Tag Archives: Raj

US Assassination Team uses drone to smuggle missile past Baghdad Airport Security

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COMMERCIAL AIRPORTS take great care to exclude weapons and explosives from their passengers’ bags and accessories. Why bother when authoritarians can bypass security regulations and restricted airspace with armed drones? US officials brag that they killed the world’s Number One Bad Guy, an Iranian major general named Qassem Soleimani, who they claim was responsible for American casualties. Naturally the precision airstrike killed Soleimani’s entourage as well, including Brigadier General Hussein Jafari Nia, Major-General Hadi Taremi, Colonel of the Guards Shahroud Mozaffari Nia, Captain Waheed Zamanian, Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, deputy-commander of the Iraq’s People’s Mobilization Forces, and Mohammad al-Shibani, Muhandis’s son-in-law. No word yet on what their crimes are alleged to have been, had charges been brought and the group been summoned to a court of law, as would be done in any self respecting international law abiding society. Anyhow NBD, the U.S. of Assholes has traded its nocturn Seal Team raid Death Squads for MQ-9 Reaper drones guided by War Room extrajudicial assassins. And Yanks no longer shy away from Death’s Head nomenclature. We’ve gone from Predator drones to Reaper. Ha ha “Grim Reaper” get it? America Fuck Yeah! No, you dumbfuck blimpnecks, that drone is actually a sower. Of a grim harvest.

Crowdsourcing vigilante justice against mass-shooter Dylann Roof? Not for me.

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White supremacist mass-shooter Dylann Roof was brutalized by a fellow inmate of the Charleston County Jail and social media is applauding the news. Some are even trying to raise money for his attacker, Dwayne Stafford, who breached Roof’s protective custody area, unquestionably with inside help. Do you see nothing wrong with encouraging extrajudicial retribution when the justice system fails to give you blood? This is the essence of what drove lynch mobs to storm jails and courthouses. Dylann Roof, like George Zimmerman, and fellow murderous racists, are products of systemic racism, they’re not driving it. They should bear the full brunt of legal remedies, no more. The people’s fight against racism and violence is against the system. If we are wishing for equitable treatment of white and black suspects under the law, let’s cheerlead for more humane treatment for all, not equitable brutality. Let’s propose that all suspects detained by police be served burgers instead of lead bullets. We don’t have to like Dylann Roof, very likely schitzophrenic, but while Roof is in the custody and at the mercy of our court system he is entrusted to our care, to be treated as we would wish to be treated. I believe violence is a prerogative of individual human beings, a right measured by social contract. But where the machinery of law enforcement is concerned, I favor it be held to strict adherence. Someone punched George Zimmerman in the face for bragging about killing Trayvon Martin? I’m okay with that.

Denver Occupier Martin Wirth was shot in the back as sheriffs shot each other.

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Much as it’s comforting to think our Occupy Denver comrade Martin Wirth went out in a blaze of glory, with bank repo henchmen in his gunsights, another truth seems to be emerging from the crime scene report and autopsy. Key details are still obfuscated, such as where were sheriffs deputies when struck by bullets and what caliber ammo were they firing? Evidence made public indicates that deputies fired many shots into Martin’s home trying to snipe him at his computer desk. Martin was not hit until he tried to make his escape up the hill out back. Our friend was shot with eleven large caliber hollow-points IN THE BACK.

The location of shell casings and penetration trajectories in the house suggest a shootout between someone who came up through the basement garage and others who breached the front door. Neighborhood witnesses have yet to recount in full what they saw. Martin is dead, but we are told the Park County deputies didn’t trim their force of enough trigger happy motherfuckers for locals to feel safe contradicting the official version of events.

According to the Final Anatomic Diagnoses conducted by a Dr. Galloway for David Kintz Jr, Park County Coroner:

Present widely distributed over the back involving the upper; mid; the lower; the left gluteal; and the left upper thigh laterally; are 11 entrance type of large caliber gunshot wounds showing circumferential marginal abrasion

Deputies claim Martin was levelling his gun at them when they shot him, except all eleven of their Hydra-Shok bullets struck Martin Wirth in the back.

WOUND SUMMARIES:

The autopsy reveals eleven entrance gunshot wounds involving the full spectrum of the back with a predominance of the mid-back. The autopsy further reveals five exit wounds involving the lower right neck and the mid and upper chest. A sixth exit wound is located in the upper abdomen, in the midline. At the autopsy, three bullets were retrieved outside the body. One bullet is found in the clothing related to the chest; a second bullet is found under the head while removing the clothing; a third bullet is retrieved from the body bag. Two large caliber bullets are recovered from the right and left anterior chest wall. One large caliber bullet remains deeply embedded in the left pelvis. The extensive internal injuries in this case associated with six anterior exit wounds preclude a precise definition of wound tracts.

The crime scene report described where Martin’s body was left for hours and the pool of blood beneath him, but does not say where Sheriff’s deputy Nate Carrigan was found, nor where two other deputies were injured.

The diagram below records where bullets struck Martin’s house.

If evidence supported the Park County narrative, all the facts would probably be public. Instead we’re left to speculate: whether officers sprinkled the home with empty shell casings matching Martin’s gun, or if deputies deployed with rifles of the same caliber as Martin’s so their rounds could be confused for his.

Martin Wirth made it clear he intended to defend his home from fraudulent foreclosure. He told a variety of people he wanted to shoot it out if it came to that. I’m not certain it did. One neighbor described the Park County eviction team visit on February 24 thus:

“They showed up like the Marines invading Iwo Jima. I think they attacked the house like the Marines landing on the beach.”

Modern Nat Turner insures Dallas cops cannot assail Black lives with impunity

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Chris DornerWas ANYBODY going to stop the unfettered lynching of people of color in America? Did President Obama ever deliver anything more than a eulogy? Few police officers are being convicted or even indicted. Videotaped killings of black men by lawmen have become so common, those disseminating the videos are being accused of harboring fetishes. People expressing offense online are being shamed for being clicktivists, though clearly the only fuels firing public outrage are the videos. Meanwhile Black Lives Matter spokespeople have become so jaded they ridicule the efficacy of street protests. And now everyone is condemning the lone direct action taker.

The killing of any human being is terrible, but the retaliatory killings of police in Dallas could have been prevented. Not by expecting minority communities to stomach further and unending extrajudicial assassinations, but by having police curb their racism and use of lethal force. Or of course by disbanding militarized police departments. Public officials can’t even broach that conversation. Do we expect the police state to dismantle itself?

Self-styled black revolutionary Micah Xavier Johnson, a typical PTSD-hardened Afghan vet, put “suicide by cop” to the service of his embattled community and avenged the deaths of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile. He didn’t shoot their actual killers, but he didn’t hit innocents either. Johnson targeted America’s systemic enforcers of inequity, hitting twelve police officers, five of whom have now died.

Let’s note those cops weren’t “protecting the first amendment rights” of a spontaneous protest of the Sterling and Castile murders, but were harassing and detering demonstrations. The officers could have chosen not to, and hopefully, their comrades in other cities, molesting other legal assemblies, may now choose to stand down, because now authoritarian bullying has come in the line of fire.

There is poetic justice for those who would decry “Blue Lives Matter”. If they’re going to pretend it, let them feel the oppressive threat of violence which black lives bear. For one evening, in a small corner of Dallas, Texas, police brutality faced a comeuppance.

For now Johnson’s act is being condemned as an atrocity, as a massacre even, though obviously his victims 1) met every standard of belligerent adversary, 2) were armed, and 3) outnumbered him. Let’s concede that Johnson is a credit to his military training. He confirms how our soldiers could so murderously rapage through our war zones against lesser equipped combatants. Johnson’s motive echoes that which provoked US atrocities overseas, seeking revenge against civilians, exacting collective punishment for deadly IEDs.

If we acknowledge the violence with which African Americans are oppressed, and the mendacity of its apologists and enablers, can we condemn violent resistance? International law accords oppressed peoples the human right to resist.

Slave rebellion leader Nat Turner is recognized today as a hero, but was exhaustively vilified in his day because he killed slave owners, indescriminate of old or young. Whites retaliated and killed many more blacks. More violence follwed from abolitionsists and Jayhawkers, all of it lamentable. But slavery didn’t end because we willed it.

Because this era’s history is written with erasers, our victors’ primary tool, Micah Johnson will probably never be praised for heroism.

Johnson will join fellow effaced cop-killer Christopher Dorner. A previous African American reservist vet who was immolated alive, killed instead of being apprehended, lest an investigation benefit from his testimony about why he could no longer bear LAPD corruption in 2013.

From Dorner’s “manifesto”, before Michael Brown, Ferguson and Baltimore:

“Those Caucasian officers who join South Bureau divisions (77th,SW,SE, an Harbor) with the sole intent to victimize minorities who are uneducated, and unaware of criminal law, civil law, and civil rights. You prefer the South bureau because a use of force/deadly force is likely and the individual you use UOF on will likely not report it. You are a high value target.

“Those Black officers in supervisory ranks and pay grades who stay in south bureau (even though you live in the valley or OC) for the sole intent of getting retribution toward subordinate caucasian officers for the pain and hostile work environment their elders inflicted on you as probationers (P-1?s) and novice P-2’s. You are a high value target.

You perpetuated the cycle of racism in the department as well. You breed a new generation of bigoted caucasian officer when you belittle them and treat them unfairly.

Mikah Johnson’s last words we only know through the spin of Dallas police, the same people who decided not to wait him out, nor to smoke him or gas him out from hiding in a public parking garage, but instead to send a robot with a bomb and M.O.V.E. his ass like every other black nationalist revolutionary.

No, you murdurous assholes, Johnson didn’t “want to kill all white people.” He wanted to kill white cops. Just like Dorner, he wasn’t a threat to the public, he was a threat to the police state. You cops ensured Mikah Johnson didn’t live to dictate “confessions” and you even obliterated his body like Osama bin Laden. Drawn and quartered essentially, to preclude memorializers being able to center on an idol to build a resistance.

You and I may grapple with what to think of Johnson’s personal rampage, but the state knew immediately his was the selfless heroism they fear most. As with bin Laden, they knew his apprehension must be terminal.

Lest I be misunderstood, I do not promote armed insurrection, sedition or murder. I cannot. But I will not condemn Micah Johnson.

I need not agrandize him either. Taken without his revolutionary ideology, Johnson was an ordinary mentally wounded veteran like many others. Homicidal vets with PTSD are at the core of our epidemic of police brutality. Our law enforcement teams are full of OIF and OEF soldiers who got their start shooting up cars at checkpoints and acting out racist genocide to their heart’s content.

It’s not a new problem, the US has always had active warzones feeding veterans into homelessness for those who couldn’t cope and filling government jobs for those who thrived. Beside policemanship, a very common job for discharged soldiers has always been the post office. Rembember the rampaging gunman problem we used to call “going postal?”

America’s racism problem may be transcended by a succession of church services, but class struggle is not a hearts and minds operation. Fascist rule and its army of the rich are not going to be wished away by militant nonviolence. That’s as likely as counting on the tooth fairy.

Worrying that acts like Johnson’s will provoke increased authoritarian repression is an expression of privilege provided by someone aclimated to a tolerable status quo, clearly a white perspective for whom black lives matter not enough.

Until all of us share the plight of the average Syrian refugee, trapped in our capitalist frontier war zones, none of us are shouldering an equitable burden of the police state.

That’s why it is more than black lives that matter. The middle class greivances of Occupy Wall Street are only a class removed from Black America’s suffering. We’re still talking about privileged Americans who support a grander racism that drives our global exploitation of all peoples.

I don’t have any faith that an arc of history bends toward justice in this corporate dark age. For my own sense of what’s right, it’s important to recognize Micah Johnson and Christopher Dorner for who they were, flawed, maybe very minor, aspiring Nat Turners, who wanted to strike against today’s slave masters and their brutal blue foremen.

The Lindsey Flanigan Courthouse Plaza protest timeline (July 2015 – present)

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UPDATED: This is a timeline of the legal battle which began in July 2015 over activists’s right to protest in the Lindsey Flanigan Courthouse Plaza. It explains why activists with Occupy Denver did not believe they were being given lawful orders when commanded to stop and why activists still believe the DPD were wrong to make their arrests. The city’s charges of “encumbrance” and “obstruction” appeared calculated to circumvent a federal injunction protecting the public’s First Amendment rights.

July 27, 2015
Mark Iannicelli and Eric Brandt distribute jury nullification literature at Lindsey Flanigan Courthouse (LFC) plaza. Mark Iannicelli is arrested and jailed for two days, charged with seven felony counts of jury tampering. #15CR03981 (charges dismissed 12/16 by Judge Plotz).

Aug 7
Warrant is issued for arrest of Eric Brandt for same incident, same charges. Eric Brandt is arrested and jailed #15CR04212 (charges dismissed 12/16).

Aug 14
Colorado 2nd Judicial District Chief Judge Michael A. Martinez issues order CJO-1 barring protest, including structures, in LFC plaza. (The Chief Judge later explained that his motivation was to preempt racial unrest on occasion of potential death sentence being given to African American Dexter Lewis, so soon after Aurora Theater Shooter James Holmes, who is white, had been spared the death penalty.)

Aug 17
Through attorney David Lane of Kilmer, Lane & Newman, plaintiffs Eric Verlo, Janet Matzen & Fully Informed Jury Association file complaint for federal injunction protection against continued arrest of jury nullification pamphleteers in LFC plaza

Aug 19
Having become apprized of CJO-1 posted at courthouse, Verlo et al file amended complaint to include a challenge of the “plaza order”. US District Court Judge William J. Martinez grants an injunction hearing for August 21.

Aug 21
1. An AMENDED CJO-1 is posted to courthouse entrance. Colorado Chief Judge Martinez amends PLAZA ORDER prohibitions to apply only to “highlighted area”, not entire plaza.

2. US Judge Martinez hears oral arguments on federal injunction. LFC plaza is stipulated to be not just a “designated” free speech zone but a “traditional” free speech zone.

Aug 25
US District Judge William Martinez grants preliminary injunction, strikes first paragraph from amended plaza order. He rules the prohibitions in the highlighted area cannot limit non-amplified speech, the accosting of passersby, or the distribution of literature.

Aug 26   FOUR ARRESTS
8am: New REDACTED amended CJO-1 [Plaza Order] is posted on glass door of Lindsey Flanigan Courthouse. Occupy Denver activists initiate an all-day protest to distribute FIJA fliers.

10am: Protesters erect a popup canopy which is immediately confiscated by DPD citing activist lack of permit. Other materials confiscated include table, chairs, drums, banners, signs and jury nullification brochures. However there are no arrests or citations.

1pm: City Attorney Wendy Shea agrees to have DPD return confiscated property. DPD equivocates (for two days), citing lack of a specific person to whom property should be released.

3pm: Plaintiffs Verlo et al file motion to hold DPD in contempt of federal injunction for the confiscations. (DPD was later found not to be in contempt because evidence was not conclusive that literature had been confiscated.)

9pm: Occupy Denver erects three tents. DPD and SWAT seize the tents. Four protesters arrested for “obstruction”: William Hall #15GS012195 (took a plea deal: probation and area restriction), Adrian Brown #15GS012196 (trial 3/8, not guilty obstruction & failure to obey, guilty interference, 20 days jail, on appeal), Fred Hendrich #15GS012197 (case dismissed 6/13), Eric Verlo #15GS012198 (trial 1/11, guilty obstruction & interference, 20 days jail, on appeal)

10pm: Remaining protesters stay overnight in sleeping bags awaiting release of arrestees. (Thus begins a 24-hour protest which continues for 56 days.)

Aug 28     ONE CITATION, TWO ARRESTS
4pm: After further calls to city attorney, the canopy is reclaimed from DPD property, and is erected immediately. DPD confiscates it as “encumbrance”. Citation is issued for dog off-leash to Caryn Sorado #15GV552914 (dismissed 11/24 via plea deal)

7pm: Immediately after his delayed release from jail, Adrian “Monk” Brown erects a tent. Within half hour, while walking his dog at South end of plaza, Brown is arrested by DPD and tent is confiscated. #15GS012303 (trial 11/16 w Rodarte, jury finds Brown NOT GUILTY)

8pm: Eric Brandt protests Brown’s arrest, chases DPD Commander Lopez car, arrested. #15GS012304 (trial 8/24 w Spahn)

Sept 1
8am: Hearing before US judge Martinez to hold DPD in contempt. Paying a visit to the Denver Department of Pubic Works, activist learn that there is no permit required for “free speech activity” and furthermore the department does not have jurisdiction over the Lindsey Flanigan Courthouse plaza.

4pm: Activists erect three empty tents marked with bold letters “JURY NULLIFICATION TENTS”. At 6pm, DPD arrives in force to confiscate the three tents, and pass out paper notices [Encumbrance Notice] which read:

“!!Notice!! It is illegal to place ANY encumbrance on the public right of way. An encumbrance is defined as “any article, vehicle or thing whatsoever” which is on “any street, alley, sidewalk, parkway or other public way or place.” D.R.M.C. § 49-246 et. seq. The manager of Public Works may order all encumbrances in the public right-of-way to be removed. The failure to remove items so ordered is a criminal offense; the maximum possible penalty for which is up to one year in the county jail and/or up to $999 fine. PLEASE REMOVE ALL PERSONAL ITEMS FROM THIS AREA. If personal items are not removed immediately, you may be subject to an order of removal at which time all items will be subject to removal by the Denver Police Department. Agency – Denver Police Department”

The Denver ordinance cited above reads:

“§ 49-246. The manager of public works or the manager’s designee (hereinafter in this article, “manager”) is authorized to remove or to order the removal of any article, vehicle or thing whatsoever encumbering any street, alley, sidewalk, parkway or other public way or place (any such thing hereinafter in this article to be called an “encumbrance”). The manager may prescribe appropriate methods, specifications, placement and materials for encumbrances in the public right-of-way.”

Sept 3
US District Court Judge William Martinez rules DPD is not in contempt because evidence was not conclusive that literature had been confiscated. (Note: plaintiff’s order to show cause was filed on 8/26 before that evening’s arrests.)

Sept 7
In the LFC Plaza, city workers install steel signs in center of plaza which read: “NOTICE In reference to DRMC Sec. 49-246 this plaza must remain free from all encumbrances/obstructions – Denver Public Works”

Sept 8
4:30pm: DPD conducts sixth raid on protest, confiscating everything that can’t be gathered and held by activists.

Sept 11
Night raid, to avoid arrest everyone must stand and gather personal items as if to leave.

Sept 12
DPD Night raid. Everyone made to stand, no arrests.

plaza-handcuffs-timothy-campbell-nmt

Sept 13
Night raid, stop and frisk of Timothy Campbell because he “looked threatening” to an HSS security guard. Campbell is handcuffed but released. Michael Moore is issued a citation for having his dog Lizzie off leash #15GS013171 (1/5 plea deal, six month probation).

Sept 14
DPD confiscates “encumbrances”: chairs, flags, banners, toilet paper

Sept 15
While Michael Moore is loudly protesting at doors of jail about delayed release of Eric Brandt, jail deputies assault Moore and attempt to take him into custody. DPD arrives and delivers Moore to Detox. No arrests.

Sept 16   ONE ARREST
Surveillance operator observes Jose “Pedro” Trejo urinating in public. DPD force arrives, Pedro arrested #15GS013298 (Plea deal, time served, $50 fine).

Sept 17
1am night raid makes 12th raid. DPD threaten arrest for “violation of urban camping ban”

Sept 18   FOUR ARRESTS
While activists are celebrating 4th anniversary of Occupy Wall Street, DPD evict assembly citing encumbrances, arrest Eric Brandt #15GS013512 (trial 8/29 w Spahn) and confiscate majority of protest equipment and personal property, warn others to leave and face arrest upon return. Activists return and DPD arrest three more: Adrian Brown #15GS013537 (dismissed 3/18), Jay Maxwell #15GS013517 (plea deal, year probation), and Timothy Campbell who is tackled and charged with assault #15CR05088 (jailed 4 days, charges dropped 9/22).

Via their attorney, plaintiffs Verlo et al receive Spoliation Letter to preserve all correspondence, media, eg. evidence of activities in plaza, from August 2015 onward.

Sept 19   ONE ARREST
2:38am: Later that night, Mark Iannicelli is arrested for not removing his chair from plaza #15GS013527 (District court considering motion to dismiss)

Sept 24   THREE ARRESTS
Possible police agent sent into camp to provoke fight. Arrest of Adrian Brown #15M08835 (charges dropped) and Matthew Lentz #15CR05197 (jailed 5 days, charges dropped 9/28). Brandt arrested for interference #15GS013823 (6/13 trial ended in hung jury. Retrial is 8/1 w Faragher).

Sept 25
Adrian Brown files motion for expanded discovery on 8/26 tent arrest case (#15GS012196). Sept 25 is before the 30 day period after which HALO camera footage is regularly overwritten. (Other 8/26 defendants will be told their discovery motions were filed too late to prevent destruction of HALO surveillance video. Although all motions were similarly worded and requested the identical evening’s footage at Brown.)

City challenges temporary injunction with US Court of Appeals.

4pm: CURFEW notice posted by City workers who install eight steel signs on periphery of plaza declaring a curfew. Signs read:

“NOTICE The grounds of the Lindsey-Flanigan Courthouse and the Denver Detention Center are closed to the public from 8:30PM until 7:30AM. Except to conduct official business within tne facilities. Violators are subject to citation or arrest pursuant to D.R.M.C 38-115”

7:25pm: Activist are driven off the plaza by DPD. Protest continues overnight on sidewalk along Colfax Ave. DPD conduct night raid forcing everyone to stand and gather sleeping bags as usual.

Sept 26
Protest relocates across Colfax Ave to triangle shaped park on Northwest corner of Tremont and Colfax.

Sept 28?
After an activist discussion of an alternative fallback location being the plaza in front of the Wellington Webb Building, we discover curfew signs have now been posted there too.

Sep 30
City of Denver files motion to dismiss injunction.

Oct 6   ONE ARREST
Possible infiltrator disrupts camp by stealing property. She is ousted by Caryn Sodaro but later files a complaint in municipal court seeking a protection order against Sodaro. Warrant is issued for Sodaro’s arrest #15GS014734 (11/18 plea deal, 150 days jail).

Oct 9
Plaintiff files response to motion to dismiss.

Oct 16
Reply brief by plaintiffs

Oct 21   ONE ARREST
On first day of rain since plaza protest began, DPD effects full eviction of COLFAX CAMP. Confiscates personal property and protest materials. Hauls much of it in a garbage truck. Eric Brandt is arrested for obstruction and interference #15GS015407 (trial 9/7 w Spahn)

Oct 26
Reply from plaintiffs.

Nov 12
Reply in support of defense

Nov 16
Jury finds Monk Brown no guilty of 8/28 obstruction. Judge Nicole Rodarte in 3G. Deputy city attorney prosecuted the case.

Nov 17
Oral arguments to court of appeals, courtroom III

Dec 16
Denver District Court Judge Kenneth Plotz dismisses Jury Tampering charges against Mark Iannicelli and Eric Brandt (city does not appeal).

Jan 11
8/26 tent arrestee Eric Verlo found guilty of obstruction and interference, 20 days jail. Represented by public defender. On appeal based on ineffective assistance of counsel.

Jan 13
City makes first request for plaintiffs to show documents to defendants, as per spoliation letter. (Meanwhile activist defendants have received discovery motion responses that surveillance video is overwritten and all of city correspondence is privileged.)

Feb 1
Plaintiffs Verlo et al are informed that US District Judge William Martinez wishes to hold a full trial to consider a permanent injunction. Depositions will be recorded on Feb 12.

March 8
8/26 tent arrestee Monk Brown found not guilty of obstruction and failure to obey, but guilty on interference, sentenced to 20 days jail, on appeal based in inconsistent verdict.

March 16
Mark Iannicelli arrested again distributing JN fliers #16GS003320. He’s detained and cited for harassment and violation of CJO-1. Released within hours, charges dropped are 3/18.

May 2
Verlo et al file motion to show cause why former Denver defendants should not be held in contempt of court for the March 16 arrest of Mark Iannicelli. Filing was delayed because city refused to produce discovery evidence. Plaintiffs had to file a CORA request to learn facts of Iannicelli’s arrest.

May 11
Deposition of Chief Justice Michael Martinez

May 31
Order received from Federal Judge William Martinez:

ORDER: Before the Court is Plaintiffs’ Motion for Order to Show Cause Why Former Denver Defendants Should Not Be Held in Contempt of Court [108]. Per D.C.COLO.LCivR 7.1(d) and Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 6(d), the Denver Defendants’ deadline to respond was May 26, 2016. Denver filed nothing on that date, and has since filed nothing. Accordingly, the Court could deem the motion confessed. Solely in the interests of justice, however, Denver is ORDERED to file a response on or before June 3, 2016. No reply will be accepted without prior order or leave of Court. SO ORDERED by Judge William J. Martinez on 05/31/2016.

June 1
Motion to dismiss 8/28 chair arrest of Mark Iannicelli moves case to district court. Dismissal expected.

June 3
City responds to motion to show cause.

June 13
Fred Henrich 8/26 tent case dismissed.

June 20
Federal judge William Martinez responds:

ORDER: Before the Court is Plaintiffs’ Motion for Order to Show Cause Why Former Denver Defendants Should Not Be Held in Contempt of Court [108]. Given the nature of the alleged violation of this Court’s preliminary injunction, and given the lack of evidence that the alleged violation presents an ongoing problem, the Court sees no pressing reason to address potential contempt at this time. Plaintiffs are therefore DIRECTED to file a notice, no later than June 24, 2016, explaining why the Court should give priority to their motion. Otherwise, the Court intends to set this matter for a hearing immediately following the bench trial scheduled to begin on April 17, 2017 between Plaintiffs and the Second Judicial District. SO ORDERED by Judge William J. Martinez on 06/20/2016.

June 22
Jury trial for Eric Brandt’s 9/24 interference arrest results in hung jury. Retrial scheduled for 8/1 w Judge Faragher.

—-

NOTES:
A. List of 2015-16 plaza arrests (20) & citations (2)

No. Name: Date: Offense: Result:
1. Mark Iannicelli 7/27 (jury tampering) DISMISSED 12/16
2. Eric Brandt 7/27 (jury tampering) DISMISSED 12/16
3. William “Reno” Hall 8/26 TENT (obstr.) PLEA, prob., area restriction
4. Adrian “Monk” Brown 8/26 TENT (obstruction) NOT GUILTY obstruct & failure, GUILTY interference
5. Fred Hendrich 8/26 TENT (obstruction, interference, failure to obey) DISMISSED 6/13
6. Eric Verlo 8/26 TENT (obstruction, interference) GUILTY, 20 days jail, on appeal
7. Caryn Sodaro 8/28 (DOG citation) PLEA deal
8. Adrian “Monk” Brown 8/28 TENT (obstruction) NOT GUILTY 11/17
9. Eric Brandt 8/28 (failure to obey) ***trial 8/24
10. Michael Moore 9/13 (DOG citation) PLEA deal
11. Jose “Pedro” Trejo 9/16 (urinating in public) PLEA deal
12. Eric Brandt 9/18 TARP (obstruction) ***trial 8/29
13. Jay Maxwell 9/18 HANDCART (obstruction) PLEA deal
14. Adrian “Monk” Brown 9/18 A COOLER (obstr) DISMISSED 3/8
15. Tim Campbell 9/18 (assault/resisting) DROPPED
16. Mark Iannicelli 9/19 CHAIR (obstruction) to be dismissed
17. Matthew Lentz 9/24 (assault) DROPPED
18. Adrian “Monk” Brown 9/24 (assault) DROPPED
19. Eric Brandt 9/24 (interference) ***hung jury, retrial 8/1
20. Caryn Sodaro 10/6 (disturb, threats) PLEA deal, 150 days concurrent
21. Eric Brandt 10/21 WET PILE (obstruction) ***trial 9/7
22. Mark Iannicelli 3/16/2016 (harassment, violation of CJO-1) DISMISSED

B. Running tally:
Cases dropped or dismissed: 9
Not guilty verdict, obstruction: 2
Guilty verdict, interference: 1
Guilty verdict, obstruction & interference: 1
Plea deals: 6
Cases outstanding: 4

3. Trials still scheduled:
August 1, Eric Brandt (9/24 interloper interference), RETRIAL, LFC 3H
August 24, Eric Brandt (8/28 Lopez failure to obey), jury trial, LFC 3F
August 29, Eric Brandt (9/18 tarp obstruction), jury trial, LFC 3F
September 7, Eric Brandt (10/21 Tremont obstruct.), jury trial, LFC 3F
April 17-19, 2017, Verlo v Martinez, permanent injunction, Araj Federal Courthouse Rm A801

Human rights for even Anders Breivik

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In retrospect, awarding the newly elected Barack Obama a Nobel Peace Prize was about as smartly ambitious as it gets. Everyone knows humanitarians don’t do it for the reward. A Nobel Prize is wasted if there’s not some eligible sociopath who might be influenced with the pressure to behave themselves. President Obama’s Nobel medal was an experiment in paying it forward. Who knows how much more bloodthirsty Obama might have gotten with his drones had not the Nobel committee tried to extort him with its higher expectations? The Nobel award givers took a lot of ribbing for their foolishness from those of us who weren’t idealist enough. AND SO IT COMES AS NO SURPRISE when Norway’s mass murdering overachiever Anders Breivik sued his jailers for abusing his human rights because he wasn’t getting sufficient visitors in his cushy prison suite, that the Norwegian supreme court would rule Breivik was right.

Of course they did. If you’re not going to give a death sentence to a crazed bigot who guns down 76 children, if you’re not going to throw him in a hole but instead give him a spacious accommodation, if instead of a life sentence you let him pursue university studies and limit his incarceration to twenty some years, then you don’t want to isolate your prisoner from human contact if it might appear even as a semblance of solitary confinement. Because lesser cultures do that.

Lesser capitalist flagship states isolate, execute and torture. I so appreciate that Norway wants to set a high bar, but I despair that the land of Guantanamo and waterboarding and indefinite detention and ILLEGAL detention and rendition and extrajudicial assassination and no habeus corpus can’t even see this bar to reach it.

Ask the candidates: who, as president, vows to jail Obama, Clinton and Bush?

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If Americans really want to differentiate which presidential candidate represents change, a good question would be, which will prosecute America’s celebrity war criminals? Who, among them, will jail past leaders guilty of crimes against humanity?

Obama 2008 didn’t do it. President Obama didn’t even close Guantanamo, end torture, or disarm drones. By failing to curb Pax America’s wars of aggression, Obama too should now stand in the docket. Wasn’t it hoped, as Bush and Cheney helivac’d from the White House, that Obama’s “change” meant calling that chopper back for a return to accountability? At minimum, superficially? Justice didn’t happen, Obama didn’t want to look back, and the villains remain to foul the political discourse as foils to perpetuate high crimes and to normalize the forgiving of greater trespasses.

Is American exceptionalism fathomless? ISIS hasn’t grown out of the terrible twos yet already John Kerry wants to charge it with genocide; not to haul ISIS perps before the Hague –extrajudicial assassination by drone circumvents that– but because genocide law holds that those who do not condemn it are its accessories.

How far does culpability reach among our active enablers of war crimes? It extends into our pool of candidates certainly, but how far? Does Senator Bernie Sanders, at one edge, consider himself an accessory to the crimes of past and current administrations? It’s possible Sanders voted against the wars, interventions and regime changes, but will he prosecute those who did not?

Donald Trump stands on the periphery as well, avaritic criminality is not alas a purview of the International Criminal Court, but he does seem an unlikely candidate for honoring the rule of law let alone conscience.

Still, would it hurt to ask? An independent party candidate might have the only acceptable answer. Who, as president, will honor humanity’s highest laws? Who will hold state terrorists accountable?

Denver art student informs Tale of Two Hoodies with Goya’s Third of May 1808. This KKK cop executes the black child.

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A Tale of Two Hoodies
DENVER, COLORADO- Here’s what the Denver Post article didn’t explain about the Denver high school art student who was pressured to remove her controversial piece from public display. Where was it being shown? At the Wellington Webb Building. That’s not irrelevant because it’s where viewers became offended. You could go inquire about the incident, if you knew where to ask, or where to protest the work’s removal. The WELLINGTON WEBB BUILDING downtown on Colfax. What’s so controversial, the scene is real isn’t it? There’s more.

The student’s drawing is essentially a reproduction of Michael D’Antuono’s 2014 piece “A Tale of Two Hoodies” which still sparks outrage. Missing in this version is the bag of Skittles which the black child offers the cop, locking the two figures in a standoff. Or obviously a mugging. The Skittles of course recalls Trayvon Martin and we know how that ended. The hands in the air references “Hands Up Don’t Shoot” and Michael Brown who shared the same fate.

Original 2014 workAll else about the Denver student’s contextualization of D’Antuono’s work is the same, the confederate flag uncovered from beneath the wallpaper of Old Glory. In the student’s piece the American flag appears worn through. In D’Ontuono’s original the racist flag has bursted through. The cop and hood are the same, except in the original the cop was maybe more fat.

What’s also missing in the DenPo whitewash is the context of the unamed student’s assignment. She was tasked with contextualizing TWO works. The influence of the second piece is not as apparent as the first. The boy’s hands-up wasn’t merely recalling the mantra of the Black Lives Matter movement, it was evoking the student’s other chosen influence, Goya’s famous “The Third of May 1808.” In that iconic work, a firing squad is executing a rebel with outstretched arms.

KNOWING THIS, you can see the student’s policeman has drawn his gun for an EXECUTION, not an arrest. The boy is not following an order or raising his hands in surrender. If even in resignation, this boy’s upheld arms communicate a plea. How does that inform you about this young Denver student’s understanding of “Hands Up Don’t Shoot” or “I Can’t Breathe”?

The officer’s Klan hood certifies that this shooting is a lynching. Many lynchings in the traditional sense were perpetrated by deputized citizens.

Denver Chief of Police Robert White said of the student’s work: “I’m greatly concerned about how this painting portrays the police.” Well sure, and Chief White didn’t know the half of it.

Should you go complain at the Wellington Webb Building? The Denpo article mentions Chief White intends to “have a conversation with the student and her parents.” You may want to caution that the Office of the Independent Monitor be invited attend that conversation, as a ride-along so to speak, to assure it isn’t the one-sided transaction to which we are becoming accostomed and inured.

Does Chief White think that racially enhanced officer involved extrajudicial executions should not be a student’s concern? He needs to look past what offended him and try to understand the art piece before he forces a conversation. Or what kind of conversation will it be. The student has already made her statement.

FOOTNOTE:
Here’s what Michael D’Antuono had to say about his original work. I’ve updated the original broken links:

This painting, created during the Trayvon Martin case, symbolizes the travesty of racism in the criminal justice system. It has been the object of much controversy and censorship. In 2014, I was Incensed that George Zimmerman was trying to profit from his notoriety for killing an unarmed teenager by auctioning his painting on eBay. In response, I put this piece on eBay with half of the proceeds going to the Trayvon Martin Foundation. The very same day Zimmerman sold his painting for $100,000, and as soon as it became evident that my piece was on par to pass Zimmerman’s mark, eBay shut mine down for violating their strict policy of not selling anything on their site glorifying hate groups or showing anything symbolic of the Klu Klux Klan. The hypocrisy of eBay was that at the time they killed my auction, they were selling over 1500 other items related to the KKK. Misrepresenting it’s meaning, a hate group co-opted the piece in 2015, passing out flyers in Southfield, Michigan. In 2016, a high school teacher in Nevada, was suspended for using the painting to inspire critical though.

BREAKING: Denver DA Mitch Morrissey to be subpoenaed in jury tampering case of Mark Iannicelli and Eric Brandt!

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DENVER, COLORADO- Denver Judge Johnny C. Barajas wouldn’t produce Eric Brandt, who’s still being held in county jail without bond, he wouldn’t commit to joining Brandt’s case with that of Mark Iannicelli, he wouldn’t commit to granting a preliminary hearing, but he has allowed Attorneys David Lane and Lonn Heymann to subpoena all complainants, including Denver District Attorney Mitchell R. Morrissey!
 
The target of a recent recall effort, the Denver DA won’t indict killer cops or sheriff’s deputies, but Morrissey and his cronies in the DPD will have to show up August 31 at 8:30am to account for the abridged First Amendment rights of Messrs Brandt and Ianicelli.

Police take poetic license with wanted posters of New York prison fugitives

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LOOKIT! New York authorities have issued fresh images of escapees David Sweat and Richard Matt. You might wonder where they got photos more recent than the last mug shots, which was the last time the prison break fugitives were in custody. Plus the news coverage has been unequivocal that authorities haven’t seen the wayward prisoners since.

It turns out the latest images are called “PROGRESSIVE PHOTOS” depicting how the convicted murderers are supposed to look at ten days into their freedom quest. Authorities are assuming they haven’t reached razors, so each has a ten-day shadow; and police artists have Photoshopped t-shirts over the original penitentiary vestments. But the photo manipulation didn’t stop there. The original mugshots were taken in identical environments, but these renditions feature distinct atmosphere changes, both darker.

The younger David Sweat is now lit with harsh florescent lights as one might encounter him in a convenience store or in YOUR GARAGE. Sweat’s pores are exposed like one might observe from inappropriate intimacy. Sweat’s receding hairline now looks more like hair plugs, as if his first stop after Dannemora was to a hair club for men. Sweat’s original friendly demeanor has been replaced with a calculated desperation. I’m guessing police artists have a PS morph tool labeled “John Wayne Gacy”.

Sweat’s brother-art-thou, alleged lothario Richard Matt, is now bathed in the incandescent light of YOUR BEDROOM.

I’m sure wanted posters have always afforded sheriffs the discretion to paint fugitives as menacing as needed. Photo manipulation is another animal altogether. It’s not poetic license, it’s character assassination. And it’s extrajudicial. Sweat and Matt are guilty of a nonviolent jailbreak. Until we can offer them justice — run boys run.

Is Dzhokhar Tsarnaev guilty of a worse crime than US forces commit overseas?

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Dzhokhar TsarnaevDoes the “Boston Marathon Bomber” look like he deserves the death penalty? Funny, you don’t even know what he looks like. US authorities have been meticulous about controlling images of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev since the manhunt for the teen and his older brother ended in extrajudicial firing squads which teen Dzhokhar survived. He’s been in custody since then and the only more recent image his captors released was of Dzhokhar giving the finger to a jail cell surveillance camera. This to influence the jury to give the death penalty. Why the embargo on images? Are authorities afraid the public will feel sympathy for the disfigurement Dzhokhar suffered from his fusillade? Where defense attorneys not permitted to submit images of Dzhokhar smiling? Is the image ban in effect a media blackout? Remember how Saddam Hussein’s trial was broadcast without sound? Now US dumb justice has become literally blind, all Star Chambers and spectral evidence.
 
Is Dzhokhar Tsarnaev guilty of a worse crime than US forces commit overseas? If an American sniper turned in the Tsarnaev brothers headcount, he’d be handed a potato peeler and punished with kitchen duty. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is a small fry. US drone pilots eat massacres like the Boston Marathon for breakfast.

FreddieGray’s spine was severed at the neck. I believe literally that is lynching.

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African American Freddie Gray died as a result of his spine being severed at his neck. It’s no hyperbole to describe the continuing police murders of young black men as deputized, mob LYNCHINGS. The overwhelming victims of these extrajudicial executions are people of color. As if to underline this point, Baltimore police made this clear in no uncertain medical terms. I’m not a doctor, but what injury could better support the inference that Freddie Gray was lynched?

Tulsa sheriff lets yahoo donors ride along to taser or shoot black suspects

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Eric Harris running from an undercover sting in Tulsa Oklahoma
So. Black man Eric Harris was killed by Oklahoma lawmen last week, accidentally shot in the back by a deputy who thought he was triggering his taser, not his gun. He didn’t unholster one instead of the other, he actually jumped out of the cruiser with a weapon in each hand! Funny thing about that deputy… –But first let’s make clear that the Tulsa County Sheriff has already excused the officer of wrongdoing, likewise all the other cops who piled on Harris as he died, mocking his final breath. “Fuck your breath” said one cop as they kneed Harris’ face into the pavement until he died.

So triggerman Robert Bates was an “Advance Reserve” deputy, a retired insurance exec who donated to the department and thus was allowed to ride along with regular deputies and use tasers on people and other fun stuff. Bates used to be a cop in 1965 when black men were lynched more regularly –so White America believed. It turns out nothing has changed since those days. Except that today’s lynch mobs are not open to the public, today extrajudicial executioners have to wear a badge. Naturally good ol’ boys like Bates want a piece of that action.

It turns out, to be a volunteer donor-deputy is also a license to kill. Bates flat out shot Eric Harris as he laid on the ground. Though lawmen were converging from multiple vehicles and the winded Harris was already prone, someone called “taser, taser”. That’s when Bates pulled his gun instead and fired. Then Deputy Oops said “I’m sorry. I shot him!” The other deputies now pretend they didn’t hear Bates, or the gunshot. That is their defense for climbing on the victim and hastening his death.

The whole gruesome execution is on video, which the Tulsa County Sheriff supplied to make the case that the officers acted appropriately.

One of these days, a video will emerge of a deputized-donor riding along wearing a white hood and a noose.

NE Patriots are serial cheaters, so are their namesakes. The unfair advantage is an essential of Capitalism.

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First the New England Patriots got caught spying on their adversaries, now they’ve been tweaking the air-pressure of their game balls to sneak a ballistic handling advantage. Rules be damned, Patriot quarterback Tom Brady prefers his ordnance two pounds psi shy, hollow-points –if you will– which are also against regulation. For how long have the Patriots been manipulating advantages? And how else? They weren’t satisfied with the home field advantage on Sunday. Maybe officials should bring protractors to investigate the Boston gridiron. A level playing field doesn’t likely suit the Patriots either.

OF COURSE it doesn’t. Who expects sportsmanship from “patriots?!” Patriotism is the antisocial insistance on your own cultural superiority. American exceptionalism is an endorsement of tactical superiority, covert war, disproportionate force, drones, extrajudicial assassination, death squads, snipers, collateral damage, and torture. Formal US policy is to FLAUNT international law. American materialism profits from insider trading, extortion, usury, and corporate hegemony uber alles! Why would our surrogate Sunday warriors pretend there is honor among thieves?

Of course America underinflates footballs to best our opponents. We also diligently deploy inspectors to ensure our intended defeatees can’t recallibrate theirs. Meanwhile our leaders dissemble when plausible deniability stretches thin.

Of course NFL officials are not discussing a Super Bowl disqualification for the recidivist Patriots. Instead they’re weighing minor penalties, no doubt manageable, if not tax deductible. If America’s best cheaters don’t advance to the Super Bowl, the outcome would be hypocritical. Go Team! America Fuck Yeah!

I’m kidding of course. Sack the quarterback, disqualify the Patriots, send whoever else to the Super Bowl, then march the entire US defense and offense departments to the Hague.

UPDATE 1/23:
While fans and media try to belittle the scandal (ie. “Deflate-gate” and “Ballghazi”), statisticians have noted a damning anomaly relating to the advantage gained from underinflated footballs. After the rules were changed to allow offensive teams to use their own footballs –Brady was among the quarterbacks lobbying for the change– New England’s ball handling superiority grew beyond the realm of probability.

Probably all teams know that well-inflated footballs fly further but underinflated balls are easier to grab. Maybe the purpose of making a personalized array of game balls available is so offensive teams can exploit alternate characteristics as needed. Maybe the NFL understood this when they granted the rule change. Maybe the Patriots just couldn’t pass up every opportunity to cheat, until the statistics made plain their greed. Whether by hubris or head-injury numbskulledness, Tom Brady and his receivers thought they coud break PT Barnum’s rule too.

The American Dream hinges on equality of opportunity and fair play, but of course Capitalism idealizes the unfair advantage.

Btw I abhor the theatre of corporate sports, but when it exposes the reek of America’s national character, I like to make sure to smell it.

Charlie Hebdo cartoonists didn’t merit death, like adversaries of West do.

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I AM A CIArLIEEven the nuanced critiques of the CHARLIE HEBDO COMEUPPANCE in Paris begin by disclaiming “of course the cartoonists didn’t deserve to die.” But I wonder, have none among us yet earned our adversaries’ judgment? We western imperialists are quick to decide which of our opponents deserve to die, even as mere collateral in our preemptive justice-dealing. How uncharitable of our exceptionalism to think that only we can direct extrajudicial assassinations. Paris is a front line like any other noncombatant zone marauded by US drones. Our intelligence agencies aren’t bothered to explain who they target and why. Contrast our existential rationalizations with the concrete evidence, much of it rubble, with which anti-imperial defenders can condemn us.

Is the Israeli Left any lesser invasive? Support Israelis who don’t live in Israel

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Happening upon a Middle Eastern restaurant advertising itself to be Israeli-owned, I wondered, as a BDS-adherant promoting boycott, divestment and sanctions to pressure the state of Israel to abandon apartheid and illegal occupation, if this business fell under the BDS dragnet. BDS targets Israel and not just products from the Occupied Territories as moderates might prefer. At times BDS also focuses on prominent Zionist enterprises whether they be Israeli or American. Very likely these proprietors evangelize for Israel, but I thought a broader principle suggested itself: LET’S DO SUPPORT ISRAELIS WHO DON’T LIVE IN ISRAEL! Wouldn’t that be precisely the goal?! But a word about other Israelis for whom BDS is asked to make an exception, the oft-celebrated Israeli Left. Are we supposed to be reassured that many Israelis do not support the ethnic cleansing perpetuated by their right wing government? What of the purported majority of Americans who oppose our continued wars and our drone extrajudicial executions? If populations cannot prevent the crimes perpetrated in their name, indeed the responsibility falls to who other but them, does their objection earn any points until they act?

“Jaber was sleeping near his car when the missile arrived. 3 people killed.”

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PRISMDELIVERY CONFIRMATION for drones! You can get it for free with the Metadata iPhone app. The following notice arrived this morning, March 3, postmarked Yemen: “Jaber was sleeping near his car when the missile arrived. 3 people killed.” The blurb is as much as the USG knows, based on preliminary reports from the ground, and highlights what little they know of their intended victim. It’s also based on the POV of the targeting pilot whose job it is to study the slow-mo video of the warhead’s GoPro camera. Extreme Extrajudicial Assassination –Radically illegal too!
 
UPDATE: Mar 3, Yemen
“The second drone strike of the day killed 1 person in Abyan.”

Rogue vigilante Chris Dorner burned at the stake by angry hooded white men

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Tuning in to developments with fugitive cop-killer Chris Dorner in Big Bear on Tuesday, I half expected a televised denouement like Fahrenheit 451, where impatient viewers were given a contrived final scene, fitting the short arc of the average attention span for corporate media fodder. As I recall, that renegade fireman watched his pursuers stage his capture/demise, because authorities favored truncating a felon-on-the-lam narrative lest it generate a deviant hopeful following; it didn’t matter if the criminal really escaped. Could Ray Bradbury have envisioned the expectations which reality TV has created to satiate real blood lust?

No doubt Bradbury foresaw the ferocity with which a vengeful police state would immolate their one-man insurgent, with a compliant media averting their cameras so American viewers didn’t witness another Waco.

Americans should be attuned to these out of sight infernos, all our wars for example. Except that we know Dorner was set aflame with an paramilitary incendiary device dubbed “the burner”, this is what our extrajudicial executions look like via drones. Only last week news junkies were treated to the legal argument which the USG made to justify killing untried suspects, even US citizens. A if international law differentiated among infidels. One man’s infidel may be another’s exemplar, but he’s every government’s infidel.

So Chris Dorner had snapped. His manifesto, rambling only as much as those were his parting words, Dorner a Falling Down avenger who knew there would be no Hollywood ending. But Dorner had bought into the Rambo Army-of-One mythology. No disrespect intended toward Dorner’s feat, but elite military training proved more of a dud than a fighting machine, did it? What a laugh that American forces deign to train Afghan recruits. Any one mujahideen is likely the equivalent of a high-capacity magazine clip of US special forces in their underwear. But it’s likely authorities will never reveal Dorner’s actual superhuman achievement. He knew what he was up against, and now so do we. The crooked police machine has proven to be worse than Dorner’s complaints. Perhaps that was meant to be the audience takeaway. We didn’t get to see Chris Dorner burn at the stake, but we sure as hell felt the heat.

Julian Assange and Bradley Manning put lie to Western pretense of freedom and rule of law

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The UK wouldn’t extradite Pinochet, but they’re threatening to storm the Ecuadorian embassy in London to see that Wikileaks impresario Julian Assange is extradited to Sweden where a prosecutor wants to decide whether to charge him for sexual violations, more likely so that the Australian can then be rendered to the US to be imprisoned like Bradley Manning and face the death penalty for espionage. The US denies this intention, though it voted against Ecuador’s allies to hold a meeting about the continuing US-UK assault on journalism and whistleblowers. Can the Western empire let Assange and Manning escape severe reprimand? The two are only the mastermind and the alleged-source who’ve ignited the global uprising behind the anti- austerity movements, Arab Spring, and Occupy. President Obama cannot leave either off the hook without encouraging a deluge of more insider defections. Bradley Manning is already under torture in military custody, but Assange continues to evade US clutches. Should he escape to asylum in Ecuador where Obama’s exterminator drones can deal “American Justice”? The US has yet to condemn a white man to targeted assassination, but in the Global South, in darker-skinned populations, who will know? I favor Ecuador expanding its embassy to more than the first floor office, to offer Wikileaks an entire center of operations for as long as Julian Assange is confined under virtual house arrest. In Assange’s speech from the embassy balcony he repeated three times: “Bradley Manning must be released.” Journalists must be free to expose the crimes of the rich. Citing prison sentences for a Bahrain dissident and Russia’s Pussy Riot, Assange concluded: “There is unity in the oppression. There must be absolute unity and determination in the response.”

Here’s the full text of Assange’s statement:

“I am here today because I cannot be there with you today. But thank you for coming. Thank you for your resolve and your generosity of spirit.

“On Wednesday night, after a threat was sent to this embassy and the police descended on this building, you came out in the middle of the night to watch over it and you brought the world’s eyes with you.

“Inside this embassy, after dark, I could hear teams of police swarming up into the building through its internal fire escape. But I knew there would be witnesses. And that is because of you.

“If the UK did not throw away the Vienna conventions the other night, it is because the world was watching. And the world was watching because you were watching.

“So, the next time somebody tells you that it is pointless to defend those rights that we hold dear, remind them of your vigil in the dark before the Embassy of Ecuador.

“Remind them how, in the morning, the sun came up on a different world and a courageous Latin America nation took a stand for justice.

And so, to those brave people. I thank President Correa for the courage he has shown in considering and in granting me political asylum.

“And I also thank the government, and in particular Foreign Minister Ricardo Patino, who upheld the Ecuadorian constitution and its notion of universal rights in their consideration of my asylum. And to the Ecuadorian people for supporting and defending this constitution.

“And I also have a debt of gratitude to the staff of this embassy, whose families live in London and who have shown me the hospitality and kindness despite the threats we all received.

“This Friday, there will be an emergency meeting of the foreign ministers of Latin America in Washington DC to address this very situation.

“And so, I am grateful to those people and governments of Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Columbia, El Salvador, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Argentina, Peru, Venezuela, and to all other Latin American countries who have come out to defend the right to asylum.

“And to the people of the United States, United Kingdom, Sweden and Australia who have supported me in strength, even when their governments have not. And to those wiser heads in government who are still fighting for justice. Your day will come.

“To the staff, supporters and sources of Wikileaks, whose courage and commitment and loyalty has seen no equal.

“To my family and to my children who have been denied their father. Forgive me, we will be reunited soon.

“As Wikileaks stands under threat, so does the freedom of expression and the health of all our societies. We must use this moment to articulate the choice that is before the government of the United States of America.

“Will it return to and reaffirm the values, the revolutionary values it was founded on, or will it lurch off the precipice dragging us all into a dangerous and oppressive world, in which journalists fall silent under the fear of prosecution and citizens must whisper in the dark?

“I say it must turn back. I ask President Obama to do the right thing. The United States must renounce its witch-hunts against Wikileaks. The United States must dissolve its FBI investigation.

“The United States must vow that it will not seek to prosecute our staff or our supporters. The United States must pledge before the world that it will not pursue journalists for shining a light on the secret crimes of the powerful.

“There must be no more foolish talk about prosecuting any media organisation; be it Wikileaks, or be it the New York Times.

“The US administration’s war on whistleblowers must end.

“Thomas Drake, William Binney and John Kirakou and the other heroic whistleblowers must – they must – be pardoned or compensated for the hardships they have endured as servants of the public record.

“And to the Army Private who remains in a military prison in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, who was found by the United Nations to have endured months of torturous detention in Quantico, Virginia and who has yet – after two years in prison – to see a trial: he must be released.

“Bradley Manning must be released.

“And if Bradley Manning did as he is accused, he is a hero and an example to us all and one of the world’s foremost political prisoners.

“Bradley Manning must be released.

“On Wednesday, Bradley Manning spent his 815th day of detention without trial. The legal maximum is 120 days.

“On Thursday, my friend Nabeel Rajab, President of the Bahrain Human Rights Centre, was sentenced to three years in prison for a tweet. On Friday, a Russian band were sentenced to two years in jail for a political performance.

“There is unity in the oppression. There must be absolute unity and determination in the response.

“Thank you.”

Occupy Denver tells DPD to GET BACK!

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Occupy Denver J29 action
Denver occupiers took to the streets last night in solidarity with OCCUPYs nationwide to protest the brutal January 27 clampdown on an attempted squat in Oakland, California. My favorite chant of the evening was “THEY SAY GET BACK, WE SAY FUCK THAT!” but by the march’s end it was DPD officers who were told to back off. As the protesters took Colfax Avenue and adjacent street, Denver cruisers kept traffic away, eliminating potential witnesses or passersby who might join in. But when Occupy Denver led their protest to the police station, officers with riot control weapons closed in to encircle them in what’s now referred to as a “kettle”, or extrajudicial detainment. Taking a page from the DPD manual the occupiers told their would-be attackers to “GET BACK, GET BACK!” and Obi-Wan-Kenobied their way out of the uncivil-liberty trap. [more on the evening’s account later today]

Colonel Gaddafi meets his killer-to-be. Would you have shaken that hand? I’m talking about Obama’s.

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Can you match this for a haunting image? There’s Colonel Gaddafi and President Obama, two years ago. I suppose the Tea Party would pretend they were pals. Why wouldn’t they be, both are misunderstood weirdos, both were espoused rescuers of their respective peoples. Where similarities end, the rivalry is epic. One the protector of Africa and the unaligned world, the other its despoiler. One perhaps rendered timid with age, bombed into submission, his own daughter killed by an extrajudicial US assassination attempt, the other his future killer. I look at this image and reflect on the author of the Little Green Book, ideology for the Libyan renaissance, whose recent pitiless murder was videotaped and televised from all angles. Others might look more soberly at President Barack Obama, skilled comfort giver, who we’ve come to see shows no reticence for killing thousands sight unseen, but here he’s looking his mark straight in the face. What’s Obama saying with that handshake? I’m not sure Obama’s eye contact is going to have the effect it used to.

Occupying an empty house

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My friend Maureen gets frustrated with me because i keep slinging all this outlandish stuff at her, and as one might expect, she has a hard time getting it sometimes, and an even harder time imagining that any of it might be true or practical. I keep telling her that money is over, she keeps telling me that people use money for good things. I start hanging around Occupy Wall St. and its attendant movement and she feels alienated because she lives largely from Stock Exchange investments. Maureen is not the only one with this issue; a man appeared at our GA in CSpgs last week deeply troubled by the fact that we “haters” were trying to force his grandma to eat cat food because as he noted, “Wall Street”, that is, the package of various stock offerings available there, is owned diffusely by grandmas and retirees, penny-pinchers and wheeler-dealers all over the world. My friend and this guy are both put off by the extremely jarring nature of the realizations at hand that have precipitated huge crowds of traffic-clotting protesters into the streets. (Actually that stranger stayed for the GA and came around, while Maureen has an injury preventing her attendance, so this is kinda for her, as well as everyone else).

The issue with the money that’s causing problems is closely associated with the Global nature of Occupy! and because of that, its fragmented nature. Both issues are rendered all the more discordant to many by their perceived urgency among occupiers. We want things to change right now, not after the next bullshit election cycle, but rather before we all die when the food chain collapses. Many within the movement at hand will object to what i posit here, but there really is no way around it in my own mind, so i have no choice but to put it out there. The FED, the IMF, World Bank, Bank of England, Royal Dutch, Al Rajhi, etc, etc, and their intertwined financial/military/industrial destruction machine already exist as a very solid Global beast with utterly uncontrollable and ravenous hungers. We humans are equally as Global, and Occupy! is the same. The destructive elements in this conflict as well as the creative are out of the hands of nationalistic players, and our old notions of money and its production will not save us in time. Once again, if it were gonna, it woulda.

I’ve put this educational chart up before, and if you have no motivation to look any further then i hope you’ll just go get another beer and stay out of the way. The World as we know it is a disaster, and we made it so. Don’t give me that crap about global warming is caused by dinosaur farts. We’ve dumped more toxic shit into the ecosystem in the last century than can be said to have even existed, anywhere. If Humanity can’t effect the world, like one hears on Rush, of some of those other insane programs where are all the American Bison? Passenger Pigeons? Pennsylvanians drinking tap water? Live, healthy corals? Why are so many of us completely, stubbornly ignorant of these obvious and urgent facts. It’s the Fear, of course, and it’s actually propagated deliberately by some, who fail in turn to recognize that they are trapped by it themselves. we’ll move on to the business of the Fear another time.

Plenty of accusations fly around about who caused the money crisis, the environmental crisis, and any other crisis at hand. It really doesn’t matter, and even though some players have obviously been behaving recklessly, some in succession with conspiratorial characters of some pedigree, we absolutely must give up the hatred and sort out solutions, if we want to live. There are a few links at the bottom to articles, (and one video–don’t like ’em myself), on financial and economic collapse. There are plenty more. The point is to assure you all that our monetary system, the means we’ve “developed” through haphazard mutual throat-slitting for trade and interaction among ourselves, is fucked. We can’t fix it. The “money” we’ve been passing around isn’t reflective of anything real. The “price” we pay for things has utterly nothing to do with their intrinsic worth or their scarcity in the world. This is our collective fault, not simply the fault of a couple Rothschilds and Morgans. We all scrabbled to keep up appearances and grubbed around to buy stupid shit we never needed, or even used. The numbers involved down at the FED are so unrealistic they’re meaningless, and trade imbalances and the like merely amount to spiffy terms for describing exported slavery, a kracken which is quickly coming home to roost for Westerners intent on prolonging the petro-economy for the sake of the god damn Fear. There is no money. Its value has been pilfered away by milquetoast pirates one Stewie Griffin party at a time.

The ends of the Dollar and the Euro represent terrific opportunity. Not for making more money, you dumb-ass! That’s the thinking that’s got us in this state in the first place. Some reasoned arguments exist that attempt to exonerate the financiers held up by many Occupiers as responsible for this mess. It really doesn’t matter. The people playing this game, which are all of us, have all been working at competition together ever since we began to establish societies. We didn’t know any better at the time. Now it’s apparent that the approach we’ve been taking isn’t working. If you are trapped in a mindset that insists on claiming a bigger slice of pie, or plaintively keens of the potential virtue of money if only it flows through the right hands, i’m sorry for you. Because when this all really hits the fan, you will be completely lost. We own nothing, except stuff that’s really not worth much, if you figure it in money. At some future point it may be necessary to argue these points at a higher level, because financiers are fond of obfuscation and bullshit in the literature, and hate to admit to themselves or anyone else how evilly they’ve been behaving, but soon enough the thing will collapse beyond the need to parse words.

So follow. The Earth is in the balance, because of the natural behavior of human beings when set loose to compete. Humans also have an innate drive to form societies and cooperate. The mechanisms of the old competitive game are worn, and the game is pretty much decided. We’ve already abandoned borders within the confines or the Game, only keeping nationalisms and “racial” distinctions in place when convenient to some other aspect of the Game, like the continued propagation of slavery, or the demonization of controllers of certain resources. Pull back and look a little. It’s 100% game players causing all the wars in the world, all the food shortages, all the misery. Do we really give a shit what color or religion a thirsty guy in the desert may be? Am i really worried about Iraqi invaders pouring over the horizon? Please! Even if all the current unrest and destabilization isn’t manipulated by people who thought George Orwell was writing textbooks, none of this is necessary. We don’t need petroleum, (look it up yourself fer cryin’ out loud). We don’t need to hate a bunch of desert nomads just because our shitheads set them up in business as a part of a grand scam. We don’t need to compete.

Cooperative living is so much easier and less troublesome you naysayers will be feeling really silly before this is over. It’s OK, though. It’s not so easy to see, at least for now. If it takes too long to avoid the pain you’ll see soon enough. Come see us then. What we have isn’t worth money but i am rich, rich rich! And this Manse won’t collapse, with or without money. Stay with us….

http://economiccrisis.us/
http://www.naturalnews.com/032999_financial_collapse_Euro.html
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=26756
http://www.uctv.tv/search-details.aspx?showID=16225
http://129.81.170.14/~dupre/SEEDS.pdf

No evidence to hold Sabar Lal Melma in Guantanamo, but enough to kill him?

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Image of Melma undarkened and flipped to shed menacing demeanorHard to imagine we’d come to look at Guantanamo as a lesser evil. Gitmo held terror suspects without charges, indefinitely, secretly, and tortured them, to death sometimes. At least they and their families back home were safe from the pretext of a drone strike or special ops night raid. The targeted assassination of released 5-year Guantanamo alumn ISN 801 Sabar Lal Melma in Afghanistan raises the question: what constitutes enough cause to send a death squad after a suspected illegal combatant? The US didn’t have the evidence to bring charges against Melma, who was finally released in 2007 after an outpouring of Afghan voices vouched for his innocence, yet the US military retained suspicion enough to send NATO commandos into his home this weekend to execute the former detainee in front of his kids. It would seem if Obama has a problem with Guantanamo, it’s that illegal rendition and imprisonment is not extrajudicial enough.

Colo. College guest Donald Gregg: the man who hired the man who killed Che

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He administered OPERATION PHOENIX during the Vietnam War, the CIA counterinsurgency operation which sought to pacify Vietnam with the targeted assassination of thousands of potential insurgents. For Vice President George H. W. Bush’s office, he coordinated the funding of the illegal US covert war against Central America, aka, the IRAN-CONTRA scandal. Yes, he supervised both Felix Rodriguez and Luis Posada, each of CIA-state-sponsored-terrorism fame. But Colorado College introduced Donald P. Gregg only as former national security adviser and ambassador to Korea. And CC gave Gregg an honorary degree — with not a peep from the know-nothings they laud as their exemplary students.

I attended because I was insulted by the lecture’s title: “What do Ho Chi Minh, Saddam Hussein, and Kim Jung Il have in common?” the speaker further slandered the father of modern Vietnam by indulging to associate another villain to the list, that of Muammar al-Gaddafi. But gracefully Gregg acquitted himself by explaining that Ho Chi Minh had been misjudged, and thus perhaps there is call to engage even our most despicable adversaries in dialog, lest we repeat our mistaken policies, as Gregg believes we are doing in Afghanistan.

Not much objectionable with that. Actually, you can read Gregg’s address, it’s virtually word for word the introduction he wrote for a 2009 study of the CIA’s unheralded successes in Vietnam. To his credit, Gregg does not echo the ongoing theme that Vietnam was winnable.

Relating his more recent expertise about Korea, Gregg offers that Kim Jong Il is more than your common loon. Rather, Il is of unusually high intelligence, underrated by the US, driven despotic by his isolation.

Or driven mad by our offense, I’d add. I’m surprised Kim Jong Il tolerates that we name our ambassador in Seoul as the Ambassador to Korea, rather than to South Korea. How dare US-occupied Korea assert to represent the national identity of Korea? As in Vietnam, it’s the north doing the heavy lifting toward inevitable unification.

Gregg nearly had me convinced he was reformed until he added a forth bogeyman for comparison, Iran.

Iran mustn’t get nukes, etc, etc, Ahmadinejad unpredictable, can’t be trusted, etc.

Ho Chi Minh had been demonized Gregg said, based on a wrong-headed anti-Communist domino-theory mindset, yet Gregg is perfectly willing to be stuck to Capitalism’s current mindset against Islam.

Gregg made such winning arguments for tolerance, respect, diplomacy, and the integrity of the best intelligence officers, but isn’t that precisely the neo-liberal spiel? The CC audience lapped it up.

Here was the closest most of us will ever get to someone connected to the murder of Che Fucking Guevara, icon of the world struggle against Western oppression. That’s explaining the obvious, but I’d add, Che’s heroic stature is no more diminished even if only known as a t-shirt image to this crowd.

School-of-the-Americas-trained Rodriguez knew the stature of the hero he was cutting down, to this day he brags about wearing Che’s watch as a keepsake. Rodriguez returned from this assignment with a piece of notebook paper wrapped around the tobacco left in Guevara’s pipe.

Donald Gregg didn’t kill Guevara, but we might have asked him how many youthful Viet Cong he killed or had tortured, etc, how many aspiring Nicaraguan freedom fighters, or Burmese victims, or boys and girls of yet to be named regions, of the CIA’s yet unrevealed adventures in extrajudicial preemptive death-dealings.

All of this may be blood under the bridge, except that the undercurrent of this elder statesman’s lecture tour is beating the drum for confrontation with Iran.

Palin signed off on Giffords shooting, grizzly lipstick plot to direct gunmen

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Assassination checklist for Tea Party political opponentsAZ representative Gabrielle Giffords was one of twenty crosshairs on Sarah Palin’s checklist directing political assassinations.
 
Whether Jared Lee Loughner was a lone gunman, or in a TP or al-Qaeda cell, shouldn’t the DOJ investigate the grizzly mastermind who is inciting these acts? While they’re at it, Vice President Biden for illegally targeting Wikileaks’ Julian Assange, and Boss Obama who commands extrajudicial assassinations via military/CIA drones. If this was a GPS map of Pakistan the “unhinged shooters” would be Predator Drone operators.

Michael Moore tweeted these interesting links:

Dem Rep Giffords shot in head in Az. Sarah Palin had put CROSSHAIRS/ BULLSEYE on Giffords on her website! OUTRAGE!

When Rep Giffords voted in favor of health care bill, her office in Tucson was attacked & vandalized.

Palin “set gun sights on 20 Dems (including Giffords).” Palin site now seems 2 b 2 taking down crosshairs map!

In 2009, another gun nut showed up where Rep Giffords was speaking (at another Safeway) & dropped his gun

Giffords opponent held June event 2 “Shoot a Fully Automatic M16” to “Get on Target” & “Remove Gabrielle Giffords”

When Palin put crosshairs on a map w/ Rep. Giffords & 19 other Dem congressmen/women, she urged followers to “reload” & “aim” for Democrats.

Stunning admission by Tucson sheriff: Arizona “a mecca” of hate & bigotry which unhinges the unbalanced Wow.

Christina Green was the 9yr old killed. She was born on 9/11. Was on student council & only girl on baseball team.

If a Detroit Muslim put a map on the web w/crosshairs on 20 pols, then 1 of them got shot, where would he b sitting right now? Just asking.