Last week Leah Lynn Plante was arrested and placed in solitary confinement for remaining silent during a grand jury trial. Due to the secrecy of the proceedings, little information has come to light about her or her two friends, Katherine “Kteeo” Olejnik and Matthew Kyle Duran since the story went viral last week.
However, word was just sent out from Leah's supporters that she had been released, although unfortunately her two friends still remain behind bars.
JOINT BASE PEARL HARBOR-HICKAM, Hawaii – Hawaii is a paradise for most visitors. But it was Wade Hicks, Jr.'s prison for five days.
The 34-year-old from Gulfport, Miss., was stranded in the islands this week after being told he was on the FBI's no-fly list during a layover for a military flight from California to Japan.
The episode left Hicks scrambling to figure out how he'd get home from Hawaii without being able to fly until he was abruptly removed from the list on Thursday with no explanation. It also raised questions beyond how he landed on the list: How could someone on a list intelligence officials use to inform counterterrorism investigations successfully fly standby on an Air Force flight?
Hicks said he was traveling to visit his wife, a U.S. Navy lieutenant who's deployed in Japan. He hitched a ride on the military flight as is common for military dependents, who are allowed to fly on scheduled routes when there's room.
Hicks said that during his layover at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam, a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent told him he was on the no-fly list and wouldn't be allowed on a plane.
“I said, ‘How am I supposed to get off this island and go see my wife or go home?' And her explanation was: ‘I don't know,'” Hicks said.
Hicks said he was shocked and thought they must have had the wrong person because he doesn't have a criminal record and recently passed an extensive background check in Mississippi to get a permit to carry a concealed weapon.
But the agent said his name, Social Security number and date of birth matched the person prohibited from flying, Hicks said. He wasn't told why and wonders whether his controversial views on the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks played a role. Hicks said he disagrees with the 9/11 Commission's conclusions about the attacks.
“It was a whitewash and a lie from top to bottom. … They were covering up for both parties — sure that the American people would be shocked by the negligence of the politicals.”
Web hosting firm ServerBeach recently received a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) violation notice from Pearson, the well-known educational publishing company. The notice pertained to Edublogs, which hosts 1.45 million education-related blogs with ServerBeach, and it focused on a single Edublogs page from 2007 that contained a questionnaire copyrighted by Pearson. ServerBeach informed Edublogs about the alleged violation, and Edublogs says it quickly took down the allegedly infringing content.
Instead of calling the matter settled, though, ServerBeach took Edublogs' servers offline last Wednesday, temporarily shutting off all 1.45 million blogs, according to Edublogs. ServerBeach confirms taking all of the Edublogs offline, telling Ars that the outage lasted for “roughly 60 minutes before we brought them back online and confirmed their compliance with the DMCA takedown request.”
As you might expect, ServerBeach and Edublogs have slightly different accounts of how it all happened.
Phi Beta Iota: The criminal insanity of how ServerBeach handled this matter should be broadcast widely. We certainly would not trust any company so cavalier, so utterly oblivious to the unwarranted cost of their unbirdled actions. This specific instance should be the poster child for why an Autonomous Internet is needed with multiple backups such that no one unprincipled moron can wreak such havoc. ServerBeach – posterchild for how not to do business.
We also heard a lot of bombast after the first war with Iraq, Operation Desert Storm in 1991; then, the technologists declared a “revolution in military affairs.” The Government Accountability Office (GAO) spent two years looking at that: The air campaign should more accurately be characterized as bombing a tethered goat led by a military jackass, and even then, the air campaign did not live up to the hype. The high-cost “silver bullet” of the war, the F-117 stealth light bomber, badly underperformed its puffery. For example, in contrast to claims that “alone and unafraid” it destroyed Saddam's air defense system in the first hours of the first night, the F-117s actually had help from 167 non-stealthy aircraft and were confirmed by the Defense Intelligence Agency's bomb-damage assessments to have effectively destroyed only two of the 15 air defense targets assigned to them that first night. Overall, the GAO found that effectiveness did not correlate with cost and that on many dimensions the ultralow-cost A-10 close-combat attack aircraft was the top performer.
Defense Secretary Leon Panetta told reporters on Thursday that “temporary adjustments” to low-level joint U.S.-Afghan patrols, enacted in the wake of widespread protests over an anti-Islam video, had mostly come to an end. “I can now report to you that most [U.S. and allied] units have now returned to their normal partnered operations at all level,” Panetta said.
The shift was intended, as Panetta said, to “protect our forces” — not just from anger at the video, but from a broader problem. Afghan forces have killed at least 52 of their American mentors this year. The NATO military command in Afghanistan isn’t totally sure why, and blames a mix of specific Afghan grievances and Taliban infiltration. So last week, the command decreed that the two-star generals at regional headquarters have to approve all joint U.S.-Afghan operations below the battalion level — which accounts for most of them.
Perhaps the most enduring feature of US foreign policy is a self-righteous sense of divine mission blinds the Orientations of its self-referencing practitioners to the real world consequences of their Decisions, and Actions. Their missionary zeal makes their outlooks impervious to the corrective effects negative feedback from the real world. Put simply, with a few exceptions, our foreign policy elites have evolved a long-term blockage in their Orientation that prevents them from LEARNING from their mistakes, regardless of whether those mistakes evolved out of conflating the impulses of nationalism with the pretensions of a global communist “threat” (e.g., Mossadegh in Iran,Vietnam, etc.) or with a world wide “threat” of Islamic militancy (e.g., using the war on terror to invade Iraq or wage war in Afghanistan and Pakistan by confusing the nationalism of Saddam Hussein and the Taliban with the global pretensions of a criminal gang of Sunni Salafi fanatics ), or by conflating the national interests of Israel with the national interests of the United States.
The U.S. alliance of convenience with Sunni Salafis eastern Libya to effect a regime change is only the latest case study of the blowback (re: in Mali and now the assassination of the US ambassador) that results when arrogance of ignorance* shapes a policy to meddle in the affairs of others.
So you might ask: Has our self-styled elite learned anything from its Libyan misadventure? One need only to look at Syrian civil war to answer to this question.
