FBI agent writes anonymous letter warning Americans
FBI agents being fired for taking part in legitimate and important investigations.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0QdzJXwOSmQ
Lone Candle
Champion of Truth
FBI agents being fired for taking part in legitimate and important investigations.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0QdzJXwOSmQ
When it comes to the Jan 6 rioters there’s an emphasis on what they did to police offers. That matters, but the most important part about the incident wasn’t the attack on the police, but the attack on United States democracy. The rioters attacked the legislature of the United States in their seat of power, and some did so with the intent of, at least temporarily, ending U.S. democracy by keeping a president who lost an election in power.
“In 2023, the Military Police in Brazil recorded having killed 6,296 people (approximately 17 people per day)—eight times the U.S. police lethality rate—yet evidence points to the actual number being much higher. The overwhelming majority of the victims are black, poor, young, male, uneducated, and living in the urban peripheries.”
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“As Brazil’s militarized policing has continued to expand, so have the gangs’ control and influence. Brazilian authorities seized 72.3 tons of cocaine in 2023. Gangs have bought, threatened, and manipulated elections, politicians, and members of the judiciary. Last year, 3,238 people were found to be enslaved by gangs, and gangs have control of entire cities and the prison system. They have major stakes in real estate, mining, petroleum, casinos, and cryptocurrency, valued at billions of dollars. There have been hundreds of cases of police working directly for organized crime, including as contract killers, creating an incentive against eliminating criminality.”
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“Most of the weapons used by Brazilian police come from U.S. suppliers. This includes the Colt M4 carbine, the Mossberg 590A1 shotgun, the Browning M2 machine gun, various sniper rifles, night vision systems, armored vehicles, and helicopters—all American-made.
The gangs also use American weapons, sold to intermediaries without strong checks by U.S. manufacturers (and very often provided by police officers involved with gangs and militias). These U.S. weapons were once legally sold by the U.S. government to the Brazilian police.”
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“The U.S. State Department, along with the FBI, has provided various training programs and exercises with the Brazilian military police. One of these programs, promoted by both the Trump and Biden administrations, the “Rapid Response to Active Shooters Course,” began in 2019 and is meant to “quickly and effectively respond to attacks involving shooters in public spaces.” In the overwhelming majority of police killings in Brazil, officers and their precincts insist that they “were met with gunfire,” despite many prominent cases showing that the police shot first.”
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“Today’s Military Police is a remnant of Brazil’s military dictatorship, which was also supported by the U.S. State Department, the FBI, and the CIA during the Cold War. Then, the Military Police was used as a political hammer to bludgeon political opponents, union leaders, and any Communist threats. The U.S. government produced local anti-Communist propaganda while funding and arming the state’s death squads. U.S. agencies also trained the Military Police to use some of the most extreme tactics still in use today.
A democratic Brazil has done little to reform the Military Police’s ruthless and repressive practices, with continued U.S. backing. Last year, the U.S. State Department gave $11.7 million to the Brazilian security state, returning to Bush-era numbers despite little progress made. The overwhelming majority of U.S. security assistance went to Brazilian law enforcement, financially rewarding ineffective policing.”
https://reason.com/2024/12/02/u-s-taxpayers-are-funding-police-brutality-in-brazil/
Pistachio Wars With Iran, Slave Labor, and Wildfires: the Absurd American Dystopia of 2025
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qTn_tE_fF8c
“Situations like the ones we’ve seen in Lewisville, West Ocean City, and countless other places highlight how bankrupt our current approach to “helping human trafficking victims” is. If these women really are in trouble, there has got to be a better way to get them services than making them jack off a cop (sometimes several times) first. And if they’re neither victims nor perpetuating harm against anyone, then leave them alone.”
https://reason.com/2024/11/13/texas-cops-fired-for-inappropriate-sexual-contact-with-massage-workers/
“Qualified immunity allows government officials to avoid liability even in cases where courts find that they violated the plaintiffs’ constitutional rights. Defenders of qualified immunity say it protects police from frivolous lawsuits, but in practice it also short-circuits credible allegations of civil rights violations before they ever reach a jury.”
https://reason.com/2024/11/14/supreme-court-wont-hear-a-qualified-immunity-case-where-a-cop-disclosed-an-abuse-report-to-a-womans-abuser/
“Video footage of Phoenix police officers beating and tasing a deaf black man with cerebral palsy has led to an internal investigation and widespread media coverage—and it couldn’t come at a worse time for the city. This summer the Justice Department (DOJ) released a scathing report accusing the police department of systemically violating the civil rights of vulnerable residents.
Local TV news outlet ABC15 first published footage last week showing the violent arrest on August 19 of Tyron McAlpin, who is now facing felony aggravated assault and resisting arrest charges as a result of the incident.”
https://reason.com/2024/10/16/phoenix-police-pummel-a-deaf-man-months-after-the-justice-department-found-widespread-civil-rights-violations/
“On its face, there’s nothing wrong with providing additional psychological support for federal agents who work with trafficking survivors. But HSI—a division of Immigration and Customs Enforcement—has quite a questionable record when it comes to “helping” trafficking victims. At times, HSI has been known to subject suspected victims to potentially traumatizing experiences. And much of the “human trafficking” work the agency does just involves plain old prostitution stings.”
https://reason.com/2024/09/30/congress-passes-bill-backing-self-care-for-people-pursuing-prostitution-stings/
“The annual U.S. death toll from illegal drugs, which has risen nearly every year since the turn of the century, is expected to fall substantially this year. The timing of that turnaround poses a problem for politicians who aim to prevent substance abuse by disrupting the drug supply.
Those politicians include Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, who promises to deploy the military against drug traffickers, and his Democratic opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, whose platform is also heavy on supply-side tactics. Neither candidate seems to have absorbed the lessons of the “opioid epidemic,” which showed that drug law enforcement is not just ineffective but counterproductive, magnifying the harms it is supposed to alleviate.”
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“While replacing street drugs with methadone or buprenorphine reduces overdose risk, Dasgupta et al. say, it does not look like expanded access to such “medication-assisted treatment” can account for the recent drop in deaths. But they think it is “plausible” that broader distribution of the opioid antagonist naloxone, which quickly reverses fentanyl and heroin overdoses, has played a role.
By contrast, Dasgupta et al. say it is “unlikely” that anti-drug operations along the U.S.-Mexico border have helped reduce overdoses. They note that recent border seizures have mainly involved marijuana and methamphetamine rather than fentanyl, the primary culprit in overdoses, and that retail drug prices have been falling in recent years—the opposite of what you would expect if interdiction were effective.
Supply-side measures, which are doomed by the economics of prohibition, not only have failed to reduce drug-related deaths. They have had the opposite effect.
Prohibition makes drug use much more dangerous by creating a black market in which quality and purity are highly variable and unpredictable, and efforts to enforce prohibition increase those hazards. The crackdown on pain pills, for example, drove nonmedical users toward black-market substitutes, replacing legally produced, reliably dosed pharmaceuticals with iffy street drugs, which became even iffier thanks to the prohibition-driven proliferation of illicit fentanyl.
That crackdown succeeded in reducing opioid prescriptions, which fell by more than half from 2010 to 2022. Meanwhile, the opioid-related death rate more than tripled, while the annual number of opioid-related deaths nearly quadrupled.
Trump and Harris seem unfazed by that debacle. Trump imagines “a full naval embargo on the drug cartels,” while Harris aspires to “disrupt the flow of illicit drugs.” They promise to achieve the impossible while glossing over the costs of persisting in a strategy that has failed for more than a century.”
https://reason.com/2024/09/25/recent-overdose-trends-underline-the-folly-of-the-war-on-drugs/
“On May 22, 2022, Michael Jennings, a pastor at a church in Childersburg, Alabama, was watering his out-of-town neighbor’s flowers when another neighbor called 911 to report a suspicious person. Two police officers, Christopher Smith and Justin Gable, soon arrived and began questioning Jennings.
Body camera footage of the incident shows that Jennings told the officers that his name was “Pastor Jennings” but refused to hand over his I.D. card, saying “I’m not gonna give you no I.D., I ain’t did nothing wrong….I used to be a police officer.”
“Come on man, don’t do this to me. There’s a suspicious person in the yard, and if you’re not gonna identify yourself—” said one of the officers, before Jennings interjected, “I don’t have to identify myself.”
The officers arrested Jennings, and he was booked at the Childersburg City Jail on obstruction of government operation charges. The charges were dropped just days later, and he then sued, claiming that the officers wrongfully arrested him and violated his constitutional right to be free from unreasonable search or seizure.
Last December a judge dismissed the suit, ruling that the officers had qualified immunity, protecting them from civil liability. (Qualified immunity is the doctrine that shields officials from federal civil rights claims unless their alleged actions violated “clearly established” law, with “clearly established” defined extremely narrowly.) But Jennings appealed, and last Friday a three-judge panel for the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the decision.”
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“Even if the officers had a right to demand Jennings identify himself, Jennings still complied with the state’s ID requirements. He told the officers who he was, that he lived across the street, and why he was in his neighbor’s yard.
“While it is always advisable to cooperate with law enforcement officers,” the opinion reads, “Jennings was under no legal obligation to provide his ID. Therefore, officers lacked probable cause for Jennings’ arrest for obstructing government operations because Jennings did not commit an independent unlawful act by refusing to give ID.”
With the court’s decision, Jennings can continue suing the officers who wrongfully arrested him. But it shouldn’t have taken this intervention for Jennings to be able to lodge his lawsuit in the first place. Stringent qualified immunity protections made police officers—and other government actors—virtually unaccountable for violating citizen’s rights. The fact that Jennings’ clear-cut case was dismissed in the first place reveals the deep flaws in that system.”
https://reason.com/2024/10/01/alabama-pastor-can-sue-the-cops-who-arrested-him-for-refusing-to-show-his-id/