California is in the midst of a historic rainstorm, but will it be a waste?
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His fans have had enough…
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Even more sports teams seem to be regressing into the painfully woke ideology, and this time the National Hockey League is on the hook.
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Capitol Hill is in a frenzy over the latest debt deal reached between lawmakers.
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After nearly two decades of courtroom arguments, the Defense Department has finally turned over records on an intelligence program that could have prevented the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.
The non-profit public interest law firm Judicial Watch announced in a statement after a nearly 19-year Freedom of Information Act battle, “the Department of Defense produced 62 pages of records out of hundreds of previously withheld documents regarding the U.S. intelligence program ‘Operation Able Danger.’ The Defense Department identified hundreds of pages of responsive records but withheld them, claiming the overwhelming majority are still classified to this day.”
“It shouldn’t take two decades to decide that the American people can’t see documents about a military investigation that could have prevented 9/11. What an insult to the American people and the victims of 9/11,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton.
“Able Danger was formed in 1999. It compiled publicly available information regarding al Qaeda and other targets,” Judicial Watch notes.”
“In August 2005 interviews, Tom Fitton, president of Judicial Watch, and other experts reported that the operation identified four future September 11, 2001, hijackers as al Qaeda members in the United States well before the attacks,” Judicial Watch states, adding, “The Senate Intelligence Committee began its investigation of the program in August 2005. In September 2005, the Senate Judiciary Committee conducted a hearing on Able Danger, however, members of the data-mining team were blocked from testifying.”
That’s when Judicial Watch stepped in, submitting a FOIA request to Defense Department for related records, as well as information on “U.S. intelligence, law enforcement and/or counterterrorism projects and/or programs utilizing data mining software/techniques to search open-source records in the public domain.”
Judicial Watch lays out what they discovered, writing:
The Defense Department response on August 24 from U.S. Special Operations Command identifies hundreds of pages of responsive records but claims the overwhelming majority are still classified and, over 20 years later, remain exempted from disclosure:
[S]pecifically, Sections 1.4(a), military plans, weapon systems, or operations; 1.4(c), intelligence activities (including covert actions), intelligence sources or methods, or Cryptology; 1.4(g), vulnerabilities or capabilities of systems, installations, projects, plans, or protection services relating to the national security; and Section 1.7(e), for compilation of items of information that are individually unclassified, but may be classified if the compiled information reveals an additional association or relationship.
The records obtained by Judicial Watch include an unredacted, declassified Top Secret/SCI record contains a 17-page listing of unclassified, open-source internet resources listing websites and URLs for topics such as terrorism news stories; Office of the Coordinator of Counterterrorism; and “Albanian Terrorism in Kosovo,” among many others. Across the bottom of page three of the lists of open-source records is a statement: “Began to understand the status of ongoing efforts!” The author of the exclamation is not identified.
Small passages of what seem to be declassified Top Secret/SCI analytical reports (unnamed and undated) feature commentary such as:
Arab countries in North Africa especially, Algeria, Tunisia, Morrocco, Libya, Egypt, and almost all other Arab countries have been annoyed for the high profile of Osama bin Laden first in Pakistan and later in Afghanistan especially, when he publicly claims that he trains Arab fundamentalists to overthrow most of Arab regimes in the Middle East.
The records also cite journalist Jason Burke’s December 1998 reporting that Osama bin Laden decided to get into drug trafficking as a new weapon and approached (through intermediaries) major opium and heroin dealers, as well as major landowners in the opium-growing districts of Afghanistan, and offered to buy all of the opium they grow.
Drug trafficking was also featured in an undated/unsourced, declassified TOP SECRET/SCI record that stated:
In fact, heroin is the major source of income for the Taleban [sic] government that has seized power in Afghanistan. It is not the Taleban government alone; heroin is also a major source of earning for the Inter Service Intelligence ISI of Pakistan, which has been providing support and assistance for the Taleban government which has seized power in Afghanistan. The lion’s share of the funds earned through heroin smuggling is spent on intelligence service and also on subversive activities carried out by the ISI in neighboring countries.
Another undated/unsourced excerpt states:
Opium is traded at large bazaars in Afghanistan that are the treacherous domain of criminal syndicates. One of the more notorious is located in the town of Sangin, a three-hour drive west of the Taliban capital of Kandahar. ‘Sangin is known as a dangerous place,’ says Bernard Frahl, head of the U.N. drug-agency office in Islamabad, who visited the market town in October. “It is known for people going in and not coming out.” Of about 500 shopkeepers crowded along one main street, and two or three footpaths off it, he says, almost half sell opium.
“The records produced to Judicial Watch include the homepage of a Swedish construction firm and what appears to be a worker complaint from someone employed in Saudi Arabia,” Judicial Watch adds.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of American Liberty News.
ANALYSIS – From the day cinematographer Halyna Hutchins was shot and killed on the set of the movie Rust, on Oct. 21, 2021, there has been a flurry of speculation over whether anyone would be criminally charged.
Hutchins was killed when a live round was fired from a real ‘prop’ gun being held by liberal actor Alec Baldwin.
Well, now the speculation is over, and Baldwin will be charged.
He has always denied responsibility, saying the replica old west revolver should have had dummy bullets and that he never pulled the trigger.
On the first point, Baldwin is correct; on the second, he is less convincing.
The set armorer is responsible for ensuring gun safety. And there was no reason for live rounds to be on a movie set. Period.
Much less mixed in with dummy rounds.
The armorer certainly is responsible if not culpable. And a big question is why live rounds were on the set and mixed in with dummy rounds and who put them there.
But experts have shown that Baldwin’s claim of not firing the gun doesn’t wash.
It is physically impossible for this type of gun to fire without the trigger being pulled and/or the hammer dropped.
Beyond his immediate possible culpability as the man who ‘fired’ the gun, Baldwin was also a producer of the low-budget Western film.
After the shooting numerous current and former crew members from the film publicly claimed that safety was extremely lax, and formal complaints had been made and ignored about those safety concerns.
The shooting occurred while rehearsing a scene inside a wooden chapel on Bonanza Creek Ranch in New Mexico.
This is a popular western location seen in the likes of Jimmy Stewart’s 1955 “The Man from Laramie” and Paul Newman and Robert Redford’s 1969 “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.”
As the crew worked out positions for the scene, Baldwin, playing a grizzled 1880s Kansas outlaw, fired a live round from an Italian-made Pietta Long Colt revolver replica – the bullet passed through Hutchins’ chest and lodged in director Joel Souza’s shoulder.
Hutchins died in a flight to the hospital in Albuquerque, while Souza was later discharged from the hospital.
In April 2022, the producers, including Baldwin, were fined $136,793 by the New Mexico Occupational Health and Safety Bureau, which said: “management knew that firearm safety procedures were not being followed on set and demonstrated plain indifference to employee safety.”
A wrongful death lawsuit was then filed against Alec Baldwin and other key members of the production in Feb. 2022.
The lawsuit named Baldwin and others who “are responsible for the safety on the set” and called out “reckless behavior and cost-cutting” that led to the death of Hutchins, according to the family’s lawyer.
The lawsuit also claimed that Baldwin and other “Rust” crew and cast committed “major breaches” of safety on the set.
That lawsuit was later settled.
But Baldwin’s legal woes continue as he is now being hit with two counts of involuntary manslaughter over the shooting.
Hannah Gutierrez Reed, the film’s young and inexperienced armorer, will also be charged with two counts of involuntary manslaughter.
Meanwhile, assistant director Dave Halls who handed the gun to Baldwin prior to the shooting signed a plea agreement for a charge of the negligent use of a deadly weapon.
In return, he received a suspended sentence and six months of probation, according to the district attorney.
If Baldwin is convicted, he could be facing up to 18 months in prison.
“Involuntary manslaughter in New Mexico is a Class D felony punishable by up to 18 months in prison,” former Assistant U.S. Attorney Neama Rahmani explained to Fox News Digital. “If Baldwin is convicted, I can see him being sentenced at or near the max.”
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The family of vice presidential candidate Tim Walz aren’t fans of his politics…
An image circulating online shows family members of vice presidential candidate Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz openly supporting former President Trump.
The photo was shared online by former Nebraska Republican gubernatorial candidate Charles Herbster. It shows eight people wearing “Nebraska Walz’s (sic) for Trump” T-shirts.
“Tim Walz’s family back in Nebraska wants you to know something…” Herbster wrote on X.
Family members told Fox News they consider themselves “distant” from Walz and have never met or spoken with him. One person in the photo who wished to remain anonymous said they are supporting Trump because “he supports our values.”
Trump replied on Truth Social to the image, implying that he plans to “meet” with Jeff Walz, the older brother of the Minnesota governor.
A left-wing city council faces a class action lawsuit from concerned citizens over a scheme to give an average $25,000 in financial assistance to citizens based on their skin color.
The non-profit public interest law firm Judicial Watch announced in a statement a hearing in its “class action civil rights lawsuit filed against Evanston, Illinois, on behalf of six individuals over the city’s reparations program.”
“To date, Evanston has awarded over $6,350,000 to 254 individuals based on their race. The city must be stopped before it spends even more money on this clearly discriminatory and unconstitutional reparations program,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton.
“The court ordered the in-person hearing for oral argument on Evanston’s pending motion to dismiss the lawsuit,” Judicial Watch reports.
Judicial Watch reports it “filed the lawsuit over the city’s use of race as an eligibility requirement for a reparations program, which makes $25,000 direct cash payments to black residents and descendants of black residents who lived in Evanston between the years 1919 and 1969.”
According to The New Republic, program will also reportedly give financial assistance to their descendants, who never experienced racism in Evanston.
Judicial Watch alleges “that the program violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.”
In its response to the city’s motion to dismiss, Judicial Watch states:
[T]he program’s use of a race-based eligibility requirement is presumptively unconstitutional, and remedying societal discrimination is not a compelling government interest. Nor has remedying discrimination from as many as 105 years ago or remedying intergenerational discrimination ever been recognized as a compelling government interest. Among the program’s other fatal flaws is that it uses race as a proxy for discrimination without requiring proof of discrimination.
Support for Donald Trump is surging after news broke that Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg plans to indict the former president this week.
Watch Amanda explain the latest developments below:
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ANALYSIS – It isn’t news that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has proven to be vulnerable to political pressure. Just look at the threat assessments produced in 2020 that single out ‘white supremacists’ as the ‘most lethal domestic terror threat’ in the U.S., despite their numbers being minuscule.
According to that report, self-described ‘white supremacists’ were responsible for 49 homicides in 26 attacks spread across more than a decade and a half – from 2000 to 2016.
Yes, that’s more murders than any other specific domestic extremist group but let’s get real.
There are more murders in Chicago in one weekend than the entire number of white supremacist killings nationwide in those sixteen years.
This DHS report, though produced under the last year of Trump’s term, like many others recently by different federal agencies, like the FBI, is part of a wider political campaign that conflates the relatively small number of white supremacists, and other so-called right-wing extremists, with the tens of millions of mainstream conservatives and Trump supporters.
And we can now add traditional Catholics to the feds’ “most wanted” list.
The FBI recently produced a memo by its Richmond, Virginia, Field Office that was leaked on Jan. 23, 2023.
That memo, according to a group of 20 GOP state attorney generals, “identifies ‘radical-traditionalist Catholic[s]’ as potential ‘racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists.’”
In their letter to FBI Director Christopher Wray and U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland, Fox News reported, the AGs told the FBI and Department of Justice (DOJ) to “desist from investigating and surveilling Americans who have done nothing more than exercise their natural and constitutional right to practice their religion in a manner of their choosing.”
The AGS also asked that the DOJ and the FBI “reveal to the American public the extent to which they have engaged in such activities.”
The AGs letter notes that the FBI memorandum deploys “alarmingly detailed theological distinctions to distinguish between the Catholics whom the FBI deems acceptable, and those it does not.”
It’s in this context of politicized and weaponized federal law enforcement agencies, that this latest report of DHS malfeasance deserves special attention.
Specifically, we are talking about the DHS Office of Intelligence and Analysis (OIA), whose leadership, according to Politico, was called “shady” and run “like a corrupt government.”
For years it has been operating a secretive domestic-intelligence gathering program that many DHS employees have complained may be illegal.
The OIA’s Overt Human Intelligence Collection Program allows DHS officials to bypass lawyers and seek intelligence interviews with individuals being held in local jails, federal prisons, and immigrant detention centers.
While most law-abiding U.S. citizens may not care much about this DHS target group, remember this is just another example of how elements of DHS appear corrupt, and play fast and loose with the law, and all our civil liberties.
But the Department’s politicization is probably the biggest danger according to documents obtained by Politico.
As the New York Post reports:
The ability of DHS to be impartial and withstand caving to political pressure was also a major concern, documents show.
An internal analysis during the Trump administration found a “significant number of respondents cited concerns with politicization of analytic products and/or the perceptions of undue influence that may compromise the integrity of the work performed by employees. This concern touches on analytic topics, the review process, and the appropriate safeguards in place to protect against undue influence.”
The document adds that “a number of respondents expressed concerns/challenges with the quality and effectiveness of I&A senior leadership” such as the “inability to resist political pressure.”
“The workforce has a general mistrust of leadership resulting from orders to conduct activities they perceive to be inappropriate, bureaucratic, or political,” the document continues.
It is clearly time to rein in rogue elements at DHS and FBI, but also to clean house at the top levels of both organizations, and DOJ.
Opinions expressed by contributors do not necessarily reflect the views of Great America News Desk.
