Army medic Nicholas Walker returned home from Iraq after 250 combat missions, traumatized and broken. His friends and family couldn’t help him. Therapy couldn’t help him. Heroin couldn’t help him. Pulling bank heists helped him.

By Scott Johnson at Buzzfeed:

"Nicholas Walker, Nico to his friends and family, is a U.S. Army veteran with an exemplary record of service as a medic during the very worst years, and in the very worst areas, of the war in Iraq. He is also a convicted bank robber — and not just the garden variety; in only four months, Walker managed to rob nearly 10 banks (an 11th attempt was aborted), making him one of the most prolific individual bank robbers in Ohio. “It’s definitely in my top two, in terms of robberies by one individual,” said Art Hernandez, a federal prosecutor who helped send Walker to prison for 11 years in 2012. “It’s one of the most unusual [cases] I’ve ever prosecuted.”'
...
"Despite its ubiquity, every case of PTSD is different. Nick Walker, instead of retreating quietly into a life of physical or emotional abuse, or simply killing himself, chose to cope by lashing out in a unique and mystifying way. It was a decision that baffled his family and friends, and even, eventually, Walker himself. It was no less confounding for the experts brought in to examine him afterward. Pablo Stewart, a forensic psychiatrist who testified on Walker’s behalf, said his was “one of the worst cases of PTSD I’ve ever seen.”'

It's a "Must Read," full story here.

This is your Moment of Clarity #229: Two-thirds of the prisoners in Guantanamo Bay (Gitmo) have been hunger striking since February. Some may soon die. But there's a reason you should care about these men...

From CloseGuantanamo.org:

The ongoing existence of this abominable experiment in indefinite detention poisons America's claim to be a nation that believes in justice, and the detention of 86 prisoners cleared for release, who are held because it is politically inconvenient to release them, is a disgrace. Please read our latest exclusive report about the cleared prisoners still in Guantánamo, our latest world exclusive from Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison, our first report about the hunger strike, and our follow-ups here and also here.

We are a group of lawyers, journalists, retired military personnel and concerned citizens seeking to close the "war on terror" prison at Guantánamo Bay, where 166 men are still held, even though 86 of them have been cleared for release. In June, we published an exclusive report identifying 40 prisoners cleared for release up to eight years ago who are still held. We have also just produced a new report telling the stories of 55 of the 86 cleared prisoners whose names were included on a list released by the Justice Department in a court case in September.

Also, just a few days left for the Moment of Clarity Show kickstarter campaign, to contribute, click here.

Keep fighting,

Lee

An anti-abortion activist in Iowa with ties to Scott Roeder, the man who murdered abortion provider George Tiller, is under fire for calling for the shooting of the people who reopened Tiller’s abortion clinic. “If someone would shoot the new abortionists, like Scott shot George Tiller ... It will be a blessing to the babies,” Dave Leach says on a YouTube video. The video includes a recorded conversation between Leach and a man Leach identifies as Roeder, who is currently serving life in prison for Tiller’s 2009 assassination.

In an interview with The Des Moines Register, Leach said he would not personally harm any abortion providers.

"I'm 67 years old. I don't know anything about guns," he said. "I think I could accomplish more with words." He denied that his comments were meant to encourage anyone to kill abortion providers. "That's not exactly a call for that to happen," he said. "Any reasonable person looking at that statement would not equate that with a call for action."

USA Today:

In the YouTube video, the man Leach identifies as Roeder laughs as Leach talks about the prospect of someone shooting the new leaders of the Wichita clinic. Then the second man wonders aloud about the clinic director's motives. "To walk in there and reopen a clinic, a murder mill where a man was stopped, it's almost like putting a target on your back -- saying, 'Well, let's see if you can shoot me,'" he says.

Then the man quotes a fellow activist, who predicted that the abortion industry would end if 100 abortionists were shot. "I think eight have been shot, so we've got 92 to go," the man whom Leach identified as Roeder says. "Maybe (the Wichita clinic director) will be number nine. I don't really know. I'm not sure about that. But she's kind of painting a target on her."

Prison officials are investigating whether the man on the recording was indeed Roeder, and, if it was, how he was able to participate in such a phone call.

A spokesman for the Kansas Department of Corrections said inmates may speak on the phone only with people who are on a list approved by prison administrators.

Hunger Strikes and Indefinite Detention: A Rundown on What's Going on at Gitmo

By Cora Currier, ProPublica, April 18, 2013

It's been 11 years since the first detainees were brought to Guantanamo Bay. But the future of the prison, and the fate of the men inside it, is far from certain.  With 59 detainees at Gitmo currently on hunger strike, by the military's count, here's a primer on what's going at the island prison.

What started the hunger strike?

It began after guards allegedly mishandled detainees' Korans in a cell search in early February — but it's certainly become about more than the holy books.

The military says detainees have previously hidden "improvised weapons, unauthorized food and medicine" in the spines of the Korans, and that the February searches were standard, conducted by Muslim translators. (Koran searches had set off hunger strikes before, in 2005.)

Attorneys for hunger strikers say the detainees have offered to relinquish their Korans rather than have them searched. The military initially would not accept that option, but now says, "if they choose not to have one, they choose not to have one."

In any case, just about everyone – from the International Committee of the Red Cross to the general in charge of U.S. Southern Command – agrees the strike comes out of growing frustration and hopelessness among detainees. As we detail below, there are few indications that Gitmo will be shuttered or detainees transferred in the near future. The last detainee to leave Gitmo, last fall, was dead.

General Kelly, of U.S. Southern Command, said last month that detainees had watched Obama's State of the Union address, and heard no mention of Guantanamo. "That has caused them to become frustrated and they want to ... turn the heat up, get it back in the media," Kelly said.

In an account published in the New York Times last weekend, a Yemeni hunger striker named Samir Moqbel said he hoped "that because of the pain we are suffering, the eyes of the world will once again look to Guantánamo before it is too late." (Moqbel had recounted his story by phone to his lawyers.)

Another detainee, a Saudi Arabian named Shaker Aamer, also recently wrote an op-ed. Calling himself "a bit of a professional hunger striker," Aamer said "this one is a whole lot different." Lawyers say the strike is far more widespread than the military's count.

According to the military, two detainees have attempted suicide since the strike began.

Continue reading »

Matthew Keys, deputy social media editor of Thomson Reuters and former web producer at a Tribune Company-owned television station in Sacramento, Calif., has been charged in a federal indictment for allegedly conspiring with members of hacker group "Anonymous" to hack into a Tribune Company-owned website. A Justice Department press release said that Keys, 26, was charged with providing log-in credentials to a Tribune Company server and encouraging Anonymous members to disrupt the website. A hacker then made changes to a Los Angeles Times news feature. Keys could face up to 10 years in prison, three years of supervised release and a fine of $250,000 for each count if convicted.

Justice Department:

Matthew Keys, 26, of Secaucus, N.J., was charged in the Eastern District of California with one count each of conspiracy to transmit information to damage a protected computer, transmitting information to damage a protected computer and attempted transmission of information to damage a protected computer.

Keys was employed by Sacramento-based television station KTXL FOX 40, as its web producer, but was terminated in late October 2010.

The three-count indictment alleges that in December 2010 Keys provided members of the hacker group Anonymous with log-in credentials for a computer server belonging to KTXL FOX 40’s corporate parent, the Tribune Company. According to the indictment, Keys identified himself on an Internet chat forum as a former Tribune Company employee and provided members of Anonymous with a login and password to the Tribune Company server. After providing log-in credentials, Keys allegedly encouraged the Anonymous members to disrupt the website. According to the indictment, at least one of the computer hackers used the credentials provided by Keys to log into the Tribune Company server, and ultimately that hacker made changes to the web version of a Los Angeles Times news feature.

The indictment further alleges that Keys had a conversation with the hacker who claimed credit for the defacement of the Los Angeles Times website. The hacker allegedly told Keys that Tribune Company system administrators had thwarted his efforts and locked him out. Keys allegedly attempted to regain access for that hacker, and when he learned that the hacker had made changes to a Los Angeles Times page, Keys responded, “nice.”

Each of the two substantive counts carry a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison, three years of supervised release and a fine of $250,000. The conspiracy count carries a maximum penalty of five years in prison, three years of supervised release and a fine of $250,000.

Some new information on the prosecution of Aaron Swartz...

CNET News:

State prosecutors who investigated the late Aaron Swartz had planned to let him off with a stern warning, but federal prosecutor Carmen Ortiz took over and chose to make an example of the Internet activist, according to a report in Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly.

Middlesex County's district attorney had planned no jail time, "with Swartz duly admonished and then returned to civil society to continue his pioneering electronic work in a less legally questionable manner," the report (alternate link) said. "Tragedy intervened when Ortiz's office took over the case to send 'a message.'"
...
The Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly report was written by Harvey Silverglate, a prominent Cambridge criminal defense lawyer whose clients have included Michael Milken and Leona Helmsley. Silverglate, the author of Three Felonies A Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent, is of counsel to the firm that initially represented Swartz in his attempts to defend himself against 13 felony charges brought by Ortiz's office. Those charges carried a maximum penalty of 50 years in prison.

Silverglate told CNET today that:

"Continuance without a finding" was the anticipated disposition of the case were the charge to remain in state court, with the Middlesex County District Attorney to prosecute it. Under such a disposition, the charge is held in abeyance ("continued") without any verdict ("without a finding"). The defendant is on probation for a period of a few months up to maybe a couple of years at the most; if the defendant does not get into further legal trouble, the charge is dismissed, and the defendant has no criminal record. This is what the lawyers expected to happen when Swartz was arrested for "trespassing at MIT." But then the feds took over the case, and the rest is tragic history.

Be sure to also read the mention of the efforts by Ortiz to seize a family-owned motel, that failed -- thankfully -- and the stinging rebuke she received from the judge in the case. The case screams "Abuse of power!"

Up with Chris Hayes talked about the ongoing legacy of Aaron Swartz on Saturday:

There were five of them, not even men yet, accused of a violent rape. They were prosecuted aggressively by district attorneys and vilified by a tabloid press, then sent to prison for as many as 13 years.

In 1989, the case of the Central Park Five, as the attack on a 28-year-old white investment banker in uptown Manhattan has come to be known, roiled the country, touching on race and class and fears about crime.

But the defendants -- all black or Latino, none older than 16 -- didn't commit the attack on the Central Park jogger. They were the victims of coerced confessions and authorities eager for scapegoats.

Then in 2002, after the five had all spent years in jail, a previously unknown man admitted to beating and sexually assaulting the woman. All five of the convictions were vacated.

An explosive new documentary looks at a case once referred to as "the crime of the century": the Central Park Five. Many people have heard about the case, but far too few know that innocent teenagers were imprisoned as a result. The film tells the story of how five black and Latino teenagers were arrested in 1989 for beating and raping a white woman in New York City’s Central Park. Media coverage at the time portrayed the teens as guilty and used racially coded terms like "wolf pack" to refer to the group of boys accused in the attack.

Donald Trump took out full-page ads in four city newspapers calling for the reinstatement of the death penalty so they could be executed. However, the convictions of the five were vacated in 2002 when the real rapist came forward and confessed to the crime, after the five defendants had already served sentences of almost seven to 13 years.

New York City is refusing to settle a decade-long civil lawsuit brought by the men. And now lawyers for the city are seeking access to footage gathered for the new film.

Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! speaks to one of the Central Park Five, Raymond Santana; filmmaker Sarah Burns; and journalist Natalie Byfield.

Full transcript after the jump.

Continue reading »

The United States is spending over $200 billion a year on a justice system that locks up more people than any country on earth. We have more prisoners than China. More than Russia. More than anyone. This colossal system is hitting our communities with staggering financial and human costs.

Our prison system is a beast, gobbling resources that should be going to communities. Watch this video to find out why. To get involved and do something, visit http://beyondbars.org.

There have been at least 40 alleged members of the hacktivist collective Anonymous arrested during the past year. In an interview with the National Post, one of the group's last remaining leaders tips us off to the group's next planned action.

Christopher Doyon, aka "Commander X," whose name is public because he's been indicted for hacking a California county government website after government officials forcibly removed a homeless encampment from courthouse steps. Doyon faces 15 years in prison for that action. For the interview, he met with a reporter and photographer from the Post in Canada where he is a now a fugitive from the FBI.

At the end of the interview, Doyon makes a whopper of a claim, make of it what you will:

Q. What’s next for Anonymous?
A: Right now we have access to every classified database in the U.S. government. It’s a matter of when we leak the contents of those databases, not if. You know how we got access? We didn’t hack them. The access was given to us by the people who run the systems.

Every classified database is a bit of a stretch for me to wrap my brain around. I can't even begin to imagine how many such databases our nation uses. But remember that Bradley Manning released a few hundred thousand emails from just one such database.

The five-star general (and) the Secretary of Defence who sit in the cushy plush offices at the top of the Pentagon don’t run anything anymore. It’s the pimply-faced kid in the basement who controls the whole game, and Bradley Manning proved that. The fact he had the 250,000 cables that were released effectively cut the power of the U.S. State Department in half. The Afghan war diaries and the Iran war diaries effectively cut the political clout of the U.S. Department of Defence in half. All because of one guy who had enough balls to slip a CD in an envelope and mail it to somebody.

Now people are leaking to Anonymous and they’re not coming to us with this document or that document or a CD, they’re coming to us with keys to the kingdom, they’re giving us the passwords and usernames to whole secure databases that we now have free reign over. … The world needs to be concerned.

Now this claim, that the Anons next action could be the result of an inside job is quite plausible, and again, recall Bradley Manning. As we saw with Manning's Cablegate, just that one database created quite the stir for the U.S. government. Even with the "keys" to but a few of these databases would make Anonymous quite the force to be reckoned with, despite their diminished membership.

[Photo of the teepee that led to Wednesday's Occupy Oakland raid - via @geekeasy]

Khali Johnson was arrested for "basically littering," which could somehow turn into his third strike and a lifetime in prison.

You may recall that I told you all about the situation with Khali last month, after his arrest during a December 16th Oakland Police raid. There was great concern because Khali had been held in detention unusually long, appeared at each court hearing severely bruised and didn't have access to his prescribed psychiatric medication.

More Via:

The threat of life imprisonment looms for Occupy Oakland activist Marcel Johnson - better known by his alias, Khali - after a third-strike arrest during the demonstration. Having spent about 15 years incarcerated already, 38 year-old Khali said he was trying to turn his life around by distributing food to the needy at the Occupy Oakland encampment, where he was a frequent, vocal, sometimes endearing presence. On December 16 he was arrested outside City Hall for violating anti-encroachment laws — namely, for a dispute about a blanket — which normally wouldn't have warranted more than a few hours jail time. Since Khali was in fact violating his probation terms for a different case in Sacramento, he was taken to Santa Rita and made to serve some jail time in lieu of going to trial, his attorney Dan Siegel explained. There, Khali was held in solitary confinement and not given his psychiatric medications, which might explain why he got into an altercation with a peace officer — the exact circumstances of which are still widely disputed. Now, Khali faces a felony assault charge in place of his original misdemeanor. As of Friday, December 23, Khali's bail was set at $580,000, according his attorney, Dan Siegel.

Siegel won't be representing Khali in the assault case, but luckily was able to convince a judge to order a medical evaluation that hopefully will explain the altercation between Khali, and the officer in Santa Rita. The next scheduled court date for Khali is January 9th in Pleasanton where he will face that potential "third strike," and bail that would be completely out of reach as Khali is homeless, with no money or possessions to his name.