The message was pretty clear: the public is not welcome at the trial of three men dubbed the NATO3, which began today, January 21, in Chicago.

The court has issued orders that anyone wishing to attend must submit state-issued identification the day before they want to observe what is supposed to be a public trial, so they can be cleared by the Sheriff's office. And that must be repeated each day!

Last March – before Edward Snowden revealed the NSA’s sweeping collection of phone and other data – Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said no such operation existed. Now, a group of ex-national security officials urge President Obama to fire Clapper.

Message to the National Lawyers Guild 2013 Convention

Brothers and Sisters of the National Lawyers Guild;

I wanted to send you this most important Health Bulletin–Not Personal (pause) but on the steady evisceration of the Right to Counsel, the bulwark of all we do.  Within the last weeks, a suspect was forcibly detained for crimes against the US.  He was taken from Libya to an offshore (ship?) where he was being interrogated, read tortured. 

Renowned defense attorney Lynne Stewart, unjustly charged and convicted for the “crime” of providing her client with a fearless defense, is dying of cancer while imprisoned in the Federal Medical Center, Carswell, Texas.

On September 7, 2013 the Washington Post reported

The Obama administration secretly won permission from a surveillance court in 2011 to reverse restrictions on the National Security Agency’s use of intercepted phone calls and e-mails, permitting the agency to search deliberately for Americans’ communications in its massive databases, according to interviews with government officials and recently declassified material.

“Manning’s sole purpose was to do precisely those things that POTUS claims to respect and honor”

This week we witnessed the distressing spectacle of a hero apologizing to those who should be prostrating themselves in shame for their persecution of him.

This kangaroo courtroom with a blustering prosecutor waving his hands about and a stern judge pronouncing this hero “Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty…”, both of whom claim the moral and legal high ground. They do our Commander-in-Chief’s vengeful bidding.

Obama tells the nation that he wants us to feel "comfortable" with the government spying on all of our electronic communications and activities. He doesn't want to alter the warrantless spying on everyone. Perish the thought! He just wants us to feel more comfortable with it.

While he destroys the Fourth Amendment, he says in effect that he had to destroy it in order to save it.

Barack Obama pulled out the “we’re not Big Brother” line again Friday in the ongoing to effort to bamboozle people alarmed about the vast National Security Agency surveillance of whole populations exposed by Edward Snowden.  The important thing to him is not that the surveillance is curtailed, but that you feel comfortable with it.

Friends, Supporters, Comrades:
Well, we are once again being educated in the meaning of “protracted struggle”, not that anyone wanted or needed this.  It was clear yesterday in Court in NYC that Judge Koeltl was not going to act solely within the “spirit ” of the law but would instead rely upon the Bureau of Prisons to make a “legal” motion on my behalf.  Although the lawyers valiently argued that justice does not allow for a “right” without a “remedy”, in my case, the right to die at home and the fact that there is no appeal (remedy)  from the Bureau’s decision.

When U.S. District Judge John Koetl sentenced radical attorney Lynne Stewart to 10 years in prison in 2009, he said he was not giving her a "death sentence," even though she had been diagnosed with cancer in 2005 and her imprisonment would delay a planned surgery for 18 months. But, outrageously, Lynne is being left to die confined in a federal prison near Fort Worth, Texas, as cancer spreads through her body. (For background on her case, see "Free Lynne Stewart NOW!" online at revcom.us).

In arguing that Russia should send Edward Snowden back to the U.S. to face charges for exposing, from inside the NSA, a vast surveillance network on whole populations, Attorney General Eric Holder was in the ironic position of alleging that: