For all of September, The Dissenter will mark 20th anniversary of #September11 with retrospective series on rise of security state that puts whistleblowers front and center. Because these individuals listened to their conscience & implored us to turn away from the dark side.
FBI whistleblower Coleen Rowley accused FBI Headquarters of failing to urgently respond to intelligence ahead of #September11.
Embarrassed, the FBI became a "preventative crime" agency, concocting terrorism plots they could take credit for thwarting.
One of most important and best documentaries produced to coincide with the 20th anniversary of #September11.
It reflects how FBI was given immense power and abused it, often by preying on young black and brown men with financial troubles.
For paid subscribers of The Dissenter, this covers anti-immigrant policy adopted by Attorney General John Ashcroft after #September11 to squeeze Arab, Muslim, or South Asian communities.
Attorney General John Ashcroft on October 25, 2001: "Let the terrorists among us be warned: If you overstay your visa, even by one day, we will arrest you. If you violate a local law, you will be put in jail and kept in custody as long as possible." #September11
Former FBI special agent Terry Albury is one of few to challenge racist counterterrorism approach that involves mapping communities and relies on profiling and destroying people who won't be informants.
From Janet Reitman's New York Times Magazine profile of Terry Albury, which is a must read.
"There is this mythology surrounding war on terrorism, and FBI, that has given agents the power to ruin the lives of completely innocent people..." #September11nytimes.com/2021/09/01/mag…
I'll keep adding to this thread as entries in the series are published at The Dissenter.
@shadowproofcom We didn't ask @adfontesmedia to include us in their chart and review our articles for bias and reliability, but they did. Their team gave our posts pretty high scores for reliability. And we don't hide our bias so who cares where they plot us.
One of the posts reviewed is a parody of a Max Boot column that I wrote so I don't know how it could be reliable, and I don't believe bias is all that relevant. (And it's marked so they could've chosen anything else.)
The first hearing before the UK High Court of Justice in the US government's appeal in WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange's extradition case will start shortly. I'm remotely observing.
Thread for updates on the "preliminary" appeal hearing.
This Assange appeal hearing is not the main appeal hearing. That will come later.
Today's hearing is on the two grounds for appeal that the High Court of Justice declined to grant the US government. Prosecutors will try to persuade the High Court they were wrong.
This hearing for the US will be focused on discrediting Professor Michael Kopelman, an experienced neuropsychiatrist who assessed Assange from May-December 2019.
It will also be about the US's view that the district judge gave too much weight to certain suicide risk evidence.
The four remaining Espionage Act charges against drone whistleblower Daniel Hale that US prosecutors refused to drop were dismissed with prejudice by Judge Liam O'Grady. And just about all of the coverage of Hale's sentencing didn't report this remarkable development.
It unfortunately wasn't acknowledged in the report from @etuckerAP nor was it in @joshgerstein's coverage. It wasn't in @rachelweinerwp's coverage for Washington Post either. It isn't mentioned in The Intercept's coverage by @rdevro and @MazMHussain. And I missed it initially.
Only because I interviewed @ChipGibbons89 after sentencing did I learn that the four remaining Espionage Act charges were dismissed. But I wasn't able to attend court proceedings while these other media organizations did have reporters present.
Drone whistleblower Daniel Hale will be sentenced within the next hour, and if the US government has its way, he will receive the harshest sentence ever issued against someone for releasing documents without government authorization to the press.
THREAD will follow sentencing
Daniel Hale, who was involved in drone program while in US Air Force and deployed to Afghanistan: "The most disturbing thing about my involvement in drones is the uncertainty if anybody that I was involved in 'kill or capture' was a civilian or not. There's no way of knowing."
US prosecutors say Daniel Hale shared documents with a reporter for "self-aggrandizement," and it was not to inform American citizens. But @soniakennebeck, director of "National Bird" (in which Daniel appeared), wrote a letter to the court that counters this attack.
Drone whistleblower Daniel Hale’s sentencing hearing is scheduled for 9 am (ET) on July 27. Notice he will come before the judge and have to wait for plea agreement hearing. Then he and his defense will have a very limited time to address the court.
Daniel Hale will have no time to go past the window given to him. There are four defendants waiting to go before Judge Liam O’Grady at 10 am (ET).
A federal court is about to put its stamp of approval on harshest sentence ever issued against former government employee or contractor responsible for “unauthorized disclosure” of information, and it will likely be one of shortest Espionage Act sentencing hearings
Ahead of sentencing on July 27, drone whistleblower Daniel Hale penned a letter to the judge highlighting his experiences with US drone strikes in Afghanistan and how he "came to violate the Espionage Act."
Hale describes his role in the US military's drone program, when he was deployed to Afghanistan. He tracked down "the geographic location of handset cellphone devices believed to be in the possession of so-called enemy combatants."
Hale recounts first time he witnessed US drone strike.
"I could only look on as I sat by and watched through a computer monitor when a sudden terrifying flurry of Hellfire missiles came crashing down, splattering purple-colored crystal guts on the side of the morning mountain."