https://twitter.com/SamKraemerTV/status/1462560504208146438
https://mobile.twitter.com/IntelPointAlert/status/1462563354963288074
yikes that's pretty cringe
>Okay what are the odds HRC tweeted about Wisconsin days before?
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/19/us/politics/wisconsin-republicans-decertify-election.html
Wisconsin Republicans Push to Take Over the State’s Elections
Led by Senator Ron Johnson, G.O.P. officials want to eliminate a bipartisan elections agency - and maybe send its members to jail.
Republicans in Wisconsin are engaged in an all-out assault on the state’s election system, building off their attempts to challenge the results of the 2020 presidential race by pressing to give themselves full control over voting in the state.
The Republican effort — broader and more forceful than that in any other state where allies of former President Donald J. Trump are trying to overhaul elections — takes direct aim at the bipartisan Wisconsin Elections Commission, an agency Republicans created half a decade ago that has been under attack since the chaotic aftermath of last year’s election.
The onslaught picked up late last month after a long-awaited report on the 2020 results that was ordered by Republican state legislators found no evidence of fraud but made dozens of suggestions for the election commission and the G.O.P.-led Legislature, fueling Republican demands for more control of elections.
Then the Trump-aligned sheriff of Racine County, the state’s fifth most populous county, recommended felony charges against five of the six members of the election commission for guidance they had given to municipal clerks early in the pandemic. The Republican majority leader of the State Senate later seemed to give a green light to that proposal, saying that “prosecutors around the state” should determine whether to bring charges.
And last week, Senator Ron Johnson, a Republican, said that G.O.P. state lawmakers should unilaterally assert control of federal elections, claiming that they had the authority to do so even if Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat, stood in their way — an extraordinary legal argument debunked by a 1932 Supreme Court decision and a 1964 ruling from the Wisconsin Supreme Court. His suggestion was nonetheless echoed by Michael Gableman, a conservative former State Supreme Court justice who is conducting the Legislature’s election inquiry.
Republican control of Wisconsin elections is necessary, Mr. Johnson said in an interview on Wednesday, because he believes Democrats cheat.
“Do I expect Democrats to follow the rules?” said the senator, who over the past year has promoted fringe theories on topics like the Capitol riot and Covid vaccines. “Unfortunately, I probably don’t expect them to follow the rules. And other people don’t either, and that’s the problem.”
https://mobile.twitter.com/IntelPointAlert/status/1462130725545811976
Active shooter reported at Atlanta International Airport in Georgia
#Atlanta l #GA
Police are currently responding to reports of an active shooter inside the terminal. Footage shows chaos unfolding at a security checkpoint.
More information as it becomes available!
https://mobile.twitter.com/ATLairport/status/1462133024406048779
There is not an active shooter.There was an accidental discharge at the Airport.There is no danger to passengers or employees. An investigation is ongoing, more information will be published on this channel.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/06/us/politics/military-jury-cia-torture.html
Foreman Says Military Jury Was Disgusted by C.I.A. Torture
A Navy captain whose letter recommended clemency for a Qaeda terrorist drafted the damning two-page document in 20 minutes.
Capt. Scott B. Curtis wrote that “the treatment of Mr. Khan in the hands of U.S. personnel should be a source of shame for the U.S. government.”
By Carol Rosenberg
Nov. 6, 2021
GUANTÁNAMO BAY, Cuba — A Navy captain who as head of a jury in a war-crimes court wrote a damning letter calling the C.I.A.’s torture of a terrorist “a stain on the moral fiber of America” said his views are typical of senior members of the U.S. military.
Capt. Scott B. Curtis, the jury foreman, said it is just that he had the opportunity to express his thoughts in a letter proposing clemency for the prisoner Majid Khan, a Qaeda recruit who pleaded guilty to terrorism and murder charges for delivering $50,000 from his native Pakistan to finance a deadly bombing in Indonesia.
But before he started writing, the eight-officer jury sentenced Mr. Khan to 26 years in prison.
“There was no sympathy for him or what he had done,” said Captain Curtis, who agreed to reveal his identity in an hourlong interview last week. “The crime itself, everyone thought that was an evil act and he should be accountable for that. It was the torture that was a mitigating factor.”
On the eve of his sentencing on Oct. 29, Mr. Khan, 41, offered a graphic account of his physical, sexual and psychological abuse by C.I.A. agents and operatives inflicted on him in dungeonlike conditions in black-site prisons in Pakistan, Afghanistan and a third country. He described how he went from graduating from a suburban Baltimore high school in 1999 to becoming a courier and would-be suicide bomber for Al Qaeda to, since 2012, a repentant cooperator with the U.S. government.
The two-hour presentation was so vivid it “kind of riveted us,” Captain Curtis said.
Mr. Khan pulled up a shirtsleeve to show the panel scars from shackles on his wrists. He offered to lift his pant leg to show similar scars on his ankle from the times he was hung in chains from a bar in a darkened cell for so long that his limbs swelled and the shackles cut his skin.
It took the panel just 90 minutes to reach a decision. Not everybody agreed to the lowest end of a possible 25- to 40-year sentence, so they settled on 26 years.
Then, Captain Curtis said, while the other officers chatted among themselves, he spent about 20 minutes writing the two-page, handwritten letter on red-ruled notebook paper — no crumpled up false starts, no rough drafts.
This letter was drafted in the deliberation room recommending clemency for Majid Khan. Seven members of Mr. Khan’s eight-officer jury signed it, using their panel numbers. The jury was drawn from a pool of 20 active-duty officers who were brought to Guantánamo Bay on Oct. 27.
“Honestly, I sat down and wrote the letter myself and then read it to the rest of the panel,” he said. “I threw it on the table and said, ‘Anyone wants to sign this is welcome to do this, you’re under no obligation at all.’ Surprisingly, seven of eight, myself included, signed it.”
The clemency letter provided a harsh critique of the legal framework and C.I.A. detention system that the Bush administration established after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the legacy of which continues today in the form of the wartime prison at Guantánamo Bay now holding Mr. Khan and 38 other detainees. It also offered an unusually candid view of the thinking of some U.S. military officers on the use and value of torture.
Those who signed it included a Marine lieutenant colonel, two Army lieutenant colonels, two Navy commanders and a Marine major. Their areas of specialty include aviation, submarines, communications, cybersecurity and administration.
“We were are all pretty much of the same mind,” he said. “I just articulated it on paper.”
Captain Curtis, 51, an engineer whose specialty is aircraft carrier nuclear power systems, said by telephone from his current duty assignment in Tampa, Fla., that he understood that the letter’s sentiment might stir controversy but rejected the notion that this was a liberal position. In the military he has served for 30 years, he said, there is widespread agreement that “torture is wrong.”
“I think you’ll find that your senior people fully understand that acts like torture do more long-term damage than good, if they do any good,” he said, noting that Senator John McCain was no liberal and decried torture.
He anticipated no adverse impact on his career for identifying himself as the author of a letter condemning what he saw as a culture of abuse. Captain Curtis will retire from service this time next year and is likely in his last assignment, at the U.S. Central Command, the Pentagon division that oversees operations in the Middle East and South Asia.
“I think the United States is still the good guys, for lack of a better term, throughout the world,” he said. “We certainly make mistakes and I wasn’t condemning the present military and the present C.I.A.”
Last week, the jury foreman said, was his closest encounter with a terrorist. They sat about 15 feet apart inside the courtroom at Guantánamo Bay, with the prisoner’s father and youngest sister watching at the back of the court.
Mr. Khan’s description of his torture were reminiscent of portrayals in the movie “Zero Dark Thirty” and “snippets of things” Captain Curtis had heard about torture. “What surprised me was that I had someone in front of me that it happened to,” he said.
Captain Curtis has had experience in irregular warfare. In 2010, while he commanded the U.S.S. Ashland, Somali pirates mistook his amphibious dock landing ship for a cargo ship and attacked it in the Gulf of Aden. “We blew them out of the water,” he said. At least five were captured and brought to the United States for trial. One got a 33-year sentence for cooperating with the government. The rest are serving life in federal prison.
In the case of Mr. Khan, his 26-year sentence was largely symbolic. When he pleaded guilty in 2012, he became a government cooperator and the parties agreed to delay sentencing so that Mr. Khan could demonstrate that cooperation as part of a deal that would, in exchange, reduce his eventual jury sentence.
But the jury was not told about the deal.
Captain Curtis said he had taught R.O.T.C. units in recent years and was keenly aware of “what 21-year-olds are capable of.” Mr. Khan, while in his 20s, “did some terrible things,” among them delivering $50,000 that was used to finance the 2003 bombing of a Marriott hotel in Jakarta, Indonesia, that killed 11 people. “The 41-year-old man in front of us truly regretted what he had done.”
The captain said his letter intentionally “didn’t accuse anybody of illegal acts” and that he was familiar with what was authorized under Enhanced Interrogation. “But slamming his head against the wall every time they moved him and beating him while he was hooded, I don’t think those are legal acts. I think that falls into the category of torture.”
The letter asking a senior Pentagon official to grant mercy, or clemency, to Mr. Khan was not read aloud in court. The foreman gave it to the bailiff, a soldier in battle dress, who delivered it to Maj. Michael J. Lyness, Mr. Khan’s military defense attorney.
The panel then left the courtroom and, while riding a ferry across Guantánamo Bay to quarters where they were sequestered, discovered in an internet search that Mr. Khan, even before sentencing, had a deal that could release him as soon as February, or as late as February 2025.
Some of the panel members “were a little bit offended” that their sentence was essentially “meaningless,” he said. They found it “a little frustrating given the thought we put into it.”
But Captain Curtis said he understood that the knowledge would have “tainted our process” of arriving at the right sentence, and that some members would have concluded “it doesn’t matter what we do — just pick a number.”
It is not known where Mr. Khan, a citizen of Pakistan, will go after Guantánamo, or when he might leave. In 2002, according to his plea, he wore a suicide vest in a failed effort to assassinate the president of Pakistan at the time, Pervez Musharraf, a U.S. ally in the war on terrorism. Then in 2012, according to his military lawyers, he “joined Team America” and became a cooperator in cases against other Qaeda members.
His lawyers argue that he could be in danger if he were repatriated. It will be up to American diplomats to find a safe place for him to resettle with his wife and daughter, who was born after his arrest in 2003.
“That’s going to be a tough one,” said Captain Curtis. “I’m assuming they have a witness protection program type thing and that they’ll end up in Norway or something like that.”
>Durham
>https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/06/us/politics/military-jury-cia-torture.html
>https://twitter.com/georgesoros/status/1462449727312642051
that's four times I forget to post the pic
https://apnews.com/article/caribbean-haiti-7c9a01e4cbded48c99b6bda46041ba79
US missionaries say 2 of 17 abductees freed in Haiti
Two of 17 members of a missionary group who were kidnapped more than a month ago have been freed in Haiti and are safe, “in good spirits and being cared for,” their Ohio-based church organization announced Sunday.
Christian Aid Ministries issued a statement saying it could not give the names of those released, why they were freed or other information.
“While we rejoice at this release, our hearts are with the 15 people who are still being held,” the group said.
The missionaries were kidnapped by the 400 Mawozo gang on Oct. 16. There are five children in the group of 16 U.S. citizens and one Canadian, including an 8-month-old. Their Haitian driver also was abducted, according to a local human rights organization.
The leader of the 400 Mawozo gang has threatened to kill the hostages unless his demands are met. Authorities have said the gang was demanding $1 million per person, although it wasn’t immediately clear that included the children in the group.
The spokesman for Haiti’s National Police, Gary Desrosiers, confirmed to The Associated Press that two hostages were released on Sunday.
The FBI, which is helping Haitian authorities recover the captives, declined to comment.
The release comes as Haiti struggles with a spike in gang-related violence and kidnappings, with the U.S. government recently urging U.S. citizens to leave Haiti amid deepening insecurity and a severe lack of fuel blamed on gangs blocking gas distribution terminals. On Friday, Canada announced it was pulling all but essential personnel from its embassy.
The fuel shortage has forced hospitals to turn away patients and paralyzed public transportation, with some schools closing and businesses shortening their work hours.
Haiti also is trying to recover from the July 7 assassination of President Jovenel Moise and a 7.2 magnitude earthquake that struck in mid-August, killing more than 2,200 people and destroying tens of thousands of homes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Institute_for_Democracy_and_Electoral_Assistance
International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance
(IDEA)
https://www.idea.int/
>International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance