Saturday, July 20, 2013

The right of sovereign citizenship without suspicion. The opposition to the USA military might entertain options in their arguments.


WASHINGTON 
Fri Jul 19, 2013 1:08pm EDT


At a hearing in U.S. District Court in Washington, (click here) Judge Rosemary Collyer said she would rule as soon as she could, at least on the preliminary question of whether citizens or their family members have a right to bring a lawsuit.
The U.S. government acknowledged in May that it had killed four Americans in drone strikes in Yemen and Pakistan since 2009 as part of its campaign against al Qaeda and affiliated groups.

The families of three of those killed, including New Mexico-born militant cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, are suing over their deaths. They argue the killings were illegal.

In a courtroom so full that people stood in the back, Collyer openly struggled with what role U.S. courts should have in overseeing the highly secretive targeted-killing program run by President Barack Obama and his senior staff.
She reacted skeptically to U.S. Justice Department lawyer Brian Hauck, who urged Collyer to leave the program's work to the military and the White House. "The executive is not an effective check on the executive when it comes to a person's constitutional rights," Collyer said.

To civil liberties lawyers who argued the killings took place away from active hostilities, Collyer said that the United States is at war against a diffuse group of militants without a clearly defined battleground.

"There is no doubt that al Qaeda attacked the United States in 2001, and that the organization has called for continued attacks against U.S. interests around the world," she said.

The American Civil Liberties Union and the Center for Constitutional Rights, both based in New York, represent the families.

Hina Shamsi and Pardiss Kebriaei, lawyers for the groups respectively, said that in killing the Americans the government violated fundamental rights under the U.S. Constitution to due process and to be free from unreasonable seizure.

The lawyers also said that for those rights to be meaningful for U.S. citizens, the families of those killed must be able to assert those rights in a courtroom.
Collyer countered that the lawsuit was highly unusual, and she wondered what documents the ACLU and Center for Constitutional Rights might demand from the government if she allowed the lawsuit to move forward....

The other side of the coin are the families that fell victim to the violence at Fort Hood. Do they get to sue Hassan and Anwar al-Awlaki for their losses, too? And do they get to sue the USA government for not preventing the access by Hasan to al-Awlaki. If the USA government/military had the capacity to prevent contact between Hasan and al-Awlaki, do the families of the soldiers lost have the right to sue for the negligence of the USA to prevent the radicalization as well?

By: Rex Castillo


Both sides (click here) in the court martial of accused Fort Hood shooter Maj. Nidal Hasan began to reveal their strategies in a Thursday pretrial hearing.

Hasan's inexperience showed in court as he deferred to Col. Kris Poppe, a member of his support counsel. Poppe wanted the prosecution to provide a written summary of their witness' testimony so that Hasan can review the statements and properly prepare.

The prosecution's Col. Mike Mullighan said this is not a requirement and said the defense is just "chasing ghosts,” in effect saying the request was another delay tactic by the defense to push back the trial. 

Mullighan assured presiding judge Col. Tara Osborn the prosecution's witnesses will only speak about their loss of a family member in the shooting.
Col. Poppe said the written summaries are essential because Hasan clearly has less experience than his opponents....

The catch 22 to all this is the fact nothing prevented the elder Boston Bomber from visiting areas where radicalized young men existed and that would have also been the case with Hasan. However, the travels were known. The potential danger could have been assigned to their return for investigation further. AND could the radicalization have happened in the period of time they visited? I think not. I believe the internet played a huge roll in the radicalization of all involved.

Global Security Partnerships are possible. The issue is sovereign security from terrorism. Is it not?

The wrongful invasion into Iraq polarized the international community. All of a sudden the USA was more of a threat than the simple thought of a singular Superpower.

I don't know of one continent where President Obama hasn't extended a welcome to come together to close the gap on these dangerous groups. With the determination of the USA military to conquer the threat of terror related groups the world is becoming smaller. Telecommunications are becoming a threat to a country. Pakistan is a primary example of the explosion of telecommunication threat. The Pakistani police and military have had to develop methods using telecommunication methods to find those responsible for killing and increasing the tensions of terrorism among the people.

I am proposing through the example of Brazil how countries can develop partnerships with the USA to end the threat of well armed groups. It is something for every country to consider. I think there is promise in joint resources. The question is, do other nation's care to trust the USA again?

Biden Calls Brazil's Rousseff Over NSA Spying Tensions (click here)

..."He lamented the negative repercussions in Brazil and reiterated the U.S. government's willingness to provide more information on the matter," Rousseff's communications minister, Helena Chagas, told reporters after the 25-minute telephone call.
Biden repeated an invitation for Brazil to send a delegation to the United States to obtain more technical and political details on the case, Chagas said. She said Brazil accepted the proposal but has not decided who will go or when.
Brazilian newspaper O Globo reported earlier this month the NSA targeted Latin American countries with spying programs that can monitor billions of emails and phone calls for suspicious activity, citing documents leaked by Edward Snowden, a fugitive former U.S. intelligence contractor. 
Latin American countries fumed at what they considered a violation of their sovereignty and demanded explanations and an apology.
The American ambassador in Brazil, Thomas Shannon, acknowledged that the United States collects large amounts of data on email traffic but does not access the content of messages or conduct the monitoring on Brazilian territory. He said the reports did not paint an accurate picture of U.S. information gathering....
There is room for any police officer to condemn freedom of speech when it is a reflection of their own memory of the manhunt. 

This is ridiculous. The Boston police were provided the Facebook picture during roll call.

Man, talk about oppression. Rolling Stone is fine and even appropriate.

 Tsarnaev’s image distributed to troopers at roll call.(click here)

I don't want to hear it anymore.

Rolling Stone should sue those that pulled the magazine from circulation. It is censorship. It violates the contract with the public trust.

US - Australia Drone Program. There would be less signals in Australia to interfere with drone technology.

I suppose it is better than bombing.

There is a smaller populous in Australia, so the electronic signals coming and going is more limited. It provides for less noise to signals sought by the military.

Any Australian noise could probably be filtered out. 

July 21, 2013
Philip Dorling 

...A Fairfax Media (click here) investigation has now confirmed a primary function of the top-secret signals intelligence base near Alice Springs is to track the precise ''geolocation'' of radio signals, including those of hand-held radios and mobile phones, in the eastern hemisphere, from the Middle East across Asia to China, North Korea and the Russian far east.

This information has been used to identify the location of terrorist suspects, which is then fed into the United States drone strike program and other military operations.

The drone program, which has involved more than 370 attacks in Pakistan since 2004, is reported to have killed between 2500 and 3500 al-Qaeda and Taliban militants, including many top commanders.

But hundreds of civilians have been also killed, causing anti-American protests in Pakistan, diplomatic tensions between Washington and Islamabad and accusations the ''drone war'' has amounted to a program of ''targeted killing'' outside a battlefield. This year, the Obama administration acknowledged four American citizens had been killed by strikes in Pakistan and Yemen since 2009.

''The [Taliban] know we're listening but they still have to use radios and phones to conduct their operations; they can't avoid that,'' one former Pine Gap operator said. ''We track them, we combine the signals intelligence with imagery and, once we've passed the geolocation [intelligence] on, our job is done. When drones do their job we don't need to track that target any more.''...