Via Revolution

On February 23, 2012, the Illinois Appellate Court denied the appeal of the unjust conviction and vindictive sentencing of Gregory Koger for videotaping with an iPhone a public event at the Ethical Humanist Society of Chicago (EHSC). The court mandated that he serve out the rest of the time on the outrageous 300-day sentence. Now there needs to be a powerful outcry against this latest outrage that threatens to railroad Gregory to jail again.

African Americans have always been systematically associated with crime in America, as a means of making them outlaws in their own land. Since 9/11, Muslims have been systematically linked with terrorism, in an attempt to depict the entire group as a clear and present danger to the American state. It should come as no surprise, then, that the internal logic of a racist and repressive society leads the U.S. to place Black Muslims under extraordinary surveillance.

You can find a lot of Black Muslims in a place like Newark, New Jersey, which is why the New York City police have for years been sending undercover officers out of their jurisdiction to spy on Newark.

By Bill Quigley

Today US Army Private Bradley Manning is to be formally charged with numerous crimes at Fort Meade, Maryland.   Manning, who was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by members of the Icelandic Parliament, is charged with releasing hundreds of thousands of documents exposing secrets of the US government to the whistleblower website Wikileaks. These documents exposed lies, corruption and crimes by the US and other countries.  The Bradley Manning defense team points out accurately that much of what was published by Wikileaks was either not actually secret or should not have been secret.

One of the many businesses in Newark spied on by NYPD (photo from report released by AP)

By Kevin Gosztola

The New York Police Department (NYPD) built databases on Muslim-owned businesses and places of worship, according to a report from the Associated Press. The surveillance operation relied on ethnic profiling to produce demographic maps of Long Island, New York, and Newark, New Jersey. The Newark Police Department worked with the NYPD, but according to the AP, city’s mayor, Cory Booker, never was informed of the operation.

“Plainclothes officers from the NYPD’s Demographic Units” moved throughout Newark, took photos and eavesdropped on conversations. A 60-page report shows police specifically cataloged all the “Islamic Religious Institutions” in Newark. But, in the report, there is no mention of “terrorism or criminal behavior.”

by Glen Ford 

It is well known that the United States is the unchallenged leader in mass incarceration, and that nearly half of the 2.4 million inmates of the American Gulag are Black. Many in the Black Freedom Movement have long contended that mass Black incarceration, as practiced in the United States, fits the legal definition of genocide.

Others, because of fear or denial, insist on absolving the United States of the ultimate and ongoing crime of genocide. This is not a semantic question. The charge of genocide differs in international law from war crimes and crimes against peace, in that genocide can occur when a country is technically at peace with the rest of the world.

By Glenn Greenwald

CBS News‘ Scott Pelley appears to be one of the very few American journalists bothered by, or even interested in, the fact that President Obama has asserted and exercised the power to target U.S. citizens for execution-by-CIA without a shred of due process and far from any battlefield. It was Pelley who deftly interrogated the GOP presidential candidates at a November debate about the propriety of due-process-free assassinations, prompting Newt Gingrich, Mitt Romney, and Michele Bachmann to applaud President Obama for assassinating U.S. citizen Anwar Awlaki (just as Rick Perry, Dick and Liz Cheney, and Bill Kristol had done). Last night, Pelley did the same when he interviewed Defense Secretary and former CIA chief Leon Panetta on 60 Minutes. It’s well worth watching this three-minute clip because, although Panetta doesn’t say much that is new (he simply asserts the standard slogans and unproven assertions that Obama defenders on this topic always assert), watching a top Obama official, under decent questioning, defend the power to target U.S. citizens for assassination viscerally conveys the rigidly authoritarian mindset driving all of this:

via KFI AM, Los Angeles 

Joint military training exercises will be held evenings in downtown Los Angeles through Thursday, according to the Los Angeles Police Department.

The LAPD will be providing support for the exercises, which will also be held in other portions of the greater Los Angeles area, police said. 

by Glenn Greenwald 

Condemnation of President Obama is intense, and growing, as a result of his announced intent to sign into law the indefinite detention bill embedded in the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA).

By Dennis Loo  

Read more...