War on Terror

Meanwhile - Banks Financing Mexico Gangs Admitted in Wells Fargo Deal - Bloomberg....

Crossposted - Barclays Bank Forfeits $298 Million for Aiding Rogue Nations

18 August 2010

Court filings: http://cryptome.org/0002/barclays/usa-v-barclays.htm

Barclays Bank Forfeits $298 Million for Aiding Rogue Nations

http://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/2010/August/10-crm-933.html

Department of Justice

Office of Public Affairs

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Wednesday, August 18, 2010

Barclays Bank PLC Agrees to Forfeit $298 Million in Connection with Violations of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act and the Trading with the Enemy Act

WASHINGTON – Barclays Bank PLC, a United Kingdom corporation headquartered in London, has agreed to forfeit $298 million to the United States and to the New York County District Attorney’s Office in connection with violations of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) and the Trading with the Enemy Act (TWEA), announced Assistant Attorney General Lanny A. Breuer of the Criminal Division and District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance Jr., of the New York County District Attorney’s Office. The violations relate to transactions Barclays illegally conducted on behalf of customers from Cuba, Iran, Sudan and other countries sanctioned in programs administered by the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC).

A criminal information was filed Aug. 16, 2010, in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia charging Barclays with one count of violating the IEEPA and one count of violating the TWEA. Barclays waived indictment, agreed to the filing of the information, and has accepted and acknowledged responsibility for its criminal conduct. Barclays agreed to forfeit the funds as part of the deferred prosecution agreements reached with the Department of Justice and the New York County District Attorney’s Office. The deferred prosecution agreement was approved today by U.S. District Court Judge Emmet G. Sullivan.

"Banks like Barclays will not be permitted to disregard sanctions put in place by the U.S. government," said Assistant Attorney General Lanny A. Breuer of the Criminal Division. "Not just once, but numerous times over more than a decade, Barclays stripped vital information out of payment messages that would have alerted U.S. financial institutions about the true origins of the funds.  This serious conduct has now resulted in a serious sanction – forfeiture of $298 million, a public admission of its illegal acts, and the implementation of stringent compliance measures. As I’ve said repeatedly, when corporations self-disclose their criminal wrongdoing to us, as Barclays did, they will not get a pass, but we will take their disclosure, cooperation and remedial efforts into consideration."

"Criminal activity of the type we found at Barclays does more than deceive our financial institutions, it threatens the security of our country," said District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance Jr. "The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office has been a leader in these investigations, and I am committed to continuing our work with federal law enforcement agencies in this arena."

"Barclays implemented practices designed to evade U.S. sanctions for the benefit of sanctioned countries and persons," said OFAC Director Adam J. Szubin. "The substantial economic benefit to sanctioned parties and the systemic nature of the apparent violations could have resulted in a much more onerous OFAC fine had Barclays not voluntarily self-disclosed and had it not cooperated with OFAC throughout the investigation. This is the first settlement of this magnitude where OFAC determined that all of the apparent violations were voluntarily self-disclosed by the bank."

Under IEEPA and TWEA, it is a crime to willfully violate, or attempt to violate, any regulation issued under the act, including those related to Cuba, Iran, Libya, Sudan and Burma. The IEEPA and TWEA regulations are administered by OFAC.

According to court documents, from as early as the mid-1990s until September 2006, Barclays knowingly and willfully moved or permitted to be moved hundreds of millions of dollars through the U.S. financial system on behalf of banks from Cuba, Iran, Libya, Sudan and Burma, and persons listed as parties or jurisdictions sanctioned by OFAC in violation of U.S. economic sanctions.

According to court documents, Barclays followed instructions, principally from banks in Cuba, Iran, Libya, Sudan and Burma, not to mention their names in U.S. dollar payment messages sent to Barclays’ branch in New York and to other financial institutions located in the United States. Barclays routed U.S. dollar payments through an internal Barclays account to hide the payments’ connection to OFAC-sanctioned entities and amended and reformatted the U.S dollar payment messages to remove information identifying the sanctioned entities. Barclays also deliberately used a less transparent method of payment messages, known as cover payments, as another way of hiding the sanctioned entities identifying information.

There is something creepy and un-American about such clandestine and underhanded behavior. To those of us who have lived under a totalitarian regime, there is an eerie feeling of déjà vu. This case, if any, deserves the comprehensive, mature and diverse consideration that an en banc panel can provide. We are taking a giant leap into the unknown, and the consequences for ourselves and our children may be dire and irreversible. Some day, soon, we may wake up and find we're living in Oceania.
--Kozinski Chief LOLcat of the 9th Circuit

Via Chief Judge of 9th Circuit: “1984 here at last,” especially for poor. | Dailycensored.com -

So frequently these authoritarians schemes get one greenlight after another. This dissent nails down a wide variety of problems, from GPS spying to the distinct pattern of only appointing rich people with rich friends to the judiciary. This is a really nice dissent from Chief Judge Kozinski, who is regarded apparently as a bomb-throwing libertarian.

I'll post it in full, because we gotta pay some respect when one of these cats actually earns his paycheck.

******

VIA Laws, Life, and Legal Matters - Court Cases and Legal Information at Leagle.com - All Federal and State Appeals Court Cases in One Search

See also: Judges Divided Over Growing GPS Surveillance - NYTimes.com

U.S. v. PINEDA-MORENO

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, Plaintiff-Appellee,
v.
JUAN PINEDA-MORENO, Defendant-Appellant.

No. 08-30385.

United States Court of Appeals, Ninth Circuit.

Filed August 12, 2010.

Before: Diarmuid F. O'Scannlain and N. Randy Smith, Circuit Judges, and Charles R. Wolle, Senior District Judge.[1 ]

Order; Dissent by Chief Judge Kozinski, Dissent by Judge Reinhardt.

The petition for rehearing en banc is DENIED.

ORDER

Judges O'Scannlain and N.R. Smith have voted to deny the petition for rehearing en banc, and Judge Wolle has so recommended.

The full court was advised of the petition for rehearing en banc. A judge requested a vote on whether to rehear the matter en banc, and the matter failed to receive a majority of the votes of the nonrecused active judges in favor of en banc consideration. Fed. R. App. P. 35.

Chief Judge KOZINSKI, with whom Judges REINHARDT, WARDLAW, PAEZ and BERZON join, dissenting from the denial of rehearing en banc:

Having previously decimated the protections the Fourth Amendment accords to the home itself, United States v.Lemus, 596 F.3d 512 (9th Cir. 2010) (Kozinski, C.J., dissenting from the denial of rehearing en banc); United Statesv. Black, 482 F.3d 1044 (9th Cir. 2007) (Kozinski, J., dissenting from the denial of rehearing en banc), our court now proceeds to dismantle the zone of privacy we enjoy in the home's curtilage and in public. The needs of law enforcement, to which my colleagues seem inclined to refuse nothing, are quickly making personal privacy a distant memory. 1984 may have come a bit later than predicted, but it's here at last.

The facts are disturbingly simple: Police snuck onto Pineda-Moreno's property in the dead of night and attached a GPS tracking device to the underside of his car. The device continuously recorded the car's location, allowing police to monitor all of Pineda-Moreno's movements without the need for visual surveillance. The panel holds that none of this implicates the Fourth Amendment, even though the government concedes that the car was in the curtilage of Pineda-Moreno's home at the time the police attached the tracking device. The panel twice errs in very significant and dangerous ways.

1. The opinion assumes that Pineda-Moreno's driveway was part of his home's curtilage, yet concludes that Pineda-Moreno had no reasonable expectation of privacy there. Curtilage is a quaint word most people are not familiar with; even among judges and lawyers, the word is seldom well understood. Yet, it stands for a very important concept because it rounds out the constitutional protections accorded an individual when he is at home.

Curtilage comes to us by way of Middle English and traces its roots to the Old French courtillage, roughly meaning court or little yard. In modern times it has come to mean those portions of a homeowner's property so closely associated with the home as to be considered part of it. The walkway leading from the street to the house is probably part of the curtilage, and the stairs from the walkway to the porch almost certainly are, as is the porch where grandma sits and rocks most afternoons and watches strangers pass by. The attached garage on the side of the house is part of the curtilage, and so is the detached shed where dad keeps his shop equipment and mom her gardening tools—so long as it's not too far from the house itself. The front lawn is part of the curtilage, and the driveway and the backyard—if it's not too big, and is properly separated from the open fields beyond the house.

Whether some portion of property—the porch, the stairs, the shed, the yard, the chicken coop—is part of the curtilage is sometimes a disputed question. But once it is determined that something is part of the curtilage, it's entitled to precisely the same Fourth Amendment protections as the home itself. How do we know? Because the Supreme Court has said so repeatedly.

In Oliver v. United States, the Court said as follows:

[O]nly the curtilage . . . warrants the Fourth Amendment protections that attach to the home. At common law, the curtilage is the area to which extends the intimate activity associated with the "sanctity of a man's home and the privacies of life," and therefore has been considered part of home itself for Fourth Amendment purposes. Thus, courts have extended Fourth Amendment protection to the curtilage.

466 U.S. 170, 180 (1984) (quoting Boyd v. United States, 116 U.S. 616, 630 (1886)) (emphasis added). Three years later, the Court reiterated the same view in United States v. Dunn, 480 U.S. 294, 300 (1987):

[In Oliver] we recognized that the Fourth Amendment protects the curtilage of a house and that the extent of the curtilage is determined by factors that bear upon whether an individual reasonably may expect that the area in question should be treated as the home itself.

(Emphasis added). See also Dow Chemical Co. v. United States, 476 U.S. 227, 231 (1986) (citing Oliver, 466 U.S. at 170). There's no disputing that the Court considers the curtilage to stand on the same footing as the home itself for purposes of the Fourth Amendment.

While it can be unclear whether a particular portion of the homeowner's property is part of the curtilage, there's no doubt here because the government concedes that Pineda-Moreno's driveway is a part of his curtilage, and the panel expressly assumes that it is. United States v. Pineda-Moreno, 591 F.3d 1212, 1214-15 (9th Cir. 2010). Having made that assumption, Oliver and Dunn require the panel to "treat[ ] [it] as the home itself." Dunn, 480 U.S. at 300. Instead, the panel holds that Pineda-Moreno was required to separately establish a reasonable expectation of privacy in the curtilage. That— according to Oliver and Dunn—is like requiring the homeowner to establish a reasonable expectation of privacy in his bedroom. We are often reminded that we must follow Supreme Court precedent, see, e.g., Winn v. Ariz. Christian Sch. Tuition Org., 586 F.3d 649, 658-59 (9th Cir. 2009) (O'Scannlain, J., dissenting from denial of rehearing en banc), but the panel here forgets this advice.

The panel does cite California v. Ciraolo, 476 U.S. 207 (1986), but that case undermines its position. Ciraolo held that a homeowner has no reasonable expectation of visual privacy in his property as to activities that might be seen from a low-flying airplane. The activity there in question— cultivation of marijuana—took place in the homeowner's yard, so the Court could have limited its discussion to the curtilage. Instead, Ciraolo quoted a passage from Katz v.United States, 389 US. 347, 361 (1967), to the effect that "a man's home is, for most purposes, a place where he expects privacy, but objects, activities, or statements that he exposes to the `plain view' of outsiders are not `protected' because no intention to keep them to himself has been exhibited." Ciraolo, 476 U.S. at 215 (quoting Katz,389 U.S. at 361). This passage applies equally to a person's yard as his porch and his bedroom window: If what you do in your home is visible to the public, you have no reasonable expectation that it will remain private. Ciraolo citesOliver and follows its analysis by treating the curtilage and the home as exactly the same for Fourth Amendment purposes.

The panel's rationale for concluding that Pineda-Moreno had no reasonable expectation of privacy is even more worrisome than its disregard of Supreme Court precedent: According to the panel, Pineda-Moreno's driveway was open to the public in that strangers wishing to reach the door of his trailer "to deliver the newspaper or to visit someone would have to go through the driveway to get to the house." Pineda-Moreno, 591 F.3d at 1215. But there are many parts of a person's property that are accessible to strangers for limited purposes: the mailman is entitled to open the gate and deposit mail in the front door slot; the gas man may come into the yard, go into the basement or look under the house to read the meter; the gardener goes all over the property, climbs trees, opens sheds, turns on the sprinkler and taps into the electrical outlets; the pool man, the cable guy, the telephone repair man, the garbage collector, the newspaper delivery boy (we should be so lucky) come onto the property to deliver their wares, perform maintenance or make repairs. This doesn't mean that we invite neighbors to use the pool, strangers to camp out on the lawn or police to snoop in the garage. See United States v. Hedrick, 922 F.2d 396, 400, 402 (7th Cir. 1991) (Cudahy, J., dissenting).

The panel authorizes police to do not only what invited strangers could, but also uninvited children—in this case crawl under the car to retrieve a ball and tinker with the undercarriage. But there's no limit to what neighborhood kids will do, given half a chance: They'll jump the fence, crawl under the porch, pick fruit from the trees, set fire to the cat and micturate on the azaleas. To say that the police may do on your property what urchins might do spells the end of Fourth Amendment protections for most people's curtilage.

The very rich will still be able to protect their privacy with the aid of electric gates, tall fences, security booths, remote cameras, motion sensors and roving patrols, but the vast majority of the 60 million people living in the Ninth Circuit will see their privacy materially diminished by the panel's ruling. Open driveways, unenclosed porches, basement doors left unlocked, back doors left ajar, yard gates left unlatched, garage doors that don't quite close, ladders propped up under an open window will all be considered invitations for police to sneak in on the theory that a neighborhood child might, in which case, the homeowner "would have no grounds to complain." Id.

There's been much talk about diversity on the bench, but there's one kind of diversity that doesn't exist: No truly poor people are appointed as federal judges, or as state judges for that matter. Judges, regardless of race, ethnicity or sex, are selected from the class of people who don't live in trailers or urban ghettos. The everyday problems of people who live in poverty are not close to our hearts and minds because that's not how we and our friends live. Yet poor people are entitled to privacy, even if they can't afford all the gadgets of the wealthy for ensuring it. Whatever else one may say about Pineda-Moreno, it's perfectly clear that he did not expect— and certainly did not consent—to have strangers prowl his property in the middle of the night and attach electronic tracking devices to the underside of his car. No one does.

When you glide your BMW into your underground garage or behind an electric gate, you don't need to worry that somebody might attach a tracking device to it while you sleep. But the Constitution doesn't prefer the rich over the poor; the man who parks his car next to his trailer is entitled to the same privacy and peace of mind as the man whose urban fortress is guarded by the Bel Air Patrol. The panel's breezy opinion is troubling on a number of grounds, not least among them its unselfconscious cultural elitism.

2. After concluding that entering onto Pineda-Moreno's property and attaching a tracking device to his car required no warrant, probable cause, founded suspicion or by-your-leave from the homeowner, the panel holds that downloading the data from the GPS device, which gave police the precise locus of all of Pineda-Moreno's movements, also was not a search, and so police can do it to anybody, anytime they feel like it. Contra United Statesv. Maynard, No. 08-3030, slip op. at 19 (D.C. Cir. Aug. 6, 2010). Our panel relies on United States v. Knotts, 460 U.S. 276 (1983), a case from the early 1980s, which involved very different technology.

The Knotts Court refers to the device used there as a "beeper" and describes it as "a radio transmitter, usually battery operated, which emits periodic signals that can be picked up by a radio receiver." Id. at 277. The beeper helped police follow a vehicle by emitting a signal that got stronger the closer the police were to it. The Court considered the beeper to be an aid to following a vehicle through traffic: "The governmental surveillance conducted by means of the beeper in this case amounted principally to the following of an automobile on public streets and highways." Id. at 281. Individuals traveling on streets and highways can be seen by the public, so they have no reasonable expectation that they won't be followed. The beeper helped the police follow the suspect more effectively—the way binoculars enhance the ability to see what is otherwise visible. But the beeper could perform no tracking on its own, nor could it record its location. If no one was close enough to pick up the signal, it was lost forever.

The electronic tracking devices used by the police in this case have little in common with the primitive devices inKnotts. One of the devices here used GPS satellites to pinpoint the car's location on a continuing basis—much like the electronic maps that are now popular in cars. The other type of device was, essentially, a cell phone that tracked the car's movements by its proximity to particular cell towers.

Beepers could help police keep vehicles in view when following them, or find them when they lost sight of them, but they still required at least one officer—and usually many more—to follow the suspect. The modern devices used in Pineda-Moreno's case can record the car's movements without human intervention—quietly, invisibly, with uncanny precision. A small law enforcement team can deploy a dozen, a hundred, a thousand such devices and keep track of their various movements by computer, with far less effort than was previously needed to follow a single vehicle. The devices create a permanent electronic record that can be compared, contrasted and coordinated to deduce all manner of private information about individuals. By holding that this kind of surveillance doesn't impair an individual's reasonable expectation of privacy, the panel hands the government the power to track the movements of every one of us, every day of our lives.

The Supreme Court has recognized that advances in "police technology [can] erode the privacy guaranteed by the Fourth Amendment." Kyllo v. United States, 533 U.S. 27, 34 (2001). To guard against this, courts "must take the long view, from the original meaning of the Fourth Amendment forward." Id. at 40. Kyllo followed a line of cases going back to United States v. Karo, 468 U.S. 705 (1984), Katz, 389 U.S. at 353, and Silverman v. United States,365 U.S. 505, 512 (1961), which stemmed the erosion of personal privacy wrought by technological advances.

In Kyllo, the Court held that use of a thermal imager to detect the heat emanating from defendant's home was a search for purposes of the Fourth Amendment because the then-new technology enabled police to detect what was going on inside the home—activities the homeowner was entitled to consider private. Any other conclusion, the Court noted, "would leave the homeowner at the mercy of advancing technology—including imaging technology that could discern all human activity in the home." Kyllo, 533 U.S. at 35-36 (citing Karo, 468 U.S. at 705). "While the technology used in the present case was relatively crude," the Court continued, "the rule we adopt must take account of more sophisticated systems that are already in use or in development." Id. at 36. In determining whether the tracking devices used in PinedaMoreno's case violate the Fourth Amendment's guarantee of personal privacy, we may not shut our eyes to the fact that they are just advance ripples to a tidal wave of technological assaults on our privacy.

If you have a cell phone in your pocket, then the government can watch you. Michael Isikoff, The Snitch in Your Pocket, Newsweek, Mar. 1, 2010, available at http:// www.newsweek.com/id/233916. At the government's request, the phone company will send out a signal to any cell phone connected to its network, and give the police its location. Last year, law enforcement agents pinged users of just one service provider—Sprint—over eight million times. SeeChristopher Soghoian, 8 Million Reasons for Real Surveillance Oversight, Slight Paranoia (Dec. 1, 2009) http://paranoia/dubfire. net/2009/12/8-million-reasons-for-real-surveillance.html. The volume of requests grew so large that the 110-member electronic surveillance team couldn't keep up, so Sprint automated the process by developing a web interface that gives agents direct access to users' location data. Id. Other cell phone service providers are not as forthcoming about this practice, so we can only guess how many millions of their customers get pinged by the police every year. See Justin Scheck, Stalkers Exploit Cellphone GPS, Wall St. J., Aug. 5, 2010, at A1, A14 (identifying AT&T and Verizon as providing "law-enforcement[ ] easy access to such data").

Use LoJack or OnStar? Someone's watching you too. E.g., OnStar Stolen Vehicle Assistance, http://www.onstar.com/ us_english/jsp/plans/sva.jsp (last visited July 17, 2010). And it's not just live tracking anymore. Private companies are starting to save location information to build databases that allow for hyper-targeted advertising. E.g., Andrew Heining, What's So Bad About the Google Street View Data Flap?, Christian Sci. Monitor, May 15, 2010, available at http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/2010/0515/What-s-sobad-about-the-Google-Street-View-data-flap. Companies are amassing huge, ready-made databases of where we've all been. If, as the panel holds, we have no privacy interest in where we go, then the government can mine these databases without a warrant, indeed without any suspicion whatsoever.

By tracking and recording the movements of millions of individuals the government can use computers to detect patterns and develop suspicions. It can also learn a great deal about us because where we go says much about who we are. Are Winston and Julia's cell phones together near a hotel a bit too often? Was Syme's OnStar near an STD clinic? Were Jones, Aaronson and Rutherford at that protest outside the White House? The FBI need no longer deploy agents to infiltrate groups it considers subversive; it can figure out where the groups hold meetings and ask the phone company for a list of cell phones near those locations.

The panel holds that the government can obtain this information without implicating the Fourth Amendment because an individual has no reasonable expectation of privacy in his movements through public spaces where he might be observed by an actual or hypothetical observer. But that's quite a leap from what the Supreme Court actually held inKnotts, which is that you have no expectation of privacy as against police who are conducting visual surveillance, albeit "augmenting the sensory faculties bestowed upon them at birth with such enhancements as science and technology afford[s] them." 460 U.S. at 282.

You can preserve your anonymity from prying eyes, even in public, by traveling at night, through heavy traffic, in crowds, by using a circuitous route, disguising your appearance, passing in and out of buildings and being careful not to be followed. But there's no hiding from the all-seeing network of GPS satellites that hover overhead, which never sleep, never blink, never get confused and never lose attention. Nor is there respite from the dense network of cell towers that honeycomb the inhabited United States. Acting together these two technologies alone can provide law enforcement with a swift, efficient, silent, invisible and cheap way of tracking the movements of virtually anyone and everyone they choose. See, e.g., GPS Mini Tracker with Cell Phone Assist Tracker, http://www.spyville.com/passive-gps.html (last visited July 17, 2010). Most targets won't know they need to disguise their movements or turn off their cell phones because they'll have no reason to suspect that Big Brother is watching them.

The Supreme Court in Knotts expressly left open whether "twenty-four hour surveillance of any citizen of this country" by means of "dragnet-type law enforcement practices" violates the Fourth Amendment's guarantee of personal privacy. 460 U.S. at 283-84. When requests for cell phone location information have become so numerous that the telephone company must develop a self-service website so that law enforcement agents can retrieve user data from the comfort of their desks, we can safely say that "such dragnet-type law enforcement practices" are already in use. This is precisely the wrong time for a court covering one-fifth of the country's population to say that the Fourth Amendment has no role to play in mediating the voracious appetites of law enforcement. But see Maynard, slip op. at 19.

* * *

I don't think that most people in the United States would agree with the panel that someone who leaves his car parked in his driveway outside the door of his home invites people to crawl under it and attach a device that will track the vehicle's every movement and transmit that information to total strangers. There is something creepy and un-American about such clandestine and underhanded behavior. To those of us who have lived under a totalitarian regime, there is an eerie feeling of déjà vu. This case, if any, deserves the comprehensive, mature and diverse consideration that an en banc panel can provide. We are taking a giant leap into the unknown, and the consequences for ourselves and our children may be dire and irreversible. Some day, soon, we may wake up and find we're living in Oceania.

REINHARDT, Circuit Judge, dissenting from the denial of rehearing en banc:

I concur in Chief Judge Kozinski's dissent.

I have served on this court for nearly three decades. I regret that over that time the courts have gradually but deliberately reduced the protections of the Fourth Amendment to the point at which it scarcely resembles the robust guarantor of our constitutional rights we knew when I joined the bench. See Fisher v. City of San Jose, 558 F.3d 1069, 1089 (9th Cir. 2009) (en banc) (Reinhardt, J., dissenting); United States v. Ankeny, 502 F.3d 829, 841 (9th Cir. 2007) (Reinhardt, J., dissenting); United States v. Crapser, 472 F.3d 1141, 1149 (9th Cir. 2007) (Reinhardt, J., dissenting); United States v. Gourde, 440 F.3d 1065, 1074 (9th Cir. 2006) (en banc) (Reinhardt, J., dissenting);United States v. Kincade, 379 F.3d 813, 842 (9th Cir. 2004) (en banc) (Reinhardt, J., dissenting); United States v. Hudson, 100 F.3d 1409, 1421 (9th Cir. 1996) (Reinhardt, J., dissenting); Acton v. Vernonia Sch. Dist. 47J, 66 F.3d 217, 218 (9th Cir. 1995) (Reinhardt, J., dissenting); United States v. Barona, 56 F.3d 1087, 1098 (9th Cir. 1995) (Reinhardt, J., dissenting); United States v. Kelley, 953 F.2d 562, 566 (9th Cir. 1992) (Reinhardt, J., dissenting);United States v. Alvarez, 899 F.2d 833, 840 (9th Cir. 1990) (Reinhardt, J., dissenting); United States v. Flores, 679 F.2d 173, 178 (9th Cir. 1982) (Reinhardt, J., dissenting).

These decisions have curtailed the "right of the people to be secure . . . against unreasonable searches and seizures" not only in our homes and surrounding curtilage, but also in our vehicles, computers, telephones, and bodies — all the way down to our bodily fluids and DNA.

Today's decision is but one more step down the gloomy path the current Judiciary has chosen to follow with regard to the liberties protected by the Fourth Amendment. Sadly, I predict that there will be many more such decisions to come.

I dissent.

Jesse Trentadue: …who’s testifying about Howe had reported that the plan to bomb the Murrah building four months in advance, had gone with Strassmeir and others to scout the target – the first thing the U.S. Attorney does when Graham stops testifying is ask the judge to seal the transcript, and the judge says why, and he says, "We don’t want it getting out and mucking up the McVeigh trial: the fact that here an ATF agent, an informant, had gone to Oklahoma City to scout the Murrah building to be bombed with people other than McVeigh four months in advance." And the judge granted the order, and he ordered the transcript sealed.

*******

Jesse Trentadue is an attorney whose brother got killed in prison, probably because the FBI thought he was the Oklahoma City Bombing's enigmatic John Doe #2. Trentadue has been seeking justice for years and has finally hit an unexpected CIA FOIA lawsuit wall in the cases.

The line is still more-or-less that McVeigh was in with a bunch of FBI / ATF informants -- making the whole thing a preventable false flag attack. Also discussed here is the role of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which may have done cutout informant operations for the FBI because they couldn't get into Elohim City as a specifically "religious" compound.

Also a white supremacist style Midwestern bank robbery ring that McVeigh apparently ran with had some undercover operatives. Roger Moore, a gun dealer and wealthy veteran of the aviation world, was "held up" by Terry Nichols apparently to provide the Kinestiks needed for the Murrah bombing.

Nichols claims McVeigh spilled the beans that one top FBI agent named Potts was controlling or handling McVeigh. The a Nichols deposition about the subject is in the file directory listed below.

Additionally the FBI has obviously tampered with the videocamera evidence and in fact the video expert from the OJ Simpson trial died of a "heart attack" after telling them the tapes were obviously erased! Between that, Trentadue's unlucky brother, and one of the bank robbers, the full spectrum of international and domestic espionage operations setting up Oklahoma City emerge.

Nichols claimed McVeigh knew Elohim City was "ATF City", i.e. obviously loaded with informants, but he wanted to go there and do it anyway with the various other agencies, almost as a kind of audience or support grid for a false flag attack in Oklahoma City -- perhaps McVeigh wanted to play it out and see if they would let him pull this off?

The new CIA angle is probably related to information about Andreas Strassmeir, the German national who was involved as an informant for possibly the German BND service as well as the FBI or ATF.

Additionally there is a good discussion of how the oh-so-wonderful Southern Poverty Law Center was running informant activities, probably operating as an FBI cutout, at Elohim City. Another element is how current US Attorney General Eric Holder was the direct lead DOJ goon for covering up Trentadue's murder.

Previously in 2007: New 1995 Oklahoma City bombing conspiracy video from BBC! GOP's Rohrabacher rebukes FBI for coverup?? | HongPong.com.

First a couple other things from Antiwar.com. Kudos to them for following this. The wall of secrecy goes right to the usual suspects.

Populism, Left and Right by Justin Raimondo -- Antiwar.com

At Least 50 Killed in Pakistan’s Weekend of Bombings -- News from Antiwar.com

Defense Spending Is Much Greater than You Think | The Beacon

*********

Key interview lays it out: They Are Lying to You About the Oklahoma City Bombing by Scott Horton -- Antiwar.com

Scott Horton interviews Jesse Trentadue, April 19, 2010

Interview conducted March 30, 2010. Listen to the interview. Scott’s collection of OKC audio clips here. Scott’s collection of Jesse Trentadue’s court files here.

For Antiwar.com and KAOS radio 95.9 in Austin, Texas, I’m Scott Horton. This is Antiwar Radio. And our first guest on the show today is Jesse Trentadue. He’s an attorney from Salt Lake City, Utah. Welcome to the show, Jesse, how’re you doing?

Jesse Trentadue: Thank you very much.

Scott Horton: I really appreciate you joining us here. All right, so, I guess I’ll give a short introduction to the story here, just to catch everybody up, and I’ll try to make the long story short if I can: Jesse’s brother, Kenneth Michael Trentadue, was tortured to death in federal custody in the summer of 1995. And it turns out the reason, the probable reason anyway that he was tortured to death in federal custody, was because it was a case of mistaken identity. They were trying to get him to admit that he was a guy named Richard Lee Guthrie, who was one of the John Does suspected in the Oklahoma City bombing. And Kenneth Trentadue, unfortunately, was just at the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong color hair, the wrong truck, the wrong dragon tattoo on his arm, and they were just convinced that he was Richard Guthrie, and he paid for it with his life. And a massive cover-up commenced, but they didn’t realize that they were messing with Jesse Trentadue, who happens to be a lawyer in Utah and knows how to work the system to, well, approach a remedy and justice. And so this is how Jesse’s story has become one with the story, the true story, of what happened behind the Oklahoma City bombing. And just in the last week Jesse has gotten refused by the court on some motions, some Freedom of Information Act suits that he had filed against the Central Intelligence Agency for any files that they had about the Oklahoma City bombing, and even though the files that he was suing for were denied, the judge’s decision on why he was denied was full of all kinds of extra interesting things itself. So, do I have that basically right, Jesse? Please correct me if I went off the story anywhere there, and then maybe please let’s get into what the judge’s decision actually said here.

Trentadue: Nope, I think you’re absolutely right. And one of the things your listeners should know is, I didn’t start out to solve the Oklahoma City bombing. I started out to find out who killed my brother, and as it happened, every lead I came across took me back to the bombing in Oklahoma City in April of 1995, including a message I received from Tim McVeigh shortly before he was executed. I mean they sent me a message that when he saw my brother’s picture and heard what happened to him, he said that I want you to know that essentially the FBI probably killed him because they thought he was John Doe 2, who was Richard Lee Guthrie.

[......]Horton: All right, well, so, what do we find out this week? What’s in these new documents? This judge told you, no, basically, your latest suit from Freedom of Information Act against the CIA has failed, correct?

Trentadue: It has, but, as you pointed out, [the judge] did a lot for me and he did a lot for the American people. He told us things that otherwise we would never have known. What happened is, I, in order to document the link between my brother’s murder and the bombing, and the connection to Guthrie, I filed a number of Freedom of Information Act suits. I sued the FBI. This time I sued the CIA. And it was sort of on a hunch, I said to the CIA I want all documents showing your involvement in the Oklahoma City bombing or prior knowledge of that attack. And they came back and gave me 37 blank pages, 12 documents all together, 37 blank pages, and they were stamped Secret, National Security. And they said, "Oh by the way, we have all these other documents that are so super secret we can’t even give you blank pages." So…

Trentadue: Well, I sued them and said I want those documents, and the judge, of course, they came in, and it’s the very first time anyone in my Freedom of Information suits has ever asserted national security and the exemption of producing. And that’s like, it’s a rock that you can’t get around, once the government throws up national security. And they did more than that. They said to release these documents would pose a grave threat to the security of the United States of America. And the judge’s hands are tied at that point. It’s like a shield that he can’t go beyond, behind. But what he did, and I think he did this intentionally, is he wrote his opinion to let me know and the public know that there was a foreign connection to the Oklahoma City bombing. And he goes through it and he discusses the CIA’s assistance in helping prosecute Tim McVeigh and Terry Nichols. And he talks about the contacts with foreign informants, foreign witnesses. He paints a very clear picture that there was foreign involvement, and of course there has to be because the CIA is a foreign intelligence agency. By law it cannot operate within the borders of the United States unless, unless there is a foreign element here.

......Horton: Well, now, do you have any real indication as to what he’s talking about, if this is perhaps, you know, has to do with Andreas Strassmeir or whether this is, you know, along the lines of Jayna Davis and the American Enterprise Institute and trying to pin it on Middle Easterners?

Trentadue: I think it, I think it was Strassmeir, a German national and a former Army officer and counterterrorist person from the Republic of Germany. That’s my opinion. Of course he doesn’t say who, but it’s my feeling that’s the person.

.......Trentadue: No, but I think it’s significant, what he’s done. I mean, in one of the documents is talking about trying to extradite an organized crime figure from another country, that’s part of the bombing prosecution. And these things are, this is happening after, after the FBI says "We’ve caught Tim McVeigh and Terry Nichols, they’re the ones who did it, end of story." So, long after they’re telling the American public that, the CIA is running down witnesses and suspects in foreign countries for the FBI and the Department of Justice. But, I think this was important for a number of reasons. It’s the first time it’s ever been documented, no one even suspected, that the CIA was involved in the Oklahoma City bombing. And, more than that, one of the things that came out is they actually had the Geospatial Intelligence Agency involved. Now I imagine very few if any of your listeners know what that is, and I certainly didn’t until the name came up in these CIA documents. And that’s the spy satellite program the CIA operates. So you have not only the CIA involved, you have the spy satellite folks involved.

Horton: Well, you know, I wonder, after all these releases, have you figured out who was running Strassmeir exactly? I mean, it seems like it would be kind of strange if the CIA was running him the whole time and then they go doing a big investigation about him after the fact, you know?

Trentadue: I think it was a joint operation between the FBI and the German government. You remember the people they targeted were the emerging neo-Nazi movement. It came to life in the United States. It was being exported back to Europe. The German government was petrified that this would take root there. And so I think it was a joint effort by the German government and the United States through the FBI to do this, infiltrate these groups. And I’ve come across a name that makes me believe that is so, because they refer to this operation as PatCon, the FBI did, P-A-T-C-O-N, which was an acronym for Patriot Conspiracy. And I think the objective was to infiltrate the militia movement, and they targeted this group, a potentially dangerous group in eastern Oklahoma who lived in a compound called Elohim City. Strassmeir worked his way into that compound as the explosives and weapons inspector, and I think he was an agent provocateur. I think he ginned those folks up to bomb the Murrah building.

Horton: Yeah, it does seem to be a question of – well and I don’t to get too far into speculation here because honestly after all these years, you know, my memory fails, and also I’m not so sure anymore about some of the things I used to think I was more sure about, but it certainly seems as though, you know, Strassmeir was not the only FBI agent or informant in on this and that there’s enough hard evidence to show, well for example, the last time we spoke we talked about how the ATF informant, Carol Howe, was reporting back on this group of, you know, terrorist plotters and even as admitted by her ATF handler under oath, she even went with them to case the building, and then the next day drove her ATF handler on the same route and said "That’s the building we cased," before the bombing ever even happened. And, so it sure is, it sure seems pretty clear to me that, you know, there was some kind of infiltration, as you said, going on there, but then I guess the question comes down to, doesn’t it, whether it was a sting that got out of control or whether this guy Strassmeir’s mission actually was to get a bombing done. I mean, after all, there was a bombing, killed 168 people. Somebody built that bomb.

Trentadue: Carol Howe reported that four months before the bomb went off. In one of the documents reported this to the ATF, she went with Strassmeir and others to scout the target. One of the documents that came out as a result of my suing the FBI was a teletype from FBI headquarters, then Director Louis Freeh, to his field office in Oklahoma City saying that two days before the bombing McVeigh had called Elohim City to speak with Strassmeir asking for more help to carry out the attack. I mean, they clearly knew, clearly knew in advance it was going to happen. Now this is something you struggle with and I struggle with, did it go south on them, was the plan to catch the people in the act, or did they really want it to happen. I – God I had to think it – as much as I hate the FBI, I hate to think it’s the latter. You have to look at what they get when there’s a terrorist attack. They get all new funding, they get the Patriot Act, they get all these other laws that take away our rights.

.......Horton: All right, now, for anybody who remembers back then who paid attention and tried to have an unbiased eye to what was going on, I think it was pretty apparent that the trials of McVeigh and Nichols both in Denver were ridiculous sham fake trials, the kind that you would expect to see in some Third World dictatorship or something. They did nothing but bring witness after witness to talk about how sad they were and then they did nothing but exclude anybody who could shed light on what actually happened there. And in fact, I have the clip here, I guess I won’t play it now, I might try to stick it on the end of the interview here, but there’s a clip from "60 Minutes" where one of McVeigh’s jurors says, "Well, you know, if he didn’t do it, I would expect for someone to come in and testify that, you know, he was with me that day or something, and since that didn’t happen, I had to go ahead and convict." In other words, the state did not prove their case at all, the national government, the U.S. Attorney’s office, did not prove their case beyond saying we’re really, really sure it was McVeigh. Now, I don’t doubt that it was McVeigh, or not very much, I guess I got a 1% doubt, but – maybe less than 1% – but certainly there is no doubt whatsoever that they refused to put on a real trial because if they put on a real trial all this stuff about the prior knowledge and Andreas Strassmeir and Carol Howe and all the rest of it would have come out. In fact, you know, if I’m going to go as far as compare it to a Third World dictatorship, let me go ahead and add the detail, they indicted Carol Howe for having a pipe in her garage and white supremacist literature consistent with her costume as undercover informant and charged her with conspiracy to bomb people so that she would be under indictment at the time of the McVeigh trial and unable to testify. And then as soon as the trial was over they dropped the charges against her, they didn’t even try to prosecute her. It was just a scheme to keep her off the stand, even though Stephen Jones, the lawyer, tried to subpoena her over and over again, obviously.

Trentadue: …who’s testifying about Howe had reported that the plan to bomb the Murrah building four months in advance, had gone with Strassmeir and others to scout the target – the first thing the U.S. Attorney does when Graham stops testifying is ask the judge to seal the transcript, and the judge says why, and he says, "We don’t want it getting out and mucking up the McVeigh trial: the fact that here an ATF agent, an informant, had gone to Oklahoma City to scout the Murrah building to be bombed with people other than McVeigh four months in advance." And the judge granted the order, and he ordered the transcript sealed.

.......Trentadue: And it gets more incredible, I mean, one of the things I have is I have affidavits from the people who knew how the surveillance system worked in the Murrah building including one from an Oklahoma City police officer who was on the scene immediately after the blast trying to find survivors and rescue them and they’re ordered out of the building and the FBI takes the cameras down. I mean…

Horton: Mmhmm. Well, and you know there were three different bomb scares after the bombing where they said "We found an undetonated bomb, everybody run." And I guess I used to just be convinced that that meant that they found an undetonated bomb, but maybe there was something else going on there. I guess JD Cash thought that there were not internal explosives but that the ATF, for example, had a tow missile up in their offices that they had to get rid of and maybe some other things. And I guess you’re saying it sounds like one of these bomb scares was about getting rid of the security cameras.

Trentadue: It was. They went in immediately and took the cameras down off the building. And why, within minutes of the blast, when people are searching frantically due to rubble trying to rescue the people and save lives, would the FBI order the rescuers out and then remove the cameras?

........Horton: All right, now, what do you have, and you know, I just, I shouldn’t make this personal, but I guess I kind of am making it personal. Every day I turn on TV and somebody from the Southern Poverty Law Center is saying that anyone who does not approve of whatever the administration is doing at any given time is basically a neo-Nazi, basically responsible for the Oklahoma City bombing. If you’re a member of the Tea Party movement, which I am certainly not and have not much in common with, but according to them, if you’re a member of the Tea Party movement, then, well, you’re basically John Doe No. 2. And, you know, it’s extra frustrating to me since John Doe 2 apparently was an undercover FBI informant and they get to go ahead and continue to, you know, beat any dissent against a Democratic [Party] controlled government over the head with this bombing. Um, but it’s always somebody from the Southern Poverty Law Center who is the guest, the expert guest, who gets to tell us how many hate groups there are in America at any given time and conflate basically anybody to the right of Rachel Maddow together with Timothy McVeigh. And so I’m kinda curious to know what evidence you have, Jesse, that the Southern Poverty Law Center was in any way involved with the neo-Nazi/cops who did the Oklahoma bombing.

Trentadue: Well it appears, and first of all, I agree with you, it’s a sad state in our country’s history where to voice an opinion means you’re attacked from one side or the other. It means you no longer discuss things as a nation or a people. That we’ve become so divided now that you’re either one side or the other or forced into one side or the other. But for the Southern Poverty Law Center, they had, and they’ve had – they had apparently informants, another level of informant, at Elohim City at the same time that Strassmeir and Carol Howe and the other government informants were there. These documents that I’ve had them produce, and not widely reported on, refer to the Southern Poverty Law Center reporting to the FBI the information it was receiving from its informants at Elohim City about the bombing.

Horton: Now do you know who those informants were?

Trentadue: I do not.

Horton: Are there any indications whether…

Trentadue: The names are blacked out. The FBI pleaded with the judge not to turn over any of the documents because they said they had guaranteed five or six people anonymity and confidentiality and it would expose them to risk of their life if their names were disclosed, and the judge said "Well, black out the names but turn the documents over." So I have documents talking about the informants, but the informants’ names are redacted or blacked out. By their own admission they’ve had five or six there that they had promised protection.

Horton: Hmm. But I guess, are there any other… because, you know, I remember JD Cash talking about this back in the day and I forget whether he said there was any other indication as to the identities of the informants that were working with Morris Dees.

Trentadue: I suspect that Strassmeir was reporting to the Southern Poverty Law Center too.

Horton: See that was something about this, right? – was Janet Reno’s order restricting, I think this is what JD Cash told me, that there was a guideline from the Justice Department that went down that said or that in some way restricted the authority of the FBI to infiltrate groups.

Trentadue: A religious compound. I talked to JD about that and he’s absolutely right. He believed that it was a cutout operation that the FBI was, that the Southern Poverty Law Center was a straw man being run by the FBI in this operation because the FBI could not, because it was a governmental entity, invade this religious compound. And Elohim City claimed to be a right-wing Christian fundamentalist compound.

Horton: Well but there’s all kinds of other evidence that any number of these guys were actually working for the FBI as either cops or like perhaps Strassmeir paid informants, people who’ve been, you know, threatened with prosecution and then turned state’s witness and, you know, should we go down the list here? I mean there’s quite a bit of FBI work going on at Elohim City. Was it all being outsourced through the SPLC?

Trentadue: I don’t know, but I think a large part may have been, at least from the documents that I’ve been given, I mean, or that the judge has ordered released. They were very active there. But I don’t think it was all run through them. The ATF for example had Carol Howe and probably others.

Its taking a while but I have a lot of footage from Michael Ruppert's visit to St Anthony Main for the screenings of Collapse last week...

Overall it was quite awesome, with new items of geopolitics and a lot of jokes.

Plus the lighting looks like the movie which is neat :)

Standby on that one, I think I will make several short clips on the various subjects (9-11, Wellstone, debt, get ready now, the Fed & banking, geopolitics & Iran etc.) Ruppert and St Anthony Main, Bluemark Films & Mn Film Arts were all gracious enough to let me throw this together @ the very last second!

Need moar time for viddys!

Article I Section 10 Clause 3....

No State shall, without the Consent of Congress, lay any Duty of Tonnage, keep Troops, or Ships of War in time of Peace, enter into any Agreement or Compact with another State, or with a foreign Power, or engage in War, unless actually invaded, or in such imminent Danger as will not admit of delay.

LOL ""The Governors' Council now has direct control. Fear will keep the people in line. The last remnants of the Republic have been swept away."

via freeper montag813

This is definitely not good news.

“The formation of the Council of Governors was required by the Fiscal Year 2008 National Defense Authorization Act which stated, “The President shall establish a bipartisan Council of Governors to advise the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of Homeland Security, and the White House Homeland Security Council on matters related to the National Guard and civil support missions.” (NDAA FY2008, Sec 1822)”

I heard about this sneeky Governors' Council prospect a while ago, and now it is here!! Have no doubt that it's the front -- indeed, a primary front -- for advancing NORTHCOM's agenda to militarize the 'battlespace' of the United States itself.

Recently a state government official told me in hushed tones about how the benign euphemism 'civil support' actually means essentially the backdoor to Posse Comitatus restrictions on domestic military activity. Search for 'civil support teams' and you'll get the idea.

Notice how this whole thing reeks of NORTHCOM and the Pentagon. Shades of Oliver North and Rex84 to be sure.

Via Cryptogon.com the observation that the 10 governors matches the 10 FEMA regions of Doom!: Obama Establishes Council of Governors Via Executive Order: “Synchronization and Integration of State and Federal Military Activities in the United States”. Plenty more on Cryptogon, don't miss it.

Moar commentariat: LiveLeak.com - Obama Decrees: a Federal Council of Governors, American Republic replaced by “Council of Governors”?, LA TIMES: Whereas said Barack Obama orders up a new Council of Governors to talk security stuff, and the Freeper thread on it. Some Freepers of course argue that this is an unconstitutional blurring of the state and federal levels. As one asks: "Because this sounds like the Feds trying to cloak their intended attempt to federalize the state militias and National Guards with the consensus of only 10 selected Governors?" Yah.

Also well noted by paulycy: "At the same time if they are creating parallel structures of command and control to the ones that already exist then at some point the feds can shut down the existing govt entities and put its own fully-controlled and extra-constitutional infrastructure in to full power...... We need to learn more about this and any other action to set up parallel control structures and state-nullifying measures."

Wicked fantasies like this one are rolling around. The RAND Corporation proposes a US militarized police force, why not?! More spooky stuff from a decade ago.

Very soon I will try to get the story out about what their plan is for Minnesota, that's a whole ball of wax itself. Can you say National Guard drug intelligence operatives in local police forces, running I2 identity intelligence softwares?

**********

THE WHITE HOUSE Office of the Press Secretary

For Immediate Release January 11, 2010

EXECUTIVE ORDER

ESTABLISHMENT OF THE COUNCIL OF GOVERNORS

By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America,including section 1822 of the National Defense Authorization Act of 2008 (Public Law 110-181), and in order to strengthen further the partnership between the Federal Government and State governments to protect our Nation and its people and property, it is hereby ordered as follows:

Section 1. Council of Governors.

(a) There is established a Council of Governors (Council).The Council shall consist of 10 State Governors appointed bythe President (Members), of whom no more than five shall be of the same political party. The term of service for each Member appointed to serve on the Council shall be 2 years, but a Member may be reappointed for additional terms.

(b) The President shall designate two Members, who shall not be members of the same political party, to serve asCo-Chairs of the Council.

Sec. 2. Functions. The Council shall meet at the call of the Secretary of Defense or the Co-Chairs of the Council to exchange views, information, or advice with the Secretary of Defense; the Secretary of Homeland Security; the Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism; the Assistant to the President for Intergovernmental Affairs and Public Engagement; the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Homeland Defense and Americas' Security Affairs; the Commander, United States Northern Command; the Chief, National Guard Bureau; the Commandant of the Coast Guard; and other appropriate officials of the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Defense, and appropriate officials of other executive departments or agencies as may be designated by the Secretary of Defense or the Secretary of Homeland Security. Such views, information, or advice shall concern:

(a) matters involving the National Guard of the variousStates;

(b) homeland defense;

(c) civil support;

(d) synchronization and integration of State and Federal military activities in the United States; and

(e) other matters of mutual interest pertaining to National Guard, homeland defense, and civil support activities.

Sec. 3. Administration.

(a) The Secretary of Defense shall designate an Executive Director to coordinate the work of the Council.

(b) Members shall serve without compensation for their work on the Council. However, Members shall be allowed travel expenses, including per diem in lieu of subsistence, as authorized by law.

(c) Upon the joint request of the Co-Chairs of the Council, the Secretary of Defense shall, to theextent permitted by law and subject to the availability of appropriations, provide the Council with administrative support,assignment or detail of personnel, and information as may benecessary for the performance of the Council's functions.

(d) The Council may establish subcommittees of the Council. These subcommittees shall consist exclusively of Members of the Council and any designated employees of a Memberwith authority to act on the Member's behalf, as appropriate toaid the Council in carrying out its functions under this order.

(e) The Council may establish a charter that is consistentwith the terms of this order to refine further its purpose, scope, and objectives and to allocate duties, as appropriate,among members.

Sec. 4. Definitions. As used in this order:

(a) the term "State" has the meaning provided inparagraph (15) of section 2 of the Homeland Security Act of 2002(6 U.S.C. 101(15)); and

(b) the term "Governor" has the meaning provided inparagraph (5) of section 102 of the Robert T. Stafford DisasterRelief and Emergency Assistance Act (42 U.S.C. 5122(5)).

(a) Nothing in this order shall be construed to impair orotherwise affect:

(1) the authority granted by law to adepartment, agency, or the head thereof; or

(2) functions of the Director of the Office of Management and Budget relating to budgetary,administrative, or legislative proposals.

(b) This order shall be implemented consistentwith applicable law and subject to the availability ofappropriations.

Sec. 5. General Provisions. more

(c) This order is not intended to, and does not, createany right or benefit, substantive or procedural, enforceable atlaw or in equity by any party against the United States, itsdepartments, agencies, or entities, its officers, employees, oragents, or any other person.

BARACK OBAMA

THE WHITE HOUSE,January 11, 2010. ###