Today's number is Fifteen

Good morning 99percenters!
Morning news dump and music by Buddy Holly.

This is how the CIA botched Iraq post-9/11: Bob Gates, careerist sycophancy, and the real history of the Deep State
A veteran CIA officer explains to Salon exactly where the agency has gone wrong for decades — and the consequences

In a lengthy exchange with Ray McGovern, or when you listen to him speak, a lot comes at you. This is a former C.I.A. officer who, as branch chief in the analysis section, counted daily White House briefings among his tasks. Given his years out in Langley, Virginia—from the early Kennedy days until he retired in 1990—he was witness to the agency’s collapse into a factory producing politically and ideologically motivated “intelligence.” Long before the end, Langley had turned into a building full of “prostitutes”—McGovern’s word “not too strong.”

Good morning fabulous citizens of C99.

“Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.”
― Charles Darwin

Today is the final installment of this series on police brutality and the militarization of our local police forces. For this essay, I am going back to where we started with it and reference Campaign Zero. Campaign Zero was created by four activists affiliated with the Black Lives Matter movement but Campaign Zero is a separate entity from Black Lives Matter.

Good morning 99percenters!
Climate news and music by Levon Helm.

Today's number is eight

Good morning 99percenters!
Sunday morning news dump and music by Dan Hicks and His Hot Licks --RIP Dan Hicks.

Pentagon Releases 200 Photos of Bush-Era Prisoner Abuse, Thousands Kept Secret
'What the photos that the government has suppressed would show is that abuse was so widespread that it could only have resulted from policy or a climate calculated to foster abuse.'

The Pentagon on Friday was forced to release nearly 200 photographs of bruises, lacerations, and other injuries inflicted on prisoners presumably by U.S. military personnel in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Bundy Family’s Odd Mormon Connection, Explained

The Bundy family claims a Mormon faith as inspiration for their cause…

When I began this series back in December, I honestly did not know where it was going to take me as I researched the background materials for my essays. I originally figured that it might be three parts at the most, but it kept growing and growing.

It's day one of 29, FWIW, (so I get to do a leap day later on)

It is also the day that the Space Shuttle Challenger disintegrated upon reentry

Today's number is one