Axios: Thousands of migrant youth allegedly suffered sexual abuse in U.S. custody for years

High Times: San Francisco DA plans to expunge or reduce over 9,000 marijuana convictions

East Bay Times: California keeps a secret list of criminal cops, but says you can’t have it

The Week: Tulsi Gabbard warns talk of regime change in Venezuela undermines the Kim-Trump summit

DAMON LINKER: America is not responsible for Venezuela

More from the weird world of false flag hate crimes: Gay rights activist burned down own home, killing his five pets, in hate crime hoax

Actual hate crime caught on tape: UC Berkeley police seeking felony warrant for suspect in assault on conservative

Techdirt: Beware the rise of censorship under the guise of stopping fake news: UK regulators push for dangerous plan. Ed: Fake news, the kind that does real damage (i.e. starting a war, manufacturing consent for various legislative atrocities, etc.), is promulgated by the major news outlets, whose owners have a vested interest in what “news” is printed. Read independent news and opinion sites, watch only Jimmy Dore, and vote Tulsi Gabbard.

Forbes: Survey: Nearly half of people who use cannabidiol products stop taking traditional medicines

FEE: How government-guaranteed students loans killed the American dream for millions

JEFF TUCKER: Where did AOC get her sweet potatoes?:“It drives me crazy to see people so fully enjoying the benefits from private property, trade, technology, and capitalistic endeavor even as they blithely propose to truncate dramatically the very rights that bring them such material joy, without a thought as to how their ideology might dramatically affect the future of mass availability of wealth that these ideologues so casually take for granted.

To me, it’s like watching a person on IV denounce modern medicine — or a person using a smartphone to broadcast to the world an urgent message calling for an end to economic development.”

USA Today: The 20 companies profiting the most from war: “Maryland-based Lockheed Martin, the largest defense contractor in the world, is estimated to have had $44.9 billion in arms sales in 2017 through deals with governments all over the world. The company drew public scrutiny after a bomb it sold to Saudi Arabia was dropped on a school bus in Yemen, killing 40 boys and 11 adults. Lockheed’s revenue from the U.S. government alone is well more than the total annual budgets of the IRS and the Environmental Protection Agency, combined.”

NBC: “We did not sign up to develop weapons”: Microsoft employees protest $480 million Hololens military deal

Futurism: Legal marijuana could threaten the alcohol industry, according to new report

Washington Examiner: Bay of Pigs veteran serving America’s longest marijuana prison sentence may be headed to Cuban prison

Texas Monthly: Houston police chief says he’ll end no-knock warrants after botched raid that left middle-aged couple and their dogs dead

Activist Post: How the Jussie Smollett hoax reveals the scope of the surveillance state

FEE: “Restaurant recession” hits NYC following $15 minimum wage

Reason: Legal weed did more to stop drug smuggling than any wall

Tulsa World: Medical marijuana ‘Unity Bill’ clears Oklahoma House committee

Reason: Phony Houston drug warrant prompts FBI investigation and review of 1,400 cases :“Officer Gerald Goines, who was shot in the neck during the no-knock raid, obtained the warrant by claiming that he had sent a confidential informant into the house on January 27 to buy heroin from a man matching Tuttle’s description. The C.I. supposedly returned with “a quantity of brown powder substance,” subsequently identified as black-tar heroin, and reported that there many more bags of it in the house, along with a 9mm semi-automatic handgun. Police foundneither of those things, or any other evidence of drug dealing, when they searched the house the next day after they killed Nicholas and Tuttle during a shootout they started by breaking into the house and killing the couple’s dog with a shotgun.

After two informants named by Goines and every other C.I. known to work with him denied participating in the “controlled buy” he described, investigators concluded that Goines had invented the episode. Goines “lied in an affidavit,” Police Chief Art Acevedo said last Friday, and “more than likely…will be charged with a serious crime.” Under Texas law, lying in a search warrant affidavit is aggravated perjury, a third-degree felony punishable by two to 20 years in prison. Under federal law, willfully depriving someone of his constitutional rights “under color of any law” is punishable by a prison term up to life or by execution “if death results.””

Techdirt: Google fesses up to hidden microphone in Nest home security system

FINALLY: Supreme Court rules that Constitution limits police asset forfeiture

VIDEO: Conservative Berkeley student gets punched in face for protesting hate crime hoaxes

LEE CAMP: Everyone has fallen for the lies about Venezuela

The Nation: U.S. foreign policy is for sale

The irony of using Soviet-style tactics to investigate Russian “collusion”: How the Russia-gate investigation is Sovietizing American politics

Chron: Feds share watchlist with 1,400 private groups

PHILIP GIRALDI: The growing anti-Semitism scam

The New Republic: This is what the beginning of a real Israel debate looks like

The American Conservative: Who is policing the prosecutors?

Reason: Court rules against NYPD union: Body cam footage can be made public

Techdirt: Fatal Houston PD drug raid apparently predicated on drugs a cop had stashed in his car

City Journal: The frenzied search for racism

One who is stationed in an elementary school. For only the most recent example, take a gander at the story of the 11-year old arrested for refusing to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance.

He apparently had simply not stood for the pledge on a daily basis, with his teacher being perfectly fine with it, but February 4th was different in that his class had a substitute teacher, one who made such a fuss about the child’s refusal to stand that the school cop was brought in. The cop, of course, needlessly escalated the situation to the point that the child was arrested.

Here’s Jimmy Dore on the incident:

TULSI 2020: Rep. Tulsi Gabbard on warmongers in their ivory towers VIDEO

The American Conservative: Trump’s alarming abuse of executive power

Reason: Houston narc who lied to justify deadly raid had been previously accused of perjury

Consortium News: The FBI came close to staging a coup

Common Dreams: Despite ‘war crimes’ concerns in Yemen, Raytheon nabs $1.6 billion arms deal with UAE

JUSTIN RAIMONDO: The neocon revival

Jacobin: The tragic life of war criminal Elliott Abrams

TUCKER CARLSON: Why are these professional war peddlers still around?

PHILIP GIRALDI: Is Tulsi Gabbard for real? America is ready for a genuine peace candidate.

ERIC PETERS: Tasered 11 times over a turn signal

First World War Lord: Raytheon exec on sales to Saudi Arabia: “We don’t make policy”

Activist Post: Facebook “exploring additional measures” to fight anti-vaccine information

Reason: U.S. citizens sue border patrol agents who detained them for speaking Spanish

Techdirt: FBI’s internal investigations of shootings by agents clears agents 98% of the time

High Times: Children’s book aims to start the conversation about cannabis

As Jimmy Dore points out in the latest episode of the Jimmy Dore Show, American war criminals are never prosecuted, but rather commended, given medals, and positions of power and prestige. For compelling evidence of this, witness war-pig-at-the-trough Elliot Abrams being grilled by Minnesota rep. Ilhan Omar on what are by every civilized standard war crimes committed by U.S.-backed South American governments against their own populations. Aside from lying to Congress over the Iran-Contra scandal, Elliott was instrumental in the cover-up of hundreds of massacres, as we will see shortly.

Abrams was, of course, pardoned by George H.W. Bush for his role in lying to Congress about the selling of weapons to Iran in order to fund death squads, euphemistically dubbed ‘Contras’, in Nicaragua during the 1980’s, but let’s look at the far more heinous acts, those that can be considered real war crimes.

These war crimes took place almost entirely in South and Central America, but let’s look at Guatemala, where the most horrific atrocities took place. The Guatemalan Genocide of the early 1980’s is history erased from the history books. I have never heard of it before today, but the facts surrounding it are crucial to understanding not only why Abrams should be sitting in a windowless cell, but to understanding the modus operandi of U.S. foreign policy today.  To understand it, we must go to the beginning. In 1954, the CIA overthrew the elected government of President Jacobo Arbenz and installed the military dictatorship of Carlos Castillo Armas. The action was code-named PBSUCCESS, and the CIA armed, trained, and funded 480 Armas-led fighters to carry out the coup.  This coup was the first of a string of military coups, up to the 1982 coup that installed Efrain Rio Montt to power. Montt’s rule was a reign of terror, and he was the dictator that committed the worst of what is known as the Guatemalan Genocide, in which he sought to exterminate the indigenous Mayan people of Guatemala, as he saw them as a threat to his power and a haven for left-wing insurgents. Montt’s military wiped out over 600 indigenous villages, with soldiers decapitating and crucifying their victims, and committing wanton acts of infanticide. Abrams at the time was Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights, ironically enough, and concealed and defended Montt’s actions. Abrams thought the threat of Communist control of South America rationalized pro-U.S. rule-by-terror regimes. A self-fulfilling prophecy it seems. The resulting death toll of indigenous Maya stands at over 18,000 for just 1982.  Montt was convicted of war crimes charges, finally, in 2013, for the murder of 1,771 Maya Ixil Indians, and sentenced to 80 years in prison.

Another massacre took place at El Mozote in El Salvador in 1981 by the soldiers of the Atlacatl Battalion, which had trained at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and then sent back to El Salvador to perform its function as a death squad of the US-back government. Over 800 civilians were murdered, with children separated from parents and grandparents before being gunned down. The battalion went on to commit several other massacres during its tenure.

There is so much history of U.S. funding of South American military dictators and I am just beginning my education. It’s ugly, horrifying, but necessary in order to break the hypnosis that we have regarding American foreign policy. Those massacres of the 80’s mirror, in many ways, the slow-motion genocide of Yemen by the U.S.-backed Saudi butchers. And there is no shortage of Elliott Abrams’ to cover for that slaughter as well.

Here is the Jimmy Dore segment:

Marijuana Business Daily: Oklahoma medical marijuana sales surge to $4 million in January

Free Beacon: Kamala Harris packed California prisons with pot peddlers

National Review: Why it matters if Amy Klobuchar is an abusive boss

BONNIE KRISTIAN: The unaddressed sins of Kamala Harris and Amy Klobuchar

Reason: ACLU releases model legislation to unlock ‘black box’ of prosecutor secrecy

The New Atlantis: How the new tech utopia fostered tyranny

SaveTheChildren.net: Yemen: 85,000 children may have died from starvation since start of war

Democracy Now!: Yemen: Grain supplies at risk of rotting as millions face famine

Kelley Vlahos: Walter Jones cried while the rest of them lied

Activist Post: Tulsi Gabbard wants to legalize marijuana, punish Big Pharma, and end private prisons

Marijuana legalization is the true ‘Green New Deal’: Colorado saw record $1.5 billion in marijuana sales in 2018

Headlines I never thought I’d see: Iowa GOP lawmaker introduces bill to legalize medicinal psilocybin, MDMA

Nick Gillespie: A border wall is a bad idea, but so is the “border security” Democrats say they want

The Intercept: Pro-Israel lobby caught on tape boasting that its money influences Washington

Techdirt: Minnesota judges spent only minutes approving warrants sweeping up thousands of cellphone users

Philip Giraldi: Being Marco Rubio: The boyish senator from Florida is owned by the Israel lobby.

Reason podcast: Green New WTF?