Iran set up? NYPD document: Gather intel info at Shiite mosques

NEW YORK (AP) — The New York Police Department recommended increasing surveillance of thousands of Shiite Muslims and their mosques, based solely on their religion, as a way to sweep the Northeast for signs of Iranian terrorists, according to interviews and a newly obtained secret police document.

The document offers a rare glimpse into the thinking of NYPD intelligence officers and how, when looking for potential threats, they focused their spying efforts on mosques and Muslims. Police analysts listed a dozen mosques from central Connecticut to the Philadelphia suburbs. None has been linked to terrorism, either in the document or publicly by federal agencies.

The Associated Press has reported for months that the NYPD infiltrated mosques, eavesdropped in cafes and monitored Muslim neighborhoods with plainclothes officers. Its spying operations were begun after the 2001 terror attacks with help from the CIA in a highly unusual partnership.

The May 2006 NYPD intelligence report, entitled “US-Iran Conflict: The Threat to New York City,” made a series of recommendations, including: “Expand and focus intelligence collections at Shi’a mosques.”

The NYPD is prohibited under its own guidelines and city law from basing its investigations on religion. Under FBI guidelines, which the NYPD says it follows, many of the recommendations in the police document would be prohibited.

The report, drawn largely from information available in newspapers or sites like Wikipedia, was prepared for Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly. It was written at a time of great tension between the U.S. and Iran. That tension over Iran’s nuclear ambition has increased again recently.

Police estimated the New York area Shiite population to be about 35,000, with Iranians making up about 8,500. The document also calls for canvassing the Palestinian community because there might be terrorists there.

“The Palestinian community, although not Shi’a, should also be assessed due to presence of Hamas members and sympathizers and the group’s relationship with the Iranian government,” analysts wrote.

The secret document stands in contrast to statements by Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who said the NYPD never considers religion in its policing. Kelly has said police go only where investigative leads take them, but the document described no leads to justify expanded surveillance at Shiite mosques.

The document also renews debate over how the NYPD privately views Muslims. Kelly has faced calls for his resignation recently from some Muslim activists for participating in a video that says Muslims want to “infiltrate and dominate” the United States. The NYPD showed the video to nearly 1,500 officers during training.

Documents previously obtained by the AP show widespread NYPD infiltration of mosques. It’s not clear, however, whether the May 2006 report prompted police to infiltrate the mosques on the list. One former police official who has seen the report said that, generally, the recommendations were followed but he could not say for sure whether these mosques were infiltrated.

A current law enforcement official, also familiar with the report, said that since it was issued the NYPD learned that Hezbollah was more political than religious and concluded that it’s not effective to monitor Shiites.

Both insisted on anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the program.

Neither David Cohen, the NYPD’s top intelligence officer, nor department spokesman Paul Browne responded to emails or phone calls from The Associated Press this week.

Iran is an overwhelmingly Shiite country, but Shiites are a small percentage of the U.S. Muslim population. By contrast, al-Qaida is a Sunni organization and many U.S. leaders consider Shiite clerics as allies in the fight against homegrown extremism. Shiites are often oppressed overseas and many have sought asylum in the West.

The document is dated just weeks after Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told Congress that, “We may face no greater challenge from a single country than from Iran.”

Even now, the U.S. remains particularly concerned with Iran, not only because of its nuclear research but also because intelligence officials don’t believe they know how Iranian sympathizers inside the United States would respond if the two countries went to war. By far, the largest group of Iranians in the U.S. lives in or around Los Angeles. Yet the NYPD, with a smaller Iranian population that police estimated at about 8,500 in New York City, shared the concerns about reactions to an open military conflict.

Asad Sadiq, president of the Bait-ul-Qaim mosque in the Philadelphia suburb of Delran, N.J., said the NYPD was being unfairly broad.

“If you attack Cuba, are all the Catholics going to attack here? This is called guilt by association,” Sadiq, a dentist, said after seeing his mosque in the NYPD document. “Just because we are the same religion doesn’t mean we’re going to stand up and harm the United States. It’s really absurd.”

The AP showed the document to several veteran counterterrorism analysts. None said they had seen anything like it.

“It’s really problematic if you make a jump from a possible international conflict to saying therefore we need to monitor Shiite mosques writ large,” said Brian Fishman, the former research director at West Point’s Combatting Terrorism Center. “It doesn’t follow.”

For instance, the NYPD analysts focused much of the report on the Alavi Foundation, a New York nonprofit group that the federal government has since accused of being secretly controlled by the Iranian government. Analysts then looked at a mosque where Alavi members prayed and that police say may have been linked to an effort to buy information about rocket technology for Iran.

There is no explanation, however, for how those suspicions warranted expanding surveillance to other Shiite mosques, including those far outside the department’s jurisdiction in Connecticut and New Jersey.

“Any time that you begin to isolate certain communities from a policing perspective because you think there’s risk, you have the potential that somebody overreaches,” said Robert Riegle, a former Department of Homeland Security analyst who oversaw efforts to work with state and local agencies.

At the Al-Mahdi Foundation mosque in Brooklyn, worshippers intoned their prayers Wednesday while touching their foreheads to disks of clay on the floor, a Shiite tradition.

“After 1,400 years, the Shias are being targeted in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Pakistan, everywhere,” imam Malik Sakhawat Hussain said after being told that his mosque was in the NYPD document. “If U.S. authorities become suspicious of the Shias, I would say we are a very oppressed community of the world.”

At the Masjid Al-Rahman, a prayer hall in the basement of a Brooklyn apartment building, manager Abo Maher was surprised to see his mosque on the NYPD’s list of Shiite locations.

“This isn’t even Shia,” he said. “Their information is wrong.”

The police department’s Demographics Unit, the secretive squad of plainclothes officers used to monitor restaurants, social clubs and other gathering spots, found similar issues in Iranian neighborhoods, one former NYPD official recalled.

Muslims make up only a fraction of New York’s Iranian community so squad members returned from their rounds in Iranian neighborhoods and reported finding Jews and Christians, the former official said.

Sadiq, the New Jersey mosque president, said about 250 families — mostly Pakistanis and Indians and few Iraqis — attend his mosque. Every few years, he said, an FBI agent stops by, introduces himself and asks whether there’s been any radical rhetoric in his mosque and whether he knows anyone with connections to Iran. The most recent meeting was just Wednesday, he said, and the NYPD would be welcome if it came openly.

The intelligence unit operates in secrecy with little outside oversight. The City Council is not told about secret intelligence programs. And though the unit operates under the auspices of a federal anti-drug task force and receives federal money, it is not overseen by Congress. The Obama administration, including the Justice Department, has repeatedly sidestepped questions about whether it endorses the NYPD’s tactics.

“They think that they can do whatever they want and get away with it,” Sadiq said.

The document also suggests a broader international intelligence mission than the department has previously acknowledged. The NYPD has officers stationed in 11 foreign cities such as London, Paris, Madrid, and Tel Aviv, where they work with local police and act as the NYPD’s eyes and ears overseas.

In their recommendations for the foreign liaison unit, analysts wrote that officers should: “Focus international intelligence collection on the Iranian threat, to include the activities of the IIS, Hezbollah, Hamas etc. throughout Europe and the Middle East.”

NYPD officers abroad are not supposed to be spies and do not answer to the U.S. director of national intelligence or the CIA station chiefs who coordinate America’s efforts to gather intelligence on Iran. In fact, the NYPD’s international officers aren’t even paid by the department. Rather, the program is paid for through a nonprofit foundation that raises money from corporate donors.

It has not previously been known that the NYPD would consider gathering overseas intelligence on Iranian intelligence services. The police department does not disclose details about the inner workings of the international program to the City Council, to Congress or to U.S. intelligence agencies.

___

View the NYPD document: http://bit.ly/wYrAUX

FBI Uses Chainsaw In Raid On Wrong Apartment

FBI agents used a chainsaw to enter a Fitchburg apartment.

FITCHBURG (CBS) – It’s going to be a while before things get back to normal for Judy Sanchez and her three-year-old daughter.

Last Thursday, a team of FBI agents swarmed her apartment building as part of a massive citywide drug and weapons gang raid.

Trouble is, Sanchez lives in apartment 2R.

The suspect they were after is in 2F.

At 6:04 last Thursday morning, just before Sanchez’ alarm was set to go off, she heard a pounding outside her second floor apartment.

“I just happened to glance over and saw this huge chainsaw ripping down the side of my door,” she explains. “And I was freaking out. I didn’t know what was going on.”

Within moments, the chainsaw had cut through most of her door, and someone on the FBI’s arrest team kicked the rest of it in.

“That’s when I heard the clicking of a gun and I heard ‘FBI, get down!’, so I laid right on down.

And they said get your dog, so I got her and at the same time I am laying in her urine because she did pee on herself at the same time.”

That dog is the family’s three-month-old pit bull puppy.

Sanchez says they left her on the floor for 35 minutes, with her daughter screaming for her mommy in the other room.

“I was told not to move, so I didn’t move,” she tells WBZ, out of fear that she’d be shot.

Eventually the feds figured out they were in the wrong spot and they arrested the suspect they were after in the next door apartment.

Sanchez can’t believe that a two-year long federal investigation ended at the wrong door.

“The looks on their faces when they knew they got the wrong door was priceless,” she recalls. “They looked at each other dumbfounded.”

Sanchez says another agent came by later that day to offer an apology, but it was one that Sanchez felt wasn’t quite genuine.

“For me it felt routine apology, it felt like just a regular, ‘I’m sorry for the inconvenience. Here’s the phone number for your landlord to get reimbursed for the door, have a good day.’

And that’s how I felt, like it was a smack in the face.”

Tazed again – Park Ranger uses weapon on man for letting dog off leash

Is there no where left to go to avoid the Global Police State?

SF Chronicle

A Montara man walking two lapdogs off leash was hit with an electric-shock gun by a National Park Service ranger after allegedly giving a false name and trying to walk away, authorities said Monday.

The park ranger encountered Gary Hesterberg with his two small dogs Sunday afternoon at Rancho Corral de Tierra, which was recently incorporated into the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, said Howard Levitt, a spokesman for the park service.

Hesterberg, who said he didn’t have identification with him, allegedly gave the ranger a false name, Levitt said.

The ranger, who wasn’t identified, asked Hesterberg to remain at the scene, Levitt said. He tried several times to leave, and finally the ranger “pursued him a little bit and she did deploy her” electric-shock weapon, Levitt said. “That did stop him.”

San Mateo County sheriff’s deputies and paramedics then arrived and Hesterberg gave his real name, the park spokesman said.

Hesterberg, whose age was not available, was arrested on suspicion of failing to obey a lawful order, having dogs off-leash and knowingly providing false information, Levitt said.

He was then released. He did not return a phone call seeking comment.

Witnesses said the use of a stun gun and the arrest seemed excessive for someone walking two small dogs off leash.

“It was really scary,” said Michelle Babcock, who said she had seen the incident as she and her husband were walking their two border collies. “I just felt so bad for him.”

Babcock said Hesterberg had repeatedly asked the ranger why he was being detained. She didn’t answer him, Babcock said.

“He just tried to walk away. She never gave him a reason,” Babcock said.

The ranger shot Hesterberg in the back with her shock weapon as he walked off, Babcock said.

“We were like in disbelief,” she said. “It didn’t make any sense.”

Rancho Corral de Tierra has long been an off-leash walking spot for local dog owners. In December, the area became part of the national park system, which requires that all dogs be on a leash, Levitt said.

The ranger was trying to educate residents of the rule, Levitt said.

The park service is investigating the incident, he said.

Occupy London assault: Bailiff plows car through protesters

Police in London have been accused of excessive force in their efforts to clear out Occupy demonstrators. Protesters stood together last night as officers broke down the doors to their camps. RT’s Laura Smith has more on the London based battle between occupiers and officers.

Indianapolis Goes into Police State Mode for Super Bowl Week

Yeah sure… The Super Bowl is a big stage and a big target. The only problem with turning the city into a high tech police state is… You cannot actually stop a “terrorist” if they truly want to attack the big show (Especially from a suicide attack). We personally witnessed a massive republican guard in force in NYC at the 2004 coronation of George W. Bush. What we took away was that it was all for show. Yes, the elites have good protection, and even more so when they are cocooned in their castles…. But the people are not much safer. Anyone with a backpack full explosives should be able to do massive damage, which could get major international attention for their cause. Seeing as the borders are wide open, and IED’s are pretty easy to create…. Its easy to imagine how it could all go down.

Of Course…That will not happen. How do we know? Because 99% of all “terrorism” only happens with funding and permission from Global Authorities. (Id Est: The REAL Terrorists) – An attack stateside would be a black eye for such a massive show of  force,  and would have “we the peeps” doubting the effectiveness of such security.

However, in the aftermath of  Super Bowl 46, the people will be just a bit more CONditioned to give up their liberties, and to rah rah rah for the global police state keeping them safe at their gladiatorial bread and circus event.

Security = CONTROL!

(Take NY and the points …….. and always root for Patriots!)

Thousand police officers deployed on streets of Indianapolis as massive Super Bowl security operation swings into gear

• 150,000 Patriots and Giants fans expected to converge on city
• Tom Brady arrives and says he’s already organised a victory party
• Special teams sweeping Lucas Oil Stadium

By Wil Longbottom

A massive security operation involving 1,000 police officers has been launched in Indianapolis as the city’s first Super Bowl rolls into town this week.

Super Bowl fever has already hit the city and 150,000 NFL fans are expected to descend on downtown Indianapolis in one of the most high-security events in the U.S.

The city has invested millions of dollars to keep spectators safe, including most bizarrely the installation of 150 new manhole covers after a series of underground explosions.

Fever: Police officers watch the crowd in Super Bowl village, Indianapolis, ahead of the big game on Sunday

Security: A guard stands at the side of a concert in the heart of Indianapolis as crowds continue to gather ahead of the Super Bowl

Officers at the event have been equipped with smartphones and other electronic hand-held devices to allow them to feed photos and videos to a new state-of-the-art operations centre on the city’s east side. (Facial recognition apps)

Police cruisers will be driven around a 44-block area in the heart of the city as backup, and officers from the FBI will also be scanning the crowd for signs of pickpocketing, prostitution or other trouble. (That is crime NOT Terror, in which case  4th and 5th amendments need to be heeded, as well as the 1st amendment for any protestors! )

The Super Bowl venue, Lucas Oil Stadium, will even be swept for nuclear threats as authorities leave nothing to chance.

Gridiron: The pilot holds the New England Patriots’ flag out of the cockpit after the team’s charter flight arrived in Indianapolis yesterday

Super star: Patriots’ quarterback Tom Brady wheels his luggage on to the team bus after a sendoff at the Gilette Stadium, Foxborough

Experience: Fans photograph Super Bowl rings on show at an NFL exhibition in downtown Indianapolis

Public Safety Director Frank Straub said: ‘This is clearly bigger in terms of the amount of people who will be downtown over an extended period of time.’

Indianapolis is used to hosting large sporting events – the Indianapolis 500 attracts more than 200,000 fans every year and the NCAA’s men’s Final Four basketball tournament has been held there six times since 1980.

But its first Super Bowl poses some unique challenges.

Under a security risk rating system used by the federal government, the Super Bowl ranks second just below national security events involving the president and the Secret Service, according to Indianapolis Chief of Homeland Security Gary Coons.

Thrill-seekers: Fans climb a tower to have a go on one of four zip slides running through the Super Bowl Village in downtown Indianapolis and, right, one woman has to be rescued after her harness got caught

Show: DJ Pauly performs on the main stage in Indianapolis. Around 150,000 fans are expected in a 44-block area of downtown for Sunday’s Super Bowl

Attraction: A young fan tackles a sprint challenge in the Super Bowl Village and, right, the stadium where Sunday’s game will take place

The ratings are based on factors including international attention, media coverage, number of people the event attracts and visits by celebrities and foreign dignitaries.

In comparison, the Indianapolis 500 ranks two levels below the Super Bowl.

A series of explosions in Indianapolis Power & Light’s (IPL) underground network of utility cables has caused concern over the safety of fans – with a dozen blasts since 2005 sending manhole covers hurtling through the air.

The IPL has spent $180,000 installing new locking manhole covers in the Super Bowl village. The covers lift a couple of inches off the ground if an explosion takes place – enough to vent gas without feeding oxygen to magnify the blast.

Special teams from the Department of Energy will sweep the stadium – normally home to the Indianapolis Colts – for nuclear terror threats and the new $18million communications centre has been opened in time for the lead-up to the big game.

Competitor: New York Giants’ quarterback Eli Manning holds the NFC Championship trophy after his team beat the San Francisco 49ers to reach the Super Bowl

Game: Quarterback Tom Brady at a press conference in Indianapolis yesterday. Both teams have won the Super Bowl three times

Glamour: Tom Brady’s Brazilian supermodel wife Gisele Bundchen and, right, Eli Manning poses at a film premiere with his wife Abby McGrew

Mr Straub added: ‘We’re using more technology, and state-of-the-art technology, than has been used in any Super Bowl before this one.’

Super Bowl XLVI pitches the New England Patriots against the New York Giants, in a replay of the 2008 game in Glendale, Arizona.

Both teams have won the Vince Lombardi trophy three times, but the Giants beat the Patriots in XLII 17-14.

Patriots’ quarterback Tom Brady was given a raucous sendoff in Foxborough yesterday as he gave a confident interview to 25,000 fans.

He said: ‘We’re going down there for one reason. We’re going to give it our best and hopefully we’ll have a lot more people at our party next weekend.’

Flashback: The Patriots and Giants faced off against each other in Super Bowl XLII in Glendale Arizona – with New York scoring a surprise win

Arena: The Super Bowl will take place in Lucas Oil Stadium, home of the Indianapolis Colts

It is the Patriots’ fifth Super Bowl in the last 11 years and their first since the Giants scored their shock win.

But team were more subdued after arriving in Indianapolis.

Wide receiver Wes Welker told the New York Daily News: ‘We’re just planning on this game. Putting a game plan together and getting ourselves ready to play is object No. 1′

Last year, the Super Bowl became the most watched American television programme in history, with an average audience of 111million viewers.

‘I’m going to destroy America and dig up Marilyn Monroe’: British pair arrested in U.S. on terror charges over Twitter jokes

Two British tourists were barred from entering America after joking on Twitter that they were going to ‘destroy America’ and ‘dig up Marilyn Monroe’.

Leigh Van Bryan, 26, was handcuffed and kept under armed guard in a cell with Mexican drug dealers for 12 hours after landing in Los Angeles with pal Emily Bunting.

The Department of Homeland Security flagged him as a potential threat when he posted an excited tweet to his pals about his forthcoming trip to Hollywood which read: ‘Free this week, for quick gossip/prep before I go and destroy America’.

Austin Police Brutality Protest News Coverage At APD Headquarters

Hawaii may keep track of all Web sites visited

CNET

Hawaii’s legislature is weighing an unprecedented proposal to curb the privacy of Aloha State residents: requiring Internet providers to keep track of every Web site their customers visit.

Its House of Representatives has scheduled a hearing this morning on a new bill (PDF) requiring the creation of virtual dossiers on state residents. The measure, H.B. 2288, says “Internet destination history information” and “subscriber’s information” such as name and address must be saved for two years.

H.B. 2288, which was introduced Friday, says the dossiers must include a list of Internet Protocol addresses and domain names visited. Democratic Rep. John Mizuno of Oahu is the lead sponsor; Mizuno also introduced H.B. 2287, a computer crime bill, at the same time last week.

See also this follow-up story: Hawaiian politician backs away from Web dossier law

Last summer, U.S. Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas) managed to persuade a divided committee in the U.S. House of Representatives to approve his data retention proposal, which doesn’t go nearly as far as Hawaii’s. (Smith, currently Hollywood’s favorite Republican, has become better known as the author of the controversial Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA.)

Democrat Jill Tokuda, the Hawaii Senate’s majority whip, who introduced a companion bill, S.B. 2530, in the Senate, told CNET that her legislation was intended to address concerns raised by Rep. Kymberly Pine, the first Republican elected to her Oahu district since statehood and the House minority floor leader.

 

John Mizuno, Dem. state legislator in Hawaii and a sponsor of the bill, wants to require virtual dossiers to be compiled on state residents: two years’ worth of their Internet browsing.

(Credit: Hawaii.gov)

“I was asked to introduce the Senate companions on these Internet security related bills by Representative Kymberly Marcos Pine after her own personal experience in this area,” Tokuda said. “I would defer to her on the origins of these bills as she has done the research and outreach, and been the main champion of this effort.”

Pine, who did not immediately respond to queries, has been targeted by a disgruntled Web designer, Eric Ryan, who launched KymPineIsACrook.com and claims she owes him money, according to an article last summer in the Hawaii Reporter. Her e-mail account was also reportedly hacked around the same time. The article said Pine would advocate for “tougher cyber laws at the Hawaii State Capitol” as a result.

“We must do everything we can to protect the people of Hawaii from these attacks and give prosecutors the tools to ensure justice is served for victims,” Pine said at the time.

Whatever its sponsors’ motivations, the bill isn’t exactly being welcomed by Hawaiian Internet companies.

“This bill represents a radical violation of privacy and opens the door to rampant Fourth Amendment violations,” says Daniel Leuck, chief executive of Honolulu-based software design boutique Ikayzo, who submitted testimony opposing the bill. He adds: “Even forcing telephone companies to record everyone’s conversations, which is unthinkable, would be less of an intrusion.”

Mizuno’s proposal currently specifies no privacy protections, such as placing restrictions on what Internet providers can do with this information (like selling user profiles to advertisers) or requiring that police obtain a court order before perusing the virtual dossiers of Hawaiian citizens. Also absent are security requirements such as mandating the use of encryption.

Because the wording is so broad and applies to any company that “provides access to the Internet,” Mizuno’s legislation could sweep in far more than AT&T, Verizon, and Hawaii’s local Internet providers. It could also impose sweeping new requirements on coffee shops, bookstores, and hotels frequented by the over 6 million tourists who visit the islands each year.

“H.B. 2288 raises all of the traditional concerns associated with data retention, and then some,” Kate Dean, head of the U.S. Internet Service Provider Association in Washington, D.C., which counts Verizon and AT&T as members, told CNET. “And this may be the broadest mandate we’ve seen.”

Even the Justice Department has only lobbied the U.S. Congress to record Internet Protocol addresses assigned to individuals–users’ origin IP address, in other words. It hasn’t publicly demanded that companies record the destination IP addresses as well.

In Washington, D.C., the fight over data retention requirements has been simmering since the Justice Department pushed the topic in 2005, a development that was first reported by CNET. Proposals publicly surfaced in the U.S. Congress the following year, and President Bush’s attorney general, Alberto Gonzales said it’s an issue that “must be addressed.” So, eventually, did FBI director Robert Mueller.Updated at 10:00 a.m. PT.

Declan McCullagh is the chief political correspondent for CNET. Declan previously was a reporter for Time and the Washington bureau chief for Wired and wrote the Taking Liberties section and Other People’s Money column for CBS News’ Web site.

U.S falls to 47th in press freedom rankings after Occupy crackdown

Take that “City on the Hill” – American Exceptionalism? – Do you get it now? We cannot preach Human Rights to China, Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia etc… If we are not the best example of it here at home. No excuses! O’Bomba is your alleged president… The buck stops there! Quit making excuses for him, and the others that are out and out saying that they want to take your freedoms for their own advantage. We do not except this from foreign dictators like Syria’s Assad… Why accept it here?

Daily Mail

Sweeping protests around the world made it an extremely difficult year for the media, and tested journalists as never before, the annual report into press freedom reveals.

The annual report by Reporters Without Borders has been released, showing the United States fell 27 points on the list due to the many arrests of journalists covering Occupy Wall Street protests.

The slide in the United States places it just behind Comoros and Taiwan in a group with Argentina and Romania.

 

Under arrest: Journalists covering Occupy Wall Street protests found themselves a target of authorities

Reporters Without Borders said the heightened unrest around the world resulted in a significant shake-up of the group’s annual Press Freedom Index, which assesses governments’ commitment to protecting media freedoms.

The Paris-based non-governmental Reporters Without Borders has named “crackdown” the word of 2011 in an assessment of global media freedom during a year in which journalists covering sweeping protests were tested as never before.

The non-governmental organisation seeks to defend journalists’ freedom to work and combat censorship internationally.

Despite the big changes, some constants remained. The country with the freest media in the world was Finland, followed by Norway, Estonia, the Netherlands and Austria. Eritrea was last, with North Korea just above.

The United States was not alone in the falling grades: Bahrain fell 29 points because of the crackdown in that country.

Egypt and Syria also fell a few points to languish near the bottom of the pack (166) and (176) respectively.

The group judged that Syria, along with Iran and China, ‘seem to have lost contact with reality as they have been sucked into an insane spiral of terror.’

Pakistan was the world’s deadliest country for journalists, and Eritrea came in last in the list of overall press freedom.Syria, where an uprising against the government has been met with a brutal crackdown that has left more than 5,000 people dead, received its worst rating ever at 176.

 

Press freedom? Journalists sit it out in a hallway as gun-battles continue around the Rixos hotel in Tripoli, Libya, in August last year

In Afghanistan (150th) and Pakistan (151st), reporters remained under constant threat from the Taliban, religious extremists, separatist movements and political groups. With 10 deaths last year, Pakistan was the world’s most dangerous country for journalists for the second year in a row.

‘Never have journalists, through their reporting, vexed the enemies of freedom so much. Never have acts of censorship and physical attacks on journalists seemed so numerous.

 

Clashes: Occupy demonstrators are confronted by police as they march to the White House

The equation is simple: the absence or suppression of civil liberties leads necessarily to the suppression of media freedom. Dictatorships fear and ban information, especially when it may undermine them,’ it said.

Elsewhere within the European Union, countries such as Bulgaria (80th), Greece (70th) and Italy (61st) failed to address the issue of media freedom violations, largely because of a lack of political will.

Libya came in 154th in the list, while Yemen was in 171th place.’
‘The future of both of these countries remains uncertain, and the place they will allow the media is undecided.

The same goes for Egypt, which fell 39 places to 166th place.’

Syria was 176th, because journalists were unable to work because of total censorship, widespread surveillance, indiscriminate violence and government manipulation.

The report also highlights how pro-democracy movements that tried to emulate the example of the Arab revolutions were brutally suppressed. Vietnam (172nd) saw many arrests, while China (174th) stepped up its system of controlling news and information in response to public dissatisfaction with corruption and other injustices.

The biggest falls in the index were in Africa – Djibouti fell 49 places to 159th, Malawi (146th) fell 67 places and Uganda fell 43 places to 139th.

The Paris-based press freedom watchdog said Wednesday that the wave of uprisings in the Middle East, the Occupy movement in the West and continued protests in China gave journalists an unprecedented role in advancing democracy. But they also were often targeted by governments trying to quash dissent.

‘Never has freedom of information been so closely associated with democracy. Never have journalists, through their reporting, vexed the enemies of freedom so much,’ the group said in a statement accompanying its report.

But the important role journalists played put them in the cross hairs of repressive regimes, the report said, adding: ‘Never have acts of censorship and physical attacks on journalists seemed so numerous.’

Read more:

LAPD And Special Forces Conduct Military Maneuvers In The Skies Above Downtown LA (VIDEO)

LOS ANGELES ( VIDEO – CBS) — The Los Angeles Police Department teamed with military special operation forces Wednesday evening to conduct multi-agency tactical exercises in the skies above downtown LA.

Many questioned what was going on Wednesday night as a Black Hawk helicopter and four OH-6 choppers – or “Little Birds” – flew over the city, at one point hovering just above the US Bank building downtown and later flying low over the Staples Center as the Lakers played inside.

Someone could be seen sitting inside an open chopper with his legs hanging off the side.

Sky9 spotted the Black Hawk in the dark, making what appeared to be a drop off at a park before quickly ascending back into the air.

Throughout the exercise, the five rotorcrafts were staged at Dodgers Stadium.

The LAPD said the purpose of the training was in part to ensure the military’s ability to operate in urban environments.

Chief Warrant Officer David Duran was a U.S. Army aviator for 12 years. He now flies Blackhawk helicopters for the National Guard in California. Duran says what KCAL9 saw Wednesday night could be a dry run for a future mission.

“They do a lot of mockup training,” said Duran. “But it’s always best to get the closest terrain layout to what the objective is.”

Duran said the military chooses training environments based on what they might be facing in the near future.

“If it’s a mountainous terrain, they go to the mountains; if it’s a desert terrain, they use the desert; if they’re in a coastal terrain, they use the coast,” said Duran. “If it’s an urban terrain, you know, whatever’s needed.”

In a release Monday, the LAPD said training exercises would take place at various sites around the greater Los Angeles area through Thursday. The exercises were coordinated with local authorities and owners of the training sites, according to the release.

Many wondered Thursday night about the safety of such drastic maneuvers being conducted over an urban area.

The LAPD said safety precautions were taken to prevent risk to the general public, as well as the military personnel involved.

Similar exercises have been seen in Miami and Boston.

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