“April 2017 was another month of mass slaughter and unimaginable terror for the people of Mosul in Iraq and the areas around Raqqa and Tabqa in Syria, as the heaviest, most sustained U.S.-led bombing campaign since the American War in Vietnam entered its 33rd month.”
Read more: https://consortiumnews.com/2017/05/09/the-silent-slaughter-of-the-us-air-war/
“More than half the states in the country have legalized medical marijuana, but some hospitals still bar users from life-saving organ transplants. The policy delayed the late Riley Hancey’s lung transplant for months.”
Read more: https://www.buzzfeed.com/alysonmartin/smoking-pot-can-get-you-kicked-off-transplant-lists-even-in
“Duterte is doing nothing more than copying the processes and methods of the U.S. government in its war on drugs and its war on terrorism, both of which most members of the mainstream media have long supported.”
Read more: https://www.fff.org/2017/05/09/dutertes-murder-model-u-s-government/
“The commission released its findings on Monday and noted that the judge’s defense is that he was trying to be funny.”
“FBI Director James Comey has put to rest any hope of achieving privacy in the United States. Speaking at a cybersecurity conference at Boston College on Wednesday, Comey said that ‘there is no such thing as absolute privacy in America.’ He added that everything Americans engage in, including conversations with members of the clergy and their attorneys, live within ‘judicial reach.’ ‘In appropriate circumstances, a judge can compel any one of us to testify in court about those very private communications,’ Comey said, according to CNN, which obtained a video of his remarks.”
Read more: http://fortune.com/2017/03/09/fbi-james-comey-privacy/
“Video of police officers dragging a passenger from an overbooked United Airlines flight sparked an uproar Monday on social media, and a spokesman for the airline insisted that employees had no choice but to contact authorities to remove the man. As the flight waited to depart from Chicago’s O’Hare Airport, officers could be seen grabbing the screaming man from a window seat, pulling him across the armrest and dragging him down the aisle by his arms. The airline was trying to make room for four of its employees on the Sunday evening flight to Louisville, Kentucky.”
“Four privacy-minded lawmakers have introduced legislation requiring law enforcement officials to obtain a warrant before searching phones belonging to US citizens, and prohibiting them from barring entry to Americans who decline to share their passwords at the border. ‘Americans’ Constitutional rights shouldn’t disappear at the border,’ Senator Ron Wyden said in statement to BuzzFeed News.”
Read more: https://www.buzzfeed.com/hamzashaban/new-bill-would-outlaw-warrantless-phone-searches-at-the
“While the cancer is in remission, Charf is still struggling with the deadly disease – and is now being pursued by an equally deadly and persistent stalker, the Internal Revenue Service. A few weeks ago, the IRS sent Charf – who is now a mother – a notice claiming that the donations that had paid for her treatment were considered income, and demanding more than $15,000 in back taxes and more than $3,500 in penalties.”
The Pentagon has admitted to an airstrike that is believed to have killed more than 200 civilians in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul, at the edge of the autonomous Kurdistan region.
In the 1980s, Kurdistan was targeted by Saddam Hussein, then-president of Iraq, because the Kurds supported Iran in the Iran-Iraq War. After his capture in the second Gulf War, Hussein was charged by the U.S. occupational government with genocide, convicted, and hung for his crimes.
What is lesser known is that at the same time, the U.S. government, still fuming after the humiliation of the Iran hostage crisis (a populist reaction to the brutality of the U.S.-backed dictator Mohammad Reza Shah, and a major factor in Ronald Reagan’s victory in the 1980 presidential election), was a major – and thoroughly documented – supporter of Hussein in the war:
Iraq began receiving support from the United States and west European countries as well. Saddam was given diplomatic, monetary, and military support by the US, including massive loans, political clout, and intelligence on Iranian deployments gathered by American spy satellites. The Iraqis relied heavily on American satellite footage and radar planes to detect Iranian troop movements, and they enabled Iraq to move troops to the site before the battle.
With Iranian success on the battlefield, the US made its backing of Iraq more pronounced, supplying intelligence, economic aid, and dual-use equipment and vehicles, as well as normalizing its intergovernmental relations (which had been broken during the 1967 Six-Day War). President Ronald Reagan decided that the United States “could not afford to allow Iraq to lose the war to Iran”, and that the United States “would do whatever was necessary to prevent Iraq from losing the war with Iran”. Reagan formalised this policy by issuing a National Security Decision Directive to this effect in June 1982.
In 1982, Reagan removed Iraq from the list of countries “supporting terrorism” and sold weapons such as howitzers to Iraq via Jordan and Israel. France sold Iraq millions of dollars worth of weapons, including Gazelle helicopters, Mirage F-1 fighters, and Exocet missiles. Both the United States and West Germany sold Iraq dual-use pesticides and poisons that would be used to create chemical and other weapons, such as Roland missiles.
Although the U.S. government began to play both sides a few years later in the Iran-Contra affair, the CIA nevertheless threw its support heavily to the Iraqi government utilizing internationally banned chemical weapons in its campaign against Iran.
Precursors to chemical weapons, as well as biological weapons, cluster bombs, and the loans to pay for them, were brokered to Iraq by pharmaceutical representative Donald Rumsfeld, who would later be appointed Secretary of Defense in the George W. Bush administration. The Bush administration would go on to invade Iraq in 2003 citing as a primary motivation its possession of such “weapons of mass destruction”.
By 2014 it became well known that many a true word was spoken in such jest: Iraq did in fact have WMDs, and they were obtained from the United States itself. (The truth, however, was revealed in the context of whipping up a new war against the terrorist organization ISIL, so the media still gets zero points for honesty.)
Until now, the Kurds have been major supporters of U.S. interests in the Middle East, perceiving the U.S. as a liberator and protector pursuant to their darkest hour in 1988.
Is the U.S. military going to burn one of its few remaining bridges in the Middle East by invoking the “collateral damage” doctrine in this instance? How will Kurds, tough fighters to the core, react to their family members being wiped out in reckless bombings?
“Data provided by the Department of Homeland Security shows that searches of cellphones by border agents has exploded, growing fivefold in just one year, from fewer than 5,000 in 2015 to nearly 25,000 in 2016. According to DHS officials, 2017 will be a blockbuster year. Five-thousand devices were searched in February alone, more than in all of 2015. ‘That’s shocking,’ said Mary Ellen Callahan, former chief privacy officer at the Department of Homeland Security. She wrote the rules and restrictions on how CBP should conduct electronic searches back in 2009. ‘That [increase] was clearly a conscious strategy, that’s not happenstance.'”
Read more: http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/traveling-while-brown-u-s-border-agents-can-search-your-n732746