Military Resistance 13I12
“U.S. Defense Officials Increasingly Wary Of White House Plans To Scale Back The U.S. Presence In Afghanistan”
“Options Include Keeping Thousands Of American Troops In The Country Beyond The End Of 2016”
Sept. 24, 2015 By Julian E. Barnes in Brussels and Gordon Lubold in Washington; Wall Street Journal [Excerpts]
U.S. and allied defense officials, increasingly wary of White House plans to scale back the U.S. presence in Afghanistan, are reviewing new drawdown options that include keeping thousands of American troops in the country beyond the end of 2016, American and allied officials said.
The top international commander in Afghanistan, U.S. Army Gen. John Campbell, has sent five different recommendations to the Pentagon and to North Atlantic Treaty Organization officials in Brussels, each with its own risk assessment, officials said.
The options include keeping the current U.S. presence at or near 10,000; reducing it slightly to 8,000; cutting the force roughly in half; and continuing with current plans to draw down to a force of several hundred troops by the end of 2016.
Some officials worry that too large a cut could cause the Afghan government to come under increased pressure from the Taliban and other militants, officials said. Others believe a smaller force of several thousand Americans still could be effective at backing the Afghan government.
If the White House opts to keep a higher number of troops in place, it will fall to Mr. Obama’s successor to determine the long-term role of the U.S. in Afghanistan.
A larger American presence would allow several NATO allies and partner nations to maintain their own current force levels, according to allied officials. That, in turn, would allow the alliance to keep several bases operating around Afghanistan.
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AFGHANISTAN WAR REPORTS
Georgian Soldier Killed In Taliban Attack On Largest Foreign Base In The Country
September 23, 2015By AFPBy JOSEPH GOLDSTEIN, New York Times
KABUL:
A Georgian soldier posted in Afghanistan was killed and another wounded when their patrol came under attack by the Taliban, their government said Wednesday.
Private First Class Vasil Kulijanishvili, 21, “died Tuesday in a clash that took place while on patrol” at the Bagram Airfield, some 50 kilometres north of Kabul, Georgian Prime Minister Irakli Garibashvili told a cabinet meeting before ministers observed a moment of silence.
Officials said in June that Bagram Air Base, which is about 30 miles north of Kabul, the capital, had been coming under an increasing number of rocket attacks.
Coalition soldiers began patrolling the surrounding area in search of rocket launch sites, according to the Afghan police chief for the Bagram area, Col. Masoom Khan
Another Georgian national was wounded in the clash, which the Taliban claimed via their recognised Twitter account.
“His condition is stable,” Gabribashvili said of the second soldier.
Some 885 Georgian soldiers are deployed in Afghanistan, making the country the second-largest contributor after the United States to the 12,500-strong U.S.-led Resolute Support mission.
Taliban spokesperson Zabiullah Mujahid said the insurgents carried out a rocket attack on the facility, the largest foreign base in the country, on Tuesday evening.
Their new leader Mullah Akhter Mansoor, in a message marking the Muslim festival of Eidul Azha, warned the government Tuesday it must cancel a security deal with the US and expel all foreign troops if it wants peace.
Soldier Who Attacked Afghan Police Commander For Keeping Child Sex Slave “Has Been Ordered To Leave The US Army By November 1”
“Martland, Who Has Served As A Green Beret For 11 Years, Was Told That “His Case ‘Does Not Meet The Criteria’ For An Appeal”
Sergeant Charles Martland has been sacked by the US military
Sep 24, 2015 By Rebecca Perring, The Daily Express [England]]
Sergeant 1st Class Charles Martland, from Massachusetts, has been ordered to leave the US army by November 1 and has now been refused permission to appeal.
It comes after the 33-year-old and another soldier shoved a local commander, whom he had trained, accused of raping a 12-year-old Afghan boy. He walked away with bruising.
The Afghan commander was also said to have attacked the boy’s mother when she said she was going to report the attack in war-torn Kunduz Province, where the soldiers were deployed in 2011.
But Sergeant Martland was reprimanded by a senior officer for “flagrant departure from professionalism and even-tempered leadership” and axed.
Earlier this week Mr Martland, who has served as a Green Beret for 11 years, was told that his case “does not meet the criteria” for an appeal.
The US Army Human Resources Command wrote in a memo to the soldier: “Consequently your request for an appeal and continued service is disapproved.
Before the attack, Mr Martland and Captain Dan Quinn confronted the soldier about the claims, to which he just “laughed about it and said it ‘wasn’t a big deal’”.
The two soldiers shoved him to the ground and he walked away with bruises.
But after the attack the commander complained to the US Army, who reportedly halted Mr Martland’s mission, put him in a temporary job and sent him home.
Meanwhile, Mr Quinn quit the military and is thought to have secured a job on Wall Street.
Sergeant Martland, who received a Bronze star for valor actions during a Taliban ambush, previously wrote in a letter to the Army that he and Mr Quinn “felt that morally we could no longer stand by and allow our ALP (Afghan Local Police) to commit atrocities”.
He now has the option to appeal to the Army Board for Correction of Military Records.
POLICE WAR REPORTS
Man Who Investigates Chicago Police Department For A Living Beaten By Officers Once They Discovered What He Did:
“One Of Six Officers Who Stopped Roberts Found His IPRA Identification Badge”
“Immediately Afterwards, The Police Dash Cam Recording The Traffic Stop Cuts To Black”
09.23.15By Justin Glawe, The Daily Beast
CHICAGO —
A man who investigates the Chicago Police Department for a living was beaten by officers once they discovered what he did, according to a lawsuit filed in federal court.
George Roberts is a supervisor at the Independent Police Review Authority, the agency responsible for investigating claims of police misconduct and officer-involved shootings.
On New Year’s Day 2015, Roberts was pulled over after he left a bar.
One of six officers who stopped Roberts found his IPRA identification badge.
Immediately afterwards, the police dash cam recording the traffic stop cuts to black;
Roberts alleges in his federal lawsuit against the police this is because another officer intentionally turned off the camera.
Roberts’s attorney says police paperwork did not even note any footage existed.
In fact, police only admitted to its existence when Roberts’s criminal counsel discovered it during his trial for driving under the influence.
With no footage to contest their account of the incident, police told the media that Roberts was drunk and swerving his vehicle and that he refused to answer questions or to take a field-sobriety test.
They arrested him for minor traffic violations and DUI. Police said he fell asleep in the back of the squad car and he soiled himself.
Roberts was acquitted on the DUI charge in a bench trial and he says police are lying about what really happened after the dash cam went dark—that he was thrown to the ground before he was handcuffed and put in the back of a squad car.
Roberts’s wrists were too large for the single pair of handcuffs police slapped on him, his lawyer says. When Roberts, at 6-foot-3 and 315 pounds, complained that even the slightest movement caused the cuffs to cut into his wrists, Officer “R. Adams” allegedly taunted him with Eric Garner’s last words.
“What are you going to tell me next, you can’t breathe?”
Roberts, who is black, claims he was pulled out of the car and thrown to the ground again—a collision so violent that it made him lose control of his bowels.
From there Roberts was taken to the lock-up, where he stayed overnight in his soiled clothes.
The only visit from an officer that night was borne not of concern but jubilation, according to Roberts. A white-shirt officer, which denotes high rank, peered in on Roberts as he sat defeated on the cell floor, then pointed and laughed.
IPRA is used to getting beat up by Chicago’s cops.
Lorenzo Davis, who along with Roberts was one of just two black supervisors at IPRA, is also suing the city.
Davis says he was fired after refusing to whitewash investigations of three fatal shootings carried out by Chicago police officers.
While Davis remains unsure whether police targeted Roberts, he is sure that telling the truth about cops gets punished.
“Some people seem to think that someone saw him and recognized him, saw him in a bar and saw him drinking,” Davis says of Roberts. “That was a theory initially—that this would be a way to get back at someone who worked at IPRA.”
The only time IPRA had the balls to suggest terminating a cop was after the state’s attorney already charged him in a homicide, which hadn’t happened to any other cops in IPRA’s lifetime.
In 2012, Detective Dante Servin fired his unregistered handgun from his car, killing Rekia Boyd. (Servin has maintained he saw a man with a gun near Boyd, but investigators revealed the man was holding only a cellphone.)
Servin was charged with involuntary manslaughter but was acquitted by a Cook County judge in April on the novel basis that Servin should’ve been charged with first-degree murder.
Not only will Servin not do time in prison, he may not even lose his job. That decision rests with the Chicago Police Board, made up of nine private citizens appointed by the mayor. Protesters faced off with the board last week to demand Servin be canned. At an earlier meeting, Boyd’s brother even brought a bag of his sister’s bloody hair to make his point. Last week, he was joined by more than 200 protesters outside Chicago police headquarters.
“What they’re trying to do now is to—IPRA as well as the state’s attorney’s office—is to find one or two high-profile cases to come out against, and get all the press they can and get the heat off them,” Davis said.
“It’s so political they might go ahead and fire him.”
That’s it: politics, not facts.
Even when cops are caught on tape threatening and manhandling people—and then trying to steal the evidence—IPRA slaps them on the wrists.
Just this week, video surfaced of two plainclothes officers roughing up an Chinese-American woman in a salon that was the target of a raid.
“You’re not fucking American. I’ll put you in a UPS box and send you back to wherever the fuck you came from,” Officer Gerald Di Pasquale tells Jessica Klyzek, which was captured on surveillance video.
Klyzek told him that she’s a citizen.
“No you’re not! You’re here on borrowed time,” Pasquale tells Klyzek.
“So mind your fucking business before I shut this whole fucking place down. And I’ll take this place and whoever owns it will fucking kill you because they don’t care about you, OK? I’ll take this building. You’ll be dead and your whole family will be dead.”
After realizing they were being recorded, the officers talk about how they could obtain the footage, not realizing it was stored off site.
For implying an innocent woman would die, allowing another officer to punch her in the face, then talking about hiding the evidence, IPRA recommended a 25-day suspension for Di Pasquale and an eight-day suspension for the officer who punched Klyzek.
Klyzek, Roberts, and Davis have all demanded that juries hear their cases, which would put Chicago, its police, and its police watchdogs all on trial.
“Cops Should Be Killed”
Black Woman Arrested And Charged With “Dissemination Of Information To Facilitate Terroristic Threats” For Expressing An Opinion On Facebook;
“Judge Forced Her To Post $10,000 Bond And ‘Banned Her From Social Media’ As Condition For Releasing Her From Jail”
“It Is Clear That The Criminals Here Were The Cops”
In the 1969 Brandenburg decision, the Supreme Court said:
“Freedoms of speech and press do not permit a State to forbid or proscribe advocacy of the use of force or of law violation except where such advocacy is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action”
May 2, 2015by Cacique Hatuey, hatueysashes.blogspot.com/
Once upon a time there was a country where the constitution said you have freedom of speech.
In face of the continuing murder of Blacks by police, a 33-year-old Black woman expresses her anger by writing a status on her Facebook page the Monday night of the Baltimore rebellion saying that cops should be killed.
It was, obviously and transparently, an expression of rage, for she adds, “I condone black on white killings. “Why? Because “they condone crimes against us.”
She even pulls out the Constitution to defend her right to express her anger in such extreme terms.
She says that police are “reading this ... right now” and adding “Freedom of speech, tho. So when you can absolutely show me in the 1st amendment where it explicitly says you can’t say ‘kill all cops’ then I’ll delete my status. Other than that.... NOPE.”
Still, on Tuesday, the next day, she deletes the post.
My guess is she thought better of how she expressed her anguish.
The fairy tale:
end of story.
The reality:
acting as part of a widespread multi-agency effort, cops raid the woman’s home on Tuesday, April 28.
They confiscate all sorts of property including three computers and a cellphone, and arrest her on some sort of terrorism charge(s).
Press reports say the agencies involved included: the Federal Bureau of Investigations, the Georgia Bureau of Investigations, the Joint Terrorism Task Force, the Department of Homeland Security, the Fulton County District Attorney, the Atlanta Police, the East Point Police, the Fulton County Sheriff and the New York Police Department.
(No explanation is given for the NYPD, but it is listed with the rest.)
WSB-TV channel 2 credited itself with an assist, saying the station had “reported it (the post) to Atlanta Police and our FBI contacts,” according to the corporate outlet’s own news story. Channel 2 is part of Cox, the dominant news operation in Atlanta, which also owns the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and six radio stations, including the main news and talk station.
According to 11 Alive, Gannet’s Atlanta TV station, the woman, Ebony Dickens “was charged with dissemination of information to facilitate terroristic threats.”
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution said she was “charged with making terroristic threats,” adding that “Police said Wednesday they would try to get charges upgraded to a felony, because a gun found during a search showed she had the means to carry out the threats.”
Channel 2 claims: “Dickens has been charged with disseminating information related to terrorist acts.”
CNN, a national outlet based in Atlanta, agreed with Channel 2: “Dickens, 33, appeared in court Wednesday on a charge of disseminating information related to terrorist acts.”
But CNN seems to think there was an aggravating factor.
Their story begins, “A fake name on a Facebook post can still get you in real trouble,” adding that “Ebony Dickens of East Point, Georgia, posted her Facebook rant under the name Tiffany Milan, police said.”
And then there is what a judge did. Instead of apologizing to her and raking the cops and prosecutors over the coals for violating the woman’s constitutional rights, the judge forced her to post a $10,000 bond and “banned her from social media” as a condition for releasing her from jail.