Your Daily Crimes of the Bloated Empire

When the NSA Has Lost Even Diane Feinstein... it's pretty amazing.

The NSA outrages ARE fucking outrageous.

Obviously everyone spies on each other, but what gets me is 1) the incredible waste of the attitude to capture everything, and 2) the spying ultimately is nothing to do with stopping terrorism and everything to do with gaining economic advantage for our rapacious capitalist empire.

As bad as that is, drone killings are even more sickening and outrageous, and hardly anyone gives a shit. In this pathetic story, kids who saw their grandmother get blown up, testify to a precious few handful of decent Congressional representatives.

Rafiq, like so many fathers, wants his children to have peaceful lives and the best education possible. He hopes Zubair grows up to be a doctor and that Nabila is a lawyer.

"(The drone attack) created a disruption in our lives," he said. "Our children live in fear. They don't want to go to school. They don't want to play outside."

Ultimately, only five members of Congress arrived at the briefing to hear their testimony Tuesday morning: Rep. Alan Grayson of Florida, who organized the briefing, along with Reps. Jan Schakowsky, D-Ill., Rush Holt, D-N.J., John Conyers, D-Mich., and Rick Nolan, D-Minn.

What compelling interest did the U.S. government have in murdering a grandmother of nine and a midwife who helped deliver babies in the village, Rehman asked them. How can he reassure his children that the drones will not come back?

"I no longer love blue skies," Zubair said. "In fact, I now prefer gray skies. The drones do not fly when the skies are gray."