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In The Bush/Cheney Whitehouse, The Torture was Brutal

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.”

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Featured Mike Brown Racism

High School Counselor Threatens to “Personally Shoot” All #ICantBreathe Protesters

On her Facebook post, Mary Kate Blankenburg, the Counselor at the Central Bucks West High School in Pennsylvania, threatened to kill all the protesters who were protesting the death of Eric Garner. Blankenburg wrote to “personally shoot every one of them!”

Her Facebook post has since been deleted, but of course screenshots of it was captured before the deletion occurred. Blankenburg wrote, “If my child cannot get to the Eagles game due to protesters, I will personally SHOOT every one of them. You’ve been warned idiots!!”

Blankenburg has since been suspended and an investigation is on the way. Central Bucks School District Superintendent David Weitzel in a statement said;

“We will take appropriate action once we learn all of the facts. I also notified the District Attorney’s Office on Sunday and we are working with them as they investigate this incident,” he said.

“The content of the post does not in any way reflect the beliefs or values of the Central Bucks School District.”

 

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Featured

Man Shot By Police in The Heart of Hollywood – PIC

No one seems to know how to deescalate a situation anymore. One person always go home to their family,  which means the other person is more than likely making an unplanned, one way trip to the morgue.

The shooting occurred about 7 p.m. at the corner of Hollywood Boulevard and Highland Avenue in the heart of Hollywood’s entertainment and tourism district, Los Angeles Police Officer Jane Kim told BuzzFeed News.

Police were responding to a call for an assault with a deadly weapon when they arrived and found a suspect armed with a knife, Kim said. The man survived the shooting and was take to a hospital, but later died.

Police did not provide information about the suspect’s name, age, or ethnicity.

Lisa Bregman happened to be driving through the intersection at the moment the shooting occurred. Bregman said she heard a series of gunshots, then looked up and saw a man lying on the ground.

“It was more than one or two,” Bergman said of the number of gunshots. “Like maybe three or four.”

Bregman took a photo of the scene while police still had their guns drawn.

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Featured

Report – 87 Chokehold Complaints Filed Against the NYPD This Year

According to an investigation from Vocativ, chokeholds are apparently a happening thing with the NYPD. 

Even though the chokehold is prohibited by the NYPD, there were 87 chokehold complaints filed against the NYPD in 2014. Vocativ looked at the complaints filed against the NYPD through the Civilian Complaints Board and discovered that civilians filed hundreds of “use of force” complaints, including the 87 for chokeholds.

Chokeholds were the second most common “use of force” complaints, after “officers pointing guns at people,” which took the top spot at 140 complaints. The most common “abuse of authority” complaints, meanwhile, included searching and entering as well as random searches, with 366 complaints each. But Vocativ notes that chokehold complaints are, unfortunately, “difficult to prove” — only one of the 87 complaints was “substantiated” and resulted in disciplinary action by the NYPD. – Meghan DeMaria

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Featured

Pastor Said To Cure Aids We Must Kill The Gays

And that was his sermon Sunday morning from the pulpit. He proudly uploaded the video to YouTube on Monday.

Meet Pastor Steven Anderson of Tempe Arizona.

“Turn to Leviticus 20:13,” he says in the video, “because I actually discovered the cure for AIDS.”

“If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death. Their blood shall be upon them,” Anderson read aloud.

“And that, my friend, is the cure for AIDS,” he said. “It was right there in the Bible all along — and they’re out spending billions of dollars in research and testing. It’s curable — right there. Because if you executed the homos like God recommends, you wouldn’t have all this AIDS running rampant.”

Video

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Featured

Another Police Shooting – Unarmed Black Father of Four Shot Dead in Phoenix

According to Sgt. Trent Crump, spokesman for the Phoenix Police, the officer who has not been identified,  “was doing exactly what we want him to do” when he shot and killed 34-year-old Rumain Brisbon. Friends and family said Brisbon was simply delivering dinner to his children on Tuesday night when the deadly encounter with police happened.

Crump told reporters that the officer and his partner were responding to a burglary call about 6 p.m. Tuesday (8 p.m. ET) when a local resident told them that men in a black sport-utility vehicle were dealing drugs. The license plate number given by the resident matched a vehicle owned by a resident of a block where police were already investigating a report of loud music, Crump said, so the officer approached the SUV, whose driver got out.

When the officer told the driver, later identified as Brisbon, to show his hands, the driver instead put his hands into the waistband of his pants, at which point the officer drew his gun, Crump said. Brisbon began to run away, but the officer chased him down, and they began struggling, Crump said.

“The officer believed he felt the handle of a gun while holding the suspect’s hand in his pocket,” Crump said. Unable to keep his grip on Brisbon’s hand, the officer fired two shots, Crump said. The object in Brisbon’s pocket was later discovered to be a bottle of pain pills.

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Featured

Another Grand Jury Frees Two White Officers Who Beat a Black Woman Over a Traffic Ticket

And the beat goes on…

Two former Jasper police officers won’t face criminal charges for assaulting a woman in their custody last year, the last chapter in an incident that became a flashpoint for racial tension in the East Texas town.

The Beaumont Enterprise reported in November that a grand jury had cleared officers Ricky Grissom and Ryan Cunningham, who are white, for a violent encounter with a black woman named Keyarika Diggles inside the Jasper City Jail. Overhead cameras caught the officers grabbing Diggles by the hair, slamming her face onto a counter and pinning her to the floor, before dragging Diggles, by the feet, into a holding cell. According to her lawyers, Diggles spent hours in the dark “detox” cell before being strip-searched by police dispatcher Lindsey Davenport.

Along with the damning video footage, the case was troubling because Cunningham and Grissom had arrested Diggles at home that morning for nothing more than an unpaid traffic ticket. And the ticket wasn’t quite unpaid—the single mother of two had been paying down her debt in monthly installments. Even after those payments, she still owed $100 at the time Grissom and Cunningham knocked on her door—but it’s still not clear why they’d chosen to arrest her that day.

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Featured

Heartless Couple Mocks Eric Garner’s Death on Live TV – Video

While the family of Eric Garner and other decent human beings mourned Ericsson senseless loss and the grand jury’s decision, some people were rejoicing. This couple could not contain their excitement.

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This Republican Blamed Obesity for Eric Garner’s Death

Rep. Peter King has said some dumb things in the past, so who do you go to if you want to hear dumb things about the Eric Garner murder? You go to Peter King of course.

After the grand jury decided not to indict any of the police officers involved in Garner’s murder, Peter King went on CNN and praised the officers for a job will done, and at the same time, the Republican managed to cast blame on the victim for the victim’s death.

“You had a 350-pound person who was resisting arrest. The police were trying to bring him down as quickly as possible,” King said in an appearance on CNN’s “The Situation Room.” “If he had not had asthma and a heart condition and was so obese, almost definitely he would not have died from this. The police had no reason to know he was in serious condition.”

The confrontation between Pantaleo and Garner was also caught on video that showed Garner repeatedly telling the officer he couldn’t breathe. King said police hear that kind of thing all the time.

“But if you can’t breathe, you can’t talk,” he argued.

The Long Island congressman also dismissed the idea that any racial animus played into Garner’s death.

“I have no doubt, if that were a 350-pound white guy, he would have been treated the same,” King told CNN.

Earlier Wednesday, the congressman tweeted his thanks to the grand jury for not indicting Pantaleo.

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Featured Politics Racial profiling

Jon Stewart Goes Off on Non – Indictment in Eric Garner’s Death – Video

Jon Stewart was at a loss of words last night as he too tried to cope with the non-indictment decision handed down by the grand jury in the Eric Garner case.

“I don’t know,” Stewart confessed. “I honestly don’t know what to say. If comedy is tragedy plus time, I need more f*cking time. But I would really settle for less f*cking tragedy, to be honest with you.”

Garner’s death at the hands of a police officer in Staten Island New York, was caught on video and showed an overly aggressive group of officers bringing down and ultimately killing the unarmed man for committing the unthinkable crime of selling loose cigarettes.

The decision not to indict anyone for the killing of Mr. Garner sparked thousands of people to take to the streets in protest calling for justice in the Garner’s death. Stewart echoed those calls, questioning the justice system and our concept of a civilized society.

“We are definitely not living in a post-racial society. And I can imagine there’s a lot of people out there wondering how much of a society we’re living in at all.”

Video

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Yes, The Man Who Filmed Eric Garner’s Death Was Indicted

Ramsey Orta

No, the man that killed Eric Garner was not indicted, but the man who videotaped the killing, was. And we call this “justice.”

On Wednesday, a Staten Island grand jury decided not to return an indictment for the police officer who put Eric Garner, an unarmed black man, in a chokehold shortly before his death. A different Staten Island grand jury was less sympathetic to Ramsey Orta, however, the man who filmed the entire incident.

In August, less than a month after filming the fatal July 17 encounter in which Daniel Pantaleo and other NYPD police officers confronted Garner for allegedly selling untaxed cigarettes, a grand jury indicted Orta on weapons charges stemming from an arrest by undercover officers earlier that month.

Police alleged that Orta had slipped a .25 caliber handgun into a teenage accomplice’s waistband outside a New York hotel. Orta testified that the charges were falsely mounted by police in retaliation for his role in documenting Garner’s death, but the grand jury rejected his contention, charging him with single felony counts of third-degree criminal weapon possession and criminal firearm possession.

In Garner’s case, on the other hand, jurors determined there was not probable cause that Pantaleo had committed any crime. A medical examiner ruled Garner’s death homicide in part resulting from the chokehold, a restraining move banned by the NYPD in 1993.

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Featured

Grand Jury – No One is Responsible For The Illegal Chokehold that Killed Eric Garner

Another police officer decided to take the law into his hands and appointed himself the prosecutioner, the star witness, the judge and the executioner. He applied an illegal chokehold, ignored the victim’s plea that he couldn’t breathe and held on to the man’s throat until the man stopped breathing.

Today we learned that the police officer, who I must reiterate used an illegal chokehold that killed a man, today we learned the officer apparently did nothing wrong as a New York grand jury failed to indict. In the last two weeks, two police officers who killed two different individuals walked without even a slap on the wrist.

The constant in these two stories is of course, race. White police officers and black victims.

In a statement released after the grand jury found no reason to take him to court, the officer who applied the illegal chokehold, Daniel Pantaleo, said, “I became a police officer to help people and to protect those who can’t protect themselves. It is never my intention to harm anyone and I feel very bad about the death of Mr. Garner. My family and I include him and his family in our prayers and I hope that they will accept my personal condolences for their loss.”

Now I’m not saying that Pantaleo woke up that day determined to kill someone, but if his intention was not to cause “harm” to Mr Garner and instead was to “protect those who can’t protect themselves,” then Pantaleo should have released his illegal chokehold when Garner cried for his life uttering the phrase, “I can’t breathe,  I can’t breathe..” 11 times!

But hey, Pantaleo had the right to “go home to his family,”‘ right? That’s another constant we keep hearing – that the officer has to go home to his family. Or that he was ‘scared for his life’ and needed to remove that threat by choking Garner from behind until Garner’s lifeless body laid motionless on that Staten Island sidewalk.

“I became a police officer to help people and to protect those who can’t protect themselves,” he said, and Eric Garner’s last words were, “I can’t breathe! I can’t breathe! I can’t breathe! I can’t breathe! I can’t breathe! I can’t breathe! I can’t breathe! I can’t breathe! I can’t breathe! I can’t breathe! I can’t breathe!”

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