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It wasn't just the corporate cash.
I’ve suggested that the answer to all these questions could be found in the giant wads of corporate cash flowing into their campaign coffers. But as I’ve watched the two senators closely and spoken about them with members of Congress as well as Hill staff, I’ve come to the conclusion this isn’t it – or at least not all of it.
The corporate money explanation leaves out the single biggest factor affecting almost all national politicians I’ve dealt with: Big egos. Manchin’s and Sinema’s are now among the biggest.
Before February of last year, almost no one outside West Virginia had ever heard of Joe Manchin, and almost no one outside of Arizona (and probably few within the state) had ever heard of Kyrsten Sinema. Now, they’re notorious. They’re Washington celebrities. Their photos grace every major news outlet in America.
This sort of attention is addictive. Once it seeps into the bloodstream, it becomes an all-consuming force. I’ve known politicians who have become permanently and irrevocably intoxicated by it.
I’m not talking simply about power, although that’s certainly part of it. I’m talking about narcissism – the primal force driving so much of modern America, but whose essence is concentrated in certain places such as Wall Street, Hollywood, and the United States Senate.
Once addicted, the pathologically narcissistic politician can become petty in the extreme, taking every slight as a deep personal insult. I’m told that Manchin asked Biden’s staff not to blame him for the delay of “Build Back Better,” and was then infuriated when Biden suggested Manchin bore some of the responsibility. “You want to understand why Manchin stabbed Biden in the back on voting rights?” one House member told me this week. “It’s because he’s so pissed off at Ron Klain [Biden’s chief of staff].” I’m also told that if Biden wants to restart negotiations with Manchin on “Build Back Better,” he’s got to rename the package because Manchin is so angry he won’t vote for anything going by that name.
Paradoxically, a large enough slight played out on the national stage can also enthrall a pathologically narcissistic politician. Several people on the Hill who have watched Sinema at close range since she became a senator tell me she relished all the negative attention she got when she gave her very theatrical thumbs down to increasing the minimum wage, and since then has thrilled at her burgeoning role as a spoiler.
The Senate is not the world’s greatest deliberative body, but it is the world’s greatest stew of egos battling for attention. Every senator believes he or she has what it takes to be president. Most believe they’re far more competent than whoever occupies the Oval Office. Yet out of one hundred senators, only a handful are chosen for interviews on the Sunday talk shows, only one or two are lampooned on SNL, and very few get a realistic shot at the presidency. The result is intense competition for national attention.
Again and again, I’ve watched worthy legislation sink because particular senators didn’t feel they were getting enough credit, or enough personal attention from a president, or insufficient press attention, or unwanted press attention, or that another senator (sometimes from the same party) was getting too much attention.
Barack Obama didn’t enjoy glad-handing senators, even though he got to the presidency through that august body — which proved a huge handicap when it came to legislating. Bill Clinton would talk to senators (or, for that matter, to almost anyone else) all the time, but Clinton had too much confidence in his own charm to give individual senators the ego boosts they wanted — thereby rubbing the most narcissistic of them the wrong way (Nebraska senator Bob Kerrey voted against Clinton’s healthcare plan because he wanted more attention; New York senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan was lukewarm on it because he felt he wasn’t adequately consulted).
Some senators get so whacky in the national limelight that they can’t function without it. Trump had that effect on Republicans. Before Trump, Lindsay Graham was almost a normal human being. Then Trump directed a huge amp of national attention Graham’s way — transmogrifying Graham into a bizarro creature who’d say anything Trump wanted in order to keep the attention coming.
Not all senators are egomaniacs, of course. I had the good fortune to work closely with the late Paul Wellstone, who was always eager to give others credit while being the first to take any blame. I know several now serving who have their egos firmly in check — including Mark Kelly, Raphael Warnock, Sherrod Brown, Bernie Sanders, and Elizabeth Warren. Most of the rest lie on an ego spectrum ranging from inflated to pathological.
Manchin and Sinema are near the extreme. As I said, neither had much national attention prior to the last February. But once they got a taste of the national spotlight, they couldn’t let go. They must have figured that the only way they could keep the spotlight focused on themselves was by threatening to do what they finally did this week — shafting American democracy.
Donald Trump. (photo: Scott Olson/Getty Images)
To see the most compelling evidence of the former president’s criminality, look to the Peach State.
The request was triggered by the reluctance of key witnesses, including Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, to cooperate without being subpoenaed to testify. The special-purpose grand jury wouldn’t have the power to bring indictments, but it “may make recommendations concerning criminal prosecution as it shall see fit.”
With this letter, Willis brought back to the fore the actions surrounding the 2020 election contest by former President Donald Trump that are most suspect under both state and federal criminal law. The district attorney seeks a special grand jury with good reason, as Trump appears to have crossed the line into outright illegality, and that behavior merits a serious and thorough criminal investigation.
Since last winter, the public has focused much of its attention on the violent right-wing terror attack on the Capitol on January 6. And this is understandable. But the truth is that the most compelling evidence of Trump’s criminality lies in his actions before that day. And nowhere is his misconduct more clearly documented than in the state of Georgia.
A brief refresher is in order. At 3 p.m on Saturday, January 2, 2021, Trump called Raffensperger and attempted to push him to intervene in the counting of Georgia’s presidential votes. “I have to find 12,000 votes,” Trump said. Trump was joined on the call by his chief of staff, Mark Meadows, and a team of lawyers including Cleta Mitchell. At the beginning of the call, Trump declared, “I think it’s pretty clear that we won. We won very substantially in Georgia.”
Read: Trump’s revenge begins in Georgia
During the call, Trump made a series of spurious claims of voter fraud and announced that he had “probably” won by half a million votes. And then he said the following, words that should be front and center in any criminal investigation of the former president:
And you’re going to find that they are—which is totally illegal, it is more illegal for you than it is for them, because you know what they did, and you’re not reporting it. That’s a criminal, that’s a criminal offense. And you can’t let that happen. That’s a big risk to you and to Ryan, your lawyer. And that’s a big risk … I’m notifying you that you’re letting it happen. So look. All I want to do is this. I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have because we won the state.
Ominously, these rambling demands that Raffensperger change the outcome of the presidential election in Georgia contained the threatening assertion that if Raffensperger didn’t yield, he could face criminal sanctions more severe than the sanctions for those Trump accused of casting illegal ballots.
Trump, in a statement distributed by email yesterday, said that his call to Raffensperger “was perfect, perhaps even more so than my call with the Ukrainian President, if that’s possible,” and repeated his false claim that “massive voter fraud” occurred in Georgia.
As astonishing as the details of that phone call are, the call represents but one part of Trump’s efforts to influence the outcome of the Georgia vote. The Senate Judiciary Committee’s majority staff report, released on October 7, found that Trump also forced the resignation of the U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Georgia, Byung Jin Pak, after Pak investigated and “did not substantiate” Trump’s claims of election fraud in Georgia.
Indeed, that same report indicates that Trump’s designs on changing the outcome of the election in Georgia played a key role in his repeated demands that the Department of Justice investigate and take action on a number of wholly false claims of electoral fraud and illegality.
Georgia also figured prominently in a December 27, 2020, phone call with then–Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen, during which Trump allegedly told Rosen, “Just say the election was corrupt and leave the rest to me and the [Republican] congressmen.” Jeffrey Clark, the former acting assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s Civil Division, separately threatened Rosen’s job if he didn’t use the DOJ to coerce Georgia and other states to certify a new slate of electors.
Of course, the efforts regarding Georgia were elements of a much larger effort to undermine and reverse the entire election. Most notably, we know that both behind the scenes and right out in the open Trump was demanding that Vice President Mike Pence take action to, at the very least, unlawfully delay the counting and certification of the Electoral College votes on January 6.
But the question remains: Were Trump’s attempts to reverse the outcome in Georgia (and nationally) criminal? There is compelling evidence that they were, under both Georgia state law and federal criminal statutes.
Perhaps the best guide to why is a Brookings Institution report, published in October, that assessed Trump’s actions in light of Georgia criminal law. Among the seven lawyers and scholars who wrote the report was Gwen Keyes Fleming, an experienced former Georgia prosecutor and the former DeKalb County district attorney. The report concluded that “Trump’s post-election conduct in Georgia leaves him at substantial risk of possible state charges predicated on multiple crimes.” The crimes include “criminal solicitation to commit election fraud” and “conspiracy to commit election fraud,” among others.
I highlight those two statutes because they most plainly apply on their face. Georgia’s conspiracy-to-commit-election-fraud statute makes it a crime when one “conspires or agrees with another” to violate Georgia’s election laws and, crucially, states that “the crime shall be complete when the conspiracy or agreement is effected and an overt act in furtherance thereof has been committed, regardless of whether the violation of this chapter is consummated.” In other words, the scheme does not have to succeed to be criminal.
Georgia’s relevant criminal-solicitation statute is also both straightforward and deeply problematic for Trump. Its first provision states:
A person commits the offense of criminal solicitation to commit election fraud in the first degree when, with intent that another person engage in conduct constituting a felony under this article, he or she solicits, requests, commands, importunes, or otherwise attempts to cause the other person to engage in such conduct.
And what is the precise violation of Georgia election law that Trump was conspiring to commit and soliciting others to commit? His demands implicate a number of laws, but among the most applicable is Georgia Code Section 21-2-566, which prohibits willfully tampering “with any electors list, voter’s certificate, numbered list of voters, ballot box, voting machine, direct recording electronic (DRE) equipment, electronic ballot marker, or tabulating machine.”
As the Brookings report notes, Trump’s demands to Raffensperger appear to represent a “clear request” that “Raffensperger alter the final vote tallies so that Trump would appear to have won the election.” If Raffensperger had done so, he’d have tampered “with lists of voters, voting machines, ballot records, DRE equipment, tabulating machines, or voter/ballot data uploaded to the secretary of state website from tabulating machines and DRE equipment.”
Although Willis is investigating violations of state law, federal laws may apply as well, most notably a broad federal statute, 18 U.S. Code Section 241, that prohibits “conspiracy against rights.” The relevant language makes it unlawful for two or more people to “conspire to injure, oppress, threaten, or intimidate any person in any State, Territory, Commonwealth, Possession, or District in the free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured to him by the Constitution or laws of the United States.”
As with many federal criminal statutes, broad language is narrowed and defined by precedent, and the precedents under Section 241 are problematic for Trump. The scope of the statute was outlined in a December 2017 guidebook, and its words are instructive.
First, it is unambiguous that the right to vote in federal and state elections is among the rights protected by the statute. Even though the misconduct may have been aimed at the election of Georgia’s slate of presidential electors, federal criminal law still applies.
Second, a number of past cases are directly relevant to the actions and intent of the Trump scheme. For example, previous cases have held that it’s unlawful to prevent the counting of ballots, fail to count votes, alter votes already counted, or change votes cast at voting machines. The Trump plan depended on changing outcomes by failing to count votes or adding votes until the totals tipped over in Trump’s favor.
Third, just as with Georgia law, the conspiracy does not have to succeed for criminal liability to attach. Moreover, the guidebook states, “Section 241 reaches conduct affecting the integrity of the federal election process as a whole, and does not require fraudulent action with respect to any particular voter.”
Other statutes may also apply, including 18 U.S. Code Section 610, which makes it unlawful for any person to intimidate, threaten, command, or coerce federal employees to engage in political activities, including working for candidates, and 52 U.S. Code Section 20511(2), which makes it a crime when someone “knowingly and willfully deprives, defrauds, or attempts to deprive or defraud the residents of a State of a fair and impartially conducted election process.” But these lack the voluminous precedent of Section 241 and might present a more difficult path for the prosecution.
The Georgia investigation is a consequential victory for the rule of law in this country. Its very existence signals that no man or woman is above the law, a concept foundational to the American experiment. When you walk through the evidence of Trump’s brazen effort to bully, threaten, and command subordinates and state officials to steal an election, his actions quite obviously demand a close criminal inquiry.
For a sitting American president to seek to engineer a coup is unprecedented, but our law contains ample precedents that punish other citizens for similar misconduct. The law is not just for the little people. Trump is not a king. He does not enjoy sovereign immunity. He is presently nothing more than a private citizen, and if President Trump broke the law, then Citizen Trump should face the consequences.
Syrian Democratic Forces fighters and civilians inspect the damage at the northern part of the Tabqa Dam on the Euphrates River. (photo: Rodi Said/Reuters)
The Tabqa Dam was a strategic linchpin and the Islamic State controlled it. The explosions on March 26, 2017, knocked dam workers to the ground and everything went dark. Witnesses say one bomb punched down five floors. A fire spread, and crucial equipment failed. The mighty flow of the Euphrates River suddenly had no way through, the reservoir began to rise, and local authorities used loudspeakers to warn people downstream to flee.
The Islamic State, the Syrian government and Russia blamed the United States, but the dam was on the U.S. military’s “no-strike list” of protected civilian sites and the commander of the U.S. offensive at the time, then-Lt. Gen. Stephen J. Townsend, said allegations of U.S. involvement were based on “crazy reporting.”
“The Tabqa Dam is not a coalition target,” he declared emphatically two days after the blasts.
In fact, members of a top secret U.S. Special Operations unit called Task Force 9 had struck the dam using some of the largest conventional bombs in the U.S. arsenal, including at least one BLU-109 bunker-buster bomb designed to destroy thick concrete structures, according to two former senior officials. And they had done it despite a military report warning not to bomb the dam, because the damage could cause a flood that might kill tens of thousands of civilians.
Given the dam’s protected status, the decision to strike it would normally have been made high up the chain of command. But the former officials said the task force used a procedural shortcut reserved for emergencies, allowing it to launch the attack without clearance.
Later, three workers who had rushed to the dam to prevent a disaster were killed in a different coalition airstrike, according to dam workers.
The two former officials, who spoke on the condition that they not be named because they were not authorized to discuss the strikes, said some officers overseeing the air war viewed the task force’s actions as reckless.
The revelation of Task Force 9’s role in the dam attack follows a pattern described by The New York Times: The unit routinely circumvented the rigorous airstrike approval process and hit Islamic State targets in Syria in a way that repeatedly put civilians at risk.
Even with careful planning, hitting a dam with such large bombs would likely have been seen by top leaders as unacceptably dangerous, said Scott F. Murray, a retired Air Force colonel, who planned airstrikes during air campaigns in Iraq, Afghanistan and Kosovo.
“Using a 2,000-pound bomb against a restricted target like a dam is extremely difficult and should have never been done on the fly,” he said. “Worst case, those munitions could have absolutely caused the dam to fail.”
After the strikes, dam workers stumbled on an ominous piece of good fortune: Five floors deep in the dam’s control tower, an American BLU-109 bunker-buster lay on its side, scorched but intact — a dud. If it had exploded, experts say, the whole dam might have failed.
In response to questions from The Times, U.S. Central Command, which oversaw the air war in Syria, acknowledged dropping three 2,000-pound bombs, but denied targeting the dam or sidestepping procedures. A spokesman said that the bombs hit only the towers attached to the dam, not the dam itself, and while top leaders had not been notified beforehand, limited strikes on the towers had been preapproved by the command.
“Analysis had confirmed that strikes on the towers attached to the dam were not considered likely to cause structural damage to the Tabqa Dam itself,” Capt. Bill Urban, the chief spokesman for the command, said in the statement. Noting that the dam did not collapse, he added, “That analysis has proved accurate.”
“The mission, and the strikes that enabled it, helped return control of the intact Tabqa Dam to the people of Northeast Syria and prevented ISIS from weaponizing it,” Captain Urban said. “Had they been allowed to do so, our assessments at the time predicted that they would have inflicted further suffering on the people of Syria.”
But the two former officials, who were directly involved in the air war at the time, and Syrian witnesses interviewed by The Times, said the situation was far more dire than the U.S. military publicly claimed.
Critical equipment lay in ruins and the dam stopped functioning entirely. The reservoir quickly rose 50 feet and nearly spilled over the dam, which engineers said would have been catastrophic. The situation grew so desperate that authorities at dams upstream in Turkey cut water flow into Syria to buy time, and sworn enemies in the yearslong conflict — the Islamic State, the Syrian government, Syrian Defense Forces and the United States — called a rare emergency cease-fire so civilian engineers could race to avert a disaster.
Engineers who worked at the dam, who did not want to be identified because they feared reprisal, said it was only through quick work, much of it made at gunpoint as opposing forces looked on, that the dam and the people living downstream of it were saved.
“The destruction would have been unimaginable,” a former director at the dam said. “The number of casualties would have exceeded the number of Syrians who have died throughout the war.”
A Ready-Made Fortress
The United States went into the war against the Islamic State in 2014 with targeting rules intended to protect civilians and spare critical infrastructure. Striking a dam, or other key civilian sites on the coalition’s “no-strike list,” required elaborate vetting and the approval of senior leaders.
But the Islamic State sought to exploit those rules, using civilian no-strike sites as weapons depots, command centers and fighting positions. That included the Tabqa Dam.
The task force’s solution to this problem too often was to set aside the rules intended to protect civilians, current and former military personnel said.
Soon, the task force was justifying the vast majority of its airstrikes using emergency self-defense procedures intended to save troops in life-threatening situations, even when no troops were in danger. That allowed it to quickly hit targets — including no-strike sites — that would have otherwise been off limits.
Rushed strikes on sites like schools, mosques and markets killed crowds of women and children, according to former service members, military documents obtained by The Times and reporting at sites of coalition airstrikes in Syria.
Perhaps no single incident shows the brazen use of self-defense rules and the potentially devastating costs more than the strike on the Tabqa Dam.
At the start of the war, the United States saw the dam as a key to victory. The Soviet-designed structure of earth and concrete stood 30 miles upstream from the Islamic State’s self-proclaimed capital, Raqqa, and whoever controlled the dam effectively controlled the city.
Rebel groups captured the dam in 2013, and the Islamic State took control during its violent expansion in 2014. For the next several years, the militants kept a small garrison in the dam’s towers, where the thick concrete walls and sweeping view created a ready-made fortress.
But it also remained a vital piece of civilian infrastructure. Workers at the dam continued to produce electricity for much of the region and regulate water for vast stretches of irrigated farmland.
In March 2017, when the United States and an international coalition launched an offensive to take the region from the Islamic State, they knew they would have to seize the dam to prevent the enemy from intentionally flooding allied forces downstream.
Task Force 9 was in charge of the ground offensive and had been devising ways to take the dam for months before the strike, according to one former official. The task force ordered a report from specialized engineers in the Defense Intelligence Agency’s Defense Resources and Infrastructure office to assess what size of bombs could safely be used in an attack.
The agency soon came back with a clear recommendation: Do not strike the dam.
In a presentation that ran about four pages, according to the two former officials, the engineers said small weapons like Hellfire missiles, which have 20-pound warheads, could be used on the earthen sections of the dam, but it was unsafe to use any bombs or missiles, no matter the size, on the concrete structures that controlled the flow of water.
The former officials said the report warned that a strike could cause a critical malfunction and a devastating flood that could kill tens of thousands of people. The findings echoed a United Nations report from January 2017, which stated that if attacks on the dam caused it to fail, communities for more than 100 miles downstream would be flooded.
The military report was completed several weeks before the strike and sent to the task force, one former official said. But in the final week of March 2017, a team of task force operators on the ground decided to strike the dam anyway, using some of the biggest conventional bombs available.
2,000-Pound Bombs
It is unclear what spurred the task force attack on March 26.
At the time, the U.S.-led coalition controlled the north shore of the reservoir and the Islamic State controlled the south. The two sides had been in a standoff for weeks.
Captain Urban said that U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces tried to take control of the dam and came under fire from enemy fighters, taking “heavy casualties.” Then the coalition struck the dam.
Dam workers said they saw no heavy fighting or casualties that day before the bombs hit.
What is clear is that Task Force 9 operators called in a self-defense strike, which meant they did not have to seek permission from the chain of command.
A military report obtained through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit shows the operators contacted a B-52 bomber circling high overhead and requested an immediate airstrike on three targets. But the report makes no mention of enemy forces firing or heavy casualties. Instead, it says the operators requested the strikes for “terrain denial.”
The two former officials said the terrain denial request suggested that allied forces were not in danger of being overrun by enemy fighters, and that the task force’s goal was likely to preemptively destroy fighting positions in the towers.
Launching that type of offensive strike under self-defense rules was a stunning departure from how the air war was supposed to work, the officials said.
Just a few weeks later, when the United States decided to disable a canal system near Raqqa, the strikes had to be approved by a military targeting board in what one former official called “an exhaustively detailed” process.
None of that happened with the dam, he said.
A senior Defense Department official disputed that the task force overstepped its authority by striking without informing top leaders. The official said the strikes were conducted “within approved guidance” set by the commander of the campaign against the Islamic State, General Townsend. Because of that, the official said, there was “no requirement that the commander be informed beforehand.”
First, the B-52 dropped bombs set to explode in the air above the targets to avoid damaging the structures, the senior military official said. But when those failed to dislodge the enemy fighters, the task force called for the bomber to drop three 2,000-pound bombs, including at least one bunker-buster, this time set to explode when they hit the concrete.
The task force also hit the towers with heavy artillery.
Days later, Islamic State fighters fled, sabotaging the dam’s already inoperable turbines as they retreated, according to engineers.
Satellite imagery from after the attack shows gaping holes in the roofs of both towers, a crater in the concrete of the dam next to the head-gates, and a fire in one of the power station buildings. Less obvious, but more serious, was the damage inside.
An Unusual Truce
Two workers were at the dam that day. One of them, an electrical engineer, recalled Islamic State fighters positioned in the northern tower as usual that day, but no fighting underway when they went into the dam to work on the cooling system.
Hours later, a shuddering series of booms knocked them to the floor. The room filled with smoke. The engineer found his way out into the sunlight through a normally locked door that had been blown open.
He froze when he saw the broad wings of an American B-52 against the clear blue sky.
Fearing that he would be mistaken for an enemy fighter, the engineer ducked back into the smoldering tower. The strikes had punched a jagged skylight through several stories. He looked up and saw fire coming from the main control room, which had been hit by the airstrike.
The dominoes of a potential disaster were now in motion. Damage to the control room caused water pumps to seize. Flooding then short-circuited electrical equipment. With no power to run crucial machinery, water couldn’t pass through the dam, the reservoir crept higher. There was a crane that could raise the emergency floodgate, but it, too, had been damaged by fighting.
But the engineer knew if they could find a way to get the crane working, they might be able to open the floodgates.
He hid inside until he saw the B-52 fly away and then found a motorcycle. Though he had never driven one before, he sped as fast as he could to the house where the dam manager lived, and explained what had happened.
Engineers in Islamic State territory called their former colleagues in the Syrian government, who then contacted allies in the Russian military for help.
A few hours after the strike, a special desk phone reserved for directed communications between the United States and Russia started ringing in a busy operations center in Qatar. When a coalition officer picked up, a Russian officer on the other end warned U.S. airstrikes had caused serious damage to the dam and there was no time to waste, according to a coalition official.
Less than 24 hours after the strikes, American-backed forces, Russian and Syrian officials and the Islamic State coordinated a pause in hostilities. A team of 16 workers — some from the Islamic State, some from the Syrian government, some from American allies — drove to the site, according to the engineer, who was with the group.
They worked furiously as the water rose. The distrust and tension were so thick that at points fighters shot into the air. They succeeded in repairing the crane, which eventually allowed the floodgates to open, saving the dam.
Another Strike
The U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces dismissed reports of serious damage as propaganda. A spokeswoman said the coalition had struck the dam with only “light weapons, so as not to cause damage.”
A short time later, General Townsend denied the dam was a target and said, “When strikes occur on military targets, at or near the dam, we use noncratering munitions to avoid unnecessary damage to the facility.”
But in the days after the strike, officers working for the coalition air war saw Islamic State images of the unexploded bunker buster and tried to figure out what had really happened, one official said. Every U.S. airstrike is supposed to be immediately reported to the operations center, but Task Force 9 had not reported the dam strikes. That made them hard to trace, said one former official who searched for the records. He said a team was only able to piece together what the task force had done by reviewing logs from the B-52.
At the air operations center, senior officials were shocked to learn how the top secret operators had bypassed safeguards and used heavy weapons, according to one of the former officials, who reviewed the operation.
No disciplinary action was taken against the task force, the officials said. The secret unit continued to strike targets using the same types of self-defense justifications it had used on the dam.
While the dam was still being repaired, the task force sent a drone over the community next to the dam. As the drone circled, three of the civilian workers who had rushed to save the dam finished their work and piled into a small van and headed back toward their homes.
More than a mile away from the dam, the van was hit by a coalition airstrike, according to workers. A mechanical engineer, a technician and a Syrian Red Crescent worker were killed. The deaths were reported widely in Syrian media sources online, but because the reports got the location of the attack wrong, the U.S. military searched for strikes near the dam and determined the allegation was “noncredible.” The civilian deaths have never been officially acknowledged.
The United States continued to strike targets and its allies soon took control of the region.
Pro-choice protesters march outside the Texas State Capitol in Austin. (photo: Sergio Flores/Getty Images)
The court's order is the latest setback for providers who are trying to revive challenges to the law five months after it was allowed to go into effect, bringing a halt to most abortions in the country's second-largest state.
The three liberal justices wrote a scathing dissent.
"This case is a disaster for the rule of law and a grave disservice to women in Texas, who have a right to control their own bodies," Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote, joined by Justices Stephen Breyer and Elena Kagan. "I will not stand by silently as a State continues to nullify this constitutional guarantee."
Last month, the Supreme Court allowed the controversial law to remain in effect but it cleared limited path forward for the providers to sue a handful of licensing officials in Texas in order to block them from enforcing the law. The court's ruling was a devastating blow to supporters of abortion rights who had hoped the justices would block the law outright. Instead, the case was returned to the conservative 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals.
The dispute settled Thursday centered on whether the appeals court should immediately return what is left of the providers' case to a district court judge who has expressed deep skepticism over the law, or whether the case could remain in the 5th Circuit for proceedings that could take months to resolve, further delaying the providers' case.
The providers asked the justices to step in to demand the 5th Circuit return the case to the district court. Without comment, the Supreme Court's majority denied the request.
In her dissent, Sotomayor castigated the majority, noting that the law has "devastated access to abortion care in Texas" even though it violates "nearly 50 years of this Court's precedents."
"Instead of stopping a Fifth Circuit panel from indulging Texas' newest delay tactics, the Court allows the State yet again to extend the deprivation of the federal constitutional rights of its citizens through procedural manipulation," Sotomayor said.
The liberal justice also outlined the unusual nature of the novel law that critics say was written with the express intent to make it difficult to challenge in federal court. That's because the Texas attorney general is barred from enforcing the law. Instead, anyone from anywhere in the country can file suit against an individual who they believe helped a woman obtain an abortion after six weeks.
"Because our precedents are clear that Texas cannot directly ban abortion before viability, the state legislature enacted a convoluted law that instills terror in those who assist women exercising their rights between 6 and 24 weeks," Sotomayor said.
She said that after the Supreme Court issued its opinion, the case should have landed back at the district court, but instead the appeals court distorted the Supreme Court's ruling.
"Texas wagered that this Court did not mean what little it said," she wrote. "That bet has paid off."
Under most circumstances a justice will end a dissent with the words "I respectfully dissent."
In Thursday's order, Sotomayor simply wrote: "I dissent."
The Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp. (photo: CNN)
My client, Ahmed Rabbani, has been cleared to leave the infamous facility in Cuba months ago – but he is still stuck there
Still, I had hoped that Ahmed would be home in Pakistan before the end of the holiday season. There was nothing stopping it: Pakistan’s Prime Minister Imran Khan has put his personal seal of approval on his return. But this did not happen. So I had to call him to deliver some urgent, and unwelcome, news.
I had to tell Ahmed that his mother-in-law is on her deathbed in a hospital in Karachi, Pakistan. That the doctors believe she only has four or five days of life left. Four days, of course, is plenty of time for a jet plane to carry Ahmed from Guantanamo to Karachi – but only if the US military allows him to go. It is unlikely that they will act in time, and Ahmed is aware of this. So I actually gave Ahmed the sad news that he will likely never see his mother-in-law again.
There was silence on the other end of the line when I finished speaking. “I have lost a large number of my relatives during my 20 years here,” Ahmed eventually said. “Two of them, in particular, were very close to me, and I was very sad and depressed when they died. One was a relative who died five years ago, who treated me like her own son. The other was my father. It is horribly sad that now my mother-in-law is in this position. If she passes away, that will leave me as the most senior member of the family, with all the responsibility. Yet I am stuck in here.”
“This is a very sad situation.” Ahmed continued, quietly. “While I am listening to this, I am actually crying. My wife has suffered alone for 20 years without me and this is really the last straw for her. For me, my mother-in-law is much more than just my wife’s mother, she loves me and I love her very much. Sometimes she acted as if she loved me more than her own children. It would have been an honour for me to spend her last days with her and do everything I could for her.”
“I wish at least I could kiss her feet before she dies,” he concluded.
I did not know how to respond. It is likely that my country will deny him this last dignity.
Ahmed has been on hunger strike almost continuously since 2013, and despite being force-fed twice a day, lost half of his weight, doing irreparable damage to his body. Over the fifteen years I represented him, he also came close to losing his will to live and tried ending his life several times. So I worried that the news I delivered may once again plunge him into a self-destructive episode of depression, and I asked him about his health.
“I was eating and getting a little better after I heard I was cleared [for release],” he said. “But now I have some heart problems. Whenever I breathe in deeply, I get a pain in my chest.
“It is a stress issue,” he continued. “There is a big stress when you have been cleared but you cannot be released. Before I learned that I could go home, one day here was equal to 10 days of a real life, dragging by endlessly. Now each day is like a month. We are waiting. We know we are going to be released one day, so there is hope. Yet we look forward to it, and nothing happens. Our country is willing to accept us, America has said go, and yet here we stay, while my mother-in-law dies. The waiting with hope is worse than no hope at all.”
During the call, we also briefly discussed January 11, 2022 – the 20th anniversary of the Guantanamo prison.
“For us,” Ahmed said, “it’s an anniversary of suffering. I wish it was the anniversary of my death, it would have been better. I have stayed alive simply because I want to see my family, otherwise I would have gone home in a coffin long ago. I am now in my 50s and there is not much between me and death. Perhaps we have to kill ourselves before they take notice.”
Ahmed wonders whether his case has become a political football between the US and Pakistan. “What does Biden want from me? Why is he keeping me here? I have no answer.”
He says he can see only one way out of his predicament. “I only have one solution, only one thing I can do where I am in control of my own destiny: I think that I will go on a peaceful hunger strike.”
“I am willing to do it until I die this time, if only to help the others to get out. I will start it immediately. Right after this call I will go into solitary confinement. I will refuse everything until I die, and go home in a box. Until I die. It is not hard for me to die.”
I believe, after almost two decades of suffering, it really would not be hard for Ahmed to die. But it also would not be hard for the Biden administration to stop wasting time and let him go home in time to see his beloved mother-in-love one last time.
My country stole decades from this man’s life, the least it can do is to show him some compassion, this one time.
An ethnic Hazara woman with a baby walks in front of her cave on a cliff pockmarked by caves where people still live as they did centuries ago in Bamiyan. (photo: Bulent Kilic/AFP)
The World Food Program has warned Afghanistan faces a “tsunami of hunger” as the economy continues to collapse, due in part to U.S. sanctions and the freezing of Afghan assets following the Taliban takeover of Kabul. Meanwhile, President Biden once again defended his decision to withdraw U.S. troops from Afghanistan on Wednesday without acknowledging the humanitarian crisis that followed his exit. We speak with journalist Jane Ferguson, who recently traveled to Afghanistan to report on the collapse of basic government services and the various factors that led to the collapse of the economy, which she says was “completely reliant on international aid.” She also speaks about the “massive pressure” the White House is under to respond to the humanitarian crisis, as well as the Taliban’s handling of the growing women’s rights movement. “What these women really need is more eyes on their movement, more of them on air, more of their voices being put on television and in the newspapers,” she says. Her most recent New Yorker piece is titled “Afghanistan Has Become the World’s Largest Humanitarian Crisis.”
Earlier this week, Senator Bernie Sanders urged President Biden to take immediate action. Sanders wrote, quote, “Afghanistan is facing a humanitarian catastrophe. I urge the Biden administration to immediately release billions in frozen Afghan government funds to help avert this crisis, and prevent the death of millions of people.”
We’re joined now by Jane Ferguson. She’s a special correspondent for PBS NewsHour, contributor to The New Yorker. She’s reported extensively from Afghanistan over the years and was in Kabul as it fell to the Taliban in August last year. She returned to Taliban-controlled Afghanistan in November to report on the humanitarian crisis. Her latest piece for The New Yorker, “Afghanistan Has Become the World’s Largest Humanitarian Crisis.”
Jane, welcome back to Democracy Now! In your piece, you write, “Exhausted mothers stood next to the beds and stared wide-eyed at their babies. One leaned over, sang lullabies, and gently kissed her child’s cheek. … About a third of the children who arrive at the unit do not survive. … The new government is struggling to feed the country’s thirty-nine million people, and the chance that an Afghan baby will go hungry and die is the highest in twenty years.” Can you describe the suffering you saw in this neonatal unit, and not only in this one hospital, but what you found? I mean, the worst it’s been in 20 years, since the U.S. invaded Afghanistan, you’re saying.
JANE FERGUSON: Yes, Amy. What we’re really seeing is the collapse of not only any kind of economic means for those mothers and their husbands to be able to make enough money to feed the children or to be able to make enough money to feed themselves and lactate babies, but we’ve also seen a compounding crisis because the medical institutions and the medical facilities across the country have also been collapsing. You know, once the flow of money, once the economic institutions just froze across the country, then you couldn’t see anybody who worked at these facilities getting paid or any of the flow of money coming in. So you have families across the country with no income. And then, when they take their children to the hospital because they’re malnourished, because there are such high cases of malnourished babies, many of them have to go to whatever units are open.
And in that story, I was describing a unit in Kabul, which was one of the few that was still operating. And those beds with babies were sometimes three, four babies in a bed. The hospital staff, many of whom hadn’t been paid in months, were basically trying to keep them alive but said that infections were just running riot through the units because they just don’t have the medicines, they’re completely overwhelmed with malnourished babies and massively understaffed. Many of those mothers that I described will have had to come from rural areas where local clinics have — many of them have completely collapsed. A recent statistic by Save the Children in Afghanistan said that as little as 17% of medical facilities across the country are now fully operational.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about exactly what the U.S. has frozen in terms of assets, and how you saw that directly translating to hunger and poverty on the ground in Afghanistan?
JANE FERGUSON: Well, when we look at the economic collapse in Afghanistan, we do broadly need to look at two major factors, although it is much more complex than that. On the one hand, we had the Afghan government assets, of about nine-and-a-half, close to $10 billion, that were being held overseas, many of them in the United States. Those were frozen instantly when the Taliban swept into Kabul and the government collapsed on August 15th of 2021. Now, they were frozen because the international community and the United States, the White House, didn’t want that money falling directly into the hands of the Taliban and the Haqqani leadership that had marched into Kabul that day.
And so, effectively, by freezing that money, we’ve also seen — and the sanctions that have come along with it — we’ve also seen the economic system in Afghanistan collapse. It became either illegal or extremely risky legally to send money in and out of Afghanistan. As a result, there were basically financial constraints on every bank in Afghanistan. At one point — and I do believe this is still the case now, but it might be even worse because it changes day to day — families and bank account holders were told they could get $200 a month of their own money out of the banks. So the banking system, as a result, also collapsed. And much of that money would have been used by a government of Afghanistan to pay their workers. As with many countries around the world, the government is the main employer. Whether or not you’re a road sweeper or you’re a schoolteacher or you’re an economist in a bank, typically you will be getting a salary from the government. Once that stops, you just have an absolutely cataclysmic cash flow stop in the economy, as well as the banking crisis.
Now, on top of that, you saw an NGO community, the charities and the international charities that have been working in Afghanistan for 20 years or more, leave the country, and for it to become incredibly difficult for them to send money into the country because of sanctions and legal problems. Now, Afghanistan’s economy was completely reliant on international aid. And it’s these issues that have basically caused incomes in Afghanistan to collapse. There’s plenty of food in the country, but nobody has any money.
AMY GOODMAN: I remember moderating a panel over a decade ago of women in aid organizations in Afghanistan, from foreign aid organizations. This is far before it was clear the Taliban would take over, you know, a decade later. And they said it is very clear we’re here because the U.S. soldiers are here; when the war ends, they will stop funding these aid organizations. Talk about what a donor economy means and what Afghanistan has been left to cope with now.
JANE FERGUSON: Basically, you know, fundamentally, structurally, one of the biggest failures — in fact, I would argue it may be the biggest failure — in Afghanistan over the last 20 years of the U.S.-led efforts there hasn’t just been the collapse of the Afghan security forces. There was so much discussion following the fall of Kabul as to how it’s possible that we could have invested so much money and time and effort in the Afghan security forces and then they collapsed. But underlying all of this has been a failure to build a functioning, even remotely independent, self-sustaining economy in Afghanistan. What we had was ingrained aid dependency and corruption. And those two things really undermined, essentially, any real development of industry, entrepreneurialism. There were very many young educated Afghans who wanted to try to build businesses, that would have created some revenue streams back to the government, but corruption made that extremely difficult, and the instability of the war. So, anybody who was running a business in Afghanistan, even if that was a legitimate, authentic business that was not funded by the international community, very often — and I talked about this in the article — very often those profits were siphoned out of the country and put elsewhere for safekeeping, partly because of the instability in the country and the corruption. So, the government was never really able to bring in tax revenue.
And I spoke also with the acting finance minister, who was there right up until the collapse of the government, who also talked a lot about how the aid economy can sometimes ingrain a level of dysfunction within the country. For instance, you know, sometimes we think that aid is much more coordinated than it is. But over the last 20 years in Afghanistan, we’ve seen examples of how aid can be patchy. It can be politicized. You know, one country might give aid only for education in this one area. And you don’t necessarily have an empowered government, central government, that can then plan and organize its economy and running its country. And so, in many ways, the international community was financially running Afghanistan. And when you add that in with the levels of corruption in politics and finance in Kabul, and a war and violence that was undermining any attempts to build a really sustaining economy, then you just didn’t have revenues to a government.
AMY GOODMAN: You say that more Afghans may die from U.S. sanctions than died at the hands of the Taliban. If you can elaborate on that? And also, how much does the Biden administration respond, understand of what’s going on right now? You have President Biden continually asked, you know: Should he have pulled out of Afghanistan? Is that really the right question to ask him, rather than what should be happening right now?
JANE FERGUSON: Well, what happens a lot, Amy — and we heard this from the Biden administration a couple of days ago when asked about competency and the government when it comes to Afghanistan — is it doesn’t matter whether he’s asked, “Was there a strategy?” He answers the question, “Should we have stayed?” And that has been the policy from the very beginning, from the collapse of the government in Afghanistan, from the chaotic, deadly last-minute withdrawal and exodus from the country. The White House won’t answer the question, “What is the strategy? What was the strategy? What will it be going forward?” — more details on what they plan to do to prevent the current reality getting any worse. Instead, what we hear repeatedly, and we have heard for months now, is it was right to leave. And that was very much so the case in August of 2021 as scenes were playing out at Kabul airport, and it is still today. The White House’s policy is to answer the question they wish they had been asked, which is, “Should we have stayed in Afghanistan?” And so, the answer is always, “We left because it was costing too many American lives, and we left because it was costing too much in American dollars.”
The problem is that the White House is under massive pressure to respond to the situation as it is, as a reality today, which is that Afghanistan could face a devastating famine, and that the crisis is unfolding at such a pace that the reaction by the White House, which has often been to respond in time once pressure builds just enough, and that, that sort of slow, piecemeal, almost ad hoc policymaking to Afghanistan, is unlikely to keep apace with the level of the crisis, because the freefall is so fast. So, for instance, in December, we saw some carveouts being announced by the Treasury Department to the sanctions to make it slightly easier to send money to Afghanistan. So, the money — you can send money to Afghanistan, and it can technically go through the hands of the Taliban or the Haqqani Network, so long as it only ends up there on the ground and used for humanitarian efforts — very difficult to ensure. But again, that’s in response to the pressure being put on, not just domestically in the United States, but the White House also has to make sure that it’s not on the defensive against rhetoric from the Taliban. The Taliban will find it very easy to turn around and say this is a Joe Biden famine, or America created this famine, created and owns this humanitarian crisis. So, they’re, very much so, going to use it for their own PR purposes, as well. So, going forward, the White House continues to be under pressure to actually respond with some sort of strategy rather than continue to simply go over the same talking points, which were — which are it was right to leave, the time was right, it was a tough choice.
AMY GOODMAN: So, let me talk more — ask you more about the Taliban’s treatment of women in Afghanistan. On Wednesday, the Taliban raided the home of Tamana Zaryabi Paryani, a women rights activist in Kabul, just days after she took part in an anti-Taliban protest. Tamana posted this video online when the Taliban arrived at her apartment.
TAMANA ZARYABI PARYANI: [untranslated]
AMY GOODMAN: This is not translated, but, of course, you can hear the fear in the voice of Tamana Zaryabi Paryani. She was arrested soon after, along with her three sisters. If we can end with this issue and what you feel needs to happen now, Jane?
JANE FERGUSON: Amy, I can relay what these women have been telling me. When I was on the ground in November, I attended one of their street protests. And they ask the media to come. They want the international press, in particular, to come and cover these issues. And they say, very clearly, “We feel safer when you are here.” There’s a reason she put that video online. She knows that the Taliban would shoot those women dead in the street if there weren’t video cameras there and the international press ready to cover it.
The Taliban are trying to do a dance between not looking like they’ve gone soft, because they’re at war with ISIS — they don’t want to lose fighters, they don’t want to lose face, they don’t want to lose commanders, territory, resources, so they have to look like they haven’t gone soft as they’ve taken over the country, or become Westernized in some way. Women’s issues are a very effective tool for them to display that. But at the same time, they’re trying to get recognized internationally.
So, they — whenever I was in the street trying to cover a protest, they forced me and my cameraman back into the car at gunpoint and told us it was for our own security because there could be an ISIS attack, and then surrounded a group of women who were calling for women’s rights, and threatened to take our filming equipment if we filmed them.
So, going forward, what these women really need is more eyes on their movement, more of them on air, more of their voices being put on television and in the newspapers. They are afraid that the minute the world’s view, the world’s cameras are turned off from them, the Taliban will continue to do exactly what we saw in that video, which is come to their houses and disappear them.
AMY GOODMAN: Jane Ferguson, I want to thank you for being with us, special correspondent for PBS NewsHour and contributor to The New Yorker. We’ll link to your latest piece, “Afghanistan Has Become the World’s Largest Humanitarian Crisis.”
Workers clean up an oil spill caused by abnormal waves, triggered by a massive underwater volcanic eruption half a world away in Tonga, at the Peruvian beach in Ventanilla, Peru, January 18, 2022. (photo: Pilar Olivares/Reuters)
The foreign ministry said that the oil spill had harmed animal and plant life in protected zones over a combined area of some 18,000 square kilometers (6,950 square miles) around islands and fishing regions.
The spill from a tanker that was unloading crude at Spanish oil company Repsol's La Pampilla refinery was blamed on unusually large waves after the massive undersea volcano explosion in Tonga some 10,000 km (6,213 miles) away triggered tsunami warnings across the Pacific Ocean. read more
The ministry called on Repsol (REP.MC) to pay for the incident.
"This is the worst ecological disaster that has occurred around Lima in recent times and has seriously damaged hundreds of fishermen's families. Repsol must immediately compensate for the damage," the ministry said on Twitter.
Peruvian prosecutors opened an investigation into a unit of Repsol due to the incident. read more
Environment Minister Ruben Ramirez met with Repsol's officials and said that around 6,000 barrels of oil were spilled, according to the company.
Peru's Supervisory Agency for Investment in Energy and Mining (Osinergmin) said in a statement it has ordered one of the refinery's four terminals to be shut down until the causes of the spill are determined.
La Pampilla is Peru's largest refinery and supplies more than half of the local fuel market.
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