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Investigation Shows Agency Used Contract to Censor Whistleblowers

The following press release was issued today by my attorneys and the National Whistleblowers Center (NWC). For the full release visit their website at http://www.whistleblowers.org

Washington, D.C. April 10, 2012. Today, the National Whistleblowers Center (NWC) revealed that the FBI required employees to sign employment contracts that are illegal under Federal law. The NWC launched the investigation in response to a nearly yearlong campaign by the FBI to prevent the publication of whistleblower Sibel Edmonds’ new book, Classified Woman: The Sibel Edmonds Story. Read more È

Former AG Mukasey on Terrorist Organization MEK Payroll

Dear Department of Justice and Department of Treasury Officials:

We might have just helped you bag another material supporter of terrorism this week! And you’ll never believe who the culprit is! We were even able to tape record some of his own damning admissions! (That’s the reason for my calls last week to your duty attorneys and media offices.)

As you know, Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control has an ongoing investigation into several high profile former political figures, trying to discover their financial transactions with the terrorists in the Mujaheddin e Khalq aka “MEK”. One of the former political officials apparently being investigated for his financial transactions and paid advocacy on behalf of MEK is former Attorney General Michael Mukasey. Well Mukasey happened to get tapped on March 15 to give an “ethical leadership” speech at the University of St. Thomas Law School and some of us went to hear what he had to say. As an aside, the overall thrust of his speech was anything but ethical. Instead he mostly defended the Bush Administration and its lawyers for having used their talents “to push the legal limits” of what the Executive Branch could do in its “war on terror.” (Of course there are many legal scholars who think those Bush attorneys pushed over the legal limits.) He especially defended John Yoo and Robert Delahunty (now a St. Thomas law professor) who working in Bush’s Office of Legal Counsel, co-wrote memos in early 2002 claiming the U.S. did not have to follow the Geneva Conventions. Researchers have since gained evidence through multiple interviews of returned soldiers that the major factor in U.S. troops’ having committed atrocities and abuses in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as terrible torture of detainees was their being told they no longer had to follow the Geneva Conventions. But Mukasey didn’t seem to care much about any abuses or torture. In fact, although he refused to answer during his Senate Confirmation hearing whether waterboarding was torture, he explicitly declared that waterboarding is not torture and therefore was/is not illegal as practiced by CIA contractors. Read more È

What Will Happen Today?

A hearing is scheduled today in a federal district court in New York City in a 9/11 case still winding its way through the court system.  The case was brought by thousands of relatives of people killed on 9/11, as well as insurance companies exposed to heavy losses.  The case was originally brought against defendants including members of the Saudi royal family and the Saudi government.  The plaintiffs are seeking to have the government of Saudi Arabia reinstated as a defendant, after it had previously been insulated under theories of sovereign immunity. 

Today’s hearing deals with issues relating to affidavits filed a few weeks ago by two former United States Senators in the case.  The material reportedly in these affidavits raises important questions about the integrity of the government’s 9/11 investigation. The affidavits came from Robert Graham, a former 18 year Senator from Florida, Chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and chairman of the Congressional Joint Inquiry, along with Robert Kerrey, former Senator from Nebraska and a member of the 9/11 Commission.  Read more È

Banking on Washington

Kenneth Wainstein earned an undergraduate degree from the University of Virginia in 1984, and went on to receive a law degree from the University of California-Berkeley in 1988.  He began working for the U.S. Justice Department in 1989 as an assistant U.S. attorney, with his work including narcotics and public corruption cases.  He served nine years in the U.S. Attorney’s office in Washington D.C. beginning in 1992, where he rose in rank to become the “Principal Assistant U.S. Attorney.�

In April 2001, Wainstein filled a vacancy and served as Interim United States Attorney for the District of Columbia.  Four months later, in August 2001, at a time of heightened importance for interdepartmental communication in counterterrorism efforts, he became the director of the Executive Office for US Attorneys at the Justice Department.  This office provided oversight and organizational services for U.S. Attorneys around the country.

During 2001, John Ashcroft was serving as the Attorney General of the United States, being appointed to that position in December 2000 by new President George W. Bush.  Ashcroft then served as Attorney General for the next four years.  At the FBI, within the Department of Justice, turnover was taking place at senior levels during 2001.  Louis Freeh served as Director of the FBI from 1993 until late June, 2001.  Thomas Pickard served as Acting Director of the FBI from June 25, 2001 to September 4, 2001, when Robert Mueller succeeded him. Read more È

The New FBI Trick to Keep the Public in the Dark

The Freedom of Information Act is intended to be one of the American citizens’ key checks against the fraud and corruption that inevitably happens in the corridors of power when information can be hidden behind a secrecy classification. One agency of the government that has been notoriously uncooperative with the spirit and the letter of the FOIA law, however, is the FBI. Since the days of J. Edgar Hoover, the Bureau has zealously guarded some of its key documents and acted to stonewall those seeking access to sensitive records, which are said to include scandalous details of some of the highest ranking political figures of the past century and explosive details of some of the Bureau’s biggest investigations.

This is our EyeOpener Report by James Corbett examining some of the methods and loopholes that the FBI has used over the years to protect key documents from Freedom of Information requests and hide information from the public, bringing to light the new trick- “blackballing� as part of the Bureau’s standard operating procedure and the troubling question about the nature of governmental secrecy raised by this process.

Watch the Preview Here:

Watch the Full Video Report Here:

*The Transcript for this video is available at Corbett Report: Click Here

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Newsworthy

US Rebuffs Russians Ingenuity on Iran

Missile Shield in Turkey? NATO Military Action against Iran Implies Suicide

Drone War in Pakistan: Photos from the Ground Showing Civilian Casualties

Canadian Military Stages Show of Force against Russia in Arctic

How Israel Offered to Sell South Africa Nuclear Weapons

100 Hours in Israeli Detention for Trying to Visit Bethlehem

**** Read more È

Nick (Nicholas) Merrill joins us to recount his ‘surreal’ experience as the first American to stand up and challenge the FBI’s National Security Letters, living under FBI gag orders for the past six years, and being identified only as ‘John Doe’ in court documents. Mr. Merrill relates what made him resist the FBI order, and dicusses the unconstitutionality of these practices- government warrantless surveillance and searches, and violations of American’s liberties and privacy. He talks about the implications of the issuance of 50000 FBI national security letters per year seeking information on ordinary Americans and US businesses, our nation’s descent towards a police state, the importance of speaking out and resisting these government practices that violate our constitutional rights, our moral obligation to protect our liberties and privacy as a nation, his goals to raise public awareness on these issues, and ways to deal with them through his recently established nonprofit organization, and more!

Nick Merrill is the founder of Calyx Internet Access and the Calyx Institute. He was the first person to file a constitutional challenge against the National Security Letters statute in the USA PATRIOT Act. After receiving a National Security Letter from the FBI, he sued the FBI and DOJ and became the plaintiff in the lawsuit Doe v. Ashcroft filed on behalf of a formerly unknown ISP owner by the ACLU against the U.S. federal government. Mr. Merrill never complied with the FBI’s NSL request, and eventually – several years into the lawsuit – the FBI decided it no longer wanted the information it had demanded and dropped its demand for records. However for several years after dropping the demand, the FBI continued to prevent him from publicly speaking about the NSL, or even from being publicly identified as the recipient of the NSL. Because National Security Letters are accompanied by an open-ended, life-long gag order, Merrill was unable to be identified in court papers as the plaintiff in the case and instead was referred to as “John Doe”. In 2010, after more than 6 years, Nick Merrill was partially released from his gag order and allowed to reveal his identity, although he still cannot reveal what information the FBI sought from him.

Here is our guest Nick Merrill unplugged!

Interview with Nick Merrill [ 1:06:21 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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This week we interviewed Mark Klein, the AT&T whistleblower; the interview should be posted in 3 or 4 weeks. I know you’re going to find it interesting and enlightening. Speaking of AT&T, check out our contributor Ishmael’s informative interview with Jeff Farias here.

I have a few noteworthy tidbits below. Don’t pay attention to their publication dates, since the issues, these cases and reports, are ‘timeless’ in nature.

Another Police State Government Villains & an Irate Minority Fighter Story

This week the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a privacy watchdog organization, released a comprehensive and eye-opening report on a bogus subpoena issued by a US attorney in Indiana to force Indymedia.us , an independent alternative news site to hand over all the data containing about their users who visited the site on a particular day. Not only that, consistent with other National Security Letters practices, the Justice Department issued gag order to prevent the site from speaking about the subpoena:

The report describes how, earlier this year, U.S. attorneys issued a federal grand jury subpoena to Indymedia.us administrator Kristina Clair demanding “all IP traffic to and from www.indymedia.us” for a particular date, potentially identifying every person who visited any news story on the Indymedia site. As the report explains, this overbroad demand for internet records not only violated federal privacy law but also violated Clair’s First Amendment rights, by ordering her not to disclose the existence of the subpoena without a U.S. attorney’s permission.

Because Indymedia follows EFF’s Best Practices for Online Service Providers and does not keep historical IP logs, there was no information for Indymedia to hand over, and the government withdrew the subpoena. However, as the report describes, that wasn’t the end of the tale: Ms. Clair wanted EFF to be able to tell the story of the subpoena and shine a light on the government’s illegal demand, yet the subpoena ordered silence. Under pressure from EFF, the government admitted that the subpoena’s gag order had no legal basis, and ultimately chose not to go to court to try to force Ms. Clair’s silence despite earlier threats to do so.

This is another story of our government villains determined to butcher the Constitution and speed up our descent towards a police state. This is another example illustrating how government abuses are thriving and expanding in secrecy. In this case, it took an irate, a determined, and a believer in Constitutional Rights, to get up and challenge the attempted despotism. In this particular case, the despotic villains backed down. But as EFF appropriately questions:

How often does the government attempt such illegal fishing expeditions through internet data? How many online service providers have received similarly bogus demands, and handed over how much data, violating how many internet users’ privacy? How many of those subpoena recipients have been intimidated into silence by unconstitutional gag orders?

Let’s hope the number of those who choose to speak up and fight back keeps increasing. But meanwhile, in addition to sitting and wishing and hoping, let us each be one of the irate minority who keeps on fighting until we become the majority, and the villains are restrained and ruled by we the people.

The Deceitful Media Pimping Tyranny

Freedom daily had a well-presented piece by James Bovard on the US media. I get tons of links and references everyday, and usually all I can do is a quick glance. With this one I was hooked after the first paragraph, and I’m sure those of you who’ve been visiting my site for a while would know why:

Why do politicians so easily get away with telling lies? In large part, because the news media are more interested in bonding with politicians than in exposing them. Americans are encouraged to believe that the media will serve as a check and a balance on the government. Instead, the press too often volunteer as unpaid pimps, helping politicians deceive the public. Read more È