14 January 22
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ALSO SEE: Guns, Ammo ... Even a Boat: How Oath Keepers Plotted an Armed Coup
The group was founded in 2009 in the wake of Barack Obama’s election to the presidency and comprises far right wing conspiracy theorists. It is led by the terrifyingly looney Rhodes. The Southern Poverty Law Center writes, “In 2014, Rhodes claimed the group had an unlikely 35,000 dues-paying members who are said to be mostly, although not exclusively, current and former military, law enforcement and emergency first responders.” Some Oath Keepers hold, or are running for, elective office.
Leader Rhodes said things after Biden’s win like ““This is a military invasion by the cartels and a political coup by the domestic Marxist controlled left, which sees open borders and mass-illegal invasion as their ticket to permanent illegitimate political power.”
Note how corporate Democrats like Joe Biden are misidentified as Marxists (!) and this left wing conspiracy is connected to immigration law. Note that Trump did not change immigration law one iota and millions of people immigrated into the US on his watch. This is just white supremacy dressed up as right wing outrage. In 2016, Rhodes had added to his heady mix of imaginary Marxists and menacing immigrant hordes a putative “Islamic” threat of terrorism that would collaborate with the Latino organization La Raza and with the Black Lives Matter movement. Somehow he held that the late Republican Sen. John McCain was orchestrating these sinister forces, and in 2015 Rhodes advocated hanging him.
Despite the group’s pose as a defender of the constitution against what they call “Islamic terrorism,” they are just a homegrown American version of al-Qaeda.
Al-Qaeda hijacked planes with which to attack government buildings in Washington, D.C.
The Oath Keepers planned to use boats on the Potomac to ferry over heavy weaponry with which to do the same thing.
Al-Qaeda saw the US government as a conspiracy to impose a left-liberal democratic order on people, whereas they wanted a government reflective of their ethnic and religious nativism.
The Oath Keepers agree after their own manner.
Al-Qaeda was xenophobic and did not want American Jews and Christians in the Middle East.
The Oath Keepers are xenophobic and don’t want immigrants in the U.S.
Al-Qaeda was fascinated with military training and with weaponry, and were willing to use these against innocent civilians.
The Oath Keepers also armed and trained themselves and were planning attacks on civilian lawmakers.
Al-Qaeda killed twenty-nine people inside the Pentagon with Flight 77 (plus 64 passengers) on 9/11.
The Capitol insurrectionists were responsible for the death of Iraq War vet and Capitol policeman Brian Sicknick, whom they assaulted and sprayed with bear spray, and who died of stroke. They were also responsible for driving 4 members of the Capitol police to suicide.
In fact, the Oath Keepers came much closer to disrupting the workings of the US government than al-Qaeda did.
By the way, the al-Qaeda cell around the “Blind Sheikh,” Omar `Abdel Rahman, who plotted and carried out the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993, were also charged with seditious conspiracy, and the government won its case.
The DOJ Indictment alleged that
“Rhodes and certain co-conspirators, to include selected regional leaders, planned to stop the lawful transfer of presidential power by January 20, 2021, which included multiple ways to deploy force. They coordinated travel across the country to enter Washington, D.C., equipped themselves with a variety of weapons, donned combat and tactical ger, and were prepared to answer Rhodes’s call to take up arms at Rhodes’s direction. Som co-conspirators also amassed firearms on the outskirts of Washington, D.C., distributed them among “quick reaction force (“QRF”) teams, and planned to use firerms in support of their plot to stop the lawful transfer of presidential power.”
Although CBS News editors circulated a memo instructing their reporters not to call January 6 an “insurrection,” it seems clear that that is exactly what it was. Why is CBS running interference for these terrorists?
The DOJ complaint says that the insurrectionists invaded the outer part of the Capitol at 2 pm on Jan. 6, and that “at that time, Rhodes entered the restricted area of the Capitol grounds and directed his followers to meet him at the Capitol.”
Then Oath Keeper fascist brown shirts marched up the east steps of the Capitol in “stack” formation. Stack One joined an angry mob, some of whom assaulted police officers shouting “take their shields” and “Our house!” At 2:38, the indictment says, the doors were breached and Stack One advanced into the Capitol with the crowd. Stack One then split up, one group heading for the Senate Chamber, where they ran up against stiff resistance from the Capitol police. Unable to break into the Senate, they regrouped and left the building. The other half of Stack One attempted to find Speaker Nancy Pelosi in the House of Representatives, but failed to do so and left.
Another formation of Oath Keepers constituted Stack Two and forced their way into the Rotunda. They again ran into a forceful response from the police.
Still others were waiting outside Washington, DC, having formed Quick Reaction Force teams.
After Joe Biden was elected president, Rhodes messaged his group on the Signal app, “We aren’t getting through this without a civil war. Too late for that. Prepare your mind, body, spirit.” He later said that they should emulate Serbs who rose up when Slobodan Melosevic “stole their election” [ in October 2000].
As his buddies in Florida were undergoing training in “unconventional warfare,” Rhodes later texted his group that if President Biden took office, “It wil be a bloody and desperate fight. We are going to have a fight. That can’t be avoided.”
On Dec. 22, 2020, Rhodes said in an interview with a local Oath Keepers leader that if Biden came to power “We will have to do a bloody, massively bloody revolution against them. That’s what’s going to have to happen.” He also urged Trump to deploy the US military to halt the transfer of power.
Rhodes said he wanted to “scare the shit out of” congressional representatives and frighten them into decertifying Biden. Rhodes then bought a weapon sight and night-vision goggles for $7,000 and sent them to a contact near Washington, D.C., suggesting he had some night-time sniping in mind.
Some conspirators said they planned to bring weapons (“long rifles, some sidearms”), others said they would depend on the quick reaction teams to bring them in from 10 minutes outside the city at the right time. One of them, Caldwell, proposed using a boat on the Potomac to bring the “heavy weapons” over.
Rhodes seems to have spent $20,000 on weaponry and ammunition for the operation. On the morning of January 6, Oath Keeper leaders spoke of “armed conflict” and “guerrilla war.”
After their plot to find Vice President Pence, Speaker Pelosi, and other representatives and Senators failed, the Oath Keepers continued to conspire to return the next morning, or in subsequent weeks. Rhodes bought another $15,000 or so of weaponry and sights. They seem to have wanted to stop the inauguration on January 20, but could not find a way to do so. The inauguration was small and very well guarded, but if it had been a traditional sort of event, it looks as though the Oath Keepers would have tried to shoot it up.
January 6 and its aftermath clearly could have been far more bloody if the Capitol police and then the Secret Service had not done such a good job of protecting elected officials from these heavily armed and militarily trained wack jobs. It should be remembered how the odious Trump cultivated these right-wing militias, and told a similar group to “stand back and stand by” during his debate with Joe Biden. They stood by all right.
"Big investors have helped drive housing prices further upward over the last year, straining families' budgets as they grapple with the pandemic," Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) said in letters she sent to three companies. (photo: Elizabeth Frantz)
The senator charges that investors in suburban neighborhoods are helping to price out first-time buyers and driving up rents
On Thursday, the Democrat sent letters to Progress Residential, Invitation Homes and American Homes 4 Rent, companies that have acquired tens of thousands of suburban homes across the United States. Warren accused the companies and other large investors of pricing out first-time home buyers, contributing to skyrocketing rents and pursuing needless evictions.
“Big investors have helped drive housing prices further upward over the last year, straining families’ budgets as they grapple with the pandemic,” the letters said. “When potential homebuyers are unable to compete with large investors and their seemingly limitless cash on hand, they are forced to rent.”
The inquiries come as a relatively new real estate phenomenon is spreading in suburban neighborhoods across the United States: large companies buying up thousands of single-family homes every month and putting them up for rent.
The letters demand information about company profits, rent increases, evictions and fees imposed on renters, citing recent critical coverage of the industry by The Washington Post and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists.
A Dec. 15 article by the organizations detailed the creation of Progress Residential by a private equity firm. Attracting investors from around the world, the firm, Pretium Partners, created a billion-dollar investment venture that buys up single-family homes, predominantly in Sun Belt neighborhoods.
The investigation drew from investment records contained in the Pandora Papers, a cache of 11.9 million previously undisclosed documents from tax havens around the world, as well as dozens of interviews with renters and former employees. The reporting showed that Progress Residential has been ringing up substantial profits for wealthy investors around the world while outbidding middle-class home buyers and subjecting tenants to what they allege are unfair rent increases, shoddy maintenance and excessive fees.
Asked for comment Thursday, a Progress spokesperson responded with a statement that said: “We are dedicated to being a part of the solution to our nation’s housing crisis. For households across the country that choose to rent, Progress has long been committed to providing high-quality housing experience through consistent, dependable and attentive service at our well-maintained and affordable homes.”
American Homes 4 Rent said: “We acknowledge and appreciate the recognition that our country faces an unprecedented housing supply shortage, decades of underinvestment and restrictive zoning that undermines construction. As the 45th largest homebuilder in the U.S., we are looking to help improve the situation and arrive at solutions.”
Invitation Homes did not respond to a request for comment.
Democratic supporters of U.S. president Joe Biden hold letter-signs reading all together 'Senate, Act Now' during a candlelight vigil on the National Mall. (photo: Probal Rashid/Getty)
Election law expert Richard L. Hasen on the problem of election subversion — and what can be done to stop it.
The rejection of the legitimacy of the 2020 election by many Republicans has fueled widespread, state-level voter suppression campaigns and a growing effort to subvert America’s election system.
In a last-ditch effort, Biden is calling for filibuster reform to pass two voting rights bills: the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. Both bills face long odds in the Senate without changing the filibuster rules.
But as the 2022 midterm elections loom, voting rights and election law experts are sounding the alarm about risks that neither bill would fully address.
They’re calling attention to election subversion, a strategy to would negate legitimate election results by simply refusing to accept them — like, for example, appointing rogue presidential electors. (Following the 2020 election, Trump pressured Republican lawmakers in states like Michigan, Georgia, and Pennsylvania to replace the state’s electors in an attempt to reject each state’s popular vote.) This part of election law hasn’t incited as much public outrage as the many laws restricting voting passed by Republican-run state legislatures in 2021.
“The 2020 election showed numerous paths for trying to manipulate election outcomes,” said Richard L. Hasen, a professor of law and political science at the University of California Irvine and the author of Election Meltdown and the forthcoming Cheap Speech. “And although the system barely held last time, because we had some heroic people, including heroic Republicans, there’s good reason to believe a lot of those people will no longer be in office at the time of the next election,” he said.
According to Hasen, lawmakers can’t simply believe that democracy will hold itself together against these threats.
As the Senate prepares to consider voting rights legislation — and as legislative circumstances for Democrats remain bleak — I talked to Hasen about what’s at stake for voters and the country’s election system overall. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Fabiola Cineas
This week seems like a big moment for voting rights. Biden and Harris went to Atlanta to push for voting rights legislation and on the heels of the January 6 anniversary, people are talking about the threat of election subversion. And unlike before, Biden is pushing lawmakers for a filibuster carve-out. But at the same time, voting rights activists are boycotting Biden’s speech, saying he’s put forth little action. What do you make of all of this? Does Biden’s speech mean anything right now?
Richard L. Hasen
What is Biden’s endgame? I don’t understand it. It seems to me that he’s setting up a lot of people for disappointment. He’s making it a priority now because probably he doesn’t have much choice in terms of getting pressure from the Democratic base to do something. But it seems like too little too late. Really. He should have been on voting rights last summer. He should have been giving speeches all around the country, getting a lot of attention to this issue. He should have gone to West Virginia and Arizona. I’m not seeing any movement among those wavering senators about making some different filibuster rule to get this thing passed.
And meanwhile, I think Democrats separately squandered an opportunity that they could have had back last January, a year ago, to deal with the election subversion issue. There seems like there’s maybe a little more hope about that because you are hearing noises from some Republicans to the effect of Electoral Count Act reform and other kinds of anti-subversion legislation. Maybe there’s a path for that, I don’t know. But it doesn’t seem to be quite as dire as the situation related to voter suppression.
Fabiola Cineas
Do you give Biden any credit for going farther than he ever has in talking about a filibuster carve-out?
Richard L. Hasen
Well, sure. He’s actually saying it, I just don’t know what good it is going to do at this point. I wrote a piece in March of last year saying this needs to happen now. This needed to be prioritized back then — Democrats were spending all this time on the very broad HR 1 [the For the People Act], which is even broader than the Freedom to Vote Act, but since they were talking about voting rights they should have been focused on the John Lewis bill which was much more pinpointed in dealing with voter suppression and, which, I thought had a better chance to pass. Although now, neither one seems like it’s going to get us there.
Fabiola Cineas
And though these laws — the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act — have been on the table for months and months, would they still have the power to restore and protect voting rights and also fight election subversion?
Richard L. Hasen
I think that if both the John Lewis Voting Rights Act and the Freedom to Vote Act passed in their current form, they would go a very long way toward dealing with serious voting rights problems in the country, from restoring preclearance to making it harder to engage in partisan gerrymandering to improving campaign finance disclosure. It would not have done much on the issue of election subversion, which I think of as kind of a separate type of problem.
Fabiola Cineas
What is your definition of a free and fair election?
Richard L. Hasen
In a free and fair election system, all eligible voters can easily cast a ballot that will be fairly and accurately counted. And the results will reflect the choices of those voters. So it’s a low bar if we can reach it.
Fabiola Cineas
You’ve drawn attention to the fact that we are now at a place where a majority of Republican voters say they believe Trump’s “big lie” that the election was stolen. And accepting this lie is part of what it means to be a Republican. This also means that they’re willing to accept a stolen election for their side next time. What does this mean for 2024 and how do you see this playing out for midterms this year?
Richard L. Hasen
First of all, I think this issue is the subversion issue, not voter suppression. The biggest impact of these false beliefs on the part of Republicans about a stolen election on 2022 is that they make it more likely that those who will be running elections in 2024 will be people who embrace the “big lie.” There’s a very good NPR compilation of [more than a dozen] Republicans running for secretary of state or other election office, who have embraced the “big lie” or used to say that Biden illegitimately won the election. Those people, if they’re running the election in 2024 for president, create a dual problem. First, are they going to fairly administer the election and second, even if they would fairly administer the election, would voters believe that they would fairly administer the election? After all, if you agree with these false claims, how do we know if you could tell truth from fiction? Or if you would be on the level of explaining the reality of what’s going on in your elections?
Fabiola Cineas
As we settle into a new year, what are some of the key problems affecting the US election system now?
Richard L. Hasen
I think the most immediate threat — and this is the point I’ve been trying to drive home as an even greater risk than voter suppression, which is a real problem — is this risk of stolen elections or election subversion. This is something I never expected to have to worry about in the contemporary United States but here we are. It’s a risk that the true election winner will not get declared the winner. And this is a risk that is uniquely problematic for the presidential election because that election features so many steps in the process between the time that the voters votes and the time that those votes are finally subject to certification by Congress.
And what we learned from 2020 and Trump’s attempts to manipulate the process is that there are lots of pressure points. We depend so much on people acting in good faith, rather than on rules that limit discretion. We need to be able to limit discretion and make sure that those who are in charge of counting and certifying the votes are people who are going to do so, following the rules. Changing the rules won’t be enough, but changing the rules is necessary.
Fabiola Cineas
Can you say more about the threats that election administrators are facing, from being forced to leave the field to being threatened by Trump, and how these endanger the election ecosystem?
Richard L. Hasen
Administrators are saying they’re going to retire before 2024 and some of the people who are going to replace them are people who believe the false claims about the 2020 election being stolen. So we have both a loss of experience among those who administer elections but we also have a potential that the people who are replacing them are going to be not administering elections fairly. And election administrators for the most part are not paid well. They work under very stressful conditions under the best of circumstances. And to have them face the threat of violence and being accused of committing fraud when they’re not is very problematic.
Our election administrators, our poll workers, are our frontline. We need to have competent election administrators who are acting fairly and whose results are accepted as legitimate and when that building block is undermined the whole edifice of our democracy is threatened.
Fabiola Cineas
Can the 1887 Electoral Count Act, which sets the deadlines by which states have to certify and then transmit their slate of electors to Congress, actually be amended to prevent partisan manipulation of Congress’ count of state electoral slates?
Richard L. Hasen
Amending the Electoral Count Act is something that would be helpful in lowering the risk of election subversion. It alone won’t eliminate the risk. But I think a lot could be done. Especially if done on a bipartisan basis. If Democrats and Republicans agreed to the changes that would help a great deal.
Fabiola Cineas
So what’s your response to people who say that what you’re laying out is unlikely to happen? Many people seem to believe that things will just work themselves out.
Richard L. Hasen
I have a few responses. One is, if you look at 2020, we came much closer to a successful subversion of the election results than a lot of people understand. It wouldn’t have taken much if Mike Pence had been assassinated or he had decided to try to take power in his own hands to reject the Electoral College vote, or if state legislatures had sent in a few slates of electors causing a political and constitutional crisis. So one answer is, we’re a lot closer to this than people think.
And the other is, even if the risk is relatively small, which I don’t believe it is, it’s still catastrophic. I’ve said before, I feel kind of like a climate scientist or an epidemiologist. This is what I do. I study this stuff all day every day and my warning lights are flashing red. You look at people who study the rise of authoritarianism and transitions from democracy in other countries — they’ve reached the same conclusion.
If you talk to Larry Diamond at Stanford or Steve Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, the authors of How Democracies Die, those authors are briefing Senate Democrats. If you talk to those people, they are frightened. I think people who try to minimize the risks are just in denial or not paying attention.
Fabiola Cineas
Why do you think some lawmakers continue to act like democracy isn’t being seriously threatened?
Richard L. Hasen
Well, I think it’s different for Democrats and Republicans. I think Republicans, many of them are afraid to stand up to Donald Trump. They know they’ll face a primary. Look what happened to [GOP Sen.] Mike Rounds this weekend when he said that the election was fair. He was attacked by Trump. There’s a huge cost to be paid as a Republican for standing up.
And Democrats, it’s more of a mystery to me as to why they don’t see the house on fire like I do. You’ll have to ask them. There’s been a reluctance to separate out the question of subversion from voting rights. I think they should have been pursued separately on separate tracks as sort of a pursuit on a bipartisan basis in January of 2021. That’s when emotions were still raw, when Mitch McConnell was still talking about what a danger Donald Trump was to democracy, something he’s no longer talking about.
Fabiola Cineas
What can Democrats do now to move forward and fight election subversion while also restoring and protecting voting rights?
Richard L. Hasen
There’s some reporting now that there are at least four Republican senators that are in talks about reforming the Electoral Count Act. I would hope that that would broaden, both in terms of the number of Republican senators that would be willing to have a discussion about this, as well as broadening beyond the Electoral Count Act to other provisions that can minimize election subversion. I think there’s more room for bipartisan compromise on election subversion. Maybe we’ll get some movement in that direction.
Fabiola Cineas
And looking to midterms, is there anything more immediate that we should focus on when it comes to voting rights?
Richard L. Hasen
What the future holds is uncertain. A lot of the opportunities that may have been available in Congress seem to be closing. I think what we need to think about is what we as individuals can do to shore up our election system. I don’t know that any legislative solution is going to be forthcoming, and the danger to our election system is real. So it may take mass peaceful protests and organizing in order to assure that we have fair elections in the future. I don’t know that they’ll be necessary, but I think we need to be prepared for them because there are these risks that the vote count will not be fair.
The supreme court justice Amy Coney Barrett in October. Barrett signed a newspaper ad that called Roe v. Wade 'barbaric' in 2006. (photo: Michael Reynolds/EPA)
In one case, a doctor whose name was published by Indiana group was warned by FBI of kidnapping threat against her daughter
In one case, court records show, a doctor whose name was published by the group, which is called Right to Life Michiana, was warned by the FBI of a kidnapping threat that had been made online against her daughter.
The threat prompted the doctor to temporarily stop providing abortion services at the Whole Woman’s Health Care clinic in South Bend, which is also named on the Michiana group’s website. The doctor said in the court document that the clinic regularly attracts large gatherings of protesters, who she feared could identify her.
Barrett signed a two-page advertisement in 2006, while she was working as a professor at Notre Dame, that stated that those who signed “oppose abortion on demand and defend the right to life from fertilization to natural death”. The second page of the ad called Roe v Wade, the landmark 1973 decision that legalized abortion, “barbaric”.
The advertisement, which was published in the South Bend Tribune and signed by hundreds of people, was sponsored by a group called St Joseph County Right to Life, which merged with another anti-abortion group in 2020 and is now called Right to Life Michiana.
The supreme court is expected to rule this year on challenges to Roe v Wade that many court experts expect will gut the rights of women in the US to obtain legal abortions. In arguments before the court, Barrett – who has said her personal views do not affect her legal judgment – argued that passage of safe haven laws, which allow parents to relinquish their newborns at hospitals or other designated centers without the threat of legal consequences, had in effect given women options outside of abortion for those who did not want to become parents.
During her 2020 confirmation hearing, Barrett said she had signed the advertisement as a private citizen, while she was making her way out of church, and had not recalled signing it until it became public following a report in the Guardian.
“It was consistent with the views of my church,” she said, in response to senators’ questions about the statement. She later added: “I do see as distinct my personal, moral, religious views and my task of applying the law as a judge.”
An examination by the Guardian of Right to Life Michiana, which publishes the same advertisement denouncing Roe v Wade as “barbaric” every year, reveals that the group does more than publish statements in newspapers: it urges supporters to “take action” against what it calls a “local abortion threat”.
In one section of the website, which is titled Local Abortion Threat: The Abortionist, the group lists the names and educational background of six doctors that it claims perform abortions at the Whole Woman’s Health Clinic in South Bend.
Among them is a doctor – who the Guardian is declining to name – who testified in 2021, in a case involving abortion restrictions in Indiana, that she started traveling to South Bend once a month – beginning in 2020 – in order to perform first trimester abortions at the South Bend clinic. She stopped making the trip – a 2.5-hour car trip each way from her home – after she was alerted by Planned Parenthood, who had been alerted by the FBI, that a kidnapping threat had been made against her daughter online.
“I felt it would be best for me to limit my travel and exposure during that time,” the doctor said in testimony. “I was concerned that there may be people who would be able to identify me during that travel, as well as it’s a very small clinic without any privacy for the people who are driving in and out, and so therefore, people could directly see me.”
Jackie Appleman, the executive director of Right to Life Michiana, said in response to questions from the Guardian that the information on its website was “publicly available information”.
“Right to Life Michiana does not condone or encourage harm, threats or harassment towards anyone, including abortion doctors, abortion business employees and escorts. We encourage pro-choice groups to also accept our nonviolent approach when it comes to the unborn,” she said.
The group has also previously stated that it supports the criminalization of doctors who perform abortions and the criminalization of procedures that routinely occur in the in vitro fertilization process, including the discarding of frozen embryos or selective reduction of embryos.
The publication of doctors’ names – and in some other cases, their home addresses – is a well-known tactic used by anti-abortion groups.
The practice gained attention in the 1990s and early 2000s because of a legal battle over a website called the Nuremberg Files, which was supported by radical abortion opponents and published the names, photos, home addresses and licence plate numbers of abortion providers. In some cases, spouses and children were also identified. Doctors who had been murdered had a line crossed through their names.
One of the most high-profile cases of violence against abortion providers surrounded the case of George Tiller, who was one of the few doctors who performed late-term abortions when he was killed while attending church in 2009.
Sharon Lau, the midwest advocacy director for Whole Woman’s Health Alliance, and serves as its security specialist, said Michiana Right to Life regularly protested at the group’s South Bend clinic, approaching patients and blocking its driveway.
Asked about the naming of doctors on the Michiana website, Lau said: “It is clearly something that is threatening, so we take it seriously and we know that these types of things have consequences. The language is saying, ‘these people are a threat’. Which spurs people to action. We saw that with Dr Tiller.”
WWHA has been frustrated in part, she said, by what appeared to be a reluctance by local prosecutors to charge protesters who it said were violating trespassing rules.
“The law is not enforced. We know that if you enforce the fairly minor crimes, it can prevent escalation, so we’ve tried to impress that on them,” Lau said.
Melissa Fowler, program director at the National Abortion Federation, said anti-abortion protesters have been emboldened by the recent passage of abortion bans in Texas and Mississippi, and that the group had documented an increase in aggressiveness, including protesters taking advantage of “open carry” laws to stand near health clinics with visible weapons.
Mira Shah, a doctor who travels in order to performs abortions in underserved communities, including in South Bend, who is listed on the Michiana website, said such groups aimed to instill fear in medical professionals and try to get them to stop doing their work.
“It can honestly be scary,” Dr Shah said. “I am really careful and do what I need to do to stay safe. We’re trying to care for our patients and do the best we can do.”
Amy Coney Barrett’s chambers at the supreme court was forwarded questions by the Guardian but did not respond to a request for comment.
Protesters hold signs with a photo of Jason Walker during a demonstration in front of the Fayetteville Police Department. (photo: AFP)
North Carolina community demands answers as Black man is shot dead and the white off-duty police officer who pulled the trigger still walks free four days later, writes Rachel Sharp
Then, on Saturday afternoon, the Black 37-year-old was gunned down in broad daylight just 100 yards from his home in a neighbourhood in Fayetteville, North Carolina.
His teenage son was inside their home with Mr Walker’s parents at the time.
And the man alleged to have pulled the trigger?
A white off-duty police officer.
In the four days since Mr Walker’s death, protesters have gathered in the local community demanding answers as the version of events from the law enforcement officer and from eyewitnesses don’t match up.
Cumberland County Deputy Sheriff Jeffrey Hash shot and killed Mr Walker just after 2.15pm on Saturday afternoon in the residential area around Bingham Drive and Shenandoah Drive.
Deputy Hash claimed Mr Walker jumped on his car, ripped off the windscreen wipers and began smashing the windscreen as he was driving through the area with his wife and daughter.
In a 911 call from the scene, the deputy, who has worked with the sheriff’s office for more than 16 years, is heard saying he “just had to shoot him”.
However, this version of events is disputed by both a trauma nurse who witnessed what happened and by Mr Walker’s grieving family.
Elizabeth Ricks, who administered medical aid to the dying man at the scene, said Mr Walker was simply crossing the street when the off-duty officer struck him with his vehicle, before shooting him dead.
Civil rights attorney Ben Crump, who is representing the victim’s family, said Mr Walker was “shot in the back as he tried to return home”, before dying in the road.
Now, four days on from the killing, Deputy Hash is still walking free.
He was not arrested at the scene and has not been fired from his role as a law enforcement officer.
Cumberland County Sheriff’s Office said he has been placed on administrative leave while an investigation is under way.
Fayetteville Police Chief Gina Hawkins has defended the failure to arrest the officer, saying that “evidence is still being collected” in the case, while protesters have taken to the streets of Fayetteville for three nights running, calling for justice over what is the latest in a long line of law enforcement killings of Black people in America.
Here’s everything we know so far:
The shooting
Fayetteville police said that, according to a preliminary investigation, the shooting unfolded when Mr Walker “ran into traffic and jumped on [the] moving vehicle” being driven by the deputy, according to a statement.
“The driver of the vehicle shot [Mr Walker] and notified 911.”
Authorities have not confirmed how many times Mr Walker was shot or where he was struck by bullets.
Bystanders reported hearing four gunshots ring out and Mr Walker’s family said he was shot twice in the back.
Chief Hawkins said in a press conference on Sunday that the black box from the deputy’s truck, which is his personal vehicle, showed that the vehicle “did not impact anything or anyone”.
She said that a windshield wiper had been torn off the vehicle and used to smash the windshield in several places.
The police chief also added that the only witness to what happened told investigators Mr Walker was not hit by the truck.
“We currently have no witnesses who claim that anyone was hit by this truck,” she said.
Yet, the official line from the police department contradicts comments made by Ms Ricks, the trauma nurse who said she saw the incident unfold.
Ms Ricks addressed a crowd of protesters on Sunday, where she told them she saw the Black man being hit by the vehicle as he tried to cross the road.
She toldWRAL News she “did not see anyone in distress” before the shooting.
“The man was just walking home,” she said.
“It breaks my heart he didn’t survive and I’m trying to cope with that as well. I don’t want to take away from Jason or the injustice and I’m not going to be silent.”
Smartphone footage of the aftermath of the shooting, posted on social media, shows a man, later identified as Deputy Hash, stood by his truck calling 911.
Mr Walker is lying on the ground close to the rear wheels of the car.
A woman, identified as Ms Ricks, is seen crouching over him appearing to give medical aid.
Deputy Hash is heard telling the dispatcher that “people are hostile right now”, to which a man across the street replies: “Nobody is hostile. Don’t you f***ing say that.”
Ms Ricks is heard saying: “I don’t know where the entry point is. He won’t tell me where he shot him.”
The off-duty officer is not seen attempting to administer medical aid to Mr Walker.
When two officers arrive on the scene, they do not ask the off-duty officer for his weapon.
One of the officers briefly crouches down toward Mr Walker.
The police chief later said that the officers did not step in to save the Black man because the trauma nurse was providing him aid.
Emergency responders are then seen arriving on the scene and taking over.
“I’m going to protect my wife and child,” the deputy tells the officers in the footage.
The 911 call
It was Deputy Hash who called 911 to report the incident after shooting Mr Walker dead.
On Tuesday, authorities released the 911 call.
In it, the officer is heard telling the dispatcher: “I had a male jump on my vehicle and break my windshield. I just shot him.”
He adds: “He jumped on my vehicle. I just had to shoot him.”
The deputy says the man “came flying across Bingham Drive running” so he “stopped so I wouldn’t hit him and he jumped on my car and started screaming, pulled my windshield wipers off, and started beating my windshield and broke my windshield.”
Later in the call a voice, believed to be that of Ms Ricks, is heard asking where on Mr Walker’s body he had shot him.
“Where did you shoot him?” she asks.
The deputy responds: “I don’t know. He was on the front of my vehicle, he jumped on my car.”
The woman replies: “I don’t care about that! Where is the entry point?”
“I do not know,” replies the deputy.
The dispatcher tells Deputy Hash not to “engage with them, just talk to me”.
The aftermath
Two days after the fatal shooting, Cumberland County Sheriff’s Office finally revealed the identity of the deputy involved.
The office said that Deputy Hash had been placed on administrative leave pending an internal investigation.
“Deputy Hash has served with the Cumberland County Sheriff’s Office since 2005 and is currently assigned as a Lieutenant in the Civil Section,” the statement, on Monday, read.
“Our sincere condolences go out to Jason Walker’s family.”
There is no indication that Deputy Hash and Mr Walker knew each other prior to Saturday’s shooting.
Chief Hawkins said that Deputy Hash was taken into custody from the scene and his statement taken, but that he was not arrested.
The firearm used in the shooting was also taken by investigators and was not the deputy’s service weapon, according to the police chief.
As of Wednesday morning, the deputy has not been arrested.
Questions have been mounting over the treatment of the officer and why he has not been arrested or charged.
Chief Hawkins defended the law enforcement response in an interview with CBS17.
“Often individuals are not arrested immediately without, with lack of evidence, so right now evidence is being collected by the State Bureau of Investigation to determine that,” she said.
The North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation has taken over the investigation at the request of the Cumberland County District Attorney’s office in order to prevent conflict of interest.
The FBI is also reviewing the case to see if there were any civil rights violations.
City council members voted for the US Department of Justice to get involved in the case in a meeting on Monday night.
Meanwhile, the community is demanding answers with protests held every night since Sunday in the city.
Mr Walker’s cousin Brittany Monroe told WRAL the 37-year-old was her “best friend” and that the account from the deputy doesn’t match the person she knew.
“I don’t understand how it could happen to him. He would do anything for anybody,” she said.
Mr Crump said in a statement that Mr Walker’s death was a “case of ‘shoot first, ask later,’ philosophy seen all too often within law enforcement”.
U.S. Army Pfc. Jodi Smith watches as detainees in orange jumpsuits kneel in a holding area in Camp X-Ray at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, Jan. 14, 2002. (photo: Petty Officer 1st Class Shane T. Coy/Getty)
I Spent 20 Years Covering America’s Secretive Detention Regime. Torture Was Always the Subtext.
I would spend the next two decades learning those prisoners’ names and covering the story of America’s not-so-secret terrorism detention complex. It started as a research challenge: to uncover the secrets of what some have called the “American Gulag.” Later, as hundreds more nameless “enemy combatants” were brought to the remote U.S. naval base on the south coast of Cuba, I followed the story through the brief wax and long wane of the Guantánamo news cycle. I wanted to know who was detained and why — and when the “war on terror” would end.
I collected boxes of files and spreadsheets of data, building a trove of Guantánamo research as I moved to new jobs and new cities. Along the way, I encountered other reporters and researchers with similar habits and disparate methods, all seeking to understand what was going on down there.
Some 780 Muslim men have been held at Guantánamo since 2002. More than 500 were released during the Bush administration, about 200 under President Barack Obama, one by President Donald Trump, and one so far by President Joe Biden. Many have been repatriated, while others have been transferred to countries that negotiated with the U.S. to accept them. Nine died in custody. Thirty-nine remain at Guantánamo today. Of those, 18 have been approved for transfer to other countries, including five approved by the Biden administration on Tuesday.
In 2004, the Post appended my list of detainees and added my name to the Page 1 byline of a story headlined “Guantánamo — A Holding Cell In War on Terror.” Reporters Scott Higham and Joe Stephens had visited the U.S. enclave in Cuba while I stayed behind in the newsroom. They brought me back a baseball cap with the logo of the Joint Detention Operations Group, known as JDOG, from the Guantánamo gift shop.
It wasn’t until the spring of 2006 that the Pentagon released an official list of detainees’ names. (The list is no longer even available on the .mil website, but it is safe in the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.) By that time, I had taken a research position at the New York Times, where I joined reporters in obsessively tracking the flights of the CIA’s secret rendition jets to and from black sites around the globe. We focused on connecting the Guantánamo detainee names with military tribunal documents released following Freedom of Information Act litigation by human rights lawyers and news organizations. Months of work by newsroom engineers produced the innovative interactive database known as the Guantánamo Docket, launched in 2007 and still online. The database, recently updated by Times reporter Carol Rosenberg, now has an extended list of contributors spanning its nearly 15 years of existence.
In September 2006, President George W. Bush acknowledged the CIA’s secret detention program, saying that 14 “high-value detainees” in CIA black sites had been brought to Guantánamo. (“I want to be absolutely clear with our people and the world: The United States does not torture,” Bush pledged in the same speech. “It’s against our laws, and it’s against our values. I have not authorized it — and I will not authorize it.”)
“So I’m announcing today that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Abu Zubaydah, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, and 11 other terrorists in CIA custody have been transferred to the United States naval base at Guantánamo Bay,” the president said to applause from a supportive audience in the White House. “They are being held in the custody of the Department of Defense. As soon as Congress acts to authorize the military commissions I have proposed, the men our intelligence officials believe orchestrated the deaths of nearly 3,000 Americans on September the 11th, 2001, can face justice.”
Fifteen years later, the organizers of the 9/11 attacks still have not faced justice.
The Obama Years
On January 22, 2009, Obama’s second day in office, he signed an executive order to shut down Guantánamo within a year. He wanted to try the 9/11 architects in U.S. federal courts, but a Democratic-controlled Congress blocked him. In 2011, the government initiated a new procedure for reviewing the status of the remaining detainees, and the military commission trials were reset. I was following the “war on terror” as it came home.
At NPR, where I had by then joined a new investigative team, I worked with criminal justice reporter Carrie Johnson to expose another secretive prison system right here in the U.S., where convicted terrorists, mostly Muslim, were segregated in facilities known as Communications Management Units. Our editors dubbed these prisons “Guantánamo North.”
We could not visit the facilities, but we met with prisoners who had been released, including one man at his home in Washington, D.C. (The only former Guantánamo detainee I’ve met in real life, as opposed to via Zoom, is Sami al-Hajj, the Al Jazeera journalist who was imprisoned there for six years. We talked when I was seated at his table at an awards banquet during a journalism conference in Norway in 2008.)
In April 2011, NPR and the Times collaborated to publish a trove of secret Guantánamo documents obtained by WikiLeaks. I went up to New York to read and process them for inclusion in the Guantánamo Docket database while reporting on the revelations for NPR.
Finally, on May 5, 2012, the 9/11 defendants were arraigned in the military courtroom in Guantánamo. I was watching on closed-circuit TV from a building in Fort Meade with a large group of reporters who had not made it onto the military-approved media trip to Guantánamo. As the hours passed, we glimpsed the accused when the camera panned over the defense tables. It was our first look at a gray-bearded Khalid Sheikh Mohammed — known to everyone as “KSM” — who would appear worldwide the next day in sketch artist Janet Hamlin’s amazing drawing.
Torture was always the subtext. As months and years of pretrial hearings dragged on, the defense lawyers continued to demand evidence about the conditions under which the captives had been held, details of their “enhanced interrogations,” and the reliability of admissions made while being held underwater, locked in a box, or standing naked and sleep-deprived in Afghanistan, Thailand, Poland, Lithuania, Romania, and Guantánamo.
After I joined The Intercept in 2014, I continued to trek to Fort Meade for the military commission hearings and to the Pentagon to watch the Periodic Review Board process launched during the Obama administration. Detainees who have not yet been charged — despite being held for 15 to 20 years — can make their case to a panel of U.S. defense and intelligence officials as to whether they still “pose a threat.” The “open” portion, which observers can watch on live video at the Pentagon, lasts at most 15 minutes, and the detainee doesn’t speak. I attend these so that I can see the prisoners and report back, and so that the Pentagon knows that yes, the press is still interested in how they look and the aging of the detainee population. It goes without saying that there are very few in the media room for these ongoing hearings.
When the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on the torture regime was released in December 2014, my Intercept colleagues and I mined the text and footnotes to map the black sites and looked for the CIA detainees who didn’t get to Guantánamo.
The banality of the torture system shone through in 2016 as we developed Guantánamo stories from The Intercept’s archive of NSA documents leaked by whistleblower Edward Snowden. In 2003, an NSA staffer described an assignment there. As we reported:
“On a given week,” he wrote, he would “pull together intelligence to support an upcoming interrogation, formulate questions and strategies for the interrogation, and observe or participate in the interrogation.”
Outside work, “fun awaits,” he enthused. “Water sports are outstanding: boating, paddling, fishing, water skiing and boarding, sailing, swimming, snorkeling, and SCUBA.” If water sports were “not your cup of tea,” there were also movies, pottery, paintball, and outings to the Tiki Bar. “Relaxing is easy,” he concluded.
The Trump Era
In January 2017, I went to Guantánamo for the first time, as a reporter for The Intercept covering the 9/11 military commission hearings. Under the guidance of Rosenberg, the doyenne of the Gitmo press corps who was then writing for the Miami Herald, I was introduced to the amenities of the press room, the media sleeping tents, latrines, showers, and the confusing, ever-changing rules of the road. No Wi-Fi except at the supermarket complex, pay-by-the-week internet access in the press room, and don’t forget your ethernet connector. Military minders accompanying us everywhere on base. Operational security — OPSEC — reviews of every photo taken every day. Notebooks and pens only in the visitor gallery at the back of the courtroom, where we sat separated by glass from the defendants, legal teams, and judge. No drawing or doodling allowed.
I was excited to be there, in the room as the 9/11 defendants walked in, surrounded by military guards until they took their seats, then turning to chat among themselves. Five defendants, each with a legal defense team headed by “learned counsel,” meaning an attorney experienced in death penalty cases.
Also in the visitor gallery, separated from the press and nongovernmental organization representatives by a curtain, were relatives of the victims, bearing witness to the proceedings.
In June 2018, I went on the Joint Task Force Guantánamo media tour. JTF GTMO is in charge of the detention center. We were able to go inside the prison, although mostly to see a Potemkin village reproduction of a cellblock, complete with a prison library. With my former Intercept colleague Miriam Pensack and a crew from Voice of America, we were given access to parts of the mysterious facility, including lots of institutional kitchens. We even briefly glimpsed one detainee from inside the guard center, a man I was later able to identify from his physical description in the files I’d been compiling for the previous 16 years.
The admiral in charge met with us, and a contractor working as a cultural adviser lectured us about the hunger strikers “faking it.” We also went on a drive to the abandoned Camp X-Ray, where the first detainees were held in 2002 and the location of those infamous photos of men in orange jumpsuits and shackles. We took photos of the fences and weeds and drove to the lonely border with Cuba, where more photos were allowed and then OPSEC’d.
On September 11, 2019, reporters and victims’ relatives joined sailors, soldiers, their families, and military commission attorneys at the base for the annual 9/11 evening run that commemorates the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and the fallen jet in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. At sunset, near the turnaround mark, I saw the Windward Point Lighthouse, built in 1904 by the 1898 U.S. occupiers of Guantánamo. I was the last person to finish the race on that beautiful tropical night. The next day, back in the courtroom, motion hearings about classified evidence and discovery and potential witnesses continued.
Returning in January 2020, I watched as the defense called a reluctant and antagonistic witness, James Mitchell, a psychologist known as the architect of the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation” techniques. He testified just yards from the defendants waterboarded under his orders in the black sites. “I felt my moral obligation to protect American lives outweighed the temporary discomfort of terrorists who voluntarily took up arms against us,” Mitchell said, holding back tears. “I’d get up today and do it again.”
Then the coronavirus pandemic hit. The military commissions were suspended for more than a year and a half. When they restarted, the media tents were gone and public health restrictions prevailed. Wary, I watched from Fort Meade in August 2021 as the arraignment of the three alleged Bali bombers, 18 years after their capture, dissolved into disagreements over the quality of the Malaysian interpreters.
In November 2021, there were required Covid tests, masks, and takeout meals in hotel rooms and on backyard patio tables. Camp X-Ray was now off-limits, no photos were allowed, and we had to agree that any selfies from the border gate would not be published or posted. There was a new judge in the 9/11 case — the fourth — and he had a lot of catching up to do. The chief prosecutor was gone, and the chief defense officer was retiring. Some of the victims’ families were now speaking out about possible plea agreements, instead of a capital trial after 20 years of waiting.
The Biden administration could take some relatively simple steps to increase transparency around Guantánamo. To begin with, it could declassify the 6,000-page Senate torture report. A second courtroom now being built at Guantánamo for $4 million could have facilities for press to observe the proceedings in person, which are not in the current plans. And it could speed up the Freedom of Information Act process. My 2017 request for State Department documents relating to the detainee transfer process is still open, with a projected delivery date in 2023.
I signed up for this month’s session at Guantánamo so that I could be there on the 20th anniversary of the first detention, which was Tuesday. But the hearings in the 9/11 case were canceled. So I didn’t take an Uber to Joint Base Andrews at 4:30 a.m. on Saturday for a Covid test and a charter flight to Cuba a few hours later. I didn’t need my ethernet connector or my bug spray or my T-Mobile phone because that’s the only carrier on the base.
And my press ID? I hung it on a hook with an old Capitol Hill pass, where it’ll stay until the trial of the 9/11 defendants begins in 2023.
'The fossil fuel industry's strongest defender is still putting up a fight.' (photo: Getty)
The fossil fuel industry’s strongest defender is still putting up a fight.
On Wednesday, the dominant fossil fuel lobbying group held an hourlong press conference about its annual State of American Energy report during which various API executives touted the fact that the United States has maintained its position as a net exporter of oil and gas despite the general chaos of the COVID-19 pandemic; the “growing diversity” of the oil and gas workforce; and the “spirit of innovation” that the industry brings to the pressing dilemma of climate change.
That last talking point may seem surprising given that the organization’s driving motive has long been to stymie legislative action to address climate change, but API and other fossil fuel business groups have recently made moves to reform (and in some cases, reverse) their stance on select market-based climate policies. (The operative term being “market-based.”) In particular, Big Oil had thrown support behind carbon pricing systems and carbon capture technologies – neither of which requires fossil fuel companies to significantly change their business models.
During the address, API officials made a point of talking up the American fossil fuel industry’s development of carbon capture technology as a way to reduce their own emissions. Carbon capture generally involves trapping carbon emissions right at the site of a source of pollution, such as a power plant, to be stored or used for another purpose.
This type of mechanism will certainly be one helpful tool in the massive reduction in emissions needed to avert catastrophic levels of warming, but it shouldn’t be too heavily leaned upon. A recent report by the Government Accountability Office detailed the overall failures of that technology so far — and the ways in which it provides new opportunities for fossil fuel extraction. As Molly Taft wrote for Gizmodo on Wednesday:
The one “successful” CCS project to come out of all that investment was the Petra Nova plant, which closed in 2021 after just four years of operation. Petra Nova’s CCS technology required so much extra energy to run that its owners created an entirely separate natural gas plant just to fuel it. The carbon dioxide pulled from the plant’s emissions was also used to drill for oil, essentially negating the climate benefits.
Senior Vice President Megan Bloomgren concluded her segment of this charade by saying: “The energy our industry manufactures every day is doing more to help the human condition than ever before.” Her comment punctuates the organization’s repeated claim that the biggest threats to said human conditions include foreign oil dependence and “energy poverty.” Meanwhile, we continue to break average global warming records and climate change is already connected to 5 million preventable deaths a year.
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