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Russ Kick, writer, editor and ‘rogue transparency activist,’ dies at 52

imrs-1-300x200 Russ Kick, writer, editor and ‘rogue transparency activist,’ dies at 52

Writer, editor and citizen archivist Russ Kick in 2009. (Terrence Boyce)

By Harrison Smith
September 24, 2021 at 10:29 p.m. EDT

Russ Kick, a writer, editor and self-described “rogue transparency activist” who pried loose government records, using Freedom of Information Act requests to obtain overlooked documents and peek behind the curtain of official secrecy, died Sept. 12 at his home in Tucson. He was 52.

His sister, Ruth Kick, did not give a cause but said he had been in poor health for more than a decade.

Mr. Kick’s interests extended from “undeleting,” as he sometimes called his document gathering, to classic literature, erotica, food and ancient meditation practices. “I can’t focus completely on any one thing for too long,” he wrote in an online biography. “My personal brand is a mess.”

Driven in part by a distrust of authority and an obsession with trivia, he wrote news articles for the Village Voice and edited myth-busting books such as “You Are Being Lied To” (2001) and “Everything You Know Is Wrong” (2002), which brought together the voices of scholars and journalists — including Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky — to correct “media distortion, historical whitewashes and cultural myths.”

Kick-edited-The-Graphic-Canon-a-book-series-that-reimagined-literary-works-as-comics-and-visual-art-as-well-as-a-spinoff-series-The-Graphic-Canon-of-Crime-Mystery.-Seven-Stories-Press-232x300 Russ Kick, writer, editor and ‘rogue transparency activist,’ dies at 52

Kick edited “The Graphic Canon,” a book series that reimagined literary works as comics and visual art, as well as a spinoff series, “The Graphic Canon of Crime & Mystery.” (Seven Stories Press)

He also edited literary anthologies and the Graphic Canon series, for which he enlisted artists such as Robert Crumb and Will Eisner to reinterpret literary classics as comics and visual art. By turns bawdy and poignant, the series marked a kaleidoscopic alternative to the giant, doorstop literary anthologies published by W.W. Norton. “Work that might normally put you to sleep will leave you awe-struck,” artist and author Annie Weatherwax wrote in 2012, reviewing the first volume for the New York Times.

Mr. Kick’s work on the book series marked a temporary departure from some of his abiding interests: crusading against government secrecy and holding powerful people and institutions accountable. “I’m certainly not a journalist in the normal sense of the word,” he once told the Times. “I’m more of an information archaeologist. I’m trying to get the stuff that’s either been purposely buried or just covered over by time.”

Working largely on his own, without institutional support, Mr. Kick filed FOIA requests to obtain documents related to U.S. biological and chemical warfare programs, U.S. Border Patrol facilities, animal experimentation and a host of other issues. “Oftentimes it was those mundane requests that would be a critical resource years down the line,” said Michael Morisy, the co-founder and chief executive of MuckRock, a nonprofit news site where Mr. Kick had worked the past two years.

In an email interview, he added that Mr. Kick was “omnipresent” in the FOIA community, “the person you’d turn to every time there was a question about document arcana or the ins-and-outs of obscure filings.” Mr. Kick was also known as one of the first to regularly publish original documents in full, rather than to simply share quotes or transcriptions, according to Washington Post FOIA director Nate Jones.

“He influenced this generation of FOIA requesters by showing the power of posting the records unvarnished and letting them speak for themselves. . . . His sites were completely dedicated only to that,” Jones said. “I suspect the hosting fees were quite high, yet nonetheless he was a declassified document posting machine.”

Mr. Kick started publishing documents in earnest in 2002, on a website he called the Memory Hole. Its name was a kind of reverse homage to the incinerator used to destroy embarrassing government files in George Orwell’s “1984.” (In later years, he created the websites Memory Hole 2 and AltGov2 to share his work.)

Among his first major releases was an unredacted internal report from the Justice Department, documenting harsh criticism of its diversity efforts. When the report was first published on the department’s website in 2003, half of its 186 pages were blacked out. Mr. Kick simply downloaded the file, opened it in Adobe Acrobat and used the “TouchUp Object” tool to highlight and delete the black bars.

“It was that simple,” he told the Times. “I was kind of surprised, but we are talking about a government bureaucracy, so I wasn’t that surprised.”

Six months later, Mr. Kick made headlines by publishing Pentagon photographs of the coffins of troops killed in Iraq and of service members caring for the remains of their fallen comrades, which he obtained through a FOIA request. The Defense Department had previously barred the publication of such photos and called their release a mistake.

Their publication on the Memory Hole, and later in newspapers and on TV networks including CNN, ignited a national debate over access to wartime images, the privacy of military families and the human cost of war. “I’ve always thought that war should not be sanitized and airbrushed,” Mr. Kick told NPR, explaining his decision to publish. “I think people should see what the real results of war are.”

In a phone interview, BuzzFeed News investigative reporter Jason Leopold said the publication of the Iraq War photos inspired his own use of FOIA requests, often for documents that he had never previously thought to seek. “I remember thinking to myself, ‘I want to duplicate that. I want to get documents,’ ” he said. “Russ went after records that we as journalists never went after, because we felt we would never get them.”

Russell Charles Kick III was born July 20, 1969, in Tuscaloosa, where his father was studying for a PhD in business and computer science at the University of Alabama. His mother was a homemaker, and his father later taught at Tennessee Technological University in Cookeville, where Mr. Kick graduated from high school.

Both parents had grown up in strict Catholic families before rebelling against organized religion — his father wrote a spiritual text called “The Key to Self-Discovery” — and encouraged their children to read widely, from Isaac Asimov novels to books about Eastern philosophy. “Most parents worry that their kids are going to grow up and join some cult,” his sister Ruth said. “My mom worried we were going to join the Catholic Church.”

Mr. Kick graduated from Tennessee Tech with a bachelor’s degree in psychology, then studied for a master’s degree in public policy at Vanderbilt University in Nashville before dropping out to focus on writing. “I started reading, writing, and over-collecting books at an early age and just rolled with it,” he later wrote. “I’ve always been interested in important things that are suppressed, ignored, or simply forgotten, so those became my themes.”

In 2017, he revealed that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials had asked for official permission to destroy old documents about the deaths and sexual assaults of detained immigrants in their custody. Organizations including Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington sued the National Archives and Records Administration to block ICE’s plan to destroy the records. A federal judge ruled in March that the agency could not destroy the files.

“I do get angry when it’s obvious somebody is lying to us, or keeping something from us,” Mr. Kick had told the Los Angeles Times in 2004. “I take it personally.”

His marriage to Kimberly Gannon ended in divorce. In addition to his sister, of Oro Valley, Ariz., survivors include his mother, Jane Woody Kick, of Tucson.

David Cuillier, a University of Arizona professor who studies government transparency and public-records access, said Mr. Kick’s records requests “demonstrated that anyone could use FOIA to show the public what the government is up to.”

“His work has inspired other average people and journalists to push for government transparency,” he added in an email. “That has made the country stronger — in holding government accountable. What he did wasn’t easy, especially on his own time without institutional support. But it made a difference.”

READ MORE AT THE WASHINGTON POST

RUSS KICK”S AMAZON AUTHOR PAGE

 

Filed Under: News and Views

Abolish the FBI

This editorial includes very important information about the FBI’s abuses against transparency and the national security system but goes way overboard in calling for its abolition; changing the name will not eliminate the need for such an institution. Despite rabid abuses the FBI is an outstandingly powerful institution here and around the world and performs very important essential and courageous acts and operations which benefit the public. However, to perform its functions properly, it must give paramount attention to the need for transparency when allegations of abuse are made.

WSJ|OPINION|BUSINESS WORLD

How much more do we need to learn about 2016 to realize the agency is a disaster?

By Holman W. Jenkins, Jr. | Sept. 21, 2021 6:30 pm ET

In ignoring the latest John Durham indictment, most of the media and official Washington are ignoring the elephant between its lines: the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Mr. Durham, the special counsel appointed to investigate the government’s handling of the Russia collusion mess, levels a single criminal charge against Michael Sussmann, then a lawyer for the Democrat-linked firm Perkins Coie. In delivering to the FBI fanciful evidence of Trump-Russia collusion a few weeks before the 2016 election, Mr. Sussmann is alleged to have lied to the FBI’s chief lawyer, James Baker, claiming he was acting on his own behalf and not as a paid agent of the Clinton campaign.

Already you might be rolling your eyes. Mr. Durham provides ample reason in his own indictment for why the FBI would have known exactly whom Mr. Sussmann was working for. If Mr. Sussmann didn’t lie at the time, Mr. Baker may have lied since about what transpired between him and Mr. Sussmann. Either way, we are free to suspect the FBI would have found it useful to be protected from inconvenient knowledge about the Clinton campaign’s role. The same FBI then was busy ignoring the political antecedents of the Steele dossier, also financed by Mr. Sussmann’s law firm on behalf of the Clinton campaign, information that the FBI would shortly withhold from a surveillance court in pursuit of a warrant to spy on Trump pilot fish Carter Page.

Mr. Durham, in describing the Sept. 19, 2016, meeting with Mr. Baker, suggests that a properly informed FBI might have thought twice before opening an investigation into Mr. Sussmann’s phony story about the Trump Organization and Russia’s Alfa Bank. This is a way also of saying the FBI might have found it harder to proceed without the political deniability that Mr. Sussmann’s alleged statement provided.

At this late date, none of this can be consumed without recognizing that the FBI was already hip-deep in the 2016 election. It began a few weeks earlier with Director James Comey’s insubordinate, improper (according to the Justice Department’s own inspector general) intervention in the Hillary email case. We learned much later that Mr. Comey justified this unprecedented action by referring to secret Russian “intelligence” that his FBI colleagues considered a red herring and possible Russian disinformation. Your eyes should really be rolling now.

Mr. Comey thereupon created the preposterous jam for himself when new information surfaced in the Hillary case, which led him to reopen the case shortly before Election Day and likely tipped the race to Mr. Trump. Of course the “new information” turned out to be a nothingburger. Worse, the information had been sitting unnoticed in the FBI’s hands for weeks.

These antic actions, along with the subsequent FBI leakfest aimed at undermining the president it just helped to elect, might be written off as a singular consequence of Mr. Comey’s overweened sense of importance.

But this doesn’t explain the FBI’s top counterintelligence deputy, Peter Strzok, engaging in compromising political banter on an FBI network while playing a central role in the FBI’s most politically sensitive investigations. It doesn’t explain FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith’s criminal act of falsifying agency submissions to the surveillance court.

Ask yourself: In what way, in anyone’s memory, has the FBI covered itself in glory? The Larry Nassar case, in which it failed to pursue a serial abuser of teenage gymnasts? The Noor Salman case, in which it trumped up a failed prosecution of the innocent and abused wife of the Orlando nightclub shooter? The Hatfill case, in which it attempted to railroad an innocent scientist over the 2001 anthrax attacks?

Ironically, Hollywood is now the FBI’s biggest devotee because the agency’s screw-ups are fodder for its best movies. The FBI’s role in the assassination of Black Panther Fred Hampton was the subject of “Judas and the Black Messiah.” Its persecution of an innocent security guard in the Atlanta Olympics bombing was the theme of “ Richard Jewell. ” Its cosseting of the criminal psychopath Whitey Bulger was a central pillar of the Johnny Depp film “Black Mass.”

The FBI’s last extended run of good publicity, aimed at helping live down the smell of J. Edgar Hoover, came more than 50 years ago thanks to Efrem Zimbalist Jr. and his weekly show on ABC, “The F.B.I.,” which went off the air in 1974.

By now, after its performance in the 2016 election, the evidence might seem conclusive that the agency is a failed experiment, however able and dedicated many of its agents.

Its culture at the top seems incapable of using the powers entrusted to it with discretion and good judgment or at least without reliable expectation of embarrassment. The agency should be scrapped and something new built to replace it. One possibility is a national investigative corps that would be more directly answerable to the 93 U.S. attorneys who are charged with enforcing federal law in the 50 states.

READ MORE AT THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

Filed Under: Uncategorized

Activity in Case 1:20-cv-01527-TNM CLEMENTE v. FBI, D.C. et al Status Report

U.S. District Court

District of Columbia

Notice of Electronic Filing

The following transaction was entered by Duffey, Thomas on 9/21/2021 at 10:52 PM and filed on 9/21/2021

Case Name: CLEMENTE v. FBI, D.C. et al
Case Number: 1:20-cv-01527-TNM
Filer: FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION
JOHN DOE AGENCY 1 THROUGH JOHN DOE AGENCY 10
U.S. DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE
Document Number: 27

Docket Text:
Joint STATUS REPORT by FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION, JOHN DOE AGENCY 1 THROUGH JOHN DOE AGENCY 10, U.S. DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE. (Duffey, Thomas)

Filed Under: News and Views

Abimael Guzman, leader of Peru’s Shining Path terrorist group, dies at 86

imrs-212x300 Abimael Guzman, leader of Peru’s Shining Path terrorist group, dies at 86

Mr. Guzman, leader of Peru’s Shining Path terrorist group, in a Lima jail in 1992. (Hector Mata/AFP/Getty Images)

By Matt Schudel
September 11, 2021 at 8:52 p.m. EDT

Abimael Guzmán, the mastermind of the Shining Path terrorist organization in Peru, a brutal Maoist movement that nearly toppled the country’s government in the 1980s and early 1990s, leaving thousands of people dead, died Sept. 11 in a hospital at a military prison outside Lima. He was 86.

Peru’s justice minister, Aníbal Torres, announced the death, saying the cause was an infection.

Mr. Guzmán, a onetime philosophy professor and longtime Communist Party member, traveled to China in the 1960s and became a devotee of Mao Zedong and the Cultural Revolution, a repressive movement meant to reorder Chinese society.

Calling himself “President Gonzalo,” Mr. Guzmán devised a set of principles based on Maoist thought as the guiding ideals of the Sendero Luminoso, or Shining Path, a term derived from an earlier leader of Peru’s Communist Party.

Building a stronghold at a provincial university in Ayacucho in the Andes Mountains, Mr. Guzmán proved to be a charismatic leader whose followers — mostly students and small farmers — considered him a godlike figure. They called him the Fourth Sword of Marxism, after Karl Marx, Russian revolutionary Vladimir Ilyich Lenin and Mao. A U.S. State Department official once described him as “Charlie Manson with an army.”

Mr. Guzmán advocated a violent takeover of Peruvian society, maintaining that true revolution would come only after crossing a “river of blood.” To him, even the Cuban regime of Fidel Castro and the Chinese leaders who succeeded Mao were too soft. His vision of nationalism resembled that of Cambodia’s Pol Pot, whose regime killed nearly a quarter of the country’s population.

“Judgment day has arrived,” he told his followers in 1980, just as the Shining Path’s effort to overthrow the country was beginning. “The future lies in guns and cannons.”

At first, Peruvian officials paid little attention to the movement, which began with the takeover of town halls in rural areas, bombings at polling stations and assassinations of local leaders. By 1981, Shining Path guerrillas had extended their reach to the capital of Lima, announcing their arrival in a particularly gruesome way: by hanging the carcasses of dozens of dead dogs from lampposts, as a warning to “capitalist dogs” and to anyone unwilling to follow Mr. Guzmán’s doctrinaire ideas.

“Violence is a universal law,” he said in 1988. “Without revolutionary violence . . . you can’t overthrow an old order to create a new one.”

Authorities seemed helpless against the Shining Path, as guerrillas disrupted Peru’s electrical system, food and water supplies. Police stations were raided for guns, and bombs were set off in theaters and restaurants, putting the entire nation, then numbering about 20 million people, on edge.

The group financed its widespread campaign of terror through bank robberies and by seizing airstrips used by drug dealers in remote parts of Peru. They demanded huge payoffs from cocaine kingpins, who appeared to be afraid of Mr. Guzmán’s guerrillas.

Kidnapping and murder were key parts of the Shining Path’s ruthless mode of operation, and bodies began to pile up around the country. The first large-scale massacre took place in 1983 in the town Lucanamarca, where 69 people — including the elderly and at least 18 children — were killed with machetes, axes and a vat of boiling water.

“The main thing was to make them understand that we were as tough as a bone, and ready to do anything,” Mr. Guzmán said afterward. “They were facing a different type of fighter.”

In 2003, a Peruvian truth and reconciliation commission determined that almost 70,000 people had been killed in the 1980s and 1990s — about half by Shining Path terrorists and the other half by the government’s police and military forces. Most of the victims were concentrated among Peru’s poor, Indigenous people in rural regions, where Mr. Guzmán had his strongest support.

For years, Mr. Guzmán remained a wraith, invisible to authorities whose efforts to capture him proved futile. By 1990, the Shining Path controlled a substantial part of the Peruvian highlands and countryside. More than 100 local officials had been assassinated in the preceding year, and a third of the country’s courts were idled because they did not have judges. Nearly three-quarters of the country was placed under a state of emergency or virtual martial law.

In 1990, Alberto Fujimori was elected Peru’s president, promising to snuff out the Shining Path and bring Mr. Guzmán to justice. On Sept. 12, 1992, in an operation later found to have been supported by the CIA, Peruvian police raided a house in a middle-class district of Lima, arresting Mr. Guzmán in his hiding place on the second floor above a dance studio. Photographers snapped pictures of him wearing a striped prison outfit, shouting revolutionary slogans in his cell. It was called the “capture of the century.”

After denouncing the notion of human rights, Mr. Guzmán changed his position a year later, when he was convicted of treason and sentenced to life in prison. His second-in-command in the Shining Path movement, Elena Iparraguirre, also received a life sentence. (She assumed her role after Mr. Guzmán’s first wife, Augusta La Torre, mysteriously died in 1988; there were suggestions that she was either murdered or died by suicide.)

Mr. Guzmán said the Shining Path movement would continue, but it soon fell apart without him.

CONTINUE READING AT The Washington Post

Filed Under: News and Views

Paul Schrade holds no animosity towards convicted RFK killer Sirhan, still pressing for evidence into possible second shooter

AP18152262165276-300x169 Paul Schrade holds no animosity towards convicted RFK killer Sirhan, still pressing for evidence into possible second shooter

In this Thursday, May 31, 2018, photo, Sen. Robert Kennedy aide Paul Schrade holds an evidence photo of gunman Sirhan Sirhan’s revolver with the eight expended shell casings found in the chamber, and the Weisel, Goldstein, and Kennedy bullets, at his home in Los Angeles. When a gunman open fire toward Sen. Robert Kennedy, the first bullet missed the senator and struck Kennedy aide Paul Schrade in the head. Schrade woke up the next day and found out the Democratic presidential candidate was dead. Today, Schrade believes the Los Angeles Police botched the case and failed to investigate possible leads about a second gunman. (AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes)

by: José Gaspar

Posted: Aug 27, 2021 / 08:26 PM PDT / Updated: Aug 27, 2021 / 08:26 PM PDT

Sirhan Sirhan, the man convicted of killing Robert F. Kennedy in 1968, was granted parole Friday. Sirhan was convicted of shooting and killing the presidential candidate and wounding five others at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles.

Kennedy had just delivered a speech after winning the California primary. He was gunned down in a hotel hallway moments later.

RFK assassin moves closer to freedom with help of 2 Kennedys

Among those shot that night by Sirhan was Paul Schrade, a current board member of the Dolores Huerta Foundation. At that time Schrade was with the United Auto Workers and part of the Kennedy campaign.

“They thought I was dead,” said Schrade in a phone interview with 17 News. “A friend of mine from a different union came and put a voter straw hat over my head because he thought I was dead, but then he checked my pulse and found I wasn’t.”

Schrade believes Sirhan was not the one who shot and killed Kennedy and that a second gunman was involved. For the past 52 years, Schrade has been working to bring to light evidence he said proves Sirhan was not the one responsible for killing Kennedy.

“Who was this guy they were covering up? Who was so important for the district attorneys to keep covering up for 52 years that shot RFK?” said Schrade.

Despite being shot by Sirhan, Schrade adds he holds no animosity toward him.

“I don’t excuse him for what he did, but I don’t excuse the LAPD and the district attorneys for 52 years of saying he’s guilty when he is not,” said Schrade.

READ MORE at KGET

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Filed Under: News and Views

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