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The influence of banana growers in Colombia pre-dates the ongoing civil war. In 1928, the Colombian government brutally shut down a strike by United Fruit Company banana pickers under threat from the U.S. government. Some estimates put the death toll from the military action as high as 2,000, including workers, women and children. United Fruit was once one of the most powerful corporations in the world, manipulating the governments and economies of multiple Latin American countries. Chiquita was a trademark of United Fruit until 1990, when the company renamed itself Chiquita Brands International in an effort to rehabilitate its image. (Chiquita was purchased by two Brazilian companies in 2015, and is now headquartered in Switzerland.)

“It should be noted under the peace agreement, at least the one that went down in October, Coca-Cola was one of the companies named [that will be] subjected to further investigation for paramilitary ties,” Kovalik said. Coca-Cola, or at least its Colombian bottlers, have also been linked to paramilitary groups and human rights abuses. The bottlers and the company’s Atlanta headquarters have faced multiple lawsuits over attacks on union organizers. A 2010 documentary, “The Coca-Cola Case,” focused on the soda giant’s role in turning Colombia into the “trade union murder capital of the world,” June Chua wrote in a review for Rabble.ca that year.

Colombia is rich with resources that foreign corporations are eager to exploit, particularly in the mining, agriculture, and biofuels industries. “Mining is probably the biggest threat now to indigenous people, Afro-Colombians and peasants, and will continue to be as the peace agreement goes forward,” Kovalik added. Justin Podur, an author and global political analyst, told MintPress that Colombian human rights activists frequently say that “displacement in Colombia is not a side effect of the war, it’s really the point of the war.” Whether by design or coincidence, decades of unrest created fertile ground for profit.

In one of the most shocking examples of fossil fuel companies supporting the death and displacement of Colombian people, Kovalik highlighted the “the Santo Domingo massacre, in which Occidental Petroleum were part of an operation to bomb the Santo Domingo community.”

In a 2005 article for Z Net on the massacre, Kovalik and Luis Galvis explained: “On December 13, 1998, in what has become one of the most notorious war crimes in Colombia, the hamlet of Santo Domingo was attacked by a U.S. cluster bomb from a Colombian Air Force helicopter. Seventeen civilians, including 7 children, were killed as a result of the bombing.” In 2002, the Los Angeles Times revealed that the bombing had actually been carried out at the behest of, and with the assistance of, the Houston-based oil company which had its headquarters in Los Angeles at the time. Times staff writer T. Christian Miller wrote: “Los Angeles-based Occidental Petroleum, which runs an oil complex 30 miles north of Santo Domingo, provided crucial assistance to the operation. It supplied, directly or through contractors, troop transportation, planning facilities and fuel to Colombian military aircraft, including the helicopter crew accused of dropping the bomb.”

And, earlier this year, Gilberto Torres, a Colombian union activist, sued BP in London. He alleges that in 2002, he was kidnapped and tortured for 42 days by paramilitaries who were following orders from the oil giant.

A comprehensive criminal investigation by the U.S. government would dissuade future government officials from ordering or using torture and abuse. Failure to conduct an independent criminal investigation not only flouts international law but it also undermines America’s ability to advocate for human rights abroad and compromises Americans’ faith in the rule of law at home. The ACLU and other human rights groups have until May 1st to submit “shadow reports” to the Human Rights Committee, which will subsequently assess and grade U.S. implementation of the key priority recommendations.  The Obama administration can still avoid a low grade by responding to domestic and international calls to appoint a special prosecutor to conduct a comprehensive criminal investigation of the tactics described in the Senate torture report, including all acts authorizing or ordering acts of torture and other abuses and provide redress to victims of torture.  

John Rizzo, who served as the CIA's acting general counsel during the black-site program and later wrote a memoir, "Company Man," said the agency has long fought against declassifying any information on the locations of the secret prisons overseas. "That was something we had fought for years and years," Rizzo told us. "Up to now one of the only remaining classified facts about the program was the names of countries where there were black sites." Rizzo said the concern about even referencing the locations of the black sites is that one could piece together the locations with other information that is likely to be in the final public report. One Republican Senate staffer familiar with the negotiations over the report said Feinstein's office relented on some concerns about redacting information that could identify countries hosting the black sites. "Do you scrub enough information to prevent that information from being released?" the staffer said. "It ended up as a half-step in-between, some of the stuff she wanted released and some of the information identifying the countries has been redacted."

There is also a risk that any information about foreign countries that aided the CIA programs, even using code names,  could be matched against public reporting that already exists to make them more identifiable. There have been news reports about cooperation by the governments of Poland,  Lithuania, Romania, Thailand and others. "Just because something is leaked doesn’t mean it’s still not secret," Rizzo said. "A national security secret is still a national security secret until the government says otherwise."

Originally there had been bipartisan support for the majority staff’s investigation, and the committee’s Republican staff was initially part of the investigation -- but it withdrew early in the process. Even after the Republican staff disowned the investigation, some Republican senators continued to support declassification, including John McCain and Lindsey Graham.

The release will not include internal CIA documents that the agency accused Feinstein’s staff of improperly removing from a CIA facility that had been set up for the investigators to work at. Feinstein said that her staff had removed the documents, including a review by Panetta, only after CIA officials tried to surreptitiously remove them from computers being used by the committee’s staff. “What was unique and interesting about the internal documents was not their classification level, but rather their analysis and acknowledgement of significant CIA wrongdoing,” Feinstein said on the Senate floor in July. “The interrogations and the conditions of confinement at the CIA detention sites were far different and far more harsh than the way the CIA had described them to us.”

Gilbert drew attention to the fact that the overflowing hospital did not have enough supplies to treat all of its patients, and censured the international community for doing nothing to assist them. Israel would not let in foreign doctors, and yet Palestinians were “dying waiting for surgery.” “This is a complete disaster,” he remarked, calling it “the worst man-made disaster” he could think of. “There are injuries you just don’t want to see in this world.” Operation Protective Edge In 2008 and 2009, Gilbert treated Palestinians who had been grievously wounded by Israel’s use of experimental and illegal chemical weapons, including white phosphorous, dense inert metal explosives (DIME) munitions, and flechette shells. In July 2014, in the midst of Israel’s most recent attack on Gaza, Gilbert spoke with Electronic Intifada, revealing that he saw indications of renewed use of DIME weapons and flechettes. While volunteering in Shifa hospital, Gaza’s principal medical facility, Gilbert penned an open letter, lamenting the unspeakable horrors the Israeli military was instigating.

Before Operation Protective Edge commenced in early July 2014, Gilbert toured medical and health facilities and individual homes in Gaza, researching for a United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) report on the dire state of the strip’s health sector. He wrote of “overstretched” health facilities, widespread physical and psychological trauma, “a deep financial crisis,” a lack of needed medical supplies, and a “severe energy crisis.” He also noted the “devastating results of the blockade imposed by the Government of Israel,” with rampant poverty, a 38.5% unemployment rate, food insecurity in at least 57% of households, and inadequate access to clean water. All of these already extreme ills were only exacerbated by the July-August Israeli assault on Gaza, an onslaught that left roughly 2,200 Palestinians dead, including over 1,500 civilians, more than 500 of whom were children. Gilbert is not the only one Israel has recently prevented from entering Gaza. In August, just after the end of its military assault, Israel refused to allow Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, the world’s leading human rights organizations, from entering the strip, impeding them from conducting war crimes investigations. The organizations had been requesting access for over a month, before Israel had even begun its ground invasion of Gaza, yet were continuously prevented from doing so, Israeli journalist Amira Hass reported in Haaretz, “using various bureaucratic excuses.”

Other aid workers and medical professionals have faced even worse consequences for volunteering to help Palestinians. In August, Israeli occupation forces killed a social worker. In the same month, as the Israeli military engaged in a campaign to target and openly murder Palestinian civilians who spoke Hebrew, Israeli forces assassinated volunteers working with the Palestine Red Crescent, a non-profit humanitarian organization, part of the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement. A common myth suggests that Israel ended its occupation of Gaza with its 2005 disengagement. The state’s ability to ban, and even kill, internationally recognized human rights organizations and doctors—not to mention food,construction equipment, and medical supplies—from entering Palestinian territory, however, demonstrates that Gaza is by no means autonomous. Israel’s siege of the strip is clearly a continuation of its 47-year-long illegal military occupation. As legal scholar Noura Erakat explains

Despite removing 8,000 settlers and the military infrastructure that protected their illegal presence, Israel maintained effective control of the Gaza Strip and thus remains the occupying power as defined by Article 47 of the Hague Regulations. To date, Israel maintains control of the territory’s air space, territorial waters, electromagnetic sphere, population registry and the movement of all goods and people. … Palestinians have yet to experience a day of self-governance. Israel immediately imposed a siege upon the Gaza Strip when Hamas won parliamentary elections in January 2006 and tightened it severely when Hamas routed Fatah in June 2007. The siege has created a “humanitarian catastrophe” in the Gaza Strip. Inhabitants will not be able to access clean water, electricity or tend to even the most urgent medical needs. The World Health Organization explains that the Gaza Strip will be unlivable by 2020. Not only did Israel not end its occupation, it has created a situation in which Palestinians cannot survive in the long-term.

In a late October discussion with the Daily Targum, Gilbert encouraged Americans to do what they can to speak out against Israel’s illegal occupation and blockade of the Palestinian territories, and to pressure their government to stop its indefatigable support for Israeli crimes. At present, the US provides Israel with over 3.1$ billion of military aid per year. In the past 52 years, over $100 billion US tax dollars have been given to the country in military aid alone. “You are the change-makers,” Gilbert told American readers. “The key to the change when it comes to the occupation of Palestine lies in the United States.” “Solidarity, not pity,” he said, is the solution.

The papers recovered from the dictatorship’s archives include secret correspondence from MI6, MI5 reports on Libyans living in the UK, a British intelligence assessment marked “UK/Libya Eyes Only – Secret” and official Libyan minutes of meetings between the two countries’ intelligence agencies.

An attempt by government lawyers to have that claim struck out was rejected by the high court in London on Thursday , with the judge, Mr Justice Irwin, ruling that the allegations “are of real potential public concern” and should be heard and dealt with by the courts.

First, they target a Muslim: not due to any evidence of intent or capability to engage in terrorism, but rather for the “radical” political views he expresses. In most cases, the Muslim targeted by the FBI is a very young (late teens, early 20s), adrift, unemployed loner who has shown no signs of mastering basic life functions, let alone carrying out a serious terror attack, and has no known involvement with actual terrorist groups. They then find another Muslim who is highly motivated to help disrupt a “terror plot”: either because they’re being paid substantial sums of money by the FBI or because (as appears to be the case here) they are charged with some unrelated crime and are desperate to please the FBI in exchange for leniency (or both). The FBI then gives the informant a detailed attack plan, and sometimes even the money and other instruments to carry it out, and the informant then shares all of that with the target. Typically, the informant also induces, lures, cajoles, and persuades the target to agree to carry out the FBI-designed plot. In some instances where the target refuses to go along, they have their informant offer huge cash inducements to the impoverished target. Once they finally get the target to agree, the FBI swoops in at the last minute, arrests the target, issues a press release praising themselves for disrupting a dangerous attack (which it conceived of, funded, and recruited the operatives for), and the DOJ and federal judges send their target to prison for years or even decades (where they are kept in special GITMO-like units). Subservient U.S. courts uphold the charges by applying such a broad and permissive interpretation of “entrapment” that it could almost never be successfully invoked. As AP noted last night, “defense arguments have repeatedly failed with judges, and the stings have led to many convictions.”

There are countless similar cases where the FBI triumphantly disrupts its own plots, causing people to be imprisoned as terrorists who would not and could not have acted on their own. Trevor Aaronson has comprehensively covered what amounts to the FBI’s own domestic terror network, and has reported that “nearly half [of all DOJ terrorism] prosecutions involved the use of informants, many of them incentivized by money (operatives can be paid as much as $100,000 per assignment) or the need to work off criminal or immigration violation.” He documents “49 [terrorism] defendants [who] participated in plots led by an agent provocateur—an FBI operative instigating terrorist action.” In 2012, Petra Bartosiewicz in The Nation reviewed the post-9/11 body of terrorism cases and concluded: Nearly every major post-9/11 terrorism-related prosecution has involved a sting operation, at the center of which is a government informant. In these cases, the informants — who work for money or are seeking leniency on criminal charges of their own — have crossed the line from merely observing potential criminal behavior to encouraging and assisting people to participate in plots that are largely scripted by the FBI itself. Under the FBI’s guiding hand, the informants provide the weapons, suggest the targets and even initiate the inflammatory political rhetoric that later elevates the charges to the level of terrorism.

"The whole purpose...was to evaluate whether the CIA agents were violating the law," Morison said. "The only reasonable interpretation of that analysis is that there is no such thing (as the common law of war)." On Monday this week, Morrison and the rest of Khadr’s legal counsel, filed a motion in Guantanamo’s appeals court asking that the conviction against their client be vacated.

Should Khadr’s attorneys succeed, then a number of cases pertaining to current or former Guantanamo detainees accused of war crimes could be called into question. According to Human Rights Watch, however, only six of the 149 detainees at Gitmo face any formal charges — fewer than the number of prisoners who have died while held there in military custody.

At a fundamental level, suspicious activity reporting, as well as the digital and physical infrastructure of networked computer servers and fusion centers built around it, depends on what the government defines as suspicious.  As it happens, this turns out to include innocuous, First Amendment-protected behavior. As a start, a little history: the Nationwide Suspicious Activity Reporting Initiative was established in 2008 as a way for federal agencies, law enforcement, and the public to report and share potential terrorism-related information. The federal government then developed a list of 16 behaviors that it considered “reasonably indicative of criminal activity associated with terrorism.” Nine of those 16 behaviors, as the government acknowledges, could have nothing to do with criminal activity and are constitutionally protected, including snapping photographs, taking notes, and “observation through binoculars.”

There are any number of problems with this approach, starting with its premise.  Predicting who exactly is a future threat before a person has done anything wrong is a perilous undertaking. That’s especially the case if the public is encouraged to report suspicions of neighbors, colleagues, and community members based on a “hair-on-the-back-of-your-neck” threshold. Nor is it any comfort that the FBI promises to protect the innocent by investigating “suspicious” people in secret. The civil liberties and privacy implications are, in fact, truly hair-raising, particularly when the Bureau engages in abusive and discriminatory sting operations and other rights violations.

A few months later, a scathing report from the Senate subcommittee on homeland security described similar intelligence problems in state-based fusion centers. It found that Department of Homeland Security (DHS) personnel assigned to the centers “forwarded ‘intelligence’ of uneven quality -- oftentimes shoddy, rarely timely, sometimes endangering citizens’ civil liberties and Privacy Act protections... and more often than not unrelated to terrorism.”

Law enforcement officials, including the Los Angeles Police Department’s top counterterrorism officer, have themselves exhibited skepticism about suspicious activity reporting (out of concern with the possibility of overloading the system). In 2012, George Washington University’s Homeland Security Policy Institute surveyed counterterrorism personnel working in fusion centers and in a report generally accepting of SARs noted that the program had “flooded fusion centers, law enforcement, and other security outfits with white noise,” complicating “the intelligence process” and distorting “resource allocation and deployment decisions.” In other words, it was wasting time and sending personnel off on wild goose chases.

Under federal regulations, the government can only collect and maintain criminal intelligence information on an individual if there is a “reasonable suspicion” that he or she is “involved in criminal conduct or activity and the information is relevant to that criminal conduct or activity.” The SAR program officially lowered that bar significantly, violating the federal government’s own guidelines for maintaining a “criminal intelligence system.” There’s good reason for, at a minimum, using a reasonable suspicion standard. Anything less and it’s garbage in, garbage out, meaning counterterrorism “intelligence” databases become anything but intelligent.

yet another burgeoning secret database that the federal government calls its “consolidated terrorism watchlist.” Inclusion in this database -- and on government blacklists that are generated from it -- can bring more severe repercussions than unwarranted law enforcement attention. It can devastate lives.

There is hope, however. In August, four years after the ACLU filed a lawsuit on behalf of 13 people on the no-fly list, a judge ruled that the government’s redress system is unconstitutional. In early October, the government notified Mashal and six others that they were no longer on the list. Six of the ACLU’s clients remain unable to fly, but at least the government now has to disclose just why they have been put in that category, so that they can contest their blacklisting. Soon, others should have the same opportunity.

As of August 2013, there were approximately 47,000 people, including 800 U.S. citizens and legal permanent residents like Mashal, on that secretive no-fly list, all branded as “known or suspected terrorists.” All were barred from flying to, from, or over the United States without ever being given a reason why. On 9/11, just 16 names had been on the predecessor “no transport” list. The resulting increase of 293,650% -- perhaps more since 2013 -- isn’t an accurate gauge of danger, especially given that names are added to the list based on vague, broad, and error-prone standards.

The No Fly List is only the best known of the government’s web of terrorism watchlists. Many more exist, derived from the same master list.  Currently, there are more than one million names in the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment, a database maintained by the National Counterterrorism Center. This classified source feeds the Terrorist Screening Database (TSDB), operated by the FBI’s Terrorist Screening Center. The TSDB is an unclassified but still secret list known as the “master watchlist.” containing what the government describes as “known or suspected terrorists,” or KSTs.

Nothing encapsulates the post-9/11, Alice-in-Wonderland inversion of American notions of due process more strikingly than this “blacklist first, innocence later... maybe” mindset. The Terrorist Screening Database is then used to fill other lists. In the context of aviation, this means the no-fly list, as well as the selectee and expanded selectee lists. Transportation security agents subject travelers on the latter two lists to extra screenings, which can include prolonged and invasive interrogation and searches of laptops, phones, and other electronic devices. Around the border, there’s the State Department’s Consular Lookout and Support System, which it uses to flag people it thinks shouldn’t get a visa, and the TECS System, which Customs and Border Protection uses to determine whether someone can enter the country.

According to documents recently leaked to the Intercept, as of August 2013 that master watchlist contained 680,000 people, including 5,000 U.S. citizens and legal permanent residents. The government can add people’s names to it according to a shaky “reasonable suspicion” standard. There is, however, growing evidence that what’s “reasonable” to the government may only remotely resemble what that word means in everyday usage. Information from a single source, even an uncorroborated Facebook post, can allow a government agent to watchlist an individual with virtually no outside scrutiny. Perhaps that’s why 40% of those on the master watchlist have “no recognized terrorist group affiliation,” according to the government’s own records.

This opens up the possibility of increased surveillance and tense encounters with the police, not to speak of outright harassment, for a large but undivulged number of people. When a police officer stops a person for a driving infraction, for instance, information about his or her KST status will pop up as soon a driver’s license is checked.  According to FBI documents, police officers who get a KST hit are warned to “approach with caution” and “ask probing questions.” When officers believe they’re about to go face to face with a terrorist, bad things can happen. It’s hardly a stretch of the imagination, particularly after a summer of police shootings of unarmed men, to suspect that an officer approaching a driver whom he believes to be a terrorist will be quicker to go for his gun. Meanwhile, the watchlisted person may never even know why his encounters with police have taken such a peculiar and menacing turn. According to the FBI's instructions, under no circumstances is a cop to tell a suspect that he or she is on a watchlist.

Inside the United States, no watchlist may be as consequential as the one that goes by the moniker of the Known or Appropriately Suspected Terrorist File. The names on this blacklist are shared with more than 17,000 state, local, and tribal police departments nationwide through the FBI’s National Crime Information Center (NCIC). Unlike any other information disseminated through the NCIC, the KST File reflects mere suspicion of involvement with criminal activity, so law enforcement personnel across the country are given access to a database of people who have secretly been labeled terrorism suspects with little or no actual evidence, based on virtually meaningless criteria.

And once someone is on this watchlist, good luck getting off it. According to the government’s watchlist rulebook, even a jury can’t help you. “An individual who is acquitted or against whom charges are dismissed for a crime related to terrorism,” it reads, “may nevertheless meet the reasonable standard and appropriately remain on, or be nominated to, the Terrorist Watchlist.” No matter the verdict, suspicion lasts forever.

The SARs program and the consolidated terrorism watchlist are just two domestic government databases of suspicion. Many more exist. Taken together, they should be seen as a new form of national ID for a growing group of people accused of no crime, who may have done nothing wrong, but are nevertheless secretly labeled by the government as suspicious or worse. Innocent until proven guilty has been replaced with suspicious until determined otherwise. Think of it as a new shadow system of national identification for a shadow government that is increasingly averse to operating in the light. It’s an ID its “owners” don’t carry around with them, yet it’s imposed on them whenever they interact with government agents or agencies. It can alter their lives in disastrous ways, often without their knowledge. And they could be you. If this sounds dystopian, that’s because it is.

Rebels and analysts say Assad’s forces are increasing their attacks to exploit what the regime sees as a window of opportunity opened by a campaign that Washington and its allies launched last month against the Islamic State, a heavily armed al-Qaeda offshoot that is also known as ISIS or ISIL.

The regime has stepped up aerial bombardment of the rebel-held suburbs of eastern Damascus, as well as in areas near the city of Idlib. Government helicopters have dropped some 45 barrel bombs in recent days in the countryside near Idlib to halt rebel movements near two military bases on a strategic road connecting Aleppo with Hama, to the south, said Abdullah Jabaan, a resident of Idlib and journalist for the Syria Live News Network, which supports the opposition.

Meanwhile, Assad’s military has largely avoided territory held by Islamic State militants, instead striking moderate rebel factions that could be slated to receive weapons and military training from the coalition, said Riad Kahwaji, chief executive of the Dubai-based Institute for Near East and Gulf Military Analysis. “If the regime manages to fully besiege Aleppo at this time, they would block and undermine the plans of the alliance to use the opposition, or at least present the opposition, as the ultimate ground force to deal with ISIS,” he said. A successful routing of those rebels could position the Assad regime as the only force in Syria capable of fighting the Islamic State, he said.