industryterm:law school

Meet Francis Malofiy, the Philadelphia Lawyer Who Sued Led Zeppelin
►https://www.phillymag.com/news/2019/02/11/francis-malofiy-led-zeppelin

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Francis Malofiy may be the most hated man in the Philadelphia legal community. He may also be on the cusp of getting the last laugh on rock’s golden gods.

#droit_d_auteur #musique #plagiat

Pan Am Flight 103 : Robert Mueller’s 30-Year Search for Justice | WIRED
▻https://www.wired.com/story/robert-muellers-search-for-justice-for-pan-am-103

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Cet article décrit le rôle de Robert Mueller dans l’enquête historique qui a permis de dissimuler ou de justifier la plupart des batailles de la guerre non déclarée des États Unis contre l’OLP et les pays arabes qui soutenaient la lutte pour un état palestinien.

Aux États-Unis, en Allemagne et en France le grand public ignore les actes de guerre commis par les États Unis dans cette guerre. Vu dans ce contexte on ne peut que classer le récit de cet article dans la catégorie idéologie et propagande même si les intentions et faits qu’on y apprend sont bien documentés et plausibles.

Cette perspective transforme le contenu de cet article d’une variation sur un thème connu dans un reportage sur l’état d’âme des dirigeants étatsuniens moins fanatiques que l’équipe du président actuel.

THIRTY YEARS AGO last Friday, on the darkest day of the year, 31,000 feet above one of the most remote parts of Europe, America suffered its first major terror attack.

TEN YEARS AGO last Friday, then FBI director Robert Mueller bundled himself in his tan trench coat against the cold December air in Washington, his scarf wrapped tightly around his neck. Sitting on a small stage at Arlington National Cemetery, he scanned the faces arrayed before him—the victims he’d come to know over years, relatives and friends of husbands and wives who would never grow old, college students who would never graduate, business travelers and flight attendants who would never come home.

Burned into Mueller’s memory were the small items those victims had left behind, items that he’d seen on the shelves of a small wooden warehouse outside Lockerbie, Scotland, a visit he would never forget: A teenager’s single white sneaker, an unworn Syracuse University sweatshirt, the wrapped Christmas gifts that would never be opened, a lonely teddy bear.

A decade before the attacks of 9/11—attacks that came during Mueller’s second week as FBI director, and that awoke the rest of America to the threats of terrorism—the bombing of Pan Am 103 had impressed upon Mueller a new global threat.

It had taught him the complexity of responding to international terror attacks, how unprepared the government was to respond to the needs of victims’ families, and how on the global stage justice would always be intertwined with geopolitics. In the intervening years, he had never lost sight of the Lockerbie bombing—known to the FBI by the codename Scotbom—and he had watched the orphaned children from the bombing grow up over the years.

Nearby in the cemetery stood a memorial cairn made of pink sandstone—a single brick representing each of the victims, the stone mined from a Scottish quarry that the doomed flight passed over just seconds before the bomb ripped its baggage hold apart. The crowd that day had gathered near the cairn in the cold to mark the 20th anniversary of the bombing.

For a man with an affinity for speaking in prose, not poetry, a man whose staff was accustomed to orders given in crisp sentences as if they were Marines on the battlefield or under cross-examination from a prosecutor in a courtroom, Mueller’s remarks that day soared in a way unlike almost any other speech he’d deliver.

“There are those who say that time heals all wounds. But you know that not to be true. At its best, time may dull the deepest wounds; it cannot make them disappear,” Mueller told the assembled mourners. “Yet out of the darkness of this day comes a ray of light. The light of unity, of friendship, and of comfort from those who once were strangers and who are now bonded together by a terrible moment in time. The light of shared memories that bring smiles instead of sadness. And the light of hope for better days to come.”

He talked of Robert Frost’s poem “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” and of inspiration drawn from Lockerbie’s town crest, with its simple motto, “Forward.” He spoke of what was then a two-decade-long quest for justice, of how on windswept Scottish mores and frigid lochs a generation of FBI agents, investigators, and prosecutors had redoubled their dedication to fighting terrorism.

Mueller closed with a promise: “Today, as we stand here together on this, the darkest of days, we renew that bond. We remember the light these individuals brought to each of you here today. We renew our efforts to bring justice down on those who seek to harm us. We renew our efforts to keep our people safe, and to rid the world of terrorism. We will continue to move forward. But we will never forget.”

Hand bells tolled for each of the victims as their names were read aloud, 270 names, 270 sets of bells.

The investigation, though, was not yet closed. Mueller, although he didn’t know it then, wasn’t done with Pan Am 103. Just months after that speech, the case would test his innate sense of justice and morality in a way that few other cases in his career ever have.

ROBERT S. MUELLER III had returned from a combat tour in Vietnam in the late 1960s and eventually headed to law school at the University of Virginia, part of a path that he hoped would lead him to being an FBI agent. Unable after graduation to get a job in government, he entered private practice in San Francisco, where he found he loved being a lawyer—just not a defense attorney.

Then—as his wife Ann, a teacher, recounted to me years ago—one morning at their small home, while the two of them made the bed, Mueller complained, “Don’t I deserve to be doing something that makes me happy?” He finally landed a job as an assistant US attorney in San Francisco and stood, for the first time, in court and announced, “Good morning your Honor, I am Robert Mueller appearing on behalf of the United States of America.” It is a moment that young prosecutors often practice beforehand, and for Mueller those words carried enormous weight. He had found the thing that made him happy.

His family remembers that time in San Francisco as some of their happiest years; the Muellers’ two daughters were young, they loved the Bay Area—and have returned there on annual vacations almost every year since relocating to the East Coast—and Mueller found himself at home as a prosecutor.

On Friday nights, their routine was that Ann and the two girls would pick Mueller up at Harrington’s Bar & Grill, the city’s oldest Irish pub, not far from the Ferry Building in the Financial District, where he hung out each week with a group of prosecutors, defense attorneys, cops, and agents. (One Christmas, his daughter Cynthia gave him a model of the bar made out of Popsicle sticks.) He balanced that family time against weekends and trainings with the Marines Corps Reserves, where he served for more than a decade, until 1980, eventually rising to be a captain.

Over the next 15 years, he rose through the ranks of the San Francisco US attorney’s office—an office he would return to lead during the Clinton administration—and then decamped to Massachusetts to work for US attorney William Weld in the 1980s. There, too, he shined and eventually became acting US attorney when Weld departed at the end of the Reagan administration. “You cannot get the words straight arrow out of your head,” Weld told me, speaking of Mueller a decade ago. “The agencies loved him because he knew his stuff. He didn’t try to be elegant or fancy, he just put the cards on the table.”

In 1989, an old high school classmate, Robert Ross, who was chief of staff to then attorney general Richard Thornburgh, asked Mueller to come down to Washington to help advise Thornburgh. The offer intrigued Mueller. Ann protested the move—their younger daughter Melissa wanted to finish high school in Massachusetts. Ann told her husband, “We can’t possibly do this.” He replied, his eyes twinkling, “You’re right, it’s a terrible time. Well, why don’t we just go down and look at a few houses?” As she told me, “When he wants to do something, he just revisits it again and again.”

For his first two years at so-called Main Justice in Washington, working under President George H.W. Bush, the family commuted back and forth from Boston to Washington, alternating weekends in each city, to allow Melissa to finish school.

Washington gave Mueller his first exposure to national politics and cases with geopolitical implications; in September 1990, President Bush nominated him to be assistant attorney general, overseeing the Justice Department’s entire criminal division, which at that time handled all the nation’s terrorism cases as well. Mueller would oversee the prosecution of Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega, mob boss John Gotti, and the controversial investigation into a vast money laundering scheme run through the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, known as the Bank of Crooks and Criminals

None of his cases in Washington, though, would affect him as much as the bombing of Pan Am 103.

THE TIME ON the clocks in Lockerbie, Scotland, read 7:04 pm, on December 21, 1988, when the first emergency call came into the local fire brigade, reporting what sounded like a massive boiler explosion. It was technically early evening, but it had been dark for hours already; that far north, on the shortest day of the year, daylight barely stretched to eight hours.

Soon it became clear something much worse than a boiler explosion had unfolded: Fiery debris pounded the landscape, plunging from the sky and killing 11 Lockerbie residents. As Mike Carnahan told a local TV reporter, “The whole sky was lit up with flames. It was actually raining, liquid fire. You could see several houses on the skyline with the roofs totally off and all you could see was flaming timbers.”

At 8:45 pm, a farmer found in his field the cockpit of Pan Am 103, a Boeing 747 known as Clipper Maid of the Seas, lying on its side, 15 of its crew dead inside, just some of the 259 passengers and crew killed when a bomb had exploded inside the plane’s cargo hold. The scheduled London to New York flight never even made it out of the UK.

It had taken just three seconds for the plane to disintegrate in the air, though the wreckage took three long minutes to fall the five miles from the sky to the earth; court testimony later would examine how passengers had still been alive as they fell. Nearly 200 of the passengers were American, including 35 students from Syracuse University returning home from a semester abroad. The attack horrified America, which until then had seen terror touch its shores only occasionally as a hijacking went awry; while the US had weathered the 1983 bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut, attacks almost never targeted civilians.

The Pan Am 103 bombing seemed squarely aimed at the US, hitting one of its most iconic brands. Pan Am then represented America’s global reach in a way few companies did; the world’s most powerful airline shuttled 19 million passengers a year to more than 160 countries and had ferried the Beatles to their US tour and James Bond around the globe on his cinematic missions. In a moment of hubris a generation before Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, the airline had even opened a “waiting list” for the first tourists to travel to outer space. Its New York headquarters, the Pan Am building, was the world’s largest commercial building and its terminal at JFK Airport the biggest in the world.

The investigation into the bombing of Pan Am 103 began immediately, as police and investigators streamed north from London by the hundreds; chief constable John Boyd, the head of the local police, arrived at the Lockerbie police station by 8:15 pm, and within an hour the first victim had been brought in: A farmer arrived in town with the body of a baby girl who had fallen from the sky. He’d carefully placed her in the front seat of his pickup truck.

An FBI agent posted in London had raced north too, with the US ambassador, aboard a special US Air Force flight, and at 2 am, when Boyd convened his first senior leadership meeting, he announced, “The FBI is here, and they are fully operational.” By that point, FBI explosives experts were already en route to Scotland aboard an FAA plane; agents would install special secure communications equipment in Lockerbie and remain on site for months.

Although it quickly became clear that a bomb had targeted Pan Am 103—wreckage showed signs of an explosion and tested positive for PETN and RDX, two key ingredients of the explosive Semtex—the investigation proceeded with frustrating slowness. Pan Am’s records were incomplete, and it took days to even determine the full list of passengers. At the same time, it was the largest crime scene ever investigated—a fact that remains true today.

Investigators walked 845 square miles, an area 12 times the size of Washington, DC, and searched so thoroughly that they recovered more than 70 packages of airline crackers and ultimately could reconstruct about 85 percent of the fuselage. (Today, the wreckage remains in an English scrapyard.) Constable Boyd, at his first press conference, told the media, “This is a mammoth inquiry.”

On Christmas Eve, a searcher found a piece of a luggage pallet with signs of obvious scorching, which would indicate the bomb had been in the luggage compartment below the passenger cabin. The evidence was rushed to a special British military lab—one originally created to investigate the Guy Fawkes’ Gunpowder Plot to blow up Parliament and kill King James I in 1605.

When the explosive tests came back a day later, the British government called the State Department’s ambassador-at-large for combating terrorism, L. Paul Bremer III (who would go on to be President George W. Bush’s viceroy in Baghdad after the 2003 invasion of Iraq), and officially delivered the news that everyone had anticipated: Pan Am 103 had been downed by a bomb.

Meanwhile, FBI agents fanned out across the country. In New York, special agent Neil Herman—who would later lead the FBI’s counterterrorism office in New York in the run up to 9/11—was tasked with interviewing some of the victims’ families; many of the Syracuse students on board had been from the New York region. One of the mothers he interviewed hadn’t heard from the government in the 10 days since the attack. “It really struck me how ill-equipped we were to deal with this,” Herman told me, years later. “Multiply her by 270 victims and families.” The bombing underscored that the FBI and the US government had a lot to learn in responding and aiding victims in a terror attack.

INVESTIGATORS MOVED TOWARD piecing together how a bomb could have been placed on board; years before the 9/11 attack, they discounted the idea of a suicide bomber aboard—there had never been a suicide attack on civil aviation at that point—and so focused on one of two theories: The possibility of a “mule,” an innocent passenger duped into carrying a bomb aboard, or an “inside man,” a trusted airport or airline employee who had smuggled the fatal cargo aboard. The initial suspect list stretched to 1,200 names.

Yet even reconstructing what was on board took an eternity: Evidence pointed to a Japanese manufactured Toshiba cassette recorder as the likely delivery device for the bomb, and then, by the end of January, investigators located pieces of the suitcase that had held the bomb. After determining that it was a Samsonite bag, police and the FBI flew to the company’s headquarters in the United States and narrowed the search further: The bag, they found, was a System 4 Silhouette 4000 model, color “antique-copper,” a case and color made for only three years, 1985 to 1988, and sold only in the Middle East. There were a total of 3,500 such suitcases in circulation.

By late spring, investigators had identified 14 pieces of luggage inside the target cargo container, known as AVE4041; each bore tell-tale signs of the explosion. Through careful retracing of how luggage moved through the London airport, investigators determined that the bags on the container’s bottom row came from passengers transferring in London. The bags on the second and third row of AVE4041 had been the last bags loaded onto the leg of the flight that began in Frankfurt, before the plane took off for London. None of the baggage had been X-rayed or matched with passengers on board.

The British lab traced clothing fragments from the wreckage that bore signs of the explosion and thus likely originated in the bomb-carrying suitcase. It was an odd mix: Two herring-bone skirts, men’s pajamas, tartan trousers, and so on. The most promising fragment was a blue infant’s onesie that, after fiber analysis, was conclusively determined to have been inside the explosive case, and had a label saying “Malta Trading Company.” In March, two detectives took off for Malta, where the manufacturer told them that 500 such articles of clothing had been made and most sent to Ireland, while the rest went locally to Maltese outlets and others to continental Europe.

As they dug deeper, they focused on bag B8849, which appeared to have come off Air Malta Flight 180—Malta to Frankfurt—on December 21, even though there was no record of one of that flight’s 47 passengers transferring to Pan Am 103.

Investigators located the store in Malta where the suspect clothing had been sold; the British inspector later recorded in his statement, “[Store owner] Anthony Gauci interjected and stated that he could recall selling a pair of the checked trousers, size 34, and three pairs of the pajamas to a male person.” The investigators snapped to attention—after nine months did they finally have a suspect in their sights? “[Gauci] informed me that the man had also purchased the following items: one imitation Harris Tweed jacket; one woolen cardigan; one black umbrella; one blue colored ‘Baby Gro’ with a motif described by the witness as a ‘sheep’s face’ on the front; and one pair of gents’ brown herring-bone material trousers, size 36.”

Game, set, match. Gauci had perfectly described the clothing fragments found by RARDE technicians to contain traces of explosive. The purchase, Gauci went on to explain, stood out in his mind because the customer—whom Gauci tellingly identified as speaking the “Libyan language”—had entered the store on November 23, 1988, and gathered items without seeming to care about the size, gender, or color of any of it.

As the investigation painstakingly proceeded into 1989 and 1990, Robert Mueller arrived at Main Justice; the final objects of the Lockerbie search wouldn’t be found until the spring of 1990, just months before Mueller took over as assistant attorney general of the criminal division in September.

The Justice Department that year was undergoing a series of leadership changes; the deputy attorney general, William Barr, became acting attorney general midyear as Richard Thornburgh stepped down to run for Senate back in his native Pennsylvania. President Bush then nominated Barr to take over as attorney general officially. (Earlier this month Barr was nominated by President Trump to become attorney general once again.)

The bombing soon became one of the top cases on Mueller’s desk. He met regularly with Richard Marquise, the FBI special agent heading Scotbom. For Mueller, the case became personal; he met with victims’ families and toured the Lockerbie crash site and the investigation’s headquarters. He traveled repeatedly to the United Kingdom for meetings and walked the fields of Lockerbie himself. “The Scots just did a phenomenal job with the crime scene,” he told me, years ago.

Mueller pushed the investigators forward constantly, getting involved in the investigation at a level that a high-ranking Justice Department official almost never does. Marquise turned to him in one meeting, after yet another set of directions, and sighed, “Geez, if I didn’t know better, I’d think you want to be FBI director.”

The investigation gradually, carefully, zeroed in on Libya. Agents traced a circuit board used in the bomb to a similar device seized in Africa a couple of years earlier used by Libyan intelligence. An FBI-created database of Maltese immigration records even showed that a man using the same alias as one of those Libyan intelligence officers had departed from Malta on October 19, 1988—just two months before the bombing.

The circuit board also helped makes sense of an important aspect of the bombing: It controlled a timer, meaning that the bomb was not set off by a barometric trigger that registers altitude. This, in turn, explained why the explosive baggage had lain peacefully in the jet’s hold as it took off and landed repeatedly.

Tiny letters on the suspect timer said “MEBO.” What was MEBO? In the days before Google, searching for something called “Mebo” required going country to country, company to company. There were no shortcuts. The FBI, MI5, and CIA were, after months of work, able to trace MEBO back to a Swiss company, Meister et Bollier, adding a fifth country to the ever-expanding investigative circle.

From Meister et Bollier, they learned that the company had provided 20 prototype timers to the Libyan government and the company helped ID their contact as a Libyan intelligence officer, Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi, who looked like the sketch of the Maltese clothing shopper. Then, when the FBI looked at its database of Maltese immigration records, they found that Al Megrahi had been present in Malta the day the clothing was purchased.

Marquise sat down with Robert Mueller and the rest of the prosecutorial team and laid out the latest evidence. Mueller’s orders were clear—he wanted specific suspects and he wanted to bring charges. As he said, “Proceed toward indictment.” Let’s get this case moving.

IN NOVEMBER 1990, Marquise was placed in charge of all aspects of the investigation and assigned on special duty to the Washington Field Office and moved to a new Scotbom task force. The field offce was located far from the Hoover building, in a run-down neighborhood known by the thoroughly unromantic moniker of Buzzard Point.

The Scotbom task force had been allotted three tiny windowless rooms with dark wood paneling, which were soon covered floor-to-ceiling with 747 diagrams, crime scene photographs, maps, and other clues. By the door of the office, the team kept two photographs to remind themselves of the stakes: One, a tiny baby shoe recovered from the fields of Lockerbie; the other, a picture of the American flag on the tail of Pan Am 103. This was the first major attack on the US and its civilians. Whoever was responsible couldn’t be allowed to get away with it.

With representatives from a half-dozen countries—the US, Britain, Scotland, Sweden, Germany, France, and Malta—now sitting around the table, putting together a case that met everyone’s evidentiary standards was difficult. “We talked through everything, and everything was always done to the higher standard,” Marquise says. In the US, for instance, the legal standard for a photo array was six photos; in Scotland, though, it was 12. So every photo array in the investigation had 12 photos to ensure that the IDs could be used in a British court.

The trail of evidence so far was pretty clear, and it all pointed toward Libya. Yet there was still much work to do prior to an indictment. A solid hunch was one thing. Having evidence that would stand up in court and under cross-examination was something else entirely.

As the case neared an indictment, the international investigators and prosecutors found themselves focusing at their gatherings on the fine print of their respective legal code and engaging in deep, philosophical-seeming debates: “What does murder mean in your statute? Huh? I know what murder means: I kill you. Well, then you start going through the details and the standards are just a little different. It may entail five factors in one country, three in another. Was Megrahi guilty of murder? Depends on the country.”

At every meeting, the international team danced around the question of where a prosecution would ultimately take place. “Jurisdiction was an eggshell problem,” Marquise says. “It was always there, but no one wanted to talk about it. It was always the elephant in the room.”

Mueller tried to deflect the debate for as long as possible, arguing there was more investigation to do first. Eventually, though, he argued forcefully that the case should be tried in the US. “I recognize that Scotland has significant equities which support trial of the case in your country,” he said in one meeting. “However, the primary target of this act of terrorism was the United States. The majority of the victims were Americans, and the Pan American aircraft was targeted precisely because it was of United States registry.”

After one meeting, where the Scots and Americans debated jurisdiction for more than two hours, the group migrated over to the Peasant, a restaurant near the Justice Department, where, in an attempt to foster good spirits, it paid for the visiting Scots. Mueller and the other American officials each had to pay for their own meals.

Mueller was getting ready to move forward; the federal grand jury would begin work in early September. Prosecutors and other investigators were already preparing background, readying evidence, and piecing together information like the names and nationalities of all the Lockerbie victims so that they could be included in the forthcoming indictment.

There had never been any doubt in the US that the Pan Am 103 bombing would be handled as a criminal matter, but the case was still closely monitored by the White House and the National Security Council.

The Reagan administration had been surprised in February 1988 by the indictment on drug charges of its close ally Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega, and a rule of thumb had been developed: Give the White House a heads up anytime you’re going to indict a foreign agent. “If you tag Libya with Pan Am 103, that’s fair to say it’s going to disrupt our relationship with Libya,” Mueller deadpans. So Mueller would head up to the Cabinet Room at the White House, charts and pictures in hand, to explain to President Bush and his team what Justice had in mind.

To Mueller, the investigation underscored why such complex investigations needed a law enforcement eye. A few months after the attack, he sat through a CIA briefing pointing toward Syria as the culprit behind the attack. “That’s always struck with me as a lesson in the difference between intelligence and evidence. I always try to remember that,” he told me, back when he was FBI director. “It’s a very good object lesson about hasty action based on intelligence. What if we had gone and attacked Syria based on that initial intelligence? Then, after the attack, it came out that Libya had been behind it? What could we have done?”

Marquise was the last witness for the federal grand jury on Friday, November 8, 1991. Only in the days leading up to that testimony had prosecutors zeroed in on Megrahi and another Libyan officer, Al Amin Khalifa Fhimah; as late as the week of the testimony, they had hoped to pursue additional indictments, yet the evidence wasn’t there to get to a conviction.

Mueller traveled to London to meet with the Peter Fraser, the lord advocate—Scotland’s top prosecutor—and they agreed to announce indictments simultaneously on November 15, 1991. Who got their hands on the suspects first, well, that was a question for later. The joint indictment, Mueller believed, would benefit both countries. “It adds credibility to both our investigations,” he says.

That coordinated joint, multi-nation statement and indictment would become a model that the US would deploy more regularly in the years to come, as the US and other western nations have tried to coordinate cyber investigations and indictments against hackers from countries like North Korea, Russia, and Iran.

To make the stunning announcement against Libya, Mueller joined FBI director William Sessions, DC US attorney Jay Stephens, and attorney general William Barr.

“We charge that two Libyan officials, acting as operatives of the Libyan intelligence agency, along with other co-conspirators, planted and detonated the bomb that destroyed Pan Am 103,” Barr said. “I have just telephoned some of the families of those murdered on Pan Am 103 to inform them and the organizations of the survivors that this indictment has been returned. Their loss has been ever present in our minds.”

At the same time, in Scotland, investigators there were announcing the same indictments.

At the press conference, Barr listed a long set of names to thank—the first one he singled out was Mueller’s. Then, he continued, “This investigation is by no means over. It continues unabated. We will not rest until all those responsible are brought to justice. We have no higher priority.”

From there, the case would drag on for years. ABC News interviewed the two suspects in Libya later that month; both denied any responsibility for the bombing. Marquise was reassigned within six months; the other investigators moved along too.

Mueller himself left the administration when Bill Clinton became president, spending an unhappy year in private practice before rejoining the Justice Department to work as a junior homicide prosecutor in DC under then US attorney Eric Holder; Mueller, who had led the nation’s entire criminal division was now working side by side with prosecutors just a few years out of law school, the equivalent of a three-star military general retiring and reenlisting as a second lieutenant. Clinton eventually named Mueller the US attorney in San Francisco, the office where he’d worked as a young attorney in the 1970s.

THE 10TH ANNIVERSARY of the bombing came and went without any justice. Then, in April 1999, prolonged international negotiations led to Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi turning over the two suspects; the international economic sanctions imposed on Libya in the wake of the bombing were taking a toll on his country, and the leader wanted to put the incident behind him.

The final negotiated agreement said that the two men would be tried by a Scottish court, under Scottish law, in The Hague in the Netherlands. Distinct from the international court there, the three-judge Scottish court would ensure that the men faced justice under the laws of the country where their accused crime had been committed.

Allowing the Scots to move forward meant some concessions by the US. The big one was taking the death penalty, prohibited in Scotland, off the table. Mueller badly wanted the death penalty. Mueller, like many prosecutors and law enforcement officials, is a strong proponent of capital punishment, but he believes it should be reserved for only egregious crimes. “It has to be especially heinous, and you have to be 100 percent sure he’s guilty,” he says. This case met that criteria. “There’s never closure. If there can’t be closure, there should be justice—both for the victims as well as the society at large,” he says.

An old US military facility, Kamp Van Zeist, was converted to an elaborate jail and courtroom in The Hague, and the Dutch formally surrendered the two Libyans to Scottish police. The trial began in May 2000. For nine months, the court heard testimony from around the world. In what many observers saw as a political verdict, Al Megrahi was found guilty and Fhimah was found not guilty.

With barely 24 hours notice, Marquise and victim family members raced from the United States to be in the courtroom to hear the verdict. The morning of the verdict in 2001, Mueller was just days into his tenure as acting deputy US attorney general—filling in for the start of the George W. Bush administration in the department’s No. 2 role as attorney general John Ashcroft got himself situated.

That day, Mueller awoke early and joined with victims’ families and other officials in Washington, who watched the verdict announcement via a satellite hookup. To him, it was a chance for some closure—but the investigation would go on. As he told the media, “The United States remains vigilant in its pursuit to bring to justice any other individuals who may have been involved in the conspiracy to bring down Pan Am Flight 103.”

The Scotbom case would leave a deep imprint on Mueller; one of his first actions as FBI director was to recruit Kathryn Turman, who had served as the liaison to the Pan Am 103 victim families during the trial, to head the FBI’s Victim Services Division, helping to elevate the role and responsibility of the FBI in dealing with crime victims.

JUST MONTHS AFTER that 20th anniversary ceremony with Mueller at Arlington National Cemetery, in the summer of 2009, Scotland released a terminally ill Megrahi from prison after a lengthy appeals process, and sent him back to Libya. The decision was made, the Scottish minister of justice reported, on “compassionate grounds.” Few involved on the US side believed the terrorist deserved compassion. Megrahi was greeted as a hero on the tarmac in Libya—rose petals, cheering crowds. The US consensus remained that he should rot in prison.

The idea that Megrahi could walk out of prison on “compassionate” ground made a mockery of everything that Mueller had dedicated his life to fighting and doing. Amid a series of tepid official condemnations—President Obama labeled it “highly objectionable”—Mueller fired off a letter to Scottish minister Kenny MacAskill that stood out for its raw pain, anger, and deep sorrow.

“Over the years I have been a prosecutor, and recently as the Director of the FBI, I have made it a practice not to comment on the actions of other prosecutors, since only the prosecutor handling the case has all the facts and the law before him in reaching the appropriate decision,” Mueller began. “Your decision to release Megrahi causes me to abandon that practice in this case. I do so because I am familiar with the facts, and the law, having been the Assistant Attorney General in charge of the investigation and indictment of Megrahi in 1991. And I do so because I am outraged at your decision, blithely defended on the grounds of ‘compassion.’”

That nine months after the 20th anniversary of the bombing, the only person behind bars for the bombing would walk back onto Libyan soil a free man and be greeted with rose petals left Mueller seething.

“Your action in releasing Megrahi is as inexplicable as it is detrimental to the cause of justice. Indeed your action makes a mockery of the rule of law. Your action gives comfort to terrorists around the world,” Mueller wrote. “You could not have spent much time with the families, certainly not as much time as others involved in the investigation and prosecution. You could not have visited the small wooden warehouse where the personal items of those who perished were gathered for identification—the single sneaker belonging to a teenager; the Syracuse sweatshirt never again to be worn by a college student returning home for the holidays; the toys in a suitcase of a businessman looking forward to spending Christmas with his wife and children.”

For Mueller, walking the fields of Lockerbie had been walking on hallowed ground. The Scottish decision pained him especially deeply, because of the mission and dedication he and his Scottish counterparts had shared 20 years before. “If all civilized nations join together to apply the rules of law to international terrorists, certainly we will be successful in ridding the world of the scourge of terrorism,” he had written in a perhaps too hopeful private note to the Scottish Lord Advocate in 1990.

Some 20 years later, in an era when counterterrorism would be a massive, multibillion dollar industry and a buzzword for politicians everywhere, Mueller—betrayed—concluded his letter with a decidedly un-Mueller-like plea, shouted plaintively and hopelessly across the Atlantic: “Where, I ask, is the justice?”

#USA #Libye #impérialisme #terrorisme #histoire #CIA #idéologie #propagande

Innocence Project New Orleans (IPNO).
▻http://www.ip-no.org/about-us

http://www.ip-no.org/sites/default/files/tmp/interro.jpg

Innocence Project New Orleans (IPNO) has grown to be the second largest free-standing (not a law school clinic) innocence project in the country.

IPNO is a nonprofit law office with full time staff attorneys working cases from start to finish, supported by investigators, paralegals and a constellation of volunteer assistance – primarily outside attorneys working pro bono as co-counsel and law students who assist with case review and investigation – at no cost to our clients.

IPNO has a national reputation for winning exonerations; both in cases where DNA can prove innocence, and in more difficult cases where DNA does not exist or has been destroyed. The latter type of cases require hundreds of hours of traditional investigation to gather the evidence needed to exonerate an innocent prisoner.

Since 2001, IPNO has won the freedom or exoneration of 30 wrongfully convicted prisoners who served a total of over 656 years in Louisiana and Mississippi’s prisons between them (These numbers continue to grow – check out our list of exonerees for the most recent information). We also provide intensive support and guidance to each of our clients upon their release.

We simultaneously use our clients’ cases to ask for changes in laws and policies that cause indigent prisoners to be wrongly convicted. IPNO believes in preventing wrongful convictions by increasing openness and accountability in the criminal justice system. This approach makes the system fairer for everyone who encounters it. And, in the states with the nation’s highest rates of incarceration, an exceptionally high proportion of the people are impacted by the criminal justice system.

NYPD Refuses to Disclose Information About Its Face Recognition Program, So Privacy Researchers Are Suing
▻https://theintercept.com/2017/05/02/nypd-refuses-to-disclose-information-about-its-face-recognition-progra

Researchers at Georgetown University law school filed a Freedom of Information lawsuit against the New York City Police Department today for the agency’s refusal to disclose documents about its longstanding use of face recognition technology. The NYPD’s face recognition system, which has operated in the department’s Real Time Crime Center since at least 2011, allows officers to identify a suspect by searching against databases of stored facial photos. Records pertaining to the NYPD’s program (...)

#NYPD #immatriculation #criminalité #biométrie #facial #automobilistes #surveillance (...)

##criminalité ##vidéo-surveillance

The North isn’t better than the South: The real history of modern racism and segregation above the Mason-Dixon line - Salon.com
▻http://www.salon.com/2014/12/14/the_north_isnt_better_than_the_south_the_real_history_of_modern_racism_and_se

http://media.salon.com/2014/12/all_eyes_are_upon_us.jpg

For Edward Brooke, the North pulsed with promise. Brooke first set foot in New England during World War Two, when his army regiment trained in Massachusetts. He was a native of Washington, D.C., and Washington was a Jim Crow city. When the war ended, Brooke moved to Boston and enrolled in law school. He voted for the first time in his life. And he did much more. Brooke was elected the state’s attorney general in 1962; four years later, he won election to the United States Senate. Brooke achieved all of this in a state that was 97 percent white. What constituted political reality in Massachusetts—an African American man winning one million white votes—was the stuff of hallucinations below the Mason-Dixon line.

#états-unis #racisme

The pro-Palestinian Jewish Activists on U.S. College Campuses - Source Haaretz.com
▻http://www.haaretz.com/.premium-1.709425
Supporting the Palestinian cause, as they see it, is not a betrayal, but rather an affirmation, of their Jewish values.
Judy Maltz Mar 17, 2016 6:40 PM

As pro- and anti-Israel groups battle it out on college campuses across America, much attention has focused on the successful efforts of Palestinian rights organization to recruit other groups to their cause – among them blacks, Latinos, LGBT and union activists. Less notice has been given to the preponderance of Jews among their ranks.

A recent tour of college campuses across California – a hotbed of anti-Israel activity – shows that Jewish students have come to assume key roles in the Palestinian solidarity movement.

Many are founding members or serve on the boards of their local Students for Justice in Palestine chapters. Others have been instrumental in pushing through motions in student government recommending that their universities divest from American companies that “profit from the Israeli occupation.”

Yet others have been lending support to their Palestinian allies on campus through local student chapters of Jewish Voices for Peace, an organization that supports boycott, divestment and sanctions as well as the Palestinian right of return (an idea considered anathema by much of the pro-Zionist left). In fact, JVP and SJP often organize campus activities together.

Some of these Jewish students come from families with roots in Israel and bring in-depth knowledge of the conflict to their activism. Others have never stepped foot in the country. Some have found their way into the anti-Zionist left following an initial flirtation with J Street U, a progressive Zionist organization that opposes the occupation.

For quite a few, Israel’s last two wars in Gaza, in which thousands of Palestinian civilians were killed, were the trigger for their radicalization. On the whole, these activists are relatively non-committal when it comes to advocating for a particular solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but on one point they all agree: Supporting the Palestinian cause, as they see it, is not a betrayal, but rather an affirmation of their Jewish values.

Who are these Jewish activists who have taken up arms in the pro-Palestinian struggle on United States college campuses? Here are some of their stories, as told to Haaretz:

Eitan Peled
A UCLA senior studying economics and public affairs

Eitan Peled, who grew up in San Diego, is the scion of a prominent leftist family in Israel. His late grandfather Matti Peled, a general during the Six-Day War, served in the Knesset and was one of the founding members of the Progressive List for Peace, a Jewish-Arab political party that was among the first to advocate for dialogue with the Palestine Liberation Organization. His father, Miko Peled, is also an outspoken peace activist.

The younger Peled serves today as a member of the SJP board at University of California, Los Angeles, where he is also active in JVP. Often on his childhood trips to Israel, he recounts, he would travel with family members to visit their Palestinian friends in the West Bank.

“The imbalance was striking to me,” he says. “There were no swimming pools or parks there like there were in Tel Aviv, and my Palestinian friends had never even been to a beach because they weren’t allowed to go. That is what fueled my activism.”

Asked if he had ever felt shunned on campus by fellow Jews because of his particular form of activism, Peled responds: “I’m not sure. But in any event, I’m proud of my activism.”

Sarah and Elizabeth Schmitt
A UCLA junior majoring in history, Sarah Schmitt, like Peled, is active in both SJP and JVP. Now her older sister is showing similar inclinations

Growing up in a relatively unaffiliated Jewish family in conservative Orange County, Sarah Schmitt has never visited Israel. She first developed a keen interest in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict when she was barely a teen, during Operation Cast Lead, Israel’s 22-day offensive in Gaza that began in December 2008. “I just couldn’t understand the disproportionate nature of the killing, and that captivated me,” she says.

As a student of history later on in life, Schmitt says, she began examining the conflict through the lens of Jewish history and became even further entrenched in her views. “It gave me a sense of disillusionment with the entity that presents itself as the Jewish state,” she says.

Schmitt is not the only one in her family to feel betrayed by Israel. Her older sister Elizabeth, a history major at UC Santa Barbara, has shown similar inclinations of late. “I recently attended my first meeting of SJP here on campus,” she reports, “and although I wouldn’t call myself an activist, I’m definitely interested in getting more involved. I think the fact that Sarah has been so active has influenced me, but I’ve also been doing a lot of reading on my own about the conflict.”

Asked how their parents have responded, she says: “It’s made them question their beliefs as well, to be honest. Definitely my mom – my dad, maybe not so much.”

Melanie Malinas
A doctoral student in biophysics at Stanford

Melanie Malinas grew up in a Reform family in Ventura and took off a year before beginning her graduate studies to teach Hebrew school in Reno, Nevada. Never having traveled to Israel, her first exposure to the country came through a friend and fellow undergraduate at Oberlin College, who was active in a Zionist youth movement.

“He got me interested, which prompted me to do my own research, and I started drawing my own conclusions,” she recounts. She had her first epiphany, she says, after reading an essay critical of Israel by writer and author Peter Beinart (today a Haaretz columnist). “It was like ‘wow,’” she says, “and it really sparked my interest.”

As a first step in her activism, she joined J Street U, but was soon disillusioned. “It felt like it wasn’t in line with what I was feeling,” she says. So in 2012, she decided to attend the annual SJP conference.

“I was blown away,” she recalls, “not only by their commitment to the Palestinian issue, but also to other forms of social justice.” As a core member of the SJP leadership team at Stanford, she helped push through a motion on divestment that was passed last year.

Asked what sort of solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict she supports, Malinas says: “I wouldn’t say I’m in favor of a one-state or two-state solution, but I do support the right of return for Palestinians, and although I consider myself an anti-Zionist, I don’t think Jews should be expelled from Israel.”

Michaela Ruth ben Izzy
A Stanford sophomore and SJP activist on campus

Michaela Ruth ben Izzy grew up in what she describes as a “culturally Jewish” home in Berkeley where her parents were active in the Reconstructionist movement.

Although her grandparents live in Israel, and she has visited the country several times, “Izzy,” as she is known, says she was not well educated on the conflict until she began attending university. “There were a lot of things I simply didn’t know,” she says.

As she began educating herself and forming her own opinions, J Street U seemed like it might be a good fit for her. “I wanted to get involved, and it felt like a good place,” she recounts.

That was until last summer when during a trip to Israel to visit her grandparents, she decided to take a few weeks and travel around the West Bank. “Being able to see things from the other side really shifted my worldview,” she says. “When I got back, the first thing I did was join SJP.”

“I see this as a very Jewish thing,” she notes. “Wrestling with the status quo has always been a Jewish value, and I think it’s in my Judaism to question these things.”

Kelsey Waxman
A Berkeley senior studying history and Arabic literature
Kelsey Waxman was raised by social activist parents in urban Chicago where “great emphasis was put on applying Jewish values to daily life.”

“Growing up in a very diverse neighborhood taught me not only the importance of diversity, but also to approach people with respect, wherever they’re from,” she says.

Waxman learned about the other side of the conflict through her Palestinian friends in public school, and years later, when she spent two months on a study abroad program in Jordan, where she lived with a local family of Palestinian refugees. Initially, says Waxman, she thought J Street might be a good outlet for her activist tendencies, but after attending one of the organization’s conferences, found herself disappointed.

After a summer spent volunteering at the Aida refugee camp outside Bethlehem, she says she realized where she belonged. “Members of my Jewish community back home had connected me to folks at JVP, but there was no JVP chapter here at Berkeley at the time,” she recalls. “So in September 2015, together with another student here, I founded the chapter.”

Contrary to what might be assumed, not all the members of the Berkeley JVP chapter are Jewish. “We also have Palestinian, Muslim, Christian and Hindu members,” says Waxman.

Why did she choose JVP over SJP, which already has an active chapter at Berkeley? “For me, it was important to speak about my experiences as a Jewish person because so much of what goes on in Palestine is justified by politicians who have the same religious identity as me,” she says.

Tallie Ben Daniel
A doctoral student at UC Davis

Tallie Ben Daniel was born and raised in Los Angeles, the daughter of a Jewish-Iraqi mother and an Israeli father. Today, she serves as the academic advisory council coordinator at JVP.

“I grew up with a lot of knowledge of Israel, having visited many times and having a lot of family there,” she says, “and I’ve always known that it’s a very complicated place.”

It was during her undergraduate years at UC Santa Cruz, recalls Ben Daniel, that she made two important discoveries. “I had always thought that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was a conflict between two equals, but I suddenly understand that the two sides were not equal because one side was an occupier,” she relays. “The other thing I discovered is that there were many American Jews who did not want to have this conversation.”

Because this was not the sort of conversation that could be had in a predominantly Palestinian organization like SJP, she and some like-minded friends at the time set up their own group called “Confused Jews.”

“That lasted about six months,” she recounts, “but it allowed me to realize just how different our views were.” Only when she eventually joined JVP, recalls Ben Daniel, did she finally feel at home. “I realized that I hadn’t had a Jewish community until then, and it felt great. I especially loved the fact that it had such a big tent.”

Elly Oltersdorf
A history major at UC Davis

The daughter of a Jewish-Australian mother and a non-Jewish German father, Elly Oltersdorf grew up in a very Zionist home in San Diego. When asked if reports of widespread anti-Semitism on her campus are true, the UC Davis junior responds: “The only time I felt uncomfortable as a Jew on this campus was when I came out as pro-BDS. In fact, today, some people even question my Jewishness.”

For the record, her initiation into social activism began elsewhere. “When I first started university, I became involved in the movement against raising tuition and then in Black Lives Matter,” she relays. It was the 2014 war in Gaza that sparked her interest in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. “That was a turning point for me,” she says. “I felt that something was severely wrong that needed to be addressed.”

The president of the local chapter of JVP, Oltersdorf says her parents, and especially her mother, find it hard to accept her views. “For my mother, Israel is something so emotional that she has difficulty thinking rationally about it,” she says.

Liz Jackson
A graduate of Berkeley law school

The only Jewish attorney at Palestine Legal, a non-profit that defends Palestinian rights activists, Liz Jackson is a graduate of Berkeley law school. Her dubious claim to fame – which goes a long way toward explaining where she is today – is having participated in the first ever Birthright trip to Israel.

“I didn’t know much about Israeli history at the time, but this was so obviously a propaganda trip,” she says. “It was all about partying and getting free things, and it seemed to me that their main message was to find a Jewish man to marry. I was a serious kid, and that really disgusted me.”

A prominent member of JVP, Jackson, through her employer, also represents student activists in SJP when they have a brush with the law. In the past year alone, she says, her organization has responded to 240 incidents, mainly involving false accusations of anti-Semitism and support for terrorism.

Jackson, a 37-year-old mother of two, grew up in the Northeast, where she attended Brown University as an undergraduate. Before starting law school, she became involved in economic social justice work in Boston, where she says that “for the first time in my life, I felt that I had a Jewish community.”

Operation Cast Lead began just as she was beginning law school and had become active in immigrant rights and other economic justice issues. “I became horrified and riveted and couldn’t look away,” she says.

Not long thereafter, she joined a fact-finding trip to Israel and the West Bank for Jewish American peace activists. When she returned to Berkeley, she became involved in the divestment campaign at Berkeley that kicked off the BDS campus wars.

Trying to explain what drew her to full-time professional involvement with the Palestinian cause, Jackson says: “I think that many people like me feel a connection because of our Jewish background. We identify with refugee rights and the underdog because such an important part of our Jewishness is overcoming oppression. That may sound cheesy, but it’s really been real for me.”

David McCleary
A doctoral candidate in molecular and cell biology at Berkeley

David McCleary is a leader of the campus chapter of SJP, where he says about one-third of the core membership is Jewish. The son of a Jewish mother and an Irish-Catholic atheist father, McCleary, who grew up in Orange County, was raised Jewish and “nominally Zionist,” as he describes it, but never visited Israel.

A long-time union activist, he says it was Operation Cast Lead that “opened my eyes” to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and “what it meant to have a Jewish state.”

“It made me realize something was wrong, and it made me question the Zionist narrative that the Jews needed their own homeland,” he says.

No, he says, the Holocaust did not justify the need for a Jewish state because “the only thing that saved the Jewish people during the Holocaust was the world getting together and saying this is wrong – and since then a system of international law has been set in place to ensure it doesn’t happen again.”

But it took the 2014 Gaza war to turn him into a hard-core pro-Palestinian activist. “Those images of the destruction at Shejaiya [a neighborhood in Gaza particularly hard hit during the 2014 war], I asked myself if anything is worth that.”

Asked if it is true that pro-Israel students on campus are meant to feel unwelcome in social justice organizations, he responds: “It’s totally true. You’re either for justice or against justice.”

Witch-hunt Against Left Wing Activist Is the Prologue to a Stasi State - One day, when things get out of control, some will be sorry that they collaborated or stood by, but by then it will be too late.

Gideon Levy Jan 13, 2016

▻http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-1.697329

The treatment of the detained “left-wing activist” is the prologue to a Stasi state. The ongoing events surrounding the anti-occupation organizations is a witch-hunt. There is no other way to describe the madness of the campaigns Israel is waging other than in these harsh terms.
They are not exaggerations – prologue to a Stasi state and witch-hunt. The media is fanning the flames. The politicians are inciting, the authorities rejoice, most Israelis yawn and everyone is satisfied. A coalition of wall-to-wall satisfied people – the right, the center, the government, the security apparatus, the press and most citizens. It is a coalition that is foreign to democracy.
One day, when things get out of control, some of these groups will be sorry that they collaborated or stood by, but by then it will be too late. The fire will consume them, too. The facts that the Israel Bar Association did not announce a strike, journalist associations did not protest and law school faculty heads did not sign a petition proves how great the rift is.

The false arrest of Khalida Jarrar: Israeli ’justice’ put to shame - Opinion - - Haaretz Daily Newspaper | Israel News
By Gideon Levy | Jun. 1, 2015
▻http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/1.659008

The charge sheet against the Palestinian legislator - in jail now for two months - ought to be studied in every law school: This is how you slap together false accusations and fabricate an indictment.

Here’s a case after which nobody will seriously be able to make any of the following five claims anymore: one, that Israel is a state of law; two, that the regime in its occupied territories isn’t a military dictatorship; three, that Israel has no political prisoners; four, that the military court system in the territories has any kind of connection, however weak, to law and justice; and five, in light of all of the above – that Israel is a democracy.

Does that sound overblown? Sometimes, one case suffices to prove a point.

Khalida Jarrar, a member of the Palestinian parliament, has been under arrest for two months already, yet virtually no one has uttered a peep. At first, Israel said it would deport her to Jericho for six months, but Jarrar refused to recognize the legitimacy of the one deporting her. The Israel Defense Forces folded.

Then she was put under administrative detention, as punishment for her refusal to be deported. But the IDF was frightened by the wave of international protests over its detention without trial of a legislator. So it decided to put her on trial.

The indictment, comprised of no fewer than 12 counts, ought to be studied in every law school: This is how you slap together false accusations and fabricate an indictment. This is how the system that dares to call itself a “legal system,” with “judges” and “prosecutors,” “verdicts” and “hearings,” actually behaves. Everyone plays along with this ridiculous costume party and takes their senseless roles seriously. And this is the result.

Jarrar, a veteran political activist who has no criminal history even according to the occupation authorities, who was elected in democratic elections and who fights for the rights of women and the release of prisoners, is accused of a plethora of crimes for which the words “grotesque,” “parody” or “farce” would be far too kind. Of what is she not accused? The fact that she opposed the occupation, visited a released prisoner and called for the release of the leader of her movement (the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine); that she participated in a book fair and even “asked about the welfare of the activists and the success of the books at the fair”; that she gave interviews, speeches and lectures; that she participated in marches; and that maybe – it’s doubtful even according to the indictment – she once incited to the kidnapping of soldiers in order to bring about the release of Palestinian prisoners.

Twelve counts of shame for the authors of this indictment – one of the most ridiculous legal documents ever written here, even by the military legal system. A system where the judge salutes the prosecutor, who outranks him militarily, and both are skullcap-wearing Orthodox Jews, perhaps even settlers – purely by chance, of course; it would never influence their worldview, never affect their conduct. A legal system that doesn’t even bother to translate the judge’s words for the defendant, and in which the judge delays his decision to free her for 72 hours, which somehow turns into another week (!) of detention. But who’s counting?

So Jarrar passed this weekend, too, in prison. After even the military judge recognized the hollowness of this indictment and ordered her released on bail, the prosecutor appealed. The appellate court accepted his appeal and ordered her kept in prison until the end of the trial. The court knows why it overturned the decision of the trial judge, Maj. Haim Balilty: The IDF had announced that if the court ordered her freed, she would be put under administrative detention. The rule of law.

A feminist parliamentarian, a brave, determined and patriotic lawmaker, is being kept under false arrest – and it’s as if nothing had happened. A handful of Knesset members from the true left took the trouble to visit her and speak out on her behalf, but aside from that, there has been complete silence and apathy. The Knesset speaker didn’t raise an outcry; the Supreme Court president didn’t utter a word; the head of the Israel Bar Association kept mum. So did women’s organizations and most of the media.

One day, they will (perhaps) be asked: Where were you when Jarrar was rotting in jail? What did you do then? Did you understand that by your shameful silence, you contributed to turning Israel into a state of political prisoners – today Jarrar, and tomorrow yourselves?

The ’Caliphate Cubs’ of IS - Al-Monitor: the Pulse of the Middle East
▻http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2015/06/iraq-isis-children-recruits-army-qaeda-execution.html#

Samir Abdul Aziz (a pseudonym) is a former lawyer who lost his job following IS’ closure of many of the law schools in Mosul. In a phone interview with Al-Monitor, Abdul Aziz said it was difficult for him to determine the exact number of children fighting under the IS banner. However, based on information he gathered from people close to the group, he said that IS has been training child soldiers in special camps in Mosul.

“IS uses certain names to label [children’s] camps, which gives the impression that they are some sort of private religious schools. The organization also calls the children fighters ’The Caliphate Cubs.’ Children undergo three different levels of training in these schools. The first is religious training, whereby children are taught IS jihadi ideology and approach. Children are brainwashed into becoming hateful and ready to commit suicide. The second level is practical, as children receive harsh physical training, and are taught to use weapons. The third level is psychological: Children are taken to public squares to participate in slaughters, or are placed at the forefront of the Hisbah [religious police] sessions, or in the mosques’ sermons so as to promote their leadership skills and their sense of superiority,” Abdul Aziz said.

Sous réserve de recoupement... Malheureusement, pas impossible

#enfants_soldats #irak #isil

Controversy Swirls Around NYU Law Professor Involved in Obama’s Drone Program
▻http://www.newsweek.com/controversy-swirls-around-nyu-law-professor-involved-obamas-drone-program-

While working for the Obama administration, Koh was the most public legal defender of the president’s drone strike program. Last month, a petition was circulated at NYU Law—one of the top law schools in the country—that called Koh’s teaching of international human rights law for the 2014-1015 academic year “unacceptable.”

TIMELINE — SUMMER 2010 : DLA Piper Which Housed CaliforniaALL Partnered with CaliforniaALL’s Freada Klein Kapor’s Level Playing Field Institute to Provide Internships for Minority Undergraduates in DLA Piper’s San Francisco (TLR Note: Video Dated 2009)

Throughout the summer, we again partnered with the Level Playing Field’s IDEAL Scholars program and the Jackie Robinson Foundation Scholars program to provide summer internships for minority undergraduates in our San Francisco Office.

The Level Playing Field Institute’s IDEAL Scholars program is a six-week internship for low-income, under-represented students of color attending the University of California-Berkeley who are interested in pursuing law school. The Jackie Robinson Foundation (JRF) provides four-year college scholarships to disadvantaged students of color to ensure their success in college and develop their leadership potential. DLA Piper’s close relationship with the JRF, including our providing office space and resources to JRF’s West Coast operations in Los Angeles, came about through Los Angeles Managing Partner Michael Meyer, who is on the JRF board and is a longtime supporter of its scholarship program.

During their internship with us, the students shadow DLA Piper lawyers and staff; at the culmination of their internship, they deliver a presentation on the functions and synergies of the departments with which they worked. The goal of the internship is to give the students some perspective of what it is like to work in a large law firm and to develop an appreciation for all jobs performed. Hear from past IDEAL scholars in a YouTube presentation provided by the Level Playing Field Institute.

Sources:

►http://www.dlapiper.com/files/upload/DLA_Piper_Diversity_and_Inclusion_News_J...

AND:

►http://www.dlapiperdiversity.com/community

AND:

►https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dy-Qts35c3E

US drones « terrorize » communities : Report
►http://english.al-akhbar.com/content/us-drones-terrorize-communities-study

The US government’s drone program in Pakistan “terrorizes” local communities, kills large numbers of civilians and drives anti-American fervor in the country, a new study by the law schools of Stanford and New York University finds.

The study, titled “Living Under #Drones,” finds that Pakistanis living in affected areas are afraid to attend public gatherings such as weddings and funerals as ground operators that guide the unmanned aircraft frequently mistake them as groups of al-Qaeda-linked fighters.

“Their presence terrorizes men, women, and children, giving rise to anxiety and psychological trauma among civilian communities,” the study reads. “Those living under drones have to face the constant worry that a deadly strike may be fired at any moment, and the knowledge that they are powerless to protect themselves.”

Une description minutieuse, sous forme graphique, des étapes à franchir pour la conquête spatiale.
►http://blog.makezine.com/2012/09/13/the-rockwell-international-integrated-space-plan

I first encountered this amazing infographic hanging on a professor’s office wall when I was visiting law schools back in 1999. [...] All I really knew about the poster was that it had been created in the 80s by analysts at Rockwell International and that it was called the “Integrated Space Plan.”

A noter la réponse de Ron Jones, auteur du document
►http://blog.makezine.com/2012/09/13/the-rockwell-international-integrated-space-plan/#comment-720128

NASA’s leadership has allowed it to become politicized and it no longer pushes boundaries that the private sector cannot. Why? NASA and Congress have failed to define a common vision that defines a next step and why. This is precisely why I created this document, to help head off this kind of predicament.

#espace #science #makezine

Nobel geht die Welt zugrunde

http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7198/7040877463_0401e47313_z.jpg

Louis Vuitton threatens law school over parody poster ►http://boingboing.net/2012/03/07/louis-vuitton-threatens-law-sc.html

http://boingboing.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/LVidiots.jpg

The poster, titled “Fashion Law”, takes the distinctive LV monogram and replaces its iconography with copyright and trademark symbols. The symposium takes place March 20 in Philadelphia.

In a reply to Pantalony, the University’s general counsel denied that the poster infringed LV’s trademarks, describing the laws that establish the public right to parody—especially for noncommercial and educational purposes. He also invited Pantalony to attend the symposium so that he may learn more about intellectual property.

The Leslie Brodie Report Mulls Filing Amicus Curiae Media Brief in Support of Plaintiff Abigail Fisher in Matter of Fisher v. University of Texas seeking to declare affirmative action programs unconstitutional

Law dean Erwin Chemerinsky of the University of California at Irvine calls the case “potentially momentous.” He counts four likely votes to overturn the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Grutter v. Bollinger, which upheld a law school admissions policy that used race as just one factor in the admissions decision. The outcome will probably depend on Justice Anthony M. Kennedy.

The case is Fisher v. University of Texas. Justice Elena Kagan has recused herself from the case, the New York Times reports.

Please see @:

►http://lesliebrodie.posterous.com/the-leslie-brodie-report-mulls-filing-amicus