90 Miles From Tyranny

Wednesday, July 10, 2013

Documents Obtained by Judicial Watch Detail Role of Justice Department in Organizing Trayvon Martin Protests

Document: DOJ Community Relations Service was deployed to Sanford, FL, “to provide technical assistance for the preparation of possible marches and rallies related to the fatal shooting of a 17-year-old African American male.”

Washington, D.C. – Judicial Watch announced today that has obtained documents in response to local, state, and federal records requests revealing that a little-known unit of the Department of Justice (DOJ), the Community Relations Service (CRS), was deployed to Sanford, FL, following the Trayvon Martin shooting to help organize and manage rallies and protests against George Zimmerman.

JW filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requested with the DOJ on April 24, 2012; 125 pages were received on May 30, 2012. JW administratively appealed the request on June 5, 2012, and received 222 pages more on March 6, 2013. According to the documents:

March 25 – 27, 2012, CRS spent $674.14 upon being “deployed to Sanford, FL, to work marches, demonstrations, and rallies related to the shooting and death of an African-American teen by a neighborhood watch captain.” March 25 – 28, 2012, CRS spent $1,142.84 “in Sanford, FL to work marches, demonstrations, and rallies related to the shooting and death of an African-American teen by a neighborhood watch captain. March 30 – April 1, 2012, CRS spent $892.55 in Sanford, FL “to provide support for protest deployment in Florida.” March 30 – April 1, 2012, CRS spent an additional $751.60 in Sanford, FL “to provide technical assistance to the City of Sanford, event organizers, and law enforcement agencies for the march and rally on March 31.” April 3 – 12, 2012, CRS spent $1,307.40 in Sanford, FL “to provide technical assistance, conciliation, and onsite mediation during demonstrations planned in Sanford.” April 11-12, 2012, CRS spent $552.35 in Sanford, FL “to provide technical assistance for the preparation of possible marches and rallies related to the fatal shooting of a 17 year old African American male.” – expenses for employees to travel, eat, sleep? From a Florida Sunshine Law request filed on April 23, 2012, JW received thousands of pages of emails on April 27, 2012, in which was found an email by Miami-Dade County Community Relations Board Program Officer Amy Carswell from April 16, 2012: “Congratulations to our partners, Thomas Battles, Regional Director, and Mildred De Robles, Miami-Dade Coordinator and their co-workers at the U.S. Department of Justice Community Relations Service for their outstanding and ongoing efforts to reduce tensions and build bridges of understanding and respect in Sanford, Florida” following a news article in the Orlando Sentinel about the secretive “peacekeepers.”

Photo Taken Of Eric Holder Around
the Time he Armed Himself And
Stormed An ROTC Building To
Claim It For Racial Division.

In reply to that message, Battles said: “Thank you Partner. You did lots of stuff behind the scene to make Miami a success. We will continue to work together.” He signed the email simply Tommy.

Carswell responded: “That’s why we make the big bucks.”

Set up under the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the DOJ’s CRS, the employees of which are required by law to “conduct their activities in confidence,” reportedly has greatly expanded its role under President Barack Obama. Though the agency claims to use “impartial mediation practices and conflict resolution procedures,” press reports along with the documents obtained by Judicial Watch suggest that the unit deployed to Sanford, FL, took an active role in working with those demanding the prosecution of Zimmerman.

On April 15, 2012, during the height of the protests, the Orlando Sentinel reported, “They [the CRS] helped set up a meeting between the local NAACP and elected officials that led to the temporary resignation of police Chief Bill Lee according to Turner Clayton, Seminole County chapter president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.” The paper quoted the Rev. Valarie Houston, pastor of Allen Chapel AME Church, a focal point for protestors, as saying “They were there for us,” after a March 20 meeting with CRS agents.

Separately, in response to a Florida Sunshine Law request to the City of Sanford, Judicial Watch also obtained an audio recording of a “community meeting” held at Second Shiloh Missionary Baptist Church in Sanford on April 19, 2012. The meeting, which led to the ouster of Sanford’s Police Chief Bill Lee, was scheduled after a group of college students calling themselves the “Dream Defenders” barricaded the entrance to the police department demanding Lee be fired. According to the Orlando Sentinel, DOJ employees with the CRS had arranged a 40-mile police escort for the students from Daytona Beach to Sanford.

“These documents detail the extraordinary intervention by the Justice Department in the pressure campaign leading to the prosecution of George Zimmerman,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “My guess is that most Americans would rightly object to taxpayers paying government employees to help organize racially-charged demonstrations.”

- See more at: http://www.judicialwatch.org./press-room/press-releases/documents-obtained-by-judicial-watch-detail-role-of-justice-department-in-organizing-trayvon-martin-protests/#sthash.9cvO7xiq.dpuf

Black Panther Boss Who Got Off For Voter Intimidation Arrested

The Obama Justice Department let the New Black Panther Party off the hook for voter intimidation in a federal election but this week the radical group leader, King Samir Shabazz, who led that effort got busted on gun charges.

New York police spotted Shabazz wearing a bulletproof vest in Harlem, stopped him and discovered he was carrying a loaded and unlicensed gun, according to a newspaper report in Shabazz’s hometown of Philadelphia. He was jailed and slapped with charges of illegal gun possession and illegally wearing body armor. Now he could actually go to jail. This is the same thug who says black people should create militias to exterminate whites, skin them alive, pour acid on them, sick pit bulls on them, bust their heads with rocks and even raid nurseries to “kill everything white in sight.” The same newspaper quotes the Black Panther leader, a Philly street preacher, on a black-power radio show: “I would love nothing more than to come home with a cracker’s head in my book bag.” The news article points out that “such sentiment hasn’t gotten him arrested.” But Shabazz did get charged for violating federal law during the 2008 presidential election when he and his Black Panther posse blocked a polling station in Philadelphia, clad in paramilitary outfits and brandishing weapons.

The Black Panthers intimidated voters as well as poll watchers by verbally threatening them, hurling profanities and racial epitaphs. Under the 1965 Voting Rights Act, the Department of Justice (DOJ) brought a voter intimidation case against the Black Panthers, which have been labeled a hate group by a number of leftwing nonprofits for their anti-white and anti-Semitic rhetoric. For instance, the Southern Poverty Law Center, a civil rights organization dedicated to fighting hate and bigotry, describes the Black Panthers as a “virulently racist and anti-Semitic organization whose leaders have encouraged violence against whites, Jews and law enforcement officers.”

Led by Shabazz, the Black Panthers violated the section of the Voting Rights Act that prohibits intimidation, coercion or threats against any person for voting or attempting to vote, according to the complaint filed by the feds in 2009 in U.S. District Court in Philadelphia. The DOJ also pursued an injunction preventing any future deployment of or display of weapons by Black Panther members at the entrance of a polling location. But a few months later the Obama DOJ quietly dropped the charges and it all disappeared like a bad dream.

Picture Taken When Eric Holder Was A member Of
A Group Sympathetic to The Black Panthers.

Judicial Watch investigated and after suing the DOJ, obtained explosive documents that show Obama
political appointees were intimately involved in the decision to dismiss the voter intimidation case against the Black Panthers. The documents directly contradict sworn testimony by Obama’s Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division, Thomas Perez, that no political leadership was involved in the decision. Adding to the scandal, a veteran DOJ civil rights attorney who worked on the Black Panther case accused the agency of racial bias for dropping charges against the group and resigned over the “corrupt nature of the dismissal.” During testimony before the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, the whistleblower, J. Christian Adams, said there’s a pervasive and open hostility towards equal enforcement of the law in the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division.

http://www.judicialwatch.org/blog/2013/06/black-panther-boss-who-got-off-for-voter-intimidation-arrested/

FACTS

The missing link in your storable food strategy: Where are all the fruits that provide essential nutrients to keep you alive?

(NaturalNews) I don't know if you can feel it too, but there's a lot of cultural tension in the air these days. Many people believe things are on the verge of snapping, causing possible riots (the Zimmerman trial

verdict), bank closures (bond market implosion) or another martial law scenario (like the Boston bombing).

Whatever happens, we want you to be safe and self-reliant. Stocking up on storable organic foods is one of the best investments you can make in your health and survivability during any possible disruptions (including hurricanes and natural disasters).

But most people have a huge gap in their food storage strategy: They're stocked up on bulk grains like corn and wheat, but they've left out stored fruit. That's a huge mistake because while grains provide bulk calories to keep you alive, fruit provides the natural nutritional compounds that keep you healthy and support your eyes, brain, liver, heart and virtually all biological functions*.

Even though fruit is extremely important, it's very difficult to store

The reason most storable food companies focus on soy, wheat and corn (and all their derivatives including hydrolyzed vegetable protein) is because these are "dead starches" that have a super long shelf life.

And they're great for providing the bulk calories you need to say warm in the winter, for example, but they're dead, processed, nutrient-depleted foods that you can't live on forever. If you try to live on just soy, wheat and corn for very long, you'll suffer severe nutritional deficiencies and start to experience brain fog, immune suppression, eyesight problems and weakened organs throughout your body (including liver, kidneys and heart). This makes you susceptible to all the diseases that run rampant during hard times, including possible bioweapons or viral pandemics.

If you want to stay alive for very long, your diet needs nutrients that only come from fruit.

But regular dried fruit doesn't store very well, and it doesn't taste very good either. The only way to store fruit so that it taste fantastic while retaining nearly all its nutrients (which are delicate molecules) is through freeze-drying.

Freeze-dried fruits need to be part of your preparedness plans

For the last several years, I've searched across the food industry to try to find freeze-dried, certified-organic, non-China, "clean" fruits available in a ...

Former Lt. Col. in Stasi, Wolfgang Schmidt, advises: “The only way to protect the people’s privacy is not to allow the government to collect their information in the first place.”

Wolfgang Schmidt was seated in Berlin’s 1,200-foot-high TV tower, one of the few remaining landmarks left from the former East Germany. Peering out over the city that lived in fear when the communist party ruled it, he pondered the magnitude of domestic spying in the United States under the Obama administration. A smile spread across his face.

“You know, for us, this would have been a dream come true,” he said, recalling the days when he was a lieutenant colonel in the defunct communist country’s secret police, the Stasi.

In those days, his department was limited to tapping 40 phones at a time, he recalled. Decide to spy on a new victim and an old one had to be dropped, because of a lack of equipment. He finds breathtaking the idea that the U.S. government receives daily reports on the cellphone usage of millions of Americans and can monitor the Internet traffic of millions more.

“So much information, on so many people,” he said.

East Germany’s Stasi has long been considered the standard of police state surveillance during the Cold War years, a monitoring regime so vile and so intrusive that agents even noted when their subjects were overheard engaging in sexual intercourse. Against that backdrop, Germans have greeted with disappointment, verging on anger, the news that somewhere in a U.S. government databank are the records of where millions of people were when they made phone calls or what video content they streamed on their computers in the privacy of their homes.

Even Schmidt, 73, who headed one of the more infamous departments in the infamous Stasi, called himself appalled. The dark side to gathering such a broad, seemingly untargeted, amount of information is obvious, he said.

A still-standing portion of the former Berlin Wall
and a guard tower. (Credit: Getty Images)

“It is the height of naivete to think that once collected this information won’t be used,” he said. “This is the nature of secret government organizations. The only way to protect the people’s privacy is not to allow the government to collect their information in the first place.”

U.S. officials have defended the government collection of information since word of it broke in newspaper stories based on documents leaked by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden. The records are used only to track down terrorists overseas, officials say. The collection has been carefully vetted by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, a body of U.S. judges whose actions are largely kept secret. There is no misuse.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who grew up in East Germany, tried to provide an out for President Barack Obama, offering as a possible explanation for the sweeping nature of the U.S. collection efforts that “the Internet is new to all of us.” She was roundly mocked for that statement, and her administration appeared far less forgiving more recently, when similar spying charges were leveled against the British government.

Germans are dismayed at Obama’s role in allowing the collection of so much information. Before his presidency, hundreds of thousands of Germans turned out to hear him speak in Berlin. During a visit last week, the setup was engineered to avoid criticism: Obama spoke to a small, handpicked audience, many from the German-American school. Access to the Brandenburg Gate, the backdrop for his speech, was severely limited, as was access to Berlin’s entire downtown.

As many Germans as heard Obama speak turned out at quickly arranged protests, including one by self-proclaimed tech nerds near the historic Checkpoint Charlie, where U.S. soldiers welcomed visitors from the communist sector of Berlin for four decades with a sign, “You are entering the American sector.” One demonstrator added this coda: “Your privacy ends here.”

The center-left newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung took Obama to task over the surveillance issue. “Governments do not have the right to conceal broad lines of policy,” the newspaper wrote. “President Obama is operating according to an odd maxim: ‘I am doing a lot of the same things that George W. Bush did, but you can trust me because I am the one doing it.’ Not even Obama is deserving of that much trust.”

“Everyone knows that gathering so much information is bullshit,” said Reinhard Weisshuhn, a political activist and foreign policy adviser. “It’s a total breach of trust by the government. This is how a society destroys itself.”

For 15 years, the Stasi tracked Weisshuhn’s every move and conversation. His Stasi file, which he, like many other Stasi targets, reviewed after the Berlin Wall collapsed, ran to 9,000 pages. He was shocked, and he’s quick to stress that the United States shouldn’t be compared to the totalitarian East German state.

“But that doesn’t mean the president gets a free pass,” he said. “The United States is an open society. This is a problem that must be honestly addressed and fixed.”

Weisshuhn shares a common German perception on the scandal: Snowden, who’s been charged under the Espionage Act for leaking news of the domestic spying, isn’t the bad guy.

“In our case, we thought we were being paranoid until we saw what they’d gathered and realized we’d been naive,” Weisshuhn said. “Here, it’s not the whistle-blower who is wrong, it’s the gathering of information.”

Germans, especially those raised in the east, are unconvinced by arguments that the sweeping collection of information is used only to track terrorists. The assertions by U.S. officials that unspecified attacks have been thwarted don’t persuade them, either. They haven’t forgotten the fear of living under a government that used vague threats to justify blanket spying. In East Germany, the threats came under the banner of disloyalty to socialist ideals. In the United States, the monitoring programs come under the banner of anti-terrorism.

Dagmar Hovestaedt is the spokeswoman for the German Stasi Records Agency, which showed 88,000 people last year what the Stasi had gathered on them. She said the U.S. should consider doing the same.

“This is a study on how to deal with the information the NSA is now gathering,” she said of her archive. “To say that the NSA is the equivalent of the Stasi is too simplistic, but the people who are spied on do have a right to know what was learned about their lives, what they had hoped to keep private that was not. Transparency is essential.”

Still, she noted that Stasi victims have a large advantage in finding out what was studied.

“It’s easy to make information available when it was gathered by a state that no longer exists,” she said.

Stefan Wolle is the curator for Berlin’s East German Museum, which focuses in part on the actions of and reactions to the Stasi. What becomes clear when studying the information the organization gathered is the banality of evil: Simple pieces of everyday life are given much greater importance than they deserve when a secret organization makes the effort to gather the information.

“When the wall fell, I wanted to see what the Stasi had on me, on the world I knew,” he said. “A large part of what I found was nothing more than office gossip, the sort of thing people used to say around the water cooler about affairs and gripes, the sort of things that people today put in emails or texts to each other.

“The lesson,” he added, “is that when a wide net is cast, almost all of what is caught is worthless. This was the case with the Stasi. This will certainly be the case with the NSA.”

heh. from a left wing website:

http://www.popularresistance.org/ex-stasi-officer-envious-of-nsa-spy-powers/

The conclusion is completely wrong here. With data mining and big data, they can zero in on individuals whose viewpoints they do not approve of, their electronic footprint including every purchase, their location at any time of the day, every email, text message, blog post are now available and can be assembled automatically for targeting.