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Civil Liberties Media Articles

Below are key excerpts of revealing news articles on the erosion of our civil liberties from reliable news media sources. If any link fails to function, a paywall blocks full access, or the article is no longer available, try these digital tools.

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Wearing a mask at a riot is now a crime
2013-06-19, CBC (Canada's Public Broadcasting System)
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/story/2013/06/19/pol-mask-bill-royal-assent.html

A bill that bans the wearing of masks during a riot or unlawful assembly and carries a maximum 10-year prison sentence ... became law today. The bill is meant to give police an added tool to prevent lawful protests from becoming violent riots, and that it will help police identify people who engage in vandalism or other illegal acts. The bill originally proposed a penalty of up to five years, but the House of Commons justice committee amended it and doubled the penalty to up to 10 years in prison for committing the offence. The bill didn't have unanimous support, and was opposed by some who are concerned about its effect on freedom of expression and privacy. Civil liberties advocates argued the measures could create a chilling effect on free speech and that peaceful protesters can unintentionally find themselves involved in an unlawful assembly. They also noted that there are legitimate reasons for wearing masks at protests; some may be worried about reprisals at work, for example, if sighted at a political protest. "Any law that infringes upon civil liberties needs to be held to a test of absolute necessity, and I don't think that test has been met in this instance," said Michael Byers, a political scientist at the University of British Columbia.

Note: Police seem to be specifically targeting the now popular Guy Falkes masks representing opposition to oppressive authority. For more on the erosion of civil liberties, see the deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources available here.


Edward Snowden: saving us from the United Stasi of America
2013-06-10, The Guardian (One of the UK's leading newspapers)
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/jun/10/edward-snowden-united-st...

Since 9/11, there has been, at first secretly but increasingly openly, a revocation of the bill of rights for which this country fought over 200 years ago. In particular, the fourth and fifth amendments of the US constitution, which safeguard citizens from unwarranted intrusion by the government into their private lives, have been virtually suspended. The United States is not now a police state. But given the extent of this invasion of people's privacy, we do have the full electronic and legislative infrastructure of such a state. These powers are extremely dangerous. There are legitimate reasons for ... secrecy about communications intelligence. But what is not legitimate is to use a secrecy system to hide programs that are blatantly unconstitutional. In 1975, Senator Frank Church spoke of the National Security Agency in these terms: "I know the capacity that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must see to it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision, so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return." The dangerous prospect of which he warned was that America's intelligence gathering capability which is today beyond any comparison with what existed in his pre-digital era "at any time could be turned around on the American people and no American would have any privacy left." That has now happened. That is what [Edward] Snowden has exposed, with official, secret documents. We have fallen into Senator Church's abyss.

Note: The above was written by Daniel Ellsberg, a former US military analyst who in 1971 leaked the Pentagon Papers, showing how the US public had been misled about the Vietnam war. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles about questionable intelligence agency practices and the erosion of privacy.


Supreme Court says police may take DNA samples from arrestees
2013-06-03, Washington Post
http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2013-06-03/politics/39704073_1_dna-samples...

A divided Supreme Court ruled [on June 3] that police may take DNA samples when booking those arrested for serious crimes, narrowly upholding a Maryland law and opening the door to more widespread collection of DNA by law enforcement. The court ruled 5 to 4 that government has a legitimate interest in collecting DNA from arrestees ... to establish the identity of the person in custody. Conservative Justice Antonin Scalia ... amplified his displeasure by reading a summary of his dissent from the bench. The court has cast aside a bedrock rule of our Fourth Amendment law: that the government may not search its citizens for evidence of crime unless there is a reasonable cause to believe that such evidence will be found, Scalia said from the bench. He added, Make no mistake about it: As an entirely predictable consequence of todays decision, your DNA can be taken and entered into a national DNA database if you are ever arrested, rightly or wrongly, and for whatever reason. Steven R. Shapiro, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union said the decision creates a gaping new exception to the Fourth Amendment and violates a long-established understanding that police cannot search for evidence of a crime ... without individualized suspicion.

Note: For deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources on government assaults on privacy, click here.


U.S. acknowledges killing of four U.S. citizens in counterterrorism operations
2013-05-22, Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/us-acknowledges-killing...

The Obama administration acknowledged [on May 22] that it has killed four Americans in overseas counterterrorism operations since 2009, the first time it has publicly taken responsibility for the deaths. Three are known to have died in CIA drone strikes in Yemen in 2011: Anwar al-Awlaki, his 16-year-old son and Samir Khan. The fourth Jude Kennan Mohammad, a Florida native indicted in North Carolina in 2009 was killed in Pakistan, where the CIA has operated a drone campaign against terrorism suspects for nearly a decade. His death was previously unreported. In addition to disclosure of the four killings, Holder wrote that Obama has approved classified briefings for Congress on an overall policy document, informally called the playbook. The document, more than a year in the making, codifies the administrations standards and processes for its unprecedented program of targeted killing and capture of terrorism suspects outside of war zones. Nearly 400 drone strikes, in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia, have been launched by the CIA and U.S. military forces during Obamas presidency. According to Holders letter, Awlaki was the only U.S. citizen the administration has specifically targeted and killed. Two weeks after Awlakis death, his 16-year-old son, Abdulrahman who had gone to the Yemeni desert in search of his father was killed in a drone strike meant for someone else. That strike was similarly unacknowledged, although a senior administration official privately characterized it as a mistake.

Note: So an American citizen, Awlaki's son, was killed by a drone by "mistake"? What happened to the Fifth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which states no citizen shall "be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law"? For deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources on the atrocities carried out by the US and UK in their global wars of aggression, click here.


Another Chilling Leak Investigation
2013-05-21, New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/22/opinion/another-chilling-leak-investigation...

With the decision to label a Fox News television reporter a possible co-conspirator in a criminal investigation of a news leak, the Obama administration has moved beyond protecting government secrets to threatening fundamental freedoms of the press to gather news. The latest reported episode involves James Rosen, the chief Washington correspondent for Fox News. In 2009, Mr. Rosen reported on FoxNews.com that North Korea planned to launch a missile in response to the condemnation of its nuclear tests by the United Nations Security Council. The Justice Department ... indicted Stephen Jin-Woo Kim, a State Department security adviser, on charges of leaking classified information. Mr. Kim pleaded not guilty. Normally, the inquiry would have ended with Mr. Kim leak investigations usually focus on the source, not the reporter. But, in this case, federal prosecutors also asked a federal judge for permission to examine Mr. Rosens personal e-mails, arguing that there is probable cause to believe Mr. Rosen is an aider and abettor and/or co-conspirator in the leak. Though Mr. Rosen was not charged, the F.B.I. request for his e-mail account was granted secretly in late May 2010. The government was allowed to rummage through Mr. Rosens e-mails for at least 30 days.

Note: For a fascinating and revealing look inside Fox News by an insider, click here. For deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources on government threats to civil liberties and freedom of the press, click here.


IRS targeted groups that criticized the government, IG report says
2013-05-12, Washington Post
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2013/05/12/irs-targeted-...

At various points over the past two years, Internal Revenue Service officials targeted nonprofit groups that criticized the government and sought to educate Americans about the U.S. Constitution, according to documents in an audit conducted by the agency's inspector general. The documents, obtained by The Washington Post from a congressional aide with knowledge of the findings, show that on June 29, 2011, IRS staffers held a briefing with senior agency official Lois G. Lerner in which they described giving special attention to instances where statements in the case file criticize how the country is being run. Six months later, the IRS applied a new political test to groups that applied for tax-exempt status as social welfare groups. On Jan. 15, 2012 the agency decided to target "political action type organizations involved in limiting/expanding Government, educating on the Constitution and Bill of Rights, social economic reform movement," according to the appendix in the IG report, which ... has yet to be released. The new revelations are likely to intensify criticism of the IRS, which has been under fire since agency officials acknowledged they had deliberately targeted groups with "tea party" or "patriot" in their name for heightened scrutiny. Sen. Susan Collins ... described the practice as absolutely chilling and called on President Obama to condemn the effort.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on government corruption and the erosion of civil liberties.


Wisconsin Farmer to Stand Trial for Selling Raw Milk
2013-05-12, The Daily Beast/Newsweek
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/05/12/wisconsin-farmer-to-stand-tr...

A Wisconsin dairy farmer is set to go on trial for a strange offense: selling raw milk to a group of consumers who were members of a private buyers club. So in many parts of America, its basically legal to grow, sell, and smoke pot. But you can go to jail for selling people fresh milk? Wisconsin dairy farmer Vernon Hershberger, a 41-year-old father of ten, will go on trial later this month. Hershberger started a private buyers club for raw milk in 2003 after some friends from townwho were retired farmerswanted to continue getting this raw milk that they had for years. By word of mouth ... it grew from there. By the time of his arrest in 2010, over 100 families were members. Technically, these club members were not customers of the farm, but partners: they legally leased animals from Hershberger, and in return for his family boarding and caring for their cattle on his 157 acres of farmland, they paid certain agreed-upon fees each time they came to pick up the products of those cattlenamely, raw milk. So Hershberger felt he didnt need a license as a retail food establishment, because there was no retail going on; the milk already belonged to the club members. Hershberger grew up milking cows by hand on a small Amish dairy farm, and this hold order violated his religious values: though no longer Amish, hes a non-denominational Christian, and opposes waste.

Note: For deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources on government corruption, click here.


Report: IRS targeting went beyond Tea Party
2013-05-12, Seattle Times (One of Seattle's leading newspapers)
http://seattletimes.com/html/nationworld/2020975214_irsteapartyxml.html

The Internal Revenue Services special scrutiny of small-government groups applying for tax-exempt status went beyond keyword hunts for organizations with Tea Party or patriot in their names, to a more overtly ideological search for applicants seeking to make America a better place to live or criticize how the country is being run, according to a part of an inspector generals report that was given to Congress. The head of the division on tax-exempt organizations, Lois Lerner, was briefed on the effort in June 2011, seemingly contradicting her assertion on Friday that she learned of the effort from the press. But she seemed to work hard to rein in the focus on conservatives and change it to a look at any political advocacy group of any stripe seeking tax exemptions. The appendix of the inspector generals report ... chronicles the extent to which the IRSs exempt organizations division kept redefining what sort of social welfare groups it should single out for extra attention since the 2010 Supreme Court ruling Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. That decision allowed corporations and labor unions to raise and spend unlimited sums on elections as well as register for tax-exempt status under section 501(c)4 of the tax code, as long as their primary purpose did not consist of targeting electoral candidates. On June 29, 2011, according to the documents, IRS staffers held a briefing with Lerner in which they described giving special attention to instances where statements in the case file criticize how the country is being run.

Note: For deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources on government corruption, click here.


IRS apologizes for inappropriately targeting conservative political groups in 2012 election
2013-05-11, Washington Post/Associated Press
http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/irs-apologizes-for-inappropriately-tar...

Senior Internal Revenue Service officials knew agents were targeting Tea Party groups as early as 2011, according to a draft of an inspector generals report obtained by The Associated Press that seemingly contradicts public statements by the IRS commissioner. The IRS apologized [on May 10] for what it acknowledged was inappropriate targeting of conservative political groups during the 2012 election to see if they were violating their tax-exempt status. The agency blamed low-level employees, saying no high-level officials were aware. But on June 29, 2011, Lois G. Lerner, who heads the IRS division that oversees tax-exempt organizations, learned at a meeting that groups were being targeted, according to the watchdogs report. At the meeting, she was told that groups with Tea Party, Patriot or 9/12 Project in their names were being flagged for additional and often burdensome scrutiny, the report says. The 9-12 Project is a group started by conservative TV personality Glenn Beck. Lerner instructed agents to change the criteria for flagging groups immediately, the report says. On Jan, 25, 2012, the criteria for flagging suspect groups was changed to, political action type organizations involved in limiting/expanding Government, educating on the Constitution and Bill of Rights, social economic reform/movement, the report says.

Note: For deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources on government corruption, click here.


Are all telephone calls recorded and accessible to the US government?
2013-05-04, The Guardian (One of the UK's leading newspapers)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/may/04/telephone-calls-recorded-...

CNN's Out Front with Erin Burnett [has been] focused on the possible involvement in the Boston Marathon attack of Katherine Russell, the 24-year-old American widow of the deceased suspect, Tamerlan Tsarnaev. Anonymous government officials are claiming that they are now focused on telephone calls between Russell and Tsarnaev that took place both before and after the attack to determine if she had prior knowledge of the plot or participated in any way. Burnett interviewed Tim Clemente, a former FBI counterterrorism agent, about whether the FBI would be able to discover the contents of past telephone conversations between the two. He quite clearly insisted that they could: BURNETT: There's no way they actually can find out what happened, right, unless she tells them? CLEMENTE: No, there is a way. We certainly have ways in national security investigations to find out exactly what was said in that conversation. We certainly can find that out. BURNETT: So they can actually get that? People are saying, look, that is incredible. CLEMENTE: No, welcome to America. All of that stuff is being captured as we speak whether we know it or like it or not. On Thursday night, Clemente again appeared on CNN. He reiterated what he said the night before but added expressly that "all digital communications in the past" are recorded and stored. All digital communications - meaning telephone calls, emails, online chats and the like - are automatically recorded and stored and accessible to the government after the fact. To describe that is to define what a ubiquitous, limitless Surveillance State is.

Note: All of our communications have been monitored by government computers for years. BBC News reported in this this 1999 article about the Echelon network which monitors all communications globally. For deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources on government and corporate threats to privacy, click here.


Report: Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's repeated requests for a lawyer were ignored
2013-04-29, The Guardian (One of the UK's leading newspapers)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/apr/29/tsarnaev-right-to-counsel...

The initial debate over the treatment of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev focused on whether he should be advised of his Miranda rights or whether the "public safety exception" justified delaying it. Now, the Los Angeles Times ... reports something which, if true, would be a much more serious violation of core rights than delaying Miranda warnings - namely, that ... Tsarnaev had repeatedly asked for a lawyer, but the FBI simply ignored those requests, instead allowing the interagency High Value Detainee Interrogation Group to continue to interrogate him alone: "Tsarnaev has not answered any questions since he was given a lawyer and told he has the right to remain silent by Magistrate Judge Marianne B. Bowler on Monday, officials said. Until that point, Tsarnaev had been responding to the interagency High Value Detainee Interrogation Group, including admitting his role in the bombing, authorities said. A senior congressional aide said Tsarnaev had asked several times for a lawyer, but that request was ignored since he was being questioned under the public safety exemption to the Miranda rule." Denying him the right to a lawyer after he repeatedly requests one is ... as fundamental a violation of crucial guaranteed rights as can be imagined. To ignore the repeated requests of someone in police custody for a lawyer, for hours and hours, is just inexcusable and legally baseless. If the LA Times report is true, then it means that the DOJ did not merely fail to advise him of his right to a lawyer but actively blocked him from exercising that right.

Note: The government appears to be setting a precedent in seeing how far they can go with taking away our constitutionally guaranteed rights. For deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources on civil liberties, click here.


Despair Drives Guantnamo Detainees to Revolt
2013-04-25, New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/25/us/guantanamo-prison-revolt-driven-by-inmat...

A hunger strike is now in its third month [at Guantnamo prison], with 93 prisoners considered to be participating more than half the inmates. Both military officials and lawyers for the detainees agree about the underlying cause of the turmoil: a growing sense among many prisoners, some of whom have been held without trial for more than 11 years, that they will never go home. While President Obama made closing the prison a top priority when he entered the White House, he put that effort on the back burner in the face of Congressional opposition to his plan to move the detainees to a Supermax facility inside the United States. The prisoners had great optimism that Guantnamo would be closed, Gen. John F. Kelly, who oversees the prison as head of the United States Southern Command, recently told Congress. They were devastated when the president backed off ... of closing the facility. That disappointment was heightened by Mr. Obamas decision in January 2011 to sign legislation to restrict the transfers of prisoners. More than half the inmates were designated three years ago for transfer to another country if security conditions could be met, but the transfers dried up. President Obama has publicly and privately abandoned his promise to close Guantnamo, said Carlos Warner, a lawyer who represents one of 17 hunger strikers being kept alive by force-feeding through nasal tubes. His tragic political decision has caused the men to lose all hope. Thus, many innocent men have chosen death over a life of unjust indefinite detention.

Note: For deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources on civil liberties, click here.


Hacktivists as Gadflies
2013-04-15, New York Times blog
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/04/13/hacktivists-as-gadflies

We have had gadflies among us ever since [Socrates], but one contemporary breed in particular has come in for a rough time of late: the hacktivist. Hacktivists, roughly speaking, are individuals who redeploy and repurpose technology for social causes. In this sense they are different from garden-variety hackers out to enrich only themselves. Barrett Brown, a journalist who had achieved some level of notoriety as the the former unofficial not-spokesman for Anonymous, the hacktivist group, now sits in federal custody in Texas. Mr. Brown came under the scrutiny of the authorities when he began poring over documents that had been released in the hack of two private security companies, HBGary Federal and Stratfor. Mr. Brown did not take part in the hacks, but he did become obsessed with the contents that emerged from them in particular the extracted documents showed that private security contractors were being hired by the United States government to develop strategies for undermining protesters and journalists, including Glenn Greenwald, a columnist for Salon. Because Stratfor had not encrypted the credit card information of its clients, the information in the cache included credit card numbers and validation numbers. Mr. Brown didnt extract the numbers or highlight them; he merely offered a link to the database. For this he was charged on 12 counts, all of which pertained to credit card fraud. The charges against him add up to about 100 years in federal prison.

Note: For deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources on civil liberties, click here.


Domestic drones and their unique dangers
2013-03-29, The Guardian (One of the UK's leading newspapers)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/mar/29/domestic-drones-unique-da...

The use of drones by domestic US law enforcement agencies is growing rapidly, both in terms of numbers and types of usage. As a result, civil liberties and privacy groups led by the ACLU ... have been devoting increasing efforts to publicizing their unique dangers and agitating for statutory limits. The belief that weaponized drones won't be used on US soil is patently irrational. Police departments are already speaking openly about how their drones "could be equipped to carry nonlethal weapons such as Tasers or a bean-bag gun." The drone industry has already developed and is now aggressively marketing precisely such weaponized drones for domestic law enforcement use. Domestic weaponized drones will be much smaller and cheaper, as well as more agile - but just as lethal [as the large missile-firing drones used by the US military overseas]. The nation's leading manufacturer of small "unmanned aircraft systems" (UAS) ... is AeroVironment, Inc. (AV). AV is now focused on drone products - such as the "Qube" - that are so small that they can be "transported in the trunk of a police vehicle or carried in a backpack." AV's website ... touts a February, 2013 Defense News article describing how much the US Army loves [its] "Switchblade" [drone]. Time Magazine heralded this tiny drone weapon as "one of the best inventions of 2012", gushing: "the Switchblade drone can be carried into battle in a backpack. It's a kamikaze: the person controlling it uses a real-time video feed from the drone to crash it into a precise target. Its tiny warhead detonates on impact."

Note: This important article also discusses drones used by government agencies such as police for purposes of continuous surveillance. But it misses entirely another major dimension: privately owned and controlled drones, which are becoming dirt cheap and within the reach of virtually anyone. Will the new "DroneWorld" in the making combine the worst features of the Police State with the Wild West?


The FBI's anticipatory prosecution of Muslims to criminalize speech
2013-03-19, The Guardian (One of the UK's leading newspapers)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/mar/19/preemptive-prosecution-mu...

One of the major governmental abuses denounced by the 1976 final report of the Church Committee was the FBI's domestic counter intelligence programs (COINTELPRO). Under that program, the FBI targeted political groups and individuals it deemed subversive and dangerous ... and infiltrated them with agents who, among other things, attempted to manipulate members into agreeing to commit criminal acts so that the FBI could arrest and prosecute them. What made the program so controversial was that the FBI was attempting to create and encourage crimes rather than find actual criminals - all in order to punish those whose constitutionally protected political activism the US government found threatening. Over the past decade, US Muslims have been routinely targeted with precisely this same tactic of preemptive or anticipatory prosecution. It's all designed to take people engaged in political and religious advocacy which the US government dislikes ... and use paid informants to trick them into saying just enough to turn them into criminals who are then prosecuted and imprisoned for decades. The same pattern repeats itself over and over. The FBI ensnares some random Muslim in a garden-variety criminal investigation involving financial fraud or drugs. Rather than prosecute him, the FBI puts the Muslim criminal suspect on its payroll, sending him into Muslim communities and mosques in order not only to spy on American Muslims, but to befriend them and then actively manipulate them into saying just enough to make their prosecution possible.

Note: For deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources on illegal activities of intelligence agencies, click here.


Judge: FBI gag orders unconstitutional
2013-03-15, San Francisco Chronicle (SF's leading newspaper)
http://www.sfgate.com/politics/article/Judge-FBI-gag-orders-unconstitutional-...

In a blow against government secrecy, a federal judge ruled [on March 15] that the tens of thousands of "national security letters" the FBI sends each year demanding customer records from phone companies, banks and others, are unconstitutional because they forbid recipients from revealing that the letters exist. A gag order that makes it a crime to disclose one has received such a letter "restrains ... speech about government conduct" with little opportunity for judicial review, said U.S. District Judge Susan Illston of San Francisco. She directed the FBI to stop issuing national security letters that contain gag orders, but put her ruling on hold during an expected government appeal. Attorney Matt Zimmerman of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which filed the suit in May 2011 on behalf of an unnamed telecommunications company, said [that] the gag orders "have truncated the public debate on these controversial surveillance tools." The USA Patriot Act, passed in response to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, authorized the FBI to issue national security letters on its own for information that it considers relevant to an investigation of international terrorism or spying. Virtually all of the letters include a permanent gag order. In 2008, a federal appeals court in New York found the gag orders constitutionally defective. Congress amended the law in 2006 to allow recipients to challenge national security letters on constitutional grounds, but left the government with near-total power over the gag orders, Illston said.

Note: For deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources on illegal activities of intelligence agencies, click here.


New Pope Tied up in Argentina's 'Dirty War' Debate
2013-03-14, ABC News/Associated Press
http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/papal-election-stirs-argentinas...

It's beyond dispute that Jorge Mario Bergoglio, [the new Pope], failed to openly confront the 1976-1983 military junta as it kidnapped and killed thousands of people in a "dirty war" to eliminate leftist opponents. But human rights activists differ on how much responsibility Pope Francis personally deserves for the Argentine church's dark history of supporting the murderous dictatorship. Some leading Argentine human rights activists agree that Bergoglio, now 76, doesn't deserve to be lumped together with other church figures who were closely aligned with the dictatorship. "Perhaps he didn't have the courage of other priests, but he never collaborated with the dictatorship," Adolfo Perez Esquivel, who won the 1980 Nobel Peace Prize for documenting the junta's atrocities, said. But others say Bergoglio's rise through the Argentine church since then has put him in many positions of power where he could have done more to atone for the sins of Catholic officials who did actively conspire with the dictators. Some priests even worked inside torture centers, and blessed those doing the killing. Bergoglio twice invoked his right under Argentine law to refuse to appear in open court in trials involving torture and murder inside the feared Navy Mechanics School and the theft of babies from detainees.

Note: An entire edition of Democracy Now! was devoted to the record of Bergoglio, including an interview with the Argentine journalist Horacio Verbitsky. For more analysis, click here, here and here.


U.S. to let spy agencies scour Americans' finances
2013-03-13, Chicago Tribune/Reuters
http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2013-03-13/business/chi-us-to-let-spy-agen...

The Obama administration is drawing up plans to give all U.S. spy agencies full access to a massive database that contains financial data on American citizens and others who bank in the country, according to a Treasury Department document. The proposed plan represents a major step by U.S. intelligence agencies to spot and track down [targeted persons] by bringing together financial databanks, criminal records and military intelligence. Financial institutions that operate in the United States are required by law to file reports of "suspicious customer activity," such as large money transfers or unusually structured bank accounts, to Treasury's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN). The Federal Bureau of Investigation already has full access to the database. However, intelligence agencies, such as the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency, currently have to make case-by-case requests for information to FinCEN. The Treasury plan would give spy agencies the ability to analyze more raw financial data than they have ever had before. Financial institutions file more than 15 million "suspicious activity reports" every year, according to Treasury. Banks, for instance, are required to report all personal cash transactions exceeding $10,000.

Note: For deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources on the games intelligence agencies play, click here.


Jorge Bergoglio: Who is the new pope?
2013-03-13, CBS News/Associated Press
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-202_162-57574147/jorge-bergoglio-who-is-the-new-pope

Jorge Mario Bergoglio - who will be now known as Pope Francis - has spent nearly his entire career at home in Argentina, overseeing churches and shoe-leather priests. The 76-year-old archbishop of Buenos Aires ... is the first Jesuit to be elected pope. In a lifetime of teaching and leading priests in Latin America, which has the largest share of the world's Catholics, Bergoglio has shown a keen political sensibility. Bergoglio is known to be conservative on spiritual issues. He opposes abortion, same-sex marriage and supports celibacy. Bergoglio's legacy as cardinal includes his efforts to repair the reputation of a church that lost many followers by failing to openly challenge Argentina's murderous 1976-83 dictatorship. Many Argentines remain angry over the church's acknowledged failure to openly confront a regime that was kidnapping and killing thousands of people as it sought to eliminate "subversive elements" in society. Bergoglio twice invoked his right under Argentine law to refuse to appear in open court, and when he eventually did testify in 2010, his answers were evasive, human rights attorney Myriam Bregman said. Bergoglio's own statements proved church officials knew from early on that the junta was torturing and killing its citizens, and yet publicly endorsed the dictators. The dictatorship could not have operated this way without this key support," [Bregman said.]

Note: An entire edition of Democracy Now! was devoted to the record of Bergoglio, including an interview with the Argentine journalist Horacio Verbitsky. For more analysis, click here, here and here.


1.6 Billion Rounds Of Ammo For Homeland Security? It's Time For A National Conversation
2013-03-11, Forbes
http://www.forbes.com/sites/ralphbenko/2013/03/11/1-6-billion-rounds-of-ammo-...

The Denver Post, on February 15th, ran an Associated Press article entitled "Homeland Security aims to buy 1.6b rounds of ammo". It confirmed that the Department of Homeland Security has issued an open purchase order for 1.6 billion rounds of ammunition. Some of this purchase order is for hollow-point rounds, forbidden by international law for use in war, along with a frightening amount specialized for snipers. Also reported elsewhere, at the height of the Iraq War the Army was expending less than 6 million rounds a month. Therefore 1.6 billion rounds would be enough to sustain a hot war for 20+ years. DHS now is [also] showing off its acquisition of heavily armored personnel carriers, repatriated from the Iraqi and Afghani theaters of operation. The Department of Homeland Security is apparently taking delivery (apparently through the Marine Corps Systems Command, Quantico VA, via the manufacturer Navistar Defense LLC) of an undetermined number of [recently retrofitted] Mine Resistant Protected MaxxPro MRAP vehicles for service on the streets of the United States. Why would they need such over-the-top vehicles on U.S. streets to withstand IEDs, mine blasts, and 50 caliber hits to bullet-proof glass? In a war zone yes, definitely. [But] on the streets of America?

Note: For a U.S. Army field manual titled "Internment and Resettlement Operations" (FM 3-39.40) describing how large numbers of American citizens could be sent to internment camps if involved in "terrorist" activities, click here. The introduction to this document states, "Commanders will use technology and conduct police intelligence operations to influence and control populations, evacuate detainees and, conclusively, transition rehabilitative and reconciliation operations to other functional agencies." For a disturbing report on the massive expansion of drones over US skies, click here.


Important Note: Explore our full index to key excerpts of revealing major media news articles on several dozen engaging topics. And don't miss amazing excerpts from 20 of the most revealing news articles ever published.