TiLTNews Network: Earth Watch - Freedom is defined by the ability of citizens to live without government interference, not by safety. It is easy to clamor for government security when terrible things happen; but liberty is given true meaning when we support it without exception, and we will be safer for it ~ Dr. Ron Paul
Photo: *w*/cc/flickrA federal judge on Monday gave class action status to lawsuit brought forth by men at a notorious California prison who are challenging their prolonged solitary confinement.
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Class Action Lawsuit Hovers Over 'Draconian Nature' of Solitary Confinement
andrea
Wed, 04 Jun 2014 17:11:17 GMT
Last updated: 03 Jun 2014 19:30
Bergdahl is still in Germany recovering from five years in captivity [IntelCenter]
The United States army has said it intends to investigate the circumstances of Bowe Bergdahl's disappearance in Afghanistan amid claims of his desertion, and anger from former comrades who risked their lives to search for him.
John McHugh, the secretary of the US army, said on Tuesday that officials would interview Bergdahl about the circumstances of his disappearance in Afghanistan once completes a rehabilitation programme in Germany.
"All other decisions will be made thereafter, and in accordance with appropriate regulations, policies and practices," said McHugh, indicating that he could face punishment based on his interviews.
Bergdahl disappeared off his base in Afghanistan in 2009 after telling comrades he was disillusioned, and was captured by Taliban-aligned fighters.
Al Jazeera's Rosiland Jordan, reporting from Washington, said that several members of Bergdahl’s unit had complained in the past few days that they had risked their lives to find a man they considered a deserter.
"One man has charged that at least six soldiers were killed while looking for Bergdahl. They are all upset that the Obama administration is celebrating the return of a man who should instead, they think, be court-martialed," Jordan said.
"He’s not leaving the military right now, so he will have to report to a military base for his next assignment – and any possible disciplinary actions."
'Walked away'
Bergdahl was swapped for five high-ranking Taliban prisoners on Saturday, through a deal brokered by the Qatari government. The Taliban men are now in Qatar, where their movements are said to be restricted.
On Monday, an unnamed Pentagon official was quoted by the AP news agency as saying that Bergdahl walked away from his military unit before his capture on June 30, 2009 by the Taliban fighters.
General Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the AP news agency on Tuesday that the army investigation could lead to further action.
There are a variety of offences related to an absence without proper approval, and a number of potential actions could be taken by the military.
He could be tried by court martial for desertion He could be given a non-judicial punishment for a lesser charge, such as being away without leave. He could also be given credit for time already served while he was a prisoner.
Critics of the Obama administration have meanwhile questioned the deal with the Taliban.
"The administration has invited serious questions into how this exchange went down and the calculations the White House and relevant agencies made in moving forward without consulting Congress despite assurances it would re-engage with members on both sides of the aisle," John Boehner, the speaker of the House of Representatives, said on Tuesday.
Boehner backed calls for congressional hearings on the decision to swap the prisoners.
Bergdahl faces US probe amid desertion claims
Tue, 03 Jun 2014 19:28:03 GMT
Last updated: 02 Jun 2014 20:44
Bergdahl said he could help Afghans by leaving his post, members of his unit said [IntelCenter]
A US soldier freed after five years in Taliban captivity walked away from his unit and US military decided not to exert extraordinary efforts to rescue him, a former Pentagon official has told the AP news agency.
The agency on Monday reported the unnamed official as saying that the US government instead pursued negotiations to get Bowe Bergdahl back, leading to his release on Saturday.
The official told AP that a Pentagon report in 2010 concluded that he had walked away from his post in Afghanistan before his capture by Taliban fighters.
The official said that members of his unit portrayed him as a naive, "delusional" person who thought he could help the Afghan people by leaving his army post.
However a military investigation did not formally accuse Bergdahl of desertion, the official said.
The 28-year-old from Idaho was on Saturday exchanged for five senior Taliban figures held by the US in Guantanamo Bay prison in a deal brokered by Qatar.
Disillusioned
Bowe enlisted in 2008 without telling his parents, drawn by recruiters' promises that he would be able to go overseas to help people, according to a 2010 Rolling Stone profile.
Once deployed to Afghanistan, he appeared to become disillusioned about the US military mission. In his final email to his parents before his capture, he wrote, "I am ashamed to even be an American," Rolling Stone reported.
After he was captured on June 30, 2009, some believed he willingly walked away from his post. According to US diplomatic cables, Bergdahl's unit began searching for him that morning when he did not show up for roll call.
"He left of his own volition," one US defence official told the Reuters news agency, declining to be identified. "But we have no idea of his motivation, or what was going through this young man's mind at the time."
Asked whether Bergdahl should be disciplined, US national security adviser Susan Rice told ABC News on Sunday: "Anybody who's been held in those conditions in captivity for five years has paid an extraordinary price."
The comments came as some in the US began to question the swap of Bergdahl for five high-value Taliban prisoners.
John McCain, a leading Republican senator, said: "These are the highest high-risk people. Others that we have released have gone back into the fight."
Jay Carney, a White House spokesman, defended the decision. "We have a history in this country of making sure that our prisoners of war are returned to us - we don't leave them behind," he told CNN.
"The threat potentially posed by the returned detainees was sufficiently mitigated to allow us to move forward and get Bowe Bergdahl back home where he belongs."
US soldier 'walked off base' before capture
Mon, 02 Jun 2014 20:44:21 GMT
BREAKING: Supreme Court Unanimously Strikes Down Obama’s Power Grab
President Obama has had an up and down relationship with the Supreme Court. He publicly admonished them during his 2010 State of the Union address over theirCitizens United decision, but sang their praises when they upheld Obamacare by ruling it a tax.
He may not like future rulings from the Court on Obamacare though, as they are considering the Hobby Lobby case regarding the abortion mandate provision of Obamacare and how it infringes on religious liberty. They may also soon be considering a Constitutional challenge of the healthcare law on the grounds that it violated the ‘Origination Clause‘ by being introduced in the Senate instead of the House, where tax bills are required to begin.
Obama doesn’t have many fans on the Supreme Court either, with even his ultra-liberal nominees to the Court ruling against him at times. Justice Scalia has been especially critical of Obama, calling him a “self-interested President” and decrying his continuous power grabs.
One such power grab by the Obama administration was just struck down unanimously by the Supreme Court, who ruled against Obama’s “boundless” interpretation of a chemical weapons law used to convict a woman of an international crime for a simple local assault case. (H/T Reason)
At issue in Bond v. United States was the conviction of Carol Anne Bond, a Pennsylvania woman sentenced to six years in federal prison under the Chemical Weapons Implementation Act after she smeared two toxic substances on the door knob and car door of a woman who had been carrying on an affair with Bond’s husband. According to Bond, the federal government exceeded its enumerated powers by making a federal crime out of her purely local offense. Today, the Supreme Court ruled in Bond’s favor.
The Obama administration’s “boundless” interpretation of the chemical weapons law, declared the opinion of Chief Justice John Roberts, “would transform the statute from one whose core concerns are acts of war, assassination, and terrorism into a massive federal anti-poisoning regime that reaches the simplest of assaults.”
Even the four liberal Justices joined in the decision, saying the federal law had noapplication in the matter.
“an amateur attempt by a jilted wife to injure her husband’s lover, which ended up causing only a minor thumb burn readily treated by rinsing with water.” The power to prosecute such acts rests entirely in the hands of the states, the Court concluded. “There is no reason to think the sovereign nations that ratified the [Chemical Weapons] Convention were interested in anything like Bond’s common law assault.”
The three conservative Justices, Scalia, Thomas and Alito, concurred in the decision to overturn Bond’s conviction, but wrote their own opinion on the matter, feeling that the unanimous decision actually didn’t go far enough.
In contrast to Roberts, these three justices argued that the chemical weapons law did cover Bond’s conduct, and therefore the law should be struck down on constitutional grounds. “As sweeping and unsettling as the Chemical Weapons Convention Implementation Act of 1998 may be, it is clear beyond doubt that it covers what Bond did,” wrote Justice Scalia. “So we are forced to decide—there is no way around it—whether the Act’s application to what Bond did was constitutional. I would hold that it was not.”
You can read the Court’s opinion of Bond v. United States here.
This is good news. The Supreme Court has stepped up and pushed back against the constant power grab by the Obama administration. There was absolutely no reason for the federal government to charge that women under a law designed for international war crimes and terrorism, especially considering her crime was a simple assault case that should have been handled at the County level, at most the state level.
The Obama administration was simply seeking a way to expand on the already expansive federal reach, setting a precedent for the feds to involve themselves in simple local crimes for any reason, if they so choose. They need to be stopped, and the federal government needs to be put back in it’s place, which isn’t getting involved in local crimes and prosecution that the states are more than capable of handling on their own.
Please share this on Facebook and Twitter if you are glad the Supreme Court rejected another one of Obama’s power grabs, and hope they will continue to strike his administration down as they continue their ever constant quest to expand their power and influence.
BREAKING: Supreme Court Unanimously Strikes Down Obama’s Power Grab
Ben Marquis
Mon, 02 Jun 2014 20:15:27 GMT
The Federal Housing Finance Agency and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau are planning to seize financial records on mortgage borrowers for a new federal database.
Amid shocking reports that the National Security Agency has been compiling data on American citizens without a personalized warrant or probable cause, The Washington Examiner is reporting that two federal agencies are making plans to seize the private financial records of millions of American mortgage borrowers for use in a centralized database. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the Federal Housing Finance Agency currently maintain a National Mortgage Database Program which was initially designed to hold generic data about the mortgage marketplace. However, the executive branch regulatory bureaus appear to have made a policy reversal regarding the private data of citizens and are now seeking a wide range of financial and demographic data points on specific citizens for inclusion in the searchable database.
The agencies recently expressed intentions to expand the database in a posting to the Federal Register. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was created by the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. The bureaus claim that the personal details are necessary in order to create a report for Congress which is allegedly required under the Housing and Economic Recovery Act of 2008, a bill signed into law by former President Bush that originally created the Federal Housing Finance Agency.
The database would contain records on any Americans who have taken out a single-family residential first lien loan at any time from 1998 onward. The compiled data points would be very comprehensive and would include not only financial records such as credit histories, social security numbers, reports on total assets, and credit card transactions, but also unrelated demographic data, including information on the age, race, religion, and number of residents in the household.
US Senator Rand Paul once warned that the government may be working on a database that could include financial records such as Americans’ credit card histories and pointed out that such data could be used to track citizens’ activities. “Think about your credit card records, and I tell people all the time, think about what people can know about you that might be on your Visa bill. I really think that’s personal information, and unless you are specifically named on a warrant, nobody should be looking at that,” said Senator Paul. The existence of such a database raises security concerns, as privacy advocates worry that identity thieves and hackers will target the sensitive information that is set to be collected in the database.
Such an effort to collect private data on specific citizens absent a warrant and suspicion of criminal activity violates Fourth Amendment protections. Senator Mike Crapo and Congressman Jeb Hensarling issued a letter to the directors of the FHFA and the CFPB stating that the expansion of the database “can easily be perceived as an abuse of the trust placed in your agencies by the American people.”
The Washington Examiner estimates that the policy change could affect up to 227 million Americans.
Read Other Stories
A smaller portion of America’s population prefers to conclude their evening with the rantings of televised actors, who make big bucks portraying themselves as objective news anchors. In what may be the ultimate irony, these Americans turn to the corporate-controlled mainstream pressfor information on today’s most pressing issues.
We are told by the federal government, and by the corporate-controlled media, that naked body scanners and unreasonable searches and seizures of our persons and luggage in our nation's airports are designed for "our security."“The Congress shall have Power… To coin Money, regulate the Value thereof, and of foreign Coin, and fix the Standard of Weights and Measures;”
Amanda Warren
Activist Post
Seattle's new policy changes to restrict the use of excessive force have area cops in an uproar. And they are doing everything they can to reverse those changes to lift the veil of limits while exercising brute force. On Wednesday, 120 officers are plaintiffs in a new lawsuit.
So why did a policy change occur this year? By 2012, the Seattle Police Department had been under heavy federal watch after numerous incidents of using excessive force, mainly on minorities, Reuters reports. Years of excessive police force were so significant that Seattle worked out a new policy with the U.S. Department of Justice.
The lawsuit seeks to dismantle all of it. The reasons why, and what the officers want, are very telling....
According to the lawsuit, the officers find that the new policy will "unreasonably restrict and burdenPlaintiffs' right to use force reasonably required, to protect themselves and others from apparent harm and danger."
But the reason for any kind of a restriction in the first place was bred out of unreasonablyendangering the lives of citizens.
They want compensation and a complete policy overhaul. And get this - they call the policy "unconstitutional and beyond repair."
Unconstitutional. Delusion much?
Along with the city of Seattle, targets of the lawsuit also include U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder and Mayor Ed Murray.
In keeping with a court order, presumably meant for confidentiality, Murray didn't say much about the suit. But he did say:
The Justice Department and the federal courts say we need to deal with issues of use of force as well as other issues in our police department.
In reality, this seems to be another insider tap on the wrist, much as we have seen in Albuquerque, New Mexico. There, the APD (Another Person Dead) has "come under fire" by the Department of Justice for policy changes including a training manual that encouraged more confrontational behavior when dealing with citizens. The DOJ ultimately issued a list of "recommendations" to help the police maintain some outward semblance of accountability.
Apparently, the Police State in Seattle didn't get that memo of behavioral protocol, and has decided to publicly state that it simply can't do its job unless it is completely unrestrained.
http://www.activistpost.com/2014/05/seattle-cops-sue-city-for.html
Recent other articles by Amanda Warren
