<div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table float_right"><div><div class="image">REUTERS/Sue OgrockiTrading resumed with a flourish in the S&amp;P 500 pit at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, October 26, 1998.</div></div></div>Stocks had a pretty nice sell-off today.
First, the scoreboard:
<ul>
<li>Dow: 16,117.7 (-222.3, -1.3%)</li>
<li>S&amp;P 500: 1,846 (-21.0, -1.1%)</li>
<li>Nasdaq: 4,260.4 (-62.9, -1.4%)</li>
</ul>
And now the top stories:
<ul>
<li>Today's market-moving news arguably started to pour out overnight in Asia where <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/r-chinas-jan-feb-economic-activity-cools-to-multi-year-lows-2014-13">China's latest stats on industrial production</a>, retail sales, and fixed asset investment all fell short of expectations. Combined with last weekend's horrific plunge in exports, economists now see the slowdown in China more clearly, and some <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/wall-street-cuts-china-gdp-forecasts-2014-3">have already slashed their GDP growth forecasts</a>. "New leaders are now facing a critical test: whether they can stabilise the economy, without significantly compromising the progress of lowering debt risks," said Societe Generale's Wei Yao. "We think that they will try to send clear easing signals but continue to refrain from any big stimulus program. Cutting the required reserve ratio is an option, but it is more a gesture than for real impact."</li>
<li>Data out of the U.S. was mostly better than expected. <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/us-retail-sales-february-2014-3">Retail sales climbed 0.3%</a> in February, which was higher than the 0.2% gain expected. Similarly, sales excluding autos and gas climbed 0.3%.</li>
<li> <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/initial-jobless-claims-march-8-2014-3">Initial weekly jobless claims</a> fell to 315,000, which was much better than the 330,000 expected by economists. The 4-week moving average fell to 330,500 from 336,750 last week. "Claims data have been volatile dating back to last fall, as factors such as computer system upgrades, seasonal adjustments related to moving holidays, and severe weather all potentially complicated the interpretation of the previously steady downward trend," said Barclays' Cooper Howes. "That being said, the 4wma has settled in around where it was last summer before these factors came into play, suggesting that it may be stabilizing."</li>
<li>It was hours after the economic data that we saw risk assets like stocks to fall and safe assets like Treasury securities to rise. "The ignition of the Russia/Ukraine situation has created the bid," said <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/markets-take-a-sharp-turn-lower-2014-3">Tom Tucci, head of U.S. Treasury trading at CIBC World Markets</a>, in an emailed note to clients shortly after noon. "Massive short covering in the last hour after yesterday's real money buying."</li>
<li>Don't Miss: <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/17-mind-blowing-facts-about-russia-2014-3">17 Mind-Blowing Facts About Russia »</a> </li>
</ul>

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<div class="image-container float_right click-to-enlarge" style="width:400px"><div class="image"><a title_source="Robert Johnson/Business Insider" title_caption="Guantanamo feeding tubes and ensure" class="zoomin" href="http://static6.businessinsider.com/image/5150e070eab8ea1821000005-960/tube-3.jpg"></a></div>Robert Johnson/Business InsiderGuantanamo feeding tubes and ensure</div>People across the country are disgusted by the <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/15/opinion/hunger-striking-at-guantanamo-bay.html">description of force-feeding at Guantanamo Bay</a> offered by detainee Samir Naji al Hasan Moqbel.
Samir Naji, who has been at Guantanamo since 2002, offered the following account in a New York Times Op-Ed via his attorney:
I will never forget the first time they passed the feeding tube up my nose. I can’t describe how painful it is to be force-fed this way. As it was thrust in, it made me feel like throwing up. I wanted to vomit, but I couldn’t. There was agony in my chest, throat and stomach. I had never experienced such pain before. I would not wish this cruel punishment upon anyone.
I am still being force-fed. Two times a day they tie me to a chair in my cell. My arms, legs and head are strapped down. I never know when they will come. Sometimes they come during the night, as late as 11 p.m., when I’m sleeping.
It sounds terrible. And lthough Naval spokesman Captain Robert Durand called this description "<a href="http://news.yahoo.com/obamas-guantanamo-policy-hit-violence-force-feeding-200659248.html">absolutely false</a>," there's no doubt the situation is ugly nonetheless.
However, there is no evidence that Guantanamo guards are acting out of line. In fact, they are doing exactly what U.S. courts have ordered guards to do in domestic prisons.
In 2005, the Washington State Court of Appeals ruled that <a href="http://seattletimes.com/html/localnews/2002297397_fast03m.html">the state was obligated to force-feed hunger-striking inmate Charles R. McNabb</a>.
"The right to decline force-feeding is not absolute because the state has an interest in protecting the sanctity of the lives of its citizens," wrote appellate judge Ken Kato for a unanimous three-judge appellate panel in Spokane, according to The Seattle Times. 
While the state could allow a terminally ill patient to decline treatment, in McNabb's case the decision appeared to be "set in motion for purposes of committing suicide," Kato wrote. And prisons don't let prisoners commit suicide.
Last year the Connecticut Supreme Court similarly ruled that <a href="http://www.ctnewsjunkie.com/ctnj.php/archives/entry/supreme_court_rules_in_favor_of_doc_in_hunger_striking_case/">the state could force-feed hunger-striking inmate William B. Coleman</a>.
Although Coleman's lawyer argued that the force-feeding process was a kind of torture, the Supreme Court concluded that, “It is clear that the commissioner appropriately sought to preserve the defendant’s life using the safest, simplest procedure available, rather than improperly seeking to punish the defendant for engaging in his <keyword id="6357287" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="60" keywordseo="Hunger-strike">hunger strike</keyword>. We therefore conclude that the trial court properly determined that the weight of international authority does not prohibit medically necessary force-feeding under such circumstances.”
Physically imposed forced feeding can no doubt, be painful. In fact, in 1975 the World Medical Association (WMA) stepped up and <a href="http://www.cirp.org/library/ethics/tokyo/">issued an international set of guidelines</a> for physicians advising them against performing the procedure at all, arguing that it really was akin to torture.
Nonetheless America has clearly decided not to let prisoners commit suicide by starvation.
And so we turn to what's happening right now in Guantanamo, where a mass hunger strike has reached its sixth week. Forty three of 166 detainees are acknowledged as participants in the strike, with many being force-fed.
When we were in Guantanamo last month, the hunger strike was just gathering steam and had allegedly begun after detainees became upset that uniformed guards handled their Korans.
We were taken to the detainee medical center where the feedings occurred.
We were told that cooperative detainees were simply given a can of Ensure to drink — and that many supposedly took this option. Less cooperative detainees were strapped into a feeding chair. If a detainee relaxed at this point, a small, pliable rubber tube would be slipped through his nose and into his stomach. If a detainee continue to struggle, a larger, more rigid tube would be forced into him.
This can be a barbaric process, but it appears to be the appropriate response based on U.S. law.
It may also be a politically safer option than allowing detainees to die. Guantanamo faced some of its most intense public scrutiny in 2006 following the death of three detainees in an apparent suicide pact.
There remains a rumor among detainees that three simultaneous deaths would force the release of all remaining detainees, according to the base cultural advisor, an Iraqi named Zak.
Guantanamo has weathered <a href="http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2005/12/30/46_guantanamo_detainees_join_hunger_strike/">worse hunger strikes than this</a> one in the past, also resorting to force-feeding to keep detainees alive.

Why The Military Force-Feeds Detainees At Guantanamo Bay

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<div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table"><div><div class="image"></div></div></div>In May 2012, two police officers in Chico, California allegedly banged on the front door of a college custodian <a href="https://www.aclu.org/national-security/lawsuit-challenges-governments-suspicious-activity-report-program">named Wiley Gill</a> and with guns drawn asked him to step outside.
"It's the first time I've ever had tunnel vision," Gill, now 28, said in a recent phone interview. "I could have told you the color of the gun. I could have told you what the make and model is ... All I saw was the gun."
The police, who said they were looking into a domestic violence report and thought the suspect went into Gill's house, searched his residence even though he was reluctant to let them do so. Police say they found a "flight simulator type of game" on his computer. Gill thinks he just had a website open about video games he liked.
In any event, Gill ended up in a government database of "suspicious activity" along with others <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/the-fbi-tracked-me-down-because-of-one-photo-i-took-2014-7">who got there for taking a picture</a>, buying a computer, and even standing in a train station, according to the ACLU. Now the ACLU is <a href="https://www.aclu.org/files/assets/sar_complaint.pdf">fighting that database in federal court</a> and using Gill's story to help make its case. Gill is one of five plaintiffs in the ACLU's complaint challenging the legality of the National Suspicious Activity Reporting Initiative. 
<h3>The National Suspicious Activity Reporting Initiative</h3>
In the wake of 9/11, the U.S. government began building a database to allow various government entities to share "information about suspicious activity <a href="http://nsi.ncirc.gov/about_nsi.aspx">with a potential nexus to terrorism</a>." Both the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security oversee the National Suspicious Activity Reporting (SAR) Initiative, which the government refers to as NSI.
<div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table float_left"><div><div class="image"></div></div></div>To aid these efforts, the federal government set up a national network of 78 offices called <a href="http://www.dhs.gov/national-network-fusion-centers-fact-sheet">fusion centers</a> to empower local police, emergency responders, firefighters, and even public health officials to gather "threat-related information."
The website for the NSI program specifies that local authorities <a href="http://nsi.ncirc.gov/about_nsi.aspx">aren't supposed to break the law</a> when collecting this information. That website also assures the public that their "privacy, civil rights, and civil liberties" will be protected.
Indeed, a Justice Department website on <a href="https://it.ojp.gov/PrivacyLiberty">fusion center priorities</a> begins with this quote from Benjamin Franklin: "Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety."
The right-leaning Heritage Foundation has argued that a robust SAR program that utilizes the eyes and ears of local cops plays an important role in <a href="http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2012/01/a-comprehensive-suspicious-activity-reporting-sar-system-requires-action">catching "homegrown" terrorists</a>. 
"Police officers have long been the first line of <keyword id="6354810" type="ORGANIZATION" weightage="100" keywordseo="Defense">defense</keyword> against criminal activity across America," according to January 2012 paper by the Heritage Foundation. "Throughout their daily patrols, officers are repeatedly confronted with suspicious behavior, their training and experience providing the necessary filter for distinguishing the abnormal and dubious from the mundane and perfunctory."
But some civil liberties advocates say local fusion centers have been overzealous. In May 2014, The New York Times reported fusion centers <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/23/us/officials-cast-wide-net-in-monitoring-occupy-protests.html">had closely scrutinized</a> Occupy Wall Street protests throughout the country. At one point, officials reported on a group of Occupy protesters who planned on singing Holiday carols at an undisclosed location, according to The Times. 
"People must have the ability to speak out freely to express a dissenting view without the fear that the government will treat them as enemies of the state," Mara Verheyden-Hilliard of the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund told The Times.
For its part, the ACLU <a href="https://www.aclu.org/files/assets/sar_complaint.pdf">alleges in its lawsuit</a> the Suspicious Activity Program made enemies out of Americans simply because of their race or religion, or in one case, because of a man's decision to take a photo of a piece of public art painted on a <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/the-fbi-tracked-me-down-because-of-one-photo-i-took-2014-7">natural gas storage tank</a>.
Wiley Gill, the 28-year-old custodian who likes video games, believes he was targeted because he's a "white Muslim male."
<h3>'Suspicious Male Subject In Possession of Flight Simulator Game'</h3>
Gill, who converted to Islam at the age of 23, believes police had him on their radar before they searched his home in May 2012.
Two Chico, California, police officers also knocked on his door in 2010 to ask him about supposedly "anti-American statements" he made, according to his account <a href="https://www.aclu.org/files/assets/sar_complaint.pdf">outlined in the ACLU's complaint</a>. The police wouldn't elaborate on the nature of those statements, according to Gill. 
"Why would you come to my door and accuse me of something I haven't done without having any proof?" he said.
Gill also remembers police officers visiting his mosque in 2011. Those officers said they were paying a "courtesy visit to build good relations with the Muslim community,"<a href="https://www.aclu.org/files/assets/sar_complaint.pdf"> according to the ACLU complaint</a>. The police gave a presentation to people who attended the mosque.
More from the ACLU complaint: "Mr. Gill listened to the presentation. When it was over, CPD officers asked Mr. Gill his name, whether he went to school, and if he was employed. Mr. Gill answered all of their questions. His understanding is that the officers did not question anyone else in this manner. "
The ACLU believes that when the police finally came to his home in May 2012 they were using the domestic violence call as an excuse to search his home. Regardless of the police department's motives, that May incident made Gill a subject of a Suspicious Activity Report (SAR).
<div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table float_right"><div><div class="image"></div></div></div>That report acknowledged police were wrong about a domestic violence suspect fleeing into Gill's house, but it notes that when they did happen to search his house, Gill "attempted to hastily close down" his computer screen. Here's what police found, <a href="https://www.aclu.org/files/assets/sar_complaint.pdf">according to the SAR attached to the ACLU's complaint</a>: a webpage with a title "similar to 'Games that fly under the radar.'" The website appeared to be a "flight simulator type of game," according to the SAR. 
Gill's "full conversion to Islam as a young WMA [white Muslim male]," his "pious demeanor," and "potential access to flight simulators over the internet" were all "worthy of note," according to that SAR attached to the ACLU<a href="https://www.aclu.org/files/assets/sar_complaint.pdf"> complaint</a>. (The Justice Department declined to comment on that complaint, and the Chico Police Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)
The ACLU ultimately obtained that SAR through a public records request and then notified Gill he was on the feds' radar. He decided to join the case because he doesn't want the local police and FBI targeting him because of his religion.
"You don't think it would ever happen to you. I'm just a normal 28-year-old," Gill said. " ... The reason I helped the ACLU with their case is, regardless of what your religion is, you shouldn't be badgered by the police ... and having the FBI come open a case on you, just because of your religion."
<h3>A Nation Under Surveillance </h3>
The ACLU alleges the SARS program extends beyond surveillance of Muslims, and that Americans have been put into that database simply for taking photographs. 
One of those photographers - a graphic design student named Aaron Conklin - captured the attention of local authorities when he took a photo of the Shell Refinery in Martinez, California in November 2013. Conklin took that photo from a public strip mall, and he says he cooperated with security guards who told him to stop taking photos. Contra Costa sheriff's deputies searched his car despite that cooperation, <a href="https://www.aclu.org/files/assets/sar_complaint.pdf">according to the ACLU complaint</a>. 
The ACLU believes he became the subject of a SAR because the government views taking pictures of infrastructure "in a manner that would arouse suspicion in a reasonable person" to be a "potential terrorism nexus activity."
James Prigoff, <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/the-fbi-tracked-me-down-because-of-one-photo-i-took-2014-7">an 86-year-old photographer and retired executive</a>, also believes he became the subject of either a SAR or a SAR "precursor report" after trying to take a picture of a piece of infrastructure - the iconic "Rainbow Swash" painted on a natural gas tank near Boston. An agent of the <a href="http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/investigate/terrorism/terrorism_jttfs">Joint Terrorism Task Force</a> managed to track him down at his home on the other side of the country in Sacramento, California to question him about the photo, he says. An agent also spoke to an elderly neighbor of Prigoff's, he told me. 
<div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table"><div><div class="image"></div></div></div>When I asked him if the incident made him feel paranoid about being spied on, Prigoff told me he's not a "paranoid person nor a worrier."
"I see things as they are and understand the implications of what is taking place as the nation comes under more and more surveillance," he said, "and the government expands its definition of 'so called' terrorists and terrorism to the extreme that I witnessed in this particular incident."

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The Disconcerting Story Of How A 28-Year-Old Custodian Became A Suspected Terrorist

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