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n2doc's JournalCIA ‘Mistakenly’ Destroys Torture Report
The CIA inspector general’s office — the spy agency’s internal watchdog — has acknowledged it “mistakenly” destroyed its only copy of a mammoth Senate torture report at the same time lawyers for the Justice Department were assuring a federal judge that copies of the document were being preserved, Yahoo News has learned.
Although other copies of the report exist, the erasure of the controversial document by the CIA office charged with policing agency conduct has alarmed the U.S. senator who oversaw the torture investigation and reignited a behind-the-scenes battle over whether the full unabridged report should ever be released, according to multiple intelligence community sources familiar with the incident.
The deletion of the document has been portrayed by agency officials to Senate investigators as an “inadvertent” foul-up by the inspector general. In what one intelligence community source described as a series of errors straight “out of the Keystone Cops,” CIA inspector general officials deleted an uploaded computer file with the report and then accidentally destroyed a disk that also contained the document, filled with thousands of secret files about the CIA’s use of “enhanced” interrogation methods.
“It’s breathtaking that this could have happened, especially in the inspector general’s office — they’re the ones that are supposed to be providing accountability within the agency itself,” said Douglas Cox, a City University of New York School of Law professor who specializes in tracking the preservation of federal records. “It makes you wonder what was going on over there?”
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https://www.yahoo.com/news/senate-report-on-cia-torture-1429636113023030.html
Oopsie!
‘Take it off! This is America!’: Man who yanked hijab pleads guilty to religious obstruction
Near the end of his Southwest Airlines flight from Chicago to Albuquerque in December, Gill Parker Payne decided he had to take action.
Seated a few rows in front of him was a woman he had never met before. She was wearing a religious headscarf, known as a hijab, which Payne recognized as a Muslim practice. He stood up, walked down the aisle and stopped next to her seat. Looking down at the woman, Payne instructed her to remove the covering.
“Take it off! This is America!” Payne, 37, later recalled saying. When she didn’t do it herself, Payne did: He grabbed the hijab from the back and pulled it all off. Violated, the woman, identified by the Justice Department only as K.A., quickly pulled the hijab back over her head.
On Friday, as part of a plea deal with the federal government, Payne pleaded guilty to obstructing the woman’s exercise of her religious beliefs. “Because I forcibly removed K.A.’s hijab, I admit that the United States can prove beyond a reasonable doubt that I intentionally obstructed K.A.’s free exercise of her religious beliefs,” he said in a written statement in the plea agreement.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2016/05/14/take-it-off-this-is-america-man-who-yanked-hijab-pleads-guilty-to-religious-obstruction/
First Openly Gay Army Secretary Nominee Stalled by Single Senator
It's been eight months since President Barack Obama nominated Eric Fanning to become secretary of the Army — the first openly gay man to be recommended to that branch's highest ranking civilian position.
Since then, he's no closer than he was months ago to a confirmation. Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kansas, is holding up Fanning's confirmation because the lawmaker wants Obama to promise not to move Guantanamo Bay detainees to the Fort Leavenworth, Kansas military installation.
"Let me be very clear on this — as a veteran, a Marine — I support Mr. Eric Fanning for this post," Roberts said on the Senate floor late last month. "If the White House calls and assures me that terrorists held at Guantanamo will not come to Ft. Leavenworth, I will release the hold - immediately."
White House officials suggested Roberts is grandstanding.
"It is hard to imagine that Senator Roberts takes this particularly seriously," White House press secretary Josh Earnest told reporters in a press briefing last month. "You may recall the last time that anybody has talked about Senator Roberts was when he filmed a video of himself crumbling up the president's plan to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay and throwing it in a wastebasket. So maybe he relishes the opportunity to be before the camera, but it's not apparent that he takes this critically important national security issue all that seriously."
more
http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/first-openly-gay-army-secretary-nominee-stalled-single-senator-n573881
Sanders giving Clinton a taste of her own medicine
By Eric Zorn
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has a near lock on the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination, yet Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, her only rival, continues to campaign hard from the rear, winning primary races, whipping up crowds and ignoring calls for him to drop out in the interest of party unity.
I'm sure she can relate. Eight years ago at this time, Clinton was the die-hard rival who refused to quit in the face of near mathematical certainty that Barack Obama would be the Democratic nominee.
She was the one who, like Sanders, was pointing to polling data suggesting that, despite her opponent's lead, she was the most likely winner in November against the Republican nominee.
"The White House is won in the swing states, and I am winning the swing states," she told her supporters after clobbering her opponent in the West Virginia primary on the second Tuesday in May 2008, just as Sanders clobbered her on the second Tuesday in May 2016. "This race isn't over yet. Neither of us has the total delegates it takes to win."
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http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/zorn/ct-sanders-giving-clinton-a-taste-of-her-own-medicine-20160513-column.html
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