Some of you may be aware of COINTELPRO (acronym for COunter INTELligence PROgram), the secret operation run by the FBI during the days of J. Edgar Hoover where they engaged in all manner of covert activities such as infiltrating religious, civil rights, and anti-war movements and having their agents try to get those groups to engage in illegal actions that would discredit them and land the leaders in jail. While the groups strongly suspected the presence of FBI informants and provocateurs in their midst, they could not prove it and the FBI denied it.
[Read more…]

One of my firm rules-of-thumb is to never, ever believe the first reports that emerge from a chaotic situation like a mass shooting or other attack. Authorities often use the fact that the public fixates on the first report to promote initial false news to serve their agenda, knowing that many fewer people pay attention to the later corrections. Other people seize upon wrong information and run with it to create wild scenarios.
[Read more…]

In order to take a break from all the bad news coming out of the Trump administration, I thought a piece of good news would help so here is an item about the Boy Scouts of America deciding to allow transgender children into their programs.

The Boy Scouts of America announced Monday that it will allow transgender children who identify as boys to enroll in its boys only programs.

The organization said it had made the decision to begin basing enrollment in its boys-only programs on the gender a child or parent lists on the application to become a scout. The Boy Scouts had previously held a policy that relied on the gender listed on a child’s birth certificate for those programs.

The organization’s leadership had considered a recent case in Secaucus, New Jersey, where an 8-year-old transgender child had been asked to leave his Scout troop after parents and leaders found out he is transgender. But the statement issued Monday said the change was made because of the larger conversation about gender identity going on around the country.
[Read more…]

Glenn Greenwald reports that a raid by the US Navy Seal Team 6 in Yemen has resulted in the death. among many other civilians including children, of Nawar al Awlaki, the 8-year old sister of 16-year old Anwar al Awlaki who was himself killed in 2011 by a US drone strike in Yemen. Both of them were the children of Anwar al Awlaki who was himself murdered in a drone strike two weeks before his son. It should be noted that the father and his two children were all US citizens, a fact that did not spare them from summary execution with no due process by Barack Obama then and Donald Trump now.
[Read more…]

Back on December 15, I wrote the following:

Another thing to watch for are the inevitable lawsuits that are going to be filed as the Trump administration takes actions that are of dubious legality. Autocrats are used to thinking that their word is law and although US presidents have got used to thinking that they can bend the law to their will, Trump is likely to take that approach well beyond even what Obama and Bush and their predecessors did. Trump has been a magnet for lawsuits in the past and there is no reason to think that he will be less so as president. How will he react when a court rules against him?

[Read more…]

Ryan Devereaux writes about the chaos and confusion and suffering wreaked by Donald Trump’s actions that seem to have been done without consulting the agencies that would be tasked with implementing the policies and might have been able to warn him about the dangers of issuing poorly thought out and likely unconstitutional actions.
[Read more…]

Donald Trump’s executive order banning travelers from seven Muslim countries has resulted in confusion at airports as people already on the way suddenly found themselves denied entry.

Earlier on Saturday, President Trump’s executive order, signed the day before, sowed chaos in airports, universities, corporations and living rooms in the US and abroad, as people grappled with the ramifications of its sometimes vague language.

Travelers were pulled off plans or detained at checkpoints, universities urged at-risk students not to leave the country or to seek legal advice while tech giants recalled their workers from abroad. Throughout, families took calls from panicked loved ones whose lives were cast into disarray, unable to return to their homes, with everything from cars to pets waiting where they left them.

[Read more…]