PBC News & Comment: NSA Whistleblower Tom Drake Details Salt Lake Dragnet

NSA veteran Thomas Drake reveals NSA’s total surveillance of Salt Lake City during 2002 Olympics, joined by attorney Rocky Anderson….--Anderson was Mayor of Salt Lake City at the time, and leads lawsuit based in part on Drake’s sworn declaration of the NSA’s unconstitutional “field operation” in US; follow developments in the case here
--imprisoned CIA whistleblower Jeff Sterling—convicted solely by phone metadata—is rejected in appeal to reduce his sentence
--in major opus, Washington Post publishes magazine-length report on alleged Russian hacking in 2016, with more unproven claims and anonymous sources
--NY Times runs lengthy laundry list of Trump’s lies since January, and shows some courage by calling them “lies”
--Trump intentionally misled about possibility of tapes of Comey conversations
--Gareth Porter reveals how US arms in Syria wound up in the arms of al Qaeda groups
--2 very different perspectives on Syria both say US is “sleepwalking” into global confrontation—aka world war—in Syria
--Saudis and allies present demands to Qatar, including shutdown of al Jazeera
--gruesome torture—including a human rotisserie—reported in Yemen and attributed to UAE, implicates the US
--Physicians for Human Rights releases new report that US torture methods amounted to unethical human experimentation, we talk to co-author Dr. Scott Allen
--Senate healthcare-wrecking bill is in trouble, Rand Paul thinks it’s not cruel enough
--GOP extremist in Missouri say “show me your birth control pills” in new law that allows employers and landlords to punish people for contraception and abortion
--new Netflix doc shows how billionaires Peter Thiel and Sheldon Adelson used their wealth to control media outlets they considered unfriendly
--Nancy Pelosi defends her leadership, as some Dems call for change