A NEWS CO-OP IN DC SO YOU DON'T HAVE TO BE

Category archive

SECRECY & THE SECURITY STATE - page 27

Obama’s Pick to be Army Chief Worries About Troop Reductions, Cites Russia, ISIL, North Korea

by

President Obama’s choice to be the next Army Secretary said he has concerns about plans to scale back the branch. Eric Fanning said that he does “worry about the size of the Army today,” when asked Thursday by Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R-N.H.) at his confirmation hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee. The Army is planning to reduce troop levels by 40,000 by the end of next year. The reductions to a 450,000-strong fighting force were mandated at the start of the decade by the so-called sequestration…

Keep Reading

Dems Say GOP Conducting Criminal Justice Reform “Sabotage” with Major Deregulatory Ask

by

Democratic lawmakers accused their Republican counterparts of holding up watershed changes to the criminal justice system in a bid to advance profound, business-friendly revisions to the federal criminal code. The Senate Judiciary Committee’s ranking member Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) said Republican members were attempting to tie provisions about criminal intent to broader reforms to use them “as a vehicle for corporate giveaways” and called the effort “sabotage.” “We have asked those pushing these mens rea reforms for a list of criminal statutes they find concerning,” Leahy said.…

Keep Reading

Transfers Out Of Guantanamo Ramp Up–Fewer Than 100 Prisoners Remain

by

For the first time since 2002, there are fewer than 100 detainees at the military prison in Guantanamo Bay. The Department of Defense announced Thursday that it had transferred ten prisoners out of the facility and into the custody of the government of Oman. Each individual was unanimously approved for transfer by the Guantanamo Review Task Force, the Pentagon reported. While there were only 15 detainee transfers in all of 2015, there have already been 14 releases from Guantanamo this year alone—a sign that President…

Keep Reading

Rep Urges House Panel to Actually Deal With Cops Shooting Black People in Criminal Justice Reform

by

The House Judiciary Committee reauthorized and tweaked two George W. Bush-era criminal justice reform programs on Tuesday as part of its push to humanize the US judicial system. But it must start tackling a problem raised only in recent years by the Black Lives Matter movement if it wants to foster wider confidence in American law enforcement officials, one committee member said. “We’ve got a problem in this country, a racial problem with police shootings—mostly at African American individuals who have been the subject of shootings…

Keep Reading

High Court in Philippines Upholds “Pivot to Asia” Agreement with U.S. Military

by

The Philippine Supreme Court on Tuesday declared legal a defense agreement that the country signed in 2014 with the United States. The accord, which had never been implemented, passed judicial review in a 10-4 vote after the high court ruled that the government of President Benigno Aquino didn’t require prior legislative consent. When the agreement was signed, President Obama said that the agreement would grant the US military “greater access to Filipino facilities, airfields and ports, which would remain under the control of the Philippines.”…

Keep Reading

Gitmo Detainee Transferred to Saudi Arabia

by

The Pentagon announced Monday that it released a prisoner at Guantanamo Bay into Saudi Arabian custody, bringing the total number of individuals left at the military prison camp to 103. The transfer of Muhammed Abd Al Rahman Awn Al-Shamrani, who was sent to Guantanamo in 2002, was cleared by the president’s Periodic Review Board in September 2015. The panel determined that the ongoing detention of the Saudi national “does not remain necessary to protect against a continuing significant threat to the security of the United States.”…

Keep Reading

Bernie Adds Voice to Growing Chorus Against Obama Deportation Raids

by

Thousands of Central American men, women, and children in the US are being rounded up by the Department of Homeland Security and deported back to their home countries, in what’s being described by a leading presidential candidate as an “inhumane” assault on vulnerable families. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) on Thursday called on President Obama to “immediately end” the mass raids being carried out across the country. The operations are targeting families who in recent years escaped violence gripping their home countries–namely Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador.…

Keep Reading

Report Details Nearly Two Decades of State Department Transparency Woes

by

The Office of Secretary of State going back to Bill Clinton’s presidency is routinely failing to comply with the Freedom of Information Act, according to a department inspector general report published Thursday. The staff charged with responding to FOIA inquiries about America’s top envoy has routinely conducted insufficient searches and failed to respond to requests within the 20-day time limit established by the law. The inspector general noted the Department’s Executive Secretariat (S/ES) “took four and one-half times as long” as the average federal government…

Keep Reading

Oregon Standoff A Result of “Federal Inaction,” Watchdog Group Claims

by

An environmental whistleblower advocacy group said the ongoing armed occupation of a federal wildlife refuge in Oregon “stems from the lack of a coherent response to earlier confrontations with anti-government extremists.” Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility said that federal officials’ refusal to punish rancher Cliven Bundy for his April 2014 standoff in Nevada set a precedent that encouraged his son, Ammon, to lead the seizure of Malheur National Wildlife Refuge. By Wednesday, the occupation entered its fifth day. “Rather than abating conflict, the federal hands-off…

Keep Reading

Additional FOIA Exemption for the Pentagon Likely This Year

by

Congress appears ready to grant the Pentagon another exemption to the Freedom of Information Act, according to internal Defense Department documents. The exemption, which would shield unclassified but non-public “military tactics, techniques and procedures” from disclosure was proposed last year, but was kept out of the 2016 defense policy bill by lawmakers, the memo noted, “due to jurisdictional concerns and process issues (but not content issues).” National security researcher Steven Aftergood, who reported on the “planning documents,” said Wednesday that the administration is going to…

Keep Reading

Grassley: Blame Obama, Not Trump for Islamophobia In U.S.

by

According to Senate Judiciary Committee chair Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa.), it’s not Republicans’ anti-Muslim rhetoric and over a decade of ongoing, endless war in the Middle East that has bred a backlash against Islam in the United States: it’s President Obama’s apparent refusal to publicly use a term. The senator made the comment on Wednesday, as GOP party leaders and rank-and-file alike scrambled to distance themselves from a bigoted proposal by Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump. The heir businessman turned politician called on federal officials to stop all Muslims from…

Keep Reading

1 … 25 26 27 28 29 … 56
Go to Top