As a kid, I got used to being stopped by the police. I grew up in an inner-ring suburb of St. Louis. It was the kind of place where officers routinely roughed up my friends and family for no good reason.
Ihated the way cops treated me.
But I knew police weren’t all bad. One of my father’s closest friends was a cop. He became a mentor to me and encouraged me to join the force. He told me that I could use the police’s power and resources to help my community.
So in 1994, I joined the St. Louis Police Department. I quickly realized how naive I’d been. I was floored by the dysfunctional culture I encountered.
I won’t say all, but many of my peers were deeply racist.
The brutality of the CIA’s torture program under the leadership and direction of George Bush and Dick Cheney is quite frankly, terrifying.
Interrogations that lasted for days on end. Detainees forced to stand on broken legs, or go 180 hours in a row without sleep. A prison so cold, one suspect essentially froze to death. The Senate Intelligence Committee is finally releasing its review of the CIA’s detention and interrogation programs. And it is brutal.
Here are some of the most gruesome moments of detainee abuse from a summary of the report, obtained by The Daily Beast:
The CIA has previously said that only three detainees were ever waterboarded: Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Abu Zabaydah, and Abd Al Rahim al-Nashiri. But records uncovered by the Senate Intelligence Committee suggest there may have been more than three subjects. The Senate report describes a photograph of a “well worn” waterboard, surrounded by buckets of water, at a detention site where the CIA has claimed it never subjected a detainee to this procedure. In a meeting with the CIA in 2013, the agency was not able to explain the presence of this waterboard.
Contrary to CIA’s description to the Department of Justice, the Senate report says that the waterboarding was physically harmful, leading to convulsions and vomiting. During one session, detainee Abu Zabaydah became “completely unresponsive with bubbles rising through his open full mouth.” Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was waterboarded at least 183 times, which the Senate report describes as escalating into a “series of near drownings.”
Republican Senate Majority Leader-elect, Mitch McConnell, campaigned on repealing Obamacare, promising to uproot Obamacare “root and branch” he often said, and the voters in Kentucky, who benefit most from Obamacare decided to put McConnell in charge.
So in an effort to keep his promise to take away his constituents healthcare, McConnell is already gearing up for a repeal vote in the senate.
“Number one: We certainly will have a vote on proceeding to a bill to repeal Obamacare. … It was a very large issue in the campaign,” he told Roll Call in an interview published on Monday.
Republicans will have 54 members in the new Senate to convene on January 3 – short of the 60 needed to overcome an expected Democratic filibuster on a bill that repeals Obamacare.
Though he spoke of a more cooperative and functioning Senate, McConnell insisted that Republicans “will go at that law [Obamacare] – which in my view is the single worst piece of legislation passed in the last half century – in every way that we can.”
Another step in trying to find some form of justice for Mike Brown came today in the release of an autopsy report conducted by the Justice Department, and the findings of a homicide in Brown’s killing.
A federal autopsy of Michael Brown, an unarmed black teen whose fatal shooting by a white police officer set off nationwide protests, found he died from multiple gunshot wounds and described his death as a “homicide.”
The findings of the Justice Department post-mortem released on Monday echoed those of two previous autopsies carried out by St. Louis County’s medical examiner and a private examiner hired by the Brown family. It found that Brown — who was shot in Ferguson, Missouri, on Aug. 9 — suffered “severe injuries of the skull, brain and right chest” and appeared to have been shot in the hand at close range. “The manner of death is homicide,” the Justice Department’s medical examiner ruled.
Sources tell TMZ that rapper Earl Hayes called Floyd on FaceTime Monday morning in a rage, over claims his wife — VH1 star Stephanie Moseley — had been unfaithful.
According to our Floyd sources, Earl said he was going to kill his wife. The champ was pleading with him to get a grip … to no avail. Floyd will not say how much he saw, but he acknowledges he was a witness and heard everything.
Floyd is in shock and is having extreme difficulty dealing with the fact that he witnessed a horrifying murder/suicide.
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