Conscientious Objection Background A conscientious objector is an “individual who has claimed the right to refuse to perform military service” on the grounds of freedom of thought, conscience, disability or religion. In general, conscientious objector status is only considered in the context of military conscription and is not applicable to volunteer military forces. In an all volunteer military, the definition skews a bit. You will see these applicants below, despite willingly signing up, seemingly changed their minds and wanted out. Below, you will find the applications submitted to different armed services. As more are released, they will be added here.…
Author: John Greenewald
Background The following documents were obtained through a FOIA lawsuit by the Freedom of the Press Foundation. Below the documents, you will also find a copy of the original, and well documented, press release article, as published by the Freedom of the Press Foundation on March 18, 2016. Documents Released Justice Department’s opposition to FOIA reform [144 Pages, 12MB] Additional Information This work below is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License by the Freedom of the Press Foundation. New documents show the Obama admin aggressively lobbied to kill transparency reform in Congress March 8, 2016 By Trevor…
CREST Background The following is the background information on CREST, as supplied by the CIA. The automatic declassification provisions of Executive Order 13256 (formerly EO 12958, as amended) require the declassification of nonexempt historically valuable records 25 years or older. The EO was originally issued in April 1995 and via amendment established 31 December 2006 as the first major deadline for automatic declassification under the “25-year program”. By that date, agencies were to have completed the review of all hardcopy documents determined to contain exclusively their equities. For CIA, the 2006 deadline covered the span of relevant documents originally dating from the…
Background From 1947 – 1969, the United States Air Force conducted an “investigation” into the UFO phenomena. It began as Project Sign, Grudge and later became known by its more popular name as Project Blue Book. After only a few years into the project, the Air Force continually discredited UFO witnesses, cases and told the public most cases were generally explainable as swamp gas, the planet Venus, hoaxes, etc. But one man did not believe the explanations given, and in 1966, began pushing for Congressional hearings on the topic. His name? Gerald Ford. Although more popularly referred to as the…
Pioneer Program Background The Pioneer program is a series of United States unmanned space missions that were designed for planetary exploration. There were a number of such missions in the program, but the most notable were Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11, which explored the outer planets and left the solar system. Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11 carry a golden plaque, depicting a man and a woman and information about the origin and the creators of the probes, should any extraterrestrials find them someday. Early Able Tests The earliest missions were attempts to achieve Earth’s escape velocity, simply to show it…