Archive for the ‘Uncomfortable Truths’ Category

Shut down the FISA court

Posted: December 17, 2019 by chrisharper in crime, Uncomfortable Truths
Tags: ,

By Christopher Harper

It’s time to get rid of the secret court created under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, better known as FISA.

The approval of warrants to investigate the Trump campaign is the latest abuse of the court, which was created in 1978 to limit spying.

A FISA warrant is one of the most aggressive searches, authorizing the FBI “to conduct, simultaneous telephone, microphone, cell phone, email, and computer surveillance of the U.S. person target’s home, workplace, and vehicles,” as well as “physical searches of the target’s residence, office, vehicles, computer, safe deposit box, and U.S. mails,” as a FISA court decision noted. 

Even more important, the FISA court is extremely deferential, allowing about 99 percent of all warrant requests.

But there’s more. The FISA court has a long history of abuse. 

James Bovard, the author of Attention Deficit Democracy, provided some of the details:

–In 2002, the FISA court revealed that FBI agents made false or misleading claims in 75 cases.

–In 2005, FISA Chief Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly proposed requiring FBI agents to swear to the accuracy of the information they presented. That never happened because it could have “slowed such investigations drastically,” the Washington Post reported. FBI agents continued to exploit FISA secrecy to lie to the judges.

–In 2017, a FISA court decision included a 10-page litany of FBI violations, which “ranged from illegally sharing raw intelligence with unauthorized third parties to accessing intercepted attorney-client privileged communications without proper oversight.”

–Earlier this year, a secret FISA court ruling was released documenting the FBI’s illegal searches of vast numbers of Americans’ emails.

Keep in mind, the FISA court is closed to the public and the press, unlike almost every other court in the country. Therefore, there is virtually no oversight of the FISA court. 

The critics of the FISA court come from both sides of the political spectrum. Maybe there’s hope that this egregious example of injustice can be shut down.

Although many conservatives think the FISA court is useful in fighting terrorism, I think its abuses far outweigh its benefits.

Northam Can Order the VA Guard Around

Posted: December 14, 2019 by julietteochieng in News/opinion, politics, Uncomfortable Truths, war
Tags: , , , , ,

Or he can try to

by baldilocks

On Virginia, the National Guard, gun-grabbing, and Democrats wish-casting for civil war:

With dozens of Virginia counties declaring themselves Second Amendment sanctuaries, some Democratic lawmakers have said the governor should use the National Guard to enforce future gun control legislation — but can he?

Virginia Democrats, who control the legislature and governorship, have proposed several measures, including an “assault weapons” ban, universal background checks, and a red flag law. In response, 75 counties vowed they will not enforce future gun control legislation. Virginia Democratic Rep. Donald McEachin told the Washington Examiner on Thursday that Gov. Ralph Northam “may have to nationalize [sic] the National Guard to enforce the law” if local authorities refuse to do so themselves.

The president, as commander-in-chief of the armed forces, is the only person who can nationalize [sic] the Guard, but state governors have the latitude to use it to enforce state law, legal experts said.

“Until nationalized [sic],  it’s a creature of the state. So that’s what leads me to believe that, yes, the governor can activate the National Guard to enforce even a state law,” Gary Solis, a military law professor at Georgetown University, told the Washington Examiner.

Note to Rep. McEachin and to Russ Read, the author of this article: ‘nationalize’ doesn’t mean what you think it means.

Allow me to expand on who commands the National Guard.

The governor of each state is the Commander-in-Chief of his/her state’s National Guard. When a governor wants his state’s national guard to go somewhere within the state and do a thing, he is giving orders to mobilize, not nationalize. And when a president calls a guard unit to active duty, he is activating that unit, not nationalizing it.

(All this talk about “nationalization” makes me think we have a bunch of socialists in government, media, and academia. Nah, that can’t be true … )

People may remember that Guard units have served in many of our overseas conflicts. When they do so, they are on active duty and the POTUS is their CinC. Here’s how that happens.

When a POTUS wants to activate a Guard unit, he requests to do so in writing to the governor. Almost always, the governor says “yes” and the POTUS then becomes the CinC of the Guard unit(s) for the duration of said Guard unit’s active duty period. That’s why it seems to be automatic.

However, I could see Northam saying “no” under these conditions. That’s federalism.

All that said, it’s so cute how members of the Democrat-dominated VA legislature publicly ponder pitting the military against the state’s LEOs and its gun owners — as if they thought that no one was paying attention and they could just blurt out their fantasies in friendly company.

Simply, it’s beyond ridiculous to think that even a small portion of the VA Guard units would carry out orders to make war against their neighbors, especially considering that many of the LEOs who are defying the tyrants in the VA government are probably guardsmen/guardswomen (and reservists) themselves.

We’re watching you and rooting for you, people of Virginia. Don’t lose heart.

UPDATE: Readers are telling me that the Guard chain of command is more complicated than I’ve laid out. I’m looking it over.

Juliette Akinyi Ochieng has been blogging since 2003 as baldilocks. Her older blog is here.  She published her first novel, Tale of the Tigers: Love is Not a Game in 2012.

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The Pentagon’s Vast All-Wing Conspiracy: Plunder

Posted: November 26, 2019 by julietteochieng in Uncomfortable Truths, war
Tags: , , ,

Nicknamed “Pentagram” for a reason

by baldilocks

While reading the media frenzy on the firing of Navy Secretary Richard V. Spencer, I ran across a report on something that I read last year and promptly put out of my mind because it was too big to fathom, both the fact of it and the implications of it.

In 2018, the Pentagon conducted an audit; it was the first time Department of Defense had ever done so since its 1947 creation, even though an annual audit for the Department has been legally required since 1990. The audit failed – an insufficient description.

The Pentagon cannot account for $21 trillion. TRILLION. Times 21.

Truthdig:

There are certain things the human mind is not meant to do. Our complex brains cannot view the world in infrared, cannot spell words backward during orgasm and cannot really grasp numbers over a few thousand. A few thousand, we can feel and conceptualize. We’ve all been in stadiums with several thousand people. We have an idea of what that looks like (and how sticky the floor gets).

But when we get into the millions, we lose it. It becomes a fog of nonsense. Visualizing it feels like trying to hug a memory. We may know what $1 million can buy (and we may want that thing), but you probably don’t know how tall a stack of a million $1 bills is. You probably don’t know how long it takes a minimum-wage employee to make $1 million.

That’s why trying to understand—truly understand—that the Pentagon spent 21 trillion unaccounted-for dollars between 1998 and 2015 washes over us like your mother telling you that your third cousin you met twice is getting divorced. It seems vaguely upsetting, but you forget about it 15 seconds later because … what else is there to do? (…)

Let’s stop and take a second to conceive how much $21 trillion is (which you can’t because our brains short-circuit, but we’ll try anyway).

  1. The amount of money supposedly in the stock market is $30 trillion.

  2. The GDP of the United States is $18.6 trillion.

Remember: the Pentagon is run by generals, admirals and GS-eleventies and it is they who approve of these monstrous expenditures. It’s impossible to even begin to comprehend the decades of graft that many of them have perpetrated for the benefit of themselves and their associates. But I do think that the antipathy and open insubordination to President Trump is directly related to his general trend of turning off the spigots of tax dollars which go into the pockets of all these public “servants.”

No other president has been willing to ask “hey, where did all this money go?”

That’s why everyone dipping into our pockets – Democrat and Republican, military and civilian — wanted Donald Trump gone even before he arrived. And why they keep trying to make it happen.

I don’t know if the country can recovery from this vast rape-and-pillage, but if it can, the first step has already been taken.

(Thanks to MintPress News)

Juliette Akinyi Ochieng has been blogging since 2003 as baldilocks. Her older blog is here.  She published her first novel, Tale of the Tigers: Love is Not a Game in 2012.

Follow Juliette on Facebook, Twitter, MeWe, Patreon and Social Quodverum.

Hit Da Tech Guy Blog’s Tip Jar !

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An immigration crackdown in Greece

Posted: November 25, 2019 by chrisharper in Uncomfortable Truths
Tags: , ,

By Christopher Harper

Having spent the past few days roaming around Greece, I find it amazing that the U.S. press hasn’t picked up on the crackdown on immigrants.

The Greek government has adopted a policy to “shut the door” on migrants not entitled to stay — a hardening of its stance amid a new surge in arrivals.

That would be from a country that often tilts toward the left side of the political spectrum.

Simply put, recent elections tossed out the old leader as citizens got tired of the immigration crisis in the country.

“Welcome in Greece are only those we choose,” Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis told Parliament. “Those who are not welcome will be returned. We will permanently shut the door to illegal human traffickers, to those who want to enter even though they are not entitled to asylum.”

Greece was the main gateway into the European Union for more than a million people fleeing conflict in 2015-16.

In speaking with some local residents, citizens are unhappy that the refugees often have no desire to participate in the country’s social life, including keeping their children out of school. Few are trying to learn Greek.

“Greece has its strengths, but it is not an unfenced vineyard,” Mitsotakis said recently, using a Greek expression meaning the country is not open to anyone. “Those days are gone.”

Moreover, Mitsotakis’ government said it wants to move up to 20,000 asylum seekers out of sprawling island camps and onto the mainland by the end of the year and expects that new facilities will be ready by July 2020.

Medecins Sans Frontieres has raised concerns over the new centers, arguing that the new facilities would amount to detention centers. Human rights groups have also criticized a new framework for speeding up the processing of asylum requests as a “rushed” attempt that would impede access to a fair asylum process for refugees.

Separately, officials in neighboring North Macedonia said a police patrol detained a group of 33 migrants found walking through the southern part of the country, near its border with Greece. Police said the group consisted of 21 Afghan nationals, seven Pakistanis, three Iraqis, and two Iranians.

Although the Balkan route followed by migrants trying to reach Europe’s prosperous heartland has been closed since 2016, thousands still use it. They usually pay large sums to smuggling gangs to illegally get them through the closed borders.

Sound familiar?

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