11 December 21
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We need parents and families to teach values and reinforce behavior that challenges the gun-slinger culture.
Just days after the school shooting, Rep Thomas Massie, a Republican from Kentucky, posted a family photo with each member of his seven-person family brandishing a rifle, with a caption ending in “p.s. Santa, please bring ammo.” The congressman must have assumed that celebrating Christmas — literally the mass celebrating the birth of Christ — by this macho display would bolster his political prospects.
The Michigan indictments challenge what has become a gun-slinging culture. Children are being raised in homes like Massie’s where guns are not simply owned to hunt animals but collected and celebrated as protection against the “other.”
The Oxford attack was the deadliest U.S school shooting since May 2018, when eight students and two teachers were shot at the Santa Fe High School in Texas. According to CNN, there have been 48 K-12 shootings, 32 of them since August.
Should we hold parents responsible for the terrorist acts of their children? Kyle Rittenhouse, aged 17, carried an AR-15 with 30 rounds — a weapon of war — to the protests in Kenosha that turned violent after a white police officer shot and paralyzed Jacob Blake, a Black man, without being held responsible. Rittenhouse shot three people, killing two. He was carrying a gun purchased for him by a 20-year-old friend. His mother, a single mother struggling to raise 3 children, took her son to a bar, where he was photographed with members of the right-wing Proud Boys. Despite internet reports to the contrary, she apparently didn’t know that her son had gone to Kenosha.
In the Oxford case, the prosecutor moved to indict the parents because “the facts of this case are so egregious.” On the day of the shooting, Ethan’s parents were called urgently to the school when one of his teachers found an alarming note he had drawn, scrawled with images of a gun, a person who had been shot, a laughing emoji and the words “Blood everywhere” and “The thoughts won’t stop. Help me.”
His parents dismissed concerns that their son might be a danger to his classmates. They did not reveal that he had access to a gun that they had just given him. They refused to take him out of school for the day. They didn’t ask their son if he had the gun on him and didn’t bother to search his backpack. A few hours later he took his gun from that backpack and started shooting.
I have no idea if the parent’s will be found guilty. Michigan has no law requiring that guns be stored safely locked and with ammunition separated from the weapons. A jury will sort the facts out.
What I do know is that homes are where values are forged. Children are not born to be racist or nationalist. They are taught those values. The children of southern plantation owners weren’t born to assume that children with dark skins are less than human. They had to be taught those values. Children who assume guns can be the answer to their pain aren’t born with that assumption.
We need to challenge the celebration of vigilantes and gun-slinging, the laws that allow people to march with weapons of war down the streets of our communities, and the culture that worships guns even in the hands of children. The unspeakable deaths of children won’t stop unless we crack down on those responsible for providing them with guns, whether by commission or by negligence. That’s true in our cities and in our rural communities and affluent suburbs. Sensible laws can help. Communities can mobilize to teach. Most of all, we need parents and families to teach values and reinforce behavior that challenges the gun-slinger culture.
We started with a romantic image of a man teaching his son how to hunt and shoot a deer with a rifle. We’ve ended with legislators sending out Christmas cards displaying their whole family armed with everything from assault weapons to shotguns. And with a troubled 15-year-old, with a handgun holding 30 rounds, killing four and wounding 7 of his classmates. This murderous culture cannot be allowed to fester. And parents, whether held criminally responsible if an act of terror is committed or not, are responsible for the example they set and for what they teach their children at home.
Demonstrators protest anti-abortion laws in front of the Governor's Mansion in Austin, Texas. (photo: Evan L'Roy/The Texas Tribune)
By leaving the law in place and barring meaningful ways to challenge it, the court greenlighted state efforts to overturn constitutional rights.
On December 10, in a ruling with far-reaching consequences, the U.S. Supreme Court essentially said the challenges facing patients and providers might never end. Not only does the court’s ruling allow Texas’s abortion ban to remain in effect indefinitely, it also gives other states the green light to write additional laws that flagrantly violate the Constitution.
“The implications of today’s decision will be profound and will reverberate for years to come,” said Marc Hearron, senior counsel with the Center for Reproductive Rights. “Today it is abortion rights under attack. Tomorrow, I have no doubt we will see copycat abortion laws in other states. And after that, any other fundamental right recognized by the Supreme Court can come under attack, and the federal courts will be handcuffed from doing anything to stop it.”
The Ripple Effect of S.B. 8
At issue in the case is Texas Senate Bill 8, which bans all abortion after six weeks, well before many people know they’re pregnant. Roughly 90 percent of people who obtain abortions in the state are at least six weeks into pregnancy; 10 percent of the U.S. population of reproductive age lives in Texas. While similar bans enacted in 11 states have been blocked by the federal courts for flouting nearly 50 years of precedent upholding the right to abortion before fetal viability — roughly four months beyond the six-week mark — the Texas law was designed specifically to circumvent constitutional protections.
Instead of making the ban enforceable by a state actor, like the head of the state health department or the attorney general, S.B. 8 allows private actors to bring civil suits against anyone they believe may have provided an abortion or helped someone obtain an abortion in violation of the law. The latter could include a friend who drives a patient to a clinic or an abortion fund that helps to finance care.
The point is to farm out enforcement so there is no clear state actor for providers or patients to sue to block the law from taking effect, what’s known as a pre-enforcement challenge.
In July, a coalition of Texas providers, abortion funds, doctors, and religious leaders tried to block the law by suing the clerks tasked with accepting civil lawsuits and the district judges who would have to handle those S.B. 8-generated cases. Their efforts were stymied by the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, and the law took effect, creating chaos across the nation’s delicate and interconnected network of abortion providers.
Since the law took effect, two-thirds of patients calling the Trust Women clinic in Oklahoma City have been from Texas. Wait times for appointments have also skyrocketed: up to four weeks in Oklahoma and more than six weeks in Louisiana. The ripple effect of Texas’s law has been particularly consequential in states that are already weighed down by their own onerous abortion restrictions; patients there now face a whole new series of obstacles to accessing care.
Meanwhile, the federal government also filed suit to block S.B. 8, arguing that it had to do so to vindicate the constitutional rights of millions of Texans the state had disenfranchised. The effort was initially successful when federal District Judge Robert Pitman penned a blistering opinion blocking the law. Some 48 hours later, however, the 5th Circuit stepped in and reversed Pitman’s decision.
The providers and the federal government asked the Supreme Court to get involved, and on November 1, a full two months after the law had decimated reproductive rights in Texas, the justices heard arguments in both cases. The question before the court was whether the state could insulate itself from legal challenges to the law.
Texas Solicitor General Judd Stone argued that the state was well within its right to codify a law designed to evade federal oversight. The implications of this, however, seemed to bother a majority of the court: If Texas could do an end run around a constitutional right that it disfavored, what would stop other states from employing the same sort of legal maneuvering to single out rights they didn’t care for? Stone admitted that if Texas was successful, then all rights would essentially be up for grabs.
The Country Is Not Prepared
On December 10, the court’s majority retreated from the concerns expressed during oral arguments and instead blessed Stone’s position, allowed S.B. 8 to remain in effect, barred any meaningful way to challenge it, and dismissed the federal government’s suit.
Allowing abortion providers to sue court clerks or state judges to block enforcement of S.B. 8 would invite chaos, Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote for the majority. If federal judges could block the clerks from filing lawsuits related to S.B. 8, where would it all end? he asked. “Could federal courts enjoin those who perform other ministerial tasks potentially related to litigation, like the postal carrier who delivers complaints to the courthouse?”
The only state officials that the providers could sue, Gorsuch wrote, were state licensing officials: the heads of the medicine, nursing, and pharmacy boards, along with the state health official in charge of licensing abortion clinics.
While that might sound like something, it provides little, if any, meaningful relief: These officials have the right to police individual providers and clinics pursuant to their licensing duties, but suing them does nothing to block random people, living anywhere in the country, from filing civil lawsuits under S.B. 8’s enforcement scheme. It also offers no protection for those who are alleged to have aided or abetted a person seeking an abortion: clinic staff, abortion funds, or the parents and friends who may help a patient along the way.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor pushed back in a fiery dissent. “The court should have put an end to this madness months ago, before S.B. 8 first went into effect,” she wrote. “It failed to do so then, and it fails again today.”
The state law not only outsources enforcement to bounty hunters — who can collect at least $10,000 for every successful suit they file — but it also perverts the civil justice system, erecting insurmountable obstacles in front of the providers and others who would have to defend themselves.
For example, while a provider may successfully argue in an individual lawsuit that S.B. 8 is unconstitutional, any such ruling would be isolated to that case. It wouldn’t stop another person from filing suit over the same alleged conduct, forcing the provider back into court again and again to make the same argument. And while the law guarantees that attorney fees will be paid to winning plaintiffs, it prohibits defendants from recouping fees if they win — so providers would have to fund their own defense “no matter how frivolous the suits,” Sotomayor wrote.
“Abortion providers face calamitous liability from a facially unconstitutional law,” she wrote. “The threat is not just the possibility of money judgments; it is also that, win or lose, providers may be forced to defend themselves against countless suits, all across the state, without any prospect of recovery for their losses or expenses.”
Because Texas passed a law that is blatantly unconstitutional under Supreme Court precedent and weaponized the civil justice system to enforce it, Sotomayor argued, the court was duty bound to step in and provide relief.
Sotomayor also expressed deep concern about what the court was unleashing by failing to stop Texas’s bold attempt to evade federal court oversight and usurp constitutional protections. “The dispute is over whether states may nullify federal constitutional rights by employing schemes like the one at hand,” she wrote. “The court indicates that they can, so long as they write their laws to more thoroughly disclaim all enforcement by state officials, including licensing officials.”
“This choice to shrink from Texas’s challenge to federal supremacy will have far-reaching repercussions,” she continued. “I doubt the court, let alone the country, is prepared for them.”
No Easy Answers
The fact that the Supreme Court had already allowed S.B. 8 to stand for months before hearing the case emboldened state lawmakers elsewhere to follow Texas’s lead. Copycat legislation has already been filed in Florida, Ohio, and Alabama. In Arkansas, Republican state Sen. Jason Rapert tried and failed (at least for now) to get his colleagues to take up Senate Bill 13 during a special session aimed at tax cuts. His proposal goes further than S.B. 8 and would ban all abortion. It also declares the bill an “emergency” measure, teeing it up to take immediate effect if passed, which lawmakers claim is necessary to stop pregnant people displaced by Texas’s law from seeking care in Arkansas.
The court’s monthslong inaction in the S.B. 8 case also signaled that it did not see a problem with denying the right of bodily autonomy to pregnant people.
Instead, on December 1, a month after oral arguments related to S.B. 8, the court heard arguments in a different abortion case, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. While Dobbs was nominally about whether Mississippi could impose a 15-week ban on abortion, the state’s solicitor general made clear that what the state really wanted was for the court to do away with nearly 50 years of precedent supporting the right to abortion; a majority of the court seemed on board with that idea.
The court has overturned its precedents in the past — but only in cases where its decision actually granted individuals broader constitutional rights. Ruling in favor of Mississippi would mark the first time the court has overruled itself to constrict individual rights.
Where S.B. 8 is concerned, the legal road ahead isn’t entirely clear. On December 9, a Texas judge ruled that various aspects of the law’s enforcement mechanisms were unconstitutional — including deputizing private individuals and the mandatory award of at least $10,000 per lawsuit.
The ruling only impacts the 14 cases currently pending before state district Judge David Peeples — suits filed against the state’s largest anti-abortion activist organization, Texas Right to Life, by nonprofit organizations, providers, and Planned Parenthood. For now, the ruling only bars Texas Right to Life from suing those specific plaintiffs; the anti-abortion group has already appealed the decision.
But if the case makes it to the Texas Supreme Court, those justices could rule in a way that would block enforcement of the law statewide, said Julie Murray, a staff attorney at Planned Parenthood Federation of America. “Of course, that will take time,” she said. “The reality on the ground is that there are no easy answers.”
At least two workers died under the working conditions, another was repeatedly raped, while others were kidnapped and threatened with death.
At least 100 immigrant workers were freed from conditions in which at least two died, another was repeatedly raped, and others were kidnapped and threatened with death.
Named “Operation Blooming Onion,” the yearslong probe brought together multiple federal agencies to investigate a “transnational criminal organization” that allegedly engaged in human trafficking, visa fraud, forced labor, mail fraud, money laundering and other crimes that earned the collaborators more than $200 million.
The collaborators of the ring are accused of taking advantage of and defrauding the federal visa program for guest farmworkers, known as H-2A, to bring immigrant workers from Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras and other countries to the United States.
At least two workers died under the working conditions, another was repeatedly raped, while others were kidnapped and threatened with death, according to the allegations in the indictment. Workers were also forced to work at gunpoint, the court documents say, earning 20 cents for each bucket of onions they dug up with their hands. Some were sold to farms in other states.
The defendants face charges that can carry up to a life sentence.
The operation represents one of the country’s largest human-trafficking and visa fraud investigations, according to the Department of Justice.
It is also the first under a new model pursued by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, known as ICE, that deepens its focus on employer accountability, rather than the immigrant workers that are being taken advantage of.
In October, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas issued a memo directing immigration authorities to cease the massive worksite raids that were used as an enforcement tactic under then-President Donald Trump.
Mayorkas said the tactic, which led to the arrests of sometimes hundreds of unauthorized immigrants, was not focused on “exploitative employers.”
This operation illustrates ICE's effort to further focus on aiding immigrant victims and cracking down on employers who take advantage of visa programs and unauthorized workers, said two ICE officials who are familiar with the case and the shift in priorities and who asked not to be identified because they were not permitted to speak publicly.
The hope, the officials said, is to work with the immigrant communities and change the perception of ICE among groups that have historically been suspicious of the law enforcement agency, so that immigrants or exploited workers feel comfortable coming forward to aid investigations.
"We want to have them cooperate with us to go at these employers who are kind of using this underserved population as a means to increase their bottom line," one of the officials said.
In this case, more than 100 workers were freed “from the shackles of modern-day slavery,” David Estes, the acting U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Georgia, said in a statement, adding that the operation “will hold accountable those who put them in chains.”
“The American dream is a powerful attraction for destitute and desperate people across the globe, and where there is need, there is greed from those who will attempt to exploit these willing workers for their own obscene profits,” he said.
The first of about two dozen named defendants, and the person for whom the “transnational criminal organization” described in the indictment appears to be named, is Maria Leticia Patricio, 70, of Nichols, Georgia. She was charged with conspiracy to commit mail fraud, two counts of mail fraud, conspiracy to engage in forced labor, and conspiracy to commit money laundering.
Patricio pleaded not guilty, and Juanita Holsey Bostick, the lawyer who represents Patricio, according to court documents, declined to comment. Other named defendants who have been arraigned in court have also pleaded not guilty.
Three of the defendants — Victoria Chavez Hernandez, Jose Carmen Duque Tovar and Rodolfo Martinez Maciel — are “considered fugitives and actively are being sought,” the Department of Justice said Thursday. They face charges ranging from conspiracy to commit mail fraud to forced labor.
“This is an ongoing investigation,” said Barry Paschal, a spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney’s office for the Southern District of Georgia. “I’m sure there will be plenty more to come out of this in the months and years to come.”
The criminal enterprise was allegedly widespread and operated within Georgia, Florida, Texas, Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras. Court documents state that the defendants would threaten the victims with violence and deportation; charge them exorbitant fees they couldn't afford for transportation housing and food; and withhold travel and identification documents to force them to work.
For years, migrants were brought to the United States under false pretenses and pressed to work on farms as day laborers and live in dirty, cramped conditions without regular access to food and water, according to the indictment. Some were also illegally forced to do lawn care or work on construction sites or in restaurant kitchens, the indictment states.
The indictment also alleges that the defendants spent their earnings lavishly on new cars and trucks and gambled millions of dollars at the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel and Casino in Tampa, Florida.
The casino said it had been cooperating with federal authorities for more than a year.
"The casino files all required financial reports consistently," said casino spokesperson Gary Bitner. "This case was no exception."
Paschal said his office is continuing to look for victims and encouraged anyone with information to contact the National Human Trafficking Hotline. Meanwhile, the workers who were freed are receiving assistance from a team of victim service providers from both government and nongovernment organizations, though it is unclear what their futures may hold.
Last year, an NBC News investigation found that as the federal visa program for guest farmworkers, known as H-2A, has expanded it has left more guest workers vulnerable to abuse.
Federal laws are supposed to ensure decent working conditions, fair pay and safe housing for guest workers, who are tied to the employers who sponsor them and must return to their home countries after the short-term visas expire.
But workers are often reluctant to speak out against employers who are responsible for their housing, transportation, pay and their ability to stay in the U.S., workers and labor advocates say. The workers also are often in remote, rural areas and don’t speak the language.
“Access to justice is really kind of a practical impossibility for a lot of these workers,” Daniel Costa, the director of immigration law and policy research of the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank, said.
Costa said the extent of the allegations in the indictment was “evidence of the scale of lawbreaking that’s going on in these programs and the ability of employers and traffickers and recruiters to really be pretty bold, because they know for the most part nobody’s looking into what they’re doing.”
Charles Kuck, a longtime immigration attorney in Georgia who has worked on H-2A cases and investigations, said the raid and indictment are both “unusual, when we know that the conditions for workers that they described are not unusual. This is just people getting caught.”
Kuck said while there are many H-2A employers who follow the rules and do everything right, “there are a lot of bad apples out there.”
“I think it’s a sign that the administration takes seriously the problem of human trafficking and mistreatment of workers that come on visas, and things that may not have been priorities under the prior administration, even though they began the investigation as such,” Kuck said.
The memo released by Mayorkas appears to make public that signal of the agency's new priority.
“We can most effectively protect the American labor market, the conditions of the American worksite, and the dignity of the individual by focusing our worksite enforcement efforts on unscrupulous employers,” Mayorkas said in the memo.
Costa said the memo’s guidance could be a “very big deal” and “a really positive step going more towards protecting the workers themselves and going after bad employers.”
Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp. (photo: CNN)
In an extended interview with Academy Award-winning filmmaker Alex Gibney, he discusses his new film, “The Forever Prisoner,” which tells the story of Guantánamo prisoner Abu Zubaydah, the first so-called high-value prisoner subjected to the CIA’s torture program, who has been indefinitely imprisoned since 2006 without charge.
This week, the Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing about closing Guantánamo, the first hearing on the issue in eight years. The Biden administration has declined to send a witness to testify, so far has failed to outline a clear plan to close Guantánamo.
Since it opened in 2002, Guantánamo has been used to indefinitely imprison hundreds of, well, overwhelmingly Muslim men deemed suspected terrorists by the U.S. government, without due process, many of them never being charged. One of those still imprisoned at Guantánamo is Abu Zubaydah, his story told in the HBO documentary The Forever Prisoner. Again, this is the trailer.
UNIDENTIFIED: In 2002, FBI and CIA agents thought they had nabbed a diabolical al-Qaeda mastermind. Abu Zubaydah has never been charged with a crime. He was imprisoned in the secret CIA unit called Strawberry Fields — as in forever.
DANIEL JONES: Prior to 9/11, the CIA never captured or detained anybody. They weren’t prepared.
LAWRENCE WILKERSON: People started looking for who was best to interrogate, and there weren’t any.
UNIDENTIFIED: Psychologist James Mitchell was the only candidate considered.
JOSE RODRIGUEZ JR.: I just took it for granted that they knew what they were doing.
UNIDENTIFIED: The CIA officers were certain he was holding back, because he wasn’t telling them what they wanted to hear.
JOHN RIZZO: Something more aggressive had to be done.
LAWRENCE WILKERSON: The lawyer’s philosophy is, “Tell me what you want to do, boss, and I’ll make it legal.”
JOSEPH MARGULIES: We asked him to draw what was done to him.
UNIDENTIFIED: Abu Zubaydah is put in isolation.
ALI SOUFAN: Everything that was happening was Mitchell’s experiment. Nudity has been approved. Sleep deprivation has been approved. Noise has been approved. The same song again and again and again.
UNIDENTIFIED: He spent 11 days in a coffin-shaped box. He was on the waterboard.
ALI SOUFAN: I mean, this is crazy.
UNIDENTIFIED: The best evidence of what happened is the video.
LAWRENCE LUSTBERG: What was the reason why you thought that it was important to have the tapes destroyed?
JOSE RODRIGUEZ JR.: I needed to protect the people who were there.
JOHN RIZZO: Destroying evidence would inevitably lead to accusations of a cover-up.
JOSE RODRIGUEZ JR.: It would make the CIA look bad.
UNIDENTIFIED: It was an impossible story to tell. So I sued the CIA to get materials unredacted.
UNIDENTIFIED: We saw constant manipulation by the CIA, misleading Bush, misleading Obama.
JAMES MITCHELL: If my boss tells me it’s legal, if the president approved it, I’m not going to get into what some journalist thinks about it.
UNIDENTIFIED: In America, we have this thing called innocent until proven guilty.
LAWRENCE WILKERSON: We were the leaders of the effort against cruel and unusual punishment. After 9/11, that’s out the window.
UNIDENTIFIED: Do the ends always justify the means? Are we prepared to abandon our principles in order to defend them?
AMY GOODMAN: That’s the trailer for the new HBO documentary The Forever Prisoner.
For more, we’re continuing our conversation with its director, Alex Gibney, the Academy Award-winning filmmaker.
Alex, welcome back to Democracy Now! Now, the advantage of a Part 2 is we really get to spend time looking at, well, this astounding — the footage you have, the information you got under the Freedom of Information Act. But again, if you could start off by explaining who Abu Zubaydah is and why you chose to make your film about him?
ALEX GIBNEY: So, Abu Zubaydah is a Palestinian who grew up in Saudi Arabia. In the — around 2002, he was a facilitator, moving people in and out of Afghanistan from Pakistan. And in 2002, he was captured in a raid by the CIA and FBI and sent to a secret site in Thailand to be interrogated, initially, for all sorts of reasons.
The two people who interrogated him were two FBI agents: Ali Soufan and Steve Gaudin. Ali Soufan, in particular, knew a great deal about al-Qaeda and al-Qaeda-related operatives, and so was the perfect person to interrogate him. They interrogated Abu Zubaydah. And within an hour, he was cooperating and, indeed, gave them information about an impending plot in Israel. It was foiled.
George Tenet, the head of the CIA, was thrilled, until he discovered that Ali Soufan was an FBI agent, not a CIA agent. Why it made any difference, I don’t really know. But on that basis, he moved very quickly to try to put in a CIA team to interrogate Abu Zubaydah, and this team ultimately would go down the path of so-called enhanced interrogation techniques, otherwise known to the rest of the world as torture. And the person sent who devised those techniques was a man named James Mitchell, a psychologist, who had been hired as a contractor by the CIA.
So, Abu Zubaydah is the kind of the patient zero, the first person to undergo this torture program that was initiated by the CIA. And that’s why his story is so important and so compelling to understand how and why this happened.
AMY GOODMAN: And, I mean, just to go back, you have Ali Soufan and his partner questioning Abu Zubaydah. Abu Zubaydah is in very bad shape. He has been shot a number of times. It looks like he’s not going to make it. The word comes back from the U.S., “You are to keep him alive at all costs.” He’s sent to a hospital with Ali Soufan at his side, like his brother, like his relative, continuing to talk. This astounding moment when Ali Soufan gets word that because they’re FBI and not CIA, and George Tenet wanted credit, that they are to be pulled off this team, and this other group, no telling who they were, were going to move in, if you could talk more about that?
ALEX GIBNEY: It’s a little bit astounding. I mean, as I said, you know, Ali Soufan was getting incredible information. In addition to an impending plot, very early on, they also, you know, got from Abu Zubaydah the identity of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the fact that he was, in fact, the mastermind, or the alleged mastermind, behind 9/11. So they were getting torrents of information. But for some reason, what was more important than anything to George Tenet — and this was a kind of CIA operation, even though FBI agents were doing it — what was more important than anything to George Tenet was to be able to take credit for this. And so, on that basis, he dispatches this team. It’s one of the mysterious things about this.
And the person that they dispatched, who would ultimately invent these EITs, initially experimenting and then codifying them, was hired almost on a whim. I mean, you know, George Tenet gets furious. He turns to one of his lieutenants, a man named Jose Rodriguez, who ran the Counterterrorism Center. And he asked his lawyer, “Jeez, do you know anybody who might be good at this?” And his lawyer says, “Well, you know, my wife knows a guy.” His wife knew a guy. They didn’t go through some kind of extraordinary, you know, vetting process; they just hired the first person that Jose Rodriguez’s lawyer’s wife happens to know. And that was a psychologist named James Mitchell, who happened to have done a paper for the CIA.
AMY GOODMAN: So, I want to go to a clip from your film, The Forever Prisoner, where we hear from James Mitchell, the retired Air Force psychologist, chief architect of the CIA’s torture program. This clip begins, though, with the FBI agent Ali Soufan.
ALEX GIBNEY: You call this guy Boris. Is Boris his real name?
ALI SOUFAN: No. I cannot talk about him, and I cannot even mention his real name.
ALEX GIBNEY: This is Boris. His real name is James Mitchell. He also wrote a book about the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah. But Mitchell’s book had the full cooperation of the CIA, because Mitchell was the inventor of EITs, the acronym for what the CIA called enhanced interrogation techniques, and what the rest of the world called torture.
JAMES MITCHELL:* If my boss tells me it’s legal, especially if the president has approved it, I’m not going to get into the nuances about what some guy in the basement or what some journalist thinks about it, because they’re free to trade places with me anytime they think they can do a better job of protecting Americans.
AMY GOODMAN: That’s psychologist James Mitchell. Alex, the involvement of Mitchell and Jessen, these psychologists, would eventually really blow up the American Psychological Association, as well, with the involvement of psychologists with torture — you know, the American Psychological Association, the largest group of psychologists in the world. But back to this beginning, if you can first tell us about how you got information? Here we see Ali Soufan saying, “I’m not going to tell you his name. It’s Boris.” But you then come up with all this information and go back to Ali Soufan to really reveal what was going on here. How did you get the information? And lay out what you learned about these secret torture prisons and, ultimately, Abu Zubaydah going to Guantánamo.
ALEX GIBNEY: Well, the simple answer is we sued the CIA, and the CIA, remarkably, backed down. And I think they backed down because it was just too embarrassing. I mean, the fact was that Ali Soufan had written a book in which he had contained — which contained a great deal of information about the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah. But that book was — while it was not at all redacted by the FBI, it was heavily redacted by the CIA, page after page after page just black. Ali Soufan, rather than go through 10, 15 years of a battling with the CIA, chose to publish it with those redactions intact in order — as a kind of a protest. We, though, sued the CIA to get that unredacted. And one of the reasons I suspect that they backed down was that, I mean, it was clear that the redactions were purely punitive. For example, they would redact the first person singular pronoun “I” — “I went here, I did this,” but “I” would be redacted. So I think going before a judge would have been hugely embarrassing for the CIA. So, they unredacted his book, which meant that Ali Soufan, for the first time, could talk about what happened.
And indeed, as part of our FOIA process, we also got Ali Soufan’s original interrogation notes, which gave contemporary evidence of exactly what Abu Zubaydah was saying at the time. We were able to get videotape of Abu Zubaydah himself. And we got an extraordinary amount of cables back and forth from the black site to CIA headquarters with all — and, indeed, one of the other things we got were drawings done by Abu Zubaydah at the behest of his attorneys to show what had been done to him. We had his diaries. We had other documentation of what had happened to him.
So, with all of this data, newly acquired data, which had never been seen before, we were able to tell this foundational story of Abu Zubaydah. But it really took some work. And also with the extraordinary help of Ray Bonner, an investigative journalist, who launched the suit with me, and this great clinic out of the Yale Law School called the MFIA Clinic, which helped to do a lot of our legal work, we pushed forward, and we were able to get an extraordinary amount of information that finally shed light on how this program, this torture program, came to be.
AMY GOODMAN: I encourage people to go to our website at democracynow.org to see our latest interview with Ray Bonner. Alex, Abu Zubaydah was waterboarded 83 times. I mean, you go from the treatment by Ali Soufan, who is holding his hand, who’s speaking to him in Arabic, of course, in the hospital and getting unbelievable amounts of information, to these men covered in black, moving into — when we say torture, if you could go into what that torture was, the horror of the torture?
ALEX GIBNEY: Yeah, I think that “horror” is is a pretty good word for it. I mean, they claim to be operating in a kind of scientific fashion, but the fact was that James Mitchell and his partner, Bruce Jessen, who came later, once these techniques had been legalized, they had never conducted an interrogation before. And while they had observed waterboarding as part of the SERE school to help train people to resist the depredations of authoritarian regimes, they had never administered waterboarding. But they proceeded on waterboarding Abu Zubaydah 83 times. Now, some people will say that waterboarding is a kind of simulated drowning. There’s nothing simulated about it. It’s drowning. You are literally forced — you put a cloth over somebody’s head, you immobilize them, and you pour water down their nose and throat until they’re breathing water. And when you breathe water, you drown. That’s what they were doing. And they did it to him 83 times. Brutal.
They would also put him in a coffin-shaped box, where he — for days at a time, where he would defecate on himself. They would slam him up against walls. They would subject him to sleep deprivation for 72 hours. Now, people say, “Sleep deprivation, it sounds like, well, you just get a little bit tired.” You began to hallucinate. And the fact is, if you cannot sleep for an extended period of time, you die. So, all of these techniques were being employed simultaneously and with a kind of reckless abandon, because nobody had really done this before.
So, yeah, it was brutal torture, for nearly a month. And Abu Zubaydah still is haunted by this. Every night, he wakes up — or, I don’t know if it’s every night, but often he’ll wake up screaming, because he feels he’s drowning.
AMY GOODMAN: And the artistry of Abu Zubaydah, can you talk about his drawings?
ALEX GIBNEY: His drawings are very — I was talking to his lawyer, Joe Margulies, about this. I said that they’re very — they’re very skilled. Joe wasn’t willing to weigh in on their aesthetic accomplishments, but I will. I mean, I think they’re exquisitely expressive in terms of what happened to him. And they’re very valuable, because — well, for one very key reason.
There was, at one time, a tremendous amount of evidence about what was done to Abu Zubaydah from the very beginning, when the CIA arrived in Thailand in early April. They videotaped every interrogation session, including all of the torture sessions, the waterboarding sessions. Well, after the Abu Ghraib scandal came out, and everybody — there was such a huge uproar over it, the CIA, or a number of people inside the CIA, without any legal authorization, decided to destroy these videotapes. So there is no record now. Evidence of a crime was destroyed.
AMY GOODMAN: Wasn’t —
ALEX GIBNEY: In fact, one of the people —
AMY GOODMAN: One of the people, Gina Haspel?
ALEX GIBNEY: Yes, one of the people — at the behest of Jose Rodriguez, Gina Haspel made sure that those videotapes were destroyed. As we know, Gina Haspel became CIA director under the Bush administration. So there was hardly anybody held to account for destroying evidence of a possible crime, which is kind of one of the staggering things about this entire episode, that no one, really, at the CIA, nor Mitchell, the contractor, have really been held to account for what it was that they did. And because this program was made legal by what I would regard almost like mafia lawyering — as Larry Wilkerson says in the trailer, “Tell me what you want to do, boss, and I’ll make it legal.” That’s kind of the legal process that operated here. But, you know, beyond that, this idea that Jose Rodriguez and Gina Haspel would just destroy these tapes, I mean, that’s, in my mind, illegal. You can’t destroy evidence of a possible crime. But nobody was held to account, which is maybe one of the most shocking things about this.
And indeed, the full record of what happened to Abu Zubaydah, and indeed the whole torture program, is still heavily classified, because the CIA, you know, has put the fear of God into so many people to try to prevent the truth from being told, which is, I think, one of the most enduring lessons about this story and, indeed, one of the reasons I made the film. The fact is, there can be good reasons for keeping things secret. You protect sources and methods. But everyone agrees that you can’t use the classification process in order to hide mistakes or to hide crimes. And that’s precisely what was done here. And so, I would hope that this film might lead people to demand the ultimate declassification of the full Senate torture report.
AMY GOODMAN: Which is what I wanted to get to, is what you’re hoping with your work. I mean, Alex, you won an Oscar, an Academy Award, for Taxi to the Dark Side, and you move from that to this film, The Forever Prisoner. At the heart of your work is the inhumanity, the corruption of this dangerous what is called patriotism after 9/11, and what you’re hoping will happen right now.
ALEX GIBNEY: OK. So, a lot of my work deals with this issue of the end justifies the means. To me, once you decide that the end justifies the means, you’re on the path to corruption. And if you say, “I did this for patriotic reasons, so everything I did is OK,” it’s not OK.
But I think the other thing I hope will happen to this film is, frankly, the closing of Gitmo. The fact that Gitmo, Guantánamo, is still open is an outrage. And let’s take it in the case of Abu Zubaydah. One of the things we discovered in doing this story was a cable sent back from the black site to Langley, just before they were about to torture Abu Zubaydah. And they said, “Look, if he dies, don’t worry. We’ll cremate him. Nobody will ever know. But if he survives, we want your assurance that he’ll never get to talk to anybody again.” They get a cable back from HQ at the CIA that says, “Rest assured, he will remain incommunicado for the remainder of his life.” That’s a direct quote. Now, that’s called indefinite detention. That’s the kind of thing we accuse reprehensible authoritarian regimes of doing. But that’s what we’re doing at Guantánamo, because Abu Zubaydah has never been charged with a crime, nor has he ever been able to challenge his detention.
In fact, even the Supreme Court recently, earlier this fall, were shocked, a kind of — I would argue, in a kind of Claude Rains fashion. But they were shocked that he had never been afforded the basic principle of habeas corpus, which is the essence of the rule of law. So, one of the things I hope will happen as a part of this film is that we’ll finally have the courage to shut down this affront to the rule of law which is Guantánamo.
AMY GOODMAN: And the latest news that the Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing about closing Guantánamo, the first on the issue in eight years, the Biden administration declining to send a witness to testify, so far failing to outline a plan to close this? And you have Abu Zubaydah himself now petitioning to be released, saying the War in Afghanistan and against al-Qaeda is over.
ALEX GIBNEY: Yes, that’s absolutely true. And there’s also a Supreme Court case pending to decide whether or not Abu Zubaydah will actually finally be able to speak. This is a legal case revolving around the black site, the torture site in Poland. The question is: Will Abu Zubaydah be permitted to speak about what happened to him? And yes, will he be permitted to finally, you know, have his habeas petition heard to see whether he can be properly released, as he should be, in my view?
AMY GOODMAN: Alex Gibney, I want to thank you for being with us, Oscar award-winning filmmaker, his latest film, The Forever Prisoner, which tells the story of Abu Zubaydah, the first high-value Guantánamo detainee, as he’s called, subjected to the CIA’s torture program following the 9/11 attacks. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman. Thanks for joining us.
"Cryptocurrency, or a group of digital moneys maintained through decentralized systems, has grown into a billion-dollar industry." (photo: Stocks)
Less than a quarter of Americans presently own some form of cryptocurrency as of May 2021. But those numbers increase substantially within fringe right-wing spaces, according to Hatewatch’s findings, approaching something much closer to universal adoption. Hatewatch struggled to find any prominent player in the global far right who hasn’t yet embraced cryptocurrency to at least some degree. The average age of a cryptocurrency investor is 38, but even senior citizens in the white supremacist movement, such as Jared Taylor of American Renaissance, 69, and Peter Brimelow of VDARE, 73, have moved tens of thousands of dollars of the asset in recent years.
Cryptocurrency, or a group of digital moneys maintained through decentralized systems, has grown into a billion-dollar industry. A growing swath of Americans embrace the technology. Nothing is inherently criminal or extreme about it, and most of its users have no connections to the extreme far right. (One of the authors of this essay owns cryptocurrency, as disclosed in an author’s note at the end.) However, the far right’s early embrace of cryptocurrency merits deeper analysis, due to the way they used it to expand their movement and to obscure funding sources. It is not uncommon for far-right extremists to seek to hide their dealings from the public. The relative secrecy blockchain technology offers has become a profitable, but still extraordinarily risky, gamble against traditional banking.
“There are a lot of Bitcoin whales from pretty early [on in its history],” futurist and computer scientist Jaron Lanier told the Lex Fridman podcast in September. (People use “whales” to describe those who hold large sums of cryptocurrency.) “And they’re huge, and if you ask, ‘Who are these people?’ there’s evidence that a lot of them are not the people you would want to support.”
‘A huge tolerance for unreality’
Johnson of Counter-Currents, an influential figure in the white nationalist movement due to his outspoken support for the creation of an “ethnostate” serving only white, non-Jewish people, first picked up Bitcoin on Jan. 19, 2012, Hatewatch found, making him the first known figure in the movement to invest. Hatewatch could not determine how Johnson generated just shy of 30 Bitcoin on that Thursday in January 2012 – whether he mined it or purchased it, or someone merely sent it to him – but the date falls just a year-and-a-half after the first known commercial cryptocurrency transaction took place.
Johnson obtained the 29.82 Bitcoin on a date when prices for the asset sat between five and 10 dollars. Hatewatch found that Johnson flipped the Bitcoin from that first transaction and additional ones into over $800,000 worth of value. He has turned his website Counter-Currents into a hub for cryptocurrency discussion in the movement and solicits donations in digital tokens, or cryptocurrency “coins,” such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, Monero, Bitcoin Cash, Tether, Cardano, Ripple, Dash, Neo, Stellar Lumens and Basic Attention Token. Hatewatch reached out to him for a comment on this essay, but he did not respond.
“If any of you haters out there have any Bitcoin and you just want to get rid of it, send it to Counter-Currents, we have a Bitcoin address,” Johnson said on a Jan. 5 edition of his livestream, referring to those who perceive cryptocurrency as lacking in real world value. “I’ll hold it, I’ll stack it, I’ll keep it … I have a huge tolerance for unreality.”
Johnson often platforms on his site an antisemitic white nationalist personality who goes by the pseudonym Karl Thorburn. As Thorburn, the author advises people in the movement to purchase and hold Bitcoin as an investment. He wrote through his Telegram account that he advertises for Bitcoin so white nationalists can have money they “can travel with, that bad people can’t seize/inflate, and that will allow [them] to live in a safer, White neighborhood and start a family.”
Thorburn also advises people in the movement on how to donate cryptocurrency to white nationalist causes without exposing their identities, highlighting one of key reasons that the assets appeal to them.
“Just transfer the [Bitcoin] from your exchange account to another wallet you control, and later move the [Bitcoin] from that wallet to the donor’s address. This creates plausible deniability because you aren’t sending the [Bitcoin] directly from your exchange account to a publically [sic] known nationalist,” he wrote for Johnson’s site in a post published on Nov. 26, 2020.
Matt Gebert, a State Department official Hatewatch identified as a white nationalist organizer in 2019 (the government suspended him after we published the story), also has contributed material to Johnson’s Counter-Currents. In April, Gebert brought the person behind the Thorburn pseudonym onto a podcast. Explaining how he got interested in white nationalism, Thorburn said that he “went into the Stefan Molyneux thing, where it was hardcore atheism, and hardcore anarcho-capitalism” before becoming a white nationalist. A significant number of people who started in libertarian online spaces adapted to the pro-fascist ideology of the “alt-right” movement during the rise of Trump.
“And in fact that’s what really led me into Bitcoin,” he said of Molyneux’s influence.
David Gerard, a cryptocurrency analyst and author of Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain, told Hatewatch that the cryptocurrency community denies that extremists have immersed themselves in their subculture.
“Bitcoin started in right-wing libertarianism,” Gerard said in an email. “This is not at all the same as being a neo-Nazi subculture. That said, there’s a greater proportion of Nazis there than you’d expect just by chance, and the Bitcoin subculture really doesn’t bother kicking its Nazis out. … Bitcoiners will simultaneously deny they have Nazis (which they observably do), and also claim it’s an anti-bitcoin lie, and also claim it’s good that anyone can use Bitcoin.”
‘At the expense of the parasites’
Molyneux, a self-described moral philosopher who started his career as a libertarian pundit, denies being a white supremacist despite repeatedly and falsely claiming that non-white people are predisposed to be of lower intelligence. He started to embrace white nationalism around 2018 during a trip to Poland. (Hatewatch obtained leaked video of Molyneux calling a monologue he filmed at that time his “white nationalism speech.”) He never responded to a request for comment about that incident.
YouTube, and even typically more lenient Twitter, suspended Molyneux’s access to their websites in 2020 after years of his using the platforms to denigrate women and non-white people. Molyneux, relegated to fringe websites, saw his website traffic and his ability to raise funds plummet. One of his associates implied that Molyneux could survive the change because of Bitcoin.
“Stefan Molyneux was in Bitcoin at $1. He is more than ok,” Mike Cernovich, known primarily for pushing the #Pizzagate conspiracy theory in 2016, posted to Twitter in June after Molyneux was removed.
Molyneux may have obtained Bitcoin prior to 2013, but the earliest existing wallet of his identified by Hatewatch pulled in Bitcoin for the first time on Jan. 25, 2013, roughly a year after Johnson received his donation in January 2012. Molyneux's experience with Bitcoin stands out alongside the other extremists Hatewatch studied. Not only did he invest long-term in Bitcoin, holding the asset through periods of volatility rather than cashing out, but his donors bestowed him with 1250 Bitcoin tokens, far more than anyone else Hatewatch studied. (The price of one Bitcoin has ranged between roughly $30,000 and $68,500 U.S. dollars in value during 2021.)
Hatewatch found that an anonymous “mega-whale,” someone who controls thousands of Bitcoin tokens, gave large donations from that sum to multiple wallets in 2020, including one operated by Molyneux. On Oct. 11, this anonymous individual doled out 50 Bitcoin in total to such causes as the Ron Paul Institute, the Free Software Foundation and the American Institute for Economic Research. They gave Molyneux 10 Bitcoin, which is today worth nearly half a million U.S. dollars. Whoever operated the account held onto their Bitcoin since 2010, underscoring Molyneux’s importance to Bitcoin’s community of early adopters and libertarian devotees.
Molyneux generated million-dollar profits in less than a decade through his donations, flipping $1.67 million worth of value into at least $3.28 million. In February 2021, he described the value of cryptocurrency using tropes commonly associated with antisemitism.
“Bitcoin is a currency that serves the people at the expense of the parasites, rather than the currency which serves the parasites at the expense of the people,” Molyneux said of the cryptocurrency on his independent radio show. “Bitcoin is rescuing your precious labor from being hoovered up endlessly by the invisible vampire mosquitoes of central banking.”
Molyneux responded to a request for comment by telling Hatewatch that by “parasites,” he was likely referring to his “deep moral opposition to imperialistic governments and wars of aggression” and his belief that “Bitcoin can put an end to such wars.” (Hatewatch has elected to publish the full comment of Molyneux, who disputes that he is “far right,” here.)
‘The dollar is going to collapse’
Neo-Nazis promote propaganda claiming that Jewish people control the banking industry for the purpose of deliberately harming or undermining the ambitions of non-Jewish white men. They also often openly cheer for the destruction of the U.S. as we know it – portraying the collapse of the government and financial system as an inevitability. This dystopian worldview primed neo-Nazis to embrace cryptocurrency’s promise early. The Daily Stormer lays out these beliefs in explicit terms.
“Bitcoin is going to become the new gold. Because of that, if you don’t buy any now you’re doing yourself a disservice. So buy some when the price goes down again, and when you do consider donating to us here at Stormer so we can continue to fight the Jew-owned banking empire,” a Daily Stormer post from Oct. 24, 2017 claims.
Daily Stormer editor Andrew Anglin, who in recent posts to his site advocated for the legalization of gang rape and called the COVID-19 pandemic a hoax, and Andrew “weev” Auernheimer, a man known for hacking, praising far-right terrorists and providing technical support to Anglin, started promoting cryptocurrency to their audience as early as 2015. Auernheimer’s first known Bitcoin address issued transfers in May 2014, roughly a month after he celebrated his release from federal prison and demanded 28,000 Bitcoin from the U.S. federal government as restitution. As of Dec. 1, 20 of the largest and oldest Bitcoin addresses known to belong to Auernheimer pulled in payments totalling $886,345 and transferred out roughly $1,069,395. Anglin, who appears to have adopted cryptocurrency soon after Aurnheimer in December 2014, has moved around at least 1 million U.S. dollars in Bitcoin, as Hatewatch previously reported .
“We know as an absolute matter of fact that the dollar is going to collapse, and presumably every other fiat currency on the planet is going to get dragged down with it. Maybe property or metals are better than crypto. Maybe even the stock market is better than crypto – I am not a financial advisor and I have no idea. But what we know as a matter of fact is that you want your money somewhere,” Anglin wrote in 2020 of cryptocurrency.
Daily Stormer published a post in December 2017 under the byline “Tim Hort” that links their interest in cryptocurrency directly to their genocidal ideology. The post embeds a clip from Russia Today host Max Keiser asking his viewers to “imagine [JP Morgan Chase CEO] Jamie Dimon being sucked through a straw … imagine [Goldman Sachs Banker] Lloyd Blankfein being sucked through a garden hose … imagine Jamie Dimon and Lloyd Blankfein being spaghettified as they are sucked into the Bitcoin black hole.” Keiser is a self-described “Bitcoin maximalist,” meaning he believes the token is destined to become the dominant form of future money, even among other cryptocurrencies. Daily Stormer interpreted his words as a call to first destroy the financial system and then kill Jewish people.
“Max Keiser is explaining how Bitcoin will finally allow us to break free of the Jewish control of our finances,” the post claims. “When we can finally control our own finances without needing to rely on the central k*** banks, we can start repairing. And start up the ovens of course.”
Hatewatch reached out to Keiser through Russia Today’s press email, but no one replied.
In Hatewatch’s analysis of Daily Stormer’s Bitcoin transaction history, we found transactions that resemble the types of payments employers give to employees. Cryptocurrency wallets known to be controlled by Anglin regularly transferred Bitcoin, worth a market rate of between $2,000 to $3,000 U.S., into Auernheimer's most active wallet on the first or second day of every month. Between Aug. 1, 2018, and Dec. 1, 2021, Anglin transferred a total of $91,920.56 to Auernheimer across 38 separate monthly transactions.
The Associated Press and PBS Frontline collaborated on a report in September showing that Anglin supporters have sent him at least $4.8 million in Bitcoin, based upon data pulled from Chainalysis, a cryptocurrency analytics firm.
‘It’s really good for anonymous transactions’
Anglin and Auernheimer likely have more money than Hatewatch can report. Both men pushed their audience toward the privacy-focused token Monero in the years following its release in 2014. Researchers cannot yet trace Monero due to its relative anonymity, as Hatewatch previously reported. Monero’s website describes their product as “a private, decentralized cryptocurrency that keeps your finances confidential and secure.” Critics note the degree to which law enforcement and other government officials so far struggle to see what people are doing with it.
The criminal underworld has reportedly employed Monero at a growing rate. The Financial Times noted in June that Monero has become “an increasingly sought-after-tool for criminals such as ransomware gangs.” In August, when comedian John Oliver ran a segment on his show depicting Monero’s advertising as subtly winking at criminals, an outreach organizer for the token defended their technology on grounds that it fights back against “a society of ever-growing mass surveillance.” Monero has elsewhere argued that it enables commerce and does not promote secrecy, or crime, any more than cash.
The cryptocurrency-focused website The Block reported in August 2020 that 45% of illegal darknet markets, which traffic in things like stolen credit card information, ransomware, drugs and hacked passwords, support Monero. The number has likely only risen, due to Monero’s increasing name recognition and availability. Anglin appears to have transacted with Russian darknet markets that traffic in illegal wares, according to analysis previously conducted by Hatewatch based on his Bitcoin usage. (Anglin later denied the existence of the payments by writing on his forum: “This is totally fake. I don't even know what any of this is about. I never bought any Russian darknet drugs lol.”) Due to Monero’s current untraceable nature, Hatewatch cannot yet see if he’s also used that token in a similar manner.
Auernheimer publicly described his enthusiasm for Monero on a podcast with embattled white supremacist Christopher Cantwell in December 2017. Auernheimer, who is believed to be living in Eastern Europe, has involved himself in the promotion of at least one hack-and-leak effort launched by Russian military intelligence, among other stunts. A judge sentenced Cantwell to 41 months of prison in February on charges related to extortion and threats made against a fellow extremist.
“They’re trying to shut me out of the financial system,” Cantwell said of why he wants to get his audience involved in cryptocurrency on that December 2017 podcast. “People want to throw money at me and I’m like, ‘I’d love to take it, but I have no way to take it from you right now.’”
Auernheimer responded to Cantwell by saying that he recently sold off some of his own Bitcoin, taking profit from it. Hatewatch identified Auernheimer as having sold off large amounts of Bitcoin roughly a month before the podcast aired – on Nov. 13, 2017.
“I hold a lot of Monero though. That’s my big thing now. I’m way into Monero. I hold a significant amount,” Auernheimer said. He went on after describing the difficulty to obtain Monero: “It’s really riding on the virtues of its technology. It’s really good for anonymous transactions. … It seems like a good idea.”
Anglin has described Monero as a tool to work around “spies from the various ‘woke’ anti-freedom organizations.” Other far-right extremists have followed Daily Stormer’s lead. The white supremacist group National Justice Party, which is linked to a pro-Kremlin propagandist who relocated to Moscow after attending the Jan. 6 U.S. Capitol insurrection, accepts donations on their website in only two cryptocurrencies today – Bitcoin and Monero.
‘Do you know how much I fucking hate the government’
National Justice Party founder Michael Peinovich is among a group of extreme, far-right fringe activists who now install a system called BitPay that automates the creation of new Bitcoin wallets to coincide with each new transaction. Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas, embraces a similar technique. So does Nick Fuentes, the pundit whose vocal support for the Stop the Steal movement generated large crowds of young white nationalists and neofascists at events in the runup to the violence on Jan. 6. In each case, the BitPay system makes donations difficult to track.
Fuentes accepts payments on his site through Litecoin, a so-called fork of Bitcoin that trades at a fraction of its value per token. French computer programmer Laurent Bachelier, who also donated to Anglin of the Daily Stormer and the white nationalist non-profit VDARE, gave 13.5 Bitcoin to Fuentes before killing himself through an intentional drug overdose on Dec. 8, 2020. Fuentes has claimed that the government has seized some of the money he received in donations.
“I don’t like to brag or anything, but if you knew how much money they took – do you know how much I fucking hate the government because I woke up and one of my checking accounts – one of my checking accounts, which has lots and lots and lots of money in it, had zero dollars,” Fuentes said on one of his livestreams in April.
Fuentes has not received or spent any Bitcoin at that address since Dec. 16, 2020, when he withdrew all 13.73371697 Bitcoin in his account, worth $266,392.40. Customers at his website are directed to pay for merchandise emblazoned with slogans like “Radical Extremist,” “White Boy Summer” and “Hate Speech Enjoyer” using dynamically generated Litecoin addresses or by making regular credit card payments through Visa and Mastercard.
Similarly, Peinovich’s main donation address had received 37.65076951 Bitcoin over its lifetime, for a total of $28,668.10 in donations, but went quiet once he switched to dynamically generating addresses in BitPay. The balance in the account is currently 0.06546048 Bitcoin, currently worth about $3,307.06. Hatewatch reported on Peinovich’s collaboration with the extremist Glen Allen, who acted as a shadow lawyer in his defense during the Sines v. Kessler trial, which focused on violence stoked by white supremacists at the August 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Leaked emails show Peinovich offering to compensate Allen through Bitcoin, demonstrating how white supremacists use the currency to organize in secret.
“Let me know how I can send you some cash or some more bitcoin,” Peinovich writes in an email to Allen.
Allen did not respond to a request for comment about his emails with Peinovich.
‘A place that doesn’t hate us’
In the aftermath of the violence on Jan. 6, a gaming video livestreaming site called DLive banned Fuentes. Their decision further isolated the 23-year-old extremist, who had up to that date used nightly live video appearances on the site to influence crowds of young men to attend Stop the Steal rallies. People donated to white supremacists and neofascist livestreamers in substantial amounts on DLive, as Hatewatch has previously reported. The company permanently removed a number of extremists beyond Fuentes after Hatewatch reported on them, including the antisemitic performer Owen Benjamin and Jan. 6 participant Tim “Baked Alaska” Gionet.
“We feel better being in a place that doesn’t hate us,” Benjamin said affectionately of DLive in the months before they suspended his account.
DLive uses a blockchain-based system to distribute donations to its livestreamers, meaning it functions like an under-regulated cryptocurrency market. Sites like these, particularly those operated by ideologically driven libertarians, have become easy ways for extreme far-right figures to promote their propaganda and earn a living. Another blockchain-themed video site that traffics in an in-house currency is Odysee, which has in recent months given platforms to hateful propagandists banned from conventional sites, such as Fuentes, Peinovich and David Duke, among hundreds of others. Odysee’s situation may portend trouble for websites built on this model.
Critics of blockchain-based sites note the degree to which they operate outside of the rules of banks, despite in some cases issuing money for people and storing it. The Securities and Exchange Commission sued Odysee’s parent company LBRY, not for issues related to the hateful content promoted on their site, but for offering unlicensed securities. The SEC claims that LBRY promoted their cryptocurrency as a security without being licensed to do so. LBRY denies the government’s allegations. That case, filed in March 2021, is pending in federal court.
‘The music will eventually stop’
When the Australian bank Westpac cut ties with Hitlerite, anti-Muslim extremist Blair Cottrell, his supporters, and many libertarians who may feel ambivalent about his hateful beliefs and simply love cryptocurrency, hyped his situation as an ideal reason for Bitcoin’s existence. These advocates suggested that if banks agree to cut ties with far-right extremists, those who are affected should respond by converting their fiat money (money issued by a government) entirely into cryptocurrency. This way of seeing the world, layered with dreams of big payoffs in passive income and understandable fears of government intrusion, has taken hold on the far-right fringe. But converting your money entirely into cryptocurrency carries undeniable risks.
“Regulators want to crack down on fraud,” financial analyst Jacob King told Hatewatch of the cryptocurrency space. “While this is great news in the long run, it will have a disastrous impact on the price of Bitcoin and many altcoins as they are dependent on price manipulators like Tether and Binance.
By “altcoins,” King refers in a general sense to cryptocurrencies that are not Bitcoin, running the gamut from more universal tokens such as Ethereum, Bitcoin Cash and Litecoin, to much more obscure offerings. His point of view runs contrary to the propaganda churned out on a regular basis by the cryptocurrency industry, which has become notorious for publishing quixotic assessments of their space. He mentions two potential looming dangers for cryptocurrency prices in Tether and Binance.
Tether, a so-called “stable coin,” which is in theory ‘tethered’ to the price of the U.S. dollar, plays a critical role in cryptocurrency, enabling investors to shift funds between tokens on exchanges, or pull them out temporarily, without completely exiting and putting money back into fiat currency. As Bloomberg noted in July, “Tethers in circulation are worth about $62 billion and they underpin more than half of all Bitcoin trades.” The thesis of that article helps underscore King’s concerns about what Tether could in theory do to tank the value of other cryptocurrencies. It notes that the DOJ is investigating whether Tether hid from banks the fact that transactions were tied to cryptocurrency. The Tether investigation also deals with possible market manipulation:
In the course of its years-long investigation, the Justice Department has examined whether traders used Tether tokens to illegally drive up Bitcoin during an epic rally for cryptocurrencies in 2017. While it’s unclear whether Tether the company was a target of that earlier review, the current focus on bank fraud suggests prosecutors may have moved on from pursuing a case tied to market manipulation.
The feds are also allegedly probing Binance, cryptocurrency’s most trafficked exchange, in an investigation led by government officials who investigate money laundering and tax evasion, according to a Bloomberg report published in May. Bloomberg reported that “the specifics of what the agencies are examining couldn’t be determined” but noted that U.S. investigators have long expressed concern that such exchanges could be used for illicit finance. Binance indicated to Bloomberg that it does not comment on specific matters but touted its “robust compliance program” and asserted it takes its “legal obligations very seriously.”
In addition to investigations such as these, so-called exit scams, which prey on trusting investors, incidents of hacking and hoaxes intended to pump up prices, all point to the possibility that the profitability such early investors as Greg Johnson saw last decade may not be as easy to find in the future. This scenario would prove even more risky if extremists choose to eschew traditional banking altogether or if traditional banks choose to cut them off.
“Neo-Nazis have mainly used cryptocurrencies to escape the traditional financial system,” King added. “While that may have worked for the last few years, we’re seeing a huge pushback from regulators. The crypto markets are like a giant game of musical chairs. The music will eventually stop, and millions will be subjected to major losses as the prices tank back to their true values.”
Hatewatch reached out to Tether and Binance for a comment on this story and King’s depiction of them as “price manipulators.” Tether did not reply. Two different spokespersons for Binance responded to Hatewatch's request for comment to push back on King's depiction of the company, calling it “absolutely false” and “wildly inaccurate.” They also noted that any investigation of Binance may not lead to official actions against them.
Jay Cassano, the CEO of Cointelegraph, one of the biggest publications covering the cryptocurrency community industry and community, expressed a different point of view about the impact of regulation on cryptocurrency prices to Hatewatch.
“While there are certainly sections of the crypto community that are opposed to any form of regulation, the belief that crypto prices will fall in response to increased regulation is overly simplistic,” Cassano wrote in a text message. “On the contrary, there is widespread belief among cryptocurrency enthusiasts that a lack of regulatory clarity is slowing more widespread adoption. There are also those who actively want cryptocurrency to become part of the regulated economy, if only so that it will stop being viewed as criminal.”
The publicly traded cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase has already taken steps to remove some extreme far-right users from its service, which could become a larger trend if politicians pass regulations on the industry.
In addition to concerns about crashes, investors sometimes lose access to their cryptocurrency due to missing passwords or other blunders, rendering millions of dollars of value useless. Such may be the case of James Allsup, a white supremacist who associates with Peinovich. Known for his participation in the deadly 2017 “Unite the Right” march on Charlottesville, Virginia, Allsup may have abandoned a wallet with 1.00586899 Bitcoin sitting in it right now, Hatewatch found. Allsup has not interacted with the wallet since 2018 but he has opened up new ones, suggesting that his money may have been rendered inaccessible. Hatewatch attempted to call numbers believed to be associated with Allsup to ask about this dormant Bitcoin wallet but failed to connect.
‘More valuable than gold’ or ‘close to nothing’
The “true values” of cryptocurrencies, as King put it, depends on who you are asking, and opinions vary in the extreme. What happens to digital currencies from here is likely to have a profound impact on the far right due to the degree to which extremists have adopted the technology relative to the population as a whole.
“Bitcoin is not new. It’s been around for a while. I’ve been watching it closely. I’ve not seen one example of it creating economic growth,” the computer scientist and futurist Lanier said on a September episode of the Lex Fridman podcast.
Balaji Srinivasan, a former Chief Technology Officer for the cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase, who has developed a reputation for speaking in bullish, quixotic terms about the space, compares Bitcoin and Ethereum to a future version of gold and oil.
“Thesis: the crypto version of any product ends up being far more valuable than the original,” he tweeted in January. “Bitcoin is already more valuable than PayPal and will eventually be more valuable than gold.”
For the risk analyst and author Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the true value of Bitcoin may be zero. He opined about its value in a recent paper:
Few assets in financial history have been more fragile than bitcoin. The customary standard argument is that ‘bitcoin has its flaws but we are getting a great technology; we will do wonders with the blockchain’. No, there is no evidence that we are getting a great technology – unless ‘great technology’ doesn’t mean ‘useful’. And at the time of writing – in spite of all the fanfare – we have done still close to nothing with the blockchain. So we close with a Damascus joke. One vendor was selling the exact same variety of cucumbers at two different prices. ‘Why is this one twice the price?’, the merchant was asked. ‘They came on higher quality mules’ was the answer. We only judge a technology by how it solves problems, not by what technological attributes it has.
Either way, those who invest in cryptocurrency have already experienced price volatility in the extreme, demonstrating the degree to which funds can evaporate overnight. A neo-Nazi who purchased Monero at the time Auernheimer endorsed it on Cantwell’s podcast in November 2017 would have seen their money rise to five times its value as of May 2021, only to see it shed roughly 60% of that amount just two months later. Bitcoin has somewhat infamously lost nearly all value during different market crashes throughout the years, only to see it skyrocket back up.
“The current price pump is artificial, and bubbles always pop,” the author Gerard told Hatewatch.
Relatives participate in a ceremony to commemorate the 37th anniversary of El Mozote Massacre in the village of El Mozote, Meanguera, El Salvador. (photo: Jose Cabezas/Reuters)
Justice and accountability for the El Mozote massacre and other crimes of US-backed Salvadoran forces remain elusive.
Some 1,000 civilians, most of them women and children, were slaughtered over a period of several days by the Salvadoran military’s elite Atlacatl Battalion, which had been trained, funded, and equipped by the United States.
A Jacobin Magazine tribute published on the 35th anniversary of the massacre recalls some of the gruesome scenes:
“The soldiers entered the house and began slashing the children with machetes, breaking their skulls with their rifles and choking them to death. The youngest children were crammed into the church’s convent, where the soldiers unloaded their rifles into them.”
The bloodbath took place in the context of El Salvador’s civil war of 1980-92, which ultimately killed more than 75,000 people – with the vast majority of atrocities perpetrated by the right-wing state in collaboration with paramilitary outfits and death squads.
Joining in the collaborative effort, naturally, was everyone’s favourite Cold War superpower to the north, the US, which throughout the course of its existential battle to make the world safe for capitalism has managed in the process to destroy countless human lives.
Between 1980 and 1982 alone, US military aid to El Salvador soared from $6m to $82m and would later skyrocket to more than $1m per day.
The continued overzealous funding was made possible in large part by the shamelessness with which officials from the Ronald Reagan administration lied to cover up Salvadoran state terror, including at El Mozote.
The administration also waged a campaign to discredit the few journalists intent on exposing the truth, such as former New York Times correspondent Raymond Bonner, author of Weakness and Deceit: America and El Salvador’s Dirty War.
In a new documentary titled “Massacre in El Salvador”, Bonner and photographer Susan Meiselas reflect on the whole sordid affair in El Mozote, where they arrived together in January 1982 to find a “ghost town” and a severely traumatised woman named Rufina Amaya, one of the sole survivors.
Amaya, whose blind husband and three daughters – aged five years, three years, and eight months – had perished in the slaughter, would later recall overhearing a conversation between soldiers of the Atlacatl Battalion:
“‘Lieutenant, somebody here says he won’t kill children’, said one soldier. ‘Who’s the son of a b**** who said that?’ the lieutenant answered. ‘I am going to kill him.’”
Near the beginning of the “Massacre in El Salvador” documentary, a video clip features President Reagan – a former Hollywood actor – delivering the following lines in an apocalyptic tone better suited to the silver screen than to reality: “Very simply, guerrillas are attempting to impose a Marxist-Leninist dictatorship on the people of El Salvador.”
Never mind that massacring 1,000 civilians is not any way to go about “saving” them from the spectre of communism – or from the guerrillas’ dangerous attempts to bring some semblance of equality and justice to a country that had long suffered from the tyrannical rule of an exceptionally brutal elite.
To be sure, the US has never had a problem with brutal right-wing tyranny – as long as profits keep flowing in accordance with US interests.
Now, four decades after El Mozote and nearly three decades after the official end of the civil war, the latest Salvadoran tyrant – President and Twitter star Nayib Bukele, who has even bizarrely self-identified as the “world’s coolest dictator” – is doing a fine job of ensuring that justice in the country remains ever elusive.
In addition to blissfully converting El Salvador into a Bitcoin dystopia, Bukele has pursued various other actions befitting a, well, dictator – like firing five Salvadoran Supreme Court judges as well as the attorney general earlier this year.
Significantly, he also fired Judge Jorge Guzmán, who had been investigating the El Mozote case since 2016, when a post-civil war amnesty was reversed. The amnesty reversal had opened the possibility that the perpetrators of the massacre might finally be held accountable for their crimes – and that people like Maria Rosario, who lost 24 members of her family in the rampage, might obtain the emotional closure that human beings generally require in order to move on with their lives.
And yet responsibility for El Mozote extends far beyond the individuals from the Atlacatl Battalion who macheted and beheaded their way through the village and its surroundings.
The US is also directly responsible for this as well as other episodes of state terror in El Salvador and many other territories across the world.
Thanks to the perks of imperial privilege, however, history and accountability are simultaneously disappeared – except, of course, when things like 9/11 happen, and then the global populace is commanded to “never forget”.
The notorious Elliott Abrams, who was appointed in 1981 as Reagan’s assistant secretary of state for human rights and humanitarian affairs, dutifully promoted the US version of “human rights” by denying that the El Mozote massacre had ever transpired. Years later, he would continue to maintain that the Reagan administration had enjoyed a legacy of “fabulous achievement” in El Salvador.
But while 40 years of murderous impunity is an achievement indeed, it is anything but fabulous.
By 2030, petrochemicals could account for more than a third of growth in oil demand. Here's what governments can do about it.
The chemical sector doesn’t just make products like inks, solvents, glues, and soaps. It also makes products out of oil and gas like plastics, fertilizer, and synthetic rubber. The chemical industry often relies on fossil fuels to power its factories and make its products. And some of these chemicals, like refrigerants, are potent greenhouse gases themselves. All of those emissions add up.
The report, published by the nonprofit Center for Progressive Reform with input from other environmental nonprofits, shows the chemical industry is responsible for 7 percent of total global greenhouse gas emissions — some 3.3 gigatons of greenhouse has emissions a year. That’s orders of magnitude less than the 89 percent of global carbon emissions that the fossil fuel industry produces, but it’s still a significant contribution, especially considering the fact that world governments are scrambling to slash emissions wherever possible as climate change accelerates and the window to take action grows narrower. Yet chemicals, the report said, “continue to be overlooked in efforts to mitigate climate change.”
Emissions from the chemical industry are on the rise. In the U.S. alone, emissions from this sector increased 43 percent between 1990 and 2019 to meet growing demand. By the end of this decade, petrochemicals — chemicals derived from oil and gas — could account for more than a third of growth in oil demand, more than the freight, aviation, and shipping industries. In short, if governments don’t intervene, the chemical industry could become an increasingly serious obstacle to global efforts to decrease emissions.
In addition to the role chemicals and petrochemicals could play in exacerbating global warming, the industry also poses a risk to the communities in which it operates — areas the report shows are often inhabited by people of color and low-income residents. Some of these communities are already experiencing chemical disasters due to extreme weather fueled by warming temperatures, and more neighborhoods could experience such disasters as extreme weather continues to plague the United States and other countries. An analysis of the industrial facilities regulated under the federal Risk Management Program, which use, manage, or store hazardous chemicals, showed a third of these facilities in the U.S. — nearly 4,000 buildings — are at risk of being impacted by wildfires, flooding, hurricane storm surge, or coastal flooding.
So what can legislators do to better protect residents from hazardous substances and prevent the chemical industry from tanking the planet? The report recommends that the Environmental Protection Agency put more stringent measures in place requiring chemical manufacturing facilities to become more energy efficient. Chemical and petrochemical companies could transition their factories and facilities to renewable energy, which would reduce emissions from at least one facet of their operations. Legislators could also continue to pass laws outlawing single use plastics, which help reduce demand for oil-based products. And they could pass more laws that phase out chemicals that produce greenhouse gases like hydrofluorocarbons, which are used in refrigeration. Lastly, the EPA could conduct risk assessments of neighborhoods and communities that are home to hazardous chemical facilities and require those facilities to plan for extreme weather disasters.
“We can’t solve the climate crisis without significantly reducing and replacing fossil fuels throughout the chemical industry,” Darya Minovi, policy analyst at the Center for Progressive Reform, said in a press release. “The chemical industry must do its part to stop our global temperatures from rising to the point of no return.”
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