Tag: news

A
couple of weeks ago, the city council of League City, Texas, passed
a resolution expressing worry that “many illegal aliens suffering
from diseases endemic in their countries of origin are being
released into our communities.” Tom Green County claimed the influx
of Central Americans at the southern border puts Americans “at risk
for epidemics of serious diseases.” A Texas congressman said they
might be carrying Ebola.

Now, there is no doubt that some of the youngsters and adults
arriving in Texas suffer from various afflictions, including
scabies and lice. It’s hard to maintain optimal hygiene while
trekking through the desert and sneaking rides on freight trains,
writes Steve Chapman.

But scabies and lice are not unique to Honduras and Guatemala.
The United States has a million cases of scabies every year and as
many as 12 million of lice infestation. Local officeholders in
Texas, however, rarely get agitated when these ailments pop up in
New York or St. Louis, according to Chapman.

View this article.

Another state, another botched execution carried
out with secret new drugs. This time: Arizona, where convicted
murderer Joseph Randolph Wood gasped and snorted for more than 90
minutes after his execution began. What should have been a 10- to
15- minute ordeal took 117 minutes for Wood.

According to witnesses, Wood “gulped like a fish on land” and
made movements “like a piston: the mouth opened, the chest rose,
the stomach convulsed.” He gasped for air roughly 660 times over
the course of the 117-minute execution—which had been carried out
using a controversial two-drug cocktail the state had never used
before.

One of the drugs, midazolam, has been used in flawed executions
carried out in other states this year, including the
horrific botched execution of Clayton Lockett in Oklahoma, who
died of a heart attack more than 40 minutes after the procedure
started. It was also used in Ohio on
Dennis McGuire, who gasped and snorted on the gurney before
being pronounced dead 25 minutes after the execution began.

In the weeks leading up to Wood’s execution, his attorneys
argued that Wood had a First Amendment right to information about
the drugs that would be used to kill him, which Arizona—like many
states throughout the country—has kept confidential. On Saturday,
the U.S. 9th Circuit Appeals Court sided with Wood and ruled
that the execution could not be carried out until Arizona provided
him with information about the origins of the lethal injection
drugs, as well as the qualifications of the personnel who were
going to administer the drugs.

The 9th Circuit’s ruling is significant, as it marks the first
time a federal court has ever issued a stay of execution based on
the issue of drug secrecy. In all previous challenges, the court
has sided with states. (Notable that one of the judges who
dissented from the decision was Judge Jay Bybee, known for signing
the infamous “torture memos” in
2002, which authorized “enhanced interrogation techniques” used at
Guantanamo Bay.)

Arizona state officials appealed, but the circuit court
upheld the ruling.  On Tuesday, the U.S. Supreme Court
vacated
the federal court ruling and cleared the way for the execution to
proceed on Wednesday at 10 a.m. MDT. However, the Arizona Supreme
Court halted the execution minutes before it was set to take place
in order to consider a last-minute appeal by Wood’s lawyers over
the secrecy of the lethal injection drugs to be used.

A couple of hours later, the state supreme court dissolved the
stay, and Wood was strapped to the gurney. At 1:52 p.m., the
execution commenced. According to journalists present, he began to
gasp for air roughly seven minutes after the procedure began, and
continued gasping for more than an hour and a half. According to
his lawyers, who had enough time to file an
emergency motion for a stay of execution while he laid alive on
the gurney, staff checked Wood for sedation at 3:02 p.m. and found
he was still alive. At 3:49 p.m., Wood was finally pronounced
dead.

Shortly after, Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer released a statement
ordering the Arizona Department of Corrections to conduct a “full
review of the process.” However, because the review is going to be
conducted by the very same people who were responsible for the
botched execution yesterday, one should be skeptical that the
investigation will be unbiased or thorough.

In her statement, Gov. Brewer also claimed, “Wood died in a
lawful manner and by eyewitness and medical accounts he did not
suffer.” This, she said, “is in stark comparison to the gruesome,
vicious suffering that he inflicted on his two victims—and the
lifetime of suffering he has caused their family.” Wood was
sentenced to death in 1991 for shooting and killing his estranged
girlfriend and her father in 1989.

Brewer’s response to Wood’s death was predictable yet telling.
Besides misrepresenting some eyewitness accounts, Brewer’s comments
reveal her ignorance of the role of the state in carrying out
capital punishment.

Yes, it’s true that Wood’s victims suffered. And yes, the
families of the victims have suffered as well, probably much more
than Wood did last night. But there are limits to the type of
punishment the state can impose on prisoners in America—the
punishment they receive for their crimes isn’t supposed to
match the level of pain and suffering they impose on their victims
or victims’ families. Vengeance isn’t the job of the state. To
argue otherwise signals a fundamental misunderstanding of the
restraints purposely put on the government to protect its citizens
from abuse and tyranny.

Wood certainly won’t be the last inmate to have his execution
botched. As long as states continue to experiment on inmates with
secret lethal injection drugs from presumably dubious sources
without providing an ounce of transparency into the process, these
grisly results are going to continue to repeat themselves again and
again.

The latest document leak from The
Intercept (that’s Glenn Greenwald’s new web publication) comes
not from Edward Snowden, it seems. Instead, an unidentified source
within the intelligence community has provided The
Intercept with the secret 166-page document that explains how,
exactly, the government puts people on terrorist watch lists and
what happens with that information.

Dirty Wars author
Jeremy Scahill, along with journalist Ryan Devereaux, scoured
the documents to break down the details for readers.
There is a lot to examine. Looking it over, I see three major
take-aways:

The standard for getting on the watch list is low.
“Reasonable suspicion” is enough. The Intercept
notes:

The document’s definition of “terrorist” activity
includes actions that fall far short of bombing or hijacking.
In addition to expected crimes, such as assassination or
hostage-taking, the guidelines also define destruction of
government property and damaging computers used by financial
institutions as activities meriting placement on a list. They also
define as terrorism any act that is “dangerous”
to property and intended to influence government policy through
intimidation.

This combination—a broad definition of what constitutes
terrorism and a low threshold for designating someone a
terrorist—opens the way to ensnaring innocent people in secret
government dragnets. It can also be counterproductive. When
resources are devoted to tracking people who are not genuine risks
to national security, the actual threats get fewer resources—and
might go unnoticed.

“If reasonable suspicion is the only standard you need to label
somebody, then it’s a slippery slope we’re sliding down here,
because then you can label anybody anything,” says David Gomez, a
former senior FBI special agent with experience running
high-profile terrorism investigations. “Because you appear on a
telephone list of somebody doesn’t make you a terrorist. That’s the
kind of information that gets put in there.”

And The Intercept notes, the names on the watch list
show up when local law enforcement agencies interact with the
listed folks, so somebody on the list is going to be treated with
even more suspicion if he or she gets pulled over for speeding (for
example) and might not even know why.

This isn’t a small list, by the way. The Associated Press
earlier in the month noted that the federal government has
added more than 1.5 million names to the watch list over the
past five years, though many have also been subsequently
removed.

Yes, there is profiling. There is a mechanism
to elevate entire “categories of people,” who are on the watch list
to add to “no fly” lists, again without any evidence the
individuals are actually plotting any sort of acts of
terrorism:

The rulebook does not indicate what “categories of people” have
been subjected to threat-based upgrades. It is not clear, for
example, whether a category might be as broad as military-age males
from Yemen. The guidelines do make clear that American citizens and
green card holders are subject to such upgrades, though government
officials are required to review their status in an “expedited”
procedure. Upgrades can remain in effect for 72 hours before being
reviewed by a small committee of senior officials. If approved,
they can remain in place for 30 days before a renewal is required,
and can continue “until the threat no longer exists.”

“In a set of watchlisting criteria riddled with exceptions that
swallow rules, this exception is perhaps the most expansive and
certainly one of the most troubling,” [Hina] Shamsi, the ACLU
attorney, says. “It’s reminiscent of the Bush administration’s
heavily criticized color-coded threat alerts, except that here,
bureaucrats can exercise virtually standard-less authority in
secret with specific negative consequences for entire categories of
people.”

If you’re on the list, all your stuff gets picked
over. If the federal government thinks you might be a
terrorist, they are instructed to get as much information about you
as they can when they yank you aside at airports or border
crossings:

In addition to data like fingerprints, travel itineraries,
identification documents and gun licenses, the rules encourage
screeners to acquire health insurance information, drug
prescriptions, “any cards with an electronic strip on it (hotel
cards, grocery cards, gift cards, frequent flyer cards),”
cellphones, email addresses, binoculars, peroxide, bank account
numbers, pay stubs, academic transcripts, parking and speeding
tickets, and want ads. The digital information singled out for
collection includes social media accounts, cell phone lists, speed
dial numbers, laptop images, thumb drives, iPods, Kindles, and
cameras. All of the information is then uploaded to the TIDE
database.

Screeners are also instructed to collect data on any “pocket
litter,” scuba gear, EZ Passes, library cards, and the titles of
any books, along with information about their condition—”e.g., new,
dog-eared, annotated, unopened.” Business cards and conference
materials are also targeted, as well as “anything with an account
number” and information about any gold or jewelry worn by the
watchlisted individual. Even “animal information”—details about
pets from veterinarians or tracking chips—is requested. The
rulebook also encourages the collection of biometric or
biographical data about the travel partners of watchlisted
individuals.

Read the entire Intercept story
here. They’ve also posted a PDF of the full “Watchlisting
Guidance” report
here.

The University of Arizona has decided to follow colleges around
the country in banning smoking on all campus
property. The new
policy is the university’s way of promoting “health
and wellness,” like a good parent.

UA’s ban covers not just cigarettes, but also chewing tobacco,
cigars, and e-cigarettes. Hostility toward e-cigarettes
is particularly nonsensical, since the tobacco-free product is used
by many as a smoking cessation product. In fact, e-cigarettes
are much more effective at helping people quit smoking
than nicotine patches, according to
this study.

Some students are irritated about the ban, but who are they to
stand athwart history? From The College Fix:

The fact that they are banning all tobacco products is crazy,”
sophomore Kevin Uznanski, who does not smoke, told The
College Fix. “I think that the policy will work to a certain
degree, but it will not eliminate all tobacco use on campus.”
..

“Banning electronic cigarettes is just too much,” Uznanski said,
noting that the devices – which emit vapor, not smoke, and whose
use is known as “vaping” – have a minimal effect on bystanders.

Violators will be referred to “the appropriate college student
representative for educational resources,” which sounds much worse
than just paying a fine or something.

“What this really about is not healthcare, not Obamacare,” says
Michael Cannon, director of health policy at The Cato Institute. “it’s whether the
president of the United States is in fact the president of the
United States and subject to the Constitution or an autocrat that
can impose taxes on his own.”

Click above to watch now or click below for page with full
transcript, downloadable links, and more resources.

View this article.