Arizona Gets Rid Of Evidence After Supreme Court Ruling, Baiting Iran, Army Corps Negligent In Afghanistan

Gene Lyons
Dana Milbank
Bryan Curtis

"Washington D.C. was under a tornado watch. It was pretty crazy, especially when the White House landed on Christine O'Donnell." – Jimmy Fallon

"Election Day is less than a week away. It's a shame that either of these parties has to win." – Jay Leno

"Election Day is next Tuesday. According to a new poll, one out of three voters is still undecided. It's a tough choice. Do you vote for the people who got us into this mess, or the people who can't get us out of this mess?" – Jay Leno

The state of Arizona didn't waste any time in executing Jeffrey Landrigan., once they got the green light from the Supreme Court, they slipped him the lethal mickey on Tuesday night. The execution had been held up because Arizona would not tell the FDA where it had obtained one of the drugs used in the lethal injection, which is currently in short supply in the US: "Shortages of barbiturates used in executions has led to delays in several states. The only domestic manufacturer approved by the Food and Drug Administration to make sodium thiopental, the barbiturate used in Arizona, is Hospira Inc; it suspended production of the drug a year ago because of supply issues, and is expected to be producing it again in the first quarter of next year.


With no supplies coming from sources approved by the F.D.A., Judge Roslyn O. Silver of Federal District Court had demanded that the state provide information about the origins of Arizona’s drug in order to know whether there were risks of impurity or efficacy that could violate Mr. Landrigan’s rights under the Eighth Amendment barring cruel and unusual punishment."

The weird part of the judge's argument was that, with a non--FDA approved source: “whether the non-F.D.A. approved drug will cause pain and suffering.” Or that the drug would leave the person a comatose vegetable instead of killing him, leaving it to some guard making minimum wage to put a pillow over his head ... Even weirder is that Arizona refused to disclose to a Federal court where they got the drug. They later claimed it came from England, but it could even more easily have come from Mexico, which would have caused some pain and embarrassment to Governor Jan Brewer, who is running for re-election.

The case quickly went through the appeals process in one day, all the way to the Supreme Court, who issued a one-page order, on a 5 - 4 vote, to allow the execution with the mystery drug. They ignored suspicions about the mystery drug, saying that there was no way to prove what was speculation, nor did they insist on knowing where the drug came from. Sodium thiopental has to be used within a short time frame after it has been made, because it goes bad quickly, and that's why there's no stockpile of it anywhere. It's also one reason this case whizzed through the courts so quickly, maybe it's due date was Wednesday morning...

Depending on where you stand on the issue of lethal injection, this was either a victory for how the current injections are done, using three drugs instead of just one, or that, in Arizona's case, crime pays. Or that Arizona got rid of the evidence after the Supreme Court ruling, by injecting it into Mr Landrigan as soon as possible...

The Iraqi foreign Minister under Saddam Hussein, Tariq Aziz, had been held by the US ever since he surrendered to them. He had said that he would rather die than end up in an American prison. Ironically, he will get his wish. When the US troops began leaving Iraq, Aziz was turned over to the Maliki government, who promptly put him on trial, with the outcome of sentencing him to death by hanging. If the Americans had kept Aziz, we might have been able to have gotten the details of working with Saddam before the US invaded. Now, we'll never know, and Maliki will get the revenge he has always dreamed and salivated over. At least they won't have to worry about the potency of any lethal injection drugs, ol' Aziz will be taken out to the hangin' tree...

I'm not sure what Obama is planning on doing after the elections; it looks like he is going to try to bait Iran and get some public sympathy back, because Iran is always an easy target. The story in the NY Times is stupid and makes no sense, proving that Hillary has surrounded herself with a few too many hawks, and that in the past it has been no trouble getting the gullible Obama to go along.

Last year we came so close, oh so close to actually having a nuclear agreement with Iran, officials say. Now, we are going to enter into another round of negotiations, and because we think we have them by the short hairs after the stuxnet virus melted their controller software: "... the conditions on Tehran would be even more onerous than a deal that the country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, rejected last year. Iran’s reaction, officials say, will be the first test of whether a new and surprisingly broad set of economic sanctions is changing Iran’s nuclear calculus." No, we want to see if we have broken their pride yet, not seeing if a reasonable agreement can be reached. I hadn't realized that the ghosts of neocons past still ruled in the State Dept. Maybe Obama's detractors are right, that he is too arrogant and therefore gullible to arguments that play into his vanity...

This one threw me. Russia's Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, who has been criticized for trying to whitewash Russia's past and by saying that really, Josef Stalin wasn't so bad. Really, because Putin had to work under him and he should know, as the ex-head of the dreaded KGB... On Tuesday, Vladimir Putin comes out with a book review, telling the press that all schoolchildren should read Alexander Solzhenitsyn's book, the Gulag Archipelago. It's a great book, but chronicles many things wrong with the Soviet system, just the opposite of Putin's recent efforts... Maybe he was in some way trying to counter Mr Gorbachov's recent criticisms that his administration has been no better than when it was under Soviet control... Or maybe Mr Putin is stuck in the writing of his own memoirs, looking to some decent Russian writers for inspiration, no matter how distorted his view on history has become...

One last tidbit, supporting my thesis that the Army Corps of Engineers are inept, screw up every project they do, and should have been disbanded after WW11... The special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction released a report slamming the Army Corps for lax oversight on construction projects that they sub-contracted out. The Afghan owned company that was contracted to build all of the new police stations has done such a poor job of it that most of the building are already falling apart. They basically were little more than mud huts, about the same quality level that the poorest Afghans live in, with substandard roofing, uninsulated windows, cheap plastic plumbing, and patched together with low-grade cement. The Army Corps were supposed to inspect all of the work and oversee the materials used, instead they must have been partying in the American's compound, keeping well away from any field of combat...