NCIS Investigation Reportedly Shows Bergdahl Had ‘Deliberate Plan’ to ‘Offer Himself up’ to the Taliban

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Photo Credit: EPA; AP; Reuters

Photo Credit: EPA; AP; Reuters

A 2009 NCIS investigation into Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl’s activities while in Afghanistan reveal that there is clear evidence Bergdahl was “going over to the other side with a deliberate plan,” Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer said on Fox News’ “The O’Reilly Factor” Monday night.

Shaffer, a former military intelligence officer and Fox News contributor, said two senior sources told him that the Naval Criminal Investigative Service investigation included a forensic review of his computer, which show Bergdahl’s apparent intent to travel to Uzbekistan.

“He was going to go off to Uzbekistan,” Shaffer told Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly. “He had made contact with local Afghans and wanted to be moved to Uzbekistan and then made contact with the Russians because he wanted to talk to Russian organized crime …

“Clearly he was not all there relating to what he was doing,” Shaffer told O’Reilly. “I think we’re going to see more and more, as this report is made public that there were a number of disconcerting things within Bergdahl.”

A military source also told Fox News there was strong intelligence after Bergdahl’s 2009 disappearance indicating he was handed over to the Taliban about 10 days after he left his base, and that the group wanted him. The source, who is familiar with the investigation and efforts to recover Bergdahl, said there was an effort to pick up Bergdahl — and potentially block his crossing into Pakistan — but the intelligence was either bad or old and the effort was not successful. (Read more from “NCIS Investigation Reportedly Shows Bergdahl Had ‘Deliberate Plan’ to ‘Offer Himself up’ to the Taliban” HERE)

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U.S. Secretly Tracked Billions of Calls for Decades

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Businessman has stress - Mann schreit ins TelefonThe U.S. government started keeping secret records of Americans’ international telephone calls nearly a decade before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, harvesting billions of calls in a program that provided a blueprint for the far broader National Security Agency surveillance that followed.

For more than two decades, the Justice Department and the Drug Enforcement Administration amassed logs of virtually all telephone calls from the USA to as many as 116 countries linked to drug trafficking, current and former officials involved with the operation said. The targeted countries changed over time but included Canada, Mexico and most of Central and South America.

Federal investigators used the call records to track drug cartels’ distribution networks in the USA, allowing agents to detect previously unknown trafficking rings and money handlers. They also used the records to help rule out foreign ties to the bombing in 1995 of a federal building in Oklahoma City and to identify U.S. suspects in a wide range of other investigations.

The Justice Department revealed in January that the DEA had collected data about calls to “designated foreign countries.” But the history and vast scale of that operation have not been disclosed until now.

The now-discontinued operation, carried out by the DEA’s intelligence arm, was the government’s first known effort to gather data on Americans in bulk, sweeping up records of telephone calls made by millions of U.S. citizens regardless of whether they were suspected of a crime. It was a model for the massive phone surveillance system the NSA launched to identify terrorists after the Sept. 11 attacks. That dragnet drew sharp criticism that the government had intruded too deeply into Americans’ privacy after former NSA contractor Edward Snowden leaked it to the news media two years ago. (Read more from “U.S. Secretly Tracked Billions of Calls for Decades” HERE)

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Obama Says Climate Change Is Harming Americans’ Health

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Photo Credit: My Way News

Photo Credit: My Way News

Global warming isn’t just affecting the weather, it’s harming Americans’ health, President Barack Obama said Tuesday as he announced steps government and businesses will take to better understand and deal with the problem.

Obama said hazards of the changing climate include wildfires sending more pollution into the air, allergy seasons growing longer and rising cases of insect-borne diseases.

“We’ve got to do better in protecting our vulnerable families,” Obama said, adding that, ultimately, all families are affected.

“You can’t cordon yourself off from air,” Obama said. Speaking at Howard University Medical School, he announced commitments from Google, Microsoft and others to help the nation’s health system prepare for a warmer, more erratic climate.

Warning of the perils to the planet has gotten the president only so far; polls consistently show the public is skeptical that the steps Obama has taken to curb pollution are worth the cost to the economy. So Obama is aiming to put a spotlight on ways that climate change will have real impacts on the body, like more asthma attacks, allergic reactions, heat-related deaths and injuries from extreme weather. (Read more from “Obama Says Climate Change Is Harming Americans’ Health” HERE)

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Obama Moving Fast to Take Cuba off Terrorism Sponsor List

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Man stands near national flags of U.S. and Cuba on balcony of a hotel being used by first U.S. congressional delegation to Cuba since change of policy announced by U.S. President Obama, in HavanaPresident Barack Obama vowed on Tuesday to act quickly once he receives a State Department recommendation on whether to remove Cuba from the U.S. list of terrorism-sponsoring countries, a remaining obstacle to the restoration of relations between Washington and Havana.

With just days to go before a hemispheric summit in Panama where Obama will come face-to-face with Cuban President Raul Castro, he offered no clear sign of how he was leaning or the timeframe for his decision. He ordered the review immediately after announcing a diplomatic breakthrough with Havana on Dec. 17.

Obama, in a Reuters interview in early March, said he hoped the United States would be able to open an embassy in Cuba by the time of the April 10-11 Summit of the Americas, and U.S. officials have since said the review was being expedited.

But the lack of a decision so far on taking Cuba off the terrorism blacklist – something Havana has steadfastly demanded – has raised strong doubts about whether the review will be finished in time to make further strides toward normalization before the summit.

“As soon as I get a recommendation, I’ll be in a position to act on it,” Obama said in an interview with National Public Radio. (Read more from “Obama Says Would Move Fast to Take Cuba off Terrorism Sponsor List” HERE)

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FBI Would Rather Prosecutors Drop Cases than Disclose Stingray Details

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Photo Credit: arstechnica

Photo Credit: arstechnica

Not only is the FBI actively attempting to stop the public from knowing about stingrays, it has also forced local law enforcement agencies to stay quiet even in court and during public hearings, too.

An FBI agreement, published for the first time in unredacted form on Tuesday, clearly demonstrates the full extent of the agency’s attempt to quash public disclosure of information about stingrays. The most egregious example of this is language showing that the FBI would rather have a criminal case be dropped to protect secrecy surrounding the stingray.

Ars previously published a redacted version of this document in February 2015, which had been acquired by the Minneapolis Star Tribune in December 2014. The fact that these two near-identical documents exist from the same year (2012) provides even more evidence that this language is boilerplate and likely exists in other agreements with other law enforcement agencies nationwide.

The new document, which was released Tuesday by the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU) in response to its March 2015 victory in a lawsuit filed against the Erie County Sheriff’s Office (ECSO) in Northwestern New York, includes this paragraph:

In order to ensure that such wireless collection equipment/technology continues to be available for use by the law enforcement community, the equipment/technology and any information related to its functions, operation and use shall be protected from potential compromise by precluding disclosure of this information to the public in any manner including but not limited to: press releases, in court documents, during judicial hearings, or during other public forums or proceedings.

(Read more from “FBI Would Rather Prosecutors Drop Cases than Disclose Stingray Details” HERE)

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Author: Hillary Clinton Threw Book, Split Bill’s Head Open in White House

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Democratic presidential candidate Bill Clinton (r)During the height of President Bill Clinton’s Monica Lewinsky scandal, a White House maid entered the bedroom to clean and was shocked to find the president and first lady’s bed covered in blood.

The blood belonged to the president, who said publicly that he “hurt himself running into the bathroom door in the middle of the night.”

But the White House residence staff believed differently. As one worker told author Kate Anderson Brower, “We’re pretty sure [Hillary Clinton] clocked him with a book.”

“There were at least 20 books on the bedside table for his betrayed wife to choose from,” Brower adds, “including the Bible.”

For “The Residence,” political journalist Brower interviewed more than 100 former members of the notoriously secretive White House residence staff, as well as former first ladies Laura and Barbara Bush and Rosalynn Carter and several former first children, for an intimate look at the personal sides of our presidents. (Read more from “Author: Hillary Clinton Threw Book, Split Bill’s Head Open in White House” HERE)

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Bigoted Walmart Puts Christian Employees on ‘Watch List’ [+videos]

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walmart.topic.395-sfSpanI know several high-level executives in Walmart’s corporate office. I know them personally and I know their families. They have shared their faith with me and we have spent time in prayer together.

But now that Walmart has shown its public support for laws that force Christians to violate their faith, every executive, every store manager, every department manager and every team leader is forced into silence. No longer are they free to express their religious faith with its biblical position on marriage and sexuality.

In opposing Arkansas’ Religious Freedom Restoration Act, Walmart now sanctions religious discrimination and anti-Christian bigotry within the company.

Apparently, homosexual activists and their friends have taken influential control of Walmart’s Human Resources and Public Relations departments. Nothing less than full support of the gay brand of “diversity” – and only their brand – will be tolerated.

Last year, Walmart sponsored no less than eleven homosexual events across the nation. In addition, its corporate in-house magazine (Walmart World) touted full-page ads promoting Walmart Pride, the company’s sanctioned homosexual employee resource group. (Read more from “Bigoted Walmart Puts Christian Employees on ‘Watch List'” HERE)

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100-Pound Snowden Bust Appears in NYC Park to Celebrate “Fight Against Modern-Day Tyrannies” [+video]

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edward-snowden1By Sophia Rosenbaum and Reuven Fenton. Even a fake Edward Snowden can’t spend a day in NYC before getting carted away by authorities.

A 100-pound bronze bust of the infamous whistleblower was erected early Monday morning on top of Fort Greene Park’s Prison Ship Martyrs monument, which pays homage to Revolutionary War soldiers.

Two anonymous artists took it upon themselves to modernize the monument by sneaking into the park at 4 a.m. and adhering Snowden’s plaster head to the top of a pillar.

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“We have updated this monument to highlight those who sacrifice their safety in the fight against modern-day tyrannies,” the artists wrote in a statement to ANIMAL New York.

“It would be a dishonor to those memorialized here to not laud those who protect the ideals they fought for, as Edward Snowden has by bringing the NSA’s 4th-Amendment-violating surveillance programs to light,” they added. “All too often, figures who strive to uphold these ideals have been cast as criminals rather than in bronze.” (Read more from “100-Pound Snowden Bust Appears in NYC Park” HERE)

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John Oliver Meets with Edward Snowden: ‘They Are Still Collecting Everybody’s Information, Including Your D**k Pics’

By Eric Carriere. On this week’s episode of Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, the loveable Brit met with National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden.

The entire clip wasn’t aimed at engaging in a massively intellectual conversation about data sharing and government surveillance, but rather, finding a way to make the issue palatable to the average American. How did Oliver achieve this you might ask? In layman terms, he simplified the issue of mass surveillance down to a case of the government being able to view your d**k pictures.

“Over the last couple of years, you’ve probably heard about strange-sounding programs, such as XKeyscore, Muscular, Prism, and Mystic, which are, coincidentally, also the names of some of Florida’s least popular strip clubs,” Oliver joked. “Welcome to XKeyscore — our dancers are fully unredacted and Tuesdays are wing nights.”

Oliver was focusing on the government’s debate over reauthorizing the Patriot Act on June 1 and section 215 of the act that provides the government with the ability to take “any tangible things, including books, records, papers, documents, and other items” from businesses. (Read more from this story HERE)

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Networks Ignore Major Story on Failure of Obama’s DOJ to Seek Contempt Charges for Lois Lerner

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Lois LernerLast week, the Department of Justice announced it would not be seeking contempt charges against Lois Lerner for refusing to testify to Congress on the IRS targeting scandal.

The Big Three (ABC, CBS, NBC) networks, so far, have refused to report on this big development in the Obama IRS scandal that they apparently just don’t want to talk about any more.

On April 1 Politico’s John Breshnan and Rachal Bade reported the following:

“The Justice Department will not seek criminal contempt charges against former IRS official Lois Lerner, the central figure in a scandal that erupted over whether the tax agency improperly targeted conservative political groups. Ronald Machen, the former U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, told House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) in a seven-page letter this week that he would not bring a criminal case to a grand jury over Lerner’s refusal to testify before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee in March 2014. The House approved a criminal contempt resolution against Lerner in May 2014, and Machen’s office has been reviewing the issue since then….Lerner cited her Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate herself during congressional testimony on March 5, 2014, although then-Oversight Chairman Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) said she had waived that right by giving an opening statement at a hearing 10 months earlier when she asserted her innocence. Issa wanted her charged by the Justice Department with criminal contempt of Congress for failing to answer questions about her role in the scandal.”

(See “Shocker! Obama’s DOJ Won’t Seek Contempt Charges for Lois Lerner, Networks Ignore”, originally posted HERE)

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Closing Argument: Prosecutor Claims Boston Bomber Wanted to Punish US for Wars in Muslim Countries

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A courtroom sketch shows accused Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev during his trial at the federal courthouse in BostonAs he planted a backpack containing a bomb near a group of children, Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev made a coldblooded decision aimed at punishing America for its wars in Muslim countries, a federal prosecutor told the jury during closing arguments Monday at Tsarnaev’s death penalty trial.

“This was a cold, calculated terrorist act. This was intentional. It was bloodthirsty. It was to make a point,” Aloke Chakravarty said. “It was to tell America that `We will not be terrorized by you anymore. We will terrorize you.’”

Defense attorney Judy Clarke countered by arguing, as she did at the trial’s outset, that Tsarnaev took part in the attack but did so under the malevolent influence of his now-dead older brother, Tamerlan. Clarke repeatedly referred to Dzhokhar Tsarnaev – then 19 – as a “kid” and a “teenager” . . .

The jury is expected to begin deliberating Tuesday morning in the case against Tsarnaev, 21, almost two years after the twin bombings near the finish line of the Boston Marathon killed three people and wounded more than 260. It was the nation’s deadliest terror attack since 9/11.

If Tsarnaev is convicted – and that is considered a near certainty, given his lawyer’s admission – the jury will then begin hearing evidence on whether he should get life in prison or a death sentence. (Read more from “Prosecutor: Boston Bomber Wanted to Punish US for Wars in Muslim Countries” HERE)

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