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Republican Liz Cheney disowned by own party in home state
16 Nov, 2021 01:55
for criminal contempt, October 19, 2021 © Reuters
The Wyoming Republican Party voted to stop recognizing its congresswoman Liz Cheney as a Republican in response to her criticism of former President Donald Trump, which included voting for his impeachment.
Wyoming’s Republican Central Committee voted 31-29 in favor of no longer recognizing Cheney as a Republican on Saturday.
Newsweek noted, however, that the vote was “a symbolic gesture” and “does not strip Cheney of any power.” Cheney will continue to serve as Wyoming’s sole congressional representative and as a member of the US Republican Party.
While many conservatives celebrated the news on social media, calling it “long overdue” and “about time,” a spokesperson for Cheney told AP it was “laughable” to suggest the congresswoman was no longer “a conservative Republican.”
“She is bound by her oath to the Constitution,” the spokesperson said, accusing “a portion of the Wyoming GOP leadership” of allowing “themselves to be held hostage to the lies of a dangerous and irrational man” – in seeming reference to Trump.
Dick Cheney was Deep State's key player in the George W Bush White House. Deep State hates Donald Trump because he does not always play by their rules and they can't control him as they would like. It's not surprising that he is being attacked by the next-gen Deep Stater.
Several Wyoming county Republican organizations had already voted to stop recognizing Cheney as a Republican before the state vote on Saturday, citing Trump in their letters notifying her of the decision.
Cheney – the daughter of controversial former Republican Vice President Dick Cheney – has long been accused of being a RINO, or ‘Republican In Name Only’, and received heavy backlash from the party after she voted to impeach Trump following the January 6 storming of the Capitol by a group of his supporters.
Cheney, a prominent neoconservative figure in the party, was one of just 10 Republicans who voted to impeach Trump in January.
FBI hid evidence in Malcolm X murder trial, convictions tossed
18 Nov, 2021 20:56
© Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
A New York judge voided the convictions of two black men for the 1965 assassination of activist Malcolm X, after a re-investigation inspired by a Netflix documentary found the FBI had withheld evidence of their innocence.
State Supreme Court Justice Ellen Biben threw out the convictions of Muhammad A. Aziz (aka Norman 3X Butler) and Khalil Islam (aka Thomas 15X Johnson), who were charged with assassinating Malcolm X at Manhattan’s Audubon Ballroom and sentenced to life in prison in 1966.
Thursday's decision to void their sentence followed the 22-month investigation by Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. and lawyers for the two men, which found that both prosecutors and the FBI had withheld evidence that could have exonerated Aziz and Islam during their trial.
According to the investigation, prosecutors failed to disclose that undercover police officers were present at the Audubon Ballroom at the time of the shooting. The New York Police Department did not reveal that the New York Daily News received a call tipping them off about the impending assassination. The FBI did not tell state officials that a particular man who matched the description of one of the assassins was known to them, and even identified by an informant – letting Aziz and Islam be blamed instead.
The probe did not find a conspiracy by government or police to have Malcolm X killed, or reveal who prosecutors believe is actually to blame. The FBI notes identified the shotgun-wielding assassin described by a witness as “dark-skinned, stocky and having a ‘deep’ beard” as William Bradley, aka Al-Mustafa Shabazz. He died in 2018, and his lawyer denied that he had taken part in the killing.
Bradley was an enforcer for Nation of Islam, the organization Malcolm X famously joined in 1952 but broke away from in 1964 to launch a new group, Organization of Afro-American Unity.
The third man convicted in the assassination, Mujahid Abdul Halim, confessed to the murder and his conviction has not been overturned. He has always maintained Aziz and Islam were innocent. The two men spent decades trying to clear their names. Aziz was released from prison in 1985, and is now 83. Islam was released in 1987 and died in 2009, at the age of 74.
“This wasn’t a mere oversight,” their lawyer Deborah Francois told the New York Times. “This was a product of extreme and gross official misconduct.”
“These men did not get the justice that they deserved,” said DA Vance. The failure cannot be remedied, he added, “but what we can do is acknowledge the error, the severity of the error.”
His re-investigation was inspired by the Neftlix documentary series 'Who Killed Malcolm X?', hosted by Abdur-Rahman Muhammad. After it began, a book was published accusing Bradley of being one of the assassins. ‘The Dead Are Arising,’ by Les and Tamara Payne went on to win a Pulitzer Prize in the biography category.
Was this another case of FBI incompetence, or was there a reason for their criminal withholding of evidence.
Biden’s summit is ‘old propaganda’ rhetoric - Oliver Stone
24 Nov, 2021 13:22
On the latest episode of RT's ‘Going Underground’, Afshin Rattansi asked the Oscar-winning director what he thought about the so-called ‘Summit for Democracy’ that will be hosted by Biden next month.
“That’s old propaganda: ‘We’re the free world, and the Russians and the Chinese are not. And the Iranians and all the bad guys are on the other side. It doesn’t work that way if you go to those countries,” Stone said. “It’s relative. You have to understand – there's grey matter, it's not black and white.”
Stone pointed to the role of money in American politics and cited reports that a record $14 billion was spent on the 2020 US presidential and congressional campaigns.
When it takes $14 billion to elect a president, you wonder – what kind of democracy is this? You can’t even get a congressman to talk to you unless you pay and you have a business interest. It’s very hard in Washington to get attention for an ordinary citizen. You need money, you need lobbying weight. Our government is totally corrupt.
Biden’s virtual summit on December 9-10 will focus on “challenges and opportunities facing democracies,” according to the White House. The US has invited 110 countries to participate, notably leaving out China, Russia, Iran, and Turkey.
It's just a coincidence that these are the countries which don't buy weapons from America. I expect this conference to turn into a sales forum for American weapons.
Stone also discussed his new documentary about John F. Kennedy’s assassination in 1963, ‘JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass’, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival this summer. A four-part series version of the film, ‘JFK – Destiny Betrayed’, was screened at the Rome Film Festival in October.
The filmmaker said he found it telling that his project received “very little mainstream coverage” in the US compared to the press it got in Europe.
"It’s a memory hole. They don’t want to talk about it because our film raises substantial questions. In fact, it contradicts the official theory,” Stone said. “I’m used to this, you know. There’s a wall of silence here.”
In the same interview, Stone criticized Biden and his predecessor, Donald Trump, for delaying the release of the remainder of the classified documents on the Kennedy case.
Watch the full interview here:
Family of Capitol rioter who died by ‘overdose’ demands autopsy review
24 Nov, 2021 17:29
in Washington, DC, January 6, 2021 © Reuters / Stephanie Keith
The family of a woman whose death during the pro-Trump riot on Capitol Hill was ruled a drug overdose is crowdfunding an autopsy review, after Washington, DC police refused to release body camera footage of her final moments.
Rosanne Boyland was 34 when she traveled in January from her home in Georgia to Washington, DC to protest the certification of Joe Biden’s electoral victory. After crowds of Trump supporters took their rowdy protest to the US Capitol, Boyland would later be found dead among them, with her death ruled an amphetamine overdose by the DC medical examiner’s office several months later.
Her family aren’t buying the story, and have launched a crowdfunding campaign to finance a review of her autopsy.
“There are still many questions about exactly what happened to her,” the family wrote on GiveSendGo this month. “Videos show her being beaten by a female officer after being crushed by protesters pushed by police. Yet the DC Medical Examiner said Rosanne's body showed no signs of trauma, and attributed her death to the prescription medication she took every day for years.”
In an update to the campaign posted on Tuesday, they added that Boyland was not abusing amphetamines. Rather she was taking adderall, a prescription drug containing four kinds of amphetamine used to treat ADHD and narcolepsy. “The only drugs in Rosanne's body were her prescription medications,” they wrote.
Thousands of hours of video footage – from both surveillance cameras and police body cameras – captured during the Capitol protest remain unreleased, with authorities citing the importance of this footage to ongoing criminal investigations. Boyland’s family filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request with the DC Metropolitan Police to obtain body camera footage from officers who handled her unconscious body, but their request was denied.
Some of this footage allegedly shows Boyland being carried into a space beneath the House majority leader’s office, where lawyers for other defendants claim that their clients were assaulted by Capitol Police officers. Conservative journalist Julie Kelly reported on the story last week, after seeing legal documents alleging a series of brutal beatings taking place in the tunnels under the Capitol.
Three other protesters died in the Capitol on January 6. Air Force veteran Ashli Babbitt was shot dead by a Capitol Police officer. Two other Trump supporters in their 50s – Benjamin Philips and Kevin Greeson – died of medical emergencies.
Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick, whose death was initially blamed on the pro-Trump mob, passed away of a stroke the day after the riot.
