07 July 21
Do You Give a Damn About Reader Supported News?
This organization is literally built on community service and community support. The two are 100% interdependent. That is why you get what you expect from RSN.
We need you folks, in reasonable numbers, to contribute.
In solidarity.
Marc Ash
Founder, Reader Supported News
If you would prefer to send a check:
Reader Supported News
PO Box 2043 / Citrus Heights, CA 95611
Follow us on facebook and twitter!
07 July 21
Live on the homepage now!
Reader Supported News
n a visit to Europe to mark the 100th anniversary of the end of the first world war, Donald Trump insisted to his then chief of staff, John Kelly: “Well, Hitler did a lot of good things.”
The remark from the former US president on the 2018 trip, which reportedly “stunned” Kelly, a retired US Marine Corps general, is reported in a new book by Michael Bender of the Wall Street Journal.
Frankly, We Did Win This Election has been widely trailed ahead of publication next week. The Guardian obtained a copy.
Bender reports that Trump made the remark during an impromptu history lesson in which Kelly “reminded the president which countries were on which side during the conflict” and “connected the dots from the first world war to the second world war and all of Hitler’s atrocities”.
Bender is one of a number of authors to have interviewed Trump since he was ejected from power.
In a statement a Trump spokesperson, Liz Harrington, said: “This is totally false. President Trump never said this. It is made-up fake news, probably by a general who was incompetent and was fired.”
But Bender says unnamed sources reported that Kelly “told the president that he was wrong, but Trump was undeterred”, emphasizing German economic recovery under Hitler during the 1930s.
“Kelly pushed back again,” Bender writes, “and argued that the German people would have been better off poor than subjected to the Nazi genocide.”
Bender adds that Kelly told Trump that even if his claim about the German economy under the Nazis after 1933 were true, “you cannot ever say anything supportive of Adolf Hitler. You just can’t.”
Trump ran into considerable trouble on the centennial trip to Europe, even beyond his usual conflicts with other world leaders.
A decision to cancel a visit to an American cemetery proved controversial. Trump was later reported to have called US soldiers who died in the war “losers” and “suckers”.
Kelly, whose son was killed in Afghanistan in 2010, left the White House in early 2019. He has spoken critically of Trump since, reportedly telling friends the president he served was “the most flawed person I have ever met in my life”.
Bender writes that Kelly did his best to overcome Trump’s “stunning disregard for history”.
“Senior officials described his understanding of slavery, Jim Crow, or the Black experience in general post-civil war as vague to non-existent,” he writes. “But Trump’s indifference to Black history was similar to his disregard for the history of any race, religion or creed.”
Concern over the rise of the far right in the US grew during Trump’s time in power and continues, as he maintains a grip on a Republican party determined to obstruct investigations of the deadly 6 January assault on the US Capitol by supporters seeking to overturn his election defeat.
Trump has made positive remarks about far-right and white supremacist groups.
During a presidential debate in 2020, Trump was asked if he would denounce white supremacists and militia groups. He struggled with the answer and eventually told the far-right Proud Boys group to “stand back and stand by”.
In 2017, in the aftermath of a neo-Nazi march in Virginia which earned supportive remarks from Trump, the German magazine Stern used on its cover an illustration of Trump giving a Nazi salute while wrapped in the US flag. Its headline: “Sein Kampf” – his struggle.
The special session starts less than a week after the Supreme Court gave a green light to an Arizona law that imposed some restrictions on how ballots may be cast and collected. Voting rights activists worry that the court's decision is a signal that the federal courts won't step in if states like Texas try to make it harder for citizens to cast a ballot.
"You kind of learn to go with the flow and find a way to hold on to seeds of hope, because we don't have control," said Dionna La'Fay, an organizer in Texas for Black Voters Matter, a group that works to mobilize voters of color on issues related to voting rights, among other things.
La'Fay says this year has been exhausting. In Texas, a GOP-backed voting bill nearly passed at the end of May, until a last-minute walkout by Democrats blocked it.
The bill that nearly passed, Senate Bill 7, would have created a slew of new criminal penalties related to voting and would have limited voting on Sundays. Voting rights advocates warned that limiting voting hours on Sundays would have affected "souls to the polls" campaigns held predominately by Black churches in the state.
One of the more controversial measures in the bill would have made it easier for election workers to overturn election results following allegations of voter fraud. Some Republicans have since backed away from some of those measures, but state leaders say a voting overhaul is still necessary.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has said more needs to be done in the state to make elections more secure — without offering any evidence that voter fraud has marred results in Texas in recent elections.
The Supreme Court's ruling in the Arizona case sends a message that the courts are not going to side with voting rights advocates who want voting to be more accessible, said Charlie Bonner, the communications director for Move Texas, a group that mobilizes young voters.
"So it's on us to pick up the fight and push forward pro-voter policies that are going to make sure we can protect our fundamental rights and expand access to all eligible voters," he said.
Voting groups in Texas have long turned to the courts when their other efforts have failed. But ever since an earlier 2013 Supreme Court ruling ended some protections offered by the Voting Rights Act, it has been more difficult in federal courts.
Mimi Marziani with the Texas Civil Rights Project says that this doesn't mean voting rights groups can or should bypass the courts.
"The protections of the Voting Rights Act have been whittled down in the last decade," she said. "But at the same time, there are other federal laws — some of them that have been disregarded, I think."
Her group recently filed a lawsuit against a group of Trump supporters who swarmed a Biden campaign bus that was driving on a highway through Texas in late October. Marziani says those individuals engaged in political violence, and her group is suing them using the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871.
Her group has also had some success challenging state practices through the National Voter Registration Act. But ultimately, Marziani says more federal voting protections are needed. And that is up to Congress.
"I don't know what else they are waiting to drop from the sky to feel like it's the time to act on federal voting legislation," she said. "But this should be seen as that sign. You know the laws on the books are getting weaker."
For advocates like La'Fay, new federal protections would also mean that state-by-state efforts like the ones she's involved with would be less necessary.
"If we had federal legislation, there wouldn't be as much power to do these things in the individual states," she said.
But action in Congress has its own hurdles. Republicans in the Senate recently blocked consideration of an expansive voting rights bill, and Democrats also have their own internal divisions over how best to proceed.
Ultimately, some voting rights advocates see more political organizing as the best path forward after the Supreme Court's ruling. Bonner's group, Move Texas, plans to double down on organizing voters.
"This is a call to all of us to work harder, to fight back — and then it's on all of us to turn out in the next election in numbers so high that no amount of voter suppression could confuse the outcome," he said.
Investigators work the scene of a fatal crash involving a Minneapolis police squad car on July 6, 2021. (photo: David Joles/AP)
Leneal Lamont Frazier was on his way home when police pursuing a suspect crashed into his car, his sister told BuzzFeed News.
arnella Frazier, the teenager who filmed Minneapolis police officers killing George Floyd last year, said that her uncle, Leneal Lamont Frazier, was killed early Tuesday after Minneapolis police in pursuit of a car crashed into his vehicle.
A Minneapolis police officer was chasing a carjacked vehicle involved in several robberies at around 12:30 a.m. when the officer crashed into another car, MPD spokesperson John Elder said.
The driver and the police officer were both transported to the hospital, and the driver died shortly after. The officer sustained serious but not life-threatening injuries, Elder said.
The suspect remained at large on Wednesday.
Frazier, whose video of George Floyd's death sparked a national reckoning on race and police brutality, posted on Facebook on Tuesday evening that the driver killed in that crash was her uncle.
"MINNEAPOLIS police Killed my uncle. MY uncle... Another black man lost his life in the hands of the police! I asked my mom several times 'he died??'" she wrote. "Minneapolis police has cost my whole family a big loss...today has been a day full of heartbreak and sadness."
Cheryl Frazier, Leneal's sister, told BuzzFeed News that her brother had been on his way home when the crash happened.
"The only thing that we know is that he was going home and the police was chasing someone else, and he ended up getting hit by the police," she said.
The family heard about the crash through Leneal's oldest son, who is incarcerated. Authorities contacted him first, Cheryl said, "and that's when we actually got on the phone and started calling around."
Leneal had six children. The oldest was 22 and the youngest 6 months old, Cheryl said. He also had a grandchild.
In a GoFundMe raising money for his funeral expenses and his children, the family described him as having "the biggest heart a person could ever have."
"He would help anyone, anytime no matter the circumstances," they said. "He loves to cook and bbq, and to just spend as much time with his family as possible. He was one of the sweetest people you will ever meet."
Cheryl said her brother's death has shocked the family.
"We're trying to hang in there," she added. "It's still fresh."
The Minnesota State Patrol is investigating the crash and will submit its findings to the county attorney, a spokesperson told BuzzFeed News.
The MPD allows officers to pursue a suspect only in situations in which the officer believes the suspect is involved in “a serious and violent felony or gross misdemeanor,” or if their driving “would pose an imminent and life-threatening danger to the public if not apprehended,” the Star Tribune reported in 2019.
The policy was changed to limit police car chases after a string of dangerous pursuits over the years.
Law enforcement officials works at the scene of a fatal shooting at the First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, Texas, on Sunday, Nov. 5, 2017. (photo: Nick Wagner/Austin American-Statesman)
A federal judge wrote that the Air Force was “60% responsible" for the deaths and injuries at First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs.
federal judge has ruled that the U.S. Air Force is mostly responsible for a former serviceman killing more than two dozen people at a Texas church in 2017 because it failed to submit his criminal history into a database, which should have prevented him from purchasing firearms.
U.S. District Judge Xavier Rodriguez in San Antonio wrote in a ruling signed Wednesday that the Air Force was “60% responsible" for the deaths and injuries at First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs. The attack remains the worst mass shooting in Texas history.
Devin Kelley had served nearly five years in the Air Force before being discharged in 2014 for bad conduct, after he was convicted of assaulting a former wife and stepson, cracking the child’s skull. The Air Force has publicly acknowledged that the felony conviction for domestic violence, had it been put into the FBI database, could have prevented Kelley from buying guns from licensed firearms dealers, and also from possessing body armor.
“Its failure proximately caused the deaths and injuries of Plaintiffs at the Sutherland Springs First Baptist Church,” Rodriguez wrote.
Kelley opened fire during a Sunday service at the church of Sutherland Springs in November 2017. Authorities put the official death toll at 26 because one of the 25 people killed was pregnant. Kelley died of an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound after he was shot and chased by two men who heard the gunfire at the church.
The lawsuit against the federal government was brought by family members of the victims. Rodriguez ordered a later trial to assess damages owed to the families.
Covid vaccine. (photo: iStock)
ALSO SEE: Delta Is Now the Dominant Coronavirus Variant in the US
he fight against the pandemic in some wealthier nations has now turned into a race between the highly contagious delta variant first identified in India and the rollout of vaccines most scientists say still provide strong protection against infection.
Some studies, however, hint at the nightmare scenario that the seemingly miraculous shots developed last year may not be quite as effective as they were against the original virus strain.
Israel’s Health Ministry this week announced that the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine — one of the world’s most effective shots — was offering only 64 percent protection against infection and symptomatic illness caused by the delta variant.
The vaccine was still highly effective at preventing severe illness and death, the ministry said.
Here are some significant developments:
- Sydney’s lockdown has been extended by a week to July 16, New South Wales state officials confirmed. Australia’s largest city is struggling to stamp out a small outbreak of the delta variant, but only about 8 percent of the country has been fully inoculated.
- Singapore will not include people inoculated with the Sinovac shot in its national vaccine count. The city-state has not approved the Chinese-developed shot for its vaccination program, though some private clinics are allowed to administer Sinovac doses.
- The United States is dispatching 2 million Moderna vaccine doses to Vietnam, the White House said. The Southeast Asian country had been a coronavirus containment success but its vaccination rollout has been slow, and a wave of infections starting in May has not receded.
- Turkmenistan is making coronavirus vaccination mandatory for all adults, Reuters reported Wednesday, citing the Central Asian nation’s Health Ministry. The authoritarian government has reported no coronavirus cases since the pandemic began, but this year registered Russian- and Chinese-made vaccines for use inside the country.
- England’s chief medical officer warned of an increase in “long covid,” in which symptoms persist for months, among young people. While Britain’s vaccination rollout is among the world’s fastest, the youth inoculation rate is still relatively low; the country is jettisoning almost all distancing curbs later this month.
Israel has fully inoculated about 60 percent of its population, the vast majority of whom received the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine. Some health experts criticized the Israeli study, however, and said that a number of factors — from testing to an individual’s risk profile — could have contributed to the result.
But if true, such a substantial drop in the vaccine’s protection level could have serious implications for countries betting almost entirely on mass immunization campaigns — as well as poorer nations that have barely started their own vaccine drives.
In Britain, where the variant now accounts for at least 95 percent of new infections, government officials have admitted that cases will soar after covid-related restrictions are lifted, despite the fact that more than 50 percent of the population has been fully vaccinated.
Officials maintain that high vaccination rates will keep hospitalizations and deaths low. In May, researchers affiliated with Public Health England found that two doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine were 88 percent effective against symptomatic illness caused by the delta variant.
“We will soon be able to take a risk-based approach that recognizes the huge benefits that the vaccines provide both to people who get the jab and their loved ones too,” British Health Secretary Sajid Javid said Tuesday.
His opposition counterpart, Jonathan Ashworth, however, expressed fear that the vaccine wall the government was relying on to protect the country was “only half built.”
One of the biggest demonstrations was in central Thor province where hundreds of women turned out at the weekend. (photo: Facebook)
Women in north and central regions of country stage demonstrations as militants make sweeping gains nationwide
omen have taken up guns in northern and central Afghanistan, marching in the streets in their hundreds and sharing pictures of themselves with assault rifles on social media, in a show of defiance as the Taliban make sweeping gains nationwide.
One of the biggest demonstrations was in central Ghor province, where hundreds of women turned out at the weekend, waving guns and chanting anti-Taliban slogans.
They are not likely to head to the frontlines in large numbers any time soon, because of both social conservatism and lack of experience. But the public demonstrations, at a time of urgent threat from the militants, are a reminder of how frightened many women are about what Taliban rule could mean for them and their families.
“There were some women who just wanted to inspire security forces, just symbolic, but many more were ready to go to the battlefields,” said Halima Parastish, the head of the women’s directorate in Ghor and one of the marchers. “That includes myself. I and some other women told the governor around a month ago that we’re ready to go and fight.”
The Taliban have been sweeping across rural Afghanistan, taking dozens of districts including in places such as northern Badakhshan province, which 20 years ago was an anti-Taliban stronghold. They now have multiple provincial capitals in effect under siege.
In areas they control, the Taliban have already brought in restrictions on women’s education, their freedom of movement and their clothing, activists and residents of those areas say. In one area, flyers were circulating demanding that women put on burqas.
Even women from extremely conservative rural areas aspire to more education, greater freedom of movement and a greater role in their families, according to a new survey of a group whose voices are rarely heard. Taliban rule will take them in the opposite direction.
“No woman wants to fight, I just want to continue my education and stay far away from the violence but conditions made me and other women stand up,” said a journalist in her early 20s from northern Jowzjan, where there is a history of women fighting.
She attended a day’s training on weapons handling in the provincial capital, which is currently besieged. She asked not to be named in case it falls to the Taliban. “I don’t want the country under the control of people who treat women the way they do. We took up the guns to show if we have to fight, we will.”
She said there were a few dozen women learning to use guns with her, and despite their inexperience they would have one advantage over men if they faced the Taliban. “They are frightened of being killed by us, they consider it shameful.”
For conservative militants, facing women in battle can be humiliating. Isis fighters in Syria were reportedly more frightened of dying at the hands of female Kurdish forces than being killed by men.
It is rare, but not unprecedented, for Afghan women to take up arms, particularly in slightly less conservative parts of the country. Last year a teenager, Qamar Gul, became famous nationwide after fighting off a group of Taliban who had killed her parents. The militants included her own husband.
In Baghlan province, a woman called Bibi Aisha Habibi became the country’s only female warlord in the wake of the Soviet invasion and the civil war that followed. She was known as Commander Kaftar, or Pigeon.
And in northern Balkh, 39-year-old Salima Mazari has recently been fighting on the frontlines in Charkint, where she is the district governor.
Women have also joined Afghanistan’s security forces over the past two decades, including training as helicopter pilots, although they have faced discrimination and harassment from colleagues and are rarely found on the frontlines.
The Taliban shrugged off Afghanistan’s historical precedents, claiming the demonstrations were propaganda and men would not allow female relatives to fight.
“Women will never pick up guns against us. They are helpless and forced by the defeated enemy,” said a spokesperson, Zabihullah Mujahid. “They can’t fight.”
The Ghor provincial governor, Abdulzahir Faizzada, said in a phone interview that some of the women who came out in the streets of Firozkoh, the provincial capital, had already battled the Taliban, and most had endured violence from the group.
“The majority of these women were those who had recently escaped from Taliban areas. They have already been through war in their villages, they lost their sons and brothers, they are angry,” he said. Faizzada added that he would train women who did not have experience with weapons, if the government in Kabul approved it.
The Taliban’s conservative rules are particularly unwelcome in Ghor, where women traditionally wear headscarves rather than covering themselves fully with the burqa, and work in fields and villages beside their men, Parastish said.
The Taliban have banned women even from taking care of animals or working the land in areas of Ghor they control, she added. They have closed girls schools, ordered women not to leave home without a male guardian and even banned them from gathering for weddings, saying only men should attend.
Women from these areas were among those who marched. “More than a dozen women have escaped from Allahyar in Shahrak district last week and came to us and asked for guns to go and fight for their lands and freedom. The same situation is in Charsadda region,” Parastish said.
“Women said: ‘We are getting killed and injured without defending ourselves, why not fight back?’ They were telling us that at least two women were in labour in their region, with no medical things around and they couldn’t come with them.”
For now, she said, the main thing holding the women back was the men in power. “The governor said there is no need for us now and they will let us know.”
Sasha Beaulieu, a co-founder of the Red Lake Treaty Camp, stands at the edge of the Mississippi River during a World Water Day rally in northern Minnesota, on March 22, 2021. (photo: Jaida Grey Eagle/The Intercept)
he early morning sun was still low on a dirt road in northern Minnesota this March as a small crowd faced Aitkin County sheriff’s deputies. The crowd drummed and chanted messages of support for the seven people on the other side of the police line, who sat linked together from one side of the road to the other, locked to concrete-filled barrels. The chained demonstrators were stopping construction personnel from entering a pump station for Enbridge’s Line 3, a tar sands oil pipeline that has become the latest flashpoint in the fight to halt the expansion of the fossil fuel industry as the climate crisis deepens.
Big Wind, a Northern Arapaho 28-year-old from the Wind River reservation in Wyoming, greeted me from behind a mask. They described what water protectors, members of the Indigenous-led anti-pipeline movement, had recently encountered along Line 3’s route: an intensifying law enforcement presence including aerial surveillance at a pipeline resistance camp.
“It was actually really crazy — a DHS helicopter flew over camp yesterday,” Big Wind told me, referring to the Department of Homeland Security. They heard it before seeing it circle twice just above the tree canopy. “You could tell it was intentional and it was to intimidate us and to surveil us.”
As Big Wind described the low-flying DHS helicopter, a masked police officer approached us. Big Wind went on, “We see the police taking a more escalated response to the actions that have been happening here.”
“Can you describe that escalated response?” Aitkin County Sheriff Dan Guida cut in. “’Cause I’m the police, and I argue with you that we haven’t taken an escalated response. We’ve had a very even-keeled response.” Big Wind knew Guida well and was irritated by the interjection.
“I was literally talking about how there was a helicopter flying over,” Big Wind said, “a DHS helicopter — and you just interrupted my conversation.”
“We have no helicopters,” Guida replied. “We haven’t been in any helicopters. The stories you tell — they need to be true.” Big Wind retorted that the water protectors had video of the helicopter.
“Thought you didn’t want to argue,” Guida snapped back. “Take a look at the badges around here and find me the Department of Homeland Security. There’s none here.” Guida was proud of his recent record: Despite an influx of activists as the winter cold eased, his deputies had avoided making any arrests the prior week. “I don’t call that an escalated response. I call it exceptional public safety,” he told Big Wind. “Don’t tell lies about cops.”
The sheriff and I stepped aside to talk further. I asked him about the special Enbridge-funded account that the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission had set up to reimburse law enforcement for pipeline-related expenses. For water protectors, the funding from Enbridge positions the police as biased toward the company — or at worst privatized operatives for Enbridge.
Guida assured me there was nothing wrong with the pipeline company’s payments to police. “Enbridge doesn’t pay for us,” he said. “It’s a reimbursement for expenses that are related to this line that we wouldn’t normally have.” Guida said the arrangement was better than taxpayers footing the bill, adding that a government-appointed account manager needed to approve every Enbridge payment. Guida said, “I don’t think that we have any connections with Enbridge — there’s a good separation.”
A few days later, Guida left me a voicemail to acknowledge a mistake: “I do have to apologize, because there was a helicopter that buzzed the camp,” he said. Big Wind had been right.
Big Wind’s camp is in a neighboring county, and Guida was unaware that another sheriff had called in Customs and Border Protection. Guida’s understanding of what was happening in the battle between the pipeline company and the water protectors was incomplete — a symptom of the sprawling, multiagency response to pipeline resistance.
For water protectors, the law enforcement denials and the escalating Enbridge-funded policing are part of a pattern of law enforcement working hand in hand with pipeline companies to police their opposition — and then refuting that a collaboration exists. From Standing Rock to Jordan Cove, private and public resources, sometimes intermingled, are put in service of what water protectors say amounts to a corporate counterinsurgency against their efforts to save the planet from the fossil fuel industry.
In Minnesota, the label is more than just semantic. The state permit for the Line 3 pipeline includes an unusual condition: “The Permittee, the permittee’s contractors and assigns will not participate in counterinsurgency tactics or misinformation campaigns to interfere with the rights of the public to legally exercise their Constitutional rights.”
Water protectors say Enbridge has violated its permit conditions. They point to the escrow account created for Enbridge to pay for pipeline policing, an intensification of surveillance, and a yearslong divide-and-conquer effort by the pipeline company aimed at local communities. Though questions remain surrounding what exactly the state of Minnesota meant by the permit provision, Enbridge and the police’s efforts seem to bear the hallmarks of corporate counterinsurgency. An Intercept investigation involving dozens of interviews, thousands of pages of public records, and reviews of academic literature suggests the pipeline opponents have a strong case to make.
“They were told not to do — what is it? — ‘counterinsurgency’ is the exact term they’ve used,” said Tara Houska, a 37-year-old Anishinaabe water protector from Minnesota and a veteran of the fight at Standing Rock. “I don’t understand how surveilling, harassing and targeting people on a daily basis is not counterinsurgency.”
Enbridge’s pipeline is just one battleground in a larger struggle with enormous stakes. Enbridge, a Canadian energy firm, is expanding and rerouting its old, corroded Line 3. Branded as a “replacement” project, the new pipeline would double the old Line 3’s capacity to carry tar sands oil from the Canadian province of Alberta to a hub in Wisconsin, where it can be more easily transported to refineries from the Gulf Coast to eastern Canada.
Rapidly ending the extraction of this particular fossil fuel is imperative to the climate crisis due to the nature of the oil: The processes required to transform sticky Alberta sludge into usable fuel make tar sands oil one of the most intensive fossil fuels in terms of carbon dioxide emissions. The risks are compounded when tar sands travel: Oil pipeline spills are endemic, and Enbridge has a particularly nasty record.
Most of the U.S. portion of the route, more than 330 miles, is in Minnesota. There, the conflict over Line 3 centers on both the larger climate considerations and local concerns, particularly of Anishinaabe people. Though the struggle against Line 3 has lasted the better part of a decade, the efforts were invigorated by mounting Indigenous-led resistance to pipelines that bisect treaty lands across North America. Opposition to the Dakota Access pipeline in North Dakota gave rise to what became known as the water protector movement in 2016 and was promptly met with a private-public crackdown at the edge of the Standing Rock Reservation.
As The Intercept reported in an investigative series beginning in 2017, Energy Transfer, the firm behind the Dakota Access pipeline, hired private security contractors who saw the Standing Rock movement as “an ideologically driven insurgency with a strong religious component” — going so far as say that water protectors “generally followed the jihadist insurgency model.” The security firm, TigerSwan, ran a counterinsurgency modeled on what the U.S. military did in Iraq and Afghanistan, infiltrating the anti-pipeline movement, conducting surveillance and spreading propaganda, while routinely coordinating with local law enforcement.
When Enbridge brought the pipeline fight to Indigenous lands in Minnesota, the public officials responsible for issuing a permit were well aware of what had just happened next door in North Dakota. Three years ago, Minnesota Public Utilities Commissioner John Tuma, a Republican, spoke at a public hearing during the permitting process for Line 3. “I was not impressed with what happened out there,” Tuma said, of North Dakota. “This is the United States of America. Citizens of Minnesota have a right to protest.”
Tuma was in favor of explicitly prohibiting counterinsurgency in the construction permit. “I think what’s critical for me to know as we go forward is that those kind of activities, this insurgency-type stuff, the Pinkerton-style-type stuff doesn’t happen here in Minnesota,” he said. The anti-counterinsurgency language was inserted into the permit — but with no definitions to accompany it. The vagueness has meant accountability to the terms of the permit’s anti-counterinsurgency clause is hard to come by.
Tuma declined to comment for this story, but the Public Utilities Commission’s Executive Secretary Will Seuffert confirmed that the commission never defined the term “corporate counterinsurgency.” As for accountability, Seuffert said the state’s designated public safety liaison for the pipeline, Department of Public Safety Commissioner John Harrington, would be the one to monitor for such tactics and raise concerns if they occur. The Department of Public Safety did not reply to a request for comment.
The U.S. government’s 2009 Counterinsurgency Guide begins with a foundational idea: that defeating so-called insurgencies is not about armed force. “American counterinsurgency practice rests on a number of assumptions: that the decisive effort is rarely military (although security is the essential prerequisite for success); that our efforts must be directed to the creation of local and national governmental structures that will serve their populations,” the manual says, and “in particular, understanding of the ‘human terrain’ is essential.”
Scholars in the burgeoning field of corporate counterinsurgency research say that companies follow a similar model. By examining U.S. counterinsurgency strategies abroad, the police and private security response at Standing Rock, and resistance to extractive industries around the globe, researchers have cobbled together a set of corporate counterinsurgency symptoms that communities can watch out for.
The goal for corporations is to control territory in order to advance an economic project. In a recent paper, Alexander Dunlap, a post-doctoral research fellow at the University of Oslo, says companies do so by using “hard” and “soft tactics.” Corporate counterinsurgency often involves private security, vigilante or police violence, Dunlap says, but just as important are propaganda efforts. Corporate forces construct countermovements as well as community development projects. Military-style surveillance is not just a means to harvest intelligence but also to seed paranoia among adversaries. As other scholars have pointed out, corporate counterinsurgents develop “persons of interest” lists to track individuals considered threatening and stigmatize activists as eco-terrorists, paid protesters, or members of criminal groups.
In the absence of definitions in the directive from the Public Utilities Commission, Minnesota’s multiagency coalition managing pipeline resistance, known as the Northern Lights Task Force, doesn’t seem to be making a big effort to avoid the strategies of counterinsurgency laid out by Dunlap and others. Instead, Minnesota public safety officials have, in private, embraced the approach taken at Standing Rock.
In December 2020, shortly after Minnesota approved the Line 3 construction permit, Nicholas Radke, the intelligence coordinator for the Minnesota Department of Public Safety, distributed a Standing Rock After-Action Report from the North Dakota Department of Emergency Services. “The AAR is the best document I’ve read in 10 years of working for the state!” he wrote in an email, obtained by a public records request, to a handful of local officials along the pipeline route, as well as to Enbridge’s security lead for Line 3. “I’d recommend reading it word for word.”
In the document, many of the indelible public images of the Standing Rock movement — dogs being sicced on demonstrators or water hoses blasting water protectors in sub-freezing temperatures — are relegated to a timeline in the appendices. The main body of the report characterizes the police response to Standing Rock as an “extraordinary” demonstration of “professionalism, restraint, and courage,” celebrating that no one had died. The report praised law enforcement’s aerial and social media surveillance efforts but lamented that, unlike the security company, police hadn’t done better at developing its own informants, in part, apparently, because the movement was so Indigenous.
“While there was some human intelligence coming from sources in the camps, the very nature of the protest was a limiting factor,” the document says. “Non-Native Americans were often excluded from sources of information.”
Music played over a portable speaker as Winona LaDuke, a onetime vice-presidential candidate, tried out salsa moves in front of Enbridge’s Park Rapids, Minnesota, headquarters. LaDuke, a leader of the Stop Line 3 movement, and other water protectors do this every Tuesday, though Enbridge hasn’t used the building much since construction began. “The Park Rapids Enbridge building will sit vacant during the pipeline build-out, but Enbridge energy signage will remain to reroute protestors from other sites,” a Northern Lights Task Force planning document notes. The water protectors don’t mind: Salsa Tuesdays drum up support. Passing cars honked as the water protectors danced.
Across the street, the attorney Mara Verheyden-Hilliard was waiting to pick up dinner at a Mexican restaurant before meeting up with the actor and activist Jane Fonda. Fonda was visiting to draw media attention to the anti-pipeline movement. Verheyden-Hilliard, director of the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund’s Center for Protest Law and Litigation, who has represented Fonda in cases related to her other activism, had come along to gather information for a potential lawsuit.
“We’re looking at Enbridge, we’re looking at the sheriff’s offices, and we’re looking at the public safety escrow trust,” Verheyden-Hilliard explained, “because we believe that these three things have created a really extraordinary mechanism that fully financially incentivizes a level of repression to silence and shut down the organizing here.” The attorney didn’t need to look far for examples of how the police and Enbridge are working together.
The escrow account is the most obvious form of collaboration. In North Dakota, public agencies spent millions of dollars responding to pipeline protests. The Minnesota Public Utilities Commission created the Enbridge- funded account so that, this time, the pipeline company would foot the bill. A publicly appointed account manager occasionally rejects sheriff’s office invoices that overreach, but so far Enbridge has reimbursed more than $1 million in expenses, for things like crowd control training, overtime pay, and so-called personal protective equipment, like riot suits and tear gas masks.
“What that’s doing is essentially privatizing the public police forces to work in service to the pecuniary interests of the private corporation,” Verheyden-Hilliard said. “And, more specifically, it means that the corporation gets to use the public police forces to crack down on their political opponents.”
It also fits within the framework of counterinsurgency. Whether fighting in foreign wars or for corporate interest, winning the loyalty of local institutions against opposing forces is an imperative. “Police primacy is highly desirable as it reinforces the perception of insurgents as ‘criminals’ rather than ‘freedom fighters,’” the U.S. Government’s Counterinsurgency Guide says.
With promises of reimbursement on the table, police and Enbridge officials were communicating regularly in the year leading up to the final construction permit’s approval. Meanwhile, the interagency Northern Lights Task Force was pouring “countless hours” into building an elaborate infrastructure for quelling pipeline opposition. More than a dozen Northern Lights subcommittees met monthly or weekly. An agenda for a January 2020 task force meeting included a discussion of “Phone/car tracking possibilities to consider.” The group also planned to discuss potentially backgrounding organizers for links to terrorism and whether to launch a “public information campaign on who they are and what they have done in the past.” Multiple planning documents described law enforcement drone assets.
The Northern Lights Task Force didn’t respond to a request for comment. Guida, the Aitkin County sheriff, said his county isn’t tracking anyone’s phones or cars and the conversation might have been about tracking law enforcement vehicles. He added that he typically learns about what water protectors are doing by simply looking at Facebook. “So many people think this Northern Lights Task Force is like a group of ninja people wearing black suits,” he said.
As construction got underway, officials began “meeting daily with Enbridge” at the Northern Lights Task Force’s Duluth operation center. In Cass County, the corporate-police meetings happened “several times daily,” according to a reimbursement request submitted to the escrow account. The local sheriff, Tom Burch, told The Intercept that he believes that was an overstatement but acknowledged that the office does communicate with an Enbridge liaison nearly every day about pipeline activity.
By the time Verheyden-Hilliard arrived in Minnesota, the fruits of law enforcement’s preparations were apparent. Among the testimony she’d collected was story after story of law enforcement pulling over pipeline opponents for minor infractions. Earlier that day, as she drove in front of Fonda’s vehicle toward a press conference, a state patrol officer turned on her lights behind the attorney. After issuing a warning for not flashing a signal within 100 feet of a turn, the state patrol officer followed Verheyden-Hilliard’s car for 12 miles.
The warning wasn’t what the attorney was worried about. “Again and again, what they’re doing is they’re not generally issuing citations — they’re seizing the identity information,” she said. “We believe that this is an illegal surveillance operation to try and target and collect the identities of people.”
When I asked Guida about the stops, he said that his officers only pull people over when they’re breaking the law. When I pressed him about whether traffic stops were being used to collect identity information, he acknowledged that that’s standard procedure. He said, “Absolutely, there’s intelligence that comes from every traffic stop.”
Namewag, located in Hubbard County, Minnesota, is one of a handful of anti-pipeline camps strung along the oil superhighway’s route. “We also took lessons from Standing Rock,” explained Tara Houska, the water protector from Minnesota, when I visited this spring. “You can’t just be in one place.”
Houska and other members of the camp, including Big Wind, were tense. Another water protector had just been pulled over right outside of camp for having expired tags. Run by the anti-pipeline Giniw Collective, Namewag is focused on direct actions like locking down to equipment or holding sit-ins at construction sites. Direct actions and other protests against Line 3 have seen more than 500 people arrested or issued citations.
Collective members assert that, at this late stage of development, there is little other recourse — and that the tactic gets results. “If it were not for the hundreds of people that have been arrested fighting Line 3 so far, there’s no way — we wouldn’t have national news outlets out here covering this story,” Houska told me.
Since nonviolent direct action can run afoul of the law, the camp became a target for surveillance. The police stops had ramped up with the spring temperatures, leaving people on edge, which they figured was part of the point. “I honestly don’t think that there’s a car here that hasn’t been pulled over,” said Big Wind. “When you’re in that constant state of crisis, I think they don’t want you to be making the right decisions.” (The Hubbard County Sheriff’s Office did not respond to a request for comment about the stops.)
The Aitkin County Sheriff’s Office, which is near the Namewag camp, had called in reinforcements for a week in March when Extinction Rebellion, a climate group known for its splashy direct-action protests, had declared it would be in the area. The police coordinated with Enbridge security personnel, documents show, and patrolled the pipeline route. It ended up being a relatively quiet week for demonstrations, but in a single day, Big Wind said, police pulled over seven water protectors in the area.
The lines between the activities of the tar sands company, law enforcement, and pro-pipeline community members tend to blur and overlap, but wide-ranging efforts at surveillance have been clear. In one case, an unidentified bearded man with an earpiece regularly walked his dog by Namewag. The water protectors followed the man one day and spotted him in a silver truck — with the dog but without the beard. “Should we all, as a camp, get like the glasses with the nose and the mustache and start wearing those?” Houska said, making light of the creepy situation.
It wasn’t the only example of apparent subterfuge. In the winter, water protectors climbed into a section of pipeline to slow construction. Once there, the water protectors told Big Wind, a person who looked Indigenous crawled in to talk to them. “They said, ‘Hey, I’m with Giniw. Umm, it’s not safe here. Let’s go. Let’s get out of here,’” Big Wind recalled. The water protectors, who have formed tight-knit communities, had no idea who the person was.
Enbridge has also taken control of land adjacent to nexuses of the resistance. In October 2019, the company purchased a plot of land right next to Namewag and, since then, drones have regularly appeared over the protest camp. Reporters at Gizmodo were able to confirm that some of the drones spotted along the Line 3 route, including above water protectors’ homes, belong to Customs and Border Protection, but others remain unidentified. Drones also appeared above the solar energy business, 8th Fire Solar, which is a project of Honor the Earth, a nonprofit headed up by the activist LaDuke that is heavily involved in the anti-pipeline movement. As Enbridge had done at Namewag, in July 2020, the company quietly purchased the strip of land next door to the solar business.
Across the street from 8th Fire Solar, the neighbor had posted a sign in their yard, reading “Minnesotans for Line 3.” The blue signs, which dot the pipeline’s path, are the physical manifestation of another aspect of Enbridge’s campaign: its work to recruit local communities’ support. The online presence of Minnesotans for Line 3 is as robust as its yard signs. The group spent around $20,000 on Facebook ads in March and April alone, circulating testimony from motel, restaurant, and construction supply store owners about how friendly pipeline workers are and how much they’ve boosted business.
Minnesotans for Line 3 describes itself as a “grassroots organization of people who understand how important it is to have reliable energy to power our economy,” but a disclosure form unearthed by the DeSmog lists Enbridge as a sponsor of a Minnesotans for Line 3 TV ad. Pipeline opponents say that the group is an astroturf organization, a grassroots group hiding the fact that it is sponsored by a corporation to advance the corporation’s agenda.
Another record lists Minnesotans for Line 3’s ad buyer as Velocity Public Affairs, a PR firm that used to openly promote its work for Enbridge on its website. In 2019, Velocity trademarked the name “Respect Minnesota.”
The Respect Minnesota campaign, which water protectors view as an astroturf effort, centers around a neutral-sounding pledge that community members can sign, promising to abide by what Houska called “passive-aggressive ‘Minnesota Nice,’” including by obeying the law. The initiative is described on its website as being led by the Local 49 Operating Engineers, which represents pipeline workers, with other signatories including related unions, local community leaders, chambers of commerce, and Enbridge subcontractors Michels and Precision.
Enbridge spokesperson Juli Kellner told The Intercept that questions about Minnesotans for Line 3 should be directed to the group itself. Minnesotans for Line 3 did not address its relationship to Enbridge but said, “Minnesotans for Line 3 represents thousands of people in every county across Minnesota who support replacing our energy infrastructure with something that is newer, and better to protect the environment and support the economy.”
In a statement, Respect Minnesota pointed to its union organizers and said, “We’ve publicly stated that Respect Minnesota is supported by those unions as well as Enbridge, Michels and Precision because they see the value in promoting respect and a safe environment for everyone.” Kellner said, “Enbridge is just one of the businesses, unions, community organizations, and thousands of individuals from around the state who have taken the Respect Minnesota pledge.”
Shanai Matteson understands the attractiveness for locals of a vague appeal like “respect.” She moved to Honor the Earth’s Welcome Water Protectors camp in Aitkin County last summer, but she’s also from the area. The nearby land where Matteson’s grandmother was born is now part of the pipeline route.
Matteson sees Enbridge’s efforts to rally support from the local community as soft counterinsurgency tactics. Donations to fire departments and other local services, even environmental causes, are part of it, though she understands that local acquiescence to the pipeline as about more than money.
After settlers invaded Indigenous land in Minnesota, mining became a key means for European descendants to support themselves. “That story about our way of life as extraction is so deep,” she said. Matteson’s grandfather worked as a miner and her uncle is a retired member of the same union that claims the Respect Minnesota campaign. Matteson thinks Enbridge has used Minnesota’s historic economic dependence on extractive industries and its conflict-avoidant culture to draw support from a wide range of descendants of European settlers in her community.
She pointed toward Bob Marcum, who sits on the board of the nearby Long Lake Conservation Center’s foundation. An environmentalist and active member of the Democratic Party, Marcum testified at a Public Utilities Commission hearing that Native people were not being adequately consulted on Line 3. Yet when Matteson asked her dad to see if Marcum would sign an anti-pipeline petition, she was told that he would not. Enbridge has given money to the center and Paul Eberth, who long acted as the Line 3 project manager, sits alongside Marcum on the foundation board.
I met with Marcum in the conservation center’s enormous student dining room. Marcum, who is 68, was nervous about our conversation and agreed to talk only as a private citizen, not as a representative of the foundation. The conservation center, which is run by Aitkin County, is his family legacy — his father founded it as one of the first environmental education centers in the U.S.
When I asked if he thought Enbridge’s involvement with the Long Lake Conservation Center was a type of “green-washing” — a way for major contributors to the climate crisis to present an environmentally friendly appearance — Marcum was clear: “I kind of made a gentleman’s agreement when we started working together that that’s not something we do.”
Marcum acknowledged that Enbridge has contributed at least $40,000 to the center over the years — a relatively small portion of the its $750,000 annual budget. Marcum’s shrinking eagerness to openly criticize Enbridge, though, seemed more related to his growing friendship with pipeline boss Paul Elberth. “It turns out Paul brings his kids out here, and he wants the very best for his kids. When you find him away from his desk, and he’s taking a few days off, he’s up in the Boundary Waters,” Marcum explained, referring to the popular wilderness canoeing destination on the border with Canada. “He’s just a very nice man.”
Not long ago, Paul Eberth took on the position of tribal engagement lead for Enbridge, not just for Line 3, but also the controversial Line 5 pipeline in Michigan. It’s a sign of how crucial demonstrating Indigenous support has become for one of the largest global oil transport corporations. And Eberth’s job isn’t easy.
Besides the protest movement’s Indigenous leadership, three tribes — the Red Lake Nation, the White Earth Nation, and the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe — have been behind the most significant legal challenges to Line 3’s construction. The pipeline route does not pass through their reservations, but it does pass through lands to which the tribes retain treaty rights. They argue, among other things, that they were not properly consulted. Meanwhile, the Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe rejected Enbridge route alternatives that would have expanded the portion of the old pipeline that passes through their reservation. The corporation found a new route.
An Enbridge proposal provided to Minnesota’s Star Tribune newspaper demonstrates how much tribal buy-in is worth to the pipeline. The company proposed a package worth more than $25 million to the Red Lake Nation to drop its lawsuit and publicly communicate its opposition to “unlawful protesting.” They offered $1.25 million in community investments, including toward powwow facilities, on top of another $25 million for a solar energy project that would power Line 3.
The Red Lake Nation rejected the offer. “The letter was just disregarded,” Tribal Secretary Sam Strong told me at a pipeline resistance camp set up through a tribal council resolution. The camp, which is on treaty land, overlooks the intersection of the pipeline easement and the Red Lake River, still frozen during my visit this spring. Enbridge continued to push, hiring Red Lake tribal members to promote the pipeline and trying to buy local support. Strong told me, “That divide-and-conquer strategy is the same strategy that the federal government used to terminate Native people.”
Red Lake wasn’t the only tribe approached by Enbridge — and other efforts were more successful. The Fond du Lac band, whose reservation is bisected by Line 3, opposed the pipeline before accepting its own version of the proposal made to Red Lake. The details of the Fond du Lac deal have not been made public, but a letter sent to tribal members in January, shared with Indian Country Today, indicates that the $400 monthly payments all tribal members receive from tribal enterprises are now coming from Enbridge.
There is still dissent among tribal members. Taysha Martineau, a 28-year-old Fond du Lac water protector, crowdfunded the cash to buy a strip of land next to the pipeline easement on the reservation and established the Migizi camp. Setting up the camp was not an easy decision for Martineau. Given Enbridge’s success at winning the tribe’s support, continuing to resist the pipeline risked damaging important relationships. Of all the resistance camps along the route, Migizi is the most controversial because it lacks the support of Martineau’s tribe. And perhaps more than anyone I met, Martineau has been subject to the full range of Enbridge and law enforcement tactics.
Martineau was singled out by law enforcement even before the camp’s establishment. In December, the Carlton County Sheriff’s Office emailed around photos of Martineau and labeled their partner, who is also a pipeline opponent, a “professional protester.” Given how small the community is, the recipients were not anonymous officials: One was a tribal officer Martineau had turned to during a tough period of her youth. The same officer arrested Martineau later that winter. “Those are the choices that we made as individuals, you know,” said Martineau. “But that’s also part of the division that this company is presenting here in our community.”
The rifts only deepened. Early this spring, pipeline opponents from outside the reservation tossed an electronic device into a construction site. Police responded swiftly — bomb squads, phone alerts, and evacuations. Though the device turned out to be harmless, community members, rattled by law enforcement’s reaction, were upset with the demonstrators.
Fond du Lac residents, including the tribal chair and Martineau’s family members, went to the camp to confront the water protector. They demanded that people from outside Fond du Lac leave, but the greatest ire was reserved for Martineau. “I believe it was, you know, law enforcement-induced mass hysteria to turn the community against the opposition,” said Martineau. “And I think it was effective.” (A Fond du Lac representative declined to comment on what happened at the Migizi camp.)
Carlton County Sheriff Kelly Lake defended the law enforcement response in an email to the Intercept. “I think that is an unfair and completely inaccurate description,” she said. “If we ignored a call like that and people got injured or killed, I wouldn’t want to be explaining why we ignored it.” She added that distributing images of lawbreakers to other jurisdictions is a common practice among police.
The divisions will not be easily repaired. “I love my community unconditionally, but my mother’s never going forget or forgive the way they treated me,” Martineau said. “And I worry about my children.”
On the cusp of summer, Enbridge began preparing to drill under more than 20 rivers and waterways. With time running short, water protectors are traveling in growing numbers to stand with the Anishinaabe-led movement — and being greeted by an intensifying police response.
So far, Enbridge and law enforcement have only shown flashes of the kinds of spectacular displays of repression that defined Standing Rock. In early June, water protectors gathered for the largest direct action yet against Line 3 at a pipeline pump station. A Customs and Border Protection helicopter sent a cloud of dust and debris over the protest. It was identical to the one that Guida, the Aitkin County sheriff, denied and later conceded had buzzed the resistance camp in March. Though authorities denied that they intended to use rotor wash to disperse the crowd — a combat tactic — the helicopter’s low flight path in an area where water protectors were locked to construction equipment appeared to violate Federal Aviation Administration rules.
In the aftermath of the protest, Enbridge stressed to the media that a Native-owned business’s contract work was disrupted. Meanwhile, members of the Northern Lights Task Force, who were in town to assist during the weekend of action, used the Long Lake Conservation Center as a staging area. Customs and Border Protection Public affairs officer Kris Grogan told The Intercept that the agency couldn’t comment on the June 7 flight, which is under investigation, but that a key mission of the agency’s Air and Marine Operations is to support law enforcement partners.
Pipeline opponents are urging the Biden administration to intervene to stop construction — and he still could. On June 23, though, the administration defended the U.S. Army Corps’s decision to issue a federal permit for Line 3, arguing in a court filing that Red Lake’s legal challenge should be thrown out. That same day, tribal members were defending themselves from an attempt by the Minnesota Department of Transportation to evict the Red Lake Treaty Camp from the side of the highway. In the following days, the Hubbard County Sheriff’s Office moved to barricade the entrance to the Namewag camp.
The pipeline fights in the upper Midwest represent only one point in a global spectrum of corporate efforts to suppress water and land defense movements. In places like Guatemala, the confrontations can grow much more deadly, say Simon Granovsky-Larsen of the University of Regina in Canada, and Larissa Santos of the University of São Paulo in Brazil, who recently wrote a paper offering their own rubric for identifying corporate counterinsurgencies.
I asked Granovsky-Larsen and Santos whether they thought Enbridge’s response to the Stop Line 3 movement fits the definition. “It aligns very much with what we understand as corporate counterinsurgency,” Santos said.
She was less convinced, though, that the actions of Enbridge and the Northern Lights Task Force violate the spirit of the Public Utilities Commission permit. Instead, she proposed that the permit language was itself part of the strategy, sending a message meant to preempt concerns that counterinsurgency tactics would be used. Santos suggested that the commission seemed to be saying, “It won’t be the same that happened to Standing Rock. We have an agreement.” She said, “I see this as an information strategy from above to pacify resistance.”
Enbridge, for its part, did not respond to The Intercept’s specific questions about whether a counterinsurgency was underway. Kellner, the spokesperson, said public agencies were responsible for both the escrow account as well as security. “We understand there are differing opinions about the energy we all use,” Kellner said. “As a company, we recognize the rights of individuals and groups to express their views legally and peacefully.”
I asked the researchers whether it’s even possible to build a tar sands oil pipeline in an era of climate crisis without counterinsurgency tactics.
“Absolutely not,” Granovsky-Larsen replied. “I don’t see any scenario across Turtle Island” — a common name used by Indigenous people for North America — “where tar sands extraction and transport could gain the necessary legitimacy where a company wouldn’t feel the need to either implement counterinsurgent tactics — or a harsher form of repression.”
Follow us on facebook and twitter!
PO Box 2043 / Citrus Heights, CA 95611
No comments:
Post a Comment