Category: News

Does everyone remember when USAID created that “Cuban Twitter” and paid all those guys to start agitating for regime change on it? What if that wasn’t even the most ridiculous thing USAID was doing in Cuba at the time?

Good news, it wasn’t! USAID also hired a bunch of Serbian music promoters and spent millions of dollars trying to create a regime-change themed hip-hop music movement in Cuba.

The scheme wasn’t totally unrelated to fake Cuban Twitter, which they used to try to promote the

It didn’t take long for the hip-hoperation to be found out, either, as when they tried to bankroll a music festival put on by a pro-government singer, in the hopes of turning it toward the aim of regime change, Cuba started detaining people involved, and learned of the USAID involvement.

Senators are criticizing USAID once again for wasting a bunch of money on a crazy plot with money that was supposed to be for humanitarian aid. As usual, USAID is defending the program as an attempt to “increase civil engagement.”

Tuesday’s release by the Senate Intelligence Committee of its long-awaited report on the torture by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) of detainees in the so-called “war on terror” does not go far enough, according to major U.S. human rights groups.

While welcoming the report’s release, the subject of months of intensive negotiations and sometimes furious negotiations between the Senate Committee’s majority and both the CIA and the administration of President Barack Obama, the groups said additional steps were needed to ensure that US officials never again engage in the kind of torture detailed in the report.

“This should be the beginning of a process, not the end,” said Anthony Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). “The report should shock President Obama and Congress into action, to make sure that torture and cruelty are never used again.”

He called, among other steps, for the appointment of a special prosecutor to hold the “architects and perpetrators” of what the George W. Bush administration called “enhanced interrogation techniques” (EITs) accountable and for Congress to assert its control over the CIA, “which in this report sounds more like a rogue paramilitary group than the intelligence gathering agency that it’s supposed to be.”

He was joined by London-based Amnesty International which noted that the declassified information provided in the report constituted “a reminder to the world of the utter failure of the USA to end the impunity enjoyed by those who authorized and used torture and other ill-treatment.

Continue reading “Release of Senate Torture Report Insufficient, Say Rights Groups”

Early in Citizenfour – journalist Laura Poitras’ new film about whistleblower Edward Snowden – Snowden explains his internal struggle over whether to out himself as the source of the evidence for broad NSA spying on American citizens.

Snowden thinks it’s much more powerful for someone to openly leak information about wrongdoing than to do so anonymously – it sends the message to government officials that they’re the wrongdoers, not the whistleblower. However, he is also leery of the media’s tendency to focus on personalities at the expense of factual analysis. He wants the information he’s leaking to be the story, not himself.

Citizenfour tries to straddle the line Snowden identifies.

It’s in large part a drama about Snowden and the journalists he chooses to confide in – namely, Glenn Greenwald and Poitras herself, though the latter is hidden behind the camera. As such, it can’t help but be a portrait of these individuals. Indeed, the movie doesn’t try to avoid this, employing lingering close-ups of Snowden staring out the window of his hotel room.

At the same time, it’s a summary and dramatization of the story Snowden broke and selected events connected to it. Ultimately, however, the portraiture takes an upper hand, at the expense of more nuanced reporting.

Continue reading “Citizenfour’s Personality Problem”

Even though the U.S. has been warring in Iraq for 24 years now, The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs says the war there and in Syria against ISIS could go another four years. That is a wildly arbitrary guess since so far, the longer we have been at war in the region the more the jihadist resistance has grown.

This week on the Podcast Ron Paul says that the firing of Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel is bad news in light of the wildly hawkish new members of the Senate. Together the latest developments spell a more active war with more spending and more killing.

Click here to listen.

Subscribe to The Ron Paul and Charles Goyette Weekly Podcast on iTunes

Charles Goyette is New York Times Bestselling Author of The Dollar Meltdown and Red and Blue and Broke All Over: Restoring America’s Free Economy. Goyette also edits The Freedom and Prosperity Letter.

Sony Pictures went through a nasty hacking attack this past week. It ground the studio to a halt for awhile, and also led to the leaks of some upcoming movies.

So whodunnit? Believe it or not, it sounds like it was North Korea.

Sony speculated that North Korea was behind the attack, and North Korea explicitly didn’t deny the idea, and the FBI’s own investigations are focusing on that possibility.

It’s potentially the best and craziest publicity a movie could possibly get, but upcoming Seth Rogen movie The Interview, a comedy in which a TV host and producer go to North Korea to interview Kim Jong Un and are courted by the CIA to assassinate him, made North Korea livid.

North Korea complained to the UN that the Seth Rogen movie amounts to a war crime, which itself could be the setup to myriad bad Hollywood jokes, but now it seems they got so mad that they attacked Sony Pictures.

The village of Oakley, Michigan is easy to miss, even when you’re driving through it. There’s one stop light, and on either side are a gas station and a tavern/restaurant. 290 people call it home.

It’s also the home of one of the most bizarre secret police organizations in the United States. Tiny little Oakley has over 100 “reservist” police, who basically bought their badges from the police chief.

The reservists reportedly include high-profile Michigan lawyers, who use their nominal status as police officers to access police databases for cases, and NFL players who want to carry guns into stadiums, which would be illegal if they weren’t sort-of cops.

I say reportedly because the list of reservists is secret. Not just in that it hasn’t been made public, it’s preposterously secret. Like last month when the village finally managed to force the police to stop being police (because they had no insurance at the time and the village couldn’t afford the lawsuits), they asked the state police to try to help get all the equipment back, and conceded that even they have no clue who these “reservists” who have all their equipment are. Some of that equipment, reportedly, included Pentagon-provided gear, because a 290-person village surrounded by farmland clearly needs that.

The attempts to eliminate the police force began in September, failed, and continued up until the courts finally upheld the village council’s right to take away police powers they granted in the first place. That’s likely to be reversed, as the November election saw pro-police candidates sweep the vote, but that’s a discussion for another time.

Rather, the focus now is on already approved FOIA requests for the names of those secret police, filed in some cases by the village council members themselves. There had been no response from the police, other than a vague mention of ISIS, but now there’s an outright lawsuit.

According to the Saginaw News, the new lawsuit is filed by multiple John Does and the reservist force in general. Apparently they don’t even want the courts to know who they are, and the suit is once again citing the “perceived threat” from ISIS as a reason to keep their names, as police officers, secret from the public, from the village they putatively work for, from everybody.

The lawsuit goes on to accuse the owner of the tavern (who in a village this small you’ll find unsurprising was also a village council member) of plotting against the police over liquor law violations.

That too is a topic with a crazy amount of backstory, starting with a policeman unsuccessfully trying to pick up a waitress. This led to demands from the chief to fire her, and half a dozen harassment lawsuits from the tavern against the police chief, most of which the tavern-owner won, which were a big part in why Oakley’s old insurance company dropped them.

The lawsuit goes on to cite a Department of Homeland Security bulletin which warns that law enforcement should consider themselves targets for ISIS, which is a ridiculous claim in the ass-end of Saginaw County, and doubly so because these reservists aren’t remotely law enforcement officers. Rather, they just bought badges at a highish price so they could flout the law.

When I was five years old I had a little star-shaped metal badge that said “Sheriff” on it too. It was shaped like a star and came with a little toy gun. It didn’t cost thousands of dollars like these did, but it seems equally valid as a tool of law enforcement. It also seems equally likely to attract ISIS.