01 December 21
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I grant you humility is not a trait one tends to hear in connection with current or former TV news anchors. And for good reason. But the longer I have lived on this planet, the more I have witnessed and learned, the more I recognize that facing our world, and certainly our place in the cosmos, with humility is the only path to recognizing a key truth to our existence.
These thoughts return once more with the flare up of the ominous omicron Covid variant. How dispiriting it is. How full of uncertainty and concern. How humbled we feel at the mercurial power of nature.
Humility is often contextualized in terms of loss - a loss of control, a loss of assuredness, a loss of expectation, a loss of certainty. And all of this applies with the current public health anxiety sweeping the globe once more. The protections the human mind has mustered to push back against the chaos, especially the vaccines so miraculous in their power, efficacy, and speed of development, now wobble with unknowns. Will they work? If so, how well?
Doctors and scientists, while rightfully raising alarms around omicron, also caution that there is much more at this point that we don’t know than we do. Over the course of this pandemic, the global public has experienced what researchers know all too well. The more we learn, the more we realize how much we still don’t understand. Nature is full of complexities and surprises. It’s humbling. And to try to respond with hubris in the face of these immutable truths is a key ingredient in a recipe for disaster.
But humility should not only be considered in terms of our inabilities. Countless times in my life I have been humbled by human ingenuity, kindness, selflessness, knowledge, and community. Especially in difficult, frightening, and alienating times, we must keep these assurances in mind.
I am humbled by the healthcare workers who have sacrificed so much. I am humbled by the scientists who are rushing to develop treatments and vaccines for the coronavirus. I am humbled by all those who are endeavoring to try to make the world better, to ease suffering and comfort the afflicted. And I am humbled by all of you who have joined in the community we are building.
I know we face grave challenges. And I know that pride and hubris seem ascendant. We are inundated with chest pounding, gaslighting, and caustic overconfidence. Humility can and should be an appropriate rejoinder. It is not in its essence inherently hopeful, but it can be a source of hope.
We can find solace in recognizing that there is only so much we can control and predict. There is only so much that we can know and fix. But if our mind is open to accepting the winds of change that power nature, we can recognize that change is a force for creation as well as destruction. We can find ways to regroup and rebuild, together, with humility.
A child looks out at buildings that were damaged in an airstrike in the southern Yemeni city of Taez on March 18, 2018. (photo: Ahmad al Basha/Getty)
ALSO SEE: Saudis Used 'Incentives and Threats'
to Shut Down UN Investigation in Yemen
Activists want Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin to open new investigations of past airstrikes, apologize for civilian deaths, and compensate relatives.
Experts say that isn’t true.
“There was a time I could have said that,” Larry Lewis, who spent a decade analyzing military operations for the U.S. government under Presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump, told The Intercept. “But that’s not what I’m seeing of late. Civilian protection is not prioritized. We’re not the best because we’re choosing not to be the best.”
The hard sell from the Pentagon comes in the wake of a New York Times investigation of a 2019 airstrike in Baghuz, Syria, that killed up to 64 noncombatants and was obscured through a multilayered coverup. It also follows intense media coverage of an August drone strike in Kabul, Afghanistan, that the Pentagon initially insisted was a “righteous strike” before admitting that it killed 10 civilians, seven of them children.
Revelations about these attacks have raised calls for increased scrutiny of U.S. military strikes. On Tuesday, the Yemen-based group Mwatana for Human Rights and the Columbia Law School Human Rights Clinic asked Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin to open new investigations of past U.S. attacks in Yemen, apologize for the deaths of civilians whom the U.S. has already acknowledged killing, and provide compensation to their families.
“The Department of Defense should do more to show it takes the prospect of accountability for civilian deaths and injuries with the seriousness it deserves,” wrote Radhya Al-Mutawakel, the chair of Mwatana, and Priyanka Motaparthy of Columbia in a letter sent to Austin and shared exclusively with The Intercept. “The recent New York Times report on civilian deaths in Baghuz, Syria indicates serious gaps in how the Department has ensured accountability. These events have raised serious concerns that there may be significant shortcomings in how the military responded to reports of civilian harm from Yemen, as well.”
A report by Mwatana released earlier this year examined 12 U.S. attacks in Yemen, 10 of them so-called counterterrorism airstrikes, between January 2017 and January 2019. The authors found that at least 38 Yemeni civilians — 19 men, six women, and 13 children — were killed and seven others injured in the attacks.
A June Pentagon report on civilian casualties acknowledged one of those incidents, the death of a civilian in Al-Bayda, Yemen, on January 22, 2019. Mwatana’s investigation found that the attack killed Saleh Ahmed Mohamed Al Qaisi, a 67-year-old farmer who locals said had no terrorist affiliations. The U.S. had previously acknowledged four to 12 civilian deaths in another incident chronicled by Mwatana, a raid by Navy SEALs on January 29, 2017, that was first exposed by The Intercept. Both Mwatana and The Intercept reported a higher death toll. Regarding the remaining allegations, Central Command, which oversees U.S. military operations in the Middle East, told Mwatana in an April 2021 letter: “USCENTCOM is confident that each airstrike hit its intended Al Qaeda targets and nothing else.”
But the Pentagon gives short shrift to investigations of civilian harm. Mwatana’s 156-page analysis of the 12 incidents was based on four years of investigations, often including site visits soon after attacks, by researchers who conducted nearly 70 interviews. It also drew on government documents, medical records, photographs, and videos. In 2017, however, there were reportedly just two full-time staff members at CENTCOM responsible for assessing reports of civilian harm caused by U.S. strikes in Yemen, Syria, and Iraq. A 2020 analysis of 228 U.S. military investigations of civilian casualty incidents found that site inspections were carried out in just 16 percent of those investigations.
“The U.S. military continues to refuse to conduct investigations of civilian harm where it can, and it never talks to victims and witnesses,” said Marc Garlasco, once the chief of high-value targeting at the Pentagon and now the military adviser for PAX, a Dutch civilian protection organization.
In their letter to Austin, Al-Mutawakel and Motaparthy pointed out that investigations by news outlets disproved initial reports that the August strike in Kabul killed only an Islamic State target. “Only after a subsequent review of these detailed facts from the ground did the Department of Defense acknowledge its error,” they wrote. “Similarly, we believe there is a need to open new investigations into the civilian harm reports we provided, based on Mwatana’s detailed investigations in Yemen.”
Exposés by journalists and NGOs have routinely been necessary to push the Department of Defense to investigate attacks and admit to killing civilians. For example, CENTCOM reported that between August 2014 and March 2017, at least 352 civilians were killed in U.S. attacks in Iraq and Syria. But a 2017 investigation by journalists Azmat Khan and Anand Gopal of nearly 150 U.S.-led coalition airstrikes targeting ISIS in Iraq found that 1 in 5 of the coalition strikes resulted in civilian death, a rate more than 31 times that acknowledged by the coalition. A 2019 investigation by Amnesty International and Airwars, a U.K.-based airstrike monitoring group, revealed that while U.S.-led forces took responsibility for 159 civilian deaths in Raqqa, Syria, more than 1,600 civilians were actually killed in air and artillery strikes. The U.S. now acknowledges that 1,417 civilians were slain in U.S. attacks in Iraq and Syria.
As the war against ISIS in Syria came to a close in March 2019, U.S. aircraft dropped three bombs on a field in Baghuz, where women, children, and possibly a small number of ISIS fighters were sheltering, leading to a death toll that an Air Force lawyer in charge of determining the legality of strikes, Lt. Col. Dean W. Korsak, called “shockingly high.”
The military had determined in 2019 that at least four civilians were slain in the Baghuz strike, but those deaths did not appear in the Pentagon’s 2019, 2020, or 2021 civilian casualty reports to Congress. CENTCOM only admitted that civilians had been killed after the Times contacted the command with its findings. In an email Korsak shared with the Senate Armed Services Committee, a major with the Air Force Office of Special Investigations said that agents generally looked into civilian casualty reports only when there was a “potential for high media attention, concern with outcry from local community/government, concern sensitive images may get out.”
The circumstances surrounding the Baghuz attack offer additional reasons for skepticism of U.S. claims about civilian casualties. While the death toll was “almost immediately apparent” and Korsak flagged it as a possible war crime, the Times reported, “at nearly every step, the military made moves that concealed the catastrophic strike. The death toll was downplayed. Reports were delayed, sanitized and classified. United States-led coalition forces bulldozed the blast site.” On Monday, Austin ordered a high-level inquiry into the strike and earlier investigations of it.
Lewis, who authored the 2013 report “Reducing and Mitigating Civilian Casualties: Enduring Lessons” for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, says it’s imperative for the Pentagon to create an independent review process for civilian harm. “It’s feasible because I’ve done it in Afghanistan,” he told The Intercept. “You need to know that someone is looking at your homework. If not, it’s easy to give it a half-effort — or worse. And this is what we saw in Iraq and Syria. We saw the same thing later in Afghanistan and in Somalia and Yemen too.”
“CENTCOM has never conceded a civilian death or injury from its actions in Yemen without either a journalist or NGO having already extensively reported on the case,” said Chris Woods, the director of Airwars. Its admissions only followed the reports of deaths by The Intercept and Mwatana and an Airwars investigation of a strike that the Pentagon later said wounded two civilians.
Over four years, the Trump administration conducted at least 181 attacks in Yemen, nearly the same number that Obama carried out during his eight years in office. Attacks under Trump resulted in up to 154 civilian deaths, according to Airwars. The Pentagon, however, claims that as few as five civilians were killed by the U.S. during that four-year span.
There have been four alleged U.S. airstrikes in Yemen during the Biden administration, including two earlier this month, according to data provided by Airwars to The Intercept. Central Command denies involvement. “CENTCOM conducted its last counterterror strike in Yemen on June 24, 2019,” the command told The Intercept by email. “CENTCOM has not conducted any new counterterror strikes in Yemen since.” The CIA did not respond prior to publication to questions about agency strikes in Yemen this year.
Like Al-Mutawakel and Motaparthy, Lewis says that the United States should reinvestigate civilian casualty allegations in Yemen. But he doesn’t think that the Pentagon should stop there. “We need an independent review for Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, Somalia, Libya, and, yes, Yemen,” he told The Intercept.
PAX’s Garlasco went even further, calling for outside assessments of both targeting processes and civilian harm. “Only a complete and thorough review of U.S. airstrikes by an independent body can provide the proper distance and recommendations to improve civilian protection,” he said.
Conducting reviews and reducing civilian casualties in U.S. military operations will take more engaged leadership — on the part of the Pentagon or Congress — and dedicated funding, experts say. “One reason that this is such a mess is because this is not resourced,” said Lewis. “Civilian harm is a vast, complex, and challenging problem. DOD has $700 billion, but how much of it does it devote to civilian harm? Practically nothing.”
Despite acknowledging, for example, that it killed or injured 33 civilians in 2020 and having more than $3 million set aside for casualties resulting from U.S. attacks, the Pentagon failed to make any “ex gratia” payments to survivors. Motaparthy noted that despite the Pentagon’s immense budget, the military routinely claims that it lacks the resources to quickly respond to civilian casualty reports.
“The U.S. military should open new investigations into civilian harm we have reported and make a serious effort to understand the civilian impact of U.S. operations,” said Mwatana’s Al-Mutawakel. “All civilians killed or harmed by the U.S. military deserve acknowledgment, amends or reparations, and accountability for wrongs.”
Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., plays a recording of a death threat left on her voicemail in the wake of anti-Islamic comments made last week by Rep. Lauren Boebert, R-Colo., who likened Omar to a bomb-carrying terrorist. (photo: J. Scott Applewhite/AP)
Omar, one of only a handful of Muslim members of Congress, has been the subject of repeated attacks by conservative pundits and some Republicans in Congress, which she says have led to an increase in the number of death threats she receives. The most recent instance came after a video of first-term Colorado Rep. Lauren Boebert calling Omar a member of the “jihad squad” and likening her to a bomb-carrying terrorist went viral.
“When a sitting member of Congress calls a colleague a member of the ‘jihad squad’ and falsifies a story to suggest I will blow up the Capitol, it is not just an attack on me but on millions of American Muslims across the country,” Omar said during a news conference Tuesday. “We cannot pretend this hate speech from leading politicians doesn’t have real consequences.”
Then Omar played the voicemail, laden with profanity, racial epithets and a threat to “take you off the face of the (expletive) earth,” which she said was among hundreds of such messages she has reported since joining Congress. Omar said the voicemail was left for her after Boebert released another video on Monday attacking her.
In the grainy recording, a man can be heard saying, “You will not be living much longer, b——” while promising that “we the people are rising up.” He also calls Omar a “traitor” and pledges that she will stand trial before a military tribunal.
Omar then concluded, “It is time for the Republican Party to actually do something to confront anti-Muslim hatred in its ranks and hold those who perpetuate it accountable.”
Boebert’s incendiary remarks are just the latest example of a GOP lawmaker making a personal attack against another member of Congress, an unsettling trend that has gone largely unchecked by House Republican leaders.
The chain of events was set in motion over a week ago when a video posted to Facebook showed Boebert speaking at an event and describing an interaction with Omar — an interaction Omar maintains never happened.
In the video, Boebert claims that a Capitol Police officer approached her with “fret on his face” shortly before she stepped aboard a House elevator and the doors closed.
“I look to my left and there she is — Ilhan Omar. And I said: ‘Well, she doesn’t have a backpack. We should be fine,’” Boebert says with a laugh.
Boebert’s comment about Omar not wearing a backpack was an apparent reference to her not carrying a suicide bomb.
Reaction to the video was swift. Omar called on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Republican Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy to “take appropriate action.” But so far McCarthy, who is in line to become House speaker if Republicans retake the majority next year, has proven reluctant to police members of his caucus whose views are often closely aligned with the party’s base.
Rep. Andre Carson, D-Ind,, who is also Muslim, said he is working with Democratic leadership on a House resolution that could address the issue.
Boebert initially took steps to ease the situation. Last week, she apologized “to anyone in the Muslim community I offended,” but not directly to Omar.
But after after declining to apologize directly to Omar during a tense phone call Monday, which Omar abruptly ended, Boebert again went on the attack.
“Rejecting an apology and hanging up on someone is part of cancel culture 101 and a pillar of the Democrat Party,” Boebert said in an Instagram video.
So far, McCarthy is taking her side.
When asked Tuesday what he would do if Democrats tried to censure Boebert, McCarthy said: “After she apologized personally and publicly? I’d vote against it.”
Matthew G. Whitaker, the chief of staff to Attorney General Jeff Sessions, has developed an amicable rapport with President Trump. (photo: Charlie Neibergall/AP)
Former Acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker left the Trump administration and almost immediately started asking for presidential pardons—without registering as a lobbyist.
But one person stands out among that crowd, both for his former role in the Trump administration and for the fact that he never registered as a lobbyist—even though he was being paid $400,000 by a conservative “dark money” group that had tapped him to lead its efforts to secure pardons and commutations.
Matthew Whitaker held senior roles in Trump’s Justice Department from September 2017 to February 2019, finishing off his DOJ tenure with a three-month stint as the acting attorney general. And when he finally departed the administration, he found quite the cushy gig: chairing a new project for the right-wing nonprofit FreedomWorks.
The group brought Whitaker on in March 2020 to head up its new “American Freedom Initiative,” which FreedomWorks claimed “aims to recommend deserving individuals to the Trump administration for pardons and commutations.” A previously unreported federal filing from FreedomWorks, which does not have to disclose its donors, shows that the organization paid Whitaker $400,000 last year in unspecified “consulting” fees.
That role raises a number of ethical questions for Whitaker. He was directly involved in White House clemency negotiations possibly as late as Trump’s last full day in office, but never registered as a lobbyist while advocating for pardons—and FreedomWorks never named clemency issues in any of its 2020 lobbying reports.
Still, Whitaker is listed as an advocate in two official announcements—the December clemency granted to convicted health-care fraudster Daniela Gozes-Wagner, and the last-minute conditional pardon extended to Stephen Odzer, who in 2006 pleaded guilty to more than $16 million in bank fraud.
Kedric Payne, senior director of ethics who specializes in lobbying law at nonpartisan watchdog Campaign Legal Center, said the available evidence suggests that “extensive paid lobbying” went unreported.
“Federal law requires disclosure from those who are paid to lobby for pardons,” Payne explained. “This matter raises red flags because there appears to be extensive paid lobbying, but no evidence of lobbying registration. The public has a right to full disclosure about who is lobbying our public officials.”
Paul S. Ryan, vice president of litigation at government watchdog Common Cause, pointed out that the laws surrounding lobbying for pardons specifically are fuzzy, and before Trump’s final months relatively untested. But he also noted that a number of Trump lobbyists saw fit to disclose that work.
“Other lobbyists tied to Trump have reported massive income lobbying the administration for pardons. Any failure by Whitaker to disclose hundreds of thousands of dollars received to lobby the Trump administration warrants close scrutiny,” Ryan told The Daily Beast.
Neither Whitaker nor FreedomWorks replied to requests for comment.
The arrangement also raises questions about Whitaker’s still-fresh relationships to Justice Department officials and Trump himself, who passed over Deputy AG Rod Rosenstein when he gave Whitaker the top job in November 2019.
The appointment was riddled with controversy over its constitutionality and Whitaker’s own qualifications, as well as the influence Trump was trying to exert over Robert Mueller’s special investigation. Whitaker helmed the department through the final stages of the Mueller probe, but his main credentials for that job seemed to be that he had served for two years as chief-of-staff to Trump’s first attorney general, Jeff Sessions.
That tenure actually meant that Whitaker’s time at the DOJ almost perfectly overlapped with the conviction and sentencing in one of his successful clemency bids.
In September 2017, a jury found Daniela Gozes-Wagner guilty of fraud and money laundering for her role in a Russian company’s multimillion-dollar Medicare and Medicaid fraud scheme. Whitaker had been appointed chief-of-staff to Sessions the previous week.
Gozes-Wagner was later sentenced to 20 years in prison and ordered to pay $15.2 million in restitution. It was the harshest punishment in the case, though a number of circumstances complicated the company’s prosecution, including guilty pleas, government cooperation, and an incapacitating suicide attempt. Whitaker left the DOJ two days prior to the sentencing.
Still, it’s unclear whether FreedomWorks itself saw any return on its investment in Whitaker.
According to the group’s website, AFI advocated for clemency on behalf of more than 30 people. Many were women and people of color, and the site lists several convictions related to drug offenses. But the site identifies only three successful applications, and the list does not include Gozes-Wagner or Odzer.
Those three clemencies were also granted before FreedomWorks launched its collaboration with Whitaker. White House records show that Whitaker advocated for all three in his personal capacity, but the clemencies were issued in February 2020, about three weeks before Whitaker officially joined FreedomWorks.
In a March 11 interview announcing the new initiative, FreedomWorks communications director Peter Vicenzi inquired specifically about those three cases, asking Whitaker, “We submitted their names, correct?”
Whitaker did not answer directly, responding, “So AFI—we’re working with many of the other groups in this space.” The White House announcement cited multiple organizations backing those same three candidates, but FreedomWorks and AFI were not among them.
In the announcement video, Whitaker, who a decade prior to accepting the Trump administration post served as an assistant U.S. attorney, pre-empted accusations of hypocrisy. His efforts, he said, were “no way an indictment broadly” of law enforcement officers who “work so hard on these cases and put their lives on the line.”
Some of his former colleagues would appear to disagree. Federal prosecutors called Trump’s generous application of executive clemency—specifically toward health-care fraudsters like Gozes-Wagner—“disheartening, demoralizing” and “an incredible kick in the teeth.”
However, another possible clemency was in the air, and it hit close to home for Whitaker.
Weeks before Whitaker joined AFI, a federal judge had sentenced Trump loyalist Roger Stone to 40 months in prison on convictions for witness tampering and giving false statements.
Whitaker repeatedly took up for Stone, who was indicted on his watch as acting attorney general in January 2019.
Shortly after Stone was taken into custody, Whitaker—in his capacity as acting attorney general—said in sworn congressional testimony that he had been briefed on the decision and repeated a conspiracy theory about the arrest.
Five days before Trump doled out the February 2020 pardons, Whitaker went on Fox News as a private citizen to defend then Attorney General William Barr’s controversial move to reduce the DOJ’s recommended sentence for Stone, which he said was “too serious.”
In that interview on Feb. 13, 2020, Whitaker said the president had “absolutely” done nothing wrong when he suggested Barr should intervene. He also claimed CNN had been “tipped off” to Stone’s arrest, and complained about the jury foreperson’s “bias,” citing prior anti-Trump tweets.
The day after the February pardon spree, Trump tweeted a clip of Tucker Carlson discussing Stone’s sentencing, in which the Fox News personality floated the idea that the president “could end this travesty in an instant with a pardon, and there are indications tonight that he will do that.”
Trump eventually commuted Stone’s sentence in July. Whitaker then once again took to Fox News, pushing back on widespread criticisms of cronyism.
In that interview, Whitaker—who was at the time getting paid to secure clemencies from his former boss—said that Trump “has looked at cases where he feels that a fairness, a fundamental fairness, has not been done and he tries to right those wrongs.” The former top prosecutor added that he “would expect as this president continues to serve in this role that he will grant other pardons, commutations, and other executive clemency as he sees fit.”
At least two of those reprieves would go to applicants Whitaker backed: Gozes-Wagner and Stephen Odzen. However, Odzen’s narrow pardon did not cover his exposure in two ongoing suits, a still-unsettled contract dispute involving PPE for COVID-19, and a $500 million fraud lawsuit the Securities & Exchange Commission brought against a predatory lender. That case prompted the lender to take action against Odzen and several of his companies, which owed a combined $91 million.
By comparison, those numbers tower over the $26 million Whitaker’s own former employer, World Patent Marketing, paid to settle a federal fraud suit in 2018. The Federal Trade Commission shuttered the business for scamming clients hoping to secure patents for their inventions, many of which—such as a “masculine toilet”—were outrageous and stood little chance of success.
Whitaker acted as an attack-dog attorney for the company, and had invoked his status as a former assistant U.S. attorney to lend the operation credibility. The FTC subpoenaed Whitaker’s records in October 2017, weeks after his DOJ appointment under Sessions, but he reportedly did not respond. A court official handling the case said he had “no reason to believe” Whitaker was aware of the scam.
The FBI and the U.S. Postal Service later reportedly opened investigations into the company, and they have not been reported to have closed.
Government records released this September show a number of Freedom of Information Act requests to the FTC for documents related to Whitaker, some of them regarding his role in World Patent Marketing. The status of those requests was not disclosed.
A memorial for several unhoused residents who recently died and had lived at an encampment in Van Nuys. (photo: Sam Levin/Guardian UK)
UCLA researchers and unhoused advocates raise the alarms about the catastrophe of ‘preventable’ deaths outside
Authored by researchers from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and a coalition of unhoused residents, the report analyzed the LA county coroner’s records to identify 1,493 cases of people who died between March 2020 and July 2021 on the streets and were probably unhoused. The most common cause of death was accidental overdose.
The authors identified people believed to be unhoused based on the locations of their death, including freeway underpasses, parks, sidewalks, dumpsters, abandoned buildings, bus stops, tents, riverbeds, railroads and encampments.
The 1,493 figure is probably an undercount. The coroner’s office only tracks fatalities that were “sudden, violent or unusual”. The data does not include unhoused people who were receiving medical care or hospitalized when they died. The count also excludes people who died while in shelters or cars.
In encampment communities that have suffered losses, some residents live in fear that their friends and loved ones could be next. “When pillars of this community die, it’s such a hard hit,” said La Donna Harrell, an unhoused resident and organizer involved in the report, who lives at a street encampment in the San Fernando Valley that has lost multiple residents to sudden deaths.
“We’re always hearing about this person or that person passing away and it’s a lot of heartbreak,” said Angie Campos, 36, who lives at the encampment in Van Nuys.
Dying young on the streets
The report presents the first detailed picture of deaths on the street during the pandemic, featuring individual stories of some of the lives lost over the last year and a half. The researchers found that:
- More than 35% of the 1,493 deaths occurred on sidewalks. The next most common sites were parking lots (13%), alleys (5.7%), tents (5.6%) and embankments (3.6%).
- The average age of unhoused residents who died was 47 years old.
- Black residents made up 25% of all unhoused deaths, while constituting only 8% of the region’s population.
- 48% of deaths were classified as accidental, 19% natural, 13% as homicides and 9% were suicides. The rates of accidental deaths and homicides were higher among unhoused people than among the general population in that time period.
- Nearly 40% of the accidental deaths were attributed to drug and alcohol overdoses, mirroring the sharp increase in overdoses in the broader population.
Ananya Roy, director of the UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy, which produced the report, said the young age of death was particularly disturbing: “If we were to see this metric in any other part of the world, we would dismiss that place as one of great poverty, as a violator of human rights, as a predatory government that exploits its people. We’ve got to get serious about using that metric to understand the levels of impoverishment and abandonment here in the US.”
Researchers say LA county is on track to surpass the number of unhoused deaths last year. It recorded 630 unhoused deaths in 2014 and that figure has grown each year by an average of 16%, according to the report. There were 1,267 unhoused deaths reported in 2019 and 1,383 in 2020, and the coroner’s office said it has seen 1,300 in the first 10 months of this year.
The researchers say the deaths were particularly troubling because they came at a time when specific programs were put in place to protect unhoused people during the pandemic.
“When people are passing away outdoors and on the sidewalks, that is a failure of the state,” said Chloe Rosenstock, co-author of the report and an organizer with Street Watch LA, an advocacy group for the unhoused. The majority of deaths were not from “natural” causes and were preventable, she said.
In addition to the 1,493 deaths on the streets, researchers identified 418 people who died suddenly in motels or hotels who were probably unhoused residents living temporarily in hotel rooms. It’s unclear how many of the 418 people may have been housed in the rooms as part of Project Roomkey, one of the county’s signature efforts to protect unhoused communities during the pandemic, but the county has separately confirmed that more than 90 people died while in the program.
For the motel deaths, the researchers found that the average age was even younger, at 44 years old. Nearly 60% of those deaths were attributed to overdoses.
‘He meant the world to me’
The crisis in part reflects the dangers and difficulties of life on the street for people who are unhoused, who often suffer from serious health challenges exacerbated by the conditions of outside living.
But the fatalities also stem from inadequate and at times harmful government strategies that have failed to provide people with permanent housing and have focused on criminalization and clearing the streets, advocates say.
The city of LA has increasingly cracked down on outdoor camping over the last year, including shutting down two public parks, removing unhoused residents from the Venice Beach boardwalk and passing a new ordinance restricting sleeping outdoors in certain areas.
Meanwhile, efforts to get unhoused residents into permanent housing have faltered. City and county officials have argued that they connect unhoused residents to shelter or hotel rooms before they evict an encampment. But residents have complained about the strict rules at many of the sites, including curfews and limits on when residents can leave.
The majority of residents have not transitioned from hotel rooms to permanent housing, and advocates say that many end up in more dangerous situations than they faced before, with isolation from their networks compounding struggles with addiction or leaving people without help if they overdose. The treatment services in the region have not kept pace with the crisis.
One of the most high-profile encampment shutdowns, in March 2021 at Echo Park Lake, displaced 183 people. As of October, only four had received permanent housing, a county spokesman recently told the Guardian.
“We need more resources, and we need better resources,” said Lashenee Gibson, 30, who was living at the Echo Park encampment until it was shuttered.
Gibson said she and her husband, Arron, entered a Project Roomkey hotel in Orange county early in the pandemic, but the program did not lead them to permanent housing as they had hoped. They briefly stayed in a shelter after that, but they weren’t able to live together there and the Covid safety protocols were poor, she said, so they left and began camping in Echo Park where the others were gathering.
“They just keep moving the homeless around,” she said. “It’s unnecessary, and it’s a merry-go-round that just keeps repeating itself.” The programs available to them typically involved being housed with people facing severe mental illness who weren’t receiving specific treatment, she said, which can create a difficult living environment.
Gibson and her husband moved into another Project Roomkey hotel in LA this year, but stayed in separate rooms. In May, her husband died in the middle of the night, from an accidental overdose, she said. The program would not let her see his body or say goodbye. The two were not legally married yet and had planned to officially tie the knot the following week.
“They didn’t care,” Gibson said. “Maybe it’s happened so many times, that they were just like, ‘She’ll be ok,’ or ‘Oh, it’s another one.’ It was just a simple throwaway … But this person meant the world to me.”
Her husband, Arron, was 28 years old, and the couple had ambitions to run a meal prep business focused on healthy food. He was also an aspiring actor. “He was just always energetic and positive and making sure he always looked out for everyone else but himself,” she said.
Gibson recently managed to get placement in a two-year housing program run by a not-for-profit organization: “I’m happy to have my own home, but I’m waking up to no one to share it with me.”
Heidi Marston, executive director of the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (Lahsa), said in an email that Project Roomkey was launched to provide an immediate option for the most vulnerable unsheltered residents during the pandemic and to stop the spread of Covid-19 among the unhoused population.
The program, she wrote, was built around Covid safety protocols, relying on wellness checks and establishing minimal in-person contact. “While our funding for Project Roomkey did not include money for life-saving measures, we partnered with several organizations to offer participants health care and mental heath care, and we deployed Narcan at each site to prevent as much loss of life as possible,” she added. “Once inside, our resources and harm reduction model can help people regain some of the health that they lost while being unhoused. While some may pass on after they come inside, I think it’s safe to presume that there were a lot of deaths prevented because of Project Roomkey.”
“Experiencing homelessness negatively affects your health. It ages you ... It compounds your health conditions. You become sicker faster because you’re not getting the care you need in the first place,” Marston wrote, adding that deaths were frequent among this population: “The best thing we can do is get people inside.”
Living in fear
Harrell, the unhoused organizer at the Van Nuys street encampment, said the deaths in the encampments are hard on those that remain behind.
Harrell is mourning her friend Tony Goodwin, a 61-year-old veteran, who suffered an apparent heart attack in September. Goodwin had recently entered a Project Roomkey hotel, but was kicked out of the program because he missed curfews, advocates said.
“Tony was the one I leaned on. He’s the person I would go to at three in the morning when I was hungry,” said Harrell, who has organized vigils on the street for lost residents and helped set up a memorial with candles and flowers on the block. In addition to Goodwin, one other resident died unexpectedly while fighting cancer and another was hit by a car.
“There wasn’t one person Tony didn’t help here and a lot of people depended on him,” said Angie Campos, who had camped next to him. “People would steal from him, and he’d say, ‘They probably needed it more than me.’” One person on the street didn’t get out of bed for days while mourning Goodwin, she said.
Campos said that fentanyl was devastating unhoused residents struggling with addiction and that she wished there was easier access to treatment programs.
City officials, however, have used a new law to designate the street where Campos and Harrell live as a site where camping is outlawed. It’s unclear when the residents might be forced out and a spokesperson for the city council president, who is pursuing the clearing, said there was no immediate deadline for the removal of tents and that the office was focused on outreach.
“Authorities treat us like we are animals, like we’re a disease,” said Fernando, 43, who is living in a trailer on the block and asked not to use his full name. “They’re making these laws where we can’t sleep anywhere or they make us go to these dark corners. It just feels like they’re trying to get rid of us.”
Unhoused people struggle with addiction because they often lack access to correct medications, he said, adding: “People have nothing and addiction keeps them out of this reality.” He said it felt as if the local government didn’t care when people on the street overdosed.
The victims aren’t just random addicts, he said, but community members with friends and families mourning their loss.
Leonardo Bispo Dos Santos takes a container of rice and beans at a feeding station in Rio de Janeiro. He spends his days waiting for food. (photo: Dado Galdieri/Bloomberg)
At least 92.8 million Latin Americans run out of food or had gone a day or more without eating in 2020.
According to the 2021 Regional Overview of Food Security and Nutrition, in just one year, and in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, the number of people living with hunger increased by 13.8 million, reaching a total of 59.7 million people. The prevalence of hunger in Latin America now stands at 9.1 percent, the highest it has been in the last 15 years, although slightly below the world average of 9.9 percent. Just between 2019 and 2020, the prevalence of hunger increased by 2 percentage points.
“We must say it loud and clear: Latin America and the Caribbean is facing a critical situation in terms of food security. There has been an almost 79 percent hike in the number of people living in hunger from 2014 to 2020”, said Julio Berdegue, the regional representative of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).
“Although the pandemic has exacerbated the situation, hunger has been on the rise since 2014. We must fix deep vulnerabilities in our food systems, make them more inclusive and sustainable and ensure they deliver wellbeing for the people that feed our societies,” said Rossana Polastri, the director for Latin America of the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD).
Between 2019 and 2020, Mesoamerica experienced the largest increase––2.5 percentage points––reaching its highest value in the last 20 years: 10.6 percent, or 19 million people. The overall highest prevalence occurs in the Caribbean (16.1 percent, 7 million people) while in South America hunger affects 33,7 million people, or 7.8 percent of the population.
In Latin America, the prevalence of severe food insecurity –that is people who had run out of food or had gone a day or more without eating– reached 14 percent in 2020, a total of 92.8 million people, up from 47.6 million people in 2014. Food insecurity, however, did not affect men and women equally: in 2020, 41.8 percent of women in the region experienced moderate or severe food security, compared with 32.2 percent of men. This disparity has been rising in the last 6 years and it increased sharply from 6.4 percent in 2019 to 9.6 percent in 2020.
The 2021 Regional Overview of Food Security and Nutrition is a joint publication of the FAO, the IFAD, Pan American Health Organization/World Health Organization, World Food Program and United Nations Children's Fund.
Canadian police continue to arrest Indigenous land defenders blocking construction of Coastal GasLink pipeline that would carry natural gas through Wet’suwet’en land. (photo: Vancouver Sun)
Canadian police continue to arrest Indigenous land defenders blocking construction of Coastal GasLink, a 400-mile pipeline that would carry natural gas through Wet’suwet’en land. Police arrested two people Monday for blockading an access road, less than two weeks after arresting more than 30 in a violent raid on Coyote Camp and elsewhere that ended a 56-day blockade of a drilling site. We get an update from Wet’suwet’en land defender Molly Wickham, also known as Sleydo’, just released from jail. “This is the third time they have come in and raided Wet’suwet’en territory,” says Wickham. “We’ve never signed any documents to cede our land.”
PERSON: They’re walking to the door. They’re breaking it down.
MICHAEL TOLEDANO: They are breaking down the door.
PERSON: Get out of here.
MICHAEL TOLEDANO: They’re breaking down the door.
POLICE: Show me hands.
MOLLY WICKHAM: Get that [beep] gun off me. Get your [beep] gun off me! Lower your gun!
POLICE: I want to see everybody’s hands.
MOLLY WICKHAM: Get your [beep] gun off me! This is sovereign Wet’suwet’en land!
POLICE: Step away from the door.
PERSON: The RCMP have breached the door. They are acting under the authority of the injunction.
MOLLY WICKHAM: The attack dogs are there.
PERSON: There are attack dogs here.
MOLLY WICKHAM: Standing there, right beside the door.
PERSON: Militarized police. They used axes found in camp to break down the door.
MICHAEL TOLEDANO: And the chainsaw.
PERSON: And a chainsaw that they found in camp to break [inaudible].
POLICE: [inaudible] you’re under arrest.
MOLLY WICKHAM: Don’t touch me!
MICHAEL TOLEDANO: Don’t touch her.
MOLLY WICKHAM: Do not touch me.
PERSON: Get your hands off of her!
PEOPLE [inaudible]
POLICE: You’re under arrest.
PERSON: Get your hands off of her!
PEOPLE [inaudible]
POLICE: You’re under arrest.
PERSON: This is sovereign Wet’suwet’en territory!
MICHAEL TOLEDANO: I’m filming a documentary for CBC Television.
POLICE: No problem. You’re under arrest.
POLICE: Get that out of my face and back up. You’re under arrest.
PERSON: For the record, I’m a member of the media. You’ve been notified that I’m here. I’m [inaudible]
POLICE: You’re under arrest right now, so step out.
PERSON: I’m coming with you. I’m coming with you.
POLICE: [inaudible] you’re under arrest.
PEOPLE: [inaudible]
MICHAEL TOLEDANO: I’m a member of the media. I am filming a documentary for CBC Television!
PERSON: Lower the camera.
MICHAEL TOLEDANO: You are twisting my wrist! I’m a member of the media. I’m filming a documentary for CBC Television. I have press credentials.
AMY GOODMAN: Dramatic footage of the violent raid on Coyote Camp. Among those arrested and who we heard in this video was Molly Wickham, also known as Sleydo, a land defender and matriarch of the Gidimt’en Clan of Wet’suwet’en Nation, leader in this protracted battle to protect the land. She joins us now again. Molly, you were just released from jail last week. The cabin where we spoke to you from two Fridays ago was burned to the ground? Explain what happened in this raid. We heard you saying, “Get your bleeping gun off me.”
MOLLY WICKHAM: The CIRG team of the police, the specialized group of RCMP to deal with specifically industry and Indigenous land defenders, surrounded our camp with tactical teams that they dropped in helis. They had canine units, semiautomatic weapons. They broke down the door without an arrest warrant or a search warrant and came into the tiny house that we were at and used axes and chainsaws and held us at gunpoint and arrested seven people inside and then four people at the cabin that they later burned down. They bulldozed the entire camp and CGL was present at the raid.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Could you talk about this branch of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police? They call it the Community-Industry Response Group. What is this, a protection outfit?
MOLLY WICKHAM: Yes, it is basically this rogue group of police that work for private industry. They are directed by private industry. The government has claimed no oversight or direction towards this particular group of police that come in and do—this is the third time that they have violently raided Wet’suwet’en territory. They don’t have the same accountability as other police do and they take direction and were using CGL vehicles for the arrests, for the raid. They were staying at the man camps with CGL. They had put up an exclusion zone that they were letting only CGL through and blocking all Wet’suwet’en, even our house chiefs, from the territory, during the raids.
AMY GOODMAN: Molly, if you could talk about again why you are there, this bigger struggle that is taking place.
MOLLY WICKHAM: The Wet’suwet’en hereditary chiefs have never ceded or surrendered our territory and so they still have title to our land. We don’t have treaties. We have never signed any documents to cede our land and they said that there is no pipelines within our system to go through Wet’suwet’en territory. Wedzin Kwa is our sacred headwaters where our salmon spawn. It’s the last clean drinking water source in our territory and Coastal GasLink is about to drill under our headwaters.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Who owns Coastal GasLink? Could you talk about their corporate connections?
MOLLY WICKHAM: Yes. They are owned by TC Energy. They are partly owned by AIMCo, which is an investment firm in Alberta that actually holds our CMP police retirement funds, and by KKR, which is a private equity firm in the United States as well.
AMY GOODMAN: What are you demanding right now?
MOLLY WICKHAM: We are demanding that Coastal GasLink get off our territory and that the governments come to the table with the Wet’suwet’en and actually start implementing and respecting our title to the territories. This is a larger issue that could have easily been resolved if implementation of our title was recognized, if our governance system was recognized. Instead, the government is choosing to take direction from a private corporation to come in and destroy our lands and our waters and they are using militarized RCMP against unarmed Indigenous women on our territories and removing us from the territory.
One of the conditions of my release was that I am restricted from accessing my territory. Coastal GasLink wanted to ban me from my territory completely which is a violation of our Section 35 rights under the constitution and of course a violation of Wet’suwet’en law. They successfully banned my husband from our territory other than to come to our home, directly to and from our home, which prevents us from hunting, fishing, doing anything on our territory, getting firewood. They banned everybody else who was arrested from our territory, claiming terra nullius, essentially, that we don’t have a community out here, that we don’t have infrastructure, and that there’s no—
AMY GOODMAN: Molly, we have to leave it there but we will continue to follow this struggle. Thank you so much. I’m Amy Goodman with Juan González. Stay safe.
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