Police Taser and Arrest Severely Autistic Man for Walking Down the Street
By Mike Sawyer * December 27, 2014 * The Free Thought Project

Tario Anderson was simply walking down the street. Because of that he was assaulted, kidnapped, and charged with a crime and the Greenville police department doesn’t see anything wrong with it.

Greenville, SC — An innocent 34-year-old autistic man was tasered and arrested by police on Christmas eve because he was walking down the street at night.

Greenville City Police were in the area responding to reports of gunshots when they came across Tario Anderson and shined a spotlight in the innocent man’s face. Anderson reacted by walking away from this stressful sensory overload.

“When they put their spotlight on him, he immediately put his head down, put his hands in his pockets and began to walk away from him,” Officer Johnathan Bragg with Greenville Police said. “They then got out of the vehicle and approached him and ordered him to stop at which point he did flee from the officers and they pursued him.”

Anderson had committed no crime but since he did not immediately bow down to the police, he was tasered and cops piled on top of him.

His mother, Carolyn Anderson, said he has severe autism, does not understand much and did not need to be arrested or shocked with a Taser.

Read more at http://thefreethoughtproject.com/police-taser-arrest-severely-autistic-man-walking-street/#cRpGbQ284LQbScQl.99

“What are you dancin’ in the street for? What the f**k is wrong with you?” barks the NYPD cop as he assaults a man for dancing.
By Matt Agorist * The Free Thought Project * December 29, 2014


New York, NY — A harmless and humorous dance challenge by TV personality Ellen Degeneres, goes brutally awry after the NYPD gets involved.

Ellen’s #DanceDares have brought humor and laughter to so many people, until now. The premise for the #DanceDare is simple, dance behind someone without them noticing.



Most of these interactions simply make people smile, or at worst walk away. However, when YouTube personality, Alexander BOK attempted this playful stunt behind an NYPD officer, he was accosted and assaulted.

Accosted and assaulted for dancing in the street on Christmas Eve.
In what looks more like a gang bullying than a police detainment, BOK is immediately thrown up against the NYPD van while a hand clinches his neck – for dancing.


http://thefreethoughtproject.com/york-man-detained-choked-thrown-ground-nypd-dancing-street/

Fox Affiliate Apologizes for Editing Innocent Protesters to Sound Like Bloodthirsty Cop Killers
Caught red-handed, an affiliate of the conservative news outlet apologizes for manipulating video to make protesters seem violent.

A Baltimore Fox station has apologized for what it calls “an honest misunderstanding.”

Gawker caught the broadcast Sunday, which cut a protester short, making her words difficult to understand. The actual chant was, “We won’t stop. We can’t stop. Till killer cops. Are in cell blocks.” But Fox45 reported that the woman, Tawanda Jones, leading the chant was saying, “We won’t stop. We can’t stop. So kill a cop!”

Below (at this link) videos of the unedited chant, the edited version and a follow-up interview with Jones.
http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/fox-affiliate-apologizes-editing-innocent-protesters-sound-bloodthirsty-cop

Baltimore Fox Affiliate Edits Protest Footage To Sound Like 'Kill A Cop'
By BRENDAN JAMES * Published DECEMBER 22, 2014 * TPM

A Fox affiliate in Baltimore aired a segment on Sunday showing footage from a "Justice For All" demonstration in Washington, D.C. in which it edited a chant to sound like protestors were shouting "kill a cop."

"At this rally in Washington, D.C. protestors chanted, 'we won't stop, we can't stop, so kill a cop,'" the WBFF broadcast said.

But the full footage, flagged by Gawker on Monday via C-SPAN, revealed that the chant was "we won't stop, we can't stop, 'til killer cops are in cell blocks."

The protest was attended by Rev. Al Sharpton. YouTube videos of the misinterpreted chant contain labels such as "Sharpton's 'Go Kill A Cop' March."

TPM reached out to WBFF's news director for comment on Monday, but received no response.

Tell-tale videos here: http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/fox-wbff-edit-protest-kill-a-cop

Abolishing the CIA
Sunday, December 21, 2014 * Common Dreams * by Robert C. Koehler

The shock resonating from the Senate Intelligence Committee’s CIA torture report isn’t due so much to the revelations themselves, grotesque as the details are, but to the fact that they’re now officially public. National spokespersons (except for Dick Cheney) can no longer deny, quite so glibly, that the United States is what it claims its enemies to be.

We’re responsible for the worst sort of abuses of our fellow human beings: A half-naked man freezes to death. A detainee is chained to the wall in a standing position for 17 days. The stories have no saving grace, not even “good intelligence.”

The Axis of Evil smiles, yawns: It’s home.

The question is, what do we do with this moment of national self-awareness? Beyond demanding the prosecution of high-level perps, how about really changing the game? I suggest reviving S. 126, a bill introduced into the U.S. Senate on Jan. 4, 1995 by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, titled: Abolition of the Central Intelligence Agency.

Abolish the agency that has secretly stirred up hell on earth. Its sins go far beyond torturing suspected terrorists. This agency, with its annual budget (in 2013) of nearly $15 billion, has covertly carried out the bidding of special economic and political interests since its founding, orchestrating, among much else, the overthrow of democratically elected, populist governments in Iran, Guatemala and Chile because the U.S. couldn’t control them. In each case, the regime that followed was darkly repressive, murderous; the blood of their victims is also on American hands.

The abolition of the CIA could be a conscious step in tearing our government out of the grip of the war consensus — this unelected force that feeds on perpetual global mistrust and hatred, the exact opposite of what true security requires. In Moynihan’s speech introducing the bill to the Senate, he declared that the end of the Cold War “was a victory achieved by openness, not secrecy. By frankness, not intrigue.

“The Soviet Empire,” he continued, “did not fall apart because the spooks had bugged the men’s room in the Kremlin or put broken glass in Mrs. Brezhnev’s bath, but because running a huge closed repressive society in the 1980s had become — economically, socially and militarily, and technologically — impossible.”

~snip~

“Secrecy,” Moynihan proclaimed, “is a disease. It causes hardening of the arteries of the mind.”

http://www.commondreams.org/views/2014/12/21/abolishing-cia

Update on fallout from a Nov. 2011 event: The powerful take-away for me is, whatever I do, I WON'T be calling police to do "welfare checks"[, esp. for anyone I give a rats ass about... in other words, don't do it at all. I've heard of other cases of this, one in New York where a Senior (black) male was murdered, shot dead. after his door was busted down, right after he'd yelled at police through the door, "I'm fine, so you can go now!! Please just leave me alone, etc." (paraphrased).

~~~~~ * ~~~~~ * ~~~~~ * ~~~~~ * ~~~~~ * ~~~~~ * ~~~~~ * ~~~~~ * ~~~~~ * ~~~~~ *

Innocent Man Raided, Tased, Beaten, & Shot By a Corrupt SWAT Team who Lied to Get the Raid
By Matt Agorist * December 18, 2014 * The Free Thought Project (dot com)

Houston, TX — A completely innocent man was shot, tasered, brutally beaten, and had stun grenades thrown at him by vicious and incompetent SWAT officers. Then, those same officers tried to cover up their mistake by charging the victim, Chad Chadwick, with six criminal offenses including felony assault on a police officer.

This incident happened in 2011, but it has taken Chadwick three years and his entire life savings, to finally beat the charges that he was falsely accused of. Last month, a jury found Chad Chadwick not guilty of interfering with police. With tears in their eyes members of the jury offered the exonerated defendant comforting hugs, according to My Fox Houston.

“They tried to make me a convict. It broke me financially, bankrupted me. I used my life savings, not to mention, I lost my kids,” said Chadwick.

Chadwick had been drinking and went to sleep in his bathtub on the night of September 27, 2011, when police were given a tip from a friend of Chadwick’s who said they were concerned with his emotional well-being. So naturally the police responded by mobilizing a heavily militarized SWAT team.

“They came in did what they did, figured out that they messed up and now they are doing everything they can to cover it up. They treated a normal American citizen like an animal. It’s not right,” Chadwick said in an interview with FOX 26.

VIDEO of a damning FOX News Clip & remainder of text: http://thefreethoughtproject.com/innocent-man-raided-tased-beaten-shot-corrupt-swat-team-lied-raid/#uxsVTByFSbpbcMLE.99

The CIA Didn’t Just Torture, It Experimented on Human Beings
Reframing the CIA’s interrogation techniques as a violation of scientific and medical ethics may be the best way to achieve accountability.
by Lisa Hajjar * The Nation * Dec. 18, 2014

Human experimentation was a core feature of the CIA’s torture program. The experimental nature of the interrogation and detention techniques is clearly evident in the Senate Intelligence Committee’s executive summary of its investigative report, despite redactions (insisted upon by the CIA) to obfuscate the locations of these laboratories of cruel science and the identities of perpetrators.

At the helm of this human experimentation project were two psychologists hired by the CIA, James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen. They designed interrogation and detention protocols that they and others applied to people imprisoned in the agency’s secret “black sites.”

In its response to the Senate report, the CIA justified its decision to hire the duo: “We believe their expertise was so unique that we would have been derelict had we not sought them out when it became clear that CIA would be heading into the uncharted territory of the program.” Mitchell and Jessen’s qualifications did not include interrogation experience, specialized knowledge about Al Qaeda or relevant cultural or linguistic knowledge. What they had was Air Force experience in studying the effects of torture on American prisoners of war, as well as a curiosity about whether theories of “learned helplessness” derived from experiments on dogs might work on human enemies.

~snip~

Mitchell, like former CIA Director Michael Hayden and others who have defended the torture program, argues that a fundamental error in the Senate report is the elision of means (waterboarding, “rectal rehydration,” weeks or months of nakedness in total darkness and isolation, and other techniques intended to break prisoners) and ends—manufactured compliance, which, the defenders claim, enabled the collection of abundant intelligence that kept Americans safe. (That claim is amply and authoritatively contradicted in the report.)

As Americans from the Beltway to the heartland debate—again—the legality and efficacy of “enhanced interrogation,” we are reminded that “torture” has lost its stigma as morally reprehensible and criminal behavior. That was evident in the 2012 GOP presidential primary, when more than half of the candidates vowed to bring back waterboarding, and it is on full display now. On Meet the Press, for example, former Vice President Dick Cheney, who functionally topped the national security decision-making hierarchy during the Bush years, announced that he “would do it again in a minute.”

No one has been held accountable for torture, beyond a handful of prosecutions of low-level troops and contractors. Indeed, impunity has been virtually guaranteed as a result of various Faustian bargains, which include “golden shield” legal memos written by government lawyers for the CIA; ex post facto immunity for war crimes that Congress inserted in the 2006 Military Commissions Act; classification and secrecy that still shrouds the torture program, as is apparent in the Senate report’s redactions; and the “look forward, not backward” position that President Obama has maintained through every wave of public revelations since 2009. An American majority, it seems, has come to accept the legacy of torture.

Human experimentation, in contrast, has not been politically refashioned into a legitimate or justifiable enterprise. Therefore, it would behoove us to appreciate the fact that the architects and implementers of black-site torments were authorized at the highest levels of the White House and CIA to experiment on human beings. Reading the report through this lens casts a different light on questions of accountability and impunity.

MORE: http://www.thenation.com/article/193185/cia-didnt-just-torture-it-experimented-human-beings#

... avoid getting asked such painfully obvious questions by M$M,
the most obvious one being: why is it just fine for Tricky Dick
to open cozy trade agreements for decades now with Red China?

.. but it's 'over-reach' for Obama to normalize relations and opening
up trade with Cuba is "bad" because Cuba is so "repressive, with no
free press" etc.

I'm not very familiar with this website, so not sure of article's veracity; but
I did immediately think of all the opinions i post on DU getting fed into some
police database. Not to be paranoid or anything, but it does give me some
pause.

It's like we are being conditioned to censor ourselves, for fear of getting pegged
as a "cop-hater" and a week later seeing flashing blue & red in my rearview mirror.

ON EDIT: Here's another article in Reuters, a source I DO trust: http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2014/12/12/police-data-mining-looks-through-social-media-assigns-you-a-threat-level/

Cops Are Scanning Social Media to Assign You a “Threat Rating”
By Matt Agorist * December 16, 2014 * Free Thought Project

Online activity, purchases, and “comments that could be construed as offensive,” all contribute to your threat score.



Police State, USA — Imagine the following scenario: You are on your way home from work, driving down the road, when you notice police lights in your rear view mirror. You are being pulled over.

As you sit their, on the shoulder, adrenaline rushing, simultaneously angry and nervous, the police officer, in his patrol car behind you, is sizing you up based on an algorithm that determines your “threat rating.”

The officer enters your license plate into a mobile application on his laptop. In a matter of seconds, this application crawls over billions of records in commercial and public databases, including all available social media engagement, recent purchases and “any comments that could be construed as offensive.” The application then determines if your “threat rating” is green, yellow, or red.

Imagine that you are one of our informed and frequent readers and understand the importance of police accountability and are unafraid to voice your completely peaceful, yet strong opinion about police misconduct. Imagine that you left a comment on facebook this morning about a particular officer’s misconduct; imagine that it is this particular officer who just pulled you over.

Your rating just came back red. Up until this point, you have never committed a crime, you have never been violent, you have never even so much as run a stop sign. However, this police officer now knows that you made a comment about him punching the (insert handcuffed and helpless victim example here) on facebook, and he literally sees red (your threat rating).


Read more at http://thefreethoughtproject.com/cops-scanning-social-media-assign-threat-rating/#Su1dQkxR9uqYZPXx.99

CNN's #AskACop Hashtag Backfires, Triggers Anti-Police Backlash
CNN's request for viewers to ask cops questions via Twitter didn't go so well.
AlterNet * By Kali Holloway * December 17, 2014

In a move that seems to suggest it has no idea how Twitter works, CNN asked viewers to submit questions to police officers using the hashtag #AskACop. It went exactly the way you and anyone who has ever used social media would expect.

The request was part of a special “CNN Tonight” episode titled “Cops Under Fire.” Host Don Lemon, in the company of a panel of police officers, put out the call to Twitter users to submit questions they might #AskACop. On the heels of widespread protests against police brutality, particularly in communities of color, the questions that poured in were mostly thinly veiled criticisms of outrageous police abuses.

CHECK OUT SOME OF THE AWESOME TWEETS HERE (scroll down past the ad):
http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/cnns-askacop-hashtag-backfires-triggers-anti-police-backlash