29 October 21
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World leaders often are responsible for large numbers of deaths of soldiers in war, but we are talking domestic civilian lives here.
To put this death toll in perspective, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini (d. 1989) of Iran killed 20,000, mostly members of the Mojahedin-e Khalq (MEK or People’s Jihadis) guerrilla group. Brutal Syrian dictator Hafez al-Asad (d. 2000) is estimated to have killed 25,000 civilians, half of them at the city of Hama in 1982. Hissen Habre of Chad, who was tried at the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity in the central African country of Chad, killed 40,000 civilians. Papa Doc Duvalier (d. 1971), the feared autocrat of Haiti, killed 60,000. Joseph Kony, head of the destructive east African terrorist group, the Lord’s Resistance Army (Christianity’s answer to al-Qaeda) killed 100,000.
If what Birx is saying is true (and she was right there with a front row seat), Donald J. Trump ranks among the worst mass murderers of the past 50 years.
Some countries even take such actions seriously. A senate panel has recommended that Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro be impeached for crimes against humanity for the death toll his contrarian policies toward COVID produced in that country.
Birx told a Congressional panel that her alarm at the spike in COVID illnesses and deaths in the fall of 2020 and through the last days of the Trump administration in January, 2021, kept escalating. She says that she conveyed that ever-increasing anxiety to the White House throughout that period. She says her language became more and more vehement, asking for “More mitigation, more treatment, and early use of vaccines to protect the elderly.”
Trump’s response, she lamented, did not rise to the level of the national danger.
Here’s the money graf from the testimony:
Q: And what was the impact of the failure to implement the measures to the extent that you felt was needed?
A: Well, it’s difficult to give you a statistical answer on that and a number. But when I start looking at states that had some of the different mitigation pieces utilized, when they had very similar demographics across states and looking at states that are similar, ones that had mask mandates versus those that didn’t have mask mandates, there was about anywhere between a 10 to 15 percent increase in fatalities for those without a mask mandate. …
I believe if we had fully implemented the mask mandates, the reduction in indoor dining, the getting friends and family to understand the risk of gathering in private homes, and we had increased testing, that we probably could have decreased fatalities into the 30 percent less to 40 percent less range. …
So, really, we’re talking about the 400,000 [deaths after the first wave]. So, yes, I’m talking about a third of those, I think, could have been prevented with optimal mitigation across this country.
At the 40% range of preventable deaths, that would be 160,000 Americans who died because Trump wouldn’t encourage them to wear a damn mask or stay out of crowded, poorly ventilated indoor spaces and other common sense things you’d do to avoid an upper respiratory infection (which you mostly get by people breathing on you or from handshakes). Trump also wouldn’t actually use the machinery of the federal government efficiently, to get people monoclonal antibodies or, when vaccines became available, to get them efficiently to the elderly.
Asked why she had said in an interview that an election year was the worst time to have a pandemic, she replied, “Well, even across the country, the governors and mayors and others that were campaigning, as well as the White House that was campaigning, just took people’s time away from and distracted them away from the pandemic in my personal opinion.”
In September and October, in the run-up to the election, she said, “I felt like the White House had gotten somewhat complacent through the campaign season, and I wanted to make sure that as soon as everyone was back the day after the election,that people would comprehensively reengage.”
She complained of White House staff that “they weren’t there and we weren’t having COVID meetings continuously.” That is what she meant by “complacent.”
In other words, the White House was not doing anything about COVID last fall.
In contrast, Birx knew what was needed. More centers around the country that could administer monoclonal antibody treatments (this was before the vaccine), more mask mandates, aggressive testing, and discouragement of people from meeting in person for Thanksgiving and Christmas. Then once the vaccines became available, she wanted a laser focus on getting them in the arms of the elderly. None of these policies was implemented.
She complained that Scott Atlas, a radiologist and right wing commentator whom Trump had appointed coronavirus adviser to the White House, was fixated on getting to herd immunity by actually encouraging people to get the virus. (It is not clear that herd immunity is possible with COVID, because antibody responses in those who fall ill seem to fade within six months). She also noted that the long term effects of having COVID could be serious– that there is much we do not know, so actually encouraging people to contract it is potentially very dangerous.
Birx said that Atlas’s quirky and fatal views undermined the work of the coronavirus task force, and she blamed Trump: “The fact that he was brought in and given a title of senior adviser to the President, I’m assuming that most of the senior advisers supported him being there because he remained there for a number of months.”
In a CBC interview, below, Birx added that many persons in Trump’s inner circle continued to believe that the virus was a hoax. Hence the lack of action.
Joe Biden showed only a month later how it could be done. In the face of a lack of vaccinators, Biden brought in the army, which has a lot of people who know how to give shots. If it hadn’t been for the unexpected rise of the delta variant, the pandemic would have been more or less over by now, given the efficiency with which Biden acted.
As for Trump, not only will he skate on 160,000 charges of manslaughter, the Republicans would put him back in charge of the country if they could.
Supporters of Julius Jones, who has been on death row since 1999, on February 25, 2021, in Oklahoma City. (photo: Sue Ogrocki/AP)
ALSO SEE: Oklahoma Carries Out Third Consecutive Botched Execution
After Years-Long Hiatus
A three-member panel of the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals issued the stays for death row inmates John Marion Grant, who was scheduled to die on Thursday, and Julius Jones, whose lethal injection was set for Nov. 18.
The court ruled that U.S. District Judge Stephen Friot in Oklahoma erred when he removed Grant, Jones and three other inmates from a lawsuit challenging the state's lethal injection protocols because they did not designate an alternative method of execution.
The court determined that the inmates did identify alternative methods in their complaint, even if they didn't specifically check a box designating which specific method they would use.
The panel wrote, “We find nothing in the relevant case law that specifically requires a prisoner to designate a method of execution to be used in his case by ‘checking a box' when the prisoner has already identified in his complaint the very same alternative methods given as choices on the form."
Dale Baich, an attorney for some of the death row inmates, said the court made the right decision.
“Today’s order should prevent the state from carrying out executions until the federal district court addresses the ‘credible expert criticism’ it identified in Oklahoma’s execution procedures," Baich said in a statement. “Those issues will be carefully reviewed by the court at the trial scheduled in February.”
Oklahoma Attorney General John O'Connor said he planned to appeal the ruling to the U.S. Supreme Court.
“We are hopeful the Supreme Court will vacate the stay so that justice can finally be served for the people of Oklahoma, including the families of the victims of these horrific crimes," O'Connor said in a written statement.
O'Connor had pushed for seven executions to be scheduled through March, and prison officials announced this week that they have confirmed a source to supply all the drugs needed for those executions.
“Extensive validations and redundancies have been implemented since the last execution in order to ensure that the process works as intended,” the Department of Corrections said in a statement.
Oklahoma has historically had one of the nation’s busiest death chambers, but a series of problematic lethal injections in 2014 and 2015 led to a de facto moratorium. Richard Glossip was just hours away from being executed in September 2015 when prison officials realized they received the wrong lethal drug. It was later learned that the same wrong drug had been used in a January 2015 execution.
The drug mix-ups followed a botched execution in April 2014 in which inmate Clayton Lockett struggled on a gurney before dying 43 minutes into his lethal injection — and after the state’s prisons chief ordered executioners to stop.
While the moratorium was in place, Oklahoma moved ahead with plans to use nitrogen gas to execute inmates, but ultimately scrapped that idea and announced last year it planned to resume executions using the same three-drug lethal injection protocol that was used during the flawed executions. The three drugs are midazolam, a sedative; vecuronium bromide, a paralytic; and potassium chloride, which stops the heart.
Oscar Rodriguez, brother of 18-year-old Mona Rodriguez, who was shot by a Long Beach Unified School District safety officer. (photo: Jason Armond/LA Times)
The officer, Eddie F. Gonzalez, was fired from his position one day after shooting Manuela "Mona" Rodriguez on Sept. 27.
A bullet fired by Gonzalez hit Rodriguez "in the upper body" as she and two friends drove away from an off-campus parking lot near Millikan High School, according to the Long Beach Police Department. Gonzalez, who was driving nearby, stopped after witnessing a fight between Rodriguez and a 15-year-old girl, according to police.
Rodriguez, the mother of a 5-month-old boy, was taken off life support and died Oct. 5.
Oscar Rodriguez, the brother of Mona, spoke after the charges were announced.
“My sister was amazing. She was a person to help me out in my times of trouble as a young child," he said. "She was there for me, and now that she’s gone I don’t know how to heal. This type of criminal action should not be allowed in our state, in our country.”
Los Angeles County District Attorney George Gascón announced the charge of one count of murder during a news conference in downtown Los Angeles on Wednesday afternoon.
“We must hold accountable the people we have placed in positions of trust to protect us,” Gascón said. “That is especially true for the armed personnel we traditionally have relied upon to guard our children on their way to and from and at school.”
Calls to end having armed officers in schools grew during the social activism surge that followed the 2020 police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, but criticism of school police spending and law-enforcement practices on campuses began earlier. A 2019 American Civil Liberties Union study advocated a shift in spending from campus policing to mental health professionals.
The "prioritization of school police is troubling, not only for the lack of mental health support for our nation’s students, but also given that research indicates school police do not reduce mass shootings and instead contribute to less inclusive school climates," the report said.
Luis Carillo, a lawyer representing the Rodriguez family, commented on the charges following the announcement.
"This is the beginning of justice for Mona, her mother and the entire Rodriguez family," he wrote in a statement. "But it took too long to arrest the man who unjustly killed Mona Rodriguez."
In dismissing Gonzalez from his job after Rodriguez's death, the district found that he violated policy forbidding an officer from firing at a fleeing person, a moving vehicle or through a vehicle window unless such action is warranted as "a final means of defense."
Gonzalez had passed all his background checks and his required training had been confirmed before he was hired in January, according to Superintendent Jill A. Baker.
He was a safety officer employed by a school district, which is different from school resource officers, who are federally defined as being fully sworn, certified law enforcement officers deployed by a law enforcement agency to perform community-based policing on a school campus.
Gonzalez is expected to be arraigned Friday, the district attorney's office said.
A Guantanamo Bay prisoner who went through the brutal U.S. government interrogation program after the 9/11 attacks described it openly for the first time Thursday, saying he was left terrified and hallucinating. (photo: AP)
Adil Dghoughi was shot by a White property owner Terry Turner. (photo: Courtesy Faizan Syed)
Adil Dghoughi, 31, was killed earlier this month by the homeowner Terry Turner, who has been charged with murder.
Turner’s lawyers say they will defend their client under the rubric of Texas’s stand-your-ground law and castle doctrine that allows homeowners to use deadly force against someone on their property if the actions are seen as immediately necessary.
Stand-your-ground laws counter the notion that in the event of danger, one must retreat or run away. Rather, a person may “stand their ground” and justifiably defend themselves.
Critics of the laws say they lead to unnecessary deaths and are often a cover for racism. The first stand-your-ground law in the US was enacted in Florida in 2005, with heavy lobbying from the National Rifle Association (NRA). The law came under national scrutiny in the wake of the 2012 shooting of Trayvon Martin, a Black teenager killed by George Zimmerman, a neighborhood watch person.
The details of the Texas killing have shocked many.
Dghoughi, a Muslim who immigrated to the US in 2013 and studied finance, had borrowed the Audi of his girlfriend, Sarah Todd, after a barbecue in Converse, a town just outside San Antonio. On the way back home, he stopped and pulled over in Turner’s neighborhood in Martindale, a city about 55 miles north-east of San Antonio. Dghoughi’s family and girlfriend believe he was possibly lost in an unfamiliar town and was checking for directions.
According to the affidavit provided to a Texas chapter of the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), it was 3.30am when Turner got up to use the bathroom and noticed a car parked in his driveway.
Turner, documents say, retrieved his gun, and when he came outside, the car Dghoughi was driving had its headlights on and was reversing out of the driveway. Turner shot Dghoughi through the car window as he was leaving, and the bullet hit his hand and his head. Turner then called 911 and said: “I just killed a guy.”
Turner claimed Dghoughi pointed a gun at him. No gun was found.
Sandra Guerra Thompson, a law professor at the University of Houston, said: “The law will presume the use of force was immediately necessary if the other person forcibly entered a person’s occupied habitation or vehicle.
“It requires you to have evidence that the individual who was killed was in the process of committing some kind of crime. If there isn’t any evidence of any kind of criminality, [self] defense just doesn’t apply.”
Thompson added: “It’s customary to drive into people’s driveways without it being considered trespass … There are other reasonable steps a concerned homeowner could take, like calling the police.”
Faizan Syed, a spokesperson for CAIR, said: “We believe the death of Adil is murder, plain and simple. Terry Turner should have been arrested the same day he shot and killed Adil.”
Syed added: “It’s a disgrace to this country and to our legal system that it took 14 days almost, along with calls to the Department of Justice, the Texas Rangers and other agencies, before the police department did their very minimal job of finding, arresting, and charging Terry Turner.”
Dghoughi’s family and attorney say he posed no threat to Turner. Dghoughi’s family is now arranging for his burial in Morocco.
The administration of President Joe Biden has been under pressure to fulfill his campaign promise to overturn the anti-immigration legacy of his predecessor Donald Trump. (photo: Daniel Becerril/Reuters)
Families in lawsuit allege emotional distress and trauma after being separated during Trump’s years in power.
Citing people familiar with the matter, the Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday that Homeland Security, the Departments of Justice, as well as Health and Human Services are considering paying what could be close to $1m per family in settlements – since most of the families separated were made up of one parent and one child.
The move, according to the report, is part of an effort to settle lawsuits on behalf of parents and children who were separated after crossing the US-Mexico border to seek asylum.
According to the WSJ, the families – 940 so far – allege that parents and children are suffering from long-lasting emotional distress, trauma and psychological harm, due to being separated, for years in many cases.
The development also comes amid rising pressure on Joe Biden to fulfil his campaign promise to overhaul the immigration system and overturn Trump’s anti-immigration legacy.
The Trump administration, which made restricting immigration a primary goal of his presidency, imposed the so-called zero tolerance policy along the border in April 2018 to deter undocumented migrants from crossing into the US.
Under the policy — which made crossing the border a criminal offence — adults were prosecuted and put in expulsion proceedings. Children, including infants, were held in temporary detention centres and then flown or bussed to other locations in the US. Many were placed with foster families.
The policy drew widespread outrage and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) sued the Trump administration over the policy. It said more than 5,500 families were separated by the “cruel” policy.
The Trump administration abandoned the practice in June 2018. But rights groups say the separations began before the policy was officially announced and continued after it was terminated.
The ACLU says hundreds of families remain separated. The group said the Trump administration did not keep full records of information and contact details for parents, making it a difficult task to locate them.
Shortly after taking office, the Biden administration announced a task force that is charged with uniting families who are still separated. It is unclear exactly how many families remain apart.
The Biden administration has also allowed parents who have been separated from their children to come to the US, and stay0 if they choose.
Immigration along the US-Mexico border is at a 20-year high, and the Biden administration has been struggling with putting together a coherent policy.
It has been facing pressure from Republican leaders who blame Biden for the surge, saying overturning Trump’s restrictive border policies, is to blame.
The Biden administration has also been facing growing criticism from immigration advocates who say he has not done enough to reverse Trump’s legacy.
Despite criticising the zero tolerance policy as “unjust”, the Biden administration continues to rely on Title 42, another Trump-era policy that allows for the immediate deportation of asylum seekers at the border, without the chance to apply. The rule cites the need to protect the country from the further spread of the coronavirus.
But the administration has exempted children travelling alone and without a parent from Title 42 expulsions. Minors arriving at the border have been allowed to apply for asylum. And provided they have a relative or sponsor in the US, have been able to enter the country to pursue their claim.
Exxon Mobil Chairman & CEO Darren Woods meets with Chinese Premier Li Keqiang at the Zhongnanhai Leadership Compound on September 7, 2018, in Beijing, China. (photo: Mark Schiefelbein/Getty)
In first-of-its-kind testimony, top executives from ExxonMobil, BP, Chevron and Shell Oil were put under oath about their alleged role in misleading the public on global warming science.
The House Committee on Oversight and Reform questioned on Thursday top leaders at ExxonMobil, BP, Chevron and Shell Oil, as well as two trade organizations they fund, over what Democratic lawmakers said was the petroleum industry’s role in spreading disinformation about the science of climate change — and whether the companies’ current commitments to clean up their acts were enough to forestall dangerous global warming.
Becoming heated at moments, Democrats drew stark parallels between their climate hearing and an infamous 1994 inquiry at which tobacco executives testified under oath that they believed nicotine was not addictive.
“You can either come clean, admit your misrepresentations and ongoing inconsistencies and stop supporting climate disinformation, or you can sit there in front of the American public, and lie under oath,” said Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), chair of the House Oversight Subcommittee on Environment.
Big Tobacco was eventually to forced to settle with state prosecutors and curtail cigarette marketing. At the moment, it is unclear if the Big Oil hearing yielded any bombshell revelations that may move U.S. climate policy.
Democrats are intent on getting more information. At the end of the hearing, Rep. Carolyn B. Maloney (D-N.Y.), chair of the committee, let the oil executives know she intended to subpoena the companies for documents regarding their communications about climate change.
“Please note that I do not take this step lightly,” she said.
Still, the historic six-hour hearing comes as President Biden is set to fly to Scotland to attend a major international climate conference and negotiate bigger cuts in greenhouse gas emissions from China and other top polluters. His administration is also in the midst of trying to secure a deal to boost funding for alternative forms of energy by $555 billion as part of a signature $1.75 trillion bill.
“This is a watershed moment in not only efforts to hold fossil fuel interests accountable for the decades of deception, but also more broadly in the climate battle itself,” said Geoffrey Supran, a research fellow at Harvard University who studies the history of climate politics.
Appearing by video conference rather than in person, the oil executives acknowledged the burning of their products is contributing to the rise in global temperatures — a position many petroleum firms once refused to take. Yet the industry’s top brass denied its involvement in a campaign to deliberately mislead the public on climate change.
“While our views on climate change have developed over time, any suggestion that Chevron is engaged in an effort to spread disinformation and mislead the public on these complex issues is simply wrong,” Chevron CEO Michael Wirth told lawmakers.
No company sustained more intense questioning than the nation’s biggest oil company, Exxon.
Maloney said there was a “clear conflict” between what Exxon’s old executives said about climate change and what the company’s own researchers were privately telling the company leaders.
She grilled Exxon CEO Darren Woods about statements sowing doubt about climate change from one of Woods’s predecessors, Lee Raymond, including a mid-1990s speech in which Raymond said “the case for so-called global warming is far from airtight.”
Those public statements came even as Exxon’s scientists were studying the effects of greenhouse gas emissions and warning the company’s leaders of the “generally negative consequences” of rising sea levels.
“Do you agree, there is an inconsistency?” Maloney asked.
“No, I do not agree there was an inconsistency,” Woods responded, noting those statements were decades old and the company’s position has evolved along with the consensus in the scientific community.
“I think the quotes speak for themselves,” Maloney said in response.
The oil industry’s main lobbying group, the American Petroleum Institute, also came under scrutiny.
Khanna called on oil companies to quit their membership in API over its opposition to climate policies such as electric vehicle subsidies. French oil giant Total announced in January that it was leaving the lobbying group, saying it could not reconcile differences with the powerful trade association over electric vehicle subsidies and fees on methane emissions.
“Would any of you take the opportunity and look at API and say, ‘stop it'?" Khanna asked executives from BP, Shell, Exxon and Chevron.
His question was met with blank stares. None of the executives would commit to leaving the powerful lobbying group.
The oil executives repeatedly noted gasoline and other fuels they sell will remain a key part of the world’s economy for decades to come. “There are no easy answers,” Exxon’s Woods said. Many of the oil industry witnesses touted companies’ support for the Paris climate accord and efforts to reduce emissions on their own.
During the hearing, the oil industry rallied around the idea of placing a price on carbon dioxide emissions as a solution to climate change. One proposal would charge polluters a fee of $40 per ton in exchange for protection from lawsuits and other regulations.
But critics of Exxon say a secretly recorded video of one of the company’s top lobbyists undermines that stance. Keith McCoy, formerly Exxon’s senior director for federal relations, said the firm’s public support of a carbon tax was just a “talking point” with little chance of passing Congress, according to a video released by Greenpeace UK in July.
Democrats played a portion of the video during the hearing. “They are obviously lying like the tobacco executives were,” Maloney said after it finished.
Four of the liberal lawmakers known as “the Squad” — Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) and Cori Bush (D-Mo.) — took turns bashing the fossil fuel industry for the harm they say their pollution has on vulnerable communities.
“I need Chevron to cut the check. You owe $50 billion to Indigenous communities and people that you harmed for profit,” Tlaib told Chevron’s Wirth.
Republicans on the panel accused Democrats starting their own campaign to divert attention from Biden’s record.
Rep. James Comer (Ky.), the ranking Republican, blasted his Democratic colleagues for holding a hearing about past oil industry statements at a time when the country faces so many crises, listing off the recent increase in gasoline prices, the withdrawal from Afghanistan and the coronavirus pandemic.
“This hearing is simply a distraction,” he said.
To underscore their opposition to Biden’s climate agenda, Republicans brought in Neal Crabtree, a laid-off welder on the Keystone XL pipeline, to testify alongside the oil executives. Biden quashed the controversial pipeline as one of his first actions in office on January.
The extent to which some oil companies understood the risks of climate change decades before much of the public did has become clear in recent years.
Reporting from Inside Climate News and the Los Angeles Times showed that Exxon’s own researchers studied the link between climate change and fossil-fuel emissions decades ago, even as the company publicly doubted about that science at the time. Shell’s in-house scientists knew, too, of the risk climate change posed back in the 1980s, according to documents compiled by a Dutch news organization.
Democrats say the hearing marks just the beginning of their inquiry. Lawmakers next plan to scrutinize the role social media and public relations firms play in propagating falsehoods about climate change, Khanna said in an interview following the hearing.
Well before the oversight panel launched its investigation, five states and more than a dozen cities had filed lawsuits alleging that the oil industry misled the public as local governments contend with rising seas, more intense fires and other effects of climate change.
Among the litigants is Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison (D), who sued Exxon, API and Koch Industries last year for allegedly “downplaying the role that the purchase and consumption of their products played in causing climate change and the potentially catastrophic consequences of climate change.”
When asked about the parallels between his legal challenge and the Oversight hearing, Ellison told The Post, “The parallel is as clear as day: deception is their business model.”
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