Details of torture report reveal broken limbs, hypothermia, and rectal feeding

One prisoner at a CIA black site froze to death. Others were forced to stand on broken feet, threatened sexually with broomsticks, or subjected to "rectal feeding" for no apparent medical reason. The Senate Intelligence Committee released those details and more Tuesday in the 500-page execu​tive summary of its report on the CIA's Bush-era "enhanced interrogation" program.

Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein unveiled the long-awaited, long-delayed report by the Senate Intelligence Committee on the CIA's now-discontinued "Rendition, Detention, and Interrogation" program this morning, calling it a "stain on our country and our values."

The controversial 6,700-page report describes, among other things, detainees being kept in a dark, freezing, dungeon-like prison, being kept awake for up to 180 hours at a time, and being subjected to "near-drowning" over and over. The three-year Senate investigation concluded the "brutal interrogation techniques in violation of US law, treaty obligations, and our values" were not effective in prying intelligence from detainees.

The report also found that the CIA misled the public, the White House and Congress on both the brutality of the program and its effectiveness.

"The waterboarding technique was physically harmful, inducing convulsions and vomiting," the report states. "Abu Zubaydah, for example, became 'completely unresponsive, with bubbles rising through his open, full mouth.' Internal CIA records describe the waterboarding of Khalid Shaykh Mohammad as evolving in to a 'series of near drownings.'"

CIA interrogators threatened detainees with broomsticks and power drills and threatened to rape and kill detainees' mothers. Other detainees with broken feet and legs were subjected to stress positions for extended periods of time.

"The two detainees that each had a broken foot were also subjected to walling, stress positions, and cramped confinement, despite the note in their interrogation plans that these specific enhanced interrogation techniques were not requested because of the medical condition of the detainees," the report states. "CIA Headquarters did not react to the site's use of these CIA enhanced interrogation techniques despite the lack of approval."

The Senate report also describes a photograph of a "well worn" waterboard, at a site where the CIA said it had never previously used the practice.

The results of the "enhanced interrogation techniques," especially at the dungeon-like CIA site known as "Cobalt" in the report, led to noticeable mental health deterioration among detainees, the report found. At least one detainee at the Cobalt site died of hypothermia.

"Throughout the program, multiple CIA detainees who were subjected to the CIA's enhanced interrogation techniques and extended isolation exhibited psychological and behavioral issues, including hallucinations, paranoia, insomnia, and attempts at self-harm and self-mutilation," the report states. "Multiple psychologists identified the lack of human contact experienced by detainees as a cause of psychiatric problems."

White House spokesman Josh Earnest said Monday that President Obama supported releasing the report "so that people around the world and people here at home understand exactly what transpired." However, more hawkish members of Congress, the intelligence community, and its allies said the report would inflame anger against the U.S. and its key allies and endanger American personnel abroad.

"We are concerned that this release could endanger the lives of Americans overseas, jeopardize U.S. relations with foreign partners, potentially incite violence, create political problems for our allies, and be used as a recruitment tool for our enemies," Republican Senators Marco Rubio and Jim Risch said in a statement on Monday.

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper confirmed in a meeting with members of the Intelligence Committee over the weekend that the administration was concerned that the report could incite violence against Americans overseas, but said that he nevertheless supported its release. The US has been beefing up security at embassies, and administration officials have said that the Pentagon has strengthened protections for US forces in Afghanistan.

In the lead up to the report's release, defenders of the CIA's interrogation techniques launched an aggressive media campaign - a "prebuttal," one of Washington's more obnoxious neologisms - against the findings. Former Vice President Dick Cheney called the report's findings "a bunch of hooey" in the , and former CIA lawyer John Rizzo said on FOX News that the report is "absolutely unfair and preposterous." Former CIA officials even built a website, CIAsaveslives.com, to hit back at the report's findings.

"It's a one-stop shopping place for the other side," Bill Harlow, a top CIA spokesman during the Bush administration, told . "With the website ... we'll be able to put out newly declassified documents, documents that were previously released but not well read, and host a repository for op-eds and media appearances by various officials."

Feinstein called the pushback "a campaign of mistaken statements and press articles."

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North Carolina church members indicted for kidnapping, choking and beating gay man to cure 'homosexual demons'

© WSPA

Matthew Fenner

Five members of a controversial North Carolina church were indicted this week on charges that they kidnapped and assaulted a fellow member because he had been possessed by "homosexual demons."

On Monday, a Rutherford County grand jury indicted Sarah Covington Anderson, Adam Christopher Bartley, Brooke McFadden Covington, Justin Brock Covington and Robert Louis Walker Jr. on charges of second degree kidnapping and simple assault. Anderson was also charged with assault by strangulation.

Matthew Fenner told WSPA that he was a member of The Word of Faith Fellowship church in 2013 when the others physically attacked him for being gay on Jan. 29, 2013.

"I honestly thought I was going to die," Fenner recalled. "My head was like being flung back, my vision was going brown and black... I couldn't breathe and I'm sitting here thinking if I don't get out of this, I'm probably going to die."

According to QNotes, the suspects slapped and strangled Fenner, and they threatened to imprison him for two days to fight his "homosexual demons."

Although the church has been accused of abusing LGBT people in the past, Fenner said that local officials refused to take him seriously or even let him file a complaint at first.

QNotes described the Spindale church as "cult-like" for a technique of "deliverance" in which members are encircled, and subjected to "high-pitched shrilling sounds, screams and prayers."

In an affidavit, Fenner recalled how Sarah Covington Anderson had told him he was "disgusting" because of his sexual orientation before the physical abuse began on one of three instances that he described.

"Deliverance soon ensued (which meant extremely rough pushing, loud screaming, and other violent measures intended to 'break me free of the homosexual 'demons" they so viciously despite), and I was at one point grabbed by my throat by Sarah and shaken, punched, and beaten," the affidavit said. "I received many bruises on my collarbones, neck, chest, and shoulders."

"I had at least 15-20 college age men around me, screaming, shaking me, punching me, hitting my chest, grabbing my head, telling me to repeat different phrases, all of which caused (and have resulted in much) mental distress to high levels," he added.

An attorney for the church insisted that all of the charges were false.

"They are innocent of the charges leveled against them and we look forward to proving their innocence and to their complete vindication before a trial court," a statement from the attorney said. "We are adamant that no one ever physically harmed Mr. Fenner... The church does NOT target members who are gay."

The U.S. Department of Justice dropped a hate crimes investigation against the church in 2012 after Michael Lowry recanted allegations that that church members held him against his will for months because he was gay. But he now says that he was coerced into changing his story.

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Russia Today and the propaganda wars waged by Western media

'Information' that supports your side; disinformation that invents, distorts or invents the truth or presents spurious allegations and assumptions as facts; outright lies and propaganda; controlling the flow of information through 'embedded' reporters and hand-picked pools in order to eliminate 'inconvenient facts' or simply prevent journalists from ever seeing them - all these techniques and methods have long been essential to modern war, and they have become crucial to the murky wars and armed conflicts of the early 21st century.

The essential purpose of such efforts is to attain 'information dominance' and make sure that your 'narrative' is the one that most people hear, that they keep on hearing it as often as possible, that you can shape the ways in which these conflicts are represented and perceived by a global audience that now receives information through an all-pervasive mass media that includes 24-hour tv, the Internet, smartphones and tablets.

The best propaganda of all is the kind that you don't even recognize as propaganda; you simply assume that what you see is what you get; that the journalists and pundits you see are independent of their governments and willing to hold their actions up to scrutiny and ask questions that they don't to hear; that the journalists, newsreaders and pundits you are watching or listening to have any subjective perspective or ulterior motives or any interest in anything except the plain unvarnished truth.

In the West we often take it for granted that this is what we've got, and that our media would never and could never stoop so low as to transform journalism into propaganda. That is something that other countries do.

The problem is that large sections of the world's population don't believe in our inherent truthfulness as much as we do or are tired of hearing our stories. Now satellite technology and the worldwide web have made it possible for different voices to provide a different perspective, and even to counter the stories emanating from CNN, the BBC and numerous other outlets, and when it happens our own masters of war are not happy about it.

Sometimes we respond by identifying the source of disinformation as a military target, as NATO did when it bombed Serbia's television offices, or al-Jazeera's offices in Afghanistan. At other times we simply attempt to discredit them by comparing our own exemplary journalistic standards to the crude propagandising that other countries supposedly engage it.

The US did that with al-Jazeera on more than one occasion, and the British government did the same when it banned Press tv. And now Russia Today is getting the same treatment, as the West moves ever-closer to an all-out war with Russia. For months, Western media pundits have been shaking their heads in horror at the impact of the new international Russian media on non-Russian audiences.

Last month for example, that august bastion of the truth, the Wall Street Journal, criticized 'Putin's disinformation matrix', which it described as ' merely one part of the Kremlin's aggressive media effort' that included ' mobilizing thousands of online "trolls," cultivating sympathetic political cranks abroad, and exploiting Western freedom of speech and the Western model of public diplomacy to advance Moscow's illiberal aims.'

This is a bit rich coming from the uber-conservative WSJ, which never saw an American neocon war that it didn't like, and which never bothered to question the assumptions on which such wars were based, and which as late as last September had an editorial arguing that Dick Cheney was 'right all along' about Iraq and Syria.

These are not guys to speak truth to power - or to give others lectures for not doing so. And that same month , a web journal run by the supposedly non-partisan Institute of Modern Russia published a report entitled , which accused Russia of having 'weaponised information' through its new digital channel. The article claimed that

'Since at least 2008, Kremlin military and intelligence thinkers have been talking about information not in the familiar terms of "persuasion," "public diplomacy" or even "propaganda," but in weaponized terms, as a tool to confuse, blackmail, demoralize, subvert and paralyze.'

Goodness, can such evil stalk the world? Indeed it can, because last week the US Congress approved Resolution 758,, which noted that

'the Russian Federation has expanded the presence of its state-sponsored media in national languages across central and western Europe with the intent of using news and information to distort public opinion and obscure Russian political and economic influence in Europe'

There is a lot more where this came from. Personally I don't watch Russia Today enough to be able to make an overall comment on the quality of its journalism. I have seen good things and bad. Certainly I have never seen any program or report critical of Putin, though I do remember watching the Russian Foreign Minister getting a far tougher grilling from a journalist than I have seen any American or British foreign minister receive from any of our supposedly independent and fearless reporters.

I have also seen news reports that are 'anti-Western' insofar as they focus overwhelmingly on negative aspects of European and American society. So I don't doubt that such coverage is biased, or even that Russia Today has been conceived in part to project a pro-Russian view of world events to a Western audience.

I don't see RT - or any other media outlet for that matter - as the 'voice of truth'. But it does have a refreshingly wide range of often critical pundits of varying quality, who remind me what a narrow, limited and safe range of 'experts' and commentators the BBC, CNN or Channel 4 News draws upon say. I have briefly appeared on Russia Today myself on three occasions, and I once appeared on Tariq Ramadan's show on Press tv.

The Ramadan appearance was in connection with my book I have no doubt that I was of interest to Russia Today because of critical pieces I have written here and elsewhere on Western foreign policy in Iraq and Syria.

Nevertheless I didn't say anything that I didn't want to say or that I didn't actually believe, and I didn't see myself as a troll or a propagandist or a supporter of Putin - a politician who I have very little time for as it happens.

I certainly didn't feel 'weaponised', and what I find laughable about the condemnation directed at RT is the assumption that Western governments would never themselves use the media to advance their political or foreign policy interests. According to

'Russia has hybridized not only its actual warfare but also its informational warfare. Much of the epistemology democratic nations thought they had permanently retired after the Cold War needs to be re-learned and adapted to even cleverer forms of propaganda and disinformation.'

Yes, how unfortunate that 'democratic nations' should now be forced by those sinister ghouls in the Kremlin to re-learn the 'epistemology' they had supposedly discarded out of the goodness of their freedom-loving hearts, er, when exactly?

As early as the 1989 invasion of Panama, the US military identified information as a crucial theatre of war, and sent only a handpicked pool of reporters to Panama City to report on the invasion - except that they spent most of the war locked in a room which Pentagon-approved video footage and briefings until major combat was almost over.

And it has continued ever since, in Kosovo, in Gulf Wars 1 and 2, in Afghanistan and the 'war on terror.' US military strategists have written dozens of articles on 'strategic communications', ' public diplomacy' and 'information warfare' and the Pentagon has also 'weaponised' information to achieve its aims.

Between 2002 -2008 according to the , the Pentagon secretly infiltrated more than seventy retired military officers into the tv networks to serve as media commentators and act as 'message force multipliers' or 'surrogates' in promoting the Iraq War.

Most of these pundits, the Times reported at the time 'have ties to military contractors vested in the very war policies they are asked to assess on air' and the fact that these connections were not mentioned when they appeared had created 'a symbiotic relationship where the usual dividing lines between government and journalism have been obliterated.'

The itself had experience of this kind of infiltration, when the pro-war journalist Judith Miller recycled false information fed to her from the Iraqi National Congress about Saddam Hussein's weapons program.

Why is that not 'propaganda and disinformation'? Yet somehow we are now expected to hold up our hands in horror, because other countries who for one reason or another our governments have designated as strategic opponents, may be using the media to promote their own foreign policy agendas or simply to counter our own 'weaponised' information.

And did I mention Fox News? Oh very well, if you insist.

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U.S. Congressmen admit they didn't read NDAA before voting for it

© AFP Photo / Brendan Smialowski

US House members admitted they had not read the entire $585 billion, 1,648-page National Defense Authorization Act, which predominantly specifies budgeting for the Defense Department, before it was voted on Thursday in Congress.

"Of course not. Are you kidding?" Rep. Jim Moran (D-Virginia) said when asked by CNSNews if he had perused the entire bill, which was just posted online late Tuesday night before it was ultimately passed in by the House by a vote of 300-119 about 36 hours later.

Moran said he did not plan to read the entire bill before voting because "I trust the leadership."

"Do you think [House Speaker John] Boehner and [Senate Majority Leader Harry] Reid have read it?"asked CNSNews.

"I know their staff has," Moran responded.

When pressed directly about his knowledge of every aspect of the massive National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) of 2015, House Speaker Boehner (R-Ohio) assured CNSNews he was aware of all aspects of the multi-faceted, complex bill.

"I've been through almost every part of that bill, as it was being put together," he said. "So, trust me, I am well aware of what's in that bill."

House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-Maryland) also indirectly acknowledged the near impossibility for anyone to read such a comprehensive bill. He told CNSNews he had not read the full text, but understands its contents.

"The committees have gone over it, it's been in conference, and I have an outline of exactly what it does," he said. "So, I know what it does."

Upon taking control of the US House in 2010, Republicans maintained that they would allow the public to read full text of bills at least three days before they are voted on in the Lower Chamber. This promise materialized, in part, from a quote by then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in 2010, when her Democratic Party controlled the House and help shepherd the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, through Congress.

"We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what's in it, away from the fog of the controversy,"Pelosi infamously stated of the hot-button legislation. While she may have been alluding to what she believed to be the bill's future popularity, following the rancor and oft-disputed claims - "death panels" - surrounding the debate over what the legislation meant for a sensitive issue like health care, the line was used as a political cudgel to help the GOP regain the House later that year.

Yet, Republicans voted on the 2015 NDAA after the full bill had been available to read - for both the public and members of Congress - just 36 hours prior, as pointed out by InfoWars.

The legislation will now get a vote in the Senate, likely next week.

The NDAA is annual legislation that directs budgeting and expenditures for the US military. The bill passed in the House on Thursday "authorizes $521 billion in base discretionary spending for Defense Department activities, as well as $64 billion for overseas contingency operations," according to The Hill.

The legislation authorized $6.6 billion for operations against Islamic State, the extremist group that is the target of US-led airstrikes in Syria and Iraq. That funding to combat Islamic State includes authorization of the deployment of 1,500 additional US forces and funding to train and supply Iraqi security forces over the next two years.

"I really wish to emphasize that the train-and-equip mission is just that. It in no way, shape, manner or form authorizes the use of military force," said Rep. Adam Smith (D-Washington), the ranking Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee.

The 2015 NDAA targeted US soldiers with cuts to benefits and other services.

"The bill also reduces benefits for troops and their families. It would raise the copay by $3 for most pharmaceuticals under Tricare, the military health insurance plan," The Hill added.

The legislation also included cuts to subsidies for military commissaries, where US service members buy groceries, by $100 million.

In addition, such massive, must-pass bills are chocked full of "pork," or just about anything a House member, especially those with clout, can pass by House leadership and the various committees that have domain over the bill's attributes.

For example, as RT reported Wednesday, the 2015 NDAA includes a handful of land deals including one that gives a foreign mining company 2,400 acres of national forest in Arizona that is cherished ancestral homeland to Apache natives.

"Since time immemorial people have gone there. That's part of our ancestral homeland," Terry Rambler, chairman of the San Carlos Apache Tribe, told The Huffington Post. "We've had dancers in that area forever - sunrise dancers - and coming-of-age ceremonies for our young girls that become women. They'll seal that off. They'll seal us off from the acorn grounds, and the medicinal plants in the area, and our prayer areas."

Previously, the House refused an amendment to the NDAA of 2014 that would have repealed a controversial provision placed in the NDAA of 2012 that has ever since provided the executive branch with the power to arrest and detain indefinitely any US citizen thought to be affiliated with Al-Qaeda or associated organizations. The House also rejected last year an amendment that would have expedited the shut-down of the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

In January of 2014, the US Supreme Court decided against weighing in on a challenge to Section 1021(b)(2) of the 2012 NDAA, which can be interpreted in a way that allows for the government to detain without trial any American citizen accused of committing a "belligerent act" against the country "until the end of hostilities."

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Quantum teleportation of subatomic particles reaches 15.5 miles across optical fiber

© GAP, University of Geneva (UNIGE)

These crystals captured and stored quantum information at the end of the teleportation.

A new distance record has been set in the strange world of quantum teleportation.

In a recent experiment, the quantum state (the direction it was spinning) of a light particle instantly traveled 15.5 miles (25 kilometers) across an optical fiber, becoming the farthest successful quantum teleportation feat yet. Advances in quantum teleportation could lead to better Internet and communication security, and get scientists closer to developing quantum computers.

About five years ago, researchers could only teleport quantum information, such as which direction a particle is spinning, across a few meters. Now, they can beam that information across several miles.

Quantum teleportation doesn't mean it's possible for a person to instantly pop from New York to London, or be instantly beamed aboard a spacecraft like in television's "." Physicists can't instantly transport matter, but they can instantly transport information through quantum teleportation. This works thanks to a bizarre quantum mechanics property called entanglement.

Quantum entanglement happens when two subatomic particles stay connected no matter how far apart they are. When one particle is disturbed, it instantly affects the entangled partner. It's impossible to tell the state of either particle until one is directly measured, but measuring one particle instantly determines the state of its partner.

In the new, record-breaking experiment, researchers from the University of Geneva, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the National Institute of Standards and Technology used a super fast laser to pump out photons. Every once in a while, two photons would become entangled. Once the researchers had an entangled pair, they sent one down the optical fiber and stored the other in a crystal at the end of the cable. Then, the researchers shot a third particle of light at the photon traveling down the cable. When the two collided, they obliterated each other.

Though both photons vanished, the quantum information from the collision appeared in the crystal that held the second entangled photon.

Going the distance

Quantum information has already been transferred dozens of miles, but this is the farthest it's been transported using an optical fiber, and then recorded and stored at the other end. Other quantum teleportation experiments that beamed photons farther used lasers instead of optical fibers to send the information. But unlike the laser method, the optical-fiber method could eventually be used to develop technology like quantum computers that are capable of extremely fast computing, or quantum cryptography that could make secure communication possible.

Physicists think quantum teleportation will lead to secure wireless communication - something that is extremely difficult but important in an increasingly digital world. Advances in quantum teleportation could also help make online banking more secure.

The research was published Sept. 21 in .

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California Residents Load up Sandbags Before Storm

© Naval Research Laboratory

A NASA satellite image shows a storm forming over the Pacific Ocean that should arrive over most of California on Dec. 11, 2014.

A powerful storm expected to pack hurricane-force winds and heavy rain triggered emergency preparations across Northern California on Wednesday, with residents gathering sand bags, crews clearing storm drains and San Francisco school officials canceling classes for the first time since 9/11.

As much as 8 inches of rain could fall on coastal mountains over a 24-hour period starting late Wednesday, the National Weather Service said. Ski resorts in the northern Sierra Nevada could get more than 2 feet of snow.

"It's a short amount of time for that amount of water," Weather Service forecaster Diana Henderson said. "We are anticipating some localized flooding, maybe some downed trees and downed power lines. It could have an effect on a wide range of people."

The storm is expected to be one of the windiest and rainiest in five years and could also cause debris slides, especially in areas affected by this year's intense and widespread wildfires.

Public schools in San Francisco and Oakland and some private schools in the Bay Area planned to stay closed Thursday.

San Francisco Unified School District Superintended Richard A. Carranza said he didn't to put students at risk and that staff absences and power outages could affect the district's ability to supervise and feed students.

Wind gusts of up to 70 mph were expected on mountain tops, creating possible blizzard conditions in the Sierra. Rain, pounding surf and gusty winds were forecast for Southern California starting Thursday evening.

In California's agricultural heartland, farmers were looking forward to the dousing after three consecutive dry years. Parts of the state have experienced above-average rainfall this year, but not enough to make much of a dent in the drought.

James McFarlane, a third-generation farmer in Fresno County, said workers would have to stop picking citrus crops during the storm, but rain this time of year makes fruit bigger, allowing it to fetch higher prices.

"If we're not getting some Mother Nature-dictated time off out in the field, that probably means we're going to have a hard time finding surface water in the warmer months," he said.

The rain and the snow in the Sierra Nevada fills reservoirs that supply irrigation water during hot, dry months.

In San Francisco, where as much as 4 inches of rain was forecast, crews cleared storm drains and removed loose rocks from a hillside to prevent them from crashing down. Residents were advised to sweep up leaves and debris in front of their properties to prevent them from clogging drains.

"We have crews working starting tonight in 12-hour shifts," said Rachel Gordon, a spokeswoman for San Francisco's public works agency. "It will be all hands on deck."

Farther north, a series of strong weather fronts with high winds and heavy rains could lead to flooding and landslides this week in western Washington state.

The National Weather Service expects as much as 14 inches of rain between Monday and Thursday in the Olympic Mountains west of Seattle.

Saturated soils will bring the risk of mudslides, while winds could topple trees.

High winds were also forecast in Oregon.

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Why is the Treasury Department seeking survival kits for bank employees

© Photo Courtesy Flickr User Rob Young

The Department of Treasury is seeking to order survival kits for all of its employees who oversee the federal banking system, according to a new solicitation.

The emergency supplies would be for every employee at the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), which conducts on-site reviews of banks throughout the country. The survival kit includes everything from water purification tablets to solar blankets.

The government is willing to spend up to $200,000 on the kits, according to the solicitation released on Dec. 4.

The survival kits must come in a fanny-pack or backpack that can fit all of the items, including a 33-piece personal first aid kit with "decongestant tablets," a variety of bandages, and medicines.

The kits must also include a "reusable solar blanket" 52 by 84 inches long, a 2,400-calorie food bar, "50 water purification tablets," a "dust mask," "one-size fits all poncho with hood," a rechargeable lantern with built-in radio, and an "Air-Aid emergency mask" for protection against airborne viruses.

Survival kits will be delivered to every major bank in the United States including Bank of America, American Express Bank, BMO Financial Corp., Capitol One Financial Corporation, Citigroup, Inc., JPMorgan Chase & Company, and Wells Fargo.

Items will also be delivered to OCC offices across the country, from Champaign, Ill. to Billings, Mont. The agency also has offices in Sioux City, Iowa; Joplin, Mo.; and Fargo, N.D.

The mission of the OCC is to "ensure that national banks and federal savings associations operate in a safe and sound manner, provide fair access to financial services, treat customers fairly, and comply with applicable laws and regulations."

The agency has roughly 3,814 employees, each of which would receive a survival kit. The staff includes "bank examiners" who provide "sustained supervision" of major banks in the United States.

"Examiners analyze loan and investment portfolios, funds management, capital, earnings, liquidity, sensitivity to market risk for all national banks and federal thrifts, and compliance with consumer banking laws for national banks and thrifts with less than $10 billion in assets," the OCC website explains. "They review internal controls, internal and external audit, and compliance with law. They also evaluate management's ability to identify and control risk."

It is not clear why the Treasury Department is ordering the kits. Contracts for survival kits are usually made for the military, or law enforcement such as the FBI.

The OCC did not return request for comment before publication of this story.

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