Head of the Senate Intelligence Committee Sen. Dianne Feinstein on Tuesday accused the CIA of interfering with the committee’s investigation into the agency’s Bush-era torture program, including conducting an unauthorized “search” of the committee’s computers and removing documents, in an effort to thwart a potentially “searing indictment” of the interrogation program.
In a statement given on the Senate floor, the democratic senator said she had “grave concerns” that the CIA’s search “may well have violated the separation of powers principles embodied in the United States Constitution” as well as “the Fourth Amendment, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, as well as Executive Order 12333, which prohibits the CIA from conducting domestic searches or surveillance.”
She also said the CIA was attempting “to intimidate this staff—and I am not taking it lightly.”
As Politico reported, Feinstein’s
The ACLU praised Feinstein’s efforts to call out the CIA’s surveillance and its efforts to cover up its own wrongdoing.
“After so many years of Congress being unable or unwilling to assert its authority over the CIA, Senator Feinstein today began to reclaim the authority of Congress as a check on the Executive Branch. Public release of the Senate torture report will be the next step to reining in a CIA that has tortured, destroyed evidence, spied on Congress, and lied to the American people,” stated Christopher Anders, senior legislative counsel with the group.
Reprieve, a charity that represents some of those tortured under the program, welcomed the senator’s comments as well.
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“Senator Feinstein is right: the CIA torture program should never have existed,” stated Alka Pradhan, Counter-terrorism Counsel at Reprieve US. “The only way to move forward from this terrible chapter in American history is to allow the Senate to fully exercise its oversight function, and to declassify the Senate Select Intelligence Committee Report on the CIA torture program. We cannot learn from history unless we know what it is.”
CIA head John Brennan denied the allegations, telling NBC News’ Andrea Mitchell, “We wouldn’t do that.”
“When the facts come out on this, I think a lot of people who are claiming that there has been this tremendous, sort of spying and monitoring and hacking will be proved wrong, ” Brennan said.
Yet what continues to stand out to some observers is not Feinstein’s defense of separation of powers but the irony that a senator who has been a longtime defender of surveillance is now outraged that her Senate committee was spied upon.
In December, for example, Feinstein said that the NSA’s bulk collection of phone data “is constitutional and helps keep the country safe from attack.” The comment came a month after she had proposed a bill that would “codify” the NSA’s worst abuses. But this defense surveillance goes back years, such as her backing Bush’s FISA amendments as well as legal immunity for telecommunications firms for their role in surveillance.
NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden called out the hypocrisy of Feinstein’s outrage over senators being spied upon while supporting of NSA spying on ordinary citizens.
In a statement sent to NBC News, Snowden said, “It’s clear the CIA was trying to play ‘keep away’ with documents relevant to an investigation by their overseers in Congress, and that’s a serious constitutional concern.”
“But it’s equally if not more concerning that we’re seeing another ‘Merkel Effect,’ where an elected official does not care at all that the rights of millions of ordinary citizens are violated by our spies, but suddenly it’s a scandal when a politician finds out the same thing happens to them,” Snowden stated.
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Members of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Hostage Rescue Team (HRT) have participated in hundreds of nighttime raids in Iraq and Afghanistan as forefront in the Bureau’s evolution from a domestic crime fighting organization to an international anti-terrorism force, according to a Washington Post article published Thursday.
Reporting on the “little known alliance” between the Bureau and the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), the Post details how, since early 2003, the FBI’s military role grew from shepherding other FBI officials outside of the Green Zone to fighting side by side with JSOC officers on nightly raids.
The Washington Post reports:
According to former FBI deputy director Sean Joyce, in 2010 after JSOC “shifted priorities” in Afghanistan—now targeting “local insurgents who were not necessarily plotting against the United States”—the FBI “drew down” their presence there and FBI-JSOC operations moved to “other parts of the world.”
The implications of the reporting, according to independent journalist Kevin Gosztola, are far reaching. “This is the effect of the war on terrorism,” he writes, “which has put America on a permanent war footing.”
Gosztola continues:
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Fast food workers in 80 cities, both in the U.S. and around the globe, are demonstrating together on Thursday with demands for increased wages and better treatment from restaurants—dominated by international chains like McDonald’s, Burger King, Taco Bell, and others—that make billions in profit annually on the back of their low-paid labor force.
From New Zealand and Austrailia to Asia, from Europe to Africa, and in both hemispheres of the Americas, the international day of protests and strikes is being chronicled on Twitter under the hashtag #fastfoddglobal:
Tweets about “#FastFoodGlobal”
As the New York Times reports:
USA Today reports from New York City:
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Writing for CNN International, Ron Oswald, the general secretary of Geneva-based International Union of Food, Agricultural, Hotel, Restaurant, Catering, Tobacco and Allied Workers’ Associations (IUF) and a lead organizer for the international day of protest, explains why fast food workers in all countries need to be paid more. He writes:
From industry’s perspective, however, there’s no need for change.
Scott DeFife, an executive vice president for the National Restaurant Association—which some call the “other NRA” that represents many of the largest corporations in the fast food industry—dismissed Thursday’s protests when he told the Times: “These are made-for-TV media moments — that’s pretty much it.”
But for workers struggling to feed their families and meet basic needs, the sentiment was strikingly and consistently different.
Delores Leonard of Bronzeville, Illinois told the Chicago Tribune on Thursday that she joined the day’s demonstration in Chicago because her hourly wage of $8.25 at McDonald’s doesn’t cover even half of her rent and utility bills.
“[The] people that prepare the food are the heart and soul of the services,” said the mother of two daughters who is forced to rely on government assistance, food stamps and Medicaid, to make ends meet. “It’s absurd for $8.25. It’s just not enough, and if [other people, including the owners] were in our shoes, they would understand.”
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Canada’s housing market has come racing out of the pandemic lockdowns this spring, setting a third consecutive monthly record for home sales in September.
The association says September home sales were up 45.6 per cent compared with the same month last year. Compared with August, CREA says home sales were up 0.9 per cent on a seasonally adjusted basis.
Month-over-month gains in Ottawa, Greater Vancouver, Vancouver Island, Calgary and Hamilton-Burlington, Ont., were mostly offset by declines in the Greater Toronto Area and Montreal.
Watch: ‘Velocity’ in U.S. resale housing market is the highest ever. Story continues below.
The actual national average home price also set another record in September at $604,000, up 17.5 per cent from the same month last year.
CREA says excluding sales in Greater Vancouver and the Greater Toronto Area, two of the most active and expensive housing markets, lowers the national average price about $125,000.
“Many Canadian housing markets are continuing to see historically strong levels of activity as we enter into the fall market of this very strange year,” CREA chair Costa Poulopoulos said in a statement.
“Along with historic supply shortages in a number of regions, fierce competition among buyers has been putting upward pressure on home prices. Much of that was pent-up demand from the spring that came forward as our economies opened back up over the summer.”
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The Ontario Real Estate Board earlier this month requested that open houses be suspended during the second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Many economists who chimed on in the latest CREA numbers said the aggressively strong market can’t continue.
“We doubt that this recent sizzling strength can persist amid some of the building headwinds, which should at least somewhat tame market conditions in the months ahead,” Bank of Montreal chief economist Doug Porter said.
“The underlying economic conditions simply do not support such a piping hot market over a sustained period.”
HuffPost Canada, with files from The Canadian Press
America Votes
The latest polls, breaking news and analysis on the U.S. election from HuffPost’s Washington, D.C. bureau
In the Heritage Cup tournament’s final first round match, Trent Seven will face off with Kenny Williams on NXT UK next Thursday (October 22). Seven was among the first seven wrestlers announced for the Heritage Cup tournament. Williams qualified for the tournament as its final entrant by defeating Ashton Smith and Amir Jordan in a Wild Card triple threat match.
The winner of Seven vs. Williams will advance to face Dave Mastiff in the semifinals of the Heritage Cup tournament. Mastiff defeated Joseph Conners via knockout in a first round match on NXT UK this week. Noam Dar vs. A-Kid will be the other semifinal match. Dar advanced by defeating Alexander Wolfe in the first round, while A-Kid defeated Flash Morgan Webster in his first round match.
Heritage Cup matches have the following rules:
There will be six rounds for Heritage Cup matches. Each round will be three minutes.
There will be 20-second breaks between each round.
All matches are two-out-of-three falls.
Falls can be won by pinfall, submission, or countout.
Once a fall occurs, the round ends.
Once someone has won two falls, they are declared the winner and they advance in the tournament.
If there’s a disqualification or knockout, the match ends without the need for two falls.
If a match goes the full six rounds, whoever is ahead on falls wins.
The Heritage Cup will be defended as a championship under the same rules following the tournament.
WWE has also announced that next Thursday’s NXT UK will feature a contract signing for WALTER and Ilja Dragunov’s upcoming NXT UK Championship match. WALTER is defending his title against Dragunov on NXT UK the following week (Thursday, October 29). Dragunov & Pete Dunne defeated WALTER & Wolfe in the main event of NXT UK this week. Dragunov pinned WALTER to get the win. It’s the first time WALTER has been pinned in NXT UK.
Revelations based on documents provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden and reporting on by both the New York Times and Germany’s Der Spiegel newspaper on Sunday show that the National Security Agency infiltrated China’s premiere technology company, obtained detailed product blueprints, spied on its executives, and took so much data the NSA analysts didn’t “know what to do with it” all.
The NSA’s targeting of Huawei—which makes devices for public use like smartphones but also industrial infastructure components used in large fiber-optic and other network systems is something like the Chinese equivalent of Apple and Cisco combined—is not surprising by itself. But the documents show a striking level of peneatration into the company’s network and also reveal that the targeting of high level political officials in the Chinese government, including former Chinese President Hu Jintao and his successor and current President Xi Jinping..
According to the Der Spiegel:
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Both newspaper articles make the point that the US has specifically and repeatedly accused Huawei of being an untrustworthy actor, with US government officials warning that the company might be using its market position to support the intelligence and geopolitical ends of the Chinese governement.
As the Times reports:
Voicing his approval of the reporting, though he was not directly involved in the publication of either, journalist Glenn Greenwald signaled the importance of the latest revelations by tweeting:
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Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) rolled out the 2015 House Republican budget on Tuesday. His “Path to Prosperity,” critics charge, is a path to austerity that is completely out of step with what Americans want.
Releasing the budget, the House Budget Committee Chairman called it “a plan to balance the budget and create jobs” that “shows how we will solve our nation’s biggest challenges.”
His proposals, says Robert Greenstein, president of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, are a “path to more adversity.”
Summarizing some of the proposals, Suzy Khimm writes at MSNBC that Ryan has
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In addition, CBPP’s Greenstein states, his budget
A point-by-point breakdown by the non-profit National Priorities Project shows that the Ryan budget — unlike the Congressional Progressive Caucus’s Better Off budget released earlier this month — is out of step with what Americans want.
NPP points out that 70 percent of people oppose cuts to SNAP (food stamps.) Ryan’s budget calls for deep cuts to the program. In contrast, the CPC budget restores SNAP benefits to pre-Farm Bill levels, investing $15 billion over 10 years.
Ryan’s budget calls for a lowering of the corporate tax rate to 25 percent. The CPC budget calls for closing of tax loopholes— that’s in line with what 79 percent of Americans want.
Sixty-nine percent of Americans say improving education should be a priority. The CPC budget meets that call with substantial general discretionary funding for educatino, as well as $47 billion over 10 years to invest in teachers and K-12 schools. The Ryan budget, in contrast includes cuts to overall discretionary spending, which includes education, and would provide financial aid to fewer families.
Commentators are calling Ryan’s budget a political exercise as it is likely to go nowhere, yet the proposal is likely to garner more corporate media coverage than the CPC’s economic blueprint that offers a progressive vision in line with what the nation actually wants.
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People detained at a privately-run immigrant detention center in Washington have been thrown in solitary confinement and cut off from communication after participating in a hunger strike against inhumane conditions in the facility and soaring deportations nation-wide. Now, they are going on the offensive—seeking a restraining order against Immigration and Customs Enforcement on charges they were unjustly retaliated against for exercising their constitutionally-protected right to protest.
“They are whistle-blowers,” said human rights campaigner Maru Mora Villalpando, who is directly supporting the protests, in an interview with Common Dreams. “Now that people are paying attention, they are using torture against them by putting them in solitary confinement.”
The peaceful protest began at the Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma, Washington on March 7, and according to Villalpando, at least 240 people are withholding food. Protesters are demanding an end to deportations, as well as higher-quality food and medical care, pay for work inside the detention center (they currently receive just $1 for a day’s worth of labor), and an end to extremely high commissary prices.
Numerous reports have emerged that people who are perceived to be leaders of the protests have been targeted by authorities at the facility with solitary confinement, threats of deportation, and other punitive measures. The facility is run by GEO Group — the notorious private prison company profiting from high levels of deportation and detention of suspected undocumented people under President Obama.
Andres Ramirez-Martinez, Manuel Uriostegui, and Ericson Gonzales are the plaintiffs in the motion for a temporary restraining order, which is being filed by the ACLU of Washington and Columbia Legal Services and is slated for a hearing Friday morning. They say that corrections authorities invited approximately 20 detainees to meet with an assistant warden to discuss the hunger strike, but instead they were handcuffed and moved to solitary cells with no explanation.
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“I was handcuffed and placed in administrative segregation where I am locked in an isolation cell for 23 hours a day,” said Uriostegui, according to a statement released by supporters of the hunger strike. “My cell has a bed, sink, and toilet and is not very big. . . I am also only allowed to shower three days a week and cannot participate in programming. I was not told why I was placed in administrative segregation, or if or when I would be released from segregation.”
“Retaliating against and punishing immigrant detainees engaged in peaceful protests is an unlawful attempt to chill free speech rights. Like all civil detainees, they have free speech rights protected by the Bill of Rights,” said ACLU-WA Legal Director Sarah Dunne.
Those locked inside the NWDC are not the only ones facing retaliation for peaceful protest. People held at the Joe Corley Detention Center in Conroe, Texas—also run by GEO—have faced solitary confinement, communications blackouts, and deportation for participating in a similar hunger strike inspired by their Washington counterparts. Hunger striker Manuel Martinez-Arambula was deported Thursday, according to organizers supporting the protests.
The hunger strikes come amid growing U.S. movements against soaring deportations under Obama, which will soon reach 2 million. On Saturday, immigrant justice advocates across the United States will rally for an immediate halt of deportations.
Said Villalpando, “The eyes of the world are watching right now.”
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In reference to last week’s “Spring Meetings” between the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, critics are calling on the two financial giants to put their money where their mouths are and initiate policies that fight growing global inequality, rather than create it.
In the build-up to the annual meetings between finance ministers, central bankers and other top officials, three reports were published by the IMF and World Bank that warn about the growing gap between the global rich and poor. These reports call for a change in IMF and World Bank lending and advisory policies including the implentation of measures that would eradicate global tax evasion and create tax code reform that benefits the poor over the rich.
However, according to executive director of Oxfam America Ray Offenheiser, even though World Bank President Jim Yong Kim and IMF managing director Christine Lagarde “have been outspoken about the dangers of skyrocketing inequality,” the world has yet to see “real initiatives to back up their rhetoric.”
The lofty talk coming from IMF and World Bank officials has left some observers scratching their heads. As institutions well known for pushing fiscal policies that have enriched the world’s wealthiest while pushing punishing austerity on struggling nations, some quipped that the recent talk has them sounding like they just returned from an Occupy Wall Street rally.
“From the Occupy movement, to the corridors of power: the rallying cry against inequality could be heard the last few days in a setting far removed from the street demonstrations that sprouted in 2011,” wrote Alexander Panetta, reporting for the Canadian Press. “The past week’s global financial meetings heard repeated warnings about inequality and its deleterious effect on economic growth.”
Head of the IMF Christine Lagarde, went so far as to say that the organization is already incorporating these ideas into the policy advice it offers member-states, Panetta reports.
“The fund is always changing, evolving in the past 70 years,” Min Zhu, deputy managing director of the IMF, told a panel discussion on Thursday. “After the [2008 financial ] crisis, particularly, income inequality became an issue.”
However, as rights group Oxfam pointed out last week, despite this shift in language, those organizations are yet to actively shift policies away from their austerity-driven past.
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“International financial institutions should change the policy advice they [give] countries and shift the balance towards investment in health, education and progressive fiscal policies,” said Oxfam’s Offenheiser. “Austerity worsens inequality, as the IMF and World Bank know well. They advised aggressive cuts to health and education in developing countries in the 1980s and 90s, and some of these countries took two decades to climb back to square one. Gaps between rich and poor widened, economies were shattered, and the poor continued to get poorer even when growth improved.”
According to a recent report by the the European Network on Debt and Development (Eurodad), these harsh austerity measures imposed by the International Monetary Fund have actually risen sharply over the last few years, causing hardship for poor countries. According to the group, this increase in IMF driven austerity is placing a heavy debt burden on poor countries with little to no payback, despite promises by the financial behemoth to change.
“What we found was truly shocking,” wrote Jesse Griffiths, co-author of the report and director of Eurodad. “The IMF is going backwards – increasing the number of policy conditions per loan, and remaining heavily engaged in highly sensitive and political policy areas.”
Crisis-ridden Ukraine was the latest to accept austerity measures in exchange for up to $27 billion dollars in loans, including massive cuts in pensions and a 40 percent increase in the consumer prices for gas to heat their homes.
“And the unfortunate thing is that even though Lagarde and the IMF may be bringing up this issue,” said Deborah James Director of International Programs at the Center for Economic and Policy Research on the Real News Network ahead of the meetings, “the policies that they are still imposing to this day on countries around the world that have to accept loans from the IMF, as well as the policy advice that they give to countries that are not under IMF loan conditionalities, are still actually exacerbating inequality to an amazing degree.”
Referencing Christine Lagarde’s record as head of the IMF so far, James continued:
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Israel on Tuesday declared it is withdrawing from the so-called “peace talks,” citing Wednesday’s announcement of a unity pact between the Palestine Liberation Organization and Hamas.
In an interview with the BBC’s Middle East Editor Jeremy Bowen, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas can “have peace with Israel or a pact with Hamas—he can’t have both.”
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According to Middle East scholar Juan Cole, the “hostility of Israel and the US to a Palestinian internal reconciliation also derives from their desire to divide and rule. A united Palestinian front would make that strategy much less salient. If the 4.4 million Palestinians in the Occupied territories could speak with a single voice, they would nearly have the weight of the 5.5 million Israeli Jews.”
The talks, brokered by the U.S., had long shown signs of fraying. Critics have slammed Israel for constructing settlements, destroying Palestinian homes, repressing protests, and killing Palestinian civilians throughout the course of the U.S.-brokered negotiations.
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