligence agency in the U.S., founded in 1882.
Some of the most famous persons who have served as the ONI's commanders include Bobby Inman(later NSA director), and Rufus Taylor (later CIA deputy director).
Here's a link:
link to oni.navy.mil
Re: "Smearing" of Snowden:
James Di Eugenio, author of Destiny Betrayed, and an expert of the Jim Garrison investigation had urged the Assassination Records Review Board (AARB)to push for release of National Security Agency files relating to the JFK assassination, citing the fact that New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison's key obstructionist, Walter Sheridan, was an NSA counter-intelligence officer. Sheridan also played a key role in coordinating the "Get-Hoffa Squad" on behalf of U.S. Attorney General Robert Kennedy that eventually resulted in the Teamster leader's conviction and imprisonment on federal charges.
The AARB later reported that the NSA had documents responsive to the request and was cooperataing to receive those papers.
It was ironic that dozens and dozens of books and hundreds of periodical articles have been published regarding the speculation of possible Defense Department, FBI, or CIA conspiracy in the JFK assassination, but America's largest intelligence-gathering organization has almost never been mentioned, other than by Mr. Di Eugenio, in this vein.
Actually, the McGowan versus Maryland opinion of the U.S. Supreme Court in 1961 did validate the Sunday closure laws since they had achieved a secular purpose, although their initial intent may have been religious in nature. However, I do agree that "blue laws" in general are deemed by U.S. courts to be unconstitutional and the McGowan holding was expressly re-affirmed in 2005 by the Supreme Court to strike down the display of the Ten Commandments at court facilities in Kentucky as the intent of the display was ruled to promote a religious purpose.
In 1967, The U.S. Supreme Court reversed the felony conviction of a white man arising out of his marriage to a black woman(Loving versus Virginia)on Equal Protection Clause grounds and put an end to enforcement of criminal laws in Southern states barring interracial marriage. The concept of regulating marriage is nothing new from Sourthern legislators.
The Establishment Clause of the First Amendment was not likely implicated in the review of the Court since much of our laws in America are based on Judeo-Christian principles. The doctrine of separation of powers and the death penalty for murder have been rooted in such origins. The Supreme Court has addressed issues previously - such as Sunday closure laws - that reflect the government adopting or giving deference to religious principles.
"...you would have to file a lawsuit."
In Jabara vs. Kelley, 75 FRD 475(ED Mich 1977)the federal court, Judge Ralph Freeman, analyzed the "state secrets privelege" under the 1953 Supreme Court decision in Reynolds in the context of a FOIA enforcement action brought by the ACLU in the name of Abdeen Jabara, former defense counsel to Sirhan Sirhan and an executive director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. The court held that such matters could be reviewed "in camera" (i.e. in the judge's chambers) to protect national security.
The court also held the "ongoing criminal investigation privilege" is not indefinite and expires after the elapsing of a reasonable amount of time, even if the investigation remains "open" in the government.
Qatar is unusual in the Mideast to the extent of its ties and orientation to Western interests.
After the U.S. Armed Forces removed themselves from Saudi Arabia, Qatar became home to a regional command for the U.S. military.
Qatar gave several milion dollars in foreign assisatance to Israel as a reward for its 2005 Gaza disengagement to construct a soccer stadium that could be used by Arabs and Jews alike.
Qatar denounced the continued detention of IDF corporal Gilad Shalit by Gazan militants.
The Daily Star(Lebanon)reported on May 2, 2013 a rare meeting occurred between Christian rivals MP Samir Gemayel (Phalange Party) and MP Suleiman Franjieh at Gemayel's residence in Bikfaya. It was there agreed that it would be in the best interest for Lebanon to steer clear of the Syrian Civil War.
Lebanese MP Franjieh is a close friend of Syrian President Assad.
The Kataeb (Phalangist Party) may be with the rebels in general (as the Obama administartion is) but few Western-oriented governments or political parties are supportive of the extremist al-Nusra Front - who owe their allegiance to Al-Qaeda.
The Phalangist party website:
link to kataebonline.org
Ecuador has played a central role in the international drug trade:
link to narconon.org
The rights of convicted felons to vote varies from state to state.
In Florida, the post-Civil War enfranchisement of former slaves led authorities in the late 1800s to obtain trumped-up criminal charges against ex-slaves to prevent them from voting.
Currently, the relatively minor crimes that often constitute felony convictions - e.g. personal use drug possession, unpaid child support, shoplifting etc. may result in lifetime disenfranchisement in some jurisdictions.
The subject of felon voting rights has been discussed:
link to projectvote.org
Idriss was a brigadier general in the Syrian Army Corps of Engineers.
He has no known experience as a battlefield commander.
Once rebel leaders who have been "vetted" to receive U.S.-supplied weaponry get them there is no guarantee where they eventually wind up. Guns and artillery pieces have generally high intrinsic value in the black market.
"...arms to the right people in Syria...."
While the emphasis has been on the "Free Syrian Army" as the "good guys" fighting Assad, and the Al-Nusra Front as the "bad rebels", the truth is likely that somewhere around half of the Syrian rebel forces are Islamic fundamentalists of varying degrees and orientation.
The Syrian Islamic Front and the Syrian Islamic Liberation Front are composed of Muslim fundamentalists; the former is composed of Salafists who deem Al-Nusra Front as an ally and the latter are composed of both Salafists and Muslim Brotherhood adherents. The Syrian Islamic Front and Syrian Islamic Liberation Front together field about 65,000 fighters.
These two Islamic forces are needed to oust Assad and are being funded via Persian Gulf oil-rich states. To the extent that they are excluded from U.S.-supplied weaponry, this will likely engender enmity between those forces and the Free Syrian Army.
Syria is the next Afghanistan.
Looks like the State Department may have dropped the ball by revoking Snowden's American passport yesterday - only after he was already flown to Moscow by an Aeroflot jet.
Thank you for the link. That article correctly contains information about the fear that anti-aircraft missiles and posiibly other weaponry will fall into the hands of dangerous Islamic extremist groups.
What the article does not reveal in that the Syrian anti-Assad forces are highly fragmented and about half the fighters are Islamic fundamentalists in origin.
Besides the well-publicized Al-Nusra Front, which has an estimated 6,000 fighters under arms, there are:
(A)the Syrian Islamic Front adhering to Salafist doctrine with about 25,000 combatants whose goal is to make Syria an Islamic state and ruled by Sharia - they consider the Al-Nusra Front an ally;
(B)the Syrian Islamic Liberation Front with about 40,000 armed personnel principally adhering either to the Muslim Brotherhood or to Salafist principles -they see their organizing principle as Islam but do not consider the extremist Al-Nusra Front as an allied force;
The danger with the U.S arming and training Syrian rebels is that when and if this long civil war to topple Assad may be over, a second civil war may erupt in this nation of 22 million between the Free Syrian Army (FSA) and the equally numerous forces of the aforesaid Islamic fundamentalist groups. An FSA leader has already said the FSA will turn its guns on Al-Nusra once the Russian-backed Assad regime falls.
It may be Afghanistan revisited.
Nowhere in the 41 recommendations of the 9/11 Commission Report is there mention of the National Security Agency and in the hundreds of pages of that report - often critical of the FBI and CIA - the NSA is only fleetngly mentioned a few times, and even then in a usually positive manner.
The National Security Agency did claim to have uncovered proof of a terrorist conspiracy in the death of U.S. Ambassador to Sudan Cleo Noel in 1974 when it said it had intercepts of communications between P.L.O. chairman Yasser Arafat and his military chief Khalil al-Wazir ordering Noel's execution after he and two Western diplomats were kidnapped in the Sudan. Their information did not prevent the deaths of three diplomatic personnel but it did evidence the apparent complicity of Arafat in that tragedy.
It is interesting that the NSA, the largest U.S. intelligence-gathering organization, was previously rarely ,if ever, mentioned in major Congressional investigations of government misconduct- while the FBI and CIA are often a political hot potato on Capitol Hill.
Only the Church Committee received appreciable amounts of testimony from NSA leaders - Congress previously has otherwise steered away from real confrontation or scrutiny of the NSA and the personnel that operate it.
"Life is unfair."
-------------President Jimmy Carter
"Only a few percent of the U.S. population is locked up."
Russia and the U.S. have had in the last few years the highest incarceration rates of any nation on Earth.
Americans are going to jail for unpaid child support, jaywalking, driving on expired driver's licenses, talking too loud on their cell phone, using vulgar language and consumers purchasing untaxed cigarettes. These are actual cases.
It is estimated that 50% of all young black males in the U.S. are either incarcerated, on parole or serving probation for criminal matters.
Jail is a cure-all for every societal malady.
An excellent link to describe the complex nature of who constitute the "rebels" opposing Assad's regime.
Usually the homeowner was the victim or being used as a pawn by a loan officer or mortgage broker trying to rake in a commission knowing some bank would would eventually get stuck with an uncollectible promissory note down the road.
Besides mortgage brokers, there were "foreclosure specialists" who often victimized homeowners promising to save their home, although there were some legitimate and helpful groups such as Greenpath, who have achieved success in advocating for homeowners in financial distress.
"....no prosecutions were pursued after the 2008 financial crisis."
In actuality, I spent the last 15 years litigating cases with banking institutions in the court system. Fraud and misconduct abounded.
I questioned bank attorneys why would someone who simutaneously took out two mortgages on the same property without disclosing this to the relevant financial institutions was not prosecuted - they replied the FBI is too busy going after more serious crime.
A state police detective once told me that they would not prosecute mortgage fraud unless the loss sustained was over $350,000.00.
An FBI agent once told me that the pre-occupation with terrorism prevented his agency from investigating most forms of financial fraud.
I witnessed tremendous amounts of financial fraud civil cases wind their way through the federal and state judiciaries - sometimes the perpetrators were banks, sometimes they were customers - but it was exceedingly rare that any criminal prosecutions occurred, but if there were, the sentences were light - often probation.
Very often a homeowner or businessman lied to a loan officer or mortgage broker to get loan - the officer or broker did not care if the loan was procured via fraud because he was getting paid on commission. And the financial institution underwriting the transaction sold the mortgage a few weeks later to a bank who would get stuck when the mortgage went into default and was uncollectible and secured by realty that was close to valueless.
I had one case in Detroit where a bank was actually sued for catching a customer committing fraud and freezing his account. The federal judge is dismissing the case called it "peculiar" that a bank should be sued in a such a circumstance.
It is my belief that this type of fraud contributed to the 2008 financial meltdown. I blame the state and federal government authorities for not vigorously prosecuting these cases criminally as it encouraged many to engage in fraud with little fear of accountability.
The Patriot Act cannot repeal the Bill of Rights; the U.S. Constitution is higher authority under the Supremacy Clause.
I also would say that the U.S. Supreme Court has had its share of members with intelligence connections. Lewis Powell served in Army Intelligence and William Rehnquist's wife was a CIA agent. Thurgood Marshall was an FBI informant.
Much of the federal judiciary is drawn from members of the bar who have backgrounds in the FBI or Department of Justice who will not hesitate to interpret the Constitution in a friendly way to the U.S. intelligence community.
ECHELON was initially held to be unconstitutional by U.S. District Court Judge Anna Diggs-Taylor in Detroit - she was a former civil rights activist from the MLK era. That ruling was reversed by the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati.
Yeah, but think of all the sharholders and employees of DuPont, Dow Chemical, Colt Industries, Raytheon, Boeing, Northrop, Grumman Aerospace, Fairchild, General Dynamics, Wedtech, Bell Helicopter and all of the other defense contractors who have done very well due to the wars throughout history.
Dupont made record profits for a U.S. corpoaration during WWI as every artillery shell fired by the American Expeditionary Force was maufactured by their workers.
Not to mention the Krupp empire in Germany and Beretta in Italy. War equals profits.
The Central Intelligence Agency, per the NY Times report, is supposed to be ensuring that only approved rebel groups will receive arms procured through their efforts - however once the weapons enter Syria no one can guarantee who they will be sold or otherwise re-distributed to by the "approved" rebels.
The Syrian National Coalition has attempted to get the State Department's terrorist designation lifted for Jabhat al-Nusra so they would apparently be unconcerned about using their connections in the Free Syrian Army to see the al-Nusra Front is well-armed.
Isn't that always the way it has always been?
Were American Indians consulted before the "Trail of Tears" was imposed on them?
Were the Palestinian families living in refugee camps since 1948 ever asked about how they felt about giving up their land to recent Jewish immigrants from post-war Europe?
My opinion all along is that the Syrian Civil War is fueled not out of concern for human rights violations by the Assad regime - but rather political opportunism of the U.S. and Israelis to rid themselves of a Russian naval installation at Tartus and disrupting the supply line from Iran to Lebanon as to Hezbollah. The Syrian opposition are merely pawns of superpowers in international politics, and are heavily reliant on foreign aid to survive against Assad's modern armed forces.
What is the West doing to help Syrian refugees in Turkey, Iraq, and Jordan?
What are they doing to contain Jabhat al-Nusra - who have been engaged in terrorist acts against Shi'ites and others?
America's good faith shall be judged by the level of its humanitarian aid rendered to the Syrian populace.
There is unlikely to be any "negotiated settlement" without Assad leaving power.
In my opinion, one side will have to militarily defeat the other. An that is not likely to happen any time soon without direct foreign military intervention. So casualties may mount for years as a stalemate exists on the battlefield.
And if the Free Syrian Army wins, will they turn their guns on Jabhat al-Nusra as some have suggested?
One criticism I am hearing of the Obama administration plan to supply arms to rebels is that it will only consist of small arms rather than items such as anti-aircraft missiles that could defend against the formidable air power ofthe Assad regime.
This current plan will only extend the civil war in Syria by causing gridlock between the warring factions.
"I remain deeply confused about Israel's ambivalence on the issue of Syria."
The Israeli Foreign Ministry has no reason to like Assad since he has allowed his country to be used as an arms pipeline to Hezbollah from Iran, however overt suport of the opposition in Syria would do little to assist rebels, but may discredit them.
There are reports from Debka, the military news periodical published in Israel, that Al-Nusra Front fighters are receiving medical attention in Israel.
It would not surprise me if Israel had been rendering some level of covert assistance to the rebels, however the danger in doing so would be to create a situation in which a successor to the Baathist regime may be a greater threat to Israel than Assad.
"The U.S. started the war in El Salvador."
I doubt it.
Although President Jose Napoleon Duarte had CIA ties and Robert D'Aubuisson received limited training at the School of the Americas, the ultraconservative death squads of that era and the murders that occurred were internally generated in nature.
America did its best to keep leftist elements from acquiring power in San Salvador during the Reagan administration.
"Nobody remembers Clinton's paralysis in Algeria."
It is worse than that - the American public never knew in the first place.
How many Americans actually were aware of the human rights violations and murder in East Timor - even though almost as many died there as American servicemen in WWII?
How many Americans knew of the mass killings by Hafez Assad's armed forces in Hama? While Sabra and Shatila made international headlines Hama was barely noticed by anyone outside the Middle East - even though the death toll exceeded 9/11 WTC hijackings.
Syria - like many international hotspots - has had its internal affairs long ignored by the outside world. The only interest the West has currently is that it is an oppportunity to take out a Putin ally and close down Russia's naval base at Tartus.
On the Golan Heights, Jabhat al-Nusra is reported to control Syrian territory bordering on Israel:
See "Israel's New Neighbor:Syrian Al-Qaeda Rebel Group" by David Lev reported on last month:
link to israelnationalnews.com
I thought the same thing - there are only a few non-Alawite Shi'ite Muslims within Syria when contrasted with the rest of the Syrian populace - and when the article did not mention the victms were Alawite, I assumed they were not.
"....the idea that there is a number of secular-minded rebels is by now questionable...."
The Free Syrian Army (FSA)has been led by former senior army officers of the Assad regime who opposed atrocities against Syrian protestors.The FSA has previously given its allegiance to the Qatar-based 64-member Syrian National Coalition (SNC) as the government-in-exile .
The SNC has George Sabra, an Orthodox Christian as its Acting President; Sabra was named to the central committee of the Syrian Communist Party in 1985 and produced the Syrian version of "Sesame Street". He also heads the Syrian National Council, the Istanbul-based longtime group of Syrian exiles.
The SNC also has Suheir Atassi, an attorney and prominent feminist, serving as an influential vice-president.
The SNC as well as the Free Syrian Army have had a broad cross-section of Syrian society among their respective ranks. This includes the business sectors, in addition to those identifying with Islamic goals.
The truly extremist Islamic elements among the rebels have fought separate from the FSA in such groups as Jabhat al-Nusra - many of these are foreign fighters, primarily Iraqi, who are responsible for many of the terror attacks similar to the one described above.
Remembering what was done to Daniel Ellsberg, Jim Garrison, Philip Agee, Karen Silkwood, and what is now being done to Bradley Manning, it would not surprise me in the least to see those in certain quarters doing everything possible to dig up whatever they could on Snowden to discredit him.
Eric Snowden does deserve some type of punishment for what he did so as to act, at very least, as a deterrent to U.S. intelligence contractors and personnel who consider to violate confidentiality clauses and oaths. Many cheered when a Palestinian-American immigrant tossed a pie into the face of Senate Armed Services Committee chairman Carl Levin at a town hall meeting not too long ago, but the 30-day jail term for a federal misdemeanor conviction was necessary to prevent every activist from doing the same thing to a U.S. Congressman.
Unlike Daniel Ellsberg, a Harvard University graduate and doctorate holder, Snowden appears to have had little formal education and, like Pfc. Manning, was placed in a sensitive position in U.S. intelligence that he should not have been allowed in. Manning and Snowden may have produced positive impacts upon the public interest due to their conduct - but the disloyal manner in which these security breaches occurred cannot and should not be condoned by the President nor the United States Department of Justice. I am rather surprised to see Ron Paul and his son Rand, a member of the U.S. Senate cheer on Mr. Snowden.
There is no doubt Mr. Snowden will face a long road of legal action that will take years and years to play itself out.
What I have noted as interesting is that unlike the FBI, CIA, and MI-6, the National Security Agency has rarely been the subject of publicity via Hollywood.
Maybe the Snowden story will resurrect interest in the box office dud sci-fi thriller entitled "The Box", in which Frank Langella portrays an NSA agent who rises from the dead and approaches and offers everyday American families the opportunity to press a button on a box in exchange for payment of one million dollars only to discover the adverse implications imposed afterward by mysterious NSA personnel.
A great irony is that Snowden may be able to take advantage of an extradition treaty exemption between China and the U.S. that forbids extradition for crimes of a political character.
This exemption provision was inserted by U.S. negotiators to protect Chinese wishing to defect to America but may now be used to protect Snowden.
"Questions will be raised about Snowden's mental balance."
Yes, that was done after the Meir Kahane assassination when federal officials announced the gunman was emotionally unstable, thus allaying the American public's concern about a possible terrorist act.
After the gunman was acquitted of murder, the Justice Department eventually convicted him of RICO conspiracy after alleging criminal association with the terror organization that was involved in the WTC bombing - and claiming the Kahane killing was in furtherance of a conspiracy, thus avoiding application of a double jeopardy defense.
The feds have already released information on Bradley Manning suggesting an unstable family background and being a misfit in the Army.
During the Vietnam War, members of the Foreign Service often had disagreements on the State Departments Indochina policy. As a result a "dissent channel" was created on the theory that such expression was beeficial to overall Department functioning.
Nevertheless, there have been claims of retaliation against whistleblowers or dissenters who have questioned the legality or wisdom of the conduct of superiors in the Foreign Service.
The federal courts allowed the Justice Department and the U.S. Congress in the 1980s to twist the U.S. Constitution language to death to allow "administrative drug forfeiture" proceedings in which the DEA or other federal authority could seize property and hold it and the owner or possessor would have to sue the government to get their property back. States passed the same forfitre laws modeled after federal legislation.
This was part of the War on Drugs initiated by the Reagan administration.
Many citizens could not post a bond required by law in order to commence court proceedings. Some courts held these forfeiture statutes as unconstitutional. I persuaded a state court judge in Michigan in 1992 to declare the statute unconstitutional as the law prevented indigents from initiating court action to recover their property.
Instead of the War on Drugs, we have the War on Terrorism and in lieu of the forfeiture statute, we have the Patriot Act that is constitutionally questionable. Over the last almost dozen years, the federal judiciary has analyzed this Act of Congress and held, at various times, certain aspects to be violative of the U.S. Constitution.
GOP Congressman James Sensenbrenner of Wisconsin introduced the Patriot Act bill shortly after 9/11 and got it hastliy passed during the public panic after the World Trade Center attacks. He has recently commented on the recent NSA scandal and commented that he did not believe the conduct of the NSA was the type contemplated by the framers of the Patriot Act. Sensenbrenner has sat for decades in Congress and has been one of the strongest advocates of law enforcement interests.
We must remember that the NSA does not derive its authority form either the U.S. Constitution or any Act of Congress - but rather an obscure executive order of the President that could be rescinded at any time. This particular point was mentioned on the record of the Church Committee proceedings in the 1970s. The Central Intelligence Agency and Department of Defense, on the other hand, have their respective origins in the National Security Act of 1947.
Her prison warden has granted her a compassionate release due to her cancer which awaits approval in the bureaucracy in Washington D.C.
The U.S. Government acquired the "proof" you refer to due to a FISA warrant and NSA surveillance that violated the attorney-client privilege.
Her co-counsel, Abdeen Jabara, spent years under NSA surveiilance commencing in 1967 and was never charged with any criminal offense. Much of that surveillance infringed upon matters of attorney-client privelege. The ACLU litigated years of casework in the federal court system on Jabara's behalf resulting in a settlement.
See http://www.lynnestewart.org for current developments on her case.
Regarding the Lynne Stewart case, her intial sentence was only 28 months. Even though she had been diagnosed with Stage IV cancer, the U.S. Court of Appeals vacated the sentence and she was eventually re-sentenced to 10 years imprisonment; this enhancement was due to alleged trial perjury - under federal sentencing guidelines if a jury rejects your trial testimony the sentencing judge can give you a heavier sentence than if you simply did not testify at all and were convicted of the underlying charge. She is in her 70s and currently serving time in a federal prison.
She defended, along with Ramsey Clark and Abdeen Jabara, the "Blind Sheikh" who was convicted in the initial WTC bombing in 1993.
It is now being said that his freedom is in the hands of the Chinese government. If they decide to hand him over then He could be in a United States District Court within 24 hours.
In the past, the government has taken a dim view of disgruntled former personnel who have disclosed confidential matters or criticized the Agency.
The Department of State in 1981 won a case in the U.S. Supreme Court against former CIA officer Philip Agee, who authored "Inside the Company: A CIA Diary" to revoke his passport. He eventually died in Cuba.
In the early 1970s the U.S. government, in the first case of censorship of a book, obtained an injunction against the full publication "The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence" by former CIA official Victor Marchetti and ex-State Department analyst John Marks. This book eventually became a key factor in the impanelling of the Church Committee.
We can go well back before 1978 in Metro Detroit to discover evidence of highly questionable surveillance against U.S. citizens.
William Bufalino had been a prominent attorney that repesented the Teamsters union and its then-president Jimmy Hoffa - Mr. Hoffa had been under FBI investigation and prosecution during the 1950s and 1960s.
Bufalino sued Michigan Bell Telephone Company after ithad been discovered that his law firm's telephones were subject to surveillance equipment. That action reached the United States Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals during 1969.
See: link to federal-circuits.vlex.com
Abdeen Jabara, who successfully appealed the death sentence of Sirhan Sirhan and received a ruling reducing the sentence to life imprisonment in 1972, filed suit via the ACLU in United States District Court in Detroit in late 1972 alleging improper surveillance by the FBI, CIA, and National Security Agency. That case was litigated for over a decade and established landmark judicial opinions on the legality of government surveillance and acccess of citizens to government records about them pursuant to the Freedom of Information Act.
See: link to federal-circuits.vlex.com
Jabara currently practices law in New York and has collaborated with former United States Attorney General Ramsey Clark.
"...his administration was soon sabotaged and he (Carter) lost re-election."
Yes, you mean when Jimmy Cater "cleaned house" and appointed Stansfield Turner as CIA director in the late 1970s.
Ted Shackley, the CIA Associate Deputy Director of Operations, who was forced to retire after an internal investigation found improprieties, later helped George H. W. Bush climb to becoming a plausible presidential candidate and had weely meetings with him during the 1980 campaign. Everything was done to humiliate Carter during his re-election run and Shackley's man became vice-president.
Shackley would eventually, as a private citizen, become deeply involved in running the Nicaraguan Contra war in the mid-1980s along with fellow former CIA official Felix Rodriguez.
The Central Intelligence Agency kept files on over 300,000 Americans under Operation CHAOS during the Vietnam War. The program was run by CIA Director Richard Helms to determine if the US anti-war movement was being controlled or influenced by foreign governments - Helms later reported to the President that there was no proof of this uncovered.
The only real opposition to the aggressive conduct of US intelligence organizations against its own citizens is Congressional committees and public interest organizations such as the American Civil Liberties Union.
Some interesting federal cases arising out of Detroit:
United States District Judge Anna Diggs-Taylor in Detroit initially held the ECHELON program of the NSA was unconstitutional as it violated the Fourth Amendment. She was however reversed by the U.S. Court of Appeals in Cincinnati. Diggs-Taylor had been a civil rights activist who marched with MLK in the Selma-to-Montgomery demonstration and who later saw her then-husband, Charles Diggs, sitting in U.S. Congress in the 1970s convicted of taking kickbacks after an FBI investigation.
Abdeen Jabara, the former defense counsel to Sirhan Sirhan who later became executive director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, had FBI, NSA, and CIA surveillance imposed on him since 1967 and, via the ACLU, fought a long court battle in the United States District Court in Detroit and U.S. Court of Appeals over this surveillance, which was eventually settled. His case established landmark judicial opinions on the government's ability to initiate such surveillance and a citizen's right to access of such information under the Freedom of Information Act.
One major question is using surveillance for purposes for which it was intended. Recall the Karim Koubriti terror cell case in Detroit that wound up in the convictions being vacated for prosecutorial misconduct. At least one of the defendants was later convicted of insurance fraud after his personal life came under extreme scrutiny. Assistant U.S. Attorney Rick Convertino and a State Department investigator were later tried and acquitted of obstruction of justice in the terror prosecution.
In the Hutaree terror case, there was the criminal defense attorney who got his client out on bail over vigorous U.S. Atotrney objctions and was sued three days later for non-payment of a long dormant student loan obligation.
N.C. Deday LaRene, one of Detroit's most prominent criminal defense counsel, was charged with tax evasion several years after winning acquittal in the sedition indictment in Detroit of white supremacist leader Robert Miles.
Geoffrey Fieger, longtime civil rights attorney and former Democratic nominee for governor, was indicted and acquitted of campaign finance violations in federal court in Detroit. The judge presidng over his trial stated that he rarely seen such a massive FBI investigation in his career on the bench.
Metro Detroit's most prominent Palestinian-American attorney, Tim Attalla, was charged with obstruction of justice and drug possession in federal court. The alleged obstruction was advising an arrestee not to answwer a detective's interrogation. The drug charge stemmed from an informant allegedly seeing Attalla with a Viagra tablet. Attalla was acquitted after a bench trial. Attalla had been earlier cited by an Israeli newspaper as a prominent pro-Arab political figure in Michigan.
Every one of these cases involved allegations of politically-motivated or otherwise opppresive government conduct targeting individuals who had been vocal opponents or of government action or policy or engaged in the legal representation of such persons.
The circumstances are reminiscent of the massacre of German camp administration and guards at Dachau upon its liberation in April 1945. Even the American commander who entered the camp admitted murders took place of Germans, the only dispute being the number. Yet no court-martial took place. General Patton wanted the matter dropped.
There is about as much public sympathy in the U.S. over the Nazi guards at Dachau as the alleged Al-Qaeda inmates in GITMO.
Abdul Rashid Dostum, an ethnic Uzbek, has been a key player in Afghanistan for the last several decades.
He had been an army commander during the Marxist regimes ruling in Afghnistan from the 1970s until 1992. He later turned on the Marxists and joined the U.S.-backed rebel forces that took Kabul. He was a key leader of the Northern Alliance that opposed the Taliban and gained stature when a powerful ally, the charismatic Ahmed Shah Massoud, was assassinated two days prior to the 9/11 hijackings in 2001.
Gen. Dostum has always had questions about his human rights record as a warlord administering areas of Afghanistan.
The likely reason Obama has not wanted to investigate the incident in question is that Gen. Dostum extended an olive branch to the U.S. in 2009 and has been friendly to the U.S-backed Hamid Karzai. America will not want to implicate a leader that is helping to stabilize the Karzai government in Kabul.
Someone needs to listen to Sean Baker the Army Specialist who went "undercover" as a detainee in a guard training exercise at GITMO.
He was assaulted and beaten so bad by American servicemen he sustained alleged brain damage and is now collecting disability benefits and suing the government.
The Army captors being trained in cell extraction were told the undercover Baker was a unruly detainee who was held for assaulting an American soldier. Baker's pleas that he was really an American soldier were ignored during the beating until the assaultive guards saw his Army uniform underneath the prison-issued inmate jumpsuit they were tearing away from his body.
Exactly. Why should U.S. Congressman advocate for the rights of these prisoners when there is no corresponding political benefit?
The argument also is deterrence. The U.S. wants to let Al-Qaeda know that in the event of capture, a place exists like Guantanamo in which they can expect painful retribution. Same argument for deploying the drones. Don't committ acts of terror and you will not have to worry about America's "bad side".
France had Devil's Island - this place in Cuba is not
uch better. The Soviets had the Gulag system to stifle political dissent and the Nazis had the SS-administered concentration camps.
The punishment and deterrent objectives of Guantanamo are impressive -even if they violate international law.
Regarding the "sucessful" use of torture.
Remember the abduction and torture of CIA chief of station William F. Buckley in Beirut. Within a short period of time the CIA informants in the area turned up dead or missing and it was presumed that Buckley passed secrets during the torture sessions. Buckley died after repeated torture sessions, per information received by the U.S. government.
Islamic Jihad was righfuly castigated over the killing, abduction, and torture of Western individuals in Beirut during the 1980s. The Buckley incident caused great discomfiture among top government officials within the Reagan administration and he was eventually awarded the CIA's highest honor posthumously.
America's employment of the same methods used by terrorist elements results in a loss of moral standing and only encourages further like acts by those elements it so vehemently denounces.
Yes, Hezbollah has also become involved in the political processes, successfully fielding candidates for the Lebanese parliament unlike Al-Qaeda or its affiliates - whose activities seem confimed to terror attacks and paramilitary conflict.
Thank you.
I had wondered what the difference was myself between these two groups.
Analogous to the extremist Islamic Hezbollah and the secular-oriented Amal movement in Lebanon.
You are correct in indicating that the Baathist Arab states were pro-Soviet in orientation under Nasser in Egypt, Assad in Syria and Saddam Hussein's Iraq.
The Red Army and air force of the USSR piloted jets and anti-aircraft batteries over the Sinai Peninsula in the 1973 Yom Kippur War.
The Soviet Union also supplied advanced weaponry to Libya up until the mid-1980s to prop up the Khadafy regime.
The chief sponsor of the Palestine Liberation Organization since its inception in 1964 was the USSR and its Soviet bloc satellites. PLO fighters were trained in Russia and the Palestinians had substantial capital investments in factories in these satellites. Lieutenant General Ion Pacepa, military intelligence chief in Romania under Ceaucescu and author of "Red Horizons", disclosed Yasser Arafat's tight relationship with the KGB and Romanian intelligence. Declassified CIA documents also have substantiated a realtionship between the most violent Palestinian splinter groups and the Communist-era Romanian government - including ties to Abu Nidal and even Hassan bin Salameh.
There was one story that the Operation Galilee invasion in 1982 actually pre-empted a Soviet-backed PLO planned invasion of Israel from Lebanon that had been imminent.
Syria is a literal hodgepodge of sects and foreign interests jockeying for position much like Lebanon was during the 1970s and 1980s. This has had international repercussions and will have a continuing devastating effect on the Syria population.
The Alawite sect of Shi'ite Islam comprises about 12% of the Syrian population. But President Assad and his Alawite minority have extensive, even a controlling, influence over the Syrian government via the Baath Party. Some prominent Alawites have joined the Syrian opposition movements. There is a very small percentage of the Syria population that is non-Alawite Shi'ite, however the most active Shi'ites in the civil war in Syria have been foreign fighters from Iraq and elsewhere that have been split in their loyalties between Assad and the rebels.
Christian Syrians, who comprise about 9% of the population in Syria, have done relatively well under Assad, however many have joined Sunni Muslims in anti-government demonstrations.
The primary sectarian force behind the Free Syrian Army and the Islamic fundamentalist factions have been Sunni in orientation. Sunnis are the majority within Syria and have held a substantial number of seats in the Syrian National Coalition.
Russia wants their Mediterranean Sea base at Tartus retained and are therefore supporting the Assad regime.
Israel wants to see Assad gone since he has allowed Syria to have maintained the existence of a line of military supplies from Iran to Hezbollah in Lebanon.
America sees Assad as a sponsor of terrorism due to his Hezbollah ties and prefers his removal. Senator McCain has even gone into rebel-held terrotory to embrace the anti-Assad fighters. The CIA has been exposed by investigative reporters to be running the logistical side of arming Syria's rebels.
The Lebanese Sunnis want to see Assad fall due to his regimes constant intermeddling in Lebanese affairs in support of Hezbollah.
Jordan is having a serious refugee problem due to the ongoing civil war in Syria.
Both Iraq and Iran governments see an ally in Assad and need his teritory so that Hezbollah can be supplied with arms.
Syria is headed to a long-term civil war where years will likely elapse before anyone will have any chance of prevailing to restore any semblance of civil order. The death tolls could reach into the hundreds of thousands and billions of dollars of weaponry furnished by world powers to assist in this annihilation.
We have previously seen this scenario in Indochina, the Balkans, Afghanistan, Iraq, Sri Lanka, and East Timor amongst other areas of the world.
A number of the survivors of the Holocaust, like Menachem Begin, had a survival mentality that dictated practicality of force as a preferred instrument of control against the Arab populations.
Many of the terror gang leaders, such as Begin and Yitzhak Shamir became post-independence political leaders -while other founding Jews of the State of Israel- such as Meir Vilner - adopted a conciliatory approach toward Arabs. Many of these ex-terror gang members joined the Likud Party.
Since the 1970s, the conservative Likud bloc has largely dominated the Israeli government and has taken a hard line against Palestinian human rights.
Arab Israelis are de facto stateless due to the clever legal loopholes that they create to deny Arabs rights of citizenship.
For instance, eligibilty for government benefit programs in Israel is conditioned on having a family member acquire service in the Israel Defense Forces. Since universal conscription exists for Israeli Jews (with limited exceptions)and almost no Arabs serve in the IDF (with notable exception of the Druzes) this means, as a general rule, Jewish Israelis have access to benefits from Israeli government social welfare programs and Arab Israelis do not.
The Kingdom of Jordan and the United Nations have tried to administer and fund educational and social programs to assist Palestinians under occupation, however Jordan had largely curtailed these efforts.A number of Isreali civil rights organizations have criticized Israeli government over its treatment of Palestinians, including Yesh Din, the Israeli Coalition Against Housing Demolitions, Machsom Watch, and B'Tselem.
In the sixty-five years of the existence of Israel, only one Arab Muslim has ever sat in the Israeli cabinet an no Arab has ever sat in the powerful foreign relations or defense committees of the Knesset.
Of course, Arabs living in the Occupied Territories have no voting rights in Israeli government elections and are governed by the Civil Administration, a division of the Israel Defense Forces headed by a brigadier general, that imposes martial law upon Arabs in the West Bank. The West Bank is divided into military districts governed by an Israeli army colonel who acts as a district governor.
West Bank Palestinians are tried in military tribunals administered by the Israel Defense Forces. Fifteen years may be added to a criminal sentence for disrepect exhibited to the tribunal and conviction rates of Arab youhs exceed 99%. Jewish setttlers in the West Bank, in contrast, have their court cases heard in civilian courts within Israel.
Israel also uses a "adminisrative detention" system to hold Palestinians it has suspicions are engaged in subversive activity but does have sufficient proof to level criminal charges against. As many as 6,000 Palestinians have been held at one time using this legal process. This type process was described in the "Gulag Archipelago" by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn as being implemented in the Soviet Union during the Lenin and Stalin eras.
Israel is a de facto apartheid state.
There's always been a fine line in that area about who are the good and bad guys.
Remember in the 1980s in Lebanon where we had the warring factions, including Amal, Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, the Phalange, and the various Palestinian liberation groups. Nabih Berri was either the most respected stateman in Lebanon or a terrorist depending on who you spoke to.
The most infamous photo op that never occurred was when Gulbuddin Hekmyatar, the Afghan warlord, made speeches in America to Afghan exiles but turned down an invitation to the White House to visit President Reagan - although many Afghan leaders did so and submitted to a photo op with the Commmander-in-Chief in the Oval Office.
Hekmyatar's rebel group received covert training assistance and weapons via the U.S. and Israel during the 1980s.
Hekmyatar later became Afghan prime minister in 1994, but by 2002, the Bush administration deemed him expendable and attempted to assassinate him in a drone strike. The drone missed and Hekmyatar later announced support for al-Qaeda and a bounty on U.S. servicemen.
The recent report of the battle death of a Flint, Michigan mother, Nicole Mansfield, and the prior FBI arrest of American ex-serviceman Eric Harroun begs the question of how many Americans are involved in the Syrian Civil War and what organizations may be facilitating this?
Harroun's father has publicly stated his son worked for the CIA and there is already one YouTube video that has questioned whether Ms. Mansfield may have had such ties.
The fact that the U.S. Senate is apparently gung-ho about the arming of anti-government militants and one of its members has apparently met with extremist elements does remind one of the initiation of U.S. involvement in Afghanistan.
Michelle Bachman also viewed as favorable the bizarre Islamo-Marxist cult known as MEK that was suspected of terrorist activity within Iran.
The MEK cult was actually at one point getting certain communications training via the U.S. Armed Forces.
There is a precedent for the Russians and Israel engaged in military conflict.
In 1982, the Soviet Embassy in Beirut sustained heavy damage from Israeli shelling during Operation Galilee.
At one point an Israel Defense Forces tank broke through the gate of the Soviet Embassy while firing shells.
The Soviet Union took no action in retaliation against Israel.
Russia is not anxious to fight Israel and Moshe Yaalon is likely just puffing to increase his right-wing persona.
Yair Lapid and his father, Yossi, were no friends of the ultra-orthodox community within Israel.
The ultra-orthodox community in Israel has long been the allies of Likud and this hasbeen a mutually beneficial relationship for decades.
Yair Lapid would likely pursue a two-state solution that is more realistic than that proposed by Netanyahu and his party, Yesh Atid strongy supports peace initiatives with the Palestinians.
Expect the PM to give in to Lapid to keep his position.
Actually the death toll was greater than 4 million.
8.8 million were killed in action in WWI.
President Wilson reportedly broke down and cried when he authorized the American Expeditionary Force to combat.
The Americans provided an edge to the Allies that ended the war sooner.
The map of Africa correctly identifies the Belgian Congo.
The story behind it was the brutal colonization by King Leopold II commencing in 1885. Inhabitants were summarily executed, traded as slaves, , conscripted into the army, and had their orphaned children indoctrinated into Christianity.
It is one of the great untold chapters in world history.
In the 2009 Lebanese Parliament elections, the Amal Party won 13 seats and Hezbollah 12 to help form the ruling coalition.
Nabih Berri has retained his long-held position as Speaker of the Lebanese Parliament.
Hezbollah rules in a de facto manner areas of south Lebanon via its militia, but the Amal Party commands the loyalty of the Shi'ite Lebanese community in the major population centers, such as around Beirut.
Amal is respected as a centrist secular political party and Hezbollah is viewed by most Lebanese, even among Shi'ites, as extremist in orientation.