Spencer S. Hsu
Washington Post: April 19, 2015

The Justice Department and FBI have formally acknowledged that nearly every examiner in an elite FBI forensic unit gave flawed testimony in almost all trials in which they offered evidence against criminal defendants over more than a two-decade period before 2000.

Of 28 examiners with the FBI Laboratory’s microscopic hair comparison unit, 26 overstated forensic matches in ways that favoured prosecutors in more than 95 per cent of the 268 trials reviewed so far, according to the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL) and the Innocence Project, which are assisting the government with the country’s largest post-conviction review of questioned forensic evidence.

The cases include those of 32 defendants sentenced to death. Of those, 14 have been executed or died in prison, the groups said under an agreement with the government to release results after the review of the first 200 convictions.

The FBI errors alone do not mean there was not other evidence of a convict’s guilt. Defendants and federal and state prosecutors in 46 states and the District of Columbia are being notified to determine whether there are grounds for appeals. Four defendants were previously exonerated.

The admissions mark a watershed in one of the country’s largest forensic scandals, highlighting the failure of the U.S. courts for decades to keep bogus scientific information from juries, legal analysts said. The question now, they said, is how state authorities and the courts will respond to findings that confirm long-suspected problems with subjective, pattern-based forensic techniques — like hair and bite-mark comparisons — that have contributed to wrongful convictions in more than one-quarter of 329 DNA-exoneration cases since 1989.

In a statement, the FBI and Justice Department vowed to continue to devote resources to address all cases and said they “are committed to ensuring that affected defendants are notified of past errors and that justice is done in every instance. The Department and the FBI are also committed to ensuring the accuracy of future hair analysis, as well as the application of all disciplines of forensic science.”

Peter Neufeld, co-founder of the Innocence Project, commended the FBI and department for the collaboration but said, “The FBI’s three-decade use of microscopic hair analysis to incriminate defendants was a complete disaster.”

“We need an exhaustive investigation that looks at how the FBI, state governments that relied on examiners trained by the FBI and the courts allowed this to happen and why it wasn’t stopped much sooner,” Neufeld said.

Norman Reimer, the NACDL’s executive director, said, “Hopefully, this project establishes a precedent so that in future situations it will not take years to remediate the injustice.”

While unnamed federal officials previously acknowledged widespread problems, the FBI until now has withheld comment because findings might not be representative.

Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., a former prosecutor, called on the FBI and Justice Department to notify defendants in all 2,500 targeted cases involving an FBI hair match about the problem even if their case has not been completed, and to redouble efforts in the three-year-old review to retrieve information on each case.

“These findings are appalling and chilling in their indictment of our criminal justice system, not only for potentially innocent defendants who have been wrongly imprisoned and even executed, but for prosecutors who have relied on fabricated and false evidence despite their intentions to faithfully enforce the law,” Blumenthal said.

(read the full article at National Post)

Spencer Ackerman
The Guardian : February 24, 2015

The Chicago police department operates an off-the-books interrogation compound, rendering Americans unable to be found by family or attorneys while locked inside what lawyers say is the domestic equivalent of a CIA black site.

The facility, a nondescript warehouse on Chicago’s west side known as Homan Square, has long been the scene of secretive work by special police units. Interviews with local attorneys and one protester who spent the better part of a day shackled in Homan Square describe operations that deny access to basic constitutional rights.

Alleged police practices at Homan Square, according to those familiar with the facility who spoke out to the Guardian after its investigation into Chicago police abuse, include:

Keeping arrestees out of official booking databases.
Beating by police, resulting in head wounds.
Shackling for prolonged periods.
Denying attorneys access to the “secure” facility.
Holding people without legal counsel for between 12 and 24 hours, including people as young as 15.

At least one man was found unresponsive in a Homan Square “interview room” and later pronounced dead.

Brian Jacob Church, a protester known as one of the “Nato Three”, was held and questioned at Homan Square in 2012 following a police raid. Officers restrained Church for the better part of a day, denying him access to an attorney, before sending him to a nearby police station to be booked and charged.

“Homan Square is definitely an unusual place,” Church told the Guardian on Friday. “It brings to mind the interrogation facilities they use in the Middle East. The CIA calls them black sites. It’s a domestic black site. When you go in, no one knows what’s happened to you.”

The secretive warehouse is the latest example of Chicago police practices that echo the much-criticized detention abuses of the US war on terrorism. While those abuses impacted people overseas, Homan Square – said to house military-style vehicles, interrogation cells and even a cage – trains its focus on Americans, most often poor, black and brown.

Unlike a precinct, no one taken to Homan Square is said to be booked. Witnesses, suspects or other Chicagoans who end up inside do not appear to have a public, searchable record entered into a database indicating where they are, as happens when someone is booked at a precinct. Lawyers and relatives insist there is no way of finding their whereabouts. Those lawyers who have attempted to gain access to Homan Square are most often turned away, even as their clients remain in custody inside.

“It’s sort of an open secret among attorneys that regularly make police station visits, this place – if you can’t find a client in the system, odds are they’re there,” said Chicago lawyer Julia Bartmes.

Chicago civil-rights attorney Flint Taylor said Homan Square represented a routinization of a notorious practice in local police work that violates the fifth and sixth amendments of the constitution.

“This Homan Square revelation seems to me to be an institutionalization of the practice that dates back more than 40 years,” Taylor said, “of violating a suspect or witness’ rights to a lawyer and not to be physically or otherwise coerced into giving a statement.”

(read the full article at The Guardian)

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Ben Swann : January 20, 2015

The 20 year-old Ohio man charged with plotting to blow up the U.S. Capitol building was a “peace loving, momma’s boy”, according to his father.

Christopher Lee Cornell is from just outside Cincinnati, Ohio. According to federal authorities he was plotting to attack the capitol with pipe bombs and to shoot government officials as they fled the building. According to court documents, his arrest came after he reportedly posted to Twitter his support for Muslim terrorists and then showed his plans to an FBI informant who contacted him. At the end of August, Cornell had allegedly written the informant an instant message saying the two of them should carry out a lone wolf attack as a way of supporting ISIS.

He didn’t think ISIS or al Qaeda would give them an official sign-off, but he felt he didn’t need it. As we have reported, Cornell’s father has told various media outlets including CNN and CBS news that his son was definitely “set up.”

So, is Cornell’s father correct? Is it possible that his son was set up by that FBI informant? Keep in mind, Cornell purchased two AR-15 rifles and 600 rounds of ammo before he was arrested in the parking lot of a gun store in Cincinnati. His father says that Christopher worked seasonal, minimum wage jobs and had saved about $1,200 dollars. The guns and ammo purchased at the store were worth about $1,800 dollars.

There are a lot of questions about this story, including how the informant found Cornell in the first place. How long had they communicated? Who actually posed the idea of the attack? Did Cornell have his own means or the opportunity to carry out such an attack? All of these questions are important because the FBI has made these kinds of arrests over 500 times since 9/11. What we almost never hear, however, is how these arrests are made and the role of the so called informants.

Take for instance the case of 8 “anarchists” who had plotted to blow up a bridge in the Cuayhoga County National Park near Cleveland in 2012. When the case made it to court, it was revealed that the one person in the group who had led the brainstorming of targets, showed them bridges to case out, pushed them to buy C-4 military-grade explosives, provided the contact for weapons, gave them money for the explosives and demanded they develop a plan because “we on the hook” for the weapons… was the FBI informant.

Another example, in 2004 there was the case of Shahawar Siraj who was charged with plotting to blow up a subway station in NYC. Siraj’s attorneys say he was set up because “Siraj had no explosives, no timetable for an attack and little understanding about explosives.”
In fact, they say it was the informant who had pushed for the attack. Most conversations between Siraj and the informant were recorded, except for the very first conversation and other “key” conversations. Those became he said, she said arguments. At one point, Siraj had even said that he needed to talk with his mother before he would have been willing to do anything and that was when the FBI stepped in.

And then there is the case of the Newburgh 4, four black muslim men, sentenced for plotting to blow up a bronx synagogue using car bombs and plotting to fire a stinger missile at US military planes. In an unprecedented case, these men were offered up to $250,000 dollars by the informant to help with the bombing, as well as free vacations to Puerto Rico and expensive cars. The judge in this case, after giving three of the four 25 year sentences, was clear stating “Nothing that any of these men did was the product of any independent motivation on their parts.” “It is beyond question that government created the crime here.”

These are only a few examples. In fact, an investigation in 2011 shows that more than 500 times after 9/11 the government has arrested and charged similar suspects. In 158 of those cases an informant was involved. What’s more, in 49 of those cases the informant is the one who proposes the act of terror and then coordinates the plot.

(read the full article and view pictures at Ben Swann)

RELATED: FBI create another terrorist to entrap

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