Tag: war on whistleblowers

She Noticed $200 Million Missing, Then She Was Fired

Earlier this year, the governing board of one of California’s most powerful regulatory agencies unleashed troubling accusations against its top employee.

Commissioners with the California Public Utilities Commission, or CPUC, accused Executive Director Alice Stebbins of violating state personnel rules by hiring former colleagues without proper qualifications. They said the agency chief misled the public by asserting that as much as $200 million was missing from accounts intended to fund programs for the state’s blind, deaf and poor. At a hearing in August, Commission President Marybel Batjer said that Stebbins had discredited the CPUC.

“You took a series of actions over the course of several years that calls into question your integrity,” Batjer told Stebbins, who joined the agency in 2018. Those actions, she said, “cause us to have to consider whether you can continue to serve as the leader of this agency.”

The five commissioners voted unanimously to terminate Stebbins, who had worked as an auditor and budget analyst for different state agencies for more than 30 years.

But an investigation by the Bay City News Foundation and ProPublica has found that Stebbins was right about the missing money.

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PENTAGON TRAINING EQUATES WHISTLEBLOWER CHELSEA MANNING WITH TERRORISTS

IN THE DECADE since her historic transfer of secret military and diplomatic materials to WikiLeaks, Chelsea Manning has consistently and across party lines been condemned as a traitor. Less common, and absent entirely from the government’s efforts to imprison her, are allegations that her leak was an act of terrorism. But anti-terrorism training materials obtained by The Intercept show that the Pentagon is teaching defense workers exactly that.

Both civilian contractors and enlisted personnel are commonly required to complete JS-US007, a Pentagon course designed to “increase your awareness of terrorism and to improve your ability to apply personal protective measures,” according to Joint Knowledge Online, a Department of Defense education portal. JS-US007 covers a variety of grimly serious topics, from detecting roadside bombs to surviving active shooter scenarios and skyjackings. The training also covers so-called insider threat attacks, acts of terroristic violence in which members of a group strike the group itself, like the 2009 Fort Hood, Texas, shooting in which Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan shot and killed 13 individuals on the base, wounding 30 more. The Department of Homeland Security defines insider threat terrorism as “an unlawful use of force and violence by employees or others closely associated with organizations, against those organizations to promote a political or social objective.” Other definitions may differ on technicalities, but like other acts of terrorism, the unifying theme is the violence of the acts.

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Police Launch Investigation Into Death of Vaccine Safety Advocate Brandy Vaughn

The Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Office Monday announced it is investigating the sudden death of Brandy Vaughn, a well-known Pharma whistleblower and advocate for vaccine safety, who died Dec. 7.

A spokesperson for the sheriff’s office said in a statement that investigators won’t determine the cause of Vaughn’s death until the completion of a pending toxicology screening, a process that normally takes 4 – 6 weeks.

Brandy’s death was originally reported as resulting from gallbladder complications. But many of her friends and co-activists in the vaccine safety movement suspect foul play. Those suspicions have gained traction due to a wave of mysterious deaths — many of them violent —among alternative and integrative medical doctors in recent years. In response to this trend, Brandy made a Facebook post almost exactly a year before her death in which she said, “If something were to happen to me, I have arranged for a close group of my friends … to hire a team of private investigators to figure out all the details …”

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Bipartisan Bill Introduced to Repeal Unconstitutional Patriot Act

Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) and Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI) have joined forces from across the aisle in an attempt to bring an end to the unconstitutional Patriot Act forced upon the American people in the wake of 9/11.

Since its quick arrival on October 26, 2001, the USA Patriot Act has been an assault upon civil liberties of ordinary citizens, as well as a boon for the military-industrial complex receiving a flood of taxpayer dollars in the name of security.

Moreover, the bulk data collection of information on Americans has never received proper transparency or oversight, even to Congress. Rep. Massie and Rep. Gabbard are now introducing new legislation called the “Protect Our Civil Liberties Act” (HR8970) as a means to remedy the abuses with 6-point approach.

  1. Repeal the Patriot Act, which permitted phone metadata collection.
  2. Repeal the FISA Amendments Act, which permitted email surveillance.
  3. Make retaliation against whistleblowers inside the intelligence community illegal – with penalties for engaging in such activity.
  4. Ensure that probable cause warrants are issued in all cases of government surveillance of Americans.
  5. Prohibit government backdoors designed to end-run encryption and other privacy measures.
  6. Mandate that the Government Accountability Office annually monitor all surveillance programs for compliance.

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Tulsi Gabbard Urges Donald Trump to Pardon Edward Snowden and Julian Assange

Representative Tulsi Gabbard has called on President Donald Trump to pardon National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower Edward Snowden and WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange before he’s set to leave office on January 20, 2021.

The Hawaii Democrat took to Twitter to highlight her own video message from October 6 and suggested that Trump use his presidential pardon power to grant clemency to the men, both of whom have been charged under the Espionage Act of 1917.

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Pentagon Investigators Fired For Exposing Cover Up Of Military Sexual Assaults

Three Pentagon officials who were tasked with investigating sexual assault in the military say that they were either fired or suspended for reporting on cases of sexual assault and exposing attempts to cover up these crimes. They were essentially fired for doing what they were hired to do.

The three women spoke to CBS News this week, about their work with the Pentagon’s Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Program, and how they faced retaliation for properly investigating the crimes that were taking place within the military’s ranks, just as the victims themselves were facing retaliation.

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Farcical Coverage of Julian Assange’s Farcical Hearing

US corporate media have buried coverage of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s extradition hearing in the UK, despite its being the media “Trial of the Century” (FAIR.org, 9/25/20). But even in the scarce coverage that does exist of this unprecedented case with immense implications for freedom of expression, one would hardly get the impression that the US and British governments are involved in an illegal conspiracy—in violation of their own laws—to punish Assange for the “crime” of journalism.

Coverage before and at the start of the trial by establishment media outlets like the New York Times (9/7/20), Wall Street Journal (9/7/20), USA Today (9/6/20) and the Associated Press (9/6/20) largely omitted simple facts, like Assange displaying signs of abuse. Of these reports, only USA Today cited Nils Melzer, a UN special rapporteur on torture, who observed that when he visited him last year, Assange displayed symptoms of “psychological torture,” likely caused by extreme stress, chronic anxiety and isolation.

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