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posted by martyb on Friday July 20 2018, @11:01PM   Printer-friendly
from the sue-or-be-suet? dept.

Rolling Stone:

When a U.S. citizen heard he was on his own country’s drone target list, he wasn’t sure he believed it. After five near-misses, he does – and is suing the United States to contest his own execution
...
With Reprieve’s help, Kareem did what the system asks a law-abiding American citizen with a grievance to do. He sued, filing a complaint in district court in Washington, D.C., on March 30th, 2017, asking the U.S. government to take him off the Kill List, at least until he had a chance to challenge the evidence against him.

The case, still unresolved more than a year later, has awesome implications not just for Kareem but for all Americans – all people everywhere, for that matter.

It’s not a stretch to say that it’s one of the most important lawsuits to ever cross the desk of a federal judge. The core of the Bill of Rights is in play, and a wrong result could formalize a slide into authoritarianism that began long ago, but accelerated after 9/11.

He needs to take the matter to Information Retrieval, but heaven help him if he doesn't get his receipt stamped first.

[Ed note: It's a long read, but provides extensive background on the US government's kill list development, implementation, and complications in trying to do anything about it.]


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  • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 21 2018, @01:53AM (8 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 21 2018, @01:53AM (#710214)

    English language, learn it, love it.

    Evidence != proof.

    I'll just go ahead and quote a massive chunk of an article so your lazy brain doesn't have to work too hard.

    The verdict on this is unclear. But there is certainly plenty of evidence pointing toward collusion; what you would call “probable cause” in a legal context, or what a journalist might simply consider reason to continue investigating the story. And the investigating thus far, both by special counsel Mueller and by journalists working on the story, has been fruitful. The efforts have continued to turn up contacts between Trumpworld and Putinland, cover-ups, and dishonesty.

    Even as recently as Friday afternoon, we got new indictments charging Trump’s former campaign chair and his former GRU operative business partner with witness tampering and obstruction of justice.

    It’s important, obviously, not to prejudge a case. It turns out that Saddam Hussein was acting like a man who was covering up a secret nuclear weapons arsenal because he didn’t want the world to know how weak his defenses really were.

    By the same token, it’s certainly possible that the various Trump-Russia contacts never amounted to anything and that they’ve been consistently covered up for some reason other than an effort to hide collusion. But both the contacts that have been revealed so far and the deception used to deny their existence are certainly evidence of collusion — evidence that should be (and is being) pursued by the special counsel’s office and that should not be dismissed by the press or by elected officials.
    The circumstantial case for collusion

    It’s worth backing up to recall what we all saw on camera before anyone knew anything about an FBI investigation, before FBI Director James Comey was fired in an effort to halt the investigation, and before Mueller and his team revealed anything:

            Two separate hacks of Democratic Party emails — one purloining a trove of internal Democratic National Committee emails and one that stole a ton of correspondence from John Podesta’s personal Gmail account — were perpetrated over the course of 2016, by what are now believed to have been agents operating on behalf of the Russian government.
            These emails were not immediately released, and they were not released by the hackers who obtained them. Instead, the emails were disseminated to the public by using Julian Assange and WikiLeaks as an intermediary. Their releases also seemed strategically timed — the DNC emails disrupted efforts to create a show of unity between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders at the beginning of the Democratic National Convention, while the Podesta emails were released right after the infamous Access Hollywood tape.
            Trump and his campaign, at the time, believed these emails were a big deal and cited them frequently. Trump built substantial portions of his campaign messaging around narratives — typically half-true at best — contained in the emails, and made no bones about welcoming the hacking.
            “WikiLeaks, I love WikiLeaks,” he said on several occasions on the campaign trail, and he also explicitly called on the Russian government to hack and release Hillary Clinton’s emails.
            Trump also spent the 2016 campaign running an overtly pro-Russian campaign message, praising Vladimir Putin’s leadership, defending him from allegations of murdering his political opponents, and calling for a realignment of US strategy in Syria and Ukraine.

    I would not necessarily call any of this “evidence” of collusion, but it’s certainly grounds for suspicion. It gave the impression that Trump was on some level coordinating his campaign messaging with the Russian hackers, and that either he was taking a pro-Putin line in exchange for Russian help or he sincerely believed in the pro-Putin line and therefore saw nothing wrong with accepting Russian assistance.

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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Saturday July 21 2018, @02:08AM (6 children)

    by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Saturday July 21 2018, @02:08AM (#710218) Journal

    I'm sure that you'll admit that an opinion piece that cites a lot of circumstantial evidence is not, in and of itself, evidence.

    Meanwhile - Hillary was happy to climb into bed with the Russians when they were putting hundreds of millions of dollars into her "foundation". The circumstantial evidence surrounding the sale of uranium futures to Russia are far more convincing than that of collusion between Trump and Putin.

    But, if you are a die-hard partisan, you can convince yourself of anything the party tells you.

    • (Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 21 2018, @06:35AM (5 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 21 2018, @06:35AM (#710300)

      Emails!! She did it first!!!!

      OMG get over it, you got a "republican" government, now sack it up and deal with the fact that Trump is likely a traiyor selling out our country.

      Whassamatter big fella? Cant handle all the shame this will require? Its ok, ill wait for the final findings from the investigation but im afraid Trump will irreperably damage the US before you trogs get with reality.

      • (Score: 4, Interesting) by Runaway1956 on Saturday July 21 2018, @07:20AM (1 child)

        by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Saturday July 21 2018, @07:20AM (#710305) Journal

        What shame? Are you under the impression that Trump is "my guy", "my candidate", or some other such silly shit? If you've read much of my writing, you know that I despise Trump - but I despise Hillary far more. And, I enjoy pointing out your own fucking hypocrisy. The D side can't get over having lost the election, is the reason behind all the witch hunts in the Trump administration.

        Your side was in bed with the Russians, so long as it was putting money into the Clinton and Democrat coffers. Now, it's nothing but evil Russians, and collusion between the two most powerful people in the world.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 21 2018, @05:29PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 21 2018, @05:29PM (#710492)

          Oh i know your feelings about trump, and obviously you dont know me cause i didnt vote for either of the turds.

          However, your hatred as you SAID aligns you with Trump against the whiny democrats of which i am not one. You can condemn both, but you continually push for Trump while saying you arent. There is no proof and the actual investigation is yielding damning results, but all you can focus on are libruhl tears. It is sad you have such hupocrisy yet are blind to it.

      • (Score: 4, Insightful) by Pav on Saturday July 21 2018, @03:17PM (2 children)

        by Pav (114) on Saturday July 21 2018, @03:17PM (#710441)

        Those emails showed Bernie was cheated in several ways, and so uncontroversially that the DNC ruling committee had to resign en mass, and Donna Brazille was sacked from her media job for leaking debate questions to Hillary (only to be immediately hired by the Hillary campaign). That's your subverting democracy right there, and they cheated a guy who was further ahead of Trump than Hillary n the polls consistently for half a year. Democracy definitely suberted. And this was balls out. Unambiguous. And noones talking about it. I wonder why. Also, it showed Hillary's media allies "elevated" Trump! This was supposedly because he was the guy she had the best chance against. Again, this was a blatant subverion of US democracy. Again, noone is talking about it. Ask yourself why.

        If Russia hacked that server... (which Obamas ex FBI deputy doubts, as well as several other ex three-letter-agency people such as Bill Binney, Thomas Drake etc...) then the Russians HELPED US democracy. BTW, the FBI never got access to that server. BTW, so many uncritically believe Robert "weapons of mass distruction" Mueller. Surely people on a nerd forum have memories long enough to realise this guy has proven he'll happily push untruth on the US people if it suits him. And why the sobbing about democracy in a country with the electoral college, rampant gerrymandering and voter disenfranchisement? Does ANYONE believe mainstream Democrats or Republicans actually give a flying crap about democracy?

        • (Score: 2) by HiThere on Saturday July 21 2018, @05:09PM (1 child)

          by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Saturday July 21 2018, @05:09PM (#710487) Journal

          What you, and most other people, don't seem to understand is that the Democratic Party (like the others) is a privately owned organization. I don't think they broke any laws in cheating to select Hillary. It was vile and unethical, but I don't *think* it was illegal.

          That said, it was pretty clear to me from the start that Bernie was the "designated loser" in the competition. And he seemed to be aware of it, and be willing to accept it in order to get his message out. But IIUC the DNC could have just appointed Hillary as their candidate, and not even bothered with a primary...but the cost in voter commitment would be too high.

          That said, they did break their own rules to get Hillary to win the nomination.

          The Republicans weren't much better, but they were blindsided by Trump. So we got someone even worse than the machine candidate. Whoopee!

          Perhaps you can tell I'm a bit disgusted with all the political parties. Last time there wasn't a single candidate in any of the four parties on my ballot I thought better than the wino passed out on the corner.

          --
          Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
          • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Pav on Saturday July 21 2018, @10:40PM

            by Pav (114) on Saturday July 21 2018, @10:40PM (#710598)

            Debbie Wasserman-Shultz, the head of the DNC who presided over Hillary's cheating against Bernie has also since cheated against Tim Canova (her primary opponent), and there was definitely blatant illegality in that race - basically lying about the result, then ballot destruction to hide this fact. There was an interesting video [youtube.com] released just hours ago of a three-way interview with Tim about the situation, with a citizen activist software developer called Melissa Schwartz talking about her source software which allows citizens to become involved in exit polls to catch stuff like this early.

            BTW, in the lawsuit against the DNC the first judge to hear the case specifically addressed the legality of cheating, and made very clear he considered the argument that the DNC could choose who they liked (made by the defence) to be bogus... but very strangely he threw it out anyway on juristictional issues, though since then the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals has found sufficient jurisdiction to continue.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 21 2018, @02:33AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 21 2018, @02:33AM (#710224)

    Less evil than Hellary and Ocramma, so what's yer point?