From [HERE] Barack Obama has agreed to preserve the Senate’s landmark investigation into the CIA’s use of torture after 9/11, but his decision ensures that the document remains out of public view for at least 12 years and probably longer.
Obama’s decision, revealed in a letter from White House counsel W Neil Eggleston, prevents Republican Richard Burr, the Senate intelligence committee chairman who has been highly critical of the investigation, from destroying existing classified copies of the December 2014 report.
Daniel Jones, a former committee staffer who led the torture inquiry, criticized the preservation as inadequate.
“The bar for positive White House action on this is incredibly low. Preserving the full 6,700-page report under the Presidential Records Act only ensures the report will not be destroyed,” Jones said. “It does little else.”
The full Senate torture report, which documented brutality by the CIA against at least 119 detained terrorism suspects, will be held out of public view at Obama’s presidential library.
Democrat Dianne Feinstein of California, Burr’s predecessor as chair and now the vice-chair of the Senate intelligence committee, said on Monday she was “pleased” Obama had placed the inquiry she spearheaded into his presidential record. Feinstein noted the document would “one day be available for declassification”.
But that day, according to secrecy and intelligence experts, is a long way off.
Eggleston wrote to Feinstein on Friday that the classified version of the report, over 6,700 pages in length, will remain restricted under a legal provision, the Presidential Records Act, for 12 years.
“At this time, we are not pursuing declassification,” Eggleston wrote.
Under the act, the Senate torture report will be exempt from the Freedom of Information Act for a full 12 years. But expiration of the provision afterward does not mean that disclosure will necessarily follow.
From [HERE] and [HERE] The 325,000 residents of Corpus Christi, Texas, face a water shortage after the city’s utility infrastructure was contaminated with an industrial chemical Wednesday night.
The city told residents their tap water was contaminated by a “back-flow incident” in the industrial district, which allowed a chemical into the utility system. It told residents to stop using tap water for virtually anything, “until further notice.”
It said to use bottled water for “beverage and food preparation … making ice, brushing teeth, washing dishes or clothes, washing hands, and bathing.”
Stores ran out of bottled water “within an hour of the city’s announcement,” the Corpus Christi Caller-Times reported Thursday.
Corpus Christi is 54% Latino and is ranked as the second least literate city in the U.S. [MORE]
Stores quickly raised prices of bottled water.
A Stripes gas station was charging $26.16 for a pack of 24 Nestle water bottles, according to a receipt from a “friend’s friend” posted on Facebook by a city resident.
The contamination was caused by 3 to 24 gallons of Indulin AA86, an asphalt emulsifier made by Valero in Corpus Christi, according to the Caller-Times.
Valero told the newspaper that though the contamination happened at its plant, it was caused by “third party operations” near the facility.
Indulin AA86 is considered hazardous by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.
It can burn the eyes and skin and damage the digestive system, including the gastrointestinal tract, though there are no known chronic health effects from contact with it.
The city said it was advising the measures “in an abundance of caution until we can investigate further and have the water tested.”
The Corpus Christi Caller-Times ( http://bit.ly/2hE1UHn ) reports more than half a dozen lawsuits have been filed against Ergon Asphalt and Emulsion Inc. and Valero since city officials alerted residents to the leak late Wednesday.
Ergon spokesman Bill Miller says the company's been leasing the plant for its manufacturing purposes and Valero owns the plant.
Miller declined comment on the lawsuits. Valero officials say it's not the contamination source.
The suits similarly allege Valero and Ergon of exposing unsuspecting business owners and residents to toxic chemicals and forcing businesses to close or struggle to stay open.
State Rep. Todd Hunter, R-Corpus Christi, told the Caller-Times that the city is in “regular contact” with the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality.
The TCEQ will investigate, in conjunction with the city, the State Operations Center, the Health and Human Services Commission and the U.S. EPA Region 6. Corpus Christi, on the Gulf of Mexico, is home of the fifth-largest port in the United States and is the eighth-largest city in Texas.
From [HERE] Michigan must continue delivering bottled water to Flint residents pending its appeal of an order requiring it to do so until it verifies residents’ water filters are working correctly, the Sixth Circuit ruled.
In November, a federal judge ordered the state to deliver four cases of bottled water per week to every Flint household, until officials verify the home has a properly functioning water filter on their kitchen faucet.
A divided Sixth Circuit upheld that decision Friday, finding the state’s claim that bottled water delivery would cost $10.5 million a month and bankrupt the city is “disingenuous.”
“According to the state defendants, the cost of verifying the proper installation and maintenance of water filters is $955,971. The cost of verifying and maintaining water filters and delivering bottled water to residents that are not part of the allegedly 96 percent of homes that already have a functioning water filter is nowhere near $10.5 million,” the per curiam order says.
The order was filed by U.S. Circuit Judges Damon Keith and Bernice Donald. Both are black Democratic appointees.
Without this injunction, the two-judge majority said it is unclear how the state planned to ensure Flint residents have access to safe drinking water.
From [HERE] and [HERE] Dylann S. Roof, so-called self-radicalized racist who killed nine black parishioners last year when he opened fire during a long-planned assault on Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, was found guilty by a federal jury after an uncontested trial here on Thursday.
Mr. Roof, 22, stood, his hands at his side and his face emotionless, as a clerk read the verdict aloud in Federal District Court, where he had been charged with 33 counts, including hate crimes resulting in death.
Mr. Roof, whose lawyers conceded his guilt, will face the same jurors when they gather on Jan. 3 to decide whether he will be sentenced to death or life in prison without parole. The jury deliberated for only about two hours on Thursday afternoon. The jury was made up of nine whites and three blacks. [MORE]
The outcome seemed a foregone conclusion from the first minutes of the trial, which began on Dec. 7 and included a swift acknowledgment from the chief defense lawyer, David I. Bruck, that Mr. Roof was responsible for the “astonishing, horrible attack” on June 17, 2015.
Mr. Roof had confessed to investigators nearly 18 months earlier and revealed his purpose in his so-called blatantly racist manifesto that he allegedly published online. His choice of targets seemed intensely premeditated — according to the "manifesto" he scouted the church half a dozen times — although he also researched other black churches and a festival elsewhere in South Carolina before settling on Charleston because, he wrote, it is the “most historic city in my state.” However, he neglected to premeditate any get-away plan and planned to get caught.
Prosecutors and defense lawyers agreed on the basic contours of Mr. Roof’s march toward racial animosity. He belonged to no hate groups and acted alone in Charleston, but they said he had been an avid consumer of racist materials online.
“You can easily give him way too much credit for thinking of this stuff if you don’t see where it came from,” Mr. Bruck said of Mr. Roof, who had declared in his writings that he had not been “raised in a racist home or environment.”
In a 53-minute closing argument, an assistant United States attorney, Nathan S. Williams, depicted Mr. Roof as “a man of hatred, a man who’s proven to be a coward and a man of immense racial ignorance.”
The prosecutor’s voice often rose in outrage, and the jurors were again shown photographs of the carnage Mr. Roof left behind: blood, bodies, and bullet-scarred tables. “He must be held accountable for each and every action he took in that church,” Mr. Williams urged.
Mr. Roof has said he intends to represent himself during the penalty phase, so Mr. Bruck, as he has done throughout the trial, did his best on Thursday to suggest that his client was unstable, and thus not fully accountable.
Mr. Bruck, who called no witnesses, peppered his closing argument with words like “abnormal,” “delusional,” and “suicidal.” Mr. Roof told the F.B.I. in a confession shortly after being arrested that he had saved ammunition to kill himself if, as he expected, he confronted the police when he left Emanuel.
The government's tale went as follows,
The Wednesday night assault on the oldest A.M.E. congregation in the South began less than an hour after Mr. Roof entered through an unlocked side door and took a seat at a weekly Bible study meeting. The congregants, including the church’s pastor, the Rev. Clementa C. Pinckney, were studying the parable of the sower. When the congregants closed their eyes for a familiar benediction, the sound of gunfire roared through the fellowship hall.
When they looked up, they saw Mr. Roof holding a semiautomatic pistol he had bought about two months earlier and concealed in a pack on his waist. Mr. Pinckney was the first wounded, and the churchgoers began diving below the room’s circular tables. Mr. Roof kept firing, striking the victims at least 60 times. One photo showed a table bearing an opened Bible, a study sheet and an empty magazine.
The three survivors were Ms. Sanders, Ms. Sheppard and Ms. Sanders’s 11-year-old granddaughter. During turns on the witness stand, Ms. Sanders and Ms. Sheppard described the havoc that turned a house of worship into a blood-soaked scene.
Ms. Sheppard told jurors that Mr. Roof had approached her and asked whether she was wounded. She was not. “I’m going to leave you to tell the story,” Mr. Roof replied, according to Ms. Sheppard.
Mr. Roof was arrested the next morning in Shelby, N.C., where F.B.I. agents questioned him for about two hours and began to piece together his descent into racist thinking and how, over the course of six months, he planned his assault.
But before Mr. Roof spoke of his beliefs, which he had detailed in a handwritten journal and an online manifesto, he admitted to the attack. “I did it,” Mr. Roof said. The manifesto was never updated and appears to be written by multiple authors. [MORE]
The confession served as the centerpiece of the prosecution’s case. Prosecutors also introduced an array of technical evidence, such as phone records and GPS data, to demonstrate Mr. Roof’s premeditation and document his views on race.
The trial featured six days of testimony from 30 prosecution witnesses, including a recorded confession and excerpts from Roof's journal, and it painted a picture of a young man filled with racial hatred who spent months planning to murder black people.
No one testified on behalf of Roof. Apparently, Mr. Roof's defense lawyer did not make a single objection during the entire "trial."
During closing argument Roof's attorney argued Roof was a suicidal, impressionable loner who never grasped the gravity of what he did. However, if his defense attorney wanted to mitigate or minimize Roof's criminal responsibility for the murders it could have offered expert testimony or other evidence to explain the undue influence older adults or racist materials had upon Roof. With no apparent defense strategy, Roof could have also changed his plea from "not guilty" to guilty prior to trial. The trial seem to serve no purpose for Roof. If he intended to do a "slow plea" in front of the jury then Roof could have testified to explain himself. But he didn't.
Defense attorney David Bruck conceded in his closing argument Thursday that Roof killed the victims and even praised the FBI investigation.
Due to the contrived nature of the evidence (immediate, volunteered full confession, murder plans journal, unauthenticated facebook page, a familiar, convenient narrative, immaculately planned murders without a get-away-plan, etc) many believe that the entire episode was a false flag operation conducted by the government [public servants (police) murder Black people all the time. The generic narrative keeps people polarized, misdirected and fearful]. This uncontested trial will probably do little to dispel many of the false flag theories out there.
As explained by Dr. Blynd: Massa'bating- the practice of a native Black American "coming" to terms with his or her Negrohood—or sell-out status—by mechanically stroking the pulsating ego of the massa' and then jacking into the Matrix for his sole gratification, i.e., the continuance of global racism white supremacy. A male massa'bator cannot possibly be self-respecting as long as he is self-erecting the edifice of oppression through the self-protection of historical amnesia—forgetting where he has "come" from. [MORE]
In case you forgot about this mf, happy to be labelled a "Trump surrogate," good ole' Pastor Massa'bator here was last seen hollering and singing at the Republic convention this summer. This fat mf is a complete lunchbox. On Sunday after getting called nigger by one of his white viewers on his own call in show, "the Colors That Unite," he explained that "racism is racism despite the color of the skin of the person who is saying it." He suggested for the racist viewer to go pray to [white] Jesus, son of [the white] God that he [Burns] worships. Like his masters, he is also a pathological liar. [see video at bottom of post]
lol. This SNigger, surrogate for white supremacy has executed his programming well. Racists like to use the terms "racist" and "racists" and racism interchangeably or confusingly with what is really bigotry or just name calling. However, to be a racist is to be an "upholder, supporter and perpetrator of the institution of the White Supremacy Dynamic in a system of oppression (structured and perpetuated injustice—racism." Here, his white audience member was a racist.
There is no system of Black supremacy. White supremacyis the only functioning form of racism there is- as there is no place in the world where non-whites dominate whites or are operationally or functionally superior to white people in all areas of people activity. 'Everywhere one finds Whites and Blacks in close proximity to each other, whether it is Chicago or Zimbabwe, the Whites are in control. This extraordinary universal phenomenon which defies every known statistical law of probability is rarely questioned (90% of the world is non-white)'. [MORE]
In a system of white supremacy/racism non-whites cannot be racist to whites b/c they have no power to do so. It is a white over Black system of vast unequal power by design.
"Q: Are you saying blacks cannot be racist toward whites?
A: That’s correct. Of course, all people can be hateful or prejudiced. Those terms describe individual behaviors, not systematic power. Racism is the COLLECTIVE behaviors of a group. A white individual within a system of racism/white supremacy has the implicit or explicit support of that system IF they choose to practice racism.
If a poor man robs a rich man at gunpoint that doesn’t mean the poor man is more powerful (economically and politically) than the rich man. The poor man is an individual who committed a crime of opportunity. There are no powerful institutions or systems that support his right to rob the rich man, but there are institutions and systems that allow the rich man to rob the poor man - which is why he doesn’t need a gun to do it.
A black person who mistreats a white person doesn’t mean black people are more powerful (economically and politically) than white people. Never confuse the actions of a black individual (or a group of black individuals) that mistreats someone white as proof that black racism exists. Their “power” is limited ONLY to what they can do as individuals. There are NO black institutions or systems that support, defend, or finance the right of blacks to mistreat whites.
There are NO black individuals or black organizations that have the power to strip whites of their collective right to live where they want, work where they want, get an education wherever they want, or control what white people do collectively in ANY area of human activity. There are NO black institutions that are more powerful than white institutions. Therefore, blacks do not have the COLLECTIVE POWER to diminish the quality of life for the white collective.
Q: What is collective power?
A: Collective power is the institutions and systems that benefit one group at the expense of another group, and allow one group to dominate another group in all areas of human activity.
For example, when a white policeman shoots an unarmed black man, his fellow officers, the police chief, internal affairs, the union, the media, the prosecutor, the judge, and the jury will support, defend, and finance that white police officer’s “right” to shoot (murder) an unarmed black person. That is white collective power.
It is rare for a white police officer to be punished for using excessive force against a black man, woman, or child. It is just as rare for a black police officer to use excessive force against a white person.
In fact, the authors were unable to find a single instance of a black police officer shooting or killing an unarmed white person in the history of modern law enforcement. This is not surprising but it is absolute proof that the black individual operating within a system of white supremacy cannot mistreat whites even if he or she is wearing a uniform, a badge, and carrying a gun.
This does not mean blacks are less likely to abuse power than whites if given the opportunity. It means blacks cannot abuse power that does not exist." [MORE]
From [HERE] Seattle’s political leaders are looking to shake free of Wells Fargo in protest of the bank’s financing of the Dakota Access Pipeline project that threatens to foul the water supply and sacred lands of North Dakota’s Standing Rock Sioux.
The city will be stuck with the megabank for at least another year. But under legislation introduced Monday by Councilwoman Kshama Sawant, it would take its business elsewhere once Wells Fargo’s current contract to manage $3 billion in city funds expires next December.
Wells Fargo is one of two American banking titans that is directly lending to Dakota Access LLC. It has given the companies involved in the project close to half a billion dollars in funding, much of it in the form of direct project loans for the pipeline. Citibank has chipped in another $527 million, according to Food & Water Watch.
The protesters recently won a partial, temporary victory when the Army Corps of Engineers decided not to approve the next phase of the pipeline’s planned route earlier this month. But the fight in North Dakota is ongoing and protesters have not decamped. Seattle and other public institutions should support the protests with their dollars, Sawant said in a blog post announcing the legislation.
“Elected officials nationwide owe it to the activists to stand with them. One clear way this City Council can do that is by divesting the City of Seattle from Wells Fargo,” the outspoken socialist wrote. “The pipeline executives have arrogantly announced they intend to wait until Trump comes to power, with the hope that his new administration will reverse the Army Corps’ decision. By urgently taking steps to divest from Wells Fargo, starting today, our city will have taken an important step against Trump’s agenda.”
While Seattle can’t break the contract by which Wells Fargo manages its operating fund, the bill introduced Monday would prevent the city from giving the bank additional business in the final 12 months of that deal.
It’s not as severe a ding to the bank’s bottom line as California’s decision in September to cut Wells Fargo out of the state’s massive municipal bonds market, which is expected to cost the bank millions in fee income. But where California’s move was spurred by revelations that the bank had serially defrauded retail banking customers thanks to a corner-cutting sales culture, Seattle’s stiff-arm marks the first major attempt to rap the bank’s knuckles over its pipeline financing. [MORE]
From [HERE] A surviving relative of two Yemeni men killed by Hellfire missiles fired from a U.S. drone made a rare appearance Tuesday at the D.C. Circuit to fight for an apology from the government.
The wrongful-death case brought by Faisal bin Ali Jaber, a Yemeni engineer who described the reality of living under the U.S. drone program as “a living hell,” marks the first time a U.S. court has granted a civilian drone victim a hearing.
Ali Jaber lost his brother-in-law Salem bin Ali Jaber – an imam who regularly preached against al-Qaida in his sermons – and his 26-year-old nephew Waleed bin Ali Jaber, a local traffic cop, after a U.S. drone strike exploded near a local mosque in Hadramout in eastern Yemen in 2012. The strike also killed three unknown youths.
“The three youths — the presumed intended targets of the strike — were not high-ranking members of a terrorist organization, nor did they pose a threat — imminent or otherwise—to the lives of any Americans,” Ali Jaber’s appeals brief states.
Last year, Ali Jaber sued President Barack Obama, former Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta and former CIA Director David Petraeus not for monetary damages, but for an apology and explanation of why his relatives were killed.
“This is a really important action for this court,” Ali Jaber’s attorney Jeffrey Robinson said to the D.C. Circuit’s three-judge panel Tuesday morning.
Robinson called on the court to decide whether it will be held hostage to the political-question doctrine that prevents courts from interfering in executive policymaking – one of the primary reasons cited by U.S. District Judge Ellen Huvelle for dismissing the lawsuit back in March.
File Under Massa'bating. Sugah RayRay in Charge of Financials, thank you satan! who will he promote next? Jim Who? Go away old man.
sniggering - 1) the modus vivendi of opportunist (sell-out) compromises. 2) the actions of SNiggers. (See Coin-Operated). [From Funktionary by Dr. Blynd]
Sunday, December 18, 2016 at 01:05AM 
