WASHINGTON — The Treasury Department’s inspector general told senior Treasury officials in June 2012 he was auditing the Internal Revenue Service’s screening of politically active organizations seeking tax exemptions, disclosing for the first time on Friday that Obama administration officials were aware of the matter during the presidential campaign year. At the first Congressional hearing into the I.R.S. s ...

DoD “instruction” seeks to abolish Posse Comitatus, grease skids for military coup Paul Joseph Watson Infowars.com May 17, 2013 A recent Department of Defense instruction alters the US code applying to the military’s involvement in domestic law enforcement by allowing US troops to quell “civil disturbances” domestically without any Presidential authorization, greasing the skids for a de facto military coup ...

Michael Allison faces 75 years in prison for five counts of recording law enforcement officials without their consent in Robinson, Illinois.Illinois is one of the states applying old eavesdropping and wiretapping statutes to new technologies like cell phones or anything else that records audio.Most states allow citizens to record audio in public of on-duty law enforcement officials without their permission. ...

(Jed Morey)  The manhunt for the Boston Marathon bombing suspects offered the nation a window into the stunning military-style capabilities of our local law enforcement agencies. For the past 30 years, police departments throughout the United States have benefitted from the government’s largesse in the form of military weaponry and training, incentives offered in the ongoing “War on Drugs.” For the average ...

The total state needs total information. How else can it track every dollar to snatch, every child to draft, every opinion to slap down? The monitoring of movement will always be done covertly or – if revealed – in the name of safety and fairness. Obama assumed office with a vow to lead the most transparent White House in American history. Now another Godzilla Act has another massive gotcha that steps close ...

As her children were being taken away from her, Daisy Bram screamed, "My babies! My babies!" In 2011, Daisy Bram and Jayme Walsh lived with their two small children, Thor and Zeus, in Butte County, California. Like so many other people in northern California, Bram and Walsh had medical marijuana recommendations and a small cannabis garden in their back yard. In September, their home was raided by Butte Coun ...

As the Obama administration is hit by scandal after scandal, it was revealed that Verizon wireless handed over private data belonging to journalists with the Associated Press last year without any hesitation or questions asked. Interestingly, the Associated Press said the decision to publish the article that reportedly sparked the investigation was only made after consulting the White House and the CIA. Thi ...

US Attorney General Eric Holder has claimed he was unaware of the subpoenas for AP’s phone records, but defended them as a necessary measure. Holder recused himself from the case that has been branded as an “unprecedented intrusion” into press freedom. US lawmakers questioned the attorney general at a House Judiciary Committee about the two months of AP phone records obtained by the Justice Department witho ...

The Associated Press and the administration of United States President Barack Obama are at odds over whether or not the AP’s publishing of a May 2012 article on a foiled al-Qaeda bomb threat put the US in danger. The AP announced on Monday that the US Department of Justice seized two months’ worth of phone records belonging to journalists, an act the news agency’s CEO condemned as a “massive and unprecedent ...

Private First Class Kimberly Rivera, mother of four children and pregnant with a fifth, was sentenced on April 29 to 14 months imprisonment, which was lowered to 10 months based on a plea agreement. Her crime? After serving a tour of duty in Iraq in 2006, she found herself unable to return. She tells Amy Goodman in the Guardian why: “I had a huge awakening seeing the war as it truly is: people losing their ...