Author: Dave LIndorff

Almost a year after an FBI agent shot and killed, under suspicious circumstances, a crucial witness in the Boston Marathon bombing case during what initially appeared to be a botched midnight interrogation in an Orlando apartment, serious questions are being raised about the FBI agent who fired seven shots into Chechen immigrant Ibragim Todashev last May 22, and about what the FBI is really up to on this case.

Two investigations, one by the FBI itself and one by the Florida Attorney General’s office, exonerated the FBI in the shooting death, claiming the agent, never identified, had been acting in self-defense, when Todashev allegedly ran at him with a raised broom handle.

Now, an examination of information in incautiously censored documents provided by the FBI to Florida investigators looking into the killing have made it possible to break through FBI secrecy and learn the identity of the agent. It is 41-year-old Aaron McFarlane, who joined the Bureau in 2008 after retiring on a $52,000 lifetime annual disability pension from a short stint as an officer in the Oakland Police Department.

Aside from the question of why someone who passed through the rigorous training program the FBI runs for its recruits at Quantico, VA would also qualify for a lucrative disability pension (allegedly attributed to a foot injury on the job), it turns out that McFarlane also has a pretty checkered past at Oakland’s Police Department — a police department that has such an extraordinary record of corruption and brutality, that since 2012 it has been operated under the supervision of a federal court “compliance director,” whose job is to see that officers don’t brutalize residents or violate their civil rights.

McFarlane apparently did more than that as an Oakland cop. A report published on May 5 by criminologist B Blake discloses that during his four years with the Oakland Police, Todashev’s G-man inquisitor and killer was the subject of two police brutality lawsuits and four internal affairs investigations. Blake also discloses that McFarlane, as a defense witness in a corruption trial, pleaded the Fifth Amendment against self-incrimination in refusing to answer questions from the prosecutor in that case, which involved officers .

The rot at the core of US international affairs, domestic politics and the corporate media is evident in the American approach to the Ukraine crisis.

Just look at the freak-out from all quarters as the people of the eastern part of that country conduct, under conditions of attack and violence fomented by military units sent in by the Kiev putsch government, a peaceful plebiscite asking people to give their view as to whether they want some kind of sovereignty separating them from western Ukraine.

The official US State Department position on the balloting in Dohansk and Luhansk is that this voting effort was “illegal” and “an attempt to create further division and disorder.”

“The United States will not recognize the results of these illegal referenda,” said State Department spokesperson Jen Psaki.

The White House called the voting “illegitimate” and “illegal.”

The US has not once called the violent coup that overthrew Ukraine’s elected government illegitimate or illegal.

Indeed any violence during the voting, which appeared to actually be celebratory, came from Ukrainian troops. Even the Associated Press, which has largely been parroting the US line on separatists in eastern Ukraine, wrote:

“Although the voting in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions appeared mostly peaceful, armed men identified as members of the Ukrainian national guard opened fire on a crowd outside a town hall in Krasnoarmeisk, and an official with the region’s insurgents said people were killed. It was not clear how many.” (Actually the reporter on this story wrote that he saw the shooting, and witnessed two dead bodies as a result, so AP didn’t have to weaken the story’s authority by attributing it to “officials with the region’s insurgents+ — the latter an odd term to give to armed people working, clearly has the support of the communities, to defend them from attack by armed, uniformed thugs sent in from the Kiev regime to disrupt and kill people.)

The US corporate media have largely toed the official line, referring to the separatists in eastern Ukraine as violent when they have been in reality surprisingly restrained in the face of overt violence by military forces dispatched by Kiev. And they never mention the balloting in the east without also mentioning that the US believes that Russia is behind that effort, though in fact Russia’s leader, Vladimir Putin actually angered and annoyed separatists by calling on them — unsuccessfully — to delay their voting plan. (Even that arch cold-warrior and war criminal Henry Kissinger has told CNN that it “makes no sense” to claim Putin is behind the unrest and the separatist movement in western Ukraine.)

But let’s analyze that position calling the voting “illegal.”

America has a bloody history of favoring guns over ballots when it comes to self-determination
 

Breaking News!: Nine Jurors in McMillan Case Send Letter to Trial Judge Asking Him Not to Send Her to Jail!

In a surprise development, nine of the 12 jurors who on Monday voted unanimously to convict Cecily McMillan of felony assault of a police officer for elbowing him in the eye as he grabbed her to arrest her during a clearing of Zuccotti Park near Wall Street have written a letter to the trial judge, Ronald Zwiebel. In it they petition him not to sentence her to jail time.

The letter was first reported by the US edition of the British Guardian newspaper, which has done a far better job of reporting on this ugly case than any of the city’s three daily newspapers, which have devoted little time or space to it.

The Guardian had reported earlier on the day jurors were released from duty after rendering their verdict, that they had all rushed out to read about the case. Several said they were dismayed to learn about details that had been withheld from them by the trial judge at the request of the obsessed prosecutor — details such as the history of brutality by the officer who had grabbed McMillan from behind by the breast, causing her to throw up an elbow in defense, hitting his eye, or a brutal act by the same cop later after he had arrested her Also barred during the trial were details about the general violence used by the NYPD in clearing the group, of which Mcmillan was a part, from the Zuccotti Park public space, leaving jurors to think her incident was the only violence that took place that evening.

In its earlier report, the Guardian had quoted jurors as saying they were also shocked and upset to learn, after having voted to convict her, that she faced up to seven years in jail. They said they assumed she would be given some punishment like probation. Instead, they witnessed her being led out of the courtroom in shackels to be held on Rikers Island until her sentencing hearing several weeks later, with no bail set during the interim — a stark contrast from the way high-profile convicted business executives get treated while awaiting sentencing, or during their months of appeals.

It will be instructive to see how the judge responds — if at all — to the call by a large majority of the jurors in the case for no jail time for McMillan, as well as to see, if he does respond, how hard DA Vance and his prosecutor in the case object to any leniency in sentencing.

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Cecily McMillan and her lead attorney Martin Stolar in a photo taken during her trial

Two and a half years after the Occupy Wall Street movement took the country by storm, injecting topics like income inequality and class war into the realm of permissible national political discourse for the first time since the 1930s, the nation’s legal machinery of repression has come down like a proverbial ton of bricks on the movement just as nationally coordinated police repression crushed its physical manifestation in late 2011.

  Listen to Dave Lindorff explain on Santa Barbara radio KCSB’s Radio Occupy program how the federal government, in collusion with state and local police, and possibly with private bank and oil company security firms, planned to use “suppressed sniper fire” to assassinate the leaders of Occupy Houston, and perhaps also the leaders of other Occupy Movement actions around the country.

Drawing on classified FBI and Homeland Security documents obtained by the Partnership for Civil Justice through the Freedom of Information Act, Lindorff tells Radio Occupy host Kathy Swift how the Homeland Security Department under the Obama administration coordinated the national crackdown that crushed the Occupy Movement, and how it nearly led to a campaign of assassination against this peaceful movement that in 2011 swept the nation. He also notes that the FBI, so quick to boast about the 40-plus alleged “terror” plots it has disrupted since 9-11, has never made a prosecution or arrest in this Houston terror plot to kill Occupy leaders, about which its Houston office wrote in a memo to FBI national headquarters.

To listen to part I of this two-part interview, got to Radio Occupy. To listen to Part II, click here

Portion of a page from the Craft International website showing sniper training programs for local police

This week’s “This Can’t Be Happening!” radio program on PRN radio features an interview with Dr. Phil Nel, a distinguished professor of English at Kansas State University, and an outspoken opponent of a current effort by the Kansas Board of Regents to impose a new “social media policy” on all the state’s public higher education institutions — a policy that would allow administrators to fire even tenured faculty for posting statements that “damage” the school or negatively impact “harmony” on campus.

Nel tells program host Dave Lindorff that this current campaign in Kansas is just one part of a nationwide attack on freedom of inquiry, thought and speech on the nation’s public colleges and universities, and more broadly on public education in general.

Prof. Phil Nel and other defenders of academic freedom are taking on the Kansas Board of Regents (to hear program, click here or on the photo above)

Disgraced former Kansas Attorney General Phill Kline, who while in office as AG and later as a county prosecutor conducted a draconian inquisition against abortion doctors and the state’s Planned Parenthood organization, may still be a visiting assistant professor of law at Jerry Falwell’s Liberty “University” in Lynchburg, Virginia, but he isn’t allowed to practice law anymore.

The US Supreme Court earlier this week, without comment, upheld the Kansas Supreme Court’s 2013 decision revoking Kline’s law license citing his abuses of power in pursuing abortionists — especially Dr. Kris Neuhaus, a referring physician who offered state-mandated second opinions for patients of abortion doctor George Tiller.

While the US Supreme Court didn’t comment in reaching its decision, the ruling by the Kansas Supreme Court, which the US high court ruling upholds, didn’t mince words, finding last October that Kline had misled or allowed subordinates to mislead others, including a Kansas City-area grand jury and local judges, so as to further his investigations. The justices wrote that they had found, in reviewing his behavior, “clear and convincing evidence” of professional misconduct. They ruled that during his time as the state’s top law-enforcement official and later as a county DA, Kline had violated 11 rules governing the professional conduct of attorneys.

While the Kansas Supreme Court didn’t go into specifics about cases in its ruling, the judges did consider Kline’s prosecutorial excesses as attorney general and county prosecutor, saying that his “fervid” pursuit of abortion providers in support of his anti-abortion “cause,” was an aggravating factor in their ruling.

In the view of many observers, Kline’s obsessive and “fervid” inquisition may have directly led to the murder Dr. George Tiller.
Dr. Kris Neuhaus: 'Karma's a bitch"
 

The lies, propaganda and rank hypocrisy emanating from Washington, and echoed by the US corporate media regarding events in Ukraine are stunning and would be laughable, but for the fact that they appear to be aimed at conditioning the US public for increasing confrontation with Russia – confrontation which could easily tip over the edge into direct military conflict, with consequences that are too dreadful to contemplate.

It would be beyond ironic if, a quarter of a century after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of nearly half a century of Cold War and Mutual Assured Destruction, during all of which time US and Russian soldiers never fought against each other, we now ended up with soldiers from our two countries actually doing battle with each other, instead of just fighting proxy wars.

For now, perhaps out of sheer unwillingness to accept that dreadful possibility, I’m choosing to look for the humor in this conflict.

When it comes to the US, the laughs are easy to find.

Start with Vice President Joe Biden, a guy who has always been hard to take seriously. I mean, we’re talking about a politician who in 1988 had to quit running for president when he was caught lifting his life story from British Labor Party leader Neil Kinnock.

Still, Biden outdid even himself on his current visit to Ukraine when he called on Russia to back off in its support of pro-Russian separatists in Eastern Ukraine saying that, “No nation should threaten its neighbors by amassing troops along the border.”

This from the man who is one heartbeat from the presidency of a nation that doesn’t just have an army and a navy and an airforce along its southern shore threatening its neighbor Cuba, but actually has its navy based on Cuban territory, which it refuses to leave, despite having long ago run out its lease. And the US doesn’t just threaten. It acts, most recently by attempting to fund a fake Cuban “Twitter” operation called ZunZuneo (Hummingbird Tweet) designed to enable and encourage anti-Cuban government activists to anonymously organize and create chaos.

The US State Dept. and the NY Times tried to claim the photo on the left showed a bearded ‘pro-Russian Ukranian’ who was the same as the bearded man at right, allegedly photographed in Russia where he’s supposed to be in Russian Special forces. Really — that’s the quality of the ‘proof’ that Russians are behind the uprising in eastern Ukraine
 

There was a time when, growing up in a suburban area around Mansfield, a university town in northeastern Connecticut, I could go days without seeing a police car. These days, though, when I go back there to visit my old hometown, I see them everywhere. Where once there was one resident State Trooper for the township of Mansfield, today there’s a fleet of Troopers in squad cars, called “Interceptors.” The university too, which in my youth had a couple of university cops whose only real job was breaking up the occasional dormitory panty raid, now has a full-fledged police department, staffed with beefy cops who would be hard to distinguish from the troopers — or from recently furloughed military vets (which many of them probably are).

In communities and cities across the country, the number of police has soared, rising, according to the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics, from 603,000 in 1992 to 794,000 in 2010. This even as crime has been falling fairly steadily for over 30 years, even in cities that have had to cut back on their police staffing for budget reasons.

But it’s not just a matter of numbers. Police are also much more aggressive in their behavior towards the public. Where “no-knock” forced entries into people’s homes were a rarity 30 years ago, such so-called “breaches” are increasingly the norm in many jurisdictions — they reached over 80,000 last year by one calculation — as police departments adopt an approach that elevates “officer safety” over concerns about the safety of the public, including innocent bystanders. (Consider two recent incidents in New York where bystanders were shot by police who were firing at suspects — in one case an unarmed mentally ill man standing in traffic in midtown Manhattan.)

The same can be said about the use of supposedly “non-lethal” tasers, which have morphed from being alternatives to shooting and killing suspects to tools to enforce docility, or even to punish people who verbally contest the actions of a police officer. A recent report in the New York Times showed that as part of a growing trend to place police officers in public schools, students, including even in elementary schools, are being tasered for what used to be considered an offense meriting a trip to the principal’s office–sometimes with serious and even deadly results.

Police officer tasers a 14-year-old girl outside her highschool in Allentown, PA. Click here to view the video

One thing that the FBI does really well is exonerate itself. As I wrote earlier, the bureau’s agents have shot 151 people over the course of the last two decades, killing more than half of them, yet in its own internal reviews, the FBI has exonerated those agents all 151 times — a perfect record of blamelessness that even some of the country’s most gun-happy police departments (even in Albuquerque, NM) can’t claim.

Now another internal review, not by the FBI but by the Office of Intelligence Committee, an obscure unit which supposedly internally “oversees” the work of 17 intelligence agencies including the FBI, has smiled on the FBI’s seemingly lackadaisical investigation of Boston Marathon bomber suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev, saying that its Boston office agents did an okay job in checking him out after Russian intelligence warned the US back in 2011 that he had linked up with Islamic militants while on a visit to his family in Dagestan.

The New York Times, in a report on the inspector’s findings, quotes an unidentified “senior American official” as saying that the OIC investigation “found that the Russians did not provide all the information that they had on him back then, and that based on everything that was available at the time, the FBI did all that it could.”

What that “everything” included was interviewing the elder Tsarnaev brother (now dead, killed in a hail of police bullets during a night-time chase following the Boston bombing last April), as well as his parents and friends at school. After that brief flurry of interviews, the bureau allegedly lost interest in Tsarnaev, concluding that he was more of a threat to Russia than to the US—an interesting turn of phrase that should suggest something else might have been afoot.

And indeed, there is something missing from that report that is troubling: namely news that the FBI also reportedly sought to enlist Tamerlan Tsarnaev as an informant during its 2011-12 investigation of his activities. If attorneys for Tamerlan’s younger brother Dzhokhar are correct, the FBI, after contacting and questioning the older brother, then at least attempted to pressure him to work for them by spying on the local Chechen community in Boston. It stands to reason they may have also been interested in having him work for the US against Russia, given the US’s long record of support for rebels in former Soviet republics like Chechnya and Dagestan who have been seeking to break away from Russia. Tsarnaev would have been vulnerable to such pressure, as he had been attempting to gain US citizenship, and because had certain assets that the FBI (and the CIA) wanted: knowledge of people in Dagestan and also fluency in Chechen and Russian (a Tsarnaev uncle, Ruslan Tsarni, was already reportedly working for the CIA, even for a time living in the home of, and married to the daughter of a ranking CIA official).
Many questions remain unanswered about Tamerlan Tsarnaev, his CIA-linked uncle Ruslan Tsarni, and the FBI slaying of his friend Ibragim Todashev

Dave Lindorff, host of the Progressive Radio Network program “ThisCantBeHappening!”, interviews Professor Harold Wanless, chair of the Geology Department at the University of Miami and a leading climate change expert. Wanless talks about the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, explaining that as scary as that organization’s latest predictions are concerning accelerating global warming, it is far too conservative.

This is because the IPCC does not factor in the feedback loops that are making things get worse faster — whether it’s the doubling of the pace of Greenland and Western Antarctic ice melt every seven years, or the future release of massive methane deposits locked in Arctic permafrost and undersea methyl cathrate deposits–a process that is already beginning.

If we don’t act quickly to significantly reduce the use of carbon fuels, Wanless warns, we could see a “baked in” 70-foot sea rise, perhaps in our children’s or grandchildren’s lifetimes, and even with a less apocalyptic sea rise, an end to human civilization–and that’s just with the amount of carbon that we humans have already put in the atmosphere.

Miami University's Prof. Harold Wanless, and a view of Greenland's ice melt, showing how dirty the surface of that huge ice sheet has become from global pollution. Click on the photo to hear the podcast of this interview on PRN.fm