Internal Documents Show TSA Agents Regularly Assault and Grope Americans as Found Through Freedom of Information Act Request

We hate to say, "We told ya so," but if we in the alternative media don't point out our triumphs, nobody else will, and certainly nobody in the mainstream media: The Transportation Security Administration is a rogue agency filled with miscreants, criminals and perverts who make more of an effort to, and take more pleasure in, making the traveling public miserable than in protecting them from "terrorism."

As noted by InfoWars.com, documents obtained under a Freedom of Information Act request filed by a government watchdog organization show that TSA-caused sexual abuse is still rife around the nation, "with Americans complaining of being sexually harassed and groped while screeners laugh and sneer at them."

We've been on to the TSA all along

The documents were uncovered by Judicial Watch (JW), a Washington, D.C.-based organization that filed a lawsuit last year for more information related to alleged TSA sexual abuse.

In all, JW received 58 pages of material containing passenger complaints from 2013 alone. Alleged sexual assaults were documented at Dulles International Airport in Washington, Chicago's O'Hare International Airport, Denver International Airport, Miami International Airport and Los Angeles International Airport.

InfoWars.com further framed the issue thusly:

Clearly these documents present only a snapshot of what is going on at every airport in the US every day.

The president of JW, Tom Fitton, observed that in order to get a hold of the documents the legal accountability watchdog had to fight, indicating that "the TSA is more interested in a cover-up than in addressing the problem that its employees violate innocent travelers too often, sexually or otherwise."

According to the documents, here are a few of the cases cited:

July 5, 2013, "TSA Contact Center Record," O'Hare Airport:

The female TSO [Transportation Safety Officer] then proceeded to roughly feel of [sic] her breast including her nipples. The TSO didn't go under her arms or along her sides. She indicated that she did not receive a proper pat down. The search was limited to her breast... Two other individuals came over to where the supervisor and gentleman were and they began laughing. The caller indicated that the incident was not the business of the other two officers and not a show for them. The caller indicated that even the Supervisor, along with the others, began to roar with laughter.

July 29, 2013, "To/From Memo," O'Hare Airport:

The person began to tell me how TSO [redacted] stuck his hands down his pants and grabbed the top of his penis and placed his fingers in his butt crack... The person was sure that he was violated and wanted to talk to a supervisor.... He said he is going to file a police report with Chicago Police Department and file a lawsuit against TSA and Officer [redacted] and walked away.

You can read more incident reports here^[PDF] or here.

Voluminous coverage of TSA malfeasance, criminality:

http://www.naturalnews.com/049878_TSA_sexual_abuse_alternative_media.html

The Dragnet Surveillance Program, NSA's Gem of Tracking World Phone Telecommunications, at an End?

""Congress is up against a tight deadline to extend or reform Section 215 of the Patriot Act, the provision that the government claims authorizes the National Security Agency’s phone-data program, before it sunsets on June 1. Naturally, the legislature is in a state of disarray.

The House has already passed the USA Freedom Act, which would put modest limits on the intelligence agency for the first time in decades. Now the Senate is under pressure to act before lawmakers leave for recess Thursday afternoon. If they do nothing, Section 215 will expire hours before they return to Washington, imperiling not only the phone records program but whatever other still-secret intelligence-gathering activities the government conducts under the statute.

The USA Freedom Act is hardly radical. One of its main components—mandating that phone companies store phone records instead of the government—was initially suggested by former NSA Director Keith Alexander, and it’s been endorsed by President Obama. But a major blockage to the reform bill has been Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell, who proposed instead to extend the current version of Section 215 for five years, and then last week offered a two-month extension. GOP leadership in the House indicated that an extension of any length was a non-starter and that they would not wait around while the Senate hemmed and hawed. In other words, McConnell could accept the USA Freedom Act, or nothing.

On Tuesday McConnell retreated slightly, and announced that he would allow a vote on the reform bill. It isn’t clear if it has the 60 votes needed to pass; McConnell seemed to be betting that it would fail and Congress might then accept a short-term extension rather than letting Section 215 expire completely.

Things got even more dramatic on Wednesday afternoon, when Rand Paul showed up to stage a “filibuster.”At the time of this writing Paul is speaking on the Senate floor, but it’s not totally clear what he’s doing there. It’s not technically a filibuster, and the first thing it disrupts will likely be work on the fast-track trade bill. There’s some speculation that Paul is trying to run out the clock in order to block both a clean extension of Section 215 and the USA Freedom Act, which he opposes on the grounds that it does not go far enough (as do some civil-liberties groups). Whatever his other goals are, it’s definitely at least partly a campaign stunt. “As you read this, I will be on the Senate floor to launch my filibuster to stop ANY extension or reauthorization of the ‘PATRIOT Act’s’ unconstitutional and illegal domestic spying programs,” he wrote to donors.

Oregon Senator and NSA critic Ron Wyden joined Paul on the floor, where he promised “to use every procedural tool available to me” to prevent an extension of the bulk-phone-records program. Wyden also criticized supporters of surveillance programs for waiting until the last minute and then claiming, “‘Oh my goodness! It is a dangerous world! We’ve got to continue this program to protect us.’” As he and Paul chatted, Wyden suggested that they could continue indefinitely.""

http://www.thenation.com/blog/207857/patriot-act-fight-enters-twilight-zone

Captain America President Scorns Christians at Easter Prayer Breakfast, Oh and Clearly the Holiday is all About White Bunnies to.

""In case you missed it yesterday, President Obama took another chance at the Easter Prayer Breakfast to take a swipe at Christians for "less than loving" acts and expressions.

“On Easter, I do reflect on the fact that as a Christian, I am supposed to love. And I have to say that sometimes when I listen to less than loving expressions by Christians, I get concerned,” Obama said.

Based on current events and the news cycle, it's obvious President Obama is referring to the ongoing battle in Indiana over the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, where Christians have been smeared as anti-gay bigots for refusing to give up their belief in traditional marriage. 

It was just two months ago when President Obama took advantage of his opportunity at the National Prayer Breakfast to draw a moral equivalence between ISIS, the terror army he has repeatedly argued is not Islamic, and the Christian crusades, which were fought to defend Christians from Muslim invasion and butchering hundreds of years ago. 

"Remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ," Obama said.""

http://townhall.com/tipsheet/katiepavlich/2015/04/08/obama-slams-christiansagain-n1982305

Mainstream Media Lies for a Better America, One Nation Under Oligarchy

""The corporate mainstream media with its well-paid journalists and increasing concentration of ownership bows to the concerns of advertisers. It tends to be privately owned and its owners have a vested interest in maintaining an economic system based on private ownership and in manufacturing consent for it. Moreover, such outlets these days are increasingly part of major conglomerates, which may include armaments manufacturers, banking or industrial concerns, and will not therefore adopt stances or report on stories that are harmful to the interests of the wider organisation.

The public is thus given access to a world view that is distorted in favour of state-corporate interests. Such interests have succeeded in getting across the message that, for example, the ‘free market’ is the best way to deliver goods and services to people, state provided welfare is bad and ‘individual responsibility’ is good, ‘austerity’ is necessary, privatisation increases efficiency, an endless ‘war on terror’ must be waged on designated enemies, well-being is measured in terms of a never-ending quest for GDP growth, the US and NATO are the ‘world’s policemen’, giant agribusiness must displace peasant farmers to secure food security and gross inequalities and unregulated corporate power are both necessary and legitimate.

Over the past 15 years, numerous ‘alternative’ news websites have sprung up that challenge these assumptions and the belief that ordinary citizens should be passive consumers of a predetermined news agenda. There are now dozens of popular news sites that inform people of issues the mainstream media has deliberately failed to tell people the truth about. There are also many more sites with global reach that exist to scrutinise specific sectors, hold practices to account and counter corporate propaganda (for example, GMWatch, Corporate Europe Observatory, Food & Water Watch, Campaign Against the Arms Trade, etc.).

The existence of ‘alternative’ independent sites has led the European Union to express concerns about the ‘damaging’ effects of people having access to these sources of information. The EU argues that societal consensus is being eroded as people are being ‘led astray’ by dissenting voices on the internet. In the report ‘A free and pluralistic media to sustain European democracy’, the EU feels there is a danger that people are being misguidedly radicalised. It advocates EU funding for ‘responsible’ journalism, getting the EU’s viewpoint across regularly and prominently in the media and placing controls on the net. The EU perceives this to be ‘pluralism’.

What is ‘responsible journalism’?

An article by Annie Day indicates that as a result of its destabilisations, coups, mass bombings and death squads, the US military and the CIA have been responsible for a figure of an estimated ten million deaths since 1945. Yet the corporate media never describes any of this as constituting a form of mass terror. Through the cynical hijacking of the concept of ‘terror’, the US now attempts to justify its ongoing tyranny through a ‘war on terror’, which goes unquestioned on a daily basis by the mainstream media.

Ukraine is the latest example of a US-backed terror campaign, which the corporate media has consistently failed to question. As the world edges ever closer to nuclear war, the mainstream media merely parrots the official lie coming from Washington that the situation is all due to ‘Russian aggression’.

You can also add to that ten million, countless others whose lives have been sacrificed on the altar of corporate profit, which did not rely on the military to bomb peoples and countries into submission but on the IMF, World Bank and WTO. It begs the question how many lives have been cut short across the world because of the inherent structural violence or silent killing of the everyday functioning of predatory capitalism? 

The appropriation of wealth through a system that funnels it from bottom to top via a process of accumulation by dispossession is celebrated by the corporate media as growth, prosperity, and freedom of choice, despite evidence that, from Greece to Spain and beyond, the reality for the majority has been falling wages, increasing poverty, the stripping away of choice and misery.

So where is the ‘responsible journalism’ that the EU calls for?

Does it lie with those journalists in the corporate media whose claim to respectability is their rigid professionalism, their accountability, their objectivity?

If you can call professionalism, accountability and objectivity being in the pay of and not wishing to offend advertising interests, officialdom and powerful corporate interests then they are paragons of absolute responsibility.

Peddling their high salaried deceptions, they have failed and continue to fail the public and genuinely hold power to account. By shining their ‘investigative’ light on ‘parliamentary procedures’, personalities, the rubber stamping of policies and the inane machinations of party politics, they merely serve to maintain and perpetuate the status quo and keep the public in the dark as to the unaccountable self-serving nature of power broking and the unity ofinterests that enable Big Oil, Big Finance, Big Pharma, Big Agra and the rest of them via their secretive think tanks and policy initiatives to keep bleeding us all dry. 

But that’s the role of the media: to help reinforce and reproduce the material conditions of a divisive social system on a daily basis. It’s called having a compliant, toothless media. It’s what the corporate media itself calls part of ‘liberal democracy’. And in this type of ‘liberal democracy’, it is people like Edward Snowden or Julian Assange who expose the wrongdoings of the political-corporate elites that are hounded.

It was George Orwell who said that journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed and everything else is public relations. Orwell was correct. Former CIA boss General Petraeus stated in 2006 that his strategy was to wage a war of perceptions conducted continuously through the news media, while John Pilger observes that the role of respectable journalism in western state crimes – from Iraq to Iran, Afghanistan to Libya - remains taboo. Its role has been to serve as first-choice cheerleader for illegal wars.

Intelligence agencies secure media compliance

There are of course some good journalists working in the corporate mainstream media. But if you think this article mounts to little more than a one-sided attack on the ‘mainstream’ media, you may need to think again.

Many readers will be aware of a recent story about the former editor of Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, one of Germany’s largest newspapers, who claimed that he accepted news stories written and given to him by the CIA and published them under his own name. 

This revelation came as a shock to many. But it should not have because  in the UK, for example, the British intelligence agencies along with the CIA has for decades strived to ensure that the mainstream press and TV complied with the interests of the Establishment. In addition to making sure that the British left was subverted, infiltrated and made toothless, the mainstream media was molded by the intelligence agencies to parrot the Establishment’s viewpoints and aims.

How this was achieved is described in the article ‘The Psyops War: British Intelligence and the Covert Propaganda Front and the CIA’s Interference in British Politics.’ ""

http://www.globalresearch.ca/countering-the-lies-of-the-mainstream-media/5441427

Grand Global Genetic Food Manipulation Out of Control: The Destruction of Real Food is Almost Complete

"“Control the oil, and you control nations. Control the food, and you control the people.”* -Henry Kissenger

“Seeds of Destruction: The Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation” by F. William Engdahl is a skillfully researched book that focuses on how a small socio-political American elite seeks to establish control over the very basis of human survival: the provision of our daily bread.

This is no ordinary book about the perils of GMO.  Engdahl takes the reader inside the corridors of power, into the backrooms of the science labs, behind closed doors in the corporate boardrooms. The author cogently reveals a diabolical world of profit-driven political intrigue, government corruption and coercion, where genetic manipulation and the patenting of life forms are used to gain worldwide control over food production. If the book often reads as a crime story, that should come as no surprise. For that is what it is.

Engdahl’s carefully argued critique goes far beyond the familiar controversies surrounding the practice of genetic modification as a scientific technique. The book is an eye-opener, a must-read for all those committed to the causes of social justice and world peace.

What follows is the Preface to ”Seeds of Destruction: The Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation” by F. William Engdahl (available through Global Research):

Introduction

“We have about 50% of the world’s wealth but only 6.3% of its population. This disparity is particularly great as between ourselves and the peoples of Asia. In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security. To do so,we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming; and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives.We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of altruism and world-benefaction.”
-George Kennan, US State Department senior planning official, 1948

This book is about a project undertaken by a small socio-political elite, centered, after the Second World War, not in London, but in Washington. It is the untold story of how this self-anointed elite set out, in Kennan’s words, to “maintain this position of disparity.” It is the story of how a tiny few dominated the resources and levers of power in the postwar world.

It’s above all a history of the evolution of power in the control of a select few, in which even science was put in the service of that minority. As Kennan recommended in his 1948 internal memorandum, they pursued their policy relentlessly, and without the “luxury of altruism and world-benefaction.”

Yet, unlike their predecessors within leading circles of the British Empire, this emerging American elite, who proclaimed proudly at war’s end the dawn of their American Century, were masterful in their use of the rhetoric of altruism and world-benefaction to advance their goals. Their American Century paraded as a softer empire, a “kinder, gentler” one in which, under the banner of colonial liberation, freedom, democracy and economic development, those elite circles built a network of power the likes of which the world had not seen since the time of Alexander the Great some three centuries before Christ—a global empire unified under the military control of a sole superpower, able to decide on a whim, the fate of entire nations.

This book is the sequel to a first volume, A Century ofWar: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order. It traces a second thin red line of power. This one is about the control over the very basis of human survival, our daily provision of bread. The man who served the interests of the postwar American-based elite during the 1970’s, and came to symbolize its raw realpolitik, was Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. Sometime in the mid-1970’s, Kissinger, a life-long practitioner of “Balance of Power” geopolitics and a man with more than a fair share of conspiracies under his belt, allegedly declared his blueprint for world domination: “Control the oil and you control nations. Control the food, and you control the people.”

The strategic goal to control global food security had its roots decades earlier, well before the outbreak of war in the late 1930’s. It was funded, often with little notice, by select private foundations, which had been created to preserve the wealth and power of a handful of American families.

Originally the families centered their wealth and power in New York and along the East Coast of the United States, from Boston to New York to Philadelphia and Washington D.C. For that reason, popular media accounts often referred to them, sometimes with derision but more often with praise, as the East Coast Establishment.

The center of gravity of American power shifted in the decades following the War. The East Coast Establishment was overshadowed by new centers of power which evolved from Seattle to Southern California on the Pacific Coast, as well as in Houston, Las Vegas, Atlanta and Miami, just as the tentacles of American power spread to Asia and Japan, and south, to the nations of Latin America.

In the several decades before and immediately following World War II, one family came to symbolize the hubris and arrogance of this emerging American Century more than any other. And the vast fortune of that family had been built on the blood of many wars, and on their control of a new “black gold,” oil.

What was unusual about this family was that early on in the building of their fortune, the patriarchs and advisors they cultivated to safeguard their wealth decided to expand their influence over many very different fields. They sought control not merely over oil, the emerging new energy source for world economic advance. They also expanded their influence over the education of youth, medicine and psychology, foreign policy of the United States, and, significant for our story, over the very science of life itself, biology, and its applications in the world of plants and agriculture.

For the most part, their work passed unnoticed by the larger population, especially in the United States. Few Americans were aware how their lives were being subtly, and sometimes not so subtly, influenced by one or another project financed by the immense wealth of this family.

In the course of researching for this book, a work nominally on the subject of genetically modified organisms or GMO, it soon became clear that the history of GMO was inseparable from the political history of this one very powerful family, the Rockefeller family, and the four brothers—David,Nelson, Laurance and John D. III—who, in the three decades following American victory in World War II, the dawn of the much-heralded American Century, shaped the evolution of power George Kennan referred to in 1948.

In actual fact, the story of GMO is that of the evolution of power in the hands of an elite, determined at all costs to bring the entire world under their sway.

Three decades ago, that power was based around the Rockefeller family. Today, three of the four brothers are long-since deceased, several under peculiar circumstances.However, as was their will, their project of global domination—“full spectrum dominance” as the Pentagon later called it—had spread, often through a rhetoric of “democracy,” and was aided from time to time by the raw military power of that empire when deemed necessary. Their project evolved to the point where one small power group, nominally headquartered in Washington in the early years of the new century, stood determined to control future and present life on this planet to a degree never before dreamed of.

The story of the genetic engineering and patenting of plants and other living organisms cannot be understood without looking at the history of the global spread of American power in the decades following World War II. George Kennan, Henry Luce, Averell Harriman and, above all, the four Rockefeller brothers, created the very concept of multinational “agribusiness”. They financed the “Green Revolution” in the agriculture sector of developing countries in order, among other things, to create new markets for petro-chemical fertilizers and petroleum products, as well as to expand dependency on energy products. Their actions are an inseparable part of the story of genetically modified crops today.

By the early years of the new century, it was clear that no more than four giant chemical multinational companies had emerged as global players in the game to control patents on the very basic food products that most people in the world depend on for their daily nutrition—corn, soybeans, rice, wheat, even vegetables and fruits and cotton—as well as new strains of disease-resistant poultry, genetically-modified to allegedly resist the deadly H5N1 Bird Flu virus, or even gene altered pigs and cattle. Three of the four private companies had decades-long ties to Pentagon chemical warfare research. The fourth, nominally Swiss, was in reality Anglodominated. As with oil, so was GMO agribusiness very much an Anglo-American global project.""

http://www.globalresearch.ca/seeds-of-destruction-the-diabolical-world-of-genetic-manipulation/25303

FOIA White House Transparency None: Freedom of Information Act Void

""The administration of Barack Obama, feted as the most transparent in American history, has elected to continue contradicting itself by exempting the Office of Administration from FOIA requests. This removal of a federal regulation makes official a policy by the Bush and Obama administrations to reject FOIA requests made to that office.

This office handles, among other things, the archival of emails and other housekeeping duties. Considering the various email scandals that have involved the executive branch–Hillary’s private email server, the Lois Lerner saga–this exemption, which the White House maintains is backed by court precedents, looks especially problematic.

The announcement of this move comes during the tenth annual Sunshine Week, dedicated to preserving, protecting and expanding the right to know through FOIA. Liberal activist Anne Weismann, of the Citizens for Ethics and Responsibility in Washington, told USA Today that “The irony of this being Sunshine Week is not lost on me” and that “It is completely out of step with the president’s supposed commitment to transparency.”

Supposed, indeed.

Although most offices in the White House have been legally exempt from FOIA for decades, the Office of Administration answered FOIA requests  for 30 years. Tom Fitton of Judicial Watch told USA Today that “This is an office that operated under the FOIA for 30 years, and when it became politically inconvenient, they decided they weren’t subject to the Freedom of Information Act any more.”

That change in policy–the refusal of FOIA requests–began in the late Bush administration. A federal court ruling in 2009 argued that the office lacked sufficient independent authority to be subject to FOIA guidelines. Instead, the White House has to archive their emails, but those emails are released under the Presidential Records Act, which means that the emails will be released at least five years after the end of the Obama, or any other presidential, administration.

The White House has not disclosed why it waited six years to update its internal regulations to match the court ruling, or why it continued to voluntarily respond to FOIA requests to that office up until this point. The ruling itself eliminates any formal process that allows the public to request that the White House voluntarily release records as a part of discretionary disclosure.

In another example of exactly how much the apparently-transparent Obama administration cares about the opinion of the public or the public’s right to know, the White House said that there would not be a 30-day public comment period on the rule, making this new rule final""

http://watchdog.org/206883/foia-obama-office-administration/

The "Getting" of Assange and the Smearing of a Revolution

""This Kafka-style justice awaits Assange whether or not Sweden decides to prosecute him. Last December, the Independent disclosed that the US and Sweden had already started talks on Assange's extradition. At the same time, a secret grand jury - a relic of the 18th century long abandoned in this country - has convened just across the river from Washington, in a corner of Virginia that is home to the CIA and most of America's national security establishment. The grand jury is a "fix," a leading legal expert told me: reminiscent of the all-white juries in the South that convicted blacks by rote. A sealed indictment is believed to exist.

 

Under the US Constitution, which guarantees free speech, Assange should be protected, in theory. When he was running for president, Obama, himself a constitutional lawyer, said, "Whistleblowers are part of a healthy democracy and must be protected from reprisal." His embrace of George W. Bush's "war on terror" has changed all that. Obama has pursued more whistleblowers than any US president. The problem for his administration in "getting" Assange and crushing WikiLeaks is that military investigators have found no collusion or contact between him and Manning, reports NBC. There is no crime, so one has to be concocted, probably in line with Vice President Joe Biden's absurd description of Assange as a "hi-tech terrorist."

Should Assange win his High Court appeal in London, he could face extradition direct to the United States. In the past, US officials have synchronized extradition warrants with the conclusion of a pending case. Like its predatory military, American jurisdiction recognizes few boundaries. As the suffering of Bradley Manning demonstrates, together with the recently executed Troy Davis and the forgotten inmates of Guantanamo, much of the US criminal justice system is corrupt if not lawless.""

http://www.truth-out.org/getting-assange-and-smearing-revolution/1317922597