SECRECY & THE SECURITY STATE - page 46

House Republicans have joined their Senate colleagues in formulating a way to skirt sequestration limits on Pentagon spending. Republicans in the House are proposing a total of $613 billion in defense spending for next year, they revealed on Tuesday, according to The Hill. The sum is roughly $90 billion above the limits imposed by Budget Control Act of 2011. The difference would be financed by the Pentagon’s war-fighting fund, the Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO) fund. The military kitty has also been used by the Obama administration…

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Administration spokesman Josh Earnest confirmed that former CIA Director David Petraeus is advising the White House, despite the former general’s legal troubles stemming from his illicit disclosure of state secrets and his decision to mislead FBI agents about the matter. “He is, I think, legitimately regarded as an expert when it comes to the security situation in Iraq,” Josh Earnest told reporters on Monday. He also said, “it makes a lot of sense for senior administration officials to, on occasion, consult [Petraeus] for advice.” Over…

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Cloaked in secrecy, the White House’s targeted drone killing program is responsible for the deaths of thousands around the world—among them, troubling number of civilians. But a new lawsuit filed on Monday could finally bring some transparency and accountability to the maligned regime, as the Islamic State War could see it employed in new settings.. First reported by the Guardian, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) filed suit seeking information on the administration’s “kill list”–an informal name given to a dossier of individuals the Obama…

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During a Senate hearing examining federal law enforcement organizations’ annual budget requests, Sen. Dianne Feinstein veered off course, and took a shot at the FBI for ignoring last year’s notorious torture report. “One of my disappointments was to learn that the six year report of the Senate intelligence committee on the detention and interrogation program sat in a locker and no one looked at it,” Feinstein told FBI Director James Comey, relaying information she had received on the whereabouts of the 6,000 page report she…

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Reams of evidence of Iraqi security forces committing human rights abuses in the war against the Islamic State (ISIL) has led a key lawmaker to call on Washington to hold back some of its financial assistance to Baghdad. Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) said on Wednesday that the documentation–photographs and pictures that almost certainly show massacres of civilians, and executions and torture of prisoners carried out by Iraqi troops—demonstrates Iraqi “war crimes.” “I would say that involves the Leahy Law,” he told ABC News, referring to…

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Under the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) against the Islamic State (ISIL) proposed by the White House, US soldiers could be deployed to Africa to open up a new front against Boko Haram, according to the Secretary of Defense. “[The AUMF] can be interpreted but has not yet been interpreted to cover other groups like Boko Haram,” said Ashton Carter in response to a question from Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) during a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on Tuesday. Sen. Murphy noted that…

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The trajectory of any possible reform to the criminal justice system became more clear on Tuesday afternoon, after the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee spoke about the issue on the floor of the Senate. The influential Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) railed against a prior proposal on mandatory minimums with bipartisan support and a Feb. 17 New York Times editorial that lambasted his opposition to the bill, before noting his support for asset forfeiture reform, initiatives to improve public defenders’ offices, and more accurate criminal background…

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Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) is planning to use his gavel as the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee to push the administration to transition oversight of all lethal drone operations out of the Central Intelligence Agency, and put it under control of the Pentagon—a move the White House first announced two years ago, but has yet to deliver. “They’re backing away from it. It’s very clear that they are not pursuing what they said was their objective,” Sen. McCain told the Huffington Post in…

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In just six months last year, the Department of Justice fielded over 450 complaints from individuals who alleged that their civil rights or civil liberties were abused by law enforcement officers, but the vast majority of those complaints went unanswered by its Inspector General. Of the trio of those that the department determined worthy of an investigation, according to an IG report released Monday, all three were brought by Muslims, who said they were discriminated against by the criminal justice system. Two of the investigations…

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Despite the Justice Department’s decision to not indict former police officer Darren Wilson on civil rights charges related to his August fatal shooting of an unarmed black teenager, one member of the Congressional Black Caucus said she sees cause for optimism. Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) remarked late last week that she is “extremely disappointed that Michael Brown’s killer will not face criminal charges,” but noted that an investigation into Wilson’s former employers “represents a clear path forward.” “The report shows that the Ferguson Police Department…

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