27 June 20
Our room to back up on funding is gone. It’s a simple equation find a way to improve donations or RSN will not exist. So like it or not we have to turn our full attention to the funding problem.
With urgency.
Marc Ash
Founder, Reader Supported News
Founder, Reader Supported News
If you would prefer to send a check:
Reader Supported News
PO Box 2043
Citrus Hts, CA 95611
Reader Supported News
PO Box 2043
Citrus Hts, CA 95611
27 June 20
Andy Borowitz | Trump Vows to Ban Coronavirus Vaccine if Obama Invented It
Andy Borowitz, The New Yorker
Borowitz writes: "Donald J. Trump on Friday threatened to ban a coronavirus vaccine if it turns out that it was invented by former President Barack Obama."
READ MORE
Andy Borowitz, The New Yorker
Borowitz writes: "Donald J. Trump on Friday threatened to ban a coronavirus vaccine if it turns out that it was invented by former President Barack Obama."
READ MORE
William Barr. photo: Joshua Roberts/Reuters
"It's Ideologue Meets Grifter": How Bill Barr Made Trumpism Possible
Sean Illing, Vox
Illing writes: "Last Friday, Attorney General Bill Barr announced that US Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Geoffrey Berman, was 'stepping down' from his position."
READ MORE
Sean Illing, Vox
Illing writes: "Last Friday, Attorney General Bill Barr announced that US Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Geoffrey Berman, was 'stepping down' from his position."
READ MORE
Protesters rally outside the Fifth Police Precinct on May 29, 2020, in Minneapolis, Minnesota. photo: Stephen Maturen/Getty Images
Law Enforcement Scoured Protester Communications and Exaggerated Threats to Minneapolis Cops, Leaked Documents Show
Mara Hvistendahl and Alleen Brown, The Intercept
Excerpt: "Newly leaked documents reveal that, in the wake of George Floyd's killing, local and federal law enforcement agencies repeatedly told police in Minnesota that they were under attack."
Mara Hvistendahl and Alleen Brown, The Intercept
Excerpt: "Newly leaked documents reveal that, in the wake of George Floyd's killing, local and federal law enforcement agencies repeatedly told police in Minnesota that they were under attack."
The fears stoked by the warnings appear to have set the stage for the police’s escalating, violent response to the protests, including the widespread use of tear gas, percussion grenades, and rubber bullets, sometimes fired at close range.
The documents show that law enforcement leadership warned of potential threats from antifa and “black racially motivated violent extremists,” as well as vaguely described social media users. Federal and local agencies collected intelligence drawn from private online messaging groups and Slack channels, according to the documents. The agencies also tracked Facebook RSVPs to peaceful protest events, including a suburban candlelight vigil.
The window into the police’s internal memos came thanks to a trove of documents called Blueleaks, which were published on the website Distributed Denial of Secrets. The site’s founder told Wired that the documents came from the hacking collective Anonymous, or someone claiming to be affiliated with the group. Government officials whose files appeared among the documents told the Intercept they were “illegally obtained,” but no questions have been raised about their authenticity. The documents on Minnesota are from a host of local and federal law enforcement agencies and coordinating offices that worked to share information between them.
While the documents reveal concern over groups with a professed commitment to unrest, like the far-right group Boogaloo, they also suggest a tendency to categorize standard protest behavior as a threat to police. For instance, a May 28 document from the Minnesota Fusion Center, a post-9/11 body that coordinates among various law enforcement agencies, warned that police should look out for a dizzying array of suspicious behaviors, including people possessing balloons or bike locks and wearing masks — a description that includes many of those who took to the streets during the pandemic.
Similar warnings were issued in other parts of the country. A May 29 briefing from the Joint Regional Intelligence Center, which coordinates federal, state, and local intelligence in the Los Angeles area, said that protesters might use “Black Bloc Tactics” involving “collective, frequently violent action.” Though some examples of these tactics offered in the document would constitute crimes, others were entirely lawful and widespread activities like monitoring police scanners and communicating over encrypted apps to direct “ground movement.”
The documents also warn of a number of impending events that apparently never came to pass. A May 30 update from the Multi-Agency Command Center, a temporary coordinating agency under the Minnesota Department of Public Safety that was activated on May 29, mentioned “unconfirmed reports of the possibility of affluent neighborhoods and areas outside of the immediate metro being targeted.” Other warnings were hazy: A command center update, also from May 30, described “unconfirmed reports of extremist group activity in Minnesota related to civil unrest.” A spokesperson for the Minnesota Department of Public Safety declined to comment, adding, “We will not respond to questions based on illegally obtained documents.” The Multi-Agency Command Center ended its operations on June 7.
Some of the substantial property damage in the Twin Cities in the days following George Floyd’s killing was indeed directed at law enforcement, with the Minneapolis Police Department’s Third Precinct burned to the ground and various police vehicles vandalized. But, though there were reports of rocks being thrown at officers, an incident of shots fired at a police car, and scattered law enforcement injuries during the protests, even a list distributed by the Multi-Agency Command Center of nationwide officer injuries and deaths during the protests includes no examples from Minnesota.
Unjustified fear has long played into abuse in policing. “Since they know that they are hated, they are always afraid,” James Baldwin wrote of the police in The Nation in 1966. “One cannot possibly arrive at a more surefire formula for cruelty.” According to Dan O’Flaherty and Rajiv Sethi’s book “Shadows of Doubt: Stereotypes, Crime, and the Pursuit of Justice,” undue security service fears based on errant information have historically contributed to police killing and injuring civilians.
The anxiety that pervades the leaked documents from Minneapolis seemed to be reflected in the extreme police reaction throughout the days that followed, as protests spread across the country. In Minneapolis, the police and other security services were accused of undertaking confrontations with demonstrators and residents alike, including advancing on peaceful protests using “less-lethal” munitions and tear gas, and attacking on-lookers standing on their own porch.
“In the weeks since Floyd’s death, we have seen many videos and pretty well substantiated reports of unjustified police use of force, including several questionable homicides,” said O’Flaherty. “These incidents make you scratch your head. ‘What were they thinking? They knew the whole world was watching.’ The most cogent explanation is fear.”
Monitoring Protest Activity
The warnings began soon after Floyd’s death. On May 27, the day before Minneapolis’s Third Precinct burned, the Minnesota Fusion Center published a bulletin titled “Possibility for Increased Threatening Activity towards Law Enforcement and Government Officials following Worldwide Coverage of Minneapolis In-Custody Death.” At that point, the protests in Minneapolis had been overwhelmingly peaceful. But the document described “threats directed toward the four MPD” officers involved in Floyd’s killing — including the publishing of personal details about two of the officers online.
The bulletin urged all employees of the Minneapolis Police Department, including administrative staff, to look for suspicious people and vehicles and to “consider varying travel plans to avoid surveillance.” As further evidence that police were in danger, the dispatch offered examples of property damage, including photos of a vandalized police squad car and a broken police station window, as well as a threatening tweet sent to the Minneapolis Police Department’s Twitter account. “While recent online chatter specifically discusses targeting the four MPD officers, individuals may seek to harm any law enforcement personnel,” the bulletin stressed.
In the days that followed, the Minnesota Fusion Center and the Hennepin County Sheriff’s Office Criminal Information Sharing and Analysis Unit disseminated the RSVP counts for protest-related events, apparently taken from Facebook. “At the time of reporting, 833 people indicated online that they are attending, while 3,300 people appear interested,” read a note about a protest event titled “Justice 4 George Floyd — Stop Police Crimes — Free Them All.”
“I’m laughing because we know they’re monitoring us,” said Sam Martinez, a spokesperson for one of the organizations that planned the event, the Twin Cities Coalition for Justice 4 Jamar. Martinez estimated that 5,000 people attended and said organizers had not heard of any violence taking place, adding that the monitoring was “ridiculous.”
The documents make clear that, in some cases, law enforcement had visibility into private communications. A dispatch from the Hennepin County Sheriff’s Office on June 1 described a “private social media chat app post” that advocated targeting National Guard soldiers. According to the police document, the post claimed that members of the National Guard are “easy targets who are barely trained at all.”
Other intelligence disseminated in the reports was gleaned from Slack. A June 6 report from the Multi-Agency Command Center contended that “a revolutionary anti-capitalist group” in Minneapolis had collected details on law enforcement’s whereabouts, adding that the group’s members “used the Slack messaging app to pass intelligence to the Antifa portion of the group.” The information was attributed to the FBI.
In these two cases, it is unclear whether law enforcement had infiltrated the online groups or were tipped off by a member.
In another instance, the FBI received a tip from “a sensitive source with excellent access” about channels on the messaging app Telegram used by protesters to coordinate and “‘keep people safe from police’ during riots.” The document noted that these included “‘announcement channels,’ ‘police scanner channels,’ and ‘chat/coordination channels’ in several cities.”
And the documents show that the Hennepin County Sheriff’s Office kept tabs on RSVPs to even small events favored by families and clergy, such as a Peace and Prayers BBQ at a church in North Minneapolis and a candlelight vigil in Maple Grove, a placid suburb. Tanwi Prigge, one of the organizers of the vigil, said that she and her co-hosts had alerted police ahead of time, and that officers had helped direct traffic at the event. (The sheriff’s office declined to comment.)
The Multi-Agency Command Center reports, disseminated multiple times each day, include lists of upcoming protests and gatherings across the state. The authors of the reports were self-conscious of the potential for their surveillance to violate the Constitution. “Individuals or groups named in this product have been identified as participating in activities that are protected by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution,” a disclaimer repeated on several of the reports notes. “However, based on known intelligence and/or specific, historical observations, it is possible the protected activity could invite a violent reaction towards the subject individuals or groups, or the activity could be used as a means to target law enforcement.”
“Extremists”
Much of the anxiety about attacks on law enforcement centered on so-called extremists. On Saturday, May 30, agencies noted a change in the tone of the protests. “Domestic violent extremists are attempting to structure the protests to target specific symbols of state, local, and federal authority,” a Department of Homeland Security intelligence note stated. The document went on to say that the department had “high confidence” that “during the period of darkness from 30 to 31 May the violent protest movements will grow and DVEs” — domestic violent extremists — “and others will seek to take over government facilities and attack law enforcement.”
One precedent cited in the document for such violence is the case of Micah Johnson, who killed five Dallas police officers during a July 2016 protest against police violence. The document dubiously described him as a “black supremacist extremist.” In fact, Johnson acted alone and his involvement with what the FBI termed “black identity extremist” groups consisted of him searching and liking Facebook pages.
In Minneapolis, the agencies closely monitored the activities of various individuals that the reports framed as Black extremists. One report noted, for example, that members of a “black racially motivated violent extremist” group “planned to travel to the Government Center in Minneapolis” on May 31. The same document, dated May 30, warned of “credible information” from a “Federal partner” that “a Minneapolis-based leader of a black separatist group” was armed, had participated in demonstrations in Ferguson, Missouri, and was “likely to be violent.”
While it is unclear what agency the “Federal partner” refers to, the FBI has previously used questionable labels like “black separatist,” “black racially motivated violent extremist,” and “black identity extremist” for disparate groups and individuals, as Intercept investigations have shown. Yet no major Black activist group has proven to be a significant violent threat to the public in the U.S.
The anti-fascist movement known as antifa also came in for special scrutiny. Intelligence from a “federal partner” described in a May 30 document suggests that Minneapolis’s Fourth Precinct could be a target for violence, apparently based on a social media post by a leader of the “General Defense Council (GDC),” which the document refers to as “a branch of Antifa.” Antifa is not an organization but rather a wide-ranging, leaderless movement. The officer may have been referring to the Industrial Workers of the World’s General Defense Committee, which does identify as anti-fascist.
A June 1 report from the Multi-Agency Command Center warned, “Antifa will utilize vehicle borne improvised explosive devices (VBIEDs) to launch attacks against National Guard and law enforcement agencies,” also citing intelligence collected by a federal partner. It continued: “The vehicles will bear fictitious license plates.” The warnings turned out to be unfounded. There is no evidence that any groups used car bombs against military or police targets during the protests in Minneapolis.
Law enforcement agencies also monitored right-wing and white supremacist groups, the documents show. Most of the evidence cited apparently came from the internet, but a June 4 bulletin from the sheriff’s office noted that “members of the ‘Boohajideen,’” a term affiliated with the Boogaloo movement, had been spotted claiming to protect historically Black neighborhoods in North Minneapolis. Two documents noted the alleged presence of the white supremacist Aryan Cowboys. A June 1 report said that the Minneapolis Hells Angels had allegedly brought “approximately 75” Aryan Cowboys from northern Minnesota to Minneapolis for protection. A report few days later noted that a source claimed motorcycle gang members with apparent white supremacist views had discussed “inciting riots while posing as Antifa members” and added that such individuals “have in fact participated in civil disturbances while posing as Antifa members.”
Focus on Officer Injuries
As protests across the nation continued in the following weeks, police violence against protesters mounted. In Minneapolis, officers shot a rubber bullet at a photographer, who lost her eye, and pepper-sprayed nonviolent demonstrators from their moving vehicles. CBS News reported that at least 40 police brutality lawsuits have been filed across the U.S. in the wake of the protests.
Minnesota law enforcement, however, remained fixated on threats to officers. In the second week of protests, the Minnesota Fusion Center disseminated an appendix listing officer deaths and injuries across the U.S., and asked agencies to share additional incidents. No corresponding data about the myriad wounds protesters, media, and bystanders suffered at the hands of police attempting crowd control was included.
The leaked documents from Minneapolis are filled with rumors that may never be verified. They warn of a “truck full of Texas residents with AR-15s” and “busloads of people coming from Chicago” headed to the protest area. They also give a few telling examples of overreaction. “A rental vehicle was reported downtown Minneapolis in a parking ramp with Florida plates and radio equipment within,” read a dispatch from the sheriff’s office. “Security later confirmed it belonged to a media crew staying at the hotel.”
Another, from May 30, noted that officers from a nearby police department “made contact with individuals from Wisconsin.” The group had been en route to a protest but had changed their minds, according to the document: “The parties stated they had gotten cold feet and decided to go home.”
Armed Boogaloo movement protesters. photo: Eyevine
Violence by Far-Right Is Among US's Most Dangerous Terrorist Threats, Study Finds
Jason Wilson, Guardian UK
Wilson writes: "Violence by far-right groups and individuals has emerged as one of the most dangerous terrorist threats faced by US law enforcement and triggered a wave of warnings and arrests of people associated with those extremist movements."
Jason Wilson, Guardian UK
Wilson writes: "Violence by far-right groups and individuals has emerged as one of the most dangerous terrorist threats faced by US law enforcement and triggered a wave of warnings and arrests of people associated with those extremist movements."
The most recent in-depth analysis of far-right terrorism comes from the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).
In a report released last week, the Escalating Terrorism Problem in the United States, CSIS analyzes 25 years of domestic terrorism incidents and finds that the majority of attacks and plots have come from the far right.
The report says “the majority of all terrorist incidents in the United States since 1994, and the total number of rightwing attacks and plots has grown significantly during the past six years”, with the far right launching two-thirds of attacks and plots in 2019, and 90% of those in 2020.
The report adds: “Far-right terrorism has significantly outpaced terrorism from other types of perpetrators.” The second most significant source of attacks and plots in the US has been “religious extremists”, almost all “Salafi jihadists inspired by the Islamic State and al-Qaida”.
The report shows the far left has been an increasingly negligible source of attacks since the mid 2000s. At that time the FBI defined arsons and other forms of property damage as domestic terrorism during a period some have called the “Green Scare”.
The CSIS study came during a new wave of terror attacks and plots from white supremacist and anti-government extremists.
Last Monday, the Department of Justice announced that it had brought an array of charges, including terrorism related offenses, against a US army soldier who subscribed to a mix of white supremacist and satanist beliefs which are characteristic of so-called “accelerationist” neo-nazis like Atomwaffen Division.
Last week, federal charges were brought on Steven Carillo for the murder of a federal security officer and a sheriff’s deputy. Like the three men arrested for an alleged terror plot in Nevada earlier this month, the FBI says Carillo identified with the extreme anti-government “boogaloo” movement, which is principally concerned with removing government regulation of firearms.
But critics question the timing and motivations of the intelligence community’s pivot to combatting rightwing extremism as it comes at a time when some are arguing the legal and institutional counterterrorism apparatus developed to combat overseas terror groups should now be adapted to domestic extremists.
For some that has deep implications for civil liberties and constitutional rights, especially when it comes to suggestions that new laws should be drafted to certify such groups as domestic terrorist organizations.
Eric Ward, executive director of the civil rights nonprofit the Western States Center, said: “We are deeply concerned by the idea of any type of law that creates a legal definition around domestic terrorism. There are significant laws already on the books that meet the challenges of this moment.”
Ward said that rather than new laws, “we need a responsible leadership that is actually willing to use the tools that are already on hand”.
Ward added: “Too often we have to respond to political crisis with criminalization. And I think that is a mistake”.
But the push for new laws is an ongoing one.
In April, a joint report from George Washington University’s Program on extremism (GWU PoE) and the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) included a proposal for a “rights protecting domestic terrorism statute”. They said the law could provide “more tools for the investigation and prosecution of groups and individuals” associated with rightwing extremism.
The report did acknowledge “significant constitutional questions” would be raised by such a statute, and the possibility of “unintended consequences, particularly for members of minorities”.
There are also concerns around the creation of a surveillance state.
The GWU/ADL proposal called for increased information sharing between law enforcement agencies, increased data collection and increased resourcing.
Similar arguments have been made by influential legal and national security academics, national security nonprofits and policy shops.
Congressman Max Rose, a New York Democrat, has gone further in calling for the formal designation of US-based groups with international connections as Foreign Terror Organizations.
The FBI, meanwhile, is increasingly prepared to make comparisons between right wing extremists and Islamist terror groups.
Seth Jones, the lead author of the CSIS report, offered qualified support for the formal designation of terror groups, saying: “I still think it’s important to think through the first amendment implications and other pros and cons. But I do support taking a serious look at designation.”
Designation could open the way, he said, to also investigating people who support such groups without having formal membership in any.
But critics are alarmed by what they see as the application of ideas derived from the “war on terror” to domestic extremists.
Mike German, Brennan Center fellow, is a former FBI agent who investigated rightwing extremists but is now focused on law enforcement and intelligence oversight and reform. He sees arguments for domestic terror statutes as part of a broader reorientation of the “national security establishment” away from conflicts in the Middle East.
German attributes this move to a realization “that Isis and al-Qaida were were not as threatening to Americans as they had been, and that foreign counter-terrorism in general was sort of running out of steam”.
German said: “It’s a way of expanding the target realm that gives the counterterrorism enterprise targets that they can use to to get statistical accomplishments, rather than looking at whether or not the violence itself is reduced.”
German has argued federal authorities should prioritize the investigation of the violent crimes of far right extremists, and call them terrorist acts where appropriate, but that they should be prosecuted using existing laws, with a consideration of alternative responses like restorative justice.
He added: “When I worked these cases in the 1990s, no one suggested that we didn’t have sufficient legal authority.”
Travelers wait in line at an airport. photo: Zach Gibson/Getty Images
The EU Will Bar American Travelers Because of US Coronavirus Spread
Brooke Seipel, The Hill
Seipel writes: "The European Union is set to ban most American travelers from entering when the bloc reopens next week, with the U.S. among countries deemed too risky over its recent spike in COVID-19 cases, The New York Times reports."
READ MORE
Brooke Seipel, The Hill
Seipel writes: "The European Union is set to ban most American travelers from entering when the bloc reopens next week, with the U.S. among countries deemed too risky over its recent spike in COVID-19 cases, The New York Times reports."
READ MORE
Civilians there are the most vulnerable in the country, according to the UN. photo: Anadolu Agency
UN: Millions of Yemeni Children on the 'Brink of Starvation'
Al Jazeera
Excerpt: "Millions of children in Yemen are at risk of starvation amid the coronavirus pandemic, which is tipping the war-torn nation into further devastation, the United Nations warned, appealing for nearly m in urgent humanitarian assistance."
READ MORE
Al Jazeera
Excerpt: "Millions of children in Yemen are at risk of starvation amid the coronavirus pandemic, which is tipping the war-torn nation into further devastation, the United Nations warned, appealing for nearly m in urgent humanitarian assistance."
READ MORE
Protesters outside of a New York City courthouse for a rally coinciding with the start of a legal case against ExxonMobil, October 2019. photo: Justin Lane/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock
Hannah Murphy, Rolling Stone
Murphy writes: "The oil and gas industry was hit with yet another lawsuit when Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison announced this week that his office is suing two of the nation's largest oil companies, and the oil industry's trade group, for a '30 year campaign of deception' about the impacts of climate change."
At a press conference in Saint Paul, Ellison stated that Koch Industries, ExxonMobil, and the American Petroleum Institute “knowingly directed, conducted and funded a campaign to deceive and defraud Minnesotans and Americans” about the effects of fossil fuels on the environment. The state’s charges include fraud, failure to warn, and false statements in advertising.
Minnesota follows at least 15 progressive cities and states — from San Francisco to Rhode Island — that have filed suits against oil companies in the wake of a 2015 series by Inside Climate News, which uncovered internal Exxon documents that showed the company understood the science of climate change and the severity of its consequences more than 30 years ago, yet spent millions of dollars on a campaign to sow doubt in the science.
Using those documents, local governments have sued industry giants for fraud, and sought compensation for the damages of climate change in their communities. But the cases have yet to show results. The oil and gas industry has responded with a litany of countersuits and subpoenas that have tied up many of the cases for years. And when a case does make it in front of a judge, several have decided that it’s not an issue for the courts to decide. In Oakland, San Francisco, and New York City, judges insisted that while the impacts of climate change are real, it was a problem for legislators, not our judicial system, to address. “The problem deserves a solution on a more vast scale than can be supplied by a district judge or jury in a public nuisance case,” wrote U.S. District Court Judge William Alsup in 2018.
The Minnesota lawsuit argues that over the past three decades, climate change and oil and gas development has had a quantifiable impact on the state — itemizing costs like the nearly $614 million spent on asthma treatment in 2014 and the $165 million on flood disaster relief in 2007 — and it seeks to recoup those losses, in part by forcing the defendants to relinquish hundreds of billions in profits they made through what the state is calling unlawful conduct. But it also demands that the companies undo the misinformation campaign that they’ve run for decades, by funding “a corrective public education campaign in Minnesota relating to the issue of climate change, administered and controlled by an independent third party.”
“Misleading the public about science isn’t a new concept,” said Doug Blanke, director of the Public Health Law Center at Mitchell Hamline School of Law, who was part of the legal team that sued the tobacco industry in the 1990s, in which he won a more than $6 billion settlement for the state of Minnesota. There has yet to be the same kind of victory against the oil and gas industry, but the tobacco settlement seemed near impossible too — until it wasn’t.
The Exxon documents are damning. The complaint filed by Minnesota includes a 1979 document from Exxon Engineering that acknowledges that the CO2 in the atmosphere was increasing, and that according to “the most widely held theory,” that increase was caused by burning fossil fuels, and “the present trend of fossil fuel consumption will cause dramatic environmental effects before the year 2050.”
But Exxon worked to “emphasize the uncertainty in scientific conclusions regarding the potential enhanced Greenhouse effect.” And by 1991, the Information Council for the Environment, a front group created by the coal and electricity industries, had launched a misinformation campaign to “reposition global warming as theory (not fact).” The group released ads with taglines like “Who Told You The Earth Was Warming…Chicken Little?” and “Doomsday is cancelled. Again.”
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.