Author Archive

NSA Oral Histories

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The National Security Agency has recently declassified and posted lengthy, formerly Top Secret oral history interviews with four of its most prominent personnel: Arthur J. Levenson, Dr. Solomon Kullback, Oliver R. Kirby, and Benson K. Buffham.

Oral History Interviews

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Ag Dept releases photos/video of hideous cruelty at horse-butchering plant in Texas

Due to a Freedom of Information Act request to the US Department of Agriculture, the animal-welfare organization Animals’ Angels received around 500 photos, and a video, showing nauseating cruelty at the Beltex Corporation’s horse-slaughter facility in Texas. That abattoir has since closed, but Beltex still operates a slaughterhouse in Mexico and a “slaughter horse feedlot” in Texas where horses are kept until being sent to Mexico.

The photos, video, and accompanying documents are posted at this page. No images are displayed on the page;

However, if you want to risk vomiting and nightmares, this page displays some of the photos.

You can also read the PDF press release from Animals’ Angels, the group that filed the FOIA request. Note that the press release contains several sickening photos. Below is the text of the press release, minus the images.

Press Release
November 2008
Animals’ Angels
phone: 410-848-3153
fax: 410-848-0213
www.animals-angels.com

Animals’ Angels, an animal welfare organization
based in Maryland, last week received over 900
pages of documents and photographs from the
United States Department of Agriculture taken
during part of 2005 at the Beltex horse
slaughter plant in Texas. Documents received 36
months after making a Freedom of Information
Act (FOIA) request, reveal an appalling number
of incidences and an equally appalling degree of
suffering sustained by horses. Evidence
indicates alarming cruelty corresponding
directly to horse slaughter.

The large FOIA document contains hundreds of
photographs that graphically depict horses with
open fractures, legs missing, battered and
bloody faces, eyeballs dangling and
what appears to be horses left to bleed to
death. The document provides unimpeachable
evidence for the immediate ban on the
slaughter of American horses.

(more…)

Obama “reviewing” policy on military coffin photos

in 2004, The Memory Hole obtained and posted 288 photos of the war dead coming into Dover. During the Gulf War, the Pentagon banned the release of such photos taken by the military (and the taking of such photos by the civilian press), and it reiterated this ban soon after the invasion of Iraq.

Under the Freedom of Information Act, I requested these photos from Dover AFB, and they passed the request to the Air Force’s main FOIA Office, which denied it in full. I appealed, and – in a move that I never expected – the Air Force completely reversed itself and sent me all the photos on a CD. I posted them, the media swarmed, and the images have become iconic.

The Pentagon was not pleased, calling the release a “mistake.” Later, professor Ralph Begleiter and the National Security Archive successfully sued the Defense Department under FOIA, resulting in the release of more photos.

Obama was recently asked whether his administration will reverse or uphold the censorial policy, and his answer is um, er, well. The AP reports:

President Barack Obama says his administration is reviewing a policy that bans the media from photographing flag-draped coffins of fallen U.S. soldiers.

The president says his advisers are discussing with the Defense Department the prohibition on pictures of coffins returning from Iraq and Afghanistan.

Beyond that, Obama wouldn’t say whether he would keep the policy in place. He says he wants to understand all the implications involved before deciding how to proceed.

Agence France-Presse reports:

At the prompting of President Barack Obama, Defense Secretary Robert Gates Tuesday ordered a review of a ban on media coverage of the return of flag-draped coffins of fallen soldiers from wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“From a personal standpoint, I think, if the needs of the families can be met, and the privacy concerns can be addressed, the more honor we can accord these fallen heroes, the better,” Gates told reporters.

Gates said he ordered the review after Obama said in a White House press conference Monday night that the White House was in the process of reviewing the ban “in conversations with the Department of Defense.” …

Gates said he had ordered a review of the ban over a year ago.

“The answer that I got back — and partly it was the result of contacts with the families — is that if the news media were at Dover, many of the families would feel compelled to be there for those ceremonies for their fallen hero.

“And for these families this would delay the return of the remains home. For others it would be a financial hardship to get to Dover. And there were some privacy concerns,” he said.

“I think that looking at it again makes all kinds of sense,” he said.

The Huffington Post has more.

New documents on Bush-era torture, secret detention, extraordinary rendition

The documents are available here (scroll down to the sections titled “DOD Document Release” and “Noteworthy Pages from DOD Doc Release” at the bottom of the page).

AlterNet has covered the release: “Explosive New Documents Reveal More Details of Bush-Era Torture, Including Prisoners Tortured to Death.”

From the Center for Constitutional Rights:

February 12, 2009, New York and Washington, DC—Documents obtained through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit confirm Department of Defense involvement in the CIA’s ghost detention program, revealed three prominent human rights groups today. The groups—Amnesty International USA (AIUSA), the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), and the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice (CHRGJ)—today released documents obtained from the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) and U.S. Department of State (DOS), resulting from their lawsuit seeking the disclosure of government documents that relate to secret detention, extraordinary rendition, and torture. At a public press conference, the groups revealed that these documents confirm the existence of secret prisons at Bagram and in Iraq; affirm the DOD’s cooperation with the CIA’s ghost detention program; and show one case where the DOD sought to delay the release of Guantánamo prisoners who were scheduled to be sent home by a month and a half in order to avoid bad press.

…
Examples of DOD Joint Chiefs of Staff (JS) and TRANSCOM Documents of Interest:

•    JS 986 (May 28, 2004 Information Paper :“Applicability of Geneva Conventions to “Ghost Detainees” in Iraq) shows that the DOD interpreted the “security internee” provisions of the Geneva Conventions to allow for “ghosting” of detainees by prohibiting the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) from visiting. It also shows that the DOD recognized that indefinitely prohibiting the ICRC from visiting or failing to notify the ICRC of the existence of detainees was illegal under the Geneva Conventions.
(more…)

Obama upholds Bush’s “state secrets” approach

From the New York Times:

In a closely watched case involving rendition and torture, a lawyer for the Obama administration seemed to surprise a panel of federal appeals judges on Monday by pressing ahead with an argument for preserving state secrets originally developed by the Bush administration.

In the case, Binyam Mohamed, an Ethiopian native, and four other detainees filed suit against a subsidiary of Boeing for arranging flights for the Bush administration’s “extraordinary rendition” program, in which terrorism suspects were secretly taken to other countries, where they say they were tortured. The Bush administration argued that the case should be dismissed because even discussing it in court could threaten national security and relations with other nations.

During the campaign, Mr. Obama harshly criticized the Bush administration’s treatment of detainees, and he has broken with that administration on questions like whether to keep open the prison camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. But a government lawyer, Douglas N. Letter, made the same state-secrets argument on Monday, startling several judges on the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

“Is there anything material that has happened” that might have caused the Justice Department to shift its views, asked Judge Mary M. Schroeder, an appointee of President Jimmy Carter, coyly referring to the recent election.

“No, your honor,” Mr. Letter replied.

Judge Schroeder asked, “The change in administration has no bearing?”

Once more, he said, “No, Your Honor.”

Explosives Newsletters

Here’s something I didn’t expect to find online: the complete run of ATF Explosives Industry Newsletter from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. All 17 irregularly published issues so far.

Also, the Department of Mining of Queensland, Australia, has posted the complete run of its Explosives Safety News.

As always, I’ve downloaded the material I’m linking to. If it disappears, I’ll post it here.

Searchable Supreme & federal appellate cases online for free

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From AltLaw:

Case reports, a major part of the laws of the United States, are hard to get at, and even when on the Internet, rarely searchable. To get full access you generally need either a library of law reports, or an expensive subscription to an online database, which can cost hundreds of dollars per hour.

AltLaw is a small effort to change that—to make the common law a bit more common. AltLaw provides the first free, full-text searchable database of Supreme Court and Federal Appellate case reports.

They currently have over 700,00 documents from 231,420 cases.

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Public tax filings of exempt orgs online

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Public.Resource.Org has uploaded 746 DVDs’ worth of data (over 50 million image files) from the IRS:

Welcome to the IRS Exempt Organizations bulk data depot. You will find here raw data consisting of the public filings of nonprofit exempt organizations and nonprofit private foundations from 2002 to 2007.

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Books Are People, Too

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I recently started a new blog, Books Are People, Too, about books, book culture, and the written word in general.

Updated daily, it covers the new, the upcoming, the old, the rare; nonfiction of all stripes, fiction, poetry, magazines. Soon I’ll be posting interviews, excerpts, and reviews.

Please take a look, subscribe to the feed, and spread the word.

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Bush White House Website Preserved

The National Archives has posted the entire White House website as it existed just hours before Obama took office:

http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/

{Thanks, Mike}