DHS Detained US Citizen Inside The US, Used Intercepted Emails To Quiz Her About Her Sex Life

Just recently, we wrote about how the Department of Homeland Security's (DHS) Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) has been increasingly detaining and harassing people at the border (or near the border) under highly questionable circumstances -- and then refusing to comment on any of it. Instead, CBP has relied on a cloak of secrecy to live outside the law, acting out what we've come to expect from authoritarian police states. Recently, the ACLU filed a lawsuit on behalf of a woman, Christine Von Der Haar, who is a senior lecturer at Indiana University, after CBP detained her at the airport.

She was not entering or leaving the country.

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CIA and senators in bitter dispute over Capitol Hill spying claims

"Relations between the CIA and the US senators charged with its political oversight were at a nadir on Wednesday after the head of the agency issued a rare public rebuke to lawmakers who accused it of spying on their staff.

John Brennan, the director of the CIA, said the claims by members of the Senate intelligence committee were “spurious” and “wholly unsupported by the facts”, and went as far as suggesting the committee itself may have been guilty of wrongdoing.

The battle stems from a hotly contested report into the use of torture by the CIA in the interrogations it carried out after 9/11, whose conclusions are so explosive that it has yet to be declassified, despite exhortations from the White House that a summary should be published.

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Obama Suspends Immigrant Access--of Russian Sympathizers

CNS NEWS

Finally, Pres. Obama is acknowledging that unrestricted immigrant access "would be detrimental to the interests of the United States"...at least, when it comes to the conflict in the Ukraine.

"[U]nrestricted immigrant and nonimmigrant entry into the United States of aliens determined to meet one or more of the criteria... would be detrimental to the interests of the United States," Obama admitted in an executive order issued today.

To address this immigrant threat, Obama suspended "entry into the United States, as immigrants or nonimmigrants, of such persons" undermining democracy in the Ukraine:-

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Henry Kissinger: How the Ukraine crisis ends

WASHINGTON POST

Public discussion on Ukraine is all about confrontation. But do we know where we are going? In my life, I have seen four wars begun with great enthusiasm and public support, all of which we did not know how to end and from three of which we withdrew unilaterally. The test of policy is how it ends, not how it begins.

Far too often the Ukrainian issue is posed as a showdown: whether Ukraine joins the East or the West. But if Ukraine is to survive and thrive, it must not be either side’s outpost against the other — it should function as a bridge between them.

Russia must accept that to try to force Ukraine into a satellite status, and thereby move Russia’s borders again, would doom Moscow to repeat its history of self-fulfilling cycles of reciprocal pressures with Europe and the United States.

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Leaked EU’s Ashton Phone Tape: Kiev Snipers Were Hired by US Supported Opposition Leaders

The snipers who shot at protesters and police in Kiev were allegedly hired by Maidan leaders, according to a leaked phone conversation between the EU foreign affairs chief Catherine Ashton and Estonian foreign affairs minister, which has emerged online.

"There is now stronger and stronger understanding that behind the snipers, it was not Yanukovych, but it was somebody from the new coalition," Paet said during the conversation.

"I think we do want to investigate. I mean, I didn’t pick that up, that’s interesting. Gosh," Ashton answered.

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Obama Is Complicit in Suppressing the Truth About Torture

Reuters

President Obama is complicit in suppressing the truth about CIA torture of prisoners. That's clear from the fact that the Senate Intelligence Committee's $40 million, 6,000-page torture report is still being suppressed 15 months after being adopted. It is made clearer still by a scathing letter that one member of the committee, Senator Mark Udall, sent the White House on Tuesday. Its claims are jaw-dropping. 

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Supreme Court Declines to Hear Case That Would Have Challenged NSA Warrantless Surveillance of Lawyers

Whether the warrantless surveillance program carried out by the National Security Agency (NSA) under President George W. Bush was legal is a question the United States Supreme Court is not going to answer.

In a case very similar to a lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) against warrantless surveillance made “legal” by the FISA Amendments Act (FAA) of 2008, which the Supreme Court declined to grant “standing” in February 2013, the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) announced the Court had rejected their lawsuit against Bush-era warrantless surveillance.

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Petraeus being kept ‘quiet’? Rep asks Holder why probe of ex-CIA chief remains open

A leading Republican on the House oversight committee is asking Attorney General Eric Holder why the FBI probe into former CIA Director David Petraeus apparently remains open 16 months after he resigned from the agency following an affair with his biographer. 

Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, pressed Holder on the matter in a letter, which was reviewed by Fox News -- and suggested the probe is being left open to keep Petraeus "quiet" on issues like the Benghazi terror attack. 

"My understanding is that, as of today, the investigation into General Petraeus, is still ongoing. Why is the investigation still ongoing? When will the investigation conclude? What are the issues still in question?" he wrote.

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This Is The Gas Pipeline Map That Shows Why The Crisis In Ukraine Affects All Of Europe

If you question the strategic location of Ukraine, check out this map that Agence France-Presse made last in December — two months before protesters in Kiev forced President Viktor Yanukovych out of office.

Russia has now invaded the strategic Black Sea peninsula of Crimea, and markets are spooked at the possibility that Russian troops that are being built up on the border could enter eastern Ukraine.

As the international tug-of-war for Ukraine continues, the tension involving economic relations in the region — especially regarding gas flow from Russia to both Ukraine and Europe — will increase.

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Washington’s Arrogance, Hubris, and Evil Have Set the Stage for War

Paul Craig Roberts

In some quarters public awareness is catching up with Stephen Lendman, Michel Chossudovsky, Rick Rozoff, myself and a few others in realizing the grave danger in the crisis that Washington has created in Ukraine.

The puppet politicians who Washington intended to put in charge of Ukraine have lost control to organized and armed neo-nazis, who are attacking Jews, Russians, and intimidating Ukrainian politicians. The government of Crimea, a Russian province that Khrushchev transferred to the Ukraine Soviet Republic in the 1950s, has disavowed the illegitimate government that illegally seized power in Kiev and requested Russian protection. The Ukrainian military forces in Crimea have gone over to Russia.

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Ukraine: One ‘Regime Change’ Too Many?

Exclusive: Russia’s parliament has approved President Putin’s request for the use of force inside neighboring Ukraine, as the latest neocon-approved “regime change” spins out of control and threatens to inflict grave damage on international relations, ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern explains.

By Ray McGovern

Is “regime change” in Ukraine the bridge too far for the neoconservative “regime changers” of Official Washington and their sophomoric “responsibility-to-protect” (R2P) allies in the Obama administration? Have they dangerously over-reached by pushing the putsch that removed duly-elected Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych?

Russian President Vladimir Putin has given an unmistakable “yes” to those questions – in deeds, not words. His message is clear: “Back off our near-frontier!”

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Seriously, what?! Kerry tells Russia 'you don't invade a country on completely phony pretexts'

The US Secretary of State spoke today of the unacceptability of invading a sovereign country on phony pretexts in order to assert one’s own interests in the 21st century. But no, he was not speaking about the United States, as one might have thought.

“You just don’t invade another country on phony pretext in order to assert your interests,” John Kerry said during an interview with NBC’s Meet the Press. “This is an act of aggression that is completely trumped up in terms of its pretext. It’s really 19th century behaviour in the 21st century.”

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DOJ Still Ducking Scrutiny After Misleading Supreme Court on Surveillance

In October 2012, United States Solicitor General Donald Verrilli Jr. was in a tight spot.

Seeking dismissal of a legal challenge against an NSA warrantless electronic surveillance program, the Department of Justice had taken the position that the rabble-rousers represented by the ACLU had no standing to sue because they couldn’t prove they had been subjected to surveillance. But who, if anyone, could prove they were harmed by a program cloaked in secrecy?

Verrilli was ready with an answer: those criminals who had been caught by the program.

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Feds Refuse to Release Public Comments on NSA Reform — Citing Privacy

The Obama administration has received 28 proposals from corporations with ideas for managing the NSA’s massive database of U.S. phone call metadata. But don’t expect to see the proposals anytime soon. The government says it won’t release a word.

At issue is President Obama’s most significant NSA reform: his plan to take the trillion-plus records continuously gathered on American’s phone calls out of the NSA’s hands and give it to a third-party, and making it accessible to the government only through an order from a secret tribunal.

The plan, based on a recommendation from an NSA reform panel Obama commissioned, would put a trove of information about American citizens at arm’s length from the government, while maintaining the functionality of a program that came to light amid leaks by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.

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Yahoo webcam images from millions of users intercepted by GCHQ

Britain's surveillance agency GCHQ, with aid from the US National Security Agency, intercepted and stored the webcam images of millions of internet users not suspected of wrongdoing, secret documents reveal.

GCHQ files dating between 2008 and 2010 explicitly state that a surveillance program codenamed Optic Nerve collected still images of Yahoo webcam chats in bulk and saved them to agency databases, regardless of whether individual users were an intelligence target or not.

In one six-month period in 2008 alone, the agency collected webcam imagery – including substantial quantities of sexually explicit communications – from more than 1.8 million Yahoo user accounts globally.

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Documents Say Navy Knew Fukushima Dangerously Contaminated the USS Reagan

A stunning new report indicates the U.S. Navy knew that sailors from the nuclear-powered USS Ronald Reagan took major radiation hits from the Fukushima atomic power plant after its meltdowns and explosions nearly three years ago.

If true, the revelations cast new light on the $1 billion lawsuit filed by the sailors against Tokyo Electric Power. Many of the sailors are already suffering devastating health impacts, but are being stonewalled by Tepco and the Navy.

The Reagan had joined several other U.S. ships in Operation Tomodachi (“Friendship”) to aid victims of the March 11, 2011 quake and tsunami. Photographic evidence and first-person testimony confirms that on March 12, 2011 the ship was within two miles of Fukushima Dai’ichi as the reactors there began to melt and explode.

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National School Safety Expert: Sandy Hook shooting was a fraud

43-minute game-changing interview here.

Wolfgang Halbig has the perfect combination of expertise to evaluate what happened at Sandy Hook Elementary School:

• law enforcement: Florida State Trooper, US Customs Agent.
• education: teacher, assistant principal, principal.
• current school safety expert: trained key personnel at over 4,000 US school districts, and over 3,500 school safety officers.

His conclusion after ten months of motivated investigation:

“In my professional opinion, [Sandy Hook was] a scripted event… in planning for maybe two, two and a half years.”

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Sandy Hook: No Deaths, No Victims in Official Record

Youtube removed this video from their platform. We originally posted it on GG in 2014. We found it on Rumble.

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Who Tried to Silence Drone Victim Kareem Khan?

In the early morning hours of February 5, a group of armed men – some dressed in Pakistani police uniforms – appeared at Kareem Khan’s home, awoke him and his family at gunpoint, and took him away in an unmarked vehicle. Khan was hooded, shackled around the wrists and ankles, and driven for hours, eventually arriving at a building where he was thrown into a windowless holding cell. There he stayed for more than a week, during which he was subjected to sensory deprivation and physical abuse. Khan says he was repeatedly beaten on the soles of his feet and threatened with death by his captors. He was kept hooded and shackled for most of the day, and fed only dry bread and water.

“I thought I would never get out,” Khan later told his Pakistani lawyer, Shahzad Akbar. “…I thought I would become one more among thousands of ‘missing persons’ in Pakistan.”

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Neocons and the Ukraine Coup

American neocons helped destabilize Ukraine and engineer the overthrow of its elected government, a “regime change” on Russia’s western border. But the coup – and the neo-Nazi militias at the forefront – also reveal divisions within the Obama administration, reports Robert Parry.

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