District Attorney: California Should Reduce ‘Needlessly Harsh Penalties’ For Drug Crimes

ThinkProgress

California leaders reached a deal last week to make court-ordered prison population provisions not by releasing any prisoners, but by pleading again for a time extension or sending prisoners to private and out-of-state facilities. But San Francisco’s top prosecutor has another vision for easing overcrowding: reform drug sentences.

“In my three decades in law enforcement, I have watched as needlessly harsh penalties have overcrowded our prisons, bankrupted our state, and fed a costly and unnecessary cycle of crime,” San Francisco District Attorney George Gascón wrote in an op-ed last week, citing similar comments by U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder weeks earlier. To end that cycle, he writes, California needs to replace incarceration with rehabilitation and other public health fixes.

Gascón crunches the numbers and concludes that the state could reduce its prison population by the court-ordered 10,000 inmates with programs it already has in place, particularly an “earned credits” program which enables those who have proven themselves to be low-risk or moving toward rehabilitation to either be released, or to be transferred to other intermediary programs such as community correctional facilities, rehabilitation programs, and “conservation” and “fire camps” where inmates take part in extinguishing fires.

But Gascón also says California could reduce its prison population by at least 4,100 and save $210 million by changing drug possession for personal use from a felony to a misdemeanor, as 13 other states have done. A bill to achieve just that died in the state legislature last year. But another moderated version of that proposal is now awaiting Gov. Jerry Brown’s signature. SB 649 would give prosecutors the discretion to charge personal drug possession cases that are now classified as felonies as either a misdemeanor or a felony. Misdemeanor offenses carry a year in county jail, rather than three in state prison. A similar law that makes drug possession what is known as a “wobbler” offense now applies to methamphetamine possession in California, and marijuana possession is already decriminalized. This law would make possession of cocaine, heroine, and other hard drugs also “wobbler” offenses.

This bill would still mean some possession offenses are charged as felonies, and would leave the discretion to decide in the hands of prosecutors rather than judges. It would also have less immediate effect on California’s prison overcrowding problem, since it would only apply to future offenses. But it would stem the flow of inmates going forward, which will be necessary to keep overpopulation down, especially if federal judges give California the time extension they seek to reduce their population. Courts have thus far rebuffed Gov. Brown’s insistence that California has reduced overcrowding enough. Early results from another California sentencing reform law passed by ballot initiative earlier this year show that releasing low-risk inmates has already improved the lives of many offenders, while posing very little risk to public safety.

What You Need To Know Before This Week’s House Vote On Food Stamps

ThinkProgress

House Republicans plan to vote Wednesday on the Nutrition Reform and Work Opportunity Act, the remaining half of the policy traditionally referred to as the farm bill that would deal with the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, otherwise known as food stamps). The House passed the portion that relates more directly to agriculture in July.

Here’s what you need to know about how this week’s action in the House will affect hunger and poverty in America.

What changes are Republicans proposing for food assistance programs? The bill scheduled for a Wednesday vote cuts $40 billion from food stamps over the coming decade. While that is just a 5.2 percent reduction from what the program is projected to spend under current rules, it would affect millions of the most vulnerable people in the country. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) estimates between 4 and 6 million people would lose their food assistance benefits under the proposal. The text of the bill hasn’t been released, but it will reportedly derive its cuts from the same sorts of changes to eligibility that were proposed by House conservatives earlier this summer. Those include both a more extreme version of the Senate’s changes to the application process for food stamps and work requirements provisions that doomed the original House farm bill last time. At present, families who are enrolled in other forms of federal assistance such as heating oil vouchers can enroll more easily in SNAP, but the House bill would end that streamlined process. Conservatives argue that tighter restrictions are necessary due to fraud and waste in food stamps, but food stamp audits routinely show that the program wastes less money and is less vulnerable to fraud than the crop insurance system those same conservatives reauthorized in July.

Where will the 6 million people who lose nutritional assistance turn for food? Private charities say they will not be able to pick up the slack House conservatives intend to create with the $40 billion cut to food stamps. Food banks and soup kitchens are already stretched beyond their capacity by unusually high poverty and unemployment in the wake of the Great Recession. It is therefore highly likely that hunger will become more common in America than it already is. Currently one in seven families – totaling 49 million people, 8 million of whom are children – face food insecurity. Child hunger is already so common that three in four teachers report that their students show up to class hungry on a regular basis.

What would SNAP cuts mean for the economy? Hunger among students reduces educational attainment, which comes with long-term costs for the country that likely exceed the short-term savings conservatives seek from food assistance programs. Furthermore, the SNAP program is one of the most efficient forms of economic stimulus the government can employ. The program returns close to $2 of economic activity for every dollar spent. Cutting the program is therefore likely to create a drag on the recovery. In 2011 alone, the program lifted nearly 5 million people out of poverty.

Why weren’t food stamps handled along with the rest of the farm bill this summer? Prior to this summer, nutrition programs had always been wrapped up with agricultural programs in the farm bill. Some lawmakers refer to the nutrition matters as the “nutrition title,” since it has traditionally been a section of the farm bill rather than a standalone law. House leaders effectively doomed the decades-long marriage of agriculture and nutrition policy in June when they endorsed an amendment attaching harmful, redundant work requirements to SNAP. The amendment doomed Democratic support yet also failed to secure enough Republican votes for final passage of the farm bill. Rather than try to re-craft a farm bill that could win majority support, Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) and Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-OH) opted to split the nutrition and agricultural portions into separate legislation.

What happens next? Once the House passes a nutrition bill, the two House bills and the Senate farm bill will have to be reconciled. Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-MI), who chairs the Agriculture Committee in the upper chamber, has warned that the House’s split approach to the farm bill threatens to undermine the whole of American food policy. The Senate has passed a farm bill that cuts $4 billion, or 0.5 percent, from the food stamps budget over a decade. Those cuts will form one anchor to any reconciliation process between the two legislative bodies, and the House legislation will form the other. Meanwhile, there are already automatic cuts coming to the program in November when a Recovery Act provision expires.

Alabama Supreme Court says Juveniles can get life sentence (white supremacy requires a high number of non-whites to be incarcerated)

Sentencing Law

As reported in this effective local article, headlined "Alabama Supreme Court sets out how juvenile killers are to be sentenced," yesterday brought a major state court ruling on how juvenile murderers must be dealt with in the wake of the Supreme Court's Miller ruling.  Here are the basics via the news report:

The Alabama Supreme Court [has] issued a ruling that says state judges can give juvenile killers sentences of life with the possibility of parole under Alabama's current capital punishment law.  The court also set out 14 factors judges could use in determining whether to sentence a juvenile convicted of a capital crime to life with or without the possibility of parole.

"This is a great result for the state and its justice system," Alabama Attorney General Luther Strange said in a statement issued this afternoon. "The Court has unanimously agreed with our position that prosecutors can try juveniles for capital murder and seek sentences of life without parole in appropriate cases. This gives prosecutors and judges clarity going forward, and it eliminates the limbo that victims' families have been dealing with in recent months."

The court's ruling came in response to requests by two teens charged with capital murder in two Jefferson Count cases who sought to have their capital-murder indictments dismissed because of a ruling last year by the U.S. Supreme Court.  Judges have had two options to sentence people under Alabama's capital punishment law -- death or life without the possibility of parole....

A bill had been presented this spring in the Alabama Legislature.  That bill called for giving judges the option of a life sentence with one chance at parole after 40 years.  Legislators, however, did not enact that bill before their session ended May 20.

Meanwhile attorneys for the two Jefferson County teens -- Rashad Stoves and Larry Henderson -- had argued before the Alabama Supreme Court to overturn circuit court judges rulings in their cases to dismiss the capital murder indictments pending against them because the courts did not yet have a new law in place....

"What they've done is legislate from the bench," Wendell Sheffield, an attorney for Stoves said this morning of the Alabama Supreme Court's ruling. "They are saying it is within their equitable powers ... They've taken an unconstitutional statute and have attempted to make it constitutional." Sheffield and law partner John Lentine said at this point they are reviewing the court's decision in depth and will decide whether to take the case further.

In its ruling, the court stated that it had the right to delete the portion of the law struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court.  The Alabama justices stated that the U.S. Supreme Court did not give guidance on what factors judges should use in sentencing. "It is well settled that should a statute become invalid or unconstitutional in part, the part that is valid will be sustained where it can be separated from that part that is void," the court ruled....

The Alabama justices stated that with their ruling juveniles now will know that, if convicted, they face a sentence of life imprisonment without the possibility of parole as a "ceiling" and life with the possibility of parole as the "floor."  To help judges decide whether the sentences should be life with or without parole, the Alabama Supreme Court set out 14 factors the judges should use based on a Pennsylvania court ruling....

Sheffield and Lentine also said that it appears from the ruling that the juvenile sentencing will be done by the trial judge, without a jury's recommendation.  In capital cases involving adults in which the death penalty is an option, juries are asked to make a recommendation.

Today's ruling also will be of interest to a number of people already serving life without the possibility of parole sentences in Alabama who were considered juveniles when the crime occurred. Some of those prisoners have already filed appeals seeking to be have their sentences changed in light of last year's U.S. Supreme Court ruling.

The unanimous 50+ page opinion from the Alabama Supreme Court is available at this link, and here is its critical closing paragraph discussing the factors that are now to be considered by Alabama sentencing judges in juve murder cases: [MORE]

What Is The Role Of Jails In Treating The Mentally Ill? (the refinement of white supremacy)

The refinement of white supremacy [HERE] 

NPR

The county's Twin Towers Correctional Facility in downtown Los Angeles is a hulking, massive concrete structure. It is also part of the largest municipal jail system in the United States.

On a recent day, four men enter handcuffed with a police escort. The sheriff's deputies assign them cells, and for the duration of their sentences, this is home. The men wear bright blue pants and neon yellow shirts to set them apart from other inmates.

"Here within Twin Towers, we house approximately 3,900 inmates. A majority of those inmates are deemed mentally ill," says Lt. Joseph Badali, a supervisor with the Sheriff's Department.

The United States incarcerates hundreds of thousands of inmates suffering from mental illness, and jails and prisons are struggling to provide for inmates with severe mental health needs.

Los Angeles County is even exploring building a new jail specifically to house and provide treatment for mentally ill inmates. The proposal is estimated to cost more than $1 billion.

Prison Or Hospital?

L.A. County is not unique. In fact, it is far from it. Experts say good numbers are hard to come by, but one estimate calculates there are about 2.1 million annual bookings of persons with serious mental illnesses into jails. That number swells when you count state and federal prisons.

At one time, huge state hospitals housed the mentally ill. When they closed in the 1970s, community-based care was supposed to step in. Instead, with fewer options, the mentally ill were released to the streets, where they often got into trouble. Jails have to take mentally ill offenders in, but they can't force medication.

AP: The NYPD 'Less Transparent' Than CIA, FBI And NSA When It Comes To FOI Requests

BlackListedNews

According to the investigative journalists Matt Apuzzo and Adam Goldman, the entity most reluctant to part ways with information isn't any of the expected national intelligence agencies. No, the entity least likely to kick loose a response to a FOI request is none other than the NYPD.

Pentagon Poised for $13 Billion in Mideast Arms Sales

DefenseNews

The Pentagon has notified Congress of US $13 billion in prospective Middle East arms deals over the past 10 weeks, with Saudi Arabia and Iraq leading the administration’s summertime manifest with $10 billion in pre-approved sales of defense equipment and services.

Since mid-June, the Pentagon’s Defense Security Cooperation Agency (DSCA) informed Congress of $6.4 billion in potential defense trade with Saudi Arabia, including a $4 billion National Guard modernization program, new Mark V patrol boats and follow-on support for the Royal Saudi Air Force.

In Iraq, DSCS notified Congress of $4.7 billion in possible sales, including a $2.4 billion integrated air defense system and $900 million worth of Stryker vehicles configured for nonconventional warfare scenarios.

During the same period, it informed Congress of a potential $1.1 billion early warning radar deal to Qatar; a $588 million package of C-130J airlifters to Libya and $200 million to support Kuwait’s fleet of F/A-18 fighters.

All the prospective deals, according to DSCA, advance US foreign policy and national security interests and would “not alter the basic military balance in the region.”

In a region recoiling from one of the bloodiest summers in recent memory, the prospective US arms sales aim to bolster US-friendly regimes against the looming Iranian nuclear threat as well as terror and sectarian insurgencies that threaten regional stability, said Ed Ross, a former DSCA director of operations.

State Colleges Giving Wealthy White Kids More Financial Aid Than Poor Kids

Alternet

Public colleges and universities were generally founded and funded to give students in their states access to an affordable college education. They have long served as a vital pathway for students from modest means and those who are the first in their families to attend college.

But many public universities, faced with their own financial shortfalls, are increasingly leaving low-income students behind — including strivers like Epps.

It’s not just that colleges are continuously pushing up sticker prices. Public universities have also been shifting their aid, giving less to the poorest students and more to the wealthiest.

A ProPublica analysis of new data from the U.S. Department of Education shows that from 1996 through 2012, public colleges and universities gave a declining portion of grants — as measured by both the number of grants and the dollar amounts — to students in the lowest quartile of family income. That trend has continued even though the recession hit those in lower income brackets the hardest.

Nigerian community rejects Shell oil spill compensation offer

Aljazeera 

Members of Nigeria’s Bodo community in the oil-rich Niger Delta have rejected what their lawyers say is an insulting compensation offer from Shell for two oil spills in 2008 that devastated the fishing community’s surrounding mangroves and waters.

Sources familiar with the talks said Shell proposed a settlement of 7.5 billion naira, about $46 million. But Martyn Day, senior partner at the London-based law firm Leigh Day that represented Bodo residents in the talks, said each villager would end up with just 275,000 naira ($1,700) after subtracting a lump sum to be paid to the community.

About 13,000 fishermen lost their livelihoods because of the spills, and 31,000 inhabitants of 35 villages were affected in and around the Bodo lagoon and its associated waterways, according to Leigh Day. Independent experts estimate between 500,000 and 600,000 barrels were spilled, devastating the environment and contaminating about 30 square miles of mangroves, swamps and channels, the law firm said.

This is the latest setback in talks between the Dutch oil company and the 31,000 inhabitants of the area.  Shell acknowledged liability for the spills five years ago, but it disputes the amount spilled and the impact on the community. It offered a much-lower settlement, which was also rejected, in 2009.

“We told them in 2009 and we tell them again now, the people of Bodo are a proud and fiercely determined community,” said Chief Kogbara, a village leader.  “Our habitat and income have been destroyed by Shell oil. The claim against Shell will not resolve until they recognize this and pay us fully and fairly for what they have done."

Shell has said a joint investigation team estimated that only 4,100 barrels were spilled.  Shell blames most of the spills in the region on armed fighter attacks and thieves tapping into pipelines to steal crude oil.

The Bodo members unanimously rejected the offer from the oil giant after talks that started Monday in Port Harcourt, the London-based Leigh Day law firm said in a news release.

"Our clients know how much their claims are worth and will not be bought off cheaply," said Martyn Day, senior partner at Leigh Day. "The settlement figures ... are totally derisory and insulting to these villagers." 

Though an agreement was not reached, both Shell and Leigh Day said that talks between the community and company to start a cleanup are progressing and will continue in late September.

Online petition draws attention to Florida school named after first KKK Grand Wizard

Rt

An online petition with more than 78,000 signatures requests a reconsideration of the name of a Florida high school christened after the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.

Nathan Bedford Forrest High School, of the Duval County School District in Jacksonville, opened in 1959 and was named after the Confederate Army Lieutenant General during the Civil War who joined the KKK around early 1867.

Forrest was reportedly the first KKK Grand Wizard for a term of roughly two years. He disbanded the first incarnation of the KKK in 1869 and distanced himself from the group in the ensuing years.

Though the Change.org petition has gained nationwide attention, the Duval County School Board has final say on any name change.

Five years ago, the county school board voted 5-2 to keep the name, though the board contains all new members, the petition states. 

Insofar as the NSA is concerned you are an adversary

AnewDomain

The latest revelations regarding the NSA snoops were not totally unexpected. A backdoor to Windows? Everyone knew there was one. People just needed confirmation. Cracking codes? Well, it was always assumed that is what the National Security Administration (NSA) was supposed to do.

But the NSA showing an apparent deep hatred and resentment of the American public as a whole? That is not only a surprise. It’s inexcusable. And perverse.

What I’m referring to here is the NSA’s use of the word “adversaries” to describe people and institutions who use any sort of encryption to protect information that is important to them. This includes banking records, other financial records, medical records, private discussions, chat and more. All done by law-abiding Americans.

Here is a snippet from the Guardian story covering this.

Among other things, the program is designed to ‘insert vulnerabilities into commercial encryption systems.’ These would be known to the NSA, but to no one else, including ordinary customers, who are tellingly referred to in the document as ‘adversaries.’

(The document reads:) ’These design changes make the systems in question exploitable through Sigint collection … with foreknowledge of the modification. To the consumer and other adversaries, however, the systems’ security remains intact.’ “

This is a non-trivial comment. It’s not minor. It’s not semantics. Insofar as the NSA is concerned you are an adversary. Let’s look at the definition of the word:

Adversary: NOUN: pl. ad•ver•sar•ies
1. An opponent; an enemy.
2. Adversary The Devil; Satan. Often used with ‘The.’ “

Report: NSA can tap smartphone data

TheHill

The National Security Agency can access data from smartphones previously thought to be secure

The German weekly said it viewed top-secret NSA documents that suggest spying on smartphones is not widespread.

Those documents, however, reportedly show that the NSA can tap into Apple iPhones, BlackBerry devices and phones using Google’s Android operating system to access contact lists, SMS traffic, notes and location information.

NSA has set up working groups to deal with each operating system, Der Spiegel reported.

“It is not for us to comment on media reports regarding alleged government surveillance of telecommunications traffic," BlackBerry officials told Der Spiegel, adding that the company had not programmed a "'back door' pipeline to our platform."

The report did not say whether Der Spiegel obtained the documents from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

Citing documents leaked by Snowden, The New York Times, The Guardian and ProPublica reported late last week that the NSA has successfully cracked many of the tools that people use to protect the privacy of their online communications.

The news outlets reported that the spy agency has waged a secret campaign for years to undermine security measures and privacy tools using supercomputers, sophisticated hackers, collaboration from technology companies and a covert project to build vulnerabilities into security tools, according to the news organizations.

Read more: http://thehill.com/blogs/hillicon-valley/technology/320871-report-nsa-can-tap-smartphone-data#ixzz2epZ9kAJY 

Virginia takes a stand against solitary confinement

Washpost

SOLITARY CONFINEMENT is one of the cruelest fates that can befall a prisoner — so cruel, in fact, that the Supreme Court nearly declared it unconstitutional in 1890. Unfortunately, this particular punishment has remained a bitter reality of the U.S. correctional justice system in the century that’s followed, eliciting continual outrage from advocacy groups and inmates alike.

Locked in concrete cells without sunlight or human contact for up to 23 hours per day, inmates become prisoners of their own minds, trapped in their own anxieties, suspicions and fears. Although most of these prisoners will be re-introduced to the general population, it’s not surprising that nearly half of all prison suicides occur in solitary confinement. It’s a tactic that breaks people, often beyond repair.

Little wonder, then, that some 30,000 prisoners in California state prisons went on a hunger strike this summer to protest the use of solitary confinement. Protest organizers called off the strike after California lawmakers promised to hold hearings on the state’s so-called supermax prisons and their use of solitary confinement.

In Virginia, however, a hunger strike wasn’t necessary to highlight the cruelty of this punishment. In the past two years, the state’s Corrections Department has taken the initiative to institute a program at the Red Onion and Wallens Ridge state prisons that provides inmates in “administrative segregation” the opportunity to work their way out of crippling isolation.

Known as “step-down,” the program offers classes to inmates officials have identified as having potential for successful development. Sessions encourage them to confront issues such as substance abuse and anger management, and they’re eased back into regular human contact. Initially, the inmates participate in group sessions in adjacent individual cells; later they are handcuffed to a “security chair” for the sessions. The final step is joining the general prison population.

Crime labs under the microscope after a string of shoddy, suspect and fraudulent results

ABAJournal 

In January, the New York City medical examiner’s office confirmed that it was reviewing more than 800 rape cases from a 10-year period during which DNA evidence may have been mishandled by a lab technician who resigned in 2011 after an internal review uncovered problems with her work.

The review, then about half complete, had already turned up 26 cases in which the former technician failed to detect the presence of DNA evidence, including one in which the evidence has since led to an arrest in a 10-year-old rape case. The review uncovered 19 cases in which DNA evidence was commingled with DNA evidence from other cases.

A month earlier, a former chemist at a now-shuttered state drug lab in Boston was indicted on 27 counts of obstructing justice, tampering with evidence, perjury and other charges in connection with her handling of some of the tens of thousands of drug cases she worked on during her nine years there. “Little Annie” Dookhan is accused of faking test results, intentionally contaminating and padding suspected drug samples, forging co-workers’ signatures on lab reports, and falsely claiming to have a master’s degree in chemistry.

The ongoing investigation into her work—which could upend thousands of drug convictions—has already led to the closing of the lab, the release of hundreds of convicted drug offenders, and the termination of one lab official and resignation of another. It also led to the resignations of state Public Health Commissioner John Auerbach, whose office oversaw the lab, and Norfolk Assistant District Attorney George Papachristos, who was found to have had an inappropriately personal (albeit not romantic) relationship with Dookhan.

Cameras on Every Officer: National Day Against Police Brutality is 10/22

New Free Password Cracking software tries 8 Million Times Per Second To Crack Password

HackersNews

Today everyone want to be secure and never want to be get hacked but one of the software developed by Hashcat which will be able to crack passwords with 8 million guesses per second doesn’t want to make you feel secure.

This software is being distributed in public and anyone can download this software free of cost.

This software basically use Brute Force Attack to crack any password, Brute Force Attack is a process by which a hacker uses combinations of letter & words to crack a password.

No Fiscal Crisis for White Supremacy. How Intelligence Agencies Spend $52 Billion

WashPost

U.S. spy agencies have built an intelligence-gathering colossus since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, but remain unable to provide critical information to the president on a range of national security threats, according to the government’s top-secret budget.

The $52.6 billion “black budget” for fiscal 2013, obtained by The Washington Post from former ­intelligence contractor Edward Snowden, maps a bureaucratic and operational landscape that has never been subject to public scrutiny. Although the government has annually released its overall level of intelligence spending since 2007, it has not divulged how it uses the money or how it performs against the goals set by the president and Congress.

The 178-page budget summary for the National Intelligence Program details the successes, failures and objectives of the 16 spy agencies that make up the U.S. intelligence community, which has 107,035 employees.

The summary describes cutting-edge technologies, agent recruiting and ongoing operations. The Post is withholding some information after consultation with U.S. officials who expressed concerns about the risk to intelligence sources and methods. Sensitive details are so pervasive in the documents that The Post is publishing only summary tables and charts online.

“The United States has made a considerable investment in the Intelligence Community since the terror attacks of 9/11, a time which includes wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Arab Spring, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction technology, and asymmetric threats in such areas as cyber-warfare,” Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr. wrote in response to inquiries from The Post.

“Our budgets are classified as they could provide insight for foreign intelligence services to discern our top national priorities, capabilities and sources and methods that allow us to obtain information to counter threats,” he said.

Among the notable revelations in the budget summary:

●Spending by the CIA has surged past that of every other spy agency, with $14.7 billion in requested funding for 2013. The figure vastly exceeds outside estimates and is nearly 50 percent above that of the National Security Agency, which conducts eavesdropping operations and has long been considered the behemoth of the community.

●The CIA and the NSA have begun aggressive new efforts to hack into foreign computer networks to steal information or sabotage enemy systems, embracing what the budget refers to as “offensive cyber operations.”

●Long before Snowden’s leaks, the U.S. intelligence community worried about “anomalous behavior” by employees and contractors with access to classified material. The NSA planned to ward off a “potential insider compromise of sensitive information” by re-investigating at least 4,000 people this year who hold high-level security clearances.

●U.S. intelligence officials take an active interest in friends as well as foes. Pakistan is described in detail as an “intractable target,” and counterintelligence operations “are strategically focused against [the] priority targets of China, Russia, Iran, Cuba and Israel.” The latter is a U.S. ally but has a history of espionage attempts against the United States.

White Supremacist Felon Caught With 18 Guns, 45,000 Bullets And A List Of Black & Jewish Leaders

ThinkProgress

Federal agents were tracking Ohio resident Richard Schmidt’s imports of counterfeit sports jerseys when they stumbled upon his arsenal of 18 guns, more than 40,000 rounds of ammunition, and bulletproof body armor. Besides the arsenal, he had lists of Jewish and black leaders in Detroit, MI. He is also an ex-felon who killed a Hispanic man and wounded two others 24 years ago.

Yet before December, no one even noticed that Schmidt, 47, was amassing weapons illegally, according to the Cleveland Plain Dealer. Instead, federal investigators zeroed in on his sports memorabilia shop around September 2011, tracking his shipments of knock-off jerseys from China for over a year before they discovered the cache of firearms.

Schmidt plead guilty to federal gun charges and the counterfeit racket last month, and will be sentenced in October. But many connected to the crime are still scratching their heads over how an ex-felon with ties to white supremacist groups was able to get his hands on so many guns.

“I can’t tell you how he got all those guns and ammunition,” U.S. Attorney Steven Dettelbach told the Plain Dealer. “It’s not that I won’t tell you; it’s that I can’t. This is somebody who should never have had one gun, one bullet. But he had an entire arsenal.”

Schmidt is technically banned from possessing a gun for the rest of his life. In 1989, he pulled a gun on three men during a traffic argument, killing one man and wounding the other two. He was convicted of voluntary manslaughter and served 12 years in prison.

"Proof" Assad Used Chemical Weapons Is One Hundred YouTube Clips: Full Report Attached

Below is the government's assessment of the "Syrian Government’s Use of Chemical Weapons on August 21, 2013." It is exactly as expected, putting the full blame on Assad.

BlackListedNews

What however is absolutely mindblowing is the following:

"We have identified one hundred videos attributed to the attack, many of which show large numbers of bodies exhibiting physical signs consistent with, but not unique to, nerve agent exposure. The reported symptoms of victims included unconsciousness, foaming from the nose and mouth, constricted pupils, rapid heartbeat, and difficulty breathing. Several of the videos show what appear to be numerous fatalities with no visible injuries, which is consistent with death from chemical weapons, and inconsistent with death from small-arms, high-explosive munitions or blister agents. At least 12 locations are portrayed in the publicly available videos, and a sampling of those videos confirmed that some were shot at the general times and locations described in the footage. We assess the Syrian opposition does not have the capability to fabricate all of the videos, physical symptoms verified by medical personnel and NGOs, and other information associated with this chemical attack."

In other words, America may be about to launch World War III on the basis of one hundred videos, which it believes "the Syrian opposition does not have the capability to fabricate."

Infographic: Which white people are Controlling the Media Talking Points?

BlackListedNews

economic crisis? U.S. Government Employs 35,000 to Break and Decrypt Codes

BlackListedNews

In the latest revelation provided by whistleblower Edward Snowden, it is now known that the federal government pays 35,000 civilian and military specialists to break and decipher encrypted messages sent across the Internet.