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PBC News & Comment: Judge Blocks Release of Assassination Memo, Didn’t Want to Do It

Federal Judge reluctantly blocks release of memo used to justify the targeted “extinction” of US citizen al-Awlaki by drone strike….In what the judge herself admitted was a bizarre ruling, federal jurist Colleen McMahon refused to order the release of the memo that rationalized Obama’s order to kill Anwar al-Awlaki:  “The Alice-in-Wonderland nature of this pronouncement is not lost on me”

–US reports that its “secret” drone program killed a Taliban leader, blowback is building

–blowback example:  NY Times profiles a former Afghan soldier who killed an American and survived to brag about it

–another example: Pakistanis who proved target intel to US are tortured, forced to confess on camera, and then executed

–in an excerpt from our in-depth interview, Shahid Buttar of Bill of Rights Defense Committee tells about Sen. Feinstein’s lies about the scope of the FISA surveillance on Americans

San Francisco Chronicle editorial praises Japanese American survivors of WWII internment who oppose NDAA detention law

–DNA data used to clear wrongful conviction for rape in W. VA, but most DNA databases are not available to defense lawyers to prove innocence

–Transocean agrees to $1.4 billion for Deepwater Horizon oil disaster, as Shell’s Arctic rig remains aground–we don’t learn from blunders

–NY man who flipped the bird to a cop running speed trap wins right to sue, 6 years later