Since the NSA is spying on foreign heads
of state, it doesn't take much imagination to think they
might also be spying on members of Congress. Earlier this month,
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) wrote to Gen. Keith Alexander, head of the
NSA, asking, “Has the NSA spied, or is it currently spying, on
members of Congress or other American elected officials?” He
defined spying as “gathering metadata on calls made from official
or personal phones, content from websites visited or emails sent, or
collecting any other data from a third party not made available to
the general public in the regular course of business.”
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| © CBS News |
Gen. Alexander's reply did not deny
spying on Congress. It was straight out of Catch-22.
He couldn't answer the Senator's question, he said, because to do so would
violate his privacy.
[T]his telephone metadata program incorporates extraordinary controls to protect
Americans' privacy interests. Among those protections is the
condition that the NSA can query the metadata only based on phone
numbers reasonably suspected to be associated with specific foreign
terrorist groups. For that reason, NSA cannot lawfully search to
determine if any records NSA has received under the program have
included metadata of the phone calls of any member of Congress, other
American elected officials, or any other American without that
predicate.
If you read Gen. Alexander's letter,
you see that he only answered that part of the Senator's question
dealing with metadata and ignored the rest of the forms of spying he
asked about. The General and his colleagues undoubtedly had a good
laugh about the clever way they were able to dodge Sen. Sanders'
query.
Memo to Sen.
Sanders: I hope you've never visited any embarrassing websites. If
you have, the NSA can threaten to leak this information to your
constituents unless you vote the “right”
way.
Another Reason
Not to Vacation in Florida
I'm sure you've
heard that Curtis Reeves, a retired cop, fatally shot Chad Oulson,
the man sitting in front of him at a movie theatre, who refused to
stop texting his baby sitter as they waited to watch Lone
Survivor. Mr. Reeves' attorney
has indicated he will plead self-defense under Florida's Stand Your
Ground law, since he was hit in the face by an “unknown object”
and therefore feared for his safety. Mr. Oulson allegedly threw
popcorn at him. Ousler's wife was wounded as she tried in vain to
protect him.
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| © thinkprogress.org |
Florida's
legal community apparently regards Mr. Reeves' acquittal as a serious possibility. “Here's the problem,” said Stetson University law
professor Charles Rose, “We're trying to look into the mind of the
defendant and posit what he thought was happening. That's often why
these cases go (to) trial—because you just can't tell.” You also
just can't tell how creative defendants can be if you allow them to
report their own “thoughts.”
According to a witness, Mr. Oulson's
last words were, “I can't believe I got shot.” Apparently he
didn't realize the NRA, the American Legislative Exchange Council,
and the Florida state legislature were sowing the seeds of his
demise.
Memo to Mr. Reeves: Popcorn may indeed be life-threating, but only if you ingest it.
Cruel But Not Unusual
Speaking of the death penalty, the state of Ohio executed Dennis McGuire using a new, untested
combination of lethal drugs. It took him 25 minutes to die.
According to witnesses, which included his family, he writhed in
agony and made “loud snorting sounds” while he was dying.
Mr. McGuire's lawyers sued to prevent
the execution, arguing that the drugs could lead to “air hunger,”
which would cause him to suffer “agony and terror” as he
struggled to breathe. A medical doctor testifying for the state said
he had no idea how long the drugs would take to kill him. But the
judge accepted the Ohio Assistant Attorney General's argument that,
in spite of the Constitution's guarantee against cruel and unusual
punishment, “you're not entitled to a pain-free execution.”
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| © cathleenfalsani.com |
The apparent reason for this failed experiment is that the usual drug cocktail used for lethal injections
is in short supply and the pharmaceutical corporations have raised
the prices. This has sent the states scrambling for a cheaper
method. The combination of an anti-anxiety drug and a morphine
derivative used by Ohio is actually just a larger dose of the drug
mixture typically used as an anesthetic during a colonoscopy.
The McGuire family has announced they
intend to sue the state of Ohio for causing him “unnecessary pain.”
According to Douglas Berman, an Ohio State law professor, this will
be difficult to prove since Mr. McGuire is unavailable to testify.
(Unlike Mr. Reeves.)
Bruce Burns, a Republican State senator
from Wyoming, has introduced a bill to bring back the firing squad in
that state.
"Insane, Mad, Delusional"
A draft of a report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change suggests that it might be
necessary to “extract vast amounts of greenhouse gases from the
air” in order to prevent the global warming for which we are
currently headed. The IPCC suggests some familiar methods of carbon
dioxide removal such as planting more forests and carbon capture and
storage (CCS)—capturing and burying emissions from power plants.
CCS is untested and would be very expensive. However, the IPCC goes
on to mention more radical geoengineering proposals such as injecting
aerosols into the stratosphere to block solar heat. A recent climate model simulation showed that such schemes might have disastrous side-effects which
could render large parts of the planet uninhabitable.
The man Americans elected as their president in 2000 reacted to the draft by calling these plans “insane,” “utterly mad,” and “delusional in the extreme.” He went on
to say that:
The fact that some scientists who should know better are actually engaged in serious
discussion of those alternatives is a mark of how desperate some of
them are feeling due to the paralysis in the global political system.
Either that or they have a grant from
Exxon-Mobil.
As both Mr. Gore and Naomi Klein have suggested, the appeal of these geoengineering schemes is that they
allow us to believe that we can continue our current forms of energy
consumption without having to change our behavior. Their appeal to
energy companies is that they leave existing corporate power
relationships in place.
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