The digital rights advocacy group Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) announced Thursday it had discovered violations stemming from the FBI’s use of expiring provisions of the USA PATRIOT Act.
Documents obtained by the group as the result of pending Freedom of Information Act litigation suggest that abuses of surveillance powers granted by the PATRIOT Act had been flagged by the FBI.
A federal appeals court this week ruled that a California police officer can be held liable for injuries suffered by an unarmed man he Tasered during a traffic stop. The decision, if allowed to stand, would set a rigorous legal precedent for when police are permitted to use the weapons and would force some law enforcement agencies throughout the state — and presumably the nation — to tighten their policies governing Taser use, experts said.
Michael Gennaco, an expert in police conduct issues who has conducted internal reviews of Taser use for the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department and other agencies, said the ruling by the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals prohibits officers from deploying Tasers in a host of scenarios and largely limits their use to situations in which a person poses an obvious danger.
One quarter of Detroit-area Arab Americans reported personal or familial abuse because of race, ethnicity or religion since 9/11, leading to higher odds of adverse health effects, according to a new University of Michigan study.
The study was published online in the American Journal of Public Health.
Muslim Arabs also reported higher rates of abuse than Christians, said lead author Aasim I. Padela, M.D., a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Clinical Scholar in U-M’s Department of General Medicine and clinical instructor in the Department of Emergency Medicine.
Padela says those who reported abuse showed a higher probability of having psychological distress, lower levels of happiness and poorer perceptions of health status.
If I was to report all of the instances of police abuse it would require an entire new blog, and a lot more time. There are instances everyday of police abuse. This year was no different; from EMT’s being choked by Highway Patrol (here and here) to a 72 year old grandmother being tazed(here) to a Louisiana man being choked to death(here) by officers and an innocent mother being tazed in front of her children(here).
The following report is from CNN, however the CNN report has a much different video on their site. The video available on you tube clearly has the officer admitting he drew his gun, and another clip shows him holding what appears to be his weapon. Why did I make a post for this? I don’t know, just to share the stories I suppose.
Washington police were investigating on Sunday whether an off-duty officer drew his gun in the midst of a snowball fight involving a couple hundred people.
The Metropolitan Police Department said video from a local media outlet at the scene Saturday did not show the officer with his weapon drawn. However, authorities have since received “additional images and statements that would seem to support the allegation that the off-duty member did pull a gun,” a police statement said.
Countless prisoners are being denied justice under a federal statute whose intent was to reduce frivolous law suits, two prominent legal authorities say.
Law professors Margo Schlanger of Washington University, St. Louis, and Giovanna Shay of Yale indict the federal Prison Litigation Reform Act(PLRA) of 1996 for “undermining the rule of law in America’s prisons” by “preventing inmates from raising legitimate claims” against their keepers.
The professors trace the subsequent “dramatic decline” in prisoner law suits to the fact that “constitutionally meritorious cases are now faced with new and often insurmountable obstacles.”
Can people become so broken that truths of how they are being screwed do not “set them free” but instead further demoralize them? Has such a demoralization happened in the United States? Do some totalitarians actually want us to hear how we have been screwed because they know that humiliating passivity in the face of obvious oppression will demoralize us even further? What forces have created a demoralized, passive, disCouraged U.S. population? Can anything be done to turn this around?
Can people become so broken that truths of how they are being screwed do not “set them free” but instead further demoralize them?
YES. It is called the “abuse syndrome.” How do abusive pimps, spouses, bosses, corporations, and governments stay in control? They shove lies, emotional and physical abuses, and injustices in their victims’ faces, and when victims are afraid to exit from these relationships, they get weaker; and so the abuser then makes their victims eat even more lies, abuses, and injustices, resulting in victims even weaker as they remain in these relationships.
Political observers like The Atlantic‘s Andrew Sullivan have argued that one of the most dangerous elements of the Bush administration’s torture policies was the risk that a “torture mentality” would take hold in American society.
Those who seek evidence for that theory need look no further than Great Falls, Montana, where two teacher’s aides have been charged with using water torture on a middle school student.
Julie Ann Parrish and Kristina Marie Kallies face one count each of felony abuse after allegations that they forced a 13-year-old autistic boy’s head under water after he fell asleep in class. They also stand accused of “forcing him to sit in his soiled pants for hours and making him eat his own vomit when he got sick,” reports KTLA in Los Angeles.
Having lived in the Washington, D.C. area for the better part of the last 10 years, I’ve attended my share of protests, though, again as a resident of the Beltway, I’ve spent far more time trying to avoid them and the traffic nightmares they spawn. Among the various classes of protesters—pro-lifers, environmentalists, anti-war activists, and now Tea Partiers—the most destructive are easily the anti-globalization/anarchist protesters. So when police clashed with anti-globalization protesters last weekend in Pittsburgh, one could assume that most altercations represented justified police responses to overzealous protesters.
But a number of disturbing images, videos, and witness accounts have come out of Pittsburgh, as well as from similar high-stakes political events in recent years, that reveal the disquieting ease with which authorities are willing to crush dissent—and at the very sorts of events where the right to dissent is the entire purpose of protecting free speech. That is, events where influential policymakers meet to make high-level decisions with far-reaching consequences.
Please see our collection of videos from independent sources who were at the G-20 in Pittsburgh. (Post 9/11 Police State Aggression Grows by Leaps Each Year)-ed
Activists with the Thomas Merton Center and other groups today blasted the police response to a Friday night protest in Oakland following the G-20 summit, calling it a “military-style occupation” that resulted in the gassing and arrest of dozens of bystanders, including students and journalists.
During a press conference at the center’s Garfield headquarters, some activists threatened lawsuits against the city and placed responsibility for the confrontation with Mayor Luke Ravenstahl and top public safety officials.
“I’ll say it very bluntly: The mayor should be fired. The city council should hold his feet to the fire,” said David Meieran, an organizer with Three Rivers Climate Convergence.
I wrote earlier today about Eric Holder’s decision to ”review” whether criminal prosecutions are warranted in connection with the torture of Terrorism suspects — that can be read here — but I want to write separately about the release today of the 2004 CIA’s Inspector General Report (.pdf), both because it’s extraordinary in its own right and because it underscores how unjust it would be to prosecute only low-level interrogators rather than the high-level officials who implemented the torture regime. Initially, it should be emphasized that yet again, it is not the Congress or the establishment media which is uncovering these abuses and forcing disclosure of government misconduct. Rather, it is the ACLU (with which I consult) that, along with other human rights organizations, has had to fill the void left by those failed institutions, using their own funds to pursue litigation to compel disclosure. Without their efforts, we would know vastly less than we know now about the crimes our government committed.
Before saying anything about the implications of this Report, I want to post some excerpts of what CIA interrogators did. Every American should be forced to read and learn this in order to know what was done in their names (click images to enlarge): Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by Brian 
