06 December 21
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“I have defended that agency for the very last time,” says top lawman from a neighboring county
At a Wednesday meeting of an advisory council to the state’s Peace Officer Standards and Training (POST) board, Sheriff Sean Deringer of Wright County unloaded on Minneapolis cops who were caught on their own body cameras allegedly “hunting” protesters in the wake of the murder of George Floyd in 2020. ”I was absolutely disgusted watching that,” Deringer said, adding, “I have defended that agency for the very last time.”
In an extended rant, Derringer apologized to members of the advisory board: He said he was wrong to have dismissed public complaints that Minneapolis Police Department had been reportedly randomly shooting nonviolent protesters with beanbag rounds, pepper balls, flash grenades, and other less lethal munitions. He said his earlier reaction had been to defend his brothers in blue, making comments like: “Holy crap, everyone, that doesn’t happen. Cops do not do that.” But, then, Deringer said, he saw “bodycam footage of Minneapolis Police Department again making headlines. Because why? That’s exactly what they were doing!”
The Minneapolis PD did not respond to a request for comment. Neither did Jacob Frey, the mayor and civilian leader of the police, who has previously called the videos “galling” and “antithetical to the department we are striving to build.”
The footage of Minneapolis cops allegedly “hunting” protesters showed cops being directed to target protesters and “Fuck ‘em up.” The videos captured cops high-fiving after shooting nonviolent protesters with less-lethal impact rounds. Other cops used the same weapons in a manner that resembled a drive-by shooting, firing on people on the street, seemingly unannounced, from an unmarked van.
The footage of the misconduct only became public because cops fired on a protester named Jaleel Stallings, who thought he was under assault and fired back live rounds at the cops with his legally carried gun. (No one was hit.) Stallings was changed with attempted murder, but a jury this summer found he had acted in self-defense. The bodycam footage, used as evidence in his trial, was released to the media by Stallings’ lawyer. Stallings has also filed a civil suit alleging “evil intent” and an “malicious pattern of force” by the Minneapolis PD.
Wright, whose county is part of the Minneapolis metro area and neighbors Hennepin county, which encompasess Minneapolis, said he disagreed with a recent ballot proposition (voted down by Minneapolis residents) “to completely dismantle the police department.” But nonetheless called for sweeping reform: “I’m telling you, from the top down, that agency needs an overhaul.” Deringer added that the Minnesota Sheriffs Association was “ready to write a letter saying we absolutely denounce whatever is going on with the Minneapolis Police Department.”
Mixing in words like “pissed” and “infuriated,” Deringer said, “I am appalled by the lack of leadership in that agency,” because agencies across the state are “all cast in the same barrel of crap coming out of Minneapolis proper.”
Noting that two of his own officers were currently on leave, Deringer recognized that there are “issues” in every department in Minnesota. But “generally speaking,” he insisted, “law enforcement across the state hold themselves to such a much higher standard.”
Referring to the “hunting” videos, he added: “All 160 of my cops understand that they did something like that, they would fully anticipate that they would be fired.”
“I don’t need a criminal finding that they’ve shot somebody without cause with a beanbag round,” Deringer said. “I would kick them to the curb faster than you can imagine.”
Jason Meade(left), Casey Goodson (right). (photo: Franklin County Sheriff's Office/family photo)
The Dec. 4 2020 killing — many details of which remained obscured in changing accounts and official silence almost from the moment it happened — sparked protests in Columbus after then-Franklin County Deputy SWAT team member Jason Meade put five shots from his rifle into the back of the young Black man.
In the year since the slaying, Goodson’s family and advocates for justice had awaited signs that the now-retired deputy might be subjected to criminal justice.
By Friday, Dec. 3, the day after the charges were announced, Meade, who turned himself in to authorities on Thursday, pleaded not guilty during a video court appearance to two counts of murder and one count of reckless homicide.
He was released from jail Friday on a $250,000 bond.
Last week’s indictment announcement left Goodson’s mother, Tamala Payne, “overwhelmed with joy,” she said.
A 911 call made moments after the shooting to the Columbus Division of Police from Sharon Payne, Goodson’s grandmother, captured how the family learned their loved one had come to harm: “My grandson just got shot in the back when he comes in the house. I don’t know if he’s OK or not ’cause he’s still out there.”
When asked by the dispatcher if anyone saw the shooting, she said, “No. He went to the dentist or somewhere and came home. All I know is there’s a bunch of gunfire. He’s not a bad kid. He doesn’t have a police record. He works. I don’t know what happened.”
Initial reports on the slaying described how Meade, then a 17-year sheriff’s deputy, was in the field that day as part of his work with a U.S. Marshals Service Fugitive Task force looking for violent offenders.
Goodson was not a target of the task force and did not have any criminal warrants.
The task force had finished its work for the day and come up empty-handed in its search for fugitives when Goodson apparently drove by the parking lot where the law enforcement team was gathered for its wind-down that afternoon.
Officials said in the days after the shooting that Meade claimed he saw Goodson waving a gun as he drove by and the deputy followed him to his home. (The Marshals Service says Meade was not acting on behalf of the task force.) Meade claimed nearly a year ago that he then commanded Goodson to drop his gun and fired only when the young man responded by pointing a gun at Meade.
Goodson’s family says he was carrying only Subway sandwiches for his younger siblings and a face mask and had put the key in the kitchen door lock when he was hit by the gunfire.
There were no witnesses to the shooting, and it was not captured on dash camera or a bodycam, as Franklin County deputies do not carry body cameras.
After the indictment, Meade’s attorney, Mark Collins, released a more detailed account of his client’s version of events in a statement on Thursday.
Collins’ statement said Meade followed Goodson to his grandmother’s neighborhood, believing that he saw him point a gun at another driver. After he parked his car, he put on a tactical vest and identified himself as law enforcement.
With the vest on, he trailed Goodson on foot to Payne’s residence. Meade says Goodson was carrying a gun in his right hand and a plastic bag in his left hand. He said that he again identified himself as a member of law enforcement and ordered Goodson to show him his hands. Instead, the lawyer states that Meade saw him raise his gun.
The deputy “commanded Mr. Goodson to once again ‘drop the gun,’ and when that command was ignored, and while the gun was pointing at Mr. Meade, he, in fear for his life as well as those inside the house, fired his weapon at Mr. Goodson,” the statement details.
The family, as it has all along, emphatically disputes this account. They contend that Goodson, who was licensed to carry a concealed firearm, was not holding a weapon at the time of the shooting. Investigators have claimed a gun was recovered at the scene, but have not made public where they say it was found.
“He was targeted, pursued and shot from behind while walking into his own home,” Goodson’s family’s attorney Sean Walton said at a news conference Thursday. “On that day, Casey was simply trying to get home.”
Tamala Payne said during the news conference, “It’s been a year of sadness, it’s been a year of grief, it’s been a year of pain. But I know that every day of this year, that my family and I wake up and just fight for what’s right.”
In the year since the shooting Meade, who took a disability retirement from the sheriff’s office this past summer, has come under scrutiny for past statements he’s made as an ordained minister about use of force.
He talked about the intersection of his faith with his work from the pulpit to his Rosedale Free Will Baptist Church congregation (recorded in a YouTube video that has since been deleted).
“There are times for righteous release — that’s what I call it — when we have a use of force,” he sermonized.
“Because every now and then, you have to actually use force. We don’t go around looking for it because we don’t have to. Plenty of people out there will give you that opportunity. So we don’t have to be bullies going looking for it. That’s why I say it’s a righteous release.”
Franklin County Sheriff Dallas Baldwin, after the former deputy from his office was indicted, released a statement urging officers in his department to not rush to judgment. He said that he has “reminded my staff that while everyone is presumed innocent until proven guilty, the standards for being a Franklin County Sheriff’s Deputy must be even higher than that of our criminal justice system.”
“As law enforcement officers we must meet this higher standard because of the immense trust we ask the community to place in us,” he continued to share. “It’s vital to maintain that trust, which is why I’ve tasked members of my staff to review the facts from the independent investigation when we’re able to fully access them and determine how this agency can best learn from this tragedy.”
Goodson’s mother believes that Deputy Meade did not extend that courtesy to her son. She said that she wants “a conviction and a life sentence” for the man that took her son’s life.
People protest a COVID-19 vaccine mandate for municipal workers on Oct. 28 in New York City. Polling, vaccination and mortality data all suggest that Republicans are the biggest group of unvaccinated Americans and are suffering the worst consequences as a result. (photo: David Dee Delgado/Getty Images)
NPR looked at deaths per 100,000 people in roughly 3,000 counties across the U.S. from May 2021, the point at which vaccinations widely became available. People living in counties that went 60% or higher for Trump in November 2020 had 2.7 times the death rates of those that went for Biden. Counties with an even higher share of the vote for Trump saw higher COVID-19 mortality rates.
In October, the reddest tenth of the country saw death rates that were six times higher than the bluest tenth, according to Charles Gaba, an independent health care analyst who's been tracking partisanship trends during the pandemic and helped to review NPR's methodology. Those numbers have dropped slightly in recent weeks, Gaba says: "It's back down to around 5.5 times higher."
The trend was robust, even when controlling for age, which is the primary demographic risk of COVID-19 mortality. The data also reveal a major contributing factor to the death rate difference: The higher the vote share for Trump, the lower the vaccination rate.
The analysis only looked at the geographic location of COVID-19 deaths. The exact political views of each person taken by the disease remains unknowable. But the strength of the association, combined with polling information about vaccination, strongly suggests that Republicans are being disproportionately affected.
Recent polling data that show Republicans are now the largest group of unvaccinated individuals in the United States, more than any other single demographic group. Polling also shows that mistrust in official sources of information and exposure to misinformation, about both COVID-19 and the vaccines, run high among Republicans.
"An unvaccinated person is three times as likely to lean Republican as they are to lean Democrat," says Liz Hamel, vice president of public opinion and survey research at the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonpartisan health policy think tank that tracks attitudes toward vaccination. Political affiliation is now the strongest indicator of whether someone is vaccinated, she says: "If I wanted to guess if somebody was vaccinated or not and I could only know one thing about them, I would probably ask what their party affiliation is."
It was not always this way. Earlier in the pandemic, many different groups expressed hesitancy toward getting vaccinated. African Americans, younger Americans and rural Americans all had significant portions of their demographic that resisted vaccination. But over time, the vaccination rates in those demographics have risen, while the rate of Republican vaccination against COVID-19 has flatlined at just 59%, according to the latest numbers from Kaiser. By comparison, 91% of Democrats are vaccinated.
Being unvaccinated increases the risk of death from COVID-19 dramatically, according to the CDC. The vast majority of deaths since May, around 150,000, have occurred among the unvaccinated, says Peter Hotez, dean for the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine.
While vaccine hesitancy exists in many different groups, Hotez suspects that the deaths are "overwhelmingly" concentrated in more politically conservative communities. "How does this make sense at any level?" he asks.
Deadly consequences
The consequences for individuals are real. Mark Valentine still remembers when his brother called him to tell him he had contracted coronavirus. Valentine is a trial consultant in North Carolina. His brother Phil, 61, was a well-known conservative talk show host in Nashville, Tenn., who often expressed skepticism about vaccination.
Neither brother was vaccinated, and neither one was particularly worried about Phil's positive result. His brother said he was trying several alternative therapies commonly promoted in conservative circles. "He said, 'I've got the ivermectin, I started it this morning, and I don't think it's going to be a big deal,' " Mark Valentine recalls. "And frankly I didn't think about it anymore."
But a week later, Mark said he got a call from his brother's wife saying that the two were going to the hospital. "Before I knew it, he was in there and I couldn't get to him, couldn't talk to him," Valentine recalls. "His situation took a nosedive like you can't believe."
Phil Valentine died in August about five weeks after he announced he had tested positive for COVID-19.
Misinformation appears to be a major factor in the lagging vaccination rates. The Kaiser Family Foundation's polling shows Republicans are far more likely to believe false statements about COVID-19 and vaccines. A full 94% of Republicans think one or more false statements about COVID-19 and vaccines might be true, and 46% believe four or more statements might be true. By contrast, only 14% of Democrats believe four or more false statements about the disease.
Belief in multiple false statements highly correlates with vaccination status, Hamel says. "If you believe that the vaccines can damage your fertility, that they contain a microchip and that the government is inflating the number of COVID-19 deaths, you're going to think really differently about whether to get vaccinated."
Disinformation breeds complacency
Perhaps the most pernicious pieces of misinformation have to do with the perceived severity of COVID-19 itself. The most widely believed false statement was: "The government is exaggerating the number of COVID-19 deaths."
Hamel says that underestimating the severity of COVID-19 appears to be a major reason why Republicans in particular have fallen behind in vaccination: "We've seen lower levels of personal worry among Republicans who remain unvaccinated," she says. "That's a real contrast with what we saw in communities of color, where there was a high level of worry about getting sick."
Complacency around the risks of contracting COVID-19 certainly seemed to be a major reason why the Valentine brothers avoided vaccination. While not conspiracy theorists, they were staunch Trump supporters. The arrival of coronavirus just ahead of the presidential election of 2020 seemed like "the most fortuitous pandemic in the history of the world" for the Democratic Party, recalls Mark.
Despite the media coverage, Phil Valentine didn't believe COVID-19 was serious as long as you were healthy: "He said, 'The likelihood of me getting it is low. In the unlikely event that I do get it, the likelihood that I will survive it is 99-plus %,' " Mark Valentine recalls.
Vaccine researcher Peter Hotez is deeply troubled by the current state of affairs. A winter surge in COVID-19 cases is brewing, and the newly discovered omicron variant has the potential to make things far worse.
He thinks the elements of the Republican Party that are endorsing anti-vaccine ideas need to take a big step back. "I'm not trying to change Republican thinking or far-right thinking," he says. "I'm trying to say: 'The anti-science doesn't belong; it doesn't fit. ... Just stop it and save lives.' ''
Before his illness, Phil Valentine had sometimes promoted unproven alternative therapies and taken a mocking tone toward vaccination. As his situation deteriorated, Mark says the talk show host realized he needed to encourage his listeners to get vaccinated. Phil told his brother, "'My fear is that because I didn't get it, other folks may not get it," Mark Valentine recalls. The family put out a statement in support of vaccination, and Mark went on to his brother's talk show to encourage listeners to take the shot.
He also headed to his local Walmart to get vaccinated. "The guy comes out; he said, 'Do you have any questions or concerns?' " Mark Valentine recalls. "I said, 'Hell yeah, I've got both, but do it anyway.' "
Methodology
Vaccination rate data are the rate of vaccination among all people 18 years of age or older, as of Nov. 30. They are from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
COVID-19 deaths per 100,000 residents are calculated by dividing the deaths from COVID-19 in a county since May 1 by the county's population. County population data come from the U.S. Census Bureau's 2020 decennial census. May 1 was chosen as the start date of our analysis because that is roughly the time when vaccines became universally available to adults ages 18 and older. COVID-19 death data is collected by the Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE) at Johns Hopkins University and is current as of Nov. 30.
2020 election result data are from MIT Election Data and Science Lab.
Alaska does not report election results by county-equivalent area, so it is excluded from the analysis. Nebraska is excluded from the analysis because does not report county-level COVID-19 statistics. Hawaii is excluded because it does not report county-level vaccine data. Some counties that have reported no COVID-19 deaths since May 1 may have stopped reporting. These counties generally have very small populations and have a negligible impact on the weighted averages. Erring on the side of caution, we include all data unless it is known that they are in error.
All averages are weighted by county population. The overall average represents the average of the 3,011 counties included in the analysis.
Emily Gurley, Professor of the Practice and Emily Pond, Research Data Analyst, both of Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health helped review our methodology.
Art Shibayama's grandparents - shown in their store in Callao, Peru, in 1931 - immigrated to the country from Japan. During World War II, they became part of the first group of Japanese Latin Americans to be seized by U.S. officials and taken to an internment camp in Texas. (photo: A. Shibayama Family Collection)
The United States confined 2,200 Latin Americans of Japanese descent during World War II. They’re still pushing for redress.
What Shibayama, by then a resident of California, told the OAS in person and in legal documents, was that he was brought to America by force. In 1944, during the height of World War II, a 13-year-old Shibayama was living with his family in Lima, Peru, where his grandparents had immigrated from Japan years earlier. On March 1, Peruvian police arrived at the family’s home in broad daylight to round them up and hand them over to U.S. authorities. For 21 days, the Shibayamas traveled below deck on a U.S. naval vessel with dozens of other Peruvians of Japanese descent, bound for New Orleans. From there, armed U.S. military personnel would take them to a camp in Crystal City, Texas, where they were held as candidates for a hostage exchange program with Japan, even though Shibayama was born in Peru and a citizen of that country.
As he testified in 2017, what seemed to weigh most heavily on Shibayama’s mind was the official label the government gave him after eventually releasing him. “I want the government to erase the ‘illegal’ status from my record,” Shibayama told the commission, his elbows supporting the weight of his frame as he leaned into the microphone. “The government brought us here at gunpoint — so how could they classify us as illegal aliens?”
Most Americans today are well aware that, during World War II, the U.S. government imprisoned Japanese Americans, including U.S. citizens, in internment camps on no other evidence than the fact of their heritage. They know of the wartime hysteria that cloaked the government’s logic, and the racism and xenophobia Japanese Americans faced. But one chapter of this history has remained much more hidden, much less acknowledged by public officials: The United States simultaneously ran a parallel internment system that confined some 2,200 Latin Americans of Japanese descent, kidnapping individuals from countries such as Peru, Bolivia and Colombia — whose political leaders were in on the plot — and confining them on U.S. soil.
Most Americans also probably think the Japanese internment chapter was closed decades ago, when the U.S. government approved the largest reparations program it has ever enacted: the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, a historic law that gave $20,000 and a formal apology to victims of Japanese internment who were U.S. citizens or permanent residents. But as the country praised itself for righting that historical wrong, it excluded those it had kidnapped from abroad. Although many of them were exiled to Japan after the war, the Japanese Latin Americans who remained in the United States were ineligible for the reparations program. They later received some compensation through a court settlement, but the sum was so much lower and the apology so formulaic that some decided not to accept.
While the United States government has admitted to the Japanese Latin American internment program, the dwindling group of living victims and their descendants — including Shibayama’s daughter, Bekki — are still pushing for full compensation and recognition. And they argue the responsibility for addressing this moral debt now falls squarely on the shoulders of President Joe Biden and his administration. Their prospects might have looked better at a time of growing support for reparations and with a president who has pledged to defend human rights, as well as a Cabinet member who once vocally supported their cause. Yet, so far, the White House has been mostly silent, seeming to ignore requests for information or meetings from high-level international officials and the victims’ families.
Shibayama died in 2018, in San Jose, Calif., after decades living in America as a farmworker, an undocumented immigrant, an Army draftee and, since 1970, a U.S. citizen. But two years after his death, OAS’ Inter-American Commission on Human Rights released a report declaring that the United States had violated his right to equality under the law when it excluded him, as well as his brothers, from the 1988 reparations program. Moreover, IACHR found that Japanese Latin Americans “fell into a sort of legal no-man’s-land” when they were released as undocumented immigrants, a distinction that led to “wild inequalities.” The report made two recommendations to the United States: reparations, including monetary compensation, as well as “full disclosure” of any information the U.S. government had relating to the internment of Japanese Latin Americans.
By all public accounts, the Trump State Department, which had deemed Shibayama’s petition “inadmissible,” did not act in response to the IACHR report. On Aug. 16, 2021, after a new administration had come into power, IACHR tried again, sending a letter to Secretary of State Antony Blinken, obtained by Politico Magazine, that asked the government to provide, by Oct. 15, “detailed information on the actions undertaken by the State during this year to comply with each of the recommendations.” When the administration did not respond, a small organization called Campaign for Justice: Redress NOW for Japanese Latin Americans, which participated in the Shibayama case, decided to reach out to the administration directly.
The group has sent two letters to the Biden administration since September requesting a meeting with the U.S. ambassador to the OAS, Bradley Freden, and, more recently, with the White House’s Asian American and Pacific Islander senior liaison, Erika Moritsugu. Neither the White House nor the Department of State acknowledged receipt of the letters in repeated requests for comment, though U.S. Postal Service tracking information shows they were delivered; Grace Shimizu, one of the letters’ signatories, said Moritsugu recently acknowledged receipt by email. “Like the Trump administration, you have chosen to ignore the IACHR and its October 15th deadline,” the group’s most recent letter, first reported here, states. “A resolution of this matter is long overdue.”
In the first public acknowledgment of this case since Biden’s inauguration, a State Department spokesperson said the agency takes IACHR petitions “very seriously” but noted that the United States has not ratified the 1969 convention that created the commission, “so any recommendations made by the IACHR are non-binding for the U.S. government.” (The IACHR, which did not respond to a request for comment for this article, said in its report that it analyzed Shibayama’s legal claims under the OAS Charter, which the United States ratified in 1951.)
“The United States acknowledges the suffering experienced by the Shibayama family and those similarly situated,” the State Department statement continued. “Nevertheless, the United States reiterates its view that the petition in this case should have been found inadmissible and the IACHR lacked competence to pronounce on its merits.”
The White House did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
The Campaign for Justice had placed their hopes on Biden, who during a February foreign policy speech promised to “defend equal rights of people the world over.” But the group has been dismayed. “I expected more of the Biden Administration than this inaccurate, unfeeling, technocratic response,” Shimizu wrote in an email. Bekki Shibayama wondered: “Why is the United States government compounding the suffering that they have acknowledged against my family and other JLAs?”
On Dec. 9, two days after the 80th anniversary of the bombing at Pearl Harbor, Biden plans to host a “Summit for Democracy” that aims to cast respect for human rights as crucial to democratic well-being. That 80-year chasm also underscores how long interned Japanese Latin Americans have been waiting for redress. The path forward for the Campaign for Justice looks difficult, but Shimizu said that whatever the Biden administration does, “we will continue until our demands for justice are met.”
After all, history, unless insisted upon, has a way of vanishing.
America’s paranoia with Japanese people in Latin America began before Pearl Harbor. According to Densho Encyclopedia, a Japanese American history resource overseen by historians and academics, President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1940 authorized the FBI to station “legal attachés” at U.S. embassies in Latin America to conduct surveillance of people of Japanese descent and generate a so-called “proclaimed list” of individuals suspected to favor the Axis powers. Although some countries resisted cooperation, Peru was eager to maintain close relations with the United States; its president, Manuel Prado, thought he could consolidate support for re-election at home with a show of force.
The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor only accelerated the hysteria, and soon, countries like Peru requested U.S. military transports to spirit away individuals they perceived as “threats.” According to a 1998 law review article by Natsu Taylor Saito, a professor of law at Georgia State College of Law, the United States had proposed to repatriate all Axis officials who were in Latin America in early 1942 — but Peru took this plan a step further by also compiling lists of civilians it wished to expel. The U.S.-Peru relationship had been buoyed by a $29 million lend-lease agreement that provided Peru with weapons to defend itself after the war broke out, according to one government report.
The first ship of Japanese Latin Americans bound for the States, carrying 141 men, left Peru in April 1941. In a diplomatic cable from the Lima embassy dated July 1942, the U.S. ambassador to Peru wrote that Prado remained “very much interested [in] the possibility of getting rid of the Japanese in Peru,” and asked about “additional shipping facilities from the United States.” In her article, Saito cites evidence that the State Department knew that “most of the Japanese arrested by Peruvian authorities had no connection to either the war effort or the lists prepared by the United States.”
For Shibayama, it all happened very quickly. According to biographical details in his IACHR testimony, the subsequent IACHR report and a 2004 documentary that chronicled his life, Hidden Internment, Shibayama’s childhood summers in Peru meant waking up to swim in the beaches of Callao, a coastal district in the Lima metropolitan area where his grandparents lived. Every morning, they watched him dip into Pacific waters before it was time to open the small shop they ran. But the water also made Callao a port town, and one day, sometime in late 1942, his grandparents became part of the first group of Japanese Latin Americans to be seized and taken to Texas, according to the IACHR.
Whenever Callao’s residents spotted the ships coming in, many Japanese men went into hiding to elude the authorities. In 1944, Shibayama’s father did exactly that. When the Peruvian police came to the family’s house, Shibayama’s mother refused to reveal her husband’s location, so she was taken to jail instead, her 11-year-old daughter in tow. “They hugged each other and cried all night,” Shibayama told the IACHR. Soon, the rest of the family surrendered, and they were taken into custody by U.S. Armed Forces. When they disembarked in New Orleans, on March 21, members of the U.S. military led them off the ship at gunpoint, according to the IACHR report, and forced the internees to strip naked and be sprayed with the insecticide DDT, now classified as a carcinogen.
Courtney Ozaki, founder of the Denver-based Japanese American Arts Network, says her grandparents recalled a similarly harrowing ordeal. They had migrated to Peru looking for work in 1930, and together they had built a modestly successful business. The U.S. government separated the couple when it abducted Joey Motoichi Ozaki and placed him on a transport ship that stopped in Panama and then continued on to the United States, where he was shuffled from San Pedro, Calif., to the Kenedy detention camp in Texas, and finally to Crystal City, where most Japanese Latin Americans were held, along with a smaller number of other foreign detainees.
Over the phone, Courtney Ozaki read from a document that memorializes some of her family’s history as she recounted what happened to her grandmother, Tamiye Ozaki: “She sold everything that she could and then left the rest behind, and then she went to the Peruvian [U.S.] embassy and asked permission to join my grandpa.” Tamiye’s ship, like the Shibayamas’, docked in New Orleans. She was pregnant when she left Peru, but her granddaughter told me, “At some point, my grandmother actually lost her child.”
The Crystal City camp was a site of endless waiting. According to Hidden Internment and interviews from the Japanese Peruvian Oral History Project, internees crammed into overcrowded cabins, not knowing if they would be sent back to Japan. Guard towers rose above the 10-foot fence that encircled the perimeter. Eighty families could share one community bathhouse. Two schools were set up by the government — one with classes in Japanese and another one with classes in English, even though neither language was commonly spoken in Peru. According to the Campaign for Justice, more than 800 of those individuals seized from Latin America were exchanged with Japan for American hostages during the war, including Shibayama’s grandparents, whom he never saw again. Even after the war ended, the Crystal City internment camp was the last to close, on Feb. 27, 1948.
Upon their release, the government told the remaining 1,400 Japanese Latin Americans they had entered the United States illegally and had to leave, according to several sources. Shibayama told the IACHR that many Japanese, including his family, tried to return to Peru, only to be rebuffed by their own government. Between November 1945 and June 1946, more than 900 of them were deported to war-torn Japan, but about 300 individuals fought their undocumented status on U.S. soil. The Ozakis had a distant cousin in Denver who sponsored them to establish legal residence; Colorado’s governor, Ralph Carr, was a staunch opponent of internment.
“People saw Denver as a place to go when there were not many places they were able to go after the war, and when they had to start over with nothing,” Ozaki says.
But the vast majority of those who stayed in the United States were paroled out of the camp to go work in Seabrook Farms in New Jersey, where they became agricultural workers for low wages. Shibayama was one of them; he eventually made the farm’s baseball team. According to the Campaign for Justice, workers could technically leave the farm but faced daunting challenges, such as language barriers, poverty, racism, anti-Japanese postwar sentiment, and meager housing and education access. In Hidden Internment, Eigo Kudo, another former internee, describes the arduous daily toil at Seabrook: From 30-pound bushels or baskets, the workers picked out the produce as quickly as possible. In 12 hours, Kudo could only pick 10 baskets, despite being “one of the fastest.” One basket: 30 cents.
“I get $3 [a day], and then they deduct 30 percent for income tax because we were ‘illegal aliens,’ so we may run away without paying income tax or filing tax returns. … So I get $2.10,” Kudo says, before letting out a special kind of laughter — the kind that makes you double over as you realize the absurdity of your situation.
Today, calls for reparations of various kinds seem to be more and more common. In the lead-up to the 2020 election, Democratic presidential candidates touted their plans to atone for the economic and moral stain of slavery, building on decades of work by Black intellectuals. In February, Biden publicly backed the creation of a congressional commission to study the issue. Reparations for ongoing harm in other areas — such as the separation of immigrant families or climate change that’s been caused, in large part, by wealthy countries — have also gained some recognition.
But the only time Congress has enacted a legislative reparations program with direct payments was back in 1988. Surrounded by Japanese American leaders, including Rep. Norman Mineta (D-Calif.), President Ronald Reagan on Aug. 10 of that year signed into law the Civil Liberties Act, which promised those interned in U.S. government camps $20,000 and an apology letter with the presidential seal. “No payment can make up for those lost years,” Reagan said at the signing. “What is most important in this bill has less to do with property than with honor. For here we admit a wrong.”
But Reagan, and the law, left an ongoing wrong unaddressed: Japanese Latin Americans could receive neither restitution nor honor because only those who were U.S. citizens or permanent residents during the period of internment were eligible.
“Unfortunately, many Japanese Americans saw that as the end of the redress movement,” says Phil Tajitsu Nash, who was part of the Japanese American redress movement in the 1980s and advises the Campaign for Justice in a personal capacity. “They said, ‘Well, there it is, we got it.’”
In 1998, the Japanese Latin Americans reached a milestone of their own: the Mochizuki settlement. Stemming from a class action lawsuit in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims, the terms of the settlement offered $5,000 to Japanese Latin Americans who had been apprehended and detained, as well as a pro-forma apology from President Bill Clinton. “More than 50 years ago, the United States Government unjustly interned, evacuated, relocated, or otherwise deprived you of liberty,” it reads, in part. Compensation came from pre-existing Civil Liberties Act funding, and the payments were not made until all the Japanese American claims had been settled. In its opinion approving the settlement, the court acknowledged its imperfection: “Who among us would ever trade our eyes or legs for $5,000 or $20,000 or a hundred times that much?” But money, the court said, is how the law “seeks to right wrongs.”
According to figures from the Justice Department, which administered the payments, 145 Japanese Latin Americans (including some living in Peru and Japan) opted into the Mochizuki settlement, even as many expressed reservations about the unequal sums. “We suffered equally as they did — indeed, when you think about it, perhaps even more because we were snatched from our own country and brought to a strange land,” wrote Rose Akiko Nishimura in a sworn declaration included in the Mochizuki opinion. The decision of whether to take the funds literally divided families. The Shibayama brothers rejected the settlement and, having lost a separate case they pursued in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims, filed their petition with the OAS in 2003. “Until the crime is over — meaning it has been fully acknowledged and fully compensated — it is ongoing,” Karen Parker, then Shibayama’s attorney, said.
In its response to the petition, President George W. Bush’s State Department contended that the United States had “already made a full apology” upon settling the Mochizuki case, and argued that the Shibayamas had not in fact exhausted their domestic options because they did not appeal the case they lost in federal court. “Petitioners are essentially asking the Commission to provide remedies for events for which the United States Government has already offered redress,” the Department argued in 2004.
Around the same time, the JLA redress movement found an ally in Congress: Rep. Xavier Becerra (D-Calif.), who introduced a resolution that would have extended equal compensation to the Japanese Latin Americans. “We need to do it soon, because there aren’t too many people living today who can tell you from their personal experience what we did,” Becerra said in 2004. But the bill stalled in Congress, and the last hearings on this issue took place in 2009. Becerra, who is now Biden’s Health secretary, did not respond to a request for comment.
According to Nash, who also co-presides over the board of directors of the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund, the Civil Liberties Act was possible because Democrats saw internment as a civil liberties issue, while Republicans saw it as an unjust taking of property — “two sides of the same argument.” But now, he doubts such broad support could be achieved.
Hypothetically, if Congress managed to pass a bill giving $20,000 to the 300 Japanese Latin Americans who remained in the country, or their descendants, the government would pay approximately $6 million, which Nash calls “a rounding error in the federal budget.” The Campaign for Justice’s Shimizu, who also founded the Japanese Peruvian Oral History Project, says the number of recipients might even be lower, since some potential beneficiaries now live abroad. (The Campaign for Justice is planning a virtual reunion next year to conduct a more accurate census.) But beyond monetary compensation, the group is also seeking a public apology, full disclosure of the government’s actions during this period, and assurances that these violations won’t happen again in the future to any group.
The campaign also wants to work in tandem with those seeking redress for slavery. “[W]e are in solidarity with and will not be pitted against the reparations movement of the Black community,” Bekki Shibayama, Art’s daughter, wrote in an email. “Japanese Latin Americans have contributions to make to enact H.R.40,” the congressional resolution to create a reparations commission, which Biden has supported while expressing private reservations.
It’s unclear how far the president is willing to go on reparations-style programs. When asked in early November about reports that his administration was considering offering payments to immigrant families who had been separated at the U.S. border under President Donald Trump, Biden dismissed the reports as “garbage.” Meanwhile, in February, a government camp that houses migrant children opened in Carrizo Springs, Texas, about 16 minutes south of Crystal City. At the same time, the administration has promised support to Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, especially after the spate of violence the community has suffered during the pandemic.
But Saito, the law professor, says that when it comes to the human rights principles the United States professes to stand by, America “tends to exempt itself from their application.” She says that while the United States has not ratified OAS’ American Convention on Human Rights, Washington is bound by the American Declaration on the Rights and Duties of Man, which OAS members adopted at its founding. One possible explanation for the official resistance to the JLA redress campaign to date is that it would catalyze public support to address other moral debts the government is unprepared to tackle: “There’s much more resistance to redress for people of African descent in the United States because it’s so huge,” Saito, who has been working with the JLA movement, said in an interview. “Part of what we have to do is we have to push for redress at every level possible, and if we can win some smaller victories, we come closer to getting larger victories.”
The Campaign for Justice says it has researched strategies to continue pushing for redress “in international forums, domestic forums, and in the court of public opinion,” per a statement from the organization. Still, much hinges on the will of the U.S. government to heed the requests of OAS’ human rights body.
At the very minimum, members of the campaign believe they can leave a public record for future generations. Shibayama brought his case before IACHR, in part, to tell the world how his family’s life had changed as a result of the government’s actions. His father, who had been a successful businessman in Peru, died mired in a deep depression. “The U.S. government killed my grandfather’s spirit,” Bekki Shibayama told the IACHR as she held back tears. “I only knew him as a shell of his former self.”
“I see the layers of trauma that get passed down to these generations,” adds Ozaki. “It’s not what would make me proud to be an American.”
Troops from the 11th Airborne Division watch an atomic explosion at close range in the Las Vegas desert on Nov. 1, 1951. (photo: Bettmann Archive)
Human beings are not necessarily destined to annihilate ourselves.
PAX’s newest paper, “Perilous Profiteering,” should be front-page news around the world. Why it is not is an interesting question.
Nuclear war is still a threat to humanity. It’s true that it’s generally vanished from popular culture and our imagination since the end of the Cold War 30 years ago. What almost no one knows, however, is that many serious observers believe that the actual danger of nuclear conflict is now greater than at any point in history.
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists invented its Doomsday Clock in 1947 to express how close the world was to self-destruction. It was initially set at seven minutes to midnight. Since then it has varied, being set both closer to and further away from midnight. But today, in 2021, it is the closest it’s ever been: 100 seconds to midnight. The publication’s reasoning can be read here.
Or take it from such anti-peaceniks as former Secretaries of State Henry Kissinger and the late George Shultz. Together they warned for years of the tremendous danger of nuclear war and called for “a world free of nuclear weapons.”
It therefore would behoove everyone to read the PAX report, both to understand the forces driving us toward obliteration and because it explains why taking action is not pointless. In fact, the report is surprisingly optimistic: Public pressure has recently generated tangible victories over the nuclear weapons industry, suggesting that we may not necessarily be doomed.
PAX explains that 25 companies around the world are particularly involved in the production, manufacture, and development of nuclear weapons. America’s Northrop Grumman makes the most money off nukes, with at least $24 billion in current nuclear contracts. Other U.S. firms such as Raytheon Technologies and Lockheed Martin are close behind. But it is a worldwide industry, with companies in Europe (Airbus), India (Larsen & Toubro), Russia (Rostec), and China (China Aerospace Science and Technology) profiting from the potential end of the world.
The report also closely examines the financial infrastructure that undergirds the physical production of nuclear weapons. At least 338 companies are investors in or facilitators of the nuclear industry. They may own stock in nuclear corporations, hold their bonds, or underwrite their debt offerings. In any case, the system can’t function without them.
The largest investor in the nuclear industry is Vanguard, with $51 billion, followed a few paces behind by BlackRock, with $41 billion.
These cases do not involve a few individuals with huge investments in nuclear weapons, but rather millions of people who’ve invested in Vanguard and BlackRock mutual funds and hence own small amounts of many companies, including ones like Northrop Grumman.
It is here where the PAX report identifies genuine leverage that regular people can wield over the nuclear behemoth. While the facts and figures are all interesting enough on their own, PAX’s work is not aimed at encouraging its audience to engage in the passive consumption of information. Its goal is to provide tools for everyone to take action, with a rational hope that we can in fact, slowly but surely, consign nuclear weapons to history’s scrap heap.
PAX is part of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons. ICAN won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2017 for its role in the promotion of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, which was adopted that year at the United Nations.
The 56 countries that have ratified the treaty to date have agreed not to “develop, test, produce, manufacture, otherwise acquire, possess or stockpile nuclear weapons” — but not just that. They have also pledged not to “allow any stationing, installation or deployment of any nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices in its territory.”
The significance of this is that while none of the nine countries with nuclear weapons have ratified the treaty, they rely on many other nations without nuclear weapons to participate in their manufacture and transport. For instance, if the Netherlands were to ratify the treaty, Airbus — headquartered there — could no longer help build France’s nuclear missiles.
ICAN believes that the governments of such countries can be forced by pressure from their citizens to ratify the treaty and cut ties with the nuclear industry. It also believes that campaigns calling on pensions and mutual funds to divest from the nuclear industry can be powerful organizing tools to generate such pressure. This is not a vain dream, given that divestment campaigns played a similar role in the international isolation of apartheid South Africa.
While it is almost unknown to Americans, the nuclear divestment campaign is already happening. The second-largest pension fund on Earth, in Norway, has sold its investments in the nuclear industry. ABP in the Netherlands, the world’s fifth-largest pension fund, has done likewise. An ABP executive explained why: “Changes in society, also at an international level, [mean that] nuclear weapons no longer fit in with our sustainable and responsible investment policy.”
And the general trend, the report indicates, is downward. The 338 financial institutions that invest in or facilitate the nuclear industry is down from 390 recently. Shareholding values are down by $67 billion, and bondholding by $2 billion. It is possible to see a future in which the worldwide opprobrium that has almost eliminated the existence of biological and chemical weapons will apply to the most dangerous weapons of mass destruction.
This, then, will have to be a long fight, but it is potentially a winnable one. Human beings are not necessarily destined to annihilate ourselves. But to avoid that fate, we’ll have to study the kind of research produced by PAX — and get to work.
'NSO Group says its spyware targets only criminals and terrorists. Critics disagree.' (photo: Getty Images)
A hack targeting US officials is just the latest problem for NSO Group, the Israeli company behind Pegasus spyware.
That news — first reported Friday by Reuters — will likely exacerbate NSO Group’s fraught relationship with the US government; while the company says Pegasus can’t be used on phones with US numbers, the recent hack shows there are loopholes which allow foreign governments to spy on US citizens and government employees. It’s the first known incident of the technology being used against American officials, although it’s not yet known which of NSO Group’s clients hacked the devices.
NSO Group has long claimed that its clients — which run the gamut from monarchies like the UAE to democratic nations like Germany and Mexico — are closely vetted, but there is a long record of its technology being misused for nefarious purposes, like spying on dissidents or estranged spouses, as the ruler of Dubai is alleged to have done.
NSO Group scandals also pose a diplomatic problem; though NSO is a private company, it’s closely linked to the Israeli government, and Israel’s defense ministry has to sign off on the export license for the technology, ostensibly ensuring that it’s used only for the purposes “of preventing and investigating crime and counterterrorism,” according to an Israeli defense spokesperson who spoke to the Washington Post in July.
Extensive reporting from a group of 17 media outlets and more than 80 journalists proves that hasn’t always been the case: Among other incidents, Pegasus was allegedly used to surveil Saudi dissident and Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi before his murder in October 2018.
More recently, the US has started to take action against the company. In November, NSO Group was placed on the Commerce Department’s “entity list,” which severely restricts the export of American technologies that could be used by NSO Group to support Pegasus and similar projects.
Now, given the recent reporting on Pegasus’s use against State Department employees, harsher crackdowns on NSO and similar technology could be on the horizon. On Thursday, the Biden administration announced plans for a US-led initiative on the use of surveillance technology — like Pegasus — by authoritarian regimes. The aim, according to the Wall Street Journal, is to create a framework around the export and licensing controls of such technology, as well as create an information-sharing network to detect and report on its misuse.
Pegasus has been used to spy on dissidents, journalists, and politicians
According to the Washington Post, 11 people connected to the US embassy in the Ugandan capital Kampala — including some US citizens working as foreign service officers — were notified by Apple that their devices had been hacked.
While NSO has previously said Pegasus can’t be used against US-based devices, Americans working overseas can — and often do — acquire local phone numbers, which may be vulnerable to Pegasus attacks.
According to the New York Times, the targets were easily identifiable as State Department employees — they had used their professional email addresses to create their Apple IDs. While it’s not clear who perpetrated the attack — and there is no indication it was NSO Group or the state of Israel — using the Pegasus exploit, hackers could look at and copy files from targets’ devices, as well as track their movements and record conversations.
NSO Group maintains that governments that purchase Pegasus are carefully vetted and are not to use the product besides for specific purposes; however, the company has repeatedly sold Pegasus to countries known to use surveillance technology to track dissidents, lawyers, journalists, and other members of civil society.
Extensive reporting in July showed that security services and law enforcement agencies in places like Saudi Arabia, Mexico, Azerbaijan, and Morocco appeared to have purchased the technology, according to the Pegasus Project, a consortium of 17 news outlets including the Washington Post, the Guardian, Die Zeit, and French outlet Forbidden Stories.
According to the Pegasus Project, a list of 50,000 potential target phone numbers was hacked, apparently from servers in Cyprus, and leaked to Forbidden Stories and Amnesty International, who shared it with journalists. They were able to identify 1,000 different potential targets from the phone numbers, including politicians like French President Emmanuel Macron, a key US ally, as well as journalists, activists, and lawyers from around the world.
Pegasus is so useful — or so dangerous, depending on one’s perspective — because it can access a target’s phone completely undetected. While the spyware can infect via a link sent through a messaging service like WhatsApp, it’s also possible for users to access targets’ phones through a so-called “zero-day” exploit — a bug that the device manufacturer hasn’t yet detected. The exploit can be active and present on a device for months before the manufacturer finds the flaw and fixes it.
According to Reuters, the attacks against State Department officials’ devices were initiated through a graphics processing vulnerability which had been open to exploitation since at least February of this year, and wasn’t patched until September. Other victims include Thai dissidents and a Ugandan opposition leader.
Once a device has been infected, Pegasus can access even encrypted messaging systems like Signal, as well as cameras and microphones — enabling the hacker to record conversations and turning the device into a secret surveillance tool in itself, according to the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project. The Guardian’s reporting at the time suggested that in addition to attacking via widely-used messaging apps, Pegasus could potentially be able to attack through the Photos and Music apps on Apple devices.
In November, the company and another Israeli tech manufacturer, Candiru, were added to the US Commerce Department’s entity list, a move which prohibits NSO Group from purchasing US technology.
According to the Commerce Department, the decision to do so was made “based on evidence that these entities developed and supplied spyware to foreign governments that used these tools to maliciously target government officials, journalists, businesspeople, activists, academics, and embassy workers,” as well as evidence that the companies’ spyware was being used by governments to suppress dissent on a global scale.
The decision puts NSO Group in the company of firms like Huawei, the Chinese technology manufacturer which many Western governments have accused of digital espionage. It’s an undesirable position for a company so closely tied to the government of a US ally — one whose military and defense industries are deeply entwined with the US.
NSO Group is in debt and under pressure
Shortly after NSO Group was added to the entity list last month, according to Axios, former NSO Group CEO and co-founder Shalev Hulio wrote to Israeli officials, including Prime Minister Naftali Bennett and Defense Minister Benny Gantz, asking Israel to lobby Washington on NSO’s behalf. Hulio reportedly claimed that the addition of NSO Group to the entity list was a coordinated campaign by anti-Israeli organizations to damage the reputation of Israeli businesses, and NSO Group said publicly it was “dismayed” by the decision and had terminated contracts with government agencies which misuse its products.
Indeed, it’s an unusually forceful move for the US to place such severe restrictions on businesses in a closely allied country; however, Friday’s reports of the phone hacks of US officials in Uganda said the spying had been going on for months, a fact which could have influenced the decision to punish NSO Group so severely.
In a November statement announcing NSO Group’s addition to the entity list, the Commerce Department specifically cited embassy workers as a potential target for Pegasus.
“We have been acutely concerned that commercial spyware like NSO Group’s software poses a serious counterintelligence and security risk to US personnel, which is one of the reasons the Biden-Harris Administration has placed several companies involved in the development and proliferation of these tools on the Department of Commerce’s Entity List,” the National Security Council said in a statement to the Washington Post on Friday.
In response to NSO Group’s inclusion on the entity list, Israel’s government has sharply limited the number of nations that NSO Group and other spyware vendors are allowed to sell to, from 102 to 37.
Some groups, however, say it’s not far enough. On Friday, 81 human rights organizations from around the world, including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and Reporters Without Borders, called on the European Union to impose sanctions on the company for its repeated enabling of human rights abuses, including the recent targeting of Palestinian activists.
“There is overwhelming evidence that Pegasus spyware has been repeatedly used by abusive governments to clamp down on peaceful human rights defenders, activists, and perceived critics,” Deborah Brown, a senior digital researcher and advocate for Human Rights Watch, said. “The EU should immediately sanction NSO Group and ban any use of its technologies.”
This summer, after the Pegasus Project reporting came out, the UN Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner also called for a moratorium on the sale of such surveillance technology until an international framework on the safeguarding of human rights and the use of surveillance tech like Pegasus is in place.
Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, has repeatedly and forcefully condemned NSO Group, saying the US should “[cut] them off from the American financial system and investors by issuing sanctions under the Global Magnitsky Act,” which targets corruption and human rights abuses.
International opprobrium isn’t NSO Group’s only problem, either: According to recent reports, the firm is $500 million in debt, and risks defaulting. As Bloomberg reported in November, Moody’s dropped the company’s credit rating to Caa2 — eight grades below investment grade, indicating that Moody’s believes NSO is highly likely to default on its debts.
The downgrade and low cashflow are due to lower revenue and the payment of dividends to shareholders, but the consistent bad press and placement on the entity list will likely only contribute to NSO Group’s problems.
“Who will want to work with a company that’s been so publicly sanctioned by the U.S. government?” David Kaye, a former UN special rapporteur on the promotion of free speech and freedom of expression, told the Washington Post. “Who would invest in a company with this kind of black mark?”
Logged trees are piled along Highway 46, adjacent to the Breitenbush River. (photo: Salem Statesman Journal)
This ruling comes after two conservation groups, Cascadia Wildlands and Oregon Wild, filed a lawsuit to stop the logging. They allege the Forest Service modified logging contracts after the 2020 fires without going through the proper environmental review process and without notifying the public.
Meriel Darzen, one of the attorneys for the conservation groups, said that before the 2020 fires these areas had been set aside for selective thinning and prescribed burning. After the fire, the contracts were modified to allow companies to do salvage logging.
The plaintiffs argue that the decision to allow salvage logging was made without public input, despite heavy public involvement in the original plan, Darzen said. They also argue that because the fire drastically altered the environment, a new environmental review is necessary to determine the impact this logging would have on the area.
“Both the catastrophic 2020 fires and the Forest Service’s decision to implement ‘salvage’ where it was originally going to do selective thinning and burning were significant changes that required new analysis and public involvement,” Darzen said. “The Forest Service’s backroom decision to log these sensitive recently burned areas with no analysis is harmful.”
In court documents, the Forest Service disagreed, saying the "remaining Lang Dam harvest involves green tree thinning as originally planned in units that were unaffected by the 2020 fire," Forest Service lawyers wrote. "Plaintiffs’ declarants — who focus on harvest in burned areas — fail to identify any imminent, irreparable harm they will suffer from the remaining harvest in unburned, unmodified, Lang Dam sale units next season."
In short, the two conservation groups are suggesting this decision by the Willamette National Forest violates federal environmental law, including the National Environmental Policy Act.
“Oregon Wild brought this case to defend the simple proposition that when a wildfire burns through an ongoing timber sale, the Forest Service needs to pump the brakes and involve the public in deciding how to move forward,” Doug Heiken of Oregon Wild said. “That’s not just the law, but also the best way to protect our forests, drinking water, wildlife, carbon, and scenic values.”
The Forest Service asserted they did do that, noting in court documents they prepared a post-fire report that "thoroughly assessed the significance and likely effects of implementing previously-awarded sales after the fire," the agency said.
"The Forest Service reasonably concluded that project could proceed without significant new effects if it incorporated several implementation modifications," the agency wrote. "The careful (new) analysis is precisely the type of thorough post-decisional review regulations seek to foster."
Some of the areas have already been logged. Judge Ann Aiken's ruling halts any further logging, pending the end of the lawsuit.
Aiken is expected to release a written ruling on the decision shortly.
This is the second such ruling in less than a month, after a different federal judge halted Forest Service plans to log 400 miles of road in Willamette National Forest in early November.
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